London Noir

She’ll ride a White Horse by Mark Pilkington

Dalston

A hundred wary eyes watched his approach through the yellow-stained sodium twilight. The cats were all around him, frozen as if ready to pounce, though whether toward him or away from him, he couldn’t tell. Heldon considered himself a cat lover, but their stares forced a shiver of unease.

The pinpoints of light punctured the night — under trolleys and cars, on corrugated roofs, though most of them, attached to near-identical scrawny brown bodies, surrounded an overturned plastic barrel that had spilled a neat chevron of part-frozen meat and bone onto a torn newspaper headline: Iran: Allied Generals Are Ready.

By day, Ridley Road Market is the heart of Dalston. A heaving babel of traders and shoppers — East End English, West African, Indian, Russian, Turkish — squeeze past each other in a permanent bottleneck. The stalls — Snow White Children’s Clothes, Chicken Shop, Alpha & Omega Variety Store — offer exotically colored fabrics and cheap electrical goods alongside barrels of unidentifiable animal parts, unfamiliar vegetables, and unlocked mobile phones.

But at night the market belongs to the cats. They are everywhere. They don’t need to fight, there’s always plenty of food to go round; they just wait their turns in the shadows.

At least they keep the rats away, thought Heldon, in a transparent attempt to console himself. A foot-long rodent scuttled behind a wheelie bin. The cats’ eyes remained fixed on the larger intruder. “Don’t mind me,” he said out loud, “just keep eating your dinner.”

“Ignore the cats, they’re just keeping an eye out for troublemakers.”

The deep, careful African voice came from a closed stall within a concrete shell on the other side of the road; a tired-looking sign above a closed wooden door read, Bouna Fabrics Afr, before trailing off into decay.

The cats returned to their business. Heldon crossed the road and opened the door.

“Hello, Ani. You’ve got yourself a few more cats since I was last here.”

“Yes, my friend. At least they keep the rats away, eh?”

Aniweta smiled and the men shook hands. A Nigerian barrel of a man with a gold-ringed grasp to match, his strong dark hand engulfed Heldon’s puffy pink-white flesh. He claimed to be in his forties. But his watery eyes and leather-tan skin made Heldon think he was older than that.

“It’s good of you to see me,” said Heldon.

“Well, it’s not as if I have a choice, eh? Come, let’s go out back, this place gives me a headache.” Aniweta turned, pushed his way through the lurid yellow and green fabrics hanging from the ceiling, and disappeared.

A thick black curtain veiled a door leading into a small, dimly lit room. Lined shelves held rows of unlabeled glass jars containing dried plants, powders, and things too deformed to be identified as animal, mineral, or vegetable. A heavy wooden desk, its surface covered with what could just as easily be scientific or magical debris — scales, tongs, a pestle and mortar, stains, scorch marks, and candle wax — stood near the wall facing the entrance.

Aniweta sat down on a sturdy wooden chair and looked expectantly at Heldon.

The sickly aroma of faded incense, over-ripe vegetables, and old meat reminded Heldon of the first time he’d been down here. That was almost five years ago. Then he had been a little afraid, though he would never have admitted it at the time. Now he was just angry.

“There’s been another one, Ani. But I suppose you know that already.”

“Yes, I know. A girl this time. No doubt you will call her Eve.”

Heldon knew the market well. You had to, working in this neighborhood. Mostly it looked after itself, a closed system, and it was best not to get involved. The force had their own people in there, and the market presumably had its own people in the force. Recycled mobiles and other stolen goods were one thing. They could be dealt with quietly. But there were other things that could not be ignored. As the trade in guns and drugs got a little too casual, like it did every year, a few stalls were inevitably raided, as was the old pub on the corner of St. Mark’s Rise, which was now less popular, though more peaceful, as a beautician’s.

But all this was regular police work, and so no longer Heldon’s business.

At first, bush meat was his business. Chimps mostly, but also the odd gorilla, brought in from the Congo and Gabon. An Italian punk girl had almost fainted on seeing a huge, dark, five-fingered hand fall out of brown paper wrapping as it was passed to a customer at the Sunny Day Meats stall.

The raids found no whole animals, only parts — heads, feet, genitals, hands — most too precious for food and sold only for muti or juju. Medicine. Magic. They turned up something else too. The squad at first thought the bag contained parts of a baby chimp: fingers stripped of skin, a dark and shriveled penis and scrotum, teeth. But forensics found otherwise. They were human.

The stallholder was arrested.

Heldon’s team had kept the details from the press, but Aniweta had known. As a sangoma, a witch, he knew many things. Heldon knew very little about him, however, except that he had emigrated to London from Nigeria in the 1970s, had a UK passport, and no criminal record. He had always proved a reliable source of local and traditional knowledge, and his calm manner, coupled with a dark sense of humor, had commanded Heldon’s respect and, on occasion, fear.

At first Heldon had assumed the parts were imported. That was until September 21, 2001, the autumn equinox, when a boy was fished from the Thames outside the Globe Theatre. The five-year-old’s body was naked, apart from a pair of orange shorts, put on him, it turned out, after he had been bled to death. Then his head and limbs had been severed by someone who knew precisely what they were doing.

They named him Adam. It was sickening to keep referring to him as “the corpse” or “the torso.” They initially thought he was South African, but an autopsy revealed otherwise — inside the boy’s stomach was a stew of clay, bone, gold, and the remains of a single kidney-shaped calabar bean. The calabar bean was like a neon sign to the investigation. The plant grows in West Africa, where it’s known as the “doomsday plant” because of the number of accidental deaths it causes. It’s also used to draw out witches and negate their power — once a bean is eaten, only the innocent survive. The shorts were another clue. Bought in a German Woolworth’s, they were coral orange for the orisha spirit Ochun, the river queen of the Yoruba religion: the great diviner who knows the future and the mysteries of women.

