by Janet Roger
THIRTY-ONE
Soho was so empty it might have been in quarantine. Windows strained daylight out of the afternoon and held it captive. Snowdrifts hid a sealed-off air raid shelter in the center of Golden Square, and along a soot-brick street on its east side an electric sign flashed over the sidewalk. It showed a large, green bird with its wings folded, a long, curving neck and a bill the size of a hammock. The bird was preening in flickering neon. Below it in red-lit letters the sign said, Pelican Club. Private. Members Only. I climbed the steps to the entrance and went in along a low-lit corridor. A straw blonde was sitting alone at a hatcheck at the head of a stair, winding a curl in front of her ear and reading her star sign in a magazine. By the time I got to the hatcheck we already had an understanding; if she didn’t have to break her concentration, I didn’t have to be a member. I walked on past and took the stair to the basement.
The Pelican was a regulation poison-well for the lower excitements. A place where bubbles will sink in the champagne and a deal from the top is novel, where the hop is less reliable than a second thought and a girl with a permanent and a hard, straight smile will empty your wallet faster than the Marshall Plan. It traded to thumbed-over souls in tastes unsullied by refinement, didn’t advertise or give any guarantees, overpay its taxes or entertain the principles of union labor. In Soho, you wouldn’t pick it out in the crowd.
At two in the afternoon, the clientele it ministered to wasn’t breakfasted yet. Business was slow. The basement stair opened on a bar with a piano wedged in a corner and a tallish cadaver propping the back wall. The cadaver was posted at a closed velour curtain, reaming a fingernail with a toothpick and eying the only two occupied tables. At one of them, four US Navy officers were fixed on their hands of blackjack and paying me no attention. I paid them no attention back, sat down at a table tucked in the curve of the piano and lit a cigarette. Terry Reilly hunched there, sunk so far inside his coat the epaulettes made wing-flaps for his ears. His bottom lip wrapped over the pencil moustache to boost his next thought. “You took your time. I didn’t have to wait, you know.”
“Sure you didn’t. But things being what they are, you waited anyway.”
The boy stroked the rim of an empty glass, confounded. “What things?”
A barman pushed out through the curtain next to the sentry, carrying a tray at his shoulder. Reilly caught his eye. I said, “Pimps and professors. You’re democratic with your dalliances, Terry, but they’re dying on you. Garfield? There are witnesses to say he left the Raglan with you Christmas Eve, making you the last person he was seen alive with. Jarrett? Murdered hours later with the same handgun as Garfield, and you’re the last known to see him alive too. Call it coincidence. Police will call it a pattern. Meaning if they decide you killed the professor, they’ll take you down for the pimp as well. Or vice versa. You won’t notice the difference. Meanwhile, Voigt is looking for you, and you make yourself so memorable how hard can that be?” The drunk scene Christmas morning at the Great Eastern; the Raglan in a midday crowd; checking into Paddy’s and quitting next morning. All inside twenty-four hours. I eased in the crook of the piano. “You sold something Christmas Day, Terry. Who was buying?”
The barman set a glass from his tray on the table and went back through the curtain. The sentry was gone. Reilly made a slow, deliberate, knight-takes-pawn to replace the glass in his hand with the one at his elbow, wetted his lips, put his head back, shut his eyes and tipped the gin down his throat like raw eggs. I counted the seconds until the gin hit, then watched the startled eyes flutter. When he landed the empty glass on the table he was flying on instruments, the voice a sullen lament that all its luck had run out at one time. “I never heard of Garfield till the papers said. He was just a trick in his car in the docks, that’s all. Then the car door opened and somebody with a gun took him across the street toward the river. I don’t know who. Nobody even spoke.” The boy was sweating seventy percent proof, his face and hair damp on a tide of alcohol, lucid as a drunk gets before he passes out.
“So you didn’t know him. Tell me how he looked.”
