The Operators

by Allan Prior

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Noir

Synopsis

One job, one big pay-off, three essential components: Mo - the hard-case, the career-criminal, fresh out of prison after a long stretch 'inside'. The mastermind. Tracey - the pretty, vulnerable girl, trapped in a world of drugs and prostitution. Nevil - the handsome, lazy charmer who has tired of the succession of rich and ageing women he has duped into supporting him. Each of them wants a way out and Mo has a scheme that promises the money and freedom they all so desperately desire. The Operators is a British Noir classic from the creator of Z-Cars and Softly, Softly.

Release date: November 21, 2013

Publisher: Mulholland

Print pages: 288

Sample

TRACEY LEIGH-DUNN said the word again: whore. It sounded as bad as ever.

The Soho sounds filtered into the tiny, scented, musty room: the sharp honks of taxis; the cries of fruit vendors; the rumbling oceanic swell of a great city getting into her evening stride. Soon the public houses would be open; after that, the trade would begin. Tracey shuddered and drew the thin kimono around her. It was a cheap thing, worn no doubt by some previous girl – gone, where? – not the kind of garment Tracey would ever have selected for herself; but here she would not be herself; here she would be just a woman. The watery sun struck through the thin cretonne at the window, and Tracey blinked; a tear ran down her powdered cheek. Tracey was very surprised to feel its human, sticky warmth. She had not cried for five, long long years, not since Robin.

Mario had said, after the first time it is easy. After the first time it will not matter. Tracey bit her knuckles very hard. The maid moved cheerfully in the tiny room next door, putting a kettle on the stove. She was Middle European, almost certainly butch, retired from the game now, as primly respectable as any housewife. The small flat looked clean and fresh, considering the things that were done there: but Tracey felt that beneath it all lay dirt so deep that all the soap and water in London would never make it fresh.

The maid had noticed her white, strained face, had cheerfully wrung out a dishcloth (Tracey was to eat on the premises, no time was ever to be lost) and told her that the first day was always the worst. After that, she would be all right. Tracey shuddered, and stared hopelessly at the wardrobe, full of the props of her new profession: the black silk slips, and the pink pantie-girdles and the fish-net stockings; her eye roved over the other garments hanging there and Mario’s warning words grated in her ear: if they want to be gay, let them. It’s their privilege. They’re paying for it.

She got up from the bed – and the suddenness of her movements caused the budgerigar to flutter in his cage – and crossed the tiny room, throwing off the kimono as she moved. She stood, astonished as always, by her own beauty, turning slowly in the long mirror: her blonde, leggy, English beauty was untouched by the things she had done these last years; the sleepless nights, the drinking, the drugs, the men; but how long, she wondered, gazing at the small but perfect breasts and the downy pubic hair, how long would perfection last, in a room such as this?

Until now, the men had at least pretended that they loved her. From now on, there would be no more pretence. Mario had been the last one to pretend and he had led her to this. Tracey closed her eyes. If she cried again the mascara would run, and she would have to prepare herself for the first man all over again. She took a gymslip from the wardrobe and slipped it on, over her bare skin. She looked at herself in the mirror; and on a whim, pulled her hair back behind her ears; and suddenly the room was full of a chalky smell, and the warm aroma of many young girls and Old Minners the head-mistress was calling her name, and the girls were shuffling uncomfortably, jealousy hanging touchable in the air. Old Minners had a crush on her, she was the favourite that year. Tracey had enjoyed the envious eyes of the other girls as she had stepped forward for prize or speech. Always, the sharp glances of her competitors had meant more to her than the hungry eyes of strange men. There had been a deep, satisfying triumph in those promenades before the whole school. There had been nothing, since, to match them.

Tracey pirouetted in the mirror and winked a green-shaded eye at herself. If only Old Minners could see her now. Tracey tried hard to giggle at the idea; but there was no merriment in her. The laughter had gone with the drugs. The treatment had taken it away, perhaps for ever, like a gift that suddenly leaves an artist. She simply did not want to laugh any more.

