The Judas Goat

6

I rejected Flanders’s offer of a cab and strolled back up the Strand toward the Mayfair in the slowly gathering evening. It was a little after eight o’clock. I had nowhere to be till morning and I walked randomly. Where the Strand runs into Trafalgar Square I turned down Whitehall.

I stopped halfway down and looked at the two mounted sentries in the sentry box outside the Horse Guards building. They had leather hip boots and metal breastplates and old-time British Empire helmets, like statues, except for the young and ordinary faces that stared out under the helmets and the eyes that moved. The faces were kind of a shock.

At the end of Whitehall was Parliament and Westminster Bridge, and across Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey. I’d walked through it some years back with Brenda Loring and a stampede of tourists. I’d like to walk through it when it was empty sometime. I looked at my watch: 8:50. Subtract six hours, it was ten of three at home. I wondered if Susan was in her counseling class. It probably didn’t meet every day. But maybe in the summer. I walked a little way out into Westminster Bridge and looked down at the river. The Thames. Jesus Christ. It had flowed through this city when only Wampanoags were on the Charles. Below me to the left was a landing platform where excursion boats loaded and unloaded. Susan and I had gone the year before to Amsterdam and had a wine and cheese cruise by candlelight along the canals and looked at the high seventeenthcentury fronts of the canal houses.

Shakespeare must have crossed this river. I had some vague recollection that the Globe Theatre was on the other side. Or had been. I also had the vague feeling that it no longer existed. I looked at the river for a long time and then turned and leaned on the bridge railing with my arms folded and watched the people for a while. I was striking, I thought, in blue blazer, gray slacks, white oxford button-down and blue and red rep striped tie. I’d opened the tie and let it hang down casually against the white shirt, a touch of informality, and it was only a matter of time until a swinging London bird in a leather miniskirt saw that I was lonely and stopped to perk me up. Miniskirts didn’t seem prevalent. I saw a lot of harem pants and a lot of the cigarette look with Levis tucked into the top of high boots. I would have accepted either substitute, but no one made a move on me. Probably had found out I was foreign. Xenophobic bastards. No one even noticed the brass touch on the tassels on my loafers. Suze noticed them the first time I had them on.

I gave it up after a while. I hadn’t smoked in ten or twelve years, but I wished then I’d had a cigarette that I could have taken a final drag on and flipped still burning into the river as I turned and walked away. Not smoking gains in the area of lung cancer, but it loses badly in the realm of dramatic gestures. At the edge of St. James’s Park there was something called Birdcage Walk and I took it. Probably my Irish romanticism. It led me along the south side of St. James’s Park to Buckingham Palace. I stood outside awhile and stared in at the wide bare hard-paved courtyard. “How you doing, Queen,” I murmured. There was a way to tell if they were there or not but I’d forgotten what it was. Didn’t matter much. They probably wouldn’t make a move on me either.

From the memorial statue in the circle in front of the palace a path led across Green Park toward Piccadilly and my hotel. I took it. I felt strange walking through a dark place of grass and trees an ocean away from home, alone. I thought about myself as a small boy and the circumstantial chain that connected that small boy with the middle-aging man who found himself alone in the night in a park in London. The little boy didn’t seem to be me very much. And neither did the middle-aging man. I was incomplete. I missed Susan and I’d never missed anyone before. I came out on Piccadilly again, turned right and then left onto Berkeley. I walked past the Mayfair and looked at Berkeley Square, long and narrow and very neat-looking. I didn’t hear a nightingale singing. Someday maybe I’d come back here with Susan, and I would. I went back to the hotel and had room service bring me four beers. “How many glasses, sir?”

“None,” I said in a mean voice. When it came I overtipped the bellhop to make up for the mean voice, drank the four beers from the bottle and went to bed.

In the morning I went out early and placed an ad in the Times. The ad said: “REWARD. One thousand pounds offered for information about organization called Liberty and death of three people in bombing of Steinlee’s Restaurant last August 21. Call Spenser, Hotel Mayfair, London.” Downes had promised the previous evening to have the file on Dixon sent over to my hotel and by the time I got back it was there, in a brown manila envelope, folded in half the long way and crammed in the mail box back of the front desk. I took it up to my room and read it. There were Xerox copies of the first officer’s report, statements taken from witnesses, Dixon’s statement from his hospital bed, copies of the Identikit sketches that had been made and regular reports of no progress submitted by various cops. There was also a Xerox of a note from Liberty claiming credit for the bombing and claiming victory over the “communist goons.” And there was a copy of a brief history of Liberty, presumably culled from the newspaper files.

I lay on the bed in my hotel room with the airshaft window open and read it over three times, alert for clues the English cops had missed. There weren’t any. If they had overlooked anything, I had too. It was almost as if I weren’t any smarter than they were. I looked at my watch: 11:15. Almost time for lunch. If I went out and walked in leisurely fashion to a restaurant and ate slowly then I would have only four or five hours to kill till dinner. I looked at the material again. There was nothing in it. If my ad didn’t produce any action, I didn’t have any idea what to do next. I could drink a lot of beer and tour the country but Dixon might get restless about that after I’d gone through a couple of five grand advances.

