Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

“He safari guided The Man once. Friend of the family, so to speak. Guess what else I know.”

“Decency doesn’t allow-”

“You’re supposed to have the kid back by August first.”

“Any particular time?”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously.”

Graham ground his rubber hand into his natural one, the way he always did when he was worried. “This coffee isn’t too horrible. I’m surprised. They also don’t want her back much before August first.”

“Children should be seen and not heard?”

“Something like that.”

Yeah, something like that, Neal thought. John Chase is walking a narrow line, and he thinks he’s the only one who knows it. He wants Allie back just long enough to play her role in “The

Waltons Go to Washington,” not long enough to sing “Daddy’s Little Girl.” He must want to be Veep pretty badly to take that kind of risk.

“Today is what, May twenty-eighth?”

“Twenty-ninth.”

“Twenty-ninth. That gives me something like nine weeks to find her, get hold of her, fix her up, and persuade her to come back, and these people want it brought in on the button? Gee, what if I can’t?”

The rubber hand was really busy now, rubbing away. Graham didn’t like this thing, either.

“If you can’t bring her in on the date… forget it,” he said.

“Forget it?”

Graham shrugged. It was an eloquent gesture, the answer to a Zen koan.

“Yeah, okay,” Neal said. “I get it.”

Allie is useful for a few days if it’s the right few days. Otherwise, leave her where she is.

“Smells, right?” Graham said, rubbing a sheen onto the rubber hand.

“Like a garbage strike in July.”

“Right?”

Graham poured another cup. Neal saw he wasn’t finished with the news.

“What else do you know?” Neal asked.

“Your graduass-school thing. You can pick it up again.” Graham stirred the sugar in with great care. “Next fall.”

Could be worse, Neal thought. They could have just tossed me out. But the rubber hand was turning again. There was more, and he knew what it was.

“If I bring Allie back by August first.”

Graham frowned and nodded.

The sound of one hand clapping.

Foggy london town was sunny and hot, really hot. Summer had taken an early jump on spring. Neal stepped out of Heathrow’s struggling air conditioning into an outdoor sauna.

“A bit on the warm side, I’m afraid,” said Simon. “We’re on to having a drought, actually. Everything is turning sort of monochromatic brown.”

“I thought it rained all the time here,” Neal said.

“I’m glad I’m off to Africa, where it’s cooler,” Simon answered.

Neal laughed politely at the joke, until Simon’s puzzled expression told him he wasn’t joking.

“It is, actually, cooler there. Have you ever been?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

Simon was an eccentric. Neal guessed his age at late fifties, but knew he could be ten years off in either direction. He was tall and angular, with an Adam’s apple that belonged to a different species, and he walked with that particularly British purposefulness that people find so endearing or annoying. With the temperature tilting toward eighty, it tended toward the latter.

Simon was wearing a pink striped shirt, leaf green trousers, paisley ascot, blue argyle socks, and shoes that looked like moccasins but laced up. All this was topped off by a gray head with the odd lock of brown, shiny blue eyes, and a nose that should have been on Mount Rushmore, except it’s a small mountain.

He was a friend of Kitteredge, had taken Ethan and wife on safari, and based himself out of London. He found very little in the civilized world of much interest, and therefore could be trusted never to reveal the story of Allie Chase. He was to be Neal’s London host.

“I’m off in a week, actually, but that should give us time. I gather I’m to be your local expert. You’re some sort of man hunter, or some such thing.”

“Girl hunter, actually.”

Simon laughed. “Oh yes. Well done.”

He led them through the maze of parking lots as if they were late for lunch with the Queen. He stopped on locating a small silver sports car, a convertible with the top down.

“This,” he announced with a flourish, “is a Gordon-Keble.”

“It’s nice,” Neal said, self-consciously inane. The extent of his knowledge about cars was that they had a steering wheel and four tires-unless left overnight in his neighborhood.

“There were only thirteen ever made,” Simon continued with shy pride. “I own three of them.”

“That’s great.”

“One of my vices,” Simon confided in a tone more appropriate to a confession of sexual relations with twelve-year-old Chinese girls dressed up as nuns.

“What are the others?”

“Other cars?”

“Other vices.”

“You’ll see,” Simon answered seriously. “Shall we take the Keble to town?”

Simon tossed Neal’s single bag into a small space behind the seats as Neal settled into the car. Neal sank back in the bucket seat and felt at least two inches off the ground.

Simon turned the key in the ignition and the little car came to life with demonic energy. Neal had the scary impression that the car had been waiting for this moment; it throbbed with predatory vibrations that reached from the soles of Neal’s feet to the top of his hair. It hummed like a wolf at the edge of a flock of sheep, like the worst boy on the block let out of his room.

“Quite a feeling, isn’t it?” Simon asked proudly.

“Yes.” Terror.

Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn’t thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master.

Neal sat as low in his seat as possible and kept his eyes closed as much as pride would allow.

“Why only thirteen?” he shouted over the rushing wind in an attempt to stave off vomiting by conversing.

“After Gordon was killed, Keble just lost the heart for it!”

“How was Gordon killed?” Neal asked, hating himself, knowing the answer would make him even more miserable.

“Swerved to avoid a grouse and jumped a stone wall! Landed in a church graveyard! Convenient, that!”

Simon crossed three lanes of traffic, oblivious to a chorus of blaring horns and curses, to take advantage of a two-foot gap created by an exiting car. He accelerated up a wicked outside curve, dove down the ensuing hill, braking just in time to avoid sodomizing a dairy truck, slid into the passing lane, and floored the accelerator. The gearbox sounded like a Chinese opera.

“I’ve had three bad smashups myself!” Simon shouted by way of reassurance. “One in Madagascar! Laid up for months! Broke several major bones!”

As the slightly thinning traffic allowed the driver to exercise his full gifts and the car’s fiendish potential, Neal prayed that Simon’s skull wasn’t among those major bones. Pale and sickened, Neal was plastered to the seat by what he knew could be only G forces, and he no longer hoped for survival, only a quick and merciful immolation. As anxiety perspiration joined the flow of heat-induced sweat, and the silver demon sped farther and faster toward a fiery death, Neal silently composed a postcard to Joe Graham: “Dear Dad, having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

Simon’s flat was a second-floor walk-up on Regent’s Park Road, a quiet street not far from the London Zoo: a good neighborhood for a safe house. Simon owned the entire house but rented the ground floor to a respectably married gay couple.