Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things - Short Fictions and Wonders

I had someone who didn’t know me pawn the wallet. I bought it from the pawnshop when it wasn’t redeemed. Nice clean trail. There’s many a smart man who’s been brought down by a keepsake. Sometimes I wonder if I killed my father that day, as well as my grandfather. I don’t expect he’d have told me, even if I’d asked. And it doesn’t really matter, does it?

After that I went to work full-time for Mr. Alice. I ran the Sri Lanka end of things for a couple of years, then spent a year in Bogota on import-export, working as a glorified travel agent. I came back home to London as soon as I could. For the last fifteen years I’ve been working mainly as a troubleshooter, and as a smoother-over of problem areas. Troubleshooter. That’s rich.

Like I said, it takes real money to make sure nobody’s ever heard of you. None of that Rupert Murdoch cap-in-hand-to-the-merchant-bankers rubbish. You’ll never see Mr. Alice in a glossy magazine, showing a photographer around his glossy new house.

Outside of business, Mr. Alice’s main interest is sex, which is why I was standing outside Earl’s Court station with forty million U.S. dollars’ worth of blue-white diamonds in the inside pockets of my macintosh. Specifically, and to be exact, Mr. Alice’s interest in sex is confined to relations with attractive young men. Now don’t get me wrong, here: I don’t want you thinking Mr. Alice is some kind of woofter. He’s not a nancy or anything. He’s a proper man, Mr. Alice. He’s just a proper man who likes to fuck other men, that’s all. Takes all sorts to make a world, I say, and leaves a lot more of what I like for me. Like at restaurants, where everyone gets to order something different from the menu. Chacun a son gout, if you’ll pardon my French. So everybody’s happy.

This was a couple of years ago, in July. I remember that I was standing in the Earls Court Road, in Earls Court, looking up at the Earl’s Court Tube Station sign and wondering why the apostrophe was there in the station when it wasn’t in the place, and then staring at the junkies and the winos who hang around on the pavement, and all the time keeping an eye out for Mr. Alice’s Jag.

I wasn’t worried about having the diamonds in my inside pocket. I don’t look like the sort of bloke who’s got anything you’d want to mug him for, and I can take care of myself. So I stared at the junkies and winos, killing time till the Jag arrived (stuck behind the road works in Kensington High Street, at a guess) and wondering why junkies and winos congregate on the pavement outside Earl’s Court station.

I suppose I can sort of understand the junkies: they’re waiting for a fix. But what the fuck are the winos doing there? Nobody has to slip you a pint of Guinness or a bottle of rubbing alcohol in a plain brown bag. It’s not comfortable, sitting on the paving stones or leaning against the wall. If I were a wino, on a lovely day like this, I decided, I’d go down to the park.

Near me a little Pakistani lad in his late teens or early twenties was papering the inside of a glass phone box with hooker cards-CURVY TRANSSEXUAL and REAL BLONDE NURSE, BUSTY SCHOOLGIRL and STERN TEACHER NEEDS BOY TO DISCIPLINE. He glared at me when he noticed I was watching him. Then he finished up and went on to the next booth.

Mr. Alice’s Jag drew up at the curb and I walked over to it and got in the back. It’s a good car, a couple of years old. Classy, but not something you’d look twice at.

The chauffeur and Mr. Alice sat in the front. Sitting in the backseat with me was a pudgy man with a crew cut and a loud check suit. He made me think of the frustrated fiance in a fifties film; the one who gets dumped for Rock Hudson in the final reel. I nodded at him. He extended his hand, and then, when I didn’t seem to notice, he put it away.

Mr. Alice did not introduce us, which was fine by me, as I knew exactly who the man was. I’d found him, and reeled him in, in fact, although he’d never know that. He was a professor of ancient languages at a North Carolina university. He thought he was on loan to British Intelligence from the U.S. State Department. He thought this, because this was what he had been told by someone at the U.S. State Department. The professor had told his wife that he was presenting a paper to a conference on Hittite studies in London. And there was such a conference. I’d organized it myself.

“Why do you take the bloody tube?” asked Mr. Alice. “It can’t be to save money.”

“I would have thought the fact I’ve been standing on that corner waiting for you for the last twenty minutes demonstrates exactly why I didn’t drive,” I told him. He likes it that I don’t just roll over and wag my tail. I’m a dog with spirit. “The average daytime speed of a vehicle through the streets of Central London has not changed in four hundred years. It’s still under ten miles an hour. If the tubes are running, I’ll take the tube, thanks.”

“You don’t drive in London?” asked the professor in the loud suit. Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics. Let’s call him Macleod.

“I’ll drive at night, when the roads are empty,” I told him. “After midnight. I like driving at night.”

Mr. Alice wound down the window and lit a small cigar. I could not help noticing that his hands were trembling. With anticipation, I guessed.

And we drove through Earls Court, past a hundred tall red-brick houses that claimed to be hotels, a hundred tattier buildings that housed guest-houses and bed-and-breakfasts, down good streets and bad. Sometimes Earls Court reminds me of one of those old women you meet from time to time who’s painfully proper and prissy and prim until she’s got a few drinks into her, when she starts dancing on the tables and telling everybody within earshot about her days as a pretty young thing, sucking cock for money in Australia or Kenya or somewhere.

Actually, that makes it sound like I like the place and, frankly, I don’t. It’s too transient. Things come and go and people come and go too damn fast. I’m not a romantic man, but give me South of the River, or the East End, any day. The East End is a proper place: it’s where things begin, good and bad. It’s the cunt and the arsehole of London; they’re always close together. Whereas Earls Court is-I don’t know what. The body analogy breaks down completely when you get out to there. I think that’s because London is mad. Multiple personality problems. All these little towns and villages that grew and crashed into each other to make one big city, but never forget their old borders.

So the chauffeur pulled up in a road like any other, in front of a high, terraced house that might have been a hotel at one time. A couple of the windows were boarded over. “That’s the house,” said the chauffeur.

“Right,” said Mr. Alice.

The chauffeur walked around the car and opened the door for Mr. Alice. Professor Macleod and I got out on our own. I looked up and down the pavement. Nothing to worry about.

I knocked on the door, and we waited. I nodded and smiled at the spyhole in the door. Mr. Alice’s cheeks were flushed, and he held his hands folded in front of his crotch, to avoid embarrassing himself. Horny old bugger.

Well, I’ve been there, too. We all have. Only Mr. Alice, he can afford to indulge himself.

The way I look at it, some people need love, and some people don’t. I think Mr. Alice is really a bit of a don’t, all things considered. I’m a don’t as well. You learn to recognize the type.

And Mr. Alice is, first and foremost, a connoisseur.

There was a bang from the door, as a bolt was drawn back, and the door was opened by an old woman of what they used to describe as “repulsive aspect.” She was dressed in a baggy black one-piece robe. Her face was wrinkled and pouched. I’ll tell you what she looked like. Did you ever see a picture of one of those cinnamon buns they said looked like Mother Teresa? She looked like that, like a cinnamon roll, with two brown raisin eyes peering out of her cinnamon roll face.