The Judas Goat Read Online Free PDF

young and ordinary faces that stared out under the helmets and the eyes that moved. The faces were kind of a shock. 
    At the end of Whitehall was Parliament and Westminster Bridge, and across Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey. I’d walked through it some years back with Brenda Loring and a stampede of tourists. I’d like to walk through it when it was empty sometime. I looked at my watch: 8:50. Subtract six hours, it was ten of three at home. I wondered if Susan was in her counseling class. It probably didn’t meet every day. But maybe in the summer. I walked a little way out into Westminster Bridge and looked down at the river. The Thames. Jesus Christ. It had flowed through this city when only Wampanoags were on the Charles. Below me to the left was a landing platform where excursion boats loaded and unloaded. Susan and I had gone the year before to Amsterdam and had a wine and cheese cruise by candlelight along the canals and looked at the high seventeenthcentury fronts of the canal houses. 
    Shakespeare must have crossed this river. I had some vague recollection that the Globe Theatre was on the other side. Or had been. I also had the vague feeling that it no longer existed. I looked at the river for a long time and then turned and leaned on the bridge railing with my arms folded and watched the people for a while. I was striking, I thought, in blue blazer, gray slacks, white oxford button-down and blue and red rep striped tie. I’d opened the tie and let it hang down casually against the white shirt, a touch of informality, and it was only a matter of time until a swinging London bird in a leather miniskirt saw that I was lonely and stopped to perk me up. Miniskirts didn’t seem prevalent. I saw a lot of harem pants and a lot of the cigarette look with Levis tucked into the top of high boots. I would have accepted either substitute, but no one made a move on me. Probably had found out I was foreign. Xenophobic bastards. No one even noticed the brass touch on the tassels on my loafers. Suze noticed them the first time I had them on. 
    I gave it up after a while. I hadn’t smoked in ten or twelve years, but I wished then I’d had a cigarette that I could have taken a final drag on and flipped still burning into the river as I turned and walked away. Not smoking gains in the area of lung cancer, but it loses badly in the realm of dramatic gestures. At the edge of St. James’s Park there was something called Birdcage Walk and I took it. Probably my Irish romanticism. It led me along the south side of St. James’s Park to Buckingham Palace. I stood outside awhile and stared in at the wide bare hard-paved courtyard. “How you doing, Queen,” I murmured. There was a way to tell if they were there or not but I’d forgotten what it was. Didn’t matter much. They probably wouldn’t make a move on me either. 
    From the memorial statue in the circle in front of the palace a path led across Green Park toward Piccadilly and my hotel. I took it. I felt strange walking through a dark place of grass and trees an ocean away from home, alone. I thought about myself as a small boy and the circumstantial chain that connected that small boy with the middle-aging man who found himself alone in the night in a park in London. The little boy didn’t seem to be me very much. And neither did the middle-aging man. I was incomplete. I missed Susan and I’d never missed anyone before. I came out on Piccadilly again, turned right and then left onto Berkeley. I walked past the Mayfair and looked at Berkeley Square, long and narrow and very neat-looking. I didn’t hear a nightingale singing. Someday maybe I’d come back here with Susan, and I would. I went back to the hotel and had room service bring me four beers. “How many glasses, sir?”
    “None,” I said in a mean voice. When it came I overtipped the bellhop to make up for the mean voice, drank the four beers from the bottle and went to bed. 
    In the morning I went out