Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (3 page)

What I don’t like is the cop—as yet unnamed. It may be just paranoia, but I’ve finally admitted to myself that some copper’s got his eye on me. I’d better find out who he is and what he’s up to, especially if he’s drinking in the private clubs. Not the Europa, thank God; Maribelle wouldn’t allow, so I’m set there. And lately I’ve made a point of walking about with Arnold—he’s an alderman and safe as houses. Naturally, in another way, danger itself is tempting, but I must remember Oscar Wilde and jail. With my habits, I’m indictable almost any night of the week.

What do I know about my own private cop? Higher rank, I think. Too old to be a constable and no trace of a uniform. Now, there’s a hope: maybe he finds guardsmen too flashy and has a yen for my ARP uniform. This I find fanciful. I’d better face it: he’s on to something. Our gambling evenings are the obvious possibility, although Arnold says everyone’s happy, and I’ve seen myself that Jack and Billy and the others watch the street like rats with cheese. Recently we got the wind up and canceled a session. After that, I didn’t see my copper for a week, and I thought, Right, I’m home free. Then the other night, an unsettling incident.

I was doing my rounds: “Light showing, Mrs. Brown. Top left window”; “Light through the transom, Mr. Green”; “Blackout not adequate at all, Mrs. Simmons.” Followed up with the usual excuses. Mrs. Simmons is poor, genuinely, so I said she should use her back room tonight and I’d bring ’round some of my canvas fragments and some stretchers to seal off the front windows tomorrow. She gave me a couple fingers of gin before I put my tin hat back on. Technically, I’d just been bribed to avoid a fine; practically, I’d helped a neighbor. Point of view is everything in such matters.

Anyway, I was walking along with my hooded torch and the smell of juniper berries on my breath when I heard steps behind me—a sound that’s rather lost its erotic appeal since Damien, whose death did nothing to disturb the good burghers, I’m sure, but gave us not-so-good burghers a turn. Yes, indeed, even if my tastes run to older men, my own history—well, not relevant here. But steps behind me were definitely now a matter of concern as well as interest.

I turned around to shine my torch on him. I’m official, after all. I may be a poof running an illegal gambling op, but with badge and tin hat I’m on His Majesty’s business and you can bet I’m conscientious. What do I see for my trouble? My cop,
naturellement
—a familiar, stoutish figure in a dark raincoat and sturdy shoes. He wore a fedora low on his broad and heavy forehead, all as usual, but now the angle of the light, low and from below, highlights the planes of his face, blunt and a tad brutal, a revelation of a personality last glimpsed by the flare of a match in the park. I got a shock, although in another instant I was doubtful. The park encounter had been several months ago, and I’d seen the man’s face for a matter of seconds, though seconds is enough if you really look at something. Was he the same man I’d since marked for a cop? And would it be worse or better if he were? “Evening, Inspector,” I said; it never hurts to guess higher in rank.

He stopped and looked at me but, and this was the key thing, he didn’t recognize me; I’m sure he didn’t, even if he was the man in the park—and I was leaning again toward the idea that he was. He might know me from the club; he sat and stared at me long enough, but not from the park, or else my tin hat’s a better disguise than I’d thought. Still, he wasn’t best pleased. He thought he was in deep disguise, totally civilian, as if unaware that he carries the smell of the lockup with him at all times.

“Evening, Warden. All quiet tonight?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “Just waiting for Jerry.”

He grunted. We’ve all been waiting for months, and it had gotten so that we were torn between dread of the event and a desire to end the suspense.

“You haven’t a torch,” I said, and, I noticed, no gas mask either.

When he didn’t answer, I could tell he was wondering about me in some way.

“You’ve forgotten your mask, too.” I fumbled my notepad open.

“A sudden call.” Though he waved his hand in dismissal, he made no move and his stillness, almost amounting to torpor, made me deeply uneasy with its echoes of the park and the aftermath of violence. This was the man.

“Your name?” At the very least I had to take his name.

He cleared his throat and said, reluctantly and heavily, “Chief Inspector Mordren. John Mordren.”

“Address, sir?”

He gave his substation instead of his residence, but I didn’t feel able to press him. “Don’t let me catch you again without your mask,” I said. “We can’t risk having a chief inspector gassed.” Don’t you think my tone was admirable?

