Bloody London Read Online Free PDF Page A

doors I passed were ajar; I got a glimpse of beds, patients, some asleep, others half sitting, peering up at the TVs that hung from overhead arms. The cathode glow of the screens caught my attention and I stopped and looked at a set. The Pascoe story was already running. I turned a corner.
    From one of the rooms came a soft moan now: someone crying in pain, muffled by medication. And the alien antiseptic smell, insidious, the ammonia, the sick flesh, the weird sour smell of stainless steel – bedpans, sinks, bedrails.
    Too many times in the last year I’d smelled it. Friends died. I had waited in the hallway and smelled the sour smell.
    Behind me there was the quiet squish of rubber soles on linoleum. Hospitals spook me. Something goeswrong. An alarm shrieks. A hunk of human flesh in intensive care malfunctions. There’s the sudden noise, the officious thud of a phalanx of medics when they appear.
    Where was she? Ulanova. There’d be a cop on duty. Then I saw it. The name was on the door. No cop. I pushed the door open softly, but the bed was made up tight and empty, the lights doused. She must be dead.
    I dug some chewing gum out of my pocket. I wanted a smoke, but I was committed to three a day and I’d already had four. I glanced in the bathroom and the closet. Someone had supplied her with a toothbrush and there was a cheap watch on the bedside table, a hairnet and a little wooden icon. I wondered how the hell she got hold of the icon before they brought her in, and I sat on the edge of the bed looking at it, the sad, crappy souvenir, and felt pissed off that I was too late.
    What the hell. With the story running this big, other witnesses on this one would come out of the woodwork like cuckoos out of a clock.
    In the mirror, I caught my reflection. Like Sonny said, I had dropped some weight, I was tan from a day of fishing off Sag Harbor the week before. I’d cleaned up my act and my eyes were clear. I’m six one. Hair still dark.
    â€œYou look like an American,” my mother always laughed, way back when I was still a kid in Moscow. When I got to New York, it made it easier to dump the past.
    The last few years cost me. There was no ease in me for so long I didn’t even notice. I thought I was a goodtimeguy when I was really dying. Too much pain, too much booze. I couldn’t stop. People said, veg out, Art, chill. But I couldn’t. I was locked into what I’d seen and done, with all the obligation, fury, guilt. I’d watched other guys my age drop dead from heart attacks. Strokes. You turn forty, you’re in trouble.
    But I was OK now, better than I’d been in a real long time. I’m solvent, more or less. Lily Hanes and me, we’re good together, and there’s Beth who’s three already. Nothing was going to drag me back into the shit, and now, sitting in the silent, sunny room staring in the mirror, I hummed the Beach Boys tune that I heard the guy by the pool whistle.
    â€œSee anything you like?”
    I saw Frances Pascoe in the mirror. I got off the bed, the cheesy watch still in my hand. There was a film of talcum powder on it.
    I said, “She’s dead.”
    Mrs Pascoe shut the door to the room. “No, she isn’t. She’s gone home. I came in, like you, and found her gone. I spoke to the head nurse. Someone checked her out. When they brought her in this morning, it seems, she made a frightful stink and eventually got herself released against doctor’s orders.”
    â€œWho took her home?”
    â€œI heard it was a nephew.”
    â€œDoctors that accommodating around here?”
    â€œHere? If someone’s paying, yes.”
    â€œHe was Russian?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThe nephew. Say I’m curious.”
    â€œApparently, yes.” She glanced at the icon in my hand. “I’d better take her things.”
    Like me, she’d come to pump the old woman. Mrs Pascoe gestured at the empty bed with