‘What is this, a joke? I’m supposed to wear these things all the way to London?’
He crunched the plastic cups in his beefy fists and got up to use the bathroom. There was a guy four rows back who kept laughing at the in-flight movie, some Steve Martin vehicle which had left the factory without wheels or any gas in its tank. The guy looked like he’d have laughed at Nuremberg.
The bathroom: now there was another problem. A Japanese coffin would have been roomier. It took him a while to get everything set out: mirror, penknife, stash. They’d been sticky about the knife at airport security, until he explained that he was a New York private detective, not a Palestinian terrorist, and that the knife was a present for his cousin in London.
‘Since when,’ he’d argued finally, ‘did you get fat terrorists? Come to that, when did you last see a pocket-knife terrorist? I’d be better armed with the in-flight knife and fork.’
So they’d let him through.
He took a wrinkled dollar bill from his pocket and rolled it up. Well, it was either that or a straw from the in-flight drinks, and those straws were so narrow you could hardly suck anything up. He’d read somewhere that eighty percent of all the twenty-dollar bills in circulation bore traces of cocaine. Yeah, but he was a dollar sort of guy. Even rolled up, however, the dollar was crumpled. He considered doing a two-and-two, placing the powder on his pinky and snorting it, but you wasted a lot that way. Besides, he was shaking so much, he doubted he’d get any of the coke near his nose.
He’d laid out a couple of lines. It wasn’t great coke, but it was good enough. He remembered the days of great coke, stuff that would burn to white ash on the end of a cigarette. These days, the stuff was reconstituted Colombia-Miami shit, not the beautiful Peruvian blow of yore. If you tried testing it on a cigarette tip, it turned black and smelt like a Jamaican party. He knew this stuff was going to burn his nose. He saw his face in the mirror above the sink. He saw the lines around his mouth and under his eyes, coke lines. Then he turned back to the business at hand and took a good hit.
He wiped what was left off the mirror with his thumb and rubbed it over his gums. It was sour for a second before the freeze arrived. Okay, so he’d powdered his nose. He doubted it would put wheels on the movie, but maybe he’d find something else to laugh at. You never could tell.
Hoffer ran his own detective agency these days, though he managed to employ just two other tecs and a secretary. He’d started in a sleazy rental above a peep show off Times Square, reckoning that was how private eyes operated in the movies. But he soon saw that clients were put off by the location, so he took over a cleaner set of offices in Soho. The only problem was, they were up three flights of stairs, and there was no elevator. So Hoffer tended to work from home, using his phone and fax. He had one tec working for him; he’d only met the guy twice, both times in a McDonald’s. But the clients were happier now that Hoffer Private Investigations was above a chi-chi splatter gallery selling canvases that looked like someone had been hacked to death on them and then the post mortem carried out. The cheapest painting in the shop covered half a wall and would set the buyer back $12,000. Hoffer knew the gallery would last about another six months. He saw them carry paintings in, but he never saw one leave. Still, at least Hoffer had clients. There’d been a while when he’d been able to trade on his name alone, back when the media exposure had been good. But stories died quickly, and for a while the name Hoffer wasn’t enough.
$12,000 would buy about eight weeks of Hoffer agency time, not including expenses. Robert Walkins had promised to deposit exactly that sum in the agency’s bank account when Hoffer had spoken to him by phone. It was funny, speaking to the man again. After all, Walkins had been Hoffer’s first client. In some ways, he was Hoffer’s only client, the only one that mattered.
The Demolition Man was in action again, and Hoffer badly wanted to be part of the action. He didn’t just want it, he needed it. He had salaries and taxes to pay, the rent on his apartment, overheads, and money for his favourite drugs. He needed the Demolition Man. More crucially, he needed the publicity. When he’d started out for himself, he’d hired a publicity consultant before he’d hired an accountant. When he’d learned enough from the publicist, he’d kicked her out. She had a great body, but for what she was costing him he could buy a great body, and it wouldn’t just talk or cross its legs either.
When he’d got the call from London, he’d been able to pack his bags in about thirty minutes. But first he’d called to get a ticket on the first available flight, and then he’d called Robert Walkins.
‘Mr Walkins? This is Leo Hoffer.’ On the force, they’d all called him Lenny, but since he’d left the force and recreated himself, he’d decided on Leo. The Lion. So what if he was actually Capricorn?
‘Mr Hoffer, I take it there’s news?’ Walkins always sounded like he’d just found you taking a leak on his carpet.
‘He’s in London.’ Hoffer paused. ‘London, England.’
‘I didn’t think you meant London, Alabama.’
‘Well, he’s there.’
‘And you’re going to follow him?’
‘Unless you don’t want me to?’
‘You know our agreement, Mr Hoffer. Of course I want you to follow him. I want him caught.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ll transfer some funds. How much will you need?’
‘Say, twelve thou?’ Hoffer held his breath. Walkins hadn’t been tight with money, not so far, though he’d nixed Hoffer travelling club class.
‘Very well. Good luck, Mr Hoffer.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Then he’d packed. It didn’t take long because he didn’t own a lot of clothes. He checked with Moira at the office that she’d be able to control things for a week or so. She told him to bring her back a souvenir, ‘something royal’.
‘What about a pain in the ass?’ he’d suggested.
He finished packing and called for a cab. He didn’t have any notes to take with him. All the notes he needed were firmly lodged inside his head. He wondered if he should take a book with him for the journey, but dismissed the notion. There were no books in the apartment anyway, and he could always buy a couple of magazines at the airport. As a final measure, he stuck his penknife in his carry-on luggage, and his mirror and stash in his inside jacket pocket. The knife, of thick sharp steel, was purposely ornate and expensive: that way people believed him when he said it was a gift for his cousin. It was French, a Laguiole, with mahogany handle and a serpent motif. In emergencies, it also had a corkscrew. But the real quality of the thing was its blade.
He knew the cab was on its way, which left him only a few minutes to make his final decision. Should he carry a gun? In the wardrobe in his bedroom he had a pump-action over-under shotgun and a couple of unmarked semi-automatic pistols. He kept the serious stuff elsewhere. Ideally, he’d go get something serious. But he didn’t have time. So he grabbed the Smith & Wesson 459, its holster and some ammo from the wardrobe. He packed it in his suitcase, wrapped in his only sweater. The door buzzer sounded just as he was closing his case.
At London Heathrow, he phoned a hotel he’d used before just off Piccadilly Circus and managed to get a room. The receptionist wanted to tell him all about how the hotels were quiet for the time of year, there just weren’t the tourists around that there used to be... Hoffer put the phone down on her. It wasn’t just that he felt like shit. He couldn’t understand what she was saying either.