Tracey stood, naked but for the gymslip, and thought of the times she had laughed; the hilarious, hot-house, dormitory jokes; then her own shocked laughter, strange in her ears, when she had first heard the dirty stories Robin had been so fond of telling, Robin with his casual air of breeding, and his persistent unfaithfulness and lack of money. After Robin her laughter had changed, it had become something to use, it had a point, the pleasing of men, each one harder to please than the last. After Robin had left her in the strange hotel room, with the bill to pay, and no money in her handbag, things had never been quite the same again. Home had been more impossible than ever, her father’s soldierly back bending now under the strain of a wayward daughter he had to hide from his friends. Well, Tracey mused, at least the old boy was spared this. His sudden death should have shocked her, but it had not. It had come at what seemed a good time, soon after Robin, when she had found Pierre, and thought it new, modern, unashamed love, only to find that it was more dishonest than Robin’s kind. Pierre had not just walked out, he had told her he was walking out; and he had also left her pregnant. Her father’s small legacy had paid for the abortion. After that there had been Albert, good, kind Albert, who had been slightly coloured and who was kind and tolerant about everything else; the drugs had come with Albert; but they had not helped, they had altered nothing. All they had brought was a temporary joy; and then a very great deal of pain, so much that she had feared for the permanent harming of her looks. Tracey gazed in the mirror. Her image, untouched, smiled back, innocently.

The door opened, suddenly, and the maid looked in, her fat, cunning face smiling, her eyes running with pleasure and pride over Tracey’s figure. Tracey had heard that maids were always proud if the girl was beautiful and earned big. Also, there were the tips.

‘You look lovely in that. Some will like it.’

Tracey nodded, briefly. She did not want to look at this woman, this woman had been her teacher; this woman had taught her that the things she had learned with Robin and Pierre and Albert had been nothing but the beginning; this woman had talked about things that Tracey could not begin to imagine doing; and yet, this woman had warned her, she had to be prepared. And prepared she was. Mario had seen to that. Mario, the last of a long line of men whose gaze she had returned, foolishly, in bar or café or train, smiling back into the smile.

‘Do you fancy a cup of tea? There’s time.’

The way the old cow was looking at her, suddenly Tracey knew for certain that she was butch. She turned away.

‘No thanks.’

‘Once the first one has been in, you’ll be all right.’

‘I’m all right now.’

‘Of course you are. Of course you are.’ The maid’s cold eyes were hooded, suddenly. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you are or not, liebchen, does it?’

And she closed the door, softly.

Tracey stood, in the ridiculous gymslip, and let the truth of the words sink in. It did not matter whether she would be all right; because, soon, nothing would matter. She had reached the gutter, as her father had finally prophesied she would; and there was nothing to do about it, nowhere to go.

It was then that she remembered the telephone call. It had sounded like a joke, and she had treated it as one. It had been the last call she had taken in her old flat, before Mario had decided to put her to work. The voice, husky and unknown, giving her the message, and then, as she asked for more information, just the dialling-tone buzzing in her ear. Mario had looked up from his racing paper, swart and dangerous, and asked who had called. Gladly, she had told him she did not know. He had grunted, the sharp ring glittering on his hairy finger, his silk Bond Street shirt pulling on the thick column of his neck. By that time she was frightened of him, deeply frightened, for he had hit her the previous night; and no man had ever struck her before in all her life. Holding her smarting face incredulously, she had stared back at him, crying why? He had not replied and at that moment Tracey had seen that Mario did not care. He had hit her quite deliberately, as part of some plan to break her will, of that she had been quite certain; he had hit her and felt nothing, one way or the other. The sudden, savage blow had been a warning and a preparation, of that she was now certain; perhaps Mario had been preparing her for this moment, in this room, from his very first smile, when he had picked her up in the bar in Frith Street. Her heart screamed no to the truth of it; but Tracey steeled herself and faced the unbearable fact that Mario must have had this in his mind from the beginning. This was real. The rest had only been words, acting. He had not loved her; never for an instant. All the stories of gambler’s luck going against him, all the love and affection and sympathy turning to moodiness, the ultimate suggestion that he was broke because of her, because he had been helping her, taking her out, spending money on her, all this had been carefully calculated, rehearsed many times before, with other girls, until Mario was word-perfect. He was a professional ponce who found his own whores. Tracey was one of them. It was as simple as that, but it had taken her almost a week to realize it and the realization had come too late to be of any help. All of it, even the lovemaking. Tracey always considered herself frigid, all she had ever hoped or expected from sex was to give pleasure, not to receive it. Sometimes the man had cared enough to try to please her. Albert had tried. After the next man, nobody would try, ever again.

