Bloody London (2 page)

There are light wood floors, white walls, an open kitchen, a table, a few canvas chairs, not much else. There's a bedroom and bathroom, bed, dresser, closets. A digital clock next to the bed. I can hear the numbers flip over.

Suddenly I feel dog-weary, sit down hard on the bed. Next time I look at the clock, it's three in the morning.
My head's thick with jetlag and fatigue, eyes cruddy with sleep.

The duty-free Scotch is in my bag and in the kitchen I find a glass and pour some out. Somewhere, from another apartment, I can hear music, very faint, very far away, a dreamy ballad, maybe a show tune, and I take my drink and head for the sliding glass doors. On the balcony outside are a pair of wicker chairs, the kind with high curved backs.

The door isn't locked. I slide it open. The wind's blowing hard now. Below the balcony, the promenade that runs along the river is deserted. Lightbulbs strung between the lampposts along the riverfront tinkle against each other, glass on glass, an eerie noise, like the metal bits on a flagpole, clinking, warning me. Balancing the drink in one hand, I reach out to push the door wider. I need some air.

It's ten, twelve days since Pascoe was murdered; it seems longer. He was on his way to London the day he died. The Pascoe murder's infiltrated my life; whatever killed him, I want it over. I want to stop it all before it crashes over everything. I feel like a surfer in a huge wave. I don't know why this image keeps coming to me, I've never done any surfing in my life, but it's suffocating, the wave breaking over me, breaking my arms and legs, people I know around me on their own boards, yelling for help. Somehow I have to find the right coins to put in a slot that will make the water recede. If I don't find them, if I don't stop it, it will drown everyone I care about.

The Scotch is mellow in my mouth. Then the lights
in the apartment flicker and go out and I reach for the switch on the wall. A fuse has blown, but I don't care, I'm going to bed after a smoke, and I feel in my pocket for cigarettes and a lighter, go further out on the balcony and grab a chair. Under my hand, the smooth wicker is oily from the damp.

You know when something lousy's coming, you think you sense it before, but maybe afterwards you can't remember if you really knew, if it was the anticipation that made your gut turn over and your skin crawl, or if it came to you later. Later. After you saw it.

It's coiled up inside the wicker chair. One of the stuffed figures like a scarecrow, a dummy, and it's the size of a baby. There's a photograph stuck to its head with pins. The picture is cropped. Only the features show: mouth, nose, eyes. There are holes punched in the eyes. I've seen this before: a picture, the eyes cut out. It's a warning. They throw acid at you or cut out your eyes, it's an old curse. They make you blind, then they kill you.

The damp night is making the skin on my arms crawl like there's ants on it and I grab the crumpled picture and hold my lighter up so I can see it better, but the light goes out in the breeze. Again, somewhere in the building, a dog whines.

I get inside, shut the balcony door, flick on my lighter again. The flame makes shadows jump on the piece of paper I'm holding. There's a peculiar smell, now I get a whiff, something musty in the apartment, maybe just a mouse that passed through and died here, maybe that's all. I gulp the rest of the Scotch in my glass
and ignore the stink. The paper I'm holding has been swiped out of a file and printed off the Internet, and when I hold the lighter closer I can see the face.

The wind is coming through a crack, and I open the glass door again then slam it so hard it rattles. Then I lock it.

Where's the fuse box? I bang around looking for it. I want the lights on now. The photograph I ripped off the dummy is in my hand.

I've never been in London before in my life, no one knows I'm coming, this is a borrowed apartment. But the dummy in the wicker chair on the balcony was intended for me. To spook me, and I know it. Where's the goddamn fuse box, I think again, holding my lighter up high, squinting at the picture that I know was left for me because the face in it, the eyes cut out leaving only brutal holes, is mine.

Blood floats. It was the first thing I noticed that morning. It spread slowly outward over the water in the swimming pool uptown.

The stink of chlorine was intense. The lights the cops had rigged made their faces flat and white as they worked the edge of the swimming pool, maybe twenty guys, like the sorcerer's apprentices, some slow, some brisk, homicide, forensics, photographic. The pool was a large rectangle, the tiles, at the bottom and around the rim, dark blue with gold flecks in them. On their hands and knees, the crews took water samples, dusted, sifted invisible shreds of cloth, hair, skin, determined, hopeful, doubtful, like men panning for gold in permafrost. Whenever I'm at a scene I usually think about it in metaphors, men digging in permafrost, that kind of thing; it passes the time and keeps you sane.

