JUDAS PIG Read online

  JUDAS PIG

  Horace Silver

  First published in Great Britain in 2004 by The Do-Not Press Ltd

  Copyright owned by Horace Silver 2004

  The right of Horace Silver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the author. Be careful, I am watching!

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  “I ain’t never hoid of him. I suppose he’s one of dem foreign heavyweights. They’re all lousy. Sure as hell I’ll moider de bum.”

  American heavyweight boxer ‘Two Ton’ Tony Galento on William Shakespeare.

  I WAS BORN in the sixties on one of the shittiest housing estates in London and let me tell you things were fucking grim. Yet you still find some bitter old flag-wavers looking back in time through the bottoms of their beer glasses and telling you that they were the good old days. Days when you could leave your pints of milk on your doorstop and no one would touch them. That’s as maybe, but you’d still hear about kids going missing on their way to school. For me childhood was a brutal time full of bare light bulbs and angry black shadows. I learnt from very early on that it was us or them. Us being the poor, them being the rich. One of my earliest recollections of getting fucked over by them was when the Queen came to visit. The council came round to our flats and repainted all the doors and windows for the first time in donkey’s, before laying down fresh turf over what was nothing more than bare and cracked paving slabs. We didn’t recognise the gaff, and so, when the old rip actually turned up, we were told by our betters to turn out and cheer her on. She stared out at us down the end of her toffee nose, stayed about long enough for a shit and a shave, before swanning back off in her limo and never looking back.

  The day after she left the council came back and took up all the turf, leaving the gaff looking back like the shithole it was. I made up my mind there and then that if anyone ever took anything away from me ever again I’d exact revenge. It weren’t long after seeing how well turned out the other half were that I started to take real pride in my own appearance. I decided if you wanted respect you had to dress sharp. A philosophy I carried through my teenage years and made me the man I am today. You’ve got to be right up to the mark in this game. Ain’t nothing more off-putting than a scruffy gangster. You stroll about like a fucking paraffin, you ain’t going to get even a sniff of any sensible graft. Sharp clobber enhances a man’s reputation, but it’s got to be ream tackle. You won’t never catch this hombre dead in high-street gutter schmutter. I’m strictly South Molton Street, baby.

  And so, after giving my reflection the once-over in the window of a feng shui shop gone bust and patting down the gun bulge in my jacket, I straighten my shoulders and stroll into Tipples, a yuppified boozer on the scrag-end of the Mile End Road and that’s owned by a very good pal of mine, Tiger Teeny. Tiger was a British middleweight boxing champion back the fifties, as well as being an enforcer for the Kray twins, who, as it so happens were born less than a five minute stroll from the bar.

  The gaff is empty when I arrive, it being only just past noon, but the stink of last night’s booze lingers in the air, leaving me pleased I never had a full breakfast, or I reckon I would’ve puked all over the wooden floor. After nodding my arrival to a worn-out bint behind the jump, I make my way up two flights of stairs before emerging into a private function room, where I catch sight of the man I’ve come to meet, Freddie Cannon. He’s slumped over a table, looking as washed out as a granny’s tit, while fiddling nervously with a half-drunk glass of sweetened orange juice.

  Freddie’s a very well connected wide boy who made his dough and name in the topsoil game before moving into ringing and pinging prestige motors, alongside poggering the granny out of Page Three pussy on his luxury yacht down in Marbella. His younger brother Terry has just been stabbed to death. Only twenty-one years old. Crying fucking shame. The kid was a bit player in the West End; flash but harmless. Seems he’d been having a quiet after-hours booze in the Kit Kat strip club in Dean Street and got a little bit bolshie with someone over some bollocks on the stairs. Insults were exchanged. The other mush pulled a blade and plunged Terry four or five times before having it on his toes.

  Terry staggered out to his Jag meaning to get himself sorted out, but terrified of needles, he got confused and couldn’t bring himself to make the drive to the hospital. The poor cunt ended up slowly bleeding to death during the night on the front seat of his motor. And while his brother Freddie ain’t heavy, in the fact he can’t hold his hands up to save his life, he’s got a lot of dough wrapped round his bollocks and is well in with people like me and my firm, which makes him a dangerous cunt to cross.

  ‘Sorry about your brother, Freddie,’ I say, shaking his hand and taking a seat opposite.