The calabar would have caused his blood pressure to rise painfully, followed by convulsions and conscious paralysis; his screams imbuing the magic with a rare and terrible strength. Then his throat was slit and his torment ended by a final blow to the back of the head. Once dead, the butchery began. The blood was drained from his body and preserved; his head and limbs removed, along with what is known in muti as the atlas bone: the vertebra connecting his neck to his spine, where the nerves and blood vessels meet.

The boy’s genitals, still intact, suggested that it wasn’t his body parts the killer was after. It was his blood, drained slowly and carefully from his hanging corpse. Adam died to bring somebody money, power, or luck. Perhaps the slave traffickers who brought him to London. His journey probably began when he was snatched or sold in Benin, and continued through Germany before reaching these shores, his final destination.

Somebody had cared for Adam before he died — there were traces of cough medicine in his system. Who knows whether he was brought here with sacrifice in mind, but had he not been marked for death, he might have ended up working as a slave, or as a prostitute. At least then he’d have had a chance.

Despite arrests in London, Glasgow, and Dublin, and prosecutions for human trafficking, nobody was convicted of the boy’s murder. Heldon had burned with frustration for months, but he had managed to keep it together, unlike others in the team. The three-year investigation had taken its toll on O’Brien, the detective in charge. He’d quit the force a nervous wreck at what should have been the peak of his career. Heldon had been his deputy on the Adam case; he’d seen the strain, the shards of paranoia puncture O’Brien’s hardman armor.

And now there was another corpse.

Aniweta was right. They had called her Eve.

The girl had been mutilated like Adam, her torso wrapped in a child’s cotton dress; white with red edging. Dustmen had tipped her out of a wheelie bin on December 5, four days ago, outside a dry cleaners on White Horse Street, near St. James’s. She was probably six years old.

“What can you tell me, Ani?” Heldon asked the san-goma.

“I can tell you that this one is different.”

“So far, forensics suggest that she was killed the same way as Adam.”

“Yes, but she is different. Powerful.” Ani nodded his head, impressed. “The red and the white on the dress are for Ayaguna. He is a young orisha, a fighter. You know him as St. James, and when he comes, he rides a white horse. Now she rides with him. He likes the girls, you see, he likes them young like this. Their blood is clean. This is strong juju. You’ll find things inside her: clay, gunpowder, silver, maybe copper.”

“Anything else?”

Ani, who had been staring at the stains on his tabletop, turned to look directly at Heldon.

“Yes, my friend, I can tell that you’re not sleeping well.”

Heldon was caught off guard. “Well, you might say I’m taking my work home with me.”

“Like O’Brien?”

“No. And I don’t intend to end up like him. But yes, this has shaken me up. I didn’t expect another one so soon. And then I suppose there’s the war.”

“There is always war, that is Ayaguna’s business. But there will be no war where this girl came from. She is one of their own. A peace offering.”

“I was talking about Iran, but yes, we think the girl was another Nigerian.”

“No, she is not one of ours. She is from the Congo,” replied Ani, with a certainty that Heldon could not question. “That’s where the trouble is. But for now there will be no war. She died to end the fighting. She will keep Ayaguna happy for a while. How long depends how well the sangomas know him. If they know him well, she will have died with six fingers and six toes. Her skin cut six times with a blade and burned six times with a flame.”

“If she died to prevent a war, why was she killed here and not in her home country?”

“The sangomas don’t like war. It upsets the balance. So much death creates problems for everybody. Now the smart ones are over here.”

“Makes sense. I don’t like war either. Okay, thanks, Ani. We’ll be in touch.”

Heldon returned to the night. The cats were gone.

Forensics showed that Ani was right. Mineral analysis of her bones revealed that she was indeed Congolese. The girl had swallowed, or been forced to swallow, a mix of gunpowder, silver, copper, and clay. She had been bound and stabbed several times, then scorched with a burning twig from the iroko tree. They had not found her limbs, so they couldn’t count her fingers and toes; but Heldon suspected that if they ever found them, there would be six of each.

African newspapers revealed that the Congo had been on the brink of another bout of bloodshed, but in the past few days an agreement was reached between the warring factions. With over three million already dead, you would think they were tired of killing.

The story hardly made the UK nationals; the situation in Iran was worsening, despite the fact that things in Iraq had hardly improved since the Allied pullout eighteen months earlier. And now they were regrouping, preparing to flex their muscle against a defiantly hostile Iranian leadership. The mid-term government disingenuously declaring that the opportunity for peace lay in the hands of the Iranians, not the combined forces amassing at the nation’s borders.

More dead children.

Rather than desensitizing him to death, Heldon’s work had revealed to him its full horror. He knew what a bullet meant: the torn, seared flesh; the shattered bone; the screaming; the smell of blood. He had no children of his own, but he knew that the statistics of war weren’t just numbers. They were a thousand Adams, a thousand Eves. Blasted, mutilated, lying in rivers, in puddles, in the arms of their parents; caught in the camera’s lens, denied over breakfast, ignored on the train.

As an inevitable war loomed once again, the antiwar protests had grown incandescent, seething with fury and frustration. Heldon took part as often as he could. He didn’t tell his colleagues, just as he didn’t tell them everything that Ani had told him. It was easier that way.

He didn’t tell them about his other research either. There was no need. And he hadn’t told Ani. Again, why bother? He probably already knew all about the killings anyway. They had occurred throughout Europe and Africa over the years. Many, like Adam, were for power. Terrible as they were, they no longer interested Heldon. He was only interested in the others; the others like Eve. They were different. And they had worked. The evidence was there on the record — brief respites in long histories of warfare. Powerful juju.

She is one of their own... different... powerful.

Ani’s words drove Heldon onward as he strode through the car park behind Kingsland Shopping Centre. Smooth, smothered by concrete, a no-man’s-land between road and rail. Few people entered the mall through this back way. Once past the main entrance to Sainsbury’s, the shops tail off into a mirror of what’s available outside on Kingsland High Street.

A gray mid-morning on a school day. Any kids around now are avoiding something.

Now she rides with him.

