It was cold in the backseat of the taxi, but Vince didn’t ask the driver to turn up the heat. A little chill in the air would keep him alert.
It was important to be alert around guns.
Vince had lied to Jack about going down to dinner. Food was the furthest thing from his mind. He was singularly focused on the e-mail message that had landed in his work mailbox, and which his screen reader had converted from text to mechanical audio. “Are you afraid of the Dark? Admit it. You are. You shouldn’t have come to London. May the best blind man win.”
The city streets were wet, and the whump-whump of the windshield wipers gave rhythm to his ruminations. The Dark. He imagined the words were capitalized in the e-mail, and the significance wasn’t lost on him. He’d heard about the signature before-scrawled on the cocktail napkin in a message to Jack at the Lincoln Road cafe; on the napkin from Club Inversion that police had found in Jamal’s back pocket after he was killed. In is own mind, Vince had already made the connection between McKenna’s killer and this man who called himself the Dark. But the reference in this e-mail to “the best blind man” was confusing. Was he blind, too? Was he talking about blindness in some other sense? Was it just more taunting? Vince wasn’t sure. Nor had he determined how the Dark knew he was in London. But he recognized fighting words when he heard them. If it was a showdown he wanted, then yes, by all means: Let the better man win.
“Right turn at White Chapel High Street in twenty-five meters.”
It was the computerized voice of his GPS navigator. He didn’t trust taxi drivers, who had been known to rob blind people… well, blind.
The driver turned right, and Vince was glad to have kept him honest. They were headed for Brick Lane, an East End area once prowled by Jack the Ripper, now famous for curry houses and everything Bangladeshi. Streets were narrow and the one-way traffic was slow, so Vince used the travel time to phone his wife. The call went straight to voice mail. At the tone, he left a simple message.
“I love you.”
The taxi stopped. “I love you, too,” said the driver. “Four pounds fifty.”
The GPS navigator announced, “You have arrived at your destination.” It was nice to have the reassurance of technology that he wasn’t being dropped off just anywhere, even if the satellite was a few seconds late.
“Which way is the Kushiara ATM?” asked Vince.
“Get out and you’ll be standing right in front of it.”
That was exactly where Vince wanted to be-the corner of Brick Lane and Fashion Street, south of the old Truman Brewery. He paid the fare, stepped out to the sidewalk, and closed the door. The taxi pulled away, and even though he was alone, his old friend was with him. Rain. It was abundant in London, creating a world that didn’t depend on sight. Vince popped his umbrella and listened. He could hear footsteps around him, easily differentiating between the heavy plod of a passing jogger and the lighter step of a woman walking in high heels. He could feel the breeze on his face and smell the curry from the restaurant down the street. He heard a flag flapping in the breeze overhead, the clang of a bicycle bell. With a little extra concentration he could distinguish buses from trucks, trucks from cars, little cars from motor scooters. Nearby, a pigeon cooed, then another, and it sounded as though they were scrapping over a piece of bread or perhaps a muffin that someone had dropped on the sidewalk. A car door slammed. Men were talking in the distance. In some ways, he was more aware of his surroundings, or at least of certain details of his surroundings, than many sighted persons.
Are you afraid of The Dark?
The question had been poignant. Yes, sometimes he was-when he used his mind’s eye to step outside of himself, and he remembered a world that was so much more than sound, smell, taste, and touch. The fearful Vince was all too aware that he lived his life largely in a reactive posture-that things still existed even if they concealed themselves and did not call out to him for recognition. He wondered what lay hidden on these old streets, how close he really was to danger-to the Dark.
“Are you Vince?”
He turned at the sound of the man’s voice. “Who’s asking?”
“Prince Charles.”
The guy was every bit the smart-ass in person that he had been on the phone, and the Bangladeshi accent was just as prominent. Vince took the envelope from his pocket and handed it over. He could hear the man open it, presumably counting out the two hundred pounds in cash.
“You sure you don’t want the submachine gun?” the man said. “It’s only another hundred pounds.”
The U.K. had some of the toughest gun laws in the world, but the guy was only half joking. Even semiautomatic weapons could be had for as little as three hundred pounds, and bootleg DVDs and black-market tobacco weren’t the only illegal trade in Banglatown. It was all a matter of knowing the right person, and Chuck Mays had assured Vince that if he needed anything-anything-in the East End, an ex-pat from Dhaka named Sanu Reza was the go-to guy.
“The Glock will do,” said Vince.
“We have to walk about two blocks,” Reza said.
Vince unfolded his walking stick, asked the man for his arm, and placed his hand in the crook of the man’s elbow. “You lead,” said Vince.
“I’ve never brokered a sale to a blind guy before,” he said as they started down the sidewalk.
Vince smiled to himself, mildly amused that both Reza and the Dark were under the same misapprehension.
“No worries,” he said, thinking of the precious time he’d logged at the shooting range with Brainport back in Miami-and of the prototype of the device that his friend Chuck had shipped to the hotel. “This blind man isn’t as blind as some people think he is.”