London, 1910. The Ritz was four years old. Fruity Frynn was older.
The hotel suite, its curtains drawn, was gloomy. So was Fruity. He was the last to enter and he planned to be the first to leave. In the near darkness, he made out shapes drifting around a table lit by two bankers desk lamps and covered with architectural drawings.
Sniffing the air, he greeted the man who’d opened the door. “Mornin’ Crafty, I didn’t know Johnnie Walker made cologne.”
Crafty Blandings allowed his pince-nez glasses to slide to the tip of his nose: "Jou bliksem!”
A black-clad, shaven-headed man approached, moving with the grace of a panther, albeit a middle-aged panther with a touch of gout. Chris Dior tapped his fob watch: “Late as always, Fruity.”
“You will insist on these dawn meetings.”
“It’s 11am.”
“My point precisely – oh, look.” Fruity headed towards a liquor-laden sideboard.
Squeezing between a woman dressed like a Pearly Queen and a man with a pomaded beard, Fruity poured a brandy. He eyed the pair while giving his tall glass a short blast from a soda siphon. “I’m surprised to see you both made bail.”
“Trumped up charges,” said Slick Rick. “I only asked that Covent Garden flower girl to come up and see my etchings. I may also have suggested she bring a chaperone so the three of us could …”
“Lacks judgment, he does,” snorted Cockney Sue. “In my case, I was a bit Scotch mist after I left a gay and hearty so when on the frog and toad I dips me mitt in some geezer’s bag of fruit …”
A sigh. An elegant figure lounging in a high-backed brocaded chair stretched. “Spare us the local colour.” Jon van Hoit exhaled again, bit the tip off a cheroot, spat the end into an Aspidistra pot and snapped a match alight between thumbnail and forefinger, singeing his left eyebrow.
Standing behind van Hoit’s chair, a bit of rough flexed his tattooed forearm. The tattoo read: Rupertus fidem habemus. Tommy Two Fingers, a former Grub Street reporter so nicknamed because they were what he typed with, growled “Let’s start” through opium-stained teeth.
Dior plucked the still flaming match from van Hoit’s fingers and lit a Partagás cigar. The resulting smoke resembling a summer forest fire engulfed a nearby trio of chancers: Kerry Bushmills, Ghostie Gonzaga and Michelle Darlin. Five years earlier Bushmills claimed to have co-written with Sigmund Freud his book “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”. Freud was not amused: “Das ist ein Witz!”. Gonzaga, who earned her sobriquet by disappearing before it came to working on a caper, retreated deeper into the shadows. Darlin cracked her knuckles. The sound often heralded a left hook, a rabbit punch or a jab to the throat – someone else’s.
Two men stood with Crafty, guarding the door. Alec Chance and Greg Diorissimo had the dead eyes of stone cold killers and the nimbleness of ballerinas. To underscore their agility, they often wore matching satin pointe shoes.
Waving his cigar like a baton, Dior said: “The Mauritian will now recap the game plan.”
She stepped up. A onetime professional escapologist who specialised in shedding her manacles and freeing herself from glass-fronted water tanks, the Mauritian had broken free from numerous watery coffins and four marriages.
“Wonderful to see you again, Fruity,” she said. “You’re carrying that extra weight well although your cat burglar days are obviously in the rearview mirror.
“Tonight’s party at the South African High Commissioner’s London digs will be the major event on the diplomatic social calendar. You possibly know the Union of South Africa was created in May and Richard Solomon has been appointed as that country’s first High Commissioner here. To mark the occasion, Solomon is throwing a knees-up. Every toff is invited and they’ll be expecting expensive grog, fine nosh and great service. That’s where you lot come in.
“Your name-tagged uniforms are hanging on racks over there. In most capers, Diorissimo, Chance, Slick Rick, Darlin and Cockney Sue would be the muscle. At this party they’ll be serving drinks – Lord help us. Ghostie, Bushmills and Tommy will be offering around canapes. Crafty, you’re the greeter, directing arrivals to the ballroom.
“Van Hoit will act as usher, announcing each eminent guest as they enter.
“Don’t panic. None of you will need to do any tricky work. You can blag your way through. We’ve been told a hospitality firm is providing real staff for the event. ‘Thirteen of London’s finest’ was how Fruity’s pal at the High Commission put it.”
