Bloody London

by Reggie Nadelson

  The kids waited. A cheap electric clock ticked. The umbrella dripped. Eventually the cop in the cage told them their friend was at another station house, and they left. They had been sent from one station house to another all night long. The cop in the cage resumed eating French fries. I could smell the grease.

  “Artie, hey! Welcome to London, man. Like the weather?” Jack Cotton bounded down the stairs, his hand out. “Nice to meet you finally,” he said, escorting me up to his office, settling me in an armchair the other side of his metal desk. He buzzed a console, asked for coffee. “This is a phenomenal pleasure – I mean, after all these years we’ve been talking – to actually meet you.”

  I hooked up with Jack Cotton when I was still in the department. I kept in touch after I went freelance, but I’d never met him in the flesh. He was the best contact I ever found overseas. John Ivan Looksmart Cotton; calls himself Jack. He was an easy-going guy, medium size, medium height, medium brown, compact, muscular but comfortable, and humorous. I liked him. He wore black jeans, denim shirt, knitted silk tie, battered leather jacket.

  I must have talked to Jack a hundred times on the phone. There’s a lot of heavy traffic between New York and London, it’s the big money axis in pretty much every area: drugs, industrials, communications, illegals, people and body parts, intellectual property – meaning books and movies, stuff like that – even plain old money. And real estate.

  You can’t investigate in New York these days without overseas connections, and London’s a clearing house for Europe, Asia, Africa. I can get information plenty of places, computer stuff, police files, but you need a guy like Jack to help you read it. I used him when I could. The Brits, they don’t let their coppers, like they call them, do outside work: no running bars, no paid commerce. Ask me, it’s a lousy idea. Anyhow, it was limited to official stuff, more or less, and I was hoping we could find something official, more or less.

  I looked around the office, plain walls, bulletin board, the metal desk, couple of chairs. Jack Cotton buzzed the intercom again – it looked like something out of the 1930s – and a few minutes later a young woman appeared with a pot of good-smelling coffee.

  On the phone, he has a great voice, rich and British, but with the lilt of Jamaica where he was born. In person, it got buried in an urban nasal drawl. He had been partly raised in London, partly in Detroit by a grandmother, so his accent was a fuck-up: part south London, part West Indies, part Motown, whatever came in handy.

  “Yo, mon,” he said, “if you know what I mean,” and he laughed when he said it and pushed a red and gold box of Dunhills across the desk. I took one. Nice smoke, I thought and figured I’d quit next week.

  “Where you staying, man?” he asked and I told him. He raised an eyebrow slowly. “Very nice. Very nice indeed. Cops like me couldn’t afford a toilet around there, not anymore, not unless you got into the Docklands thing early on, back in the Eighties, though my Nina would say it’s the dark side of the moon. Londoners are very attached to their own part of town. Nice views. So what can I do for you?”

  I tossed the picture I’d pulled off the dummy onto Jack’s desk.

  He picked it up. “Where did you get this?”

  “Off a dummy someone left for me.”

  He said, “Yeah, I’ve seen this stuff before. Guy Fawkes pranks. Who knew you were coming?”

  I didn’t know Jack well enough yet to throw him Tolya Sverdloff, so I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You want to tell me why you’re here?”

  “Jack, can we do this unofficial? You heard about the Pascoe murder?”

  “Thomas Pascoe? I read something in the papers.” Jack was suddenly cautious; there was the buzz of ambition. He lit a cigarette.

  “He was coming over here the day they killed him. He wanted his burial here. Had a cousin, a sculptor name of Warren Pascoe. Ring any bells?”

  “Yeah, colleague of mine picked him up. They let him out. Bail. Some rich wankers helped him. Did it for art, they said. Hard to pin anything on Warren unless you put your hands on the bodies, so to speak.” He laughed. “Gives new meaning to the phrase habeas corpus, Warren does. You think he sat there and drew them, had them pose for him, so to speak, like models? The particular dead guys?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know.”

  “Pretty freaky stuff, using corpses for models. But he sells the shit and he likes the attention. You think he’s part of the landscape in the Thomas Pascoe thing?”