I went out, went to a pub in Shepherd’s Market near Curzon Street, had lunch, drank some beer, then walked up to Trafalgar Square and went into the National Gallery. I spent the afternoon there looking at the paintings, staring most of time at the portraits of people from another time and feeling the impact of their reality. The fifteenth-century woman in profile whose nose seemed to have been broken. Rembrandt’s portrait of himself. I found myself straining after them. It was after five when I left and walked in a kind of head-buzzing sense of separateness out into Trafalgar Square and the current reality of the pigeons. The ad would run in the morning, they had told me. I had nothing to do tonight. I didn’t feel like sitting alone in a restaurant and eating dinner, so I went back to my room, had a plateful of sandwiches sent up with some beer and ate in my room while I read my book.

The next morning the ad was there, as promised. As far as I could tell I was the only one who’d seen it. No one called that day, nor the next. The ad kept running. I hung around the hotel waiting until I got crazy, and then I went out and hoped they’d leave a message.

During the next five days I visited the British Museum and looked at the Elgin Marbles, and visited the Tower of London and looked at the initials scratched in the walls of tower cells. I observed the changing of the guard, and jogged regularly through Hyde Park along the Serpentine. I carne in six days after the ad was placed, my shirt wet with sweat, my blue sweat pants worn stylishly with the ankle zippers open, my Adidas Cross-Countries still newlooking. I asked as always were there any messages, and the clerk said “Yes” and took a white envelope out of the box and gave it to me. It was sealed and said on it only “Spenser.”

“This was delivered?” I said. “Yes, sir. ”

“Not phoned in? This isn’t your envelope?”

“No, sir, that was delivered by a young gentleman, I believe, sir. Perhaps half an hour ago.”

“Is he still here?” I said. “No, sir, I don’t believe I see him about. You might try the coffee shop.”

“Thanks.” Why hadn’t they phoned it in? Because they wanted to see who I was, maybe, and they could do that by dropping off an envelope and posting someone to watch who opened it. Then they’d know who I was and I wouldn’t know who they were. I walked toward one of the armchairs in the lobby where every afternoon tea was served. There was glass paneling on the far wall and I sat in a chair facing it so I could look in the mirror. I had on my sunglasses and I peeked out from behind them at the mirror while I opened the envelope. It was thin and unsuspicious. I doubted a letter bomb. For all I knew it might be a note from Flanders inviting me to join him for high tea at the Connaught. But it wasn’t. It was what I wanted. The note said, “Be at the cafeteria end of the east tunnel near the north gate entrance to the London Zoo in Regent’s Park tomorrow at ten in the morning.”

I pretended to read it again and surveyed the lobby from behind my shades as far as the mirror would let me. I didn’t see anything suspicious, but I didn’t expect to. I was trying to memorize all the faces in the place so if I saw one again I’d remember it. I put the letter back in the envelope and turned thoughtfully in my chair, tapping my teeth with a corner of the envelope. Pensive, deep in thought, looking hard as a bastard around the hotel lobby. No one was carrying a Sten gun. I went out the front door and strolled up toward Green Park. It is not easy to follow someone without being spotted, if the someone is trying to catch you doing it.

I caught her crossing Piccadilly. She’d been in the hotel lobby buying postcards, and now she was crossing Piccadilly toward Green Park half a block down the street. I was still in my sweat pants and I didn’t have a gun. They might want to burn me right now right quick once they had me spotted.

In Green Park I stopped, did a few deep knee bends and stretching exercises for show and then started an easy jog down toward the Mall. If she wanted me she’d have to run to keep up. If she started running to keep up, I’d know she didn’t care about being spotted, which would mean she was probably going to shoot me, or point me out to someone else who would shoot me. In which case I would bang a U-turn and run like hell for Piccadilly and a cop. She didn’t run. She let me go, and by the time I reached the Mall she was gone.

I walked back up to Piccadilly along Queen’s Walk, crossed the street and walked down to the Mayfair. I didn’t see her and she wasn’t in the lobby. I went up to my room and took a shower with my gun lying on the top of the toilet tank. I felt good. After a week of watching the sun set on the British Empire I was working again. And I was one up on somebody who thought they were one up on me. If she was from Liberty then they thought they had me spotted and I didn’t know them. If they weren’t, if they wanted just to see if they could screw me out of the thousand pounds and were taking a look at how hard I looked, I was still even. I knew them and they thought I didn’t, and moreover they thought that’s where they were. There were drawbacks. They knew all of me and I only knew one of them. On the other hand, I was a professional and they were amateurs. Of course, if one of them laid a bomb on me, the bomb might not know the difference between amateurs and professionals. I put on jeans, a white Levi shirt, and white Adidas Roms with blue stripes. I didn’t want the goddamned limeys to think an American sleuth didn’t know color coordination.

