Bloody London

by Reggie Nadelson

  I don’t know what I expected, but Warren was a link to Thomas Pascoe, and when I’d crawled out of bed that morning, I made my way east from my place on the river. I had the bronze begging hands Frankie gave me in my jacket.

  Past the fancy shops and restaurants and design firms, along Shad Thames through canyons of warehouses. On the left, as I walked, was the river. Most of the buildings looked nineteenth century. The warehouses reminded me of Soho in New York before it was a tourist trap. Names, half rubbed out, were the only vestiges of a working port: Gun Wharf. Tea. Sugar. Wheat. Spice. Once this place had belched with life. I read plenty of Dickens when I was a kid; he was always big with the resident propaganda chiefs in Moscow. This was Dickens country, most of it bulldozed now, but I remembered: Bleak House for the river, Oliver Twist for the slums – “every imaginable desolation and neglect”.

  I crossed a footbridge spun out of glistening steel, then headed a few blocks inland. On the right, I passed bleak cement storage centers stained with damp and angry graffiti, no heliport here, someone had scrawled on a building that said cold stores. Broken-down housing projects. Tooley Street, a broad desolate avenue that was deserted. A woman, clutching an umbrella, wheeled a baby in a cheap stroller. She wobbled quickly by on high-heeled pumps through the leaky day; the heels were broken; her legs, even on a cold morning, were bare. She saw me look at her. She walked faster and one of her heels caught in the broken pavement.

  Everywhere there were building sites, but the cranes were still. It was Sunday and the place felt empty of life, and I walked faster towards Warren’s and felt the gun, comforting, weighty, in my waistband.

  By the time I reached Warren’s building it was raining again, and as I hurried up the rough, cold stone steps, I could hear the wind and the river. The building had four floors; Warren’s studio was on the second floor. Somewhere remote a radio played.

  I pushed on the door, but it was open. The studio was badly lit, the walls half soaked. Wind rattled the old factory windows set high in the streaky walls. But there was a halogen lamp on a work table and in its light I saw that plaster cast of a head with vacant eyes and a sweet smile. A man bundled in an overcoat was bent over it. He didn’t hear me. He wasn’t expecting me.

  The studio stank of dope and cigars and sour wine. I looked around. The cavernous studio was full of half-made sculpture in plaster and bronze, body parts, shoulders, arms, hands, torsos, heads. They littered the work table that ran the length of the long wall. Taped to the dank cement-block walls were large sheets of white paper with sketches of more bodies, some in pencil, a few in colored chalk.

  The sculptures were beautiful, the limbs graceful, the faces sweet and placid, the arms and hands reaching and elegant.

  I looked closely at some of the heads. The expressions were sweet but closed, impassive, as if the subjects were finished with life. From a high shelf, a series of heads in bronze stared down. In the middle of the long table where Warren Pascoe was working was the head and torso of an elderly man half formed in white plaster.

  The huge tweedy overcoat draped around him, Warren worked carefully at the piece with a small steel knife. He wore wool gloves with the fingers cut off. He heard me, looked up and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  He was a small thickset man, sixtyish, partly bald, but the deft way he worked his subject made you watch. He hummed to himself like jazz musicians do, listening to a track inside his own head.

  I pulled the little bronze hands out of my pocket and put them on his work table.

  He looked at them. “Where’d you get these?”

  “Frankie Pascoe gave them to me.”

  Warren Pascoe sat down suddenly. “You’re some sort of cop, are you?”

  “Some kind.”

  “I wish you people would leave me the fuck alone, you know. I don’t do anything Leonardo didn’t do, or Caravaggio or Holbein.”

  I realized Warren was probably a headcase, and I said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I’m here because of Thomas Pascoe.”

  Warren pulled off a glove and fumbled in a stack of newspapers on the floor. He tossed me one.

  Warren Pascoe had been snitching bodies, or doing deals to get them. Dead prisoners mostly. Got them sent from the morgue so he could make casts. Christ, I thought. Warren, cousin of Tommy, was a body-snatcher. The guy was using cadavers for his models because he thinks he’s Caravaggio or Leonardo. In the newspaper piece, a local cop was quoted saying he had seen “bits of human remains around the place.”

