Life Goes On Read Online Free PDF Page B

you! Fifty thousand instead of five is quite a whack, and by the fifth whisky I’d agreed. I must have been stoned, pissed, and just plain crackers. Claud was in his element. He knew what he was doing. He must have had someone placed right in the middle of the Green Toe Gang to know their plans in such detail.
    â€˜The actual robbery went smoothly. Nobody got knocked on the head. Not a gun was fired. Clockwork wasn’t in it. The individual always collaborates, Michael. He gets a glint in his eyes because he wants to be part of the gamble as to whether it’ll come off or not. It’s the regimented law-abiding swine who causes trouble when you ask him to be part of a team. Anyway, the case of money was put into my car by the second getaway car, which the blokes in it then abandoned and walked into South Ken tube station. I set off, cool as if I had just come back from Brighton and was on my way home to lie to my wife as to where I had been. I was supposed to deliver the money to a house in Highgate for the Green Toe Gang. But Moggerhanger had given me instructions to take it to Smilin’ Thru’, and when I stopped to wait at the red traffic light (I’ll never forgive that traffic light for being on red at that particular moment) I thought to myself: “A hundred thousand of real money is in the car, already checked and counted. It’s too good to hand over to the Green Toe Gang, or to Moggerhanger. I’ll keep it for myself.”
    â€˜Ah, Michael, greed! That’s the downfall of the human race, and especially of yours truly. What commandment of the Good Book is that? One of them, I’m sure, so don’t tell me. Pure fucking greed, it was. I tell you I didn’t know what greed was till then. The idea struck me so strongly that I thought I would faint, hit another car, get pulled in by the cops and be marched off to the nick with the loot being shared out in the police car behind. But I pulled myself together. A blinding white light flashing GREED, GREED, GREED in front of my eyes got me back on an even keel. That sensation is described very well in one of Gilbert Blaskin’s novels, if I remember. It was on page one and I never got beyond it. But I was sweating, trembling, just how I was supposed to be. More than just a knee-trembler behind the dustbins in Soho would be mine for the asking with this amount of lolly. In a flash I wanted everything. You’re getting my drift, Michael? I wanted a yacht, a high-speed boat with six berths and me as Captain Codspiece flaring across the Channel to have a triple bunk-up in Cherbourg. Ah, what dreams! The likes of you don’t know one half.
    â€˜Well, some bastard behind me in a powder blue minivan with a coat of arms on the side was blaring the horn to tell me that red had changed to green, and from thinking I would get my dusters out and give him short back and sides by breaking all his windows except the windscreen so that he would at least be able to drive off and get them repaired, I shot away, jet propelled by nothing else but good old-fashioned greed. Greedy but unashamed, that’s me.’
    â€˜The material world is so dull,’ I said.
    He winked. ‘It might be. But it’s got the best stories and the most money. I’ll never forgive myself, I told myself as I left that traffic light behind. And neither, I knew, would the Green Toe Gang or Lord Moggerhanger. You just don’t do that sort of thing. I’ve got two of the most vicious gangs in London (and that means the world) after my tripes to the last millimetre. They’ll even kill the tapeworm as it tries to escape along the pavement, poor innocent thing. I honestly don’t see how I can survive.’
    â€˜Neither do I,’ I said.
    â€˜Fortunately, or unfortunately I now think, I had my passport with me when I shot from the traffic lights towards Sloane Square. That was because I make it a rule never to go out without it, not