The Snowfly (15 page)

“Who?”

“Benita Hamill. She was born there, educated in the States. Boston College and Columbia. Smart as they come and she's one of them. She's as ruthless as Churchill and writes like Keats,” he said. “She's also my daughter,” he added. “I met her mother during the Blitz. We never married, but I made sure my kid got taken care of.” He looked at me and wagged a stubby finger. “She belongs over there and you belong here. This isn't nepotism, it's professional judgment.”

“Yetter said he didn't want me to become a blood junkie.”

Daly's shoulders sagged. “I put that idea in his head.”

“Why?”

“Because that's what Yetter is and I knew it would hit home.” Daly looked over at me again. “Don't misread this, Rhodes. I want you here. My daughter got the job only because I wanted you.”

“Should I feel grateful?”

He cleared his throat. “I don't give a shit how you feel. I just want you to know how it is.”

I appreciated Daly's forthrightness. After Del Puffit, he would be fresh air in my working life. Besides, this might be an easy tour of duty and I had personal business here. At this point my interest was more in the line of the mystery, but in the back of my mind I knew that once it was solved, I wanted to fish the snowfly hatch—if such a thing existed. Why else would I go to all this trouble?

“You were here during the Blitz?” I asked Daly.

“Came over in '39 and pretty much been here ever since.”

“Do you know much about the codebreaking effort during the war?”

Daly smiled. “No, but I know somebody who knows all there is to know about that stuff. Why?”

“Something I scraped against in Vietnam,” I lied. I was thinking about Vijver-Key. They said they could write codes. Had anybody believed them? “Can you arrange an introduction?”

“I can try,” Daly said, pulling into a parking lot. “Here's home, Rhodes.”

We left the car in a lot with a female attendant in a black uniform and walked down Fleet Street, home to most of Britain's major newspapers. About halfway down Middle Temple Lane we turned left into Wine Office Court. The building housing UPI's offices was an old structure, four stories high with a nondescript entrance and no signage to indicate who or what might be inside. We trudged up narrow, dark stone stairs, worn in the middle by what I imagined to be centuries of foot traffic.

“Expensive real estate,” Daly said as he huffed and puffed. “But it's owned by an old broad who worked for us during the war and she leases it to us for next to nothing. Brits are loyal. Remember that.”

I liked the building.

The offices were on the top floor. They were small and cramped with high ceilings and a heating system that clanged and coughed and hissed like a living thing. There was a small garden on the roof where we could take tea, “when it isn't raining or the soot won't choke you, which is about a half-dozen times a year,” Daly said.

There was a receptionist sitting behind a low barrier, holding court over an ancient switchboard with all sorts of colored wires. She smiled dutifully at us. “This is Dolly,” my new boss said. “Do what she says if you want to be linked to the outside world. In fact, just do what she says,” he added.

The floors of the office were filthy, caked with grease and dirt, the air heavy with stale smoke.

The bureau chief's office was small, the same size as the others, and across a narrow hall from the tearoom. “Elevenses,” he said with a nod toward the other room. “Whole fucking country stops at eleven a.m. to have its tea. Dolly makes it every day.” He seemed amused by this.

I saw no photography equipment and no lab. “Do we have photographers?”

“Not on staff. The company's got most of its resources elsewhere. We hire local talent as we need it, fly somebody in, or use some of the crap Fleet Street shoots. It's cheaper this way. The local talent can hack it, but make sure you plan ahead. Talk to Dolly. She has the list.”

I nodded agreement and took out a notebook and began to make notes.

“Dolly's booked a flat for you.” He looked at me. “It'll get you started and we'll pick up the rent. You don't like it, you're free to find something on your own. If what you want costs more, you pay the difference. Dolly has the key.”

“Fair enough.”

“The bureau owns four cars,” Daly went on. “The one we were in is mine. The other three are up for grabs as you need them.”

I said, “Talk to Dolly?”

He grunted. “You're catching on. She'll help you work out a driver's license. We've got a deal where we can drive on our American licenses and not have to go through red tape for the locals, but let her handle it.”

He took me to an office at the end of the hallway. It was crammed with boxes and piles of curling yellow dog paper. There was a Royal upright typewriter that had lost a corner support and listed. The room seemed cold and I must have shivered.

“We call this the Fridge,” he said. “Low man on the totem, Rhodes. No choice. Good incentive to be out in the street doing your job.”

I pecked at a couple of keys on the Royal. It worked fine.

“Staffers are all out working,” he said. “You can meet them later. Dolly's already put out a note telling everyone you're on board.” Office assignment made, Daly camped me in front of Dolly's station and left us alone.

“Cuppa?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked, carefully enunciating each word.

I laughed. “That would be great.”

“Follow me,” she said.

Dolly Aster was a tall, big-boned woman with a leonine head and a huge mane of hair. She wore a short skirt, loose blouse, and satin vest festooned with rhinestones. She was married to a London cop, a detective. She had been with UPI for more than twenty years and was proud of it. She gave me Earl Grey tea and explained that this was the only proper English tea; she had no use for the fruit-flavored “concoctions” that were beginning to emerge on the market.

“Your flat is clean,” she said. “I've seen to that. Wouldn't do to have you in filth. You get enough of that in your work. I expect conditions here to be a bit better than your last assignment.” Daly had obviously told her something about my past.

She gave me a list of the other UPI reporters, their addresses and phone numbers, and the key to my flat with directions for finding it, including a city map she had carefully and precisely marked.

I thanked her for everything and she assured me I could call her at any time and that I should bother Daly only when circumstances were “dire.”

“You're in charge around here.” I meant it as a compliment.

Dolly stiffened. “Mister Daly is the regimental commander. I am merely the regiment's sergeant major.”

“But sergeants actually run the armies of the world,” I said. She rewarded me with a smile.

