“London,” she whispered then, and whatever way she said it, it made the whole place just spread out before me like some truly fabulous palace of stars. Songs that I had only half-remembered seemed to fill themselves out now and take on an entirely new life as they threaded themselves in and out of the most magnificent white buildings of solid Portland stone.
A nightingale, I thought, sang in Berkeley Square and it made me feel good for I knew that Da had liked it once upon a time. No, still did.
“Don’t I?” he said as he tilted her pale chin upwards.
“Stardust,” she smiled, and I knew she meant Nat King Cole.
With the shimmering sky over London reflected in her eyes.
When I looked again, they were standing in some anonymous part of the city and it wasn’t pleasant — there was this aura of threat or unease hanging around them. I wanted it to go away but it wouldn’t. Ma was more surprised than anyone when he drew back his cuff and punched her in the face.
A spot of blood went sailing across the Thames. Faraway I saw CINZANO, just winking away there, on and off. On and off. On and off. On and—
I heard a scream. I woke up.
I didn’t manage to get back to sleep.
Noon, I went into Joe’s Café. There was only one thing and it prevailed in my mind. That was the dancehall whose name was THE PALAIS, with its colored lights strung above the door. That was my London Assignment. To, once and for all, locate that building. I swore I’d do it — or die in the process.
I smiled as I thought of Mahoney and his reaction. He was standing by the window back at HQ, with both arms folded as he unflinchingly gazed out into the street.
“You were sent over there for one express purpose!” he snapped. “And it’s got nothing to do with fucking dance-halls!”
I took out my revolver and placed it on the table.
“So be it,” I said. “Then I’m out.”
“You’re out when I say you’re out,” replied Mahoney.
I could see a nerve throbbing in his neck. Mahoney had been over the previous summer with an active service unit that had caused mayhem. He was a legend in the movement. His London exploits had passed into history. He would have had no problem coming over himself and filling me in. Taping my confession and leaving me there in some dingy Kilburn flat, with a black plastic bag pulled down over my head.
“The organization is bigger than any one man,” he said. “Or any,” he sneered “fucking dancehall.”
I finished my tea and got up from my chair, swinging from Joe’s out into the street.
Not this one, Mahoney. Not this one.
I sat down for a bit in Soho Square Gardens. There was a paper lying beside me on the bench. Looking out from the front page was a photofit picture of an IRA bomber in long hair and sideburns.
I shook the paper and sighed, kind of tired. You could hear the Pandas blaring nearby. I slid into a cinema and tried not to hear what I was hearing. Almost inevitably, there was Edgar — smiling down at me from the screen. How could he possibly have known I was in the city? I thought ruefully. Could my cover possibly have been blown?
It couldn’t be, I concluded. Not even the great Scales of Justice detective could have managed to pull off a coup like that. I began to relax as I watched him bestride the screen. I dwelt on all his famous cases: The Mystery of the Burnt-Out Candle; Investigation at Honeydew Farm; The Willow Tree Murders.
“I know all about the dancehall,” he said. “That’s my job — I’m here to help.”
I was grateful to him for saying that, for I knew if anyone was able to help it was Edgar Lustgarten — having lived through the days when the streets of the great city had been the same as they were in the photograph, shiny and wet and full of gray overcoats, with great big double-deckers bombing around and Big Ben regally resounding across the world.
“Would you like to know what was playing that night?” he asked me. “It was ‘Who Do You Know in Heaven?’ by the Ink Spots.”
“‘Who do you know in Heaven?’” I repeated, as the colored lights flickered above the door of THE PALAIS.
There can be little doubt that The London Assignment will go down in the annals as one of the most magnificent operations ever undertaken by The Organization. Mahoney, I knew, would be especially proud.
I couldn’t believe it when I arrived in Rayner’s Lane. I couldn’t even remember how I got there. There was a dancehall, but it wasn’t the one I was after. It hadn’t even been built until 1960. Anyhow, it was boarded up and left to go to rack.
I went into another café and had a cup of tea. My hands were blue and I was shivering.
I didn’t want to hear it but they fell from the lips of a man sitting opposite. In my father’s voice. The words: “We’re rubbish, us Irish, and all our children — they’ll be rubbish. We don’t even know how to love or kiss or dance. All we can do is dress in rags. If we were in London now, that would be different. We’d deck ourselves in the finest of silks and we’d stroll down Pall Mall with our proud heads held high. Then do you know what we’d do? We’d go off to dinner in some swanky hotel, and after we’d called a toast to ourselves, we’d take a cab off to a dancehall — we wouldn’t really care where it was, just so long as the Inkspots were playing — and what we’d do then is we’d foxtrot and waltz until our feet were sore and bruised.”
He was leaning over to kiss her when I knocked over the teacup, its contents dribbling onto my feet.
I think one of the most beautiful days I can ever remember was Boxing Day three years ago. It had been snowing constantly and the city looked like something out of a fairy tale — as though it had been evacuated especially for me. On Trafalgar Square, the Landseer lions appeared even more august than usual, with their Mandarin moustaches of dusty white ice.
Starched and blue, Soho did my heart good. In the gutters, hardened wrappers possessed a special kind of poetry. It was like being a child all over again, when I’d walk the roads of the little country town which I haven’t, sadly, been back to now for many years now.
I’m looked after here — I’ve accepted this country as my home. I have a flat the Council gave me — it’s not far from Fenchurch Street, in the suburb of Aldgate.
There’s a café which I go to, near Leadenhall Market. I sit at the back. The owner is an Italian — he fancies himself an intellectual. He thought I was writing a West End play. “No,” I told him, “I’m writing a novel. A little thriller I’ve titled The London Assignment.”
He took up my notebook and read — with superiority: “Once upon a time there was a young boy who lived in a squat. He had to leave it for reasons best left unreported. The city in those days was as though a place under siege. Emmanuelle was playing at The Odeon. A Clockwork Orange was showing somewhere else. On April 26, an old tramp, who happened to be from Ballyfuckways in the Irish county of Mayo, was stumbling good-humoredly through an underpass, throatily declaiming an old ballad, when he was confronted by three youths — each of them sporting a bowler hat and with a single eye mascaraed. They beat him with their walking canes and left him for dead. A bomb blew out the windows of a restaurant that night — on Frith Street, in Soho. Thirteen people were injured. Carroll’s Number Six cigarettes cost fifteen pence for ten.”
He handed me back the notebook and smiled — in that unfortunately unappealing, superior way.
“Did you ever hear of Griffith’s theory of consistent memory?” he asked me. He then explained it, in even and measured tones, clearly anticipating my difficulties with its complexity.