  “I hate the bloody thing. I think it’s repellent,” Frankie Pascoe had said about the bronze hands. This was why; the hands weren’t art; they were practically flesh.

  “Pretty creepy stuff,” I said.

  Warren said, “I think death has a sweetness all its own. I look at the decomposing bodies and I consider how we all finish up.”

  “Look, I don’t care what you’re doing, or who, or if you’ve got bodies in your backyard.” I said. “I want to talk about Cousin Tommy.”

  Warren Pascoe got up. “Is this going to help me, do you think, talking to you?” he said, then offered me coffee out of an espresso pot he had on a hotplate. He rolled a joint and held it out to me.

  He said again, “Is it? Talking to you? I’ve talked to all of them, you know. I’m a fucking artist, man, and I wish they’d bloody leave me alone. Artists have always used death as a model. Always. Do you want the coffee?”

  I shuffled the truth. “It can’t hurt, talking to me,” I said. “You help me out, I’ll do what I can.”

  “Yeah, what the fuck,” Warren said. “Why should I let the establishment fuck me over any worse than they already have, right. Isn’t that right? They’re already looking to put me out of this place, the money boys, that is, they want to tear it down.”

  I said, “Development guys?”

  Warren laughed. “No, no one wants to live in this shithole. It’s the charities. The aid people. Homeless shelters. Warehouses for the bastards, the poor fucking homeless sods, out here on the riverfront where no one notices. You like the little irony? They want to make me homeless so they can stuff this place with other homeless bastards.” He gestured at the bronze hands. “I’ve even done some work for them, you know. And gratis.” He scratched his head. “Look, man, the wanker you really want, the chap with the answers, if you ask me, is Cousin Tommy’s fucking nephew.”

  “Cousin Tommy was a close relative of yours?”

  “No.”

  I said, “So how come he left it in his will that you do the memorial? I assume you knew he was dead.”

  “I’d heard, yes. I don’t know about his fucking will, but I’m not involved. I gave Frankie the bronze hands. I liked Frankie. I wanted her to pose for me.”

  “Did she?”

  He grinned. “In the old days she did. I liked my models alive then.”

  “She was here?”

  “She was here.” He squatted on his haunches and rummaged through a filing cabinet. The cabinet was missing part of a leg and it wobbled when he touched it. Finally, he found what he wanted and stood up. “Here.”

  It was a piece of thick paper about ten by fourteen. On it was a beautiful line drawing of a nude. A woman. I squinted at it in the dull light. “Frankie?”

  He said, “Yes. She was something.”

  “Can I keep it?”

  He reached over. “No, it’s all I’ve got.”

  “Tommy’s being dead surprised you? And Frankie?”

  He shrugged. “Cousin Tommy made a lot of noise. Always leaning on people, do the Christian thing. He never shut up.”

  “This nephew, is he someone who could have profited from Tommy’s death?”

  He looked uneasy. “I don’t like to say. I’m in enough trouble.”

  “You mean you’re looking for a deal, is that it? Warren?” I was at the end of my rope, so I let him see the gun. “I can make more trouble or I can try to make it go away.”

  Warren
reached for his coffee. “If you ask me, I think it’s where all Tommy’s money went.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Warren picked up the little bronze hands and gave them to me. “Keep these if you like. If Frankie made you a present of it, then it’s yours,” he said.

  I took the bronze. “So, Warren, just whisper me the relevant name, will you? OK?”

  “I’m not going to drop some fucker in the shit if it’s not doing me any good, you understand me?”

  The noise of the rain distracted me. Warren finally lit the joint in his hand, pulled on it hard, made some kind of calculation and said finally, “All right.”

  “So?”

  “His mother was Thomas Pascoe’s sister. Tommy was his uncle. Is that any use to you? Is that what you were after? Is there anything else?”

  “Is there?”

  “Yeah, the guy in question would run down his mother for a bigger slice of the action.”

  “What action?”

