A Cool Breeze on the Underground nc-1

by Don Winslow

  Also a bored tiger, Neal thought. Tedium is the detective’s most steadfast companion. It never goes away for long and it always comes back. Neal used to chuckle at the detective shows he’d see on TV, which were twelve minutes of commercials and forty-eight minutes of action. He knew they should have had twelve minutes of commercials, forty minutes of stupefying monotony, seven minutes and fifty seconds of paperwork, and ten seconds of what you might call action, if you weren’t too particular about your definition of action.

  Not that boredom was necessarily bad. On those rare occasions when things got exciting-someone pulling a knife, or much worse, someone pulling a gun-boredom looked pretty good. You could do a lot worse than boredom. But it was hard for Neal to keep that perspective in June in Leicester Square in London during the hottest summer in recorded history. Waiting for somebody who didn’t show up. Who might never show up. Someone who might have once spent an evening with Allie Chase and then booted her along her merry way. Somebody who was a missing link, as it were, in a very thin chain.

  Waiting, while the clock ticked slowly but the calendar raced. Neal had managed to skip Einstein, but he already knew that time was relative. Minutes dragged, hours stood positively still, but days zipped past him like taxis in the rain. May was gone, June was already a week old, and Neal was no closer to finding Allie. And finding her was only the start. Grabbing her would take time, cleaning her up more time, and time was a funny thing: Every hour seemed to take a week, and every week seemed to take about an hour. He had time on his hands and he was running out of time. Back in the States, the Democrats were gearing up for their August party, Senator Chase was polishing the acceptance speech, Ed Levine was sending Neal telexes demanding news, and Neal was sitting on a bench, racing toward his “drop dead line” in slow motion. Eight weeks now, and counting.

  The heat didn’t help. Neal’s shirt would be stuck to the back of the bench ten minutes after he sat down. The crotch of his jeans would cling tenaciously to his balls, and his armpits would smell like a Mississippi chain gang by noon.

  There wasn’t a breeze, not the slightest whisper of a cool breeze to break the still and sullen air.

  Neal would force himself to get up and move. He would sit on his bench for two hours and then walk for one. Around and about Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, Soho, Chinatown. Some days, he’d walk down to the National Gallery and watch the crowds in Trafalgar Square: hundreds of teenagers; no Allie.

  Mostly he sat, however, the tiger at work. He’d arrive on his bench around noon. (One nice thing about drug dealers are their hours. You want to talk to a dealer before noon, you’d better know where he lives.) He’d plop down on the bench, spread his arms out, and have a glance at the International Herald Tribune to check out the baseball standings. It took maybe five minutes for the little prickles of heat to start on his arms and back, followed shortly by the sweat that would become a trickle and then a stream. He had found a cafe by the tube station, and it sold a reasonable facsimile of a bagel. It became his habit to start his day with a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and a plain toasted bagel with butter. Satisfying himself that the Yankees still held first, he’d scan the headlines, then ball the bagel wrapper up inside the empty cup and toss it into the trash basket behind the bench. Then he’d settle in to watch the show. He began to know how movie ushers felt when the film had been running for three months. The sidewalk vendors already would be setting up their wares along the wrought-iron spiked fence that bordered the square. They sold the usual assortment of cheap souvenirs: cute little bobby dolls that never beat up raving psychos, T-shirts with Buckingham Palace silk-screened on the front, buttons that said LONDON UNDERGROUND-the usual crap. Neal’s own favorite was a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the Underground system. He resisted buying one. There were also the food and drink vendors who peddled warm, syrupy Cokes, soft ice cream that lasted an average of thirty-four seconds before melting down your wrist, thick Cadbury milk chocolate bars that melted even quicker and somehow always found their way onto your shirt, salted peanuts that only a far-gone lunatic would consume in this weather and that were always in hot demand. Neal craved… craved a real New York City street frank, one of the ones made from rat hairs, industrial waste, floor sweepings, and God knows what else, for which he cheerfully would have slaughtered the Queen. The closest he could come was a little stand run by some Pakistanis that sold a product the locals called the “Death Kabob.” It wasn’t bad, really, except for being the Main Drag’s answer to Ex-Lax, but it couldn’t touch a Columbus Circle dog with hot mustard and onions spread all over it.

