Vicious Circle

I parked the car at the top of Hoe Street. It was a fair walk from there, but the car was likely to be there when I got back, possibly with engine and wheels still attached. That was worth a little additional effort.

A couple of minutes’ walk past the station there’s a building with a Cecil Masey frontage that still looks beautiful through all the shit and peeling paintwork and graffiti. Aggressively Moorish, like all his best stuff: the centerpiece is a massive window in that elongated, round-topped, vaguely phallic shape, flanked by two smaller versions of itself. The same shapes appear up on top of the walls like crenellations, or like waves frozen in brick. The interiors are all marble and mirrors and gilded angels, courtesy of Sidney Bernstein or one of his underpaid assistants.

It opened in 1931 as a Gaumont, had its heyday and its slow decline like all the other prewar super-cinemas, and gently expired exactly three decades later. But then some ghoul exhumed it in 1963, and reinvented it as a members only establishment with some grandiose name like the Majestic or the Regal. For the next twenty-three years it screened softcore porn to jaded bank managers at prices set high enough to keep the riffraff out. Now it was dead again, its second demise mourned by nobody, and Nicky had bought it for a song—probably the “Death March from Saul.”

It was the perfect home for him: he was also on his second time around.

I went in around the back, up the drainpipe, and through an unlocked window, the front being boarded up solid. The council nailed the boards up in the first place, but Nicky has added some additional barricades of his own. You can buy Nicky’s services if you know his price, but he doesn’t have much use for the passing trade.

Inside it was dark and cold, heat being another thing that Nicky has no truck with. As I walked along the broad, bare corridor to the projection booth, past peeling posters from two decades before, a draft of arctic provenance played around my ankles. I rapped on the door, and after a few seconds the security camera up top swiveled to get a better look at me. I’d passed three other cameras on the way up, of course, so he knew damn well it was me, but Nicky likes to remind you that Big Brother is watching. It’s not so much a matter of security—although he takes his security more seriously than Imelda Marcos takes her footwear; it’s more the statement of a philosophical position.

The door opened, without a creak but with the faintest suggestion of roiling vapor at floor level, like the effect you’d get from a dry ice machine set on low: either a side effect of Nicky’s spectacularly customized air-conditioning, or something that he does on purpose.

I pushed the door open carefully, but I didn’t step inside right away. I don’t like to barge in without a direct invitation, because this is the keep of Nicky’s little castle—and he really does think in those terms. He’s installed all kinds of deadfalls and ambushes to stop people from intruding on his privacy. Some of them were ingenious, bordering on sadistic. In my experience, there’s nobody who can think of more varied and interesting ways to abuse living flesh than a zombie.

“Nicky?” I called, opening the door a little farther with the toe of my shoe.

No answer. Well, someone had to have unlocked the door, and someone had to be operating the cameras. Taking my life—or at least the integrity of my balls—in my hand I stepped inside, into a chill that you could reasonably say was tomblike.

I looked around, but saw no sign of Nicky. The booth is larger than that word makes it sound: a sort of first-floor hangar, with a very high ceiling which apparently helps the whole heat-exchange thing. Nicky keeps his computers up here, and anything else that’s close to his cold, cold heart at any given moment. Right now, that included a hydroponics garden, which seemed to be doing nicely despite the blisteringly cold temperature. There was a screen across one half of the room, made up out of a row of malnourished, canelike plants rooted in buckets of evil-looking brown swill. The tallest of the plants were stretching to the ceiling and spreading their leaves out across it—reaching for the sky just to surrender, as Leonard Cohen sang somewhere or other. They’d grown as far as they could without bending their backs and shooting out horizontally, and as it was they looked to be balanced pretty precariously on the inadequate foundations of the plastic buckets.

Normally Nicky would have been at the computer terminal on the other side of the room—or maybe leaning on his elbows at the plan chest off to my far right, poring over maps and charts of London, England, and the world scribbled over and over with his own hermetic symbols. Both of those spots were currently empty.

“Hey, Nicky,” I called, a little irritably. “Whenever you’re ready, mate. Meter’s running.”