Bloody London (38 page)

She went inside and tried Isobel. I stood on the deck in the rain and watched the traffic grow. Lights spinning through the fog. The shapes of cops, firemen, soldiers.

Lily reappeared with coffee. “The phone's still dead.”

We drank from the thermos. Then Lily said, “I'm going to find a phone.” She shoved her hair under a plastic hat, climbed up on to the Embankment.

Ten minutes later, she was back. She got a phone off one of the emergency crews, but Isobel's phone was dead.

“Keir will bring the kids to their house. I know he will. I have to go.” She looked at me. “It will be OK. It's higher ground at Notting Hill. It will be fine.” She was convincing herself. “I have to. I can read between the lines. What they're not saying on the radio. They're withholding news. It's bad. I have to get Beth.”

My arms tight around her, I said, “How will you get there?”

“I'll walk if I have to.”

I hesitated. “I'll come with you.”

“If there's someone you have to see, then do it.”

I followed her off the boat and on to the pavement.
The street was jammed now. A young cop struggled to inflate a dinghy by blowing on its tube like it was a balloon. His face swelled up with effort.

I held Lily. “You get Beth and I'll meet you. We'll go home to New York. I'll find you both at Isobel's. Give me the address and I'll get there. You listening, sweetheart?”

She found a piece of paper and scribbled an address, and we walked fast, together, up the block, past a line of people waiting at a payphone. Lily pulled the yellow hat down hard. “I'm going to leave you here, Artie, OK. I'm going.”

I wrote down Tessa Stiles's number. “Leave me a message there, if you can get through.”

“I promise.”

The rain and wind blew sideways now and Lily stumbled against me. “I have to go,” she said over and over, and started up the street. Then she ran back. “Tell Jack Cotton. Tell your cop friends. Tell them to get Phillip Frye.”

“Tell me.”

“I told you last night. He knows everything. The dead men near his shelter. Something stinks. And Tommy knew. He knew, Artie. Tommy Pascoe knew about Phillip, and it killed him, and Frankie, too, and the rest of them.”

“I was out there. At the warehouse.”

“You saw me?”

“Yes.”

“I tried to talk to him. It's why I stayed in London.”

“Lily?”

“What?”

“You're telling me Frye's a killer?”

“Have you ever really looked into Phillip's eyes?”

“You're not gonna take him on, swear to me, Lil.” I grabbed her wrist. “Tell me you're really going to Isobel's.”

Head bent against the rain, Lily set off. I called out, “I love you,” but Lily disappeared, her yellow slicker sucked up by the fog.

Carrying the shortwave radio I grabbed from the houseboat, I got to the King's Road and hitched a ride up towards the subway. On the street, I found a pay-phone that was still working and left a message for Jack: Get to Frye. Get Phillip Frye. I didn't figure he'd get it, a day like this, but I left it, and left another message with his wife, who I never met after all, never ate her roast lamb, and a third for Tessa Stiles.

There was a supermarket and I went in and grabbed some smokes. People packed the aisles, dripping dirty water behind them. They pushed carts methodically up and down the aisles, eyes intent, searching the shelves. Some of the shelves were already empty. People piled water, milk, sardines. There was a pile of dusty bags of charcoal, left over from the summer maybe, and people grabbed at them and piled their carts until the carts wobbled.

Kids ran alongside their parents, laughing, pulling candy off the shelves; the schools were shut. The kids inspected fancy cereal and ice cream. One of them snitched a bag of M&Ms, tore it open, tipped his head
back and poured the candy down his throat. People called out to each other and cracked anxious jokes.

“Cooking up a storm, are you?” A woman shouted out to a guy who passed, his own cart towering with food.

There was a ripple of unease. Not fear; not yet. But it infected you, and I bought batteries for the radio and more cigarettes, chocolate bars and a pint of Scotch that I stuck in my raincoat pocket. I was a kid during some bad winters in Moscow when there was a food shortage. In Moscow, no one had laughed and there was nothing you could hoard.

In front of the supermarket, people shifted bags into their cars. One woman dropped a shopping bag on the pavement. Rolls of toilet paper fell out. The rain soaked them before she could pick them up.

