by Dick Francis
Greg said, “My wife would flirt with a chair leg,” and they both looked at me indulgently and laughed.
“Don’t trust Peter,” Fred cautioned them ironically. “He’s the best liar I know, and I’ve met a few, believe me.”
“How unkind,” Vicky said disbelievingly. “He’s a lamb.”
Fred made a laughing cough and checked that we all were in fact booked on the same flight. No doubt about it. British Airways’ jumbo to Heathrow. Club class, all of us.
“Great. Great,” Fred said.
Greg, I thought, was American, though it was hard to tell. A mid-Atlantic man: halfway accent, American clothes, English facial bones. Part of the local scenery in Miami, he had presence but not his wife’s natural stage charisma. He hadn’t been a soloist, I thought.
He said, “Are you a consul too, Peter?”
“Not at the moment.”
He looked perplexed, so I explained. “In the British foreign service you take the title of your present job. You don’t take your rank with you. You can be a second or first secretary or a consul or counselor or a consul-general or a minister or a high commissioner or an ambassador in one place, but you’ll very likely be something different in the next. The rank stays with the job. You take the rank of whatever job you’re sent to.”
Fred was nodding. “In the States, once an ambassador always an ambassador. ‘Mr. Ambassador’ forever. Even if you’ve only been an ambassador to some tiny country for a couple of years and are back to being a dogsbody, you keep the title. The British don’t.”
“Too bad,” Greg said.
“No,” I disagreed, “it’s better. There’s no absolutely clear-cut hierarchy, so there’s less bitching and less despair.”
They looked at me in astonishment.
“Mind you,” Fred said to them with mock confidentiality, “Peter’s father’s an ambassador at the moment. Between the two of them they’ve held every rank in the book.”
“Mine are all lower,” I said, smiling.
Vicky said comfortingly, “I’m sure you’ll do well in the end.”
Fred laughed.
Greg pushed away his half-drunk wine and said they’d better get back to work, a popular move with the clientele, always quick to applaud them. They sang another three songs each, Greg finishing quietly with a crooning version of “The Last Farewell,” the lament of a sailor leaving his South Seas love to go back to storms and war at sea round Britain. Shut your eyes, I thought, listening, and Greg could be the doomed young man. It was a masterly performance; extraordinary. A woman at the next table brought out a handkerchief and wiped away surreptitious tears.
The diners, sitting transfixed over long-cooled cups of coffee, gave Greg the accolade of a second’s silence before showing their pleasure. Sentimental it might all be, I thought, but one could have too much of stark unsugared realism.
The singers returned to our table, accepting plaudits on the way, and this time drank their wine without restraint. They were pumped up with the post-performance high-level adrenaline surge of all successful appearances of any sort, and it would take them a while to come down. Meanwhile they talked with animation, scattering information about themselves and further proving, if it were necessary, that they were solidly good, well-intentioned people.
I’d always found goodness more interesting then evil, though I was aware this wasn’t the most general view. To my mind, it took more work and more courage to be good, an opinion continually reinforced by my own shortcomings.
He had trained originally for opera, Greg said, but there weren’t enough roles for the available voices.
“It helps to be Italian,” he said ruefully. “And so few of any generation really make it. I sang chorus. I would have starved then rather than sing ‘The Last Farewell.’ I was arrogant, musically, when I was young.” He smiled with forgiveness for his youth. “So I went into a banking house as a junior junior in the trust department and eventually began to be able to afford opera tickets.”
“But you went on singing,” I protested. “No one could sing as you do without constant practice.”
He nodded. “In choirs. Sometimes in cathedrals and so on. Anywhere I could. And in the bathroom, of course.”
Vicky raised the eyelashes to heaven.
“Now they both sing here two or three times a week,” Fred told me. “This place would die without them.”
“Hush,” Vicky said, looking round for outraged proprietorial feelings but fortunately not seeing any. “We enjoy it.”
