He stretched down to help me to my feet, when all I really wanted to do was lie on a soft mattress.
“Shall I call the police?” he asked, though he wasn’t a police lover; far from it.
“Tom... Thanks. But no police.”
“What was it all about?” He sounded relieved. “Are you in trouble? That looked to me like payback business.”
“Muggers.”
Tom Pigeon, who knew a thing or two about the rocky sides of life, gave me a half-smile, half-disillusioned look, and shortened the leashes of his hungry life preservers. More bark than bite, he’d assured me once. I wasn’t certain I believed it.
He himself looked as if he had no need to bark. Although not heavily built and without a wrestler’s neck, he had unmistakable physical power, and, at about my own age, a close-cut dark pointed beard that added years of menace.
Tom Pigeon told me there was blood in my hair and said if I would give him my keys he would open the door for me.
“I dropped them,” I said and leaned gingerly against the lumpy bit of wall. The dizzy world revolved. I couldn’t remember ever before feeling so pulverized or so sick, not even when I’d fallen to the bottom of the scrum in a viciously unfriendly school rugby match and had my shoulder blade broken.
Tom Pigeon persevered until he kicked against my keys and found them by their clinking. He unlocked and opened the gallery door and with his arm around my waist got me as far as the threshold. His dogs stayed watchfully by his legs.
“I better not bring the canines in among your glass, had I?” he said. “You’ll be all right now, OK?”
I nodded. He more or less propped me against the door frame and made sure I could stand up before he let go.
Tom Pigeon was known locally as “The Backlash,” chiefly on account of being as quick with his wits as his fists. He’d survived unharmed eighteen months inside for aggravated breaking and entering and had emerged as a toughened hotshot, to be spoken of in awe. Whatever his dusty reputation, he had definitely rescued me, and I felt in an extraordinary way honored by the extent of his aid.
He waited until I could visibly control things and stared shrewdly into my eyes. It wasn’t exactly friendship that I saw in his, but it was... in a way... recognition.
“Get a pit bull,” he said.
I stepped into my bright lights and locked the door against the violence outside. Pity I couldn’t as easily blot out the woes of battery. Pity I felt so stupid. So furious. So wobbly, so dangerously mystified.
In the back reaches of the workshop there was running water for rinsing one’s face, and a relaxing chair for recovery of all kinds of balance. I sat and ached a lot, and then phoned the taxi firm, who apologized that this Saturday and Sunday had already overstretched their fleet, but they would put me on their priority list from now on... yeah... yeah... never mind.. I could have done with a double cyclopropane, shaken, with ice. I thought of Worthington, tried for him on the phone, got Bon-Bon instead.
“Gerard darling. I’m so lonely.” She sounded indeed in sorrowing mode, as her elder son would have put it.
“Can’t you come over to cheer me up? Worthington will come to fetch you, and I’ll drive you home myself. I promise.”
I said with regret that I didn’t want to give her “flu” (which I hadn’t got) and simply went on doing very little through a highly unsatisfactory evening. Worthington’s fly-trap vision itched. I loved Bon-Bon as a friend, but not as a wife.
At about ten-thirty I fell asleep in the soft chair and half an hour later was awakened again by the doorbell.
Disorientated as I woke, I felt stiff, miserable and totally unwilling to move.
The doorbell rang insistently. I went on feeling shivery and unwilling, but in the end I wavered upright and creaked out of the workshop to see who wanted what at such an hour. Even then, after the dire lessons I’d been given, I hadn’t enough sense to carry with me a weapon of defense.
As it happened, my late-evening visitor looked pretty harmless. In addition, she was welcome. More than that, I thought that with a kiss or two and a hug she might prove therapeutic.
Detective Constable Catherine Dodd took her finger off the doorbell when she saw me, and smiled with relief when I let her in.
“We had reports from two separate Broadway residents,” she said first. “They apparently saw you being attacked outside here. But we had no complaint from yourself, even though you were hardly walking, it seemed... so anyway, I said I would check on you on my way home.”
She again wore motorcycle leathers, and had parked her bike at the curb. With deft speed, as before, she lifted off her helmet and shook her head to loosen her fair hair.
“One of the reports,” she added, “said that your attacker had been Tom Pigeon, with his dogs. That man’s a damned pest.”
“No, no. It was he who got rid of the pests. Really depressing pests.”
“Could you identify them?”
I made a noncommittal gesture and meandered vaguely through the showroom to the workshop, pointing to the chair for her to sit down.
She looked at the chair and at the sweat I could feel on my forehead, and sat on the bench normally the domain of Irish, Hickory and Pamela Jane. Gratefully I sank into the soft armchair and half answered her who? and why? queries, not knowing whether they had a police basis or were ordinary curiosity.
She said, “Gerard, I’ve seen other people in your state.”
“Poor them.”
“Don’t laugh, it’s hardly funny.”
“Not tragic, either.”
“Why haven’t you asked my colleagues for more help?”
Well, I thought, why not?
“Because,” I said lightly, “I don’t know who or why, and every time I think I’ve learned something, I find I haven’t. Your colleagues don’t like uncertainty.”
She thought that over with more weight than it deserved.
“Tell me, then,” she said.
“Someone wants something I haven’t got. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know who wants it. How am I doing?”
“That makes nonsense.”
I winced and turned it into a smile. “It makes nonsense, quite right.” And in addition, I thought to myself with acid humor, I have the Dragon and Bon-Bon on my watch-it list, and policewoman Dodd on my wanted-but-can-I-catch-her list, and Tom Pigeon and Worthington on my save-my-skin list, Rose Payne/Robins on my black mask-possible list and young Victor Waltman on my can’t-or-won’t-tell list.
As for Lloyd Baxter and his epilepsy, Eddie Payne keeping and delivering videotapes, Norman Osprey running a book with the massive shoulders of 1894, and dear scatty Marigold, often afloat before breakfast and regularly before lunch, all of them could have tapes on their mind and know every twist in the ball of string.
Constable Dodd frowned, faint lines crossing her smooth clear skin, and as it seemed to be question time I said abruptly, “Are you married?”
After a few seconds, looking down at her ringless hands, she replied, “Why do you ask?”
“You have the air of it.”
“He’s dead.”
She sat for a while without moving, and then asked, “And you?” in calm return.
“Not yet,” I said.
Silence could sometimes shout. She listened to what I would probably ask quite soon, and seemed relaxed and content.
The workshop was warmed as always by the furnace, even though the roaring fire was held in control for nights and Sundays by a large screen of heat-resistant material.
Looking at Catherine Dodd’s face above the dark close-fitting leather I most clearly now saw her in terms of glass: saw her in fact so vividly that the urge and desire to work at once couldn’t be stifled. I stood and unclipped the fireproof screen and put it to one side, and fixed instead the smaller flap, which opened to allow access to the tankful of molten glass.