Bloody London (25 page)

“Life Bubble?”

“It's a sort of instant shelter for the homeless, it's amazing, I swear it, Artie.”

“Oh, please, Lily!”

She ate a green olive. “I hate your fucking cynicism. Some things matter.” Lily held her hands tight together so the knuckles looked sharp and I could count them under the white skin. “I need to do something,” she said.

“You do do something.”

“Yeah, like what?”

“You take care of Beth. She's a happy baby. You have a million friends who depend on you. You help them out. You make them laugh. You help me. I love you. We do stuff together. Jesus, Lily, what do you want? You write stuff that's interesting. Good stuff. Useful. Funny stuff.”

“It's magazines. It's TV talk shows. It passes the time is all, nothing else. I mean, I look at what I do and I think, so fucking what?”

“You still want to save the world. You're still trying to please your parents, is that it?”

She didn't answer me.

“Where is it, this job?”

“Mostly here. Maybe a few days in Africa.”

“How long for?”

“A month or so.”

“What about Beth? She's going to be alone for a month? At least let me take her home with me.”

“She's not your child.”

“Boy, that's real tough.” I started to get up. “But I get the message.”

“Sit down. If I need to go away for a few days, my friend Isobel's here.”

“I see. So it's still Frye, isn't it, one way or the other.”

“I just finished telling you it's much more complicated.”

“Why is it complicated, Lily? Why?”

She pressed her face against the window as if to cool it. The waiter put two plates of scallops in front of us
and Lily said, “That looks good. Thanks.” Her accent never changed, but the rhythms, the inflections, had become British. She was a ventriloquist, miming the language. I was on the other side of a glass wall watching her.

Lily ate. I put my napkin on the table. Fumbled for my cigarettes and looked around.

She said, “You can smoke if you want.”

The waiter took away the plates and brought more food, a steak for lily, some liver for me. It smelled great. It tasted good. I wasn't hungry.

“Why is it complicated?”

There was sweat on her forehead and she pushed her red hair off her face. She cleared her throat, played with her fork, ordered some more wine.

“Lily?”

Outside, on the rain-soaked street, the idiotic red buses lumbered up and down. Inside, the crowd sounded like animals braying.

“Artie?” Lily put her hand tentatively on my arm, like I might push her away.

“What?”

“I started coming to London when I was still a kid and I bought into it, the whole package, the writers, the accents, the bullshit, Henry James and Jimmy Hendrix and I loved it, and I kept coming back. Also, they never asked how you felt, which was perfect for me, an entire nation in denial, pre-Diana, of course. People just screwed around and had fun.” She smiled. “I had a friend who said to me if you're an American and you're gonna be in London, there's two ways you can do it.
There's Henry James or Lily Hanes. And Lily Hanes is right. So I became me. Finally.”

“And Phil Frye?”

“Phillip was my ticket. Best people, best parties, that's how I came to London in the first place. Phil was my ticket to the revolution.”

“What fucking revolution?”

“The Sixties,” she said, tone wry, but barely smiling. “Well, it was the Seventies by then, but he introduced me to John Lennon once.”

“You didn't love Phillip when you took up with him?”

She looked at me sadly with the wide, pale, gray-blue eyes and hunched her shoulders. Lily drained her wine glass and cut a piece of meat but didn't eat it. “I loved him. Yeah, whatever that means. Maybe I didn't tell you this – I mean, you really don't know, do you?”

“Know what? What?”

She pushed the plate away, wiped her mouth, shoved her hair off her neck for the tenth time and said, “I didn't just take up with Phillip Frye.” Lily took a sip of her wine. “I married him.”

I felt like someone was standing on my windpipe. I couldn't breathe right. I finished the wine in my glass. I pushed away my plate, crumbled a piece of bread, pushed it around, picked up an olive, ate it, didn't look up. It was her lying that got me. The lie. The not knowing. The casual way Lily told me about it in a public place. First the picture of Thomas Pascoe in her drawer at home, now the lie about Phillip Frye.

