by Lavie Tidhar
‘Wait!’ He didn’t know what made him shout.
‘No more drink. No more sex… I don’t feel it when I do it. It’s like I’m not really there. Not really here. I was on a bus…’ She looked up at him, but there was nothing in her eyes. ‘Can you take me home?’
He didn’t answer, and she sighed, and the sound was like the wind stirring leaves along the pavement. ‘Maybe there is somewhere else…’ she said, and then she said one strange word: she said, ‘Nangilima.’
Then, somehow, she was gone. He wasn’t sure, afterwards, what had happened. All he knew was that she was not there any more. He got up from his crouch and looked around, but he couldn’t see her and the people who walked past never shifted and, like a drunk, he walked away, into the great hall of the station, the clockwork inside him still, somehow, ticking, and at the counter he said, ‘Londres,’ and paid for the ticket, and less than an hour later he was on the train.
IN TRANSIT
missed connections
——
The train chug-chug-chugged out of the Gare du Nord, passing through industrial landscapes like spray-painted grey fields where nothing grew. The street lights cast ghostly glows over the bare walls of this unfashionable part of town. The city was being left behind gradually, and he thought he had missed something there. There had been — clues, he thought, scattered over pavements, dropped in ashtrayed bars, garish neon signs saying: You are following the wrong trail.
But what was the trail? These were the facts: his name was Joe. He was a private investigator. He had been hired to find a man, and given more-than-adequate funds to do so. Everything else…
These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe’s world. Everything else…
He sat in the dining car and smoked and watched the lights of Paris, like a cloud of scattered moths, disappear in the distance. He had always liked trains. There was a sense of timelessness in the way they moved across a landscape, a comfort in their rhythm and their constant pattern, an order of sound and movement. The train’s whistle sounded and it made Joe smile. The dining compartment was half-empty, and beside the heavy weight of smoke he could smell brewing tea and floor polish, and as the train gathered speed the windows rattled, just a little, and the wheels turned with a soothing constancy and the windows steamed up and the car was like a cocoon, and he felt no desire to leave it.
And yet there was a little part of him that did. It was a part that, while he was staring out of the window and pulling on his cigarette and letting the lights in the dark world outside all run together as the train sped past them, asked questions. That part made him restless and irritable. It was a part that suggested he got lost underground. That he had taken the wrong line, had missed his connection, but rather than admit it to himself he continued to ride the train to somewhere else.
No. There were facts. Everything else — the Monceau Parc with its fabricated landscape, the men in black, the way Papadopulous had asked him, Are you one of them? Refugees? — none of that had significance beyond, perhaps, its connection to the immediate case. It was important, and he felt the need, somehow, to reiterate it to himself, not to confuse reality with fiction.
That seemingly resolved, he ordered tea, which made him suspect he wasn’t feeling all that well, since he only ever drank tea when he was sick, and he lit another cigarette before realising the previous one was still burning in the ashtray. He watched a white round man with a bulbous nose and a floppy hat and a grimy blue backpack enter the car through the connecting door, followed by an incredibly lovely Chinese girl at least fifteen years younger than him; she wore a long-lens Japanese camera around her neck and her hair was long and untied. They found an empty table and sat down and spoke to each other in low voices, fingers touching across the table, the man breaking off the touch to gesticulate, the girl smiling at him in obvious affection. There was something very real and solid about the two of them, and he wondered what she saw in the guy; they had wrapped the world around themselves and recreated it for themselves and yet they were fully a part of it, strange and bemusing and inexplicable with their relationship he would never know the true nature or origin of, their shared history that was private between the two of them, their life that were separate and had now joined and later may split and rejoin, remain, or part. At another table sat a man with a Slavic face, a thick dark moustache braided with silver, hairy brown hands hugging a coffee mug. Three young women with pale skin sat together, also, talking rapidly in French, bags of shopping by their feet. He felt a curious dislocation from these people, a distance he could not — did not want to — articulate. They possessed the car — the space inside it — the space around themselves — in a way he could not quite comprehend, only knowing — again, with that small, rebellious part of him that he was trying to shut down — that he could not, did not, share it.