Greg said they were going to England for a month. One of Vicky’s daughters was getting married.
Vicky’s daughter?
Yes, she said, the children were all hers. Two boys, two girls. She’d divorced their father long ago. She and Greg were new together: eighteen months married, still on honeymoon.
“Belinda—she’s my youngest—she’s marrying a veterinary surgeon,” Vicky said. “She was always mad about animals.”
I laughed.
“Well, yes,” she said, “I hope she’s mad about him, too. She’s worked for him for ages, but this came on suddenly a few weeks ago. So, anyway, we’re off to horse country. He deals mostly with horses. He acts as a vet at Cheltenham races.”
I made a small explosive noise in my throat and they looked at me inquiringly.
I said, “My father and mother met at Cheltenham races.”
They exclaimed over it, of course, and it seemed a bit late to say that my mother and stepfather met at Cheltenham races, so I let it pass. My real father, I thought, was anyway John Darwin: the only father I could remember.
Fred, reflecting, said, “Didn’t your father spend his entire youth at the races? Didn’t you say so in Tokyo, that time you went to the Japan Cup?”
“I expect I said it,” I agreed, “though it was a bit of an exaggeration. But he still does go when he gets the chance.”
“Do ambassadors usually go to the races?” Vicky asked doubtfully.
“This particular ambassador sees racecourses as the perfect place for diplomacy,” I said with ironic affection. “He invites the local Jockey Club bigwigs to an embassy party and they in turn invite him to the races. He says he learns more about a country faster at the races than in a month of diplomatic handshaking. He’s right, too. Did you know they have bicycle parks at Tokyo racecourse?”
Greg said, “Er ... uh ... I don’t follow.”
“Not just car parks,” I said. “Motorcycle parks and bicycle parks. Rows and rows of them. They tell you a lot about the Japanese.”
“What, for instance?” Vicky asked.
“That they’ll get where they want to go one way or another.”
“Are you being serious?”
“Of course,” I said with mock gravity. “And they have a baby park at the races too. You leave your infant to play in a huge bouncing Donald Duck while you bet your money away in a carefree fashion.”
“And what does this tell you?” Vicky teased.
“That the baby park draws in more than enough revenue to fund it.”
“Don’t worry about Peter,” Fred told them reassuringly. “He’s got this awful quirky mind, but you can rely on him in a crisis.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
Greg asked a few things about our time in Japan. Had we enjoyed it, for instance. Very much, we both said. And did we speak the language? Yes, we did. Fred had been a first secretary in the commercial department, spending his time oiling the wheels of trade. My own job had been to learn what was likely to happen on the political scene.
“Peter went to the lunches and cocktail parties,” Fred said, “drinking sake out of little wooden boxes instead of glasses.”
The customs and cadences of Japan still flowed strongly in my head, barely overlaid by the month in Mexico City. It was always an odd feeling of deprivation, leaving behind a culture one had striven intensely to understand. Not exactly postpartum blues, but departing-from-post blues, definitely.
The diners in the restaurant had gradually drifted away, leaving the four of us as the last to leave. Vicky and Greg went off to pack up their equipment and as a matter of course Fred and I divided the bill between us to the last cent.
“Do you want it in yen?” I asked.
“For God’s sake,” Fred said. “Didn’t you change some at the airport?”
I had. A habit. Fred took the notes and handed me some coins in return, which I pocketed. The Foreign Office was permanently strapped for cash and our basic pay came nowhere near the level of status and responsibility given us. I wasn’t complaining. No one ever entered the diplomatic service to get mega-rich. Fred said he would run me back to the airport to save me having to pay for another taxi, which was good of him.
Vicky and Greg returned, she carrying a large white handbag aglitter with multicolored stones outlined in thin white cord and he following with a large squashy holdall slung boyishly from one shoulder. We all four left the restaurant and stood for a while outside the door saying goodnights, Vicky and Greg making plans to find me the following day.
On the wall beside the door a glassed frame held a sample menu flanked by two eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of the singers, both taken, it was clear, a long time previously.
