memories.
When she came back in she had changed into some sort of dressing gown and had brushed her hair back. For a woman old enough to be my grandmother she looked good. But then you should see my grandmother. The food she was carrying looked even better. She had it on a tray: omelettes, salad, cheese, fruit, a bottle of red wine for her, and Coke for me. We didn’t say much while we ate. We were just glad to be there. Glad to be alive.
“Thanks,” I said when I finished the omelette.
“I should thank you, Nick.” Lauren poured herself some more wine. Her hand was trembling a little. “If it hadn’t been for you . . . hell . . . they were going to kill me.”
“You were the one who got out of the ropes,” I reminded her. I glanced at the poster above the gas fire. It showed her with a flashy guy in a sequined straitjacket. He had greasy black hair, a mustache, and a toothpaste- advertisement smile. “Is that Harry Blondini?” I asked.
“Yes.” She stood up and turned the stereo on. There was a click and a solo saxophone slithered through the room. She’d lit herself a cigarette and the smoke curled in time to the music. Her eyes told me everything I needed to know about the escape artist. But she told me anyway. “I loved him,” she said. “For two years we worked together in the theater and we lived together for five. We were going to get married. But then, at the last minute, he ran off with a snake charmer. What did she have that I didn’t—apart from two anacondas and a boa constrictor? That was the day before our wedding—the day before we were meant to tie the knot.” She smiled a half smile. “Well, what should I have expected from an escape artist? He escaped. And he broke my heart.
“That was when I took up singing. I’ve been singing for twenty years, Nick. The same old songs. And in all that time I’ve only met two decent people. Johnny Naples and you. You’re a nice kid, Nick. If I ever had a son, I’d have liked him to be like you.
“All I’ve ever wanted is a place of my own—maybe somewhere in the sun, like the South of France. Look at this place! Thirty feet underground—I never get to see the sun. And the Casablanca Club’s the same. When they finally bury me, I’ll actually be going up in the world. But it’s a lousy world, Nick. Lousy . . .”
Maybe she’d had too much wine. I don’t know. I’d asked her a simple question and she’d given me her life history. It was lucky I hadn’t asked her anything tricky. We could have been there all night. I’d had enough. I was tired and I was dirty.
“I need a bath,” I said.
She shook her head. “Of all the baths in all the towns in all the world, you have to walk into mine. There’s no hot water.”
“Then I’ll just turn in.”
“You can sleep on the sofa.”
I took the tray back into the kitchen while she got me a couple of blankets. It was after she’d said good night and I was about to leave that I remembered the one question I’d meant to ask her. It was the whole reason I was there.
“Lauren,” I said. “Back in the Casablanca Club . . . you were about to tell me something. You told me that you were out with Johnny when he saw something. It made the Maltesers and everything else make sense.”
“That’s right.”
“Well . . . where were you?”
She paused, silhouetted in the doorway. “We were buying sausages,” she said. “In Oxford Street. In Selfridges. In the food department.”
SELFRIDGES
I don’t like Oxford Street on the best of days—and let me tell you now, December 24, isn’t one of them. Bond Street Station had been doing a good impersonation of the Black Hole of Calcutta and Lauren and I were glad to get out. But there was little relief outside. The Christmas rush had turned into the Christmas panic and the season seemed to have run pretty short of goodwill. Taxi drivers blasted their horns. Bus drivers leaned out of their windows and swore. You couldn’t blame them. The traffic probably hadn’t moved since December 22. There were so many people clawing their way along the pavement that you couldn’t see the cracks. And everyone was carrying bulging bags. Of food, of decorations, of last-minute presents. I sighed. Herbert was still in jail.
He’d been there almost a week now. It looked like Christmas for me was going to be the Queen’s speech and two frozen turkey croquettes.
But there was Selfridges with its white pillars, gold clocks, and flags fluttering across the roof. Somewhere inside the department store—in the food section—Johnny Naples had seen something that could have made him five million dollars. The thought cheered me up. I clutched the Maltesers. Lauren had loaned me a sort of shoulder bag and I had brought the candies with me. I wouldn’t have felt easy without them.
We crossed the road, weaving between the traffic, and went in the front entrance. We were greeted by a cloud of sweet, sickly scent. This was the perfume department. They stocked all the perfumes in the world—and you could smell them all at once.
“Do you want to try this one?”
A pretty girl leaned over a counter, holding a bottle of af tershave toward me. I shook my head. She had a nice face. But she was a couple of years early.
It was hot inside Selfridges. The air had been chewed up by giant air-conditioners and spat out again. That was how it smelled. Secondhand. We went into the menswear department, following the signs that read FOOD.
The food department was even worse than perfume and menswear. It was like nuclear war had just been announced. The shelves were being stripped, the salespeople bullied. I felt Lauren put her hand around my arm.
“This way,” she said.
“I’m with you.” But it was an effort. Relax for a minute and I’d have been swept away on a river of rampant consumerism, drowned in a lake of last-minute shopping.
“If we get separated, we can meet outside Marks and Spencer,” she said. “It’s just across the road.”
We made our way around the center section of the food department, which was more or less like any supermarket. There were separate bars here and there—juice, sandwiches, and cookies—but most people were ignoring them. The meat counter was at the back. There was a number in what looked like a car headlight, hanging from the ceiling. Every few seconds there was a loud buzzing and the number changed. NOW SERVING 1108, it read when we got there. It buzzed again: 1109. A clutch of housewives stared up at it. They were all clutching tickets like they’d just gone in for some sort of raffle.
So Selfridges sold sausages. I could see them through the glass front of the cabinet. They looked very nice. I’m sure they tasted great. But I didn’t see what that had meant to Johnny Naples. What did sausages have to do with the Falcon?
“Lauren . . .” I began.
“He was standing here,” she said. “Then he suddenly turned around and went that way.” She pointed.
“You mean he went straight ahead?”
“No. We’d come from that way. He retraced his steps.”
I followed in the footsteps of the dead dwarf. They took me completely around the central supermarket, past the nuts, and into the fruits, where some fancy items nestled among the plums and Granny Smiths. BRAZILIAN LOQUATS, $3.50 LB., a sign read. That was probably a bargain if you knew what to do with a loquat. After that it was chocolates and then the checkout aisles. There was a row of six of them—with six women in brown coats and white straw hats. Five of them were ringing up prices on their registers like they were typing a novel. The sixth was just passing the purchases over a little glass panel in the counter and the prices were coming up automatically.
But I still hadn’t seen anything that made me any the wiser. As far as I could see, Selfridges didn’t even sell Maltesers.
“It was here,” Lauren said.
