SELFRIDGES
I don’t like Oxford Street on the best of days—and let me tell you now, December 24, isn’t one of them. Bond Street Station had been doing a good impersonation of the Black Hole of Calcutta and Lauren and I were glad to get out. But there was little relief outside. The Christmas rush had turned into the Christmas panic and the season seemed to have run pretty short of goodwill. Taxi drivers blasted their horns. Bus drivers leaned out of their windows and swore. You couldn’t blame them. The traffic probably hadn’t moved since December 22. There were so many people clawing their way along the pavement that you couldn’t see the cracks. And everyone was carrying bulging bags. Of food, of decorations, of last-minute presents. I sighed. Herbert was still in jail.
He’d been there almost a week now. It looked like Christmas for me was going to be the Queen’s speech and two frozen turkey croquettes.
But there was Selfridges with its white pillars, gold clocks, and flags fluttering across the roof. Somewhere inside the department store—in the food section—Johnny Naples had seen something that could have made him five million dollars. The thought cheered me up. I clutched the Maltesers. Lauren had loaned me a sort of shoulder bag and I had brought the candies with me. I wouldn’t have felt easy without them.
We crossed the road, weaving between the traffic, and went in the front entrance. We were greeted by a cloud of sweet, sickly scent. This was the perfume department. They stocked all the perfumes in the world—and you could smell them all at once.
“Do you want to try this one?”
A pretty girl leaned over a counter, holding a bottle of af tershave toward me. I shook my head. She had a nice face. But she was a couple of years early.
It was hot inside Selfridges. The air had been chewed up by giant air-conditioners and spat out again. That was how it smelled. Secondhand. We went into the menswear department, following the signs that read FOOD.
“Come along and meet Santa Claus on the third floor in Santa’s Workshop.” The voice came out of invisible speakers, floating above the heat and the crowd.
“See all your favorite nursery rhymes. On the third floor. It’s open now.”
The food department was even worse than perfume and menswear. It was like nuclear war had just been announced. The shelves were being stripped, the salespeople bullied. I felt Lauren put her hand around my arm.
“This way,” she said.
“I’m with you.” But it was an effort. Relax for a minute and I’d have been swept away on a river of rampant consumerism, drowned in a lake of last-minute shopping.
“If we get separated, we can meet outside Marks and Spencer,” she said. “It’s just across the road.”
We made our way around the center section of the food department, which was more or less like any supermarket. There were separate bars here and there—juice, sandwiches, and cookies—but most people were ignoring them. The meat counter was at the back. There was a number in what looked like a car headlight, hanging from the ceiling. Every few seconds there was a loud buzzing and the number changed. NOW SERVING 1108, it read when we got there. It buzzed again: 1109. A clutch of housewives stared up at it. They were all clutching tickets like they’d just gone in for some sort of raffle.
So Selfridges sold sausages. I could see them through the glass front of the cabinet. They looked very nice. I’m sure they tasted great. But I didn’t see what that had meant to Johnny Naples. What did sausages have to do with the Falcon?
“Lauren . . .” I began.
“He was standing here,” she said. “Then he suddenly turned around and went that way.” She pointed.
“You mean he went straight ahead?”
“No. We’d come from that way. He retraced his steps.”
I followed in the footsteps of the dead dwarf. They took me completely around the central supermarket, past the nuts, and into the fruits, where some fancy items nestled among the plums and Granny Smiths. BRAZILIAN LOQUATS, $3.50 LB., a sign read. That was probably a bargain if you knew what to do with a loquat. After that it was chocolates and then the checkout aisles. There was a row of six of them—with six women in brown coats and white straw hats. Five of them were ringing up prices on their registers like they were typing a novel. The sixth was just passing the purchases over a little glass panel in the counter and the prices were coming up automatically.
But I still hadn’t seen anything that made me any the wiser. As far as I could see, Selfridges didn’t even sell Maltesers.
“It was here,” Lauren said.
“Here—what?” I sounded tired and depressed. Maybe that was because I was. It had been a wild-goose chase and I didn’t even have enough money to go back to the meat counter and buy a wild goose.
“He knew,” Lauren insisted. “He was standing where you were. And he suddenly smiled . . .”
I looked around and suddenly I wasn’t smiling at all. There was a door opposite, leading into the street. Two men had just come in with the crowd. I think I saw them a few seconds before they saw me.
“Lauren,” I whispered.
“What?”
I gestured. They’d changed since our first encounter, but I’d have recognized Gott and Himmell anywhere. They were still wearing identical suits—pale green with embroidered vests this time. But Himmell’s left arm was now in a cast. Gott was walking with a cane. Both men had so many bandages on their face that I could hardly see any skin. But the skin I could see wasn’t looking too healthy.
“You told them about the sausages,” I said.
“Of course I told them,” Lauren growled. “They were going to give me some more of their fairy cakes.”
She’d told them. They’d come to look at the food department for themselves. And now they’d seen us.
“Let’s move,” I said.
We moved.
We ducked to the left—through an archway and down a flight of stairs past wines and spirits. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Gott giving Himmell some hurried instructions. A moment later I collided with a pair of little old ladies. With a little old screech they flew into a pile of crystallized fruit, which collapsed all around them. I didn’t stop to apologize. “Manners maketh man,” my father used to say. But Gott and Himmell weren’t far behind. And they had every good reason to unmaketh me.
“Which way?” Lauren asked.
I stopped. There was a door leading out to Orchard Street, but it was blocked with about a dozen people fighting their way in. That left us a choice of three or four directions.
“Wait a minute, Lauren . . .” I said.
I was about to say that this was ridiculous. Gott and Himmell might be crazy, but there was no way they were going to try anything. Not in the middle of Selfridges on Christmas Eve. I was going to say that they’d wait for us outside and that we’d have to give them the slip when we left. I was going to say—
But right then a cabinet of watches behind my head exploded. Just like that. Glass flew out in glittering fragments. A salesgirl screamed. I spun around. Gott was standing at the top of the stairs. He was holding a gun. It was silenced, so there had been no bang. But it was smoking. And nobody had noticed. They hadn’t heard anything and they were too busy with their shopping to stop anyway.
“That way!” I cried.
Lauren went one way. I went another.
She must have missed the way I was pointing. She ran down a corridor back into menswear while I made for the escalator. There was no time to hesitate. And perhaps it was for the best. We had a better chance of getting away if we split up.
“The meeting place for customers who have lost their companions is on the lower ground floor . . .” The voice poured soothingly out of the speakers. Lauren had certainly lost me. But unless I lost the Germans, our only meeting place would be the morgue.