A Cool Breeze on the Underground

by Don Winslow

  Supper that night was a simple repast of boiled potatoes and cold sliced ham, and was quieter than usual.

  The creak of the bedroom door woke Neal.

  Allie was standing there, clad in the plaid flannel shirt they’d found in one of the chests.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Why do the Chase women always need to talk to me in the middle of the night? Neal wondered.

  Allie sat down on the edge of the bed, inspiring in Neal a simultaneous anxiety and a faith in genetics.

  She started deliberately and slowly, as if she’d rehearsed and worried over each word. “There are things you need to know about me,”

  That’s funny, Allie, there are things you need to not know about me.

  “If we’re going to be partners,” she continued.

  “Go ahead,” Neal said, feeling guilty. Allie, he thought, I already know.

  “I … God, this is so hard … I didn’t just run away. I mean, for just no reason. Same thing for the drugs. I mean, I know I’m screwed up …” She stopped and hung her head, staring down at the rough fabric of the army blanket.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” Neal said.

  “We’re partners, anyway.”

  “I want to. It’s been on my mind.”

  Neal nodded.

  “My father…”

  I know, baby, I know.

  Slow tears dropped on the blanket.

  “He … he and I … no, he … used to …”

  Neal forced himself to look at her, forced himself to lift her chin and look her in the eyes.

  “I guess…” she said, “the word is incest”

  He stroked her cheek. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

  “The drugs helped me to forget … and the sex … I guess it helped me to get even. I don’t know.”

  Neal felt her tears on his shoulder. You can take away her pain, he thought, not all of it, but a lot. If you had half her courage, you would tell her the truth. He’s not your father, Allie. You have to live with a lot, but you don’t have to live with that. He’s not your father.

  But if I tell you now, I might blow it all, and I don’t have the guts to risk it. And I’m sorry.

  So instead, he said, “It’s all right. It’s all right. It doesn’t make a difference. It’s behind you now. It’s behind you.”

  “I’m never going back.”

  “You don’t have to. You don’t have to,” he chanted softly until she fell asleep and he pulled her down beside him. “You don’t have to.”

  Betrayal, he thought, is the only ending to any undercover.

  31

  “what do you think he’s up to?” Levine asked Graham. They were sweating out a hot afternoon in the New York office. “He hasn’t called in; he’s checked out of the hotel; if he’s at the safe house, he’s not answering. He’s disappeared. What’s he up to?”

  Graham wished he knew. since the night of Neal’s phone call, he had worried his head off. He had kept a close eye on the British papers and had seen nothing about an assault, never mind a murder. And he had called Keyes’s apartment a hundred times if he’d called it once.

  Neal had disappeared—gotten lost—just as he’d taught him. But why hadn’t he checked back in? Because he still thought that Ed was dirty, that there was a leak in the organization? Then why hadn’t he gotten in touch with his old Dad? Called him at McKeegan’s? Does he think I’m dirty now? That I’m in on it? No, Neal couldn’t think that.

  A worse option came to mind. Maybe Neal hadn’t escaped the trap. Maybe he was a prisoner somewhere, or worse. Graham didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it. Neal Carey was too good. He’d have gotten out and taken the client out with him. But where?

  Or had Neal decided that one double-cross deserved another? Taken the girl somewhere to cut a deal on his own. Or had the little fuckhead gone soft and fallen in love with her? Jesus Christ.

  “We’ve got, what, ten days?” Levine asked.

  “Eleven,” Lombardi said. “You think you’re going to hear from him? Maybe he has Allie and is working on some deal of his own.”

  “Maybe,” said Graham.

  Levine looked at him real strange: angry.

  “Neal Carey is a snotty little bastard, but he’s not a double-crosser. Not with us.” Ed said it firmly and to both of them. Ed was pissed, thought Graham.

  “Hey, you sent a head case to get a head case,” Lombardi said. “They’re probably shooting up together.”

  “Shoot this,” said Graham with an appropriate gesture.

