A Cool Breeze on the Underground (13 page)

16

The piccadilly hotel was as simple as its name. Not plain or unattractive, but simple in the sense that it knew what it was: a good solid place from which to do business, tour the city, go the theater, and take in the sights of London. It offered large rooms, big beds, decent food, and room service. You could ring up for anything you wanted at the Piccadilly Hotel. The Piccadilly Hotel knew that people went to hotels to do things they didn’t do at home.

The lobby was large, built in the days when people met socially in hotel lobbies. It featured a lounge with old wing-back chairs big enough to seat Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, and a decently dark, mahogany bar that was somehow always cool in hot weather and warm in cold weather. It was the kind of bar where the men always kept their ties knotted but felt relaxed, anyway; the kind of a lounge where the barkeep would never disturb you to ask whether you wanted another but was always there with your drink at the slightest glance.

The lobby ended at the registration desk. The Piccadilly Hotel had too much sense to make a new guest search for the bloody thing, and it was always staffed by at least half a dozen red-jacketed clerks who knew their business: See that the room was paid for, and get the guest to it. If you made a reservation at the Piccadilly Hotel, you always got a room. They didn’t believe in overbooking; in fact, they always kept a couple of rooms saved for emergencies. You could stay for a night or a year at the Piccadilly Hotel. The rules were the same. You paid your bill, and kept your jacket on.

Neal shucked his off the moment he stepped into his room, a nice large one on the sixth floor, with a small window air conditioner that struggled bravely against the heat. He kicked his shoes off on the ubiquitous red carpet and surveyed the room with a consumer’s eye. The blue wallpaper was the color of the sea after a storm, and was decorated with prints of heavily muscled, bare-chested, bare-knuckled boxers toeing the line. A manly room.

The bed had been built in an era when gentlemen kept their riding boots on for afternoon expressions of affection. Like the hotel, it was large and sturdy, and proclaimed itself the focal point of the room. A small bathroom led off from the right. It had a deep old tub, an adequate sink, and newly refurbished countertops and mirrors. One small window broke up the wall, and a double-jointed gymnast might have made out the view of Piccadilly Circus.

Neal gave the bellhop a grotesquely large tip and dismissed him with a “What’s your name, in case I need anything?”

Then he carefully hung up his jackets—the all-purpose no-wrinkle blue polyester blazer and the striped seersucker—and his summer-weight trousers. He laid his folded shirts out in a bureau drawer, placed his cheap travel alarm clock on the bedside table, and put some paperback books on the lower shelf. He carefully laid out his toilet kit on the bathroom counter and took some manila folders out of his briefcase and laid them around the room, then placed the British editions of that month’s
Playboy
and
Penthouse
on the floor in the bathroom.

After ringing room service for a bottle of scotch and a bucket of ice, Neal changed into a fresh blue shirt and red regimental tie. He knotted the tie, then undid the top button of his shirt and yanked the knot down. Next, he lit a cigar, puffed on it until it started to smoke, and left it burning in an ashtray to stink up the room.

He overtipped the room-service waiter, poured three fingers of the scotch down the bathroom drain, and made a weak one for himself. Then he sat down with his copy of the classified ads that had lured Scott Mackensen into the world of big-time sin, and started to dial numbers.

Team Number One showed up a half hour later. They were each rather pretty. The senior member sported flaming red hair, freckles, and wore a green dress and impossibly clichéd black mesh stockings. Her colleague was a pleasantly plump blond lady. Neither of them were the ones who had dated Scott and friend. Both of them tensed up when they saw only one man in the room.

“Relax,” said Neal. “I just want to talk.”

“Don’t you like us, love?” asked the green dress, just about fed up with freaks.

Neal gave them their standard fee in cash, with his apologies and reassurance.

Team Number Two was made up of two black-haired, blue-eyed, black-dressed, severe types, who accepted Neal’s apology and cash with a dry sneer of contempt.

Team Number Three consisted of two Irish girls, who were delighted with the money. Team Number Four was a pair of positively gorgeous black women, and Neal secretly felt abashed that his dismissal stuck in his throat for a long moment. Team Number Five claimed to be a mother and daughter team, and might have been for all Neal knew. It made him wonder what kind of man would go for a threesome with the older woman and a woman who was at least twenty-five dressed up as Alice in fucking Wonderland. Team Number Six arrived about one, and were smashing-looking, with a smashing fee, but still not the right ladies. Neal felt he was getting close, though, and showed them the Polaroid. “Hard up, are you, darling?” “You could say that.”

