Below the Thunder Page 14

  ‘Good morning, Bryn. I hope it is morning.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he said.

  ‘And first I must apologise for the car which may not be what you are used to. Its virtue is that it will not look so much like a hire car. And I am sure, in all the circumstances, you would not wish to stand out where we shall be sending you.

  ‘I will be giving all the instructions you will need. The car’s CD system has a pause control. Will you locate it now please.’

  There was a long gap, vexingly more extended than necessary, while he found the right button.

  ‘Use it at the end of each instruction. I will give you a few seconds to practise it once now.’

  He did not bother.

  ‘Good. Now listen very carefully. You must not, repeat not, attempt to hear my instructions more than once.’

  As if he would dare.

  He was to return to the main thoroughfare, Third Street, and turn left. Three blocks further down he should release the pause button, but otherwise maintain speed and carry on southwards.

  ‘You must press it in now.’

  He pulled away from the car lot, relieved at last to feel the air flowing through the open windows. But while the Chevrolet might have looked well-worn, it turned out to be a good, strong runner. The gear shift worked quickly and smoothly. Within a few blocks, he felt at ease.

  He remembered to release the pause button at the third intersection. Agnete had now adopted exactly the kind of dull tone a passing driver might expect from a satnav commentary. A nice touch.

  ‘Hello again. Do not worry but if you look in your rear view mirror you will see you are being followed by a green sedan. I will need to speak to you again when we join the freeway. Press pause now.’

  The only vehicle visible behind was a yellow San Francisco cab. He wondered if Agnete’s sophisticated command system had already gone awry. But within a block, the cab pulled away to the right and a small green sedan disclosed itself on the highway beyond. With Agnete – he fondly imagined – at the wheel.

  The sedan followed at a safe distance until they began to approach the feeder road to the main north-south Route 101 freeway. Bryn was preparing to ease across into one of the access lanes when it suddenly disappeared from his mirror.

  He craned back through a rear window and saw the sedan accelerating away down a side street, with a squeal of cornering tyres. A taxi overtaking on his offside blared its horn as he wavered into his path. By the time he looked again, a black car, similar to the giant Porsche he’d seen the previous evening, was coming fast down Third Street, sweeping past the rest of the traffic. He eased aside to let it through, but it braked and fell into line behind him.

  As soon as he was on the freeway, he reactivated the CD.

  ‘Hello. We will stay on the freeway for a few miles,’ said Agnete’s calm, official voice. ‘Perhaps you could switch your emergency lights on and off very briefly to indicate that you have understood everything so far.’

  He did not follow his instructions. There was no green sedan in sight. The black Porsche continued to keep pace a regular hundred yards behind, regardless of whether he speeded up or slowed. Candlestick Park passed by on the left, and then San Francisco International Airport. Still the Porsche held its place.

  He thought he could take a lesson, though, from Agnete. He increased his speed again and drifted across the freeway to the left. The Porsche did the same. He decelerated but remained in the outside lane while less patient drivers overtook on the inside. An interchange was approaching. When it was almost too late, a momentary gap in the flow of traffic gave him his chance, and he swerved across the lanes and away. The Porsche swept on with the crowd towards the south.

  He had arrived – in this city of huge and sudden economic contrasts – in another run-down, grid-planned precinct. The streets were lined with bungalows and second-hand cars. There were trash bins outside the houses and piles of uncollected rubbish on the sidewalks. All the residents in sight were Hispanic or Latino, slow moving and elderly.

  The roads were too badly maintained and uneven for him to keep up his previous pace and he dropped his speed by about half. After a long series of random left and right turns, he felt confident that any pursuer would be as comprehensively lost as he was, so he pulled up outside a shuttered drug store to take stock. He left the engine running while he fished a street map from one of the car door pockets.

  He had been studying it for barely a minute when, on some self-preserving instinct, he glanced up at the street ahead.

