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It was the hottest summer in recorded English history, and I was standing on a platform in London’s sweltering Leicester Square tube stop. The heat was impenetrable. Suddenly, inexplicably, a cool breeze wafted down the underground tunnel.
Flash forward ten years—I was squatting by a predawn fire in Kenya’s Masai Mara game reserve, thinking about a broadcast I’d heard the night before on a crackly radio, in which Joseph Wambaugh said that when he was trying to write his first novel, he wrote ten pages a day, no matter what. I’d been wanting to write a novel for a long time, never got around to it, but now I thought, If I don’t do it now, I never will. I knew I couldn’t do ten pages a day, but I thought I could do five. I went back to my tent, grabbed a yellow manuscript pad, and started writing.
The phrase “a cool breeze on the underground” had been stuck in my head for a decade, and now I asked myself, What about it? Who was standing in the underground to feel that breeze? What was he doing there? I came up with the character of Neal Carey, a graduate student who, much like me, was too busy making a living as a private detective to finish his degree.
I had no idea what I was doing. I only knew that I loved the crime fiction that I’d been reading for years (sometimes on stakeouts)—Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, Charles Willeford, John D. Macdonald, James Ellroy, Joseph Wambaugh, and others—so I decided to try that, to write a book about a young man, trained in childhood to become a street operative, sent to London to find a runaway teenage girl.
I wrote my five pages a day, no matter what. In African tents, Oxford college rooms (a long story for another time), Buddhist monasteries precariously perched on Chinese mountainsides (ditto), hotel rooms, rented apartments, rented houses, and literally on planes, trains, and automobiles.
Three years later I had a book.
The first fourteen publishers disagreed.
But while I was getting rejection letters (it was remarkable how many people’s “current needs” I didn’t meet), I was stubbornly writing the second Neal Carey novel. You see, I had no choice but to decide that I was right and the rest of the world was wrong. It takes a certain kind of insanity to do this thing.
When the fifteenth publisher offered me a contract, based on the first two chapters of Cool Breeze, I was back in Africa working on a safari, and my wife went through the scattered collection of pages left on desks and in briefcases, backpacks, and coat pockets, and she put the manuscript together and sent it in.
I never did find out where the cool breeze came from.
I only know that it started me writing a book for which I still have a genuine fondness, and launched me on a career that I love and am so grateful to have.
I hope you enjoy reading these books as much as I enjoyed writing them.
he never should have opened the door.
Neal Carey knew better, too—when you open a door, you’re never really sure what you’re letting in.
But he had been expecting Hardin, the old shepherd who came every day at teatime to sip whiskey with him. It was raining—had been raining for five solid days—and by all rights Hardin should have arrived for “a bit of wet to take the chill off.”
Neal pulled his wool cardigan tighter around his neck, edged his chair a little closer to the fire, and hunched down lower over the table to read. The fire was waging a brave but losing battle against the cold and damp, which was miserable even for March in the Yorkshire moors. He took another hit of coffee and tried to settle back into Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom, but his mind just wasn’t on it. He’d been at it all day, and now he was ready for a little conversation and a spot of whiskey. Where the hell was Hardin?
He looked out the small window of the stone cottage and couldn’t see a thing through the mist and driving rain, not even the dirt road that climbed up from the village below. His was the only cottage on this part of the moor, and on this afternoon he felt more isolated than ever. He usually liked that—he only hiked down to the village every three or four days to pick up supplies—but today he wanted some company. The cottage usually felt snug, but today it was suffocating. The one electric lamp didn’t do much to brighten the general gloom. Maybe he just had cabin fever; he had been up there for seven months, alone save for Hardin’s visits, with only his books for company.
So he didn’t stop to think when he heard the knock. He didn’t look out the window, or ease the door open, or even ask who was there. He just got up and opened the door to let Hardin in.
Except it wasn’t Hardin.
“Son!”
“Hello, Dad,” Neal said.
That’s when Neal Carey made his second mistake. He just stood there. He should have slammed the door shut, braced his chair against it, jumped out a back window, and never looked back.
If he had done those things, he never would have ended up in China, and the Li woman would still be alive.
PART ONE
Graham looked miserable and ridiculous standing there. Rain sluiced off the hood of his raincoat and down onto his mud-caked shoes. He set his small suitcase down in a puddle, used his artificial right hand to wipe some water off his nose, and still managed to give Neal that grin, that Joe Graham grin, an equal measure of malevolence and glee.
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” he asked.
“Thrilled.”
