THIRTY
THERE WERE BIG red buses running both ways on the road outside, and we elected to go south, aiming to change at the next big crossroads and head west for the centre. All our money was in big bills, which we figured wouldn’t be welcome on a bus, so we ducked into a convenience store and bought travel cards named after bivalve molluscs. Then we located the nearest bus stop and hung back in the shadows until we saw what we wanted lumbering through the traffic towards us. It was after seven in the evening, and I was tired, and Nice looked completely done in. She hadn’t slept in about a day and a half.
The outer hinterland of London felt vast, and the bus was slow, so we took a chance and got out again back in Barking, where we knew we could get the subway, which we figured would be faster. We checked the map at the station and used the District Line, which had a stop at a place called St James’s Park, which sounded like it might be near some fancy places. Which it was. We came up into the night air and saw signs to Westminster Abbey in one direction and Buckingham Palace in the other. And there was a big hotel right across the street. Five stars. Not the Ritz, not the Savoy, but a shiny international chain that looked adequate in every respect.
We went in, and the guy at the check-in desk took a little advantage of our fatigue by claiming only top-tier rooms were available that night, at prices that would have rented a house with a pool for a month outside of Pope Field, but the Romford Boys were paying, so we didn’t really care. I counted off the huge sum from one of the greasy rolls, and in return we got key cards and all kinds of information about room service and restaurants and club floors and business centres and wifi passwords. Casey Nice bought a toothbrush in the lobby shop, and we rode up in the elevator. I saw her to her door, and waited until it locked behind her, and then I continued on to my own room, which justified its top-tier status not by being notably large, but by having its bed more or less completely hidden under fat chintzy pillows. I swept them all to the floor, and threw my clothes after them, and climbed under the covers, and went straight to sleep.
I was woken up eleven hours later by Casey Nice on the room phone. She sounded bright and cheerful. Whether that was due to eleven hours of sleep or better living through chemistry, I didn’t know. She said, ‘Do you want to get breakfast?’
The clock in my head was showing just after eight in the morning, and there was bright daylight outside my window. I said, ‘Sure, come knock on my door when you’re ready.’
Which she did, about ten minutes after I was showered and dressed. She was in the same outfit as the day before, obviously, but she didn’t seem unduly perturbed by it. We rode down to the restaurant, and got a table for two in the far corner. The place was full of sleek types discussing agendas and doing deals, some of them face to face, some of them on cell phones. I ordered British food, heavy on fat and sugar, but with coffee, not tea. Casey Nice chose lighter fare, and laid her phone next to her napkin, for easy reference.
She said, ‘According to General O’Day, as of this morning neither MI5 nor the local police department knows anything about a casualty among the Romford Boys. Seems like Charlie White is playing it close to his vest.’
I nodded. Par for the course. Standard procedure. The dead guy would have gone into a car crusher in a back street or a pig trough in a local Essex farm about the same time I was going to sleep.
She said, ‘And General O’Day says so far six out of the eight nations have attempted undercover contact with the outer cordon, and they’ve all failed.’
I nodded again. A no-brainer. The Romford Boys would be erring on the side of caution. They would take the small risk of missing a genuine deal, in order to protect their mission.
She said, ‘We’ll get a full roster of names later today. And locations, but that data is difficult. There are lots of potential locations, including remote rural places. Plus we assume by now they’re already exploiting Karel Libor’s infrastructure. Which would give them more options.’
I nodded for a third time. Kott and Carson were needles in one of about a hundred unknown haystacks, and they would stay that way for the time being.
She said, ‘And the best approach to the Serbians is through a pawn shop in a place called Ealing. Which is an outer suburb, to the west, a little less than halfway back to the airport. I looked it up on the map.’
‘You’ve been busy. I hope you slept.’
‘I did,’ she said. ‘I feel great.’
I didn’t ask about pills.
She said, ‘You knew the minicab company was bent. Didn’t you? Right at the beginning.’
I said, ‘Educated guess.’
‘You used them to attract attention. Like having them pick us up at the hotel and take us to Wallace Court. Which was the plan you made on the plane. You decided to make the cordon come to us.’
Which was giving me more credit than I was due. Largely because of the word plan. I said, ‘I wasn’t sure what to expect. No one ever is. It’s all about reacting.’
She paused a beat. ‘Are you saying you don’t have a plan?’
‘I have an overall strategic objective.’
‘Which is what?’
‘To get out of here before they check the tapes.’
She said, ‘Let’s go to Ealing.’
We started back at the St James’s Park subway station, where the map showed us the same District Line we had come in on then continued westward, all the way to a station called Ealing Broadway, which Casey Nice’s phone showed was the one we wanted, which we figured was extremely convenient. So we waited in the station, which was literally tubular, like the local name, the Tube, and we got on the train, and we settled in for the long journey. I said, ‘Talk to me.’
She said, ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Tell me where you were born. Where you grew up. The name of your pony.’
‘I didn’t have a pony.’
‘Did you have a dog?’
‘Most of the time. Sometimes more than one.’
‘With names?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I want to hear you say it.’
She said, ‘I was born in downstate Illinois. I grew up in downstate Illinois. On a farm. The dogs were usually named after presidents from the Democratic party.’