  “A small hill maybe.”

  “Anything else I can help you with?”

  “He had a nephew. I’m guessing the nephew was named in the will. Name of Phillip Frye. Runs a charity named HOME. Thomas Pascoe was into homeless causes.”

  Jack was interested. “I’ve heard of Frye somewhere. He’s got a number of shelters on the river, I think.” He picked up the phone. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Jack listened for a while, then spoke softly into the phone. He got up from his desk and put the phone down. “Come on,” he said, “there’s someone who might help with Frye.” He hesitated. “I actually figured you being here in London was for your lady.”

  I was pretty surprised. “How come you know about that?”

  “I think I actually met her at a party. A tall redhead, right? Very smart. Funny. Great legs, if you’ll excuse me saying so.”

  I didn’t answer for a minute, just sucked up the smoke. Then I said, “So how come you and Lily hobnobbing at the same parties, Jack?”

  He looked uncomfortable; he must have figured Lily told me. I kept my mouth shut and followed him to the parking lot.

  “You got any Russian activity in London lately, Jack?” I said.

  “Sure. Always.”

  “What area?”

  “Dope. Petrol scams. Property more than anything. You need something specific, man?”

  In the parking lot, we climbed into a silver BMW. The rain was belting on the hood. He backed out of the lot fast, cop style, never looking back. I said, “So how come you and Lily were at the same party?”

  “Small town. I’m the luvvies’ favorite cop. Book parties for crime novels coming out, that kind of thing. I get the right invites. Soho Club. Groucho Club. The Ivy. I could take you.” Jack’s tone was wry.

  The windshield wipers started their beat. What the hell did he mean, “luvvies”, for chrissake? “It came out you knew me, Jack?”

  “Sure. Of course, man. She said you had mentioned my name once upon a time and she had remembered, which is how it came out.”

  I reached on to the dashboard for his smokes.

  Jack stepped on the gas. The town passed in a blur, but what I saw I liked. It was clean, handsome, spacious, assured, street after street of red brick houses, or tall white stuccos, squares and crescents, cul-de-sacs and ovals. And parks. Big boulevards, the Parliament building.

  We drove through the financial district they call The City. It was washed down and beautiful in a monumental way. St Paul’s Cathedral. The banks and trading houses, imperial, chilly, awesome. Money here was sunk deep. I was still trying to put London together geographically. It was big and I was out of my depth. I was edgy; there was a steady drip of anxiety in my veins.

  “You want to say where we’re going, Jack?”

  “Sorry. I thought I’d take you over to Wapping. River police. They look like a lot of guys playing around in boats, but they’re actually brilliant. They work all kinds of cases both sides of the river. I thought they might give you a line on Frye and his shelters.”

  “You do boats, Jack?”

  He laughed. “I hate fucking boats. But I spent some years in Contingency Planning at Scotland Yard, and one of my colleagues, she works out at Wapping.” He peered through the windshield. “Weather,” he laughed. “Just so you’ll know you’re in England.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “I always show willing with Tessa Stiles. Minorities stick together, that kind of thing.”

  “You don’t like her?”


  “She’s all right.” Jack shrugged. “I’m the black chap, she’s the woman, we sit on a lot of panels together. She’s smart but tetchy. Doesn’t like Americans. Thinks you treat us like a third world country. Thinks you throw money at every problem, send in the Marines.”

  “She probably prefers a good old-fashioned war, honorable killing, noble death, that kind of thing.”

  “Something like that. Her brother was killed in the Falklands. Don’t take it personal, man, She doesn’t like me either.”

  Stiles’s station house was on the river. You could hear the water, the wind at your back. We went in from the street, she met us on the ground floor and took us into the canteen. I was hungry, so was Jack. We ordered baked beans and burgers; a pretty black woman who cooked added on fries and served us; we ate alongside six other cops in the small room.

  Tessa Stiles was a handsome, stocky woman with a square face and curly brown hair, but her face was dragged down by peasant genes and worry. She wore a dark-blue sweater, a shirt and tie, a plain skirt that ended below her knees, sheer panty hose and expensive pumps. Her legs were terrific and she was vain about them, you could see that; she crossed her ankles.