There was the girl, back in Paris. He didn’t even know her name. But he knew her. The connection between them worried him. And then she had gone — like leaves blowing down the street, like clouds converging over the setting sun — and he could not rationally explain it. His mind turned away from it, from her memory, and from the memory, also, of the Parc Monceau where for a moment he had a curious sensation of having already been there, having walked hand in hand with a girl… He drank from the cooling tea, and the taste in his mouth was of leaves soaked for too long, and he swallowed and got up and went to his compartment, and into a black and dreamless sleep.
red flowers, blossoming
——
When he awoke it was to get on the boat and then there was the voyage across the sea and the spray of cold seawater as he stood on the deck and looked out. Then there was a moon and the cliffs of Dover, chalk-white, shone in its light, not ghostly, but like the face of a mute corpse, turning its face away, in death, from the ferry approaching across the black waters of the channel. The ferry docked and snatches of music came across from the land and were snatched by turn in the wind, a jazz orchestra band coming through on BBC radio. It was a cold, clean night.
He bought milky coffee in a Styrofoam cup from a lone vendor and smoked a cigarette and stamped his feet as the other passengers disembarked, the men puffy-eyed and hostile, the women with their hair in disarray, holding their hands up against the wind, looking defensive and unhappy. For Joe, though, there was a kind of peace in the moment. The point of transit was like the epicentre of two opposing forces, like the equilibrium found when an equal pull is exerted on a body from all directions, creating the moment of stillness that is free-fall. For Joe those were the moments of exquisite calm, a perfect present with no future and no past. He loved the waiting times, the empty times, the endless moments that came in-between the going and the gone.
A light rain, driven by the wind, came across the water, and Joe’s cigarette stub, extinguished, floated at his feet, hovering above the ground, and for a moment he stared at it, transfixed, as if observing an alien artefact, or a strange, unknown remnant of an ancient civilization. Then he laughed and the sound made the great open space around him seem warmer somehow, and he joined the rest of the passengers on the way to the waiting train. The cliffs of Dover, chalky and pale, were being left behind, their faces, many now, staring out across the sea. Joe stared back through the window; inside it was warm and the humidity fogged up the windows and he had to wipe the pane with his sleeve. He pressed his face to the glass, which was cool against his skin, and peered out. He wondered what the faces of Dover saw when they gazed out to sea. Across the channel the poppies grew, somewhere there beyond the water, in the French landscape he had so recently passed through; he pictured a field of poppies growing where, beneath, a field of humans had been sowed and reaped. The train gathered momentum, but for a long time Joe’s face remained glued to the glass, staring out, beyond the gentle English moon-lit landscape sprayed with silver rain, seeing, as if through a fine haze, endless
red flowers blossoming across the silent world.
PART THREE
FUZZY-WUZZIES
the angel of Christian charity
——
There were tourists milling all around the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus and the sun was seeping through dirty grey clouds, putting a sheen of sweat on girls’ upper lips and on the men’s foreheads. Cars went round the circus like herds of primitive herbivores, and in the high façade above the Café Monico opposite Anteros, large wrought-iron signs were advertising Lipton, Wrigley’s and Delicious Coca Cola. A large clock gave out Guinness Time. Joe stood underneath the statue. The god of requited love and the avenger of love scorned was a boy with wings resembling those of the pigeons milling all around the circus. It stood, one leg raised in the air, on its plinth above the fountain, its bow held aloft, its eyes glazed. It was made of aluminium. It had been modelled on a sixteen-year-old Italian boy, Angelo Colarossi. The boy had since then grown old and died. Anteros remained youthful. A tour group went past Joe and stopped beside the fountain, and their guide, bald and sweating in the lightless humidity, said, as if continuing an earlier monologue, ‘And this is the famous Angel of Christian Charity, erected on this site in eighteen ninety two, moved again to this exact spot following the Second World War—’
‘I thought this was Eros,’ a man in the tour party said. He had a thick Dutch accent and corn-yellow hair. The guide smiled and wiped sweat off his brow. ‘A common inaccuracy, sir,’ he said. ‘Though indeed, originally, it was meant to be the brother of the God of Sensual Love—’
A double-decker bus went past, the people inside looking down through their windows on the milling crowds. Joe saw a young couple kissing on the steps of the fountain, quite unconcerned with the touring party or anyone else. The girl had long black hair and the boy’s was shorn and neither were much older than the angelic Angelo Colarossi at the time he had posed for the statue.