I said, ‘Where was I born?’
‘West Berlin. You told that guy in Arkansas.’
‘Where did I grow up?’
‘All over the world, according to your file.’
‘Could you tell that by the sound of my voice?’
‘You sound like you don’t really come from anywhere.’
‘Therefore you’re going to do the talking in the pawn shop. Your accent is better than mine. Presumably these Serbian guys worry about entrapment, so any British accent would be an alarm bell. The person could be an undercover cop. Being foreign is better. And you sound really American. Assuming the Serbian ear can tell the difference.’
‘OK,’ she said, cheerful enough. Pills or no pills, she was doing fine so far.
We clattered onward, rocking a little with the motion, and then the train came out from under the ground and rode along on the surface, through the daylight, slow and stately, like any other local service. We got out at the Ealing Broadway terminal, which looked like any other regular aboveground railroad facility, and we stepped out to the street. Ealing looked like the places we had seen equally far to the east, once remote rural settlements, then swallowed up, and looking a little awkward about it. There was a long commercial strip, and some big public buildings, and some small parades of mom-and-pop stores, one of them with its window whitewashed over and a sign saying Ealing Minicabs on it, and right next to that was a place where either mom or pop or both were in the business of lending money against small and valuable securities, because there were iron bars on the windows and a sign saying Ealing Cash Loans. I had been expecting to see an arrangement of three golden spheres hanging on a black gallows, which I understood was the traditional British symbol for a pawn shop, but I had to make do with a small neon replica high in the window. Which was otherwise full of abandoned securities, some of them small, some of them valuable, some of them both, some of them neither.
‘Ready?’ I asked.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ she answered.
I opened the door, and let her step in past me, and I followed her into a place that looked nothing like it would in the movies. It was a bland, rectangular space, mostly dirty white, with laminate everywhere, and fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. Operationally it was laid out like a horseshoe, with waist-high counters running around three sides, with glass panels in the counters, showing artless displays inside of yet more abandoned pledges.
There was a guy behind the counter, at the eleven o’clock position, a medium-size man maybe forty or fifty years old, very dark and unshaven, wearing a rust-coloured sweater that must have been knitted with fat wooden needles. He was bent over, polishing something small, a bracelet maybe, with a rag held between his thumbs. He turned his head sideways, like a swimmer, and looked at us, in a way that was neither hostile nor interested. After a long minute we realized the stare was all the greeting we were going to get, so I hung back and Casey Nice stepped up, and she said, ‘Do you mind if I browse?’
Which focused all the guy’s attention on her, because of the singular pronoun. I, not we. Clearly I was not a potential browser. I was nobody. Her driver, maybe. The guy behind the counter said nothing, but he nodded, a single upward jerk of his head, which because of his position came out sideways, which seemed appropriate in the low-ceilinged space, and partly encouraging, as if to say, have at it, but also partly discouraging, as if to say, but what you see is all we got.
I stood where I was, and Nice moved around, peering down, occasionally laying a fingertip on the glass, as if to isolate something for closer consideration, and then moving on, as yet unsatisfied. She went left to right, and then all the way back again, right to left, before straightening up and saying, ‘I don’t see the kind of thing I’m looking for.’
The guy in the sweater didn’t answer.
She said, ‘My friend in Chicago told me this is where she came.’
The guy in the sweater said, ‘For what?’
He wasn’t English. That was for sure. He wasn’t French or Dutch or German. Or Russian or Ukrainian or Polish. Serbian was entirely plausible.
Casey Nice said, ‘My friend had concerns about her personal safety. You know, in a foreign city for the first time. Without the precautions she would be legally entitled to take at home.’
The guy in the sweater said, ‘Are you from America?’
‘Yes, from Chicago.’
‘This is not a gymnasium, lady. We don’t teach self-defence here.’
‘My friend said you have certain items for sale.’
‘You want a gold watch? Take two or three. Use them to bargain for your life.’
‘My friend didn’t buy a watch.’
‘What did she buy?’
Nice put her hand out, low down, away from her side, slightly behind her. She clicked her fingers. My cue, I supposed. The driver. Or the help. Or the bagman. I stepped forward and took out the dead guy’s cash roll, and held it lightly between thumb and index finger, and I tapped it end-on against the glass counter, and I held it there, upright, a fat greasy cylinder as big as a whisky glass, sour and dense with paper money. The guy took a good long look at it, and then he glanced at me, and then he turned back to Casey Nice.
He said, ‘Who is he?’
‘My bodyguard,’ she said. ‘But he couldn’t get his gun through the X-ray machine.’
‘There are laws here.’
‘There are laws everywhere. But the same thing gets past them all.’
The guy looked back at the money.
He said, ‘Go wait in the minicab office. Next door. Someone will drive you.’
‘Drive me where?’
‘We don’t keep those items here. Too many police. They search us all the time. There are laws.’
‘Where do you keep them?’
The guy didn’t answer. He took out his phone and dialled. He said a short sentence in a low tone and a fast foreign language. Not French or Dutch or German. Or Russian or Ukrainian or Polish. Serbian was still top of the list. The guy clicked off his call and shooed us away and said, ‘Go. They will drive you.’