A Cool Breeze on the Underground (12 page)

Part Two
The Main Drag

13

Foggy london town was sunny and hot, really hot. Summer had taken an early jump on spring. Neal stepped out of Heathrow’s struggling air conditioning into an outdoor sauna.

“A bit on the warm side, I’m afraid,” said Simon. “We’re on to having a drought, actually. Everything is turning sort of monochromatic brown.”

“I thought it rained all the time here,” Neal said.

“I’m glad I’m off to Africa, where it’s cooler,” Simon answered.

Neal laughed politely at the joke, until Simon’s puzzled expression told him he wasn’t joking.

“It is, actually, cooler there. Have you ever been?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

Simon was an eccentric. Neal guessed his age at late fifties, but knew he could be ten years off in either direction. He was tall and angular, with an Adam’s apple that belonged to a different species, and he walked with that particularly British purposefulness that people find so endearing or annoying. With the temperature tilting toward eighty, it tended toward the latter.

Simon was wearing a pink striped shirt, leaf green trousers, paisley ascot, blue argyle socks, and shoes that looked like moccasins but laced up. All this was topped off by a gray head with the odd lock of brown, shiny blue eyes, and a nose that should have been on Mount Rushmore, except it’s a small mountain.

He was a friend of Kitteredge, had taken Ethan and wife on safari, and based himself out of London. He found very little in the civilized world of much interest, and therefore could be trusted never to reveal the story of Allie Chase. He was to be Neal’s London host.

“I’m off in a week, actually, but that should give us time. I gather I’m to be your local expert. You’re some sort of man hunter, or some such thing.”

“Girl hunter, actually.”

Simon laughed. “Oh yes. Well done.”

He led them through the maze of parking lots as if they were late for lunch with the Queen. He stopped on locating a small silver sports car, a convertible with the top down.

“This,” he announced with a flourish, “is a Gordon-Keble.”

“It’s nice,” Neal said, self-consciously inane. The extent of his knowledge about cars was that they had a steering wheel and four tires—unless left overnight in his neighborhood.

“There were only thirteen ever made,” Simon continued with shy pride. “I own three of them.”

“That’s great.”

“One of my vices,” Simon confided in a tone more appropriate to a confession of sexual relations with twelve-year-old Chinese girls dressed up as nuns.

“What are the others?”

“Other cars?”

“Other vices.”

“You’ll see,” Simon answered seriously. “Shall we take the Keble to town?”

Simon tossed Neal’s single bag into a small space behind the seats as Neal settled into the car. Neal sank back in the bucket seat and felt at least two inches off the ground.

Simon turned the key in the ignition and the little car came to life with demonic energy. Neal had the scary impression that the car had been waiting for this moment; it throbbed with predatory vibrations that reached from the soles of Neal’s feet to the top of his hair. It hummed like a wolf at the edge of a flock of sheep, like the worst boy on the block let out of his room.

“Quite a feeling, isn’t it?” Simon asked proudly.

“Yes.” Terror.

Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn’t thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master.

Neal sat as low in his seat as possible and kept his eyes closed as much as pride would allow.

“Why only thirteen?” he shouted over the rushing wind in an attempt to stave off vomiting by conversing.

“After Gordon was killed, Keble just lost the heart for it!”

“How was Gordon killed?” Neal asked, hating himself, knowing the answer would make him even more miserable.

“Swerved to avoid a grouse and jumped a stone wall! Landed in a church graveyard! Convenient, that!”

Simon crossed three lanes of traffic, oblivious to a chorus of blaring horns and curses, to take advantage of a two-foot gap created by an exiting car. He accelerated up a wicked outside curve, dove down the ensuing hill, braking just in time to avoid sodomizing a dairy truck, slid into the passing lane, and floored the accelerator. The gearbox sounded like a Chinese opera.

“I’ve had three bad smashups myself!” Simon shouted by way of reassurance. “One in Madagascar! Laid up for months! Broke several major bones!”

As the slightly thinning traffic allowed the driver to exercise his full gifts and the car’s fiendish potential, Neal prayed that Simon’s skull wasn’t among those major bones. Pale and sickened, Neal was plastered to the seat by what he knew could be only G forces, and he no longer hoped for survival, only a quick and merciful immolation. As anxiety perspiration joined the flow of heat-induced sweat, and the silver demon sped farther and faster toward a fiery death, Neal silently composed a postcard to Joe Graham: “Dear Dad, having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

14

Simon’s flat was a second-floor walk-up on Regent’s Park Road, a quiet street not far from the London Zoo: a good neighborhood for a safe house. Simon owned the entire house but rented the ground floor to a respectably married gay couple.

