Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  “Yes?” It was a woman’s voice. “Can I help you?” Young, and a bit unsure of herself.

  Lucien leaned slightly toward the intercom. “I hope so. I am looking for a produce importer for some markets I recently bought. I was hoping you could help me.”

  “Oh.” She sounded as if she’d been expecting something else. There was a pause, then the door buzzed, and Lucien went inside. A young woman in a long sweater was getting up from her chair, behind a plexiglass shield; she pulled one of the panels aside.

  “I’m afraid it’s Mr. Crawford you would want to talk to about that,” she said as Lucien approached. “Mr. Crawford is in charge of all of our accounts. He’d know what to tell you.” There was a magazine lying open on her desk, with a picture of Mel Gibson at the wheel of an open car. Lucien turned down the collar of his coat. “Mr. Crawford is the one you’d need to talk to,” she repeated, staring with some fascination at Calais. “He handles all the business here.”

  “Fine,” Lucien replied, giving her his most persuasive smile. “I would like to talk to Mr. Crawford then.”

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s not possible. Not just now, anyway. Mr. Crawford’s at the dentist—chipped his tooth, just this morning, on a chicken bone. Chicken—isn’t that funny? I never heard of that happening.” She was taking in Lucien’s velvet-collared overcoat, his silk scarf, the rich gloss of his handmade shoes—and he wanted her to do it. He wanted her to feel impressed, comfortable, and above all, cooperative with him.

  “And when do you think Mr. Crawford will be back?” he asked.

  “Oh, I really couldn’t say. He was positively howling when he left here. Might not be in again until tomorrow.”

  Lucien looked purposely troubled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, thoughtfully touching his lower lip; he noticed her eyes fix on his ruby ring. “I am only in London for such a short time, and I wanted to get this all settled before I left.” He dropped his hand, and her gaze, for a split second, followed it down. “I’ve bought several neighborhood markets, in the East End, around Shoreditch.”

  “I have an aunt who lives out there.”

  “Do you?” Lucien said, simulating surprise and interest. “And what do you think of the area? I think it looks like a good area to invest in—lots of new people moving in, lots of opportunity. But then I’m in London so seldom. What do you think?”

  Flattered that he should be so interested in her opinion, she rattled on about her aunt, the neighborhood, all the new immigrants moving in (here, he noted, she slowed down a bit, as if to make sure she didn’t slip and say anything derogatory to someone so foreign-looking himself) He glanced, discreetly, into the tiny untenanted office that opened up behind her, but all he could see were filing cabinets, a wall calendar, a hot plate with a coffeepot on it. He waited until she took a breath, then said, “I’m so glad you agree. With such a large Indian and Asian population moving in, I want to be sure to stock the appropriate produce.”

  “Oh, yes, well then, that’s our specialty.”

  “So I understood. But with Mr. Crawford out of the office, is there anyone else I could talk to while I’m here?”

  She bit her lip. “Right now, there’s nobody here but me—aside from Terry, of course, in back.”

  “Terry?”

  “He does the unloading.” She lowered her voice. “Just a stock boy, really.”

  “But you keep your stock in back then?”

  “Yes. In the warehouse.”

  “Would it be possible for me to see what you’ve got?”

  She bit her lip again. “It’s not done, generally. Mr. Crawford, he says nobody but Terry’s ever supposed to go back there.”

  “And I’m sure he’s right,” Lucien was quick to assure her. “I’m sure Mr. Crawford wants to be sure no one has an accident back there, falling over a crate or such.” He smiled, confidently. “But I don’t think I’ll be in any danger, do you? I’ve never tripped over anything in my life.” And he knew that she believed him.

  “Well, perhaps I can call Mr. Crawford at the dentist, and ask if it would be all right. You are going to be a new customer, right? He won’t want to be turning away business.”

