My chest was hurting, as they’d said it would, so I took myself off to the sofa and watched a race meeting atDoncaster, with a large tumbler of I’m Sure I’ve Seen That Grouse Somewhere Before at my elbow.
I must have dozed off for a while, and it was the phone that woke me. I sat up quickly, gasping at the pain from my armpit, and reached for the whisky bottle. Empty. I felt really terrible. I looked at my watch as I lifted the receiver.Ten past eight, or twenty to two. I couldn’t tell which.
‘Mr Lang?’
Male. American. Click, whirr. Come on, I know this one. ‘Yes.’
‘Mr Thomas Lang?’ Got it. Yes, Mike, I’ll name that voice in five. I shook my head to try and wake myself up, and felt something rattling.
‘How do you do, Mr Woolf?’ I said.
Silence at the other end. And then: ‘A lot better’n you, from what I hear.’
‘Not so,’ I said. ‘Yeah?’
‘My biggest worry in life has always been having no stories to tell my grandchildren. My time with the Woolf family should last them until they’re about fifteen, I’d say.’
I thought I heard him laugh, but it could have been a crackle on the line. Or it could have been O’Neal’s lot, tripping over their bugging equipment.
‘Listen, Lang,’ said Woolf, ‘I’d like us to meet up some place.’
‘Of course you would, Mr Woolf. Let me see. This time you’d like to offer me money to perform a vasectomy on you without you noticing. Am I close?’
‘I’d like to explain, if that’s okay by you. You like to eat Italian?’
I thought of the celery and the yoghurt and realised that I like to eat Italian very much indeed. But there was a problem here.
‘Mr Woolf,’ I said, ‘before you name a place, make sure you can book it for at least ten people. I’ve a feeling this may be a party line.’
‘That’s okay,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘You got a tourist guide right by your phone.’ I looked down at the table and saw a red paperback.Ewan’s Guide toLondon.It looked new, and I certainly hadn’t bought it. ‘Listen carefully,’ said Woolf, ‘I want you to turn to page twenty-six, fifth entry. See you there in thirty minutes.’
There was a kerfuffle on the line, and I thought for a moment he’d hung up, but then his voice came back. ‘Lang?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t leave the guide-book in your apartment.’ I took a deep and weary breath.
‘Mr Woolf,’ I said, ‘I may be stupid, but I’m not stupid.’
‘That’s what I’m hoping.’
The line went dead.
The fifth entry on page twenty-six of Ewan’s comprehensive guide to losing dollars in the Greater London Area was ‘Giare,216Roseland,WC2,Ital,60 ppair con, Visa, Mast, Amex’ followed by three sets of crossed spoons. One glance through the book told me that Ewan was pretty sparing with his three spoon motif, so at least I had a reasonable supper to look forward to.
The next problem was how to get there without towing along a dozen brown-raincoated civil servants behind me. I couldn’t be sure that Woolf would be able to do the same, but if he’d gone to the trouble of the guide-book trick, which I have to admit I liked, he must have been fairly sure that he could move around without being bothered by strange men.
I let myself out of the flat and went down to the street door. My helmet was there, resting on top of the gas meter, along with a pair of battered leather gloves. I opened the front door and stuck my head out into the street. No felt- hattedfigure straightened up from a lamppost and tossed away an unfiltered cigarette. But then again, I hadn’t really expected that.
Fifty yards to the left I could see a dark greenLeyland van with a rubber aerial sticking out of the roof, and to the right, on the far side of the street, a red and white striped roadmenders tent. Both of them could have been innocent.
I slipped back inside, put on the helmet and gloves and dug out my key-ring. I eased open the letter-box on the front door, brought the remote control switch for the bike alarm level with the slot, and pressed the button. The Kawasaki blipped back at me once to tell me that its alarm was now off, so I threw open the door and ran down to the street as fast as my armpit would let me.
The bike started first time, as Japanese bikes tend to do, so I slid it to half-choke, popped it into first gear, and eased out the clutch. I also got on it, in case you were worried. By the time I passed the dark-green van I must have been doing forty miles an hour, and I amused myself for a moment with the thought of a lot of men in anoraks banging their elbows on things and saying shit. When I reached the end of the street, I could see, in the mirror, the lights of a car pulling out after me. It was a Rover.
I turned left on to the Bayswater Road within shouting distance of the speed limit, and stopped at a traffic light that’s never once been green in all the years I’ve been coming up to it. But I wasn’t bothered. I fiddled with my gloves and visor for a while, until I sensed the Rover crawling up on the inside, and then I glanced across at the moustachioed face behind the wheel. I wanted to tell him to go home, because this was about to become embarrassing.
As the light switched to amber, I closed the choke fully and eased the throttle to around five thousand revs, then shifted my weight forward over the petrol tank to keep the front wheel down. I dropped the clutch as the light turned green and felt theKawasaki ’s gigantic rear wheel thrash madly from side to side like a dinosaur’s tail, until it found the grip it needed to sling me forwards down the road.
Two-and-a-half seconds later I was doing sixty, and two-and-a-half seconds after that the street lamps were melting into one, and I’d forgotten what the Rover driver looked like. Giare was a surprisingly cheerful place, with white walls and an echoing tile floor that turned every whisper into a shout and every smile into a howling belly-laugh.
A Ralph Lauren blonde with huge eyes took my helmet and showed me to a table by the window, where I ordered a tonic water for myself and a large vodka for the pain in my armpit. To pass the time before Woolf arrived, I had a choice between Ewan’s guide-book or the menu. The menu looked slightly longer, so I started on that.
The first item was fighting under the name ‘Crostini of Mealed Tarroce, with Benatore Potatoes’ and weighed in at an impressive twelve pounds sixty-five. The Ralph Lauren blonde came over and asked me if I needed any help with the menu, and I asked her to explain what potatoes were. She didn’t laugh.
I’d just started to unravel the description of the second dish, which could have been poached Marx Brother for all I know, when I caught sight of the Woolf at the door, clinging determinedly to a briefcase while a waiter peeled off his coat.
And then, at exactly the same moment that I noticed our table was laid for three, I saw Sarah Woolf step out from behind him.
She looked - and I hate to say this - sensational. Absolutely sensational. I know it’s a clichй, but there are times when you realise why clichйs become clichйs. She wore a plain-cut dress in green silk, and it hung on her in a way that all dresses would like to hang if they got the chance - staying still at the bits where it ought to have stayed still, and moving at the bits where movement was exactly what you wanted. Just about everybody watched her travel to the table, and there was a hush in the room while Woolf pushed the chair in behind her as she sat down.