After all, Simon explained as they climbed the narrow staircase to his flat, “I spend most of my time in Africa, so it seemed a bit impractical to keep the whole thing.”

The flat was small. A sitting room faced the street and ran the whole width of the apartment. A small kitchen ran off this room, and the bed and bath ran off the kitchen.

Two floor-to-ceiling windows highlighted the sitting room, and a daybed flanked one of the windows. Simon set Neal’s bag down beside this bed. “Here you are, at least until I leave next week. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

“It’s great,” Neal said, then he noticed the walls. His jaw dropped.

Simon noticed.

“My other vice,” he said. “I like books.”

No kidding. The entire room was lined with bookshelves, all of which were jammed with first editions. A card table in the center of the room struggled against the weight of heavy book catalogues. Stacks of books sat in every corner and unoccupied nook. Neal stepped to the nearest wall and stared at the book spines on the shelves. A lot of them were nineteenth-century explorers’ memoirs— Burton, Speke, Stanley—all first editions. Then Neal saw the volumes of Fielding and Smollett.

“Simon, this is fantastic.”

Simon visibly brightened. “You read?”

Neal nodded as he stared at the volumes.

“What do you read?” Simon asked.

“This,” Neal answered, pointing at the shelves. “I read this. In paperback.”

“You can touch them.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“They won’t crumble in your hands.”

Neal was actually afraid that they would—books that precious, that old. He thought he could spend his whole life quite happily in this room.

“Do you collect?” Simon asked.

“I’m a starving student.”

“I thought you were a private eye.”

Neal smiled. “That, too.”

And I don’t make much money at that, either, he thought.

“What do you study?”

“Eighteenth-century lit.”

“Odd combination, detective and academic.”

A number of wry and ironic responses occurred to Neal, but he settled for, “Well, they both involve research.”

“Indeed.”

A crowbar couldn’t have pried Neal’s eyes from the bookshelf.

“Who’s your favorite?” Simon asked.

“I’m doing my thesis on Smollett.”

“Aah.”

That’s what everybody says, Neal thought. What they mean is, Aah, how boring.

Simon stepped to the bookcase and took out four volumes. He handed one of them to Neal and stood expectantly as Neal perused it.

It was a rare first edition, first volume, of Smollett’s
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.

Neal had never expected even to see one of these, and now he was holding one.

“Simon, this is a first edition.”

Simon grinned. “The 1751 unexpurgated version. But it’s better than that.” He gestured with his chin for Neal to examine the book.

“Handwritten marginal notes …” Neal looked at the notes more closely. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing, but it sure looked like old Smollett’s scrawl. He looked up from the book to Simon and raised his eyebrows.

Simon nodded enthusiastically. “From Smollett himself. Great stuff. Nasty remarks about the real people he was satirizing, little asides, that sort of thing.”

Neal’s hand started to shake. “Simon, is this…”

“The
Pickle.”

“There have only been rumors that this existed.”

Simon giggled. “I know.”

“This must be worth—”

“I paid ten for it.”

“Thousand?”

“Yes.”

“Pounds?”

“Yes.”

Neal swallowed hard. The notes in these four volumes could make his thesis. Hell, it could make his career … He handed the book back to Simon.

“Mind you, I could sell it for twenty or more. I should do, really. I’m not all that keen on Smollett, no offense.”

“None taken.”

Only a handful of people were keen on Smollett, Professor Leslie Boskin at Columbia University being one of them.

Simon took the volumes and laid them on Neal’s bed. “I know one collector, Arthur bloody Kendrick … Sir Arthur bloody Kendrick, who suspects that I have these. He’d pay a king’s ransom, mind you.”

“Why not let him?”

“The swine doesn’t love books, he loves possessing them. He sees books as commodities, investments. He doesn’t deserve books.” Simon’s face flushed with indignation. “Actually, you are one of the few people who know that I have these. One of the few people who know these volumes even exist.”

“I’m honored.”

“You love books. I can see that. I do hope you’ll have an opportunity to browse through these volumes while you’re here.”

I do hope I will, too, Neal thought.

“Actually,” said Neal, realizing that he’d actually just said
actually,
“I have to be going. I’m going to check into my hotel tonight.”

