999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [69]
This was a couple of years ago, in July. I remember that I was standing in the Earls Court Road, in Earls Court, looking up at the Earl’s Court Tube Station sign and wondering why the apostrophe was there in the station when it wasn’t in the place, and then staring at the junkies and the winos who hang around on the pavement, and all the time keeping an eye out for Mr. Alice’s Jag.
I wasn’t worried about having the diamonds in my inside pocket. I don’t look like the sort of bloke who’s got anything you’d want to mug him for, and I can take care of myself. So I stared at the junkies and winos, killing time till the Jag arrived (stuck behind the road works in Kensington High Street, at a guess) and wondering why junkies and winos congregate on the pavement outside Earl’s Court Station.
I suppose I can sort of understand the junkies: they’re waiting for a fix. But what the fuck are the winos doing there? Nobody has to slip you a pint of Guinness or a bottle of rubbing alcohol in a plain brown bag. It’s not comfortable, sitting on the paving stones or leaning against the wall. If I were a wino, on a lovely day like this, I decided, I’d go down to the park.
Near me a little Pakistani lad in his late teens or early twenties was papering the inside of a glass phone box with hooker cards—CURVY TRANSSEXUAL and REAL BLONDE NURSE, BUSTY SCHOOLGIRL and STERN TEACHER NEEDS BOY TO DISCIPLINE. He glared at me when he noticed I was watching him. Then he finished up and went on to the next booth.
Mr. Alice’s Jag drew up at the curb and I walked over to it and got in the back. It’s a good car, a couple of years old. Classy but not something you’d look twice at.
The chauffeur and Mr. Alice sat in the front. Sitting in the back seat with me was a pudgy man with a crewcut and a loud check suit. He made me think of the frustrated fiancée in a fifties film; the one who gets dumped for Rock Hudson in the final reel. I nodded at him. He extended his hand, and then, when I didn’t seem to notice, he put it away.
Mr. Alice did not introduce us, which was fine by me, as I knew exactly who the man was. I’d found him, and reeled him in, in fact, although he’d never know that. He was a professor of ancient languages at a North Carolina university. He thought he was on loan to British Intelligence from the U.S. State Department. He thought this because this was what he had been told by someone at the U.S. State Department. The professor had told his wife that he was presenting a paper to a conference on Hittite studies in London. And there was such a conference. I’d organized it myself.
“Why do you take the bloody tube?” asked Mr. Alice. “It can’t be to save money.”
“I would have thought the fact I’ve been standing on that corner waiting for you for the last twenty minutes demonstrates exactly why I didn’t drive,” I told him. He likes it that I don’t just roll over and wag my tail. I’m a dog with spirit. “The average daytime speed of a vehicle through the streets of Central London has not changed in four hundred years. It’s still under ten miles an hour. If the tubes are running, I’ll take the tube, thanks.”
“You don’t drive in London?” asked the professor in the loud suit. Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics. Let’s call him Macleod.
“I’ll drive at night, when the roads are empty,” I told him. “After midnight. I like driving at night.”
Mr. Alice wound down the window and lit a small cigar. I could not help noticing that his hands were trembling. With anticipation, I guessed.
And we drove through Earls Court, past a hundred tall red-brick houses that claimed to be hotels, a hundred tattler buildings that housed guest houses and bed-and-breakfasts, down good streets and bad. Sometimes Earls Court reminds me of one of those old women you meet from time to time who’s painfully proper and prissy and prim until she’s got a few drinks into her, when she starts dancing on the tables and