He climbed in behind the wheel, put the key in the ignition and prayed. He switched the lights off and, after a short pause, turned the key. First quickly, then slowly, he tried to coax the engine into action, but it barely clicked as he pumped the accelerator pedal up and down.
“Not today!” he screamed, banging the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. He tried a couple more times and then jumped out and ran into the house. He didn’t take his thumb off the doorbell until Joni opened it with a questioning look on her face.
“My battery’s dead, I need your car, quickly, quickly!”
“It’s being serviced. You’ve been telling me for weeks to have it attended to.” T. Hamilton McKenzie didn’t wait to offer an opinion. He turned his back on his wife, ran down the drive into the road and began searching the tree-lined avenue for the familiar yellow color with a sign reading 444-4444 attached to the roof. But he realized there was a hundred-to-one chance of finding a cab driving around looking for a fare that early in the morning. All he could see was a bus heading towards him. He knew the stop was a hundred yards away, so he began running in the same direction as the bus. Although he was still a good twenty or thirty yards short of the stop when it passed him, the bus pulled in and waited.
McKenzie climbed up the steps, panting. “Thank you,” he said. “Does this bus go to Olentangy River Road?”
“Gets real close, man.”
“Then let’s get going,” said T. Hamilton McKenzie. He checked his watch. It was 8:17. With a bit of luck he might still make the meeting on time. He began to look for a seat.
“That’ll be a dollar,” said the driver, staring at his retreating back.
T. Hamilton McKenzie rummaged in his Sunday suit.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “I’ve left—”
“Don’t try that one, man,” said the driver. “No cash, no dash.” McKenzie turned to face him once again.
“You don’t understand, I have an important appointment. A matter of life and death.”
“So is keeping my job, man. I gotta stick by the book. If you can’t pay, you’ve gotta debus ’cause that’s what the regulations say.”
“But—” spluttered McKenzie.
“I’ll give you a dollar for that watch,” said a young man seated in the second row who’d been enjoying the confrontation.
T. Hamilton McKenzie looked at the gold Rolex that had been presented to him for twenty-five years’ service to the Ohio State University Hospital. He whipped it off his wrist and handed it over to the young man.
“It must be a matter of life and death,” said the young man as he exchanged the prize for a dollar. He slipped the watch onto his wrist. T. Hamilton McKenzie handed the dollar on to the driver.
“You didn’t strike a good bargain there, man,” he said, shaking his head. “You could have had a week in a stretch limo for a Rolex.”
“Come on, let’s get going!” shouted McKenzie.
“It’s not me who’s been holding us up, man,” said the driver as he moved slowly away from the curb.
T. Hamilton McKenzie sat in the front seat wishing it were he who was driving. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t there. He turned around and asked the youth, “What’s the time?” The young man looked proudly at his new acquisition, which he hadn’t taken his eyes off for one moment.
“Twenty-six minutes after eight and twenty seconds.”
McKenzie stared out of the window, willing the bus to go faster. It stopped seven times to drop off and pick up passengers before they finally reached the corner of Independence, by which time the driver feared the watch-less man was about to have a heart attack. As T. Hamilton McKenzie jumped off the steps of the bus, he heard the clock on the Town Hall strike 8:45.
“Oh, God, let them still be there,” he said as he ran towards the Olentangy Inn, hoping no one would recognize him. He stopped running only when he had reached the path that led up to reception. He tried to compose himself, aware that he was badly out of breath and sweating from head to toe.
He pushed through the swing door of the coffee shop and peered around the room, having no idea who or what he was looking for. He imagined that everyone was staring back at him.
The coffee shop had about sixty café tables in twos and fours, and he guessed it was about half-full. Two of the corner tables were already taken, so McKenzie headed to the one that gave him the best view of the door.
He sat and waited, praying that they hadn’t given up on him.
It was when Hannah arrived back at the crossing on the corner of Thurloe Place that she first had the feeling someone was following her. By the time she had reached the sidewalk on the South Kensington side, she was convinced of it.
A tall man, young, evidently not very experienced at shadowing, bobbed rather obviously in and out of doorways. Perhaps he thought she wasn’t the type who would ever be suspicious. Hannah had about a quarter of a mile in which to plan her next move. By the time the Norfolk came in sight, she knew exactly what needed to be done. If she could get into the building well ahead of him, she estimated she only needed about thirty, perhaps forty-five, seconds at most, unless the porters were both fully occupied. She paused at the front window of a cosmetics shop and stared at the array of beauty products that filled the shelves. She turned to look towards the lipsticks in the corner and saw his reflection in the brightly polished window. He was standing by a newspaper stand at the entrance to the South Kensington tube station. He picked up a copy of the Daily Mail — amateur, she thought — which gave her the chance to cross the road before he could collect his change. She had reached the front door of the hotel by the time he had passed the cosmetics shop. Hannah didn’t run up the steps as it would have acknowledged his existence, but mistakenly pushed the revolving door so sharply that she sent an unsuspecting old lady tumbling onto the sidewalk much sooner than she’d intended.
The two porters were chatting as she shot across the lobby. The red ticket and another pound were already in her hand before she reached the porters’ desk. Hannah slammed the coin down on the counter, which immediately attracted the older man’s attention. When he spotted the pound, he quickly took the ticket, retrieved Hannah’s little case and returned it to her just as her pursuer was coming through the revolving doors. She headed in the direction of the staircase at the end of the corridor, clutching the little case close to her stomach so the man following her would be unaware that she was carrying anything. When she reached the second step of the staircase she did run, as there was no one else in sight. Once down the staircase she bolted across the corridor and into the comparative safety of the ladies’ room.
This time she was not alone. A middle-aged woman was leaning over a washbasin to check her lipstick. She didn’t give Hannah so much as a glance when she disappeared into one of the cubicles. Hannah sat on the top of the toilet, her knees tucked under her chin as she waited for the woman to finish her handiwork. It was two or three minutes before she finally left. Once Hannah heard the door close, she lowered her feet onto the cold marble floor, opened the battered suitcase to check everything was there and, satisfied that it was, changed back into her T-shirt, baggy sweater and jeans as quickly as she could.
She’d just managed to get her sneakers on when the door opened again, and she watched the lower part of two stockinged legs cross the floor and enter the cubicle next to hers. Hannah shot out and buttoned up her jeans before checking herself quickly in the mirror. She ruffled her hair a little and then began checking around the room. There was a large receptacle in the corner for depositing dirty towels. Hannah removed the plastic lid, took out all the towels that were there and forced her little case to the bottom, then quickly covered it with the towels and put the lid back in place. She tried to forget she had carried the bag from Leningrad to Tel Aviv to London — halfway across the world. She cursed in her native tongue before checking her hair in the mirror again. Then she strolled out of the ladies’ room, attempting to appear calm, even casual.