Bloody London

by Reggie Nadelson

  I followed him through the room full of young women, who all looked up hopefully when he passed, then out the door. We walked two blocks to a derelict stretch of riverfront. Planks were set across the puddles. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but the wind howled. Frye didn’t seem to notice.

  I said again, “So you profited by Uncle Tommy’s death.”

  “Then he died for a cause. He’d have liked that.”

  “How much?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Come on, Philly, what’s the harm? I mean, you’d like to know who killed Uncle Tommy, wouldn’t you?”

  “I understood they’d arrested someone in New York.”

  “You wouldn’t want to see some homeless bastard take the whole rap would you? I thought you were king of help the homeless.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? I let Tommy work with me because it suited us both. He was enlarged by it. He showed me how to work the money – we are a global organization – and it’s in New York where people know how to give properly. He showed me how to – what’s the ghastly American term? – how to grow it.”

  “Names? He gave you names?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rich assholes you could rip off?”

  “We don’t rip them off. They contribute.”

  “Russians?”

  He looked up. “Some. I suppose there are some. What difference does it make?”

  “Is Eddie Kievsky one of them?”

  For less than a second Frye hesitated, then he said, “Why the fuck in all the world should I give you my names, my people? I’m not going to do that.”

  “Why is because I’m wondering if you leaned on Tommy Pascoe to introduce you to people who gave you money and that it went wrong with the Russians. If you don’t help me, I’ll get the word out, which will make you real unpopular, OK? So do this thing for me, Philly,” I said.

  He was impervious. His face remained smooth. Getting at Frye was like punching jello. You put your fist in and broke the surface, it jiggled back, bland and gelatinous.

  He stopped suddenly in front of a run-down building. There was scaffolding on it. The door was painted blue. Half a dozen bikes were hitched to a metal rack out front. From inside came the noise of hammering.

  The hallway was an inch deep in water. There was a hole in one of the walls. Frye walked into a puddle and started yelling for someone.

  A guy, his pants falling down past the crack in his ass, a yellow hardhat perched high on his head, appeared. He dragged a cigarette out of his mouth, flipped it into the puddle where Frye stood and said, “This ain’t gonna work, guv. This place is under the water line. This part of the old docks is marshy, it’s shit, I can’t do nothing with it.”

  Frye looked at him and said briefly, “Yes, you can.”

  I said, “What is this place?”

  “One of my shelters,” he said. “The Americans worked it out first. You’ve got to privatize the shelters to make them work. That’s precisely what I’m doing here. That’s why I needed Tommy’s money.”

  Frye led me through a series of rooms, some with rows of beds, the mattresses folded back over themselves. In a kitchen area, about a dozen men sat gloomily around a table. A black and white TV played in the corner.

  “Someone has to do it.” Frye nodded at the men. “We’ve already got people here and we’re not open. There’s a tremendous overload on the system. I’ve got six more shelters in the works.”

  I looked at the guys at the table. They were a forlorn group, ragged, lonely men huddled together in the cavernous space drinking out of thick mugs. Water dripped through the old warehouse ceiling.

  “Yeah well, Phil, I wouldn’t call this home exactly,” but he said, “You’re wrong. You’re just wrong.”

  Without any warning, one of the men at the table got up. You could smell the stink. He ran at Frye and stuck his fist in Frye’s face. His hand was like a skeleton, he was so thin.

  Frye made for the door. The man followed him, and the three of us stood in the doorway, half in, half out, fetid water swirling around our feet. The rain was heavy now. The man punched Frye’s arm. He was almost incoherent but I caught the drift: how much he hated the shelter, why he was transferred from a place he liked closer to town. He had a cleft palate and when he screamed, the noise came out of a hole in the middle of his face. But he was too weak and the effort made him crumple. He fell down. Two guys dragged him away.

  “Poor bugger,” Frye said.

  “He didn’t like this shelter. You have a hierarchy? Who gets the best beds.”

  “Something like that. He’s a dead man. He could be dead tonight. Liver disease. Brain tumor.”

  We went back to Frye’s office, where he pulled a bottle of Scotch out of a drawer and poured it into the wine glasses.

