Bryce Courtenay - The Potato Factory

'You certainly may, sir! You certainly may!' Mary would rise and top up his glass and then do the same to her own, whereupon she would seat herself again holding her glass and wait. Ikey would lower his glass and take a polite sip of champagne, then in a preacher-like manner, intone: If the angle of the dangle is equal to the heat of the meat, then the price of the rise, is decided by the art of the tart.

'There it be, my dear, the entire business of brothel keepin' contained in a simple rhyme.'

Simple as he claimed it to be, Ikey thought it exceedingly clever and never tired of the reciting of it. At the conclusion of the rhyme they would clink glasses and entwine arms, each taking a sip of champagne, whereupon Mary would say, 'May our bubbles keep risin'. Amen!'

It was as close as the two of them ever came to sentimentality of the kind which might be described as love.

For Mary the bawdy house on Bell Alley was a daily confirmation that she could be a woman of enterprise and that by her own wit and skill she could gain a security in life she had never known. Ikey was proving to be her way out of poverty, misery and an almost certain slow crippling death from syphilis, or a quicker one at the hands of some madman with a shiv in need of the means for an opium pipe. There were a thousand ways a prostitute could meet her death, but very few ways in which she could expect to remain alive much beyond her mid-twenties.

In gratitude Mary showed Ikey more tolerance than ill temper. She was often sorely tempted to screw his scrawny neck, but for the most part refrained from violence, boxing his ears only when provoked to the extreme. She knew him to be a coward, a cheat, a liar and, of course, a notorious thief, though this last characteristic she regarded simply as Ikey's profession.

Without the thief there would be no magistrate or judge or lawyer or half the regular clientele of her bawdy house. And so she had no reason to place Ikey's choice of vocation in any poorer light than that of her clients. When the poor embrace the tenets of morality it comes ready-made with misery as its constant companion. Mary counted herself fortunate to have Ikey in her life and very occasionally in her bed, which was as close as anyone had ever come to loving him, or she to feeling affection for any other person since her mother and father died.

But it is not in the nature of things to remain calm. Contentment is always a summer to be counted in brief snatches of sunlight, while unhappiness is an endless winter season of dark and stormy weather. The cold wind of Ikey's and Mary's discontent was beginning to howl through the rat-infested rookeries, sniffing at the mud and shit of the dark alleys and stirring the slime of the river into a foment of disaster which was about to wash over them both.

At the end of a miserable night in December with the wind roaring and the snow swirling, Ikey was just turning into Bell Alley from Winfield Street when a figure leapt from the shadows directly into his path. Ikey jumped in fright as the dark shape presented itself through a sudden flurry of snow.

'It be friend!' Bob Marley shouted into the driving wind. 'A word is needed in yer ear, Ikey, an urgent word!'

Ikey relaxed. Bob Marley was to be trusted. As a young 'un he'd been a chimney sweep whom Ikey had plucked from his miserable trade to work for him as a snakesman. He recalled how he hadn't cheated the boy particularly and so had no reason to fear him. He was a likely lad in his day who seemed to be double jointed in all his connected parts, and could squirm and slide through apertures too small for a dock rat to enter. While he had remained small Ikey had profited well from his talent for entering property.

As a boy Marley had been intelligent and naturally cunning and would have made a good leader if he had not always been a loner. Though it was this very characteristic which meant he could be trusted not to open his gob or boast of his conquests to the other street urchins. With money in his purse for frequent visits to a chop house, the pocket-sized lad had grown quickly and was soon too big to be a snakesman. Ikey had trained him as a pickpocket but he never amounted to greatness for he refused to work in a team. He'd grown into a villain, dangerous if crossed, but known to work only for himself and only for gold. In the terms of the times and the kind with whom Ikey naturally mixed, Bob Marley was reliable as a new-minted sovereign. Ikey stepped deeper into the alley where the noise of the wind was less intense.

'I 'ave information important to ya, Ikey, most important, most important indeed! Yes! If I say so meself, information o' the kind a person doesn't come upon every day.' Marley paused and then added in an ominous voice, 'Thank Gawd!'

Ikey removed his hands from the pockets of his great coat and slipped off the filthy fur-lined glove of his right hand, then he re-entered the coat through an entirely different part of its anatomy and opened his dumby secretly. He allowed his fingers to slip through the coins in the leather purse until he sensed the warmer touch of a gold sovereign, whereupon his nimble fingers worked until they touched six sovereigns which he carefully pushed to one corner of the purse, then he took three. These he produced held between thumb and forefinger as though they were a single coin conjured from the air. He had already gauged the worth of Marley's information, which he'd set in his mind at six gold sovereigns. He knew from the tone of his informer's voice that the information was kosher. He'd think less of Marley if he didn't manage to extract another three sovereigns from him for its deliverance. He held the three gold coins out to the man in front of him.

'Three sov? Three bleedin' sov!' Marley removed the scarf that covered all but his eyes, looked at Ikey in disgust and then spat onto the snow at his feet. 'This ain't no bleedin' social call!'

But Ikey held the gold sovereigns in front of Marley until his fingers began to tingle with the cold and finally Marley, shrugging his shoulders, removed the woollen mitten from one hand and took them without a word, testing their weight in the palm of his hand before biting each in turn with a gold eye tooth. He grunted and placed them into his vest-pocket. Though he'd hoped for more, he'd been standing around in the bitter night for more than an hour, and he needed a large steak with relish and a pint of hot gin or he was sure he would perish from the cold.

'You've been shopped!' Marley said finally.

'Who done it?' Ikey asked.

'It come up from Rosemary Lane. No names. Just a good friend what's got an ear connected.'

'When?' Ikey asked.

'Termorra, early mornin', sparrow fart!' Marley paused, then added, 'After all the toffs 'ave scarpered from yer 'ouse of ill repute!'

'This mornin'! Oh Jesus! Oh me Gawd! Oh shit! This mornin'? This very mornin'?'

Bob Marley nodded and dug into the interior of his coat to produce a gold hunter at the end of a brass chain. Clicking it open, he examined its face.

'I'd say 'bout three 'ours, tosh!' He closed the lid of the watch with a flick of his thumb. 'Reckon they gotcha this time, me lovely!'

'Where?' Ikey asked tremulously. It was an important question, for if it was the house he and his wife Hannah shared he would be less concerned. The house in White-chapel had been raided several times, but the trapdoor under Hannah's bed, which led to a large false ceiling in which his stolen property was stored, was so cunningly contrived as to be invisible to the naked eye. But the house at the end of the alley in which he stood was less well accommodated to the concealment of stolen goods. A raid on Mary's bawdy house, even if he could clear it of contraband in time, which hardly seemed possible, would be a disaster. Its basement contained the heavy mechanicals of the printing press which had been brought in, one piece at a time, over several months, to make up a press of a very peculiar kind, and such as would be of great interest to the law if examined with the printing of banknotes in mind. There could be no thought of its removal, which would take several days.