Skylark (2 page)

Abruptly, the train came to a dead halt in the dark tunnel. The air-conditioner whirred,
the electric engine hummed, a few commuters murmured. Someone near me cleared his
throat.

Only that morning the
Independent
, my newspaper of choice, had given
extensive space to the inquiry into the King's Cross fire of the year before. Gruesome details
floated to the surface of my mind. Charred corpses, corpses dead of smoke inhalation, corpses
trampled by other corpses. I am not as a rule claustrophobic, but I began to sweat. I glanced at
Ann. She was pale. I grimaced at her, comically, I hoped. She smiled. Beside me, Milos clucked
his tongue.

"Did you say something?"

"Perhaps a taxi would have been faster after all. This is the third time I am delayed this
week on the Tube. They are having troubles in the electrical system."

"Wonderful."

We lapsed into silence. Apart from one or two hushed murmurs no one said anything.
We just stood there sweating in our raingear and waiting. No one looked at anyone else.

I stared at the reflection of our faces in the window and thought what fools human
beings were. I was paying our Miss Beale an outrageous sum for half a tiny flat with no shower
and a refrigerator the size of a TV set--all in order to stand below tons of English dirt, sweating
beside a hundred or so English citizens, none of whom would give me the time of day. Dumb
idea. The lady with the briefcase lowered her paper, turned the page, and began reading
something about a horse race. I wished I was at a horse race. I was willing to bet Dick Francis
didn't ride the tube.

The car shuddered and jolted about three feet forward. Right direction. It groaned to a
halt again. Tabloid Tessy read on.

Just as I was bracing myself for the next train to crash into ours, the car gave a series of
jolts and squawks and started to move. There was a soft simultaneous sigh of relief from the
commuters. They were going to live, after all. The tabloid fancier had turned to the football
scores.

At Victoria--white tile on the walls, blue edging--half the passengers got off and twice
as many pushed aboard. They were less homogenous than the City commuters--fewer pinstripes,
more jeans and sweatshirts, more women with shopping bags, fewer with briefcases, a sprinkling
of tourists in bright colors.

We were jammed in cheek by jowl by briefcase. I wriggled around so I was facing the
open door and yanked my scarf down. The door stood open, but no one else got on. The people
on the platform seemed resigned to waiting for the next train.

"Hot?" Milos and I were now facing each other, eyeball-to-eyeball. "It's stuffy, no?"

"'The mind is its own place,'" I muttered.

His mustache quirked in a grin. "Breathe lightly and think of your so-tall redwoods.
How is Ann? Can you see her?"

I peered. She had removed the plastic bonnet and shifted the bag to her left shoulder.
She gave me a wan smile.

On the platform the public address system garbled out a warning to stand clear of the
doors. They slid shut and the train began to move. I caught my reflection as we entered the
tunnel--short black hair standing up in tufts, raincoat collar askew beneath the loud scarf.
Strange, the scarf hadn't looked loud when I bought it in San Francisco.

I clung to the skyhook and swayed with the movement of the train. The lights flickered.
The train slowed, sped up again. Just a curve in the roadbed. I breathed.

I decided to distract myself by sorting out the other passengers. They were individuals,
after all, not a huge mindless organism.

The lady directly in front of me--beside Milos--had to be an upscale housewife. Hair like
Maggie Thatcher's, shopping bags from Harrods and Peter Jones. The small, intense man in the
seedy blue suit and black raincoat was an Iranian terrorist who would leave the train at High
Street Kensington to throw bombs at the headquarters of Penguin Books. Salman Rushdie, watch
out.

That was a bad thought. A shop in Charing Cross Road had been fire-bombed the week
before. I tried not to look like the proprietor of a bookstore.

I forced my mind back to the scene before me. The kid in the Oxford gray blazer was a
clerk at Lincoln's Inn. The tall woman in gray ultra-suede was a television executive, ferret-face
by the door a racetrack tout. I turned the idea over in my mind. If a bookie was a turf accountant
in English parlance, what did they call touts?

We bucketed into Sloane Square. Pea-green tiles and little white arches like lattices were
set in mosaic for the ages. Symbolizing what? The Chelsea Flower Show, probably. Half a dozen
passengers got off including the TV executive and the quondam terrorist. One man squeezed
aboard.

