The Third Angel (12 page)

“Don't worry,” Maddy said. She had to shout to be heard. “We're safe. As soon as we're through traveling, we'll come home.”

And then it was time to leave. There was a crush of people; the weekend was going to be lovely and no one wanted to miss the opportunity to spend the last few summer days in France. Luckily a porter helped Allie and Maddy find their seats just as the train left the station. In no time they were going more than 250 kilometers an hour. Through the window there were streaks of landscape in blue and black and green. They could see the blur of London that they were leaving behind.

They were comfortable in their wedding clothes. Silk was perfect for any sort of weather; it wore well for traveling. They didn't dwell on the past; instead they talked about people who were on their train. They made up stories about them, and once they started they simply couldn't stop. They guessed who was in love and whose heart had been broken, who had committed murder, and who had saved a life.

I I .

Lion Park

1966

E
VERYTHING WAS YELLOW IN THE PARK.
When it rained, leaves came swirling down. When it was sunny everything looked golden. Frieda Lewis was nineteen and had been working for four months at the Lion Park Hotel in Knightsbridge. Her favorite rooms to clean were the ones on the seventh floor. From there, she could look out the windows in the back and see the little courtyard park with its stone lion. From the front rooms she could see the tops of the trees in Hyde Park. Once she climbed onto the ledge and stood there for a moment, above the traffic and the fumes, mesmerized by the movement of the trees and of the clouds in the sky. Brompton Road seemed as if it was part of a child's game, with tiny cars set out in a row. Then all at once, Frieda felt light-headed and she had to back in through the window. Her head was pounding, but she felt exhilarated, too. She had the feeling that something special was in store for her, a miracle of some sort, something amazing and unexpected. She might be working as a maid in a London hotel, but that wasn't who she was inside.

She was a headstrong girl whose parents believed that she had ruined her chances at life. She had passed her university exams but had decided that she wanted a real life, and by that she didn't mean marriage and babies. She didn't want anything ordinary. And she certainly didn't want the life her father planned for her. He was a doctor in Reading, and he thought he knew what was best for everyone. If anything, she wanted the opposite, a life that would make her father cringe, that would hurt him. She had even considered that poetry might be her calling. She had something inside her no one understood, that much was certain, and that sort of isolation often led to a poet's life.

Frieda had broken up with her sweetheart, Bill, who had assumed she would marry him. Well, everyone made assumptions, didn't they? Everyone thought they knew her when they knew nothing at all. She had wanted a bigger life, something spectacular, and now here she was in London, much to her parents' dismay up in Reading. She was a small-town girl who desperately wanted a big-city life. That's the story of a mouse, her father had told her. Not of a bright, talented woman who should be in university.

Frieda's parents might think she was wild, but she was nothing compared to most of the girls at the Lion Park. Everyone was young and wanted to have a good time. They all wore thick black eyeliner and looked like a horde of Cleopatras when they went out en masse. They dressed in miniskirts or blue jeans with hoop earrings and high boots and they all smoked too much. The girls who worked at the hotel were given rooms on the second floor; the worst rooms had three or four girls crowded into them, but even those were fine. They held impromptu parties every night and went to concerts and clubs in a lovely, giddy group. They frequented the restaurant Cassarole on the King's Road and went to the Chelsea Antiques Market looking for old silk underwear and Victorian blouses ribbed with satin. They traded clothes. Nearly all of the girls had worn Frieda's black dress, bought for eighteen hard-earned pounds at Biba in Kensington, a dress so short you had to hold it down with both hands when exiting a taxi. Katy Horace had managed to snag Mick Jagger for a night while wearing that dress—well, maybe it was only an hour or so, but all the same it was Mick, or so she said, and it was the dress that had got to him.

The Lion Park was known for its reckless clientele—people in the music world, poets with bad reputations, men in love with other men, women who had left their husbands, drummers on tour who practiced all night and drove people mad by pounding on the furniture, girls who were thinking about suicide, couples who couldn't decide if they loved each other or wanted to kill each other. The hotel was a bit seedy—the furniture was banged up, the carpet was worn—but it was possible to have privacy here. The Lion Park was much like the Chelsea Hotel in New York; as long as you didn't outright murder anyone in your room, anything went. You could be a vampire, for all the management cared, as long as you paid your tab on time.

