Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

All this in the faint hope that young Allie was using some variation of the “I’ve lost my purse and need enough money to get home” scam that was a favorite of panhandlers worldwide.

This tends to work better at rush hour, when there are a lot more potential Samaritans to bilk, and when one is not so obvious to the thugs who control the thriving begging trade. A quick panhandler can keep moving better through large crowds and make a fair bit of change even if she couldn’t occupy one of the key choke points smack dab in the middle of the traffic flow.

Now there are a number of different strategies in this scam, and it really depends on how gutsy you are and how well you can afford to dress. If you’re really down and out, you’re better off just asking for subway fare-small change-to a nearby stop, because nobody’s going to believe you live in the suburbs and need that much more money to get back. But if you can get your hands on some better threads, you might want to give the bigger-ticket items a try, especially if you’ve got the nerve to attempt the “I’m from out of town and need five or ten pounds to get home and here is my card with my name and address and I’ll send you the money first thing” routine. The truly wonderful thing about the world is that there are people in it who will actually believe this and give the money. If you’re a teenager and try this, pick on women who look like they might have a kid your age, because they don’t want their own child stranded in the big bad city and they’re afraid not to give you the money.

Or you can go for volume and stick with the tried-and-true “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime” routine, but you have to hit a bunch of buddies to make this one pay. Anyway, people would rather be conned, even if they suspect they’re being conned, because they want you to work a little bit for the money. Or take a shot at making a really good cardboard sign: BROKE AND DESPERATE or HUNGRY AND ALONE. Always try to go for two bad conditions on the sign, though. It’s that and that gives it the poignant quality.

Or maybe Allie wasn’t begging. Maybe she was trying to steal in the Underground. Neal hoped this wasn’t the case, and really didn’t expect it to be. Despite popular legend, subways are terrible places to pick pockets. Picks like a crowd all right, but they also like to be able to get away if something goes wrong. Subways are full of things such as turnstiles, gates, escalators, and narrow passageways that make running damn near impossible. Add to this the fact that crowds of commuters have been getting increasingly irritated with increasing delays. But it was the possibility that Allie was finding her daily bread in the Underground that sent Neal on his daily tour of purgatory. It brought to mind a sermon he’d once heard when the priest really got cooking on hell, about how it was a place where murderers, thieves, and lechers baked in perpetual, torturous stench. At the time, that had sounded like the West Side Democratic Club’s steam room when all the Ryan brothers were in it. But now, he knew differently. Neal, who had been raised on New York’s subway, had never felt anything like London’s Underground.

Steamy didn’t quite describe it. Neither did grimy or any of the other dwarfs. It was killer heat. Godlike heat. All-pervasive heat that denied even the possibility of the existence of cool. Still and sullen heat. As if the air itself were heat. As if a cool breeze was just a memory of something that once was but would never be again.

Not that there was any room to breathe even if there had been something resembling oxygen. The horrific crowding on the cars began to break down even the fabled English stoicism. Stiff upper lips wilted. And that was when the train was moving. When it got stuck between stations, as it frequently did, and a polite announcement came over the PA system, the crowd responded with a single groan. People dropped their heads and stared at their feet and watched their sweat drip on their shoes. Then the train would jerk forward again, the movement providing no relief except the knowledge that the end of the ordeal was a bit closer.

Except for Neal, who wasn’t riding to get anywhere, and who wasn’t getting anywhere riding, either. Allie wasn’t on the Underground. No cool breeze, no Allie. Six weeks left.

Like aging women, cities are prettier at night. The softer light shades the insults of aging. Darkness fades the lines and wrinkles that every good woman and every good city wear on their faces as signs that somebody has lived there.

If life in the city seems impossible in the daytime, at night it is irresistible. The night is for playing. For dining and dancing, for flirting and fucking. For making eyes and making love. The feet step a little lighter, and the blood flows a little faster, and the eyes race to the flash of neon blues and reds and ambers set off by the silky soft black of night.

People do things at night they wouldn’t dream of by day. They see things differently. What was harsh becomes soft. Sordid becomes colorful. Whores become courtesans; hookers are ladies of the evening. Light reflects prettily off the broken bottles in the gutters. Everyone has a bit of the devil in them at night. There’ll be time to deal with God in the morning.

The barkers stood in Soho doorways proclaiming the virtues of nude, absolutely nude, dancers inside. But not one of the dancers was Allie. And the bouncers guarded the gates to the flashy discos, beckoning the pretty and the well-dressed and the hip and turning away the rest. But none of the blessed or the cursed were Allie. And waiters served food and drink to the stylish after-theater couples and parties who mobbed the West End pubs and cafes after the curtains had rung down. But Allie was not to be found among the servers or the served.

Back on the square, Neal watched the phone box, and every once in a while he would ring the number to see who, if anybody, answered. But it was never Allie or her dealer. And Neal kept watching; only at night, he watched more carefully. He never sat still for long at night, when the scent of a solitary, sedentary stranger would waft its way to the delicate senses of the larger predators who prowled the night.

Neal knew that the night, like most pretty things, was dangerous. The money stakes were higher, for one thing, which brought the more serious players out. And too many of them were fueled by booze and drugs, which lent an ugly air of the unpredictable and Neal hated the unpredictable.

So Neal patrolled the area, but he kept to the shadows, using corners and doorways, buying snacks at street-side windows, fading to the back of small knots of people as they checked out movie times, disco signs, and buskers. He used all the shading and masking and other subtle shit that Graham had taught him, and he didn’t trust to the “cover of darkness.” Darkness covered everybody.

“Everybody” was the hard core. The ponces checked their ladies and the dealers checked their turf. And the thugs worked the porn trade and the bodybuilders looked for poofters to roll. And the gangs were dangerous, looking for an excuse to fight. And the schizoids were worse, because they didn’t need an excuse, just the ever-present jangle of the voices in their heads. And they were all out there.

Except Allie. Except her dealer. They were nowhere.

Five weeks.

That’s how it went for a month. Neal was left with his slim lead and a bunch of maybes. Maybe the dealer had fucked up and was in the slammer. Maybe he hadn’t paid his fees and was in the river. Maybe he’d decided on a career change and had taken up actuarial science. Maybe Allie had been with him that one night and that was it. Maybe all this was futile.

So Neal would sit in his room in the small hours of the morning and choke down his carton of Chinese take-away, wash it down with two warm room-service beers, and make his check-in call to Graham. Ask if he should call it quits and come home. Get told no. Bitch about it for a minute and hang up. Take a bath to try to wash off the day’s accumulation of sweat and sleaze. Never quite manage it.