February in London.
The streets of Soho were choked in a freezing fog. Maltese, Cypriots, Italians, Greeks and Chinese coughed behind scarves. The walls of buildings looked as though they had been coated in cold grease. The people looked as though they had been dug up.
It was one o’clock: lunchtime. But the day seemed either not to have got properly light in the morning, or already to have started to get dark in the evening.
A row of restaurants emitted a welcoming glow, and none more than the Paese, which had hams and cheeses and china fruit in its window.
A big man in a coat with a fur collar walked fast along the street. He was bareheaded; his hair was dark and curly. He stopped in front of the Paese and pushed open the door. He looked as though he could equally easily have pushed a hole through the wall. In his big brown hand the door handle looked like a thimble.
The restaurant was crowded and quite noisy. There was a smell of onions and garlic and hot fat.
A little man in a black coat looked up when the door opened. He saw brilliant blue eyes in a big ugly brown face, and he ran to the door.
‘Signor conte! Che felicità!’
‘Buon giornio, Emilio. Come sta?’
Il Conte Alessandro di Ganzarello (23rd of his line) shook hands with the little manager. In his hand the manager’s hand looked like the white hand of a doll.
Emilio opened a door behind a grubby red curtain. There was a staircase immediately behind the door. Il conte went up, taking off his coat as he went. Under the coat were a dark blue suit, unmistakably English and a white silk shirt, unmistakably Italian.
He opened another door at the top of the stairs, and he was in the Paese’s private room. There were some bad, romantic paintings of the Italian lakes; otherwise the decor was much like that of the restaurant below – dark wood, fringed lampshades, a checked tablecloth.
Drinks were set out on the sideboard. The table was laid for three.
Il conte went to the sideboard and poured himself a Campari and soda. He then inspected the pictures with a look of disgust. He took the most lurid off its hook with his free hand and hung it up again with its face to the wall. It was a big picture, massively framed; he lifted it with one hand as though it were a postcard.
There was an armchair near the sideboard. Il conte lowered himself into it and stretched out his legs. The effect was of a steel spring gently uncoiling but likely at any moment to coil up again and become a powerful machine.
He was forty-five. There was a little grey in his hair.
Light footsteps could be heard running up the stairs. The man began to smile. The door opened explosively, swinging round so that it bashed the wall beside it. A girl came in.
All that could at first be seen of her was a very shaggy short coat made from the skin of some unidentifiable longhaired beast. Below the coat were long and perfect legs. There was a gleam of very bright fair hair above the coat.
The girl took the coat off and dropped it on the floor. It lay looking like an animal recently shot.
She was wearing a tight yellow dress with a short flared skirt. Her figure was superb, to match her legs. Her face was not so much beautiful as breathtakingly pretty. It was round and innocent and charmingly asymmetrical – she showed, when she smiled, a deep dimple in one cheek only.
She smiled now and ran across the room with her arms held out.
The Italian was standing up. He embraced her. ‘Ciao, carina.’
‘Sandro, love!’
‘How did it go, Jenny?’
‘Messy but all right.’
‘Have one drink and tell me quickly.’
‘Why only one?’ As she poured Glenlivet whisky Jenny said: ‘We nabbed all four of your nasty little Greeks at their nasty little farmhouse. They’d just taken delivery, as you said. Their pockets were bulging with heroin.’
‘Don’t tell me they came quietly.’
‘No. But only one’s dead.’
‘You shot him?’
‘Well yes, I rather had to, I do dislike it so.’
‘I also, usually, but not drug-traders on that scale. So I have closed the beginning of the pipeline and now you have closed this end of the pipeline.’
‘Sickening for them.’
‘They were the most efficient and dangerous group in Europe,’ said Sandro seriously. ‘I wish they were all dead.’
‘Some of yours are, surely.’
‘Certainly. Some we fortunately killed, out on the sea.’
‘Do the Italian police know about that?’
‘Not in detail. In any case they feel moral indignation about the drug traffic. Where is Colly? He must by now have told them in New York.’
‘Pop a cork and I bet he comes running.’
‘Jenny . . . ’
‘Yes, darling?’ ‘This job is finished.’
‘Yes, such a relief. I’ve never been so bored or so frightened.’
‘I also. Now I must probably go home for a little.’
‘And Colly, to all his yachts and clubs and whisky. Sickening your both rushing off. We never seem to see each other nowadays except when we’re busy.’
‘Just exactly so. For that exact reason I suggest a different arrangement.’
He embraced her gently. The effect was of a huge and benevolent bear embracing a humming-bird.
‘Oh, Sandro pet.’
‘I will love you till I die.’
‘Darling, me too, you know that.’
‘It is such a nuisance that I am married.’
‘Flavia seems quite clear you’re divorced. So does her husband.’