Ferret-face was standing in the doorway. The public address announcement crackled
out. He didn't move. Nobody said anything to him. He was looking my direction but not at me. I
noticed because he was staring so intently--rudely, in English terms. The train waited. The
automatic doors would not close, the train would not leave, until ferret-face cleared the
door.

Beside me Milos gave a grunt. I saw an arm and shoulder move. A man in a brown
pinstripe eeled out of the car. With a final stare--at Milos, I thought--the ferrety tout stepped out
onto the platform and the doors slid together. As the train began to move I saw him vanish into
the mass of waiting commuters.

"Lark..."

The train lurched and Milos fell against me. I let go of my skyhook and clutched at him,
staggering back.

"Bloody foreigners," said the woman with the
Evening Standard
.

"Stop, thief!" the Maggie Thatcher clone was shrieking. "The bugger stole my bag! Pull
the emergency lever!"

No one responded, but the murmurings grew louder. Newspapers rustled. The train sped
on.

I had regained my balance, but Milos was heavy. "Are you all right? What's the
matter?"

He said nothing at all, and he was slipping slowly to the floor.

"Somebody help me! He's fainted." I went down on one knee, and then fell to my side,
cracking my elbow, as the train rounded a curve. I fell with Milos on top of me.

"Christ, missus, he's bleeding!" A male hand assisted me to sitting position.

Various murmurs.

"Pull the lever."

"Better not, love. It'll just stop between stations. Wait for South Ken."

"Give 'em air, please."

"Back off."

I heard the chatter, but I was staring at Milos's gray face. A thin trickle of blood seeped
from one corner of his mouth. His eyes were half closed, the whites showing.

"Oh God, let me through! What's wrong, Lark?" Ann fought her way to my side and
knelt beside me. Her bag thudded to the floor. "Lordy, he's passed out."

"He's in shock," I said tightly. "Skin's clammy."

She drew in a sharp breath. Above me the Thatcher clone was telling everyone the thief
had stolen a silver trivet she had just bought for her niece's wedding and wasn't it disgraceful.
She'd had a good look at the villain, and she meant to report him to the police.

"Is he dead, lady?" the kid in the gray blazer asked me. He spoke with an American
accent. So much for Lincoln's Inn.

Ann began chafing Milos's hands. "Oh, God, tell me he's not dead."

I shifted so I could hold his head and torso in my lap,
Pietá
-fashion. "I
can't find a pulse. Is he breathing?" It was too noisy to tell.

The man who had helped me sit up was kneeling opposite me, by Milos's head. "He
looks bad, love. Trouble with his heart?"

I started to tell him I didn't have the faintest idea. Then we pulled into the South
Kensington yard, edging toward the crowded platform.

"Will somebody hold the door and call for the station master?" I looked up.

Pandemonium. The doors opened and impatient commuters were pushing on as our
lot--the uninvolved, at any rate--tried to slip away.

"Let me off! Make way!" The Thatcher woman battled out the door, followed by the
devotee of the
Evening Standard
.

"Somebody do something," I ordered in my best basketball coach voice. I coach a
women's team for the junior college at home. We had had a successful season. The helpful
man--he was fiftyish and wore the cap and tweed jacket of an older working man--began urging the
crowd to move back. The kid in the blazer stood wringing his hands.

Ann got up and used her enormous bag as a battering ram. "Get back. A man has
fainted. We need room here."

Other voices joined the chorus. The doors stayed open. At last, the waiting horde parted,
and a small white-haired man in the black London Transport uniform bustled up.

"Here, now, what's the fuss?"

The man in the tweed jacket began to explain. I concentrated on Milos. It couldn't be a
simple faint. He should have come around. And why blood? Had he bitten his tongue? He didn't
look like a heart attack victim, but I was not a paramedic, so what did I know?

"We'll have to move him, missus. The train..."

"Do you have a stretcher?"

He looked blank, and I wondered what the right word was. Hurdle? Surely not. Gurney?
"Uh, a litter to carry him on."

"Right." The official stepped back to the platform and spoke into a walkie talkie. I heard
him say something about a heart attack victim.

