A Cool Breeze on the Underground nc-1

by Don Winslow

  “The Big Apple,” Colin said, flashing his cosmopolitan outlook.

  Allie whispered something in Colin’s ear. Neal didn’t catch it.

  “Later,” Colin said.

  She whispered again.

  “I said later,” Colin answered again. A trace of annoyance played across his face. He turned to Neal. “You want some excitement, then, rugger?”

  “If you have any.”

  Colin’s smile could best be described as mischievous. “Oh, we got some, all right. What kind would you like?”

  He opened his palm to show the capsules of speed that appeared slick as Blackstone.

  This, Neal thought, is the point in the TV episode when the canny private eye figures a way to say no, or cleverly palms the pills and fakes the effects. But this is mostly because Quaker Oats is sponsoring the show and wouldn’t buy ads if the hero gets stoned for any reason whatsoever. Unless, of course, the villains hold him down and pour the stuff down his throat. Then the camera gets all blurry. But this was real life, which is even trickier than television-and often more blurry.

  Neal took one of the capsules and knocked it back with a swallow of stout. Colin spread the rest around.

  “Let’s go to The Club,” Allie said. “I wanna dance. And I mean dance!”

  “Wha’ about your engagement?” asked Colin.

  “I have over two hours!”

  “The Club it is, then.”

  The club was your basic cave, only more primitive than Neal was used to in New York’s SoHo. If New York was Cro-Magnon, this place was Neanderthal. It didn’t really have a name.

  “I dunno, rugger,” Colin had explained when asked. “We just call it The Club.”

  Neal did feel he was being clubbed by the band, which had a name: Murdering Scum. They were an opening act for the night’s headliners, The Queen and All His Family.

  “What part of town are we in?” Neal shouted above the din.

  “Earl’s Court!” Colin answered. They had fought their way to the bar. Allie, Crisp, and Vanessa had joined the bobbing throng on the dance floor. The place smelled of beer and sweat.

  Neal took a long sip of his beer, which accomplished two things: It gave him the closest acquaintance with horse urine he ever hoped to have, and it gave him time to think. This latter activity was becoming increasingly difficult. Sort of an imposition. The band was playing four hundred beats to the measure.

  Colin was in better pharmacological shape than Neal, and less stoned, so the pause in conversation dragged, as things tend to do on Amphetamine Standard Time. But the ensuing two or three decades gave Neal a chance to observe Allie, which was the point of the exercise, after all. Good to keep your mind on that. Allie was dancing in a frenzied jerking motion that threatened to tear her head from her body. And she was having a very good time.

  The Scum, as they were known to their friends, switched to a romantic ballad about “fucking till it’s red and raw” and the lead guitarist seemed to be demonstrating the technique with pelvic thrusts that would have sent Elvis himself running to a revival meeting. The band reduced its harmonic structure to the sublime simplicity of a single chord, which made a certain kind of sense given the subject matter. The crowd was sure going for it in a big way, though. Of course, most of them had safety pins jammed through their ears or noses, which did indicate a tolerance for pain. They sweated inside their leather and denim.

  Neal watched Vanessa and Crisp make Watusi leaps on the crowded floor. Every now and again, Crisp amused a fellow celebrant by spewing beer in his face, which seemed to be an acknowledged form of greeting. Neal looked around for Allie, and spotted her standing in front of the jerry-built platform that served as a stage. A sheen of sweat shone off her blond hair as she swung her head in a rhythm all her own.

  Slow, one-beat-to-the-measure cadence somewhere in the frenzied rock and roll. Allie didn’t want her love red and raw; she wanted it slow and soft.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Colin asked. He saw Neal watching.

  “Yeah.”

  “Off limits, Neal.”

  “No problem.”

  Not to worry, Colin, old sod, Neal thought. I’m only going to grab your beloved and carry her back over the big water. Whether she will or not.

  Oh, well, time to play.

  “Kind of hard to control, though, isn’t she?” Neal asked.

  “Alice? Not hard.”

  Neal gave him a little more of a prod in the psychic balls. “If you say so,” he said, smiling.