  ‘Buried him yesterday, Billy. Did you know him?’

  ‘Never met.’

  ‘Beautiful he was, wouldn’t harm a fly. Well when I say he wouldn’t harm a fly. I mean if a fly shit on his grub or something, he’d kill it, who wouldn’t? But I mean he never ever carried a tool, or anything like that.’

  ‘Fucking terrible, Freddie. I mean, you can understand someone carrying a blade when there’s a bit of graft to be done, but only slags carry knives for a night out on the tiles.’

  ‘Make you right, Billy. Any word on the cunt who done it?’

  ‘Maltese Tony Falcone.’

  ‘Never heard of him. What’s he like?’

  ‘Fucking peasant! Tons of aftershave and smelly armpits. Before he come over to this country he was probably pimping out goats.’

  ‘I hear you, Billy. Fucking thing is I’ve had the Old Bill round non-stop, driving me fucking mad they are. Course, I won’t say a dicky bird to the slags. So what’s the actual strength of this mush?’

  ‘Absolute fucking mug, no disrespect to your brother. Got a bit of reputation for plunging people, that’s about it.’

  ‘That makes it even fucking harder. I mean if he was done by one of the chaps, that’s one thing, but my little brother topped by a fucking non-entity? The cunt’s got to fucking go. How does he get his living?’

  ‘Fucking ponce! Hangs up around King’s Cross picking up teenage runaways. Gets them on the brown then on the game. No one’s going to miss the slag if he cops one in the canister. I can set him up like water. He’s on the pinball machines every night in Soho. It’d be a piece of piss.’

  ‘Thing is, Billy, my hands are tied. As you know, killing ain’t my game, and me two cousins, Jerry and Georgie, have just been weighed off with twenties. Plus the missus’s film career’s just taking back off. If I pick me hooter in public, it’s all over the fucking papers the next day.’

  ‘You want me to sort it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Bottle! I only want proper people on it, Billy. No fucking cowboys.’

  I tell him to leave it with me because two hundred gorillas for a hit is proper dough. I mean you can give can any mongrel in a mac ten large to top someone. But the chances are he’ll get caught. And when he does, it’s a dime to a dozen he’ll scream the Old Bill shop down and get everyone else in the swindle nicked. You want proper people you’ve got to pay the proper price.

  After talking the situation over with my partner Danny Longshanks, his greed finally outweighed any reservations he might have had, which means we’ve decided to take the job on ourselves. Five days later I’m easing a ringed Kawasaki through the bumper to bumper traffic of Soho’s Chinatown with Dan
ny riding pillion. Slung over his shoulder is a courier bag containing a silenced .32 semi-automatic. We’re both decked out in racing leathers and with our faces hidden behind full-face crash helmets. It’s a good disguise because motorcycle couriers are two a penny in this neck of the woods. We’ve picked a Saturday night for the bit of graft because Old Bill will be busy with pissed pricks and pickpockets. Plus, the weekend gridlock will make our getaway easier. Hooking a right into Wardour Street sees me taking a quick shufti in my wing mirrors, to check we ain’t being tailed, before slowing down to ease a right into Old Compton Street. Two hundred yards up ahead I catch sight of our destination and Maltese Tony’s nightly hangout: The Golden Goose amusement arcade. My stomach knots slightly as I glide the bike towards the pavement outside. Although I ain’t a novice in the hit game, it ain’t stopping me from shitting bricks. It’s only natural. We’re talking big bird here. All it takes is some have-a-go-hero or nose-ointment plod to come creeping along at the wrong time, and we’ve got to shoot our way out of the West End. And if Old Bill cops a bullet while we’re doing it, then we’re fucked. They don’t release cop-killers in this country. Take Harry Roberts. Blew away three pigs in ‘63, and he’s been banged up ever since. People I know who’ve met in him the boob have watched him shrink from a terrace hero to sad old man, as his bird sucked him slowly dry. Each year he tells his nick pals he’s getting out, and each year the authorities knock back his jam roll. The pitiful thing is he’s got about ten grand saved up and thinks he’s going to come out and start again. What the mug don’t realise is that ten grand don’t even get you a decent second-hand motor nowadays.