I walked to my apartment, which was on Rupert Street in Soho. UPI's offices were in Holborn and to get to Soho I had to traverse the Covent Garden district. Soho had once been open fields and home to foxes, which royalty chased on horseback. Later I learned that the name came from an old hunting call,
So-ho!
Now the area was a crowded jumble of old buildings in every imaginable architectural style and people sardined into small flats above seedy commercial establishments. There were bright new signs and old faded ones for cafés and pubs and nightspots, and the streets were filled with hawkers and buskers and hippies and young people decked out in electric colors. London's Chinatown was one block away from my place, on Gerrard Street. The bustle and noise of Soho reminded me of Saigon, without the threat of somebody tossing a grenade in my face.

My flat was small: a kitchenette, an ancient bathroom with a huge claw-footed tub, a small bedroom, and a living area with a fireplace that no longer worked. The wallpaper was clean but peeling and there were a few threadbare throw rugs on a worn parquet floor. The place was furnished with an eclectic collection of items, including a huge painting on one wall of five naked women making love, twisted into various positions so that the shape of the bodies formed a star. The predominant colors were red and peach; the figures were cartoonish. None of the women had a right breast.

My telephone was already connected, attesting to Dolly's efficiency.

Not remembering that London was five hours ahead of New York, I called Danny's home number in New York and got no answer. Then I called the New York City Public Library. She was out to lunch, but I left a message for her with my new phone numbers.

I did not have many possessions to unpack. A few clothes, a fly rod, some fly boxes, some books, a well-worn fishing vest, and a small net.

Nolan's Pub was a few doors from the flat. I stood at the bar and had a pint of bitters and fish-and-chips served in a newspaper funnel. People were friendly but left me alone and after four pints, I returned to my new home and fell into deep sleep, wondering what lay ahead.

 

•••

 

As a reporter you learn that, more often than not, you get the nexus of an idea for a story, then have to scratch and excavate for facts to flesh it out; sometimes, though, a story lands in your lap and leaves you anxious and suspicious. About a week after I began work in London, I had an unannounced visitor. I had arrived at the office early and was alone except for Dolly, who seemed to be there at all hours. I was ensconced in my office reading one of the morning papers when Dolly suddenly appeared in my doorway, looking exasperated and perturbed, but before she could say anything she was pushed aside by a tall gaunt man with a ruddy face and a disabled left hand that curled like a claw.

“Rhodes?” the stranger said curtly. “Christian Shelldrake here.” He showed no inclination to shake hands and offered no immediate explanation of what he wanted or who he represented.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“I daresay that determination will be made forthwith,” he said.

His officious tone grated at me. “Who are you with?” I inquired.

“Affiliations are less important than the individual,” my strange visitor said with a wince, and sat down. He had intense, darting gray eyes and sat tentatively on the edge of his chair as if he might have to spring away at any moment. “Let me be direct,” he added. To save his time more than mine, I thought. “I know that you served in Southeast Asia and I presume you are familiar with flutes.”

“The musical instruments?”

Shelldrake sucked in his breath with an agitated hiss and flashed an anguished look. “You are reputed, Mr. Rhodes, perhaps erroneously, to possess a high level of intelligence. If I sought a fool, I would visit Fleet Street.”

“I'm sorry, Shelldrake. I didn't mean to make a joke at your expense, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Should I?”

I sensed his veneer of formality was no more than a flimsy firewall against violence. I had met similar characters in Vietnam.

Shelldrake studied me the way a predator examines its next meal. “I refer to baton rounds, used for crowd control, most recently employed in the nationalistic disorders in Hong Kong.”

“Baton rounds,” I repeated to let him know I was listening. This was a new term to me.

“Yes, teak the length of a man's member and weighted with a metal core. Some call them flutes because the rounds are more or less rifled, but they are also more crassly known as Flying Rogers.”

I decided to be as direct as my unannounced visitor. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Everything,” Shelldrake said. “Perhaps. It depends on your critical abilities.
They
obviously cannot employ flutes against their own people. The Chinese, even in Hong Kong, are one thing, but against white Englishmen? Unthinkable. It would be political suicide, you see?”

“ ‘They'?”

“The Home Office, the government. I would say Her Royal Majesty's government, but the monarchy is a sham, inbred show dogs lacking claws, morals, teeth, or backbones.”

Shelldrake was certainly free in sharing his opinions.

“The baton device is bad?”

“It is quite lethal at close range and entirely indiscriminate and inaccurate at any distance. Fired into the pavement, the wooden shell and metal cores break up and spray pieces around like shrapnel.”

GIs in Vietnam fired their M-16s into roads and hardscrabble dirt to achieve the same effect. Military experts called the practice multiplying firepower. “Why are you here, Mister Shelldrake?”

“You are reputedly a politically sensitive man, Rhodes, apparently that unique journalist with ethics, which in this country is as rare as a royal with a brain. I read a cutting of your story on the racist experiments with wounded black soldiers on your government's hospital ship, the
Snow.
I reiterate, these heinous weapons are not intended for use on
white
Englishmen, but they will be employed without conscience on the coloreds flocking to Great Britain and no doubt will find extensive use in the colonies as well.”

“Governments decide how to handle such problems.”

“Do you trust
your
government to take such decisions honorably and correctly?”

I immediately recalled that night in Lansing when cops were issued brand-new ax handles from gleaming garbage cans. I also recalled the summer of 1967, during my first year in Vietnam, when American cities errupted in race riots that led to dozens of fatalities, mass arrests, and untold damage to private and public property. It had been strange to be covering a war and reading about violence back home.

I did not trust any government, including my own. “You want to speak out publicly?”

Shelldrake glared at me. “I want the issue thoroughly and properly aired before these weapons are employed. For very good reasons, my identity must be protected.”