  He watched the little knots in Colin’s jaw tighten. The pimp took a quick swallow of beer and set the bottle down hard on the bar. “Right,” he said.

  Colin worked his way through the crowd to where Allie was standing, her eyes closed and body gently weaving. He grabbed her by the shoulders, straightened her up, and gently lifted her chin with his left hand. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. He slapped her hard with his right hand. Her eyes widened and filled with tears.

  Neal checked the impulse to head over there. Too early for the “white knight” bit, he thought. Also, Colin would beat the shit out of you and his friends would stomp on whatever was left.

  Colin stroked the reddening splotch on Allie’s cheek, then hauled back and hit her again, harder this time, snapping her head back.

  Good going, Neal thought to himself. So far, you’re doing a real good job for this kid.

  He watched as Colin stood, hands at his side, and stared at Allie. She fought off her tears as her chin dropped to her chest and she stared at the floor. Without looking up, she held her arms straight out in front of her. After a couple of seconds that lasted about a week, Colin took her arms and pulled her to him. She burrowed her face into his chest and held him tightly. It was creepy, but Neal had witnessed worse at Westchester cocktail parties. What made this especially bad was that Colin looked over, found Neal with his eyes, and smiled. Alice hard to control? Right.

  Now where have I seen this shit before? Neal asked himself. Oh, yeah, about half my life. A pimp is a pimp is a pimp. Come to Daddy. Oops, bad choice of words there.

  He looked on as Colin and Allie started to dance. She made your basic miraculous recovery and began to move with the music. Like bad art imitating bad life, the band switched tunes, working into a hard-driving message song that the crowd seemed to know.

  It was an anthem of sorts. Neal didn’t catch the title, but the chorus went: “Burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.” The crowd joined in with a passion that could spring only from deep feeling, and Neal found himself shamed at the condescension he’d felt all night. This was a song of the dispossessed, a screaming, angry cri de coeur born of a thousand years of a class-bound society. The dancers whirled in violent sweeps, bumping and bouncing against each other, surrogate objects for mutual rage. No harm meant you, bloke, but burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.

  The inchoate fury swept around Neal, taking him along. He felt their anger, shared it. Anger at the hopelessness, at Da’ and Granda’ and you, all living off the dole in the same effin’ project on the same effin’ street with the same effin’ neighbors in the same effin’ heat. Anger at the toffs with their effin’ BBC, and their effin’ Oxbridge accents that keep out you and me. So let’s burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down. Fury at the useless effin’ effort. of it all, when every job’s the same arsehole-lickin’ beck and call, and who needs their Labour Party and their social-programs bull, so let’s burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.

  Neal shook his head to clear it, and then realized it was already clear. Who the hell expected the Murderous Scum to be eloquent, much less articulate? And didn’t he feel the same sorts of things? Like real anger at the monied class whose messes he cleaned up for a living? Whose living rooms he occupied and whose scotch he drank when they were in trouble? And wasn’t he their sheepdog? Go fetch my kid, Fido, good boy? And suddenly he felt like a traitor in this place, and the rage welled up inside him, and he wanted to beat the shit out of Sena
tor John Chase, and tell him to go fuck himself, and take Ethan Kitteredge’s little toy boat and crunch it in his hands and throw the pieces in his face and tell him what he could do with his private school education, and that was to burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down, and he found himself joining in the dance and in the chorus, weaving, bobbing, bouncing, and slamming off the other dancers as the music throbbed through him and he was hearing the words about your great damn stinking family who will never understand, with their patriotic crap about this putrid, dying land, and the endless block of flats that make a prison you can’t stand, and Christ, he understood! The sheer numbing, stupefying, fucking boredom of it! That you can never escape your class, so quit trying.

