The Keys to the Street (22 page)

It was then, hearing Clitheroe’s screams and unable to sort pain from pleasure—or were they the same?—that Bean took the brown ale chasers with glass after glass of cheap Spanish brandy. Sometimes he was almost too far gone to see the visitor off the premises, but he had to persevere, he had to keep as steady as he could, for afterward Clitheroe needed his ministrations.

Once he found him unconscious. On another occasion he wanted to take his employer to Emergency, but Clitheroe, gasping on the floor, open weals on his naked back that bled into the Turkey carpet—fortunately predominantly crimson already—forbade his
phoning for an ambulance on pain of dismissal. Bean passed out himself later, on brandy and brown ale.

There was one young man, nameless but called by him The Beater, that he particularly remembered. If the eyes were the windows of the soul, as Anthony Maddox said they were, he had no soul, for looking into his eyes was like looking into empty holes. There was nothing beyond. The tip of his nose and his upper lip were pinkish as if he had rubbed them with sandpaper. He walked gracefully, his body straight and relaxed, his shoulders permanently lifted and his knees ever so slightly bent. After his visits Maurice Clitheroe was in a worse state than after any other beatings or being ridden up the stairs or having sharp objects threaded into soft parts of his body.

He was sixty-seven, Bean’s own age. His body was covered with scars, as a constantly abused slave’s must be. Bean had never seen anything like it. He advised Clitheroe not to let The Beater come again, but his employer took no notice. Bean was not fanciful, he admitted with some satisfaction that he had no imagination, yet he thought to himself that, peculiar though it was, Clitheroe was
in love
with The Beater. He was obsessed by him. He desperately needed him. And The Beater killed him.

Or that was Bean’s view of it. The beating Clitheroe got that evening was the worst Bean had ever known. Of course he was not a witness to it, he never was, and when the screams began, he swigged brandy directly out of the bottle and hid himself in his bed with the quilt stuffed into his ears. The Beater let himself out and Bean never saw him again. Clitheroe had a hemorrhagic stroke.

His doctor, from Harley Street, just across the road, knew all about Clitheroe’s proclivities. He didn’t look at the old man’s body below the neck. By the time Clitheroe died ten days later the worst of the evidence had faded, though Bean had sometimes wondered what the undertakers thought.

So long as no one blames
me
, was his philosophy, and no one did. He gradually stopped drinking once the funeral was over. He was
interested in getting fit before it was too late, and now it had come down to one whiskey and two bottles of brown ale in the Globe on a Friday night. Freddie Lawson called the Globe “a real pub, all spit and sawdust and sausage sandwiches,” and Bean’s dinner on a Friday was not exactly a sausage but a veggie-burger sandwich with Branston pickle and sometimes a plate of chips.

He wanted to find out the identity of the round-headed man who had asked for a light on the bridge last Sunday. Freddie knew nothing about it and Peter Carrow refused to say anything until Bean told him why he needed to know. The air in the Globe was blue with smoke. It made Bean hoarse and he had to raise his voice. Several people stared at him.

“Who d’you think you’re looking at?” Bean said belligerently.

An American tourist turned his face away. Bean glared at those who kept on staring. One of them was maybe the mate of the round-headed man.

“You been drinking before you come in here?” said Carrow.

“I’m not pissed, so don’t make insinuations.” Bean dipped a chip in Branston pickle and popped it into his mouth. “There’s a feller I’m on the lookout for. Got a pal with a head like Mussolini.”

“Who?” said Carrow, who was a mere forty-five, and without waiting to hear, “What d’you want him for?”

Bean told him, not lowering his voice much. “It must be him overheard me talking in here.”

Freddie Lawson started laughing.

“A Hawaii! Where did he get that from? A Hawaii!”

“I can’t afford it,” said Bean. “Shame, because I reckon Mussolini’d do a good job.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” said Carrow, “when a working man has to do the Filth’s dirty work for them.”

The American tourist, on his way out, whispered to Bean, “Hawaii Five-O, right?”

“And you can keep your nose out of my business,” said Bean.

