Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon Read Online Free Page B

of the nippers change places?”
    “I was afraid he’d think of that,” Barry says under his breath. He speaks to the old dad: “Look, you’re all right where you are. Besides, we don’t want to put the mockers on a budding romance, do we?”
    “I’ll change places with Grandad,” the brat next to me says.
    Oh Christ, I think to myself. Vauxhall here we come.
    “You stay where you bleeding well are,” Barry says. The kid does as it’s told and I breathe at least one small sigh of relief.
    But the relief is only temporary. Because ever since we left the terminal, I’ve been as tense as a minder who’s having to wait a minute longer than he ought to. Not that I ever felt that kind of tenseness myself. But I’ve seen it inothers. And that is what I’m feeling now. Those clever sods up in the Penthouse had sussed it. I’d never flown before.
    Of course, I’ve often thought about it. And after having thought about, I’ve always sworn nothing would ever get me in the inside of an aeroplane. I mean, the things you read. Those reports in the papers. (Reports I always read, not missing a detail; I’m drawn to them; if there’s one on the front page I always lap it up, even before I’ve turned to see how Spurs have gone on.) Bodies strewn over a ten mile radius. Tape recordings of the last minutes in the flight deck. Pictures of the stewardesses, smiling. And on T.V., it’s even more favourite with my stomach muscles. The smoking wreckage. The anonymous sheets on moving stretchers. Zooming in on a chiffon scarf hanging from a tree branch, a briefcase, a kid’s spouted drinking cup lying on its side in the drizzle. I mean, it’s not that I’m frightened of going. If it was that, I’d have taken up flower arranging years ago. When you’re gone, you’re gone, no argument, seeing as how that’s the one thing there’s no answer to. No, it’s just that I like the idea of having some say in the matter of my going. Not to mention the matter of when.
    I’m all for self-determination. I like having odds. Somebody’s coming at you with a knife, you’ve got chances. Somebody’s got a pump action massaging your vertebrae, you can always make a decision. A motor coming at you down the wrong side of the M.6, you can still take evasive action. There’s a chance. And, besides, experience is a great teacher. You know what happens with a knife, a pump-action, a steering column. If you’re going to go they all have one thing in common: the swiftness of progression from cause to effect. Whereas it’s always struck me that in a plane, there’s fuck all the individual can do about anything. No room for any determinism there; no chance for the individual with the quickest reactions to take evasive action. You just go with the rest, and never having been a lover of crowds, the close proximity of other people—that descent of a minute or a minute and a half,surrounded by the wailing and the screaming of the assembled throng—would seem as long as the eternity we were all about to enter. Another thing: when I used to organise tickles, there were never any wankers on a team of mine. If I asked a specialist his opinion of a particular facet of his part in the job, I’d expect a straight answer; no flannel just so he could row himself on something for the sake of possible readies. Whereas a mate of mine, Jimmy Fish—he once told me he was in this plane coming in to land one time. It was mucky weather, the plane was circling, and the loudspeaker came on when it shouldn’t and the whole fucking planeload heard the captain saying to his copilot: “Well we can’t stay up here all night going round and round; let’s go down and have a crack at it.”
    Unbelievable. That kind of thing gives me the fucking creeps.
    So eventually the plane begins to trundle out onto the runway, and out of my porthole I can see the wing shuddering, the unsettling crudity of the bolts holding the individual metallic sheets together, the