  Then he was dancing with Allie-not dancing, really, but slamming. Shoulder off shoulder, laughing, singing, sweat flying from one to the other, and he knocked her down, off her feet, but she bounced up laughing and spun around, then put her shoulder into his chest and knocked him down, and burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down. Tear it off, tear it away, tear it to shreds. Two thousand years of civilization, to produce what? Senator Chase for Veep? Then Allie picked him up and spun him around and pushed him off and then he was dancing with Colin. Hands locked, pushing forward and pushing back, chests slamming into each other, shouting at the top of their lungs the chorus that had now become a frenetic chant. Looking at Colin and seeing himself there, another country, another time. Tear it down, tear it down. One chord beating against the wails in a shriek of fury. Hare Krishna, Hare Hare. Tear it down. Then he and Colin fell down in a heap on the floor as the song ended in a crash of drums, and they lay on the floor together, laughing and laughing, and then laughing more as Allie fell face first on top of them, shaking her hair so that her sweat sprayed on their faces.

  Neal listened to his heartbeat and felt himself breathing hard, and he made some decisions then and there about Colin, Allie, Kitteredge, and himself.

  Allie washed up in the women’s loo. She slipped off her T-shirt and splashed water on herself, roiled on deodorant, and sprayed a touch of perfume between her breasts. She pulled a dark blue silk blouse out of her bag and put it on over her jeans, then went to work with the tiny makeup kit. She expertly penciled around her eyes, used just a trace of mascara, then a light blush; bloodred lipstick topped off the look, casual, expensive, a little dangerous.

  “Killer,” said Colin. He shouted out the door. “Neal, come in, lad, and have a spot of tea!”

  Neal took a look at Allie and knew he’d seen this movie before. “What are you decked out for?”

  “Not what. Who?

  “Oh.”

  Colin spooned out a generous dose of coke and held it up to Allie. She sighed. “Something more, babe?”

  “Later.”

  “It’s always later.” She snorted the coke anyway, doing two spoons with practiced ease.

  Colin took a hit and offered a spoon to Neal. He took it in, and tasted that funny metallic taste deep down in his throat. It wasn’t very good coke.

  Colin handed Allie a slip of paper. “You want me to send Crisp along?”

  Allie shook her head. “It’s an easy one. I’ve done it before. See you back at the flat.”

  She pecked him on the lips, waved a goodbye, and headed out the door. Neal didn’t say anything; thought he’d let Colin bring it up if he wanted.

  “It’s just fucking, right?” Colin asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I need a pint.”

  “I’m buying.”

  The band was on a break. You could hear yourself talk. And think.

  “You liked it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not so much bullshit. Most rock’s become bullshit, you know. Like they forgot what it’s about.”

  “It’s physical.”

  “It’s about living right now, and forget that other crap. There’s no future anyway, so forget about it. Me, I wouldn’t half mind if the IRA blew the whole city up, start with Fuckingham Palace.”

  “You want to kill the rich. I just want to take their money.” Truer words, Neal, old pal, truer words.

  “You take their money, you have to take their shit.”

  “Not if you do it right.”

  Colin looked at him differently. “Maybe we’ll talk.”

  “Maybe.”

  They left The Club at about 2:00 A.M. Neal had a major buzz on from the speed, the coke, and God only knows how many pints. His head rang from the combined effects of drugs, alcohol, noise, and the nagging anxiety of not knowing where Allie was. Maybe I should have split and followed her. Maybe she wants out and is just looking for her chance. Maybe I could have grabbed her at whatever hotel she’s at and said, “Here I am to save the day” and gone straight to Heathrow and caught the next flight out. Maybe. But more likely, I’d have blown the whole thing.

  So he hung with Colin, Crisp, and Vanessa.

  “Come crash at my flat,” Colin said.

  “No thanks. I’ll catch a cab back to the hotel.”

  “Not at this time of night down here. Come on, you can crash on the floor, go home in the morning.”

  “Streets aren’t safe this time of the night,” Crisp said. “Lots of punks wandering around.” He grinned like an old horse headed for the stable.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  They walked along the monotonous streets lined with blocks of flats, sweetshops, and news brokers. All the places were shut down for the night and few cars prowled the street. It was pretty dull. Until they came across the Pakis.

  There were five of them and they were pissed. Pissed as in drunk. Pissed as in angry. Five larger than average Pakistani immigrants in loud pastel shirts, white jeans, and black loafers. They looked like a band at a cheap wedding. They blocked the sidewalk.

  “Hello, Colin,” said their leader. He impressed Neal as a muscular type.

