Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton

Author:Len Deighton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2011-11-29T11:43:15+00:00

Chapter 16

Next morning my phone rang at nine forty-five. I had a headache. A voice that called me ‘old boy’ suggested that I ‘toddle over the road and meet me in Greenwich Village at the corner of Bleeker Street and MacDougal. I’ll be wearing a green tweed overcoat and a brown felt hat.’

I’ll bet, I thought, with a small Union Jack flying from the crown of it. So I walked across Washington Square and along MacDougal where there are coffee houses for rich vagrants. The black chairs and marble tables were silent and empty and men in white aprons were sweeping the floors, carrying ice and emptying the garbage. Two kids were playing draughts with Coca-Cola caps on the steps of an art-jewellery studio. A dozen stray cats were asleep under a Con Edison awning and so were two winos. I stopped at the corner of Bleeker Street. It was a bright cold day with a freezing wind blowing on the cross-town streets. There was no sign of anyone resembling the tweedy man that phoned. Outside Perazzo’s Funeral Church there was an old-style funeral. There were six black Fleetwoods with Negro chauffeurs, and flower arrangements as big as allotments. Three men in black overcoats and dark glasses were fussing around the long cars and a small crowd had gathered to weep and wonder. I watched the first of the Fleetwoods roar away with headlights shining and felt a nudge in the kidneys and heard a soft voice.

‘Don’t turn round, old fruit. No point in both of us knowing what I look like. Billet-doux from the old firm. Lots of luck and all that, don’t you know.’ He paused. ‘Fascinating people, eh? Carries great status a fine funeral, you know.’

I said, ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘That’s the spirit. You’ll love the Village. Fascinating. I live here. Wouldn’t live anywhere else. Love the Village. Fascinating people, eh?’ He prodded my ribs with something that turned out to be a manilla envelope.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I gripped the envelope. He moved away and I heard a murmur of protest as he trod on feet and pushed ribs to move back through the sightseers. I gave him two or three minutes to disappear, then drifted away as the last hearse disappeared. A sign on the wall said, ‘Live and trade in the Village’. I walked past it and headed north to have breakfast.

In Washington Square a camera crew were measuring the width of the arch and being important. It was one of those days when police academy cadets were controlling the traffic and miles of brightly coloured taxi-cabs slithered very slowly up the avenue of graceful skyscrapers like banded snakes between jungle trees. On Eighth Street the wind was lifting discarded newspapers like wounded pigeons. The sky was low and pregnant with rain which would fall as soon as the wind dropped. Even now the air was damp with the threat of it.

I went into the Cookery coffee shop. I got a seat near the window and ordered Canadian bacon and a pot of coffee.

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