Simon’s face showed his disappointment. “Oh. I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk about books. I’m heading to my cottage in the country first thing tomorrow. Just for two or three days before I head to Africa, Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come up with me? Surely you can’t be in that great a rush.”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“Pity. The cottage is in the Yorkshire moors. An old shepherd’s cot, actually. Peaceful. A place you can hear your heartbeat. Ill leave directions should you change your mind.”

“Thanks.”

“At least stay to dinner. We can talk about books.”

Dinner was a beefsteak tougher than a jockey’s butt, vegetables with the taste boiled out of them, potatoes, tinned fruit, a red wine you could walk on, and conversation devoted entirely to books, Neal thought that, all in all, it was delightful. The only thing that might have made it better would have been the presence of Professor Leslie Boskin,

15

“Scholars have been talking about the
Pickle
for years, but I don’t think it even exists,” Professor Boskin said, waving his cigarette around. He smoked a lot when he was excited, and he was always excited when he was talking about Smollett.

Neal Carey sat there rapt. He was a senior at the time, an English major, and Boskin was an academic star. Neal had chosen Columbia University for two reasons: instructions from Friends, and Professor Leslie Boskin, the country’s foremost scholar of the eighteenth-century English novel. A famous authority at age thirty-seven, he had come out of a nowhere Pennsylvania steel town to win a scholarship to Harvard, which he parlayed into a Rhodes. His first book,
The Novel and the New Reading Public,
redefined the field. He was a true eighteenth-century gentleman: He paid his bills, shouted his share of the rounds, and believed first and foremost in the sanctity of friendship. One of those friends was Ethan Kitteredge, who on the deck of
Haridan
had told Boskin the truly picaresque life story of his promising young student Neal Carey. Not long after that, Boskin invited Neal to partake of a Chinese dinner. Every aspiring undergraduate in the English program knew what that meant: an invitation to become a graduate student under Boskin’s wing. Two years of harassment, browbeating, nit-picking, and slow torture.

Neal was thrilled. It was all he had ever wanted. He dug into his Peking duck and listened. Boskin was on a roll. His black eyes glowed.

“You see, Smollett struggled for years just to get noticed. He had an inferiority complex like a mule at a donkey convention. He was Scottish, he was relatively uneducated … in those days surgeons were pretty low on the social scale. So when his first novel,
Roderick Random,
came out, he thought he’d finally be accepted by the London literati.” Boskin paused to lay some strips of duck and some plum sauce onto the pancake and to take a sip of Tsingtao. “But he wasn’t. Johnson, Garrick, all the boys still snubbed him. So then he writes
Pickle
and he lets them have it. Really vicious satire. Not to mention the Lady Vane memoirs he throws in for the hell of it. Imagine it, here is the supposed diary of a highborn lady all about fucking around; and people are wondering, where did Smollett get this shit? And
Pickle
is a smash! The public loves it! And he’s picked up by London society. Johnson, Garrick, all the boys.”

Neal watched Boskin shove a huge hunk of the pancake into his mouth, chew it quickly, and wash it down with a slug of beer. It was true, Neal thought, Boskin really would rather talk about Smollett than eat.

Boskin set the beer down and continued. “But now he’s feeling badly about all the vicious shit he wrote in
Pickle,
so when he’s asked to do a second edition, he takes most of it out. But he has one copy somewhere—
one copy
in which he puts all the notes: who’s who, what the joke is, and the truth about Lady Vane. Was she his mistress? Is all the juicy stuff true?”

Boskin jabbed his chopsticks into his Dragon and Phoenix and came up with a piece of shrimp. “So Smollett gets old. As do we all, so drink up. He goes to Europe for his health. Gets a tumor the size of a baseball on his hand. His daughter and only child dies. Life sucks the big one. Miserable, bankrupt … he finally croaks in Italy. But we know for a fact that he had a copy of every one of his books with him when he went for the deep drop. So what would the widow do? No money … no prospects … no piece of The Rock …”

“Sell them.”

“Right! All she had to trade on was her late beloved’s fame. So she sold his whole collection, one by one. And every other book has surfaced except his
Pickle.
The
Pickle.
Four volumes of literary treasures. That’s how the rumor started. They say it’s never surfaced because it has all these marginal notes with all the goods on Samuel Johnson, Garrick, Akenside, and, of course, the sporting Lady Vane.

“Any collector, any eighteenth-century scholar, would give his left testicle to have a look at those volumes. Except they don’t exist. The rest of that duck is yours, by the way.”

Except they did exist—in Simon Keyes’s apartment. Neal had held them in his hands, books that could provide his future, his fortune, and his freedom. And he’d put them back on the shelf.