“Goals?”
“Excuse me?”
“What are the goals of their organization? Do they wish to save the great whales? Free Ireland? Smash apartheid? Restore Palestine? Discourage abortion?”
“I think they are anticommunist.”
“That doesn’t explain blowing Dixon up. Dixon industries aren’t practicing state socialism, are they?” Downes smiled and shook his head. “Hardly. The bombing was random violence. Urban guerrilla tactics. Disruption, terror, that sort of thing. It unravels the fabric of government, creates confusion, and allows the establishment of a new power structure. Or some such.”
“How are they progressing?”
“The government seems to be holding its own.”
“They do much of this sort of thing?”
“Hard to say,” Downes sipped at his Scotch some more and rolled it around over his tongue. “Damned fine. It’s hard to say because we get so bloody much of this sort of thing from so many corners. Gets difficult to know who is blowing up whom and why.” Flanders said, “But, as I understand it, Phil, this is not a major group. It doesn’t threaten the stability of the country.” Downes shook his head, “No, surely not. Western civilization is in no immediate danger. But they do hurt people.”
“We all have reason to know that,” Flanders said. “Does any of this help?”
“Not so far,” I said. “If anything it hurts. As Downes knows, the more amateurish and unorganized and sappy a group like this is, the harder it is to get a handle on them. The big well organized ones I’ll bet you people have infiltrated already.” Downes shrugged and sipped at his Scotch. “You’re certainly right about the first part anyway, Spenser. The random childishness of it makes them much more difficult to deal with. The same random childishness limits their effectiveness in terms of revolution or whatever in hell they want. But it makes them damned hard to catch.”
“Have you anything?”
“If you were from the papers,” Downes said, “I’d reply that we were developing several promising possibilities. Since you’re not from the papers I can be more brief. No. We haven’t anything.”
“No names? No faces?”
“Only the sketches we took from Mr. Dixon. We’ve circulated them. No one has surfaced.”
“Informants?”
“No one knows anything about it.”
“How hard have you been looking?”
“As hard as we can,” Downes said. “You’ve not been over here long, but as you may know, we are pressed. The Irish business occupies most of our counter-insurgency machinery. ”
“You haven’t looked hard.” Downes looked at Flanders. “Not true. We have given it as much attention as we can.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I understand your kind of problems. I used to be a cop. I’m just saying it so Flanders will understand that you have not been able to conduct an exhaustive search. You’ve sifted the physical evidence. You’ve put out flyers, you’ve checked the urban guerrilla files and the case is still active. But you don’t have a lot of bodies out beating the bushes on Egdon Heath or whatever.” Downes shrugged and finished his Scotch.
“True,” he said. Barry Fitzgerald came back with food. He brought with him a man in a white apron who pushed a large copperhooded steam table. At tableside he opened the hood, and carved to my specifications a large joint of mutton. When he was finished he stood back with a smile. I looked at Flanders. Flanders tipped him. While the carver was carving, Barry put out the rest oi the food. I ordered another beer. He seemed delighted to get it for me.
6
I rejected Flanders’s offer of a cab and strolled back up the Strand toward the Mayfair in the slowly gathering evening. It was a little after eight o’clock. I had nowhere to be till morning and I walked randomly. Where the Strand runs into Trafalgar Square I turned down Whitehall.
I stopped halfway down and looked at the two mounted sentries in the sentry box outside the Horse Guards building. They had leather hip boots and metal breastplates and old-time British Empire helmets, like statues, except for the young and ordinary faces that stared out under the helmets and the eyes that moved. The faces were kind of a shock.
At the end of Whitehall was Parliament and Westminster Bridge, and across Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey. I’d walked through it some years back with Brenda Loring and a stampede of tourists. I’d like to walk through it when it was empty sometime. I looked at my watch: 8:50. Subtract six hours, it was ten of three at home. I wondered if Susan was in her counseling class. It probably didn’t meet every day. But maybe in the summer. I walked a little way out into Westminster Bridge and looked down at the river. The Thames. Jesus Christ. It had flowed through this city when only Wampanoags were on the Charles. Below me to the left was a landing platform where excursion boats loaded and unloaded. Susan and I had gone the year before to Amsterdam and had a wine and cheese cruise by candlelight along the canals and looked at the high seventeenthcentury fronts of the canal houses.
Shakespeare must have crossed this river. I had some vague recollection that the Globe Theatre was on the other side. Or had been. I also had the vague feeling that it no longer existed. I looked at the river for a long time and then turned and leaned on the bridge railing with my arms folded and watched the people for a while. I was striking, I thought, in blue blazer, gray slacks, white oxford button-down and blue and red rep striped tie. I’d opened the tie and let it hang down casually against the white shirt, a touch of informality, and it was only a matter of time until a swinging London bird in a leather miniskirt saw that I was lonely and stopped to perk me up. Miniskirts didn’t seem prevalent. I saw a lot of harem pants and a lot of the cigarette look with Levis tucked into the top of high boots. I would have accepted either substitute, but no one made a move on me. Probably had found out I was foreign. Xenophobic bastards. No one even noticed the brass touch on the tassels on my loafers. Suze noticed them the first time I had them on.
I gave it up after a while. I hadn’t smoked in ten or twelve years, but I wished then I’d had a cigarette that I could have taken a final drag on and flipped still burning into the river as I turned and walked away. Not smoking gains in the area of lung cancer, but it loses badly in the realm of dramatic gestures. At the edge of St. James’s Park there was something called Birdcage Walk and I took it. Probably my Irish romanticism. It led me along the south side of St. James’s Park to Buckingham Palace. I stood outside awhile and stared in at the wide bare hard-paved courtyard. “How you doing, Queen,” I murmured. There was a way to tell if they were there or not but I’d forgotten what it was. Didn’t matter much. They probably wouldn’t make a move on me either.
From the memorial statue in the circle in front of the palace a path led across Green Park toward Piccadilly and my hotel. I took it. I felt strange walking through a dark place of grass and trees an ocean away from home, alone. I thought about myself as a small boy and the circumstantial chain that connected that small boy with the middle-aging man who found himself alone in the night in a park in London. The little boy didn’t seem to be me very much. And neither did the middle-aging man. I was incomplete. I missed Susan and I’d never missed anyone before. I came out on Piccadilly again, turned right and then left onto Berkeley. I walked past the Mayfair and looked at Berkeley Square, long and narrow and very neat-looking. I didn’t hear a nightingale singing. Someday maybe I’d come back here with Susan, and I would. I went back to the hotel and had room service bring me four beers. “How many glasses, sir?”
“None,” I said in a mean voice. When it came I overtipped the bellhop to make up for the mean voice, drank the four beers from the bottle and went to bed.