It was then that I saw — standing up above me on the plateau edge, a little fogged with the mist patches that swept by them — Miss Panda Bubakar and Najib Alakwe. They stood there and watched me as I stopped swimming and trod water.
Panda had a short leather coat flung open, her hands on the hips of a green mini-dress, her long, tight-encased legs seeming longer from the angle at which I viewed them. She was so tall that at times her head was lost in the moving patches of mist. But when her dusky face was clear I could see that she was giving me a cheerful, predatory smile and a chance to admire the sparkle of her white teeth. Najib, though I had little time to be surprised about it, was wearing a neat, sober grey suit and a dark tie on a white shirt. He stood back a little so I couldn't check whether he still had his ginger shoes. But I could see clearly that he was holding a gun in his right hand.
'Hello, hello, Rexy-dexy boy,' called Panda. 'Just keep swimming. You're on the right track. Big welcome awaits.'
'And be careful not to drop the parcel,' said Najib. Just to emphasize the need for care, he fired a shot into the water two feet from me which made me leap like a running salmon, and he called, 'No need for any alarm over personal safety. Just hand over the parcel and all is forgiven.'
'And Mamma will come up with a big brandy and nice rub down with rough towel. Whoof-whoof!' She gave that big, dark brown laughing bark of hers and did a couple of high kicks that would have left a Bluebell girl grounded.
I shook my head. 'Sorry,' I said, 'but I promised myself I would do a couple of lengths before I came out.'
'You come on straight out, lover-boy,' said Panda, 'otherwise you gonna freeze and lose all your accessories. Come on, come to Mamma. Mamma soon make baby warm.'
'Come on in,' I said. 'It's lovely. Don't know what you're missing.'
I turned, stuck the parcel between my teeth and flattened out into the nearest thing to a fast crawl that I could manage, heading away into the mist. I knew that Najib wouldn't fire at me. He didn't want me to drop the precious parcel. On the other hand that wasn't much consolation. I might make the other bank before they got round to it but I didn't fancy being stuck up in the mountains wearing only a pair of trunks. Even if I made a road I was going to have trouble thumbing a lift. The French aren't all that broad-minded.
After about twenty yards or so, I stopped, took the parcel out of my mouth and got some air. The mist hid the grass plateau now. That was good. But it also hid everything else. I hadn't the faintest idea which way to go. You can blindfold some people, dump them down in the dark and they can always tell where north is. Well, I could have been a homing pigeon but it still wouldn't have helped because I didn't have any home.
Just then, I heard Panda's delighted bark-laugh come through the mist and there was the crisp sound of a body diving into water. That scared me. She was after me, over six brown feet of human torpedo, impervious to cold water, and with a built-in radar device that could pick up a man and home on him from any distance. Once she got her long arms and lovely legs around me in the water I would have less chance than a minnow with a pike.
Parcel in my mouth, I went full ahead for a hundred yards, hoping to hit the bank. But I couldn't find any bank. I stopped, panting, no sensation in my body at all, and wondered how long it would be before Otto had company. From behind and to my right, some way away, I heard the water threshing as Panda screwed herself along. Then the sound stopped. All sound stopped. There was just the mist and the cold ripple of water around me. Then there was a sound. Up ahead of me I caught the brief tinkle of a cow-bell. I got moving. I swam thirty yards and then stopped. Somewhere behind me I heard Panda swimming. She didn't sound as though she were going fast; just heading steadily in my direction, keeping the blip of her screen dead centre. Over the noise of her swimming I heard the cow-bell tinkle again, but this time it was away at an angle to my right and the unpleasant thought occurred to me that there could be more than one cow browsing along the far shore. I did the only thing. I took a mean between the two bells and swam down it. Very sensible. In the circumstances.
But not good navigation. A mean course can land you in trouble. That's the catch with averages, they always give you a cock-eyed answer like the average English family has one and a half cars. I ran straight into Panda, simply because I hadn't allowed for the acoustic factor that sounds in a mist don't come from where they seem to come.
She came out of the mist four feet ahead of me, went astern to brake her way and gave me a big white tooth-flashing smile. Held in her teeth was a nasty-looking knife. She took the knife out of her mouth and said, 'Hiyah, honey. Come here often?'
I took the parcel out of my mouth, and through chattering teeth, said, 'You come a foot nearer and I chuck this overboard.' I held up the parcel.
She said, 'How we going to get warm if we don't get close?'
I said, 'Just switch your radar on the nearest cow-bell and lead the way.'
She shook her head and said, 'We do it side by side, lover-boy. And don't play no tricks on a poor girl what's achin' for love. You drop that parcel and I'm gonna slit you from gizzard to crutch and to hell with the waste of a good man.' She winked at me, and added, 'Anyone ever tell you you got nice shoulders? Kinda square and sexy — and I like 'em that blue colour. Goes well with the red face. Start tracking.'
We swam, four feet apart, and Panda just leading the way. I wasn't concerned with what was going to happen. I just wanted to get out of the freezing lake. My body was frozen, my mind was in need of de-icing, and my arms and legs moved as though I were swimming through mud. Only my eyes worked normally to help me keep station alongside Panda.
She grinned at me and said, 'Kinda nice, havin' the whole place to ourselves. Awful crowded in summer they say.'
I didn't answer. I had a mouth full of parcel. But I kept my eyes on her as we swam on.
She was stripped to her bra and long tights, pink, with a little balloon of trapped air swelling up over her backside, and every now and then she twisted her head to give me a beaming smile, which had a lot of mixed emotions bubbling in it. The least I could expect when we got to the bank was to be raped, then knifed. I thought of praying but decided against it. It never did a male mantis any good in the same circumstances.
Panda's radar worked. We bit the bank dead on the cow. It was a big brown-and-white beast, standing between two pines, blowing great gusts of vapour through its nostrils and it watched us with large, liquid, uncurious eyes.
Panda slid out of the water, and said, 'Hi, cow! Nice lake you've got here.' And then, water rolling over her brown arms and shoulders and rippling down her tights, she held the knife at me as I stood in six inches of water and mud at the verge. 'Just come out nice and easy, man, and then toss the parcel to Mamma. Business before pleasure, uh?' She threw her head back and bellowed, 'Najib! Najib!'
From somewhere through the mist distantly came an answering call.
Panda stood waiting for me. She was no fool. I might not know what was in her mind, but she knew what still dimly survived in the icy depths of mine. I didn't want to give her the parcel.
'No tricks, honey. I like you a lot and any time you say the word we'll shack up some place with a big bed and make the springs work double time. But first Najib must have his parcel. Okay?'
'Okay.'
I moved out of the water, but she stopped me after the first two feet.
'No more. Just toss it over.'
Somewhere up to our left Najib shouted. Panda shouted back. I looked down at the parcel in my hand, and remembered a lot of routines I'd been through in Miggs's gymnasium. Somewhere or other I guessed that Panda had been through even more routines, and she could give me inches in height, seconds in speed, and probably just as much in muscle, and she had a knife.