City of Spades

9

Introduction to the Law


When Johnny ran up the stairs I felt he’d deserted me: it was clear he didn’t yet regard me as a friend; and this regret first showed me I already thought of him as one. There I was, left among a herd of suspect colonials, too dispirited to mind much when we were shepherded up the steps, and surrounded by a posse of constables who escorted us down the street with careful eyes, like a crocodile of wicked juveniles. The cool air smacked my brain, and I walked with dignity, slightly apart, in the manner of a distinguished stranger, until we reached a squat, square, windowless building, and were elbowed in.

In the hall we were kept waiting quite a while, next separated into bands and taken into smaller rooms. There, to my delight, I saw Johnny, and also, among others, Mr Peter Pay Paul.

A plain-clothes officer came up to me. ‘May I have your name?’ This time I gave it. ‘And your address? Your age? Your occupation?’ All in a little notebook. The occupation particularly interested him.

Then, fixing me with that double look that sits in coppers’ eyes (‘I say this, but I don’t mean it, and you know I don’t, and I know you know …’ Or, ‘Yes, I’m evil too, but, you see, my evil’s licensed to discover yours’), he said, ‘You won’t mind if we ask you to submit to a search?’

‘Of course not. But why?’

‘You were found in the company of persons who are suspected of smoking hemp.’

‘Is this search voluntary?’

‘Oh of course.’ (A tight-skinned smile.)

Johnny, from his bench across the room, said in a loud voice, ‘Mr Pew, if you are searched voluntary, I suggest you ask for a non-police witness to be present also.’

‘Shut your trap, you,’ said the Law.

‘Why, Johnny?’

‘The Law, when it searches, sometimes finds things on a person that the person didn’t have before the search began.’

‘Keep quiet.’

‘Mister. Am I arrested? If so, tell me, and for what. Then you can make your search, of course, but also you must make a charge and see it sticks. But if I am not arrested, please let me speak out my mind as a free man.’

I was in admiration at such audacity. ‘You know this man?’ the officer said to me.

‘Certainly. He’s a friend of mine.’

‘So much a friend, Montgomery, that will you please give me some matches for my cigarette?’

I handed Johnny the box I’d bought to replace my lighter. As he took it, the officer grabbed it from him and opened it eagerly, scrabbling among the matches. While he did this, I saw Johnny quickly put his hand up to his mouth and swallow.

‘Perhaps now you give me my friend’s match-box?’ he said to the vexed cops.

‘We’ll begin this search,’ the officer replied. ‘Unless anyone thinks they’ve any further objections.’

A uniformed man came in, dashed at me first, turned my pockets vigorously out, then poked and patted around my clothing. Curious how even innocent objects, like handkerchiefs and rings of keys, look suspect on a station table.

Johnny meanwhile had emptied his own pockets on to it. ‘Would you like me to undress to naked?’ he enquired.

In silence, they dashed at him as well. Evidently this bull-rush, this mock assault, was part of their technique.

Nothing.

Then Mr Peter Pay Paul. They found on him six little packets. ‘Is asthma cure,’ he said, grinning proudly.

‘You’re for the cells,’ said the Law.

‘But no! Why? This is not weed. Is National Health medicine, I swear it on my mother’s life!’

‘We’ll see what the magistrate says to that,’ the Law replied, and dragged him off.

‘Poor foolish boy,’ said Johnny softly. ‘This asthma trick is one he play once too much. And surely when he appears in court, the evidence by then will be real weed and not this asthma cure.’

‘You mean they’d switch that stuff for something real?’

‘That is their usual way back home, where their stores of impounded stocks are used for such a purpose.’

‘But this is England, Johnny. Our coppers don’t do that.’

He looked at me blandly. ‘Oh, is that so? Then I have much to learn of England …’

The Law now returned. ‘We won’t keep you much longer,’ it said to me, ‘but perhaps you’d step into the next room a minute?’