I hugged Milos to me, and Ann chafed his hands. Eventually two uniformed men
brought a stretcher and lifted him to it. The waiting crowd, now swollen by two trainloads from
the opposite platform, and God knows how many from the Piccadilly Line below, milled about
and murmured. No one shouted or made a fuss. They stood clear of the doors, but they had the
same ghoulish curiosity in their eyes that crowds at a disaster showed at home. A group of
uniformed schoolchildren swirled around the edge of the crowd, voices piping, until a stern
woman rounded them up and removed them from the scene. They had probably been on a field
trip to the Natural History Museum. There was a dinosaur exhibit.

The men bore Milos to the center of the platform, and the train we had ridden moved
out. Commuters eddied about us. Two trains succeeded each other on the eastbound track. At
last, the St. John Ambulance crew appeared and began to examine Milos in a thoroughly
efficient, professional way.

I had been answering questions more or less at random. No, he was not my husband. I
didn't know his medical history. I told the London Transport officer what I knew about Milos,
which wasn't much. Ann spelled his last name, Vlaçek, and a different transport officer
took it down.

Ann was very quiet, big-eyed, sad. She clutched her huge purse to her bosom and
mourned.

I was sitting on a bench by the stationmaster's little booth by then, with Ann and the
Good Samaritan in tweeds sitting beside me. His name was Bert something, and he looked
worried. The kid in the blazer was a Mormon missionary. I was too caught up in the wonder of
that to register his name.

For no reason at all, I started to think about Milos's umbrella. It must have fallen to the
floor of the carriage. And where was my purse? Small flurry of anxiety. Ah, still in my raincoat
pocket. Unlike Ann, who toted passport, traveler's checks, identification, and sundry household
supplies around with her, I wasn't carrying much of value. I stood up and brushed my coat
off--and found the bloodstain. I had opened my mouth to announce that interesting fact when one of
the St. John crew came over to the policeman who had materialized at some point in the
proceedings.

"This man has been stabbed," the paramedic said with real distaste.

All of a sudden, everyone was looking at me, Ann with her hand at her throat, as if she
might choke.

"Well, I wondered," I muttered. "He bled on my coat."

The bobby whipped out his notebook. "You're a foreigner, miss?"

"American."

All of them but Ann nodded, as if my nationality explained everything. With a last
accusatory glower, the paramedic strode back to his mates. Someone had wheeled in a gurney
from the direction of the station.

The policeman gave us a comprehensive scowl. "Stay where you are." He went over to
confer with the ambulance crew, which was busy doing something to Milos's still form.

"My bloody luck," Bert said. The kid in the blazer looked as if he was going to cry. Ann
did.

I sat back down beside her and put my arm around her shoulders.

"I just wanted to go to a play," she wailed. "It's not fair!"

Poor Milos had just wanted to go to the play, too. I didn't say that. I was trying to sort
things out.

It was all so puzzling. Where was the woman whose bag had been stolen? Had the thief
also stabbed Milos? Why stab Milos at all? Especially on a crowded Underground train during
the rush hour. It didn't make sense. Nothing made sense.

I glanced around at the crowd, which was finally beginning to thin. Trains pulled in on
one side of the platform or the other every two or three minutes, blotting up more people than
they let off. Where was the lady whose trivet had been snatched?

I patted Ann's shoulders and scanned the crowd. No sign of the woman. She had said her
bag had been stolen, not bags. Which one? She'd been carrying a large one from Peter Jones and
a smaller Harrods bag.

Memory stirred. It was the Harrods bag. "Ann, do you still have that packet you were
carrying for Milos?"

"Y-yes. I'll have to return it to him." She sobbed harder. "I don't even know where he
lives."

"Let me see it."

"What?"

I took the handbag and pulled the plastic sack out. It contained papers, all right--a rather
messy typescript of fifty or sixty pages in a cardboard folder, the kind with fabric ties. The
manuscript looked like a single document but I couldn't tell because it was in Czech.

At least I assumed the language was Czech--I would have recognized German, French,
or Italian, and Russian uses a different alphabet. Parts of it looked like a play, with names in
boldface on the left margin. Maybe it was Milos's translation of
Macbeth
. At that
thought, I teared up, blinked hard, and stuffed the bag back in Ann's purse.