He found her under the outdoor metal stairwell. Hood up. Not doing anything.

She was one of our own.

He had thought about this moment over and over again. Can a death ever be justified? Is one unpromising life worth ten thousand others? If it works, then yes, it is. Suddenly, Heldon knew exactly what he was doing.

“Hi. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“What’s it to you? You a teacher?”

A flash of his card. “No, I’m a policeman. And I think you should come with me. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I have a very important job to do, and I need your help. How would you like to ride a white horse?”

Without protest, the girl left with him.

South by Joe McNally

Elephant & Castle

As an incomer to London, I have — almost inevitably — found myself enchanted with the city, in more than one sense of the word. I have enthusiastically thrown my hat in with those who purport to read the city; I have picked and hunted for the obscure volumes which I hope will allow me to enter their hallowed halls through recitation of the Sacred Names of the Lost Rivers, and gestured endlessly toward the notions which underpin their fictions.

For the most part, my own experiments in drift have been confined to the northern shores and, due to a specific confluence of geographical happenstance and the practicalities of car-engine maintenance, to the mysterious islets of the dead between Maida Vale and Ladbroke Grove; ghost country, the lands of the west. Too dead even for Ballard.

Think London as Mappa Mundi: wealth and comfort in the west, wealth and sterility in the far north, squalor and industry in the east (less of the latter these days — heritage docks, churches turned Starbucks), and in the south, a cliché Heart of Darkness. Incongruous strips of pristine brickwork along the river, a seething, churning mess we’d rather not think about.

It’s uncharted territory, our own little Third World, just a little too feral for the tame psychogeographer. Not the heritage poverty of the East End, this is the real thing, waving a shattered bottle in your face and ranting a cloud of whiskey fumes before smacking you down and stripping you to your frame. There’s a reason sorcerers don’t cross running water; down here, they’d be trading your scrying glass for rocks within the hour.

But then it hits me, walking from tube to Thameslink at the Elephant, the peak of the delta — Old Kent Road another Nile, tarmac khem, its length vanishing off toward an unknown source in the mythic lands supposed to exist outside the M25. And here at the peak of the delta are the tunnels.

This could have been built for us, the self-styled cultists of the city still reeling from our frantic initiations of acid-fueled underground trips, coke-blasted long marches across the city trailed by gibbering crackheads waiting to fire up the crystal snot on our cast-off tissues, graduation only by turning up some new obscurity to which the metropolisomancers can nail a thousand mad-eyed theses. Here, a series of far-sighted planners, true inheritors of the Dionysiac mantle, conspired or were somehow moved by unseen forces to create a playground for those unable to travel through an underpass without pausing to attempt to decode the hidden patterns brought to half-life by every patch of crumbling concrete and piss stain.

It starts as soon as you vanish back underground after emerging from the tube. (No, it starts with the name: Elephant & Castle. Gnomic, at first quaint, then taking on sinister overtones. The Guild of Cutlers, ivory and steel. Bone and knife blade, a union still celebrated here more nights than not.) The subterranean walkways, with their vandalized or opaque signs, are an immediate hook, an obvious nod to Crete — passages which seem carefully planned to evoke the dread that some bellowing theriomorph might lurk behind each blind turn, pure panic.

At some point, in a misguided attempt to defuse these chthonic terrors, murals have been added showing imagined scenes from some non-history of South London, jungle scenes, subaquatic fantasies. Sharks patrol these walls. But the genius loci won’t be denied. It rots the cheer, warps it over time into mania. Each grin now takes on a sinister aspect, the jolly street traders and their well-fed horses projecting an air of vague unease, like nursery drawings on the walls of a burned-out house. Crumbling and fading, they have become a desperate illustration of something that can only be hinted at in the most oblique symbolism, a private, autistic blend of Hoffman and Ryder-Waite.

Between the two stations, I stop to talk to a homeless woman sitting cross-legged with her back to one of the walls. She could be five or six years younger than me, but looks ten older. She has an immense paperback open in front of her, and I ask what she’s reading, steeling myself to be polite about Tolkien or worse. Instead, it’s an anthology of classic detective stories — Chandler, Willeford, Himes — with the words Pulp Fiction blazing across the cover. She explains that she bought it because she thought it was something to do with the film. She’s about halfway through it now. I give her a pound and tell her to put it toward another book.

A pound’s the least I can do; she’s already shading into fiction, working her way into the web of metaphor, a fate not to be wished on any human or bestowed on them without recompense. It’s a kind of death, after all. There was a real woman sitting in the underpass, reading a real book, I did stop, I did speak to her, I did give her the money, but by reducing her to this incident I triumphantly deny her the rest of her life, all the while patting myself on the back for my razor-sharp literary instincts and dreaming of Mayhew.

She was drawn into the book — her anthology, not this fiction, I’m the only one on this particular voyage just now — expecting something other than what she got, but now realizes that she’s better off with what she did get. Enter the labyrinth and confront... The pat answer is usually some reassuringly bleak psychobabble borrowed from half-heard, never-read Freud or, worse, George Lucas — yourself, your parents, your dark side. The truth is that you’re confronting the labyrinth itself, the ultimate manifestation of the journey that becomes its own destination. Anything you may find is a function of the maze.

An information bauble surfaces from the Fortean Times days. A piece by Paul Devereux on a South American temple which was designed as a shaman machine. The initiate would be fed hallucinogenic cactus, then sent into the temple. Each part was set up to accentuate some aspect of the psychedelic experience — walls that went from echoing to acoustically dead, water channels designed to create apparently source-less sounds, weird lights.

The cactus they used, San Pedro, is now widely available in Camden and Portobello Road. But bang a couple of slices of that and venture in here, and I don’t like to think what you’d get. Certainly not the sort of mantic howler in the outer darkness who lands regular spots in the LRB. Any signs one could read here would sear the brain with revelation, a freebase hit of pure kabbalah, rebridging the divisions between left and right cerebral hemispheres and turning the reader into an ambulatory conduit for the voice of the labyrinth.

