For a city is an impermanent thing, its surface ever shifting, like the sea.
And like the sea, a city has its sharks.
3
THERE’S A SHOP ON Brewer Street. You can get Russian tobacco there. Polish chewing gum. Lithuanian snuff …
If the man who’d spoken those words weren’t long dead, he’d have had no trouble finding the shop in question: it hadn’t moved, hadn’t redecorated, had barely changed at all. It was still the same stamp-sized floorspace, with a counter on which sat a till, still fondly referred to as ‘electric’; it was still shelved floor to ceiling on all sides, and each shelf still bore the same bewildering array of vendibles: the same cigars with green and yellow bands; the same chocolate frogs in the same foil wrapping. The same calendar, still celebrating 1993, still hung above the door to the stairs, and the same biscuit-tin lid, its bright motif still a twinkly-eyed Stalin, was still propped on a head-height shelf, and still saw service as a percussive device when Conference was in swing, ‘Conference’ being the designation Old Miles bestowed on any upstairs gathering numbering more than three – any fewer, he was wont to grumble, and there was no call to count cadence, a rhythm he still observed by beating Joe Stalin in the face with a tiny hammer.
Old Miles wasn’t his actual name, but it was generally held that old miles were what he walked, and nothing about the way he clung to established habits gave the lie to this.
But one reason for adhering to tradition is an awareness of impending change, and the little shop’s apparent obduracy concealed a minor shift that required major rearrangement, in that what once had been a going concern was now simply a concern. Business rates were ever on the rise, and the customer base ever dwindling, reduced by mortality and age and decreasing mobility. The shop had once been part of a local network of grocers and tradesmen of every description, where the competent shopper could provision a family for a siege. But those days were gone, and Old Miles’s tobacconist-cum-smuggler’s cave was now marooned in a hipsters’ playground. Which was the least of its worries. London altered by the day, and if the city had never been as kind nor as welcoming to strangers as it liked to pretend, it had at least thrived on the variety that strangers introduced. The political fog of the times had changed that, and political fog, as history has illustrated, is best dispelled by the waving of flags and banners, which usually foreshadows the use of truncheons and sticks. Variety was no longer a draw, and the gatherings of so-called Yellow Vests on the streets of central London were a testament to the shrinking of mental horizons that accompanies the raising of a drawbridge. Milosz Jerzinsky – Old Miles – hadn’t spent his early years fighting communists from a distance only to be sandbagged by fascists on his doorstep in old age. Besides, the leasehold on his shop had precisely as many years to run as those by which he had surpassed retirement age, and the neat mirror image these spans presented was as good as a sign from the heavens. So he had taken, he admitted to his remaining customers, the land-grabber’s shilling; he was folding his tent; he was making his departure. His shop would remain unchanged until its final day, but that arrived on the stroke of midnight, to mark time until which one last Conference was being held in the upstairs room; a gathering of stalwarts and irregulars alike, who would count the hours down glass by glass, and simply by their presence prove the remainder of that long-dead customer’s encomium on Old Miles’s place: At any given moment, half its customers used to be spooks.
But the given moments, thought the man himself, were fast wearing out their welcome.
He had just sold the last three packs of his Russian cigarettes – a life-destroying brand that only a suicide could embrace – to a fat man in a dirty overcoat who looked like he worked in a betting shop, either behind the cashier’s grille or on a stool beneath the TV, watching his pay packet break a leg in the 3:15 at Doncaster. Still, there was a grim focus in his eyes as he waited for his change, as if he were committing the little shop’s interior to memory. Maybe he’d lost more than the odd pay packet in his time. Maybe there was a whole archive of failure shelved in that ugly head, which was perhaps the reason Old Miles spoke to him as he counted coins into his waiting hand. ‘We’re closing,’ he said.
‘So I heard.’
‘There’s no future in it.’
The man grunted. ‘It looks like there’s barely a present.’
‘You’ve not been here before?’
The man didn’t answer. He was staring at the coins, as if Old Miles had shortchanged him, or slipped an unacceptable currency into his palm. But at length he shovelled them into his trouser pocket and looked Old Miles in the eye. ‘Heard about it. Never set foot inside.’
‘You can’t have bought that brand anywhere else in these parts.’
‘Maybe there’s the reason you’re having to close,’ the man said. ‘Maybe you’re too nosey to survive.’
‘There might be truth in that,’ Old Miles conceded. ‘Though up till now, I’ve considered survival one of my talents.’ He nodded in the direction of the door to his left. ‘Would you like to go upstairs?’
‘You’re not my type.’
‘There’s drink. A gathering of like-minded friends.’ He leaned closer. ‘You’ve been in the game, haven’t you? I can usually tell.’ He pulled back. ‘Call it a wake.’
‘I’m not the sentimental kind.’
‘But you look like a drinker.’
The fat man produced a cigarette from nowhere. It looked like one of those that Old Miles had just sold him – the tobacco nearly black; the tube loose in its filter – but he couldn’t have freed it with his hand in his pocket, surely. He slotted it into his mouth. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll pop my head in. See if I recognise any old faces.’
‘And if any of them recognise yours,’ said Old Miles, ‘what name would they attach to it?’
‘Christ knows,’ said Jackson Lamb, and disappeared through the door the shopkeeper had indicated.
The speciality of the house was red meat.
If you didn’t believe the menu, just look at the diners.
Diana Taverner ran the obvious numbers: if you subtracted the serving staff she’d be the only woman here, which was fine by her. Equality meant nothing if it didn’t involve earning your place at the table; a table, in this instance, occupying the private upstairs room of a pub, but one of those pubs reviewed in the Sunday supplements, with a named chef. He’d moved among them earlier, introducing himself, explaining the cuts he was intending to serve, and had come this close to asking if they wanted to meet the damn cow. Diana enjoyed her food, but the rituals involved could be tiresome.
A fork met a glass, repeatedly. The company fell silent.
‘Thank you all.’
It was Peter Judd who’d rung for quiet, and Judd who spoke now. He’d put on weight: for a man who’d never minded being photographed jogging, he reliably resembled the ‘before’ slot in a set of before-and-after photos. But those paparazzi days were behind him, she supposed, even allowing for the fact that they might turn out to be ahead of him also: writing off the career of a politician whose greed for power was so naked it required a parental advisory sticker frequently turned out to be a little previous, as the barrow-boy slang had it. And barrow-boy slang was just one of the vernaculars Judd was fluent in. Another was corporate bonhomie, which, for this evening, he’d turned up to eleven.
‘I’d just like to say how delightful it is to see you all here on what I’m sure will be the first of many – many – such occasions, being a celebration of this bold new enterprise of ours. You all know Diana Taverner, of course, and I’m sure that, like me, you’re all enjoying the the the apt nomenclature she rejoices in, for she is indeed our quick huntress, whose latest foray into the forests of international intrigue we’re making a festive ah ah ah bunfight of tonight.’