The woman nodded. ‘That’s right, sir. Should I not have accepted it?’
‘No, it’s okay. He’s some damn joker who’s been following us around, but you weren’t to know that. If he shows up again and I’m in, try to stall him and call me.’
‘Will do, Mr Blackstone.’
I took my laptop and the package up to our mini-suite and showed it to Prim. ‘A gift from Wallinger,’ I told her.
She stared at it. ‘What do you think it is?’
‘I haven’t a clue; if it’s half a pound of Semtex you can kiss your arse goodbye, for I’m going to open it.’ I was joking about the explosives: Wallinger needed us, or at least he needed Prim, to get the money. Still, I took the package into the bathroom. I undid the bow carefully; it was tied tight and the wrapping was pretty crude, a sure sign that it had been done by a man. (There’s an old Scots saying, ‘Let on you’re daft and you’ll get a hurl for nothing,’ which means, loosely translated and put into context, that if one makes a real bollocks of wrapping a present, one will never have to do it again. It’s a principle I’ve followed all my life, but I’ve never had to feign incompetence.)
Eventually I just tore the ribbon loose and ripped off the paper, feeling that involuntary pang of regret that is part of my Scots heritage at the knowledge that it couldn’t be reused. It had enclosed a small, square yellow box, around six inches by six by six. I lifted the lid off, cautiously, and saw that it was packed with tissue paper. I removed the top layers, until I came to a red plastic circle with regular upraised dots all the way around: a baby’s teething ring.
I took it out and saw a small square of paper folded below it. I unfolded it: written in a scrawled hand was, Tom doesn’t need this any more, Mommy. It’s been such a long time.
I took them through to the bedroom and showed them to Prim. She grabbed the ring with both hands, her eyes moistening. Her mouth twisted into a scowl as she read the note; when she was finished she crumpled it and threw it away. ‘What’s he doing?’ she exclaimed.
‘He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases,’ I murmured.
‘What?’
‘Alice in Wonderland. It’s the duchess talking about the sneezing boy.’
‘And what did she recommend be done about him?’
I smiled. ‘She recommended that the crap be beaten out of him, actually.’
‘She knew what she was talking about,’ Prim muttered.
Chapter 24
We thought about checking out of the Century Wilshire and driving straight to Vegas, where Everett had said my suite was waiting. Prim was all for it, but she wasn’t driving: it would have taken us until midnight and I did not fancy arriving that late.
Instead we walked back down to the Village and ate in a place called the Napa Valley Grille. . no, I don’t know where the ‘e’ came from. It was glass-walled so we were pretty visible, but I didn’t care. In fact, I found that I didn’t care about anything much, other than getting to the Bellagio, meeting up with my friends and starting work on their movie.
I hadn’t forgotten about Susie’s message, or her advice to check my e-mail, but there was a practical difficulty with that. Our hotel had no in-room access, and the one terminal they did possess seemed to have been commandeered permanently by a Japanese salesman.
Prim was pretty subdued over dinner. I could see that she was wrestling with the decision she had to make. When I considered it again, the teething-ring trick had been quite cute, a piece of psychological pressure applied just at the key moment.
In fact we hardly spoke to each other, we seemed consumed with our own thoughts, chose automatically from the menu. . I can’t even remember what we ate, and that’s unusual for me … and then just picked at our food.
We were back at the hotel and in our suite when the dam burst. I had just closed the door when I saw her shoulders start to shake; she buried her face in her hands and sat on the edge of the bed closest to her. I let her sob for a while, and then, when it had started to subside, I drew her to her feet and held her to me.
‘Oz, I’m so sorry,’ she mumbled into my chest. ‘I should never have got you involved in this. It’s taken you away from home, it’s cost you a packet, and it’s made all sorts of trouble for you. I can, can. .’ She broke off as a big sob racked her. ‘. . can tell that you’ve had enough, and that you’d rather be out of it.’
I’d been thinking just that, in spite of myself, but I could hardly admit it, could I? Besides, we had travelled a long way together, and not just in that week. And there was this too; in the course of our latest journey I had come to feel completely isolated from what I knew as home, and from the person around whom it all revolved. Susie had more or less ordered us both on this mission, and now she was giving me grief.
So I whispered into Prim’s ear the traditional Scottish words of comfort, ‘Don’t be fuckin’ daft,’ and pressed her even tighter to me. We stayed that way for the rest of the night.
When I woke next morning, at seven, my right arm was numb, trapped under her head. I eased it out without disturbing her, then peeled off the clothes in which I had fallen asleep, and headed for the shower. When I returned, still trying to dry myself adequately with a towel that was moist from the previous day, she was sitting on the bed we had slept on, with her knees pulled up to her chest, and her newly discarded clothes at her feet. Her face was puffed and blotchy, but she managed a small smile.
‘How can you do that?’ she asked. ‘You sleep all night in your clothes, yet ten minutes later you’re looking like a movie star.’
‘I am a bloody movie star,’ I reminded her.
‘Yes, now, but you’ve always been able to do that.’
I grinned at her. ‘Well, now’s your chance to do the same … although you’ve got a bit of work to do.’
‘I’d better get to it then.’ She jumped from the bed, only to pause on her way to the bathroom. ‘Do you know what’s sad, though?’ she said. ‘Now you are a movie star, you don’t fancy me a bit.’
I looked down at her figure; it had been trim before, but now it qualified as voluptuous. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ I told her. ‘I may be a happily married man, but I’m still a man. So, please, get all that out of my sight.’
She seemed cheered up by that dismissal; she spent about half an hour in the bathroom, but after she was done and dressed for the journey, everything was restored to normal. We ate a very light breakfast in the hotel courtyard, then checked out and set off on our journey.
I’d never driven from LA to Las Vegas before, but technology’s a wonderful thing. I switched on the GSP and did what I was told. All I had to do was steer the thing. It took us out of Westwood on Interstate 405, then on to I-10, through the mass of Los Angeles itself and out to San Bernadino, where it took the I-15 and headed for Nevada, across mostly open country, much of it desert. I put the Jaguar into cruise control and leaned back with not much more than a finger on the wheel, to enjoy the view from the almost empty highway.
Eventually, in the distance, Las Vegas loomed up before us; it’s one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, that fantastic skyline rising from the flat, arid landscape. The effect was as if we were standing still and it was coming up from the very ground itself to engulf us. It reminded me of the great scene in Spielberg’s Close Encounters, when the mother ship appears for the first time, and you’re stunned by the sheer size of the thing.
And engulf us it did, although the navigation system did its job to the end. It guided us along the Strip, past the steel and concrete wonderlands, until it told me to turn off and into the driveway of the Bellagio Hotel and Casino.