Moon Over Soho

“The old days,” said Smith. “Isn’t that what you’re asking about? Because I was a respectable businessman.”

“But Smithy,” said Stephanopoulis. “I don’t believe in respectable businessmen. I’ve been a copper for more than five minutes. And the constable here doesn’t think you’re respectable either, because it happens he is a card-carrying member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and so regards all forms of property as a crime against the proletariat.”

That one caught me by surprise and the best I could manage was “Power to the people.”

I rang her and left a message identifying myself and giving an impression of urgency without actually saying anything concrete. Never record anything you wouldn’t want turning up on YouTube is my motto.

First law of gossip—there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it.

“The chicken in that is embalmed, dried and pressed very flat, and then sprinkled with extra chemicals,” she said.

“Too hungry to care,” I said.

Ghosts, I was thinking, memories—I wasn’t sure there was a difference.

As property prices started rising, developers snatched up bomb sites and derelict buildings and erected the shapeless concrete lumps that have made the ’70s the shining beacon of architectural splendor that it is.

Anything that can go wrong with armed men in the light can go twice as wrong in the dark.

Have you noticed that about journalists—all they really want to talk about is themselves.

The police can live with looking corrupt, bullying, or tyrannical, but looking stupid is intolerable. It has a tendency to undermine public faith in the forces of Law and is deleterious to public order.

I’m an old-fashioned copper–I don’t believe in breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

“There’s more to life than just London,” said Nightingale.

“People keep saying that,” I said. “But I’ve never actually seen any proof.”

Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything.

It’s no fun looking down on people if you can’t let them know you’re above them.

Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis—he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land. Since the principle of any rich person who wants to stay rich is, never give anything away unless you absolutely have to, the land has stayed with Crown ever since.

It’s always better to tell a half-truth than a half-lie.

When you’re a musician free is a magic number.

“Do you feel guilty?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t do it to them and I did my best to stop it. But I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty, if that helps.”

There were screams and yells from the street below as people saw what was happening. There would be lots of phone-camera footage on the news that night from people with more media-savvy than brains.

“The world was different before the war,” he said. “We didn’t have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place—we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.”

“Shouldn’t I know about these things?” I said.

“The list of things you need to know about, Peter, is extraordinarily long,” said Nightingale.

“If they were ugly, Peter, would you care half so much?” asked Nightingale. “There are some hideous things out there that can talk and reason, and I wonder if you would be quite so quick to rush to their defense.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But that just makes me shallow, it doesn’t make me wrong.”

The difference between stripping and burlesque, as far as I could tell, was class.

Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it–at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.

“Cyrus was a musician?” I asked.

“He played the alto sax.”

“And he played jazz?”

Another brief smile. “Is there any other kind of music?”

“You can’t die of jazz,” said Dr. Walid. “Can you?”

I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age.

“You know,” I said, “I think you’ll find you can.”

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

—Dizzy Gillespie

“You shouldn’t make jokes about these things,” she said. “Science doesn’t have all the answers, you know.”

“It’s got all the best questions, though.”

It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.