“Get out of my way,” Chase said.
The evening rain had stopped, but the sparkling wet streets remained deserted. The two blocks farther on to Shaftesbury Avenue with its lights and traffic and pedestrians might as well have been two miles; they might as well not be in London at all. The smiling Jamaicans crowded closer, smelling absurdly of coconut, the spokesman saying, “And a bob for my friend, mon, we want an egg.”
“If I had you in my country,” Chase said, his voice low and compelling, “I would have your ears removed and roasted in the oven and fed you for your dinner.”
“What country is that, mon?” the Jamaican asked, giggling as though it were all a joke, as he reached out for Chase’s sleeve.
Chase’s hand came up, too fast to be seen. The heel thudded upward into the Jamaican’s nose, shattering the bone, shoving the splinters up into the man’s brain. Dying, his wide eyes already filming, the Jamaican collapsed slowly backward onto the uneven wet slate sidewalk.
The other one ran. He didn’t wait to see what happened to his friend nor to find out what Chase meant to do next. He simply spun shakily on his heel, regained his balance, and dashed tottering around the corner of Manette Street and out of sight.
Chase walked on, ignoring the twisted man on the sidewalk, who looked as though he’d been flung there from a truck. What country is that, mon? echoed in Chase’s ears, and he walked down to Shaftesbury Avenue and turned right toward Piccadilly Circus.
Uganda. Violent Uganda. Depraved Uganda. Horrific Uganda. My country. He could feel it repainting him in its own colors; he had to get out.
London seemed so tame. There had been a period in his life when his greatest pleasure was London after dark; so much more accessible than Paris. To walk the streets of Soho and the West End after midnight with his pockets full of pounds, among the prostitutes and the sharp-nosed petty crooks and the innocent schoolboys out on a fling, to choose one’s amusements, playing different parts every night; that had been the Technicolor of his existence, and now it had all faded. A few years of open sesame at the State Research Bureau—his private nonfaked Madame Tussaud’s—had turned the rest of the world pale.
In Piccadilly Circus, the restless motion of the night crawlers still continued, though it was less crowded than it had been at midnight, when he’d last walked through. The puffy-bodied sullen-faced girls in their miniskirts and shoulder-padded jackets and eyes heavily underlined in black, the skinny awkward long-necked boys in their tight black tubular pants and their sweat shirts reading UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI (bought here in London on Oxford Street), the nervous sagging-bellied older homosexuals stumbling toward the humiliation they half craved and half dreaded, the brassy semipro hookers always in pairs and wearing blond wigs like wood shavings; they all still promenaded, restless and purposeless, their eyes and mouths dissatisfied and guarded against further hurt. The coughing black taxis curved ceaselessly past the statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly, heading elsewhere, scooting away, very few with their amber FOR HIRE signs lit; not here.
There was no actual sense of order, but the trend of pedestrian flow was clockwise, echoing the movement of the traffic. Joining the minority that trekked in the opposite direction, Chase studied the faces and the bodies as they came toward him. And this place might as well as be the exercise yard of a concentration camp whose commandant, with a more than usually macabre sense of humor, has dressed his charges out of captured theatrical trunks.
What shall I have tonight? What here will best ease for a little while the boredom? The hour was late; the pubs were closed; the air was cold and dank from the earlier rain; the desperation all around was rising closer to the surface; whatever Chase wanted from this chorus line was his for the beckoning.
The fourth time he passed the same pair of boys, painfully thin, dressed almost identically in bulky black cable-knit sweaters and tight blue jeans and cracked cheap “western” boots, their hands and necks gray—not with the dirt of toil but with the grime of sluttishness—he shrugged to himself and nodded to them, then took the next turning at Glasshouse Street, the dark narrow block behind the brightly lighted curve of Regent Street. Glancing back when he reached the far corner, he saw them trailing almost reluctantly after him; smiling, he turned right on Regent Street past the gleaming huge shopwindows filled with clothing to be worn in a world those boys would never know.
He could have anything, anyone, from that sink. His trend increasingly had been to choose boys, but he told himself that meant nothing. Boys were simpler somehow, that’s all. And since he never permitted anything to be put into his own body, but only inserted himself into them, he was clearly not homosexual.
Once free of Piccadilly Circus, the empty cabs switched on their FOR HIRE signs; Chase hailed one before he’d walked as far as Beak Street. “One moment,” he said to the driver, “for my friends.”
The driver, a narrow-faced Jewish Cockney, twisted to look back at the approaching boys. “It’s your life, gunnor,” he said. “Innit.”
“It is.” Holding the door open, Chase ushered the now shyly smiling boys into the cab. “Enter my golden coach,” he said.
At ten in the morning the hotel-room phone rang. Chase, blurrily waking, fumbled for the receiver, muttered something into it, and heard Emil Grossbarger say, “Zey have brought him back.”
Chase’s mind was filled with the wisps of dreams, red and black silhouettes fast receding, no longer forming their story, leaving only a faint nervous residue of terror. He had no idea what Grossbarger was talking about. “What? Who?”
“Sir Denis Lambsmitt. Chase, vat do you know of iss?”
“Lambsmith?” Orienting himself, remembering who and what he was, Chase sat up straighter in the bed. “What do you mean, he’s back?”
“I had him removed from ze Uganda negotiation,” Grossbarger said. On the phone, one became more aware of the husky power of that voice, still potent with the strength that had been stolen from his body. “Vunce ve made our own arrangement, you and I, my dear Baron, I vished zat man’s keen eye removed from ze arena of our activities.”
“Yes, yes.” Impatient with himself, rubbing his sleep-blurred face with his free hand—smelling faintly of soap from last night’s shower, after the boys had been sent away—Chase said, “Who brought him back?”
“Your government. Vy did zey do zat?”
“I have no idea,” Chase said, astonished to realize it was the truth. He had not the vaguest idea who in Uganda would have done this, or what they could have had in mind. It was frightening to have such sudden unexpected ignorance about the arena in which he struggled for survival.
“I vant him out of it,” Grossbarger said. “Ziss is very important to me.”
“I can, um—” Chase shook the sleep webs out of his brain. “We can contain him. I assure you he won’t know what’s going on.”
“I vant him avay! Und not killed, zat tips our hand. Out of ze operation complete.”
In Grossbarger’s intensity, Chase found the sudden shocking realization of just why the man was so upset. Yes, and why he had wanted Lambsmith removed in the first place. With hatred at this knowledge welling up inside him, hatred and rage, Chase became calmer, more assured, more hidden. “I’ll cut short my vacation, Emil,” he said, using the older man’s given name for the first time, doing it deliberately, to twist the knife in them both. “I’ll go back to Kampala today.” He should in any event; clearly, he had been away too long. “I’ll find out what’s happened.”