I hadn’t gotten very far, but at least I was still alive.
Gott and Himmell had left the tea things out. I put my shoe back on and took a swig of milk out of the jug. Then I went over to the door and drew back the bolt.
Lauren raised an eyebrow when she saw me. “So you made it?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. I would have said more, but for some reason my teeth were chattering at about one hundred and fifty miles per hour. It must have been even colder out there than I’d thought.
Lauren tried the door that led to the staircase. It was locked. Then she strolled across to the broken window and looked out.
“That’s great, Nick,” she drawled. “We’re out of the closet but we can’t get out of the room. There’s nobody near enough to hear us shouting for help. You’ve sent our German friends on a wild-goose chase, and when they get back they’re going to string you up and use you for target practice. We don’t have enough rope to climb down with and we don’t have any guns.”
“That’s about it,” I agreed.
“Then you’d better think up something fast, kid.” She pointed out of the window. “Because here they come right now.”
THE LAST CHORD
I ran back over to the window. Lauren was right. The blue van was at the end of Bayly Street. It would have reached us already if a truck hadn’t backed out of the construction site, blocking its path. Now it was stuck there while some guy in a yellow hat tried to direct the driver. Fortunately it was a tricky maneuver. They’d be stuck there for maybe another couple of minutes. How had they gotten back from Victoria so quickly? I played back what had happened in my mind and realized that my great escape had probably taken about an hour. It’s amazing how time flies when you’re having fun.
Lauren was in the kitchen, rummaging through the drawers. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m looking for a knife.” She held up a whisk.
“This is all I can find.”
“They’ve got guns,” I reminded her. “You’re not going to get very far trying to whisk them.”
“I know. I know.” She threw the whisk over her shoulder. “So what are we going to do?”
What were we going to do? If we yelled for help, the only people who would hear us would be Gott and Himmell. The noise from the construction site would see to that. Even if we found a knife, it would be no defense against automatic pistols. There was no way out and any minute now they’d be coming in. I looked out of the window. The truck seemed to be pinned at an angle across the road. The man in the yellow hat was frantically giving directions, swatting at invisible flies. I heard the truck grind into gear. It began to edge backward. Soon the road would clear and the blue van would come. It would come right underneath the window. I tried to remember where it had stopped when they brought me here. That time they’d parked in front of the door. Would they park there again? Perhaps.
“Lauren,” I said.
“Yes?” She’d found a corkscrew and a dessert spoon.
“Quickly . . .”
The window that I’d broken in through was, like I said, a French window. It came all the way down to the floor. I looked out again. The truck had almost completed its turn. The man in the yellow hat was walking away, his job done.
“The piano,” I said.
“The piano?”
“Come on!”
“Nick—this is no time for a concert.”
“That’s not what I have in mind.”
I got my shoulder down to the piano and began to push. It was on wheels which helped, but even so, it must have weighed a ton. It was a Bechstein, a great chunk of black wood with a gleaming white ivory smile. God knows how much it had cost, but if this is what you needed to be a pianist, it made a good argument for taking up the triangle. Lauren had figured out what I was doing and now she stood there, staring.
“Honey,” she said. “You can’t be serious.”
“Deadly serious,” I said.
“Deadly,” she agreed.
She came over and joined me. With the two of us pushing, the piano moved more easily. Inch by inch we drew closer to the open window. It was going to be a close fit, but the piano would just about slide through the frame. It occurred to me that that was probably how they’d gotten it in here in the first place. How long had it taken them to hoist it up? The return journey was certainly going to be a hell of a lot faster.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I gazed over the top of the piano. The truck was in the clear now, rumbling quickly away. The blue van slid forward toward us. I flexed myself. There was a bust of Beethoven or someone on the piano. He was frowning as if he knew what was about to happen. The blue van drew closer, slowing down as it prepared to park.
