“Let’s go back to my place, or a hotel if you want.”
“I can’t. I gave the Clearys this number, this address. I have to be here in case someone wants me for Beth. She’s due back tomorrow.” Lily glanced at her watch. “Today. It’s today. In a few hours, Keir will have the kids back from the country. Please. It’s OK. You’re here. It’s always OK when you’re here.” Lily shivered and fooled with her hair.
“I found a picture of Thomas Pascoe in your drawer.”
“You went in my stuff ?”
I touched her hair. “You asked me to.”
“Yes, I did.”
“The best thing about marrying Phillip was the two of them, the Pascoes. I was still only a kid. They spoiled me. My own parents never had any time for comfort or good food or nice clothes. After Stalin died, my mother got really messed up. I was a baby, but I remember she ran around wild. She never believed the bad stuff. Later on, she actually used to say, ‘If only Stalin had known, if only someone had told him.’ Eventually she killed herself. I didn’t tell you that part, did I?”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Yeah, well, she couldn’t take it. She could take it OK that I was miserable. She could take it that I got left with my grandma most of the time, and that I – Christ, you know why I hate this time of year?” Lily’s voice was dry. “After Thanksgiving, this real dread would come over me, you know? Because it was December. And in December, all the other kids were getting ready for Christmas. Or Hanukkah. But not me. We didn’t celebrate. We were atheists. The holidays came and went and there was nothing, and you know what?” She looked at me.
“Tell me.”
“I wasn’t all that sad when my mother topped herself, OK?”
“Cold War scrap?”
Lily looked up, startled. “Who said that?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“They loved me, Tommy and Frances, they really did. But we drifted apart after a while. Somewhere along the line, she started drinking. He got old. Then Frankie decided I was having an affair with Tommy, and I didn’t see them anymore.”
“Were you?”
“Was I what?”
“I take it back,” I said.
She said, “Thank you. I told Frankie to leave you be. You heard on the tape.”
“It’s OK now.”
“I’m frightened.”
“What of ?”
“Fucking storm. Listen to it.” Lily’s hands were ice-cold.
“Get into bed.”
She looked at me. “I know it was some homeless guy who whacked Tommy. But it was Phillip who killed him.”
We lay in bed. Lily said, “Hold me, will you? If I could get a little bit of sleep I could make it more coherent for you. I don’t think I’ve slept for a week.”
“Then sleep. We’ll talk some more later.” I put my arms around her and she turned away, her face to the wall, and I knew she was crying. I wondered if I should have told her about Frankie and me, but Frankie was dead and I’m a coward. I couldn’t lose Lily again.
In the middle of the night, I sat up. The wind was ferocious. Lily was restless. She got up and pulled on a ratty pink bathrobe, sat on the bed, fumbled for my cigarettes and lit one. I reached for the radio. A voice droned shipping information. I thought of the poor bastards out in boats tonight.
I looked at my watch. It was five past four. Lily had left the lights on in the bathroom and in the hall. At ten past, they flickered and went out. Lily fumbled for my hand. “What is it?”
“Must be the power’s out. It’s nothing, sweetheart, it’s the storm. You have a flashlight? Some candles?”
“In the kitchen.”
It was pitch black in the living room. I scrambled for the flashlight in a drawer and switched it on. In the beam, I saw the room was a mess. Papers flying, pillows on the floor. The door to the deck was open. I yanked it shut and pushed a chair against it. The wind rocked the boat harder. There was the cracking of glass and after it, a shower of shattered splinters. I peered through the window; the window on the houseboat next door was bust.
I skidded on the kitchen floor and felt the water come over the tops of my shoes. The floor was flooded. The windows had blown open here too, and rain poured in. I stumbled around, scrambling in drawers, found some candles. I got the door shut. I locked the window and retreated to the bedroom.
“Lily?”
There was no answer.
“Lily?”
But she was in the bathroom. I yelled, “You all right?”
