Killed in the Fog Read online

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we should go to England. I’ve always wanted to go there, anyway. I’ve read twelve million English mystery stories, from Miss Marple to Jack Regan, so I know it’s not all country cottages and cutesy stuff like that.”

  “You’d want to? It seems so mundane.”

  “Excuse me, Miss Sophisticate, okay? I’m just a Manhattan boy from Yorkville who thinks it would be a swell place to go.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Matt. I’d like to go there myself.”

  “Well, why not? They speak English in England—speak it damn well, for a bunch of foreigners. It’s cold, they’ve got color TV, and there must be tons of stuff about the Civil War. I know the South kept begging them to intervene.”

  “I’ve already thought of that,” she said. “Plus, I own a house there.”

  “You own a house there,” I said. Living with a rich girl can be a strange experience.

  “Nothing incredible,” she said. “Just five bedrooms. On the South side of the Thames, in Barnes. My grandfather bought it for my mother. She did a season in London. The estate has kept it up, modernized, but I haven’t been there in years.”

  I forced myself to breathe slowly.

  “Darling,” I said, “if I were discussing flight to another country, trying to decide which foreign clime to sample, and I happened to own a house somewhere, I might have mentioned it more near the beginning of the conversation.”

  She looked at me in beautiful, round-eyed innocence.

  “It slipped my mind,” she said.

  It slipped her mind. Once again, I had to remind myself that love had led me into a new world. Shortly after we moved in, the house next door, virtually identical to Roxanne’s, sold for five hundred thousand pounds, or roughly three quarters of a million bucks. It slipped her mind.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “that’s not important. If we did go to England, what would we do with the dog?”

  Ah yes, the dog.

  Specifically, Spot, a purebred, pure white Samoyed, a breed of Siberian sled dog with a cloud of fluffy white fur dotted with black eyes and nose and split with a perpetual black grin.

  Spot and I had been together for some time now, but he was not, technically speaking, my dog. He was the property of Rick and Jane Sloan, college classmates of mine with family monies older and more voluminous even than Roxanne’s. They had caught Archaeology the way my honey had caught History, only they did it the hard way, on their knees in sand or mud, patiently digging shards of pottery out of a grudging earth. The deal was, I would watch Spot and their Central Park West apartment while they were gone.

  Well, I could easily arrange for security on the apartment, but what could I do about Spot?

  Bring him? Well, yeah, of course, I wanted to bring him. It wasn’t as easy as that.

  You see, they have no rabies in England.

  They have measles, mumps, chicken pox, and for all I know phthisic and any number of diseases you never see in the States anymore, thanks to vaccination. They’ve got Slapped Cheek Disease (no, I never heard of it either, until I saw a case in the local supermarket and asked some questions; it’s a form of measles that leaves the kids’ faces bright, bright red, as if they’d just been enthusiastically slapped): and God knows what all else the National Health Service hasn’t gotten around to vaccinating against.

  But they have no rabies.

  They got rid of it during the early years of the twentieth century by the simple expedient of killing every dog on the Island of Great Britain that had it—and every cat, squirrel, and dormouse, too.

  They keep it out by a strict quarantine. Every animal, from elephant to whale to hamster, that is brought to this island spends six full months in quarantine. Even pampered animals such as Spot, who has had more shots than an L.A. gang war.

  It’s a tough policy, but a smart one, and a good one. Rabies is no joke, either for people or for animals. But how could I let them put my dog in the clink for six months? How much less could I let them put my friends’ dog behind bars for six months just because I wanted to spend an extended time out of the country?

  Well, I couldn’t. I was about to tell Roxanne we were back at square one, when she pursed her lips off to one side, a sure sign that her gifted and unusual brain was clicking away.

  “I know what to do,” she said.

  And she did, too.

  It was something I never would have thought of, mainly because it took (a) an incredible amount of money, (b) some serious connections, and (c) the chutzpah that comes only with the habit of using both.

  What she did was as simple and audacious as wiping out the rabid animals was in the first place. Roxanne got her house declared a quarantine center, or centre, as it says on all the forms. I said they speak our language darn well for foreigners, but not perfectly.

  Anyway, she pulled strings in the State Department and learned the requirements the Ministry of Agriculture set for quarantine centres and got contractors to build them. Somehow, she also goosed along a bunch of inspectors to inspect the place and get it approved, all within a month. (Yes, we stayed packed for a long time).

  I never did ask how much it cost.

  Anyway, came the Friday morning we were set to depart. The doorman rang up to my apartment, telling me the limo was there. The driver came up to help with the bags. I took Spot’s lead, and we headed for the elevator.

  As we were walking out the door, the phone started to ring. I started back to get it, but Roxanne stopped me.

  “Leave it,” she said. “It’s Falzet. He’s got some crisis at the Network.”

  We flew across on the Concorde. It was an amazing experience—two and a half hours across the Atlantic, no jet lag, a very quiet ride, because at supersonic speed you outrun the noise of the engines. First class all the way.

  The only bad thing about the trip came when we commented to the British Airways stewardess (they still call them that) how pleasant the flight was.

