He was suspicious. “What’s that mean?”
“You know what happened to Winston?”
Thomas knew that one. “He done some African, then got topped himself.” He was so proud to know the answer, he went on with the business right through Philip’s vigorous shushing.
“Right,” I said. “Now. Put it together. Englishman who’s spent time in Canada wastes an African in London, and is done himself by person or persons unknown. Here’s your question. I can’t possibly give you any help with the answer. What kind of Yank comes around a place like this asking questions about him?”
Philip was impressed in spite of himself. “See Eye Ay?” he whispered.
I pursed my lips. “I thought you were clever lads,” I said. “For the record of course, you’re absolutely wrong; I’m just a meddling busybody who doesn’t know when I’m well out of things. Right?”
They both swore they believed me, which made sense in a way, because I was telling a desperately uncomfortable truth.
“So,” I said. “Humor the foreigner. Did you see or here anything of or about Winston before he wasted the African?”
“Do meddling busybodies have a reward budget, then?” Philip asked.
“They might. What do you know?”
Unlike a lot of more experienced snitches, Philip was at least realistic.
“Not a lot, actually. He was around the neighborhood the Friday before, you know, at the Dog & Breakfast, making loud noises about this big ‘job’ he’d got on, and how the fringe benefits were delightful. He didn’t half think he was the clever lad.”
“Idiots usually do.”
“What do you mean?” Philip asked. “He was on for five thousand quid.”
“He thought he was on for five thousand quid. He was really on for three lead pills, wasn’t he?”
“Ya, right,” Philip said. Thomas tilted his head and looked intelligent, as if he were beginning to evolve the maxim “Crime Does Not Pay” from first principles.
“In fact,” I went on, “if he were ever in line for the five grand at all, which I doubt, going around and shooting his mouth off about it was the very best way to turn gold to lead.”
“Ya, right,” Philip said again. “He was an idiot, wasn’t he?”
“Absolutely. What kind of fringe benefit was he talking about?”
“I don’t even know what that is,” Thomas said.
“It’s like the guy who delivers the crisps gets to use the van for the family on the weekend,” Philip explained.
“Exactly,” I said. “Didn’t he mention anything specific like that?”
“Wait a minute,” Philip said. “If Winston was an idiot for talking, how come I’m not one for talking to you?”
I smiled. “Because I’m the good guys,” I said.
Philip still looked skeptical; Thomas, as usual, followed his lead.
There was a zip-up pocket in the back of my sweats. I pulled a nylon wallet out of there, extracted a couple of tens, and handed one each to Thomas and Philip.
“And then, there’s that,” I said. I gestured with my head back over to where the three younger kids were still having fun with the ball. “See that they get a piece of that, okay?”
“You may want your money back,” Philip said, and Thomas looked pained.
“Why?”
“Because Winston never said nuffink about what his fringe benefit was. All he said was what I’ve already told you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
I had no complaints. Thanks to the kids, I had places to go and questions to ask. I could keep the investigation going, and a lot of times that’s the most you can ask.
And I’d already learned a couple of concrete things. Winston might have been a hood, but as a professional hit man he was a good English basketball player.
Pros don’t talk. Period.
Pros don’t usually wind up ventilated by the people who’ve hired them, either.
This led me to conclude that the person who’d hired and killed Winston Blake was no criminal mastermind, either. It was a start.
My reflections were interrupted by Philip’s asking me what I was going to do now.
“Why?”
“Because it’s getting dark, and it’s not too safe for white folks around here after dark.”
I looked at the sky and thought, He’s right. Half a lifetime and more since Sonny Boy Jeffries had called me over to his car and I was afraid again.
I called to one of the little kids to throw me the ball. I caught it, bounced it once, then put up a long hook shot from where I stood. It swished through. I still couldn’t miss.
“Keep the ball, guys,” I told them. “Practice what I showed you. I’ll be back.” In the daytime, I thought.
I was sad and vaguely ashamed as I left.
18
“Let the entertainment begin!”
Jennifer Saunders
French & Saunders, BBC
AND THE NEXT NIGHT, I was standing in front of a mirror trying to get my black tie just right for another foray back into Christieland.
“Why don’t you wear a clip-on like everybody else?” Rox asked.
“Because you can’t get them big enough,” I said. “Especially nowadays, with these wimpy little Pee Wee Herman ties fashionable with tuxes. I refuse to wear a bow tie that’s not as big across as my lips.”
“You could pucker up all the time,” she suggested.
“You pucker up,” I told her.
She did, I took advantage of it, then went back to my tie.
Rox was all ready to go. She had on a backless, strapless number once again, this time in a shimmering purple. I didn’t know where it came from, but then I didn’t know where the silver one she’d fetched me from prison in on Monday had come from either. One of Roxanne’s many extraordinary—I’m tempted to say supernatural—excellences is that she never seems to shop. Things she needs just seem to turn up, without any wear and tear on shoe leather.
