by Gregg Loomis
Lang had never returned to London until now.
Changes in the city were obvious. Every vista included building cranes. New office space, new dwellings for the City’s new e-millionaires. Lang had recently read that London was outstripping the rest of Great Britain combined in construction, prosperity and expansion.
He watched the West End from the moisture-streaked windows of the cab until Buckingham Palace flashed by. On the other side of the car, the Victoria Monument was alive with rain slickers and umbrellas, tourists seeking a vantage point for the changing of the guard. A quick left onto St. James Street and the area of the same name. They were only blocks from Piccadilly Circus, the entrance to Soho, the shopping, restaurant and theater district. Just past the crenellated twin Tudor towers of St. James’s Palace, the cab turned into a small mew, made a right and stopped in front of an unimpressive brick building, identified only by a brass plaque announcing it to be the Stafford Hotel.
Small, cheap accommodations hadn’t helped Lang evade Them in Rome. He was certain he had been followed from the pensione to Orvieto. This time he was choosing an upbeat hotel, a place Herr Schneller might stay with his wife, what the guidebooks called “moderate to expensive,” well located. The deciding factor had been its location in a cul-de-sac, a short street that hosted one private club, two small hotels and a few businesses. No shops, no restaurants. Anyone loitering there would be obvious.
A doorman who could have stolen his uniform from the set of A Christmas Carol took their baggage from the cabby. While Gurt dispensed tips and checked in, Lang inspected the lobby. It was as he remembered. Past the reception area, the parlor of a Victorian manor house was set for tea. Behind it was someone’s idea of an American sports bar–cum–men’s club. Helmets from each NFL team were placed around the top of the bar, which faced stuffed chairs far more comfortable than anything to be found in a North American counterpart. Neckties, each displaying school or regimental colors, hung from the ceiling like striped stalactites. Photos of European athletes adorned the walls along with a single print of a B-17 landing on a snow-lined runway, presumably a British aerodrome of World War II. French doors opened onto a small courtyard. Since Lang’s last visit, apartments above a garage had been built on the other side.
He wasn’t happy that the only exits from the hotel were through the front door or those units. There’s safety in numbers and nowhere is that more true than when it comes to ways to get out.
By the time he had completed his tour, Gurt was waiting at the elevator. Their room was small, neat, clean and well furnished. Once Gurt had hung a couple of dresses in the closet, she lit a Marlboro and headed for the bathroom.
“I’m going to change before I go to Grosvenor Square,” she announced over her shoulder.
The U.S. Embassy and, therefore, the Agency Chief of Station were in Grosvenor Square. Even on their own time, Agency employees had to check in upon arrival in a country other than that in which stationed. Conventional wisdom was that the requirement discouraged operatives from launching projects of their own just as Gurt was doing by accompanying Lang.
“Take a cab or you’ll get drenched,” he advised the closed bathroom door. “The nearest tube station is almost as far away as the embassy.”
The door cracked open and Gurt’s disembodied head appeared along with a cloud of tobacco smoke. “You know this or are you reading from a guidebook?”
“Where the nearest subway station is? I know. I used to spend a fair amount of time here.”
She nodded, seeming to evaluate the information. “Thanks for the point.”
“Tip.”
“Whatever. It does me happy you care.”
The door closed, leaving him to reflect that in English, people were happy. Or were made happy. Only in German were they done happy. The difference said something about the nationality. Someday he might take the time to figure out what.
2
London, St. James
Half an hour later, Lang stepped out of Fortnum and Mason, opened his new umbrella and thanked the top-hatted doorman who was holding the door open for him. His acquisition would not only shelter him from the persistent drizzle but it would also blend into the umbrella-toting crowd lining the curb, waiting for a break in the traffic.
To Lang’s right, the neon of Piccadilly Circus bled into the wet pavement, making the black asphalt dance with color. A doubledecker bus blocked then revealed the stature of Eros, the Greek god of love, who had presided over the circle for over a century.
