Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (4 page)

I’m an entirely different sort of gambler. I believe in loss. Wins come occasionally, of course—just the law of averages—but eventually complete loss is as certain as mortality. That’s why I found the wheel exciting; one risks a sort of death with the possibility of resurrection, and that summer we grew more and more reckless, playing for the highest stakes whenever we could, recouping our inevitable losses with our own illicit casino and blocking any anxieties with Champagne.

That was nighttime in the summer of 1940; night was for sensation, for risk and ecstasy. In the morning, I had to face my canvas. I’d started doing large paintings by then, though the first thing of mine to attract notice was small: a little biomorphic crucifixion. My subject. My great ambition is to paint a major crucifixion, to find a new way into that old motif, and in its pursuit I’ve ripped more canvas than you can imagine. Why, when I’m not religious, certainly not Christian? Because, like roulette, the crucifixion figures forth the shape and dimension of life.

As a child in Ireland, I was taught that God sent his only begotten son to be crucified. The old Anglican priest found that a mystery, but given my father, it didn’t seem strange to me at all. The old and powerful make the young and weak suffer, and the only curious thing was that Christ’s misery should have been in some way for our benefit. I don’t see that. A shattered Tommy dies in agony on the beach at Dunkirk; an airman plummets from the sky with his parachute in shreds; or, closer to home, an old lady I found on Kings Road has her back and both her legs broken by a lorry and bleeds to death in the darkness. Who benefits from such calamities?

Not me. I stood frozen in the drizzle, stunned for a moment by the rasping groans of the woman and the throb of the lorry that had screeched to a halt halfway down the block. I saw her umbrella, still open, perched beside her like a giant bat, and my first thought was of Nan. For an instant, I saw Nan lying in the street, blood pouring from her nose and mouth, and I thought my heart would stop, but it didn’t; or if it did, it restarted at top speed. I shouted to the driver. He had a torch, and I ordered him to stand on the pavement and wave his light to warn oncoming vehicles. His face was white and young; he kept saying that we had to get her onto the sidewalk. I knew moving her would be disastrous and told him so. At the phone box I shouted my report then raced back. In part of my mind, she was still Nan, but I arrived too late for any comfort. I found her up on the sidewalk, both driver and lorry gone. Though we have our orders and procedures, sometimes there are no good choices. Within the cone of my torch lay darkness, blood, livid flesh: a crucifixion of sorts—
a very present agony
, as the old priest used to say. I must find an image to do that justice.

Which is my work for day. Work lasts until one or so, when I eat lunch with Nan and we have our daily visit—“a wee natter” as she calls it—when we discuss the Beeb reports and I read her the morning papers, the
Times
and the
Telly
. I do this quite mindlessly. For some reason, I never take in the full sense of words when I’m reading aloud, probably because I’m conscious of reading clearly and distinctly as Nan always insisted. One day I was reading out an account of a strangulation, a man who murdered his wife over burnt toast or a bad sausage or some other trifle, when I realized that Nan, who heard the crime news from two or three different papers a day, might be an untapped resource.

“Nan,” I said, deciding to make a test. “Remember the case of that boy found dead in Hyde Park a little while ago?”

“Beaten to death and left naked,” she said promptly. “You stick to your gentlemen.” As you can see, she knew me well.

“Was there ever any more on the story?”

Nan looked at me. With her thick glasses, her eyes are enormous, like an owl’s or a lemur’s; if they don’t see much, they’re rarely fooled by what they do see. “You knew him, did you?”

“Not well. I bought him a drink once.”

“He didn’t look out for gentlemen,” she said sharply. She was about to elaborate when I broke in.

“The
Telegraph
reports didn’t have very much information. I wondered how the investigation was going.”

Nanny thought for a moment. “All quiet there,” she said, “though it’s a terrible business. But with no certain address and no relatives, the police won’t strain themselves.”

I agreed that was likely. “Would you remember the investigating officer? The name?”

“No one mentioned,” she said. “Maybe if they a get a lead, but everything depends on the battle, of course.” That was the first time Nan had given even the faintest indication she thought things might go badly. “Not that we won’t give them what-for if they try to land. You let the British Navy at them; you’ll see.”

“The Navy will get them before they land.” I certainly hoped so; I didn’t like to think about trying to send Nan away; I wasn’t sure she’d go—and where could I send her if she would?

