A Cool Breeze on the Underground (16 page)

Instead he said, “I steal wallets.”

Colin’s eyes turned killer cold. The smile vanished into a frown. He shook his head slowly back and forth while Crisp waited for the order to bash Neal’s head in. Neal could see Allie over Colin’s shoulder, observing the scene with a petulant sneer. Neal knew he could duck Crisp’s first shot. It was the second and third that had him worried, never mind what Colin might decide to contribute. Bright idea, he thought, trapping yourself against a statue. Very clever.

Colin finally spoke. “Now why did you have to tell me, sports fan? You had a nice thing going, the bit about returning my purse and all, and then you have to ball it up and fookin’ tell me about it!”

Neal wasn’t sure, but he thought the speech had the whiny tone produced by the last straw on a bad day. He sensed that Colin was more embarrassed than angry, and he almost started breathing again. On the other hand, he’d seen embarrassed people do some pretty wicked things.

“What am I supposed to do now, eh?” Colin continued. “You’ve put my balls to the mark and I should break your thieving fingers, eh? But I’m grateful for bailing me out back in the restaurant! Why do you want to put me in a position like this?”

“Just bored, I guess.”

Colin looked him square in the eye. Either this bloke was crazy or he was the coolest character he’d seen since looking in the mirror that morning.

“Well, rugger,” he started to say, then burst out laughing, “if it’s excitement you’re looking for …”

Beware the hospitality of the sociopath. So thought Neal Carey as he leaned against the brick wall and threw up, which started his nose bleeding again.

It had started mildly enough with a few pints thrown back in a congenial Garrick Street pub. Colin played host and introduced Neal around, starting with his own retinue.

“Meet Crisp,” he said. “We call ’im ‘at because ’e’s always eatin’ the ruddy things. Known ’im ‘arf me life, an’ I don’t think I know ’is real name.”

“I play the guitar,” Crisp said.

“Pleased to meet you.”

Colin introduced the girl with purple hair. “This is ’is bird, Vanessa.”

“I’m always eating Crisp,” she said in a surprisingly middle-class accent.

“And this,” Colin said proudly, clearly saving the best for last, “is Alice, your fellow Yank.”

Alice? Neal thought.
Alice?
The finest schools America has to offer and that’s the best you can come up with? He reached out to shake her hand. “Nice to meet you. Where are you from?”

She didn’t take the hand and she didn’t smile.

“Kansas,” she said. Her blue eyes challenged him to call her a liar.

“Well, Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

“‘Er name is Alice. She’s from California.”

Clever Alice, thought Neal. What better to hype the fantasy of a city-bound Brit than a golden California sunshine girl? “I’ve been out there. Where in California?”

She didn’t pause a beat. “Stockton. A real shithole.”

Neal smiled at her. You’re not bad, Allie, not bad at all. “I haven’t been to Stockton.”

She still didn’t smile back. Just looked at him flatly and said, “You ain’t missed anything.”

You ain’t missed anything? Don’t push it, kid. “My shout,” Neal said. The barkeep drew four Guinnesses from the tap.

“What brings you to London Town, then, Neal?” Colin asked. “What wind blows you to our green and pleasant land?”

A pusher who quotes Blake? This is getting weirder and weirder. “Work.”

“An’ what would ‘at be?”

“I’m a cop.”

Maybe Colin didn’t exactly choke on his beer, but it sure didn’t go down the smooth way Lord Ivey intended when he brewed the stuff.

It was so much fun to watch, Neal said, “A private detective.” No reaction at all from Allie, not a flinch.

“Get stuffed!” Colin shouted.

“Scout’s honor. I’m over here guarding some executive stiff who’s buying antiques, or something.”

“An’ you thought you might as well snatch a little nicker on the side.”

“Why not?”

“An’ when you saw me jacket ‘anging over the shitter door, you thought it belonged to John Q. Tourist….”

“But when I saw who it belonged to, I thought I better give it back.”

Now let’s see how big an ego you have, Neal thought. If you buy that one …

“It’s a good job you did,” Colin said.

… you think a lot of yourself.

“My pleasure,” Neal said, looking just enough over Colin’s shoulder to flash his most charming, sleazoid smile at Allie.

“Where are
you
from?” she asked. She wasn’t making small talk.

