Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (12 page)

“Not that kind of pursuit.” I glanced over my shoulder for emphasis. “And it won’t be good for you if I’m seen here.” With this, I gave him a shove and slipped inside. “You’re a friend in need,” I said.

John looked skeptical. “This is really too bad of you, Francis. Now you’re inside and I’ll have to put you out.”

“I’ll be gone in a minute if you’ll just listen to me.”

But comprehension was too much to expect so soon. “I need a little refreshment,” he said. “A little wake-me-up. You’re sure it’s ten? I haven’t been up at ten for years.”

“As close as I can determine.”

Before I could say more he wandered into the windowless kitchenette and darkroom that serves most of his needs, physical and artistic. He reappeared, bottle in hand, looking slightly rosier. Ignoring my appeals, he went straight to his big portrait camera and swung around to face me.

“Not today, John. Absolutely no photos today.”

He put is eye to the lens. “You’re extremely filthy and in uniform, too.” He looked up in an accusatory way. “Why aren’t you at your post?”

“I had to leave suddenly. That’s what I’m trying to explain.”

“Absent without leave! Naughty boy.”

“Very. But John, no photos. And try to remember: I’ve not been here today.”

“I frequently doubt that people
have
been here. My loves have a certain airy, indeterminate quality.” His narrow face drooped and threatened melancholy.

“This time I really haven’t been,” I said. “I need to find someone ever so quick.”

“Your busy life! Pursued and pursuing.” He took another drink. I hoped that this unseasonably early tippling would not render him completely useless.

“You met an attractive young fellow at the Europa not too long ago.”

“I meet so many,” he said glumly, “but few are what I’d call attractive.”

“This one was. Name of George. I think he works as a mechanic. I need to find him, soonest.”

“This is bad of you, Francis, to try to turn your appeal on him. If he’s so attractive, you might leave him for me.”

“I just need to talk to him. Please concentrate for a moment.”

I found a glass and poured him a proper drink. The disadvantage of liking alcohol is that so many of one’s friends are drunks. Two glasses later, John had finally achieved his normal equilibrium, and I once again broached my need to find George.

John shook his head. “Don’t remember him. Don’t. The great passion of my life, and it’s gone.” He clapped his hand on his forehead and struck a pose. You never quite know when John is serious and when he is just enjoying an attitude. I felt like taking him by his skinny neck and giving him a good shake, but patience, patience.

“Might you have taken a photograph of him?”

A sly smile.

“Have you some recent proofs? The Europa? A handsome boy who’s been around? Name of George?”

John said we could but try. I noticed his hands shook as he sorted the various folders, meticulously kept despite the squalor of the studio. “How long ago?”

“Four weeks. Five at the outside. Pre-Blitz.”

“You should have said pre-Blitz. All life is divided into pre-Blitz and post-Blitz.
Vita est omnis divisa
. . . et cetera.” He opened a folder of night images: the high contrast of electric lights in darkness, laughing faces against windows covered by blackout curtains, smoke from a cigarette hanging like a veil; two graceful boys dancing; another, solo, with blond hair and a surly expression, sizing up the crowd. There was also a small photo, barely larger than a snapshot, of Connie with longer, fairer hair than I remembered and his trademark two-inch nails, which I filched while John was refilling his glass. The photo might prove useful and I don’t believe in resisting impulse. The snap was in my pocket before he turned around.

“These are terrific,” I said. John has a good eye and the gift of instant perception. He freezes the precise moment when the subject reveals himself. What would that look like in paint? And could I achieve it in oils? One of the big questions of my life.

“George was his name?”

“Yes, George.”

He shook his head. I was beginning to think Maribelle had sent me on a wild goose chase, when, half a dozen folders on, he stopped at a shot of drinkers at the bar. I could see he recognized someone. He turned over one more photograph and said, “Oh, that George. Oh, yes! A dainty dish, metaphorically speaking. Physically well put together and all parts in working order.” He tapped a photograph of a husky fellow with thick dark hair, straight brows, and narrow eyes; he was smoking a cigarette and staring insolently at the camera. The background was apparently the Europa, and John had somehow caught his subject’s reflection in the bar mirror undistorted by the flash.

“Any last name, any address?”

