The street was blocked off by a checkpoint. Frankham shivered in his gabardine and slipped on his phones, adjusting the wire cassette until swing plugged directly into his brain. The Glenn Miller remix fed his jumping synapses. Pennsylvania 6-5,000.
“Pass on, please,” said a constable, waving pedestrians by. Soldiers in berets that seemed black in the night shoved the refugees against a wall and patted their pockets for contraband. The Herald had run an expose, indicting bogus refugees as the worst of the black marketeers.
Somewhere, far away, perhaps across the river, was the crump of a big explosion. Another one.
Frankham strode on. He was behind schedule.
The War Room wasn’t as overpopulated as the Shelter. It was more expensive and coupons were short since the bank freeze. But after his write-up, it would be the Next Place.
Frankham sipped a reasonable cocktail and leant backward on the bar-rail with proprietorial insouciance. The dance floor was a map of the European theater. Hostesses with pointers shoved toy ships and model troop dispositions about. They wore khaki skirts and had their hair done up under peaked caps. They all had sex appeal in buckets.
The Old Man himself, or rather a working simulacrum thereof, sat on the bandstand, bulging his boiler suit like a giant baby, puffing on a jutting cigar, and sampling famous sayings into nonstop swing.
“We shall fight them… fight them… fight them…”
A black couple in US army uniform combined acrobatically, the man standing on Belgium and lifting his scissor-legged partner over his head, vaulting her from Normandy Beach to Peenemunde. Her skirts divided and closed like a snapping trap.
“… on the beaches… the beaches… the beaches…”
The dancers were probably with the management. They were too good to be civvies.
Everyone was given a cigar as they came in. Frankham had dumped his in a bucket of sand, but plenty lit up, adding to the smoke-filled room fug that hung under the ceiling, obscuring the lights.
The specialty dancers reached a frenzied climax, dry-humping and rolling across France like the Eighth Army. The Old Man turned a blubbery cartwheel on the bandstand, padding wriggling. Dresden exploded in a three-foot flame which whooshed around the legs of dancers, blowing up skirts to reveal suspenders and camiknickers. Harmless miniature fire-bursts sparked all around, singeing a few, producing squeals of drunken delight.
“Never before… I said before,” the Old Man rumbled like a public school Foghorn Leghorn. “In the field of human conf… I said human conflict, has so much, and I mean sooooo much, been owed…”
In a sense, Frankham reflected, it was all owed to him.
Frankham had seen it coming a year or so back, when the first big-band tracks leaked into the clubs just as the PM was denying plans had been laid to reintroduce rationing. He had written about it in cutting-edge ’zines, then the overground press. The Blitz Spirit was returning in style. When the Austerity line of fashions hit shops just as the bombing campaign shifted from public transport to department store, the battle to stay in fashion racked up its first casualties and more eager recruits enlisted. “Theme Museums” offering realistic simulacra of the darkest hours opened, bombarding the civvies with special effects. Hair salons became barbers’ shops, and stylists became skilled in straight-razoring ’tachs to pencil lines. De Havilland sound systems swept from the East End into the city, reproducing stuttering swing and syrup sentiment. The British film industry, with Ministry of Information funding, turned out cheap but successful remakes of: The Foreman Went to France, One of Our Planes is Missing, and The Goose Steps Out. When the BBC repeated ’Allo ’Allo and Dad’s Army to higher viewing figures than the soaps, bombs fell on Albert Square and Brookside Close in retaliation, Euro-talks in Hamburg ground to an unresolvable deadlock, with ambassadors constantly on the point of recall. The spiv look alternated with the uniform style and there was much confusion over just who was entitled to wear British Army combat fatigues. Every West End theater had its wartime revue running; Andrew Lloyd Webber turned the Colditz story into a musical smash while Cameron Mackintosh produced Every Night Something Awful. Frankham had already signed for a coffee-table book on the movement. It was to be called The Finest Hour.
As he emerged into Cavendish Square, a knot of SS skins were being turned away from the War Room. The skinhead Gruppenfuhrer spat abuse at the Tommy on the door, biting down on harsh German phrases like cyanide-filled teeth. The Tommy stood his ground.
There’d been a brief shooting war on Remembrance Sunday, Nouveau Nazis skirmishing with flight-uniformed young men who called themselves the Few. It had been blown up in the papers, but the factions had chased each other up and down Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane, trading wild shots and smashing windows.
It was hard to get a cab. Frankham ambled along Margaret Street toward Regent Street and found a corner he could hail from. Standing on the pavement, he was aware of shapes crouched in the alley behind. Three sexless figures lay, their lower bodies swaddled in dirty sleeping-bags. Blank insectile eyes stood out in black-snouted faces. Gas masks.
There was a rush of noise and a whisk of air and Frankham dropped to the ground. Then came the flash and a scatter of hot ashes.
It had been close, maybe a street away. He turned and stood, and saw thin but giant flames shooting up above All Souls, Langham Place, and Broadcasting House. That one must have been an incendiary. It had fallen somewhere up on Great Portland Street, near the Post Office.
Fire-engines clanked and people were running toward and away from the explosion. Just standing, he was jostled. He patted the dust from his gabardine and stung his palm on a hot spark.
“… mumble, mumble,” said a gas mask.
“Pardon?” he said involuntarily.
“Mustn’t grumble,” the gas mask repeated.
“Worse things happen at sea,” another mask confirmed.
In the Troy Club, a Boffin, hand fused with a tumbler of Glenfiddich, tried to explain the nature of ghosts and time.
“… a collective wish can summon aspects of the past, invoke them if you will, actually bring into being objects or persons long gone…”
Frankham ignored the bespectacled loon and ordered a stiffish Gin and It. From the barman, who had patent-leather hair, hooded eyes, and a white dinner-jacket.
“Close scrape, I’ve just had,” he said.
“If it’s got your name on it, not much you can do, sir.”
Frankham threw the drink at the back of his throat. The stinging behind his eyes calmed him.
“Shook me up, I must say.”
The Troy always had the wireless on. A clubman spun the dial on the waist-high laminated cabinet, trying to find ITMA. He could only get purred news announcements about the latest raids and spun on at random. The wireless coughed out a sample of ranting Adolf, passed John Peel introducing Ambrose, then scratched into “The Lambeth Walk.”
“Bloody bad show, this,” snorted a Blimp who was having his ear bent by the Boffin. “Young turks have done for us well and proper. Too many green hands on the tiller, you know. All the good men pensioned off and put out to pasture.”
An airman, barely old enough to raise a ’tache, drank quietly and seriously at the bar, ignoring the Blimp and the Boffin. His hands were shaking almost unnoticeably.
“I should be up there,” he said, thumbing toward the ceiling. “I was due aloft tonight, but they canceled the scramble. Bomb or something. Fifth columnists, they say.”