Horns hooted as busses, trucks and cars came to a stop. Not quite used to having to check his right, rather than his left, Lang stepped in front of a bright red Mini Cooper. The driver’s hair was cut Beatles fashion, a cigarette bobbing in his mouth as he shouted into a cell phone. Lang picked his way around the rear of a Rover and two Japanese motorcycles before he got to the opposite sidewalk.
Half a block to his left was Old Bond Street. He saw the sign before number 12: Mike Jenson, Dealer in Curios, Antiquities, Etcetera. He pushed open the door and went in.
3
London, the West End
Miles away in the West End, a man scanned black-and-white television screens on which pictures of city streets flickered, stopped and rolled on to various urban scenes. Occasionally a picture was commanded to freeze, a white halo surrounding a face until the controller told the machine to proceed.
Most Londoners did not know that, on average, their likenesses were transmitted forty times a day as they commuted to and from work, ran errands between buildings or simply window-shopped. The cameras were a legacy of IRA terrorism. Thousands had been posted around the city in discreet locations, cameras little different from those used as security devices in department stores. The sheer number of images had been overwhelming, far too many to be scanned by London police.
The age of technology had come to the rescue with face-recognition software. A picture of a face could be programmed into a computer and assigned numerical values: a number for the space between the eyes, another for the length of the nose and so on. Once a face was “recognized” in the cameras’ pictures, an alarm went off and the countenance in question was highlighted, its location appearing on the screen.
Since major components of facial construction—occipital arches, mandible, rhinal bones—can be altered only by surgery or trauma, the computer could, in most instances, see through changes such as hair loss, weight loss or gain, or the most relentless force of all, age.
With the reluctance of governments everywhere to relinquish power once acquired, the London police had elected to let those few who knew of the devices forget them once the Irish Question had been temporarily resolved by tenuous agreement. On the few occasions when the subject arose, officials quickly pointed out that cameras in less-than-prosperous neighborhoods were responsible for an impressive number of arrests. Removal of surveillance equipment from “safe” areas but not from others was likely to offend the historic British sense of fair play, and, more likely, cause a political firestorm in the city council. The occasional citizen who publicly bemoaned the loss of privacy was condemned by authorities as an anarchist opposed to municipal security.
Identical technology was used by the Tampa, Florida, police as an “experiment” to identify no less than nineteen Super Bowl fans with criminal records at the 2001 game.
The London police would have been the last to admit that anything transmitted was subject to interception or, in this case, hacking.
It was just such an interception that the man in front of the screens was watching.
Lang Reilly turned just as he entered the shop, presenting both full-face and profile shots to a lens mounted unobtrusively on a rooftop. The man monitoring the screens stopped the motion in the picture and squinted at the highlighted or “haloed” area before punching numbers into a cell phone.
“You were right,” he said. “He’s tracked it back to Jenson. What do you want done?”
He listened for a mom
ent and disconnected without another word. He hurriedly entered another number.
“Jenson’s,” he said without identifying himself. “Make sure everything is sanitized, Jenson included. No, we’ve changed that. We want Reilly alive, see what else he knows.”
4
London, Old Bond Street
A bell tinkled as Lang entered the shop, a room about twenty feet by twenty. Oils and watercolors shouldered each other for space on the simple plaster walls. Regiments of dark-wooded furniture paraded in orderly ranks and files, dividing the room into squares as neat as any formed by the British infantry. There was a smell of lemon oil.
He heard footsteps on the wooden plank floor and a curtain at the back was brushed aside. A short man in a dark suit came out, his hands clasping each other as though he were washing them. A long, pale face was topped by lifeless dark hair shot with silver. His smile revealed teeth crooked enough to make an orthodontist salivate.
“Mornin’, sir,” he said in an accent Lang would have attributed to Jeeves the butler. “I help you or you jus’ browsin’?”
