resemble a bird. “I’ll have to get busy on this,” he said to himself, bringing his deliberations to an end, but without any clear sense of what “get busy” actually meant.
The day faded quickly, so quickly that the displays in the shop windows were soon being lit up for the evening. The street narrowed. Gregory found himself in a district of the city which hadn’t been rebuilt since the Middle Ages. It was jammed with dark, clumsy old buildings, most of them sheltering brand-new modern shops that sparkled unnaturally like transparent glass boxes.
Gregory turned into an arcade, amazed that the thin layer of windswept snow at its entrance still hadn’t been trampled. A woman in a red hat stood nearby looking at some smiling wax manikins dressed in evening gowns. Beyond her, where some square white floodlights brightened the concrete walk, the arcade curved slightly.
Walking slowly, hardly conscious of his surroundings and whereabouts, Gregory brooded about Sciss’s laugh. What exactly had it meant, he wondered. It had to be significant. Despite appearances, Sciss didn’t just do things for effect, although he was certainly arrogant enough, and consequently it followed that Sciss must have had a good reason for laughing, even if he was the only one who knew it.
Farther up the deserted arcade a man was walking toward Gregory — a tall, lean man, whose head was nodding as if he were talking to himself. Gregory was too busy with his own thoughts to pay much attention to him, but he kept him in sight out of the corner of his eye. The man drew nearer. Three shops turned off their lights for the night and the arcade suddenly became darker. The windows of a fourth shop were covered with whitewash because of a renovation in progress, and the only lights still visible were a few glittering displays in the direction from which the man was approaching.
Gregory looked up. The man’s pace slowed, but he kept coming, albeit hesitantly. Suddenly they stood facing each other, no more than a few paces apart. Still engrossed in his thoughts, Gregory stared at the tall male figure before him without really seeing his face. He took a step; the man did the same.
“What does he want?” Gregory wondered. The two men scowled at each other. In the shadows the man’s broad face was hidden; he was wearing his hat pushed down on his forehead, his coat was somewhat too short, and his belt was all askew, with its end twisted loosely around the buckle. There was certainly something wrong with the buckle, Gregory thought, but he had enough problems without worrying about that too. He moved as if to walk past the stranger but found his path blocked.
“Hey,” Gregory began angrily, “what the…” his words faltering into silence.
The stranger… was himself. He was standing in front of a huge mirrored wall marking the end of the arcade. He had mistakenly walked into a glass-roofed dead end.
Unable to escape the disconcerting feeling that he was really looking at someone else, Gregory stared at his own reflection for a moment. The face that looked back at him was swarthy, not very intelligent, perhaps, but with a strong, square jaw that showed firmness, or at least so he liked to think, although more than once he had decided it was only pigheadedness.
“Had a good look?” he muttered to himself, then turned on his heels in embarrassment and headed in the direction he had come from.
Halfway up the arcade, Gregory couldn’t resist an irrational impulse to turn and look back. The “stranger” stopped also. He was far away now among some brightly lit, empty shops, heading down the arcade, busy with his own affairs in his mirror world. Gregory angrily adjusted his belt in its buckle, pushed his hat farther back on his head, and went out into the street.
The next arcade led him straight to the Europa. The doorman opened the glass door for him, and Gregory strode past the tables toward the purple glare of the bar. He was so tall that he had no trouble seating himself on one of the high stools.
“White Horse?” asked the bartender. Gregory nodded.
The bottle tinkled as if there were a glass bell hidden inside it. Gregory drank quickly. The White Horse was acrid; it tasted something like fuel oil and burned his throat… he hated it. It so happened, however, that several times in a row he had stopped at the Europa with Kinsey, a young colleague at the Yard, and each time he’d had a drink of White Horse with him; from then on the bartender had considered Gregory a regular customer and made a point of remembering his preferences. Actually, Gregory had only been meeting with Kinsey in order to put the finishing touches on an apartment exchange. He really preferred warm beer to whiskey, but was ashamed to order it in such a fashionable place.
Gregory had ended up at the Europa now simply because he didn’t feel like going home. Meditating over the shot glass, he decided to see if he could organize all the facts of the “series” in some kind of systematic pattern, but found that he couldn’t remember a single name or date.
He downed his drink, tilting his head back with an exaggerated gesture.
He flinched. The bartender was saying something to him.
“What? What did you say?”
“Do you want supper? We have venison today, it’s in season.”
“Venison?”
He couldn’t understand a word the bartender was saying.
“Oh, supper,” it finally dawned on him. “No. Please pour me another.”
The bartender nodded. He rinsed out the glass at a silver-colored tap, rattling the faucets as if he wanted to smash them into little pieces, then raised his reddened, hard, muscular face to Gregory, and, watching through beady eyes, whispered.
“Are you looking for a —?”
There was no one else near the bar.
“No. What the hell are you talking about?” Gregory added indignantly, as if that had been his real purpose and he’d been caught in the act.
“No, nothing. I thought that you… for service,” the bartender mumbled, withdrawing to the other end of the bar. Someone touched Gregory’s arm lightly. He whirled around in a flash and was unable to hide his disappointment: it was a waiter.
“Pardon me… Lieutenant Gregory? Telephone for you, sir.”
Walking as quickly as possible to avoid being jostled, Gregory made his way through the crowd on the dance floor. The light in the telephone booth was burned out, so he stood in darkness, except when an occasional flash from the revolving light over the bar streamed through the booth’s little round window.
“Hello, Gregory speaking.”
“This is Sheppard.”
At the sound of the Chief’s far-off voice, Gregory’s heart began to beat faster.
“Lieutenant, I want to see you.”
“Of course, Chief Inspector. When should I…”
“I’d rather not put it off. Do you have time?”
“Naturally, yes sir. Tomorrow?”
“No. Today, if you can. Can you make it?”
“Yes sir, of course.”
“That’s fine. Do you know where I live?”
“No, but I can—”
“Eighty-five Walham Street, in Paddington. Can you come over now?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you’d rather come in an hour or two.”
“No, I can come now.”
“All right, I’m expecting you.”
The receiver jangled when Gregory hung up. He stared at the telephone in confusion. How in God’s name did Sheppard know he was at the Europa, a place he only went to occasionally to find an outlet for his penny-ante snobbism. Had the Chief been so eager to find him that he’d systematically phoned around from bar to bar? The very thought made Gregory turn red. He walked out into the street and ran to catch a passing bus. From the bus stop it was a long walk. He chose a roundabout route through back streets where there weren’t too many people. Finally he found himself on a deserted side street lined by small old houses. Here and there a puddle shimmered in the light of the antiquated gas lamps illuminating the street. Gregory had never imagined there was such a seedy little neighborhood buried in the middle of this part of the city.
