“I’d best be heading home,” he said. “Peggy’ll be back by now.”
“Where was she?”
“Work,” he said, as though the question was a silly one. “You should know.”
“Peggy wasn’t working today. I make out the holiday shifts myself.”
Lafferty borrowed her confusion, put it on his own brow. “She told me...”
Cassie smiled, her wagging finger coming up to the dimple of his chin. “Don’t tell me you thought himself was the only one stepping out for his wee adventures.” But her finger quit wagging at the look on his face, the eyes of her growing tender. “I’m sorry, Terrance, I just assumed... Everybody knows. We thought it was an open marriage kind of a thing, yours and Peggy’s.”
He sat up on the edge of the bed, his back to her. “Of course I know.” Of course he did. Hadn’t he seen her once with another man, or thought he had. But the restaurant where he thought he had was dim and smoky and he’d not got a clean look, and never made a word of mention about it, for hadn’t he himself been there at the time with another woman who was not Peggy. And hadn’t he convinced himself in all the days since that of course it hadn’t been her. And wasn’t the biggest, thickest, most self-centered eejit that ever breathed air sitting right here and now inside his own skin. “Of course I know,” he repeated. “What class of bloody eejit do you take me for?”
Cassie behind him said nothing. She touched his back in a kind of tickle where a small birthmark the shape of a tear was reputed to live. “I hope you knew,” said she. “You better bloody well have knew. Terrance, I amn’t the kind of woman to sleep with somebody else’s husband, not unless I thought it was... you know...”
He turned. She was leaning up against the pillows, clutching the sheet to her chest in earnest, the ache across her face. “Of course,” he said. He showed her his teeth. “You’ll steal the odd pig now and then from a woman, but never the same woman’s man.”
Cassie smiled too, a smile of a faltering sort. “Yes,” she said, “that’s it.”
He touched her cheek and he kissed it. Then he stood up to dress. Passing by Eldridge toward his clothes in a heap, he noticed the briefcase again peeking out from the closet. “What’s this?” says he, grasping it by the handle, hoisting it up.
Cassie sighed and slumped back down in the sheets, rolling away from him. She buried her face in the pillow, the words coming out of it muffled and low. “That’s the only other thing. That and your pigs was the only two things this past fortnight.”
He turned it, taking in the look of it. Sturdy brown leather, scuffed and worn, brass snaps and locks and corners. “Where’d you steal it from?”
She came up for air. “From the back of the ambulance. I was walking by on my way out of work. Sitting there offering itself to me, it was.”
“Ambulance?”
“They brought in two men, a car wreck. Desperate shape they were in, skulls cracked open, blood everywhere, this close to dead. I don’t know if they made it or not.”
Lafferty looked it over more closely. “What’s in it?”
“I have no bloody clue, Terrance. It’s locked.”
“Heavy,” he said, giving the thing a heft or two. Cassie sat up and started to dress, bra first, then underpants. Not your man. He sat back down naked on the bed, placing the briefcase across his knees. “Don’t you wonder what’s inside?”
“Aye,” says she, dropping the dress down over her head. A plain thing it was, with green dots. “But I hate to break it open. Ruin the bloody thing.”
“Probably nothing but papers inside.”
“Maybe magazines, I was thinking. Maybe books.”
“Have you a paper clip?”
She fetched one and stood watching him pick the lock. When he lifted the lid, the sight turned them both into stone, except for the quick blinking of four bulging eyes. For wasn’t the thing filled to the brim with bright Euro banknotes, high-denomination notes at that, all purple and yellow and green, from side to side, corner to corner, top to bottom. Reaching up over the rim. “My God,” she gasped when finally she could.
Lafferty thought his heart was going to attack. “What the bloody hell...” was all he could manage. He slammed the lid shut.
“Open it back up!” says she.
“Did anybody see you take it?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I never looked around. Sure I never do.”
“Suffering ducks and the price of turnips.”
“Terrance, I don’t care for that kind of language. Open it up again.”
He did. The money was still there. “What the bloody hell are you going to do?”
She sat down beside him on the edge of the bed. They both touched the banknotes, his right hand, her left, caressing, lingering. “I’ll have to get it back somehow. I certainly can’t keep it. I’m not a bloody thief.”
He looked at her. “You know what I mean,” she said. “Not a thief like this. I’ll have to get it back somehow to its rightful owner. Somehow without getting collared again.”
“Your rightful owner might be hard to find,” says your man. “The men carrying this around are not likely to be rightful owners. Nobody rightfully carries around a hundred thousand quid in cash.” They caressed a bit longer. “Someone’ll be looking for it. Someone’ll be looking hard, very hard.”
“How’ll I get it back to ’em? Do you suppose they’d miss just a few of them bills?”
“Yes, they would, and I don’t know. But you better be about it quick.”
Her hand dug down, riffling up through the bills. “I’ve an idea,” she said. The tone of her made him look up from the swag for the first time since he’d opened the case. He saw the face of a naughty girl, Cassie, no confusion on her brow whatsoever. “Let’s pour it all out on the bed,” says she, “and we can do it right on top of it like the king and queen of Siam. We can say we come into money.”
Lafferty sighed a worried, sweaty sigh, which may have been accompanied by a nervous giggle. Not a bad idea, he supposed, but not one he could wholeheartedly endorse. “I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of the situation here.”
“I do,” she said. “Of course I do. But what’s another hour? And, I might point out, Terrance, your oul fella there is plumping out at the very idea.”
He couldn’t deny it. The danger, the decadence, the pure raw power of possessing, even for a bit, a bald fortune such as this were a strong aphrodisiac, not to mention the suggestion itself coming from the mouth of the woman. Nevertheless, your man was reluctant to dump out the money and all the unholy jumble, wondering how they’d ever pack it back together by neat denomination and stacked so tidy, but he was just this close to overcoming his qualms when the first knock sounded at the door in front. Followed by another more urgent.
Lafferty froze, but Cassie says, “Just my neighbor for a happy Christmas or some such,” and leans down for quick peck, saying, “I’ll be back in a shake. Dump it all out on the bed.” But he didn’t. Instead he shut the case, wondering how she could know the knock of her neighbor, doubting she could, a doubt soon confirmed when the next knock was a crash, the front door shattering in, followed by voices, the deep, angry voices of men. In his naked panic he snatched the first garment at hand, her pink bathrobe, shoving the briefcase aside with his foot, heading for the door in back. Donning the robe, slipping outside in the hard slush and cold of the yard, the sun hidden low, the protests of Cassie in the living room growing louder, the gruff and mean voices of men, then the sound of a fist thumping flesh.
The sound made him sick, stopped him short. He could run back to the rescue. No. There was more than one man, there were two or three men, they would be men who fought, mean men, not men who only loved for a living, him and Cassie would just be beaten or killed, or worse. Lafferty’s thoughts raging a blind frenzy. Help. Getting help was the only thing. Police, no matter, anyone, anything. A neighbor. A phone. He ran to the door of the house that was closest, his robe flying open, his naked feet unaware of the cold and the wet. He pounded but nobody answered, the door was locked when he jiggled the knob. Wrapping the robe tight, he went to the next door, and the one after that, door after door, but nobody answered at any, though there were curtains moving, faces peeping. No one would answer a door, no one would listen to the pleas of a man in a pink chenille robe up to his elbows and knees and open in front, shouting and pounding and running wildly from this door to that.