The morning Pascoe died, it was a Monday, I was drinking hot black coffee at the fish market before it was light, watching Italian guys in big rubber boots unload a crate of red snapper onto a bed of cracked ice. I was
working a possible case at the market, a theft. Just a job. But I like the fish market early in the morning. The sun comes up. The East River turns pink, the breeze that day was soft as powder and when the mist burned off, the sky was bright blue. Then my beeper went. I looked at it, and twenty minutes after I got the message I was at the swimming pool on Sutton Place.

The body, already bagged, lay on the slippery tiles. Catch of the day, I thought. I heard one of the guys crouched by the pool hum a Beach Boys tune to himself. “Little Surfer Girl”, he hummed. In New York City, the terrible and comic always lie, as my first boss used to say, side by each. But all Sonny Lippert said to me when he looked up and saw I'd arrived was “I got a Russian for you.”

“Dead? The dead guy's Russian? On Sutton Place?” I looked at the body bag.

“No, man. The Russian's a witness. The dead guy's a teabag. And rich. Very very rich, very important, very connected, very dead also. You heard the name Pascoe?”

“Yeah, I maybe read something.”

“Thomas Pascoe. British. Pushing eighty. Big time. Investment banker. Lawyer. Charities up the wazoo.” Sonny paused to let it sink in.

I let it sink. “And?”

“Head of the co-op here. Thomas Pascoe was head of the fanciest co-op in New York City. I bet there's plenty of people mad as hell at him.”

“How'd they do him?”

Sonny chuckled. “That's the kicker. They tried to
whack his head off. I swear to God. Head of the co-op. In the pool. Where the old lady found him, the Russian. Come on.” He looked at his watch. “She's in shock. They said give it an hour, I'm still fucking waiting.”

I could already write the headline in the
Post
:
WHACK! HEAD OF CO-OP LOSES HEAD
. It was gonna play big.

Sonny Lippert's a federal prosecutor with a lot of connections and a special interest in Russians; there was a Russian involved, I could speak the language, Sonny feels I owe him in perpetuity, so here we were again.

“Homicide victims, if they got dough, Art, they're like cannibals, they eat your life.” Sonny pulled me away from the technicians. Impatience drove Sonny as he looked at the scene and tapped his foot.

He was a small, compact man, like a bantam, a fighter, with a tight hood of black curls, arms and legs pumping like a wind-up toy. I don't know if Sonny dyes his hair, but he's probably close to sixty and he looks forty-five. That morning, he wore tobacco suede Guccis, no socks, faded jeans and a white T-shirt. A black cashmere crewneck was knotted around his neck. He was small but lean; Sonny works out religiously, usually at night. He doesn't sleep good.

I took hold of his arm. “I'm glad as hell to see you, Sonny, but I was on a job.”

“What kind of job? Sniffing the swordfish? Trying to figure if some wiseguy's pushing tuna past its natural prime?”

I laughed. “Snapper.”

“An old Russian, calls herself a princess, you know?
She finds the body. In the swimming pool. Bangs right into him, head bobbing around, man, I mean, she starts yelling. She's been here fifty years, pretends she doesn't speak English, no one understands what the hell she's saying, but they can see. Severed almost. Like a piece of fruit. Pineapple on a stalk. The head, I mean. Pascoe's head.”

“And?”

“One of the janitors says she's down here most days early, doesn't like swimming with other people. What do I know, maybe she figures the rest of the residents are proles, maybe she hates herself in a swimsuit.” Sonny changed his tone. “You're looking very good, Art, man. Lost some flab there, been working out?”

I could read the flattery: Sonny needed something. It used to grate, the style, the tone – he addresses everyone as “man” – but it mostly makes me laugh now. A lot of water went under the bridge with us and I'm used to Sonny Lippert.

“You saw her already?”

