Kettle's pawnshop was at the top of Watery Lane with three brass balls over the door that hadn't been polished since the old king, and Kettle himself was a small dry man who looked at me over his glasses for a long moment before he said, "Shelby," in the tone of a man identifying a weather condition.
"I need a revolver."
"Do you."
"Something that works."
He didn't move for a while. Then he went into the back and came out with a cloth bundle and unwrapped it on the counter: a Webley, service issue, the finish worn to grey along the top of the frame where it had lived in a holster for years. Somebody's war, sold for rent.
"Belonged to a lieutenant," Kettle said. "Dead. His mother brought it in. Six rounds in the cylinder, none spare. I don't ask questions and I don't sell to boys, and you were a boy last time you were in here, so I'm making an exception on account of Kaplan's yard."
"How much."
"Four pound."
It was robbery. I paid it. He wrapped it back in the cloth and I put it inside my coat on the left, opposite the razor, and the weight of it changed how I stood.
On the way out I looked at the stairs at the back of the shop, and the door at the top with no light behind it.
"What's up there?"
"Rooms." Kettle had already gone back to his ledger. "Empty since March. Damp."
"How much a month?"
He looked up.
I took a room instead — not Kettle's, not yet, I'd need more than a hundred pounds to start renting property with. A single room over a chandler's two streets from the Garrison, iron bed, a window that shut, a door with a lock I owned the only key to. Ten shillings a week and a month up front, and the chandler's wife didn't ask what a Shelby wanted with a bed when he had a whole house of them down the lane.
I could have told her. A house is a place people can walk into. This was a place they'd have to knock.
I sat on the bed with the door locked and the Webley on my knee and the room smelling of tallow and rope, and I thought about the fact that I'd spent six pounds in an afternoon and Polly counted the coal, and then I put the thought away, because there was a message from Tommy under the door at the house and it said Garrison, six, wear a collar.
Kimber was coming.
The Garrison had been cleared.
Not shut — Tommy didn't shut things, that would have been an admission — but the regulars had been moved along with a word, and at six o'clock the place had Harry behind the bar, Grace at the far end, and the four of us at the table by the snug with our hats on the table and drinks we weren't drinking. Arthur's face had gone from purple to a dirty yellow. He'd come anyway. He sat with his back very straight and his bad eye toward the door, which was either pride or tactics and probably both.
"You'll say nothing," Tommy said to the table, and to me. "You'll sit. You'll watch. When he looks at you, you'll look back. That's all."
"What's he coming for?" John said.
"He's coming because I made him." Tommy turned his glass. "Monaghan Boy won on Saturday and he shouldn't have. Kimber's a man who notices when his horses do what he didn't tell them to."
I hadn't known about the horse. I'd known about the horse in the way I knew about everything — from the other side, as a thing that happened — but I'd been in a yard cutting a bookmaker on Saturday, and the fix had gone on without me, and the reminder that Tommy had been running a plan I wasn't part of while I was busy being seen sat in my stomach like a stone.
The door went at ten past.
Kimber came in first, because Kimber was the kind of man who came in first. Fifty, big through the chest, a coat that had cost more than the pub, and a face that had been handsome once and had eaten and drunk its way out of it. Behind him a narrow man with a ledger under his arm and a pair of glasses — Roberts, his accountant — and behind Roberts two men who came through the door and immediately stopped being people and became furniture with hands.
Four. A car outside with a driver in it. Five.
And Kimber himself with his right hand in his coat pocket in a way that told me the pocket had been cut to hold something.
He looked round the pub like a man who'd bought it and hadn't decided whether to keep it.
"Thomas Shelby."
"Mr Kimber."
"You fixed my race."
"Sit down, Mr Kimber."
Kimber didn't sit. He walked to the bar instead, slowly, and stood in front of Grace and looked at her for longer than a man looks at a barmaid, and she gave him the pleasant nothing she'd given me and did not put the glass down.
"Grace." Tommy hadn't raised his voice. "Go and see to the barrels."
She went. Kimber watched her the whole way and then came to the table smiling, as though something had been settled.
He sat. Roberts sat. The two men didn't.
