The Stargazey (19 page)

“Chilten's men probably took some things away.” But Jury recalled Chilten had said that, except for the passport, bank statement, and a couple of bills, they came away with zilch. Jury thought he'd been speaking figuratively, but perhaps Chilten meant it literally. In any event, the upshot was a big nothing. Jury said, “I agree; it's odd.”

Wiggins shook his head. “No. If Vera hadn't come in here—well, I was beginning to feel we were hunting a ghost.”

 • • • 

T
he bright neon-blue sign of the Starrdust shot cometlike across the narrow building in Covent Garden. Villains dealt with for the moment, homeopathy and
Homicide
temporarily dealt with, Wiggins was ready for his own life on the street.

The Starrdust was Wiggins's favorite venue, probably in all of London. Afterwards, they could chase Racer's wild goose to Soho and the restaurant owned by Danny Wu.
Duck,
thought Jury, telling himself a little joke,
not goose—Racer's wild duck chase
. Wu's served the best duck in London.

Wiggins parked the police-issue Ford illegally on the opposite side of the street, and they got out and walked across the cobbles. They stopped outside the shop window, sharing the pavement with a half dozen kiddies who were hypnotized by the Starrdust's big window. Something was always going on; the scene changed without notice. The window
dressers, Meg and Joy, who were Andrew Starr's shop assistants, had a friend who was some kind of electrical engineer and devised all manner of pulleys and moving parts and mechanical tracks to animate their scenes. The three of them had probably produced the best window in London; Harrods and Selfridges couldn't begin to compete.

Today the scene was a night wood. Off to the left, two small children were moving along a path, when, suddenly, a witch with raised arms and clawlike fingers popped jerkily from behind a tree. The moon brightened, the stars glittered harder, and out of his cave came Merlin in his coned hat and star-drenched coat to hammer on the witch with his miter until she disappeared. Then the wood grew darker as several forest creatures came out of hiding. Finally, the scene was so dark that eyes and stars hung in the little window theater until the whole thing went black as coal.

Everything about the Starrdust seemed to be the work of invisible hands.

“Mister, tell me how they done that,” demanded one tiny girl, who might have been the understudy for a bisque doll herself. She gazed up at Jury with her hands on top of her head as if it might blow off in the wind that was coming down Flower Street.

“The Wizard, that's who does it. Merlin. The one in the tall hat.”

The look she gave him was of the long-suffering variety. “
Mis
-ter.” She rolled her eyes as if to say he should know better and spun away like a leaf carried off by the breeze.

It was a wonder, Jury had to agree, though he thought the “how-they-did-it” was less important than the “why.”

 • • • 

The “why” of this venture lay in a deep part of the mind of Andrew Starr. He was the Merlin-in-the-wood, orchestrating these doings without doing them himself. Right now, he was leaning over an old hunt table that served as his shop desk. Atop it sat a computer and a cash register and, at the moment, something Andrew had spread out in front of him: a horoscope, most likely. Andrew was a serious astrologer and had a dedicated following, from housewives to media personalities. He was hellishly expensive, but no one bickered about the price, for he was amazingly prescient.

The shop seemed to exist in a perpetual gloaming, shadowy and darker the farther one moved toward the rear. Wiggins immediately went in the back, where the children usually collected by the Horror-Scope, a kind of Wendy house from which issued squeals of delight and fright.

Jury stopped as he always did to admire the second ceiling, the one Meg and Joy and their engineer had devised as an absolute marvel of night sky, with a moon that could wax and wane, stars and planets that could brighten and dim. Behind each planet was a light that lightened or darkened, however the timer was set, so that as Venus grew dark, Mercury dazzled. Stars, moon, all the planets of the zodiac appearing and disappearing. It was wonderful, and all courtesy of Meg, Joy, and the engineer. And the mind of Andrew Starr.

The shop was quite truly out of this world, including the music: old, scratchy songs that came from ancient records collected by the owner over the years. Hoagy Carmichael's rendition of “Stardust” was a staple, as was Glenn Miller's “Moonlight Serenade.” Jury stood gazing at the ceiling, listening to a piano's waterfall of notes, trying to place the song. It was one of those tunes that maddened as it called up memories, for you knew it but couldn't come up with it and also knew it would sadden you if you did.