Vicky saw the direction of my eyes and made a small sad moue, philosophical with an effort. Her likeness, a striking theater-type glossy with her head and shoulders at a tilt, bright light shining on the forehead, stars in the eyes, tactful shadows over the beginnings of a double chin, must have been from twenty years earlier at least. Greg’s no-nonsense straight-ahead smile had few photographic tricks and was very slightly out of focus as if enlarged from a none-too-clear print. It too was an earlier Greg, thinner, positively masculine, strongly handsome, with a dark, now-vanished moustache.
Impossible to guess at Vicky’s character from that sort of picture, but one could make a stab at Greg’s. Enough intelligence, the complacency of success, a desire to please, an optimistic nature. Not the sort to lie about people behind their backs.
Final goodnights. Vicky lifted her cheek to me for a kiss. Easy to deliver.
“Our car’s down there,” she said, pointing to the distance.
“Mine’s over there,” Fred said, pointing the other way.
We all nodded and moved apart, the evening over.
“They’re nice people,” Fred said contentedly.
“Yes,” I agreed.
We climbed into his car and dutifully fastened the seat belts. He started the engine, switched on the lights, backed out of the parking space and turned the car to the general direction of the airport.
“Stop!” I yelled abruptly, struggling to undo the hampering seat-belt buckle so easily done up.
“What?” Fred said, jamming foot on brake but not understanding. “What the hell’s wrong?”
I didn’t answer him. I got the wretched belt undone at last, swung open the car door and scrambled out, running almost before I had both feet on the ground.
In the passing beam of Fred’s headlights as he’d turned the car I’d seen the distant sparkle of Vicky’s sequined tunic and seen also that she was struggling, falling, with a dark figure crowding her, cutting half of her from my sight, a figure of unmistakable ill-will ... attacking.
I sprinted, hearing her cry out shrilly.
I myself yelled “Vicky, Vicky” in an attempt to frighten off the mugger, but he seemed glued to her like a leech, she on the ground and kicking, he close on her, hunched and intent.
No sign of Greg.
I reached the man over Vicky, cannoning into him to knock him away. He was heavier than I’d thought and not easily deterred, and far from running from me he seemed to view me as merely another mug to be robbed. He jabbed a strong fist at my face, a blow I ducked from nothing but instinct, and I tried catching him by the clothes and flinging him against a parked car.
No success. He connected with a fist to my chest that left me breathless and feeling as if he’d squashed my heart against my backbone. The face above the fists was a matter of darkness and narrow eyes: he was shorter than I and thicker.
I was losing the fight, which made me angry but not much more effective. It was hostility I was up against, I thought, not just greed. Behind the robbery, hatred.
Vicky, who had crawled away moaning, suddenly rose to her feet as if galvanized and came up behind our assailant. I saw her eyes momentarily over his shoulder, stretched wide with fear and full of determination. She took aim and kicked at him hard. He hissed fiercely with pain and turned towards her and I in turn kicked him, targeting nowhere special but hitting the back of his knee.
Vicky had her long scarlet nails up, her fingers bent like a witch. There was bright red blood in splashes down her tunic. Her mouth was stretched open in what looked in that dim light like the snarl of a wolf, and out of it came a shriek that began in the low register and rose to a fortissimo scream somewhere above high G.
It raised the hairs on my own neck and it broke the nerve of the thief. He took a stumbling step to go round her and then another, and belatedly departed at a shambling run.
Vicky fell weakly into my arms, the fighting fury turning fast to shakes and tears, her triumphant voice roughened and near incoherence.
“God. Oh God ... There were two of them ... Greg ...”
Headlights blazed at us, fast advancing. Vicky and I clutched each other like dazzled rabbits and I was bunching muscles to hurl us both out of the way when tires squealed to a stop and the black figure emerging like a silhouette through the bright beam resolved itself into the solid familiarity of Fred. The consul to the rescue. Good old Fred. I felt a bit light-headed, and stupid because of it.
