London Noir (22 page)
“But I lie to you,” she said, a little choked.
Her mother was long dead, she’d told me. Her father had habitually abused her since childhood. That was the reason she had come to London, the very minute, practically, that she’d come of age. Except that none of it, it turned out, was true.
It was the morning the IRA bombed the Baltic Exchange. I heard the explosion—it’s not that far away from my flat—and wondered had Mickey Feane, my old friend, been involved. But then I remembered—Mickey Feane was long dead, sprayed in an ambush on a back road in Tyrone.
I turned to say something and saw she wasn’t there.
That was the last I saw of Vonya Prapotnik.
I’d sit there in the gardens opposite the Lutyens monument commemorating the Merchant Navy dead, and think of Mr. Lustgarten arriving—the fat black Panda pulling up outside the building as a burly officer opened the door, clearing a path for the internationally renowned sleuth as he made his way up bare concrete stairs, pushing the door open to reveal the dank interior. Where he’d find me lying prostrate on the bed. I don’t know what title might occur to him as he observed me—rigor mortis having already set in, most likely—
An Unfortunate Case,
perhaps, or
Felo-De-Se: A Volunteer’s
Farewell
, or, perhaps, best of all,
The Aldgate Assignment.
Yes, I think I like the sound of that.
I made the tape last night and it’s good, I think—by which I mean that it’s clear and unequivocal. Precise as any good confession ought to be, with or without a black plastic hood. I left it on the table where anyone will be able to see it—you won’t need the skills of Edgar Lustgarten. I bought a jiffy bag and a packet of stickers, and in neat felt marker printed on the front:
Who Do You Know in Heaven?
What I couldn’t believe most of all was how wonderfully
bright it was. THE PALAIS in red and yellow strung-up lights. When I went in, the band were already in the middle of their set,
performing their dance steps in front of their music stands, with all
their silver instruments gleaming. They were wearing little white
jackets and neatly pressed graystripe trousers.
The Ink Spots,
in
black, was printed on a drum.
When I heard her call out to me, initially I couldn’t make out
who it was. Then, to my astonishment, I heard my mother say: “Emmet, will you do something for me? Will you make sure the
Infant of Prague is in his proper place on the fanlight and has his
little face turned toward the church? We’re getting married tomorrow morning at 10, son, you see.”
I wasn’t sure quite what to say—her taffeta dress looked so
nice—and had to think for a minute to decide on an answer. But
before I got the chance, the band had started up again, and as he
placed his arm around her waist I saw her lean in toward him
and smile.
But that was the last I saw of them because in the one or two
seconds I’d turned to give my attention to the band, as effortlessly
as though they’d grown wings, they’d sailed like moths out far
beyond the stars, in search of the heaven they’d been dreaming of
for so long.
1.
I
t starts with an accelerating whine that becomes a roaring through darkness and space. You’ll find yourself hurtling into emptiness. Lights travel past your eyes at ever increasing speed. The flooring moves beneath your feet. You’ll feel the rush, pulling you forward. The roaring continues. Everything lies straight ahead. The expressions around you seem dazed, eyes unfocused and distant.
The sound slows to a stop. A woman’s voice speaks to you from out of nowhere.
This station is Canary Wharf.
Change here for the Docklands Light Railway.
Then another woman’s voice:
This train terminates at
Stratford
.
Everyone around you looks stunned. Lost.
A gun is a dream that fits into your hand.
“So I get out here?”
They used to sleep below ground in places like this. While bombs fell from up above. The steel and glass barrier will slide apart, separating you from nothing. A vast space of columns and moving stairways, designed for handling thousands of people in transit, opens up around you, but it will be almost empty at this hour of the day. On the platform, a young skateboarder drums with his bare hands on a metal guardrail. A little Muslim girl in a glistening pink dress crouches at the edge of the concourse, sniffing at an open pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. She holds it up to her face, avidly inhaling the smell. Her father wears black combat boots, the toecaps carefully polished. Behind them, the empty silent track.
You watch the barrier as it closes again, a yellow and black stripe running the length of it at waist height. Two sets of three isosceles triangles pointing away from each other move slowly together until they are almost touching once more.
Standing on the escalator, coming up toward the third level on the concourse, just beneath the surface of the world, you get your first glimpse of towers and tall buildings. Shining high-rise blocks of steel and reflective glass, housing a working population of over 65,000. You only have to kill one of them. But anything over that will also be acceptable.
A scratchy subtitle flickers before your eyes:
It is the acts
of men who survive the centuries that gradually and logically
destroy them.