It continues. I stride edgily through the shopping center to the Thameslink. The whitewashed concrete hallway feels like an abandoned bunker somewhere deep in Eastern Europe. The floor is inches deep in rainwater, with helpful yellow signs to point out this fact. Nobody is there. The nearest thing to human contact comes from the monitors, relaying information keyed in hours ago in some other location, a cathode ray phantom, news from nowhere. I have an hour to wait for the next train. I’ve missed its predecessor by seconds as a consequence of my chat with the homeless woman. (See: She doesn’t even get a name, but the entire narrative really hangs on her; without her, you would not be reading this, or at least not in this form.)

I make for the bus stop, where the bus I need appears within seconds of my discovering that I need it. Another omen, another metaphor. This is a fertile zone; tiny possibility bombs detonating and sending ripples through the various levels of my mind. The people milling around the shopping center (the pink shopping center, a Little England nightmare made of concrete — dusky colonials and the taint of lavender) become a personal message to me from something beyond.

Once on board, I set my eyes on a mysteriously empty seat, one of three unoccupied places around a dozing bulk. It’s a long haul into terra australis incognita, and I’ll be needing my strength later. The instant I sit, I realize why the seats have not been taken up by any of my traveling companions. The man at the center of the exclusion zone smells. No, this barely does him justice. A truly heroic stench hangs around him, displaced each time he moves, sweeping out in almost visible curls before and behind him with every disturbance in his dream.

I deal with it for as long as I can, but eventually change seats (being a good middle-class boy, I wait until I am absolutely sure he is asleep; there is, I reason, no possibility that he is unaware of his miasma, and I have no desire to remind him of it again). From my new vantage point, I see that, in fact, the earlier journey through the tunnels was just a decoy, a warm-up. This, though, is the real deal. There are no signs to help me here, no friendly guides clutching books full of familiar names to ground me. I took my eye off the road and left it without even noticing.

I look briefly at each of the other passengers. Eventually, there is no one left to look at and I am compelled to turn my attention to the man in front of me.

He is sitting back yet leaning forward at the same time. A great buffalo hump squats on his back, forcing his head toward the space between his knees. A woolly brown suit of indiscernible vintage helps add to the air of something bovine. Sagging expanses of flesh the colors of corned beef — complete with waxy marbled patches of fat — droop from an acromegalic frame and turn his face into a system of soft caves. His eyes are almost buried beneath overhanging folds of puffed skin, which threaten to fuse with his cheeks: a waxwork Auden rescued, too late, from a conflagration. Messy spikes of hair protrude from his scalp like a crown of feathers. He is between sleep and waking, and the bus’ occasional stops and starts make him jerk, sending a shudder through his body, which is echoed and enlarged by corresponding movements in the mephitic cloud that clings to him like a swarm of locusts. The breath flaps out of him from behind crimson jowls.

He seems not to belong here, a refugee from a Grosz painting suppressed as too terrible for public consumption. There would be something comical about him were it not for his awesome vastness and the animal reek around him. It’s an ur-stench, building from base notes of piss, shit, and sweat to encompass subtle undertones of days-old baby vomit and rank meat that linger in the brain much longer than in the nostrils.

I find myself rapt with wonder at him, barely able to contain my authorial glee. I am working heavy juju here; I set out telling myself that something worth putting down on the page would happen tonight, and it seems that I have managed to conjure this flesh golem out of pure narrative requirement — a notional space hitherto marked LOCAL COLOR HERE fills out with something truly strange, an authentic and unfakeable encounter that a better author would have the sense to condense to a paragraph or even a phrase.

But I can’t leave well enough alone, and my mind races to find some way I can steal this creature and tame him for my own purposes. The fact that he is clearly dreaming, his physical appearance, his foulness, these are all good. I wonder for a moment if there is some way he can be shoe-horned into some sort of fiction, some easy way I can turn this to my own advantage.

As I wonder on all this, he stirs and begins to gather his belongings to leave the bus at the next stop. Assaulted by the inevitable accompanying spread of his insulating cloud, I turn back to the book I’ve been concealing myself behind (Maurice Leitch, The Smoke King) and desperately try to avoid attracting his attention. He is, after all, my creation and I do not want to be held responsible for the consequences should such a perfect beast gaze by accident into the eyes of his creator.

The bus stops, and as the doors open he shudders toward them, white plastic bags flapping from each wrist, stirring up tornadoes which disperse his spoor to the four corners of the vehicle. I steal a sideways glance at him when he blusters out onto the pavement. As he steadies himself from a sideways lurch, one of the bags swings and hits the glass beside me with with a noise I do not like. A pattern of darkness within momentarily resolves itself into what I pray is not a face, and the minotaur is gone.

Who do you know in heaven? by Patrick McCabe

Aldgate

Right,” I said, and phoned the cops.

“May I ask who’s calling?” she says.

“Edgar Lustgarten,” I said. “You might remember me from Scales of Justice. Then again, you mightn’t.”

“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,” she says.

Not that it mattered, for I was gone.

The next thing you know, there’s Feane on the Daily Mirror with an anorak over his head. But it was him all right — the two-tone shoes.

The worst thing about Mickey Feane was his relentless bragging. “Look at me — I’m super-volunteer.”

Never liked them Belfast bastards. Too cocksure.

He’d have all the time he wanted to brag now — any amount in Brixton prison.

Poor old Feane — yet another in a long line of slope-shouldered Irish felons in Albion, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

In the beginning it had been good — there can’t be any denying that.

I think I’ll go to London, I thought. Off I’ll go and I won’t come back.

“Goodbye cows,” I said, “and streets — farewell.”

Up your arse may they happily go and the rest of this miserable country as well.

After all, it was 1973. The whole fucking place was an outhouse deserted.

“Goodbye, Daddy, Mammy. Goodbye other kiddies. I hope you die,” I said as I skipped.

I had met some very good friends indeed. They really were quite jolly good fellows. They wore zig-zag tops and half-mast jeans.