Even better, she spares me the classic woman’s gambit “How does this look?” Every other woman I’ve ever known has pulled this one. You know how it goes. She asks how it looks. If you tell her it looks great, she then takes the next ten minutes telling you how it makes her look fat, and her legs look short, and the color makes her eyes look like mud.
So the next time, you look long and hard, and tell her that maybe the dress makes her world-renowned slim, gorgeous hips look perhaps maybe a bit deceptively more voluptuous than the reality with which you are delightfully acquainted might reflect.
The response to this is, “If you mean I’m fat, just say so!” followed by tears, the cancellation of the social engagement for which the dress is to be bought, followed by two weeks of a diet of steamed lettuce.
I have decided that the only safe response for the man to make is to fake a heart attack the second he hears the question.
Fortunately, as long as I stay with Ms. Schick, I’ll never have to do that. She shows up looking gorgeous, I tell her so, and she believes me.
“Matt Cobb,” she said, “fashion prima donna,” she said. “You want to make the ambassador wait?”
That was the excuse for all of tonight’s gorgeosity. Lady Arking was adding ten more channels to TVStrato’s, two of which were U.S. cable networks, and a third of which relied heavily on U.S. programming.
The U.S. ambassador had agreed to attend. This was to accomplish a couple of things. The drawback to being an ambassador is that you can never go to a person’s party because you happen to know there will be good hors d’oeuvres. Every move you make sends a message.
The new administration, in the person of Jake Grevey, the tire magnate who was the new ambassador, was sending two messages:
1. America likes to have foreigners pay for things we make, even if they’re only old TV shows and
2. Screw the French.
France’s paranoia about American cultural products had been the talk of Europe lately. French minist
ers had been saying things like, “If zis is allowed to continue, directors like Jean-Luc Godard will starve because of the latest sequel to Jurassic Park.”
Not only that, but they say it as if it were a bad thing. I’ve seen a whole lot of French movies, and if you ask me, the only good thing about World War II is that it kept down the number of them in existence.
Anyway, the French were incredibly cheesed off at American culture for making them long for exotic things like dinosaur movies and actual toilet bowls in restaurants instead of holes in the floor. They were also extremely peeved at Lady Arking and TVStrato for dropping it all over Western Europe from the sky.
Now, why, you may wonder, wouldn’t the French simply ban the reception of TVStrato, thereby keeping the nation safe for boring, pseudointellectual, pretentious, bullshit movies that nobody except a French intellectual would ever want to see?
Because they can’t. Because the European Union, formerly the European Community, formerly the Common Market, has a treaty stating that if one member country deems a program or service fit for satellite broadcast, no other country can keep it out.
So Lady Arking was adding channels—American cartoons and American sports, plus a general channel with plenty of off-Network series, and the American ambassador was going to be there to celebrate.
The French ambassador had sent his regrets.
Roxanne and I were last-minute additions to the guest list. The party had been in the works for months, one of the reasons this current unpleasantness hadn’t led to its cancellation.
The other reason, quite frankly, was that none of the current unpleasantness had yet managed to attach itself to Lady Arking in the public prints.
The party remained on, and Rox and I were going. We had been asked for, we had been assured, by the ambassador himself.
We speculated on this.
“He probably wants to know,” Rox said, “why you happen to be around when so many English people get bumped off.”
“Only two,” I protested. “I think he saw you on Monday’s news, and wants to see you in an evening gown again. I know I’m enjoying it.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “You know, you look pretty scrumptious in formal attire yourself. We should do this more often. If you can learn how to tie your tie.”
“I think I’ve almost—”
“Oh, give me that,” she said.
She advanced on me with her hands out and grabbed my neck as if she planned to strangle me.
When she pulled away, the tie was perfect.
“How did you do that?”
“Putting bows in dolly hair. Now don’t touch it.”
“Yes, ma am.”
I walked to the front room, hooked the curtain aside, and looked out the window. The limousine was just pulling up outside the house.
“He just got here,” I told Rox. “All that impatience, and I wasn’t even late.”
I helped her on with her coat. It was fuzzy, but not fur. She’s not militant about it, she just prefers not to wear it.
Whatever it was, it was warm enough. Considering that it was the only thing between her and a very cold, very damp November night, Rox showed nary a shiver as we approached the open door of the car.
I recognized our old friend Nigel, also known as James, holding the door.
“Sorry about the lack of excitement,” I told him. “No photographers.”
He touched the brim of his cap.
“That’s quite all right, sir. I expect all the excitement I can handle from the weather tonight.”
“How’s that?”
“Fog, sir. Not so bad yet, but it’s rolling right up the river. The garage was quite socked in with it.”
And as if he’d conjured them with his words, white tendrils began creeping along the ground toward us, like tentacles out to grab our legs and pull us away with them somewhere.
It was spooky. I jumped inside the car and let James close the door. I fancied that a bit of tendril was clipped off inside the Jag with us, but it soon dissipated and died.
“There’s no rush,” Roxanne assured Nigel when he took his own seat. “Be careful.”
Under her breath she muttered, “And if the ambassador has to wait, he’ll just have to lump it.”