Somehow we got the candles lit, turned the radio up and sat in the bed, wide awake now, smoking, listening to news of the worst storm since the fall of 1987. Worse. Britain was more vulnerable now, said the radio voice. It was shaping up as the worst storm since ’53, by some accounts. Global warming. Britain sinking. Over-building along the Thames. Carbons. Polar ice cap melting. A pumping system that failed in Thamesmead. Hangover from El Nino.
I said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“I have to wait for Beth.”
“I’ll call Isobel.” I picked up the phone. It was dead.
The rest of the night, the voices from the shortwave played in the dark. I reached over and touched Lily’s face. She was soaked in cold sweat. She gripped my hand. “Artie?”
“I’m here.”
“I love you, you know.”
“I know you do.”
“I love you as much as I can love anyone,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I’m so disengaged from everybody it scares me. I go into a room, a party, I think, oh these are perfectly nice people, really nice, good, interesting people, and then I start thinking, how soon can I get out of here? You’re the only person who makes me feel. I mean it. That’s the best I can do, Artie. I don’t think I have anymore to give you.”
34
Before it was light, we were up and dressed, trying to put the place back together, me working phones which were dead. Lily’s, mine, the landline to the houseboat, dead. The weather, I kept thinking. Gilchrist said it was the weather, but he was a man who ate paranoia for breakfast.
The houseboat was a mess. I went out on the deck. The rain and wind slammed into the sides of the boat, which sat high on the steel sledge. But the river was rising and water slapped the deck and sloshed over it. The river, in front of me, what I could see through curtains of rain and fog, was an angry purple-gray swell, sloshing the Embankment, still rising. Somewhere near by were sirens, and the honking, cars, trucks, insistent, relentless. It wasn’t a noise you heard a lot in London – I had noticed the quiet hum of the place my first night – but now the horns screamed.
I switched on the flashlight. The thin beam of light showed the wreckage on the boat next door. The windows were smashed. Part of the roof had caved in. The man I’d seen the night I came looking for Lily – he had on the same red sweater – came out on his deck, lifted his shoulders in despair and tried to smile.
On the Embankment, the ghosts of emergency crews appeared. Trucks. Soldiers climbing down, unpacking inflatable boats. From the roof of a building across the street, someone waved a flashlight.
Wearing a yellow slicker, Lily came outside. She held the radio. “Listen,” she said. It had rained for months on and off, the weather geek said. The Thames tributaries were full. The rain the week before pushed them over the top and there had been minor flooding – I thought of the dead men near Frye’s shelter on the river. During the night there were freak gales, and if the winds shifted and a surge tide occurred, it meant trouble.
Four hours, a reporter noted. Four hours was the minimum warning needed to close the Barrier, to shut off London from the river.
Even the weather geek was anxious. You could hear it in his voice. There was news of hoarding. The stock market computer system had shorted out before trading opened; for half an hour there was pandemonium while a back-up system booted up. Incoming flights were diverted to Paris. Everything else was canceled.
In the middle of th
e night, when the winds were blowing a hundred miles an hour, a train carrying nuclear material derailed outside a place named Stratford East. Canisters of hot stuff tumbled along the railway tracks and down to the river. A guard tried to get hold of one of the barrels and it killed him. They found him soaked, his skin peeling, his face half flayed by the contact with the radioactive spill. Then one of the containers burst; some of the contents were soaked up by the soil, some of it spilled into puddles and was carried into the river.
There was no let-up in sight: more rain was predicted. The worst weather in fifty years. The weather. I thought of Gilchrist. Christ, I thought. Maybe he knew. I said to Lily, “I have to go. I have to. Call Isobel and tell her and come with me.”
She went inside and tried Isobel. I stood on the deck in the rain and watched the traffic grow. Lights spinning through the fog. The shapes of cops, firemen, soldiers.
Lily reappeared with coffee. “The phone’s still dead.”
We drank from the thermos. Then Lily said, “I’m going to find a phone.” She shoved her hair under a plastic hat, climbed up on to the Embankment.