Through the window of a bakery I saw people eating croissants at the counter and drinking coffee. A man strolled into a video store, as if nothing much had happened, as if he might be required to spend another night at home and wanted a couple of movies. Another guy came out of a hardware store, a mop over his shoulder, laughing. Everyone draped with raincoats, slickers, plastic sheets.

The daylight showed the damage. Garbage cans were overturned. Trees were ripped up – one lay across the sidewalk – and buses were stranded in water up to their hubcaps. The window of a big department store had blown out; the bed in the window was drenched.

Up and down the main drag here, people wandered around looking for supplies. It had a surreal quality.
Some people smiled and joked. This was London, they seemed to say. Civilization. But they were nervous. The street resembled a tiny war zone.

I kept the radio on, holding it to my ear as I walked. In an appliance store, TV sets showed multiple images of London. In other parts of town, the electricity was out and a slow drip of real panic had started. There were more reports that the river would rise higher than 1953. Reports that the pumps had failed in Thamesmead and the whole place was under water, drowning in its own reclaimed marshes. Some residents on the Isle of Dogs were evacuated. Someone else reported they were loading kids on the last trains out of Waterloo before the station shut down. The financial markets opened, there was panic selling, then they shut. The sewage pumps were breaking down. People who lived along the river itself were instructed to go to the upper floors or to the roof. Somewhere safe.

Everywhere on the street, like me, people carried their radios. They held them to their ear as if it were a big sports event. The noise of the radios jammed its sound into the morning along with the sound of hammers as people boarded up stores and the jack-hammers that ripped the streets open. Men dug for power lines, rain dripping off their hardhats, and the sirens wailed and cars honked.

Sloane Square, where the subway stopped, was littered with wet flowers. A sign posted at the subway entrance announced one line was already out. I ran down the stairs, but the platform was jammed. The crowd looked restless, wet, angry. I pushed my way
back up and got a lift on a truck that took me to the river again. Cop cars, fire engines, ambulances were everywhere.

There were soldiers out now, piling sandbags along the embankment. The river looked vicious. High. Choppy. I wished I had gone with Lily. Where was she? Did she really go to Isobel's, or did she head to the river and Frye's shelter? I tried Jack again. No answer. The networks were jammed or broken. I had to get to Gilchrist.

Geoffrey Gilchrist sat on the roof of his little house on a canvas stool. He held an umbrella over himself and he was bent down, peering at the roof. My ribs hurt from where the creeps worked me over and I was breathless from running. I yelled up to him.

He looked at me, pointed to the roof and said, “It's leaking. Come up. The front door is open.”

I climbed over a broken window box on the pavement and went in the house. In the living room, buckets stood on the floor and the rain pinged through the roof on to the metal.

There was a ladder on the top floor that led to a trapdoor and the roof.

Gilchrist, wrapped in his raincoat, dropped the umbrella. He was trying to put a sheet of plastic over a hole in the roof. I helped him nail it down. Then he looked up and said, “It's the Barrier. The Thames Flood Barrier.”

“What about it?”

“They're going to ram it. Set an explosive device on
it. The forecast is bad. There's an assumption of a four-hour weather warning, but it's a false assumption. And if there's a problem with the Barrier, if it can't be raised, the Thames will flood.”

I pulled at his sleeve. “Who? Who is they?”

Gilchrist said, “What's the difference?”

“What's your price, Geoff ?”

“This is free.”

“Rammed with what?”

“A Russian paper ship, maybe. Crewed by cowboys who will risk the weather. Illegals on it. A stash of AKs for the British market. I've seen the Barrier, Artie, I've seen the plans. The concrete walls have ladders for maintenance and rings for mooring repair dinghies. There is terribly easy access from the water.”

I looked out at the river that was choked with fog.

“What kind of cowboy's gonna offer up his life on some crazed kamikaze mission? I don't buy this shit.” I turned to go.

“A ship crashed the Barrier a few years ago. No one saw it or heard it in the fog until it was too late. The crew didn't die, did they? They were conveniently fished out of the river, dried off, fed, tucked up and sent home.”

“What's the fucking point?”

“The flood.”

“The point of the fucking flood, Geoff, what's the gain?”

He looked at me and said, “Chaos. Mayhem.” He was laughing. “Fear.”