  “Thanks,” she said, “mind you, they haven’t made any new Concordes in twenty years, so this one is at least twenty years old, and nobody knows how long a Concorde lasts.” She sighed. “It’ll be a sad day when these come out of the fleet.”

  She went on talking about how great the plane was to work in, but we didn’t hear her, because Roxanne and I were both working very hard at keeping the wings in place by staring at them.

  We made it without incident. Spot loved the new place, and even though we couldn’t take him out on the street, there was a fenced-in place in the back where he could walk around.

  From the outside, Roxanne’s house was not a beautiful place. It was big and square, of whitewashed brick, with a lot of lumps with windows in the middle of them. Inside, it was decorated in a lot of maroon velvet and dark wood. The furniture was overcarved and clunky, but it was also solid and comfortable.

  I liked the place almost as much as Spot, and I got to sleep with the lady of the house, too.

  Then the other animals started moving in, all of them, dogs and cats alike, during the first two weeks we were there. I looked up some statistics. Out of the fifty-five million people living in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, two hundred fifty thousand are Americans. Most of these are military personnel, a lot are employees of multinational corporations, some are married to British nationals, and some, like Roxanne and me, are just hanging out.

  But the statistic that got me was that Roxanne had ten acquaintances who had pets they needed to get through British quarantine.

  It boggles the mind. Or at least it boggled mine. Not only that, but it got on my nerves, too. Spot always excepted, the barking and mewing demands for affection drove me so nuts that I made my big mistake.

  With the assistance of a busman, I went to visit one of the Network’s operations in London.

  3

  “She who must be obeyed ...”

  Leo McKern (after H. Rider Haggard)

  Rumpole of th
e Bailey, Thames TV

  THE NETWORK HAD OPERATIONS in London. European news was cleared through here, right off Trafalgar Square. Two floors down from that, there was a bunch of Network employees who attempted to sell Network shows in syndication throughout Europe and Asia.

  I’d often wondered about the latter group. All the networks had them. I mean, it must be pretty simple to convince somebody that the special effects in Star Trek: The Next Generation are going to play in any language. But how do you persuade somebody to translate a static, line-driven sitcom like, say, Full House into Portuguese?

  That was a question, however, that would have to wait for another time, because I didn’t go there. I didn’t go to Network News, either.

  Instead, I went to the Network’s newest and most grandiose London-based operation, TVStrato, a direct-to-home satellite TV service headquartered in London but serving all of Western Europe.

  Mainly, it served them up a menu of recent movies, and sports (you paid a premium to have these channels decoded), along with a bunch of other stuff, including U.S. services like MTV and CNN, as well as more recent American stuff than you could get on the four British broadcasting channels.

  We had it at the menagerie back in Barnes, and that was mostly what we watched. There’s good stuff on English TV if you look for it, but when you turn on at random, you usually get one of three things—dramas wherein people in (and out of) eighteenth-century dress get laid a lot; sensitive documentaries on how cattle farmers on the drought-stricken Paphooda Peninsula in Upper Frammis deal with the ringworm infestations that have been plaguing their troubled economy; and game shows that feature borderline-retarded contestants having goo dumped on their heads by sadistic hosts.

  It’s nice to have the satellite—it serves the purpose cable serves at home. Not that they don’t have cable here, mind you. A million homes were supposed to have been wired up by the end of 1994. Of course, considering that the population of London alone is something like ten million, I think it’s safe to say that the satellite people will have it pretty much their way for the rest of the century, anyway.

  TVStrato was not a wholly owned creature of the Network. If it had been, the name of it would undoubtedly have been something like NetSat or some other unpronounceable garbage.

  With all the bureaucracy and (let’s face it) anti-American paranoia rampant in these parts, the Network needed a European partner for this little venture, so they teamed up with British-International Communications, the media giant founded by the late Sir Richard Arking.

  It was a short walk from the Hammersmith Bridge bus stop to the ex-abandoned warehouse that had been gutted and refitted as TVStrato’s transmission center and studios.

  It wasn’t a prepossessing sight, since no one had bothered to update the grimy Victorian exterior while they were at it, except for an incongruously brightly silvered sign over a new glass entry-way. The sun glinted off it as I approached. From this distance, the various microwave towers and satellite dishes that had been built on the roof seemed like an infestation of particularly large and nasty bugs.

  I walked in, and a young lady in a chroma-blue and gold TV-Strato page’s uniform asked me my name and if I had an appointment. She was very pretty and blond and had nice teeth, and a little gold ball glinted from the left wing of her nose, just where the crease stopped on the way to its pert tip.

  I pulled out my Network credentials—I was on an extended leave of absence, remember, so they were still good—told her I was over from New York and that I had dropped in on the chance I might get to see Bernard Levering.

  “Certainly, Mr. Cobb,” she said brightly. “I’ll ring Mr. Levering’s office straightaway. In the meantime, if I could just trouble you to step through the metal detector?”

  I stepped, to a gratifying absence of beep. England doesn’t harbor terrorists, but it is occasionally victimized by them. As a stockholder, I was delighted to see the Network and partners taking care of my property. As a creature of permeable membranes, spillable blood, and breakable bones who was at this moment in this building, I wanted to keep bombs out as much as anybody.