We pushed with all our strength. The piano shot forward. Its back leg went over the ledge and with a hollow jangle it teetered on the brink, the pedals digging into the carpet. The van was almost level with us now. I pushed again. The piano resisted. Then, with a wave of relief, I felt it topple over backward. I can tell you now, Bechstein grand pianos are not built with any consideration for aerodynamics. It must have been a bizarre sight as it plummeted through the air: a huge black beast with three rigid legs and no wings. It flew for all of two seconds. Then it crashed fair and square into the van.
It was the Bechstein’s last chord, but it was a memorable one. If you imagine someone blowing up an orchestra in the middle of Beethoven’s Fifth, you’ll get the general idea. It was an explosion of music—or a musical explosion. A
zing,
a
boom,
and a
twang
all rolled into one and amplified a hundred times. They heard it at the construction site. I doubt if there was anywhere in London that they didn’t hear it.
The Bechstein was finished and I somehow doubted that the van would be doing much more traveling either. It hadn’t been completely crushed, but it must have been disappointed. Steam was hissing out of the radiator and two of the tires were spinning away like giant coins. Black oil formed a sticky puddle around the wreckage. The exhaust pipe had shot away like a rocket and was lying about a hundred feet down the road. The whole twisted carcass of the van was covered in splinters of wood and wires. One of the piano’s legs had shattered the front window. I didn’t like to think what it had done to the driver.
“Quite a performance, honey,” Lauren said.
“Concerto for piano and van,” I muttered.
And now people did come running. Suddenly it was as if Bayly Street had become Piccadilly Circus. They came from the construction site, from the left, from the right, from just about everywhere. They looked at the carnage. Then they looked up. I leaned out of the window and waved.
It was about twenty minutes later that one of the construction workers appeared in the Germans’ living room. He was carrying a pair of industrial pliers, which he must have used to cut through the two padlocks. Lauren and I were sitting on the sofa waiting for him.
“The piano . . .” He gaped at us. “Was it yours?”
“Sure,” I said. “But don’t worry. I wasn’t much good at it anyway.”
We walked out of the room, leaving him standing there. Well, what was he expecting? An encore?
We managed to slip away in the crowd, but not before I’d heard that—miraculously—nobody had been killed.
Apparently the driver of the van would have to be cut away from the steering wheel, while the passenger had managed to impale himself on the gearstick. A doctor had already arrived, but Gott and Himmell were more in need of a mechanic.
We got a taxi back to the office, where I picked up the real Maltesers and then we went straight on to Lauren’s place. There were too many people looking for me in Fulham. From now on I’d have to keep my head down and my raincoat collar up. Lauren lived in a huge condominium in Baron’s Court—about a ten-minute drive away. It was one of those great brick piles with fifty doorbells beside the front door and fifty people who don’t know one another inside. She had a basement apartment that must have been all of five inches above the main Piccadilly subway line. Every time a train went past, the floor rumbled. Or maybe it was my stomach. I hadn’t had a decent meal in twenty-four hours and I was hungry.
She left me in the living room while she went into the kitchen to fix supper. It was a cozy room in a theatrical sort of way, with a gas fire hissing in the grate, a kettle on the floor, and odd bits of clothes thrown just about everywhere. The furniture was old and tired, with a sofa that looked like it was waiting to swallow you up whole.
The walls were plastered with posters from theaters and music halls where Lauren had appeared, either as a singer or as an escape artist’s assistant. It was a room with a past but no future. A room of rising damp and fading memories.
When she came back in she had changed into some sort of dressing gown and had brushed her hair back. For a woman old enough to be my grandmother she looked good. But then you should see my grandmother. The food she was carrying looked even better. She had it on a tray: omelettes, salad, cheese, fruit, a bottle of red wine for her, and Coke for me. We didn’t say much while we ate. We were just glad to be there. Glad to be alive.
“Thanks,” I said when I finished the omelette.
“I should thank you, Nick.” Lauren poured herself some more wine. Her hand was trembling a little. “If it hadn’t been for you . . . hell . . . they were going to kill me.”
