The Loop Page 3

  Because I’d known I was tired, last night, I hadn’t taken any chances on my judgement of what was relevant. I’d taped our conversation, of course, and also made notes of almost everything she said, and most of it was about love, as dull as you’d expect, secondhand. Their eyes had met. Their hands had met. Their minds had met. Then their bodies had met, in the rest-room (her word), and then they’d known, and they’d gone back to their seats and exchanged photographs and talked about their childhoods and past lovers and dreams for the future and whether Jams should wear white at their wedding.

  Then they went back to the rest-room.

  Then they talked some more.

  Then they went back to the rest-room.

  By now I’d have thought the white wedding question was pretty well settled (as far as I was concerned, she’d be lucky to get away with cream) but they’d decided on white because she was a spiritual virgin until they’d met – in her heart she’d always been waiting for him.

  I flicked through the pages of blether looking for some facts. He came from the north of England, near Doncaster, from an ordinary home.

  That’s what she’d said, ‘an ordinary home’. Her words, or his? Foreign to my ear: American English. Probably his, then, as he’d chosen the US for his future, and had presumably started the process of going native. What could he have meant by it? I thought Americans used it as a euphemism for ‘working-class’ or ‘uneducated’. He probably meant ‘not posh’. That’s what I’d have meant, if I’d said it, not that I would because I’ve never come across an ordinary home. All homes are weird. It sounded evasive or defensive or outright untrue.

  I wasn’t going to waste time on it now, but I found a new page in my organizer, headed it Jacob queries, and wrote ?Chicago for 18c Eng Lit and ?ordinary home.

  Back to my interview with the lovebird.

  He was an only child. They were going to call their first child Jacob, if he was a boy, Jacob Stone Jr because by then Jacob Senior would have a teaching job at an American university and they’d make their home in America.

  Would they? A small alarm bell rang in my head. Surely he’d find it hard to get a work permit? The US was getting tighter and tighter on immigration. I added ?work permit to my list.

  Back to the interview again. By now we were on the kind of house they’d live in, but that depended on where he got his job. His choice was New England because he liked snow. In which case they would have a clapboard house. (What was clapboard?) Her choice was Seattle, Washington, in which case they’d have a ranch-style house, because of the weather, preferably overlooking the ocean.

  At that point, tired of dreams, I’d asked Jams if, when she found she was pregnant, she’d considered abortion. She said she hadn’t. Abortion was wrong. The baby was a sacred trust. Any baby was, but particularly Jacob’s.

  I kept flicking through my notes. Ah. His father had died when Jacob was twelve. His mother had died recently – he was returning from her funeral. He’d been deeply upset by his mother’s death. Jams said, because he was such a sensitive caring man.

  I sighed. Everyone was upset when their mother died. Still, she was biased. And I was biased too, because I disliked the word ‘caring’. It was usually used to describe the kind of person who asked you how you were in a sincere voice and didn’t listen to the answer, who would give you only what they wanted you to have and who would be out of the door like a rabbit if you actually asked them for anything difficult. And the people who used it behaved like that themselves.

  I looked at the photograph of Jacob that he’d given her and that she had, reluctantly, given me. It was a graduation photograph, therefore presumably five years old. It showed two people standing in bright sunlight in an ornately carved stone doorway. Jacob wore a dark suit mostly covered by a gown. He was goodlooking in an anonymous way, with smallish features and plenty of dark curly hair under his mortarboard. He was looking straight ahead, his shoulders squared either tensely or in an attempt to look assertive and masculine. The woman beside him, surely his mother, was gazing devotedly up into his face. She was old and plain and seemed not to care. Her thinnish grey hair was centre-parted and plaited unflatteringly close to her lumpy head. She was wearing a black blouse buttoned right up to the neck and at her wrists, a long shapeless black skirt and low-heeled black leather shoes. She had puffy ankles and hands. Her loving smile showed long yellow teeth in a nearly lipless mouth.