  “Hey…”

  “Are you boys finished?” Ed asked. “Because we have a problem to work out here.”

  Lombardi stood up. “No. You have a problem to work out here, I have a problem to work out in Newport. One very angry senator.”

  Graham handed Lombardi his seersucker sport coat.

  “So go to Newport,” he said. “Let us know if Allie’s home. Have you looked under the bed?”

  “That’s enough,” Levine said.

  Lombardi gave Graham a look that was meant to be tough.

  “Maybe when this is all over,” he said, “you can get a job in a casino. People can put quarters in your mouth—”

  “And pull my arm. Is that the best you can do?”

  “Hey, you’re the clown.”

  Lombardi picked up his briefcase and made his exit.

  “I should have gone to law school,” said Levine,

  “It’s not too late.”

  Ed plopped himself down on his desk and looked through the Chase file for the thousandth time. Or pretended to. Then he said, “What are you not telling me, Joe?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where’s the kid?”

  “Do I know?”

  “Do you?”

  “No!” Graham said with righteous indignation. “Hey, look out the window, would you?”

  “What, Neal and Allie are out there?”

  “No, see if that fuck Lombardi has left the building. Stupid shit forgot his wallet.”

  “Good.”

  “Come on.”

  Ed looked. “He must still be in the elevator.”

  “I’ll catch him. Yell at him when he comes out.”

  “It’s seven floors.”

  “You got lungs. Give him one of those kung-fooey yells.”

  “I’d like to,” Ed muttered as Graham headed out the door.

  Graham pressed the elevator button and went right to work when it came. A seven-floor ride was ample to memorize the credit-card numbers, but he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

  Colin couldn’t stop sweating, and it wasn’t the heat.

  As he maneuvered his motorbike through the outskirts of the city, he could feel a hundred pairs of slanted eyes on him, his mind creating gruesome pictures of flashing knives and cleavers. It wasn’t logical, he knew that. He had lost them when he’d gone under in the East End, but he was spooked nevertheless. So he made triply sure that nobody was hanging about Regent’s Park Road at three in the morning as he pulled his bike up to the sidewalk.

  He waited outside for half an hour to see whether any lights came on in the darkened flat, then decided that either heigh-ho nobody home or the inhabitants were asleep. He crept up the stairs, stealthy and silent as an ox, and paused in front of the door. Unpleasant memories of his humiliating defeat here checked him briefly, and then he let himself in.

  He let his eyes get used to the darkness and then pulled the window shades down. He listened for the sound of breathing anywhere and then turned on a lamp. He noticed instantly what he hadn’t observed on his last visit here: books, everywhere. The clue light was lit.

  He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew that this flat was his only link with Neal. He didn’t dare go to the hotel, because Dickie Huan would hear about it twenty seconds later, cozy as he was with that whoreson house pig Hatcher. Besides, he wasn’t all that interested in
the spot Neal had run from, this is where he had run to, and hadn’t planned on being found out, either.

  It didn’t take long for Colin to discern that the flat belonged to some bloke named Simon Keyes, and that Squire Keyes was positively bonks about books. Could Keyes be the mystery buyer? The flat didn’t look the home of a man who could plunk down twenty thousand quid for a book, though.

  Or did it? Think about it, Colin. If you was buying stolen goods, would you have them delivered to your home? Say hello to the missus and set the hot stuff in the parlor, there’s a good man? That might start a bit of a huff over brandy and cigars, eh? Not bloody likely. No, you’d have a little hidey-hole somewhere. Like some gents have a piece of fluff stored away, this chappie’s got himself a little library love nest. A place to come in the afternoon and cuddle up with his books, run his fingers through the pages, rub the rich leather covers. You’ve a filthy mind, Collie lad, but a brilliant one at that.

  But that wasn’t helping to find the soon-to-be-late Neal Carey. Where did you run to, Neal, with your fancy motor and my fancy lady? Let’s just have a look-see.