“The Russians don't care about terror unless there's profit. Fear of what?”

“You think there isn't profit in fear? It's got very deep pockets.” He leaned over me and said softly, urgently, “I don't care, you know. For all I care the whole bloody city can wash away, but I promised you, and I am telling you. Find someone who will believe you, Artyom. Make them put the gates up. Do it now.” He dug in a pocket and pulled out a cellphone, then handed it to me.

There was a faint signal, and I got Stiles's station house and left her another message, and I should have run like hell after that, to the police, the Barrier, Frye, but I didn't. I had to know.

“Is this what Thomas Pascoe knew? About the Barrier?”

Gilchrist said, “He knew what the Russians were. He knew about the options, the opportunities. In a sense, it was his fault, of course – which has a rather nice moral symmetry, actually – because it was Tommy Pascoe who introduced Phillip Frye to the Russians. They had the money, he said. They wanted a stake in the legitimate social system. Tommy set it in motion. He thought he would make them better citizens. He thought they'd give him and Mr Frye money for their good works, and they did, but it also gave them entrée to all sorts of deals. And Tommy didn't know what Frye was, and he couldn't stop what he had started.”

“You knew and you didn't tell me?”

“I didn't know it all until this morning. Not all of it. Not the Barrier.”

“That's not enough,” I said. “You said you owed me. I want a payback. Is this why Leo Mishkin said Thomas
Pascoe was a problem, that it was better if he was out of the way?”

Gilchrist shrugged. “I don't know any Mishkin.”

“He's Eddie Kievsky's brother-in-law.”

“Then I'm sure you're right.”

“You could have stopped it, Pascoe's murder.”

He shrugged. “That was my opportunity, you might say. I overheard things. Perhaps I even knew enough to warn Tommy, but I let it pass. Anyway, dear, who on earth would believe me? I should imagine I'm the least trustworthy man on the planet.” Gilchrist was bareheaded. Water poured down his collar.

I said, “Come inside, Geoff.”

“No, I'm enjoying this.” He gestured at the rough, gray city, the heaving river, the scurrying figures, bent under ripped umbrellas.

“Yesterday, at your club, I said Phillip Frye was going to inherit Pascoe's money. It made you talk. Who the hell cares if Frye profits from Pascoe's death, I mean, you didn't expect the dough, did you?”

Gilchrist looked at me. “Oh no. Quite the opposite. I wanted Tommy's death to be pure. I wanted it to be meaningless. A hole in the universe.”

I tried to light a cigarette, but the pack was soaked. I crouched next to Gilchrist on the roof; I was close enough to smell his sour breath.

“Why?”

“Years ago, in Moscow, Tommy Pascoe decided I had betrayed this country, him, the whole shooting match, he took it personally. We were all so young and full of ideas.”

“What ideas?”

“You're too young to remember. Silly ideas. Exploding cigars. The weather. Sex. The Americans once tried to destroy Fidel Castro by putting poison in his boot polish so his beard would fall out, that sort of thing. We responded in kind.”

“Just tell me straight.”

“Once upon a time, Tommy Pascoe tried to have me killed.”

“What, with an exploding cigar?”

He said, “I wish. It would have made a better story. You ought to go now, Artie.”

“What?”

Gilchrist looked out over London again. “Find someone who will believe you,” he said again. “It will happen soon, it's happening now,” he said dreamily. “Now.”

I was running. I ran along the river, still holding the radio, Gilchrist's words banging in my head. I stumbled. I barged into an army truck that was stranded in water. Subways were out everywhere, you heard it on the radio, the stations knee-deep in water and sludge. A sewer had burst. I could smell the shit.

Screaming sirens cut through the fog. Suddenly, a yard from me, as I ran, a metal sign flew off a pole and sliced through a woman's arm. She stood. Watched her arm hanging from her shoulder. Then she started to scream. I couldn't hear the noise anymore.

Lily being alone on foot somewhere in London scared me. I was worried for Sverdloff. He was
involved with Kievsky's crowd, with bad real-estate deals. He bought into the syndicate that bought up Docklands intending to fix the markets. He was “Half in, half out”, but when he found out the Russians would use terror to depress the market, he tried to stop them. I believed that, and anyway, I love the big prick and I owed him.