They must have brought me to where I was, which, I saw, was a jail cell and a rather spacious one at that. I estimated it to be at least seven feet wide and twelve feet long and apparently designed for single occupancy. Furnishings and appointments other than the tile bunk included a seatless toilet, a one-tap sink, a big gray iron door with a peephole, no windows, and a former occupant’s scratched notation that “Lord God it is awful here.”
I got up, used the toilet, drank some water from the tap, and reached for a cigarette. I didn’t have any. I went through my pockets and there was nothing in them. I looked at my left wrist. My watch was still on it and the time was half past five. In the morning, I assumed. They had let me keep my watch, my clothes, my headache, and my pink carnation. The carnation looked old and tired and bedraggled and I felt that we had a lot in common except that it still smelled nice.
I had never been in jail before. Not to stay. Not in a jail where they slam a big iron door shut on you. I had once spent part of a night in a New York precinct station, but there they had kept me in a room with some desks and some chairs and a window and they had let me keep my cigarettes and my matches and even a little of my dignity.
For what seemed to be a long time I stood there in the middle of the cell and looked around. I decided that I could never do a five-year stretch. Or a five-month one. Or even five days. Five hours were about my limit and I had already done that and more, so I went over and started kicking hell out of the big iron door.
After a while they came to see what was the matter. After a week maybe, or ten days, somebody came and opened the peephole and said, “Stop that kicking now. We got people here who’re trying to sleep.”
“I just thought I’d let you know I’m ready to leave,” I said.
“Ready to leave, are we?”
“That’s right.”
“Sobered up a bit, have we?”
I wasn’t going to argue. “Stone sober.”
I felt him taking a good look at me through the peephole. Finally, the voice said, “Well, let’s see what Sergeant Matthews has got to say.” The peephole slammed shut.
It took Sergeant Matthews a fortnight to make up his mind about me. Or maybe it was only ten days. That was jail time. By real time, the time on my watch, it was fifteen minutes before the key clacked and turned in the lock. The big iron door swung open and a young policeman stood there, dangling a large key from a large ring and nodding his head as if I were about what he had expected; certainly no better.
“This way,” he said, and I followed him down a hall that was lined with big iron doors like the one I had been behind. We entered a room that held some desks and a wooden bench and some chairs. Behind one of the desks was a policeman with three stripes on his sleeve. Sergeant Matthews, I presumed.
“Here he is, Sergeant, Mr. Philip St. Ives,” the young policeman said and the sergeant looked at me with thirty- or thirty-one-year-old green eyes that were neither friendly nor unfriendly and if not incurious, certainly indifferent.
“Sit down, Mr. St. Ives,” Sergeant Matthews said.
I sat down and he reached into a drawer and drew out a manila envelope and started removing its contents. The contents were what had been in my pockets. He ticked the items off on a form, shoving them across the desk to me one by one. When he got to the cigarettes I said, “Mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all, sir,” he said without looking up.
I lit one of the Pall Malls and blew some smoke up into the air. The cigarette tasted all right, better than I had expected, but it did my headache no good.
“Your people must have been English, a name like that,” he said.
“Or French,” I said.
“Oh?”
“The French spell it with a Y.”
“Pretty little place. St. Ives, I mean. Ever been there?”
“No.”
“Pretty little place.”
That seemed to exhaust the topic and Sergeant Matthews shoved the last item across the desk to me and said, “Would you count your money, sir? Should be thirty-one pounds and nine pence there plus some American coins.”
I counted it and put the money into my wallet. “It’s all there.”
He nodded. “Sign here, please.”
While I signed the form he said, “I must say,I expected you to be a size bigger.”
I handed him back his pen. “Why?”
“From the way my men were talking when I came on duty, they claimed to have collared themselves an American karate expert. Constable Wilson especially — limping around he was with a bad foot to prove it.”
“I don’t know any karate,” I said. “I just thought I was being mugged.”
“At six o’clock in the evening and the sun not down?” Sergeant Matthews made his brown eyebrows form two skeptical arcs.
“I’d forgotten where I was when they grabbed me.”
“Your home’s New York, isn’t it, sir?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t suppose they wait until dark there. Muggers, I mean.”
“Daylight or dark, it’s all pretty much the same to them.”
“Must be an interesting place.”
“Terribly,” I said. “What’re you charging me with, drunk and disorderly?”
“Just drunk, sir.”
I tapped my wallet with a finger. “Have I got enough in here to cover it?”
“That’ll be up to the magistrate, sir.”
“Can’t I just post bond and forget about it? Forfeit it, I mean.”
Sergeant Matthews shook his head. He seemed a little sorry about the entire thing. “Afraid not, sir,” he said, handing me an official-looking form. “This is your summons to appear at the Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court at nine this morning.”
I sighed, took the summons, folded it, and put it away in a pocket. “What if I don’t show?”
All traces of sympathy vanished. “Then a warrant will be issued for your arrest.”
“I’ll be there,” I said. “Can I go now?”
“Certainly, sir.” Sergeant Matthews looked at the clock on the wall. “You should be able to get back to your hotel, take a nap, tidy up, get a good breakfast in you, and be in court with plenty of time.”
I stood up. “Well, thanks for everything, Sergeant.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Where’s the best place to catch a taxi?”
“Out to the street, then right to the next corner. Should be one along directly.”
I nodded a good-bye of sorts, went through the entrance of the stationhouse, and out into what seemed to be a kind of alley or mews. I walked to the street without looking back, turned right, and headed for the corner. About halfway there, I spotted a dustbin, unpinned my carnation, and dropped it in. It had served its purpose. Somebody had recognized me all right.
Chapter Three
Only two days prior to spending that night in a London jail cell, Julia Child and I had been pounding hell out of a couple of boned chicken breasts when Myron Greene, my lawyer, the new millionaire, knocked on the door of my “deluxe” efficiency on the ninth floor of the Adelphi on East Forty-sixth. There was an ivory-colored doorbell that Myron Greene could have pressed, but he knew better because it didn’t work, and hadn’t worked in three years. The Adelphi Apartment-Hotel was that kind of a place.
I put my stainless-steel mallet down on the ancient butcher block that I had recently acquired from a seventy-two-year-old Brooklyn butcher who had said to hell with it and gone out of business the day that prime porterhouse hit $4.25 a pound. I nodded as Julia Child dipped the pounded chicken breasts, first into the nutmeg-seasoned flour, and then into the lightly beaten egg yolk. “I got it, Julia,” I said, switched off the television set, and went to the door.