The rain was making me crazy. The picture of the surfer came into my head again and stuck: I was caught in a wave I couldn't handle, the board already gone in the curl, surf full of dismembered limbs: Lily, Callie Rizzi, Sverdloff, Gilchrist. I had jumped in and dragged them with me, and I figured if I didn't get out from under, we'd all drown.

A Beach Boys tune started up, incongruous as hell, in my head. I'd heard someone sing it that morning they found Pascoe's body at the Middlemarch pool. “Little Surfer Girl” played over and over. The noise was deafening in the restaurant. But all I said to Lily was, “Is there anything else? Anything you feel you want to tell me? Any other surprises? Anything else you forgot to mention?”

She took something out of her bag and handed it to me.

I looked at the envelope. “What is this?”

“Keys.”

“Keys.”

“Keys to the place we're staying, Beth and me, and the address, and all the phone numbers.”

I felt the gun in my pocket. I didn't belong here. The place was so noisy my head hurt; I pushed my chair back. “I don't want your fucking keys, Lily.”

“What do you want?”

“Like I said, I want to know if you got any more surprises for me. I want to know how come you change the rules all the time but I'm not allowed to. It's like getting beat up, you know. One day things are fine, we're OK, you, me, Beth, the next thing I know you're
leaving for London. Now I can't see Beth because you've sent her to the country. What was it, she was the accessory of the year you had to have, the handbag of choice, like all the other over-forty girls? Or was it me, the accessory?”

“You don't have to yell at me.”

“I'm not yelling at you.”

“It's over. Phillip Frye and me. It's been over for years. We got married, we got divorced. Phil remarried. OK, I know I saw him some after that, but it's over. I swear to God. Whatever else you think about me, that's the truth.” Her eyes filled up. She reached for my hand. “Don't pull away from me. Please. Artie? I hate this. I miss you. Let me talk to you.”

Lily's eyes were wet. She rarely cries. I didn't care. She had a right to her life, but I didn't have to like it.

I pushed the keys back across the table. “Like I said, I really don't think I'll be using these.”

Head bent slightly at an awkward angle, eyes avoiding mine, Lily said, “What surprises?”

I wanted to say, “How come you have a framed picture of Thomas Pascoe in your drawer, like a relic, like some icon. You fucked him too? Or what?” I wanted to push the picture in her face and say, “Tell me”, but I didn't. I didn't want to hear the lies. I didn't ask.

She said, “I'm glad you're in London. I want you here, I do, honest. OK? Tell me about the case. Please. Artie? I don't want to hurt you.”

I zipped my jacket. “You're doing a lousy job. What is it? I'm embarrassing you? I get the lingo wrong? I
don't fit in here?” I looked around the restaurant. “You know what, Lily? I'm just a regular American, an excop, OK? I can't read all this shit and I don't care. That's all I am.”

“You get a lot of stuff wrong,” she said quietly, “but it's not about the lingo. It's not about London.”

“Then what is it I get wrong?”

“Me.”

Outside, rain dripping down my neck, searching for a cab, I turned to look through the window where Lily sat, and I saw her, alone at the table, her bad foot propped on a chair. She saw me look and raised her wine glass and tried to smile.

I went back to the apartment and switched on the radio. Risk of flooding, the radio voice whispered. Spring tides. Gale force winds. Tyne, Dogger, Fair Isle, Cromarty, Rockall, Faroes, Humpty Dumpty, what's going on, I thought. I was so groggy I couldn't focus. It was late. I was restless. I put on the TV and there was an old movie and I went and got some Scotch and climbed under the covers.

I flipped the TV channels, got the weather on BBC. A nerdy weatherman appeared on the box wearing a jacket like I'd never seen on TV, or in real life: a short bad jacket like a clown would wear, buttoned tight across his stomach.

There were gale warnings, he said. Stuff coming across the Atlantic, some kind of hump under a low, that was causing heavy rains followed by “spits and spots”. Just fucking tell me, I thought: is it gonna rain?
I figured maybe he was a joke weatherman; maybe like we got fat weather guys, they have geeks. If I'd been with Lily, we would have laughed about it. Or maybe it wasn't funny for her anymore. Maybe it was only part of the scenery for her in a town where she belonged.