  In case of grief I’m tooled up myself with a small sawn-off, loaded with buckshot and stashed down the front of my jacket. On parking up the bike, I leave the engine idling, and check my mirrors once more. After I give Danny the thumbs up, he slides off the back seat and strides purposefully past a tribal scarred Nigerian, sitting at the change counter, before disappearing into the flashing neon and headfuck clatter of the arcade. And I can picture the scene. One minute, Maltese Tony’ll be standing there with his legs splayed gunslinger wide and sucking hard on an unfiltered fag as he dry humps his favourite pinball machine. The next, he won’t even know what’s hit him and his mooey will be sliding down the plate glass of the machine, while a silenced bullet is ricocheting round the inside of his bacon bonce at 900 miles an hour, before exploding out of his eye socket in a mess of sinew and busted eyeball, spraying bone splinters and bits of brain over the machine’s flickering fascia. Then there’ll be a split second of freeze-frame stillness, a moment when anyone watching will hold their breath, not quite believing what their eyes are showing them. Just like you see the cheering crowd stop suddenly still when JFK copped it in the nut. And then Maltese Tony will slump slowly to the floor and come to rest in an undignified heap of dead ponce, his busted fucking head pissing blood all over the arcade’s monogrammed carpet. Dead as a fucking dodo. No more replays, you fucking mug.

  Before I know it, Danny’s out of the arcade and back on the bike and I’m gunning the throttle and motoring on out of Old Compton Street before chucking a left into St Martin’s Lane. By the time plod gets to finish his bacon sandwich, we’ll be out of Soho and on our way back home. Danny’s definitely the man when it comes to killing. Cool as cucumber and cold as ice. Ain’t no blood running through those veins, just hatred and greed. For which, at this moment, I’m truly thankful. We reach the safety of Canning Town without a glitch and at a prearranged meeting hook up with a trusted pal, Monksie, who’s on hand to take our guns and clobber. After sending the bike for a swim in the docks we both scrub up roadside, before putting on clean clobber and going our separate ways. And that’s how easy it is to set up a hit. All you need is plenty of arsehole and the right tools. It ain’t rocket science. It ain’t any kind of science. It’s just killing. It’s what we do.

  WOKE THIS MORNING in a stinking sweat after another poxy night’s kip. Maltese Tony? Couldn’t give a toss about that mug. Mullering a maggot for dough ain’t no harder than wiping shit off your shoes. He was over twenty-one, he knew the rules. And carrying on like that he was never going to make old bones. Nah, the reason I woke up in such a state is I’m still a prisoner of my past. The ghosts just won’t let me be. And it ain’t even like they only come when I’m asleep, they’re with me all day, every day. Very rare I get any fucking respite. I fight my enemies in the day and my demons at night. Childhood guilt can be such a destructive emotion. But I have to be strong and keep moving forward. Let’s face it, faint heart never won fuck all, let alone fair lady. Having shitted and showered I’m in serious need of a livener, so I bang up a couple of smallish hits of charlie. Don’t want to be acting like no junkie, discreetly wired is the order of the day. Of course, I ain’t always been putting this shit up my hooter. Never took anything until a few years ago. But I need it now, for not only does it ease the pain, it also helps deaden the remorse, which is more important for me. It’s all right for Danny, he’s a psychopath. The cunt ain’t got no remorse in the hurting department. But me, I feel bad about some of the people we’ve had to give it to. Not all of them, mind. Most of them are slags and I don’t give them a second thought. But when you’ve got to hurt a good man, it can be painful, for both parties. And believe me the charlie does help.

  Fifteen minutes later I’m pulling out of my dockside apartment’s underground car park in my Porsche. Top down, stereo on full blast and with Bird blowing some super spade madness out of his plastic alto. Ain’t been another jazzman, white or black, fit enough to even lick the spit off his mouthpiece. Bollocks to this, I need another line. Fuck being discreetly wired! I hit Tower Bridge. It’s empty, save for a couple of coachloads of polyestered, mid-western Yanks on a whistle-stop tour of London. Beefeaters then beef burgers. Should’ve stayed in Idaho, you sorry-arsed sons and daughters of Uncle Sam. Motoring on around the Minories, I pull up outside Tubby Isaac’s world-famous jellied eel stall, that sits at the bottom end of long demolished back alleys where Jack did his ripping back in days of yore. A man I recognise approaches from a side street. He’s casually dressed and carrying a sports holdall. After giving me a very discreet nod he casually climbs into the passenger side of my car and we shake hands. Pulling away, I check my rear-view mirror and move off, before pulling back into the kerb about a few hundred yards up the road to let the bag-man out. Inside a holdall now sitting on the front passenger side floor is two hundred grand.

