“But the next number should be the dealer’s.”
“True, but it isn’t much help. It’s a phone box in Leicester Square.”
They were there in ten minutes. Hatcher pointed to the phone box. It was unoccupied.
“Your dealer is a cute one,” he said. “The girls knew to reach him there. Maybe he keeps regular hours. Different phone booths at different times.
“You haven’t asked me for my advice, lad, but I’m giving it to you, nevertheless. Give it up. Go back to the States and tell your aunt and uncle to forget about their daughter. It’s a fine thing you’re trying to do, but… Even if you were to find her, you’re more likely to get a knife in your innards than get your cousin back. You’ve no business being on the Main Drag.”
“I have to try.” He gave it a nice touch of nobility.
“Suit yourself.”
“Thanks for your help.”
Hatcher smiled. “Forget about it. Literally.”
Neal straightened up the room. he picked up the magazines and newspapers and tossed them in the trash bin. He opened up a window to let the cigar stench out. He rinsed the glasses out in the bathroom sink and then fixed himself a fresh drink while he drew a bath.
It isn’t so bad, he thought as he lay in the hot water. He didn’t have an address but he did have this phone booth, or box, in the vernacular. And the location fits Mackensen’s story. And tomorrow I’ll check it out. And find the dealer. Who’ll lead me to Allie.
Right.
17
Except he wasn’t there. Like a road-show Shakespeare when Hamlet’s missed the bus, the dealer wasn’t onstage when the lights came up and the supporting cast was in place.
So Neal waited for him, which wouldn’t have been so bad except for the bloody heat. Neal had learned to say “the bloody heat,” because everybody around him was calling it that. In a country where air conditioning is considered decadent and they sell you an ice cube in your drink, temps in the nineties were a pain indeed.
Neal sweated through long afternoons in the square. He had picked a bench that gave him a nice view of the phone box and its surroundings. He also could check out most of the square’s pubs, movie houses, and eateries. Now a bench in a public park is a jealously guarded commodity, so Neal was careful not to monopolize his spot and draw unwanted attention from any of the long-timer winos, senile pigeon aficionados, or schizoid bums for whom the square and its benches were something called home. Public parks and gardens, built by proud city patrons and matrons as a pleasant gathering spot for the upper middle class, had long since become one of the few surviving habitats of society’s detritus, a crucial place to sit or lie down. So a regular in Leicester Square was more or less tolerated unless he caused trouble. Screaming above the city’s natural decibel level, pushing the panhandling act too hard with a tourist, dealing dope too visibly, or whipping out a weapon to lay claim to a spot on a bench were but a few of the offenses that might disturb the sensibilities of the local gendarmerie. The serene London bobbies, those fabled paragons of patience and civility, might drag a repeat offender into a convenient alley or doorway and stomp the bejesus out of him. The judicious application of nightstick to shin discouraged recidivism. The occasional hard case might require a more thorough going-over, and the rawest copper soon discovered that a trip to hospital could keep a nuisance off the beat for weeks at a time. Neal wasn’t surprised to discover that the London cops had their own version of New York’s Finest’s “Teacher, May I” technique, in which one officer raises the student’s arm high above his head, stretching out the thin sheaf of muscle that covers the rib cage. Then his partner administers the lesson in one of two modes: If he just wants to get his point across, he jams the butt end of his nightstick into the student’s ribs, inspiring an instant shortage of breath coupled with a few moments of searing, albeit temporary, pain. But if the teacher wants the pupil absent from class for a few days, he swings the nightstick like a Jimmy Connors forehand at Wimbledon, cracking the student’s ribs. Class dismissed.
So Neal took pains not to attract attention, which was more or less his role in life anyway, and therefore came naturally. Anyone who tries too hard not to attract attention almost invariably does. This is particularly true on the street, where the denizens have antennae finely tuned to the least twitch of the unnatural gesture. The only way to be inconspicuous is to be so plainly obvious, people don’t see you.
“This comes from our cavemen days,” Joe Graham had explained during one of the interminable anthropology lectures he had delivered to young Neal, “when we operated under the theory that what isn’t moving can’t hurt you. This was a fallacy, of course, but that’s what they thought, because they weren’t that smart to start with. They had about as many brains as your average transit cop. Anyways, they thought, Until it moves, it’s a rock. When it moves, it’s a saber-toothed tiger or something else that can eat us. This is why, to this day, people see motion. Sitting still, they don’t see. You show me a saber-toothed tiger that can sit still. I’ll show you a fat tiger.”
