Comeback (4 page)

One of the new bunch wrote down my name under Fred’s and paused over the address I gave him: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall, London, England.

“Diplomatic immunity, like him?” He jerked his head in Fred’s direction.

“I’ll help if I can,” I said.

He sucked his teeth a bit and asked what I’d observed.

I told him, in fair detail.

Had I seen this mugger at close quarters?

Well yes, I said, since he’d hit me.

Description?

“Dark-skinned.”

“Black?”

I found the same difficulty as Vicky over the skin color.

“Not West Indian or African,” I said. “Maybe Central American. Maybe Hispanic. He didn’t speak. I can’t tell you any better.”

“Clothes?”

“Black.” I thought back, remembering how I tried to throw him, refeeling the cloth that I’d clutched. “I’d say black jeans, black cotton sweatshirt, black sneakers. When he ran off he wasn’t easy to see.”

I made my guesses at his age, height, weight and so on but I couldn’t remember his face well enough to be sure I’d recognize him in other clothes, in daylight.

Midnight-blue shut his notebook and produced two cards with his name on them, one for Fred, the other for me. He would be grateful, he indicated, if we would present ourselves at his police station the following morning at ten A.M., and he gave us the impression that had it not been for the sheltering umbrella of the Foreign Office, the request would have been an order.

The scattered searchers returned without a mugger but with, surprisingly, Vicky’s torn-out earring, which they’d found on the ground. Bagged and labeled, it was solemnly retained in police custody. There was no sign, it seemed, of a capacious white bejeweled handbag or Greg’s wallet or his shoulder-slung holdall.

As fast as they’d arrived, the midnight-blues departed, leaving a sudden deafening silence in which Fred and I stood and looked at each other a touch dazedly, deciding what to do next.

The few curious local inhabitants faded back through their doors, their interest level in the noise and glittering red, white and blue illuminations having been remarkably low throughout, as though the circus were too familiar to bother with: though this, Fred commented ruefully, was supposed to be a quiet residential area.

“You’d better drive the BMW to the hospital,” Fred said, “and collect them and take them home.”

“Um . . .”

“I can’t do it,” he said reasonably. “I promised Meg I wouldn’t be late. She’s got her hands full . . . the children were crying because their spots are itching.”

“Won’t the hospital send them home in an ambulance?” I asked.

Fred looked at me pityingly. “This is not the National Health Service. This is pay-through-the-nose country.”

“Oh, all right. Where’s the hospital?”

He began to give me directions but shrugged finally and said I’d better follow him: so he led me to the entrance, pointed to it emphatically through his open window and, without pausing for more speech, zoomed away towards the chicken pox.

I found Greg and the friendly policeman sitting glumly side by side in the waiting area, Greg looking drained and gray, the policeman glowing with health and watching the passing nurses in the same sort of way that I did, once I settled myself in the next seat.

“How are you feeling?” I asked Greg: an unnecessary question.

“Tired,” he said, “but my head’s all right. They say there’s only a bruise. Got to rest a bit, that’s all.”

I nodded. “I brought your car,” I said. “I’ll drive you home.”

He said limply, “Thanks.”

Conversation lapsed. The ratio of middle-aged to nubile nurses proved to be ten to one. Disappointing.

After a long time Vicky reappeared, sitting in a wheelchair pushed by a (middle-aged) nurse and accompanied by a young doctor whose smudged white coat spoke of long hours on duty. Vicky, wearing a large white bandage like an earmuff above the bloodstained sparkling tunic, held a tissue to her mouth and had her eyes shut. Her face, cleaned of makeup, appeared lined and pudgy. The false eyelashes had been removed. The trouper persona was in abeyance; the grandmother alone inhabited the body.

The young doctor told Greg that his wife was fine, he’d stitched the ear under local anesthetic, it should heal without trouble, he’d given her painkillers, sedatives and antibiotics and she should come back later that day to have the dressing changed. Vicky opened her eyes and looked no better.

I glanced at my watch and found it was very nearly two o’clock. Time flies, I thought wryly, when one’s having a good time.

The doctor departed and the policeman gently asked Vicky questions that she answered in a low voice without emotion. After a while he produced a card with his name on it and asked her and Greg to go to the police station at ten in the morning to complete their statements.

“You too,” he said to me.

“Your pals have already given me a card.” I showed it to him. He peered at it and nodded. “Same place, same time.”

He said goodnight to us and left, his kindness, I saw, a habitual way of getting things done, not a deep compassion for each individual. Much better, all the same, than a brusque automatic universal disregard of sensibilities.

A nurse reappeared to push Vicky to the doorstep, but no farther. Hospital care and hospital insurance stopped right there, she firmly said. We persuaded her merely to let me fetch the car to the door, rather than have Vicky walk to the car, a concession she made with impatience. Both Greg and Vicky were beyond caring.

They chose to sit together in the back of the car, and I asked for the most elementary instructions on how to get to their home, like which way out of the gate. It was amazing we ever reached the house, as Vicky closed her eyes again and kept them shut, and Greg kept drifting off to sleep, waking when I stopped and asking where we were. You tell me, I said.

I stifled the beginnings of irritation and drove with care, and we did at last pull up in a semicircular drive outside their front door. Greg fortunately still had the house keys in his pocket, and I didn’t think it was exactly the moment to speculate aloud as to whether the thieves had acted on the knowledge they must have found in their possession and come to rob and destroy while their victims were in the hospital.

Telling the couple to stay where they were for a moment, I got Greg to give me the key, and fed it into the lock with some foreboding. All was dark and quiet inside, however, and when I felt around and found the light switch, all was also revealed as undisturbed.