  The scenery starts to deteriorate at the Aldgate end of Whitechapel Road. It’s changed since I was a kid. The secular Yids have made their dough and moved to Golders Green, whereas the frummers have stayed poor and schlepped it up to Stamford Hill. There used to be a road sign not far from here that said, five miles to Stamford Hill. Underneath, some funny cunt had sprayed, TO YOU, FOUR AND A HALF. Nowadays it’s nearly all Bengali, best curries in the fucking world, but the schmutter shops are shit, worse than the ones the Yids had. There’s plenty of Somalians as well. None of my black British mates like them. For instance, my pal Black Benji said to me only the other day, ‘Fuck me, Billy, these Somalians all look the fucking same.’ Bloom’s, my favourite Jewish restaurant, has long since closed. Now it’s a Burger King. Ain’t nothing fucking kosher about a flame-grilled Whopper. But that’s the way it is, things change. When my old man was growing up, there’d be graffiti saying JEWS FUCK OFF TO PALESTINE. Nowadays the graffiti says JEWS GET THE FUCK OUT OF PALESTINE. One of my best pals Dave is a front wheel skid, but like the flame-grilled Whopper, he ain’t what you call kosher. Dave’s a long-firmer. That’s to say, he’s a slippery bastard who buys up companies that ain’t worth a spunkless bollock and then rebuilds their credit by pumping his own dough through them. Once all is sweet, he worms his way into suppliers and wholesalers and gains their confidence to run up huge debts before pulling the rug from underneath them and then having it on his toes.

  But Dave’s a conman not a villain and he don’t like mixing
it in the ring with the likes of us. And apart from the fact that he walks a crooked mile, he ain’t got a bad bone in his entire body. He’s all about the bubbly and the craic. He’ll do anything to raise a laugh. For instance, his old man, who’s some top Rabbi, cut him out of his will because he’d shacked up with a shiksa from the Roman Road. So to spite him, Dave became a ‘tugger’.

  That’s to say, he’s tied one end of a piece of elastic to the top of his corey, the other end to his right thigh, and strolled about with it tugging at his manhood for eighteen months. And the cunt’s got some corey. In fact he’s hung like a fucking Hoover. Anyway, when he was satisfied that the sheathing had been stretched far enough over his helmet to constitute a foreskin, he went straight round to his old man’s synagogue and waggled his newly-restored corey at him through the letter box. On catching sight of his son’s new uncut corey poking at him, Dave’s old man cast a desperate look skywards for some help from the almighty, gave out a quick ‘Oy vey’, and then keeled over onto the carpet with a suspected heart attack. Priceless entertainment! That’s why l love Dave to death. In fact, I’m godfather to his chavvies. But Danny despises him. Firstly because he’s a Yid, but secondly because he’s cleverer than Danny. And thirdly because his house is bigger. Come to think of it, his hooter’s bigger as well, but I don’t think that’s a bone of contention there.

  Bethnal Green. Another fucking khazi! Boarded up buildings and swag-shops, fronted by a few manky fruit and veg stalls and run by sour-faced cockneys with bulging wallets and caravans in Clacton. This has always been a poxy part of town. Swinging London? The only thing that’s ever swung round here is us criminals on the end of the hangman’s rope. Pulling into a quiet cul-de-sac I’m now in sight of my destination, a mock Tudor two-up two-down, ex-council house number, the outside done up to the nines, replete with Greco-Roman columns, a small gravel drive and a knee high sculpture of a man who to my eyes looks like the Moors Murderer Ian Brady. Giving my nut a chance I take a sly butcher’s around, not just for Old Bill, but also for Danny’s wife Tina, because this ain’t just our safe house, it’s also where Danny keeps his moll Kelly Amore, shackled and under the cosh. Nearly every married East End gangster I know has a moll. Basically they’re just expensively painted fuck-pieces, whose only purpose in life seems to be keeping clean house, staying schtummo and swallowing, but not necessarily in that order. The only difference with Danny’s set up is that Kelly Amore’s his first cousin.