Ten minutes later, she was back. She got a phone off one of the emergency crews, but Isobel’s phone was dead.
“Keir will bring the kids to their house. I know he will. I have to go.” She looked at me. “It will be OK. It’s higher ground at Notting Hill. It will be fine.” She was convincing herself. “I have to. I can read between the lines. What they’re not saying on the radio. They’re withholding news. It’s bad. I have to get Beth.”
My arms tight around her, I said, “How will you get there?”
“I’ll walk if I have to.”
I hesitated. “I’ll come with you.”
“If there’s someone you have to see, then do it.”
I followed her off the boat and on to the pavement. The street was jammed now. A young cop struggled to inflate a dinghy by blowing on its tube like it was a balloon. His face swelled up with effort.
I held Lily. “You get Beth and I’ll meet you. We’ll go home to New York. I’ll find you both at Isobel’s. Give me the address and I’ll get there. You listening, sweetheart?”
She found a piece of paper and scribbled an address, and we walked fast, together, up the block, past a line of people waiting at a payphone. Lily pulled the yellow hat down hard. “I’m going to leave you here, Artie, OK. I’m going.”
I wrote down Tessa Stiles’s number. “Leave me a message there, if you can get through.”
“I promise.”
The rain and wind blew sideways now and Lily stumbled against me. “I have to go,” she said over and over, and started up the street. Then she ran back. “Tell Jack Cotton. Tell your cop friends. Tell them to get Phillip Frye.”
“Tell me.”
“I told you last night. He knows everything. The dead men near his shelter. Something stinks. And Tommy knew. He knew, Artie. Tommy Pascoe knew about Phillip, and it killed him, and Frankie, too, and the rest of them.”
“I was out there. At the warehouse.”
“You saw me?”
“Yes.”
“I tried to talk to him. It’s why I stayed in London.”
“Lily?”
“What?”
“You’re telling me Frye’s a killer?”
“Have you ever really looked into Phillip’s eyes?”
“You’re not gonna take him on, swear to me, Lil.” I grabbed her wrist. “Tell me you’re really going to Isobel’s.”
Head bent against the rain, Lily set off. I called out, “I love you,” but Lily disappeared, her yellow slicker sucked up by the fog.
Carrying the shortwave radio I grabbed from the houseboat, I got to the King’s Road and hitched a ride up towards the subway. On the street, I found a pay-phone that was still working and left a message for Jack: Get to Frye. Get Phillip Frye. I didn’t figure he’d get it, a day like this, but I left it, and left another message with his wife, who I never met after all, never ate her roast lamb, and a third for Tessa Stiles.
There was a supermarket and I went in and grabbed some smokes. People packed the aisles, dripping dirty water behind them. They pushed carts methodically up and down the aisles, eyes intent, searching the shelves. Some of the shelves were already empty. People piled water, milk, sardines. There was a pile of dusty bags of charcoal, left over from the summer maybe, and people grabbed at them and piled their carts until the carts wobbled.
Kids ran alongside their parents, laughing, pulling candy off the shelves; the schools were shut. The kids inspected fancy cereal and ice cream. One of them snitched a bag of M&Ms, tore it open, tipped his head back and poured the candy down his throat. People called out to each other and cracked anxious jokes.
“Cooking up a storm, are you?” A woman shouted out to a guy who passed, his own cart towering with food.
There was a ripple of unease. Not fear; not yet. But it infected you, and I bought batteries for the radio and more cigarettes, chocolate bars and a pint of Scotch that I stuck in my raincoat pocket. I was a kid during some bad winters in Moscow when there was a food shortage. In Moscow, no one had laughed and there was nothing you could hoard.
In front of the supermarket, people shifted bags into their cars. One woman dropped a shopping bag on the pavement. Rolls of toilet paper fell out. The rain soaked them before she could pick them up.
Through the window of a bakery I saw people eating croissants at the counter and drinking coffee. A man strolled into a video store, as if nothing much had happened, as if he might be required to spend another night at home and wanted a couple of movies. Another guy came out of a hardware store, a mop over his shoulder, laughing. Everyone draped with raincoats, slickers, plastic sheets.