Fruity stared into the bottom of his empty glass. “And me?”
Dior stood up quickly, too quickly, stubbing a gouty toe on a chair leg. “Fok! Given you bribed the High Commissioner’s aide-de-camp to get us on the service team, I’ll need a throat to choke if anything goes wrong. So, you’ll be joining me and the Mauritian.”
“Doing what?”
“Stealing gold bullion.”
Fruity’s sphincter twitched. He walked to the curtains and inched them apart. Summer sunlight spilled in.
At Scotland Yard, a 15-minute walk away, Inspector Clarence Barclay dragged his office curtains shut. He had a headache and a sergeant, the latter being responsible for the former. Sergeant Alfie Gardner was twirling, the tails of his waiter’s frockcoat spinning out. A cluster of po-faced police officers kitted out as waitstaff stood off to one side.
Gardner spread his arms. “I do like to frock up!”
Barclay winched, sprinkled Beechams Powders into a glass of water, stirred the mixture with the barrel of his fountain pen and gulped down the swirling result. “You’re guarding the gentry, Sergeant, not entertaining them at the Palladium.”
For over an hour, Barclay had stepped his team of eight men and four women through that night’s mission. He explained the Union of South Africa’s celebratory event could be the target of dissidents from the former Boer republics, unhappy with their country being declared a Dominion of the British Empire. The undercover police would be on duty as a lowkey security detail at the High Commission building. Neither the British nor South African governments wanted anything overt.
“Discretion is the theme, lads,” said Barclay, either cleverly bringing the female officers into the boys’ club or ignoring the fact they were in the room. “And you won’t have to work hard. The aide-de-camp assures me he’s hired 13 professionals to do the main food and drinks service.”
In the High Commission’s basement, a hulking twin-doored Chubb & Sons safe held 26 Transvaal-produced, pyramid-shaped gold bars weight 27.4 lbs each. In the heaving ballroom, an edgy Fruity held a tray of eight crystal champagne coupes. The gold was in situ to assure the City of London of the strength of the new Union. Ditto the glasses fizzing with Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame.
“High risk, high reward” was how Fruity had originally pitched the idea to Dior who, disconcertingly, had been picking his teeth with the tip of a stiletto blade. The plan: at the height of the High Commissioner’s party, when the by-then boozy guests were dancing the cakewalk to loud ragtime music, a crack team – preferably not including himself – would blow open the safe then gang members, in two and threes, would sneak downstairs, each would stash two of the heavy bars in a bag or holdall, scarper and later rendezvous.
The biggest risks? Dior had asked. Fruity named one he knew Dior could solve: the potential threat that politically obstinate Boers might target the party.
“I’ll get van Hoit and Blandings to have a sharp word with that bunch,” Dior had replied. “The Afrikaners can misbehave on another night.”
After offloading the champagne to eager guests, Fruity placed the tray near the bar and made for the stairwell just as two waiters in ill-fitting frockcoats brushed past, bearing crowded drinks trays.
Inspector Barclay’s head twitched. “I could’ve sworn that was Fruity Frynn,” he whispered to Sergeant Gardner who, because he was humming the music hall ditty "The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery" while balancing a tray, only heard the word “Fruity”.
“So judgmental!” thought Gardner.
The basement smelt of fresh paint, cold steel and Dior’s cigar. “A stick of dynamite should do it,” said Fruity, standing well back.
“Forget that milksop,” snapped The Mauritian, “make it three sticks, Mr Dior.”
Dior held his white-hot cigar tip against a dynamite fuse before the trio backed into a corridor. Forty seconds later the entire building shuddered. Dancers were flung off their feet. Band members toppled from a stage. Bottles and glassware tumbled, shattering on the floor. Flying waiters and waitresses, friend and foe alike, landed atop one another.
Dior, The Mauritian and Fruity stood shakily – faces blackened, clothes smoking and shredded – staring at the mangled remains of the safe.
Leaning against a broken door jamb, Fruity lit a cigarette and hissed: "You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"
It was, he decided, going to be a long night.
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Copyright 2025 GREG FLYNN