Neal hadn’t seen him since August at Boston’s Logan Airport, where Graham had given him a one-way ticket, a draft for ten thousand pounds sterling, and instructions to get lost, because there were a lot of people in the States who were real angry at him. Neal had given half the money back, flown to London, put the rest of the money in the bank, and eventually disappeared into his cottage on the moor.
“What’s the matter?” Graham asked. “You got a babe in there, you don’t want me to come in?”
“Come in.”
Graham eased past Neal into the cottage. Joe Graham, five feet four inches of dripping nastiness and guile, had raised Neal Carey from a pup. Taking off his rain coat, he shook it out on the floor. Then he found the makeshift closet, pushed Neal’s clothes aside, and hung up the coat, under which he wore an electric blue suit with a burnt orange shirt and a burgundy tie. He took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, wiped the seat of Neal’s chair, and sat down.
“Thanks for all the cards and letters,” he said.
“You told me to get lost.”
“Figure of speech.”
“You knew where I was.”
“Son, we always know where you are.”
The grin again.
He hasn’t changed much in seven months, Neal thought. His blue eyes were still beady, and his sandy hair was maybe a touch thinner. His leprechaun face still looked like it was peeking out from under a toadstool. He could still point you to the pot of shit at the end of the rainbow.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, Graham?” Neal asked.
“I don’t know, Neal. Your right hand?”
He made the appropriately obscene gesture with his heavy rubber hand, which was permanently cast in a half-closed position. He could do almost everything with it, except Neal did remember the time Graham had broken his left hand in a fight. “It’s when you have to piss,” Graham had said, “that you learn who your friends are.” Neal had been one of those friends.
Graham made an exaggerated pantomime of looking around the room, although Neal knew that he had absorbed every detail in the few seconds it had taken to hang up his coat.
“Nice place,” Graham said sarcastically.
“It suits me.”
“This is true.”
“Coffee?”
“You got a clean
cup?”
Neal stepped into the small kitchen and came back with a cup, which he tossed into Graham’s lap. Graham examined it carefully.
“Maybe we can go out,” he said.
“Maybe we can cut the dance short and you can tell me what you’re doing here.”
“It’s time for you to get back to work.”
Neal gestured to the books stacked on the floor around the fireplace.
“I am at work.”
“I mean work work.”
Neal listened to the rain dripping off the thatched roof. It was odd, he thought, that he could hear that sound but not recognize Graham’s knock on the door. Graham had used his hard rubber hand, too, because he had been holding his suitcase in his real hand. Neal Carey was out of shape and he knew it.
He also knew it was useless trying to explain to Graham that the books on the floor were “work work,” so he settled for, “Last time we talked, I was ‘suspended,’ remember?”
“That was just to cool you out.”
“I take it I’m cooled?”
“Ice.”
Yeah, Neal thought, that’s me. Ice. Cold to the touch and easy to melt. The last job almost chilled me permanently.
“I don’t know, Dad,” Neal said. “I think I’ve retired.”
“You’re twenty-four years old.”
“You know what I mean.”
Graham started to laugh. His eyes squinted into little slits. He looked like an Irish Buddha without the belly.
“You still have most of the money, don’t you?” he said. “How long do you think you can live on that?”
“A long time.”
“Who taught you how to do that—stretch a dollar?”
“You did.”
You taught me a lot more than that, Neal thought. How to follow a mark without getting made, how to slip in and out of an apartment, how to get inside a locked file cabinet, how to search a room. Also how to make three basic, cheap meals a day, how to keep a place clean and livable, and how to have some respect for myself. Everything a private cop needs to know.
Neal had been ten years old the day he met Graham, the day he tried to pick Graham’s pocket, got caught, and ended up working for him. Neal's mother
mother was a hooker and his father was an absentee voter, so he didn’t have what you’d call a glowing self-image. He also didn’t have any money, any food, or any idea what the hell he was doing. Joe Graham had given him all that.
“You’re welcome,” Graham said, interrupting Neal’s reverie.
“Thanks,” said Neal, feeling like an ingrate, which was exactly how Graham wanted him to feel. Joe Graham was a major-league talent.
“I mean, you want to go back to gradu-ass school anyway, right?” Graham asked.
He must have talked to my professor already, Neal thought. Joe Graham rarely asked a question to which he didn’t already know the answer.
“You’ve talked with Dr. Boskin?” Neal asked.
Graham nodded cheerfully.
“And?”