  “Charity, man, actually.” He opened a drawer under the table and took out a tube, extracted a poster, then unrolled it. There was a picture of the begging hands, and the logo HOME.

  “Gimme the name, Warren.”

  “It’s going to get me into frightful shit if I tell you.”

  I said, “Worse if you don’t. Much worse. You been stealing dead bodies, Warren.” I looked at the newspaper. “You need help here. So what’s his fucking name?”

  Warren tossed the remains of the joint into a glass jar half full of paint-stained water, pulled his thick coat around him and smiled his half-sweet smile. “His name,” he said as the wind bleated outside, “His name is Phillip Frye.”

  Phillip Frye. Phillip Frye. I started walking, the name repeating over and over in my head. I looked for a phone, then walked back in the direction I had come, the river on my right. Everything was shut up tight as a drum. It was Sunday. If Frye was Pascoe’s nephew, if Frye got the money and Lily had Pascoe’s picture in her closet, where did she fit? What was she doing here? I looked for a phone.

  I looked around me. Before I got here, I didn’t figure London for a river city. I didn’t really figure it for anything much. The rain let up some. Up on the high pebbly beach that skirted the water here, a houseboat seemed stranded by the low tides. On the deck a young couple, her in a big sweater and a long skirt, him in a red parka, made repairs on their boat. I heard the hammering. A boombox played an old, sad Willie Nelson tune. The two of them saw me and yelled did I want a beer, and held up bottles. I waved back. Kept walking. Then I saw a pub.

  From a phone in the pub, I called information and got Frye’s office, but it was Sunday and a machine answered. I conned an operator into giving me his unlisted home number and a woman with a soft, shy voice said he was out of the country. I tried Tolya Sverdloff on every number I had for him. I wanted money so Gilchrist would talk to me. Sverdloff had money, but no one answered. I needed a drink.

  The pub was smack on the river, seventeenth-century maybe, a two-story wooden building with a galleried deck on the water. Inside it was warm. I found a seat at a table near a window. I could hear the water lap the seawall.

  I drank the beer, which was OK, and they let you smoke. The bartender had an amiable face; he looked like the fat guy in The Full Monty. It was almost lunchtime and I ordered some sausages and cheese and bread. The cheese was sharp and the bread was good. I switched to red wine.

  The noise of people doing regular stuff made me feel better. I watched them, shaking out their coats, glad to be inside, getting cozy, drinking, talking, flirting, stuff you saw any town, any day. Sinatra soared on the sound system singing “Come Fly With Me”.

  A yuppie guy with round steel glasses and a good sweater was hitting on a girl in a long skirt and a brown jacket, talking at her about trees and the environment. Two men sat at the bar and drank pints of beer and talked about work. A couple of cute women, twenty-something, bare legs, short skirts, black sweaters, nasal voices, shared my table briefly, told me they loved New York, and were going over to do their Christmas shopping next month, although London was pretty cool these days, they said.

  They flirted, giggled, offered me potato chips that tasted of vinegar out of little cellophane bags, and bought me a glass of wine. We toasted Bloomingdales. Toasted London. I bought them some drinks in return. The bartender yakked with his friends. He had an accent like Michael Caine, and he cranked it up special, I figured, for the tourists. I could hear its ebb and flow as he made the rounds of the tables.

  I sat in the window of the pub and watched the action inside and out. London crept up on me. The river especially. The idea of it. The idea of Europe.

  When we left Moscow for good, we went by train to Rome for processing on our way to Israel. There were immigration forms that felt like toilet paper, there was a lousy third-class compartment and my mother crying, her lap piled with Agatha Christies. Dog-eared and stained, those books, and she read them over and over.

  My father wore a vacant expression and his crappy old officer’s coat without the decorations. Me, I was embarrassed: we were refugees. When he pulled his head back into the compartment that day, his face was wet. Now he was dead. I was an American. You didn’t get tired of America.

  I never get tired of New York, but I was liking London. I liked the river. I liked the people and the old buildings and the beer. Except for the Beatles, until now the idea of England never moved me. Until now. I looked out of the pub window at the river. London had scale and history and people who played their parts and made you laugh. In spite of the tangle I was in with the Pascoe case – I didn’t know how the hell to get the money to make Gilchrist talk to me – in spite of Lily, in spite of the weather, I liked it. I could feel myself seduced by it.