  A black Porsche was two blocks away, driving slowly towards him. A man’s head emerged from the passenger side window, and an arm. Bryn slammed into first gear – thanking God for the manual box – and shot away down a side street, engine roaring, tyres squealing.

  He had no idea when he finally shook off the Porsche. He was too riveted on last ditch turns and the avoidance of oncoming traffic to give time to his rearview mirror. Sometimes as he cornered he thought he caught a glimpse of it, mostly not. He drove like a movie driver, through pot holes, bouncing over kerb edges. Whenever the lights were red, he took a sharp left and sped on through, in the alarming and legal American way. The Chevrolet finally careered across a side walk, down a service alley, through a building site and onto a wider street with shops running down either side. His tyres should rightly have shred and burst. But – like they do in the movies – they survived.

  A police squad car was parked on the high street ahead of him and he decelerated, eased in behind it and stopped. There was no sign of the Porsche.

  He tried the CD again.

  ‘After the airport, you will pass a golf course.’

  He held the pause button down for a few seconds and tried to recall when if ever he’d seen such a thing.

  ‘You will need to turn off west at the next intersection.’

  He allowed Agnete to continue a little while with her series of notional lefts and rights; and paused her again. He had found a bay-side municipal golf course on the street map, and also the turn-off he suspected he should have taken. But where he had now arrived was a mystery. Probably best not to ask a policeman. He drove slowly on.

  The high street was in serious disrepair, cracked and roughly patched with tar, its road markings worn out and invisible. There were as many open spaces beyond the walkways as there were buildings. The overhead cables of urban decay hung again like washing lines by the roadside. He thought he might have been in Mumbai or Istanbul.

  He passed the first street sign he’d seen for some time.

  El Camino Real.

  There are many Caminos Reales in the Americas. Bryn knew them as the Roman roads of the New World. So this drab, decaying highway slipping diffidently through the suburbs below San Francisco must once have been the most pre-eminent on the West Coast: the centuries-old mission trail that linked Mexico with northern California.

  ‘You are on Route 82,’ said Agnete’s voice.

  He took another look at the street map lying open on the passenger seat. There it was: the ‘82’ clearly marked, on a road running north and south with, in bracketed letters almost too small to be legible, its historic title: Camino Real. The Royal Highway.

  Agnete apparently wanted him to continue south for ‘a further eight miles’; and look out for a parking lot to the right of the road. But eight miles from where? He carried on. Nothing. Nothing still after five, eight, ten miles. He had almost given up when he saw ahead of him an isolated, white-faced building set well back from the road. With a car park.

  He tucked the Chevrolet in amongst several well-used models of similar vintage, where he reckoned it was least likely to be noticed, and released the pause button for further information. The CD refused to play. He tried to run the last passage again in case he had missed something and the disc expelled itself. He pushed it back in and tried a second time but the CD whirred noisily, ground to a halt, and resisted all efforts to release it. He remembered Agnete’s prohibition on repeat list
ening. It was not the sly joke he’d thought it was.

  The white building was a bookshop, much the grandest he had ever seen. Even out of season, the presence of students was unmistakable. A car by the entrance had a sticker in its rear window advertising an ‘ASSU Senior Pub Night’. A young couple cycled past with laptops, tennis rackets and study files in their panniers. He guessed he might be somewhere near Stanford University, in which case he had travelled a long way south from San Francisco.

  The front part of the shop was given over to a coffee lounge, and armchairs, settees and low tables. Summer course students and a scattering of (no doubt) professors were sprawled about, mug of coffee in one hand and a book in the other. He ordered a cappuccino abundantly sprinkled with sweet chocolate powder, and settled in with them.

  He was feeling remarkably relaxed. He loved bookshops. They were his natural environment. If Marcus’ and Agnete’s grand scheme had finally ground to a halt and this fortuitously was to be his journey’s end, he could happily while away an hour or so here, amongst the cherished tools of his profession.

