Mona Lisa Overdrive

29 - Winter Journey

Petal had agreed, finally, but only after she'd suggested phoning her father for permission. That had sent him shuffling unhappily off in search of Swain, and when he'd returned, looking no happier, the answer had been yes. Bundled in several layers of her warmest clothing, she stood in the white-painted foyer, studying the hunting prints while Petal lectured the red-faced man, whose name was Dick, behind closed doors. She couldn't distinguish individual words, only a low torrent of admonition. The Maas-Neotek unit was in her pocket, but she avoided touching it. Twice already Colin had tried to dissuade her.

Now Dick emerged from Petal's lecture with his hard little mouth set in a smile. Under his tight black suit he wore a pink cashmere turtleneck and a thin gray lambswool cardigan. His black hair was plastered tightly back against his skull; his pale cheeks were shadowed by a few hours' growth of beard. She palmed the unit in her pocket. " 'Lo," Dick said, looking her up and down. "Where shall we go for our walk?"

"Portobello Road," Colin said, slouched against the wall beside the crowded coatrack. Dick took a dark overcoat from the rack, reaching through Colin to do it, put it on, and buttoned it. He pulled on a bulky pair of black leather gloves.

"Portobello Road," Kumiko said, releasing the unit.

"How long have you worked for Mr. Swain?" she asked, as they made their way along the icy pavement of the crescent.

"Long enough," he replied. "Mind you don't slip. Wicked heels on those boots ... "

Kumiko tottered along beside him on black French patent spikes. As she'd predicted, it was virtually impossible to navigate the glass-hard rippled patches of ice in these boots. She took his hand for support; doing this, she felt solid metal across his palm. The gloves were weighted, the fingers reinforced with carbon mesh.

He was silent, as they turned the sidestreet at the end of the crescent, but when they reached Portobello Road, he paused. "Excuse me, miss," he said, a note of hesitation in his voice, "but is it true, what the boys say?"

"Boys? Excuse me?"

"Swain's boys, his regulars. That you're the big fellow's daughter -- the big fellow back in Tokyo?"

"I'm sorry," she said, "I don't understand."

"Yanaka. Your name's Yanaka?"

"Kumiko Yanaka, yes ... "

He peered at her with intense curiosity. Then worry crossed his face and he glanced carefully around. "Lord," he said, "must be true ... " His squat, tightly buttoned body was taut and alert. "Guvnor said you wanted to shop?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Where shall I take you?"

"Here," she said, and led him into a narrow arcade lined solidly with British gomi.

Her Shinjuku shopping expeditions served her well with Dick. The techniques she'd devised for torturing her father's secretaries proved just as effective now, as she forced the man to participate in dozens of pointless choices between one Edwardian medallion and another, this or that fragment of stained glass, though she was careful only to choose items, finally, that were fragile or very heavy, awkward to carry, and extremely expensive. A cheerful bilingual shop assistant accessed an eighty-thousand-pound charge against Kumiko's MitsuBank chip. Kumiko slipped her hand into the pocket that held the Mass-Neotek unit. "Exquisite," the English girl said in Japanese, as she wrapped Kumiko's purchase, an ormolu vase encrusted with griffins.

"Hideous," Colin commented, in Japanese. "An imitation as well." He reclined on a Victorian horsehair sofa, his boots up on an art deco cocktail stand supported by airstream aluminum angels.

The shop assistant added the wrapped vase to Dick's burden. This was Dick's eleventh antique shop and Kumiko's eighth purchase.

"I think you'd better make your move," Colin advised. "Any moment now, our Dick will buzz Swain's for a car to take that lot home."

"Think this is it, then?" Dick asked hopefully, over Kumiko's purchases.

"One more shop, please." Kumiko smiled.

"Right," he said grimly. As he was following her out the door, she drove the heel of her left boot into a gap in the pavement she'd noticed on her way in. "You all right?" he asked, seeing her stumble.

"I've broken the heel of my boot ... " She hobbled back into the shop and sat down beside Colin on the horsehair sofa. The assistant came fussing up to help.

"Get 'em off quick," Colin advised, "before Dickie puts his parcels down."

She unzipped the boot with the broken heel, then the other, pulled off both. In place of the coarse Chinese silk she usually wore in winter, her feet were sheathed in thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged plastic soles. She nearly ran between Dick's legs as she cleared the door, but instead her shoulder struck his thigh as she squeezed past, toppling him into a display of faceted crystal decanters.

And then she was free, plunging through the press of tourists down Portobello Road.

Her feet were very cold, but the ridged plastic soles provided excellent traction -- though not on ice, she reminded herself, picking herself up from her second spill, wet grit against her palms. Colin had directed her down this narrow passage of blackened brick ...