“ ‘Stella by Starlight,' ” said Andrew, looking up from his work and smiling.

And mind reading, thought Jury. He was convinced that Andrew Starr had some sixth or even seventh sense. If there was such a thing as a dreamy businessman, Starr was its paradigm. He had shown his shrewd business sense when he'd hired Meg and Joy, had realized before they did anything that their near fairy-tale presence would be marvelous for business. They were unrelated by blood but twins of fortune. Meg and Joy appeared to spring out like Merlin to chase away your troubles. They were hovering right now by the Horror-Scope, a structure the size of a small room with a low ceiling from which emanated the sounds of bad weather, a sky lanced by lightning, eerie sounds, and “phenomena” (at least, that was what Wiggins called it), and you had to pay your twenty pence to find out just what constituted this wonder. Jury had never treated himself to the inside of the Horror-Scope, and Wiggins refused to tell him about it.

One of the “phenomena,” and one he knew well, was Jury's upstairs neighbor, Carole-anne Palutski. This particular phenomenon with its amethyst eyes and red-gold hair came streaming toward him now in clouds of pink and salmon chiffon and a lot of tiny bells wrapped around her somewhere, probably the ankles. A silver lamé turban crushed down her abundant red-gold hair, making little curl splashes around her face. It made Jury think of a pretty little girl in a Dutch painting. She was carrying a small plate that held a big slice of coconut gâteau, which could fatten the air through which it moved, but not Carole-anne herself.

“Super!” she called, in a tone of embrace, both welcoming and wondering where he'd been all her life, despite their having shared bowls of Weetabix just that morning. Then she remembered he'd stood her up for their pub date. “Come to get your palm read?” Palmistry was “Madame Zostra's” forte, together with messages from the dead who managed to laser their way into her crystal ball. “Because if you have, you needn't bother. It'll be the same.”

“No, that wasn't my intention. But are you telling me one palm-read is good for a lifetime?”

“Yours is.” She mashed her fork into cake crumbs.

If he was looking for her to find long trips and love affairs in his palm, forget it. Jury wondered why he seemed to be surrounded by people who were not in the least bothered by ambiguity: Carole-anne, Wiggins, Mrs. Wassermann. Even the cat Cyril appeared to have a tighter grasp on the iffiness of things than these people.

“Well, love, I hate to disillusion you, but there are things going on in my love life not accounted for by your hasty palm reading back in January.” Why in heaven's name did he remember it had been in January? he wondered. This increased his irritation no end. Lord knows it wasn't a fortune that would stick in the mind, largely because it was so absent of incident. Why did he recall it? It could only be that Carole-anne herself was more vivid than anything anybody could invent.

“Love life? Whoever said you had one?” She stuffed another bite of cake in her mouth and said around it, “Nah me, ahm sure.” She set her plate on the counter and said, “I only just came out to get the cordless.” She reached beneath the counter and brought out the telephone, adding,
“I've got to call Stan.” She gave Jury a snooty look. “We've an engagement.” Carole-anne had a way of using Stan Keeler to measure Jury's jealousy quotient.

“Going to Berlin, are we?”

“I'm
sor
-ry?” She cocked her head as if listening to Jury were a trial, he being a blabber of meaningless syllables.

“Stan's in Berlin doing his gig thing.”

One thing Jury marveled at was Carole-anne's ability to process information lightning-quick. Without missing a beat, she said, “I didn't say we were going
out.
We fixed up when I was to
call
him is what I meant.”

“Ah. Well, as regards my own love life, may I qualify things by saying just because you don't predict one doesn't mean there isn't one.”

Andrew was enjoying this exchange. “That rather defeats the entire purpose of predicting, doesn't it, Superintendent?” His smile was happy and on Carole-anne's side. Andrew didn't believe for a minute that she could see any farther into the future than her next manicure. Andrew was well aware of Carole-anne's limitations as a spiritualist, but he always championed her and any causes she might espouse.

Any clouding of Carole-anne's brow cleared when her boss said this. “So, what d'you want?”

“To do something for me.”

She tried not to look pleased when Jury handed over the page from the
Mirror
he'd had stashed in his pocket. “What is it?” Carole-anne forked up another bite of cake.