On nights when a famous guest was in residence, there were often dozens of girls waiting outside, screaming at the sight of any long-haired young man. The neighbors complained about the groupies, but what could they do? Freedom of speech included freedom to scream, didn't it? When the noise got bad, and the fans spilled onto the street, the authorities were called, but mostly the night porter, Jack Henry, took care of the crowds. Jack Henry joked that he'd had more sex by promising groupies he'd get them in to see some other man than he'd had in all the rest of his life. The girls who worked at the Lion Park thought him a dirty old man, though he was probably not much more than thirty. Jack surely had his flaws, but he could be depended on to keep his mouth shut. For the right tip, he could get a guest most anything: a gorgeous woman, a doctor who wouldn't report a drug overdose, bottles of absinthe or Seconals, and, most importantly, discretion. For instance, no one, not even the girls who worked at the hotel, knew that Jamie Dunn was staying on the seventh floor. But of course not many people had heard of him yet. He wasn't much of anything, not really famous, just an American singer who had signed a record deal. He had come to the U.K. for a few concert dates, all of which had been a disaster. He had a reedy, angelic voice and people complained they couldn't hear him. Audiences wanted electricity; even Dylan had gone for it. Jamie knew he had to get a band together and make some noise. And he needed his own material. That's what the executives had told him at his record company, or at least they were his company at the moment, if he gave them what they wanted, if they didn't ax him the way they did a thousand other talented, hopeful young men.

Now Jamie was holed up in room 708, trying, and failing, to write. After two days he stopped eating and started in on some serious drinking; that was how his binges always began. Like Rimbaud, he had to burn to create, but he burned without brilliance and he knew it. He just got drunker. He was six foot three and only 165 pounds, so in a matter of days he looked gaunt. His hotel room was a mess. Overflowing ashtrays, cups of coffee, dirty laundry on the floor. He'd stopped showering while he tried to write—even soap and water were possible distractions. He had his long hair tied back with a leather band. He had great bone structure thanks to a heritage that included a Cree Indian and Ukrainian grandmother along with a half-Irish, half-Italian grandfather. His mother was a Polish Jew. His was a New York City heritage, a little of everything. He hadn't cut his hair for four years. He made women swoon without even saying anything. He believed in signs, symbols, luck, fortune—all of it. His bad leg? It meant he was made for something different. The pain he always had? Proof that ordinary life was not for him. If not for his leg, he'd be in Vietnam. He'd probably be dead and gone by now.

Most of all, he believed in vows. Now he made a pact with himself that if he could write one perfect song, he'd cut off his hair. He'd make a sacrifice of himself and burn his hair on the hotplate he'd had housekeeping bring up. He'd annihilate the part of him that was so weak he often went to bed for weeks at a time when he couldn't create, when the world was just too much for him to bear.

He'd been weak as a boy, born with a defect in his hip, and had had several operations before the time he was twelve. He'd grown up in pain, spending months at a time in Queens County Hospital; even when he was discharged, he wore a metal brace that had been strapped on so tightly he still had the marks on his skin. When he ran his hand over his leg he felt a line of indentations reminding him of what he had suffered and what he now deserved as reparation. Other boys had made his life hell at school. He hated his own flesh and blood and bones. Most of all, he hated the pain. He'd taken Demerol and morphine all through his youth, then had progressed to street drugs in high school. He favored heroin, and he looked forward to shooting up more than anything. He was in love with the moment before and the moment during. He had his best ideas then, if only he could remember them. His notebooks were filled with scribbles he couldn't understand. Thank God he could function in a vacuum and was able to ignore the noise in the hotel, trained to do so by a childhood spent with three brothers who were endlessly fighting. On his first night in London, there had been a brawl out in the hallway just as he was getting down to work. It felt like home. No problem. Jamie ignored it, exactly as he had ignored his brothers. He'd always been his mother's favorite, set apart; he didn't feel much of anything watching his brothers beat each other. He didn't even take sides.