He found his tongue then. “Glad to see you’re doing your job, Warden.” As if he was pleased to give me a passing grade. Like hell.

“On your way to the Underground, sir?” I gestured with my light, offering an escort—we do that sometimes to be helpful, to build the “community support” so important for us licensed pains in the ass.

He seemed to recall himself and nodded. I started toward the South Kensington stop, figuring he was headed into the City, but no, he wanted the nearer Knightsbridge stop, just a hop from the park. That suggested interesting possibilities. “Right.” I took a glance at him as we walked along—he was half a head taller, maybe four stone heavier. Everything about him was weighty in all senses of the word, including the atmosphere he carried with him. What did he want? Well, I could guess the obvious, and I was half tempted to ask him for a light and see how he’d react.

“Curb coming; careful, sir.” Ever the polite and helpful warden—my manners really are exemplary. A sound of tires—it’s hard sometimes to judge the distance. I stopped and he did too. Then a rumble as a heavy lorry, probably military by its narrow, shielded beams, roared past, and he stepped forward to cross before, in one of those better instincts that so often bring disastrous consequences, I grabbed his arm. “Not yet. There’s another one.”

And there was: a dark, fast-moving car washed us with wind. I raised my torch but could not read its plate. “If Jerry doesn’t hurry up, we’ll all be dead beforehand.”

He stared at me for a moment, and I was glad my tin hat shaded my eyes. “The angel of the lord has passed over us,” he said. Which didn’t strike me as normal police conversation, but admittedly we were in a peculiar situation.

“Exactly, sir, though I do sometimes wonder about the efficacy of the blackout. Given the casualties.”

“Casualties in every war, Warden,” he said with a change in tone, as if he’d suddenly woken up and was now really a chief inspector with serious business requiring his attention. “The stop’s ahead. I’ll find it from here, thank you.” He crossed the street briskly and disappeared into the gloom.

My first thought was to follow him, though at this time of night the trains were few and the platforms half empty. Walk, maybe? I could probably make it to the park stop before the train. And then we’d see. I’d be late back to the ARP HQ, but it wouldn’t be the first time. I could find a call box, invent an illness for Nan—I can be a shameless liar in times of need. Off the mark at top speed, sweeping my torch before me to avoid the curbs, the pavement cracks, the stray dustbin lids and bicycles that made our rounds a shin-bashing obstacle course. I was making good time when a faint light bobbed in front of me. Tin hat, uniform. “Have you got your gas mask, mate?”

“Of course. I’m a warden.” I raised my torch in the hopes of dashing away, but no such luck. I knew him: Liam Silver, frizzy ginger hair, snub nose, small green eyes. Punctilious.

“What are you doing on my patch?”

Liam favored military slang and a military style, which didn’t do much for our “community relations.”

“Escorting a civilian to the Underground,” I said. Note use of the word “civilian.” The way to his heart.

“You’re past the stop now.”

Suspicious bastard. “What street is this? Have I gotten turned around?” How fortunate it is that people are usually willing to believe one’s stupidity.

“That’s your lack of military training,” he said. “I can tell you that my experience in night navigation has been helpful in this job. Now, you’re probably navigating by that steeple, but I have . . . blah, blah, blah . . . ”

I could feel my quarry slipping away. Even on the night schedule, my cop would have gotten a train by this time and be on his way either to the park or to points unknown. I let Silver enlighten me about the streets around me and night navigation and several other topics. Why? Why make enemies is why, and that was prudent, because as we strolled back toward what he referred to as “your patch,” I was able to remark that even some police were without their masks. “People are getting complacent,” I said.

“Policeman? I hope you wrote him up.” That’s Warden Silver. A stickler for rules.

“A warning,” I said. “He was called out suddenly.”

“No excuse,” said Silver.

“Would you know him? An Inspector Mordren. I’m wondering if he lives near here.”

“Not a name I’m familiar with.”

“Perhaps an emergency,” I said, though I didn’t believe it.

“He should still have had his mask,” said Silver.