The daylight showed the damage. Garbage cans were overturned. Trees were ripped up – one lay across the sidewalk – and buses were stranded in water up to their hubcaps. The window of a big department store had blown out; the bed in the window was drenched.
Up and down the main drag here, people wandered around looking for supplies. It had a surreal quality. Some people smiled and joked. This was London, they seemed to say. Civilization. But they were nervous. The street resembled a tiny war zone.
I kept the radio on, holding it to my ear as I walked. In an appliance store, TV sets showed multiple images of London. In other parts of town, the electricity was out and a slow drip of real panic had started. There were more reports that the river would rise higher than 1953. Reports that the pumps had failed in Thamesmead and the whole place was under water, drowning in its own reclaimed marshes. Some residents on the Isle of Dogs were evacuated. Someone else reported they were loading kids on the last trains out of Waterloo before the station shut down. The financial markets opened, there was panic selling, then they shut. The sewage pumps were breaking down. People who lived along the river itself were instructed to go to the upper floors or to the roof. Somewhere safe.
Everywhere on the street, like me, people carried their radios. They held them to their ear as if it were a big sports event. The noise of the radios jammed its sound into the morning along with the sound of hammers as people boarded up stores and the jack-hammers that ripped the streets open. Men dug for power lines, rain dripping off their hardhats, and the sirens wailed and cars honked.
Sloane Square, where the subway stopped, was littered with wet flowers. A sign posted at the subway entrance announced one line was already out. I ran down the stairs, but the platform was jammed. The crowd looked restless, wet, angry. I pushed my way back up and got a lift on a truck that took me to the river again. Cop cars, fire engines, ambulances were everywhere.
There were soldiers out now, piling sandbags along the embankment. The river looked vicious. High. Choppy. I wished I had gone with Lily. Where was she? Did she really go to Isobel’s, or did she head to the river and Frye’s shelter? I tried Jack again. No answer. The networks were jammed or broken. I had to get to Gilchrist.
Geoffrey Gilchrist sat on
the roof of his little house on a canvas stool. He held an umbrella over himself and he was bent down, peering at the roof. My ribs hurt from where the creeps worked me over and I was breathless from running. I yelled up to him.
He looked at me, pointed to the roof and said, “It’s leaking. Come up. The front door is open.”
I climbed over a broken window box on the pavement and went in the house. In the living room, buckets stood on the floor and the rain pinged through the roof on to the metal.
There was a ladder on the top floor that led to a trapdoor and the roof.
Gilchrist, wrapped in his raincoat, dropped the umbrella. He was trying to put a sheet of plastic over a hole in the roof. I helped him nail it down. Then he looked up and said, “It’s the Barrier. The Thames Flood Barrier.”
“What about it?”
“They’re going to ram it. Set an explosive device on it. The forecast is bad. There’s an assumption of a four-hour weather warning, but it’s a false assumption. And if there’s a problem with the Barrier, if it can’t be raised, the Thames will flood.”
I pulled at his sleeve. “Who? Who is they?”
Gilchrist said, “What’s the difference?”
“What’s your price, Geoff ?”
“This is free.”
“Rammed with what?”
“A Russian paper ship, maybe. Crewed by cowboys who will risk the weather. Illegals on it. A stash of AKs for the British market. I’ve seen the Barrier, Artie, I’ve seen the plans. The concrete walls have ladders for maintenance and rings for mooring repair dinghies. There is terribly easy access from the water.”
I looked out at the river that was choked with fog.
“What kind of cowboy’s gonna offer up his life on some crazed kamikaze mission? I don’t buy this shit.” I turned to go.
“A ship crashed the Barrier a few years ago. No one saw it or heard it in the fog until it was too late. The crew didn’t die, did they? They were conveniently fished out of the river, dried off, fed, tucked up and sent home.”
Bloody London Page 29