‘He is not her husband. They are deluded. There is no such thing as divorce. The arrangement which I suggest . . . ’
Jenny put her fingertip in the deep cleft of his chin and pushed his face away gently and looked at him. The big, ugly, attractive face with the blazing blue eyes looked back at her, smiling. She knew that many women had loved Sandro very much, and she knew why, and she knew that it was true that he loved her. She also knew that these attempts he made, always at the end of a job, were a mixture of habit and politeness.
‘I yearn for what you have in mind, pet, but just at the moment another drink is what I most need.’
Sandro laughed and let her go.
‘Besides, darling, I love Colly.’
‘I know, more,’ said Sandro with a pretence of angry tragedy.
‘Just the same. How did your morning go?’
‘We got the little men.’
‘All?’
‘Eighteen. No, not all. The police were quite good.’
More footsteps could be heard climbing the stairs. They were irregular and shuffling. They were the footsteps of someone either pitiably infirm or else extraordinarily lazy.
The door opened slowly. A man in his early thirties stood leaning against the doorpost. He seemed in the last stages of exhaustion. He was medium-sized, with mouse-coloured hair and greenish eyes; he wore a sort of tank-coat, a garment without distinction.
‘Colly, darling!’ said Jenny.
‘Hi, kids,’ said Colly. He came into the room as though his feet hurt and his legs were unbearably tired. ‘Those stairs.’
He and Jenny kissed and he grinned at Sandro.
‘The entire New York police force will at this minute be running around hitting people on the head with clubs.’
‘Hard, I hope.’
‘Pretty goddam hard. The Commissioner was whistling like a kettle. Sizzling. I could practically smell burning right along the transatlantic cable.’ Colly sank into the armchair and closed his eyes. ‘Give me a shot of that Scotch, will you, darling? I had a very, very exhausting time with the telephone.’
‘Get it yourself, you slob,’ said Jenny. Nevertheless she made and handed him a drink.
‘Now where is our lunch?’ said Sandro. He went to the door and shouted: ‘Emilio!’
The bottom door opened and Emilio looked up. They had an intense and protracted conversation in Italian about the cooking of the veal.
‘I’ll have to get back pretty soon,’ said Colly quietly to Jenny.
‘I know. Miserable.’
‘Thought I’d sail Perelandra down to Grenada or some place.’
‘Hard work.’
‘Hell, I don’t pull on any ropes. Jenny, listen.’ Colly’s voice suddenly became serious. ‘Come with me. Give up that screwy job.’
‘Oh, I will, in a day or two. I only did it for a cover.’
‘Come sail Perelartdra down to Grenada. It’s almost a full moon. Sea’s in the eighties. I want you on your own.’
‘Wouldn’t it be bliss?’
‘I love you, Jenny.’
‘I know, darling. I love you too.’
‘I know it. Come.’
Jenny smiled at him. Coleridge Tucker III, idler, multimillionaire, always apparently too tired to push one foot in front of another. Tanned, unremarkable face, loose-jointed average body. Unfailing good nature, unvarying lethargy. People in New York said it was an appalling waste. Many girls said they would have loved him if only he got around to coming alive. Jenny knew exactly what they meant. And she knew Colly with the mask off, Colly out from under the habitual, impenetrable camouflage – Colly swift and decisive and frightening.
‘If I didn’t love Sandro so much, darling, I really almost might.’
‘How is it,’ said Colly, ‘that you tease and tease and tease the both of us to hell and gone, and yet you’re not a tease? And how is it they let you drink Scotch when you’re only fourteen years old?’
‘I say I’m fifteen,’ said Jenny.
Sandro won his argument with Emilio and they were soon eating.
‘I must say I pine for a rest,’ said Jenny.
‘Most important,’ said Sandro.
‘And then what, I wonder?’
‘Somebody or something will come plucking at our sleeves,’ said Colly.
‘Please everybody,’ said Jenny, as though addressing the world, ‘stay out of trouble for a month.’
A nasty day turned into a nasty evening.
Jenny, her long bright hair almost hidden by her shaggy coat, scampered to her Mini in the street outside her flat. It was time she went to work.
The fog was patchy at Hyde Park Corner but it grew thicker near the river. There were few other vehicles on the streets. The lights had misty haloes. The Mini’s heater roared and the windows steamed up.
Jenny drove down Sloane Street and along the King’s Road. Dark shop-fronts, a greasy surface, no pedestrians.
She passed a stationary taxi, and in front of it two men pushing a car. She slowed down. You couldn’t leave people stranded on an evening like this. She stopped and began to get out of the Mini.
The crippled car was a battered little grey two-seater. A burly, muffled figure was at the wheel. The engine fired and the driver revved hard. It sounded healthy. The noise was loud in the quiet foggy street. Jenny expected the car to stop. But it accelerated away, past her, down the King’s Road and out of sight.