The very first day I arrived in off the boat, Harrods blew up. Two cops stopped me and said, “Hello, hello.” Believe it or believe it not, it’s absolutely true. I gave them an envelope with the old man’s name on it. They weren’t too happy with that, they declared.

“You could get into a lot of trouble over here,” they went on. “These are odd and hair-raising times, my wide-eyed little Irish friend.”

I was tripped out of my skull for most of the journey. I drank a few pints with an old chap sporting a face like a ripe tomato.

“Do you know what the English did?” he said to me. “Hung decent fellows outside their own doors.”

I had never in my life quite seen such a face. The Incredible Melting Man from Tipperary, that was the only name I could think of which might suit.

“I’ll tell you something about London,” he says, but I never heard what it was, for the next thing, slurp, down he goes right into the ashtray with a sprig of red hair sticking up like a flower.

As soon as I was sure there was no one looking, I reached into his inside pocket and effortlessly removed his bulging wallet. Inside there’s a bunch of in memoriam cards with a small square picture of this big farmer smiling. That, I assumed, was the recently deceased brother.

There was a good fat roll of money in there — all tied up with an elastic band. Consummate cattle-dealer style.

Away I went in the direction of Piccadilly. I turned a corner and there it flashed — CINZANO, on-off.

I stood there looking at it — truly mesmerized. The reason for that was, it was on our mantelpiece at home. As a matter of fact, it was the last thing I had laid eyes on before departing.

“You’re a bad boy, Emmet,” Daddy had said.

I had expected the entire town to turn out to bear witness to my leavetaking. They didn’t. It was, I’m afraid, a damp squib of an event.

I just pulled the door after me, and who comes flying right off the fanlight but his holiness — the Infant of Prague.

For the benefit of English people who never go to Mass, the Infant of Prague is a holy young boy who stands guard over doors with a gleaming golden crown and a sceptre in his hand. Sadly, on this occasion, his head had got broken. Which upset Mammy because she loved him so.

“Don’t come back!” I heard her shouting.

Then I saw Daddy glaring from the shadows.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’ll be able to give her a proper kicking now.”

He had always been very fond of football — especially whenever the ball was Mammy.

He always liked a game at the weekend. And maybe, if he’d the money, after the pub on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays — and Tuesdays.

I went into the great big neon-lit shop. A rubber girl, Rita, who’ll never say no. A woman in a mask belting the lard out of a crawling-around city gent clad in a bowler.

“I’ll teach you some manners,” she says, and she means it.

“Oh no,” he says, “please don’t do it, but do it.”

That would keep me warm, I thought, a good skelp like that, as I retired to my chambers along the banks of the Thames.

I thought of them all the way back there at home — all my turf-molded fellow country-compatriots. By now they would have realized my featherbed had not been slept in. And great consternation would take hold in the midlands.

Little would those gormless fools know just what the true nature of my visit to London was to be. I shivered gleefully as I thought: The London Assignment. A British cabinet minister is gunned down by an IRA assassin. It’s a race against the clock and one false move will be enough to leave him dead before he reaches his target.

I lovingly stroked the butt of my Smith & Wesson.686—four inches, with Hogue grips — which lay nestled deep in the pocket of my jacket. My shiny jacket of soft black leather — standard-issue terrorist fare, perhaps, but comfortable and stylish nonetheless. What the well-dressed volunteer is wearing this autumn in the mid-1970s.

“Get out of the car,” I heard myself say, “I’m requisitioning this vehicle on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. One-Shot Emmet, they call me, friend — for one shot is all it takes.”

There was a big fat moon swelling above the gasworks, looking like the loveliest floaty balloon. The old man knew a song about that moon. I remembered it well. It went: When the harvest moon is shining, Molly dear.

Once I had heard him singing it to the old lady. One night in the kitchen not long after Christmas. Long ago. Or at least I thought I had. Then I fell asleep with my hotshot volunteer’s jacket pulled good and tight around me.

So off I went — puff-puff on the train. All the way to Epsom in Surrey. What a spot that turned out to be — a hotel, a kind of club for dilapidated colonels. How many Jimmy Edwards moustaches would you say there were there to be seen?

At least, I would estimate, seventeen examples.

Big potted plants and women like vampires, Epsom Association Dawn of the Dead.

Sitting there yakking about gout and begonias.

“You’re not very fond of work, are you?” says the boss. He had apprehended me sleeping under boxes.

I took in everything in the office. The barometer on the wall reading mild, the bird creature on the mantelpiece dipping its beak in a jar. Lovely shiny polished-leather furniture — with buttons.

“It seems quite extraordinary but you don’t appear ashamed in any way.”

I was going to tell him nothing. Mahoney — my officer-in-command — had always said if arrested to focus your attention on a spot on the wall.

He fired me. “Get out,” he says. Well, fuck that for a game of cowboys.

By the time I got back to London I was edgy and tired.

Outside a Wimpy, I saw a woman with blood streaming down her face being led away by a man in a raincoat. For no reason at all I stood there for a minute looking in the window of a telly rental shop, and there on the screen is this fellow saying: “I was just coming out of my office when I heard the most frightful bang.” The policemen were still shouting: “Will you please clear the area!” All of the pubs were closing their doors. I heard someone running past, shouting: “Murdering bastards!” I hid my face and found a hostel. The London Assignment was the name of my book. The book I’d invented to get me to sleep. I was on the cover in a parka — looking dark and mean. Behind me, a mystical pair of old-country hills. The old-timer next to me said: “What time is it now?”

It’s the time of Gog and Magog, my friend, when the cloud covers the sun and the moon no longer gives forth any light.

I’d read that in a Gideon’s Bible some other old tramp had left on my locker. He must have been unhappy for I could hear him crying.

I don’t know why his whimperings should have done it but they got me thinking about Ma and Da. I got up to try and stop their faces coming. Then I saw the two of them — him just standing there with his hand held in hers.

