Bloody London (29 page)

“You do that, I can't help you. You carry a gun, you put yourself in real jeopardy here in London, OK?”

“Yes,” I said and he put his foot on the pedal and disappeared.

I didn't wait for Jack Cotton the next day when I barged into the renovated warehouse where Frye had his office. Jack had other business and I didn't want him knowing I had a gun in my pocket.

A brass plate on the wall of Frye's warehouse was engraved with the words “Charity begins at
HOME
”. There was an outline of Warren Pascoe's begging hands. The building in an area named Rotherhithe consisted of two warehouses joined by a courtyard with a view of the river. It wasn't far from Warren Pascoe's studio and the pub where I had eaten lunch the day before. Over the front door were security cameras.

The lobby was designed to play off the Victorian warehouse it had been: high ceilings, wooden pigeonholes on one wall, a long front desk, a corrugated tin roof overhead where you could hear the rain. The receptionist behind the desk was probably seventy and volunteered her name. Ida Pink, she said and told me to wait, then returned to her main occupation which was egging on a black handyman. He was on his knees,
cutting with a pocket knife the frayed cord on a battered electric heater.

Somewhere through a sound system Sting was singing “An Englishman in New York”.

Princess Diana in Capri pants and a land-mine shield inspecting a blasted hut with Phillip Frye. Crippled kids shaking hands with Phillip Frye. Frye with Nelson Mandela. Jimmy Carter in a hardhat with a hammer on a building site, putting up a house, and next to him Phillip Frye. The waiting room at home, Frye's organization, was a shrine to Phil Frye, the stuff of a self-made saint, an icon of do-good, a right-on guy who believed he could save the world. No wonder he had a grip on Lily she couldn't shake.

I looked at the wall again: Frye was pictured at Paul Newman's cancer camp where he apparently donated housing materials. There wasn't anyone or any place on the planet where Philly Frye didn't help out, not when it came to housing, not when it came to shelters.

Phillip Frye and Thomas Pascoe. A perfect pair. Maybe I was just feeling sour, seeing as how Frye knew Lily a lot longer and better than I ever did; maybe I was just pissed off about that.

“Keith and Mick over there,” said Ida Pink. “Gimme shelter, you know,” she said. “You can sit down if you want.”

I ignored Ida and headed up a flight of stairs. At the top of it, in a large square room with windows that looked out on to the central courtyard were four women. They sat, all of them, in front of computers, with phones in their hands, all chattering in the phones
and at each other like birds that landed on the same branch and enjoyed the company. Punching keyboards, drinking coffee, two of them smoking. They were in their twenties. Dressed in black. All of them pretty, a black woman in corn-rows with colored beads that jiggled, an Asian with long hair, two white girls with studs in their tongues and commas of hair over their eyes. Who was it who said age and treachery sure beats youth and exuberance?

In that room, where the walls were covered with bright posters advertising
HOME
, there was so much youth and exuberance that all I wanted was a Scotch.

A couple of doors led off the room, and one swung open now. A tall woman with a big ambitious mouth and a short leather skirt strode through it and looked me over. She introduced herself. Prudence Vane, she said. In charge of PR, she added. I asked her where Frye was. She nodded toward the other door and when I opened it and stuck my head in, I saw Phillip Frye. He was on the phone.

Frye lifted off from his chair, but kept on talking, the phone under his chin. He shook my hand with the regular guy shake of a rugby player. I remembered that about him, the one time we had met. He gestured to a chair.

I'd met Frye once, at a party on Long Island. He worked in New York for a while; he ran a publishing company. He had a long ruddy face with a high forehead and curly brown hair that was turning gray. The hair was too long, the face was cheerful and closed.

He had Thomas Pascoe's forehead and nose, but
Pascoe's was an international British face – the silver hair, the polished look. Frye's face was old fashioned and secretive. Now he put the receiver back on the phone and shook my hand for the second time.

“Artie Cohen, isn't it? Good to see you again. We met in East Hampton, didn't we? Yes, I was still in New York then, I do remember, of course. Coffee?”