  After the vendors arrived, the tourists started in, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. There were a lot of Americans, but also great hordes of Italian teenagers, who always seemed to travel in groups of three thousand, and tidy little gaggles of Japanese photo freaks. Neal had never seen an ethnic cliche come to life before, but it was really true about the Japanese: They would take a picture of anything, and they all took the same pictures, as if they didn’t know you could make more than one print from a negative. They drove Neal nuts. He had spent a lifetime avoiding having his picture taken, and now he was sure he was going to pop up in five hundred photo albums in greater metropolitan Kyoto. Not that it mattered. It was, as they say, the principle of the thing.

  However, mostly the tourists were fellow Americans: “My fellow Americans,” Neal thought once, flashing on Lyndon Johnson, and mostly they were that middle-aged type who want to travel but don’t want to leave home. So they go to English-speaking countries. You can go to Canada only so many times, so here they were in London, and boy, were they surprised. London had changed considerably from those great Forties movies. In those great Forties movies, people didn’t have foot-high purple hair or say “fuck” every fourth word. Also, it was always foggy and cool in those great Forties movies. Uh-huh.

  And their travel agents had told them there was no crime in London. Crime was reserved for those vaguely greasy people like Italians and French, not to mention Africans, Indians, and Orientals-but not the English.

  Neal sat and mused about crime in England one sultry day as he sat watching a pickpocket make his week’s wages from a single tour group meandering through the square. Why is it, he wondered, that about half of all great popular English literature is about crime and yet everybody, English or foreign, will tell you there is no crime in England? The English popular tradition is obsessed with robbery and murder, starting with Robin Hood, moving up through Dickens, then to Sherlock Holmes, and on to Agatha Christie, who had single-handedly depopulated fictional aristocracy. Even staid historical works featured set-piece public whippings and hangings, and mass transportations to Australia and so forth, and yet England maintains the reputation for public order and civility. Maybe, Neal theorized, people figure that England ridded itself through the rope or the long-distance boat trip of its criminal class, so now everybody who was left in the country was genetically disposed toward being law-abiding. He considered his theory for a while, then dismissed it as he watched the pick maneuver toward his next victim.

  Neal wondered about a bunch of things as he watched his countrymen absorb the culture of the Main Drag. He wondered how many of them, wary of visiting really foreign lands where people spoke a different language and did really strange things, realized that a good proportion of the Third World had migrated right here to good old civilized London; that many of the Empire’s former subjects had taken the phrase Commonwealth at face value and decided to try to get a little bit of the common wealth in the heart of the imperial city. It was a cruel joke, really, considering the fact that these Africans, Asians, and West Indians had created a big chunk of that wealth back in the good old days in their native lands when they bought at inflated prices the cheap consumer goods cranked out in factories in Manchester and Birmingham, and marketed by London firms. Well, the good old days were long gone, blown away by the Marne trenches, and the Blitz, and the “winds of change” that ha
d transformed the British Empire into the British Commonwealth, or as some wags would have it, the Commonpoor. Neal wondered how many of the tourists would get beyond the artificial Mary Poppins land of tourist London to go into the Brixton slums and Notting Hill Gate hovels, or onto the stretch of Bayswater Road that had become known as “Little Karachi,” or how many would journey north from London to the vast rust belt of the industrial Midlands, where the factories had lost their markets, or up into the sooty coal towns that made their West Virginia cousins look like Opryland, USA. He wondered how a supposedly intelligent man in his fifties could be so stupid as to carry his wallet in his back pants pocket.

