Disembarking took a good long time, with people standing and stretching, and re-establishing contact with their cellular networks, and retrieving their luggage, and looking under their seats for the things they had lost. So we entered the terminal as part of a ragged linear crowd, ones and twos and threes, all separated but clearly associated, all heading the same way at roughly the same speed, which was about halfway between impatient and fatigued. I saw no furtive behaviour in the passengers ahead of me. I didn’t look behind, in case I looked furtive myself.
We had no problem at the passport desk, after a long wait in a long line. Casey Nice went first, with her paperwork neatly filled out, and I lip-read a question about why she was visiting, and I saw her say, ‘Vacation,’ and then add, ‘I mean a holiday,’ like a bilingual person. I went next, and was asked no questions. My new passport got its first stamp, and I re-joined Nice beyond the podiums, and we headed out through the baggage hall, to Her Majesty’s Customs. Who were not a problem either. They were heavily invested in the hidden-surveillance thing. We walked past about an acre of one-way windows, and no visible humans at all.
Then came crowds of people waiting to greet folks other than us, and cold morning air blowing in through the kerbside doors, and overhead signs listing our onward transportation options, which were railroad or subway or bus or taxi. Heathrow was way west, and our hotel was way east, which was a long enough ride to be easily memorable by a taxi driver, as his best fare of the week. Plus the wads of money handed over by Shoemaker, while generous, were not infinite.
So we opted for the subway, for the experience more than anything, and because I believe you can best sense the mood of a city in its tunnels. The reverberant acoustic amplifies feelings of fear or tension, or reveals their absence.
It was a long ride, on hard benches, with two connections, rushing and slamming through tubes barely wider than the cars themselves. I felt no special edge in the air. Plenty of normal workaday angst and worry, but nothing more than that. We got out at a place called Barking, into mid-morning sunlight. Casey Nice looked like an abandoned waif, standing on the sidewalk outside the station with her rolling suitcase, tired and a little dishevelled. She figured our hotel was still some ways away. A long walk. I saw no cruising cabs. Too far from the centre. She said, ‘We really need a Town Car.’
I said, ‘I don’t think they have them here.’
But they seemed to have a rough equivalent. I saw a couple of battered sedans outside a whitewashed storefront labelled Barking Minicabs. We walked over there and I went in alone. There was a guy behind a high plywood counter. I asked him for a car. He said street hails were not allowed. Pre-booked only.
I said, ‘I’m not hailing anything. I’m talking in a normal voice. And I’m not on the street.’
He said, ‘Pre-booked only. We could lose our licence.’
‘Do I look like a government inspector to you? Do I look like a cop?’
He said, ‘You have to book by telephone.’ He pointed to a large sign on the wall, which said Pre-booked only, with a telephone number below.
I said, ‘Really?’
He said, ‘We could lose our licence.’
I was about to contemplate alternative methods, but then I remembered I had a phone in my pocket. Scarangello had given it to me, in Paris. O’Day had fitted it with a GPS chip, for the mission. I took it out and dialled the number on the sign. There was silence at first, while a whole lot of location services and international assistance kicked in. Then a desk phone rang, about a yard from my elbow. The guy picked it up.
I said, ‘I need a car.’
The guy said, ‘Certainly, sir. When would you like it?’
‘Thirty seconds from now.’
‘Picking up where?’
‘Right here.’
‘Destination?’
I named the hotel.
‘Number of passengers?’
‘Two.’
The guy said, ‘Your driver will be with you in a minute.’
Which was technically twice as long as I had asked for, but I didn’t make any trouble about it. I just clicked off the call and rejoined Casey Nice on the sidewalk. I told her what had happened, and she said, ‘You shouldn’t have pushed it. They’ll remember you. And a place like that is probably paying protection money to the Romford Boys. They’ll trade gossip for sure.’
The car was worn out and filthy and not very spacious, but it got us where we were going, which was a budget hotel with a parking lot, trapped in a mixed line of various enterprises in a neighbourhood that way back long ago had been a remote and distant village. It still looked like one in certain hidden corners. There was old brickwork in places, and an inappropriately grand old house, now boxed in tight by much smaller suburban structures. An old manor, presumably, fat and happy two hundred years ago, the city just a folk tale, a whole day’s ride away. But then came the railroad, and maybe the manor lost a ten-acre field, and then another, and then came the buses and the cars, and the manor lost its orchard, and then its garden, and then everything except a flagstone square in front, big enough for two cars, if both of them were careful.