Bloody London (28 page)

The wind blew her hair and she clutched at it, but her face lit up with excitement; Tessa Stiles was a zealot. “Even the Thames Barrier can't help.”

“The what?”

“Barrier's a steel wall they put up in bad weather, not far downriver from here. What if the Barrier doesn't work? What if someone takes the wife of the Barrier's controller hostage? What if a plane from City Airport – look just over there, you can see the plane going in – what if it crashes? The airport was supposed to be for short-haul props, now it flies big jets. The landing strip is a hundred meters from the Barrier.”

Stiles talked rapidly. “I don't even need a major flood. A small device breaches an underwater tunnel, we've got four trains with two thousand people each at Waterloo Station, water starts to pour in. Our tubes – subways to you – haven't got proper ventilation. It's the motion of the train that moves the air, but suppose a train's flooded. There are no fans. Carbon monoxide poisoning sets in.”

“Tess!” Jack was impatient.

It was freezing now, the wind bitter, but Tessa Stiles was wrapped up in her rhetoric. I looked in her eyes. They were dark and large and inward looking. It was as if she had an internal screen where she played her doomsday scenarios over and over, like video games.
Stiles crackled with excitement. I thought she was desperate and doomed. I wanted to say: stop. For chrissake, stop. Please. But she was lost.

She put her hand on my shoulder and climbed off the boat, then looked up at me. “I see a wall of water coming down on London.”

Inside Stiles's office, Jack said to her, “You ever come across anyone named Phillip Frye?”

She looked up. “I see. That's why you've come, is it? He runs that organization home out of a converted factory over by Rotherhithe. It's not strictly speaking my territory, being the other side of the river, but I keep an eye on both sides and I know something about Frye and I hate the way he gets his hands on derelict docks property, what's left of it, before anyone else does.”

Jack, who had been smoking and looking bored, perked up. He said to Stiles, “What's he want all the property for?”

“His homeless.”

“His?”

Stiles picked up a thermos and poured coffee in a mug. “I think it, but I can't prove it yet, that Frye's involved, and I don't know how, in pressurizing people to give him money for his shelters. In exchange he helps them – and some of them are real thugs – get permits
for development on land no one else can touch. He's connected. It's sick stuff.”

“I don't get it.”

She said, “The hotter the property market got, the more homeless there were. The more homeless, the bigger Frye's operation.”

“That's crazy.”

“Perhaps, then, Mr Frye is crazy. Do you want some coffee?”

“Enjoy the lecture?” Jack, laughing, pulled out of the parking lot behind Stiles's station. “You hungry at all?”

“I'm still eating that burger, man,” I said. “Let me buy you a drink if you have time, Jack. There's a decent bar near where I'm staying.”

I got the impression Jack was happy to hang out. We were near the bridge when his cellphone rang.

“Bloody phone,” he said, but he was listening now, face intent, eyes small and black and impenetrable.

“What is it?”

“I don't know. I'm going to have to drop you off, Art, OK? I got to take this. It looks like we have a problem.”

“I'll come with you,” I said, and he was already revving the car, crossing the bridge, heading into a bleak broken area of ramshackle buildings and wasteland. He said, “You'll have to keep out of it if I take you, OK? I can't have any cowboys on this.”

A bonfire lit up the broken ground. It was surrounded by squat, busted buildings. It looked like hell. The crummy apartments, the long stretch of rolled barbed wire, the garbage that spilled out of metal cans
and left its sour stink. The graffiti on greasy tile walls shimmered in the firelight. On the fire was half-burned furniture – a chair flared and crumbled, the flames fed on the stuffing. Five or six homeless guys, most of them drunk or ripped, I couldn't tell, crawled out of their cardboard huts and circled the perimeter, edgy, nervous, scared. A group of boys, teenagers, thirteen, fourteen, faced off with them.

A boombox pumped out rap music. On the balconies of the building, people screamed at the kids. One boy started throwing bottles into the fire.