  He pried open Simon’s desk drawer and looked around: letters mostly. Christ, but this one liked to write letters. Looks like he had carbon copies of every letter he ever wrote. No mention of Neal, though, just lots of chatter about this writer and that publisher and please do come for the weekend sometime up to the moor, and didn’t that sound like a lot of fun? He gave up on the desk drawer and started in on the card table. This was even more boring. Catalogue on catalogue of books and pictures, and bids put in writing to Sotheby’s, and the bloke did shit a ton of nicker on his books, don’t he, and hold on, Collie you idiot. Something flashed in his brain. Up to the moor? Up?

  He dove back into the desk drawer and found the letter.

  “Dear Larry,” it started, and then lots of polite toff chatter, right, get to the good part. “Please do come up to the moor weekend next.” Followed by a lot of crap about how nice it would be to have some time with you and some chippie named Mary and then: bingo, directions. Up the M-11 as far as … sound a bit familiar, does it, ring any bells? Ding-dong? Big Ben?

  Maybe, Colin thought, I’ll have to invite myself up to the moor for a little weekend party of my own. He grabbed the copy of the letter giving directions to the cottage and headed down the stairs and out the door. He was thinking that maybe life wasn’t such a kick in the balls, after all, when a swift one right in the old yobs dropped him to his knees. Through watery eyes, he could make out the smiling face of one of Dickie Huan’s boys, and, behind him, a rather relieved-looking Crisp.

  “Thanks,” colin muttered to Crisp, “a whole bloody lot, chum.”

  They dragged him into the backseat of a car. One of the Chinese drove and another held his revolver on the two prisoners.

  “You might have mentioned something, Colin. Like, ‘By the by, Crisp, old friend. If this thing goes down the crapper, Dickie Huan’s boys might be looking for us.’ You left me holding the bag. What was I supposed to do?”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Well it wasn’t too fookin’ clever, hiding at your grandda’s now, was it? You only have two fookin’ relations.”

  “They didn’t know that, though, did they? Only my dear chum Crisp knew that.”

  “I’d be bathing facedown in the river if I didn’t know that.”

  “Next traffic signal, I’m jumping out.”

  “They speak English, you bloody moron.”

  “That’s right, you bloody moron,” said the one with the pistol, “so don’t do anything stupid.”

  He shoved the gun in Colin’s face for emphasis and fun. Trailing Colin had been ridiculously easy, much easier than following someone through the twisted maze of Kowloon.

  The car weaved up through Soho and into the back streets of Chinatown. The driver hauled Colin out of the back and pushed him toward the back door of the restaurant. He gestured to Crisp. “You go.”

  “Go where?”

  “You kidding me? Just go.”

  Crisp went. Colin watched him slump off toward the Main Drag, faintly hoping he’d come back with reinforcements. Fat chance.

  Dickie Huan was in his tiny office in back of the kitchen. Colin didn’t see any cleaver. The thug pushed him into a small cane chair in front of the desk. Dickie Huan looked over at him like a strict headmaster in a cheap school.

  “You disappointed me, Colin.”

  “I’m a bit down in the mouth about it myself. But go ahead and sell the heroin to Jackie Chen. Next time, maybe.”

  “Jackie Chen bought elsewhere.”

  Bad news, that.

  “You lose face, huh?” Colin asked.

  “Fuck ‘face.’ I lose twenty thousand quid.”

  Colin felt sort of warm and runny inside. This is no time to panic, lad, he told himself. “I’m this close to having the money, Dickie.”

  “You’re this close to eating with your toes, too. Where are you getting the money?”

  Colin leaned in over the desk and whispered. Good dramatic effect.

  “I’m selling a book,”

  “I kill you right now, Colin.” Dickie Huan didn’t like being fucked with.

  “No, really. A rare book. A rare stolen book.”

  The “stolen” bit was a good strategy on Colin’s part. Your basic criminal always feels deep in his heart that theft increases the inherent value of an object.

