At Saint Sepulchre’s the bells say, ‘When will you pay me?’ but Dice, feeling twice the price, sticks simply to his sidewalk sidle, scorns the sheepish Shoreditch shrug-off, and thinks about time and money, and money and time, and how nicely they are tied up in the rhyme. Eleven o’clock. Eleven: yeah, that’s good, thinks Dice. That’s a good deal. Double down. Can’t lose. But let’s not take that train of thought. No: let’s follow Dice as he hies and hoofs, wends and winds and weaves his way, watching for cracks in the pavement. Lucky Liam Dice – ducker, diver, fucker, skiver, liar, cheater, conman, thief. He has his hands in his pockets, his feet on the ground and his fingers in many pies, on many spinning plates, before a many-ironed fire. Oh, and head, and heart? Well, his head is screwed on tight, and certainly not in the clouds, and his heart is at home in the wrong place. All these are safe bets.
A tiny newsagent’s – grimy, wedged-in – shuffles into the frame. Dice bends his artful footsteps. Inside, he smiles at the camera – the back-room, the vacant VCR, the unmonitored monitor – and strides to the counter.
‘I’ll take a packet of Lucky Strikes, if you’d be so kind.’
‘Lucky Strike. Ten, sir?’
‘Twenty, my friend. Twenty reds,’ says Dice, and the exchange makes him think that he would very much like to swap the cocked twenty betwixt his sticky fingers for a ten-spot, an Ayrton, while the turbaned head is turned. You just can’t do that anymore, though – not with these crisp new twenties, gaudy and purple and the size of a folded newspaper. A faded yellow ten is no substitute – they don’t just look different, they weigh about half as much. No dice.
Cigarettes and money change hands. These new Adam Smith twenties: there is a faint filial or familial resemblance to the new Euro folding stuff. Note that. Mark that. Now: watch carefully. Observe.
‘Thank you kindly, my friend. Do I hear you can do me change for another twenty?’ Dice hands the man another note, and watches the adept digits make up the break-up from the till. Palming and pocketing a ten, a five and a five-note jingle of coins, he mimes muddle-headedness and says,
‘Hang on – skyrocket’s full of shrapnel now. Can we swap a tenner for some coins?’ He hands over a stacked snake, quids pro quo, and adds, ‘Make sure you count that. I think it’s the full shilling, but that would be telling.’ Gravely, the Sikh’s eyes roll up like a mournful fruit machine. A burnished accent:
‘Sir, you have given me only nine pounds.’
Dice percolates, processes this. He produces a pound and a note and proposes,
‘Eleven. That’s good: that’s a good deal. I’ll give you eleven and get a twenty back. Never fear, my friend – you can count on me to count when it counts.’
‘As you like it, sir.’ The Sikh twinkles a smile and hands over a blundering bedsheet of a banknote. Liam Dice doffs an imaginary hat and with that he is off.
Having found the Lady, he shakes out a Lucky, strikes a match and continues in a puff of smoke. Back to that train of thought: all aboard the hackneyed carriage. This is how Dice thinks and acts, how he is manifest, as man and manifesto – in his thoughts and in his words; in what he does and in what he fails to do. But he is no unscrupulous archaism, no unwashed urchin. He is aware of the simple limits of his art, the crucial rules. Most things can be reduced to simple rules: secrets, for instance. You just don’t tell anyone. Once you do, that’s it: it’s gone. It’s a lost art. You can’t tell a soul. If you do, you assume that every soul you tell, guardedly, with caveats and provisos, will tell at least one other. The nature of secrets rests on something very simple. Dice’s first rule is similarly elegant in nature: don’t get caught. That’s it; that’s all. Anything else goes – but don’t ever get caught. And he never does. He never slips. He never, ever stops being clever.
For Dice, this business of being clever has worked out well, so far. For one thing, being good at being clever has meant not having to be good at the other tiresome trials that go with the territory: being good at meting out or meeting violence, a vocabulary he has never acquired, being good at associating with the sorry, the slapdash, the small-time, or being good at scarpering, capering, splitting or legging it. No: he is above all that. In fact, his qualities include being likeable, gregarious and scrupulously honest – or giving a good impression of this, or doing a good impression of this. At the baize-table, surrounded by poker faces, Dice whoops and grins, talks incessantly and explains to the collected card-sharps exactly what hand he holds, all the while watching, gauging, waiting. He always cleans up, because he has made the simple but crucial decision that the cards don’t matter. It’s a classic piece of misdirection. The cards are a prop, a ploy, a distraction from the real matter at hand. Dice is good at cards, it’s true – part of a naturally even keel where odds are concerned, a dark, cold, savant-like instinct – but he is much, much better at people. After all, what’s the use of clambering in through a ruined window – the taped glass, the wrapped fist – when you can stroll in through the front door, with a sunny smile and a handshake?