Tracey sat on the bed and lit a cigarette, shaking. Her fingers trembled often now, but not as violently as they had when she first met Mario. That was soon after she had come out of hospital, when she was still silently screaming for the drug. Now she had at least kicked that; the need for its sweet, destroying sickness came on her only at times of desperation. At that moment, she would have traded ten years of her life for a shot of the filth.

The evening sounds of Soho stepped up a pitch in the streets below; the traffic was thickening, the cries of the fruit market-traders becoming sharper. Sweat broke on Tracey’s white forehead, and her hands were suddenly icy. The stuffy room reeled, the kinky clothes, the budgerigar, the books of dirty pictures, framed and stacked like proud family-albums, the basin of warm water spun around her, and she almost cried out for help; but there was no one to cry to, only the maid.

The sudden noise of the downstairs bell paralysed her. Not so soon, please God not so soon. The maid opened the door and looked in.

‘Take that off, liebchen. He might not like it.’

Tracey stared at her, wordless.

‘Take it off, you stupid little scrubber!’ The maid’s voice was whiplash; this was the way they would all talk to her from now on, Tracey knew. Slowly, she pulled the gymslip over her head, and stood nude in the middle of the room.

‘Get something on. I told you they like something on!’

Again, Tracey nodded. Listlessly, she pulled the flimsy kimono around her. She heard feet on the stairs, a masculine voice, the maid’s cheerful reply. They were talking about the weather. She crossed the room and tugged at the cheap curtains, as she had been told to do as soon as a mug entered the flat. She looked down into the street. Under the shadow of a doorway, Mario stood, his handsome brown face tilted upwards towards her, watchful of his charge. He probably had other girls, she realized. She was one of a string. He would count the number of times the curtains were drawn and then he would count the money at the end of the day, whenever that was. Tracey looked down at him, balancing lightly on the balls of his feet, unworried, cheerful, with the build of an athlete, and no ills except the pimp’s disease, the insatiable gambling itch, and she wondered how she could ever have believed a word he said. Temporary, that had been the word he repeated to her, over and over again, it’ll only be temporary, he had said, the hairy, simian hand reaching for her under the silk sheets. She smiled, bitterly. There was some truth in that. The room was the permanent thing, the room and the need that drove men to the room. The girls like her were the temporary ones. There would be other rooms, much worse than this one. This one would be luxury. She shuddered at the thought.

‘Hello, love.’

The man stood in the doorway, the maid behind him. Tracey felt the woman’s imperative stare, and she flinched, and then, somehow, she smiled.

The maid said, ‘Deirdre’s on holiday, this is Tracey. You’ll like her.’

The man nodded uncertainly. He seemed rather tipsy; an alcoholic scent hung in the dingy room. With a terrible effort, Tracey smiled again, as the maid had taught her to smile.

‘Come in, close the door. I’ll catch my death.’

The man moved forward, the maid snapped the door behind him. He started, as if locked in, a sudden prisoner. Then he smiled, apologetically.

‘I was surprised, seeing you. I usually have Deirdre.’

‘She’s away, you see.’

‘Yes.’

He stood there, staring unhappily at her. Tracey wondered what strange evening sadness had brought him here, to this room.

‘I only come up to London every third week.’ His voice was low, as if they were conspirators. ‘I just got in, half an hour ago.’

She fought her panic down: it was all a matter of mental attitude, Mario had said. It’s only a dream, it isn’t really happening, it can’t be, she whispered to herself.

‘Nice journey?’