Reilly’s mouth slacked. “A coat. A hat. How do they ever look? I was trying to see. I got out of the car and followed them. Then I heard two gunshots. I even saw the flashes.” The idea pulled him up. “So it can’t have been me doing the shooting can it?” In his gin haze it might have looked like an ace to play, and you saw what he meant. It just wasn’t the alibi to try out on a jury. Light faded from his eyes like dusk in small windows. He watched himself backing away from the gunfire, getting in at the wheel of Garfield’s convertible and driving out of there fast. “I never thought there was going to be shooting, Mr. Newman. I…”
But you knew what he thought; that the turned-up collar, the turned-down hat brim and the .38 loose in the hand were nothing but props in the theater of the rackets, like the lace handkerchief D’Artagnan will flounce in the face of some no-account count. “Then you’re innocent of two murders. It’s not what I asked.” One of the Navy card players yelled and clapped hands. Reilly twisted around as if the commotion broke his concentration. I stubbed the cigarette in the empty glass, reached across and cupped a palm under his chin. “Over here. Look at me.”
The boy was leaving the planet, his eyes floating dark and unknowing as spawn in a pool. I walked to his side of the table, put a hand under his armpit and hoisted him off the chair. He swayed, breathed thinner air, looked around the basement as if it was another country and let himself be steered across the room, out through the velour curtain into a small, dim vestibule. At right was a deep-button door with Club Dining in brass letters and low murmuring behind. At left a door with a closer, its paint worn bare around a push-plate. I shoved Reilly through the left-hand door, felt for a light switch and set the catch. The air weighed with the rank, corrosive pall of a field latrine.
It was a single cubicle, close and peeling, with a pitted mirror over a washstand and a light over the mirror fluttering as if it had a moth trapped inside. I held Reilly upright, ran water in the basin until it brimmed, then grabbed a handful of his hair and pushed his head underwater. I held him there until he gagged, lifted him to get air, then ducked him again, and when he started flailing stood him up and let him grip the edge of the washstand. He spluttered over the wall mirror, wiped his face with a coat sleeve and started taking an interest in his surroundings. I leaned back against the door. “I’m not the one to convince, Terry. I know you didn’t murder Garfield. Or Jarrett either. But Jarrett was so contagious people are dying from his acquaintance and you know you could be next. It’s why we’re here. So tell me something that makes sense, because Garfield wasn’t just a trick you met in the Raglan and you didn’t get his name from a newspaper. He was set up. It couldn’t have worked any other way. You got to talking, let him buy you a drink. You told him where to drive his car and where to pull over, and after he was hauled out of the car at the end of a gun you got out too, not to miss the excitement. What else?”
The door handle pressed and turned in the small of my back. A customer outside in the vestibule made a low groan. Reilly rested his head against the wall mirror, coughing, wet and miserable.
“Nothing else. Jarrett had been watching Garfield around the bars for weeks, for Mr. Willard. That was nothing to do with me. I only did the pickup because I was told, and Jarrett didn’t say anything about a gun. I never wanted any trouble.”
But you don’t have to want trouble, you just rub up against it and it multiplies. I nodded, but not encouragement. “Well that’s grand. So now Garfield is dead, you’re driving his car away from a murder scene and before the night’s out his house gets turned over by somebody who has a key. I think the professor’s keys were in the ignition of his car, Terry. I also think you knew his address, and from the river you could drive there in fifteen minutes.”
Reilly moaned and rolled his forehead over the mirror, his biggest problem always to explain the simple thing
s. “I never knew his address. I only drove his car back to Jarrett’s and I didn’t take any keys. All I took was his case off the back seat.”
The latrine floor was a sump for the water slopping out of the washstand. The soles of my shoes were trying to blot it dry. But you can’t always have your moments of clarity over sherry in the library. When Henry went away for the holiday, he’d left the Buccleuch as a present and slipped a Christmas card in the pages of his boyfriend’s diary. Christmas Eve, Michael Garfield had carried them home from his office in the briefcase Reilly took from the back seat of his car. For Reilly, the Buccleuch would look like a gift-wrapped Scottish miracle, put there to settle his nerves. But when he showed his haul to Jarrett, it wouldn’t be the liquor that interested him. I said, “Go on. Police searched Jarrett’s house. They didn’t find any briefcase. Or Garfield’s diary inside it.”