Buildings are machines: electrical systems that listen and see and respond. People are just a planet’s biomass redistributing itself in time and space.
“You have a room reserved for me? Under the name Betamax?”
The girl at the reception desk will look up at you and smile brightly. “Yes, we do. Thanks for asking.”
You’ll be vaguely aware of the color scheme in the hotel lobby: a deep rose pink with polished wood surfaces. Beyond them an empty concrete plaza and a fountain swept by the wind.
You’re just product, denied a place in this world. Something played out on an old system, dated and worn. Set aside.
Step out of the elevator when it reaches the twenty-third floor.
“Room 2307?” you’ll say. “It’s along here?”
The maid will turn from her cleaning cart and smile brightly. “Fifth door to your right, thanks for asking.”
Anything over that will also be acceptable.
Your name will appear on the TV screen in your room, incorporated into a message of greeting. You ignore it. You remember a blind operative you once knew who stayed at Holiday Inns all the time because the rooms were always laid out in exactly the same way. It made finding his way around a lot easier.
You will incapacitate your first attacker by crushing his windpipe. The second you will see reflected in the white tiles of the bathroom. That will give you enough time to turn and shoot him in the chest. Twice.
He will fall toward you, fingers trailing blood across the walls and floor.
You will call down to room service to have someone come and clean out the human grease.
“This better not show up on my bill,” you’ll say on your way out.
“I’ll be sure to note that,” the girl at the reception desk will reply and smile brightly. “Thanks for asking.”
Things dazzle here, but they don’t shine. Everything has a hard reflective surface to it. The dominant color is a stormy green. You walk to the end of the block. There must be people in these buildings, but the interiors seem empty and devoid of life, despite the glass and the open structures. The sight of clouds in a vast blue sky moving across the straight edge of a building will give you a slow sense of falling.
You pause for a moment. Motorway. Distant sirens beyond the towers, the strange silence of cars passing, cold ragged wind generated by the close proximity of tall structures to each other, planes passing overhead.
Some of the buildings have names.
HSBC, Citigroup,
Bank of America
.
Have your pass ready for inspection.
You feel like you’re in transit.
A woman appears around the windswept corner of an office building. Long black hair, a swing to her hips. She must be an office worker: trim black skirt, black sweater, black patent-leather high heels. You wonder how she can walk in shoes like those. She carries a file of documents. The stiff breeze disturbs the hem of her skirt as she walks.
She will stop and nod toward the ambulance pulled up at the back entrance to your hotel. Two bodies strapped to gurneys are being wheeled out, their faces covered.
“What happened over there?” she will ask.
“Got in the way,” you’ll reply.
She watches the paramedics load up the ambulance, her file of documents held up to shade the side of her face.
“Wrong place at the wrong time?” she will ask.
“Not really,” you will reply, then after a long pause: “Some people don’t know it’s over till they see the inside of a mortuary drawer.”
“You sound like a trailer for a movie no one wants to see,” she will say.
“I’m told I have that effect.”
“And would it kill you to smile?”
“Why don’t we find out?”
The faintest of smiles will appear on her face instead. “Okay,” she’ll say.
2.
Once you get outside the neat arrangement of precincts around Canada Square, things come apart very quickly. You can see how thin, how artificial and transparent, this shining cluster of buildings really is. You sit at a café table and think about ordering something. Someone has written
Public
Enemy No One
on a nearby wall in spray paint. Beyond that is the river: rusting cranes, empty sheds, and disused landings. Worn concrete, green with age.
You will look across at her long black hair and wonder why she came with you so readily. Even so, you made it look like she didn’t have any choice. CCTV cameras are everywhere, turning the entire area into a series of flickering electromagnetic shadows.
“They never tell me who I have to kill,” you’ll remark. “Usually I’m left to figure it out for myself.”
“Is that what you meant by those people getting in the way?” she’ll ask.
You slide a blurred black-and-white photograph across the table: a snapshot of a man with graying hair, smiling enigmatically, eyes black and closely focused.
“Look at the picture,” you’ll say. “He had a different name then.”
A waitress in a green coverall will then come over. She’ll be wearing a white plastic badge with her name on it and the message,
I’m going to help you,
printed underneath. She will look more like the kind of woman who’d have her first name spelled out in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on a gold charm around her neck. You order coffee.
“How do you take it?” the waitress will ask.
“Straight out the jug,” you’ll reply. “Like my mother’s milk.”
A silent pause accompanied by a blank stare. Last time you saw a face like that, the word
before
was printed below it.
