The car, clearly far overloaded, rode like a brick. At almost every bump, it bottomed out, and the jarring repeatedly shot up Canidy’s spine to his jaw. He began to wonder if walking and dragging his suitcases would have been better than this torturous ride.
Harry seemed oblivious.
He ran up through the gears, the little engine roaring mightily. He wove through the heavy Wednesday traffic, then headed down Brook Street. At Hanover Square, he suddenly downshifted, wrestled the wheel to the left, and shot toward the traffic circle.
Canidy worried that if his luggage didn’t go flying off the trunk lid, then its weight being suddenly shifted was going to cause the Nippy to go up on its two right tires—maybe even flip.
It didn’t, and Harry accelerated heavily out of the circle, then shifted into high gear.
He picked up Mortimer Street and headed east.
As they went, Canidy could see the clear evidence of the recent bombings by the Luftwaffe that he had read about in the New York papers.
Some shops had their windows blown out while other shops were gone completely, their buildings demolished.
There were lines of women and children outside markets and laundries and more.
In the next block, two London bobbies sat sipping tea at a table on the sidewalk, taking a break from walking their beat. All that remained of the tea shop was part of the brick wall that held the store’s wooden signage; the rest of the building beyond that was gone.
As Harry got on Gower Street, Canidy realized that the destruction was looking much worse.
And Woburn Square was only blocks away.
He turned to speak to Harry but found that he was so close that he almost put his nose in Harry’s ear.
He looked forward again, out the windshield, and said, “How bad were the bombings in this area?”
“Spotty. Some parts the bombs did some serious damage. But other parts went untouched.”
Canidy thought about that a moment.
“And Woburn Mansions?”
In his peripheral vision, he saw Harry shaking his head.
“Not great,” Harry replied.
They made the next block with only the sound of the Austin whining.
As they turned onto Woburn Mansions, Canidy felt a real fear take hold.
It took him a moment to get his bearings because so much had changed.
He saw the park, then recognized the point in the park where 16 Woburn Mansions
would have been in relation to it.
He looked hard and had trouble believing his eyes.
The building with Ann Chambers’s flat—the very one that had once survived other bombings with only its limestone façade scorched black from the fires—was now rubble.
Sixteen Woburn Mansions—and everything to its right and left—was gone.
Bombed to nothing but rubble.
And what about Ann?
Oh, shit!