The wrong gun

MY BROTHER, RON, called his club The Copacabana after Barry Manilow’s 1978 hit record.

He said he liked the opening line: “Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl, with yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there …”

“It’s glamorous and sexy, Eddie,” he said, all bright eyed. “And that’s what I want my club to be.”

Fat chance, I thought.

I know a bit about clubs - I’ve had a couple of my own, and the one I run in a nearby town these days is a nice little earner. Ron’s place was more of a walk-up drinking den above a row of seedy shops in a Victorian terrace.

Outside, the streets were covered in sooty fallout from the coke ovens and steel mills, and fish and chip papers blew along pavements littered with Coke cans and broken bottles.

Inside, Ron’s club looked just about okay in the disco gloom with lights flashing, but with the house lights up for cleaning, it was grubby and jaded: a million miles from Copacabana beach, or anywhere else with sunshine and cocktails.

It had once been a snooker hall, so it was a big enough space. There was a bar at one end of the room with a spillage zone of cheap linoleum that ran for three metres on each of three sides. Drinkers seemed careful to avoid the spillage zone, preferring instead to spill their beers on the carpets. As a result, the sticky carpets plucked at the soles of your shoes like a monster from a kid’s story - a troll, or something. The dance floor in the centre of the room was some varnished plywood nailed and Duct taped into place with a few lights hanging off a makeshift gantry above.

The barman, Brian, had all the charisma of a slag heap, but he was a big lad, capable of looking after himself, which came in handy when tanked up dockers and steel workers took a dislike to each other, which they did most weekends.

To be honest, The Copacabana was a proper dive.

Ron couldn’t see that, of course. He’d always been a bit of a fantasist, more of a dreamer than a grafter, and for him The Copacabana - while not being exactly the bee’s bollocks - was his pride and joy.

It might have been more of a joy, I told him, if it turned a profit every so often, but business had always been lumpy, and things had got worse since an old cinema up the road - La Scala - had been turned into a sporting club.

“How can I compete with that palace of ponces,” Ron said, “with its pool tables and slot machines?”

“You don’t compete by whining,” I said. “You do something about it.”

There were these two blokes, local bad lads called Wayne and Barry who enjoyed giving Ron a hard time. They weren’t serious gangsters, you understand, just big lads throwing their weight around without applying much intelligence to what they were doing. And they were stupid enough to have leant on Ron for ‘protection money’.

It was an old game. For ten per cent of the takings, Wayne and Barry would make sure there was never any trouble at The Copacabana. None. They’d provide the security. But if Ron didn’t accept their offer, they simply couldn’t guarantee, hand on heart, that the place wouldn’t be ripped apart every night for a year.

It was playground gangster stuff. I knew to my cost that in the club world, there were some really bad guys you had to take seriously if you didn’t want to end up face down on a beach somewhere, but these two were just chancers.

“Forget it, Ron,” I said, “and if they bother you again let me know and I’ll send a few of the lads around to have a chat with them.”

They did bother him again, though, and Ron - always on the back foot - tried to reason with them: “C’mon lads,” he said, “ if I give you ten percent of my takings, we’ll be out of business in a month and nobody will be getting anything. I could give you ten per cent of my profits, but I doubt if you’d give me so much as a funny look for that.”

Still, they kept coming back, trying it on - Ron was such an easy target they couldn’t help themselves. One night, he pushed his key into the Yale lock of his front door and it swung open by itself.

Inside his tiny flat, Wayne and Barry were sitting on his sofa drinking his own cheap whisky out of cracked tea cups.

“Evening,” said Wayne, grinning, “we let ourselves in, hope you don’t mind.”

Ron started to speak, but Barry stopped him with a raised hand. “How are the things at The Copa, Ron,” he said. “Been going quite a while now, haven’t you? You must be raking it in.”

Ron slumped into a chair. “Maybe I would have been,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for La Scala. Blokes who drank in the Copa every night have gone down there now, we never see them. It’s really hit my business. I barely have enough left over at the end of the month to buy that whisky you’re drinking.”

Wayne stood up. He wasn’t tall, but he was stocky with big shoulders inside a battered leather bomber jacket. Barry joined him. He had a beer drinker’s gut inside his suit jacket, but it hung from a big frame, and he was tall - well over six foot.

“Well,” said Wayne, breathing whisky into Ron’s face, “how much will you give us to sort it out then?”

Ron didn’t get what Wayne was saying, and then it dawned on him: “C’mon lads,” he began … But Barry pushed past him towards the door.

“You’re gonna owe us big time,” said Wayne in a sing-song voice, laughing.

They slammed the door and Ron’s key, which he had left in the lock, fell to the tiles outside with a metallic tinkle.

Me, I had my own problems around this time. Roxy, my missus, had found out about my … ‘friendships’ with a couple of girls from my own club. It was my one weakness; it didn’t take much more than a fluttered eyelid, a wink or a blown kiss to get me going. No harm in it, I told myself, so long as the missus didn’t find out.

Only she did find out, and she put a detective onto me, and because I have a personalised numberplate he easily followed my old Jag to the farm track outside town where I did my entertaining.