  I said, “Frankie Pascoe was happy with it, that Tommy left you so much dough, that he put you in the will?”

  “I don’t know.” Frye shrugged. “I don’t actually care much. Frankie was a silly, spoiled woman. Besides, she had plenty of her own. The money was for this.” His gesture included his whole empire. “It was for all this, and more, it wasn’t for me.”

  “What’s more?”

  “The shelter I showed you. Other shelters all over town.”

  “On the river here?”

  “Yes. Abroad too. Wherever we’re needed.”

  “Thomas Pascoe’s dead, so is Frankie, but you’re not really interested. I wonder who gets her money? I wonder who gets the apartment?”

  Frye looked at his watch. “I’m late,” he said.

  The phone started ringing again. He took it off the hook and listened.

  “Lily?” he said. “Goddamn it, I’ve been trying to reach you. Don’t you pick up your phone?” He covered the mouthpiece and said to me, “What else is it exactly that you want from me?”

  I said, “Whatever Thomas Pascoe knew that got him killed.”

  Prudence Vane stuck her head in his door, and Frye said to her, “Show Mr Cohen out, Pru, will you? And be nice to him. He’s what they call a private eye. Maybe he’ll help us find our missing address books.”

  I headed for the door. I’d heard enough. I turned up my collar, but Pru Vane kept step with me.

  She was tall, thin, angular, handsome. She had a small head and slick, short hair dyed platinum. She was probably thirty. When she hitched up her thousand-dollar leather skirt, I could see she had on stockings. The flesh between her garters and her stocking tops was bare. Smooth. She gave me a real good look at the thighs.

  “Can I buy you a drink later, Mr Cohen? Dinner?”

  “Why not? It’s Artie.”

  She puckered up. “Superb,” she said. “And look, we’re having a party, a launch for the Life Bubble at the Waterclub. Great new restaurant on the river, everyone’s coming. I’ll have an invitation biked round to you,” she said.

  I wrote my address down for her, and let her believe I was up for a drink. “Tell Phil thanks. And do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get me the date of your last board meeting.”

  But Pru’s eyes had drifted. She was looking over my shoulder. “Hello, Jack,” she said.

  I turned around. Jack Cotton stood in the doorway.

  “You know each other?”

  Under his breath, Jack said to me, “I thought we were doing this together, Artie. I called by your place, you’d gone.”

  “So, Jack, you’ll be at the party, then?” Pru said. “Jack’s at every party.”

  I went out the door and Jack followed me. We stood in the courtyard under a metal overhang.

  “What’s going on here, Jack? You know these people? You know more about all this than you let on. What am I, your stalking horse?”

  Jack lit a cigarette. “I made a few calls last night. As far as New York’s concerned, the Pascoe case is wrapped and you know it. They’ve got a confession from Ramirez. You brought the case to London, Artie. Yo
u put it in your suitcase and imported it, and I’m not at all sure you declared it at customs, know what I mean. Now I didn’t mention it, man, I didn’t even mention you, but you came to me for help, remember?” He took a couple of drags on his smoke, then tossed it in the gutter.

  I said, “Someone stole Frye’s address book. People been leaning on his contributors. Some of them are Russians. I don’t get it. And I don’t like him.”

  “I don’t like him either. Let me work this with you.”

  “I have to go, Jack.”

  “I’ll drop you.”

  “I’ll walk.”

  I thought about Jack Cotton on my way back to the apartment. I didn’t figure him for a wrong guy, but he didn’t make me easy either. I stopped at the pub on the river for some lunch, and by the time I got home, the invitation from Pru Vane was already under the door. A couple of other letters too, addressed to a bank I never heard of.

  The apartment spooked me now, like jujus lived in the walls, and I dumped some groceries, coffee, Coke, beer on the table along with the invitation and the letters. Slammed the windows shut. Replaced the batteries in the shortwave, and opened the mail.

  The first letter was a foreclosure notice, as far as I could make out. The second was a bill for some work on the apartment and I tossed it in the garbage can and looked at the first one again. One bank defaulting on another. It didn’t take me long to track down the bank that held the mortgage, or to find out its main shareholder was Anatoly Sverdloff. I tried the phone numbers on the letter. It didn’t surprise me a hell of a lot when a machine answered in Russian and English.