“You were the one who got out of the ropes,” I reminded her. I glanced at the poster above the gas fire. It showed her with a flashy guy in a sequined straitjacket. He had greasy black hair, a mustache, and a toothpaste-advertisement smile. “Is that Harry Blondini?” I asked.
“Yes.” She stood up and turned the stereo on. There was a click and a solo saxophone slithered through the room. She’d lit herself a cigarette and the smoke curled in time to the music. Her eyes told me everything I needed to know about the escape artist. But she told me anyway. “I loved him,” she said. “For two years we worked together in the theater and we lived together for five. We were going to get married. But then, at the last minute, he ran off with a snake charmer. What did she have that I didn’t—apart from two anacondas and a boa constrictor? That was the day before our wedding—the day before we were meant to tie the knot.” She smiled a half smile. “Well, what should I have expected from an escape artist? He escaped. And he broke my heart.
“That was when I took up singing. I’ve been singing for twenty years, Nick. The same old songs. And in all that time I’ve only met two decent people. Johnny Naples and you. You’re a nice kid, Nick. If I ever had a son, I’d have liked him to be like you.
“All I’ve ever wanted is a place of my own—maybe somewhere in the sun, like the South of France. Look at this place! Thirty feet underground—I never get to see the sun. And the Casablanca Club’s the same. When they finally bury me, I’ll actually be going up in the world. But it’s a lousy world, Nick. Lousy . . .”
Maybe she’d had too much wine. I don’t know. I’d asked her a simple question and she’d given me her life history. It was lucky I hadn’t asked her anything tricky. We could have been there all night. I’d had enough. I was tired and I was dirty.
“I need a bath,” I said.
She shook her head. “Of all the baths in all the towns in all the world, you have to walk into mine. There’s no hot water.”
“Then I’ll just turn in.”
“You can sleep on the sofa.”
I took the tray back into the kitchen while she got me a couple of blankets. It was after she’d said good night and I was about to leave that I remembered the one question I’d meant to ask her. It was the whole reason I was there.
“Lauren,” I said. “Back in the Casablanca Club . . . you were about to tell me something. You told me that you were out with Johnny when he saw something. It made the Maltesers and everything else make sense.”
“That’s right.”
“Well . . . where were you?”
She paused, silhouetted in the doorway. “We were buying sausages,” she said. “In Oxford Street. In Selfridges. In the food department.”
SELFRIDGES
I don’t like Oxford Street on the best of days—and let me tell you now, December 24, isn’t one of them. Bond Street Station had been doing a good impersonation of the Black Hole of Calcutta and Lauren and I were glad to get out. But there was little relief outside. The Christmas rush had turned into the Christmas panic and the season seemed to have run pretty short of goodwill. Taxi drivers blasted their horns. Bus drivers leaned out of their windows and swore. You couldn’t blame them. The traffic probably hadn’t moved since December 22. There were so many people clawing their way along the pavement that you couldn’t see the cracks. And everyone was carrying bulging bags. Of food, of decorations, of last-minute presents. I sighed. Herbert was still in jail.
He’d been there almost a week now. It looked like Christmas for me was going to be the Queen’s speech and two frozen turkey croquettes.
But there was Selfridges with its white pillars, gold clocks, and flags fluttering across the roof. Somewhere inside the department store—in the food section—Johnny Naples had seen something that could have made him five million dollars. The thought cheered me up. I clutched the Maltesers. Lauren had loaned me a sort of shoulder bag and I had brought the candies with me. I wouldn’t have felt easy without them.
We crossed the road, weaving between the traffic, and went in the front entrance. We were greeted by a cloud of sweet, sickly scent. This was the perfume department. They stocked all the perfumes in the world—and you could smell them all at once.
“Do you want to try this one?”
A pretty girl leaned over a counter, holding a bottle of af tershave toward me. I shook my head. She had a nice face. But she was a couple of years early.
It was hot inside Selfridges. The air had been chewed up by giant air-conditioners and spat out again. That was how it smelled. Secondhand. We went into the menswear department, following the signs that read FOOD.