“Sorry. Never seen them. If that’s it, then, we’ll just be tripping along. Are you a frustration freak, is that it?” You don’t know the half, lady.

Number Six offered to perform for him, if that’s what he wanted. Number Seven were transvestites. Number Eight was a cop.

An enormous cop. His wide shoulders sloped from years of stooping under small ceilings and through small doors. His large head was matched by a large nose. He had sad, cop eyes. Eyes that had seen it all and wished they hadn’t. He was wearing a three-piece gabardine suit and refused to sweat. Neal put him in his late forties. “May I come in?” he asked, entering. “Sure.”

Good cops take possession of a space, and this one was a good cop. Most rent-a-cops shove their ID at you, but this guy didn’t bother. He sat down and invited Neal to do the same.

“My name is Hatcher,” he said. “I’m from Vine Street Station. Do you know where that is?”

Neal sat down on the edge of his bed. “No.”

“It’s across Man-In-The-Moon Passage. Do you know where that is?”

“I don’t know where anything is.”

Hatcher nodded. “It’s just outside the kitchen and the laundry. Do you know why I’m telling you this?”

Yeah, I do, Neal thought. You could tell me what you want to tell me straight out, but you’re establishing a pattern of question and answer. “Not really.”

“This hotel does not require a house detective, because I can be here on a moment’s notice. I am not the house detective. I am a London police inspector.”

“Would you like a drink? I have scotch, scotch and water, and scotch on the rocks.”

“Scotch, thank you.”

Neal poured three fingers into a glass and handed it to Hatcher. Then he sat down again on the bed and waited.

“The hotel staff cannot have helped but notice considerable traffic in and out of your room.”

“I’m looking for a girl.”

“Apparently.”

“A particular girl.”

“Rather particular indeed, Mr. Carey.”

Neal shrugged and tried to look stupid. It wasn’t tough. He hadn’t figured on a cop stepping into this.

“And you have yet to find her?” Hatcher asked.

“Not yet.”

Hatcher sipped at his drink. “But you intend to continue this search for … the Holy Grail.”

“Yup.”

Hatcher’s sad eyes grew a little sadder. Then he stared at the floor before staring back at Neal. It was an old cop move and it didn’t surprise Neal much. It did surprise him that it shook him up a little.

“Not in
this
hotel, lad.”

Neal stood up and freshened his own drink. He held the bottle up in an invitation that Hatcher accepted.

“Why not?” Neal asked.

“We don’t mind a little of the old in-and-out, man. But you have them trooping up here at a pace that would do credit to an Australian rabbit.”

Neal took a chance on getting his ribs bashed in. “So? It’s not illegal.”

“It’s unseemly.”

“So you don’t mind guests running whores up here, you just don’t want to get a reputation for it.”

Hatcher shook his head. “I don’t mind guests ‘running whores up here,’ I just want to receive a piece of it.”

Neal smiled.

“Understand, Mr. Carey,” Hatcher said. “This telephone business tends to cut the lads out—the bellboys, the concierge, the local constabulary who are coming up on retirement and who aren’t likely to get that promotion before the pension is set…. The referral fees are missed.”

“What are you suggesting?”

Neal could see the cop was annoyed at having to spell it out.

“I am suggesting that you try to exercise a bit of control over your libido, and that when the need does arise, so to speak, you ring the bellboy.”

And if I was looking to get laid, Neal thought, I wouldn’t mind at all. But my only shot at Allie is over the phone. He stepped to the door and opened it. “Sorry.”

Hatcher ignored the door. “You don’t mind if I have a look-see?”

“It’s your town.”

“What brings you to London?” Hatcher asked from the bathroom.

“Business.”

“You have been busy.”

Neal knew what was coming.

“Oh dear,” Hatcher said.

And here it comes.

Hatcher came back from the bathroom holding a plastic film canister.

“It’s not mine,” Neal said.

Hatcher reached into his jacket and took out a set of handcuffs. “Nevertheless.”

Neal held his hands out in front of him to show his spirit of cooperation and said, “Why don’t I tell you what I’m really doing here?”

Hatcher was back in half an hour with the hotel’s telephone records.

“Your Mackensen lad made only three calls from the room.”

They checked the phone numbers against the classified sex ads. Number eleven matched. Neal reached for the phone.

“No longer in service, lad. I checked already.”

“But the next number should be the dealer’s.”

“True, but it isn’t much help. It’s a phone box in Leicester Square.”

They were there in ten minutes. Hatcher pointed to the phone box. It was unoccupied.

“Your dealer is a cute one,” he said. “The girls knew to reach him there. Maybe he keeps regular hours. Different phone booths at different times.

