“This isn’t going to do you any good,” Fausto said. “You gotta know that, Rowley.”
“If you come any nearer,” Rowley said in a choked voice, “I’ll kill her, I will.” He spat the pipe out onto the terrace.
It seemed too incredible, too histrionic, to be real. Some of the onlookers began to laugh, under the impression they’d been roped into one of those interactive murder mystery plays. But that impression was quickly dashed when Rowley snatched up a barbecue fork from the roast beef table and quickly pressed it against the side of Audrey’s neck, creating two little dents that immediately filled with blobs of blood. There was a collective gasp, a whispered chorus of “Oh, my God!” Audrey instantly stopped struggling and stood stone-still, her eyes open very wide, as if she were straining to listen for some faint and distant sound.
“Rowley, if you hurt her, I swear to God I’ll kill you,” Buck snarled, his voice husky and trembling with rage. There was little doubt he meant it.
“Rowley, come on, don’t you see you’re making it worse for yourself?” Fausto said reasonably. “Think about it a minute. Look, you haven’t hurt her yet. We can still sit down like reasonable people, you can call your solicitor-”
“Shut up!” Rowley said, or rather screamed. With that, even the people at the other end of the terrace became aware of what was happening. Conversation ceased. The musicians stopped playing. Many of the women had their hands to their mouths. All eyes were on Rowley and Audrey.
Rowley looked quickly behind him. A few people were standing between him and the double doors that led out to the elevators. “I don’t want anybody behind me,” he yelled. “Move out of the way!”
They quickly grasped the situation and retreated toward the walls, except for one wide-shouldered man who looked as if he intended to bar the way, but Fausto motioned him aside. “Do as he says, please. I’m a police officer.”
With reluctance, the man complied. Rowley began to move slowly backward with Audrey, keeping the fork pressed against her throat. Audrey moved with him, rigid and unresisting. The blood had begun to dribble down her neck in two streams. Gideon, along with everyone else, watched helplessly.
“Rowley,” Fausto began. “Mr. Boyd-”
“Shut up!” Rowley shrieked. “Just… shut… up!”
He looked quickly behind him again to make sure the way was clear, then continued backing toward the doors some thirty feet away.
Julie grasped Gideon’s forearm. “He doesn’t see the tub,” she whispered excitedly. “I don’t think he sees the tub!”
“The what?” Gideon asked, but even as he said it he saw what she was talking about. Not far behind Audrey and Rowley, between them and the elevators, there was a circular, ten-foot-wide hot tub sunk into the terrace floor. It was obvious that Rowley wasn’t aware of it; he was dragging Audrey directly toward it.
There were more whispers as the watchers pointed it out to one another. An electric ripple seemed to flow among them. They watched, transfixed, many holding their breath. Now they were eight feet away. .. now six… now four… two more steps and…
With his foot almost on the rim, Rowley sensed the crowd’s restiveness and twisted around to glance nervously behind him. As he did so, the points of the fork came a few inches away from Audrey’s neck, and she responded instantaneously. A hard whack in the ribs from her right elbow, an almost simultaneous one from the left, and then a scrape down his shin with the heel of her shoe, ending in a full-bodied stomp on his instep, all of it in the space of a second.
“Ow! Ai-!” Rowley teetering on the rim of the tub, one arm still around Audrey’s neck, flailed with the other one, struggling for balance, but a last, sharp elbow in the gut (“Whoof!”) sent the fork flying and tipped him over backward. In the two of them plunged with a huge sploosh, the barbecue fork plopping in a moment later with its own modest splish.
And so what might have culminated in high tragedy ended instead as low comedy, in a foofaraw of spluttering, splashing, and thrashing of arms and legs. Buck dived gallantly but unnecessarily in (the tub was only four feet deep) to “rescue” Audrey, hit his head on the sitting ledge, and wobbled dazedly to his feet, from where he had to be led unsteadily up the three steps by Audrey. Eager hands reached out to help them, but she batted them away like pesky mosquitoes. Audrey didn’t like being rescued any more than she liked being abducted.
Rowley too hit his head, stood up, and sank dizzily back onto the ledge, from which he was unceremoniously fished out by the wrists by Gideon and Fausto. Passive and unresisting, he was then led away by Fausto and another police official who was there as a guest. Dripping, drooping, and utterly wilted, leaving a snail-like trail of moisture in his wake, he looked like an old sneaker that had been put through the wringer one time too many.
The barbecue fork, resting quietly on the bottom of the tub, was left for the pool attendant to retrieve.
TWENTY-SIX
Gideon spent the next several hours at New Mole House, getting his statement recorded and transcribed – a long, fatiguing process – and then, over coffee in the break room, sharing notes with Fausto (who had been busy interrogating Rowley). Then he was driven back to the hotel, where, hoping to go up to the room and call it a night, he was spotted by Pru as he crossed the lobby and hauled off, protesting, to the Barbary Bar. There he found everyone, including Julie, congregated and awaiting him and his explanation of the evening’s bizarre events.
Happily Julie had already filled them in on the faking of the First Family by Ivan, and the fact that Sheila Chan had not been the victim of a natural landslide but of murder, so he was spared going through all that. She had also enlightened them on why the mere mention of Catalan Bay had precipitated the extraordinary episode that had followed. Beyond that much, of course, she was as much in the dark as they were, so the rest was up to him. He considered begging off till morning, but on reflection he decided he owed them more consideration than that. After all, he had come close – sometimes extremely close – to believing each of them, his friends and colleagues, a multiple murderer.
He ordered a Scotch and water, settled back in his chair beneath a wall of photographs, and, under the disinterested black-and-white gazes of Michael Palin and John and Yoko, gratefully swallowed down half the drink and wearily began.
It was a combination of things, he told them, none of them really conclusive in itself, that brought it all to its extraordinary conclusion. What had first gotten him started on the right track was Rowley’s reaction to Lester’s joking comment about the Nobel Prize. That had made him think of Rowley’s earlier response to a comment of Pru’s during the group visit to the Rock. (“Yeah, but you could have done a better job with the weather,” she had said, provoking smiles from everybody but Rowley, who had replied, in all earnestness, “But what could I possibly have done about the weather?”) And that, in turn had reminded him of how Rowley had swallowed Discover magazine’s April Fool’s story about the Neanderthal tuba, hook, line, and sinker.
“I fail to see where you’re going with this,” Audrey said crankily. She and Buck, having returned from police headquarters themselves not long before, were still wearing the clumsy, collarless suicide-watch paper uniforms given to them by the police to replace their sopping clothes. On Audrey’s neck were two flesh-colored Band-Aids. “If there’s a point, I wish you’d get to it. I’d like to go to bed before morning.”
“Easy, honey,” Buck gentled. “The man’s doing his best.” His big hand was steadily, gently massaging the nape of her neck.