The Asian girl appeared with a tray and two mugs. The coffee was lukewarm. The instant brew had been made under a tap and undissolved crystals floated on the milky surface. I put the mug on Phil's desk. He didn't mention Lily. Neither did I.

The three windows in Frye's office looked on to the river. Inside, the room was jammed with books, floor to ceiling, and there was promotional material on every surface.

Modern leather chairs were heaped with posters, brochures, boxes. The tables held tangled computer gear and empty coffee cups. Under the windows was some kind of plastic tent about ten feet long, six feet high, and Frye, following my gaze, ambled over to show it off. His socks didn't match. His shoes were brown and suede. I felt better.

“Come and look at this. This is going to change the world, actually. It's the Life Bubble. It's a portable living space for the homeless, or refugees. It's insulated like a thermos, warm in winter, cool in hot climates. You can hook it up and filter clean air in environmental emergencies. It folds up flat, it weighs only a few pounds, it fits in a backpack, it's cheap to make, it's weather resistant. It's quite brilliant, don't you think so?” Behind
the little round glasses with steel rims, his eyes shone like a convert.

Frye, who wore a pin-striped suit with bell-bottom pants and a nylon velvet shirt, foraged in a box on the floor, pulled out a green bottle of white wine, opened it and poured some in two sticky glasses he found on his desk.

He offered one to me, the phone rang again, he picked it up, talking, pacing, flexing his hands back and forth. He was charged up like someone stuck him into a socket. He talked beautiful English, though, rippling, elegant, lustrous; he talked it in whole paragraphs, like a talking book. He finished the call, and said, “I'm sorry,” picked up the glass and drank the wine.

“Look,” he said, as if he had finally clocked my presence. “Maybe you can help me. Someone's stealing from this office, blueprints for projects, my personal notes, address books. Stealing donors' names. You've no idea how difficult it all is these days, people moving on to your turf.”

“Turf?”

“There are some of my contributors, if they think their names have been sold on, will leave me, and God knows there are plenty of other charities with their hands out.” He looked at me. “But you're not interested in a minor theft, are you? I've got the wrong policeman.” He laughed. “You haven't come over from New York to help me track down an address book, have you, Artie? What can I really do for you?”

I said, “Tell me about your relationship with Thomas Pascoe. Uncle Tommy, wasn't it?” I shoved a pile of
books on the floor and sat on a leather chair. There was a full pack of cigarettes in my jacket.

“He gave us money.”

“For this bubble thing?”

“Yes. Can we walk if you're going to smoke? I want some air,” he said.

“It's raining.”

“I don't care.”

“I care.”

He shoved open the window.

I stubbed the smoke out in the wine glass.

Frye said, “I put Tommy Pascoe on my board.”

“He came to the meetings. Here? In London?”

“Yes. Always. It made him feel important. And he was quite useful, but I had to keep it quiet.”

“Why's that?”

“Some of my more left-wing members didn't approve of Uncle Tommy.”

“But he had the dough.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“You were named in the will, I heard.” I wasn't sure, not until I said it, I was trying it out. But Frye nodded, and I thought: Bingo!

“Yes, I was. Thank God. We need the money. I just hope to Christ it doesn't take too long to expedite.” Frye pulled a jacket off a hook and said, “Come on. I'll show you something interesting and you can smoke all you like.”

I followed him through the room full of young women, who all looked up hopefully when he passed, then out the door. We walked two blocks to a derelict
stretch of riverfront. Planks were set across the puddles. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but the wind howled. Frye didn't seem to notice.

I said again, “So you profited by Uncle Tommy's death.”

“Then he died for a cause. He'd have liked that.”

“How much?”

“That's none of your business.”

“Come on, Philly, what's the harm? I mean, you'd like to know who killed Uncle Tommy, wouldn't you?”

“I understood they'd arrested someone in New York.”

“You wouldn't want to see some homeless bastard take the whole rap would you? I thought you were king of help the homeless.”