‘Well, I’m damned,’ said one of the men who had been pushing. ‘The bugger never even stopped to say thank you.’
Jenny knew the voice. An ordinary, nice, well-scrubbed, ambitious upper-middle-class young man, rendered more interesting in recent weeks by a fascinating new girl-friend. ‘Nigel, love,’ she called, ‘were you hoping for a tip?’
‘This evening,’ said the other man, ‘has got off to a lousy bloody start.’
Jenny went up to them.
‘Hullo, Jenny,’ said Nigel. He was about thirty, conventionally dressed in brown felt hat and dark overcoat. He looked vexed. ‘Foul man covered in ginger whiskers. Flags our cab down, asks for a push, we push his filthy car, and the sod just speeds off.’
‘Lousy bloody start,’ said the other man.
‘Do you know each other? My boss, Dave Maddox, Jennifer Norrington.’
Nigel’s boss was fortyish, very smooth, in a camel-hair coat and a Paisley scarf. Jenny remembered that Nigel was in advertising; this certainly looked like an advertising boss.
‘We’re going to your nosh-house,’ said Nigel.
‘Good,’ said Jenny. ‘I’ll give you a special bottle after your pushing. Just the two of you?’
‘No, no. Girls in the cab.’
Nigel indicated the taxi thirty yards away. An old taxi, the driver apparently bowed with age and muffled like an Eskimo. The taxi crunched into gear and began to move towards them.
‘Picking us up,’ said Camel-hair with approval.
But the taxi suddenly turned left and thudded up a side-street.
‘What the hell?’
‘Jokes,’ said Jenny. ‘Have you got Nicola?’
‘Yes,’ said Nigel. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘There you are. She’s a great one for jokes.’
‘I’m not madly amused, quite frankly,’ said Camel-hair. ‘Your bloody Nicola is not improving her prospects in the company.’
Nicola was Nigel’s new girl, the one who had made him more interesting, the one who might jolt him out of his dreary middle-class ambitions and make him into someone Jenny could respect. (Jenny was aware that her views on such subjects were not the usual ones. To her the things most people seemed to want for themselves spelt a living death: while the things she thought they ought to want would have sent them, scuttling and terrified, into bombproof rabbit-holes.) Nicola was eminently capable of jokes like this disappearance.
‘Nicola works for you too?’ she said to Camel-hair with surprise.
‘For your friend Nigel. He took her on.’
‘Ah,’ said Jenny, understanding. To her there could be no better reason for hiring someone at a thumping salary than the fact that you fancied them.
‘She’s exceedingly intelligent,’ said Nigel defensively.
‘I know that, pet.’
‘Let’s get a move on in some direction some time,’ said Camel-hair crossly.
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ said Jenny. She saw the man’s point.
It was very unpleasant standing about in the street. ‘It’s only a medium spit from here, anyway.’
She drove them to The Joint and they scrambled out.
‘This place better be good,’ said Camel-hair, who seemed to Jenny a spoilt and ill-tempered man.
They advanced towards the restaurant. The ‘J’ of Joint, on the sign over the door, was wittily formed of a naked female leg terminating at the top in a well-rounded buttock. Camel-hair stared at this conceit.
‘Three joints,’ he finally said.
‘Mm?’ said Jenny, locking her Mini.
‘Arse-knee-ankle. Cute idea. Can’t we pinch it for something, Nigel?’
‘Which do you want to pinch,’ said Nigel, ‘arse, knee or ankle?’
Camel-hair laughed. This was evidently his sort of joke, which was evidently why Nigel had made it. Good humour restored, the three of them went down the narrow stairs into the restaurant.
The joint was large, dark, crowded, noisy and gay. The customers were young and minor theatrical figures, journalists, a few advertising men, two television personal aides and some girls on the make. The waitresses were out-of-work actresses and the manager was an ex-actor.
‘They’re probably here,’ said Jenny, ‘waiting for you and giggling girlishly.’
‘Can’t see them.’
The manager came up. ‘Jenny! Once again intolerably late.’
‘Darling, I cringe. I’ve been rescuing the shipwrecked. Have two girls just arrived?’
‘I expect so, indeed. Those two?’
Not those two. Those three in the corner? No, for God’s sake. That one? No, she’d been waiting for an hour.
‘That’s funny,’ said Nigel.
‘Maybe,’ said the manager, ‘they got tired or someone picked them up or they stopped for a drink.’
He was not interested. Parties frequently fragmented on their way from bars or flats or theatres. Sometimes they reformed, sometimes not. Every evening produced a few disgruntled gentlemen dining alone and a woebegone girl or two drinking coffee or Coke.