He looked surprised at the question. ‘Yes. New Pullman train. They’ve got them very comfortable now.’ He took out his wallet. ‘Will it be the usual?’

‘Yes please.’

The man put three pound notes on the dressing-table. Tracey remembered her duties.

‘And a tip for the maid?’

‘I was just getting it.’ He fumbled in his pockets and put two half-crowns on top of the notes. Tracey swept the notes into the kimono pocket. The man took off his coat, hung it on the hook behind the door. Tracey stood watching him, the smile frozen on her face. He took off his jacket and revealed a home-knitted pullover; there was a bald patch on his head, and he was overweight. Tracey, through her panic, wondered how many children he had, and whether he loved them. He looked at her, and, surprisingly kind, took out of his pocket a packet of cigarettes; he offered her one. She took it and he lit it with a lighter, crested with an RAF badge. He saw her look at it.

‘I was Raff during the last lot. Bloke made that for me out in the Desert. I was only eighteen the day I got that.’

He sat on the bed quietly, staring at the smoke rings. He was there, Tracey realized, to find a lost excitement: youth. She smiled at him with sudden pity, but he did not see the pity, just the smile. He reached forward suddenly, and his free hand touched her nipple, beneath the thin kimono. She froze but if he noticed it, he said nothing. His eyes closed and the alcoholic scent was suddenly strong in her face. He was trying to kiss her. Quickly, she pushed him away and stood up, with a bright smile. Kissing was no part of the contract, the maid had warned her. They always tried it, they always wanted it, but they were not paying for affection, only for sex; and it was in order to remind them of it.

‘Why … why don’t you take your things off?’

He stared. ‘Oh, aye. Aye.’

He stood up and pulled the home-knitted pullover over his head. He folded it neatly, and placed it on the chair. His Marks and Sparks shirt followed it; and his trousers, which he folded neatly and with care. Tracey tried not to look at him as she went automatically through the actions the maid had taught her: she laid out the contraceptive and the clean towel and put the soap in the water. She dabbed a little cheap perfume behind each ear. She turned and smiled, but the smile stilled on her face as she looked. The man stood attired only in his singlet and socks, and he was ready.

Tracey was never sure what happened after that. The man came forward, and took her in his arms, pushing her backwards, and the hard urgent flesh was hot against her cool stomach, as he bore her backwards across the bed; and suddenly her nails raked his cheeks: the blood came but he did not cry out; his hands fell to his side, and he stared at her, mutely. He touched his cheek.

‘What … what was that for?’

Tracey pushed past him, treading into her shoes as she went; she snatched the cheap fur-coat from the rail of kinky clothes, pulled it round her tight, and flung open the door. She ran down the stairs faster than she had ever run in her life.

The maid’s face flashed into her vision and the woman’s cry rang in her ears; but she ignored it. She heard the footsteps run to the window. She had to get out of the flat and into the street before Mario had realized what had happened. If he trapped her in the passage … Tracey’s throat went dry, her heart hammered, her legs all but gave under the last stumbling leap – she took the last six lino-covered steps in a jump – and then she was fleeing along the corridor towards the cold clear air, the sound of her spike heels hammering in her head.

Suddenly she was in the street.

Tracey stood, dazed by the sudden, beloved, natural sounds of day; the cries of the costers and fruit sellers; the honking of the taxi-horns, the faraway shrill of a jet aircraft; people walking and talking. She breathed deeply, inhaling the cold, clear, saving air. She staggered back against the wall, her head full of sound and light; the room had been so dim and muted, it was all like surfacing after a deep, breath-holding dive into warm, scented, dirty water.

‘There she is! Mario! There she is!’

Tracey looked up. The maid hung half out of the window and she was gesturing wildly. Next to her was the red and bewildered face of the ex-RAF man.

‘Tracey!’

Tracey heard the feared, accented voice. It was quite soft, and sibilant, but it carried clear across the road. Mario stood on the other side of the narrow, noisy street. He was smiling. He had not started to run, yet. He would try not to cause a fracas, not here, not now, this she knew. The punishment would come later, much later, after the soft words, in a safe place.