She grasped the unit. "Where next?"

"This way," he said.

"I want the Rose and Crown," she reminded him.

"You want to be careful. Dickie'll have Swain's men here by now, not to mention the sort of hunt that friend of Swain's from Special Branch could mount if he's asked to. And I can't imagine why he shouldn't be asked to ... "

She entered the Rose and Crown by a side door, Colin at her elbow, grateful for the snug gloom and irradiating warmth that seemed central to the idea of these drinking-burrows. She was struck by the amount of padding on the walls and seats, by the muffling curtains. If the colors and fabrics had been less dingy, the effect would somehow have been less warm. Pubs, she guessed, were an extreme expression of the British attitude toward gomi.

At Colin's urging, she made her way through the drinkers clustered in front of the bar, hoping to find Tick.

"What'll it be, dear?"

She looked up into the broad blond face behind the bar, bright lipstick and rouged cheeks. "Excuse me," Kumiko began, "I wish to speak with Mr. Bevan -- "

"Mine's a pint, Alice," someone said, slapping down three ten-pound coins, "lager." Alice worked a tall white ceramic lever, filling a mug with pale beer. She put the mug on the scarred bar and swept the money into a rattling till behind the counter.

"Someone wanting a word, Bevan," Alice said, as the man lifted his pint.

Kumiko looked up at a flushed, seamed face. The man's upper lip was short; Kumiko thought of rabbits, though Bevan was large, nearly as large as Petal. He had a rabbit's eyes as well: round, brown, showing very little white. "With me?" His accent reminded her of Tick's.

"Tell him yes," Colin said. "He can't think why a little Jap girl in rubber socks has come into the drinker looking for him."

"I wish to find Tick."

Bevan regarded her neutrally over the rim of his raised pint. "Sorry," he said, "can't say I know anyone by the name." He drank.

"Sally told me I should find you if Tick wasn't here. Sally Shears ... "

Bevan choked on his lager, his eyes showing a fraction of white. Coughing, he set the mug on the bar and took a handkerchief from his overcoat pocket. He blew his nose and wiped his mouth.

"I'm on duty in five," he said. "Best step in the back."

Alice raised a hinged section of the bar; Bevan ushered Kumiko through with small flapping motions of his large hands, glancing quickly over his shoulder. He guided her down a narrow passage that opened off the area behind the bar. The walls were brick, old and uneven, thickly coated with dirty green paint. He stopped beside a battered steel hamper heaped with terry bar towels that reeked of beer.

"You'll regret it if you're on a con, girl," he said. "Tell me why you're looking for this Tick."

"Sally is in danger. I must find Tick. I must tell him."

"Fucking hell," the barman said. "Put yourself in my position ... "

Colin wrinkled his nose at the hamper of sodden towels.

"Yes?" Kumiko said.

"If you're a nark, and I sent you to find this Tick fellow, assuming I did know him, and he's on some sort of blag, then he'd do for me, wouldn't he? But if you're not, then this Sally, she'd likely do for me if I don't, understand?"

Kumiko nodded. " 'Between the rock and the hard place.' " It was an idiom Sally had used; Kumiko found it very poetic.

"Quite," Bevan said, giving her an odd look.

"Help me. She is in very great danger."

He ran his palm back across thinning ginger-colored hair.

"You will help me," she heard herself say, feeling her mother's cold mask click into place, "Tell me where to find Tick."

The barman seemed to shiver, though it was overly warm in the passageway, a steamy warmth, beer smell mingling with raw notes of disinfectant. "D'you know London?"

Colin winked at her. "I can find my way," she said.

"Bevan," Alice said, putting her head around the corner, "the filth."

"Police," Colin translated.

"Margate Road, SW2," Bevan said, "dunno the number, dunno his phone."

"Let him show you out the back now," Colin said. "Those are no ordinary policemen."

Kumiko would always remember her endless ride through the city's Underground. How Colin led her from the Rose and Crown to Holland Park, and down, explaining that her MitsuBank chip was worse than useless now; if she used it for a cab, or any sort of purchase, he said, some Special Branch operator would see the transaction flare like magnesium on the grid of cyberspace. But she had to find Tick, she told him; she had to find Margate Road. He frowned No, he said wait till dark; Brixton wasn't far, but the streets were too dangerous now, by daylight, with the police on Swain's side. But where could she hide? she asked. She had very little cash; the concept of currency, of coins and paper notes, was quaint and alien.

Here, he said, as she rode a lift down into Holland Park. "For the price of a ticket."

The bulgy silver shapes of the trains.

The soft old seats in gray and green.

And warm, beautifully warm; another burrow, here in the realm of ceaseless movement ...