  There were half a dozen hardback books strewn about the coffee tables. One of them was the first volume of Shelby Foote’s excellent history of the American Civil War – to which his own recently published monograph about the confederate generals had paid respectful homage. He picked it up and flicked through the familiar pages.

  And put it down.

  A theme seemed to be emerging in this day. Playing the recorder; the Shropshire aunt; the university bookshop; even the historic camino real. And the happy coincidence (or not) of Shelby Foote’s book. In brief, the stuff of his life. As Marcus, in particular, would know.

  He picked the book up again and looked through it more carefully. No turned down pages or underlinings or hidden messages. He put it back on the coffee table and a shop assistant tidied it away onto a small trolley, with a pile of other books she was returning to the shelves.

  He watched her shuttling up and down the aisles. The Foote, a good-sized tome almost too heavy for her slender hand, was the last to leave the trolley. She slotted it into a space in a well-stocked section with the stack heading: ‘United States History – 19th Century – Civil War’.

  From where he sat, he was confident he could identify most of the display. But there were a few works he did not recognise. This was not necessarily unusual. What concerned him more, though, was what was likely to happen if he went up and had a closer look.

  In Bryn’s world, a good hardback book was like a bottle of fine wine. Paperbacks and, heaven forbid, internet downloads were the equivalent of an off-licence purchase. The books he most prized were not easy to track down and often needed to be sourced from specialist suppliers. They defied new technologies, sold for more than he could afford, had to be treated with respect and love, and opened very carefully. The best would keep for years.

  So, generally speaking, a fine bookshop was a place of peril. He never intended to buy what he browsed. He never intended to browse. But he always did. With inevitable, and costly, consequences.

  And so it was that on this pleasant morning, when he had finished his cappuccino, he found himself wandering over to the shelves to check out what was on display.

  He ran his fingers along the title spines – Finkelman, Foote, Neely, Russo, Smith – until he came to his own recent volume about the Civil War generals; and contentedly pulled it out. An irritating vandal had taped a slip of paper across his name on the front cover. He peeled it off. And noticed that something had been written on it. A single word: Laura.

  In Marcus’s handwriting.

  His first response was one of pure exasperation. If the message was intended for him, as it had to be, then his cousin’s method of conveying it was ludicrously hazardous and whimsical. No better than a childhood treasure hunt. How could Marcus know that the paper would fall into his hands? Could he not have contrived a more direct means of communication?

  And yet, somehow, it had been successful. And he knew exactly what was meant. Once when he was very young and Marcus already a teenager, his cousin had taken him on an illicit visit to the cinema. Marcus had probably decided he needed to widen Bryn’s horizons. An old film noir was showing, far too sophisticated and grown-up, starring Vincent Price and an actress with whom both of them fell instantly in love, called Gene Tierney. It was the kind of experience a small boy never forgets. The film was called Laura.

  He went back to the coffee area. Some young men were using the shop’s free Wi-Fi system. Bryn asked a relaxed looking, longhaired student if he would mind him doing a quick internet search on his MacBook.

  ‘Sure,’ replied the young man, as if it was a request he received every day. ‘And the usual trade, bro, is a Toffee Nut Latte. A Big One.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ said Bryn.

  He searched on ‘Laura’ and ‘San Francisco cinemas’ without success. The hairy student looked over his shoulder.

  ‘Try Palo Alto. The University Theater,’ he suggested.

  The University Theater it was: Laura was scheduled to play there that afternoon, in a double bill with The Big Heat.

  He bought the student a twenty ounce Venti serving of his sweet smelling beverage and left the bookshop – for once – without any further purchases.

  Chapter 13

  The University Theater was a plain, white, Mission-style building on the outside, and a claret and gold extravaganza within. The exact, confident, unreconstructed, art deco auditorium of his earliest cinema-going memories. He bought a ticket, took a seat at the dead centre of the empty back row, and settled down for whatever awaited him.