‘Ah, the Criterion!’ the guide said, with something like relief, turning away from the fountain. ‘Wonderful theatre. Built by Spiers and Pond on the site of the White Bear Inn — come, follow me, all together now! — and opened with W.S. Gilbert’s little-known Topsyturveydom — moving on, we have—’
Joe smiled as he lit his cigarette. The site of Piccadilly Circus, at least, did not appear to be a stranger to topsyturveydom. Amongst the tourists, the school kids who had mysteriously failed to make an appearance at school, the buskers, the pickpockets, the drug pushers, the gypsy women selling paper flowers, the young musicians with their second-hand guitars, the commuters coming and going from the tube station directly below — amongst all these, the world did indeed seem to be in a permanent state of topsy-turvy. He stood below the Angel of Christian Charity and waited, smelling sweat, car fumes, marijuana smoke, passing perfumes, frying onions, burning sausages, spilled beer, and finally the smoke of a cheap cigar as he saw the man waiting in the entrance of the theatre (the tour group having moved on). He went up to the man.
‘You Joe?’ the man said. Joe nodded. They shook hands. The man was bald and round. His eyes were deep-set and small. He wore a dirty-brown raincoat, and puffed on a thin brown cigar as he spoke. He noticed Joe’s look and said, ‘Hamlet.’
‘Hamlet?’
‘The cigar. Like to be or not to be, you know?’
‘Sure. Shakespeare.’
‘Right.’
‘So which is it?’ Joe said.
‘Which is what?’
‘To be, or not to be?’
‘Ah,’ the man said, and smiled, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. ‘That is the question, isn’t it.’
The man’s name was Mo and Joe had found him in the telephone guide that rested by the phone in his hotel. He was looking under Private Inquiry Agents. He had to admit Mo looked the part. He had a grubby, well-used look, like a paperback that had been carried in a backpack for a long length of time. And he looked unremarkable. None of the people passing them by gave them more than a cursory glance. They could have been two disembodied shadows, standing there outside the theatre, while humanity surged on all around them.
Joe stayed at the Regent Palace Hotel across the road. The building suited him. His room on the fifth floor was small and had no windows. The showers were at the end of a wide and empty corridor. An army could have gotten lost in the Regent Palace. As Joe walked down endless corridors he encountered no-one else, and the only sound as he passed was of his shoes against the floor, a rhythm resembling that of a beating heart, counting seconds and minutes and the passing of time. When he checked in, the concierge had told him, reminiscing, ‘You know, in the old days, if you wanted a girl for the night you used to ring the desk and ask for an extra pillow.’
‘And today?’ Joe asked. He paid in cash. The concierge shrugged and looked into his eyes and said, ‘You just ask for a girl. My name’s Simon. You need anything you call me.’
‘Thank you,’ Joe said. Then he had gone up in the elevator; he had not seen another hotel guest since.
Joe liked London. He liked its crowds, its constant movement, its hurried busyness. There was a different kind of being alone, of not being noticed, in London. It was a city where it was easy to disappear, to become a face in the crowd that no one would ever glance twice at.
