LONDON
SHOREDITCH
The only factory left in England where stainless-steel hand tools such as the glass cutter bearing the mark H&R were still being made was a tumbledown redbrick Dickensian sprawl scattered liberally about the landscape along Myrtle Walk. There, Dalton found the ancestral digs of the venerable old firm of Higgins and Robeling, resting in the hulking shadow of Hackney Community College. This was far out in the wilds of Shoreditch; for the uninitiated, Shoreditch is to Belgravia as lime green Crocs are to a pair of Cole Haan slippers.
Dalton set himself up in an improvised OP at one of the local “eateries” provided for the sustenance of the unhappy inmates of Hackney Community College, a dark, dim, dank pit of a place called the Stag at Bay; they even had a large copy of the Landseer etching framed above the bar. It was one of those prefabricated Olde Tyme Pubs that had at one time spread out across the globe to inflict the unique consequences of authentic English cuisine upon an unsuspecting world and which had now, like Pomeranian vetch weed, come full circle to sprout themselves all over suburban London.
He took up his regular position in a booth at the back of the place with lines of sight to every entrance, front and rear, as well as decent coverage of the showroom of the Higgins and Robeling factory across the street. He ordered his usual, a Guinness and a steak-and-kidney pie. This was his third day trailing a wing on the London watch. He settled in with a sigh to watch the rain sheeting down across the phony Tudor glasswork that fronted the pub.
It was after three on a rainy late-December Friday. The old year, laden with grave new alarms in the Far East and on the turbulent borders of Russia, was stumbling toward a well-earned grave in this Sargasso season of the Holy Days, the post-Christmas week. A bank of clouds, as low, damp, and utterly depressing as the underside of the Battersea Bridge, had arrived from the Channel a few days ago and spread itself out across London, the Home Counties, and all the way up the Thames Valley.
Once it got nicely settled in, all comfy-cozy like, it went right to work lashing down a dirty bone-chilling, heartbreaking half sleet, half rain all over the place for days and days and days on end, with no sign of letting up until long after Hogmanay, if ever.
The façade of the Higgins and Robeling shop had once been cheerfully decked out in green-and-red bunting enlivened by several threadbare strings of blinking Christmas lights, but days of unrelenting rain had reduced this brave display to a limp network of moldy gray-green rags and a few plucky pin lights that twinkled on regardless, through the mist and fog, in the best traditions of Old Blighty.
Dalton had checked in, as T. Coward, Purveyor of Stainless-Steel Polishing Systems, Lorne Park, Ontario, Canada, at a small boutique hotel called Blakes, just off the Old Brompton Road. He was staying away from his Agency flat in Wilton Row until the game that was being played grew clearer, although he had his theories. He had also made no attempt to contact either the offices of Burke and Single on Threadneedle Street or the Agency safe house in Marylebone, and he never even went near the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square, not to mention his favorite local, the Grenadier, around the corner from his flat in Belgravia.
The Dan Wesson, sent on by Brancati in a diplomatic pouch to an Alitalia luggage booth at Gatwick that doubled as a dead drop for Italian couriers, was a reassuring but damned uncomfortable eight pounds in a leather shoulder holster that was spoiling the drape of his third-best navy blue pinstripe, but the trench coat he had inherited from Porter Naumann provided a kind of George Smiley-style English cover.
It was also, thankfully, waterproof and warm. He had, a few hours ago, been thrown a little off balance when he found three gold-tipped cigarette butts in the left-hand pocket of the coat. He’d been wearing this same topcoat that last night in Venice, when he and Porter Naumann had shared some of Naumann’s Sobranie Cocktails in the Piazza San Marco. If the encounter with Naumann’s ghost had been an hallucination from start to finish, where in hell did these cigarette butts come from?
