“Well, there’s no need to be touchy,” Herbert said.
It was then that a car in the street backfired. The dwarf seemed to evaporate. One moment he was standing beside the desk. The next he was crouching beneath it, one hand inside his jacket. And somehow I knew that his finger wasn’t wrapped round another bundle of money. For about thirty seconds nobody moved. Then Naples slid across to the window, standing to one side so that he could look out without being seen. He had to stand on tiptoe to do it, his hands perched on the sill, the side of his face pressed against the glass. When he turned around, he left a damp circle on the window. Hair oil and sweat.
“I’ll see you again in a week,” he said. He made for the door as fast as his legs could carry him. With his legs, that wasn’t too fast. “Look after that package with your life, Mr. Diamond,” he repeated. “And I mean . . . your life.”
And then he was gone.
My brother was jubilant. “Five hundred bucks just for looking after an envelope,” he crowed. “This is my lucky day. This is the best thing that’s happened to me this year.” He glanced at the package. “I wonder what’s in it?” he murmured. “Still, that shouldn’t worry us. As far as we’re concerned, there’s no problem.”
That’s what Herbert thought. But right from the start I wasn’t so sure. I mean, five hundred dollars is five hundred dollars, and when you’re throwing that sort of money around, there’s got to be a good reason. And I remembered the dwarf’s face when the car backfired. He may have been a small guy, but he seemed to be expecting big trouble.
Just how big I was to find out soon enough.
TIM DIAMOND INC.
The five hundred dollars lasted about half a day. But it was a good half day.
It began with a blowout at a café round the corner. Double eggs, double sausage, double fries, and fried bread but no beans. We’d been living on beans for the best part of a week. It had gotten so bad I’d been having nightmares about giant Heinz cans chasing me down the High Street.
After that, Herbert put an ad in the local paper for a cleaning lady. That was crazy, really. There was no way we could afford one—but on the other hand, if you’d seen the state of our place, maybe you’d have understood. Dust everywhere, dirty plates piled high in the sink, and old socks sprawled across the carpet from the bedroom to the front door as if they were trying to get to the Laundromat under their own steam. Then we took a bus into the West End. Herbert bought me a new jacket for the next term at school and bought himself some new thermal underwear and a hot-water bottle. That left just about enough money to get two tickets for a film. We went to see 101 Dalmations. Herbert cried all the way through. He even cried in the coming attractions. That’s what sort of guy he is.
I suppose it was pretty strange, the two of us living together the way we did. It had all happened about two years back when my parents suddenly decided to emigrate to Australia. Herbert was twenty-three then. I’d just turned eleven.
We were living in a comfortable house in a nice part of London. I still remember the address: 1 Wiernotta Mews. My dad worked as a door-to-door salesman. Doors was what he sold; fancy French sliding doors and traditional English doors, pure mahogany, made in Korea. He really loved doors. Ours was the only house in the street with seventeen ways in. As for my mum, she had a part-time job in a pet shop. It was after she got bitten by a rabid parrot that they decided to emigrate. I wasn’t exactly wild about the idea, but of course nobody asked me. You know how some parents think they own their kids? Well, I couldn’t even sneeze without written permission signed in duplicate.
Neither Herbert nor I really got on with our parents. That was one thing we had in common. Oh yeah . . . and we didn’t get on with each other. That was the second thing. He’d just joined the police force (this was one week before the Hendon Police Training Center burned down) and could more or less look after himself, but of course I had as much independence as the coffee table.
“You’ll love Australia,” my dad said. “It’s got kangaroos.”
“And boomerangs,” my mum added.
“And wonderful, maple-wood doors . . .”
“And koalas.”
“I’m not going!” I said.
“You are!” they screamed.
So much for reasoned argument.
I got as far as Heathrow Airport. But just as the plane to Sydney was about to take off, I slipped out the back door and managed to find my way out of the airport. Then I hightailed it back to Fulham. I’m told my mum had hysterics about thirty-five thousand feet above Bangkok. But by then it was too late.
Now, by this time, Herbert had finished with the police force, or to put it more accurately, the police force had finished with Herbert. He’d finally gotten fired for giving someone directions to a bank. I suppose it wasn’t his fault that the someone had robbed it, but he really shouldn’t have held the door for the guy as he came out. But in the meantime, he’d managed to save up some money and had rented this run-down apartment in the Fulham Road, above a supermarket, planning to set himself up as a private detective. That’s what it said on the door:
TIM DIAMOND INC. PRIVATE DETECTIVE
Inside, you went up a staircase to a glass-fronted door, which in turn led into his office, a long, narrow room with four windows looking out into the street. A second door led off from here into the kitchen. The staircase continued up to a second floor, where we both had a bedroom and shared a bathroom. The apartment had been made available to Herbert at a bargain-basement price, probably because the whole place was so rickety it was threatening to collapse into the basement at any time. The stairs wobbled when you went up and the bath wobbled when you turned on the taps. We never saw the landlord. I think he was afraid to come near the place.
Dark-haired and blue-eyed, Herbert was quite handsome—at least from the opposite side of the street on a foggy day. But what God had given him in looks, He had taken away in brains. There might have been worse private detectives than Tim Diamond. But somehow I doubt it.
I’ll give you an example. His first job was to find some rich lady’s pedigree Siamese cat. He managed to run it over on the way to see her. The second job was a divorce case—which you may think is run-of-the-mill until I tell you that the clients were perfectly happily married until he came along.
There hadn’t been a third case.
Anyway, Herbert was not overjoyed to see me that day when I turned up from Heathrow carrying a suitcase that held exactly nothing, but where else could I go? We argued. I told him it was a fait accompli. We argued some more. I told him what a fait accompli was. In the end he let me stay.
Mind you, I often wondered if I’d made the right decision. For a start, when I say I like a square meal a day I don’t mean a sawed-off shredded wheat, and it’s no fun starting the winter term in clothes you grew out of the summer before, with more holes in your socks than a Swiss cheese. We could never afford anything. Her Majesty’s government helped Herbert out a little, which is a fancy way of saying that he got welfare, and my parents sent the occasional check for my upkeep, but even so, Herbert never managed to make ends meet. I tried to persuade him to get himself a sensible job—anything other than private detection—but it was hopeless. As hopeless as Herbert himself.
Anyway, after the movie, we got back to the flat around eleven and were making our way up the stairs past the office when Herbert stopped. “Wait a minute, Nick,” he said. “Did you leave the door open?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s strange . . .”
He was right. The door of the office was open, the moonlight pouring out of the crack like someone had spilled a can of silver paint. We made our way back downstairs and went in. I turned on the light.