“Just read this—” adding, when she gave him her put-upon look, “when you get a free moment. Then we'll talk.”

Haughtily raising her chin, she said, “Suit yourself,” and took off for her silken tent, both cake and cordless forgotten.

Drowsy laughter floated towards them from the Horror-Scope. Wiggins was still back there. “Wiggins!”

All sound was momentarily suspended, Wiggins and the other kids not wanting to be called back to the daily round of clocks and seasons.

Only the promise of a meal at Danny Wu's could galvanize him into exiting from the Starrdust. “Wiggins,” Jury called again, “are you ready for Danny Wu's?”

First Wiggins's face appeared round the door of the Horror-Scope and then the whole of him, coming down the darkling aisle. As was the case with Carole-anne, it was difficult for him not to don the cloak of martyrdom.

“I've been ready all this time, sir. Only waiting on you.”

 • • • 

R
uiyi—the name of Danny's restaurant—was, according to his customers, food reviewers, and, most important, his own countrymen, the best restaurant in Soho. Jury and Wiggins were delighted that this was true because the ongoing investigation of Mr. Wu's alleged sideline—drugs, now bodies—had the two of them sitting at one of Danny Wu's tables a couple of times a month.

This investigation would ordinarily be handled by the Drug Squad (obviously, what those people were there for) had not Chief Superintendent Racer insisted that Jury take it. Jury only worked homicides, but that had never bothered Racer. Now that a body had been added to the drug mix, Racer was even more rabid about Danny Wu.

Danny Wu was an elegant, soft-spoken, Italian-suited man in his early forties who looked more Eurasian than Chinese. He was himself Cantonese, born in Guangdong province, later gone to Beijing. When his mother—who had raised him by herself—had realized how dreadful the place was and how difficult to get out of, she had risked her life a half dozen times to take him either to Hong Kong or Shenzhen or back to Guangdong. His mother had come from a long line of patrician landowners and had been very beautiful in the way that truly courageous people can be beautiful. And she, Jury was sure, had been. One only had to look at the face of Danny himself to know that. He had seen her picture, too. But Danny had never known his father, “so he could have been,” said Danny, “you know, one of you knobby-nosed lot.”

“Not with your nose, guv,” Jury had said, laughing.

Well-born but poor, Danny had taken any job he could get and had wound up washing dishes in a Shenzhen hotel. Fascinated with the way the cooks' knives could slice a whole head of cabbage in almost less time than it took to say the word, he had worked his way to vegetable cook and
then to sous-chef at the age of nineteen, after which he had braved the barbed wire that kept Shenzhen separated from Hong Kong. Five years were spent as head chef in a Hong Kong hotel before he came to London. As top chef in one of London's best restaurants, he had made enough money to buy real estate, and from these proceeds he'd bought up this valuable corner site in Soho and opened his own place. He had named it Ruiyi, after his mother.

All of this dedicated cookery work had been interrupted over the years by spells of work on a snake farm and some industrial espionage in Shenzhen. (“It's easier getting the Crown Jewels out of the Tower than a Barbie doll out of Mattel, Inc.”)

Jury had decided that Danny Wu was the greatest liar since Homer. “How much of him do you believe?” Wiggins had once asked. “Only the snakes and the mother,” Jury had answered, then corrected himself: “Only the mother.” That Danny spoke the truth about his mother was as evident to Jury as the rain flying against the windows, an un-English rain, a rain that spelled overrunning rivers or flash flooding somewhere.

Whenever Jury and Wiggins showed up here, they were moved in as smoothly as the little figures on the electric rail in the Starrdust's window. If police could keep Wu under surveillance as well as Danny managed to keep them, any drug trafficking would have been discovered long ago. A magician couldn't have cleared a tabletop quicker than it was done for Jury and Wiggins.

“Please,” said the venerable old waiter, bobbing and smiling as he swept his arm over a table that Jury could have sworn had been fully occupied only moments before. The waiter pulled out both chairs and motioned for them to sit. They sat. Jury looked across the small room at the queue on which they'd brought up the end and got stony stares in return. He could hardly blame them. One always had to queue up at Ruiyi.