“Ma,” I gasped, “Da.”

They were dressed in the clothes of all the old-time photographs. There was a picture on the hostel wall of a dancehall in London and somehow it all got mixed up with that. It wasn’t a modern dancehall — one from the ’40s or perhaps the early ’50s. It was called THE PALAIS — with its string of lights waltzing above the heads of the fresh-faced queue. You’d think to see them that they’d all won the pools. I’ve never seen people look as happy as that. I could see the inside in my mind — palm trees painted over a tropical ocean and the two of them waltzing. Him with his hair oiled and her with a great big brooch pinned onto her lapel.

“I love you,” I heard her say.

It was in those couple of years just before I was born. In the time of the famous detective Lustgarten, when all the cars were fat and black and nobody said fuck or visited dirty neon-lit shops. When everyone was happy because at last the war was over. We hadn’t been in the war. Eamon de Valera kept us out of it. The old man revered de Valera. Talked about him all the time. He was probably talking about him now — to her. But she wouldn’t want to hear about history. She’d simply want to be kissed by him. The history of that kiss would do her just fine. She needed no more than that to look back on.

The doors of the dancehall were swinging open now and assorted couples were drifting out into the night in the loveliest of white dresses and old-style gray suits with big lapels.

Ma was lying back on the bonnet of a car. She put her arms around him and said she wasn’t worried about a single thing in the whole world. Her laughter sailed away and I heard her saying that history was a cod, that the only thing that mattered was two people loving one another. He asked her would she love an Englishman, and she said yes she would just so long as it was him. Which was the greatest laugh of the whole of all time — the idea of her husband, Tom Spicer, being an Englishman.

“London,” she whispered then, and whatever way she said it, it made the whole place just spread out before me like some truly fabulous palace of stars. Songs that I had only half-remembered seemed to fill themselves out now and take on an entirely new life as they threaded themselves in and out of the most magnificent white buildings of solid Portland stone.

A nightingale, I thought, sang in Berkeley Square and it made me feel good for I knew that Da had liked it once upon a time. No, still did.

“Don’t I?” he said as he tilted her pale chin upwards.

“Stardust,” she smiled, and I knew she meant Nat King Cole.

With the shimmering sky over London reflected in her eyes.

When I looked again, they were standing in some anonymous part of the city and it wasn’t pleasant — there was this aura of threat or unease hanging around them. I wanted it to go away but it wouldn’t. Ma was more surprised than anyone when he drew back his cuff and punched her in the face.

A spot of blood went sailing across the Thames. Faraway I saw CINZANO, just winking away there, on and off. On and off. On and off. On and—

I heard a scream. I woke up.

I didn’t manage to get back to sleep.

Noon, I went into Joe’s Café. There was only one thing and it prevailed in my mind. That was the dancehall whose name was THE PALAIS, with its colored lights strung above the door. That was my London Assignment. To, once and for all, locate that building. I swore I’d do it — or die in the process.

I smiled as I thought of Mahoney and his reaction. He was standing by the window back at HQ, with both arms folded as he unflinchingly gazed out into the street.

“You were sent over there for one express purpose!” he snapped. “And it’s got nothing to do with fucking dance-halls!”

I took out my revolver and placed it on the table.

“So be it,” I said. “Then I’m out.”

“You’re out when I say you’re out,” replied Mahoney.

I could see a nerve throbbing in his neck. Mahoney had been over the previous summer with an active service unit that had caused mayhem. He was a legend in the movement. His London exploits had passed into history. He would have had no problem coming over himself and filling me in. Taping my confession and leaving me there in some dingy Kilburn flat, with a black plastic bag pulled down over my head.

“The organization is bigger than any one man,” he said. “Or any,” he sneered “fucking dancehall.”

I finished my tea and got up from my chair, swinging from Joe’s out into the street.

Not this one, Mahoney. Not this one.

I sat down for a bit in Soho Square Gardens. There was a paper lying beside me on the bench. Looking out from the front page was a photofit picture of an IRA bomber in long hair and sideburns.

I shook the paper and sighed, kind of tired. You could hear the Pandas blaring nearby. I slid into a cinema and tried not to hear what I was hearing. Almost inevitably, there was Edgar — smiling down at me from the screen. How could he possibly have known I was in the city? I thought ruefully. Could my cover possibly have been blown?

It couldn’t be, I concluded. Not even the great Scales of Justice detective could have managed to pull off a coup like that. I began to relax as I watched him bestride the screen. I dwelt on all his famous cases: The Mystery of the Burnt-Out Candle; Investigation at Honeydew Farm; The Willow Tree Murders.

“I know all about the dancehall,” he said. “That’s my job — I’m here to help.”

I was grateful to him for saying that, for I knew if anyone was able to help it was Edgar Lustgarten — having lived through the days when the streets of the great city had been the same as they were in the photograph, shiny and wet and full of gray overcoats, with great big double-deckers bombing around and Big Ben regally resounding across the world.

“Would you like to know what was playing that night?” he asked me. “It was ‘Who Do You Know in Heaven?’ by the Ink Spots.”

“‘Who do you know in Heaven?’” I repeated, as the colored lights flickered above the door of THE PALAIS.

There can be little doubt that The London Assignment will go down in the annals as one of the most magnificent operations ever undertaken by The Organization. Mahoney, I knew, would be especially proud.

I couldn’t believe it when I arrived in Rayner’s Lane. I couldn’t even remember how I got there. There was a dancehall, but it wasn’t the one I was after. It hadn’t even been built until 1960. Anyhow, it was boarded up and left to go to rack.

I went into another café and had a cup of tea. My hands were blue and I was shivering.

I didn’t want to hear it but they fell from the lips of a man sitting opposite. In my father’s voice. The words: “We’re rubbish, us Irish, and all our children — they’ll be rubbish. We don’t even know how to love or kiss or dance. All we can do is dress in rags. If we were in London now, that would be different. We’d deck ourselves in the finest of silks and we’d stroll down Pall Mall with our proud heads held high. Then do you know what we’d do? We’d go off to dinner in some swanky hotel, and after we’d called a toast to ourselves, we’d take a cab off to a dancehall — we wouldn’t really care where it was, just so long as the Inkspots were playing — and what we’d do then is we’d foxtrot and waltz until our feet were sore and bruised.”