  Sverdloff was in more kinds of trouble than I knew. I sat at the table and methodically I tried every number I had for him again. Moscow. New York. Hong Kong. Nothing. Come on! Come on!

  Tessa Stiles said Russians bought up property cheap in Docklands in the early Nineties. Sverdloff was one of them. Eddie Kievsky, who I first saw at Sverdloff’s Halloween party in New York, sold me a gun because I was Sverdloff’s friend. And Kievsky had a testimonial on his wall from home. I’d seen the plaque when the kid showed me her father’s room. Kievsky and Frye. I wondered who made the introduction.

  When I’d left Kievsky’s Saturday morning, the wife Irina stood in the doorway. Irina with the dark hair and fabulous blue eyes. Suddenly I knew what bugged me: Irina Kievskaya resembled Jared Mishkin.

  I put in a call to Sonny Lippert. Asked him to track down any connections between Kievsky and Mishkin.

  “Where the hell are you, Art? I’ve been calling you all weekend.”

  “Please, just do this, Sonny, will you?” I was tensing up. I wanted this thing over.

  On the radio, people were yakking, yakkety yak, talk talk talk, it gave me a headache, all the talk: a new adaptation of Chekhov; questions of moral ambiguity; more freak weather; rumor of a sell-off of some speculative building on the river. Someone read a short story while I wondered who had ripped off Frye’s addresses.

  It was still early. I got out the map and found my way to Lily’s houseboat. I had to ask her about Pascoe’s picture. About her and Frye. I was mad and scared. I suddenly thought: Lily was in trouble and I wasn’t there for her. I got it wrong, like she said.

  I couldn’t wait. When I got there, the lights were on.

  Nobody answered the door. I banged harder, then I climbed over the railing of the deck and peered in the window. The lights were on. The living room was a mess, papers on the yellow canvas butterfly chair, a half-eaten meal on the table, a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses on the dining room table. The radio played faintly, and I tapped on the window. “Lily?”

  No one answered.

  “Lily?” I was shouting.

  At the houseboat next to Lily’s, the door opened and a man in a red sweater and jeans came out on deck and looked at me. He said, “Everything all right?”

  “I’m looking for Lily Hanes.”

  “I saw Lily go out earlier,” he said. “I had the sense she was in a hurry. Can I help?”

  “No thanks.” I climbed back off the deck. “It’s OK,” I said. “You didn’t see if she was by herself?”

  He said, “I did. She wasn’t. There was somebody with her. A man, I think.”

  “Black or white? A white guy?”

  “White,” he said.

  On the embankment I found a payphone, called up Pru Vane and said I’d take her up on the drink. She was eager.

  27

  The Groucho Club, she had said. It was wet, cold and windy that night, but the streets were jammed with people. Clubs, coffee places, restaurants, people streamed in and out, some of them stylish as New Yorkers, the same brotherhood of black clothing, same pumped-up gay guys, some great women. London stayed up late. In spite of the mess I was in, I liked the nights here, the bright lights in club windows, the smoky pubs where people spilled on to the sidewalk, the noisy restaurants.

  Most of the men, poking their faces out from umbrellas, looking for cabs or addresses, were in soft shoulder suits and little round glasses. Everyone moved fast. They talked into snappy little phones – the place had New York beat for cellphones ten to one.

  At the entrance to the club stood a knot of people laughing. On the ground, on a nest of cardboard boxes, was a pair of homeless guys. Young guys. I pushed a pound coin into one hand; they were doing excellent business. Must have been a prize claim they’d staked, this venue outside the club. I wished them luck and pushed through a revolving door.

  A good-looking man with a crew cut and a high style four-button jacket told me Pru was in the bar if I was looking for her. He had a faint German accent. People dumped wet coats in the coat room, humped packages and briefcases.

  “What’s so funny?” Pru Vane said when she saw me in the bar.

  I wanted to say, “You think I should have checked my gun?” I kept my mouth shut.