It was an existential conundrum he didn’t care to contemplate. Guinness was a great antidote to existential conundrums, so he had a few, and waited, and the hours passed, and the rain fell in steady wind-driven sheets, and the passersby made their molelike way back and forth in the driving rain, with their collars up and their heads down, grimly enduring the rising damp and the ague-inducing chills of a dreary English winter that was making the venerable old town seem like one huge concentration camp smacked down in the middle of a swamp. In other words, utter dank misery, relieved every now and then by flashes of dismal gloom.
THEN CAME
THIS
DAY,
the late afternoon of the third day, and the last day Dalton was willing to sit here like a drowning duck: he was considering other more risky tactics to get this game in play, whatever it was, while poking listlessly at something gray and gristly called “bubble and squeak.” He suspected that the title of the dish came from the family names of the first two Norway rats who had found themselves included in the recipe. The publican, who had made him two days back as some sort of high-priced PI working the adultery business, suddenly loomed up at the gates of the booth, brushing back his Hitler mustache with one tobacco-stained finger and offering Dalton a cell phone on a battered tin tray.
“’Ere’s a caller fer yer,” he said in a thick Midlands accent, neither wasting words nor having any to waste. Dalton looked at the phone, and then up at the blunt, fistlike face of the publican, who had a large flat nose that might have been shaped with a mallet and small brown eyes like raisins shoved into a suet pie.
“For me?”
The publican shuffled his hobnails, rearranged his pen wiper again.
“Th’all be a Mr. Pownall?”
Dalton thought it over and then nodded.
“Lef ’ti fer yer, din’t she? Ba the wif,” he said, or may have said.
“The cell phone? It was left here by . . .”
The look on the man’s face said, as clearly as if written on his brow, A
nd I already told yer that, din
’
t I, you daft berk.
“Gimme a quid, she did, sed’if yed cum ba, I’m to old’er phone, privylike, till she call. And ’ere’s yer ’ere, the na, and ’ere’s ’er callin’, yus?”
“Ah? The wife?
My
wife?”
The publican, who may have reached the conclusion that Dalton was either deaf or retarded, tried to clarify the issue by saying all the same things all over again, only much louder, which was a tremendous help of course.
But he finished with a description that stayed with Dalton for weeks afterward: “Tall bint, wif lorly garms? Very queenly like? Any gate, she’s on t’line ’ere now, sor, as I ha’ pressed the t’ingy.”
“She’s on the line right now?” he said, taking the cell phone and putting it to his ear. The publican nodded and took himself off right sprightly, shaking his round, bumpy head and muttering darkly to himself.
“I heard that,” said Mandy Pownall. “He called me a bint!”
“True, but he said you had ‘lorly garms’ and was very ‘queenly like.’ ”
“You got the package.”
“Obviously. What took you so long?”
“Someone had to hold the fort while you were moping around in Venice like a lovesick lemur. I gather you’re still at that dreadful pub?”
“Actually, I’ve grown very fond of it. I can’t bring myself to leave.”
“You’re probably stuck to the bench. Wait there.”
TECHNICALLY,
Dalton did as he was told and waited. Tactically, he did what he was trained to do and moved to a location across the street, a glass-walled bus stop with large red-lettered signs that warned people who boarded the buses that if they didn’t take care, they would eventually find themselves at the Old Street tube station, and then where would they be, eh?
After about a half hour, he came on point, as a squat black London cab squelched to a halt by the entrance to the Stag at Bay. He noted the number in case it was one of the Agency’s car-pool units, which it was not. The cab, as the most humble cocoons often do, delivered itself of a real Mayfair butterfly.
First came the brolly, a long, slender black tube that shot up out of the cab’s interior and blossomed like a time-lapse film of a wet black flower opening, followed immediately by the lady herself, recorded in
Burke’s
and the
Almanac de Gotha
as Cynthia Magdalene deLacey Evans Pownall, but known around Sloane Street and Berkeley Square more simply as Mandy.
