Brahmin Blues : Blade Gun
“ Her! Your girl, she’s making the news, Persil. You go blind, old man?”
“What?”
Marlene pulled out her phone. She held her screen up for Spade to see. Olivia Machiavelli’s face is overlayed on the picture of Rain Woo’s body in a gutter.
“Fuck!”
“I hear you Persil, you g’wan home now. Sisters on it.”
Spade turned his cab round in a tight circle and headed back towards the Burning Bear.
Ed the Ted wasn’t in the Bear. Spade could measure the old man’s movements to the second on an average day, but this was not an average day. He always had his meals in the Bear; mooning over Molly as she fussed over him in some silent teenage rite that had grown weary with aching knees and wrinkled flesh, the youth flushed out of both of them. And yet, something still glowed between them, the ember of a lost past, a question never asked or an answer withheld. But it was still there, burning.
About now he should be sharing a table with the Molls, who gravitated to the old man’s rough aura like chicks about an old cock, pecking at his pride. They liked to tease him, ruffle his feathers to draw out a curse or a grimace like some cartoon parrot, all furrowed brows and curled curt lips and a heavy sigh. They called him grandad behind his back, and of course he loved that.
“Where’s Ed?” Asked Spade
“Dunno,”
The Buddha of Bethnal Green, breathing heavily at the effort.
“When was he in last?’ Spade asked, and two fleshy mountains either side of Normal’s broad semi-conscious skull lifted and fell.
Spade found the old man in his pit at the back of the garage where he sulked at his desk with a blade-gun in pieces before him.
“What the fuck is this, Spade?” Ed the Ted asked, not looking up from his work.
“Blade-gun, innit, Ed. You’ve seen one of ‘em before surely?”
“Pretend I ain’t. Where’s the cartridge then, the powder?”
“Electric mate, railgun. Only you need the powerpack to go wiv. You sure you ain’t seen one? I’d swear you fixed one before.”
“Fires razor blades then.”
“That’s why they call ‘em blade-guns, Ed. Them two rods sticking out the front, them’s yer launch rails. Yet blade stack pushes against yer rods a yer mycurrent across the rails sends yer blade out supersonic. Single shot or automatic, innit.”
Maybe it was time. Spade’s old fella had Alzheimer’s before he went. Early signs, but maybe. The thought of Ed the Ted not being as sharp as a tack alarm’s Spade. The old sod knows too much. One wrong word at the wrong time and people will start to think about his clock. Everyone has a clock they can’t see, counting down. It speeds up towards the end. With the wrong sort of help, it could get brutal fast.
Ed the Ted set the piece aside.
“Evil bloody thing. Cut a slot through yer and leave you to bleed out. Or lobotomise you one slice at a time. Who invents these things, Spade?”
“Israeli manufacture that one. Or Korean, under licence.”
“North Korea?”
“No idea what part mate, but Korea’s got a big arms business. Ed, about the Scholar’s girl…”
The old man looked up at Spade, suddenly everything about him is back in focus and pointing at Spade.
“Wot? ‘Ave you found her already?”
Spade held up his phone, screen towards Ed the Ted. The old man ran a hand through his crest of grey hair. He sighed heavily and rasped.
“That is not what we need right now.”
Ed went silent. Made himself a new roll-up. Discovered the old one in his mouth. Not a good sign, not good at all.
“I need you to bring me a bottle of Scotch and a big bucket of ice from the Bear.”
“What?”
Ed the Ted repeated the order slowly, so that a confused Spade could understand.
“A bucket of ice? What do you need with a bucket of ice?’
“Now! Get it done, Spade.”
“I not your bloody servant …” Spade began, his face colouring, but the old man had gone. The old bugger had sounded wound tighter than an eight day clock, proper tensile. Which could only mean bad news. Spade made his ungentle way to the door.
The Scholar is engulphed in ebony. A sweaty, butter-soft, astoundingly hot ebony that is attempting to smother him. The woman’s grand and resplendently upholstered frame was minimally restrained by lace and taffeta, then casually wrapped in a Montgolfier’s worth of silk robing tufted with feathers. The Nubian girl, known as Queenie, was from Wapping.
Queenie is, Charles is happy to admit, a glorious girl. He lay on the bed immobilised by her mass as she snores gently in his ear. Although he misses the opulence of Posh Billy’s Gaff, he is well compensated by Queenies affection. He is amused to note that he has begun to make plans for her residency in Holland Park once this unfortunate interlude is over. He will enjoy flaunting her at the family gathering this Yuletide.
