I couldn’t hear the two lambs talking. That was wrong. They ought to have plenty of things to say to each other. After all, I was Dalloway, and Dalloway was a new element in their lives; they should have been talking about me.
I crossed to the window and looked down into the street. The door of the Ford was open, and it looked like the whisky lamb’s leg sticking out of it. He was on the radio. I got the phone out of bed and put it back on the hook, and as I did so I automatically opened the draw of the bedside-table. It was a small drawer, but it seemed to contain more than the rest of the room. I rummaged through the packets of paper tissues, the cotton-wool, the paper tissues, the pairs of nail scissors, the half-eaten bar of Suchard chocolate, the paper tissues, the pens, the tweezers, the paper tissues, the paper tissues - do women eat these fucking things or what? - and there, at the bottom of the drawer, nestling on a bed of paper tissues, was a heavy bundle wrapped in a strip of chamois leather. Sarah’s fetching little Walther TPH. I popped out the magazine and checked the slot down the side. Full.
I slipped the gun into my pocket, took another deep breath of Nina Ricci, and left.
Things had changed amongst the lambs since I’d last spoken to them. Definitely for the worse. The front door was open, Micky was leaning against the wall next to it with his right hand in his pocket, and I could see Whisky standing on the steps outside, looking up and down the street. He turned when he heard me on the stairs.
‘Nothing,’ I said, and then remembered I was supposed to be American. ‘Not a goddamn thing. Shut the door will you?’
‘Two questions,’ said Micky.
‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘Make it fast.’
‘Who the fuck is Dave Carter?’
There didn’t seem to be much point my telling him that Dave Carter had been under-sixteen fives champion at school, and that he’d gone on to work for his father’s electrical engineering company in Hove. So I said, ‘What’s the second question?’
Mickyglanced across at Whisky, who’d come up to the door and got himself very much in the way of my exit. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Dalloway,’ I said. ‘Want me to write it down for you? What the hell is the matter with you guys?’ I slipped my right hand into my pocket and saw Micky’s right hand move in his.
If he decided to kill me, I knew I would never even hear the shot. Still, I’d managed to get my hand into my right pocket. Just a pity that I’d put the Walther in the left. I brought my hand out again, slowly, with my fist closed. Micky was watching me like a snake.
‘Goodwin says he’s never heard of you. He never sent anybody. Never told anybody we were here.’
‘Goodwin is a lazy son-of-a-bitch who’s way out of his depth,’ I said, irritably. ‘What the hell has he got to do with it?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Micky. ‘Want to know why?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I want to know why.’
Mickysmiled. He had terrible teeth. ‘Because he doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘I made him up.’
Well, there you are. I’d been Looped. As ye sew, so shall ye knit.
‘I’m going to ask you again,’ he said, starting towards me. ‘Who are you?’
I let my shoulders slump. The game was up. I held my wrists out in front of me in a ‘handcuff me, officer’ gesture. ‘You want to know my name?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
The reason they never heard it was because we were interrupted by an ear-drum-splitting howl of incredible intensity. The sound bounced off the floor and ceiling of the hallway and came back twice as strong, rocking the brain and blurring the eyes.
Mickywinced and backed away along the wall, and Whisky started to lift his hands to his ears. In the half second they gave me, I ran for the open door and hit Whisky in the chest with my right shoulder. He bounced back and fell against the railings, as I turned left and took off down the street at a speed I hadn’t travelled at since I was sixteen. If I could get twenty yards away from the Airweight, I’d have a chance.
To be honest, I don’t know if they fired at me. After the unbelievable sound from Ronnie’s little brass canister, my ears were in no state to process that kind of information. All I know is they didn’t rape me.
Eleven
There is no sin except stupidity.
OSCAR WILDE
Ronnie took us back to her flat off the King’s Road, and we drove past it a dozen times in each direction. We weren’t checking for surveillance, just looking for a place to park. This was the time of day when Londoners who own cars, and that’s most of them, pay heavily for their indulgence - time stands still, or goes backwards, or does some fucking thing that doesn’t correspond with the ordinary rules of the universe - and all those TV commercials showing sexy sportsters being flung about deserted country roads start to irritate you a little. They don’t irritate me, of course, because I ride a bike. Two wheels good, four wheels bad.
When she’d finally managed to squeeze the TVR into a space, we discussed taking a taxi back to her flat, but decided that it was a nice enough evening and we both fancied the walk. Or rather, Ronnie fancied the walk. People like Ronnie always fancy the walk, and people like me always fancy people like Ronnie, so we each put on a stout pair of walking legs and set off. On the way, I gave her a brief account of the LyallStreet session, and she listened in rapt near-silence. She hung on my words in a way that people, particularly women, don’t usually hang. They usually let go, twist their ankle in the fall, and blame me for it.
But Ronnie was different somehow. Different because she seemed to think that I was different.
When we finally made it back to her flat, she unlocked the front door, stood to one side, and asked, in a strangely little girl voice, if I wouldn’t mind going in first. I looked at her for a moment. I think perhaps she wanted to gauge how serious the whole thing was, as if she still wasn’t quite sure of it or me; so I put on a grim expression and went through the flat in what I hoped was a Clint Eastwoody sort of a way - pushing open doors with my foot, opening cupboards suddenly - while she stood in the corridor, her cheeks spotted with red.
In the kitchen, I said, ‘Oh God.’
Ronnie gave a gasp, and then ran forward and peered round the door-jamb.
‘Is this bolognese?’ I said, and held up a wooden spoonful of something old and badly misjudged.
She tutted at me and then laughed with relief, and I laughed too, and we suddenly seemed like very old friends. Close, even. So obviously, I had to ask her.
‘When’s he coming back?’
She looked at me, and blushed a little, then went back to scraping bolognese from the saucepan.
‘When’s who coming back?’
‘Ronnie,’ I said. I moved round until I was more or less in front of her. ‘You’re very well put together, but you do not take a size forty-four chest. And if you did, you wouldn’t take it in a lot of identical pin-stripe suits.’
She glanced towards the bedroom, remembering the cupboards, and then went to the sink and started to run hot water into the pan.
‘Drink?’ she said, without turning round.
She broke out a bottle of vodka while I threw ice-cubes over the kitchen floor, and eventually she decided to tell me that the boyfriend, who, as I think I could probably have guessed, sold commodities in the City, didn’t stay at the flat every night, and when he did he never got there before ten. Honestly, if I’d had a pound for every time a woman has told me that, I’d have at least three by now. The last time it happened, the boyfriend came back atseven o’clock - ‘He’s never done that before,’ - and hit me with a chair.