After a clattering cab ride, in which Dice is shaken around in the back of the cavernous carriage, he emerges with a spring in his step. Casually, he stiffs the driver, a seething, old-time Cockney who shakes his flat-capped head in a mute fury of exasperation as he grudgingly reveals that the black cab’s boot bears no bale of hay. Light of heart but no lighter of pocket, Dice thumbs the buzzer that reads ‘Albion Rooms’ and is greeted by a chatter of electronic synchromesh. The door swings, and so begins the descent, down the downward spiral, the sounding staircase that rings and clangs underfoot.
The room – no, the space, for it is large and lobby-ish – has been thoughtfully appointed by someone with a manic sense-fetishist’s flair for interior design, and a large and varied cache of hallucinogenics. The chest-height front-desk or bunker that Dice rests his elbows on is covered in gently-padded latex, like a twenty-foot gimp mask. The walls are a genital purple, and phosphorescent panels glow therein. Over on the west side, a snooker table in migraine yellow crouches, surrounded by fat couches. To Dice’s right, a tank is set into the wall, wherein a school of drop-out piranhas are mostly ignoring a punctured goldfish, its swim-bladder deflated and its mouth still gaping, gasping. Beneath the piped music, terrible sounds can faintly be discerned.
‘Liam. How do. Wasn’t expecting you ’til Monday.’ The voice and the face belong to Paul Bearer. Bearer is a squat, bouncerish bullet of a man, with the approximate dimensions of an overstuffed refrigerator. He creaks in black leather and bovver boots, wears a Dead Kennedys ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’ T-shirt and will have ‘STRUMMER IS GOD’ etched above his right knuckles even as he is boxed and buried.
‘Monday, eh? Thought it might be Sunday. Thought I’d drop in and find out on the way,’ says Dice.
‘On the way where, Liam?’
‘On the way to getting paid, my friend. Flash the cash and I’ll dash.’ He extends a hand, and Bearer places in it a little stack of twenties.
‘Your patter,’ says Bearer, heavily, ‘is fucking appalling. Anyway. Listen. Monday. These boys called State of the Union are booked in. Last week, they don’t show up. So – when they do show up, this week, they owe us a hundred quid. Plus the week before. That’s two ton. Or their gear’s down the pawn shop.’
‘You know you’re the only person left who still uses pawn shops, don’t you? You have heard of the internet, Paul?’
‘I have heard of the internet, Liam. I’m told it’s very convenient. However. It’s not as convenient as ringing a man with a van, who gives you the cash and removes the offending article.’ As he says this, Bearer spreads his hands wide, as if to demonstrate the irrefutable, timeless simplicity of his methods.
‘State of the Union. Two hundred sheets,’ Dice says.
‘That’s it. That’s the one,’ says Bearer.
‘Right. Anyone in tonight?’
‘Nah. Saturday night, Liam. Bands are out there, getting paid.’
Dice rolls his head around, deciding, then says, ‘Okay. I’m going now.’
Paul Bearer, as far as Dice can ascertain, is unbreakable: adamantine, diamond-hard. Try as he might, Dice cannot make a mark of him. It has to do with speed, though not in the manner you might expect. You’d think Bearer would be too quick for Dice, but it’s not that. Rather, it is Bearer’s patient, measured, juggernaut progress through life that precipitates Dice’s perpetual downfall. Dice relies on speed and confidence, assumption and inattention, all of which are lost on Bearer, who listens carefully, closes tills between transactions, double counts and checks twice, who will not be taken, who does not suffer fools. Dice has tried all the tricks in the crooked book: short counts, inflated wage slips, even a few dancing-number numbers he picked up from an accountant acquaintance. None of them work, though, and this interests Dice. A more casual, less considered confidence man – a geezer or wide boy – might be frustrated by Bearer’s unswerving resilience. Not Dice, though: he sees Bearer as an inelegant problem requiring an elegant solution – the trickster’s ‘immortal game’, if you like. It’s there. It’s just a matter of finding it. Of course, this is all within the context of the grander, sine qua non scam wherein Dice ‘works’ for Bearer. This means that he gets paid, in undeclared, under-the-counter cash, to sit in the gimp mask bunker in the lobby of the Albion Rooms. He talks to the telephone. He collects cash. He smokes cigarettes. The bands that rehearse at the Albion Rooms – their hairstyles, their humped amps – are mostly monosyllabic, and mostly take care of themselves. Very rarely is Dice required to do anything that vaguely resembles real or actual work.
As he steps back onto the sullen street, all the clocks are striking twelve, which takes us back to the start: the Old Bailey, and atop that the statue of Justice, arms aloft, sword and scales lofted – blind Justice, blindfold, the one all the tourists come to see. She isn’t blind, though. That’s what everyone is told, and that’s what everyone believes, so that’s what everyone sees. People find what they are looking for. They see what they want to see. But look closely. You can’t believe everything you’re told. Justice isn’t blind: she can see.
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