Junkyard Angel Page 7

  Persistence deserves its rewards.

  I waited until he was good and close and watched his right arm go back. Waited longer. Waited for the forwards lunge, the length of sharpened steel cutting the air between us.

  And then there was something else between us.

  I grabbed the guy away from the door and pulled him across in front of me. Fast. Fast enough. The scream was high again, tempered with anger and surprise. I let him fall. The knife must have fallen with him. I didn’t see it again.

  Only a pair of startled eyes, staring down at the body that was curling into itself on the floor and making little gurgling sounds.

  At that point the door from the cinema opened. A man took half a step forwards; stopped short; looked quickly from one to the other of us; retreated rapidly.

  He might rush off and tell the manager. He might go back to his seat and pretend that it had never happened. I didn’t want to wait and see which it would be.

  Neither did the now worried looking guy over by the exit doors. He had them part way open when I dived on him and brought him down to earth. There were lots of things I might have liked to have done to him, including asking him a few questions about who had set him and his buddy on to me. There wasn’t time. I stood over him and he gazed up at me with a look almost of pleading in his eyes.

  Oh, yes, I thought. And then I put the toe of my shoe hard into his right temple, immediately in front of the ear.

  I didn’t know what expression he was wearing after that. I didn’t bother to look. I was on my way down the alley and heading in the direction of Piccadilly tube station.

  Although he didn’t know it yet, I had a heavy date with a sax player.

  7

  The front door was at the top of a flight of stone steps and it looked as though it was open. It was. There was an electric light on in the long hallway and some kind of gas fire which flickered and burped.

  Gerry Locke was home.

  The notes of a slow blues rolled and tumbled down the stairs. I stood a while and listened. Yes: he was good. I waited to see if he was about to finish. But the choruses continued, twelve bars on top of twelve.

  I began to walk up the stairs.

  At the top of the first flight there was a long landing with another door at the end. This one was closed.

  I opened it.

  Locke was sitting on the edge of a single bed with a sagging mattress. Blankets and sheets were pushed up against the wall behind him. It looked as if the first thing he did when he woke each day was to swing his legs over the side and reach for his horn before his feet had touched the floor.

  He must have heard me come in, but he didn’t look up. I shut the door behind me. He didn’t react to that either. The sounds that came from the bell of his sax were fuller in that enclosed place. They swallowed up the air. I felt stranded. He carried on with his blues.

  I wondered who they were for.

  I went over and stood in front of him. Still he didn’t stop. I put my hand round the neck of the horn and pulled. He stopped. In mid-note. For some seconds his fingers continued to work over the keys. Then he slowly looked up at me.

  His nose was broad and it had been broken at least a couple of times. That nose dominated his whole face. Somewhere behind it a couple of eyes were tired and trying to sleep between hoods of sallow skin. His mouth was slightly open; a child whose dummy has been suddenly snatched away and who doesn’t know why.

  Finally he spoke: ‘You didn’t like it?’

  ‘I liked it.’

  ‘So … ?’

  ‘So I’ve got other things to do than listen to you running through them old changes.’

  ‘Like … ?’

  ‘Like Anna Vaughan.’

  He continued looking up into my face, then pursed his lips and let out a low whistle.

  ‘How about that?’

  ‘How about what?’

  ‘All of a sudden all of you cats are mighty keen on meeting up with Lady Anna.’

  ‘She’s a lady?’

  He grinned, ‘Right down to her cute little butt.’

  ‘And who else has been looking for her?’

  ‘Don’t you know, man?’

  ‘If I knew I wouldn’t be hanging out in here breathing in all this foul air waiting for you to make with a sensible answer.’

  His expression changed. ‘You saying I stink or something?’

  ‘Not something; I’m saying you stink—period.’

  His face broke into a broad grin, then an open laugh. ‘Well, ain’t you the cat’s doodads!’

  I was beginning to get the feeling that we could just go on all afternoon. I thought I’d try and hurry things along a little. I put on my fierce look—the one that suggested that I ate saxophone players for lunch.

  ‘So who else has been asking for her? You heard the question first time.’

  The voice was hard and he didn’t like it.

  ‘More of you pigs !’ he snarled.

  ‘I ain’t no cop,’ I told him.

  ‘Then you must be the next best thing. Why else you poking round here trying to find out where she is?’

  ‘Maybe we’re just friends.’

  He laughed aloud again, his huge nose bobbing up and down in the centre of his face. I had an almost irresistible, urge to hit it. I fought hard and controlled it—for now.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Anna don’t mess with no straights. I know her, baby; I know her of old.’

  He gave me a wink but it wasn’t friendly; merely said that he knew a hell of a lot that I didn’t.

  And which I didn’t seem to be getting close to finding out. But if he wasn’t going to be hastled into it, then there were other ways.

