A few echoing footsteps away from the ghost of Holywell Street, the alley in which Dortmunder’s barber shop was located had survived the swing of the wrecking ball. Inchball half-suspected that this was because the demolition team had not been able to find it, not because it didn’t deserve to be torn down. It was as dirty, dark, crooked and claustrophobic a passageway as any you might find in a medieval town. Once you passed through the whitewashed arch that separated it from the Strand, you entered into a squalid underworld begrimed with black soot, the pavement littered with dank scraps, and broken by great standing puddles into which it was unwise to venture, for fear that they might be bottomless sinkholes. Children dressed in little more than rags clustered in the rotten doorways. Too exhausted to beg, they eyed every intruder with sullen, lifeless suspicion.
It was the shop’s location that had first attracted Inchball’s attention. Some of the clientele he had noticed frequenting the shop could safely be classified as ‘toffs’. Foreigners, admittedly, but toffs all the same. Why on earth should such men choose this shabby little barber shop in a god-forsaken blind alley? Unless they had some nefarious purpose in going there.
Whatever the guv’nor might say about his plan, there was method to his madness.
The shop front protruded in a bulbous bay, with an old-fashioned leaded window. The sign above it advertised: FRITZ Dortmunder, BARBER.
Another sign, over the door, read: HAIR CUTTING, SHAVING, SHAMPOOING, SINGEING.
The shop was tiny. If you entered it hoping for relief from the narrowness of the alley, you would be disappointed. However, it was certainly spruce inside. The floor was freshly swept. Every surface was spotless. Gleaming implements were arranged in impeccable order. Mirrors glinted. The metallic components of the adjustable chairs shone as if they had just been polished. The air was scented with talc, hair oil and incense, no doubt burning to disguise the inescapable smell of damp and sewer gas.
There were two chairs in the shop. Yet in all the years he had been casually keeping an eye on this place, he had only ever seen one barber working in there, the man he presumed to be Dortmunder. The surplus chair added to the cramped atmosphere. The shop seemed full even before a single customer entered.
Dortmunder was seated in one of the chairs reading a newspaper when Inchball entered. It was an English newspaper, the Clarion. Inchball couldn’t decide whether this was more or less suspicious than if he had found him reading a German newspaper.
Dortmunder folded the paper away and sprang to his feet, dusting the cracked leather seat of the chair with a cloth. He then bowed to Inchball and gave what might have been a slight click of the heels. ‘Please be seated, good sir.’ He gestured to the chair he had just vacated. ‘I was keeping it warm for you!’ The man betrayed barely a hint of an accent; it was more that there was something uncertain and alien about the cadence of his speech. This in itself was deeply suspicious.
The man’s obsequious joviality did nothing to reassure Inchball. He had read enough spy literature to know that this was precisely the tactic these individuals adopted to put their victims at ease.
Physically, Dortmunder was a dapper little man, dressed in an immaculate apron and wearing silver wire-rimmed glasses. It was perhaps as well that he was no bigger than he was, otherwise he would not have fitted in his shop. His hair was dark and cut in a severe short back and sides, which Inchball thought of as being particularly Germanic. The extraordinary crispness of the cut at first inspired confidence, but then led Inchball to speculate on the question of who barbers got to cut their own hair, or whether they somehow contrived to do it themselves. He half-remembered a riddle, something to do with choosing between the only two barbers in a village. One had an excellent haircut, the other had a terrible one. Of course, the answer was you chose the man with the bad haircut. Which meant that Dortmunder’s own hair was no recommendation at all. It was simply some kind of trick.
‘You speak very good English,’ Inchball commented as he lowered himself gingerly on to the seat. Inchball was enough of a detective to disguise the suspicion in the question. He made it sound like a compliment.
Dortmunder shook out a dark blue sheet and threw around Inchball, fastening at the back of his neck. ‘Of course. My parents brought me to this country when I was a boy. It has been my home all these years. Now, sir, what can I do for you?’
‘Just a trim.’
‘Very good, sir. And after that, perhaps, hot towels and a shave? It is a speciality of the house.’
‘I don’t think so. Not today.’
Dortmunder started on the haircut, wielding the scissors with convincing dexterity. If he was not a professional barber, he had pretended to be one for long enough to more than pass muster. ‘But today, there is no charge. I think it is your first time in my shop, is it not?’
Inchball nodded. The scissor blades snapped eagerly over his head, sending tiny dark sparks flying.
‘Yes. Very well, as it is your first time here. And I am not busy. I will give you the full treatment for no extra charge. If you like it, you will come back. And next time, it will not be free. Perhaps you will become a regular customer. But is it really your first time here?’
Dortmunder pinched tufts of hair between outstretched fingers and made a cut of surgical precision. Inchball watched him in the mirror. The German’s technique matched that of any other barber he had visited. He worked carefully but swiftly, gently tilting Inchball’s head with his fingertips each time he needed to adjust his angle of attack. There was something mesmerising about the deftness of his touch. Inchball seemed to fall into a light trance. It was some time before he answered the question that had been left hanging: ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Your face seems familiar, somehow. I have a good memory for faces. I study them in the mirror, you see.’ And at this point the two men exchanged a look in which each seemed to challenge the other to frankness. And if the meaning of Inchball’s look was Are you really a barber? then equally, the meaning of Dortmunder’s was Can you really be a customer? But of course, neither man gave voice to whatever suspicions they might have been harbouring, except obliquely, perhaps with an edge of mischievous sarcasm, Dortmunder said, ‘Are you a star of the moving pictures? I do like to go to the kinematograph shows. Perhaps I have seen you in one of the films? Playing a detective perhaps?’
‘No. I’m not in films.’
‘But I have seen your face, upon my life. Are you sure you have not been to my shop before?’
‘I have walked past a couple times. And looked in.’
‘And now you have plucked up your courage to come in. So, you are entitled to hot towels and a shave at no extra charge. What do you say to that?’
‘I don’t really …’
‘Good, it is settled! Now, please, good sir. You will sit back and relax and allow me to perform the services for which I am justly famous. And if you like what I will have done, you may tell your friends, no?’
So it was that Inchball came to sink back into the barber’s chair and consented to have his face covered in what he had every reason to believe were narcotic-infused hot towels.
Immersed in a fragrant, seductive darkness, he found that it was not such a bad place to be after all. Dortmunder was massaging the crown of his head and speaking to him in a low, constant murmur.
‘It is good, no? The steam from the towels, it opens up your pores and relaxes your skin. Close your eyes, please. You may go to sleep if you wish. You are in my safe hands.’
The gentle teasing pressure on his scalp was an elusive, strangely ambiguous pleasure, at times not a pleasure at all, but never, quite, unpleasant. It made him think of birds alighting. As soon as he thought of this, the sensation ceased. He found that he instantly missed it.