The door behind me rattled in the lock. A Popeye voice whined from the other side. “C’mon will ya? Hang it up in there!”
Reilly gulped at the rotted air. “When Jarrett got back, I told him what happened at the river and he started screaming at me. He said the diary was good, Mr. Willard would want it, but where I left Garfield’s car was stupid and he’d have to move it.”
It was the truth. On a blitz site two hundred yards along Cloth Fair, the convertible was a liability. It needed dumping far off and soon, and since Reilly was likely too hopped, Jarrett went himself and died so Reilly could live. Which was poetic of him. Reilly pressed his face flat against the mirror, gasping through his teeth. “I was watching from upstairs, waiting for Jarrett to come back, when the nurse walked into the court with somebody. It was snowing hard and I couldn’t see his face, but when she went indoors and left him standing there, I knew.” His cheeks gray as wax paper. “I knew it was the one who pulled the gun on Garfield.”
So Reilly panicked for a second time that night, grabbed the briefcase and put Garfield’s diary back inside, and the Buccleuch along with it because he wouldn’t want to risk sobering up. He left by the fire escape, walked the City till daylight, then found a phone booth and left a message for Willard and got an answer right back. It told him: one, to stay away from Cloth Court because Jarrett was dead; two, that as of now he had a new address; and three, to be at the Raglan bar at noon with the briefcase and Garfield’s diary. It left Reilly with the rest of Christmas morning on his hands. He made it sound like purgatory with no remission. Part of the morning he’d passed with Dillys Valentine and gave her what was left of the Buccleuch for a Christmas present of her own. Next, he looked up Irene at the hotel and took a loan to pay his bar bill while he waited at the Raglan. Then came his biggest holiday surprise of all, when Willard arrived at noonday to make the collection in person, on account of his close interest lately in the professor. A thin, clear, stream trickled from the corner of Reilly’s mouth to the point of his chin, then pattered in the water in the washbasin. Outside, Popeye was hammering the door with the flat of his hand. “Jesus! You in there! You gotta problem?”
Reilly heaved and steadied himself. “Mr. Willard took the briefcase. He gave me money and said to stay at Paddy’s because of what happened to Jarrett.” He clamped his mouth shut, his features contorted in the glass.
“Go ahead. Make room for breakfast.”
For two seconds you could hear the mold crawling up the walls. Then the boy’s frame stiffened and convulsed into the washbasin. I slid a hand behind my back, loosed the door catch and stepped out into the vestibule.
A petty officer bristled in past me, short and solid with bulging eyes. At the threshold to the cubicle he halted abruptly, heeled around to look me up and down, then turned back to where Reilly was retching over the washstand like a trout taking a fly. The officer’s mouth looped around a fat, wheezing chuckle. “Well, good afternoon lay-deeez!” He shouldered into the cubicle, unbuttoning. “Pardon me, sweetheart, but dis is oygent.”
The hatcheck blonde was fixing her stocking run with nail varnish. At the head of the steps from the sidewalk, the Pelican’s street sign lit green and red shadows under the porch. I stood breathing air again while the bird jigged on the sign overhead. Smoke trails lifted off chimneys that still had coal to burn. In the west, a winter sun was clipping the rooftops, turning snowdrifts liquid gold in one last flare of afternoon so bright it glued my eyelashes together. Just to feel the warmth on my face, I stepped to the corner of the porch, leaned back against a column and looked straight into the light. Sunset swam. A roman candle showered sparks behind my eyelids like metal pouring. Then knuckles cracked and a voice behind me, familiar and easy, said, “Red sky.”
I twisted around, put a hand in front of my face and saw nothing but a dazzling, rippling crimson lake, and between it and me, three long, heavyset figures dancing in a row.
The first blow came high across my temple and bounced the side of my face off the stone pillar. The next and the next were put in low on my left side before I had chance to breathe. Three of them; one to take my wrists from behind and snap my arms back around the column, one to beat slow time into my ribs, deliberate as a swinging axe, and a third who only spoke two words and cracked his knuckles. They made unhurried business of it, strictly in a day’s work, and when the beating alone was enough to pin me, the one behind let go my wrists.
