Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the New World

‘A dumb man would argue that even if we have strong evidence against him — and you’re right, we may not have strong evidence, it could all be a bluff — it still wouldn’t matter,’ Blackstone said. ‘The dumb man would argue that given the level of corruption in this city, we’d only have a very slim chance of bringing him down even with top-class evidence.’ He paused. ‘How big a chance would you say we have, Alex? Twenty per cent?’

‘More like twenty-five per cent,’ Meade said.

‘So the dumb man would throw us out of his office, just as you’ve been threatening to do,’ Blackstone continued. ‘The smart man, on the other hand, would say to himself, “Is it worth running the risk, even if that risk may only be twenty-five or thirty per cent, when, if I do these people a little favour , I can have a zero per cent risk?”.’

O’Shaugnessy felt a sense of relief he hadn’t even known he needed to feel. So all these guys wanted was a bribe. They were firmly back in his world — a world in which he was a captain, and they were nothing. And maybe he would pay them the bribe, not because he had to, but because it was reassuring to know that, deep down, everybody was the same.

‘How much do you want?’ he asked. ‘And remember, boys, don’t be too greedy.’

‘You haven’t been listening, Captain,’ the Limey said coldly. ‘We don’t want money — we want a favour.’

‘What kind of little favour?’

‘Do you play chess, Captain?’ the Limey asked.

What was it with this guy? O’Shaugnessy wondered. First it was analogies and now it was chess.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t played,’ the Limey said. ‘It is quite a stretching game.’

‘I’ve played,’ O’Shaugnessy said, because he’d be damned before he admit to this Limey bastard that there was anything he couldn’t do.

‘Then you’ll know that on a chess board, you have sixteen pieces under your control, but that they’re not all of the same value.’

‘Sure,’ O’Shaugnessy said, unconvincingly.

‘The names we give to the major pieces are bishops, rooks and knights, but we might as well call them sergeants, politicians and judges — and their main job is to protect the king at all costs.’

‘That would be you, Captain O’Shaugnessy,’ Meade said.

‘I knew that,’ O’Shaugnessy growled.

‘And as well as the major pieces, there are the minor ones,’ the Limey continued. ‘The pawns. The little people. There may be knights and bishops left on the board when the game ends, but the pawns have usually all gone, because that’s their role in life — to be sacrificed when necessary.’

‘What the hell is this Limey talkin’ about?’ O’Shaugnessy asked Meade.

‘It will all be clear in a moment,’ Meade promised.

‘And in this case,’ Blackstone continued, ‘the pawn we want you to sacrifice goes by the name of Mrs de Courcey.’

‘You want me to arrest her?’ O’Shaugnessy asked.

‘No, nothing like that. All we want you to do is to starve her out for a few days.’

‘Starve her out? How?’

‘Stop selling her booze, cigarettes and food, and make sure no one else does, either.’

‘That all?’

‘Not quite. We’d like you to post a couple of patrolmen outside the brothel, to prevent her clients from going in.’

‘She pays me good money to look after her,’ O’Shaugnessy said.

‘She’s a pawn,’ Blackstone said dismissively. ‘You’re not there to serve her interests — she’s there to serve yours.’

‘An’ what are all the other madams who pay me goin’ to think, if I treat her like that?’

‘They’ll think that you’ve decided to make an example of her,’ Blackstone said.

‘What d’ya mean? Make an example of her?’

‘When I was in the army, I used to have to watch men being flogged,’ Blackstone said. He stood up, and raised his hands above his head. ‘The soldier was tied up like this, and the shirt was ripped from his back.’ He lowered his arms again. ‘Then the flogging would begin.’ He swung his right arm, as if slashing a whip through the air. ‘The whip would bite into the flesh, and blood would begin to pour out of the gashes.’

O’Shaugnessy and Meade looked on, mesmerized. They could almost see it happening — could almost hear the whip as it whistled through the air, and the dull thud it made when it landed on the naked flesh.

‘Sometimes the man being flogged would be guilty of a serious infraction of military discipline,’ Blackstone continued. ‘But sometimes the flogging was hardly merited at all — sometimes the man would have committed only the most trivial of offences.’ He paused for a moment and lowered his whip hand to his side. ‘Tell me, Alex, what do you imagine the men who were forced to watch this spectacle thought as they saw a man who’d done virtually nothing wrong being flogged to within an inch of his life?’

‘That it wasn’t fair?’ Meade guessed.

Blackstone laughed. ‘You poor simple child,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have got that answer from you, would I, Captain?’

‘No,’ O’Shaugnessy agreed, ‘you sure as hell wouldn’t.’

‘We were actually thinking two different things,’ Blackstone said. ‘The first was, “Thank God it’s him who’s getting the lash. and not me!” And the second was, “If he gets the skin ripped off his back for doing something like that, imagine what would happen to me if I really did something wrong!” Are you getting the point, Captain?’

Yeah,’ O’Shaugnessy said pensively. ‘I think I am.’

‘It’s called military discipline in the case of the floggings,’ Blackstone continued. ‘But it doesn’t have to involve a whip, and it doesn’t only apply to the army. Whores can be disciplined just as easily as soldiers can.’

‘Go on,’ O’Shaugnessy said.

‘The other madams won’t be outraged if you starve Mrs de Courcey — they’ll be scared . They’ll be falling over themselves not to offend you in any way , and the next time you decide to raise the amount of money that you expect from them, they’ll pay up without a murmur.’

It was a smart idea, O’Shaugnessy decided — and wondered why he hadn’t already thought of himself. But he certainly wasn’t going to admit how smart it was to the Limey.

‘So what’s it to be?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Are you prepared to gamble that we can’t bring you down, however hard we try — or are you willing to take out a little painless insurance?’

‘I don’t mind tellin’ you, boys, that it will be very bad for business if I do what you ask,’ O’Shaugnessy said. ‘An’ the thing is, I don’t even know why you want me to do it.’

‘It might help us to find whoever killed Inspector O’Brien,’ Alex Meade told him.

‘Well, like I told you earlier, the man should never have rocked the boat,’ O’Shaugnessy said reflectively, ‘but when all’s said and done, he was a cop — an’ an Irishman — an’ if this will help your investigation, I suppose I could go along with it. How many days do you want this starvin’ out to last?’

‘Five days should be about enough,’ Blackstone said, calculating that if it worked at all, it would work in three.

‘I’ll give you three days,’ O’Shaugnessy said. ‘’cos even three days is gonna seriously hurt my business interests.’

‘We appreciate the sacrifice that you’re making,’ Blackstone said. ‘If there were more police officers like you around, Captain O’Shaugnessy, New York City would be a much better place.’