  “Quite right,” said Lucien, “but I don’t think we need to bother him when he’s having enough trouble as it is. Why not simply have a bit of good news for him when he gets back?” There was a sheet-metal door to the left of the plexiglass window the girl was standing behind—a lot of security, Lucien thought, for a small agricultural warehouse—and he moved toward it smoothly. “Give Terry a holler, why don’t you, to let him know I’m coming back for a quick look-around. I’ve got an appointment in Kensington in half an hour, so it’ll have to be quick.” He put his hand on the doorknob, and a second later, she buzzed him through.

  Once he was on the other side of the door, she looked even more uncertain of herself. He could see now that she had thick legs, and a pair of loud argyle socks on her feet. As if she knew he’d just noticed them, she wriggled her toes and said, “Gets chilly in here, even in the summertime.”

  “Looks like you’ve found the perfect solution.” He smiled again, to show his good intentions. “The warehouse is back this way?”

  “Yes, but I think I’d better take you there myself.” She slid the glass panel closed, latched it, folded up her magazine and stuck it in a drawer—in case Mr. Crawford came back unexpectedly, Lucien thought?—and then said, “It’s just down here . . . and I can’t let you stay more than a minute or two.”

  “That’s all the time I’ve got,” Lucien reiterated.

  He followed her down a short hallway, covered with threadbare carpeting, and through another locked doorway, to which she carried a key in the pocket of her sweater. When she opened the door, a gust of cold, and pungent, air swept over them.

  “Terry?” she called out. “Terry?”

  There wasn’t any answer.

  “He’s got to be in here,” she said, pulling her sweater closed.

  The warehouse was maybe a hundred feet long, with a high ceiling, cement floor, and towering stacks of wooden crates.

  “Terry? Where are you?”

  She went down a pair of concrete steps, then into a narrow aisle running along the center of the room. Looking to the right, and then the left, she searched for the elusive stock boy. Lucien followed, noting as he did so the shipping orders and contents stenciled on the side of each crate.

  There was a lot of the usual stuff, from apples to lettuce, along with several containers marked with more exotic contents, like mangoes and durians. This would be the sort of produce sold in markets like the ones he’d invented in Shoreditch.

  Still, he hadn’t seen exactly what he was looking for.

  “So there you are,” he heard the girl say. “No wonder you didn’t hear me.”

  Lucien came around the comer of another stack of crates. Terry was sitting on an upturned box, with a Sony Walkman clamped over his ears. Seeing them, he pulled the earphones off; Lucien could hear the tinny sound of a screeching guitar.

  “Crawford’s back?” he said.

  “No. He’s still at the dentist.”

  “Who’s this?”

  She started to introduce Lucien, then realized she didn’t know.

  “The name is Sri Halim,” he said. “I’ve bought some markets in the East End, and I need a new produce importer.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Crawford about that.” He had lank brown hair falling over his forehead, and a pasty, unpleasant face. “He’s not supposed to be in here, you know,” he said to the girl.

  “He just wanted to see what we’ve got,” she said. “He’s a new customer, isn’t he?”

  Clicking off the Walkman, Terry stood up and straightened his leather jacket; he had on a pair of worn jeans and heavy black work boots. He was a couple of inches shorter than Lucien, but solidly built. “We’ve got everything,” he said. “But if you want prices and all that, you’ll have to talk to Crawford.”

&n
bsp; “So I gathered.” Lucien looked around, as if to assess the stock.

  “And I think you’d better come back sometime he’s here.”

  “Don’t have time,” Lucien said, strolling a few feet away. He’d seen what he was looking for—a stack of crates exported from Bangkok by A.C.S., Ltd., via Liverpool. It was too soon for these to have been in the shipment he saw loaded, but at least it proved the two companies conducted regular business. “I see you’ve got fresh lichee nuts,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the top crate. “I expect to move quite a lot of these.” Idly, he lifted the lid of the crate, and glanced in; removing one of the hard, and scaly, nuts, he sniffed at it, tapped it with his fingernail, tossed it back into the crate. None of the other boxes was marked, as he’d hoped, ginger or lotus roots.

