Jack Carter's Law Read Online Free PDF

arrival like myself causes the heads to flick and the lips to flutter even more. The whole place smells like the inside of a handbag. I manage to reach the bar without too much friction and I tell the drag barman to give me a vodka and tonic and while he’s getting it for me I look in the mirror behind the bar and in the mirror is the reflection of Peter the Dutchman.
    “Buy us a drink, Jack?”
    The reflection has dyed blond hair and purple tinted glasses. It’s wearing a coffee-coloured suit and a wide brown tie on a pink shirt. It’s smiling a great ice-cream smile using all the muscles you use for that kind of smile, but I know exactly what’s going on behind the purple tints. The barman waits for me to give him the nod and when eventually I do the reflection orders Campari, and sits down on the next stool but one.
    “Haven’t changed a bit, Jack,” Peter says. And I say, “Who, Peter? You or me?” Peter the Dutchman giggles and says, “I’ll never change, you know that.”
    No, I think, you’ll never change; you’ll always be the sadistic puff you always were. Peter’s the kind of queer who’s not content with getting his pleasure with the other boys; he has to take it out on the girls as well. Looking at him, I remember a little croupier girl he took home once. I saw her a couple of days afterwards, when she’d managed to summon up the courage to come to the club to pick up her money, because there was no way anybody marked like she was going to sit at a table and encourage the customers to part with their money. I remember her well. She’d even had to buy herself a wig because Peter had cut most of her hair off for her. But thank Christ I don’t have to have much contact with him. He’s a specialist but he won’t be doing any business with our firm as long as I’m working for it. He’s just done remission on five for going over the top with someone who got in his way, and with a bit of luck the next tickle he goes on he’ll do the same, and then it’ll be more than five he’ll be out of the way.
    “Well,” I say to him, “if you ever do change, don’t waste your money on sending me a telegram.”
    Then Maurice sweeps over and leads me across to his alcove, ordering my drink on the move, and I have to put up with Maurice’s brand of chitchat.
    While I’m going through this routine with Maurice there’s a commotion behind us and I turn round to see that the door has just opened and let in Walter and Eddie Coleman and their wives, pissed up to their gills and all set to make their collective presence felt on the conventions of Maurice’s Club.
    The Colemans, so to speak, are in the same line of
businesses as Gerald and Les. That is to say, they run clubs and various other legitimate and semi-legitimate businesses, but their real activity is directed towards the payrolls and the bullion and the banks and the import and export business. The only thing they don’t deal in on the scale of Gerald and Les is vice, and that’s because their patch is east and the Fletchers’ is west, and although they make a few bob out of it, the real money is in the west, and Gerald and Les have the west wrapped up. The Colemans would never attempt to upset that applecart, and at the same time it gets up their noses that Gerald and Les have a few vice strongholds in their territory and there’s sod all they can do about it, without starting the kind of aggro we can all do without.
    “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Maurice, getting up and catching his medallion on the edge of the booth’s narrow table. “All we need. The royal family.”
    He unhooks himself and gets to Walter and his crowd before they can start shoving their way through to the bar. He gives them his spiel about how nice it is to see them and how it’s been such a long time and why don’t they come and join him in the booth while Derek gets them all a drink and it’s not until Walter is halfway across the floor that he sees that I’m