‘Table for two?’ said the manager.
‘They’ll turn up in a minute. We’ll have a drink meanwhile.’
‘If they’re peckish they’ll come,’ said Jenny. ‘I must speed off and change and get to work.’
Time passed.
‘Could the taxi have broken down?’ wondered Nigel aloud. ‘Got lost in the fog? Accident?’
‘Joke, eh? You can tell Miss Nicola Bland from me . . . ’ Camel-hair, now Pin-stripe, seemed to think it unnecessary to finish his message. He was right. His tone told all.
‘I don’t know,’ he went on presently, ‘if that other bird, that Tamara, would have been much of a gas, anyway.’
‘Beautiful girl,’ said Nigel.
‘Dull. Little model from Lewisham. Probably virtuous. Don’t see her opening her legs, quite frankly. But I’m still bloody annoyed at not getting the chance to find out.’
‘What in hell,’ wondered Nigel for the hundredth time, ‘can have happened to them?’
They finally decided to eat. The wine-waitress brought the wine list. The wine-waitress was Jenny.
The eyes of Nigel’s boss, busy with thighs all evening, popped at the sight of her. It was not only that she was the prettiest girl of all the pretty girls in the room. It was also her garb that visibly impressed him. She now wore a long, loose Shetland sweater which just covered whatever pants she had on; she had sandals on her feet; between sandals and sweater her legs were bare.
‘Still no girls?’ she said.
‘We can’t think what’s happened.’
‘Sickening for you. It happens all the time. What are you eating?’
She took their order and trotted away. Nigel’s boss turned all the way round to watch her. He wondered if she was wearing pants. Nigel assured him that, as far as he knew, she always did.
‘She’s rather a sweetie, don’t you think? Quite dotty. The whole family’s barking. She says that’s the best way to dress in her job, because you can squeeze between the people so easily.’
‘Squeeze . . . it’s a funny job for a girl like her to have.’
‘She has a million jobs for about ten days each. She’s been here six weeks, it’s a record. She sold flowers for a bit—’
‘In the street?’
‘No, no, a grand shop. That was only three days. Then she popped up as a secretary in one of the film companies—’
‘She doesn’t look like a secretary.’
‘She’s not. She did her shorthand in longhand and typed with two fingers. It took them three weeks to find out. She’s quite dotty.’
Jenny brought them their claret. ‘What a long joke,’ she said to Nigel, who looked crestfallen. ‘Have you rung up her flat?’
‘Oh. No. Should I? Yes, I ought to have thought of it.’
He came back saying: ‘No reply.’
‘Should you go round there?’
‘Yes. No. If she was there she’d answer the telephone. Unless she’s been . . .’
‘What?’
‘Unless she’s gone fast asleep or something. In which case there’d be no point in standing on the doormat.’
Unless she’d been what? wondered Jenny. Nigel had checked himself. She knew Nicola well enough to guess at various experiments with pills and conceivably needles.
Presently Nigel telephoned again. ‘No reply.’
Jenny brought them Remy Martin.
Nigel’s boss, now openly lecherous, got up unsteadily and said he was going to a strip-club. ‘Coming, Nigel?’
‘No, thank you. It’s very kind but I don’t think I will.’
‘Please yourself.’
‘I’m a bit worried, actually.’
Jenny thought he was right to be worried: but agreed with him that there was nothing he could do.
At last the restaurant grew quiet and nearly empty. The bar was closed and Jenny had finished her steamy evening’s work.
She went and sat with Nigel and smoked one of his Disque Bleu cigarettes.
‘What do you think,’ she said, ‘about bashing down the door of her flat?’
‘Oh, Jenny, for God’s sake —’ Jenny recognised Nigel’s tone. She was always getting it from people when she made helpful and constructive suggestions.
Before Nigel could elaborate, as he was plainly about to do, there was a rattling descent of the wooden stairs. A tall, fair-haired girl stumbled forward into the light.
‘Tamara!’ shouted Nigel. ‘Where have you been? Where’s Nicola? What happened?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sit down,’ said Jenny.
Tamara sat down. She refused brandy but accepted coffee with relief. She was not making sense.
Nigel yammered at her but Jenny told him to be quiet. They waited while Tamara recovered her breath and her equilibrium.
While they waited Jenny thought sourly of her plea to the world at lunchtime: stay out of trouble, please please stay out of trouble, until we’ve all had a rest.
‘Lots of men,’ Tamara finally said. ‘Lots of men in a room. They made us take all our clothes off. They were horrible. They let me go. But they kept Nicola. They said . . . ’
‘What?’
‘They were sitting looking at her, and she was standing there with nothing on, nothing at all . . . They looked at her and they said she was the sort to . . . ’
‘To what?’
‘Make them all enough to retire on.’