“Mr. Jenson?” Lang asked.
There was a furtive flicker of the eyes, the look of someone in need of an escape route. Lang would have bet Mr. Jenson had unhappy creditors.
“An’ who might you be?” he wanted to know, his tone more defensive than curious.
Lang smiled, trying to seem as nonthreatening as possible. “A man looking for information.”
The caution in Jensen’s voice was not dispelled. “An’ what sort of information would that be?”
Lang admired a highboy, running a hand across mahogany drawers inlaid with satinwood. He pulled out the Polaroid, using the marble top of a commode to smooth out the creases. “I was wondering if you could tell me where you got this?”
Jenson made no effort to conceal his relief Lang wasn’t there as a bill collector. “Some bloody estate or winding-up sale, I’d imagine. Not some place where you can’t likely get another if it’s genre religious work you fancy.”
“I’m a lawyer,” Lang explained, his hand still on the cool marble on which the small photo lay. “I have a client to whom the origins of the painting shown there could be very important.”
As Jenson inspected the snapshot, his eyes narrowed, giving his long face the appearance of a fox scenting a hen house. “Don’t usually keep records of art sold lyin’ about. Space considerations, and all that, y’know. Have to look it up, check my books. That’ll take a spot of time, if you take my meaning.”
Lang did. “I, my client, that is, would expect to pay you for your time, of course.”
Jenson treated Lang to that picket-fence-in-bad-repair grin again. “I’ll have it for you”—he produced a pocket watch—“after lunch. You come ‘round a coupla hours from now.”
5
London, St. James
An hour and a half later
Lang had lunch wrapped in newspaper at a fish and chips take-away. It wasn’t the best meal available, but it was the quickest. Which meant he had time to kill. Wiping the grease from his chin with a thin paper napkin, he entered the nearby Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy of Arts, where he spent half an hour staring with total lack of comprehension at the current visiting exhibition of abstract art.
Best Lang could tell, there were two schools displayed here. First were the splattists, distinguishable by paint applied by flinging it in the general direction of the canvas or whatever surface was involved. The paint splattered as it hit, forming shapes and patterns dictated by centrifugal force and gravity rather than design. The other was the smearists, artists who preferred to glob paint at random and then smear it into whorls, lines or anything else as long as it was not in a recognizable form. Then there were the truly avant-garde, who defied definition by simply coloring the canvas a single, uniform color.
All works that very much resembled the result of Jeff’s efforts with finger paints at age three.
Jeff and Janet. For the last few days, Lang had concentrated on finding their killer rather than dwelling on the emptiness their deaths had left in his life. His fists clenched. By God, he would find the unknown They. He would have vengeance.
A schoolmarmish woman, her white hair gathered in a bun, gave him a frightened look and scurried away, turning her head to make sure he wasn’t following. Lang realized he had spoken out loud.
Conceding he was no culture vulture and that contemporary art was beyond his ken, Lang retreated to the sculpture promenade to admire a Michelangelo relief.
After the abstractionists, it was just that: a relief.
As he started back towards Old Bond Street, it stopped misting. The sky was a little lighter with a hint if not a promise of sunshine to come. Umbrellas were now furled, used as walking sticks or carried underarm.
Once again, the bell tinkled his entrance. Lang busied himself inspecting the furniture as he waited for Jenson to come out from behind his curtain. Machined rather than planed surfaces and cast rather than forged nails betrayed most pieces as reproductions, reflections of revivals of the past century: a Savonarola chair, its fish-rib back more likely made for the fashions of the 1920s rather than fifteenth-century Florence; an Irish Chippendale table from the craze of the fifties, its claw feet matching more perfectly than could have been done by any eighteenth-century craftsman.
Lang soon grew tired of the game and checked his watch. He had been waiting ten minutes. Jenson had to have heard the bell. Perhaps he was in the midst of a lengthy phone conversation.
“Mr. Jenson?” Lang called.