I waited for fifteen. Then the plain-clothes man came in and offered me a cigarette.

‘Of course, you’ll understand, Mr Pew, why we had to search you too. We know a man in your position wouldn’t probably be mixed up in anything dubious, but there it is.’

‘There is what?’

‘We have to take precautions. And also, of course, we don’t want to be accused of discrimination, do we.’ He gave me an oh, so friendly smile. ‘As a matter of fact, Mr Pew, I was wondering if a man with your connections mightn’t be willing to do us a good turn now and then.’

I looked blank.

‘You see, between you and me, this colour problem’s becoming quite a problem for us, too. Particularly in the matter of dope. Of course, these boys, it doesn’t do them much harm, I don’t suppose, they’re used to it, even though it’s not within the law. But the girls, Mr Pew, the younger girls they give it to! It’s corrupting them. Yes, corrupting them and making them serve these black men’s evil ends.’

His eyes shone, like some fake cleric’s, with a slightly mad, holy zeal.

‘What has all this to do with me, officer?’

He leant forward at my face. ‘I’ll ask you, Mr Pew, if in your position you don’t think it your duty to pass on any information that may come your way about the sources of this drug traffic.’

I got up.

‘Officer, I have no such information. And if I had, frankly …’

‘Yes?’ (A monosyllable heavy with malice and with menace.)

‘I’d not at all feel it my duty to pass it on to you.’

‘Oh, would you not.’

He slapped his hands on his knees, smiled most unpleasantly, and rose. ‘I only mentioned it, sir, because sometimes we coppers can do a good turn in return for one that’s done to us. And a friend in need can sometimes be a friend indeed.’

‘Yes, I see your point.’

He opened the door. ‘At any rate, remember what I say, in case you might find you’d better change your mind. Just ask for the Detective-Inspector of the CID – the Vice Inspector,’ he added with taut official grin.

In the corridor outside his office, I caught a glimpse of a Negro loitering. Who was it? Yes! The boxer Cannibal who’d helped steal my lighter at the Moorhen. When he saw me, he turned hurriedly away.

Johnny was waiting in the street outside. ‘What keep you so long?’ he asked – suspiciously, I thought.

‘That Vice Inspector tried to sign me up as a nark.’

‘And you accepted the offer of this Mr Purity?’

‘My dear Fortune!’

I was quite offended, and we walked two blocks in silence.

‘It seems to me, Johnny,’ I said at last, ‘that you’re very well informed about the police force and their habits.’

‘I should be. I’m a policeman’s son.’

‘But you told me your father was in business.’

‘He serve one time when a younger man in the Force back home. I know the Law – I know it both sides round. In Lagos, as anyone will tell you, I was something of a bad boy in my way. What they call one of the waterfront boys … up to various tricks, and often encountering my own dad’s former friends …’ He stopped and rubbed his stomach. ‘Oh, heavens, I don’t like the taste of that brown paper I have to swallow down when I eat those sticks of charge I had about my person.’

‘I thought that might be it. I wish I had your nerve …’

Another coloured man was lurking at the next corner: haunting the city thoroughfare as if poised with a spear in the deep bush. His face to me was quite invisible, but Johnny said, ‘Is Hamilton,’ and they began a deep conversation in a voluble, staccato rumbling tongue.

‘Hamilton,’ Johnny told me with admiration, ‘escaped the Law’s attention by crouching on top of the lavatory doors. Then he could return, when all invaders left, to pick up the weed he find undetected on the floor.’

‘Come now,’ said Hamilton. ‘I have some VP wine. We go to the Fakir for some necessary eat and drink.’

We walked through the warm night, with a wide white blaze on the city sky where the summer sun refused to set.

‘Johnny,’ I said. ‘You talk to Hamilton in African. But to others you talk in English. Why?’

‘I do not speak with Hamilton in African. I speak to him in the language of our tribe. There is no “African”, but many, many tribal languages.’