She felt sick. She could not run. She shook, a greyhound exhausted, after a hard race.

‘Stay where you are, Tracey.’

Tracey stood, her will lost, as he moved, smiling, across the road. He wore no coat, despite the sharpness of the spring day, and his young muscles moved under the tight suit.

‘Stay there, that’s a good girl.’

He was walking quite quickly now; and nobody was looking at all: people were passing by, and talking to each other, and it was all frozen and unreal, and she could not touch them. Her hand went up, and suddenly the taxi door was open and Mario was running but she was inside.

Mario stood, still smiling, on the pavement.

‘I find you. Oh, I find you, Tracey.’

The taxi-driver turned to Tracey. ‘Friend of yours, Miss?’

‘No, he isn’t.’

The taxi-driver smiled, reassured by her standard accent. At least the Convent had given her that. The driver slammed the door, and the cab moved off, into the traffic swirl of Cambridge Circus.

Tracey fell back on the seat. ‘Oh, thank God, thank God …’ She had not thanked Him for many years: there had been nothing to thank Him for.

‘Where to, Miss?’

Tracey opened her eyes. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘Where to, Miss?’

‘Oh …’ Tracey debated getting out; but it was too near. Mario might follow her, probably would. Even in the taxi, she was only safe for a time. He would follow her, of course he would follow her, why had she thought it would be so easy?

‘You all right, Miss?’

The cab-driver’s eye was solicitous, in his mirror.

‘Yes, yes …’

‘Where should I take you, Miss?’

Tracey remembered the telephone call. Why not? She smiled to herself. It would at least be something to have a drink in the American Bar wearing only a pantie-girdle, stockings and kimono and a fur coat. Robin would have laughed at that.

The cabby turned at the sound of her laughter. He looked worried.

‘You sure you’re all right, Miss?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m all right. The Dorchester, Park Lane, please.’

Tracey laughed hysterically all the way there.

GEORGE, in the American Bar at the Dorchester, knew Nevil Barclay by name. Such things were important to Nevil. He looked round the place as the barman smiled a greeting. ‘Mr Barclay, nice to see you, Sir. The usual?’ But nobody he knew was in the bar.

He nodded. ‘Thank you, George.’

This time one or two people looked round, at Nevil’s accent. The English were always surprised to see a man with such an accent wearing Nevil’s kind of clothes. Suit; Prince of Wales check. Tailor; Hawkes, Savile Row. Shoes by Lorange’s of Bond Street. Shirt by Turnbull and Asser. Watch by Omega. Cigarette case by Mappin and Webb, Regent Street. Nevil lit his Balkan Sobranie with a gold Ronson, smoothed back his hair (curly, beautifully cut by John, at Claridge’s, using only the scissors, never a razor or clippers in sight) and smiled at his reflection in the glass behind the bar. They would be even more surprised, the curious ones, if they knew who had paid for all these things. He straightened his tie, genuine, nobody could ever take that away from him, by God they couldn’t, that had been earned, it was the one honest piece of clothing he was wearing, the one thing he had bought himself. At Gieves, as a matter of fact, where else?

Nevil took his Laphroaig (just a touch of water) and drank it slowly, savouring the sharp, peaty odour of the malt, never taking his eyes from his own image behind the bar, assessing himself coldly, professionally. It mattered how he looked. Nowadays, it was the only thing that did matter.

He took stock: forty-three, but he looked less, like somebody who had played a sport well and still kept fit; which he had (boxing) and did (exercises each morning and workouts twice a week at Jack Solomon’s gym, everybody was going there this year). Well, that would have to stop. He continued his inventory: the suit covering the forward’s shoulders, the large hands, manicured but very strong and still brown from the Jamaican cruise; the clear blue eyes, the fashionably broken nose, the strong line of the jaw. Nevil looked (and in his time had passed as) a successful young tycoon who had made something of the family business. His father had actually been a street-sweeper in New Jersey. But he was English now, in thought, word and deed. He had made himself over. The accent was the only thing he could not change. Sometimes he half-heartedly posed as an airlines manager. That was nearer home anyway, but he had never flown an aircraft after the crash. His hand touched the scar at his hairline; he could not see it but he knew it was there, always. Sometimes it ached, very badly. That was when he got the black rages. He would not have one of them for a long time, weeks perhaps. He had had one that morning.