  The traditional red curtains, in their heavily ruched folds, were still drawn across the screen. Deep in the background an orchestra was playing the theme from Limelight on multiply divided strings. Two young couples whispering to each other were all the rest of the audience. It could have been an early afternoon thirty years ago in the suburbs of London, except for one thing: that all-pervasive, pungent, inescapably American aroma of stale, unsweetened popcorn.

  The violins segued into the cascading harmonies of Charmaine. The auditorium faded to darkness and the music dwindled away into the distance. For a moment there was absolute silence. Then with a roar of Rodgers and Hammerstein and a brilliant blaze of light, the Mighty Wurlitzer rose like a dolphin from the depths. For an instrument barely larger than an upright piano the din was extraordinary. The ball-gowned lady organist bouncing on the bench seat seemed likely to be around for a while, so – regretting the diuretic effects of too much coffee and his old familiar weakness – Bryn stole out for a few moments’ relief.

  When he returned, a second person was sitting in the back row.

  Agnete had camouflaged herself in jeans and a scarlet Stanford sweatshirt. Her long blonde hair had been folded up inside a floppy hat – except for the few artfully fugitive strands that trailed beside her cheeks. He doubted he’d ever seen a less unnoticeable student in his life. She looked like a fusion of Annie Hall and Greta Garbo.

  He took the seat alongside her.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ she responded coolly, as if to an importuning stranger.

  The Carousel overture succeeded a medley from South Pacific. And gave way in turn to a bells-and-percussion rendition of ‘Oh What A Beautiful Morning’. The floodlight on the Wurlitzer slowly contracted to a single spot. Two rows in front, a student couple melted into an oblivious embrace.

  He badly wanted to kiss her. It was the moment. Would an arm around the shoulder be welcome – or should he take her hand first? He had not felt so much at a loss since he’d been a teenager, and for the same reasons. He had thought about the moment too long, the penalty for failure had become too great, he could not guess how the lady would react. Whatever adult skills he might have acquired were now as rubble.

  And so, while he procrastinated, it was Agnete who made a first move. Her left arm crept towards him and his heart soared. And as quickly returned to earth:
an envelope lay in his lap. From the weight and feel of it, it contained keys. Three or four, one of which belonged unmistakably to a car. He reached a hand across and grasped hers.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Can I ask you something first?’

  She did not reply. Her hand lay coolly within his grip.

  ‘Why do I need a second car?’

  ‘You’ll get instructions,’ she whispered, so quietly he could barely hear her.

  The organist had embarked upon a final peroration and was sinking out of sight. The red curtains parted. The search-lit 20th Century Fox logo filled the screen.

  ‘Agnete,’ he whispered back. ‘No one is listening.’

  ‘I must not be seen with you.’

  ‘Are those your instructions? Or Marcus’s?’

  The film had begun and its images flickered on Agnete’s face. Her bleached profile, trained on the distant screen, was as cold and as incomparable as a Grecian marble.

  ‘When will I see you next?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘I want to see you again,’ he said.

  She drew in a deep gust of air and gathered up the scarlet hood of the sweatshirt and pulled it over the back of her hat. It was the last opportunity he might ever have: he slid his arm impulsively around her shoulder and kissed her.

  There was no resistance. No response. He held the moment for as long as he could, until her lips began to quiver and he realised the vehemence of his embrace might be preventing her breathing in. She disengaged with a gasp and stared back at him unreadably – bewilderment, anger maybe. And eased out of her seat and departed the cinema.

  The post-mortem lasted through the second reel of Laura. A dour battle for the high ground between his maturer self and the teenager in the back row. At least, he finally agreed, he had attempted to do something. No sin – no matter your age or wisdom – was greater than the failure to act. Clumsiness was an operational hazard; a peccadillo. No success was ever achieved without failure and Agnete was an experienced woman who must have endured many more inept encounters.