“What's that got to do with it? I let Tommy work with me because it suited us both. He was enlarged by it. He showed me how to work the money – we are a global organization – and it's in New York where people know how to give properly. He showed me how to – what's the ghastly American term? – how to grow it.”

“Names? He gave you names?”

“Yes.”

“Rich assholes you could rip off?”

“We don't rip them off. They contribute.”

“Russians?”

He looked up. “Some. I suppose there are some. What difference does it make?”

“Is Eddie Kievsky one of them?”

For less than a second Frye hesitated, then he said, “Why the fuck in all the world should I give you my names, my people? I'm not going to do that.”

“Why is because I'm wondering if you leaned on Tommy Pascoe to introduce you to people who gave you money and that it went wrong with the Russians. If you don't help me, I'll get the word out, which will make you real unpopular, OK? So do this thing for me, Philly,” I said.

He was impervious. His face remained smooth. Getting at Frye was like punching jello. You put your fist in and broke the surface, it jiggled back, bland and gelatinous.

He stopped suddenly in front of a run-down building. There was scaffolding on it. The door was painted blue. Half a dozen bikes were hitched to a metal rack out front. From inside came the noise of hammering.

The hallway was an inch deep in water. There was a hole in one of the walls. Frye walked into a puddle and started yelling for someone.

A guy, his pants falling down past the crack in his ass, a yellow hardhat perched high on his head, appeared. He dragged a cigarette out of his mouth, flipped it into the puddle where Frye stood and said, “This ain't gonna work, guv. This place is under the water line. This part of the old docks is marshy, it's shit, I can't do nothing with it.”

Frye looked at him and said briefly, “Yes, you can.”

I said, “What is this place?”

“One of my shelters,” he said. “The Americans
worked it out first. You've got to privatize the shelters to make them work. That's precisely what I'm doing here. That's why I needed Tommy's money.”

Frye led me through a series of rooms, some with rows of beds, the mattresses folded back over themselves. In a kitchen area, about a dozen men sat gloomily around a table. A black and white TV played in the corner.

“Someone has to do it.” Frye nodded at the men. “We've already got people here and we're not open. There's a tremendous overload on the system. I've got six more shelters in the works.”

I looked at the guys at the table. They were a forlorn group, ragged, lonely men huddled together in the cavernous space drinking out of thick mugs. Water dripped through the old warehouse ceiling.

“Yeah well, Phil, I wouldn't call this home exactly,” but he said, “You're wrong. You're just wrong.”

Without any warning, one of the men at the table got up. You could smell the stink. He ran at Frye and stuck his fist in Frye's face. His hand was like a skeleton, he was so thin.

Frye made for the door. The man followed him, and the three of us stood in the doorway, half in, half out, fetid water swirling around our feet. The rain was heavy now. The man punched Frye's arm. He was almost incoherent but I caught the drift: how much he hated the shelter, why he was transferred from a place he liked closer to town. He had a cleft palate and when he screamed, the noise came out of a hole in the middle of his face. But he was too weak and the effort made
him crumple. He fell down. Two guys dragged him away.

“Poor bugger,” Frye said.

“He didn't like this shelter. You have a hierarchy? Who gets the best beds.”

“Something like that. He's a dead man. He could be dead tonight. Liver disease. Brain tumor.”

We went back to Frye's office, where he pulled a bottle of Scotch out of a drawer and poured it into the wine glasses.

I said, “Frankie Pascoe was happy with it, that Tommy left you so much dough, that he put you in the will?”

“I don't know.” Frye shrugged. “I don't actually care much. Frankie was a silly, spoiled woman. Besides, she had plenty of her own. The money was for this.” His gesture included his whole empire. “It was for all this, and more, it wasn't for me.”

“What's more?”

“The shelter I showed you. Other shelters all over town.”

“On the river here?”

“Yes. Abroad too. Wherever we're needed.”

“Thomas Pascoe's dead, so is Frankie, but you're not really interested. I wonder who gets her money? I wonder who gets the apartment?”

Frye looked at his watch. “I'm late,” he said.

The phone started ringing again. He took it off the hook and listened.