“And what’s your name?” I asked, “Moose, by any chance?”
He looked puzzled. “Moose?” he thought about it a bit. “No, Martin. Martin Malloy.”
I smiled again, and this time the cynicism was not an act. “That figures,” I said.
He leaned across and shifted my feet to the right, uncovering the columns of numbers. His thick index finger pointed at the center row.
“But this doesn’t,” he said. “You’ve inverted one of those numbers, there in the middle. Easily done.”
I returned my legs to the ground and pulled the book nearer to me, meaning to close it. But I couldn’t help looking at where his finger had once been, and I couldn’t help seeing that he was right. I frowned.
He grinned almost by way of apology. “I’m good at figures,” he explained. “Always have been. And I learned to read upside down when I was inside.”
“You’ve been in prison, then,” I stated.
He nodded.
“And this Thelma put you there.”
His brow creased, and I remembered his size and the scar that creased in its redness on his cheek. He was no longer doing an impression of the genial giant: I had angered him. I pulled at the telephone wire, edging the instrument closer to me.
“Thelma didn’t put me there,” he said. “In fact, if anybody got me out, it was Thelma.” He glared at me. “I don’t like people who say bad things about Thelma,” he concluded.
With a supreme effort of will I fixed his eyes with mine, I kept looking at him while I nudged the receiver off the phone and let it drop on my lap. I rested my hand on the headless phone, thanking the heavens that I now had digital dialing. His frown deepened.
“Tell me more,” I said in a voice that was more fear than fake. I hit the first nine on the phone while I tried to work out whether I could manage to make a successful break for the door.
In one effortless motion he reached across the desk and pulled the receiver from my lap. He put it down on the desk. He stretched across again.
He put a finger on one of the buttons and pressed it down.
“That makes two nines,” he said. “You’ve only got to dial one more and you’re connected. Go ahead, I won’t stop you.”
The brain cells were going fast by now. It was a dare, I thought; he’d get me before my first cry for help. He was toying with me, and probably enjoying it. And yet what option did I have? I was isolated and alone, up in my grimy office in the center of London. A cry for help wafting to the street would be cause for a quickening of pace rather than investigation. I had no choice: without the phone, I had no line to the world.
I lifted my hand slowly as the seconds expanded. I could try it, I thought, and maybe I’d succeed. My hand began to shake.
“I’m really a gentle guy,” he said slowly, watching that hand. “My size militates against me, but I wouldn’t harm a fly. Certainly not a woman, that’s for sure.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, using the poised finger to point at his scar. “Shaving accident?”
He shrugged, and I saw how the rocks in his shoulders bulged. “Prison’s a rough place,” he said. “It makes you or it breaks you.”
“And it made you?”
“Thelma made me,” he said. “That’s why I want to find her.”
We were both back in fiction land. I replaced the receiver on the phone and breathed out. I no longer felt scared, only foolish-a foolishness tinged with anger. He was a pro, I thought, a real good actor, and I might as well face the fact that he had me. He and whoever had sent him-and I had a good idea as to who that was. Well, all I had to do was get rid of him, finish my accounts, close the office for perhaps the last time, and then be free to wreak my own kind of revenge.
But I’d do it subtly, I thought. I reached into the top drawer of my desk and pulled out a pad. As a heading I chose the name M. MALLOY. I underlined it: it looked better that way. On the next line I inscribed the name THELMA in block capitals.
“Parsons,” he said. “Thelma Parsons.”
“A dancer?” I asked without looking up.
“A social worker,” he said. He blinked. “But she did like to dance. She showed me pictures of herself when she was a kid. All dressed up in a white tutu, she was.”
Social worker, I wrote, failed ballet dancer.
“Thelma never failed at anything,” he said loudly. It was the first time he had raised his voice.
I smiled placatingly. It took two to tango, I thought, and I was finally in step. I wasn’t going to break my rhythm for any fake display of righteous anger by a giant gullible enough to involve himself in one of Sam’s pranks.
“Why don’t you tell me the whole story?” I suggested.
He leaned back in the chair. It creaked. He frowned and began to toy with the gold watch fob that was attached to his waistcoat. “Thelma liked to visit me in prison,” he began. “She turned me on to books.”
I glanced up and my eyes strayed to my accounts.
He laughed, or at least I think that was what described the creaking that issued from his big mouth. “Not those kind,” he said, “I always had a knack with them. That’s what got me into trouble in the first place. No, Thelma revealed the world of literature to me.”
Social worker reforms con by opening his eyes to the joys of the nineteenth century, I wrote.
“Modern literature,” he said loudly.
I gulped. I kept forgetting that he could read upside down.
“It changed my whole world view,” he continued. “Opened new horizons. I want to be able to thank her, not in the claustrophobia of prison, but in the real world. In the free world.”
Free world, I thought, more like anticommunist modern literature, then.
“So go round to her office and thank her,” I said.
He shook his head unhappily. “She’s left her job,” he said. “She was never happy with it, it cramped her style, she said, and now she’s had the courage to leave. They won’t tell me where she went-they don’t do that on principle in case some ex-con has a grudge against them.”
“And you want me to find her?” I stated.
“That’s it,” he said, delighted that the slow pupil had finally caught on.
“And then you will thank her.”
He nodded. He reached a fist into a pocket of his garish plaid suit. Here comes the punch line, I thought.
He placed a piece of paper in front of me, right side up. On it was written the name Thelma Parsons along with an address in Islington.
“That’s where Thelma used to work?” I asked.
For reply he reached once more into his pocket. Ahaa, I thought, here it comes.
I was wrong again. In front of me, dead in front, he placed a wad of new bank notes. I stared at him, and he smiled. I picked up the notes and felt their crispness.
“Two hundred and fifty pounds,” he said. “Retainer.”
“Is that what they said it would cost?” I asked.
“They?” He frowned, I resolved in future not to aggravate the scar. “It’s a guess,” he continued. “Your retainer plus something toward expenses. Give me a record when you finish, and I’ll settle up with you. I’m good at figures, you know.”
I didn’t say anything, and he had finished as well. I watched as he stood up and began to stride to the door.
“I suppose that you’ll be in touch with me rather than leaving me your address,” I said.
He turned. “That’s right,” he said. “Circumstances have conspired to make me a bit of an itinerant at the moment.” He waved a hand in my direction before turning away again, “I’ll be in touch,” he said.