“Of course they will,” she said. And we let the topic slide. In those days if you had doubts, you kept them to yourself.

We checked several days’ worth of papers, and I’d almost decided there would be no more information, when, as I was reading Nan the follow-up to the burnt-toast killing, I saw a tiny brief: “There have been no further developments in the case of the Hyde Park corpse, according to Chief Inspector John Mordren.” No, just the absurdity and irrationality of the universe confirmed in a line.

“Well,” said Nan, “that’s something. A chief inspector. That casts a different light. They’ll maybe pursue this after all.”

She must have detected something in my silence, for she added, “You’d better tell me about him.”

“Who? Damien? I told you, just a boy I saw in the clubs occasionally.”

Nanny was not deceived and shook her head. “You asked about the investigating officer.”

I tried for airy indifference. “I’ve seen him around,” I said. “I was afraid he was onto the roulette wheel.”

“It seems he’s onto murder, instead,” said Nan. And she gave me a very close look. “You mind yourself. You can’t trust policemen, no matter how high up they are.”

I went to Soho the next afternoon as soon as Nan and I finished the royal calendar (ho-hum) and the crime news (now a genuine interest). It was early for Soho. The restaurants were open, but the bars and clubs were either shuttered or losing their looks in the glum daylight. I hit several places before I found Connie nursing a whiskey in a narrow, dusty room made gloomier by a fog bank of smoke and the thick, greenish glass of the windows. In the aqueous light, he looked thin and depressed, his marceled hair lank and greasy; he smelled of patchouli.

“Buy you a drink?”

Immediate brightening; then he saw it was me: he’d been hoping for a quick visit to the park, a romantic afternoon, a splendid night, and a rich, indulgent protector—all the boys were. The belief that someone would come to change their lives was their huge weakness. It kept them waiting and drinking somewhere between hope and despair.

I sat down and ordered a glass of what now passed for wine—with France gone, even the cheapest vintage was precious—and another watery whiskey for Connie, who likes spirits. He could certainly use some.

“Any more on what happened to Damien?” I asked after a suitable exchange of gossip as preliminary.

He shook his head. “Cops don’t care. You live in Soho, you’re on the game—just less work for them in the long run, isn’t it?”

I nodded. Had to agree. “Though it’s a bloody shame, that,” I said.

Connie sniffled and rubbed his nose, then glared at me, his eyes dark with grief. “Nobody cares,” he said. “You—you don’t care.”

“What do you mean? I didn’t know Damien well, but I liked him. I surely hate what happened to him.”

“Surely,” mimicked Connie. “But how does that help him? You say ‘too bad,’ everybody says ‘too bad,’ but you don’t do anything about it. See, that’s the difference. You really care, you do something, isn’t that right?” He put his hand on my arm—stubby fingers; long, pointed nails; a surprisingly strong grip.

He was right, of course. “There’s only so much you can do,” I admitted.

“Depends, doesn’t it? There’s only so much
you
can do, right, but now I’m a different case, because I bloody well care.” He finished his drink and, preemptory in his grief, demanded another.

“All right.” I nodded to the barman. This was another side of Connie: sorrow had turned a page and brought up a whole new picture. “I can understand why you feel bad. You won’t get another mate like Damien.”

He put his nose in his glass and seemed to calm down. We talked for a few minutes about Damien’s virtues, his pretty ways and miserable luck. “And you know,” said Connie, touching the waves in his hair and fiddling with a barrette, “he’d been put in the way of a good thing.”

“Really?”

“Money in it. He bought me champers.”

“Champers is always a good sign,” I agreed.

“And more to come. That’s what he said.”

“This an ongoing thing?” I asked casually.

“No, but steady work. Parties, I think.” He made a face and added, “He was a selfish bastard. You’d have thought he’d have said, ‘And I have this mate . . . .’ Wouldn’t you have thought that? Wouldn’t you?”

“It’s lucky he didn’t. Think of it that way, Connie.”

“We’d have been all right together. Two of us, we’d have managed. Nobody’d mess with the two of us. You don’t think so, but I have ways. Damien, oh, right, Damien wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“A Buddhist, was he?” I said, trying to get him to a more cheerful place.

“They don’t kill flies?”

“Supposedly all life is sacred.”

Connie gave a sour laugh. “Sure it is. Just the same, in the park, nights, it’s better to have a mate with you.”