  I knew little about him from the photograph, but more about her. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to come between them. If he was the love of Jams’ life, then she was lucky that she hadn’t had to cope with that particular mother-in-law.

  But you couldn’t judge much from a photograph and I was wasting time, because one visit to International House might settle it. There he’d be, perhaps a bit embarrassed, and gobsmacked when he heard he was nearly a father, and there Jams would be with another disastrous end to the briefest of encounters. And there I’d be with three days’ pay for one day’s work.

  I went through the rest of the notes and the only thing that struck me was that he’d said he was close to finding the truth about himself. That was embedded in a lot of detail about the things they’d told each other about themselves, and I’d made myself a promise from the start that I wouldn’t sneer because they were speaking from the heart, and the more one speaks from the heart the sillier, usually, it sounds. Hearts aren’t sophisticated. So I didn’t sneer but I wondered what he meant when he said he was close to finding out the real him. It was in the loop.

  I read my notes again. ‘The real him was in the loop.’

  Q: The loop?

  A: Yes, that’s what he said.

  Q: What did he mean?

  A: I asked him that. He said he’d tell me when he knew, he was just working it out.

  The loop. It meant nothing to me. Except that I’d just seen it written on the map. The Loop was an area of central Chicago. Had he been referring to that?

  I added it to my list of queries. ? The loop.

  Then Barty knocked on the door. Time for breakfast.

  Chapter Five

  Just after nine I was heading south on Lake Shore Drive in my hired Mazda listening to a local country and western station. The weather was forty degrees and clear, as the radio told me repeatedly in between the old-style country songs where victim women bewailed the loss of their men, and new-style country songs where women stood up to their men, kept their self-respect, but lost the men anyway.

  Losing a man wasn’t my present problem. In the short time I’d been in America so far, I’d noticed my pulling-power was appreciably increased, almost as if a huge banner reading ‘tasty piece’ hovered over my head and marked me out from the crowd. The waiter in the coffee-shop, men in the street, and the man in the car-hire office had all looked at me and looked again, interested.

  It was the glut syndrome. I’ve noticed it before. Take one job and you’re offered others: make one friend and more line up: involve yourself in a love affair and other men start sniffing the air. During the last few months with Barty, it had been happening in England, but it was flowering here.

  I stopped for a traffic light, glanced at the driver next to me, and looked away when he smiled. The sky was blue, the clouds were small and puffy, and I was being paid double time. Hallelujah!

  Breakfast had gone well. I’d tried to mend fences: Barty’d responded with his usual deftness, managing to convey simultaneously 1) no fences had been shattered 2) he accepted the apology I wasn’t giving 3) he’d keep out of my hair for the rest of the day. We’d eat about eight.

  Once we’d got that sorted, I’d felt warm enough towards him to tell him about Jams and Jacob. By this time I was on my second cup of coffee – the States has a brilliant system where the waiter keeps topping you up. You don’t even have to catch his eye and you’re not charged extra. Funny really, since the Americans I’d met in England seemed to regard caffeine as a threat to health second only to cigarettes, and way, way
more dangerous than cocaine. Perhaps I moved in the wrong circles.

  ‘So you’re moonlighting,’ Barty’d said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Take care.’

  In pursuit of Jacob I wasn’t taking care. There was no care to take. There was just fun work to look forward to, and a new place, and my whole life. ‘Yes!’ I said, out loud, and nearly missed the exit for Hyde Park, the University of Chicago area.

  The University itself was in a very broad tree-lined and grassy avenue, a series of stone buildings, massive, aiming at Gothic. Pity it hadn’t totally missed. Not handsome, but monolithic. There was nowhere legal to park near International House so I pulled on to a grass verge and went in.

  It was like a barracks. Tall ceilings, echoing floors, walls painted in neutral khaki-ish tones. I wasn’t sure I’d have chosen to live there. Perhaps for a term while I got myself sorted out in a foreign country. But for a year? Maybe Jacob didn’t notice where he lived.