My mouth filled with blood. My chin wedged in my collarbone. My knees locked and jammed me upright until the one doing all the work straightened up and sighed, discouraged by the monotony of it. He put his palm against my forehead, pushed my head up to look in my eyes, then grunted and turned away to straighten his necktie. My legs folded. I keeled and twisted sideways, pitched forward and went down scraping plaster off the column with my chin. Paint flakes rained on the ground around me, like confetti at a wedding. It was the last thing I remembered.
Distillation of a Cordial Promise
I was lying face down on a beach in a shallow pool, shivering and listening to the dragging tide. Above or below high water I couldn’t tell, and what interest I had was theoretical because I was going no place. My left side had been worked over by somebody who practiced, I had a mouth and nose full of blood and grit, and I hadn’t figured out how to spit yet, let alone crawl.
There had been haunted hours of the same chasing dreams, twisted shadow plays of scratching rats and witches’ bedtime stories spinning in halls of mirrors, strange, unfriendly and impossible to grasp. They brought with them a smell of night at an ocean’s edge, a lift and crunch of footfall, a voice fractured and dissolved beyond understanding, talking without letup in my ear. Then the footfall scuffed around me on the shingle, a hand scooped under my shoulder and shook it hard. The soft, crazed voice leaned closer and still made no more sense to me than weeping in a madhouse. No use. I was slipping sideways again, spiraling like a seashell in a rock pool. Not touching bottom but falling through mile-wide spaces I didn’t know existed, in between wet grains of sand.
When I surfaced, I had my coat tucked under my chin for a blanket and a fire was cracking lazily nearby. The heat licked at my cheek and a sound of soft, low keening was making me curious. Not that curious, but enough to lift an eyelid and take a look around. Wide acres of a warehouse floated in the light from the fire. A plantation of cast iron columns stood shadowed in close rows. A roof pitched over studded beam sections stayed the weather directly overhead. The rest of the burned-out building was shattered and open to the stars, jittering under a hard frost. At the limit of the firelight a figure was sitting on the edge of a mattress, lean and hollowed, knees pulled up to his chest. He was tugging the ends of a blanket across the shoulders of a ragged blue suit, writing with a pencil stub on his shirt cuff one slow mark at a time. His tongue worked along his teeth as he wrote. Spittle trapped in the stubble under his lip. And from some Ypres or Delville Wood or Vimy Ridge or Paschendaele, every restless atom of his limbs danced the perpetual St. Vitus of shell-shock. I lay watching him for a time, then looked around
at the rest of the building.
A bonfire flared in the center of the floor where the old soldier camped out. In the shadows beyond, a line of blown-out windows hung high in a wall. At the foot of the wall there was a heap of charred planking, dragged out of the weather for fuel. A skinny mongrel with a tiger-stripe was snuffing around in it. Except for the three of us, what was left of the warehouse seemed deserted. Whatever company he kept in daytime, it was likely the soldier passed his chafing nights in solitary. Nobody would get any sleep otherwise. Not for the last thirty years. I lay back, started counting the pulses of a high, blue star beyond the roof ribs, and drifted out over the dark edge again, effortlessly.
There are spilled hours before dawn when the air tastes of tinplate. The shuttering blue star had set. My ribcage only hurt when I breathed out or breathed in and I was waiting for daybreak, sitting propped against an iron pillar in front of the dying fire. Each time I stirred, the soldier put away his pencil stub, picked up a rag and came over to squat down beside me. He had a can sunk in the embers at the edge of the flames, ready to reach out with the rag. We had a routine already. The soldier knelt down, wiped a thumb across two holes punched in the rim and put the can in my hands; condensed milk, warmed-over, thick enough to lay bricks with and sweeter than molasses. I held it on my knees in the rag, waiting for the metal to cool, one eye on the soldier’s dog flat out on his side with his paws crossed. Tiger twitched an earflap now and then to show he’d got me covered, but I’d been around long enough not to bother him anymore. I tried working out how long.