“And he says the same thing we do. ‘Come home, darling, everything is forgiven.’ ”
Forgiven?! Neal thought. I only did what they asked me to do. For my troubles I got a bundle of money and a stretch in exile. Well, exile’s fine with me, thank you. It only cost me the love of my life and a year of my education. But Diane would have left me anyway, and I needed the time for research.
Graham didn’t want to give him too much time to think, so he said, “You can’t live like a monkey forever, right?”
“You mean a monk.”
“I know what I mean.”
Actually, Graham, Neal thought, I could live like a monk forever and be very happy.
It was true. It had taken some getting used to, but Neal was happy pumping his own water, heating it on the stove, and taking lukewarm baths in the tub outside. He was happy with his twice-weekly hikes down to the village to do the shopping, have a quick pint and maybe lose a game of darts, then lug his supplies back up the hill.
His routine rarely varied, and he liked that. He got up at dawn, put the coffee on, and bathed while it perked. Then he would sit down outside with his first cup and watch the sun rise. He’d go inside and make his breakfast—toast and two eggs over hard—and then read until lunch, which was usually cheese, bread, and fruit. He’d go for a walk over the other side of the moor after lunch, and
then settle back in for more studying. Hardin and his dog would usually turn up about four, and the three of them would have a sip of whiskey, the shepherd and the sheepdog each having a touch of arthritis, don’t you know. After an hour or so, Hardin would finish telling his fishing lies, and Neal would look over the notes he had made during the day and then crank up the generator. He’d fix himself some canned soup or stew for dinner, read for a while, and go to bed.
It was a lonely life, but it suited him. He was making progress on his long-delayed master’s thesis, and he actually liked being alone. Maybe it was a monk’s life, but maybe he was a monk.
Sure, Graham, I could do this forever, he thought.
Instead, he asked, “What’s the job?”
“It’s chickenshit.”
“Right. You didn’t come all the way over here from New York for a chickenshit job.”
Graham was loving it. His filthy little harp face shone like the visage of a cherub whom God had just patted on the back.
“No, son, it really is about chickenshit.”
That’s when Neal made his next major mistake: he believed him.
Graham opened his suitcase and took out a thick file folder. He handed it to Neal.
“Meet Dr. Robert Pendleton.”
Pendleton’s photo looked as if it had been taken for a company newsletter, one of those head-and-shoulders shots that sit above a caption reading, meet our new vice-president in charge of development. He had a face you could cut yourself on: sharp nose, sharp chin, and sharp eyes. His short black hair was thinning on top. His gallant effort at smiling looked like an unnatural act. His necktie could have landed airplanes on a foggy night.
“Dr. Pendleton is a research scientist at a company called AgriTech in Raleigh, North Carolina,” Graham said. “Six weeks ago, Pendleton packed up his research notes, computer disks, and toothbrush, and left to attend some sort of dork conference at Stanford University, which, is near—”
“I know.”
“—San Francisco, where he stayed at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The conference lasted a week. Pendleton never came back.”
“What do the police
have to say?”
“Haven’t talked to them.”
“Isn’t that sort of SOP in a missing-person case?”
Graham grinned a grin custom-made to hack Neal off. “Who said he was missing?”
“You did.”
“No, I didn’t. I said he didn’t come back. There’s a difference. We know where he is. He just won’t come home.”
All right, Neal thought, I’ll play.
“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why won’t he come home?”
“I’m pleased to see that you’re asking some better questions, son.”
“So answer it.”
“He’s got himself a China doll.”
“By which you mean,” Neal asked, “that he’s in the company of an Oriental lady of hired affections?”
“A China doll.”
“So what’s the problem and why are we involved?”
“Another good question.”
Graham got up from the chair and walked into the kitchen. He opened the middle cabinet of three, reached to the top shelf, and pulled down Neal’s bottle of scotch.
“A place for everything, and everything in its place,” he said cheerfully. “Another thing I taught you.”
He came back into the sitting room, reached into his case, and came out with a small plastic travel cup, the kind that telescopes out from a disk into a regular old drinking vessel. He poured three fingers of whiskey and then offered Neal the bottle.
“Damp in here,” Graham said.
Neal took the bottle and set it on the table. He didn’t want to end up half in the bag and take this job out of sentiment.
Graham lifted his cup and said, “To the queen and all his family.”
He knocked back two fingers of the scotch and let the warmth spread through him. If he had been a cat he would have purred, but being a cretin, he just leered. Braced against the chill, he continued, “Pendleton is the world’s greatest authority on chickenshit. AgriTech has millions of dollars sunk into chickenshit.”