He looked at his watch. “No, I been here since, Christ, six-thirty this a.m., but I didn't see her yet. Medics were working on her, she must be eighty. I want to hear how come she's in the pool and what she knows about this piece of real estate, you dig? Art, OK?”

“The swimming pool was part of the original 1920s building design. Influenced by Rosario Candela, but maybe better,” said Lippert, who's a pedagogical asshole. “You know about Candela? He did a lot of great buildings up around here, this was a tribute. One of his students.” Sonny looked at his watch again.

I was staring at the pool, trying to imagine the scene: Pascoe down for a swim; someone goes for the neck with a saw, a sword, a knife. The old woman who finds him going nuts. I said, “What else we got on Pascoe?”

“Like I said, he was head of the frigging co-op here,” said Sonny, as we made our way through other basement rooms, some now used for storage, all with old cold stone floors. “So maybe it was symbolic, you know? Maybe they whacked his head 'cause he was head of the co-op. Maybe they didn't like his rules.” Lippert was already working up one of his arcane theories.

I followed Sonny and the small procession of special squads, looking for access routes and broken locks. There was nothing out of place. A photographer snapped every possible angle.

The ceiling seemed to vibrate. I said, “What's up there?” and a short guy answered in halting English. “Generators,” he said. “Air con.” Like the other back-of-the-house guys, janitors, supers, handymen, he was Spanish speaking. He leaned against the wall, waiting until we finished. He worked on a scratch card.

I grinned and said, “So, you win, you're gonna buy a place here?”

He was a small man with straight black hair and a Yankees cap on. The face was smooth, high boned; Peruvian, maybe, I figured; there was Indian in it, anyhow. He swivelled the cap so the peak faced forward. “You must be kidding, man, you think I wanna live in here?”

“How come? They treat you bad?”

He covered his eyes, then his ears and mouth and laughed. “They treat me like a monkey, I make like a monkey.” He added, “Is OK, you know, most of the tenants. Front-of-the-house, Irish guys onna door, management, treats us like garbage sometimes, you know what I mean? They's under-educated, the Irish. You a cop?”

I shrugged. “What's your name?”

“Pindar Aguirre,” he said, and I slipped him twenty bucks and said, “What time's the pool open usually?”

He said, “Seven o'clock.”

“Anyone ever come down before?”

“I don't know, I go off usually by six, I'm a night guy. Sometimes I seen Mr Pascoe coming in. Only Mr Pascoe. Only him allowed before opening. He OK, Mr Pascoe.”

“What about the elevator?”

“Regular elevator from the lobby got an operator and goes up. Elevator to the pool for residents only.”

“Automatic?”

“Yeah.”

“What were you before? Back home, I mean?”

He said something to himself in Spanish, then glanced up at me and said, “A poet.”

It reminded me of the big Moscow buildings when I was a kid: those Stalinist palaces, it was always the poets, brooms made of twigs, who cleaned the floors. The Nomenklatura, the bigwigs with a name, parried; the poets wiped up the shit.

We got to the elevator. Sonny grabbed my arm.

“Art?”

“You were saying?”

“I don't think anyone broke into this place. I think someone had access. You saw the security. I looked at the key system. Brand new. Electronic”

“Yeah, Sonny. It's some kind of fortress. Whoever did what's his name – Pascoe – probably knew his way around. Or hers. Anyway, New York City, we ain't got no crime, doesn't exist now, right, Sonny?”

He got in the elevator and gave a tight little smile. “Yeah, right. Coulda been a female?”

“Sure. You don't need that much heft if you get the right kind of knife and your victim's not expecting you. Coulda been a female. Coulda been a kid, for that matter, you got the right kind of weapon.”

“Shoulda coulda woulda, yeah, but what kind?”

I said, “Remember Brighton Beach, they got those knives could take your head off in three seconds flat. Chinatown too.”

“But it ain't gonna be your first choice of weapon unless you want to make a statement.”

“Unless you're nuts. I assume no one found the weapon.”

Lippert shook his head.

I said, “I talked to a guy says the pool opens at seven. What time did the old Russian find Pascoe?”

Lippert looked at me. “Before seven. I was here by six-thirty. Jesus.”

“So if she went to the pool before it opened, maybe someone invited her.”

“Like Pascoe himself.”

“Or whoever sliced his head.”