Also a bored tiger, Neal thought. Tedium is the detective’s most steadfast companion. It never goes away for long and it always comes back. Neal used to chuckle at the detective shows he’d see on TV, which were twelve minutes of commercials and forty-eight minutes of action. He knew they should have had twelve minutes of commercials, forty minutes of stupefying monotony, seven minutes and fifty seconds of paperwork, and ten seconds of what you might call action, if you weren’t too particular about your definition of action.
Not that boredom was necessarily bad. On those rare occasions when things got exciting-someone pulling a knife, or much worse, someone pulling a gun-boredom looked pretty good. You could do a lot worse than boredom. But it was hard for Neal to keep that perspective in June in Leicester Square in London during the hottest summer in recorded history. Waiting for somebody who didn’t show up. Who might never show up. Someone who might have once spent an evening with Allie Chase and then booted her along her merry way. Somebody who was a missing link, as it were, in a very thin chain.
Waiting, while the clock ticked slowly but the calendar raced. Neal had managed to skip Einstein, but he already knew that time was relative. Minutes dragged, hours stood positively still, but days zipped past him like taxis in the rain. May was gone, June was already a week old, and Neal was no closer to finding Allie. And finding her was only the start. Grabbing her would take time, cleaning her up more time, and time was a funny thing: Every hour seemed to take a week, and every week seemed to take about an hour. He had time on his hands and he was running out of time. Back in the States, the Democrats were gearing up for their August party, Senator Chase was polishing the acceptance speech, Ed Levine was sending Neal telexes demanding news, and Neal was sitting on a bench, racing toward his “drop dead line” in slow motion. Eight weeks now, and counting.
The heat didn’t help. Neal’s shirt would be stuck to the back of the bench ten minutes after he sat down. The crotch of his jeans would cling tenaciously to his balls, and his armpits would smell like a Mississippi chain gang by noon.
There wasn’t a breeze, not the slightest whisper of a cool breeze to break the still and sullen air.
Neal would force himself to get up and move. He would sit on his bench for two hours and then walk for one. Around and about Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, Soho, Chinatown. Some days, he’d walk down to the National Gallery and watch the crowds in Trafalgar Square: hundreds of teenagers; no Allie.
Mostly he sat, however, the tiger at work. He’d arrive on his bench around noon. (One nice thing about drug dealers are their hours. You want to talk to a dealer before noon, you’d better know where he lives.) He’d plop down on the bench, spread his arms out, and have a glance at the International Herald Tribune to check out the baseball standings. It took maybe five minutes for the little prickles of heat to start on his arms and back, followed shortly by the sweat that would become a trickle and then a stream. He had found a cafe by the tube station, and it sold a reasonable facsimile of a bagel. It became his habit to start his day with a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and a plain toasted bagel with butter. Satisfying himself that the Yankees still held first, he’d scan the headlines, then ball the bagel wrapper up inside the empty cup and toss it into the trash basket behind the bench. Then he’d settle in to watch the show. He began to know how movie ushers felt when the film had been running for three months. The sidewalk vendors already would be setting up their wares along the wrought-iron spiked fence that bordered the square. They sold the usual assortment of cheap souvenirs: cute little bobby dolls that never beat up raving psychos, T-shirts with Buckingham Palace silk-screened on the front, buttons that said LONDON UNDERGROUND-the usual crap. Neal’s own favorite was a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the Underground system. He resisted buying one. There were also the food and drink vendors who peddled warm, syrupy Cokes, soft ice cream that lasted an average of thirty-four seconds before melting down your wrist, thick Cadbury milk chocolate bars that melted even quicker and somehow always found their way onto your shirt, salted peanuts that only a far-gone lunatic would consume in this weather and that were always in hot demand. Neal craved… craved a real New York City street frank, one of the ones made from rat hairs, industrial waste, floor sweepings, and God knows what else, for which he cheerfully would have slaughtered the Queen. The closest he could come was a little stand run by some Pakistanis that sold a product the locals called the “Death Kabob.” It wasn’t bad, really, except for being the Main Drag’s answer to Ex-Lax, but it couldn’t touch a Columbus Circle dog with hot mustard and onions spread all over it.