“Frahm. George Frahm. My good Fleet Street training: ID every photograph. He works in a garage in Stepney. Now, let me think.” John closed his eyes before he triumphantly picked up one of his grease pencils and scribbled an address. “Repairs motors, he says. Mostly stolen, I should think.”

“This is invaluable, John.”

He leaned back against the table and gave me a close look. “You’re filthy enough to be conspicuous.”

I washed up in his kitchenette. When I emerged, drying my face and hands on one of his thin, gray towels, he asked, “So who’s behind you? Cops or robbers?”

“Some of both.”

“Darling, I am filled with admiration.” He pushed himself upright, and retrieved a shabby jacket and a rather dirty fedora from the coat rack by the door. “Nothing you’d ever wear, right?”

He’d read my mind. “And, therefore, ideal. Thanks, John. But I was never here, right? Please remember that.”

“You cut someone’s throat?” he asked.

“No, but someone may be out to cut mine.”

I ventured toward the East End wearing John’s hat and jacket, my trousers pulled down over my gumboots and my ARP gear stowed in a sack. Inconspicuous, in a word; within a few blocks I felt quite invisible. I was strongly tempted to take the tube home and reassure Nan myself. However, despite my general philosophy of life, some impulses are to be resisted. I made my way over the piles of earth and gaping sidewalks and around warning lines to the tube and the train to Stepney: another world, worse in every way. Smoke and dust hanging in the air clawed at my lungs, and every step disturbed soft flakes of ash that rose like phantoms. We’d been hit in the West End, but nothing like this, where block after block had been reduced to rubble or blackened by the fire winds sweeping off the blazing docks. Tenements had been opened like sardine cans to illustrate the caprice of the universe: one flat collapsed, blackened, any living thing crushed; the one next door, with the wallpaper unblemished on the remaining walls and the table still set for a late supper. Here a dolly with no more than a smudge on its painted nose; there a little cart, squashed to splinters with the blood of its owner on the handle. A dead horse, probably a peddler’s, lay amid rags and blood and bits of flesh. On every block, men and women were clawing their way through the rubble seeking anything they might salvage, while small children sat shocked and disconsolate on what had been the stoops of their homes. Curious boys with pale, underfed faces and streetwise eyes explored the enormous bomb craters or ringed the sinister lines and warnings of the UXB, waiting for some excitement.

The streets I’d known had been replaced by a maze of rubble barriers and improvised alleys, yet here and there were pushcarts loaded with shoddy clothes or old boots or scrap metal or salvage, and even a couple milk wagons and a vegetable seller. I was pretty well lost before I thought I recognized a pub behind the usual sandbags and the taped and boarded windows. I tapped on the door and asked for Wee Jimmy.

“And who wants to know?” asked the publican. He was big, though not as big as Wee Jimmy, but from his ginger beard and thinning hair I pegged him as a near relative.

“It’s Francis. Tell him Francis with the wheel.”

A burst of laughter. “I didn’t know you. Sure if you’re not in disguise. Come in, come in. He’s shifting kegs in the basement.” He turned and shouted, “Someone to see you, Jimmy!”

Footsteps on the stair. Wee Jimmy was perhaps six-foot-four or -five and proportionally huge, a Goliath with a missing eye and a number of convictions. We had employed him as lookout on our casino evenings. I understood that his criminal activities were various, but his nature was gentle, and he was known to Nan and not, as far as I knew, to the inspector. He greeted me warmly. After we sat down with a couple of beers, I told him I needed an errand run—usual rates. When I mentioned it was a message to Nan, he shook his head.

“That’s by way of a favor,” he said. “You’ll do me one in turn. Actually, you’ve already done me one. Painter, that’s what I call myself now. I put on that white kit and I’m bloody well invisible.” He laughed.

I explained that Nan needed to find me a place to lay low. This interested him.

“You wouldn’t consider—” He gestured around him, meaning the pub, meaning this particular quarter of the East End.

“I might bring you trouble. I need somewhere no one knows me.”

“Not a crazy boyfriend, then?”

“More like a crazy police inspector.”

“Ah,” he said. “You have become entangled with the law.”

Le mot juste!
“Exactly. And I need to be free to get disentangled.”

