‘I said it could be a long, drawn-out grind,’ Blackstone replied. ‘But who knows, you could get lucky.’
Meade’s eyes lit up with newly rekindled enthusiasm. ‘Do you really think I might get somewhere?’
Not a chance! Blackstone thought.
‘It’s a possibility,’ he said aloud.
Meade hesitated for a second, torn between his desire to see Blackstone treated properly and his urge to throw himself back into the investigation.
‘Well, if you’re sure you’re happy with the accommodation that has been provided. .’ he said finally.
‘I am.’
‘Then I’ll see you first thing in the morning?’
Meade’s last words were meant to sound like a statement, but they came out as a question. As if he couldn’t quite believe that Blackstone would still be there in the morning. As if he feared that the magical policeman from London — from whom he hoped to learn so much — would simply melt away in the night.
‘I’ll be here,’ Blackstone promised.
‘Until tomorrow, then,’ Meade replied, sounding a little relieved.
Blackstone nodded. ‘Good hunting,’ he said.
The Third Street ‘El’ ran right past Blackstone’s hotel bedroom window, so that now, instead of being one of the travelling watchers — as he’d been earlier in the day — he had become one of the stationary watched. For several minutes, he sat looking at the faces rushing by in the elevated trains. Occasionally, he waved — though no one ever waved back.
He did not mind the noise that the ‘El’ itself produced or the rattling of window-frames it left in its wake. He was a Londoner, brought up on noise, and — in a way — he embraced it as a comforting familiarity in a land where everything else seemed strange.
He had told Meade that he was exhausted, and he had not been lying. But now he found that sleep — perversely — would not come to him, and he continued to sit on his bed, smoking and listening to the cockroaches scuttling along the floor.
And, as he sat there, his mind travelled back over the sometimes-hazardous journey which had been his life.
He had given serious consideration to coming to America when he had left the orphanage. But instead, he had joined the army and fought in a bloody war in Afghanistan — a war in which many of his comrades had died, and he had almost been killed himself.
He had had a second chance to cross the Atlantic when he left the army, but once again he had chosen a different course, and become a Metropolitan policeman — had deliberately plunged himself into a world of depravity and cruelty, where he had seen many things he would now rather forget, and had once, incidentally, saved the life of a queen.
He wondered what would have happened if he had decided, on either of those two occasions, to come to America.
Would he still have been the same man he was now — a man battered by life, but still able to face himself in the shaving mirror? Or would the country have changed him — for better or worse — as it seemed to have changed so many other men?
When sleep finally came, he fell almost immediately into a dream about a woman.
He often dreamt about the women he’d loved:
Hannah — who had loved him in return, but had betrayed him to the assassins anyway, and who had died herself in the process.
Agnes — who had betrayed him to her Russian paymaster, and who he had last seen on a lonely railway station in the middle of Central Russia.
And Dr Ellie Carr — who had not betrayed him to any man, but to her love of her work.
Sometimes only one of his women would appear in his dreams. On other occasions, though, they would all be there, merging into one another and then drifting apart — so he was no longer sure which of them he had truly loved, or whether he would have continued to love any of them, if fate had allowed him to.
But that night he did not dream of Hannah, Agnes or Ellie. That night — for reasons he was quite unable to explain to himself when he woke up — he dreamed of Jenny, the O’Briens’ timid parlourmaid.
ELEVEN
The shoeshine stand was on 13th Street, half a block from where Meade and Blackstone were standing, and the shoeshine boy was kneeling down, buffing the shoes of a large man in a frock coat and silk top hat.
‘That’s him,’ Alex Meade said. ‘That’s George Plunkitt.’
‘Did you have any trouble in getting him to agree to meet us?’ Blackstone asked.
‘None at all,’ Meade replied airily. ‘Like I told you yesterday, after Inspector O’Brien’s death he must be a worried man — though not half as worried as he’ll be after we’ve been talking to him for a while.’
But he didn’t look worried — at least, from a distance.
‘Do you know what was one of the first — and of the most important — things that I learned in the army?’ Blackstone asked. ‘It was to avoid the temptation to start shooting at the enemy the moment you catch sight of him.’
‘Is that right, Sam?’ Alex Meade said, though his thoughts were clearly focused much more on Senator Plunkitt than they were on Blackstone’s military experiences.
‘And believe me, it’s not an easy temptation to resist,’ Blackstone continued, speaking as if he had gained Meade’s full and enthusiastic attention. ‘You see the man charging towards you, and you know his greatest wish in life is to get close enough to you to kill you. Your own blood is racing and you desperately want to pull the trigger. But there are two very good reasons why you shouldn’t do it.’
It seemed to have finally occurred to Meade that this was more than merely idle chatter.
‘You’re making a point here, aren’t you, Sam?’ he asked.
‘I’m trying to,’ Blackstone admitted.
Meade sighed. ‘All right, what are the two reasons you shouldn’t pull the trigger?’
‘The first is that the closer he gets to you, the more you can see of him, and the bigger a target he becomes.’
‘Sure. Makes sense.’
‘But the second one is even more important. You see, he knows you’re pointing your rifle at him. He expects you to fire it. And because of that, he knows he has no choice but to keep on running. And maybe that will work out for him. Maybe he’ll be able to dodge the bullet and be on top of you before you have time to fire again.’
‘Well, I guess that’s war for you,’ said Meade, who had never had any military training.
‘But if you don’t fire, it unnerves him even more than a bullet flying past his ear would,’ Blackstone continued. ‘Because he’s not sure what the rules are any more. And that will affect the way he acts. Sometimes the uncertainty will slow him down. Sometimes it will make him start to waver from side to side. But whatever he decides to do, he’ll start making mistakes — because you’ve robbed him of his clear sense of purpose.’
Meade grinned. ‘I get it,’ he said.
‘You do?’
‘Sure! You’re saying I shouldn’t go into this meeting with Plunkitt with all guns blazing.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ Blackstone confirmed.
‘Relax, Sam,’ Meade said. ‘I’ll run rings around the man.’
I very much doubt that, Blackstone thought.
George Plunkitt had a barrel chest and legs as thick as small tree trunks. His broad face was dominated by a large nose and a thick black moustache which looked as if it could have served as a heavy-duty scrubbing brush.
But, as they drew closer to the man, it was his eyes that fascinated Blackstone the most. They had the sharpness of a fox’s, and the cunning of a peasant’s — but what they totally lacked was any sign of the worry that Meade expected them to be showing. If they revealed anything at all, Blackstone decided, it was a sort of amusement which, while it was not exactly contemptuous, was certainly a long way from respectful.