Free Highbinders by Ross Thomas

had set out to master the city’s bus system only to fall back in utter confusion after a couple of weeks.
    But the underground had remained my specialty and I had delighted in giving detailed, even painstaking instructions to visiting Americans on how they could best go down to Kew in lilac time, or east to Upminster on the District Line, or west to Uxbridge on the Piccadilly, or even the Metropolitan.
    The first appointment that I had made for that afternoon was at an address that I vaguely recalled as being on the dingier outskirts of Maida Vale. So just to kill time and determine whether I still retained my London tube lore I strolled through Mayfair to Oxford Circus and caught the Bakerloo Line to the Maida Vale station where a news vendor told me that 99 Ashworth Road wasn’t far at all, just a couple of streets down Elgin Avenue and to my right.
    As a neighborhood, Elgin Avenue was on the skids. There was a two-block stretch of funky-looking shops and then, to the west, row after row of red brick flats that seemed bent on nudging each other toward slum status although it might be another ten years before they all got there.
    Ashworth Road was a little better. It was a short street lined with trees and well-tended gardens and prim-looking semidetached houses that probably were built just before the first world war. It was a quiet neighborhood, for some reason too quiet, until I realized that there was none of the stuff that normally serves to gauge a residential neighborhood’s vitality. There were no abandoned tricycles on the walk, or forgotten teddy bears, or waiting prams. It was a street without children, a street of drawn curtains, bolted doors, and aging but well-dusted cars, including a small Bentley that I guessed to be at least forty years old.
    I decided that it was a street from which the young had fled while the old stayed on. I was its lone pedestrian that afternoon as I walked down the cracked sidewalk, the leather heels of my black loafers banging out into that quiet that belonged in a small town, not a big city. As I walked I thought I could detect the rustle of a drawn curtain here and there and I assumed that suspicious old eyes were watching to see what house I stopped at. I may have been that month’s excitement on Ashworth Road.
    Roses were the flowers there. Dark red roses that nodded in the warm May afternoon from behind chest-high brick walls and iron fences. They were the only friendly thing in sight and the front yard of the house at 99 Ashworth Road had its full share of them.
    It was hard to tell how old he was, the man who answered my knock. He could have been a desiccated fifty or a not bad seventy. His was a dried, pinched face, tight and somehow unforgiving, and so deeply wrinkled that I wondered how he shaved.
    “St. Ives,” he said, as if calling some long forgotten roll. And then after a pause, “Philip.”
    “That’s right,” I said instead of present. “Doctor Christenberry?”
    He nodded and started to open the door wider, but thought better of it. “You understand about the consultation fee?”
    “Ten guineas.”
    “Yes. That’s correct. Ten guineas.” He opened the door just wide enough for me to slip past him. He wore old, stained gray flannel trousers, carpet slippers, a gray coat sweater that was buttoned up wrong, and a tieless shirt that may have been white at one time, but which was now a sort of grayish yellow. He said, “How do you do?” as I came in and I noticed that he smelled.
    The man whom the smell belonged to was Julian Christenberry and he had his doctorate from Heidelberg plus an M.A. and a F.S.A. from somewhere else, and according to the Assistant to the Master of the Armouries at the Tower of London, Doctor Julian Christenberry knew more than anyone else in the world about medieval armor and weaponry, unless I went to Oakeshott, who unfortunately was no longer available.
    The small foyer that I found myself in was furnished with two stiff