He was leaning over to kiss her when I knocked over the teacup, its contents dribbling onto my feet.

I think one of the most beautiful days I can ever remember was Boxing Day three years ago. It had been snowing constantly and the city looked like something out of a fairy tale — as though it had been evacuated especially for me. On Trafalgar Square, the Landseer lions appeared even more august than usual, with their Mandarin moustaches of dusty white ice.

Starched and blue, Soho did my heart good. In the gutters, hardened wrappers possessed a special kind of poetry. It was like being a child all over again, when I’d walk the roads of the little country town which I haven’t, sadly, been back to now for many years now.

I’m looked after here — I’ve accepted this country as my home. I have a flat the Council gave me — it’s not far from Fenchurch Street, in the suburb of Aldgate.

There’s a café which I go to, near Leadenhall Market. I sit at the back. The owner is an Italian — he fancies himself an intellectual. He thought I was writing a West End play. “No,” I told him, “I’m writing a novel. A little thriller I’ve titled The London Assignment.”

He took up my notebook and read — with superiority: “Once upon a time there was a young boy who lived in a squat. He had to leave it for reasons best left unreported. The city in those days was as though a place under siege. Emmanuelle was playing at The Odeon. A Clockwork Orange was showing somewhere else. On April 26, an old tramp, who happened to be from Ballyfuckways in the Irish county of Mayo, was stumbling good-humoredly through an underpass, throatily declaiming an old ballad, when he was confronted by three youths — each of them sporting a bowler hat and with a single eye mascaraed. They beat him with their walking canes and left him for dead. A bomb blew out the windows of a restaurant that night — on Frith Street, in Soho. Thirteen people were injured. Carroll’s Number Six cigarettes cost fifteen pence for ten.”

He handed me back the notebook and smiled — in that unfortunately unappealing, superior way.

“Did you ever hear of Griffith’s theory of consistent memory?” he asked me. He then explained it, in even and measured tones, clearly anticipating my difficulties with its complexity.

“It’s like this,” he continued, “consciousness prompts you to hypothesize that the story you’re creating from a given set of memories is a consistent history, justified by a consistent narrative voice...”

I half-expected Edgar Lustgarten to appear out of the throng outside, airily drift up to the window, and press his gaunt face to the grimy glass. After a minute or two of this unsolicited advice, I no longer heard a word he said.

What must Sinclair Vane — complete stranger, retired physiotherapist and formerly of 7th (Queen’s Own) Hussars — and indeed his wife, have thought when he returned to Frognal Walk Hampstead one night in 1973 to find his parlor window broken open and me, right there in his sitting room, talking to myself and clutching what I had decided was a lethal weapon — in reality a wholly amateur attempt at an imitation firearm, fashioned from a branch I’d found outside? I can only surmise he received the shock of his life. My black bomber jacket was draped across my shoulders as I shivered and menacingly narrowed my eyes. I think I might have giggled a little, in what I thought was a sinister fashion.

“I’m the most feared terrorist in Ireland,” I said. “You’re going to pay for the sins of your country. I’m sorry to have to tell you but that’s the way it is. I’m a soldier, you’re a soldier. You’re going to die, Mr. Vane.”

If I wanted to describe him, I would say he was a young version of Edgar Lustgarten — still retaining most of his hair, complete with touches of distinguished gray.

I encountered him once — a number of years after my discharge from Brixton. The snow had passed and the gutters of Soho had been recently rinsed clean by a deluge of rain, twists of steam all about me rising up into the easeful autumn sky.

He was sitting by the window of a new European-style coffee bar, surrounded by chatting white-T-shirted youths and looking so out of place. It was hard for me to do it but I was glad afterwards that I had made the effort. At first he didn’t recognize me when I said his name: Sinclair Vane.

As might have been expected, he formally stood to attention and extended his hand to shake mine.

We didn’t talk much about that night. His soul was still saddened by the recent passing of his wife.

“She was an angel, you know. She really was.”

I thought of her, his angel, as she’d encountered me that ridiculous night — weeping hysterically in the doorway by the stairs. Before Sinclair had expertly calmed her down. I recalled him in that photo on their mantelpiece — battalion commander S. Vane, in complete battledress, authoritatively squinting in the Egreb sun.

I don’t know why I thought it, but it was as clear as day as I sat in the Sir Richard Steele one still and uneventful afternoon — this image of myself and Sinclair sitting so comfortably in a London black cab, gliding along before coming to a halt just outside a dancehall whose entrance was lit by a string of warm and inviting multicolored lightbulbs.

“It was in Brighton all along,” I heard him say, as the door swung open and he reached in his pocket for the fare.

Which I knew, of course, it wasn’t — and, all of a sudden, hands of accusation seemed to reach out to grab me as I sat there in the corner of the Sir Richard Steele gloom.

I hadn’t been allowed out of Brixton for the funeral of my mother, but after my father went into the home, his papers and effects were all passed to me. You can imagine my reaction when I discovered the old photograph — creased and faded but instantly recognizable. I didn’t know what to think when I smoothed it out and, having examined it quite exhaustively, came to accept that the image I was looking at — and had been obsessed by — was that of two complete strangers, the inscription on the back reading: Dublin 1953. Neither of my parents had been to Dublin in their lives.

It was hard not to weep as I looked at it again, slowly beginning to accept that it definitely was THE PALAIS, and that the two lovers in it, well, they could have been almost anyone. For in those box-pleated suits and stiff-collared shirts, not to mention those fearful faces and averted eyes which seemed so grateful for even the tiniest morsel of hope, they could have been any pair of thrown-together souls, adrift in the black and washed-out gray of the lightless, shrinking sad Irish ’50s.