I agreed, though I didn’t necessarily believe it. “It must be a nuisance with the police ’round asking questions. You get one of the brass, one of the inspectors?”

“You’re pulling my leg. Some sergeant. A change from the vice cops, anyway. These coppers are strictly business. With the vice boys, you never know what they’ll want—but you can guess. Either way, it’s not doing the coppers any good; no one knows anything.”

“Still, you must have some idea. You were close to Damien.”

He shook his head. “Damien was a hard-luck bloke, that’s all there was to it.” He tipped up his glass and found the bottom of his whiskey.

“And just when he’d had that piece of good fortune recently. It seems a shame to let opportunity go to waste.”

“Maybe it won’t.” Connie gave me a sly look.

“You know the man?”

“I think I know how to find him, yeah, I think I do. But you won’t mind if I keep that to myself, will you?”

I could sense his hostility; there would be no profit in pressing the issue. “Just be careful, Connie. If Damien wasn’t killed where he was found, maybe it didn’t happen in the park at all.”

“Is that what the coppers think?” Anger reappeared in his voice.

I nodded. “According to the paper.”

“What do the coppers know? What do they know about Damien or me or any of us? What does anybody care?” He broke into sobs, the tears washing his mascara in two black lines down his cheeks. “You. You buy me a drink, but you don’t care. You’d like to know, maybe cut in on the business? Right? I know you—you’re after something. I know that much; everyone is. But I can take care of myself.”

I excused myself and consoled him as best I could to the tune of two more whiskeys, but Connie closed up like an oyster. In the following days, the press abandoned Damien’s tiny, pathetic story, and though I kept an eye out for my cop, his heavy presence, like some psychic barrage balloon, had suddenly shifted to a new locale. Even cruising the park I didn’t spot the bulky silhouette, the tweed jacket, and northern vowels. Gone. Damien’s case was apparently shelved and forgotten. Perhaps the inspector had been assigned an entirely new and more promising case not requiring visits to Chelsea. Good.

In the inspector’s absence, I felt that I had come out from under a shadow, and to celebrate I headed for The Pond one dark, cloudy night after my shift. Forgive the weather report: Without streetlights, we’d all become sensitive to meteorology and conversant with the phases of the moon. Soon we’d be watching the sky like druids and dreading the white nights we now welcomed.

Halfway along, my torch’s light began to dwindle, and though I switched it off to save the batteries whenever I could, within a few blocks of The Pond, it petered out for good. I stood swearing for a few minutes, angry at my own carelessness, because the torch had been wavering for a few nights, and frustrated at the thought of picking my way back through the darkness without enjoying the possibilities of the evening. Overhead, the leaden night sky was several tones lighter than the black silhouettes of the buildings.
Returning were
, as Macbeth says,
as tedious as go o’er
. Indeed! I crept at first; then, after negotiating several cross-streets and successfully avoiding a pillar box, I was striding confidently along near the park when suddenly I pitched forward, my useless torch bouncing onto the pavement and my hands scraping the cement. I found myself lying on the ground, half the wind knocked out of me and with my legs sprawled across something at once firm and yielding—and wet. Wet and sticky.

I got to my knees in a spasm of revulsion. I had fallen over someone on the sidewalk, someone who must be gravely hurt, someone bloodied. My lungs contracted with the shock and left me too breathless to shout. I pulled myself up, wiping my hands on my uniform and struggling for air, then I knelt down again. Short hair, a jacket, a man. I whispered to him, between my own gasps and wheezes, “Are you hurt? Are you all right?” I felt for the pulse and touched—in a moment of pure horror—a wound, a wound in his neck. I shook him, rubbed my hands on his jacket, his tunic, something military, some insignia, something pointed, but in my confusion I could make no deduction beyond that this man was dead, surely dead, as dead as Damien, who drank at The Pond and wore violet eye shadow.

I should have made a run for it and literally washed my hands of the matter, but there are dangers in training. While my own common sense said run, my tin hat and ARP badge said report. The nearest phone box was far behind me, immensely far in my current state of advanced breathlessness, but The Pond was a block farther, and thinking of nothing except breathing and reporting, I struggled down the street. Twice I tried the wrong steps before I found the basement entrance to The Pond. A pause at the bottom to stave off panic—there is no panic like suffocation. Draw in air, breathe, breathe, force open the airways, keep breathing.