JACK OF DIAMONDS

Chap 7 - Pt 1 (But then two hours there before...)

Artie woke up before the dawn.

His muscles ached from the climb up the wall last night, but he fell to the floor and did forty quick push-ups regardless. He wasn’t getting any younger, he told himself as soon as he finished. Still, it had been an exhilarating climb, even if he felt as if he’d been beaten with a cricket bat. He remembered how the first time he’d tried climbing he nearly fell; since then, he carried a rope in case he ran into any obstacles. So far, that only happened the one time, in London; and he’d broken a finger that time.

I’ve had too many close calls over the years, though.

He looked at his hands, which were rough and calloused, and looked at the finger he’d broken. He’d reset it himself, but it hadn’t set properly, and now it had a slight bend at the last knuckle. He was lucky it had been his pinkie finger, he reminded himself. The fact it was bent at the last knuckle sometimes worked in his favour, but he’d have preferred to forgo the pain rather than reap the benefits of a wider grip. He couldn’t remember a time over the course of the last four years when he wasn’t suffering from some minor bump or bruise.

It was no wonder his hands were hard and calloused.

I don’t remember a night in the past five years when I’ve slept for more than four hours; but I don’t complain about that either, do I?

It was obvious memories of the War kept sleep at bay; but understanding what the problem was, didn’t help resolve the issue, did it, he asked himself?

Besides, was it a problem anymore?

He’d sometimes wondered which memory it was that haunted him most, but he knew there was only the one. And rightfully so, he thought. If he’d have come home with a closet full of memories he would’ve ended up like Crockett—shaking like a leaf in a windstorm, unable to sleep, or talk to anyone without crying—finally killing himself because it seemed like the only answer. It was probably for the best, he told himself. But then, Crockett had been utterly insane. You could ask any man who’d served with him, what they thought of Crockett, and they’d all say the same thing. The man used to crawl out into No Man’s Land and come back with the ears of German soldiers he’d met along the way, and killed. They were tied around his neck with a leather thong. They even gave him a medal for his night time sorties. While they should’ve shipped him home and locked him up, they didn’t; instead, they sent him over the top again and again, thinking he’d get himself killed.

He didn’t.

Shell shock they call it.

Small wonder they call it that, he told himself. The thunder of the guns was similar to putting your head inside a metal drum and pounding on it with a hammer all day and night for a week straight. It wasn’t something you could easily forget even if you wanted to. Men were going deaf standing beside breech-loading guns; tossing buckets of water on the works to cool them; slipping in the mud holes they’d made as the guns rolled back and forth in ruts caused by concussive blasts. And you’d watch the German lines in the distance, asking yourself, how they could possibly survive such a bombardment? He remembered how he wanted to piss himself in fear when it was time for him to go over the top for the first time.

Carrying seventy pounds of weight, he slipped and fell, not getting up until the bullets stopped digging into the ground around him. And when he looked up the line was a hundred yards ahead of him, marching into a hail of bullets. He reached out to the man beside him, hoping to urge him forward—needing someone beside him—but he man rolled over with dead eyes staring up at the morning sun. There was a hole in his chest the size of his fist; the man looked so peaceful, it was easy to picture himself in his place. But not today, he remembered telling himself. There may have been no turning back, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use the others in front of him as a barrier.

And he did, many times.

And they still made me a Sergeant.

It was his first day of battle; the single-most frightening day of his life, he’d thought. It would prove to be the greatest loss in British military history, with a record 50,000 dead; all with stats, and records, and names. He may not have suffered through shell shock, he thought, but he’d certainly suffered; they’d all suffered. And still, when it was all over, when the surrenders were accepted and all was said and done, a number of them remained in Paris, hiding from themselves by either drinking themselves to death, inhaling extortionate amounts of cocaine, or thinking they needed to write their experiences down in a book, or as a piece of music.

That was the Somme.

For a whole year he’d face the onslaught; never quite conquering his fear whenever he had to go over the top. It was never a matter of him doubting if theirs was the right cause, not until he began asking himself what the point of all the endless slaughter was? He’d been lucky, he knew that. He was promoted simply because he'd outlived everyone. The others, they all knew it wasn't for meritorious bravery.