  George Anthony’s cash was already making me feel as if I was walking with a list to one side. I wasn’t used to toting that much bread for that long. I thought I’d off-load a little.

  I took out my wallet and sprinkled some notes on the bed. Locke looked down at them with something approaching disgust.

  ‘Look, pig! You don’t think I’m going to sell Anna out, do you? Not for a few lousy pennies!’

  I couldn’t be sure what I’d insulted: his integrity or his business sense. I added some more to the pile; then more still. It was going to be okay. I could tell from the way the muscles in his face relaxed.

  ‘What you want to know?’

  ‘Where she is?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That I don’t know. Not for definite. She hasn’t been around for months.’

  I reached down my hand on to the bed and grabbed up the money.

  ‘What’s that for?!’

  ‘You’re lying!’

  In the far corner of the room a fly had somehow materialised and was buzzing around in a half-dazed fashion. The stench of his bed was getting to my throat and I didn’t think I could hang around too long without throwing up.

  He was concentrating on the notes in my right hand.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  We both watched as the notes fell back to the blanket.

  ‘She was here four nights ago. Asking for bread. She wouldn’t say what for. Not that it could be too many things with Anna. Anyway, I didn’t have anything on me. Not the kind she wanted. I tried to get her to stay. Said I’d go round with her the next day and we’d see what we could turn up together. But she wouldn’t have any. She split most as soon as she got here. She looked pretty bad.’

  ‘Beaten up?’

  ‘Not yet. But she was waiting. For that or worse. Man, I tell you I’ve seen that chick in some pretty bad scenes, but I’ve never seen her as down as that night.’

  He shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘And did she say where she was? How you could get in touch with her?’

  Locke shook
his head slowly from side to side and said, ‘Nothing, man. Only …’

  ‘Only, what?’

  ‘She did say that she was working.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Shit, man, some straight gig I just couldn’t figure. Some air line office up West. Piccadilly somewhere, I think she said.’

  ‘You can’t remember the name?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘Which leaves one more thing. Who else was round here asking the same kind of questions?’

  He looked at me questioningly. ‘You really don’t know?’

  ‘I could make a few guesses. But why guess when I’ve just paid for the answer?’

  ‘Right. It was a cop. A big guy. Hard. Nasty.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Rank?’

  ‘He didn’t say that either.’

  ‘How did you know he was a cop? Didn’t he show a warrant card or something?’

  Locke grunted and coughed up phlegm deep in the back of his throat. I guessed that was all he was going to say about that one.

  ‘There was one thing I noticed about him,’ he went on after whatever was shifting around behind his mouth had settled. ‘He had this heavy ring on his right hand. Chunky, sort of.’

  Well, I thought, this was getting to be quite a case for rings. And I remembered this one only too well. Maybe Locke did too. Although I couldn’t see the marks on his face.

  I started to walk away; my eyes were beginning to smart. The fly was still batting away against the wall, unaware that there was no way he was going to win.

  ‘One thing, man,’ Locke said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lady Anna. What you aiming to do if you find her?’

  It was my turn to shrug my shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Help her, I guess.’

  His head dipped and when it came up again he was laughing all over his face. And loud.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Man, she’s got you hooked the way she always does and you ain’t even seen her yet.’

  I opened the door and carried on walking. Half-way down the stairs I heard the sound of the sax following me. Fine. There’s nothing like a little exit music.

  Except that he was playing I Can’t Get Started.

  I was thinking about what Gerry Locke had said, that I was hooked by Anna Vaughan without ever having met her. Yet I had seen that photograph; and I had listened while George Anthony talked about her. You can learn a lot about a woman from the way a guy talks about her—especially if he’s a poet.

  I was also walking up the stairs from Piccadilly underground. Right into the back of a West Indian who was standing there rapping to a friend about the latest Rastafarian news. I apologised and carried on up the other side. I didn’t mind being called a piece of white shit by someone who was probably called Earl and came from somewhere in Willesden. In his place I’d be thinking the same.

  The air line buildings that I knew were down in Lower Regent Street as well as in Piccadilly itself. I thought I’d try the Piccadilly ones first. Which brought me to Hatchards bookshop.

  It was time I went into a bookshop again. I tried the paperbacks downstairs. A guy with a lot of tight hair and an earring told me that I might find something by George Anthony up in the literature department.

  He was right.

  The book was tall and thin and was standing in line next to a lot more books by some guy called Auden. I pulled it down from the shelf. There was his picture inside the front cover. It had been taken when he had more hair, but he had been greying even then. He looked distinguished in a soulful kind of way. Leaning against an iron bridge with a river behind. I turned into the book and ran my finger down the list of contents to see if anything caught my eye.

  My eye caught on one title: Aubade for Anna. I didn’t have any idea what an aubade was, but I found the page anyway. Hell, I even read the thing!

