'The screws… look!' Kermode pointed.
And then they were at it, fingers gripped in the copper work, both of them putting their backs into it. The bomb had to be under there. That's where Durnford would have put it. Under the monstrous effigy, and close to where O'Dowda normally sat. If Kermode had remembered that grid at the start…
I yelled, 'Give it up! Get down here!'
They took no notice of me. Big man and little man, sweating at the grid, master and man, linked by so many things in the past: loyalties, villainies, drinking bouts, fishing trips, rough houses in the old days, sophisticated manipulations as the master grew richer, and always the one thinking he was untouchable, his own law, and the other knowing himself safe in the shadow of the other's power. And they didn't listen to me. They had forgotten that I was there. You don't sit down and let unpleasant things happen to you, not an O'Dowda, you fight and you overcome. That was how it had always been and that was how it would be, had to be, or life was not worth living.
I dropped behind my barrier, snuggled in against the cold, bare wax back of the duchess and then pulled the don down on top of me.
As I did so it happened. The end of the world. There was a bang as though a jet had broken the sound barrier in the room, and everything moved. I was slammed backwards, tangled up in duchess, diplomat and don, towards the steel doors. I should have been killed. I thought I was killed, ears ringing, all breath gone from my body. The steel doors waited for me, waited for the shock-wave to slam me against them and flatten me. But the wave must have hit the doors a second ahead of my body and flung them back like untidy crumpled wings. I slid twenty yards down the gallery and lay flat, eyes closed, waiting… And in the waiting I heard glass crashing, heard plaster and stone and wood falling and breaking.
I came slowly to my feet and, dazed, rubbed dust and grit from my eyes and face. On the floor at my feet was my gun and the parcel, and the severed head of the duchess with a six-inch glass splinter sticking out of her right cheek. I stepped over a red-tabbed general, half of his white moustache torn away and one glass eye shattered, and made for the door.
The room was full of smoke and dust and I could only just see the full length of it. There was no sign of O'Dowda or Kermode. But there were heads and arms and legs scattered all over the place. Most of them were wax. As I went over the threshold, staggering, not really knowing what I was doing, a gentle rain began to fall on me from the remnants of the fire sprinkler system in the roof. I went through it to the throne. The curtains and woodwork on both sides were burning away, and the robes of O'Dowda's effigy were blazing. The flames licked up around its face as it lay on the floor, one arm and one leg severed. I stood looking at it from a distance, and wondered if I were still really alive, or trapped for ever in some nightmare of death. O'Dowda was burning and melting away.
The wax of the face began to run. With the heat beating at my face, still full of stupidity from the shock-wave, I watched the great figure slowly melting before me, melting down to size, melting down to less than size. The sprinkler rain fell on my bare head, streaking down my dirty cheeks like tear-runnels, and the blaze burned fiercely at my skin so that I slowly began to step back, my eyes on O'Dowda's wax face. As the features ran away into shapelessness, I watched in horror at the thing that came swelling up through the wax into the flickering flame-light. Slowly, like a film developing, another face surfaced, grimacing up at me through the running, bubbling wax, another face, fleshless, eyesockets first dark, then filled by the fire and alive with hissing little flames. A mouth grinned, tight, and then slowly fell open as the jaw broke away and slid to the floor with burning wax spurting little red and yellow tongues from it.
Behind me, miles away it seemed, I heard voices shouting, heard a great stir of life, bells, sirens, and the clatter of feet.
I staggered to a far wall, bent over and vomited, knowing that the horror was going to be with me on many a night…the sight of a small fragile skull slowly coming back into the light as O'Dowda's face melted away.
As I straightened up, I saw the real O'Dowda. When the bomb had exploded Kermode must have been shielding him. He had been slammed away across the room to hit the window wall like a two-hundredweight sack of corn. He lay huddled against the wall and floor angle, naked from the waist up, his head cocked horribly to one side and his one remaining leg twisted back up under his body. In the fingers of his right hand, outflung, was still held a large, jagged piece of the copper grid-work.
I went back, out of the room, leaving the fire flaring away around the throne. I picked up the parcel, nearly falling from giddiness as I did so, and then staggered away down the corridor, tucking the parcel into the wasitband of my trousers and buttoning my jacket-front over it.
Sitting in a red velvet chair at the head of the stairs was Durnford, smoking, quiet, composed. He looked at me, nodded, as though congratulating himself on a neat piece of arrangement. O'Dowda and Kermode killed — main targets; Carver, shaken, contrite — minor target; and he, himself, not caring what happened now, because no one could ever take away from him the savour of the last hour, content to wait, no man able to touch him.
He said mildly, 'I phoned the fire brigade. They're arriving now.'
I said, throat dry, words coming like the dry rustle of old reeds, 'I don't feel in the mood for company.'
He pointed to a side door behind his chair. 'Go through there. Down the stairs at the end and you'll find the garage.' Then, as I braced myself for the move, he said, 'How was he at the end?'
I said, 'I thought it was panic, but it wasn't. He just knew, as always, that nothing could ever beat him. He missed out by about five seconds.' Then I went to the door and, my hand on it, added, 'When the police get here they won't let you into that room. If you want to make your farewell, do it now.'
'To him?'
'No, to her. She's on the throne, waiting for you.'
He looked at me, not understanding for a moment, and then he got up slowly and began to move away, up the gallery towards the smoke-veiled and water-sprayed room. I found my way down to the garage and out across the grounds, knowing that I had been lucky. The exception. I had got away with something that belonged to O'Dowda. That was a record. Even the things he owned but no longer wanted, he kept. Just as he had kept her, locked up in himself…
CHAPTER TEN
'Kissing don't last: cookery do!'
The Facel Vega was still where I had left it. I crawled into it like a hermit crab going back to its shell and drove off. A fire tender nearly put me into the bushes before I reached the main gates. Nobody can accuse a French pompier of not driving with panache. A police car nearly did the same for me as I turned into the main road. Somebody shouted at me through an open window. I didn't stop. It could have been Aristide Marchissy la Dole.
I went down to the lake and along to Geneva, and I kept seeing that melting wax face, bubbling and seething, and the horror coming up through it. I was going to have bad dreams for a long time unless I got away and grabbed my long-promised holiday.
I stopped at a call box and rang through to Najib.
I said, 'I've got the parcel for you. How long will it take you to get Julia?'
'No damned time at all.'
'I'll meet you outside the west end of the Cathedrale de Saint Pierre in half an hour. Okay?'
'We'll be there, and as a bonus you'll also get two thousand pounds.'