“Easier said than done.”

“I have hopes, but time is of the essence, Jimmy; I can’t leave Nan alone for too long. Would you know someone called George Frahm? I’m told he works at a garage around here.”

Wee Jimmy’s face changed. “You don’t want anything to do with George,” he said. “Not a man of your parts and education.”

I gave him a brief and well-edited account of my troubles. “He apparently knew Damien. I’ve heard he had interesting ideas on what happened. He might be able to tell me something useful.”

“He more like did the job himself,” said Jimmy, shaking his head. “Violent bugger. The garage is just a front. His boss is a fence, and George is there to protect the operation.”

“He apparently moonlights on the game, though.”

Wee Jimmy shrugged his massive shoulders, thought for a moment, then said, “I’d better go with you. No, no, business this, but a good rate for you.”

We settled on a few bob and started off, Jimmy swearing at every alteration, every ruined tenement. His own family had been bombed out weeks ago, and he’d lost a sister. “Direct hit. She was under the table right enough; table held, not a mark on her, but she took a heart attack. They’ll owe us for this,” he said, gesturing toward the steaming wreckage that extended in every direction. Jimmy was something of an expert here. Twice we were stopped by Light Rescue crews eager to make use of his great strength to shift washtubs and timbers, and once by a Heavy squad not quite heavy enough to prop up a wall. Criminal and rescuer, Jimmy seemed to be an informal member of a number of outfits—and who knew what else the war might reveal about him, or, for that matter, about any of us?

The shattered landscape deteriorated as we approached the docks with their pall of smoke and dirt. “We don’t know what’s left from one day to the next,” Jimmy said in a matter-of-fact tone. But though some of the ruins were steaming and a particularly bad section with many hoses and pumps further confused the route, we at last approached an unfriendly little block building with a high metal fence and windowless garage doors.

“Open for business,” he assured me. “Of the sort of business they do.” Down an alley no more than a footpath wide, Wee Jimmy reached up to tap on a whitewashed window. A moment later, we were inside a cluttered office separated from the work bays by a door with a shade pulled down over the glass. A wizened little man with the eyes of a dyspeptic ferret was sitting behind the desk. It took considerable effort from Wee Jimmy—and what I gathered was a large reservoir of goodwill and past obligation—to secure me an interview with George, who was eventually summoned from the closely guarded interior of the garage. Wee Jimmy and the boss retired, and I was left with the sullen but undeniably attractive and charismatic George.

Fortunately, a glance did it; I knew his type—one of my favorites, though I could expect a few bruises. He pretended disinterest, but I knew better and exerted my charm. Twenty minutes later we were drinking in a filthy pub with beer the color of urine and much the same taste. Shortly thereafter came an interlude in an alley filthier yet. Very unwise, very exciting. Had he carried a knife, he’d have gone to the top of my list, but no, a man for his fists. We sat on a sheared-off stair and shared a cigarette afterward. I mentioned my inspector as a man of similar tastes.

George was offended. He was by way of being a gentleman, while the inspector . . .

“You know him then?”

“Know of him. Sure. I know of him.”

I pressed him for more, told him the copper was an exceptional experience.

“You were just lucky,” said George. “Sure, he’d be safe enough for someone like me. Don’t know about you.” Another drag of the cigarette. “Killed a boy, he did.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

He grabbed me by the throat; sudden swings toward bodily violence were George’s stock in trade. “I never joke with strangers.”

“Right. The inspector killed someone.” He let me go. Sarcasm apparently wasn’t in his repertoire either.

“How do I know? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

A man of real perception.

“Name of Damien. You knew him?”

“We had a drink together once. I noticed he got down sometimes.”

George spat at the wall of the alley. “Good for a bit of fun but no fiber to him.”

“Consumption will do that,” I said. Mistake. Growling and threatening. George clearly liked a little groveling. I complied, then asked, “So what happened?”

“Hit him too hard, that’s what.”

“Damien was found in Hyde Park,” I pointed out.

“Think I don’t know about the park? Eh? In the fucking West End that the Jerries are ignoring? But he wasn’t killed there. He was killed here. There’s this pub with private rooms upstairs where he was a familiar face. Him and the inspector, too. Enough said?”