‘How many?’

‘More than one hundred in Nigeria. Some I know, like Yoruba, Hausa, Munshi and my own. But others I do not, so I speak English.’

‘So you speak five languages. Bravo!’

‘I teach you some Africa words one day – words of my tribe. Say “Madu”.’

‘Madu. What have I said?’

‘“My friend.” Come, we go eat. You like this Indian food?’

‘No. About Indian food, there’s a great mystery: how can a race so ancient and so civilised have devised anything so repellent? It always seems predigested and regurgitated. And the handkerchiefs it ruins!’

‘Oh? You like that fish-and-chip stuff better? Come, we go in.’

The Indians were, as is usual, a family, and they welcomed my friends with the aloof professional deference that scarcely veils indifference and contempt. Johnny and Hamilton chose a distant corner beside an ash-tray made of an elephant’s foot, and began their surreptitious chemistry with cigarette papers and little packets. After puffs, inhalations and exchange of butts, Johnny handed me the cigarette. ‘It give you appetite,’ he said.

‘No, thanks.’

‘You never smoked this stuff?’

‘As a matter of fact, once, yes. In Egypt. But from a hubble-bubble.’

‘And you liked it?’

‘It had no effect whatever.’

‘Oh-ho! Listen to this experienced Jumble man! Then either, Montgomery, your hubble-bubble contained rubbish, or you took a very feeble drag.’

‘You’ll have to be careful, smoking that stuff here.’

‘Oh, these Indians don’t mind,’ said Hamilton.

‘I mean here in England. Remember Inspector Purity.’

‘Man,’ Johnny said, ‘wherever there are Spades there will be weed.’

‘You smoked a lot at home?’

‘In Africa, with due discretion, you can smoke in even public places.’

‘Not in the main street, naturally,’ Hamilton explained, ‘or underneath the copper’s nose, as that is useless provocation.’

‘Even as babies, we may meet it,’ Johnny said. ‘A mother, to soothe our cries, may ease us to comfort with a gentle loving puff. Later, as boys, we make the experiment as you do here with your tobacco.’

‘And do not forget,’ said Hamilton, waving his hand, ‘that many of us are Mahometans and cannot indulge in liquor. Weed is to us what liquor is to you.’

‘But stronger, surely.’

‘Depending on the quantity you partake.’

‘Liquor,’ said Johnny, ‘opens you outwards and gives you a foolish love of fellow men, the wish to chatter to them in a cheerful, not selective way. But weed, you see, turns you happily inward to sit silent in the greater enjoyment of your personality. Try some?’ And he held out the stick again.

‘But it’s habit-forming.’

‘No,’ they both said. And Johnny added, ‘Charging is different from popping as liquor is.’

‘Popping?’

‘With needles. White stuff – man, that’s danger! But not this – just you try it.’

‘No, thanks. No, not for me.’

In came great piles of the predigested food, and Hamilton uncorked the VP wine.

Looking past his shoulder, I saw a huge shapeless man, but one with eyes a-glint, come lumbering light-toed through the door. Customers, when they saw him, lowered their eyes and talked a little louder. He had on a thick overcoat, despite the summer, and a large felt hat which he did not remove.

‘Say nothing to this person,’ Hamilton told me. ‘He’s Johnson: Johnson the tapper.’

‘What’s a tapper?’

‘Man, you’ll see.’

The huge man drew up a chair, smiled lippily at us all and reached out fat fingers to take food. Hamilton lifted the plates out of his reach. The stranger snatched up a glass of VP wine and drank it. ‘Cigarettes?’ he said to me.

I was getting some out, but felt Johnny’s hand upon my wrist.

‘Then give me one pound or else ten shillings,’ said the intruder.

‘But why?’

He stroked my arm and looked at me sideways. ‘Come now, come now, come now,’ he kept on saying.

The Africans ate on, taking no notice of him whatsoever.