  We ate, Jack said I was a friend from New York. Visiting. An old pal. She said, “Why don’t I give you the tour, Mr Cohen? Jack?”

  “Don’t lay too much propaganda on him, Tess, OK?”

  Stiles led us out a side door and down a wooden walkway to the jetty where a pair of police boats were moored. She looked at the river.

  “London is old and a lot of it is broken. Like New York,” she said. “I had a fellowship that took me across to the States for a bit, the Winston Churchill Fellowship, in fact.” She lifted her chin a little. “Tell me what you see.”

  I followed her gaze. Located Tower Bridge. The apartment at Butler’s Wharf on the other side of the river. I said, “What I can make out, I’m by the Thames River, the Tower of London on my right here, the bridge, boats, lot of development. But you didn’t bring me out here for this, Inspector. You tell me, you’re the expert.”

  Jack stood slightly apart, watching the water.

  Stiles said, “The Thames is tidal. I look out, and five thousand acres of disaster is what I see. Cheap buildings, land reclaimed that should have been let alone, tidal walls that crumble.” She walked to the end of the jetty and I followed.

  “Until the Sixties, Seventies, even the early Eighties, this was a working riverside. Docks. Wharves. Factories. Both sides of the river. It was heavily unionized,” she smiled. “Do you know what Spanish practices are?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Semi-legalized pilfering was how they ran it. They were all men, Englishmen, big muscles, small brains a lot of them, no blacks, no women.”

  “Racist bastards is what they were,” Jack said.

  Stiles said, “My dad was one of the good guys. He tried to open up the unions, they cut him up. Poor people like him lived here all their lives.” She pulled her sweater tight. “You ought to meet my dad. He was a good bloke, but he made trouble.”

  “How’s that?”

  Stiles smiled. “For one thing, he was an Irish fella who married a Jewish girl.”

  “Something like mine.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Stiles tugged at her own uniform sleeve. “There’s never been a woman with the river police, not at my level. There’s no women worked on the river, except the daughters of men who’d got no sons. No need for women in the police. None of it matters anymore.”

  “How come?”

  “Shipping was containerized, moved downriver to Tilbury, the whole place felt apart. My dad had put himself on the line for nothing. The biggest wasteland in Europe. Developers moved in, corrupt Labour guys, like your Tammany Hall, but nothing happened until Mrs Thatcher. Tax breaks for all. Old people were kicked out, everything was upgraded for the bastard yuppies who bought in here, crap apartments most of them. Two hundred grand. More. Newspapers moved in, Murdoch first here at Wapping, then Canary Wharf.”

  It was her subject. I let her rant. She stepped over the side of one of the boats and sat on the back of it. I went and sat next to her. The boat rocked; I lit up a cigarette.

  Stiles said, “End of the Eighties, the crash came, the whole thing could have fallen into the river, it would have been better. A few developers, foreign most of them, bought it cheap. Real scum.”

  “What kind of scum?”

  She smiled sourly, “All kinds. Money scum. Stock market scum. Canadian, Australian, British scum.”

  “Russian?”

  “Oh yes. The Russians bought. They built two hotels on the waterfront. Isle of Dogs. A new heliport. The old days, they said the Jews landed up in Stepney because it’s as far as they could walk from the boat with a suitcase. The Russians like to be close to their point of arrival too, only they don’t walk.”

  Jack called out from the jetty, “Hey, Tess, I have to get back some time tonight.”

  She ignored him. “I’ll tell you what I see. I look at this river, I see the biggest concentration of risk in the urban world. Big as the San Andreas Fault.”

  “You’re losing me here,” I said.

  Almost dreamily, she said, “If the Thames ever floods, and it will flood, London’s fucked for a decade. Britain is sinking, the world is getting warmer and wetter and Britain is sinking. Think about it. Even now, it’s been raining some of every day since September. The tributaries of the Thames are already full. Say we get some freak weather during the spring tides this month, a surge tide, a failure in weather reporting, London floods. The telecommunications go first, and the financial systems, gas, electricity, newspapers, the Underground, all property on the river right down to Westminster, Chelsea, floods. You can’t evacuate nine million people. People start to hoard. There’s a run on the banks. Raw sewage everywhere. We pump our sewage uphill out of London, if there’s a flood the pumps go, the town fills up with shit.” She waved her arms towards the night. “And all this. All Docklands.”