  Another phenomenon that engaged Neal (what the hell, he had nothing else to do while on this fool’s errand) was the propensity of American tourists to wear clothing extolling the virtues of hometowns they had just paid lots of money to escape. It seemed that half the people he observed wore T-shirts with slogans such as NO PLACE BUT ELKHART and I LUV ALBUQUERQUE, or baseball caps proclaiming loyalty to home teams, which under further consideration Neal realized he understood perfectly. After all, he was the one who checked the papers twice a day to get the baseball scores and root in absentia for Steinbrenner’s team to win the Pennant, which even Neal acknowledged was like cheering for the Nazis to overrun Holland. He wondered why he was being so goddamn superior to the tourists and their expression of affection for their homes. Shit, he thought, he’d rather be home, too. He wondered why, though. He also wondered where the hell this dealer was. And where, oh where, has my little Allie gone? Seven weeks, now, and still counting.

  Meanwhile, the hawkers and the gawkers were always well established by one or two o’clock, and by two-thirty or so the freaks, winos, druggies, and hard-core crazies moved on to their ordained places onstage, waiting with varying degrees of patience for the bit players to clear off.

  Neal would get off his bench around this time and stroll over to the Dilly on the odd chance that Allie had opted out of the pro ranks to join the recalcitrant hippies and fake down-and-out young travel scene that gathered to sit like stoned vultures around the statue of Eros. These kids sat hunched over, checking out the other kids, watching the swirling traffic, passing the surreptitious joint, enormously self-satisfied with their mass nonconformity. Allie was never there, individual nonconformity being her particular taste and talent. Neal felt sorry, though, for poor Eros, doomed to watch over a mob of kids for whom sex had become so commonplace it was an absolute bore. And aren’t you developing a fine and snooty sense of irony? he thought. He didn’t like himself much these days.

  The futile walk gave him an excuse to stretch his legs and shift the dried sweat around a little, and also work up a little fresh sweat. His route took him past, and all too often into, a Wimpy Bar, which brought up melancholy memories of Nick’s. He learned to smother the piece of cardboard the Brits called a hamburger with mustard (extra charge), catsup (ditto), and salt (on the house) before choking it down along with the greasy chips, which is what the Brits called their poor facsimile of French fries.

  After the first week, he had begun to vary his route. He would walk down St. Martin’s Lane, past the perpetual demonstration outside the South Africa Embassy, over to Trafalgar Square. He’d check out the throngs of tourists and school groups milling around Nelson’s column. Good old Lord Nelson, who in winning the great naval battle of Trafalgar saved England from Napoleon and assured the rights of all Englishmen to drive on the wrong bloody side of the road. Then Neal would cross over on to Whitehall Street and wend his way through the crowd on the narrow sidewalk, then through Horse Guards barracks, across Horse Guards Road, and into St. James’s Park.

  If there was any spot in London that Neal at his most xenophobic had to admit he loved, it was St. James’s Park. Here was refuge. Built around a superbly designed manmade lake, the park was an oasis of gentility in its finest sense. The towers of Buckingham Palace peeked in the distance over the several hundred varieties of the park’s trees. Neal would stroll, yes stroll, along the walkway to a large kiosk that sold tea, sandwiches, and pastries. He didn’t even mind standing in line at the cafeteria there, but would purchase his cup of tea, a couple of sugary doughnuts or perhaps a ham sandwich, and then walk over to the lakeside. Here he would rent a chair for ten pence and throw bits of doughnut and bread to the ducks, of which there were a stunning variety. He was sure he would have noticed Allie Chase if she had been riding on the back of one of the humongous black swans that glided past him, but otherwise he forgot about the case altogether.

  On a bandstand near the kiosk, a military band played show tunes and light classics to a crowd gathered in canvas chairs or picnicking on the grassy slope. Neal, who hated military bands, show tunes, and light classics, grew quite fond of the daily concert and was sorry when the IRA blew up the bandstand later that summer, putting an end to the music and killing two soldiers.

  This was old England, Neal thought, or at least it was what he thought old England might have been or should have been. The tourists went mostly to Hyde Park, but St. James’s Park was usually full of nannies wheeling prams or looking after toddlers, government workers from the nearby Whitehall ministries on lunch break, and retirees for whom a walk in this place was a daily routine.