‘Come, little white friend,’ said the tapper, in a soft, gentle, stupid, persistent voice. ‘Give me some sustenance.’ And he began patting me on the back – gently at first, then harder.

‘Go away,’ I said, half rising.

‘Ignore him, please,’ said Johnny. ‘He will shoot off in time.’

‘How can I ignore him?’

But sure enough, the tapper slowly stopped his patting, sat huddled a while in silence in his chair, then shambled to another table.

‘It is useless,’ said Johnny, ‘to instruct a tapper. If you resist, he will create some foolish disturbance. If you play cool, he will lose interest of his profit, and fade away.’

‘To be a tapper is a profession,’ Hamilton explained to me. ‘A horrible one, of course, but these people cannot be dismissed.’

‘They are unfortunate, and must not be subject to humiliation,’ Johnny said. ‘Come: do we take some coffee? You, Montgomery?’

‘All right.’

‘Black?’

‘Yes, black.’

‘I shall drink white in compliment to you. Then Hamilton will take us to the Moonbeam club, and show us the delights of London’s wicked mysteries. How about chicks to dance with, Hamilton? Are they to be found upon those premises?’

‘That GIs’ rendezvous is loaded up with chicks. Chicks of all activities and descriptions, some trading, and other voluntary companions full of hope.’

‘There’s a little girl in Maida Vale I’d like to ask – I wonder if she’d come?’

‘You know a girl already, Johnny? Speedy!’

‘A family friend, Hamilton, that I must see. I have some news for her about her sister. What say we go along and pick her up?’

‘We could walk out that way, this Moonbeam’s open until when the dawn … But first, Johnny, I more like you come over and see your future home with me.’

I had a sudden inspiration. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘a very nice woman to make up the party … a most engaging English girl, called Theodora. I’m sure she’d like to come. Let’s go to my place and ask her. We could have another drink there too, I think and hope.’

We walked out through the Indians’ vague bows into the star-skied town, and hailed a cab. It was the hour at which all honest Londoners have hurried to their beds and wisdom, and when the night owls, brave spirits in this nightless city, emerge to gather in the suspect cellars that nourish the resistance movement to the day.

‘Why have I done this?’ I reflected, as we drove home between rotting Georgian terraces, and the ominous green of the thick trees in Regent’s Park which, when night falls, are reclaimed from man by a jealous, antique Nature. ‘Theodora won’t be in the least bit interested, and no more will these wild Africans be in her.’

We crept stealthily up through the echoing floors of my grim house. There was a light under Theodora’s door. Asking my friends to wait, I knocked, and she bade me enter in her bold, emotionless tones.

It is a curiosity of Theodora’s austere and purposeful nature that she wears intimate clothes of a sensual and frivolous kind. There she was, still typing away, but dressed now in a gown and nightdress made for a suppler, more yielding body.

‘You were a long time at that hostel,’ she said. ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’

‘Theodora. Would you care to go out dancing?’

‘You’ve been drinking again, Montgomery.’

‘Of course I have. Would you like to come into a world where you’ve never set foot before, even though it’s always existed underneath your nose?’

She flipped out the sheet she was typing, and held it on her lap. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘I have two delightful friends outside most keen to meet you. Would you be willing to receive them, even if in your off-duty dress?’

‘Negroes?’

I nodded.

Theodora took off her spectacles (which suit her), eyed me reflecting, then said, ‘Bring them in.’

The Africans stood looking at Theodora with frank curiosity, an amiable show of modesty, and complete self-assurance. I introduced them.

‘A nice place you have here,’ said Johnny Fortune. ‘You’re an eager reader of literature, too, as I can see.’

‘Miss Pace,’ I said, ‘is a doctor of some branch of learning – economics, I believe.’

‘Letters,’ said Theodora. ‘Montgomery, please go upstairs and fetch back my bottle of gin.’