The time difference had caught up with me. The windows rattled like animals caught in a cage. I got up, but the windows were locked. I poured an inch of Scotch in the coffee mug, took it back in the bedroom, sprawled on the bed, turned on the TV.

My legs burned from walking. On cable, I found an ancient Hitchcock picture with Tallulah Bankhead I'd never seen.
Lifeboat.
Tallulah, William Bendix, they swam in front of me, but I fell asleep with the sound on before anyone in the picture went overboard.

God, it's cold, I thought the next morning as I climbed the factory stairs to Warren Pascoe's studio. It was the coldest place I was ever in, an empty factory building on a stretch of waste ground. Paradise Street. Not far from the river. Signs announcing redevelopment of the area into “Luxury apartments” dangled from metal fencing. Rolls of barbed wire were stacked and left to rust.

I don't know what I expected, but Warren was a link to Thomas Pascoe, and when I'd crawled out of bed that morning, I made my way east from my place on the river. I had the bronze begging hands Frankie gave me in my jacket.

Past the fancy shops and restaurants and design firms, along Shad Thames through canyons of warehouses. On the left, as I walked, was the river. Most of the buildings looked nineteenth century. The warehouses reminded me of Soho in New York before it was a tourist trap. Names, half rubbed out, were the only vestiges of a working port: Gun Wharf. Tea. Sugar. Wheat. Spice. Once this place had belched with life. I read plenty of
Dickens when I was a kid; he was always big with the resident propaganda chiefs in Moscow. This was Dickens country, most of it bulldozed now, but I remembered:
Bleak House
for the river,
Oliver Twist
for the slums – “every imaginable desolation and neglect”.

I crossed a footbridge spun out of glistening steel, then headed a few blocks inland. On the right, I passed bleak cement storage centers stained with damp and angry graffiti, no heliport here, someone had scrawled on a building that said cold stores. Broken-down housing projects. Tooley Street, a broad desolate avenue that was deserted. A woman, clutching an umbrella, wheeled a baby in a cheap stroller. She wobbled quickly by on high-heeled pumps through the leaky day; the heels were broken; her legs, even on a cold morning, were bare. She saw me look at her. She walked faster and one of her heels caught in the broken pavement.

Everywhere there were building sites, but the cranes were still. It was Sunday and the place felt empty of life, and I walked faster towards Warren's and felt the gun, comforting, weighty, in my waistband.

By the time I reached Warren's building it was raining again, and as I hurried up the rough, cold stone steps, I could hear the wind and the river. The building had four floors; Warren's studio was on the second floor. Somewhere remote a radio played.

I pushed on the door, but it was open. The studio was badly lit, the walls half soaked. Wind rattled the old factory windows set high in the streaky walls. But there was a halogen lamp on a work table and in its light I saw that plaster cast of a head with vacant eyes and a sweet
smile. A man bundled in an overcoat was bent over it. He didn't hear me. He wasn't expecting me.

The studio stank of dope and cigars and sour wine. I looked around. The cavernous studio was full of half-made sculpture in plaster and bronze, body parts, shoulders, arms, hands, torsos, heads. They littered the work table that ran the length of the long wall. Taped to the dank cement-block walls were large sheets of white paper with sketches of more bodies, some in pencil, a few in colored chalk.

The sculptures were beautiful, the limbs graceful, the faces sweet and placid, the arms and hands reaching and elegant.

I looked closely at some of the heads. The expressions were sweet but closed, impassive, as if the subjects were finished with life. From a high shelf, a series of heads in bronze stared down. In the middle of the long table where Warren Pascoe was working was the head and torso of an elderly man half formed in white plaster.

The huge tweedy overcoat draped around him, Warren worked carefully at the piece with a small steel knife. He wore wool gloves with the fingers cut off. He heard me, looked up and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

He was a small thickset man, sixtyish, partly bald, but the deft way he worked his subject made you watch. He hummed to himself like jazz musicians do, listening to a track inside his own head.

I pulled the little bronze hands out of my pocket and put them on his work table.

He looked at them. “Where'd you get these?”

“Frankie Pascoe gave them to me.”

Warren Pascoe sat down suddenly. “You're some sort of cop, are you?”