  “Look, mate, I told you we’ve got everything you’ll need. Just leave it. Bettina, show the man out, why don’t you, before Crawford gets back and kicks both of our asses?”

  “All right, all right, Terry—I was just trying to drum up a bit of business for the firm, you know. And I’m sure Mr.—” She stopped short, not remembering.

  “Halim,” Lucien offered.

  “Mr. Halim will be grateful for our help.”

  “Very.”

  “Be grateful all you want—outside,” Terry said.

  Lucien made a small bow from the waist, with his hands pressed together, and looked directly into Terry’s eyes; he wanted to be able to pick this face out of a crowd. Terry scowled back, a lock of greasy hair flopping over one eye. Turning, Lucien went back down the center aisle, up the cement steps, and into the office warren once again. As soon as the door to the warehouse was closed, and locked, Bettina apologized for Terry’s behavior—"I don’t know why they keep him on"—and offered Lucien a business card with Mr. Crawford’s full name and phone number on it. “He’s usually here by eight,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Lucien said, glancing at the card—Mr. Thomas Crawford, Operations Manager—before slipping it into the pocket of his overcoat. “But tell me—if Mr. Crawford is only the manager, who actually owns Lady Birch Farms?”

  Bettina looked as if it had never occurred to her even to ask. “I really couldn’t say,” she replied. “I just act as if Mr. Crawford does.”

  “Probably the best policy all around,” Lucien said. Smiling again, he thanked her for all her help, and left. He was several steps away from the office, when the door opened again and he heard her call, “Mr. Halim?”

  “Yes?”

  Just her head was poking out of the doorway. “Could you not mention to Mr. Crawford that I let you into the warehouse?”

  “Right,” he said. “But won’t Terry say something about it?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about Terry. I could cook his goose in five minutes, and he knows it.”

  Lucien waved one hand—her eyes flicked again to the ruby ring—and continued on. Hun was waiting just down the block, behind the wheel of the Bentley.

  “This is the place you looked for?” Hun asked, as Lucien settled himself into the backseat.

  “Yes . . . this is the place.”

  “Where now?”

  Lucien had to consider for a moment. Was there something else he could accomplish while he was here, or should he just head straight back to the hotel to comb over the paperwork he’d been handed at Lloyd’s? From a nearby alley, he heard the sputter, and then the roar, of a motorcycle being kicked into gear. Hun, idling the engine, turned up the heat inside the car.

  Looking out the side window, Lucien saw a man on a red motorcycle, with flames painted on the gas tank, emerge from the alley and without so much as slowing down, tear into the side street.

  Even with the helmet, also red, covering his entire head, Lucien knew who it was; it was Terry. He recognized the leather jacket, jeans, and work boots.

  “Follow that man!” Lucien said, leaning forward and batting Hun on the shoulder. “Don’t lose him!”

  Hun put the car into gear, and took off down the street.

  Terry had paused for a lorry at the corner, before roaring across the intersection.

  Lucien could see, through the windshield, that he had a saddlebag strapped across his shoulders, with the flap of an envelope peeking out. Though he might never know what was in the package, Lucien thought, at least he could find out where it was being delivered. Maybe it was just going to the dentist’s office, where Crawford was having his tooth fixed. And maybe it was going somewhere more important.

  Either way, it was worth a shot.

  “Don’t let him know we’re here,” Lucien said, and Hun nodded; he’d already have known that. It was standard procedure.

  Terry hung a sharp left, and then another. There wasn’t much traffic in these streets, which meant Hun had to hang back a little farther than usual to keep from being spotted. When they hit the main thoroughfare, Tooley Street, he closed the gap a bit, relying on the other cars to provide camouflage.

  Not that Terry showed any signs that he was worried about being followed. At one corner, he abruptly stopped, jumped off his motorcycle, and ran into a tobacconist’s for something. A minute later, he was off and running again. He made his way steadily westward, weaving his way in and out of the traffic, leaning on his bike, until Lucien gathered that he was planning to cross the river again, probably at the Westminster Bridge.