“You haven’t asked me for my advice, lad, but I’m giving it to you, nevertheless. Give it up. Go back to the States and tell your aunt and uncle to forget about their daughter. It’s a fine thing you’re trying to do, but … Even if you were to find her, you’re more likely to get a knife in your innards than get your cousin back. You’ve no business being on the Main Drag.”

“I have to try.” He gave it a nice touch of nobility.

“Suit yourself.”

“Thanks for your help.”

Hatcher smiled. “Forget about it. Literally.”

Neal straightened up the room. he picked up the magazines and newspapers and tossed them in the trash bin. He opened up a window to let the cigar stench out. He rinsed the glasses out in the bathroom sink and then fixed himself a fresh drink while he drew a bath.

It isn’t so bad, he thought as he lay in the hot water. He didn’t have an address but he did have this phone booth, or
box,
in the vernacular. And the location fits Mackensen’s story. And tomorrow I’ll check it out. And find the dealer. Who’ll lead me to Allie.

Right.

17

Except he wasn’t there. Like a road-show Shakespeare when Hamlet’s missed the bus, the dealer wasn’t onstage when the lights came up and the supporting cast was in place.

So Neal waited for him, which wouldn’t have been so bad except for the bloody heat. Neal had learned to say “the bloody heat,” because everybody around him was calling it that. In a country where air conditioning is considered decadent and they sell you an ice cube in your drink, temps in the nineties were a pain indeed.

Neal sweated through long afternoons in the square. He had picked a bench that gave him a nice view of the phone box and its surroundings. He also could check out most of the square’s pubs, movie houses, and eateries. Now a bench in a public park is a jealously guarded commodity, so Neal was careful not to monopolize his spot and draw unwanted attention from any of the long-timer winos, senile pigeon aficionados, or schizoid bums for whom the square and its benches were something called home. Public parks and gardens, built by proud city patrons and matrons as a pleasant gathering spot for the upper middle class, had long since become one of the few surviving habitats of society’s detritus, a crucial place to sit or lie down. So a regular in Leicester Square was more or less tolerated unless he caused trouble. Screaming above the city’s natural decibel level, pushing the panhandling act too hard with a tourist, dealing dope too visibly, or whipping out a weapon to lay claim to a spot on a bench were but a few of the offenses that might disturb the sensibilities of the local gendarmerie. The serene London bobbies, those fabled paragons of patience and civility, might drag a repeat offender into a convenient alley or doorway and stomp the bejesus out of him. The judicious application of nightstick to shin discouraged recidivism. The occasional hard case might require a more thorough going-over, and the rawest copper soon discovered that a trip to hospital could keep a nuisance off the beat for weeks at a time. Neal wasn’t surprised to discover that the London cops had their own version of New York’s Finest’s “Teacher, May I” technique, in which one officer raises the student’s arm high above his head, stretching out the thin sheaf of muscle that covers the rib cage. Then his partner administers the lesson in one of two modes: If he just wants to get his point across, he jams the butt end of his nightstick into the student’s ribs, inspiring an instant shortage of breath coupled with a few moments of searing, albeit temporary, pain. But if the teacher wants the pupil absent from class for a few days, he swings the nightstick like a Jimmy Connors forehand at Wimbledon, cracking the student’s ribs. Class dismissed.

So Neal took pains not to attract attention, which was more or less his role in life anyway, and therefore came naturally. Anyone who tries too hard not to attract attention almost invariably does. This is particularly true on the street, where the denizens have antennae finely tuned to the least twitch of the unnatural gesture. The only way to be inconspicuous is to be so plainly obvious, people don’t see you.

“This comes from our cavemen days,” Joe Graham had explained during one of the interminable anthropology lectures he had delivered to young Neal, “when we operated under the theory that what isn’t moving can’t hurt you. This was a fallacy, of course, but that’s what they thought, because they weren’t that smart to start with. They had about as many brains as your average transit cop. Anyways, they thought, Until it moves, it’s a rock. When it moves, it’s a saber-toothed tiger or something else that can eat us. This is why, to this day, people see motion. Sitting still, they don’t see. You show me a saber-toothed tiger that can sit still. I’ll show you a fat tiger.”

Also a bored tiger, Neal thought. Tedium is the detective’s most steadfast companion. It never goes away for long and it always comes back. Neal used to chuckle at the detective shows he’d see on TV, which were twelve minutes of commercials and forty-eight minutes of action. He knew they should have had twelve minutes of commercials, forty minutes of stupefying monotony, seven minutes and fifty seconds of paperwork, and ten seconds of what you might call action, if you weren’t too particular about your definition of action.

