Chapter 3
Old Compton Street is no place to stand around waiting for something. It’s in that part of Soho that’s a cross between Greenwich Village and Tijuana – narrow streets jammed with Italian restaurants and strip clubs and pornography shops and prostitutes. I stood in front of a grim pub just across the street from the building where our hyphenated friend lived. I’d already determined that his apartment was in the front of the building on either the third or fourth floor, depending upon whether you looked at it from an English or American point of view. You had to climb three flights of stairs to get to it, anyway.
An urgent little man in a houndstooth jacket buttonholed me and at once provided me with a good reason for standing on the sidewalk. I stood waiting for Julia’s taxi while he ran through his catalog of vice. “Looking for a girl, are you now, mate? Soho ’s full of girls, but you got to find the right sort, you know. Nice clean girl, young, white, just started in the business not two months ago. It’s no good if you get one what ain’t clean, but this is a choice bit of brass, very young and pretty-”
I put my hands in my pockets. I had a gun in each pocket and neither one could do much damage. The smaller one fired blanks, while the other, somewhat more realistic in appearance, was a single piece of cast iron. Nigel had offered me my choice and I’d taken both of them.
“Care to see a blue film, mate? Just five nicker for a full show. A Yank, aren’t you? That’s twelve of your dollars. Used to be fourteen, but you get a break with the devaluation. Bargain day, isn’t it? There’s a full hour of films, new ones, some in color. A man and a woman, two men and a woman, a man and two women, two women together, a woman and a dog, a woman and-”
A taxi drew to a stop in front of the building I was watching. Julia got out of it and passed some coins to the driver. She went into the building and the cab stayed where it was. If Hyphen was by himself she would signal the driver, tipping me in the process.
“Sell you any bloody thing you want. French postcards, French ticklers, Spanish fly. Drugs I don’t handle, but I know them what does. See a live show? Not strippers, but me and a girl, fucking and sucking and all, and then you can have her yourself or not, your choice, and all it costs-”
A shade went up in the Hyphen apartment. I saw Julia wave to her driver, who, as it happened, had already driven off with another fare. Then she lowered the shade again.
“And hoping you won’t take offense, mate, but to each his own as they say, and would you fancy a young boy? You don’t look the sort, but I always ask, and-”
I tucked my chin into my coat collar, pitched my voice low, and changed my American accent for an English one. “Special Branch,” I murmured. “We don’t bother with touts and ponces as a rule, but unless you bugger off quick I might make an exception in your case.”
I kept my eyes on the ground as I said this, and when I looked up he was gone. I walked to the far corner, crossed the street, walked back to the doorway Julia had entered a few minutes earlier. No one seemed to be paying any particular attention to me. I went inside. The foyer wall displayed half a dozen three-by-five file cards – Model, French Model, Spanish Model, with names and apartment numbers. I wondered what real models called themselves.
The apartments on the first two floors housed models exclusively. There were two apartments on the third floor, our friend’s and one belonging to a model named Suzette. I suppose she had as much right to the name Suzette as he did to Wyndham-Jones. I put an ear to his door. I could hear voices, his and hers, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. I stepped back, and the door of Suzette’s apartment opened behind me and a man emerged. Suzette was close behind him, urging him to return soon. I turned to look at him, and he couldn’t have been more anxious to avoid me if I had been his father-in-law the vicar. He plunged madly down the stairs. I turned to look at Suzette. Her bright red lips curled in a smile and she dropped one eyelid in a wink.
“Hope you weren’t waiting long, love,” she said. “The time he took, I ought to charge him by the hour.” She had a little trouble with h’s. “Now don’t be a shy one. Come inside and we’ll get acquainted.”
She was wearing a shiny wrapper the color of her lipstick, and she had so much pancake on her face that it was impossible to guess what she might look like without it. She couldn’t have looked much worse.
“I’m waiting for a friend,” I said.
“Are you now?” Again the wink. “Come inside and we’ll wait together.” She minced across the hallway at me. “Suzie’ll show you a good time, ducks. You’ve no call to be bashful.”
I had the awful feeling that as soon as she got close enough she would make a grab at my fly. I reached into my inside pocket and came up with my U.S. passport, flipped it open, and flashed it at her.
“Cor,” she said. One hand flew to her throat. “I’m just a bleeding model, it’s a respectable occupation-”
“Fifth Squad,” I said. I have no idea what that is, or if there is one. “I’m backing up my partner, he’s upstairs. Might be wise of you to stay inside.”
Her eyes widened. “What’s on?”
“Spies.”
“Russians?”
I shrugged.
“Bleeding Communists,” she said. She opened her door, ducked inside, then out again. “When you’ve done,” she said, “you might stop in for a cuppa.” Then she mercifully drew her door shut, and I put my passport away.
I stood there for another five minutes. At one point a midget passed me on his way downstairs. I tried not to guess where he had been or what he had been doing. Then I heard steps approaching Mr. Hyphen’s door. I put both hands in my pockets, drew out both guns, and decided on the one with the blanks. I stood close to the wall alongside the door.
There was the sound of the bolt being drawn. Then the knob turned, and he opened the door and held it for Julia. I walked in as she came out, digging the nose of the pistol into his middle.
“All right,” I said. “Back up now. Close the door, Julia. Now back off, friend, and turn around nice and slow, and keep your hands in the air.”
He backed off, and he put his hands in the air, but he didn’t turn around. He was my height, eight or ten years younger, and many pounds heavier. I saw at once what Julia meant about his eyes. They were cold, opaque, utterly lacking in depth. In my part of New York boys with eyes like that are very good with knives.
Slowly, his hands came down again. “Not bloody likely,” he said. “You aren’t about to shoot, are you, china?” Rhyming slang, I thought stupidly; china, china plate, mate. “Not a peeler, and there’s not a pin here for stealing, so just who in bleeding hell are you?” He took a step toward me. “Better let me take that toy before you hurt yourself.”
So I pointed the gun at his gut and fired.
It didn’t sound much like a truck backfiring. What it sounded like was a.38-caliber automatic. For an instant it must have felt like that, too, because he fell back as if shot and stared down in horror at the spot in his middle where the bullet would have gone had the gun contained one.
His face had just begun to register the fact that he hadn’t been shot when I took the other fake pistol, the cast-iron one, and bounced it off the side of his head.
I turned to Julia. She stood motionless and open-mouthed, a bronze casting entitled “Astonishment.” “Get into the hall,” I said. “You want to know where the shot came from; it sounded as though it came from upstairs. Remember what a fine actress you are. Hurry!”
She did a good job. I locked the door behind her and listened to the hubbub outside while I got Mr. Hyphen properly trussed up. There was a substantial stuffed chair with molded wooden arms. I wrestled him into it and used a roll of picture-hanging wire to fasten him in place, his arms to the chair’s arms, his feet to its legs, and the rest of him to the back and seat of it. I was in a hurry, and that sort of work isn’t my favorite diversion anyway – I can’t wrap a Christmas present properly, let alone a person. So I don’t suppose I did the sort of job that would have left Houdini hamstrung, but that wasn’t the idea. I just wanted this clown to stay in one place while I asked him questions.