A Spencer was never meant to lead troops into the breech, his brother Emerson said one cold night in November. He had to admit his brother was right. There wasn't a painting in the entire house that showed a Spencer leading the way into battle. He smiled at the irony as he half-listened to his father. He told his father there was no need for talk of politics on the Front. If it's politics, it's Russian sympathisers trying to bring on mutiny, or a revolution. The Army usually just shot those type of agitators. No real trial to speak of; it certainly couldn't be called legal, he thought.

It was one of the few times he'd been home on leave. His mother wouldn't stop crying; his father was bombastic--political--and Artie swore he'd never go back. He was pulled off the Front lines and given a position at headquarters once it was discovered he spoke several languages. Five of them, he'd say, should he be asked. No one had asked. They needed translators at headquarters, in Paris, to translate intercepted messages.

All he heard now was the melody of echoing guns sounding as distant as the thunder, and seeing the flash of bombardments as if they were sheets of lightning on the low horizon.

Why didn’t I stay in Paris?

Aceline was always on his mind whenever he thought of Paris. She’d been the one major affaire de coeur that he remembered with fondness. He’d long thought it might be nice to revisit those days: But you can never go back, he told himself. And he accepted that, or else he would’ve gone back and fixed a lot of things. But even so, there was something about leaving Paris that made him feel it wasn’t enough. He could’ve stayed--he should have stayed, in hindsight. The Lost Generation they're calling them now. He told himself he might have to consider living on the Riviera again, just as he had with his uncle all those years ago. Before Oxford; before London; before he was broken.

He could see the stars starting to dwindle through the tiny window high up in the wall. The night was still bright with the light of the moon, but it was fading like a ghost with the coming dawn. There was no knowing which constellations he was looking at out here, he realized. Everything his father had taught him about the stars was lost that first time he saw the stars in total darkness. And while he thought nothing could be darker than the inside of a trench, he'd yet to stand in the middle of the Devon countryside, looking up. The most he could do now was to guess, and while the Romantic side of his brain told him he was looking at Orion’s Belt, the more sensible half of his brain told him there were just too many stars to count.

But thinking of Paris always led him back to London. There was the London he knew before enlisting, during a fit of fervent patriotism most of his generation suffered from as far as he was concerned. He was twenty-one, attending college at Oxford—because that’s where all the Spencers went--but more imporatnly, exempt from the draft. His was a name with a long line of tradition, and as the youngest son, he was slated to be employed by his uncle’s firm, DODSON & SONS: Litigants & Insurance.

It was a life to feel stifled by, he knew now. The idea of working the same endless hours his uncle and cousins worked was ridiculous. As the youngest of five boys, there were no real expectations for him, except that he follow the family’s traditions. He’d tossed that idea aside by enlisting. His mother was hysterical, as he expected she would; his four brothers had four different opinions; his sister, as usual, was told she had no opinion.

That was the London he’d fallen in love with. He was young, single, and attractive. He enjoyed the comfort of the lower classes. He liked the girls, and he learned to fight--the hard way.

I guess Roger figured that out last night.

His father made certain he had an allowance, and would have it as long as he remained a student at Oxford. It was the realization of what the future held that made him decide to enlist. When he got home after the war, all he heard from family and friends was that he'd changed. The War had changed him.

No shit, he wanted to say. In fact, I knew that without having to be told. Twenty-four hours ago, I had a French whore name Aceline on her knees in front of me, working me like the French whore she was.

That's what he wanted to tell them. But he couldn't, could he?

I’m a thief, for one thing.

Or maybe that’s the only thing?

When he shipped home from the War, the ship docked at Plymouth. He stood at the rail, watching the crowd on the pier. The excitement was palpable. You could feel it in the air—as if lightning were building up—a static glow that seemed to come from every man, woman, and child on the docks. Women were jumping up and down in excitement as they recognized signs and placards addressed to them; some were holding bawling babies, waving them over the crowd as though banners. He saw his own name on a placard in the crowd and slunk back.

It was his sister, Peg.

