this would have been a great adventure. Now I wanted to run. At eight-thirty we boarded. At eight-fifty we took off. By nine-fifteen I had my first beer from the stewardess and a bag of Smokehouse Almonds. I began to feel better. Tomorrow perhaps I could have dinner in Simpson’s and maybe for lunch I could find a nice Indian restaurant. By ten I had drunk three beers and eaten perhaps half a pound of almonds. The flight was not crowded and the stewardess was attentive. Probably drawn by the elegance of my three-piece linen suit. Even wrinkled. I read my book and ignored the movie and listened to the oldies but goodies channel on the headphones and had a few more beers, and my mood brightened some more. After midnight I stretched out across several seats and took a nap. When I woke up the stewardesses were serving coffee and rolls and the sun was shining in the windows. We landed at Heathrow Airport outside of London at ten-fifty-five London time and I stumbled off the plane, stiff from sleeping on the seats. The coffee and rolls were sloshing around with the beer and Smokehouse Almonds. For simple hodgepodge confusion and complicated extent, Heathrow Airport’s name leads all the rest. I followed arrows and took Bus A and followed more arrows and finally found myself in the line at the passport window. The clerk looked at my passport, smiled and said, “Nice to see you, Mr. Spenser. Would you please step over to the security office, there.”
“They’ve reported me. I’m to be arrested for excessive beer consumption on an international flight.” The clerk smiled and nodded toward the security office. “Right over there, please, sir.” I took my passport and went to the office. Inside was a security officer in uniform and a tall thin man, with long teeth, smoking a cigarette and wearing a dark green shirt with a brown tie. “My name is Spenser,” I said. “People at the passport desk sent me over.” The tall thin guy said, “Welcome to England, Spenser. I’m Michael Flanders.” We shook hands. “Do you have baggage checks?” I did. “Let me have them, will you. I’ll have your baggage taken care of.” He gave the checks to the security man, and steered me out of the office with his hand on my elbow. We came out a different door and I realized we’d cleared customs. Flanders reached inside his tweed jacket and brought out an envelope with my name on it. “Here,” he said. “I was able to arrange this with the authorities this morning.” I opened the envelope. It was a gun permit. “Not bad,” I said. We came out of the terminal building underneath one of the walkways that connects the second floors of everything at Heathrow. A black London cab was there and a porter was loading my luggage in while the security man watched. “Not bad,” I said. Flanders smiled. “Nothing, really. Mr. Dixon’s name has considerable sway here as it does in so many places.” He gestured me into the cab, the driver came around and said something I didn’t understand and we started off. Flanders said to the cabbie, “Mayfair Hotel, if you would.” And leaned back and lit another cigarette. His fingers were long and bony and stained with nicotine. “We’re putting you up in the Mayfair,” he said to me. “It’s a first-rate hotel and nicely located. I hope it will be satisfactory.”
“Last case I was on,” I said, “I slept two nights in rented Pinto. I can make do okay in the Mayfair.”
“Well, good,” he said. “You know why I’m here,” I said. “I do.”
“What can you tell me?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid. Perhaps when we get you settled we can have lunch and talk about it. I imagine you’d like to freshen up a bit, get that suit off to the dry cleaners. ”
“Sure wrinkles on an airplane, doesn’t it?”
“Indeed.”
5
The Mayfair was a big flossy-looking hotel near Berkeley Square. Flanders paid the cabbie, turned the bags over to the hall porter and steered me to the desk. He didn’t seem to have a lot of confidence in me. A hired thug from the provinces, can barely speak the language, no doubt. I checked my heel for a cow flap. My room had a bed, a bureau, a blue wing chair, a small mahogany table and a white tiled bathroom. The window looked out over an airshaft into the building next door. Old-world charm. Flanders tipped the bell man, and checked his watch. “One o’clock,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to take the afternoon and get settled, then we could have dinner and I could tell you what I know. Do you need money?”
“I have money, but I need pounds,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. I’ll have it changed for you.” He took a big wallet from inside his jacket pocket. “Here’s one hundred pounds,” he said, “should you need it to hold you over.”
“Thanks.” I took my wallet out of my left hip pocket, and dug out $2500. “If you could change that for me, I’d appreciate it. Take out the hundred.” He looked at my wallet with some distaste. It was fat and slovenly. “No need,” he said. “Mr. Dixon’s money, you know. He’s been quite explicit about treating you well.”
“So far so good,” I said. “I won’t tell him you got me a room on an airshaft. ”
“I am sorry about that,” Flanders said. “It’s peak season for touists, you know, and the notice was short.”
“My lips are sealed,” I said. Flanders smiled tentatively. He wasn’t sure if he was being kidded. “Shall I come by for you, say six?”
“Six is good, but why not meet somewhere. I can find my way. If I get lost I’ll ask a cop.”
“Very well, would you care to try Simpson’s-on-the-Strand? It’s rather a London institution.”
“Good, see you there at six-fifteen.” He gave me the address and departed.
I unpacked and reassembled my gun, loaded it and put it on the night table. Then I shaved, brushed my teeth and took a shower. I picked up the phone and asked the front desk to call me at five-thirty. Then I took a nap on the top of the spread. I missed Susan.
At five-forty-five, vigorous and alert, with a spring in my step and my revolver back in its hip holster, I strode out the main entrance of the Mayfair. I turned down Berkeley Street and headed for Piccadilly. I had a city map that I’d bought in a shop in the hotel, and I’d been in London once before a few years back, before Susan, when I’d come for a week with Brenda Loring.
I walked down Piccadilly, stopped at Fortnum and Mason and looked at the package food stuffs in the window. I was excited. I like cities and London was a city the way New York is a city. The fun it would be to stroll around Fortnum and Mason with Susan and buy some smoked quail’s eggs or a jellied game hen or something imported from the Khyber Pass. I moved on up into Piccadilly Circus, which was implacably ordinary, movie theaters and fast foods, turned right on Haymarket and walked on down to Trafalgar Square, Nelson and the lions, and the National Gallery and the goddamned pigeons. Kids were in competition to see who could accumulate the most pigeons on and around them.
Walking up the Strand I passed a London cop walking peaceably along, hands behind his back, walkie-talkie in his hip pocket, the mike pinned to his lapel. His nightstick was artfully concealed in a deep and inconspicuous pocket. As I walked I could feel an excited tight feeling in my stomach. I kept thinking of Samuel Johnson, and Shakespeare. “The old country,” I thought. Which wasn’t quite so. My family was Irish. But it was the ancestral