‘You want we should go someplace we could talk that’s more comfortable?’ Mo said. Joe followed the man’s eyes to the large Guinness clock above the signs opposite. It was just past twelve o’clock. ‘Say, a pub?’
‘You got the information for me?’
The man tapped his temple. ‘Right here,’ he said.
Joe looked at the clock again. Everyone knew that after twelve was already the afternoon…
‘Sure,’ Joe said.
Romeo and Juliets
——
… And somewhere it was always just past twelve. Mo had a bitter. Joe had a French lager. They both had a shot of whisky just to help the beer go down. They had walked a short distance up Shaftesbury Avenue, turned left, and were now seated in the Red Lion pub, hemmed in by the Windmill Theatre on one side and the Pink Pussycat club on the other. A black girl with a blonde wig was standing outside the door of the Pink Pussycat smoking a cigarette. A beggar walked past pushing a shopping trolley. The Red Lion had large windows and cheap beer and Joe was paying. They finished the first round and ordered another. Neither, it seemed, could find a reason not to. ‘I’ll have a Gin and Tonic,’ Mo said. ‘Malawi-style.’
The bartender said, ‘What’s Malawi-style?’
‘You put a pickled chilli instead of a slice of lime in the glass,’ Mo said. ‘Gives it a kick.’ The bartender shrugged. ‘Just a beer for me,’ Joe said.
Two Chinese men in suits walked past. A large poster on the side wall of the Windmill Theatre promised Fully Nude Shows. The girl outside the Pink Pussycat finished her cigarette, dropping the stub to the ground, and remained standing, holding her arms across her chest. Joe lit a fresh cigarette. Mo lit a new cigar. The smell of the Hamlet had a life all of its own. Mo must have seen something in Joe’s face, because he shrugged, and said, ‘When business is good I prefer Romeo and Juliets.’
Joe let it pass without comment.
‘I’m a bit of a Shakespearean,’ Mo said. Then he smiled and said, ‘At least when it comes to cigars.’
There was something about the man, Joe thought, that wasn’t quite right. Sitting in the pub with only the dim sunlight coming in through the windows, Mo’s skin had the colour of tobacco leaves, his thin eyebrows the colour of smoke. ‘First thing I can tell you is, getting access to members’ records isn’t going to be easy,’ Mo said. ‘The Castle is your typical private members club. There are at least ten in the Soho area alone and they all take privacy very, very seriously. It’s part of the appeal. The Castle’s clientele seems to be varied — about half are actors, some writers, directors, that sort of people, and the rest is government — councillors, MPs, a couple of ministers. So they don’t want anyone snooping around.
There was a case a few years ago, one of the waiters at another club opened his mouth to a journalist, all kinds of stories — drugs, orgies, underhand deals conducted in the dining room, you know, the usual — and I only found out about it accidentally. The story never got published, the journalist involved lost his job, and I never heard shit about the waiter again. No one else ever did, either.’
‘What does that mean?’ Joe said. Mo was beginning to irritate him.
‘It means that people respect privacy around here,’ Mo said. ‘And if they don’t, they can be made to respect it. Savvy?’
‘Yes,’ Joe said, a little testily. ‘Do go on.’
‘The castle has three floors — a basement, a second and third floors—’ he was counting the way the British do — ‘and a ground floor which, as far as members are concerned, is only a reception area. That’s where the kitchens, et cetera, are located, out of sight. The members’ entrance is through an unmarked door at number twenty-two Frith Street. There is a discreet exit through the back, and also a staff entrance two doors down on Frith Street again. To become a member you have to be first recommended by an existing member, then approved by a committee. The membership numbers are restricted. On the second floor is a dining room where guests can be entertained. The third floor holds bedrooms for members wishing to stay the night. In the basement are a private dining room, a library, the smoking lounge and a postal room for use of members wishing to route their post via the club — and that’s really what you wanted to know, wasn’t it?’