"Here's what I know," Kimber said. "A Gypsy family from Small Heath fixes a horse at my course, on my day, with my money, and then has the balls to send for me like I'm a fucking tradesman." He leaned back. "So I've come. Because I want to see the man who thinks he can do that and go on breathing."
"You've seen him."
"I have." Kimber's eyes went round the table. Arthur's face — he smiled at that. John. Then me, and they stayed, and I looked back at him as instructed, and I felt the Webley against my ribs, and I thought with total clarity: I could do it now. Left hand under the coat, across the table, twice. He's three feet away and his gun's in a pocket and his men are ten feet behind him.
And then: and then Roberts, and the two, and the driver, and every copper Kimber owns, and Arthur with a bad eye and Tommy's plan in the mud. I'd be dead by Friday and so would they.
Eliminate was one word. It was the rest of the sentence that killed you.
"The twin," Kimber said. "I heard about the twin. Cut a man's face for four pound." He turned back to Tommy. "That the kind of thing you do now?"
"That's the kind of thing we do," Tommy said. "That's why you should hear me out."
And Tommy made his pitch.
I'd seen it before, of course. I'd seen it on a screen. But seeing it on a screen and sitting three feet from it were different things, and the difference was that on a screen you knew he'd win. At the table you could feel how thin it was — how close Kimber was to standing up, how much Tommy was betting on the exact weight of every word. He didn't sell. He explained. The Lees had been picking Kimber's bookmakers' pockets since Easter and Kimber's men couldn't tell one Gypsy from another and never would. Tommy could. Tommy had been to school with half of them and gone to war with the rest.
That was all he offered. Not a number, not a deal. Just the fact, laid on the table like the shilling that came after it.
Kimber listened. He let Tommy finish. Then he reached into his waistcoat and took out a coin, and held it up between two fingers so the whole room could see it, and dropped it on the floor.
It rolled and went over on the boards.
"Pick it up, pikey."
John came off his chair. Arthur got half up with him, bad eye and all, and I had my hand inside my coat before I'd decided to, and Tommy put two fingers on John's sleeve without looking at either of us.
"Sit down."
"Tommy—"
"Sit down."
They sat. I took my hand out of my coat.
Then Tommy got up, and walked round the end of the table, and went down on one knee on the floor of his own pub in front of four of Kimber's men and picked up the shilling.
He stood. He turned it over once. He put it in his waistcoat pocket.
"Thank you, Mr Kimber."
Kimber laughed. It was a big laugh and it went on longer than it should, and when it finished he stood, and Roberts stood, and the furniture became men again.
Roberts spoke for the first time, in the flat voice of a man reading out an appointment. "Mr Kimber will be at Cheltenham. Saturday."
"We'll see you there," Tommy said.
They left. The car pulled away.
Tommy sat there another minute with the coin in his pocket and his face doing nothing at all, and then he picked up the drink he hadn't touched and finished it.
"Right," he said. "We're going to the races."
I walked back to the chandler's in the dark with the gun on one side and the razor on the other, and neither of them had done anything, and that was the lesson. I hadn't liked learning it.
Kimber was real now. Not a name on a form. A big man with a cut pocket and a laugh, who'd looked at Arthur's face and smiled, who'd stood in front of Grace until Tommy moved her, who owned five men I'd counted and God knew how many I hadn't, and who could be killed by anyone with a Webley and no plans for Friday.
And Tommy had knelt on the floor for him.
That was the part I kept coming back to. Not the coin — the knee. Tommy had put himself on the boards in front of his own brothers because standing up would have cost more than kneeling did, and he'd worked that out in the half second it took John to come off his chair.
Somewhere down the line Kimber was going to be dead in the road outside that same pub with one of Tommy's bullets in him. I knew that the way I knew about Grace — as a thing that happened, at the end, after months I hadn't watched closely enough to remember properly. What I hadn't understood until tonight was that it started here, with a shilling on the floor and a man deciding to pick it up.
That was patience. I'd never seen it done.
I locked the door behind me and put the Webley on the chair and lay down in my clothes.
I thought about Kimber for a while.
Then, because it was late and I was a man and the memories were what they were, I thought about Lizzie.