Steamy didn’t quite describe it. Neither did grimy or any of the other dwarfs. It was killer heat. Godlike heat. All-pervasive heat that denied even the possibility of the existence of cool. Still and sullen heat. As if the air itself were heat. As if a cool breeze was just a memory of something that once was but would never be again.
Not that there was any room to breathe even if there had been something resembling oxygen. The horrific crowding on the cars began to break down even the fabled English stoicism. Stiff upper lips wilted. And that was when the train was moving. When it got stuck between stations, as it frequently did, and a polite announcement came over the PA system, the crowd responded with a single groan. People dropped their heads and stared at their feet and watched their sweat drip on their shoes. Then the train would jerk forward again, the movement providing no relief except the knowledge that the end of the ordeal was a bit closer.
Except for Neal, who wasn’t riding to get anywhere, and who wasn’t getting anywhere riding, either. Allie wasn’t on the Underground. No cool breeze, no Allie. Six weeks left.
Like aging women, cities are prettier at night. The softer light shades the insults of aging. Darkness fades the lines and wrinkles that every good woman and every good city wear on their faces as signs that somebody has lived there.
If life in the city seems impossible in the daytime, at night it is irresistible. The night is for playing. For dining and dancing, for flirting and fucking. For making eyes and making love. The feet step a little lighter, and the blood flows a little faster, and the eyes race to the flash of neon blues and reds and ambers set off by the silky soft black of night.
People do things at night they wouldn’t dream of by day. They see things differently. What was harsh becomes soft. Sordid becomes colorful. Whores become courtesans; hookers are ladies of the evening. Light reflects prettily off the broken bottles in the gutters. Everyone has a bit of the devil in them at night. There’ll be time to deal with God in the morning.
The barkers stood in Soho doorways proclaiming the virtues of nude, absolutely nude, dancers inside. But not one of the dancers was Allie. And the bouncers guarded the gates to the flashy discos, beckoning the pretty and the well-dressed and the hip and turning away the rest. But none of the blessed or the cursed were Allie. And waiters served food and drink to the stylish after-theater couples and parties who mobbed the West End pubs and cafes after the curtains had rung down. But Allie was not to be found among the servers or the served.
Back on the square, Neal watched the phone box, and every once in a while he would ring the number to see who, if anybody, answered. But it was never Allie or her dealer. And Neal kept watching; only at night, he watched more carefully. He never sat still for long at night, when the scent of a solitary, sedentary stranger would waft its way to the delicate senses of the larger predators who prowled the night.
Neal knew that the night, like most pretty things, was dangerous. The money stakes were higher, for one thing, which brought the more serious players out. And too many of them were fueled by booze and drugs, which lent an ugly air of the unpredictable and Neal hated the unpredictable.
So Neal patrolled the area, but he kept to the shadows, using corners and doorways, buying snacks at street-side windows, fading to the back of small knots of people as they checked out movie times, disco signs, and buskers. He used all the shading and masking and other subtle shit that Graham had taught him, and he didn’t trust to the “cover of darkness.” Darkness covered everybody.
“Everybody” was the hard core. The ponces checked their ladies and the dealers checked their turf. And the thugs worked the porn trade and the bodybuilders looked for poofters to roll. And the gangs were dangerous, looking for an excuse to fight. And the schizoids were worse, because they didn’t need an excuse, just the ever-present jangle of the voices in their heads. And they were all out there.
Except Allie. Except her dealer. They were nowhere.
Five weeks.
That’s how it went for a month. Neal was left with his slim lead and a bunch of maybes. Maybe the dealer had fucked up and was in the slammer. Maybe he hadn’t paid his fees and was in the river. Maybe he’d decided on a career change and had taken up actuarial science. Maybe Allie had been with him that one night and that was it. Maybe all this was futile.
So Neal would sit in his room in the small hours of the morning and choke down his carton of Chinese take-away, wash it down with two warm room-service beers, and make his check-in call to Graham. Ask if he should call it quits and come home. Get told no. Bitch about it for a minute and hang up. Take a bath to try to wash off the day’s accumulation of sweat and sleaze. Never quite manage it.
Then he’d think about calling Diane. Hell, he thought one night, you have two women in your life and you’ve lost them both. One you can’t find, and the other can’t find you. Brilliant.
And you’re about out of time-with Diane as well as Allie. So call her. And say what? Tell her all about Friends and your fascinating line of work? Tell her that grad school is finished because you’ve fucked up the dirty job of finding an abused child and taking her back to her abusive father?
So he’d think better of it. Try to read. Give up and drink scotch.
Day after day, night after night. And the nights were bad. Worse as the days went by and he hadn’t found the kid. Worse as images of the Halperin kid crept into his head when he tried to sleep, infecting his thoughts with images of death.
Face it, he thought. Allie could be anywhere. She could be sick and she could be hurt. She could be beat-up aching, or clapped-up aging, junked-up dying. Dead like the last kid they’d sent him after.
More and more, he went to sleep with the picture of Allie in his mind. And in his mind, she was dead.
18
She looked great.
He saw her reflection first as he was passing by one of the more expensive eateries that flanked the square. He happened to glance up, and her reflection caught his eye and jerked his head up and around. She was inches away. Behind a pane of glass. And she looked great.
Her blond hair glittered from the light of the lamp hanging above her, and even in the shadowy light of the restaurant, she looked healthy, alive. At this moment she was laughing. She wore a black sleeveless T-shirt tucked into black jeans tucked into black ankle boots, sort of a demonic female Peter Pan. Her hair was cut short and uneven, above her ears, and her left ear sported a delicate silver chain that hung almost to her shoulder. She wore blood-red lipstick. She was drinking beer from a bottle. She was a beautiful girl having a wonderful time. And she was stoned out of her gourd.
For one awful second, Neal thought he might actually tap on the glass and yell, “Allie, come on. Time to go home.” But he backed off quickly, found an eddy in the traffic flow, and watched. He was surprised to hear his own heart beating.
Allie was sitting with three other people. One was a young man of about Neal’s build. His head was roughly shaved to a stubble, and he wore an impossibly filthy T-shirt that had been white in a time beyond memory. The shirt was torn in several places and the message FUCK THE WORLD had been crudely stenciled on the chest. He had a safety pin jammed through his right earlobe. He showed outrageously bad teeth when he grinned, which was often, as he was pointedly laughing at the witticism of the other man at the table, the dominant one. The laughter of the fawning ape. This one would be no problem.
A young woman sat beside him. She sported an orange, purple, and yellow crew cut, black eye shadow and lipstick, and had enormous boobs barely contained in a black leather jacket. She was chunky, her hips and butt jammed into leather pants, and Neal could barely imagine the rivulets of sweat that flowed underneath. She might have stretched toward attractive, but she was pretty enough for the laughing boy, who was all over her. She could be trouble, Neal thought, but not too much.