Then I did feel hungry for regular food so I went back to a café I’d passed earlier, Gaby’s Deli in the Charing Cross Road near Leicester Square. I was picking up street names because when I didn’t see signs I asked people where I was. Gaby’s had a yellow awning that said HOT SALT BEEF, FALAFEL, SALADS. A sign by the door said LONDON’S BEST VEGETARIAN FALAFEL & SALAD IN PITTA. And above the awning the name in big silver three-dimensional letters with Est. 1965. The place looked busy and it smelled good when I opened the door so I went inside. I had a salt beef on rye and a bottle of beer. They didn’t have Coors or Corona so I had Maccabee because I thought it might be a Scotch beer but there was Jewish lettering on the label. The salt beef was nothing special but the beer was good. It was warm in there and the place was full of everybody’s smells. There were a lot of foreigners talking in their different languages. The lights were too bright and the voices were too loud. The man and woman at the table behind me, maybe they thought they weren’t talking loud. He was saying in his English accent, ‘There’s no reason to fake it if you can’t come, you don’t have to put on a performance for me.’ ‘I wasn’t faking it,’ she lied. Jesus, the things these people worry about. Where I come from the women don’t have time to fake it because the men are all done in ten seconds or less. But Gaby’s was OK — people talking and laughing and a couple of men giving me the eye. Well, I thought, it’s a long hop from El Paso but London isn’t so bad.
There must have been a couple of pounds of salt beef in my sandwich and I was still working on it with my second Maccabee when this guy comes in and sits down facing me. Worn-out looking character in his sixties, white hair but he might have been a redhead once. ‘Justine!’ he says.
‘How come you know my name?’ I said.
‘What is this,’ he said, ‘amnesia? I brought you into the world, for Christ’s sake.’
‘In a pig’s ass you did,’ I said.
‘Why aren’t you in Golders Green?’ he said. ‘You’re looking a little strange too. Are you on something?’
‘Look, Buster,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about or how you got my name but if you’re coming on to me I have to tell you that this salt beef and the beer are really weighing me down and I don’t feel much like spawning right now.’
‘Spawning!’ he said. ‘What are you, a salmon?’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘You wanna see my warts?’
‘Some other time,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re on but you’re a little bit too weird for me tonight. I’ll see you around.’
‘Not if I see you first,’ I told him. When he left I was remembering his scrawny white neck. The salt beef and the beer were going round and round in me so I paid up and just made it outside in time to barf in the street which didn’t get me any applause from the passers-by. I went back to Cecil Court hoping to find somebody to take the bad taste out of my mouth and there was Mr Scrawny from Gaby’s looking in the window of a bookstore. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you’ when I tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Sorry I wasn’t more friendly back there in Gaby’s Deli,’ I said. ‘Let me make it up to you.’
‘No problem,’ he said, ‘but I’ll take a rain check if that’s all right with you.’
‘Well, friend,’ I said, ‘it ain’t, so I’ll just have a little taste of your neck if you don’t mind.’
‘But I do mind,’ he said, too late because I already had my teeth in him. ‘Well,’ he said just before he passed out, ‘this’ll teach me to let Irv Goodman give me a bottle of Scotch.’
I was still trying to get a good flow going when I realised he was empty. I guess these old ones run dry pretty quick.
28 Grace Kowalski
31 January 2004. Maybe three toads in the soup were one too many. When J Two snogged Artie he started hallucinating so badly that he almost had Irv and me convinced that a huge hopping thing was coming through the wall. She’s some piece of work, that girl. And strong. After putting the frighteners on the three of us she grabbed her wet clothes, got dressed, and headed for the door. Irv and I tried to stop her but she scattered us like tenpins and hopped it. Now I know how Frankenstein felt. And at least his creation had a bolt through the neck so that anybody could see that he wasn’t the usual thing. J Two was pretty, for God’s sake.
Obviously the thing to do would have been to go after her and bring her back before she did any harm. Right, but Irv wasn’t up to that kind of thing, Artie was hiding under the bed, and I was no match for her. I couldn’t very well ring up the police and tell them to be on the lookout for a sexy woman in wet clothes with a hallucinogenic tongue. Would she be out for blood already? If not, she soon would be.
What had I intended when I brought her out of the soup? I wanted to teach Istvan a lesson. How? What kind of lesson? I don’t know, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. And, as Artie has said, once you see that a thing is possible you want to make it happen. I ought to have learnt by now that I tend to act without considering the consequences. Now the consequences were loose in Soho, out there in the dark. I wondered how soon we’d read about J Two in the papers.
29 Detective Inspector Hunter
31 January 2004. Connecting the dots will usually give you some kind of picture but you can’t always be sure what’s a dot; maybe it’s a mouse turd. Last night a man came into the station looking around wildly and complaining of being followed by ‘some huge hopping thing’. He was Walter Dixon, thirty-two, a freelance writer. ‘What do you write?’ I asked him.
‘Science fiction,’ he said. Casually dressed but respectable, didn’t strike me as an addict of any kind but you never know with writers. I sat him down, got him a coffee, and said, ‘Please begin at the beginning.’
‘OK,’ he said, ‘but keep your eye on the walls because it could be hopping through at any moment.’ He kept turning his head like a blind man listening for something.
‘You’re pretty safe here,’ I said. ‘We’ve got armed officers for just such emergencies and if it hops through a wall we’ll book it. When did you first become aware of it?’
‘Around half-eight in Cecil Court.’
‘What were you doing in Cecil Court?’
‘I’d just had a salt beef sandwich and a couple of beers at Gaby’s Deli in Charing Cross Road and I was standing in front of Watkins Books looking at their window …’
‘Yes, go on.’
‘The Illusion of Reality by Sredni Bufo was the featured book. No, I’ve got the name wrong.’
‘Never mind. You were standing in front of Watkins and?’
‘Hang on — I don’t feel its presence any more, I think it’s gone. I don’t know what came over me. Look, I don’t want to be wasting your time so I really should be going.’
‘Don’t go just yet,’ I said. ‘It’s been my experience that these huge hopping things don’t usually turn up without a reason. Two beers wouldn’t do it. Was there anything before the hopping thing?’
‘Ah! The woman …’
‘What woman?’
‘Standing next to me. Suddenly she crumpled and I caught her just before she hit the ground. I said, “Gotcha” and she held on to me. She gave me a great big wet slobbery kiss. My God, she tasted awful, then she was nuzzling my neck. Her mouth was very wet and she began to bite me but I fought her off.’