  He did just that, with Hun and Lucien following two cars behind. Progress was very slow, and Lucien’s eye alternated between the back of Terry’s helmet and the majestic spires of the Houses of Parliament, rising on the opposite bank. In the pale afternoon sun, they had a kind of sombre, golden glow about them, as if the carved stone and casement windows were radiating, and not reflecting, the wintry light.

  Terry, apparently fed up with the crawling pace of the bridge traffic, suddenly swerved to one side and made his own lane where there wasn’t one; he shot forward, and there was nothing Hun could do but wait for the cars ahead of him to get out of the way. Lucien banged the back of the seat in frustration.

  “Damn! We’re going to lose him!”

  “Nothing we can do,” Hun said philosophically.

  But that didn’t make Lucien feel any better. It was at least a minute before the normal traffic started moving again, and another minute or two before they had crossed over the Victoria Embankment and down onto Great George Street. Lucien had little hope of finding him again; by now, he could have gone in any direction.

  “Back to the hotel,” Lucien said dispiritedly, leaning back in the rear compartment again. Damn; he’d really begun to hope for something from this chase, and he was sorely disappointed to lose his quarry so late in the game. He might have been onto something. Still, they hadn’t been taken too far out of their way; they were now just a short drive away from the Connaught, where Lucien could go up to his suite, kick off his shoes, and put in a call to Epstein in New York.

  Or Hallie in Milan.

  Of course, with Hallie the chances of catching her in her hotel room were slight. If she wasn’t out on the town somewhere, with her friends Aline and Lisa in tow, she was probably pirouetting down a runway lined with photographers and popping flashbulbs, or sitting in a makeup chair, leafing through a magazine, while the hair stylist fluffed and brushed and . . .

  “Pull over!” Lucien said. “Pull over and wait.”

  From the side window, Lucien had caught a glimpse of a red motorcycle—and it was parked outside of another tobacconist’s shop . . . just as Terry had done once before.

  Was it Terry’s? And was this some kind of delivery—or pickup—route that he was on? Lucien looked back through the rear window, and now he was sure it was Terry’s motorcycle. It had the same distinctive flames painted on the gas tank.

  A moment later, Terry himself popped out of the shop, hitched up his trousers, and climbed on the motorcycle again. He took off toward Buckingham Palace, with Hun following close behind; in this neighborhood and traffic, the Bentley was hardly conspicuou
s. And this time, there were no more stops. With the saddlebag still strapped over his shoulder, Terry wheeled around the Queen Victoria Memorial and his engine roaring, headed north along the perimeter of St. James’s Park. For a moment, Lucien thought he might be out of luck after all; what if Terry simply rounded the park and returned toward Southwark and the Lady Birch Farms warehouse? Should he follow him all that way back, just to see?

  But just past the imposing block of Marlborough House, Terry made an abrupt left turn, into Pall Mall and the exclusive region of the prestigious old men’s clubs. He even slowed down.

  Lucien felt that the next stop was not going to be another tobacconist’s.

  And he was right.

  Sitting up straighter in the saddle now, Terry piloted the motorcycle to a slow stop in front of one of the many stately facades. Lucien had to look carefully to see the name of the club chiseled neatly into the slate-gray stone: The Commonwealth, it said, just below a polished brass lamp.

  Terry had parked the motorcycle at the curb, taken off his helmet, and pulled the envelope out of the saddlebag. Instead of going up the steps to the main entrance, he went around to one side, and down several steps to what must have been a trade entrance. While Hun idled the Bentley across the street, Lucien watched as Terry rang the bell, bobbed up and down in place waiting for an answer, then rang again, impatiently. When the door did open, Terry handed the envelope through, exchanged a few words, then bounded up the steps again, in his heavy black boots. At the curb, he stopped to light a cigarette, and sat on his cycle to smoke it.

  Lucien would have liked to know who that envelope had been addressed to at the Commonwealth Club, but he knew whoever had come to the door would never tell him. And he didn’t want to wait there in the car any longer, and risk having Terry take some notice of them.