When it got to be too much he yelled, “Shut the fuck up.”He pounded on the wall behind his bed and soon enough the racket had stopped.

It had happened again the next night. It sounded like the same exact argument, but then his brothers had fought over the same things for years. Jamie happened to be drunker that night so he raced into the hall with a lamp he'd grabbed to use as a weapon. But once he was standing there wearing only his torn jeans, Jamie didn't find anyone out there but a startled maid who'd been turning down the rooms. The girl had long brown hair and huge eyes and she looked like an angel out there in the hall. She was so pure and beautiful it was difficult to look at her and not feel humble. It was one of those moments Jamie would have liked to write about, if only he could write.

“Sorry,” Jamie said. He realized he might look quite threatening, unwashed and tall, limping around and holding the lamp like a spear. He might, in fact, appear to be a lunatic. “I'm hearing things. I think I'm going insane.”

“We have a ghost,” the girl said. “Or so they say.”

It was Frieda. The other girls had all warned her about room 707. Guests hardly ever stayed through the night there; they usually checked out and demanded their money back. Supposedly, someone had killed his rival in that room. No one knew the whole story, but it was definitely cold in there when you turned down the bed. Occasionally there'd be a guest who'd specifically request 707, usually a writer looking for inspiration, or a guitarist or drummer who wanted to prove his courage by spending the night in a haunted room while getting good and drunk.

“Not that I believe in ghosts,” Frieda went on to say, “although it's possible that some sort of vibration could emanate from the ether.”

Jamie laughed. “Well that explains everything. Just my luck. I'm fucking haunted.”

“It's the hotel, not you.” Frieda could see behind Jamie when she peered through his door, which had been left ajar. His room was in bad shape. She'd noticed the Do Not Disturb sign on for several days. If Frieda wasn't mistaken she saw a plume of smoke. She hoped he wasn't about to burn the hotel down to the ground. “Did you want your room turned down?”

“My room is turned upside down already. That ghost ruined my concentration, damn it. Come have a drink. I need some company. Alive company.”

Frieda laughed. “Right now?”

“You might work here, but they don't own you, do they? You're not a fucking slave, are you?”

That was the sort of challenge that always got to Frieda. It was weird that this fellow sensed her antiauthoritarian streak. Not many people knew that about her. She looked like a proper Goody Two-shoes; in fact, she was anything but. She had turned in one of her teachers at school for using stray cats for their biology lab, then had gone back, climbed in through the window of the schoolhouse, and set all the cats free. Several of them had followed her home; that was how she'd been caught and given a week's suspension from classes. The headmaster had driven by and spied the cats lounging in the grass outside her house. “We didn't think you were that sort of girl,” the headmaster had told her, but she was then and she still was now.

Frieda followed Jamie inside precisely because she shouldn't. He went to open the window first thing. The room was acrid and smoky.

“I know it stinks in here. Sorry. Whisky all right?” Jamie pulled on a T-shirt. He was extremely handsome, better looking than Mick Jagger. There was a purple suede jacket thrown over the bureau and several pairs of socks littered about. A half-eaten order of fish and chips had leaked grease onto the bureau. Frieda's mother had been a cleanliness fanatic; if she saw this room she'd probably have a stroke. Mrs. Lewis had spent her whole life making their house perfect, cooking lovely dinners, not letting a dish sit in the sink, and what had it gotten her? Absolutely nothing, in Frieda's opinion.

Frieda nodded. “Whisky's fine.” She had been in nasty rooms before, but this really was the worst. Not that she minded. “Did you have a riot in here?” she asked.

“Sorry. I've been working round the clock. I seriously don't know what day it is. Am I saying ‘sorry' a lot?”

Jamie quickly made up the bed. He wasn't very good at it. He threw a blanket over everything.

“Working at what?” Frieda said as he handed her a glass of whisky. The glass wasn't particularly clean but Frieda had read that alcohol killed all germs. You could pour it on a wound, for instance, if you had no other antiseptic. Frieda was a very quick drunk, one drink and kerplunk, she could easily find herself on the floor. So she took a tiny sip. She shivered as the whisky burned her throat. She felt very daring and grown-up.