“New York, New York. The town so nice, they named it twice,” Neal answered. He knew that one mistake inexperienced undercovers often make is telling too big a whopper as a cover story. Keep it close to home, there’s less chance of getting caught up in your own lies, especially when you’re just feeling your way.

“The Big Apple,” Colin said, flashing his cosmopolitan outlook.

Allie whispered something in Colin’s ear. Neal didn’t catch it.

“Later,” Colin said.

She whispered again.

“I said later,” Colin answered again. A trace of annoyance played across his face. He turned to Neal. “You want some excitement, then, rugger?”

“If you have any.”

Colin’s smile could best be described as mischievous. “Oh, we got some, all right. What kind would you like?”

He opened his palm to show the capsules of speed that appeared slick as Blackstone.

This, Neal thought, is the point in the TV episode when the canny private eye figures a way to say no, or cleverly palms the pills and fakes the effects. But this is mostly because Quaker Oats is sponsoring the show and wouldn’t buy ads if the hero gets stoned for any reason whatsoever. Unless, of course, the villains hold him down and pour the stuff down his throat. Then the camera gets all blurry. But this was real life, which is even trickier than television—and often more blurry.

Neal took one of the capsules and knocked it back with a swallow of stout. Colin spread the rest around.

“Let’s go to The Club,” Allie said. “I wanna dance. And I
mean
dance!”

“Wha’ about your engagement?” asked Colin.

“I have over two hours!”

“The Club it is, then.”

The club was your basic cave, only more primitive than Neal was used to in New York’s SoHo. If New York was Cro-Magnon, this place was Neanderthal. It didn’t really have a name.

“I dunno, rugger,” Colin had explained when asked. “We just call it The Club.”

Neal did feel he was being clubbed by the band, which had a name: Murdering Scum. They were an opening act for the night’s headliners, The Queen and All His Family.

“What part of town are we in?” Neal shouted above the din.

“Earl’s Court!” Colin answered. They had fought their way to the bar. Allie, Crisp, and Vanessa had joined the bobbing throng on the dance floor. The place smelled of beer and sweat.

Neal took a long sip of his beer, which accomplished two things: It gave him the closest acquaintance with horse urine he ever hoped to have, and it gave him time to think. This latter activity was becoming increasingly difficult. Sort of an imposition. The band was playing four hundred beats to the measure.

Colin was in better pharmacological shape than Neal, and less stoned, so the pause in conversation dragged, as things tend to do on Amphetamine Standard Time. But the ensuing two or three decades gave Neal a chance to observe Allie, which was the point of the exercise, after all. Good to keep your mind on that. Allie was dancing in a frenzied jerking motion that threatened to tear her head from her body. And she was having a very good time.

The Scum, as they were known to their friends, switched to a romantic ballad about “fucking till it’s red and raw” and the lead guitarist seemed to be demonstrating the technique with pelvic thrusts that would have sent Elvis himself running to a revival meeting. The band reduced its harmonic structure to the sublime simplicity of a single chord, which made a certain kind of sense given the subject matter. The crowd was sure going for it in a big way, though. Of course, most of them had safety pins jammed through their ears or noses, which did indicate a tolerance for pain. They sweated inside their leather and denim.

Neal watched Vanessa and Crisp make Watusi leaps on the crowded floor. Every now and again, Crisp amused a fellow celebrant by spewing beer in his face, which seemed to be an acknowledged form of greeting. Neal looked around for Allie, and spotted her standing in front of the jerry-built platform that served as a stage. A sheen of sweat shone off her blond hair as she swung her head in a rhythm all her own.

Slow, one-beat-to-the-measure cadence somewhere in the frenzied rock and roll. Allie didn’t want her love red and raw; she wanted it slow and soft.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Colin asked. He saw Neal watching.

“Yeah.”

“Off limits, Neal.”

“No problem.”

Not to worry, Colin, old sod, Neal thought. I’m only going to grab your beloved and carry her back over the big water. Whether she will or not.

Oh, well, time to play.

“Kind of hard to control, though, isn’t she?” Neal asked.

“Alice? Not hard.”

Neal gave him a little more of a prod in the psychic balls. “If you say so,” he said, smiling.

He watched the little knots in Colin’s jaw tighten. The pimp took a quick swallow of beer and set the bottle down hard on the bar. “Right,” he said.

Colin worked his way through the crowd to where Allie was standing, her eyes closed and body gently weaving. He grabbed her by the shoulders, straightened her up, and gently lifted her chin with his left hand. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. He slapped her hard with his right hand. Her eyes widened and filled with tears.