  The woman at the reception desk was of Asian origin, I thought, then lurched into political correctness panic, as if she could read my mind. Asian-American, that sounded better; I readjusted my internal comment. The woman was Asian-American, about my age, dressed in jeans and several layers of thin wool sweaters in shades of mustard. She had short black hair and thick glasses and she was reading an electronics textbook with fierce concentration. When I spoke, it took her a moment or two to focus on me, but then she answered readily enough after consulting her computer. No, Jacob Stone was not in residence. Yes, he had been. He’d moved out. Last September. Yes, he’d left a forwarding address which she scribbled down for me.

  I looked at it.

  c/o Nabokov,

  Apartment # 1,

  49 Humbert St,

  Chicago

  Graduate student humour. Very funny. The hairs lifted on the back of my neck. If this was a genuine forwarding address, I was Oprah Winfrey. Jacob Stone had just done a vanishing act, and I had an interesting case. I hoped.

  ‘That’ll be off Lolita Avenue, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ The receptionist looked puzzled. Not a novel-reader, and why should she be? If she’d made a reference to electronics I wouldn’t have picked it up.

  ‘Sorry, just talking to myself. Is there really a Humbert Street? Have you ever heard of it?’

  ‘Sure. Two blocks north. Off Kenwood.’

  I produced the map, she showed me, and I walked there, checking on the hire car as I passed. No parking ticket yet, though I didn’t care if I got one. They wouldn’t extradite me for parking.

  Humbert Street was a narrow side-street of smallish detached wooden houses surrounded by scrubby grass. The houses were half-familiar to me from films. They weren’t decaying but they weren’t being scrupulously maintained either, and by each front door was a cluster of bells. Multiple occupation, student lets.

  Number 49. In better condition than most, painted pale grey, the windows and front door white. I went up the steps to the raised verandah and across it to the door, and looked at the names on the bells, not expecting to find Nabokov.

  But there it was. C. Nabokov. I’d jumped to conclusions and been wrong. Come to think of it, with two hundred plus million people of assorted ancestry and God knows how many streets which they’d had to name from scratch, I’d probably also find an Austen on Mansfield Park, a Dostoevsky in Karamazov Avenue, a Beethoven on Emperor Street and a Death living on Salesman.

  I rang the bell, and I could hear it buzzing in the room by the front door, on the right. Apartment Number 1 for sure.

  No answer. I peered in at the window – large room, assorted rental furniture including a desk and the kind of sofa that collapsed into an uncomfortable bed, piles of books and papers, computer, sound system, scattered CDs. Graduate student.

  I couldn’t make out the titles of the books so I didn’t know whether they were likely to be Stone’s. His name wasn’t on the bell but he mightn’t have bothered to put it there – anyone likely to call would probably know that he was living with C. Nabokov. I wondered whether C. Nabokov was female, in which case I’d have bad news for Jams.

  I rang the bell again and then pressed all the others, on spec. An upstairs window opened and an expressive-faced tousled young Mexican looked out. (Hispanic? Mexican-American? Puerto Rican? Never mind, my thoughts were my own.) He started by looking annoyed, then gave me a ‘Hi-there!’ smile.

  I smiled back. He smiled more widely. So did I. Then I reckoned I’d better speak before the dental escalation cracked our jaws. Besides, his teeth were whiter than mine and he seemed to have more of them.

  ‘I’m looking for C. Nabokov,’ I said.

  ‘Apartment One.’

  ‘I’ve tried. There’s no answer.’

  ‘Then Carl’s out.’

  Carl. Usually a man’s name. But John Wayne had started life as Marion. ‘Is Carl a woman?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed. But we’re not real close.’ He laughed. I laughed.

  ‘I’m actually looking for someone who was staying with Carl, Jacob Stone. Do you know him?’

  ‘Sure. He’s British, like you.’

  ‘Is he staying here now?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him around for a while. D’you want to come up?’

  ‘No thanks. Not right now. When do you think Carl will be back?’

  ‘He’s in most evenings.’