  The place, long bar, armchairs, a fellow playing some pretty good piano, was awash with noise. Pru wore a weird little cardigan sweater in dull green and a sheer long dress.

  She fingered the dress fondly. “Voyage, darling,” she said. She draped her arm around my shoulder, ordered a bottle of Champagne, grabbed it by its neck, exchanged wisecracks with a waiter, and led me upstairs to a room where a couple of women played some desultory pool and sat in the corner. “Not pool, darling. Snooker.”

  “Whatever.” I sat next to her. She hitched up her dress and showed me the great legs. Pru’s white-blonde hair, slicked back earlier, fell over one eye.

  I said, “What is this place?”

  “A club. We all come here.”

  “Who?”

  “People. You know.” She laughed. “So, like Artie, once you’ve been here with me, you’ll like know everyone in London. And Everyone will know you. Like lucky you.”

  I knocked back some wine and lit a cigarette. “Lucky me. How the hell old are you, Pru?”

  “Twenty-six. So.” She chugged some Champagne out of the bottle. “So you’re Lily Hanes’s cop.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, come on, darling, everyone knows about you. Lily, when she came over to help us with a HOME project last year, she told Isobel Cleary she was in love with you, and of course it wasn’t Iz, she didn’t let on because she’s graveyard, whatever you tell her, but someone heard them talking, and you know. Anyway, it’s ace, isn’t it, I mean, being a cop.”

  “Sure. Laugh a minute.” I picked up a Champagne glass, shifted my thighs on the couch. I could hear Rick’s voice in my ear: “You’re a slut, you know.” He always says it when I work a case like this. Now I looked at Pru and thought, yeah well, fulfill my destiny.

  “It’s very very exciting, Pru. Guns. Gangsters. Tell me about HOME, what you do.”

  “I’m freelance, of course. I have other accounts. I help out because Phillip’s like connected, but he’s in the shit, I have to tell you, and the big party coming up, and this fucking weather.”

  “Connected?”

  “Very. To everyon
e. Which is why he’s so upset. Should we get another bottle? Let’s do. Someone’s taking stuff out of the office.”

  “He told me.”

  “He makes this like huge fucking great fuss about it, calls the police. Someone stealing Phillip’s addresses. I don’t believe it. I’ll tell you what I think, shall I?”

  “What do you think?”

  She ordered a second bottle. “There’s a quid pro quo.”

  “Which is?”

  She grabbed the bottle by the neck and poured it so it fizzed over the tops of the glasses, the froth running down the sides. She drank some, foraged in her tiny, shiny handbag the color of a cantaloupe, and offered me a pill.

  “What is it?”

  “Like a Quaalude, only better, second generation. Oh go on, take it,” she said. “Quid pro quo. Right. We go back to your place and fuck our brains out.”

  “And I was expecting Miss Marple.”

  “Who?”

  From downstairs I heard the piano player do some early Ellington. I kissed Pru’s cheek. “Tell me now and I’ll show you my gun.”

  She said, “Look, I have to do a little business, OK? So the board meeting, right? There was a board meeting the week Phillip’s Uncle Tommy Pascoe died, two days afterwards in fact. Is that what you wanted? Give me ten minutes, I’ll be back. Like love the gun. Very noir.”

  I squeezed her arm harder than I should; that turned her on too. The evening had turned into a cartoon. With an arch little wave, Pru Vane disappeared. Left me watching the crowd. I strolled out on to the stair landing and glanced into a dining room with candles on the tables; their reflection played in a skylight overhead.

  “Artie Cohen?” I turned and saw a tall man get up from a crowded table. He said my name again. I went in.

  He was a good-looking, saturnine guy about fifty, neat beard, brown eyes, and he was holding out his hand. “You probably don’t remember me, but I’m Keir Cleary. Isobel’s husband? Isobel, Lily Hanes’s friend? We met in New York once.”

  I shook his hand. He introduced me to some guys at his table – two French, a Brit, an American, a Russian – and they invited me to sit with them. Keir was an orthopedic surgeon with a sideline in real estate, he said, and he was eating with the guys in his consortium. I realized I was hungry. Keir must have noticed. He said why didn’t I order.