He stood up and walked over to the toilet. He put his hand on the door handle and added, 'There are police officers posted downstairs in case you don't feel like waiting.' He went in and I dashed across and turned the key.
'I'm sorry about this, Llunos, really I am!' I shouted to the door. Then I walked over to the window and peeked carefully out. He wasn't lying. A police officer looked up and waved. It was time to use the escape route through the attic. It was clear that this time I would be in the cell for a lot longer than overnight, and I was desperate to stay free long enough to see Bianca tonight. Locking Llunos in the bathroom was a high price to pay, though. He wouldn't forgive me for that so easily.
*
Eeyore opened the door, took one look at the man in shaggy blond wig, dark glasses and false moustache and said, 'Oh it's you.' He led me into the kitchen where the smell of recently fried bacon hung heavily in the air.
'I've got someone here who wants to see you,' he said as he filled the old whistle kettle and placed it on the gas oven. 'It's an old friend of mine, from my days in the Force. He knows something about the ESSJAT.' Eeyore pulled up a chair and I sat down.
'He was given the task of breaking the organisation a long time ago; but his cover was blown and they had to give him a completely new identity.' He walked out and a few seconds later came back in with the former agent. A look of surprise consumed my face. It was Papa Bronzini.
'Buon giorno!' I gasped.
He smiled sadly and said in a voice filled with pathos, 'It's OK, sir, we can dispense with the arrivedercis.'
'So you're not Italian, then?" I said obviously.
He shook his head. 'Alas no.'
An awkward moment followed as I waited for him to explain, but he didn't.
'Well you had me fooled,' I said finally.
'I used to be a bit of an actor in those days — amateur dramatics. I expect you're quite familiar with that sort of thing?'
'I've seen a few plays."
'Oh really, sir? Which ones?'
'Er . . . Lady Windermere's Fan,' I said desperately.
'Tennessee Williams?'
'Er . . . yes!'
He nodded. 'I was into method acting — eat, drink, live and sleep the part - that's the trick.' His eyes misted as he thought back to those days of greasepaint and footlights. 'Ah yes, I used to do a lot of that — Richard II... "I wasted Time, and now doth Time waste me." Are you familiar with that one, sir?'
'Yes, it's one of my favourites.'
He looked pleased. I smiled politely and stared at the floor of polished red tiles, spotlessly clean although strewn here and there with bits of straw. I'd never known a time when my father didn't have straw somewhere near him. Even in the sitting room it only added to the feeling of cleanliness, this association with the donkeys. What, after all, could be purer than the soul of a donkey? It's probably why my father had taken it as a second career. After years submerged in the moral grime of the Aberystwyth underworld he had turned to the one industry in town which traded innocence. Sospan tried to in a way, of course. He traded in the essence of the nursery, the sugary, vanilla smell of a mother's breast. But there was nothing innocent about the men who stood at his stall and ate, no matter how much they may have yearned inwardly to turn back the clock. Papa Bronzini continued to drone on about the theatre and at one point a donkey, I think it was Mignon, put her head in through the kitchen window and listened for a while before giving me an uncanny look of sympathy and loping off. Gradually the conversation turned to the old days when Bronzini and my father had worked on the Force together, the days when Bronzini had tried to bust the ESSJAT. For me, Bronzini cut a slightly pathetic figure but I saw that Eeyore was in awe of him and watched in uncritical fascination as Bronzini, now Aberystwyth's foremost mobster, described the workings of the ultra-secret elite known as the ESSJAT. He told how Gwenno Guevara had been a streetwalker before the war and had joined up to earn some extra money with the troops. Once overseas she had discovered a taste for fighting and had been good at it.
'That was the thing about Gwenno, you see, sir,' explained the old policeman. 'Whatever she turned her hand to she excelled at. Great hooker, great soldier and great chief of the ESSJAT.'
After the War Lovespoon rewarded her by offering her any job she wanted, not expecting the former hooker to choose a position in the newly formed League against Turpitude. But true to form she not only took the job but excelled at it, rising through the ranks until eventually she sat the top. At which point she simply disappeared. No one outside the organisation knew who she was, or where, although it seemed likely that Brainbocs had found out. But he of course was dead.
It was about ten to midnight when I made my way through the rows of boats, warehouses and lobster pots that made up Harbour Row. In the distance I could hear the whoop of a police siren and the engine howl of a car being driven at high speed. A chase. I took up a position deep in the shadow of a public shelter across the road from the Chandler's and thought about what I had just done. By locking Llunos up like that I had committed myself to a course from which there seemed no way back; it was as if I had been holding on to the precipice of a normal life in Aberystwyth and the last of my fingers had lost its hold.
A cat mewed at my feet and I jumped, my shoes making a harsh scraping sound which my fear convinced me could be heard across the whole neighbourhood. The racing car was nearer, but the police car seemed to have moved off, the klaxon getting fainter and fainter somewhere in the direction of Penparcau. Suddenly a door opened across the way. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up and I stopped breathing. There was a pause. The beats of my heart louder than kettle-drum notes.
A figure stumbled or was pushed out of the warehouse. A woman's figure. She turned round and looked over to where I was standing. There was no way I could see in the light and with the distance, but I knew it was Bianca. I stepped forward, terrified that a trap was about to be sprung; Lovespoon had given me his word, but what was that worth? Why arrange the meeting at a place and an hour like this? As I walked across Bianca recognised me and opened her mouth to speak, but as she did the car that had been racing through the neighbourhood rounded the corner on two wheels. I darted a glance over — it was a car I'd seen before, very recently. Bianca spun round and a cry erupted in my throat. Confusion and terror swept across Bianca's face, and then there was a bang and Bianca went sailing like a rag doll into the air. Turning, turning, turning, before hitting the ground with a single, sharp crack like an axe hitting a tree. I stood transfixed, unable to move, and watched the car reverse a yard and then slam forwards back into Bianca's broken body. The car door sprang open, a figure leaped out and sprinted round to the other side of the car and down one of the dark alleys between two warehouses. Seconds later I heard from the harbour the sound of an outboard motor being fired up.
I ran over to Bianca's side and knelt down.
She looked up, eyes glazed with pain, and tried to force her mouth to overcome the agony and speak. Far off the banshee wail of the police siren was getting louder. I grasped her shoulders tenderly and ordered her not to speak.
'Louie!'
'It's OK, don't speak.'
She curled the fingers of her hand round my forearm weak as a baby.
'Louie!'
'I'm here, baby.'
And then her index finger detached itself from the rest of her fingers and slowly formed a curl like the finger of the grim reaper; she beckoned slowly towards herself and mouthed a word. I felt myself being pulled down by the finger as if attached by an invisible thread, and when my ear reached so close to her mouth that I could feel the warmth of her breath, she spoke again. Each word making her smashed body quiver like the pangs of childbirth.