It was weird outside. In New York, usually, you wake up in the morning, look out the window, and see what looks like the inside of a cotton ball. Or you walk out of a theater into a world where a taxicab couldn’t see you even if it wanted to stop for you. The little cat feet stuff was strictly poetry.
This was the first time I’d ever seen fog actually moving in and occupying territory, and it was a weird experience. It resembled some kind of creature, but cat wasn’t even in the running. My personal money would be on something out of the Cthulu Mythos.
Then I thought of something else, and put a much brighter face on things. “Hey,” I said. “This is it. This is the first. Three months and change, and we’ve finally seen one.”
“Seen one what?” Rox demanded.
“The famous London fog. Fabled in song and story and five thousand black-and-white cop movies with William Hartnell that Channel Eleven in New York used to show at three o’clock in the morning when I was a kid.”
“Who was William Hartnell?” Rox wondered.
“Rox, I’m hurt. Are you hurt, Nigel?”
“I’m not allowed to have emotions when I’m driving, sir.”
“Oh,” I said, “very sensible. If you were allowed to have emotions, would you be hurt?”
“Absolutely bleeding, sir.”
“Thank you,” I said. I turned to Rox. “See? As soon as Nigel gets off duty and can have emotions again, he’s going to bleed.”
“Cobb,” Rox informed me flatly, “life with you is a nonstop laugh riot. So who was he, already?”
“Precisely.”
Then, before we wandered too far into an Abbott and Costello routine, I told her. “In addition to playing army sergeants and cops, William Hartnell was the first Doctor Who.”
“Oh. I like the blond one.”
I turned my attention back to the fog. The limo was so vibration free that it was only the stray lamppost looming out of the whiteness or the occasional set of yellow lights, visible as a soft glow, that gave us any feeling of motion at all.
I looked around and said, “Nigel, maybe we ought to give this up.”
His voice showed no panic, but no pleasure, either. “I’ve considered it, sir, but I really think it would be worse to go back than to press on.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir. We’re more than halfway there.”
I shrugged. The man was a professional, after all. It wasn’t as if we were on a superhighway, where the smashup of one vehicle was a potential hundred-car catastrophe. And it wasn’t like a blizzard, where visibility and traction disappeared simultaneously.
“Press on, then,” I told him.
“With the utmost care, sir.”
“Great.”
“Used to get fogs like this quite frequently when I was a lad. All the coal that used to be burnt. Hardly ever see them, anymore. They used to last for days.”
I was just as glad they didn’t last for days anymore. I didn’t like this. This fog was more conducive to claustrophobia than a locked phone booth. It was like being inside a big white balloon that rolled with you every time you took a step, so you could never get out, or even approach the skin.
When we entered the park, things were a little better. We could measure our progress by the quaint little lamps alongside the road. Jillionaires’ row, along the canal, was also well lit, mostly with security-inspired floodlights. Even if you couldn’t see the individual houses too well, you could make out where they were in the midst of the icy sculptures of fog and ice that surrounded them.
I’d done some boning up on this particular development since we’d been here last. People had to pay £600,000 a year just for the lot. Houses were built at the owner’s own expense. With that ki
nd of money tied up in a place to live, I’d have floodlights, too.
“We’re getting close,” I said.
“How can you tell?” Roxanne asked.
“Lady Arking’s place is the last one in the row, down near the zoo. Listen.”
I rolled down the window a little more so she could hear. The world gets quiet in a fog, and sounds carry. Rox could hear the grunts, wails, and howls from the zoo. The animals didn’t like the fog, either.
I gave her my best Bela. “Leezen to dem,” I said. “Cheeldren off de night—vat music dey make.”
“You’re sick,” she said.
Nigel pulled the car up a gravel drive. If I were paying almost a million dollars a year just to rent the land my house stood on, I personally would have a paved driveway, but there’s probably some kind of class thing about it that I haven’t caught on to yet.
One of the nice things about being an American in England is that you’re outside the class system. More important, it’s outside of you. You don’t have to be intimidated by anybody, and better yet, there are no constraints of custom and convention to keep you from being friends with anybody you please.
For example, I could spend part of the trip engaged with friendly banter on an equal basis with Nigel. For all he kept calling me “sir,” he was giving nothing away in that talk, and we both had fun.
Stephen Arking, for instance, could never have that sort of conversation with someone who, I suppose, he would call a servant, and not just because Stephen was a jerk, either. Bernard Levering couldn’t have done it, and he’s not only “middle class,” he’s had the advantage of a sojourn in the States to insulate him from all the bullshit.
Banbridge let us in and took Roxanne’s coat. There was appreciation in his elderly eyes as she was revealed. She saw it and smiled at him. Class system or no class system, butlers don’t smile back, but it was easy to see that he was pleased.
We were led by a subordinate (Banbridge had to stay and receive guests, after all) into a place we hadn’t been before. Hadn’t even expected it, though I suppose I should have in a place that big.
It was a room draped with blue satin, big enough to hold at least three basketball courts the size of the one I’d met the kids on the day before yesterday.
Killed in the Fog Page 16