  The wind blew her hair and she clutched at it, but her face lit up with excitement; Tessa Stiles was a zealot. “Even the Thames Barrier can’t help.”

  “The what?”

  “Barrier’s a steel wall they put up in bad weather, not far downriver from here. What if the Barrier doesn’t work? What if someone takes the wife of the Barrier’s controller hostage? What if a plane from City Airport – look just over there, you can see the plane going in – what if it crashes? The airport was supposed to be for short-haul props, now it flies big jets. The landing strip is a hundred meters from the Barrier.”

  Stiles talked rapidly. “I don’t even need a major flood. A small device breaches an underwater tunnel, we’ve got four trains with two thousand people each at Waterloo Station, water starts to pour in. Our tubes – subways to you – haven’t got proper ventilation. It’s the motion of the train that moves the air, but suppose a train’s flooded. There are no fans. Carbon monoxide poisoning sets in.”

  “Tess!” Jack was impatient.

  It was freezing now, the wind bitter, but Tessa Stiles was wrapped up in her rhetoric. I looked in her eyes. They were dark and large and inward looking. It was as if she had an internal screen where she played her doomsday scenarios over and over, like video games. Stiles crackled with excitement. I thought she was desperate and doomed. I wanted to say: stop. For chrissake, stop. Please. But she was lost.

  She put her hand on my shoulder and climbed off the boat, then looked up at me. “I see a wall of water coming down on London.”

  25

  Inside Stiles’s office, Jack said to her, “You ever come across anyone named Phillip Frye?”

  She looked up. “I see. That’s why you’ve come, is it? He runs that organization home out of a converted factory over by Rotherhithe. It’s not strictly speaking my territory, being the other side of the river, but I keep an eye on both sides and I know something about Frye and
I hate the way he gets his hands on derelict docks property, what’s left of it, before anyone else does.”

  Jack, who had been smoking and looking bored, perked up. He said to Stiles, “What’s he want all the property for?”

  “His homeless.”

  “His?”

  Stiles picked up a thermos and poured coffee in a mug. “I think it, but I can’t prove it yet, that Frye’s involved, and I don’t know how, in pressurizing people to give him money for his shelters. In exchange he helps them – and some of them are real thugs – get permits for development on land no one else can touch. He’s connected. It’s sick stuff.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  She said, “The hotter the property market got, the more homeless there were. The more homeless, the bigger Frye’s operation.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Perhaps, then, Mr Frye is crazy. Do you want some coffee?”

  “Enjoy the lecture?” Jack, laughing, pulled out of the parking lot behind Stiles’s station. “You hungry at all?”

  “I’m still eating that burger, man,” I said. “Let me buy you a drink if you have time, Jack. There’s a decent bar near where I’m staying.”

  I got the impression Jack was happy to hang out. We were near the bridge when his cellphone rang.

  “Bloody phone,” he said, but he was listening now, face intent, eyes small and black and impenetrable.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to have to drop you off, Art, OK? I got to take this. It looks like we have a problem.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said, and he was already revving the car, crossing the bridge, heading into a bleak broken area of ramshackle buildings and wasteland. He said, “You’ll have to keep out of it if I take you, OK? I can’t have any cowboys on this.”

  A bonfire lit up the broken ground. It was surrounded by squat, busted buildings. It looked like hell. The crummy apartments, the long stretch of rolled barbed wire, the garbage that spilled out of metal cans and left its sour stink. The graffiti on greasy tile walls shimmered in the firelight. On the fire was half-burned furniture – a chair flared and crumbled, the flames fed on the stuffing. Five or six homeless guys, most of them drunk or ripped, I couldn’t tell, crawled out of their cardboard huts and circled the perimeter, edgy, nervous, scared. A group of boys, teenagers, thirteen, fourteen, faced off with them.