“Let me guess,” Neal said. “Does the Bank have millions of dollars sunk into AgriTech?"
Graham’s sudden appearance was starting to make sense to Neal.
“That’s my boy,” Graham said.
That says it, too, Neal thought. I’m Graham’s boy, I’m Levine’s boy, but most of all, I’m the Bank’s boy.
The Bank was a quiet little financial institute in Providence, Rhode Island, that promised its wealthy clients two things: absolute privacy from the prying eyes of the press, the public, and the prosecutors; and discreet help on the side with those little problems of life that couldn’t be settled with just plain cash.
That was where Neal came in. He and Graham worked for a secret branch of the bank called “Friends of the Family.” There was no sign on the door, but anybody who had the necessary portfolio knew that he could come into the back office if he had a problem and talk to Ethan Kitteredge, and that Ethan Kitteredge would find a way to work things out, free of charge.
Usually Kitteredge, known to his employees as “the Man,” would work things out by buzzing for Ed Levine, who would phone down to New York for Joe Graham, who would fetch Neal Carey. Neal would then trundle off to find somebody’s daughter, or take a picture of somebody’s wife playing Hide-the-Hot-Dog in the Plaza Hotel, or break into somebody’s apartment to find that all-important second set of books.
In exchange, Friends had sent him to a toney private school, paid his rent, and picked up his college bills.
“So,” Neal said, “the Bank has a humongous loan out to AgriTech, and one of its star scientists has taken a sabbatical. So what?”
“Chickenshit.”
“Yeah, right. What’s the big deal about chickenshit?”
“Not any chickenshit. Pendleton’s chickenshit. Chickenshit is fertilizer, right? You spread it on stuff to make it grow, which sounds pretty fucking gross to me, but hey . . . Anyway, Pendleton’s been working for umptedy-zumptedy years on a way to squeeze more growing juice out of chickenshit by mixing it with water treated with certain bacteria. This, by the way, is called an ‘enhancing process.’
“Now it used to be that you couldn’t mix chickenshit in water because it would lose its juice, but with Pendleton’s process, not only can you mix it with water, but you get something like triple the effect.
“Naturally, this would make a nice little item on AgriTech’s shelf. I might even buy you some for Christmas. You could rub it on your dick, although I doubt the stuff could be that good.”
“Thank you.”
“But don’t get your hopes up, because just when Doc Guano gets this close,” said Graham, holding his thumb and forefinger a sliver apart, “to inventing Supershit, he goes off to this conference and meets Miss Wong.”
“Is that really her name?”
“Do I know? Wong, Wang, Ching, Chang, what’s the difference?”
“Yeah, so? Doctor This, Doctor That, what’s the difference? I’ll bet you AgriTech has more than one biochemist.”
“Not like Pendleton, they don’t. Besides, he took his notes with him.”
Neal could see it coming and he didn’t want this job. Maybe Robert Pendleton didn’t want to finish his research, he thought, but I want to finish mine. Get my master’s and go on for the old Ph.D. Find a job in some little state college somewhere and spend the rest of my life reading books instead of running dirty errands for the Man.
“Have the cops pick him up for theft, then. The notes are AgriTech’s property,” Neal said.
Graham shook his head. “Then maybe he’d be too unhappy to play with his test tubes anymore. The AgriTech people don’t want their professor in the slammer; they want their chickenshit in the pot.”
Graham took the bottle off the table and poured himself another drink. He was enjoying himself immensely. Aggravating Neal was almost worth the terrifying flight over, the endless trip to Yorkshire, and the hike up that damn hill. It was good to see the little shit again.
“If he doesn’t want to come back, he doesn’t want to come back,” Neal said.
Graham tossed back the whiskey.
“You have to make him want to,” he said.
“You mean ‘you’ in the collective sense, right? As in ‘one would have to make him want to.’ ”
“I mean ‘you’ in the sense of you, Neal Carey.”
All of a sudden, Neal Carey felt a lot of sympathy for Dr. Robert Pendleton. Each of them was shacked up with something he loved—Pendleton with his woman and Neal with his books—and now they were each being pulled back, kicking and screaming, to the chickenshit.
Because of him, they get me, Neal thought, and because of me they’ll get him. It’s all done with mirrors. He reached for the bottle and poured a healthy drink into his coffee cup.
“What if I don’t want to?” he asked.