  The bartender brought me a refill; I offered him a drink. “Nice place,” I said.

  He put out his hand. “Charlie Diamond,” he said.

  “Artie Cohen.”

  “You here for long?”

  “Maybe.” I drank some of the wine.

  He said, “Come and see us again.”

  I finished the wine and set off for home. The sky had cleared. Outside, I looked for the name of the pub and saw a plaque on the other side of the door. The Mayflower. From this spot the men of the Mayflower set sail and ended up in the Americas. I went back in and asked Charlie about it, and he tossed a dish cloth over his chubby shoulder, grinned and said, “This version? Nineteen fifty-eight.”

  I said goodbye to Charlie again, and the girls in the pub, then I went back to the apartment and called Jack Cotton.

  24

  I didn’t want to plug into officialdom, but I needed help, I needed access to information, and Jack Cotton was a cop I had a connection with. We’d done business together long-distance over the years, so I called Jack on the off-chance he was in on a Sunday. The line to his station house was busy.

  I was going in circles. Gilchrist wanted money. Sverdloff had disappeared off the map. Warren Pascoe was stealing bodies. Frye didn’t answer.

  Phillip Frye was Tommy Pascoe’s nephew. Was that the link between Lily and Pascoe? Lily had been married to Frye; she never told me. I didn’t call her because I was hurt and I nursed it. I missed Lily, but these days I missed her even when she was there.

  I picked up the picture of Pascoe I’d found in her apartment for the hundredth time and propped it against the coffee pot. By now I knew every line in the handsome, sanguine face, every wrinkle, every pore, every hair in his nose. Dead, Thomas Pascoe’s face haunted me like the icons of the saints that stare back at you from the walls of the religious. I put it away and went outside.

  Standing on the balcony, the wind blowing, I felt I was looking at the edge of the world. The volatile weather was making me nuts. Rain, fog, then the wind and a sudden glimpse of blue sky. Below me on the promenade, a couple guys were putting sandbags against the railing.

  I went in the bedroom and pulled a sweater out of my suitcase, then hung up my
good jacket; I had never really unpacked.

  We were already packed.

  Frankie had said it the first morning I met her, in the Middlemarch lobby.

  Pascoe was killed just before he left. Before he could get to London. Ramirez the homeless guy killed Pascoe, sure. But someone else didn’t want him getting on the plane. Someone stopped him leaving. I knew the case would end here in London, but now I saw it sharp that Pascoe died so he wouldn’t get on the plane.

  We were already packed.

  I went out, found a subway stop, and trotted down the stairs. Moneywise, the cabs were killing me.

  For ten minutes I stood in the hole in the ground waiting for a train. The floor of the station swilled with dirty water. In a couple of places along the platform, the puddles were two inches deep. There was a steady drip and I peered at the ceiling where I saw water leaking through the cracks. It could make you nuts, the drip. The platform was nearly empty. Then the train shunted into the station.

  *

  In the lobby of the police station, Paddington Green they called it, a couple sat on plastic chairs, a broken umbrella on the floor between them, leaking water. The grim building stank. A procession of cops hauled their suspects in and out of the front door and down a flight at the back of the lobby. Somewhere there was a holding cell, I figured. The station house stank of Saturday night vomit and Sunday’s blues.

  The woman on the chair was white. The guy was black. She held a baby that squalled; he edged away as if the distance freed him up from her, the kid, the broken umbrella on the floor. Behind the cage a fat white cop dozed, a radio droned on about the weather. Storm warnings. The fat cop snored loud as a death rattle.

  Two kids with Rasta braids and big red and green knitted berets walked in nervously and asked about a friend. Behind the cage, the cop opened his eyes. He was an angry man. I craned my neck and saw he had a plate of food in front of him, and he glanced at the kids a long time, and looked over their brand-new sneaks; you could see from his expression he decided the kids swiped the sneakers. He picked up a phone.