put on my normal sunglasses. I took my tie off and stuck it in my pocket and opened the collar of my shirt three buttons. I read in a Dick Tracy Crime Stopper that a small change in appearance can be helpful when following someone surreptitiously.
She wasn’t hard to follow. She wasn’t looking for me. And she was walking. She walked east on Prince Albert Road and turned down Albany Street. We went south on Albany across Marylebone onto Great Portland Street. To the left the Post Office Tower stuck up above the city. She turned left ahead of me and started up Carburton Street. The area was getting more neighborhood and small grocery store. More middle class and student. I had a dim memory that east of the Post Office Tower was Bloomsbury and the University of London and the British Museum. She turned right onto Cleveland Street. She had a hell of a walk. I liked to watch it and I had been now for ten or fifteen minutes. It was a free, long-striding, hip-swing walk with a lot of spring to it. It was fast pace for walking wounded, and I felt the gunshot wound with every step.
At the corner of Tottenham Street, diagonally across from a hospital, she turned into one of the brick-faced buildings, up three steps and in the front door. I found a doorway with some sun and stood in it, and leaned against the wall where I could see the door she’d gone in, and waited. She didn’t come out until almost two-thirty in the afternoon. Then it was just to walk half a block to a grocery store and back with a bag of groceries.
I never had to leave my doorway. Okay, I thought, this is where she lives. So what? One of the things about my employment was the frequency with which I didn’t know what I was doing or what to do next. Always a fresh surprise. I have tracked the beast to its lair, I thought. Now what do I do with her? Beast wasn’t the right word, but it didn’t sound right to say I’ve tracked the beauty to her lair. As so often in dilemmas of this kind, I came upon the perfect thing to do. Nothing. I decided I’d better wait and watch and see what happened. If at first you don’t succeed put it off till tomorrow.
I looked at my watch. After four. I had been watching the girl and her doorway since before nine this morning. Every natural appetite and need pressed upon me. I was hungry and thirsty and nearly incontinent and the pain in my backside was both real and symbolic. If I was going to do this for very long I was going to need help. By six I had to pitch it in. It was less than two blocks from the Post Office Tower. They had most of what I needed and I headed for it.
On the way I took off my wig and mustache and stuffed them in my pocket. The dining room opened at six twenty and the second thing I did after I reached it was to get a table by the window and order a beer. The restaurant was on top of the tower and rotated slowly so that in the course of a meal you saw the whole 360- degree panorama of London from much the highest building. I knew that rotating restaurants like this atop a garish skyscraper were supposed to be touristy and cheap and I tried to be scornful of it. But the view of London below me was spectacular, and I finally gave up and loved it. Furthermore, the restaurant carried Amstel, which I could no longer get at home, and to celebrate I had several bottles.
It was midweek and early and the restaurant wasn’t yet crowded. No one hurried me. The menu was large and elaborate and seemed devoid of steak and kidney pudding. That in itself was worth another drink. As the restaurant inched around 1 could look south at the Thames and to the east at St. Paul’s with its massive dome, squat and Churchillian, so different from the upward soar of the great continental cathedrals. Its feet were planted firmly in the English bedrock. I was beginning to feel the four Dutch beers on an empty stomach. Here’s looking at you, St. Paul’s, I said to myself. The waiter took my order and brought me another beer. I sipped it.
Regent’s Park edged into view from the north. There was a lot of green in this huge city. This sceptered isle, this England. I drank some more beer. Here’s looking at you, Billy boy. The waiter brought my veal piccata and I ate it without biting his hand, but just barely. For dessert I had an English trifle and two cups of coffee, and it was after eight before I was out on the street heading for home. There had been enough beer to make my wound feel okay and I wanted to walk off the indulgence, so I brought out my London street map and plotted a pleasant stroll back to Mayfair. It took me down Cleveland to Oxford Street, west on Oxford and then south on New Bond Street.
It was after nine and the beer had worn off when I turned up Bruton Street to Berkeley Square. The walk had settled the food and drink, but my wound was hurting again and I was thinking about a hot shower and clean sheets. Ahead of me up Berkeley Street was the side door of the Mayfair. I went in past the hotel theater, up two stairs into the lobby. I saw no one in the lobby with a lethal engine.
The elevator was crowded and unthreatening. I went up two floors above mine and got off and walked down toward the far end of the corner and took the service elevator, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, to my floor. No sense walking like a fly into the parlor. The service elevator opened into a little foyer where linen was stored. Four doors down toward my room from the service elevator the cross corridor intersected.
Leaning near the corner and occasionally peering out around the corner down toward my door was a fat man with kinky blond hair and rosy cheeks. He was wearing a gray gabardine raincoat and he kept his right hand in the pocket. He didn’t have to be waiting to ambush me but I couldn’t think what else he’d be doing there. Where was the other one? They’d send two, or more, but not one. He should be at the other end of my corridor so they could get me in a crossfire. They would know who I was when I stopped and put the key in my door. I stood very quietly inside the linen foyer and watched.
At the far end of the corridor the elevator doors slid back and three people got out, two young women and a fortyish man in a three-piece corduroy suit. As they came down the corridor toward me a man appeared beyond the elevator and watched them. All three passed my door and the guy down the corridor disappeared. The one closer to me turned and looked down the cross corridor as if he were waiting for his wife. Okay, so they were trying again. Industrious bastards. Hostile, too. All I did was put an ad in the paper.
I got back in the service elevator and went up three floors. I got out, went down an identical corridor to the public elevators and looked in behind them. The stairway was there. I descended around the elevator shaft and it was in the stairway that the other shooter was hiding three floors below. I’d take him from above. He wouldn’t be looking for me to come down. He’d be waiting for me to come up. I took off my coat, rolled my sleeves back over the elbows and took off my shoes and socks. It was psychological on the sleeves, I admit, but they bothered me and made me feel encumbered, and so what if I humor a fetish. The fifty-dollar black-tasseled loafers were lovely to look at, delightful to own, but awful to fight in, and they made noise when you snuck up on assassins. Stocking feet tend to be slippery. With my shoes off, my cuffs dragged and I had to roll them up. I looked like I was going wading. Huck Finn.
I went down the stairs in my bare feet without a sound. The stairshaft was neat and empty. To my right the workings of the elevator purred and halted, purred and halted. At the bend before my floor I stopped and listened. I heard someone sniff, and the sound of fabric scraping against the wall. He was on my side of the fire door. He listened for the elevator stop, and if it was this floor he’d step out after the doors closed and take a look. That made it easier. He was leaning against the wall. That was the fabric scrape I heard. He’d be facing the fire doors, leaning against the wall. He’d want the gun hand free. Unless he was lefthanded that meant he’d be on the left-hand wall. Most people weren’t left-handed.
I stepped around the corner and there he was, four steps down, leaning against the left-hand wall with his back to me. I jumped the four steps and landed behind him just as he caught a reflected movement in the wired-glass fire doors. He half turned, pulling the long-barreled gun out of his waistband, and I hit him with my forearm across the right side of the face, high. He bounced back against the wall, and fell over on the floor, and was quiet. You break your hand hitting a man in the head hard enough to put him out. I picked up the gun. Part of the same
