When the bus turned into Kennington Road, he stepped out. His head swivelled. He used the gleaming dome of the Imperial War Museum (how appropriate, he thought) to orientate himself. One problem. Kennington Road ran north and south from the crossroads where he was standing. Which way should he go?
A police car pulled up at the lights. Peach approached the window on the passenger’s side.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I wonder if you could tell me where The Bunker is?’
The policeman he was talking to had an unusually pale face. It was so pale that it was almost transparent. Even the policeman’s eyelashes were pale. Peach’s first albino.
‘Never heard of it.’ Not only an albino, but arrogant with it.
‘It’s a nightclub,’ Peach explained.
The policeman pushed his hat back on his head, revealing a strand of colourless hair. ‘Don’t know it.’
His colleague, the driver, was muttering something.
‘Try down there.’ The policeman pointed south with his chin. ‘Can’t help you otherwise, mate.’
‘Much obliged,’ Peach said. ‘Thanks very much.’
Mate, he thought. Bloody albino. Take his uniform away and he’d probably disappear altogether.
He set off down the road. The traffic lights had already changed, but several seconds passed before he heard the police car move away. He understood. If he had been approached by an old man in a sports jacket who was looking for a nightclub, he would have been suspicious too. Especially if he happened to be an albino. Axe to grind. Revenge on the world. He didn’t look back, though. He kept walking. Basic psychology. Only the guilty look back. The guilty and the stupid.
He walked for five or ten minutes and saw nothing that even remotely resembled a nightclub (not that he was any too sure what nightclubs looked like in the daylight). Kennington Road ran south into a glitter of bicycle-shops and pub-signs. Council-blocks the colour of dog-meat. A green and white striped bingo-hall. Trees so dusty that their leaves looked plastic. He began to have doubts. What if Eddie had lied? Could Moses have covered his tracks?
He sat down on a bench and mopped his forehead and the back of his neck with a large white handkerchief. He opened his suitcase and examined his notes. He took those anxious questions of his and crumpled them like so much waste-paper. He began again, with a fresh blank sheet, as it were. Outlined his mission to himself. Stated the priorities.
1) Establish the exact whereabouts of the nightclub.
2) Establish whether or not Moses Highness is living at said nightclub.
3) If so, establish visual contact.
4) If not, start again — with Eddie.
Incisive now, Peach walked across the pavement and into a newsagent’s. He asked the Indian behind the counter whether he knew of a place called The Bunker. The Indian didn’t.
He asked a teenager at a bus-stop. The teenager didn’t know either.
Peach walked on, undeterred, a pear-shaped man with a jutting lower lip. Sooner or later, he thought. Sooner or later.
Reaching another set of traffic lights, he noticed a pub on the corner. They would know. Surely. He consulted his watch. Half an hour to opening-time. He sat down on a low brick wall. And waited.
As soon as the bolts were drawn (11.32), he was through the double-doors.
‘You must be desperate,’ the landlord said. ‘You nearly knocked the place over.’ His eyes creased at the corners; he was making a joke, but the joke included as one of its ingredients a sense of wariness.
Peach eased himself on to a stool and leaned his forearms on the bar. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘has not exactly been the easiest of days.’
The landlord tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes, nodded.
Peach didn’t usually drink at lunch-time, but usually was a word that didn’t apply. Not today. ‘I’ll have a pint of bitter,’ he said. ‘Anything’for yourself?’
‘That’s very kind of you, sir. I’ll have a lager.’ The landlord pulled Peach’s bitter first, then the lager. ‘Your good health, sir.’
Peach raised his glass to his lips. ‘Cheers.’
When he spoke again he had almost drained it dry. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘whether you could help me.’
‘Do my best, sir,’ the landlord said.
‘I’m looking for a place called The Bunker. It’s a nightclub. Somebody told me that it’s on this road.’
The landlord shook a cigarette out of a squashed packet of Benson’s. He ran the tip of his tongue along his sparse moustache, pressed his lips together, and nodded (Peach’s intuition told him this happened a lot). ‘I know the place,’ he said. ‘It’s been open less than a year. Run by a coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts.’ He sniffed. ‘No pun intended.’ He struck a match and lit his cigarette. He put the match out by shaking it, the way a nurse shakes a thermometer.
Peach swallowed some more beer. ‘Where is it?’
‘Just down the road.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘About a hundred yards down. Right-hand side. You can’t miss it.’ The landlord smiled. ‘It’s pink.’
‘Pink?’
‘That’s right.’
They looked at each other and shook their heads in the manner of men who have seen all kinds of things come and go. There was a certain intimacy about the moment.
‘I don’t suppose,’ Peach ventured, ‘you know whether a young man by the name of Moses is living there, do you?’
The landlord arranged his features in a position of deep thought. ‘Moses? No. I don’t know anyone called Moses.’
Ah well, Peach thought. Worth a try.
‘Friend of yours?’ the landlord enquired.
‘Not exactly a friend,’ Peach said, ‘though we do go back a long way,’ and, turning aside, he strolled through the arcade of his own amusement.
The landlord nodded once or twice. Smoke from his cigarette rose up through blades of sunlight. Traffic sighed beyond the frosted glass. A clock ticked on the wall. It was a pleasant pub.
Peach drained his glass.
‘Another?’ the landlord said.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘It’s on me.’
Peach hesitated. ‘I really ought to be getting on, but,’ and he consulted his watch, ‘well, all right. Just a half, mind. Thank you very much.’
When he emerged from the pub some twenty minutes later, his head seemed to be floating on his neck as a ball floats on water. It was an unfamiliar though not unpleasing sensation. He paused outside a launderette and took out his notebook. In the pool of the village, he wrote, you know where the water ends and the land begins. In the ocean of the world, you drift beyond the sight of any shore. He read it through to himself and nodded several times. He was quite pleased with it. Really quite pleased. It had an oriental, no, a universal ring to it. Perhaps he would try it out in one of his pep-talks. He moved off down the road again. His lower lip slid in and out as he walked. He passed an Indian restaurant, a delicatessen, a vet’s. Then suddenly, on the other side of the road, he saw the building that Terence, the landlord, had described. It was pink all right. It was very pink. And Peach was grateful for its pinkness. If it hadn’t been so pink, he would probably have walked right past it.
He crossed the road. At last, he thought. The Bunker! He tried to peer in through one of the ground-floor windows, but he could see nothing. Effective stuff, smoked-glass. He tested the double-doors. Locked. He wished he knew more about nightclubs: how they operated, when they opened, what the routine was. The smoked-glass windows confronted him with his own ignorance.