  I think of yellow roses

  & stillness

  grass moves in waves

  shuddering my heart

  to sudden movement

  under warm spray

  memory sings

  the heads of grass

  tremble

  the poppies call

  bodies fold against the green

  turn

  across the valley

  a motor grazes silence

  poppies bleed

  into grass

  perhaps there never was

  a yellow rose

  perhaps

  my heart has never stilled.

  I almost liked it, though I didn’t begin to know why. I almost read it a second time. But I didn’t. Not then. I took the book down to the woman at the till and paid over a little more of George Anthony’s money. He’d get a little of it back in royalties and I could always put it down on expenses as research.

  I thought it was time I went and looked at the real thing.

  I found her in the first office in Lower Regent Street. The front was a couple of acres of plate glass window. Inside, set at an angle, there were four dark wood desks with four well-groomed females sitting in a neat row, one to a desk. Anna was the third one.

  Even there, even in that huge goldfish bowl of a place, something about her stood out. Sure, all four girls were beautiful, but she had a presence that the others lacked.

  She.

  Anna.

  I looked at the clock on the wall and figured out that she should be finishing in about twenty minutes. I could have stayed there just staring at her, waiting for her to look out and smile and mouth through the space between us the words, ‘Come fly me!’

  Instead I retreated to the other side of the road and stuck an evening paper up between us. I held it there or thereabouts until she came out. Then I folded it quickly, tucked it under my arm, and prepared to follow her through the rush hour crowds.

  But it wasn’t going to be the hastle I had feared.

  She obviously wasn’t in any kind of hurry and she didn’t make it difficult to keep her in sight. If she was still worried then she was doing an excellent job of not showing it. And if she didn’t want people to know where she was, then she was going about that in a strange way, too.

  She went down the subway and through the long queues waiting for tube tickets, then surfaced again at the other side of the Circus. She spent some time looking in the window of a shop in Shaftesbury Avenue that obviously specialised in the more colourful and brief kinds of ladies’ underwear.

  I was sort of disappointed when she didn’t go in and buy something, but walked on by instead.

  After a couple of right and left turns she went into an Italian place in Old Compton Street. She sat over against the wall and immediately fished into the tapestry bag she was carrying and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I watched her slip one between her lips and light it with a gas lighter. She dropped the cigarettes down on the table and went back to her bag. This time she took out a paperback and opened it about two-thirds of the way through. When the waiter came and stood by her table, she didn’t notice him at all. Not until he leaned towards her and started speaking. Then she looked up, slightly startled, and smiled.

  He went away happy.

  I decided that she was going to be there for some time and that I might as well watch her from the warm.

  The place was divided into two by a stucco wall which had painted tiles showing views of Italian fishing villages stuck along it. There was also a large gap in the wall through which the waiters could shout at one another … and through which I could see Anna. So I sat on the far wall and watched her, still pretending to read my paper.

  It was a hell of a time before the waiter even noticed me and when he went away with my order for one cappuccino he wasn’t smiling.

  Anna wasn’t e
ither. She sat there turning the pages at quite a rate and smoking non-stop, though she didn’t actually light the new one up with the butt of the old; she used her lighter each time. She also drank four cups of coffee, which was pretty good going even by my standards.

  I was lagging behind by a score of one coffee, a whole lot of cigarettes, and as for reading matter … I’d ditched the paper and was actually sitting there trying to read a book of poetry.

  What a great scene it would make for a movie! Big, lough private eye sits in restaurant reading poetry. If my friends could see me now!

  I’d managed to get that far in my life on just one poem and suddenly in the space of less than an hour that total was sent rocketing into double figures.

  I wasn’t sure if my mind would ever live it down.

  And then she moved. All that time she hadn’t looked at her watch once, but for some reason that I wasn’t able to work out she laid the book down on the table, checked the time on her wrist, put the book and the pack of cigarettes and lighter back into her bag, lifted the bill from the table, got up and walked over to the counter to pay.

  I followed her out into the street. She seemed to be heading for Leicester Square tube station. She was. She put a coin into the machine and bought a ticket. I did the same. The crowds were not as bad by this time and it was easy for me to keep tabs on her.

  Then it occurred to me. One of those obvious thoughts that always hit you too late. Like remembering you didn’t clip on your safety belt when your face is half-way through the windscreen.

  Of course she was making it easy. Of course she was taking her time. She was expecting to be followed. Encouraging it.

  It was the second time that day I’d got so far ahead of myself that I hadn’t been able to see where I was going—or who was going along with me.

  I wondered who was taking who for which ride.

  Anna was taking the Northern line in a southwards direction. I sat opposite her at the far end of the carriage and tried to work out if there was anybody else there doing what I was doing. I didn’t spot anyone doing anything obvious like pretending to read his paper while actually staring at her. Maybe guys only did things like that in books. Apart from me.