by Janet Roger
I lay soaking the heat and said what I’d heard. “She’ll be fresh air, Louis. The gentlefolk need livening up.”
He sounded doubtful. “Well I’m happy for her, Mr. Newman. Her friend is not so sure. She says independent ideas will make the girl trouble at home.”
But Voigt wasn’t going to make trouble. His daughter’s new employment had arrived care of Councilor Drake, and the councilor was too close to Willard to think of fooling with. Besides, in that pepper and salt costume Mrs. Mayhew was irresistible, and her new sales clerk would get the customers hopping. I said through the wrap, “Voigt is taken care of. Irene will be fine. Tell her friend not to worry and give it a chance.”
Louis uncoiled the towel and set it aside, took a step back to gauge the result and then clucked the side of his cheek. “I know you’re right.” I hadn’t expected that. He raised the back of the chair upright and caught my eye in the mirror. “I did a thing myself since you were here last. I got a headstone making for Miss Dillys. She never did admit the year she was born, and I don’t like to dwell on the day she died, so I said just to put her name on it. One day I’ll get it fixed for her under the blossoms. It can’t make a difference to the lady, I know, but I didn’t see how I could let it go by.”
I said Miss Dillys would appreciate that and got out of the chair, left Louis checking his till roll and putting out lights and went out the way I came in, through the hotel foyer to the exit on Liverpool Street. The rail station crowd had thinned. Night was crawling in a deep, wet hole. The City and everything in it felt as appealing as a policemen’s ball. I looked along the street to the cab stand, then backed up through the revolving door, re-crossed the foyer to the coat check and climbed the stair.
The dining room was hushed as a lay-reading. A handful of company men were getting slick with gin on ice. A party of retired tea planters dined around a table under the dome, their wives dressed in silk shawls for a cool night at a hill station. I took the same window table as before and ordered something solid, and then a bottle from the list to help it shine. And while the planters mumbled in their starch fronts and their memsahibs forgot the names of servants, I ate a dinner and drank a bottle to the City’s sometime temporary medical examiner and wondered where she might be tonight.
Dinner at the Great Eastern is the long haul for the leisured. It gave me time to wonder a lot of things about her. I thought about her notions of Good Form that Louis would approve, and about her clipped style straight out of the girls’ dormitory that sent me cross-eyed. I thought about fires that lit her cheeks when she got maddened, her hips in a long white dress, her sweet tooth and high ideals and the smile she kept under wraps in daylight. It was a beginning and I was warming to the theme, sent after another bottle to help fill in the gaps and looked around at the tables already emptying.
In the Dome Room, you eat with enough silver lying about to start another Colorado rush, with linen napkins patterned white on white and crystal glasses set in lines like Russian dolls. Then all evening a waiter takes them away, one item at a time, like Alekhine in the endgame. The new bottle arrived. Another glass disappeared in the blink of an eye. The last one I had left was filled, red as sundown on the Veldt, and as it poured, I knew where—exactly where—she would be tonight.
A flying boat on the Johannesburg run lays up on the Zambezi overnight, riding the current at a wooden jetty upriver from Victoria Falls. No question, the doctor would stay the night at the one first-rate hotel in town. Right now, she would be taking the view from its terrace, hips pressed against the stone balustrade in the moonlight. She’d have on her up-country breeches belted tight in her waist and the shirt she hadn’t handed back to me, watching the spray hang high above the falls, lost in the spell of it. Next morning, she’d get back on the clipper for the leg to Jo’burg, then take the slow train winding east. Tonight, she’d be rehearsing a speech for Sir Bernard that she knew could get her disowned, to explain the how and why of things she couldn’t let go by.
Louis would understand. But I doubted it would explain to Uncle Bernard. Probably the doctor doubted it too. The truth was, she’d started out with nothing more than an instinct about Blanche’s boy, then realized her instincts were more reliable than the police investigation she was a part of. From that point on, she’d decided the boy had to be protected, left the rulebook behind and used whatever and whoever came to hand, including the shamus she ran into along the way. She’d made mistakes. Ridden her luck. And it helped that her intuition hadn’t been wrong. Though I didn’t see that cutting much ice with the judge over sundowners on his veranda.
It would be tough out there under the jacarandas. She would hear from the judge how the law makes no accommodations with romantics, and that City Police hadn’t expected to hire one. Also, that if any part of that came as surprise to her then she wasn’t cut out for the work. It would be hard arguing with a Master of the Bench. But you guessed his niece would give it her best shot anyway, because she wouldn’t know how not to. I was thinking somebody ought to warn the old boy what was coming his way when the colonials began drifting out, arm in arm. Waiters ghosted. The company men were long gone. My table was cleared except for the glass in my hand. I held it up to the light, turned it around through a hundred shades of red and wished the doctor all the good luck in the world. Then drank and set the empty glass on its side and called Alekhine over for the check.