The door to the bedroom bursts open and a red faced Spade thunders into the bedroom. Focussing on the tableau on the bed, Spade reels.
“Oh bloody hell! Put some shorts on, no one deserves to see that.”
“Can’t move old sport,” the Scholar smiles.
“Shift her. I need a word.”
“Love to oblige Spade old man, but I am trapped by excess.”
There is a loud retort, like a hand slapping an ample rump.
Queenie starts awake, her sharp brown eyes promising retribution.
“What the hell is going on with Ed?”
The car boot opens and a bull like man in a balaclava forces a sack over his head and hauls him out of the back of the car. He is dragged across the concrete floor by his arms which makes him shriek with pain, his arms broken and useless. He scrabbles with his feet, cooperating only to reduce the pain. Two more hands join the bulls, and he is pulled upright and up onto some crude seat. The bull like man swears at the effort he is causing. He hears the rasp of gaffer tape being pulled and feels himself bound to the seat about his chest and his feet. Then the rough hands leave him, and he sits for what seems like an hour in the dark of the hood which allows the stink of his voiding to invade his darkness.
The dark sack is ripped from his head.
This old freak stands in front of him. A skeletal figure in dirty overalls and a grey T-shirt that hangs limply from his terrible bones. He has a nose like a beak and greasy, hard, pebble eyes hiding deep in his skull. The smoke from the old man’s cigarette becomes entwined in his crested hair before it drifts up to the blackness beyond the fluorescent tubes that cast a dull subterranean light. It looks as if it is the old man’s hair is smouldering.
The old man stares at him, piercing the back of his skull so that all of his reserves of hope and courage drain away onto the grimy concrete floor. Despite his self-control, he whimpers. The specter nods to himself as if listening to internal voices and turns back to the bench he is standing in front of. His lordship makes another attempt to struggle from the tape that binds him to what he now understands to be an old office chair.
The skeletal figure bends down and pulls a hacksaw from under a workbench and places it on the vinyl covered bench in the brilliant pool of light from a battered old Anglepoise. The hacksaw is large, the sort used to cut pipe and rod. It is as old as the bench it lies upon and looks as hard used. The old man’s eyes glitter at him from their dark fleshy caves as he draws on his cigarette. The coal fire of the tip disappears in another roiling exhalation of smoke and the spectre reaches down and brings up a fat metal canister with a handle and a brass nozzle. The canister is blue with ‘Butane’ printed on it in white. It looks like an industrial kettle. He places it on the bench in the same pool of light. Another hard stare and fog of smoke and the old man reaches into the pocket on his overalls and brings out a table spoon and places it in the same pool of harsh light.
“Nar. You are an intelligent man so I am not going to fanny about. You have a choice, mate. My associates and I have business to conduct and you are getting in our way. You will provide access to the database. Don’t fuck about and pretend you don’t know what we mean cos, yes, we mean that database, the one no one is supposed to know about. Getting in our way is not a healthy position to adopt, as we are a very professional outfit and we always deliver. Now this isn’t entirely your fault on account of our associate, who you met the night before, being re-tasked at the last moment. So we’ve had to improvise. We are fucking ace at improvising, which brings us all back to the here and now, in this nasty old workshop, with these nasty old tools of the trade laid out for you to inspect. Pay close attention because I am not going to make this offer twice.
If you cooperate, you will be handled gently and after we have access, you will be set free. I reckon you’d have a day to go to ground before your mob find out what you have helped us do, so you’d better be nippy. Or, and this is your choice, if you don’t help us get access to the database by providing a palm print and eyeballing the cornea scanner jobby, things will get very ugly for you. We are perfectly happy to do it the easy way, but if you insist we can do it the hard way…”
The old man stands to one side and surveys the tools of his trade.
He points at the spoon. “Eyeball.”
He points at the saw. “Hand.”
And points at the blowtorch “Cauteriser. Stops all the blood making a mess on the floor.”
Then the old man picks up a large plastic box. Through the walls of the box he can see translucent cubes and a layer of water that slops as he places the box on the bench.
“Cool box. Keep em fresh.”
The skeleton takes a deep drag on his cigarette and obscures the evil instruments with another eruption of smoke. He turns back with a black-eyed smile.
“Now, what’s it going to be? Cooperation, or ‘Hello Mr Spoon’”
Now, there are some vividly painted pictures in my mind’s eye!