Neal checked the impulse to head over there. Too early for the “white knight” bit, he thought. Also, Colin would beat the shit out of you and his friends would stomp on whatever was left.

Colin stroked the reddening splotch on Allie’s cheek, then hauled back and hit her again, harder this time, snapping her head back.

Good going, Neal thought to himself. So far, you’re doing a real good job for this kid.

He watched as Colin stood, hands at his side, and stared at Allie. She fought off her tears as her chin dropped to her chest and she stared at the floor. Without looking up, she held her arms straight out in front of her. After a couple of seconds that lasted about a week, Colin took her arms and pulled her to him. She burrowed her face into his chest and held him tightly. It was creepy, but Neal had witnessed worse at Westchester cocktail parties. What made this especially bad was that Colin looked over, found Neal with his eyes, and smiled. Alice hard to control? Right.

Now where have I seen this shit before? Neal asked himself. Oh, yeah, about half my life. A pimp is a pimp is a pimp. Come to Daddy. Oops, bad choice of words there.

He looked on as Colin and Allie started to dance. She made your basic miraculous recovery and began to move with the music. Like bad art imitating bad life, the band switched tunes, working into a hard-driving message song that the crowd seemed to know.

It was an anthem of sorts. Neal didn’t catch the title, but the chorus went: “Burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.” The crowd joined in with a passion that could spring only from deep feeling, and Neal found himself shamed at the condescension he’d felt all night. This was a song of the dispossessed, a screaming, angry
cri de coeur
born of a thousand years of a class-bound society. The dancers whirled in violent sweeps, bumping and bouncing against each other, surrogate objects for mutual rage. No harm meant you, bloke, but burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.

The inchoate fury swept around Neal, taking him along. He felt their anger, shared it. Anger at the hopelessness, at Da’ and Granda’ and you, all living off the dole in the same effin’ project on the same effin’ street with the same effin’ neighbors in the same effin’ heat. Anger at the toffs with their effin’ BBC, and their effin’ Oxbridge accents that keep out you and me. So let’s burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down. Fury at the useless effin’ effort. of it all, when every job’s the same arsehole-lickin’ beck and call, and who needs their Labour Party and their social-programs bull, so let’s burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.

Neal shook his head to clear it, and then realized it was already clear. Who the hell expected the Murderous Scum to be eloquent, much less articulate? And didn’t he feel the same sorts of things? Like real anger at the monied class whose messes he cleaned up for a living? Whose living rooms he occupied and whose scotch he drank when they were in trouble? And wasn’t he their sheepdog? Go fetch my kid, Fido, good boy? And suddenly he felt like a traitor in this place, and the rage welled up inside him, and he wanted to beat the shit out of Senator John Chase, and tell him to go fuck himself, and take Ethan Kitteredge’s little toy boat and crunch it in his hands and throw the pieces in his face and tell him what he could do with his private school education, and that was to burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down, and he found himself joining in the dance and in the chorus, weaving, bobbing, bouncing, and slamming off the other dancers as the music throbbed through him and he was hearing the words about your great damn stinking family who will never understand, with their patriotic crap about this putrid, dying land, and the endless block of flats that make a prison you can’t stand, and Christ, he understood! The sheer numbing, stupefying, fucking boredom of it! That you can never escape your class, so quit trying.

Then he was dancing with Allie—not dancing, really, but slamming. Shoulder off shoulder, laughing, singing, sweat flying from one to the other, and he knocked her down, off her feet, but she bounced up laughing and spun around, then put her shoulder into his chest and knocked him down, and burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down. Tear it off, tear it away, tear it to shreds. Two thousand years of civilization, to produce what? Senator Chase for Veep? Then Allie picked him up and spun him around and pushed him off and then he was dancing with Colin. Hands locked, pushing forward and pushing back, chests slamming into each other, shouting at the top of their lungs the chorus that had now become a frenetic chant. Looking at Colin and seeing himself there, another country, another time. Tear it down, tear it down. One chord beating against the wails in a shriek of fury. Hare Krishna, Hare Hare. Tear it down. Then he and Colin fell down in a heap on the floor as the song ended in a crash of drums, and they lay on the floor together, laughing and laughing, and then laughing more as Allie fell face first on top of them, shaking her hair so that her sweat sprayed on their faces.