I got a black woven-leather shoulder rig out of the suitcase and slipped into it. They aren’t as comfortable as hip holsters, but I wanted to wear a short Levi jacket and the hip holster would show. I put my gun in the holster and put on the Levi jacket, and left it unbuttoned. It was dark blue corduroy. I looked at myself in the mirror over the bureau. I turned up the collar. Elegant. Clean-shaven, fresh-showered, with a recent haircut. I was the image of the international adventurer. I tried a couple of fast draws to make sure the shoulder holster worked right, did one perfect Bogart imitation at myself in the mirror, “All right, Louis, drop the gun,” and I was ready for action. The room had been made up already so there was no need for a maid to come in again. I took a can of talcum powder and, standing in the hall, I sprinkled it carefully and evenly over the rug in front of the door inside my room. Anyone who came in would leave a footprint inside and tracks outside when he left. If they were observant they might notice and wipe out the tracks. But unless they were carrying a can of talc they would have trouble covering the footprints inside. I shut the door carefully over the smooth layer of talcum and took the can with me.

There was a wastebasket by the elevators and I dropped the empty talc can in. I’d get another on my way back tonight. I walked down to Piccadilly Circus and took a subway to Regent’s Park. I had my map of London folded and creased in my hip pocket and I got it out and sneaked a look at it, trying not to look just like a tourist. I figured out the best walk through the park, nodded knowingly in case anyone was watching, as if I was just confirming what I knew already, and headed on up to the north gate. I wanted a look at the territory before I showed up there tomorrow.

I went past the cranes, geese, and owls at north gate entrance and across the bridge over Regent’s Canal. A water bus chugged by underneath. By the insect house a tunnel led under a zoo office building and emerged beside the zoo restaurant. To the left was a cafeteria. To the right a restaurant and bar. Past the cafeteria were some flamingos in a little grass park. Flamingos on the grass, alas. If they wanted to burn me, the tunnel was their best bet. It wasn’t much of a tunnel, but it was straight and without alcoves. No place to hide. If someone came at me from each end they could put me in two without much trouble. Stay out of the tunnel. At the photo shop in the cafeteria I bought a guide to the zoo that had a map inside the back cover. The south gate, down by Wolf Wood, looked like a good spot to come in tomorrow. I walked down to take a look.

Past the parrot house and across from something labeled Budgerigars, there were kids taking camel rides and shrieking with laughter at the camel’s rolling asymmetrical gait. The south gate was just past the birds of prey aviary, which seemed ominous, past the wild dogs and foxes, and next to the Wolf Wood. That wasn’t too encouraging either. I went back up and looked at the cafeteria setup. There was a pavilion and tables. The food was served from an open-faced arcadelike building. If I sat on the pavilion at an open-air table I was a good target from almost any point. There was little cover. I ordered a steak and kidney pudding from the cafeteria and took it to a table. It was cold and tasted like a Nerf ball. While I gagged it down, I looked at my situation. If they were going to shoot me, there was little to prevent them. Maybe they weren’t going to shoot me, but I couldn’t plan much on that. “You can’t plan on the enemy’s intentions,” I said. “You have to plan on what he can do, not what he might.” A boy cleaning the tables looked at me oddly. “Beg pardon, sir?”

“Just remarking on military strategy. Ever do that? Sit around and talk to yourself about military strategy?”

“No, sir. ”

“You’re probably wise not to. Here, take this with you. ” I dropped most of my-steak and kidney pie into his trash bucket. He moved on. I wanted two things, maybe three, depending on how you counted. I wanted not to get killed. I wanted to decommission some of the enemy. I wanted at least one of them to get away with me following, Decommission. Nice word. Sounds better than kill. But I am thinking about killing a couple of people here. Calling it decommission isn’t going to make it better. It’s their choice though. I won’t shoot if I’m not taking fire. They try to kill me, I’ll fight. I’m not setting them up. They are setting me up… Except I’m setting them up to set me up so I can set them up. Messy. But you’re going to do it anyway, kid, whether it’s messy or not, so there’s not too much point to analyzing its ethical implications. Yeah, I guess I am. I guess I’ll just see if it feels good afterward.

They were experienced with explosives. And they didn’t worry about who got hurt. We knew that. If I were they I might wait till I got inside the tunnel, then roll in some explosives and turn me into a cave painting. Or they could do me in on the bridge over the canal. I knew who they were. I knew the girl and I had the pictures that Dixon had given me. Only the girl knew who I was. She’d have to be there to spot me. Maybe I could spot them first. How many would they send? If they were going to trap me in the tunnel, at least two plus the spotter. They’d at least want one at each end. But when they blew up the Dixons there were nine of them that Dixon spotted. They didn’t need nine. It must have been their sense of community. The group that blasts together lasts together. My bet was they’d show up in force. And they’d be careful. They’d be looking for a police setup. Anyone would. They wouldn’t be that stupid. So they’d be watching too.

I stood up. There was nothing to do but blunder into it. I’d stay out of the tunnel, and I’d keep away from open areas as best I could, and I’d look very carefully at everything. I knew them and they didn’t know it. Only one of them knew me. That was as much edge as I was going to get. The shoulder holster under my coat felt awkward. I wished I had more fire power. The steak and kidney pie felt like a bowling ball in my stomach as I headed out onto Prince Albert Road and caught a red double-decker bus back to Mayfair.