  “Your name wouldn’t be Ali, would it?” Colin inquired pleasantly. “In fact, would all your names be Ali?”

  Ali’s name was, in fact, Ali. And he wasn’t amused. “Where’s your gang, Colin?”

  “Fucking your mother, I should think.”

  For good measure, Crisp chimed in, “Why don’t you stinking wogs go back to Pakistaniland where you belong?”

  Ali smiled and said, “Colin thinks he’s a big man now because he has some protection down on the Main Drag. But, Colin, this is not the Main Drag and you don’t have any protection here.”

  “You see, Neal,” Colin said, “you’ve gone and stumbled on what the BBC calls racial tension here. We don’t like the Pakis. We don’t like them taking our jobs, our flats, our shops, and our parks. We don’t like them crowding up our city with endless brats and their ugly wives. We don’t like their dingy color, their smelly food, their greasy hair, their bad breath, or their ugly, stupid faces. The only thing they’re good for is providing poor blokes like us with a bit of a hobby. Our version of bird shooting-Paki bashing.”

  “Yes, Neal,” Ali said in a voice that let him know he was in for it, “but one of the great features of Paki bashing is that the white fellows need to be twice our number.”

  He pulled a very nasty-looking leather sap from his jeans pocket.

  Neal Carey hated fighting. He hated fighting for several reasons. One, he thought it was stupid. Two, it was scary and people got hurt. Three, he was bad at it and was usually one of the people who got hurt.

  “Another time, then,” said Neal, and he began to move around Ali. This might have worked, except that Colin had a question to ask.

  “Tell me, is it your father, or mother, or both that take it up the arse in the loo at King’s Cross?”

  The sap flicked out and would have done considerable damage to Colin’s brains, except he wasn’t there. He had ducked beneath it and opened a deep cut from Ali’s hip to knee with a single swipe of his blade. Ali dropped to his knees and let out a scream, which Colin quickly silenced with the toe of his shoe delivered soccer-style to the mouth.

&nbs
p; In the meantime, Crisp reacted somewhat negatively to a vicious kick in the balls by straightening up with the beer bottle in his hand and smashing it on his assailant’s chin. Undaunted, the young Pakistani punched Crisp in the side of the head and broke two knuckles, so he was a bit distracted when Vanessa laced him across the throat with a chain.

  Neal was feeling considerable gratitude that his opponent seemed to be bearing no weapon and was prepared to duke it out in honorable, manly fashion. Neal assumed the position: right hand held in by his chest, ready to strike; left hand held high to block opponent’s right. Block and then counterpunch. Except this guy was left-handed and launched a straight one that caught Neal flush on the nose. And hurt. And hurt even more when he did it again.

  Neal wanted to fall down, which had always worked in the gym, but he figured that hitting the deck here would just invite a boot on the neck or a nice kick in the face, so he stayed on his feet and waited for the kid to push his luck with a third shot, which he did. Blessing his attacker’s lack of imagination, Neal stepped to his own left and dodged the punch and drove a hard left hook into the kid’s stomach. Son of a bitch if it didn’t work. The kid doubled over and Neal took advantage of this to fall on top of him, knock him over, and lie on him.

  Colin was beating the uncouth piss out of the last Pakistani when Vanessa spotted the police car turning the corner.

  “Peelers!” she yelled.

  Colin broke off his engagement and grabbed Neal by the back of the collar.

  “Run like a bastard!”

  Neal wasn’t sure exactly how a bastard ran, but he assumed Colin was following his own advice, so he followed him. They ran several blocks before ducking into the proverbial alley, where he leaned against the wall, gasped for air, threw up, and started bleeding again.

  Colin’s flat was a surprise.

  It shouldn’t have been, Neal thought. Dope dealers and pimps always make money, even young corners like Colin. The flat was by no means luxurious, but it was in a not-so-bad part of shabby Earl’s Court. It was a second-floor walk-up, but spacious and surprisingly well kept. The sitting room was large and French windows led to a small balcony. The kitchen was not small, but certainly under-used. A coffeepot and a tea kettle sat on a stove, along with jars of Nescafe and sugar.