  After finishing his tea, Neal would sometimes walk north to the Mall, up Waterloo Place to lower Regent Street, and up to Piccadilly. Or he would head south down Horse Guards Road to Great George Street, Bridge Street, nod to Big Ben, then take the long hike up Victoria Embankment.

  This broad promenade along the bank of the Thames was a haunt for some vagrants and kids, but it never produced Allie Chase for him. Still, he made it a habit. He preferred active futility over passive futility, even if he was breaking Joe Graham’s philosophy of the fat and happy tiger.

  He’d get back to the square by 3:30 or 4:00, check out the scene, and then steel himself for the coming ordeal in the Underground. Each afternoon, he’d make the rounds of several tube stations during rush hour. Even amateur, unaffiliated panhandlers can make out okay in a big city during rush hour, if they have any smarts at all and a nice face. Allie had both, so Neal would launch himself on a two-hour journey from Leicester Square to Piccadilly, change to the Bakerloo Line and go to Charing Cross, check out the huge station there and then carry on to Embankment, change to the Circle Line, hit Victoria, Sloane Square, South Kensington, and Gloucester Road. There he would switch to the District Line for a quick swing to grimy Earl’s Court and then carry on up to Notting Hill Gate, where he hoped he wouldn’t find her, and on north to Paddington, where he would catch the Metropolitan Line, make a quick check of Baker Street, which always brought Sherlock Holmes to mind (maybe he could locate Allie), and over to King’s Cross, where he’d take the long Underground hike through the suburban commuter crowds to get back on the Piccadilly Line, have a peek at the Covent Garden station, and then back to Leicester Square.

  All this in the faint hope that young Allie was using some variation of the “I’ve lost my purse and need enough money to get home” scam that was a favorite of panhandlers worldwide.

  This tends to work better at rush hour, when there are a lot more potential Samaritans to bilk, and when one is not so obvious to the thugs who control the thriving begging trade. A quick panhandler can keep moving better through large crowds and make a fair bit of change even if she couldn’t occupy one of the key choke points smack dab in the middle of the traffic flow.

  Now there are a number of different strategies in this scam, and it really depends on how gutsy you are and how well you can afford to dress. If you’re really down and out, you’re better off just asking for subway fare-small change-to a nearby stop, because nobody’s going to believe you live in the suburbs and need that much more money to get back. But if you can get your hands on some better threads, you might want to give the bigger-ticket items a try, especially if you’ve got the nerve to attempt the “I’m from out of town and need five or ten pounds to get ho
me and here is my card with my name and address and I’ll send you the money first thing” routine. The truly wonderful thing about the world is that there are people in it who will actually believe this and give the money. If you’re a teenager and try this, pick on women who look like they might have a kid your age, because they don’t want their own child stranded in the big bad city and they’re afraid not to give you the money.

  Or you can go for volume and stick with the tried-and-true “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime” routine, but you have to hit a bunch of buddies to make this one pay. Anyway, people would rather be conned, even if they suspect they’re being conned, because they want you to work a little bit for the money. Or take a shot at making a really good cardboard sign: BROKE AND DESPERATE or HUNGRY AND ALONE. Always try to go for two bad conditions on the sign, though. It’s that and that gives it the poignant quality.

  Or maybe Allie wasn’t begging. Maybe she was trying to steal in the Underground. Neal hoped this wasn’t the case, and really didn’t expect it to be. Despite popular legend, subways are terrible places to pick pockets. Picks like a crowd all right, but they also like to be able to get away if something goes wrong. Subways are full of things such as turnstiles, gates, escalators, and narrow passageways that make running damn near impossible. Add to this the fact that crowds of commuters have been getting increasingly irritated with increasing delays. But it was the possibility that Allie was finding her daily bread in the Underground that sent Neal on his daily tour of purgatory. It brought to mind a sermon he’d once heard when the priest really got cooking on hell, about how it was a place where murderers, thieves, and lechers baked in perpetual, torturous stench. At the time, that had sounded like the West Side Democratic Club’s steam room when all the Ryan brothers were in it. But now, he knew differently. Neal, who had been raised on New York’s subway, had never felt anything like London’s Underground.