Through his political connections, Arnold discovered that, far from sniffing out our roulette wheel, Inspector Mordren was in the homicide division, news that cheered him more than me, although it meant that we could carry on with the casino evenings. Without entire success, I told myself that the inspector lived locally, that he was just another lover of the blackout, that my glimpses of him in the street, at The Pond, at the newsstand—even in the park—were purest coincidence, and that the anxiety of his lurking presence was just a product of the now-universal nervous strain. We were fortunate that we had gambling to distract us from the false (though ever-alarming) air-raid warnings and from the battle overhead, where the Luftwaffe and the RAF were losing planes by the score. So far, our Hurricanes and Spitfires had proved a match for the Messerschmitts and Junkers, while, in a triumph for British engineering and aviation, the feared Stuka dive-bombers had already been knocked out of the fight. But even the most sanguine civilian could calculate that our losses of men and machines must be immense. Every day planes plunged into the Channel or crash-landed in fields and suburban gardens while pilots’ chutes blossomed in the high blue sky.

I found it hard to imagine aerial blood and fire—though I was getting well acquainted with both down below—or how the ground must look flattened and tiny when seen from a great height, or the terrible fall of man and machine. The nearest we got to comprehending this strange new high-altitude warfare was in the pubs, where we met the aftereffects in exhausted men, their eyes focused immensely far away, who were trying to come down from too much adrenaline and too little sleep. There were others, too, in the worn uniforms of the defeated French, Polish, Czech, and Belgian forces: worried, angry men, eager to be mobilized, eager for revenge—and all desperate for momentary pleasure. I confess I found compensations.

Overhead as constant reminders of our highly provisional safety, elephantine barrage balloons floated, silver against the summer sky, creating a curious new upper story for a city that remained basking in the sunlight, day after day. “It was a lovely summer in ’14, too,” said Nanny. She occupied herself with the wireless and the newspapers, which Arnold read to her almost every night while I was on my dreary ARP rounds. Everybody was bored with the blackout, fed up with rationing—recently extended to meat—weary of overfilled trains, and on tenterhooks about the battle, at once remote and ever present, that would decide our fate.

In this atmosphere of the big wager, smaller bets made perfect sense. Whenever we had money, Arnold and I went to a club and played roulette. He promised me Monte Carlo when the war was over, but I enjoyed even the smallest, seediest clubs. I liked to watch the gamblers, obsessed, exhilarated, desperate: large wins and losses reveal all the strong emotions. I liked the late hours, too, for though I rise early to paint every day, I sleep very little, and I find the nights long unless I’m drinking and gambling and out on the town.

I used to arrange to meet Arnold somewhere after my ARP rounds. I’d arrive to see him holding open the club door, a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other; he’d have been on the lookout for me. “Dear boy, I’m going to be lucky tonight!” He always believed that; he was an optimistic gambler, even though he spun the wheel on our own casino nights and knew the odds and had taught them to me. Nonetheless, when he was on the other side of the table, he believed in winning. I found this curious but endearing, like Arnold himself—bald and not especially handsome, but the right age for me and well built with broad shoulders. He was a gentle, kindly person, which, given the perversity of desire, was both an attraction and a demerit. What one likes in daily life—courtesy, consideration, good humor—is not necessarily the soil in which one’s erotic life flourishes. The pattern of mine was set early on by my powerful, drunken father—a development that was surprising to me and doubtless would have been an utter and unwelcome revelation to him. But we had little contact after I left home at sixteen.

Arnold was as unlike as possible. He was a success rather than a failure, a gentleman rather than a brute. Arnold was a husband and father, a politician, a pillar of the community and utterly respectable, but it was all, on one level, a lie. His effort to be just what he was supposed to be moved me because, except for Nan, I’ve never cared enough about other people to worry what they thought of me.

But Arnold thinks about others, and so he became what they wanted. His family wanted him to be “normal”—whatever that is. I don’t think it exists. We’re all queer one way or the other, and I think it’s quite arbitrary what’s the done thing in bed. His wife wanted a husband, then children, then a position in the community. What Arnold himself really wants is the golden apple, the forbidden. He wants to risk everything because if he loses, he’ll be free. I understand that. Winning brings him one sort of freedom—freedom to drink Champagne and buy my paintings and purchase more chips. But losing—losing might open a whole new world. So he plays, though he knows better, and he believes in winning.