Today, she was long, lean, and damn-your-eyes elegant in a shimmering black capelike raincoat and high black boots. Long black gloves, of course. The coat, unbuttoned and flaring in a gust of wind, revealed a long, formfitting knit dress in a smoky charcoal hue, the mock turtleneck rising up her graceful neck. At her throat was a strand of large black pearls. The dress clung to her thoroughbred body all the way down, perhaps out of sheer sensual delight, suggesting, to the observant male eye, that she may have been wearing nothing at all under it.
Mandy hesitated at the curb, cool, composed, with none of Cora’s earthy fire, a pale English rose compared to Cora’s dark blue dahlia, her long silvery hair flying in the rain-sodden wind, her expression intense as she scanned the terrain, fixing quickly on Dalton’s figure inside the bus stop.
In spite of her striking presence, Mandy Pownall had managed to adapt to the cloak of obscurity and the reflexive diffidence of an active field officer. None of which was at all in evidence this afternoon.
She had been Porter Naumann’s lover and friend, as well as the central pillar of Burke and Single, the London banking house they ran for the Agency. After his murder and the aftermath, she had been drawn into a more active role in the field operations of London Station.
They sent her to Maidenhill and Camp Peary to pick up the essentials of basic tradecraft, and she now worked at London Station, under the lecherous eye of the reptilian Anthony Crane, too fond of the Americans to be accepted by the Brits as one of them and too British to be fully trusted by Langley. Her tradecraft, once uncertain, had improved to the point that she had gotten out of the cab in a driving rain and immediately spotted Dalton, right where she expected him to be.
“Bloody hell,” she called out to him, “I’m drowning here, you sod.”
Dalton crossed the street while she watched him, her broad smile changing into a disapproving frown as she got a better look at his face.
When he reached her, she shook her head slowly, touched the wound in his cheek, and then ran her hand around his neck, pulled him down to her, and kissed him gently on the lips. A delicate, sensual touch, breathing him in and surrounding him with her scent, something spicy, with citrus and sandalwood in it.
The fact that they had not been—and, if Dalton could hold out, would not ever be—lovers was a touchy issue between them, since Mandy officially disapproved of heroic fidelity, and she particularly disapproved of heroic fidelity to fragile Italian crybabies who couldn’t take a simple bullet to the head without getting all pouty and running off to hide out at Daddy’s villa in Capri. She released him, stepping back to take him in, her gray eyes troubled.
“I heard you were coming apart. I didn’t believe it. Now I do.”
“I’m happy for you. Maybe we can dilate on that theme inside,” he said, taking her arm and leading her back to his booth at the rear of the pub. The barman came over, perhaps just to get a second look at her “lorly garms,” and went away again to fetch her a pot of tea and a mug. When he had come back and gone again, Dalton reached into his pocket and took out the glass cutter.
“I take it there’s some kind of trouble with these people?”
Mandy flinched at the open display of the glass cutter, took it, and put it in her purse, snapping the latch with a certain dramatic emphasis.
“Why not put a notice in
The Guardian
? You hapless wretch.”
“It’s a glass cutter, Mandy. Not a dagger dripping blood. Don’t be such a dramatist. I take it there’s a problem with the Glass Cutters?”
Mandy sipped at the tea, made a face, and set it down.
“Utter swill,” she said.
“And such small portions?”
“You know the Glass Cutters? What they do?”
“I know the essentials.”
“Dangerous work, theirs, would you say? Lots of wear and tear?”
“The Glass Cutters? God no. Mind work, but not . . . why?”
“Well, my lad,” she said, sipping at her tea, “you may want to revise that view, since they seem to be dying like . . .”
“Flies?”
“Such a cliché,” she said, making a face, “but there it is.”
“But many of them are . . . getting on, aren’t they?”
“Old age has its burdens, I agree,” she said, giving him a look over the rim of her cup, “but being tortured to death is not usually one of them. Not in England, at any rate, although I admit that the National Health does all it can.”