  “Stolen? From who? You got a buyer?”

  Colin tasted the sweet air of life as the door to escape opened just a crack. “That’s the problem, Dickie. You put your finger right on it.”

  Dickie Huan valued justice—which to him meant revenge. But he didn’t value it twenty thousand pounds’ worth. He’d have Colin taken into the meat locker and kicked around just to make sure he was telling the truth and to teach him a lesson.

  “Accounts,” the voice said with a practiced professional lilt,

  “Yeah, I have some questions about my bill.”

  “Name and number, please.”

  “Lombardi, Richard,” Graham said, then rattled off the number.

  “Yes?”

  “You have me down for a bunch of calls to London, England!” Graham said, as nastily as possible.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I didn’t make any damn calls to London!”

  “Our records show—”

  “I don’t give a damn what your records show—”

  “Our records show that you made five calls from a phone booth and charged them to your account.”

  “From a phone booth? Who are you trying to—” Joe Graham was having fun, particularly when the operator got huffy.

  “Yes, sir, from area code two-one-two, number eight-five-five five-seven-two-eight.”

  “To what number in London?” he challenged.

  “It’s on your bill.”

  “I don’t have my bill with me.”

  He listened to the long sigh, the one meant to let him know that people who called to complain about their bill certainly ought to have said bill in front of their noses.

  “May I put you on hold?”

  “Time is money, lady.”

  She returned a couple of minutes later and read off the number. Very slowly. He asked her to repeat it and then hung up. Then he dialed the overseas number. It rang seventeen times before someone picked it up.

  “’ello?”

  “May I speak to—”

  “This is a phone box, mate. You ‘ave the wrong—”

  “A phone box. Where?”

  “In the ’otel?”

  “What hotel?”

  “The Piccadilly. Got to run.”

  Graham hung around for a while, thinking things over, and then decided he could think better in McKeegan’s. He had a beer and a hamburger, then another beer, and ambled back toward his apartment. The walk let him think, helped him make up his mind. When he did, he stopped in a phone booth on the corner and made a collect call to
Providence, Rhode Island. He was surprised that The Man answered his own phone. He expected a butler or something like that.

  He told The Man everything.

  32

  In the sunny days of late July, the lake became their playground. They would pack a picnic lunch of fruit and cold sliced meat and make the long hike over the moor and down through the sheep meadow to the wood, where they’d sit in the shade and watch the daily performance of Hardin and Jim. When the old man had shouted, “Gate!” and the collie had driven his charges from the meadow and along the lane, Neal and Allie would continue on, climbing the next hill to reach the lake.

  The lake wasn’t really a lake at all but the remnants of a quarry— a reminder of a turn-of-the-century effort to make the moor bear more than tufts of grass, to make its stony soil pay. The villagers below had dreamed of selling the native stone to the gentry to build fine houses. But the gentry found it cheaper to import Scandinavian wood than transport Yorkshire stone, and the quarry failed after eight years of back- and heartbreaking labor. It became a convenient spot for the local youth to meet and produce more local youth, who would in turn leave the village to make a living elsewhere.

  However, Neal and Allie had no idea of the quarry’s history, quickly dubbed it “The Lake,” and went every afternoon to skinny-dip. Well, Allie did, anyway. Neal could bring himself only to peel down to a pair of boxer shorts he’d found in a chest of drawers. This shyness was not faked. Neal had no intention of baring himself to Allie, mostly because she bared herself now so freely to him. She would shuck her clothes as naturally as a young girl in love, and if Neal found it disconcerting, all the better. She was more than aware of its effect on him, and of the reason that he clung so stubbornly to the thin facade of the ridiculous boxer shorts, and why he stayed waist-deep in the water, even when she sunbathed on the long slab of rock that rose from the cold blue of the quarry. She would tease him about his modesty, at the same time enjoying it immensely. She thought about all the guys who could never wait to get into her pants, and here was one she couldn’t talk into getting out of his.