I tried to explain to Roxy that it was nothing, I said I was sorry, I told her I loved her, I pleaded - but she’s a harridan my missus. She said she was going to take me for half of everything I had.

So, I wasn’t in the mood for any more of Ron’s drama - I had quite enough of my own to deal with, thank you. And then, you know what, he rang me again.

“I need a gun,” he said.

“What the fuck are you talking about Ron,” I said.

“Wayne and Barry … they were here. Have you seen the news?”

“What news?”

Ron whispered urgently into the mouthpiece: “La Scala. It burned down overnight. It was on the news. Dozens of fire engines. They did it … Wayne and Barry.”

Ron really wasn’t cut out for the club business, I thought. But he’d always copied me, even when he was a little kid. He always wanted what I had. I could feel myself getting annoyed.

“Get some perspective, Ron,” I said. “It’s a coincidence, those two tossers aren’t arsonists. They couldn’t set fire to a petrol station with an incendiary bomb.”

“But Eddie …” Ron began. I cut him off.

“Listen,” I said, “I’ll ask Big Dave and his brother to drop by this evening and, you know, just stand around looking intimidating. Will that do?”

“Eddie, I need a gun … I’m really scared.”

To my shame, I hung up on him then. I just couldn’t stand that whining noise he made.

Later, we found out that Ron had wandered around town, head down, shoulders hunched, listening to the noises in his own head, until he had what must have been the worst brainwave since brainwaves were invented.

He went to Dirty Dick’s junk shop and told Dick that he had begun to collect antique firearms. Dick didn’t buy it for a second - he knew what business Ron was in - but he went into the back of his shop and came back with a 9mm Luger, a souvenir some squaddie had brought back from the war.

“It’s been decommissioned,” Dick said.

Ron handed over a couple of days’ takings and walked away with the gun heavy in his overcoat pocket.

And that might have been that if it hadn’t been for the endless bloody conversation inside Ron’s head. He got himself all wound up, tight as an overwound clock, and convinced himself that Wayne and Barry would come looking for him. They were big time now, he told himself, they had a reputation to lose. They were bound to come after him.

He didn’t know where to go. I had just hung up on him, and he didn’t want to hang around the Copa. In the end, he decided to go back to his flat, lock and bolt the door and wait. He figured he’d have to face them sooner or later.

In fact, he was sound asleep - Luger in his right hand - when the banging started. Ron woke suddenly. The banging was somebody knocking on his door. Not knocking, hammering.

Ron told me later that his stomach was in knots, he thought he was going to throw up and his knees didn’t feel as if they would support his body, but he knew he had to face Wayne and Barry down, bring it to an end.

With the Luger shaking in his right hand, he used his left to unbolt the door and undo the Yale lock. He yanked the door open, held up the gun and screamed: “I’ve got a gun. I’ll shoot.”

Detective Inspector David Mouncey said coolly: “I think that would be most unwise, sir.” And while Ron stood there with his mouth open, Mouncey deftly and gently removed the gun from Ron’s hand.

***

Ron was sent down for three and a half years. His brief did a good job of persuading the jury that - since there was no ammunition anywhere - Ron clearly hadn’t intended to do anybody any harm. But the Judge took a dim view of drinking den proprietors waving firearms in the collective faces of Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

He lost his drinks licence, of course, and it took a hell of a long time for us to get it back. In the end, it was Roxy who became licensee after promising that she would make The Copacabana ‘the heart of the community’. And she did. She closed it for a month, refurbished it (she spent a bloody fortune on the ladies’ powder room) and reopened it - as Roxy’s. Ron had no choice but to agree.

These days you can open the curtains during the day and the club looks fine, a little bit like a village hall. And the coffee mornings for local mums and toddlers, the bums and tums classes and the cinema nights were pure genius. The Abba and Eighties nights pulled in the girls, and with women around the hard drinking and fighting evaporated.

To be honest, I’m thinking of borrowing some of Roxy’s ideas for my own club.

Wayne and Barry disappeared after La Scala burned down. They didn’t do it, of course, but they had told Ron they were going to do it and they knew they’d be in the frame if he told anyone. So - top rank gangsters that they weren’t - they legged it. A year or so later, they were arrested after hijacking a lorry full of white goods in the Midlands and trying to sell nicked fridge freezers to the local community. They were sent down too, the tossers.

Funnily enough, the official investigation into the fire determined that La Scala had burned down because of an electrical fault caused by a shoddy refurbishment. So, in the end, nobody had torched it.

Roxy and me, we’re planning to open a third club soon, and we’ve agreed that when he gets out we’ll make Ron a minority partner in what will then become the Eddie and Roxy Lewin Group. We wouldn’t make him a director, of course, because of his criminal record - but, as a partner, maybe he’ll get round to forgiving me for hanging up on him that time.

Anyway, he’ll be inside the business where I can keep an eye on him, not outside with his fantasies. That’s what really got Ron into trouble, you know - not Wayne and Barry or La Scala, but his dreams, anxieties and his wild imagination. Ambition is great, but it has to be rooted in reality.

And The Copacabana … in a derelict snooker hall? I mean, it’s about as unreal as you can get, isn’t it?