The London I’d always imagined was a mashup of Blow-Up, Thatcher’s teenage wasteland, and the covers of a thousand LPs. Any details of place derived from rock and roll songs: Stepney, Muswell Hill, Knightsbridge, Waterloo Bridge, more soundtrack than landscape. Brixton meant a song by the Clash about the notorious 1981 riots.
Electric Avenue meant another song, and the soundtrack changed every few feet, fading from reggaeton to rap to techno to Abba to West African to Bombay pop. Awnings offered scant coverage from the sleet, but business didn’t seem to be suffering much. I passed halal butchers and a stall selling nothing but pig snouts; open coolers where eels coiled and thrashed; carefully stacked pyramids of durians, melons, multicolored carrots and bundles of what looked like cattail rushes. One fishmonger had more exotic sea life on ice than I’d ever seen in the New York Aquarium. I peered into a basket filled with shark fins still seeping blood. Representatives of the World Wildlife Fund might net enough endangered species here to stock an ark.
I stopped to buy goat kebabs from a woman turning skewers on a hubcap grill, stood beneath a green tarpaulin and gulped down spicy meat hot enough to blister the roof of my mouth. I felt better when I’d finished. I left the shelter of the tarp and walked to a cart where a large umbrella advertised fresh jostaberry juice.
“What’s jostaberry juice?” I asked.
A rosy-faced girl with facial piercings smiled at me from beneath the hood of her anorak. “It’s a hybrid of gooseberry and black currant. You have to pick them every morning before sunrise.”
I paid her and downed the contents of the paper cup she handed me. She pointed to a metal bowl filled with tiny black fruit. “Our farm’s in Devon, if you’d like to come visit sometime. You can even help with the harvest if you like.”
“I’d love that,” I said. “Is there a bar called the Gambrel near here?”
“The gastropub? First right, that way. They do a brilliant ploughman’s; we’re one of their suppliers for nettle chevre. You might not be able to get a table if you haven’t booked. I’ll recycle that for you.”
I gave her the empty cup, sloshed my way past more food stalls, and took a right onto a side street.
The sleet had subsided to freezing drizzle. In the sulfurous glare of sodium lamps, street and sky had the smeared look of a botched watercolor. Metal shutters hid storefronts covered with graffiti and an impasto of gig posters. I saw COMING SOON signs for an organic fromagerie, a Bangladeshi Wi-Fi cafe, and a Bruno Magli shoe store.
The Gambrel occupied a corner at the end of the block, across the street from a monolithic concrete structure I assumed was a public housing project. The pub, however, was well tended. Buttery yellow light streamed from windows hung with baskets of ivy, incongruously verdant in the wintry gloom. Strings of Christmas lights still shone above the door, where a painted wooden sign displayed the image of a metal instrument with the carcass of a pig suspended from it.
THE GAMBREL.
I thought of the nickname Quinn had been given by the folks he did business with in Oslo long ago: Varsler, butcher bird. I tightened my grip on my satchel and went inside.
A wave of warmth hit me, redolent of garlic, braised beef, and a sweetly earthy scent that might have been peat smoke. Candles glowed on trestle tables where well-heeled people sat drinking, eating, gazing enraptured at their mobile phones. A young woman in a beautifully tailored jumpsuit and knee-high boots approached me with a concerned look.
“Do you have a reservation?”
“I just want a drink.”
“Of course.” She gazed pointedly at my dripping leather jacket. “Can I take your coat?”
“No thanks.”
A flicker of displeasure as she gestured toward the bar. “Herman will be happy to serve you.”
I ignored the irritated glances of several diners as I crossed the room, leaving a trail of damp bootprints on the glossy hardwood floor. I knew I looked like shit, and I felt worse, shaky and sick from too much speed and booze. The only thing that would make me feel better was more of the same.
But for the first time in forty years, I was starting to get a bad premonition about that. The incident back in Paddington wasn’t the first time I’d felt a sudden wave of dizziness, or worse. Black flecks in my recent memory. Night terrors, and the even more terrible knowledge that I no longer dreamed when I slept.
Or maybe it was that I could no longer easily distinguish between wakefulness and nightmare. I’d taken a bad blow to the head in Iceland: This on top of a lifetime of more drunken falls than I could count made me wonder if there was some dark spider nesting in my skull, spinning a toxic web of neurochemicals and failed synapses.
I forced aside the thought. I needed to find Quinn.
There’s a bar in Brixton run by someone I know; I’ll give you his number.
I had no mobile and no way to get in touch with Quinn; nothing except the name of the pub and its owner, Derek. I’d found the Gambrel. Now, I’d make contact with Derek, then hole up for a few days, until Quinn got here.
Still, “here” didn’t seem like a place Quinn would be caught dead in. His employment history for the last few decades included selling used vinyl and disposing of body parts for the Russian mob. The handsomely chiseled block of human granite behind the Gambrel’s bar looked more likely to attempt a solo ascent of K2 barefoot than admit to knowing someone like Quinn O’Boyle.
“What can I get for you?”
“Shot of Jack Daniels. And a half pint of—” I squinted, reading the name of this month’s craft beers. “Brambly Willy.”
The bartender handed me a brimming shotglass, pulled my beer and slid it across the counter. I downed the Jack Daniels, asked for a second, then handed him a twenty-pound note. “Derek around?”
“Sorry?”
“Derek. The owner.”
The bartender frowned. “You mean Derek Haverty?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“He’s gone. Up in Camden, I think.” He turned to a dark-haired girl slicing lemons at the other end of the bar. “Hey, where’s Derek Haverty now? Was it the Hobgoblin?”
The girl set down her knife and wiped her forehead. “The Banshee, I think.”
The bartender nodded. “That’s it. The Banshee. Camden Town.”
“Where’s Camden Town?”
“Take the Underground to King’s Cross, transfer to the Northern line northbound. Take you straight there.”
I knocked back the second shot and chased it with the beer. A man stood at the bar with his back to me, a pack of Gitanes on the zinc countertop beside his mobile. I palmed the cigarettes and strode back out into the street.
Around the corner from the Brixton Underground station, the same grimy kid had nodded out on the steps. Ignoring his baleful mongrel, I dropped the pack of Gitanes into the boy’s lap and hurried to catch the subway.