The glass shattered, the flames spurted higher. Sirens screamed. The pumping waa waa of the sirens was foreign, unnerving, like sirens in a war movie. Police cars were parked everywhere around the housing project. The sirens tore up the night and cracked any veneer of civility. The flames lit the faces of the boys; all of them were black. I saw now some of them were only nine or ten. Backlit, they looked like ash.

Jack kept to the sidelines. His body tensed up. Arms stiff at his side, he walked slowly to one of the uniforms and spoke to him quietly.

I got out of the car, leaned on the hood, watching. He turned back to me, and I said, “You all right?”

“Yeah. Sure. I've just got to show my face for a few minutes and we can get the fuck out. They need a black face to show up when this kind of stuff happens. Calm the natives, so to speak.”

“They got no one else?”

Jack, heading towards the kids, turned around, his compact body, outlined by the flames. “At my level? In
the Met – that's NYPD to you, man – at my level, there's no one else black.”

I leaned against Jack's car and watched him walk towards the fire. The white cops watched too. He talked to one of the boys, but I couldn't hear, and then I saw another kid raise a knife. It happened fast. I saw the blade glint. I put my hand on my gun.

A couple of white cops, faces raddled with anger, headed towards the kid with the knife. A wind had come up and it whipped the flames now. Jack was in front of the rest of the cops. He moved towards the kids; Jack looked like cannon fodder.

Then it started raining.

We sat in Jack's car after that and the windshield wipers swiped at the car. He lit a cigarette, then pulled away from the waste ground. The fires were out. The kids had disappeared. So had the cops. All that was left was the garbage and the rain.

I said again, “You OK?”

“Yeah.”

“What's going on here?”

“They're tearing down the council flats – projects to you – to make way for new development, shutting out the poor. People are angry about it, but it's the name of the game. Docklands is used up. They're moving south, the development people, the property blokes. I don't know why in the fuck anyone wants to live out here anyhow, on a piece of reclaimed marshlands that never drains. You get a bad storm, the place fucking floods over.”

I didn't care about the weather. I cared about the spectacle, the angry kids, Jack's showing himself to them, the angry white cops. Jack had no weapon but he went in anyhow.

“But how come you felt obliged, you personally?”

“Another time, Artie, OK? I need that drink.” He glanced back at the desolate scene.

Suddenly, a small white man pushed his face against the car window. Jack rolled it down. The man had a sweet moon-shaped face and no teeth and he held his hand out. “Can you help me out?” he said. Jack rolled the window back up and pulled away.

“Bloody homeless. They'd be better off if they got themselves some work to do.” Jack grinned his beguiling grin. “You thought all black people were on the Left, did you? Me, I fucking loved Mrs Thatcher. On your bike. Get a job. My parents did it. My dad worked forty years for Ford. Us kids did it. No one gave us a handout. Never mind. Anyhow, this lot are OK. Pretty much the same as before. Same film studio, different head, you know? Business as usual. Which is a good thing.”

“What lot?”

“Government, man. You're not into politics?”

“Politics bore the shit out of me. I'm not interested.”

“You will be. Politics, that is. You spend a little time here, you will be.”

I didn't know what he was talking about, I don't give a fuck about British politics or any other kind.

Jack changed his tone. “So, Artie, man, you going to buy me that drink or what?” He drove silently for
a while, the streets opened up again. I could see the river.

We closed the bar at one of the restaurants along the promenade. London was feeling like a night city to me, always dark and wet, but full of warm, light, boozy places, bars and pubs and restaurants and clubs where people congregated to cheer themselves up. Or maybe it was the company I'd been keeping since I got off the plane.

Even while the waiters stacked the chairs, we stayed on, sitting in front of the window. Fog was coming in now and it ate up the river. The promenade was deserted. A thin stream of traffic was barely visible on the bridge.

Jack was not completely comfortable with me, maybe it was the incident on the waste ground. He was a black cop in a white town. Maybe it was his meeting up with Lily. His eyes moved to the river then back to me. The sound of laughter from a couple of waiters working the other side of the room seemed to startle him.

I said, “Something else on your mind?”