She introduced him to the new London. The London he once knew had changed because of the War. The ones making the money weren’t afraid of acting outside the law. Most of them were battle-hardened veterans and had no trouble killing anyone who got in their way. They were followers, and enforcers, and they worked for the gangs as mercenaries for hire. He could understand the cold bloodedness needed for something like that, and wondered if he’d be willing to cross the line to that extreme.

The men Peg knew, they knew those men.

There was no one she knew who’d ever acted on his own; no one she knew who thought he might try to run his own gang. It took a man who felt he had nothing to lose to rise to the top. The men Peg knew tried to act threatening, even menacing—they were only three of them—but they didn’t have it in them to go all the way. Those that did were usually found weighted down, swollen and bloated in a stream out in the midlands. They all answered to someone who was a bigger threat--a man who was willing to cross the line. The men his sister knew were shadowy men who enjoyed living life on the fringes of high society; they were willing to sell cocaine and morphine, but that was just to keep their own supply available. They weren't about to cross the line and commit themselves to a cause they didn’t believe in. Instead, they’d over indulge, become addicted, and be dead within three years.

Artie knew the best thing for them would be meeting a woman who was willing to put up with their enlarged egos, and love them in spite of their faults. A woman who was worth giving up everything for, and when you looked back you’d tell yourself you made the right decision. Anything less than that, and they were lost.

He wasn’t about to let that happen to himself, knowing it was a possible future.

“I’ll tell you what I’m planning to do,” he said.

They were sitting at a table in the newest “in” place, somewhere in Plymouth. He’d forgotten the name twice since they’d entered. All that he knew was it was somewhere near the waterfront. The waiter was polite, and the beer he’d ordered was brought out fast, and it was cold. The place was loud with the raucous laughter of the next generation. The girls in shimmering, flimsy dresses that caught the soft lights in muted waves. There was a man on a piano in the corner playing English pub songs, and people echoed the songs with raucous laughter. The air was the hazy blue of tobacco smoke, with fried food, and the sweat of a hundred hungry patrons. There were blue and white tiles on the floor, tiles on the walls, and a fan in the middle of the ceiling that stirred the air with streamers of cobwebs hanging from the blades.

“What do you mean, what you’re planning to do? What about Uncle’s firm?” Peg asked, sipping a gimlet. She was serious enough. It seemed that everything their mother had instilled in her about duty and family had taken root.

“For Christ’s sake, Peg, can you see me sitting behind some fuckin’ desk for the rest of my life?”

“No,” she laughed. “But Peter and Paul? I can see them doing that, and being quite happy with it. After all, it kept them out of the War, didn’t it?”

“Peter and Paul,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “I used to look up to them. They were four years older than me, and when I was ten, they’d beat me up just for the hell of it. If I were to join the firm, I’d probably end up blowing their brains out. That’s a scandal mother would never survive.”

She looked at him for a moment—studied him—before she looked down at the table and picked up her drink. She couldn’t look him in the eye and tell him she was calling his bluff; that he just saying that to shock her, not with what she could see looking back at her, cold and deadly. She tried to laugh again, reaching across the table instead and picking up his hand.

“So what’s this big plan you have?”

“I’m never going to work for anyone again in my life, I can tell you that.”

She laughed outright, and then became serious.

“Father will never let you have your allowance again if you don’t join the firm. How do you expect to live in London without an allowance?”

“Who says I’ll stay in London?”

“Where else would you go?”

“The world’s a big place.”

“Again. How would you afford to live?”

“I can always resort to theft.”

“I doubt you’ll be very good at that,” she smiled.

“Do you?”

“What do you plan to steal?”

“Jewels. Money. Whatever I think will be worth something.”

“Stop it,” she said quickly. “I can’t tell anymore if you’re being serious.”

“I need someone. Someone I can trust, to help me.”

“What!”

She took a quick look about the restaurant, hoping no one noticed her sudden outburst. Several of the women looked disgusted with her, and she smiled at them until they turned away. She leaned in closer, lowering her voice.

“You want me to do what? You’re not serious, are you?”

She looked at the tables around them, wary of who was watching them.

There was no one watching.

“Do you know anyone who deals in stolen jewels?”

“No, I won’t do it.”

“What do you mean, you won’t? I’m your brother. If I can’t trust you, who do I go to? Just a name. I promise. I won’t ask you for anything again.”