No response.
The man had to be there. He wouldn’t have left his shop unlocked.
Lang called again with the same result. He was getting a little angry at the man’s rudeness.
Lang crossed the room and pulled back the curtain.
Two naked bulbs, the low-wattage sort the English prefer, hung from the ceiling. Dust-speckled light created an archipelago of shadows around tables, chairs and chests, all in various states of repair. Ornate but empty picture frames, some large enough for life-size portraits, leaned against furniture with a haphazardness at odds with the order of the showroom. The dimness and the dark spots gave Lang the creeps.
To his right, light seeped around a door. An office, no doubt. No wonder Jenson hadn’t heard him enter with the door shut. Lang made his way over, using touch as much as sight to avoid his shins colliding with some very unforgiving wood.
Lang reached the door and knocked. “Mr. Jenson?”
Receiving no response, he knocked again, this time harder. The door swung open.
Lang had often heard the smell of blood described as coppery. To him it was reminiscent of the taste of steel, a smell like the taste of your tongue running across the blade of a knife. However it smelled, there was blood everywhere.
Jenson sat at an old rolltop desk that was swamped in papers. Were it not for the blood, he could have been napping, head tipped against the back of a chair. Blood covered his shirt, his jacket and his trousers. Blood formed puddles on the desk and covered the bare planks of the floor. Blood was splattered across the wall in a display not unlike the art exhibition. An oozing gash separated Jenson’s chin from his throat. Eyes not yet dull gazed in surprise into the darkness of the ceiling.
Next to the desk, a safe yawned open, a trickle of papers spilling onto the floor. More papers were scattered across the desk and floor, some already reddish as the fibers sponged up the fluid of Jenson’s life. It looked as if, in a final fit, Jenson had taken every scrap of paper he could find and tossed them into the air.
Lang leaned the umbrella against a wall and touched the back of his hand to Jenson’s slack jaw. The skin was still warm. Jenson hadn’t been dead very long. Lang glanced nervously around the room. The killer could well have been hiding in those shadows on the other side of the door. Moving to face that way, he hurriedly sifted through the papers on the desk.
A quick peek showed mostly bills. Lang almost ga
gged from the overpowering stench of blood and tried to breathe through his mouth. He was probably wasting his time. Why would They kill Jenson and leave the very information they were trying to cover up?
Answer: They wouldn’t, and Lang sure didn’t want to be here when the next customer walked in.
He took a last sweeping look and noticed something on the floor under Jenson’s chair, a sheet of paper soggy and red. It would not have been visible to someone standing over the unfortunate antique dealer. Lang picked it up gingerly, trying to get as little of Mr. Jenson’s blood on his fingers as possible. These days, blood can kill, depending on what unpleasant virus it might be carrying. The paper was soaked, virtually unreadable. A DHL shipping bill. Lang was about to drop it and wipe off his fingers when the word “Poussin” made him forget his squeamishness. There were a list of items, some too blurred to read, but Lang guessed the painting had been one of a number of items of furniture and furnishings sold in bulk. The only other words were “Pegasus, Ltd”—the shipper—and an illegible address.
Either Lang was looking at a list totally unrelated to the people he was searching for—or he had gotten lucky. Which was the more likely, that Jenson had handled more than one Poussin or that his killer hadn’t seen the paper Lang was now holding? Although hardly active in the art world, Lang had never heard of Poussin a month before and the shipping bill had been where someone standing over Jensen might not have seen it, particularly if Jenson had put it on the desk and pushed it over the edge onto the floor when his muscles gave their final spasms.
Lang didn’t have a lot of time to decide. The bell over the door announced another arrival. Or departure. The killer could be escaping and there wasn’t a lot Lang could do about it.
Or maybe there was. Stuffing the bloody paper into a pocket, he cautiously went back into the storage and repair room. Whoever had sliced Jenson’s throat would be covered in blood, judging by how much had splattered the office.
