Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

So Neal took pains not to attract attention, which was more or less his role in life anyway, and therefore came naturally. Anyone who tries too hard not to attract attention almost invariably does. This is particularly true on the street, where the denizens have antennae finely tuned to the least twitch of the unnatural gesture. The only way to be inconspicuous is to be so plainly obvious, people don’t see you.

“This comes from our cavemen days,” Joe Graham had explained during one of the interminable anthropology lectures he had delivered to young Neal, “when we operated under the theory that what isn’t moving can’t hurt you. This was a fallacy, of course, but that’s what they thought, because they weren’t that smart to start with. They had about as many brains as your average transit cop. Anyways, they thought, Until it moves, it’s a rock. When it moves, it’s a saber-toothed tiger or something else that can eat us. This is why, to this day, people see motion. Sitting still, they don’t see. You show me a saber-toothed tiger that can sit still. I’ll show you a fat tiger.”

Also a bored tiger, Neal thought. Tedium is the detective’s most steadfast companion. It never goes away for long and it always comes back. Neal used to chuckle at the detective shows he’d see on TV, which were twelve minutes of commercials and forty-eight minutes of action. He knew they should have had twelve minutes of commercials, forty minutes of stupefying monotony, seven minutes and fifty seconds of paperwork, and ten seconds of what you might call action, if you weren’t too particular about your definition of action.

Not that boredom was necessarily bad. On those rare occasions when things got exciting-someone pulling a knife, or much worse, someone pulling a gun-boredom looked pretty good. You could do a lot worse than boredom. But it was hard for Neal to keep that perspective in June in Leicester Square in London during the hottest summer in recorded history. Waiting for somebody who didn’t show up. Who might never show up. Someone who might have once spent an evening with Allie Chase and then booted her along her merry way. Somebody who was a missing link, as it were, in a very thin chain.

Waiting, while the clock ticked slowly but the calendar raced. Neal had managed to skip Einstein, but he already knew that time was relative. Minutes dragged, hours stood positively still, but days zipped past him like taxis in the rain. May was gone, June was already a week old, and Neal was no closer to finding Allie. And finding her was only the start. Grabbing her would take time, cleaning her up more time, and time was a funny thing: Every hour seemed to take a week, and every week seemed to take about an hour. He had time on his hands and he was running out of time. Back in the States, the Democrats were gearing up for their August party, Senator Chase was polishing the acceptance speech, Ed Levine was sending Neal telexes demanding news, and Neal was sitting on a bench, racing toward his “drop dead line” in slow motion. Eight weeks now, and counting.

The heat didn’t help. Neal’s shirt would be stuck to the back of the bench ten minutes after he sat down. The crotch of his jeans would cling tenaciously to his balls, and his armpits would smell like a Mississippi chain gang by noon.

There wasn’t a breeze, not the slightest whisper of a cool breeze to break the still and sullen air.

Neal would force himself to get up and move. He would sit on his bench for two hours and then walk for one. Around and about Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, Soho, Chinatown. Some days, he’d walk down to the National Gallery and watch the crowds in Trafalgar Square: hundreds of teenagers; no Allie.

Mostly he sat, however, the tiger at work. He’d arrive on his bench around noon. (One nice thing about drug dealers are their hours. You want to talk to a dealer before noon, you’d better know where he lives.) He’d plop down on the bench, spread his arms out, and have a glance at the International Herald Tribune to check out the baseball standings. It took maybe five minutes for the little prickles of heat to start on his arms and back, followed shortly by the sweat that would become a trickle and then a stream. He had found a cafe by the tube station, and it sold a reasonable facsimile of a bagel. It became his habit to start his day with a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and a plain toasted bagel with butter. Satisfying himself that the Yankees still held first, he’d scan the headlines, then ball the bagel wrapper up inside the empty cup and toss it into the trash basket behind the bench. Then he’d settle in to watch the show. He began to know how movie ushers felt when the film had been running for three months. The sidewalk vendors already would be setting up their wares along the wrought-iron spiked fence that bordered the square. They sold the usual assortment of cheap souvenirs: cute little bobby dolls that never beat up raving psychos, T-shirts with Buckingham Palace silk-screened on the front, buttons that said LONDON UNDERGROUND-the usual crap. Neal’s own favorite was a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the Underground system. He resisted buying one. There were also the food and drink vendors who peddled warm, syrupy Cokes, soft ice cream that lasted an average of thirty-four seconds before melting down your wrist, thick Cadbury milk chocolate bars that melted even quicker and somehow always found their way onto your shirt, salted peanuts that only a far-gone lunatic would consume in this weather and that were always in hot demand. Neal craved… craved a real New York City street frank, one of the ones made from rat hairs, industrial waste, floor sweepings, and God knows what else, for which he cheerfully would have slaughtered the Queen. The closest he could come was a little stand run by some Pakistanis that sold a product the locals called the “Death Kabob.” It wasn’t bad, really, except for being the Main Drag’s answer to Ex-Lax, but it couldn’t touch a Columbus Circle dog with hot mustard and onions spread all over it.

After the vendors arrived, the tourists started in, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. There were a lot of Americans, but also great hordes of Italian teenagers, who always seemed to travel in groups of three thousand, and tidy little gaggles of Japanese photo freaks. Neal had never seen an ethnic cliche come to life before, but it was really true about the Japanese: They would take a picture of anything, and they all took the same pictures, as if they didn’t know you could make more than one print from a negative. They drove Neal nuts. He had spent a lifetime avoiding having his picture taken, and now he was sure he was going to pop up in five hundred photo albums in greater metropolitan Kyoto. Not that it mattered. It was, as they say, the principle of the thing.

However, mostly the tourists were fellow Americans: “My fellow Americans,” Neal thought once, flashing on Lyndon Johnson, and mostly they were that middle-aged type who want to travel but don’t want to leave home. So they go to English-speaking countries. You can go to Canada only so many times, so here they were in London, and boy, were they surprised. London had changed considerably from those great Forties movies. In those great Forties movies, people didn’t have foot-high purple hair or say “fuck” every fourth word. Also, it was always foggy and cool in those great Forties movies. Uh-huh.

And their travel agents had told them there was no crime in London. Crime was reserved for those vaguely greasy people like Italians and French, not to mention Africans, Indians, and Orientals-but not the English.

Neal sat and mused about crime in England one sultry day as he sat watching a pickpocket make his week’s wages from a single tour group meandering through the square. Why is it, he wondered, that about half of all great popular English literature is about crime and yet everybody, English or foreign, will tell you there is no crime in England? The English popular tradition is obsessed with robbery and murder, starting with Robin Hood, moving up through Dickens, then to Sherlock Holmes, and on to Agatha Christie, who had single-handedly depopulated fictional aristocracy. Even staid historical works featured set-piece public whippings and hangings, and mass transportations to Australia and so forth, and yet England maintains the reputation for public order and civility. Maybe, Neal theorized, people figure that England ridded itself through the rope or the long-distance boat trip of its criminal class, so now everybody who was left in the country was genetically disposed toward being law-abiding. He considered his theory for a while, then dismissed it as he watched the pick maneuver toward his next victim.