After Baenhaker parted company with Rocq, he walked back to Lower Thames Street feeling as if he had been hit with a sledge-hammer. He was surprised at the intensity of the hatred he felt for Rocq; it was stronger even than he could ever remember feeling against the Arabs, after his mother and two sisters had been blown to pieces by a terrorist bomb in a Jerusalem vegetable market. He found he could not prevent himself from shaking with rage. He was filled with a desire to go home, get his Walther and go back and blow Rocq’s brains out. All his training in the control of emotions, never to let personal feelings intervene, was of no use. He could not get it out of his mind: he wanted to smash Amanda to pulp and blow Rocq’s brains out.
He reached his office, and began to stab out her home phone number on his push-button phone. Then he stopped. He realized she would be at work; he began to stab out her work number.
‘Garbutt and Garbutt,’ said the receptionist of the Knightsbridge architects.
‘I’d like to speak to—’ he paused, then hung up; he shook his head. There was no point, he knew. He began to attack an unpleasant spot that was festering just above his shirt collar. Then he sat back and thought about his meeting with Rocq. Other than discovering who it was that had pinched Amanda from him, he had achieved very little. He had blown any chances of a quick answer to anything from Rocq. However angry he might have felt with Ephraim, first after his visit to the hospital and then after his phone call, he wanted to stay on the right side of the chief of the Mossad. Ephraim could, he knew, make life very unpleasant indeed for him; equally, he could make it very much better. The information Ephraim had asked for really should not be that difficult, he reasoned; after all, it was a private company, not the vaults of MI5, which held the information.
The offices of Globalex did not operate around the clock, Rocq had told him. All the office staff would have left by eight thirty, and the cleaning staff by nine thirty. He wondered if the doorman he had seen lived on the premises, not that that particularly bothered him.
He forgot about the aches and pains in his body from the accident, and started to think hard:
It was Wednesday today: he had tonight and Thursday night; there was no time to lose. He would go straight in tonight. He began to draw up in his mind the list of things he would need. For the first time in a long time he felt excitement, felt his adrenalin begin to flow. ‘You can do whatever you want to get this information,’ Ephraim had said. ‘Anything at all that you do will have our full support.’ The words were like a drug to him, like a deep snort of cocaine. He began to feel good, very good and very protected; it had been a long time, he reflected, since his Control had given him carte blanche. Far too long.
23
Amanda, standing above Rocq, carefully unscrewed the top of the can of Mazola corn oil, then tipped the tin upside down. The cooking oil gushed out all over him. She poured it over his chest, down his body, down each leg, then back up again; the oil gushed over his body and onto the polythene sheet on which he lay, and which stretched out not only across the bed, but across several feet of the thick pile carpet all around the bed.
‘Enough — I’m drowning!’
She dropped a small studded leather ring, about one inch in diameter, onto his stomach; ‘Put that on,’ she said.
‘What the hell is that supposed to be? A lifejacket?’
‘No silly, it’s the very latest thing.’
‘Latest what? If it’s meant to be a condom, it’s not much use — it’s got a bloody great hole in it.’
‘It’s from the States — a girlfriend of mine just sent it to me. Haven’t you seen one before?’
‘What is it?’ Rocq inspected the object carefully: it looked like a miniature dog collar. ‘A Hoopla for mice?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s an extra special small size for you.’
‘Small size what?’
‘You’re really thick at times, aren’t you. Where the hell do you think it goes?’
‘I’m meant to put that on?’ he said, astounded.
‘Sure you are.’
‘What does it do?’
‘It’s meant to keep a certain part of you interested in me — regardless of how the rest of you feels.’
‘Is that meant to be a hint? I didn’t know I was such a crummy lover I needed propping up.’
She kissed him deeply. ‘You’re a wonderful lover.’ She rubbed some oil slowly across him. ‘Simply wonderful. I thought it might be fun to try one of these out, that’s all.’
Reluctantly, Rocq tried it out. Two hours later, when he was finally allowed to remove it, he collapsed into a coma.
The alarm went off at 6.30 and Rocq snapped out of the dream he was having that he was drowning in a butter dish. He lay back and began to focus his mind; it was his normal practice, before he got out of bed, to recall the events of the day before, and plan the day ahead. It was something he’d done ever since he was a child.
He remembered the row he and Amanda had had the night before last. After the taxi had dropped him outside the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street, and in full view of 120 guests at the Andy Warhol preview, he had fallen flat on his face, and proceeded to be sick onto the pavement. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, he reflected, if he hadn’t then proceeded to enter the gallery, collar Warhol, spend five minutes explaining to him in a slurred voice, while Warhol helped to prop him up, why, in his view, the pile of vomit on the paving stones was a more important personal statement than Warhol’s life work. For a further half hour, he had staggered about among the guests, avidly lecturing anyone he could collar on the poetic beauty of tomato skins and diced carrots, before eventually falling asleep for half an hour in the ladies’ lavatory.
Sometime around midnight that night he had finally shaken off the worst effects of Elleck’s Chivas Regal, and by dawn he was beginning to feel sober. Before leaving for work, he had made a number of telephone calls, first to Milan and then to Tunquit, in Umm Al Amnah, then to Toronto, then Lagos, then Kuwait. When he had arrived in the office, shortly before 9.00, yawning and with a splitting headache, the first thing he had done was check the gold price. The London Exchange hadn’t yet opened, but gold, which had closed on the London Exchange the previous night at $494 an ounce had risen during the night, and had closed on the Hong Kong exchange at $521, which would be the opening price in London. Rocq had smiled to himself. By the close of the London exchange on Wednesday afternoon, gold had risen again, another $8, closing at $529.
He stretched a hand out of the bed, found his handkerchief, wiped off as much of the Mazola as he could, picked up the telephone receiver, and dialled Globalex’s closing prices. The recorded voice informed him that gold was currently at $538. Rocq slid out of the bed and waded his way over the polythene, and through the broadloom, to the shower.
The traffic was thicker than usual as he pulled his new Porsche into his parking bay, in the multi-storey NCP car park behind Lower Thames Street, at five past nine, twenty-minutes later than usual. He switched off the engine, and sat back for a few moments, savouring the smell of the new car: the fresh leather and hot oil. He climbed out; the door shut with the neat clunk that he liked; he reflected that there was no other car he knew of where one could get pleasure out of merely shutting a door.
He crossed Lower Thames Street, and walked up towards Mincing Lane. His feeling of well-being suddenly disappeared and was replaced with one of disquiet; up ahead was a cluster of police cars, with blue lights flashing, as well as an ambulance. Part of the pavement appeared to be cordoned off. As he got closer, he saw that the area around the entrance to Globalex was cordoned off with white tape.