I was so busy reading that it took me a few minutes to realize how quickly he’d made himself at home. Or how right it felt.
“Female intuition,” I said glibly.
“And a good memory,” he said, concentrating surprisingly hard on stirring coffee that contained neither milk nor sugar. “The size of that trunk? The colour and design of his suit? Neck at right angles to the body? One might almost say photographic.”
In a book, I’d have had the grace to blush. In real life, I stared him out.
“A word of advice, though, Lois.” When he leaned back in the chair, I heard it creak. Then again, it could have been a low chuckle in the back of his throat. “Next time, either tuck the roll into the inside of your stocking or wear a less figure-hugging skirt. By the way, happy birthday,” he said, tossing a box across the table.
No point in asking who had told him. “What is it?”
“What does it look like?”
It looked like a diamond solitaire. “A reward from the Belle Vue?”
“Are you kidding? Those people won’t even give their fleas away.” His craggy face grew serious. “Lois, please say you’re not going to make me go down on one knee.”
I dropped the box. We banged heads picking it up.
“You’re asking me to marry you?”
“Why not?” He ran his hand over his jaw. “I get free housing through my job, which would save you rent on this place, for a start. Then it’s not like Susan and I don’t get on.” If I had a daddy, I’d like him to be like the road-safety man. “And… well…”
“Well what?” This time I was determined he would do it.
“And I love you.”
I loved him too, but I was holding that one up my sleeve. “I won’t change what I do, Sullivan. I’ll still be Hepburn Investigations with seedy divorces and even seedier clients.”
“It never occurred to me that you would change, Lois, and I don’t want you to. Not ever.”
“I still bank my cheques in Susan’s trust fund?”
“Absolutely.”
I told him I supposed it was a deal, only on this occasion we didn’t seal it with a handshake. Afterwards, and once you could wipe the grin off my face, because that’s something else I hadn’t done in a decade, I have to admit that committing to a lifetime with someone didn’t seem half so scary.
Slowly, the world turned back to a million shades of grey.
MAKEOVER by Bill James
Of course, the murmur went around the Monty Club in Shield Terrace more or less immediately and-also, of course-reached its owner, Ralph Ember. Versions did vary in detail, but all said a club member, Cordell Maximillian Misk, known mostly as Articulate Max, somehow wangled himself into the team who did the copycat bank raid on International Corporate Diverse Securities and came away with a very delightful individual share in untraceables. So when Articulate turned up with his mother and great-aunt Edna at the club, asking to see Ralph personally, he had an idea what they wanted, even before any conversation began. Ralph was in his upstairs office at the time testing the mechanisms of a couple of Heckler & Koch automatics. A barman called on the intercom to tell Ember they would like a conference.
It was the press, not Ember, who gave the International Corporate Diverse Securities raid this “copycat” title, because it seemed so accurately modelled on that huge suction job done at the Northern Bank in Belfast, maybe by the IRA, in December 2004. Although the takings from I.C.D.S. in Kelita Street, Holborn, London, were not up to the Belfast haul of (pounds)26 million, the methodology looked similar: basically, get among the bank executives’ families and keep them hos-tage until the managers opened up the vaults and let the money go. Ralph thought the idea might have come from an American novel and film, The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
The I.C.D.S. product, as Ralph heard it, varied from (pounds)21 million to (pounds)12 million. Even the larger amount did fall short of Belfast, but both these lesser figures were clearly satisfactory millions, all the same, and so were the eight between-that is, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20. Ralph and most other people familiar with Misk would have considered this sortie beyond his class, even in a dogsbody role. Some accounts said he’d been lookout, others that he ran the phone link at one of the hostage homes. But the rumours putting him on the operation in some sort of job persisted. And as soon as Ralph came down to meet the three, he did notice a new jauntiness in Articulate. That was how Ralph would describe it, “jauntiness.” In his view, jauntiness in an established Monty member such as Max often meant a whack of recently obtained safe loot, “safe” indicating two factors: (a) it had been lifted from someone’s safe, for example a Holborn, London, bank’s, and (b) the notes were old and, therefore, reasonably safe to spend.
Usually, Ralph saw in Articulate the standard niggly, comical, defeated self-obsession of a small-time crook who believed unwaveringly that next week he’d be big-time, and who’d believed unwaveringly for an age he’d be big-time next week, these next weeks having slipped long ago into the past. Max’s nickname came the satirical way some blubber lump weighing three hundred pounds might be called “Slim.” More than any other quality, Articulate lacked articulateness, so, joke of jokes, label him with it. People mocked his taste for sullen silence. And, until now, in Ember’s opinion, Misk had been the feeble sort who put up with mockery, possibly even expected it, not someone formidable and esteemed enough to get asked on to an enterprise like the I.C.D.S, all expenses paid, retrospectively.
One major point about Ralph Ember was he wanted to hoist the Monty to a much higher social level very soon, and people like Articulate and his relations would obviously be the first to get permanently kicked out. Ralph hoped to polish up the Monty to something like the prestige glow of big London clubs such as the Athenaeum or the Garrick, with their memberships of powerful and distinguished people-bishops, editors, high civil servants, TV faces, company chairmen. Articulate did not really suit. In fact, most of the present Monty membership did not really suit. Ralph would have bet the Athenaeum rarely staged celebration parties for jail releases, turf-war victories, suspended sentences, parole and bail successes. These happened regularly at his club.
Just the same, while Articulate and folk like him remained on the Monty’s books, Ralph regarded it as a prime duty to treat them with all politeness and decency and, yes, friendliness, as if they truly counted for something. Membership of the Monty was membership of the Monty and entailed absolute recognition from its proprietor. Articulate and the two women called in the afternoon, when the club was quiet, so he could allow them some of his time. Ralph came to the Monty at these off-peak periods more often than previously, because he liked to do a thorough, undisturbed daily check on club security. Ralph naturally had enemies, and lately they had begun to look and sound a few troublesome degrees more focused. Anyone who collected (pounds)600,000 a year untaxed from drugs commerce, besides profits from the Monty and some entrepreneurial commissions, was sure to have envious enemies, well-focused envious enemies. Hence the H & K’s. Hence, also, the shield fixed on one of the internal pillars and intended to give Ralph protection from gunfire when he sat behind the bar at a little shelf-desk checking on stock and sales. He’d had the shield covered with a collage of illustrations from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a work by the poet William Blake, so that it would look like part of the décor and, in fact, add some class. But it was thick steel. In Shield Terrace he needed a shield. For instance, a lad called Luke Apsley Beynon had begun to get very bothersome. Something terminal might need to be done there before too long.