When I returned, I was disconcerted to hear Theodora say: ‘This legend of Negro virility everyone believes in. Is there anything in it, would you say?’

‘Lady,’ Johnny answered, ‘the way to find that out is surely by personal experiment.’

‘And is it true,’ the rash girl continued, unabashed, ‘that coloured men are attracted by white women?’

‘I’d say that often is the case, Miss Pace, and likewise also in the opposite direction.’

I hastened to pour out gin. I did not like my friend Theodora treating them in this clinical manner.

‘Mr Fortune,’ I said, ‘has come here to study the movement of the isobars.’

‘With what object?’ Theodora asked.

‘Because back home, my studies over, I’ll get a good job upon the airfield.’

‘I see. And you, Mr Ashinowo, as I think it was. What do you do?’

‘Lady,’ said Hamilton, ‘at one time I pressed suits by day and worked in the Post Office by night.’

‘Doing what?’

‘As switchboard relief operator. But I was sacked, you see, for gossiping, they said, with some subscribers.’

‘And you did?’

‘I tried to make friends that way when nice voices called me up for numbers. But this, I was told, was not my duties, and they sacked me.’

‘And now?’

‘I live on hope mostly, and charity from the splendid National Insurance system.’

I broke in impatiently on all this. ‘The point really is, Theodora, would you care to step out with us, for time is getting on.’

But politely, though quite firmly, she replied, ‘No, I don’t think so, thank you, Montgomery. I’m sure you gentlemen will excuse me, but I have work to do.’

‘Do change your mind,’ said Johnny to her. ‘Even a serious lady like yourself must at times relax herself.’

She smiled and shook her head. My two friends knocked back their gins, told me they would be calling home a moment, and gave me directions where to meet them in an hour. I saw them to the door and, like two innocent conspirators, they set off loping and prowling up the street.

Theodora was typing again when I returned. ‘I think I’m in danger,’ I told her, ‘of becoming what Americans call a nigger-lover.’

‘“Negro-worshipper” is the polite phrase, I believe. You spent the whole evening with those people?’

‘Yes. And I say, thank goodness they’ve come into our midst.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they bring an element of joy and fantasy and violence into our cautious, ordered lives.’

‘Indeed. Isn’t there another side to the coin?’

‘There must be, but I haven’t found it yet. Unless it is that they live too much for the day …’

Theodora got up and fiddled with her documents. ‘It’s always a danger,’ she said, ‘to fall in love with another race. It makes you dissatisfied with your own.’ She tucked typed sheets away in little files. ‘Most races seem marvellous,’ she continued, ‘when one meets them for the first time. It may surprise you, Montgomery, but once I was enamoured of the Irish. Yes, think of it!’ (She shuddered.) ‘I loved them for what I hadn’t got. But I’m damned if I love what I found out that they had.’

‘You’re swearing, Theodora. It’s unlike you.’

‘You’d better go to bed.’

I drained the gin. ‘You’re not coming to this ball with me, then? Those boys will certainly put it down to colour prejudice.’

‘Don’t be so cunning, Montgomery. It’s too transparent. Your friend Fortune wouldn’t think so, anyway. He’s too intelligent.’ Theodora tightened the gown around her waist, smoothed meditatively her lean, albeit shapely, thighs, then turned round and said to me, ‘All right, very well – I’ll come.’

I gazed at her awestruck. ‘Might I ask, Theodora, why you’ve changed your inflexible mind?’

There was a pause; then: ‘It will be an opportunity to study conditions.’

‘What does that mean, my dear?’

‘Conditions of coloured people living in London.’

‘But why? Why you?’

‘The Corporation might put on a series of talks. It’s a topical and unusual theme.’

I drew breath. ‘Theodora! I shall not be party to such a plot! If you come out with my friends, it is to come out with them, and not to ferret raw material for impartial radio programmes.’

There was a silence.

‘Very well,’ she said at last. ‘I accept your condition. I’ll get dressed.’