Not that boredom was necessarily bad. On those rare occasions when things got exciting—someone pulling a knife, or much worse, someone pulling a gun—boredom looked pretty good. You could do a lot worse than boredom. But it was hard for Neal to keep that perspective in June in Leicester Square in London during the hottest summer in recorded history. Waiting for somebody who didn’t show up. Who might never show up. Someone who might have once spent an evening with Allie Chase and then booted her along her merry way. Somebody who was a missing link, as it were, in a very thin chain.

Waiting, while the clock ticked slowly but the calendar raced. Neal had managed to skip Einstein, but he already knew that time was relative. Minutes dragged, hours stood positively still, but days zipped past him like taxis in the rain. May was gone, June was already a week old, and Neal was no closer to finding Allie. And finding her was only the start. Grabbing her would take time, cleaning her up more time, and time was a funny thing: Every hour seemed to take a week, and every week seemed to take about an hour. He had time on his hands and he was running out of time. Back in the States, the Democrats were gearing up for their August party, Senator Chase was polishing the acceptance speech, Ed Levine was sending Neal telexes demanding news, and Neal was sitting on a bench, racing toward his “drop dead line” in slow motion. Eight weeks now, and counting.

The heat didn’t help. Neal’s shirt would be stuck to the back of the bench ten minutes after he sat down. The crotch of his jeans would cling tenaciously to his balls, and his armpits would smell like a Mississippi chain gang by noon.

There wasn’t a breeze, not the slightest whisper of a cool breeze to break the still and sullen air.

Neal would force himself to get up and move. He would sit on his bench for two hours and then walk for one. Around and about Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, Soho, Chinatown. Some days, he’d walk down to the National Gallery and watch the crowds in Trafalgar Square: hundreds of teenagers; no Allie.

Mostly he sat, however, the tiger at work. He’d arrive on his bench around noon. (One nice thing about drug dealers are their hours. You want to talk to a dealer before noon, you’d better know where he lives.) He’d plop down on the bench, spread his arms out, and have a glance at the
International Herald Tribune
to check out the baseball standings. It took maybe five minutes for the little prickles of heat to start on his arms and back, followed shortly by the sweat that would become a trickle and then a stream. He had found a cafe by the tube station, and it sold a reasonable facsimile of a bagel. It became his habit to start his day with a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and a plain toasted bagel with butter. Satisfying himself that the Yankees still held first, he’d scan the headlines, then ball the bagel wrapper up inside the empty cup and toss it into the trash basket behind the bench. Then he’d settle in to watch the show. He began to know how movie ushers felt when the film had been running for three months. The sidewalk vendors already would be setting up their wares along the wrought-iron spiked fence that bordered the square. They sold the usual assortment of cheap souvenirs: cute little bobby dolls that never beat up raving psychos, T-shirts with Buckingham Palace silk-screened on the front, buttons that said LONDON UNDERGROUND—the usual crap. Neal’s own favorite was a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the Underground system. He resisted buying one. There were also the food and drink vendors who peddled warm, syrupy Cokes, soft ice cream that lasted an average of thirty-four seconds before melting down your wrist, thick Cadbury milk chocolate bars that melted even quicker and somehow always found their way onto your shirt, salted peanuts that only a far-gone lunatic would consume in this weather and that were always in hot demand. Neal craved … craved a real New York City street frank, one of the ones made from rat hairs, industrial waste, floor sweepings, and God knows what else, for which he cheerfully would have slaughtered the Queen. The closest he could come was a little stand run by some Pakistanis that sold a product the locals called the “Death Kabob.” It wasn’t bad, really, except for being the Main Drag’s answer to Ex-Lax, but it couldn’t touch a Columbus Circle dog with hot mustard and onions spread all over it.

After the vendors arrived, the tourists started in, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. There were a lot of Americans, but also great hordes of Italian teenagers, who always seemed to travel in groups of three thousand, and tidy little gaggles of Japanese photo freaks. Neal had never seen an ethnic cliche come to life before, but it was really true about the Japanese: They would take a picture of anything, and they all took the same pictures, as if they didn’t know you could make more than one print from a negative. They drove Neal nuts. He had spent a lifetime avoiding having his picture taken, and now he was sure he was going to pop up in five hundred photo albums in greater metropolitan Kyoto. Not that it mattered. It was, as they say, the principle of the thing.