The round-headed man’s friend failed to declare himself and Bean had to go home unsatisfied. While he was out at the shops the next morning he considered walking over to the cash dispenser outside Barclay’s in Baker Street. Perhaps Mussolini wouldn’t want it all at once but would accept twenty-five before the assault on Clancy and twenty-five after the deed was done. He started to cross the Marylebone Road before the lights changed, but he was too late and retreated angrily when a van nearly mowed him down. The driver stuck up two fingers in response to Bean’s raised fist.

A few years back, someone
had
been hit by a van just about here. Well, in Luxborough Street, same difference. A laundry and dry cleaner’s van it was. The one who was in the way had only been one of those beggars, so it didn’t matter much. After that the van had skidded and hit a wall and the driver, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, had been thrown out and found by the ambulance men draped over the spiked railings of the mansion flats. Bean remembered the case well and remembered Mr. Clitheroe reading it out of the paper to him as he often did; he liked reading aloud.

The beggar had been killed instantly, hadn’t felt a thing, no doubt, but the driver, for all he’d three broken ribs, had been found guilty of manslaughter, not just careless driving, and he’d gone to prison. Not for all that long, though going to prison at all Bean thought a monstrous injustice. But it went to show how dangerous the streets were round here.

With Clancy incapacitated he would be able to use the tunnel again.

Mr. Cornell came to the door. In the time it had taken Bean to exercise Boris, Valerie Conway had gone away on her summer holidays. Cornell, at any rate, was a gentleman, coming to the front door, not expecting Bean to go down into the area. Bean told him about the photos he’d taken of Boris and Mr. Cornell seemed interested, said that if Bean would drop a selection in sometime he’d like to have a look.

With no Valerie to needle or be needled by and no stairs to climb, he got to Devonshire Street five minutes early and saw through a downstairs window Erna Morosini kissing a man. They were both in dressing gowns. The man wasn’t her husband, Bean was sure of that, and maybe he could make something of it, maybe it would lead to an augmentation of his funds. The trouble was that Mrs. Morosini looked not at all disconcerted when she answered his ring, but was all smiles, happier than he’d ever seen her.

“I’d love to see photos of Ruby. Will you drop them in? Not naughty ones, mind!”

That made up his mind for him. He could afford it. He was going to increase his income, would buy a new camera and draw out fifty pounds for Mussolini. The beggar with the beagle was sitting outside the Screen on Baker Street when he got over there, and talking to him, or standing beside him and wearing a typically evil expression, was Clancy, the key man. His hair had the blue sheen of a peacock’s feather; the sun shining on his keys made a breastplate of them and made Clancy look, in Bean’s eyes, like some demon god in a Hammer film. Bean went into one of the Sherlock Holmes souvenir shops and bought the red baseball cap with a picture of Holmes in a white circle he’d seen in the window. It was summer weight, with a perforated crown.

On Sunday he felt quite excited. It started to rain as soon as he got into the park. He was wearing his heavier-weight cap, and over his jacket a raincoat of clear plastic, so he was all right. Just the same, he would have preferred to keep under the trees but that would mean staying in those parts of the park where dogs were not permitted to run loose, Queen Mary’s Rose Garden or the surroundings of the lake. But once their pads touched grass, Charlie and the borzoi pulled so hard that Bean could scarcely keep his feet. He had to set them free and the others with them.

A veil of rain and low-hanging clouds half obscured the Mappin Terraces of the zoo, brown man-made mountains and the ranged
blocks of flats of St. John’s Wood, red and white and sixties gray rough-cast. The few high-rise buildings loomed out of the mist, and to the south the spaceship head on the stalk of the Post Office Tower stood out distinct, but grayer and uglier than on a sunny day. Bean stuffed his hands in his pockets, feeling the roll of notes. Water began to drip off the peak of his cap, so he turned it backward, the way he’d seen kids do in American TV programs.