Graham started rubbing his fake hand into his real one. It was a habit he had when he was worried or had something unpleasant to say.
Neal saved him the trouble. “Then you’ll have to make me want to?”
Graham was really working on the hand now. Pissing Neal off was fun, but extorting him wasn’t. However, the Man, Levine, and Graham had agreed that Neal had been shut up with his books too long, and if they didn’t get him back into some kind of action, they would lose him. That happened sometimes; a first-class UC—an undercover guy—would be put on R-and-R after a tough job and never come back. Or, worse, the guy would come back dull and rusty and do something stupid and get hurt. Happened all the time, but Graham wasn’t going to let it happen to Neal. So he had come to fetch him for this dumb, chickenshit job.
“You been away from Columbia for what, a year now?” Graham asked.
“About that. You sent me on a job, remember?”
Neal sure as hell remembered. They had sent him to London on a hopeless search for the runaway daughter of a big-time politico— just to keep his wife content and quiet—and he had screwed up and actually found her. She was hooking and hooked, and he had wrenched her off her pimp and the junk and delivered her to her mother. Which was what the Man wanted him to do, but the politician was sure as hell pissed off, so Friends had to pretend that Neal had screwed them over, too. And so he had “disappeared.” Happily.
“Can you do that?” Graham asked. “Just take off from gradu-ass school like that?”
“No, Graham, you can’t. Friends of the Family fixed it. What am I telling you for? You’re the one who fixed it.”
Graham smiled. “And now we’re asking you for a little favor.”
“Or you’ll unfix it?”
Graham shrugged a that’s-life shrug.
“Why me?” Neal whined. “Why not you? Or Levine?”
“The Man wants you.”
“Why?”
Because, Graham thought, we ain’t going to sit around with our hooters in our hands while you turn yourself into a hermit. I know you, son. You like to be alone so you can brood on things and get happily miserable. You need to get back to work and back to school—back with some people. Get your feet back on concrete.
“You and Pendleton are both eggheads,” Graham said. “The Man figures he’s been paying for your expensive education for jobs just like this one.”
Neal took a hit of scotch. He could feel Graham pulling in the line.
“Pendleton’s some sort of biochemist. I study eighteenth-century English Lit!” Neal said. Tobias Smollett: The Outsider in Eighteenth Century Literature: Neal’s thesis title and a sure cure for insomnia. Except, that is, for eighteenth-century buffs. Both of them would love it.
“I guess all eggheads look alike to the Man.”
Neal tried a different tack.
“I’m out of shape, Graham. Very rusty. I’ve worked maybe two cases in the last two years and I screwed both of them up. You don’t want me.”
“You brought Allie Chase home.”
“Not before I botched it up and almost got us both killed. I’m no good at it anymore, Dad, I—”
“Stop being such a crybaby! What are we asking here? You go to San Francisco and find the happy couple, which shouldn’t be too difficult even for you, seeing as they’re in the Chinatown Holiday Inn, Room ten-sixteen, right there in your file. You get the broad alone, you slip her some cash, and she dumps him. She’s no dope. She knows that money for nothing is better than money for something.
“Then you buddy up to Pendleton, have a few shooters with him, listen to his sob story, and pour him onto a plane. What’ll it take? Three, four days?”
Neal walked over to the window. The rain had let up a little bit, but the fog was heavier than ever.
“I’m glad you have this all figured out, Graham. Are you going to do my research for me,
too?”
“Just do the job and come back. You can spend the whole summer here at the Mildew Hilton if you want. You have to be back at school September ninth, though.”
He reached into his case and pulled out a large manila envelope.
“The schedules and book lists for your—what do you call them?—your seminars. I worked it out with Boskin.”
Graham is so damned good, Neal thought. Old Graham brings the prizes with him and dangles them in front of my nose: seminars, book lists . . . You have to hand it to him—he knows his whores.
“You’re too good to me, Dad.”
“Tell me about it.”
So there it is, Neal thought. A few days of sleazy work in California, then back to my happy monk’s cell on the moor. Finish my reading, then back to graduate school. Jesus, this double life of mine. Sometimes I feel like my own twin brother. Who’s insane.
“Yeah, okay,” Neal said.
“I’m telling you,” Graham said, “this one is a grounder, easy throw to first, out of the inning.”
“Right.”
So maybe it’s time to come down from the hill, Neal thought. Ease myself back into the world with this sleazy little job. Maybe it’s too easy up here, where I don’t have to deal with anything or anyone except writers who’ve been dead for a couple hundred years. ...