“Is she all right?” Fred was asking me anxiously. “Where’s Greg?”
Vicky and I declutched and the three of us in unison looked for Greg.
He wasn’t hard to find. He was lying in a tumbled unconscious heap near the rear wheel on the far side of what turned out to be his and Vicky’s dark blue BMW.
There was a stunned moment of disbelief and horror. Then, crying out, Vicky fell on her knees beside him and I squatted down and felt round his neck, searching for the pulse under his jaw.
“He’s alive,” I said, relieved, straightening.
Vicky sniffed in her tears, still crying with distress. Fred, ever practical, said, “We’d better get an ambulance.”
I agreed with him, but before we could do anything a police car wailed with its siren down the road and drew up beside us, red, white and blue lights flashing in a bar across the car’s roof.
A big man in midnight blue trousers and shirt with insignia stepped out, bringing his notebook to the ready and telling us someone had just reported a woman screaming and what was it all about. Fast, I thought. Response time, spectacular. He had been cruising nearby, he said.
Greg began moaning before anyone could answer and struggled to sit up, appearing dazed and disoriented and startlingly old.
Vicky supported him round the shoulders. Looking at her with pathos and pain and gratitude, he saw the blood on her tunic and said he was sorry.
“Sorry!” Vicky exclaimed blankly. “What for?”
He didn’t answer, but one could see what he meant: sorry that he hadn’t been able to defend her. It was encouraging, I thought, that he seemed to know where he was and what had happened.
The policeman unclipped a hand-held radio from his belt and called for the ambulance and then, with notable kindness, asked Vicky just what had occurred. She looked up at him and tried to answer, but the phrases came out unconnectedly and on jagged half-hysterical breaths, as if from splintered thoughts.
“Greg’s wallet . . . well, they banged his head on the car . . . shadows . . . didn’t see them . . . he was trying . . . you know, he was trying to take my rings . . . the plane tickets . . . it’s my daughter’s wedding . . . I’d’ve killed him . . .” She stopped talking as if aware it was gibberish and looked lost.
�
��Take your time, ma’am,” the policeman said. “When you’re ready.”
She took a visibly deep breath and tried again. “They were waiting . . . behind the car . . . I could kill them . . . They jumped on Greg when he went round . . . I hate them . . . I hope they die ...”
There were high-colored patches of extreme stress over her cheekbones and more strong flush marks on her jaw and down her neck. Blood on her neck, also; quite a lot of it.
“You’re doing good,” the policeman said.
He was about my age, I thought, with a natural kindness not yet knocked out of him by the system.
“My ear hurts,” Vicky said violently. “I could kill him.”
I supposed we’d all noticed but not done much about the source of the blood on her tunic. One of her lobes was jaggedly cut and steadily oozing. She turned her head slightly, and the other ear shimmered suddenly in the car’s lights, revealing a large aquamarine ringed by diamonds.
“Your earring,” Fred exclaimed, fishing his pockets for a handkerchief and not finding one. “You need a bandage.”
Vicky put a finger tentatively to her torn ear and winced heavily.
“The bastard,” she said, her voice shaking. “The bloody bastard. He tugged . . . he just ripped . . . he’s torn right through my ear.”
“Shouldn’t earrings come off more easily than that?” the policeman asked uncritically.
Vicky’s voice, high with rage and shock, said, “We bought them in Brazil.”
“Er . . .” the policeman said, lost.
“Vicky,” Fred said soothingly, “what does it matter if they came from Brazil?”
She gave him a bewildered look as if she couldn’t understand his not understanding.
“They don’t have butterfly clips on the back,” she told him jerkily. “They have butterfly screws. Like a nut and bolt. So they don’t fall off and get lost. And so people can’t steal them ...” Her voice died away into a sob, a noise it seemed suddenly that she herself disapproved of, and she sniffed again determinedly and straightened her shoulders.