He finished off his drink quickly and said, “Nothing I can think of. Look, about Lily Hanes. She didn't tell you we'd met or about that party, did she?”

I finished my drink and kept my mouth shut.

Cotton was nervous and he stuttered some. “We met at the party. She's a nice lady, Artie, but she's messed up with a bunch of charity wankers who like to imagine they're doing good things for poor people and I'm sorry for you.”

“You got something to be sorry about?”

“OK.” He reached for his drink and swallowed it down. “We almost had a scene. Now that's the fucking truth, and I'm telling you because if you want my help on Pascoe, there has to be some trust between us. She was a little frightened. She was on painkillers and a little high, her leg all messed up and I've got some stuff I'm working out at home, but fucking nothing happened. Nothing. I swear to God. I'm a pretty big bastard but I'm not a big enough shit to sit here drinking with you if there was anything.”

“I didn't ask.”

“Well,” he said. “So tomorrow I'll track down whatever I can on Pascoe for you, OK?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“I'll help you where I can, man. But even if I got you attached formally, which there's no point, you know you would not be allowed to do much, not to interrogate, for one thing, but most of all, no guns. We can welcome you, we can offer you all kinds of courtesy as a brother of the badge, so to speak – you like my phrasing?” He grinned. “Being as how you were a New York City detective, and my friend, but what's the point of a formal attachment?”

“I operate pretty much on my own. I'm here as a tourist. I'd just as soon keep it that way. What I'm looking for is who stopped Pascoe coming to London. Him, his wife, they were packed. Ready to go. There's Russians in it hip deep. New York, we've got Russians manipulating real estate prices same as they eat borscht, and some of them wanted Tommy Pascoe dead. People
are getting killed for living space and nobody who matters gets indicted.” I lit up one of my own cigarettes.

“Here too. Plenty of them. Russians with money, the babes who drop a hundred thousand grand, that's pounds, man, at Harrods in an afternoon, Russians that got a string of racehorses. Casinos. Some of them buying up the big houses that belonged to Arabs, up around Highgate, Hampstead, some in Mayfair and Knightsbridge.”

“Anything else?”

“I bet you'll like this one. Since the Prime Minister went to visit Yeltsin in Moscow, we've got our KGB brothers walking the beat in London looking for Russian gangsters.”

We laughed, and I thought of Geoffrey Gilchrist.

“One thing you should know, Artie, you'll forgive my sounding patronizing, is that London is a very small town. Very. Areas of relationship cross over that might be different from New York City. Politicians. Money. Lawyers. The aid business, you know, charity. Good works.” Jack's tone was sardonic.

“I want something on Phillip Frye real bad.”

“I understand.” He looked at his watch. “Why don't we pay Phillip Frye a visit together tomorrow?”

Jack's phone rang. He wandered to the other side of the room while he talked. I got the check and paid for the drinks.

Jack said, “I have to go.”

I walked with him around the corner and watched while he got in his car, then leaned out the window. “Maybe we'll play some golf.”

I didn't want to insult his game by saying I thought, Tiger Woods notwithstanding, golf's a game for guys with prostate trouble, so I nodded.

“And Nina's hoping you'll come round for supper too, next week? And Lily, of course, if you like. You're all welcome.”

Jack was trying hard, so I said, “I'll let you know. About the golf. And dinner. Thanks.”

“Roast lamb, the works.”

“Nina doesn't cook Caribbean?”

“Nina?” Jack laughed. “She's as English as it gets. You think I wanted to marry my mum? Christ, when I met Nina and she told her old man she was marrying a black chappie, the next time I went to call, her dad met me at the front gate with a shotgun. You think I'm joking? Like I said, this is England. They can change the labels all they want, old Britain, new Britain, it's always the smell of England getting up your nostrils.”

“Yeah. So thanks. Hey, it's good to meet you, you know?”

He backed out of the alley, then before he turned towards the street, he stopped and leaned on his horn to get my attention. I went after him.

“Jack?”

He said, “Tell me for sure you're not thinking about carrying some kind of weapon, Art.”

“For sure, Jack.”