“Black, no sugar,” you’ll reply. “Thanks for asking.”
She will later hand you a cardboard cup covered with a plastic lid. You stare at it. A newspaper lies on the next table. You notice the headlines out the corner of your eye.
Mars Robot Goes Insane. Weapons of Mass Destruction Found
in New York.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” she’ll observe as the waitress walks slowly away.
“Is anybody?”
The blurred black-and-white photograph still lies on the table between you.
“It’s not what you’ve done that poses the biggest threat these days,” you’ll say. “It’s what you owe. We want to extract our money before war breaks out in the ghost galaxies.”
“And for that you have to find this guy, this …? ” She’ll pause, waiting for a name.
“John Frederson.”
She’ll frown.
“I don’t think I know him,” she’ll say. “Where’s he from?”
“Standard Oil New York,” you reply. “The Ryberg Electronics Corporation of Los Angeles, Phoenix-Durango, Islam Incorporated, the Russian petroleum industry …”
“He gets around.”
“Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, London … It’s amazing how much damage the system can take while still sending out signals.”
“So it’s up to you to track him down and …”
“Make him see reason.”
“All you’re missing is a raincoat and a gun,” she’ll say, a smile playing on her lips. Then she’ll take another look at you.
“Well, maybe just the raincoat,” she’ll add.
“Is that a problem?” you ask before peeling the tight-fitting plastic lid off your cardboard cup and taking a sip.
“I don’t like guns,” she’ll reply. “Guns kill people.”
“Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?” you’ll say, pulling a face. The coffee tastes like weed-killer. “Come on,” you’ll say. “Let’s get out of here.”
Total Information Awareness and the Policy Analysis Market focus upon high-level aggregate behavior in order to predict political assassinations or possible terrorist attacks.
“Where are we going now?” she’ll ask, taking a pack of cigarettes from her black patent-leather purse.
“Do you have to?” you’ll ask. “Cigarettes kill people.”
Another scratchy subtitle appears before your eyes:
Ordinary men are unworthy of the position they occupy in this
world. An analysis of their past draws you automatically to this
conclusion. Therefore they must be destroyed, which is to say,
transformed.
“Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?” she’ll reply.
* * *
Welcome to the Royal Lounge of the Baghdad Hilton,
the sign says.
No caps, no hoods, or tracksuits after 7 p.m.
You stand together inside the entrance of a cheap hotel, watching tired-looking girls appear and disappear behind a threadbare red-velvet curtain. Their movements are subdued and discreet: all shadows and cellulite.
A door in a dark side passage will open briefly onto a scene of Al Qaeda suspects kneeling manacled in their own private darkness, eyes, ears, and mouths covered, held captive behind a chain-link fence that runs down the center of the “Gitmo Room.”
Prostitute phone cards in reception show high-contrast pictures of female GIs in camouflage fatigues leading naked men around on leather leashes. Each one of them reads:
Call
Lynndie for discipline and correction. All services. Open late. Thanks for asking.
“Well, you certainly know how to show a girl a good time,” she’ll remark.
“Keep quiet and follow me,” you’ll say.
You push your way through the velvet curtain, but a man in a dark suit puts an arm out to stop you.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” the man will say.
“I just did,” you’ll reply. “Get used to it.”
Then you snap his forearm just below the elbow joint, breaking both bones instantly. You watch the blood leaking out from his sleeve.
On the second floor you stop outside one of the rooms.
“What are you doing?” she’ll hiss at you. “
Trying
to start trouble?”
“Another operative was sent here a few months ago,” you’ll reply, tapping gently on the door. “He was supposed to contact me when I first arrived. He didn’t show.”
“Maybe he forgot.”
“Impossible.”
“Maybe you forgot.”
“I know when I can’t remember something.” You sound dismissive. Impatient. Almost brutal.
“Okay. I have two things to tell you,” she’ll say after a pause.
“Yes?”
“One: I don’t really appreciate you talking to me in that tone of voice, especially if you’re still expecting me to help you.”
“And two?”
“And two: There’s some guy behind you pointing a gun at the back of your head.”
You always know what you’re doing.
You’ll turn around and grab him by the throat. There will be a blind spasming of the flesh, and in another second there will be just you and the girl in the corridor again.
“See if he’s got a pass key on him,” you’ll say.
“As dumps go,” she’ll remark, looking around at the room, “this is a dump. Who do you suppose did the decorating? The Three Stooges?”
But you’re already staring at the body on the bed.
“Is that your contact?” she’ll say.
You’ll nod.