He took pride in doing his job well, but there were limits. The rain had come on more heavily and now the Mappin Terraces and all the trees to the north had disappeared behind a gray-out. None of the dogs seemed to notice except for Gushi, who stood close to Bean’s feet, shaking himself and whimpering. Bean began calling them. As was always the case with dogs—except the woman walker’s—some were obedient and some were not. Experience told him Charlie wouldn’t come. He whistled shrilly while clipping Gushi, Marietta, and McBride onto the leash. Ruby bounded up, throwing herself on top of the scottie in a simulated act of sexual intercourse, gender not much affecting role in dogs.

Bean shouted at her and resumed his whistling. All the dogs shook themselves, their loose skin rattling. Bean wished he had invested in waterproof trousers when he bought the plastic raincoat. There wasn’t a sign of Charlie, though Boris suddenly appeared out of the gloom, like the Hound of the Baskervilles Bean had seen in a Sherlock Holmes film. He padded up with lowered head and dripping ears, growling unpleasantly when Bean grabbed his collar.

He thought he had allowed plenty of time, but he looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly twenty to five. With five dogs on the leash, he stood not knowing which direction to go in. Where would Charlie go? One of the refreshment places maybe, to root about in a bin or beg for food. Not that anyone would be eating out of doors in this weather.

Neither was in the direction Bean wanted to go. Right up till this moment, he had been in two minds about Mussolini, hoping to meet
him and give him the go-ahead and fearing to meet him. But now doubt had fled and he desperately wanted to see the man again, to reach the bridge, carry out his negotiations, and set the process in motion. As he plodded along the path, tugged by his troop of dogs, he saw the key man once more in his mind’s eye, the blue hair and beard, the cruel eyes, the clanking chain mail. He mustn’t miss his chance of teaching the key man a lesson.…

Charlie was nowhere around the restaurant. Did that mean he had to traipse all the way back to the Broad Walk? Ahead of him the path led down to the Long Bridge, crossing a different arm of the lake from the one where Mussolini would soon arrive, where he might already be.… Bean had never lost a dog, never had a dog go missing for more than a minute or two. But Charlie had disappeared, had been absent now for a quarter of an hour. It was five to five.

To the north of the lake, where ducks disported on the sodden grass or bounced on the little waves, Bean stood and cursed. The dogs, taking advantage of a pause, shook themselves vigorously. Bean began whistling again. Whatever happened, whatever he must forgo, he couldn’t go back to Mr. Barker-Pryce and his bristling eyes and cigar without Charlie.

There was a sound of scuffle and splashing, a quacking and honking, as three pink-footed geese and a white duck rose in a flurry of panic-stricken feathers from the water’s edge. Charlie was behind them, joyously leaping, his paws muddied to the hocks, his appearance so changed by total immersion that he looked as thin as the borzoi and as dark as the poodle. Bean made a grab for him and the retriever, understanding that the game and the glories of liberty were over, drew his whole body together and relaxed it in a massive series of shakes. Bean and the other dogs were soaked in water and flying mud. Even Bean’s face was spattered with mud, his hands red and wet, his feet squelching in inundated shoes.

But he ran. With all six dogs galloping ahead of him like a husky
team—if only he had a sled!—he made for the bridge over the loop of the lake. The sky was lightening and the rain easing up. Under the trees that led to the bridge it was almost dry. Bean took a deep breath and clenched the fist that held the leash. But of course Mussolini wasn’t there; even if he had been there he wouldn’t be any longer, not at five past five, not half an hour after the appointed time.

He ran across the rest of the span. The rain had almost stopped and the sun was coming out through the drizzle. Bean took the path toward the mosque, whose golden dome the sun had set glittering like an old coin, like a coin when they still made them of precious metals. He fancied this was the way Mussolini had gone last time. But there was no sign of him, there was scarcely a soul about but for the man tying up the paddle boats to the island in the Hanover pond.

He was never late but he was going to be late getting his dogs back. Their owners would worry. They wouldn’t listen to excuses about Charlie’s truancy. Bean hurried to the path that runs parallel to the Outer Circle toward the Clarence Gate, and lifting his eyes to scan the green prospect and the lake edge, searching still for the round-headed man, saw a rainbow form itself in a brilliant arc, one end in Madame Tussaud’s and the other far away in Camden Town.

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