However, mostly the tourists were fellow Americans: “My fellow Americans,” Neal thought once, flashing on Lyndon Johnson, and mostly they were that middle-aged type who want to travel but don’t want to leave home. So they go to English-speaking countries. You can go to Canada only so many times, so here they were in London, and boy, were they surprised. London had changed considerably from those great Forties movies. In those great Forties movies, people didn’t have foot-high purple hair or say “fuck” every fourth word. Also, it was always foggy and cool in those great Forties movies. Uh-huh.

And their travel agents had told them there was no crime in London. Crime was reserved for those vaguely greasy people like Italians and French, not to mention Africans, Indians, and Orientals—but not the English.

Neal sat and mused about crime in England one sultry day as he sat watching a pickpocket make his week’s wages from a single tour group meandering through the square. Why is it, he wondered, that about half of all great popular English literature is about crime and yet everybody, English or foreign, will tell you there is no crime in England? The English popular tradition is obsessed with robbery and murder, starting with Robin Hood, moving up through Dickens, then to Sherlock Holmes, and on to Agatha Christie, who had single-handedly depopulated fictional aristocracy. Even staid historical works featured set-piece public whippings and hangings, and mass transportations to Australia and so forth, and yet England maintains the reputation for public order and civility. Maybe, Neal theorized, people figure that England ridded itself through the rope or the long-distance boat trip of its criminal class, so now everybody who was left in the country was genetically disposed toward being law-abiding. He considered his theory for a while, then dismissed it as he watched the pick maneuver toward his next victim.

Neal wondered about a bunch of things as he watched his countrymen absorb the culture of the Main Drag. He wondered how many of them, wary of visiting really foreign lands where people spoke a different language and did really strange things, realized that a good proportion of the Third World had migrated right here to good old civilized London; that many of the Empire’s former subjects had taken the phrase
Commonwealth
at face value and decided to try to get a little bit of the common wealth in the heart of the imperial city. It was a cruel joke, really, considering the fact that these Africans, Asians, and West Indians had created a big chunk of that wealth back in the good old days in their native lands when they bought at inflated prices the cheap consumer goods cranked out in factories in Manchester and Birmingham, and marketed by London firms. Well, the good old days were long gone, blown away by the Marne trenches, and the Blitz, and the “winds of change” that had transformed the British Empire into the British Commonwealth, or as some wags would have it, the Commonpoor. Neal wondered how many of the tourists would get beyond the artificial Mary Poppins land of tourist London to go into the Brixton slums and Notting Hill Gate hovels, or onto the stretch of Bayswater Road that had become known as “Little Karachi,” or how many would journey north from London to the vast rust belt of the industrial Midlands, where the factories had lost their markets, or up into the sooty coal towns that made their West Virginia cousins look like Opryland, USA. He wondered how a supposedly intelligent man in his fifties could be so stupid as to carry his wallet in his back pants pocket.

Another phenomenon that engaged Neal (what the hell, he had nothing else to do while on this fool’s errand) was the propensity of American tourists to wear clothing extolling the virtues of hometowns they had just paid lots of money to escape. It seemed that half the people he observed wore T-shirts with slogans such as NO PLACE BUT ELKHART and I LUV ALBUQUERQUE, or baseball caps proclaiming loyalty to home teams, which under further consideration Neal realized he understood perfectly. After all, he was the one who checked the papers twice a day to get the baseball scores and root in absentia for Steinbrenner’s team to win the Pennant, which even Neal acknowledged was like cheering for the Nazis to overrun Holland. He wondered why he was being so goddamn superior to the tourists and their expression of affection for their homes. Shit, he thought, he’d rather be home, too. He wondered why, though. He also wondered where the hell this dealer was. And where, oh where, has my little Allie gone? Seven weeks, now, and still counting.

Meanwhile, the hawkers and the gawkers were always well established by one or two o’clock, and by two-thirty or so the freaks, winos, druggies, and hard-core crazies moved on to their ordained places onstage, waiting with varying degrees of patience for the bit players to clear off.

Neal would get off his bench around this time and stroll over to the Dilly on the odd chance that Allie had opted out of the pro ranks to join the recalcitrant hippies and fake down-and-out young travel scene that gathered to sit like stoned vultures around the statue of Eros. These kids sat hunched over, checking out the other kids, watching the swirling traffic, passing the surreptitious joint, enormously self-satisfied with their mass nonconformity. Allie was never there, individual nonconformity being her particular taste and talent. Neal felt sorry, though, for poor Eros, doomed to watch over a mob of kids for whom sex had become so commonplace it was an absolute bore. And aren’t you developing a fine and snooty sense of irony? he thought. He didn’t like himself much these days.