  “He is?” the young woman in the security booth asked the phone at her ear. “Yes, that’s right. Mr. Matt Cobb. Very good. Thank you.”

  She smiled at me again. She was very pretty. I tried not to stare at the thing in her nose until it occurred to me that if she didn’t want people to look at it, she wouldn’t have put it on display.

  Of course, that logic could get you in trouble sometimes—it didn’t seem to apply to low-cut dresses on either side of the Atlantic, for instance—but it seemed to hold me in good stead here.

  “Mr. Levering will be right down to fetch you,” she said. “Please have a seat in the meantime.”

  She waved me to a stark, modern, rectangular love seat in severe black leather and chrome. It was absolutely identical to the ones I’d left behind with Falzet on Sixth Avenue. I almost cried from nostalgia.

  I managed to control myself. I sat on the love seat—it even felt the same—and wondered what people in offices do in that lengthy interval between the time someone tells you they’ll be “out to fetch you straightway,” and the time they actually show up. I wondered what I had done, when I had people showing up at my office, but I couldn’t remember.

  Eventually, Bernard showed up. The lobby directory here showed him as “Director of Operations,” i.e., head of all the day-today business. He was a dark-haired, worried-looking little guy with glasses and an incipient stoop. He had worked for the Sales Department at the Network in New York for a couple of years before coming back to England to work for a then-budding TVStrato.

  We’d gotten to know each other pretty well in those days. We hit it off. He’d become entranced with American sports, especially basketball, and I became his resident guru when someone leaked it to him that back in college I was a second-team small-college All-American. When I told him that in high school my best friend, next-door neighbor, and back-court partner had been NBA star Cornelius U. Martin III, he was ready to name a sneaker after me.

  Anyway, Bernard soaked up knowledge like a sponge; learned that Bernard King pronounced his first name with the accent on the NARD, rather than saying Bernid, the way Mr. Levering and all his fellow Brits did; spouted statistics like three pages of agate in the New York Post.

  And that was just basketball. It was the same thing with baseball and football, though without the hero worship.

  I liked him a lot. He was quick-witted and funny, with a wry, throwaway delivery that never failed to crack me up.

  Somebody once said we should try out for nightclubs as a transatlantic comedy team. Bernard replied, “No, I don’t fancy us for the stage. We’d make a grand pair of hecklers, though.”

  “Matt,” he said, pumping my hand enthusiastically in both of his. “Has New York sent you to check up on us, then?”

  “No,” I told him. “I’m here on holiday.” That’s what I told everybody. It was simpler than explaining that Roxanne Schick had so much damn money, the home office had given us visas that would let us stay in the United Kingdom until the next ice age, if we wanted to.

  “That’s great. How long are you going to be here, do you think?”

  “Oh, another six months or so. Or until I figure out cricket.”

  “Another six months? How long have you been here already, Matt?”

  “About three months. I think I’ve got rugby down, and snooker’s easy enough to figure, but cricket is a challenge. I know Americans can do it, because an American owns the big cricket annual.”

  “Wisden’s.”

  “Whatever. I’ve watched it assiduously, but all I can make of it is one guy working his head off, while the rest stand around not doing much of anything, and then it’s teatime.”

  “Obviously,” he said, “you’re missing the subtleties.”

  I laughed. “Obviously,” I said.

  We went to a lift and got in. It was the same brushed stainless stee
l as in New York. I felt more nostalgia. I also felt that somebody’s brother-in-law must have a racket going, selling elevators to the Network.

  “Listen, Bernard,” I said. “There’s one more thing I don’t understand about England.”

  “Just one? And after three months, too. My wife’s been here for years, and she says she doesn’t understand a goddamn thing about the place.”

  Now that he mentioned it, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand, like how come when you bought the last of some item at the supermarket, they never ever restocked it, or why nobody would offer a discount on new books. But I let all that go for now, and addressed myself to the matter at hand. Or rather nose.

  “What’s with the downstairs receptionist?” I asked.

  “Why? Are you on the outs with your ice skater?”

  That had been two girlfriends ago. “We sort of slid apart,” I reported, and Bernard laughed again.

  “So you’re interested,” he said.

  “Strictly academic,” I told him. “I’m here with somebody.”

  “Oooh, ’er downstairs wouldn’t like that. Judo-threw a guy from technical across the lobby and into a wall for stepping out on her.”

  “That must have gone over well with the management.”

  “You think you’re being sarcastic, but as a matter of fact, it did. Her ladyship announced it was the first truly practical solution to sexual harassment she’d ever heard of. She gave the bloke the sack and Jill (that’s her name) a pay rise.”

  “Which she then celebrated by buying a diamond to stick through her nose.”

  “Aha,” he said, “squeamish, are we? How old were you before you learned not to argue with a woman over fashion?”

  “It doesn’t come up much,” I said.

  “Lucky man. My wife’s an American—you knew Sandy in New York—and she looks at magazines from two countries and clucks her tongues over all of them. But then one day she’ll tell me she absolutely must have an orange-and-green checked cashmere scarf, and there is no peace on earth until she gets it.”