The London Assignment had been an extremely effective operation — from the British establishment’s point of view, not from mine. Or from Sinclair’s, I hasten to add. I don’t think he wanted me charged at all. My demise and subsequent incarceration hastened due to the fact that the day before the trial had been due to begin, three cleaning ladies, a hotel porter, and two foreign tourists had been blown to pieces in a restaurant in Piccadilly.

In these, the latter days of the ’90s, I largely subsist by means of the dole and a couple of hours a night gathering glasses in a pub. I suppose you could say I’m well-known around Aldgate. No one is aware of my murky past. I live in a tower block, not far from the station, which gets lonely sometimes and sees me perhaps in The Hoop & Grapes, nursing a tepid lager, or back in Trinity Square Gardens again, feeding the pigeons and surrounded by clamorous, insatiable, supremacist youth. Whose faith in the future I need to be near. Walkman stereos were just coming in ’74. I was bundled into a van, not to see the light of day until mid-’95. I still derive a childish innocence from wearing mine, fancying myself a lone knight of the streets, immersed in shaky ’30s-style strings and mellow muted jazz trumpets as I drift, a shadow figure, along the golden streets of Soho.

Among the personal effects forwarded to me after my father’s death was a letter to her, written in 1949. I know it so well I can quote it verbatim.

One of the chapters in my forthcoming book is called The Hampstead Conclusion. With a walk-on part by Edgar Lustgarten.

I’d wrecked the house that night, of course. And made a speech for the benefit of the Vanes. So that they might clearly comprehend my motivation — the reasons which led to The London Assignment.

“Then and only then let my epitaph be written!” — a segment from my Republican firebrand namesake Robert Emmet’s famous courtroom speech — I remember bawling as I tipped a small glass table over. “Do you hear me, Vane, you imperious, self-regarding, cold-blooded Englishman?” I’d snapped, before delivering a lengthy soliloquy regarding the inadvisability of antagonizing a “nation who were educating Europe when others were painting themselves with woad,” along with any number of references to a certain “Mahoney” whose underground army was by now primed and about to launch a full-scale assault on “Her Majesty’s government of despots and butchers, as well as...”

As well as nothing, as a matter of fact, for before I knew it, Sinclair Vane had somehow pinned my two arms behind my back and knocked me out with a well-aimed blow, something which I would have anticipated had I examined the mantelpiece a little bit more comprehensively — there were at least four photos of him attired in military fatigues — or applied myself with more diligence to my researches, particularly those pertaining to ex-servicemen who had distinguished themselves repeatedly in the field of combat, unarmed and otherwise. Particularly, it appeared, with the 7th Armoured Division with Monty at El Alamein.

The notice of his death I happened to come upon in the Times. I don’t know why I went there — to the funeral in Willesden Cemetery — some unformed notion, a vague desire for closure, maybe. All I remember is shaking his sister, Miss Vane’s, hand. She was so distressed I don’t think she even saw me.

When I got home I explained to Vonya — or tried to. But in the end gave up about halfway through. I could see it wasn’t making any sense. She was a lovely girl, whom I happened to meet quite by chance one day on my bench in Trinity Square Gardens.

She stayed with me but we didn’t have sex. As I poured out the coffee, a young Muslim man was arguing with two policemen, employing body language I knew so well.

“But I lie to you,” she said, a little choked.

Her mother was long dead, she’d told me. Her father had habitually abused her since childhood. That was the reason she had come to London, the very minute, practically, that she’d come of age. Except that none of it, it turned out, was true.

It was the morning the IRA bombed the Baltic Exchange. I heard the explosion — it’s not that far away from my flat — and wondered had Mickey Feane, my old friend, been involved. But then I remembered — Mickey Feane was long dead, sprayed in an ambush on a back road in Tyrone.

I turned to say something and saw she wasn’t there.

That was the last I saw of Vonya Prapotnik.

I’d sit there in the gardens opposite the Lutyens monument commemorating the Merchant Navy dead, and think of Mr. Lustgarten arriving — the fat black Panda pulling up outside the building as a burly officer opened the door, clearing a path for the internationally renowned sleuth as he made his way up bare concrete stairs, pushing the door open to reveal the dank interior. Where he’d find me lying prostrate on the bed. I don’t know what title might occur to him as he observed me — rigor mortis having already set in, most likely — An Unfortunate Case, perhaps, or Felo-De-Se: A Volunteer’s Farewell, or, perhaps, best of all, The Aldgate Assignment.

Yes, I think I like the sound of that.

I made the tape last night and it’s good, I think — by which I mean that it’s clear and unequivocal. Precise as any good confession ought to be, with or without a black plastic hood. I left it on the table where anyone will be able to see it — you won’t need the skills of Edgar Lustgarten. I bought a jiffy bag and a packet of stickers, and in neat felt marker printed on the front: Who Do You Know in Heaven?

What I couldn’t believe most of all was how wonderfully bright it was. THE PALAIS in red and yellow strung-up lights. When I went in, the band were already in the middle of their set, performing their dance steps in front of their music stands, with all their silver instruments gleaming. They were wearing little white jackets and neatly pressed graystripe trousers. The Ink Spots, in black, was printed on a drum.

When I heard her call out to me, initially I couldn’t make out who it was. Then, to my astonishment, I heard my mother say: “Emmet, will you do something for me? Will you make sure the Infant of Prague is in his proper place on the fanlight and has his little face turned toward the church? We’re getting married tomorrow morning at 10, son, you see.”

I wasn’t sure quite what to say — her taffeta dress looked so nice — and had to think for a minute to decide on an answer. But before I got the chance, the band had started up again, and as he placed his arm around her waist I saw her lean in toward him and smile.

But that was the last I saw of them because in the one or two seconds I’d turned to give my attention to the band, as effortlessly as though they’d grown wings, they’d sailed like moths out far beyond the stars, in search of the heaven they’d been dreaming of for so long.

Betamax by Ken Hollings