‘Again please, George. A large one this time.’

‘Yes, Mr Barclay. That sort of a day, Sir?’

‘Yes George, that sort of a day.’

And by Christ it had been. Nevil could not believe he had done it, even now. Left Dora, the bitch, his meal ticket, just the same; walked out of the Savoy on an instant. The Savoy one night and some Sussex Gardens bed-and-breakfast gaff the next? He shook his head. He had done nothing quite so impetuous for at least two years, which to him was a very long time indeed, a lifetime. Which it had been, in the years when he had first thought about time, how much there was of it, or wasn’t … strapped into a cockpit, you counted time in minutes, seconds even. It was a habit that had never left him. He lived, even now, as though his last hour might come that week, that day. It was a style learned in youth and impossible to break. Nevil found his palms were sweating, as they always did when he thought about those days, and he downed most of his second drink in a gulp. The peaty, connoisseur’s taste did not especially please him any longer. He was drinking for the effect now.

Had he actually done it? Had he shouted the words at Dora that he had been wanting to shout all those weeks, months, whatever it was, he didn’t remember, he didn’t want to know how long it had been, too long anyway. Had he really shouted old, and ugly, and stupid, and old again, just for good measure, for the revolting, hungry, ageing kisses in stateroom or hotel balcony, the too-public caress on his neck, on shipboard or in nightclub, the deliberate warning-off of some nubile girl, that this was her man, her kept man? Looking back, he wondered at himself. How had he been able to keep it up? How had he smiled into the suddenly contemptuous eyes of the girls, holding up his glass with a ‘Salud!’, brown foot trailing in blue water, or digging into sand, white and smooth as salt. Why do you do it, one of the girls had asked him (where had it been, Cannes or Juan Les Pins, he had forgotten) but he remembered his answer: ‘Because she pays me for it.’ The girl had looked at him with increasing interest – her father was a millionaire Greek shipowner, she was darkly beautiful and already depraved, at seventeen – and asked him, without a smile, ‘And can I pay you? I’ve never paid anybody before.’ He had grinned and said, ‘You will, darling. When you’re as old as she is.’ And then they had gone back to her villa and he had made sex to her (not love, he never made love, not now) and dominated her, and hurt her as he hurt all his women; and she had cried out in pain but not too loudly (for there were servants in the house) and she had been hurt, not only in body, but in spirit, and he was glad of that; for she had paid for the insulting words. The bites on her lips (they were puffing badly) would be hard to explain; so would the bruises on her arms and neck.

She had lain back, exhausted, and said, ‘You’re a brute. The things you do to a girl. One day you’ll kill somebody.’

He had grinned at her, bronzed, happy in his muscle and masculinity.

‘Probably.’

‘Have you killed anybody, ever?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘The War.’

‘Oh, that old thing.’

‘Yes, that.’

‘Did you see the men you killed?’

‘No.’

‘Do you enjoy it with her?’ the girl had asked.

‘Who? That old hag, you’re joking.’

The girl had looked at him, smiled. ‘Oh, that reminds me. I think I owe you something, don’t I?’ And she had taken some banknotes from her handbag, and offered them to him with an amused, contemptuous smile. He had slapped her very hard then. He saw later that she had told the newspapers that she had been attacked by an unknown man, that a small quantity of jewellery had been missing. That was true, anyway. He had taken it.

Nevil smiled his charming, wry smile to his mirror-image. It was hard to believe all that was over. He sighed. Dora hadn’t been too bad, at first. He had been on his uppers when they met, and although she had been practised in the art of keeping a paid man (she had always settled by cheque, she had never given him money, no more than a few pounds in his pocket at any one time) she had not been as demanding as one or two of the younger women he had lived with, and on. Yet the others had not made it so obvious to the wo. . .