  ‘OK. Thanks again. I’m Alex Tanner, by the way.’

  ‘Glad to know you, Alex. I’m Raul. Raul Escobedo.’ He gave me a final smile and wave and closed the window behind him. I took one of my Alex Tanner Private Investigator cards and scribbled a note to Carl Nabokov, giving him the number of my hotel and asking him to ring me.

  Then I went back to the car. I needed to be back at the Black-stone to be picked up by the police by noon, and I couldn’t be late for that. Plus, to be fair to Alan, I had to run over the drugs doco notes one last time. Just because the job he’d given me was easy didn’t mean I couldn’t make a mess of it. In feet I was more likely to, because I’d have to force myself to concentrate. So I drove back to the hotel to meet the police and do the work that Alan Protheroe was paying me for.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Barty. It was a long, exhausted, grateful moan. I pushed lightly and he rolled away from me and lay on his back, arms flopping outwards. ‘Where’s my pillow?’ he said.

  ‘On the floor at the end of the bed, I think. Why don’t you look?’

  ‘Look for me, woman.’

  ‘In your dreams.’

  I didn’t move. He fetched the pillow and settled himself comfortably.

  ‘That was terrific,’ I said. It had been. I wondered why. Maybe I was feeling more attractive. Maybe I was trusting Barty more.

  Whatever it was, I liked it. I punched my own pillows more comfortably under my head and settled back, close to Barty, my side pressed to his side all the way down, though because he was so much taller his side went on longer. The hair on his leg was rough. I rubbed my leg against it, felt the drying sweat, felt almost part of him.

  ‘What’s the time?’ he said.

  ‘I squinted at my clock. ‘Five past nine.’

  ‘We’ve missed our table.’

  ‘Where were we going?’

  ‘Never mind, you’re not interested.’

  ‘True,’ I said. I wasn’t. Barty liked poncy restaurants. He said he liked good food and most good food was only to be found in poncy restaurants. That could have been true. I didn’t think any food was worth the price he so often paid. ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really . . . my stomach still thinks it’s in London, and three in the morning. Are you?’

  ‘Not enough to get up for.’ I yawned and stretched and cuddled back into the crook of his arm.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll leave you alone soon.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ I said, a little surprised that he’d so misjudged my mood. I didn’t want him out. I was only pleasantly tired. ‘Ask me about m
y day,’ I said.

  ‘So, how’d the drugs research go?’ he said.

  ‘It’s not research proper, just mopping up for Alan. It went fine. You know the American police better than I do. They’re much more media-oriented than us. They were disappointed that I didn’t want to make a major motion picture and cordon off the streets of central Chicago. I just need some exterior shots of a drug-ridden housing project and a war-zone high school, and then the talking head.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘A policeman. Commander in the Third Division. A lovely man, good-looking and very clued up. So that’s all finished.’

  ‘And the missing person case?’

  In a minute, I’d tell him. First: ‘Barty, have you ever fallen in love at first sight?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said promptly. ‘When I was at school.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘I can’t remember her name,’ he said.

  ‘What can you remember?’

  ‘Her legs.’

  ‘Jams has fantastic legs, of course,’ I said, conscious of my rather stubby numbers. ‘But do you believe in it? Love, like that?’

  His head was higher than mine, and he bent forward to peer at my face. ‘Is this a fish?’ he said.

  ‘Absolutely not. I was thinking about Jams, about whether it was possible, what she said.’

  ‘The Sicilians call it “the thunderbolt”,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve seen The Godfather too,’ I said. ‘And I don’t care if the Maltese call it “the falcon”. That isn’t what I asked. Do you think it’s possible? Really?’

  ‘Yes, I do. All you need are the preconditions.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Mutual lust and a seeking heart,’ he said, stroking my hair.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘It sounds good. Is it true?’

  ‘I think so. That’s why I fell in love with Miranda.’

  His first wife. Of whom I was still, sometimes, a little jealous. I prodded round in my emotions for jealousy and didn’t find any. ‘And then what happened?’