Feeling exposed to predators and half-ready for another attacking rush from the many surrounding bushes, I tried to hurry Greg and Vicky into the house without actually scaring them into paralysis, but they were agonizingly slow. It wasn’t until we were all safely inside with the door locked behind us that I began in any way to relax.

They lived in a one-story house, most of the rooms flowing into each other without doors. No heating problems, of course, in South Florida. I went round checking that all the curtains were drawn, finding that the Wayfield taste in interior decorating ran to bright floral prints and mahogany.

Returning to find them both sitting in the chairs nearest the front door, as if their legs could take them no farther—the life force at its lowest ebb—I suggested they make themselves a hot sweet drink before they went to bed. I, I said, would phone for a taxi.

They looked at me in horror.

“Oh no,” Vicky said, near to tears. “Stay here. Please do. I hate to say it, but I feel so shaky and shivery. And I’m scared. I can’t help it. They might come here. I’ve realized they must know our address.”

Greg reached across for her hand and squeezed it. He didn’t actually say he was scared but he too begged me to stay.

“You chased them off before,” Vicky said. “They won’t come if you’re here.”

I thought with longing of a quiet bed in the airport hotel but saw I couldn’t abandon them to a panic-filled night. I’d known them for less than six hours: felt I’d been with them forever.

“I’ll stay,” I said, “but it wasn’t I who chased them off. You,” I said to Vicky, “you did it yourself with that brilliant scream.”

I remembered her as she looked then, a white-haired witch with scarlet raking nails and brilliant eyes, the personification of all the dark female powers that had petrified men from prehistory.

“You were magnificent,” I said: frightening, I might have added, if I’d wanted to admit it.

She brightened a little at the memory, a movement in the eyes. “It wasn’t just the scream,” she said. “It was the kick.”

I asked in awakening understanding, “Where?”

She looked down at her shoes, high-heeled with sharply pointed toes.

“Where do you think?” she said. “I used to be a dancer too. High kicks. I was behind him. I aimed for just below the bottom of his spine. I was so angry I’d have killed him if I could.” She looked up, a smile somewhere near, full of revengeful satisfaction. “I was right on target. It was a doozie, hard and straight. He had his legs apart, balancing himself to clobber you.” She paused, then finished it with a nod. “I got him in the balls.”

 

 

 

 

T
wo nights later I flew to England. Across the aisle

Vicky and Greg slumbered peacefully, blanketed to their chins, heads together, babes in the wood.

“Peter, it wouldn’t hurt you to put your journey off for one more day,” Fred had said. “It isn’t as if you’ve got anything to go
to,
especially. And Greg and Vicky are badly shaken by all this, you know they are.”

Fred was at his most earnest, almost evangelical in his desire to do good. Rather, in his desire that
I
should do good. I thought of a T-shirt I’d once owned that read, “Stress is what happens when your gut says NO and your mouth says
YES I’D BE GLAD TO
”; and Fred asked me what I was smiling at.

“Nothing, really.”

“Then you’ll wait a day?”

“Yes, all right.”

“Great. Great. I was sure you would. I told them I was sure you would. They can’t possibly go tonight, you can see that.”

We were in his office at the time, in the consulate in Miami, on the day after the mugging. The night had passed undisturbed by marauders but it had been an exhausted pair that had pottered round the kitchen in dressing gowns that morning to assemble much-needed breakfasts. Vicky’s ear was throbbing, Greg’s forehead was dark with bruise and both were suffering from depression.

“All my credit cards ...” Greg said wearily. “There’s so much to
do
.” He picked up the telephone and passed on the bad news to the companies.

I thought of my bags sitting unattended in my unused room and phoned the hotel: no problem at all, I could pick up the luggage later but they would charge me for the past night regardless. Fair enough, I agreed.

Once they were dressed, I drove Vicky and Greg to meet Fred and keep the police appointment, a session that taxed the Wayfields’ remaining stamina sorely. The only bright spot for Vicky was the return of her earring, though it would be a long time, she guessed, before she could wear it.

“I don’t want to keep thinking of last night,” she said vehemently during the interview, but the friendly policeman carried on asking friendly persistent questions nonetheless. Finally they let all four of us go, and Fred in his car led the rest of us in the BMW across town to his official domain.

The consulate proved to be a modest suite of offices high in a glass-walled tower. British firms and holidaymakers had clamored for it to be opened, but funding it, it was rumored in the service, Fred said, had meant closing its equivalent in some other place from where the tourist tide had ebbed.

Arriving on the twenty-first floor, we squeezed through tall doors into a small entrance and waiting area already filled by an indignant family who’d been robbed at Disney World and a man in a wheelchair who’d been brought in by the police as he couldn’t remember where he was staying in Florida and had been found dazed and alone in the street repeating an English address.

Behind a glass partition, two good-looking young women, trying to sort everything out, welcomed the sight of Fred with relief.

“Bombproof glass, of course,” Fred said to me, and signaled the girls to let us in through the electronic glass door. “Carry on,” he said to them, which they did most competently, it seemed to me.

Beyond the antiterrorist door, the available space had been cleverly divided to allow for all the familiar sections of embassy life, but in miniature. Records room, cipher room, conference room, individual offices, large busy secretaries’ room, kitchen and a more spacious office with the best view for the man in charge.

This efficient layout was staffed by Fred himself, he said, along with the two super-secretaries and two vice-consuls, one of whom was involved in trade, the other, currently out on a job, in delicate areas like the unlawful movement of drugs.

Fred parked Greg and Vicky in a conference room just big enough for a round table surrounded by dining chairs and then, his forehead sweating, beckoned me into his private sanctum and shut the door.

“They won’t be able to leave today,” he said. “They” had become shorthand for Greg and Vicky. “Tickets, easy. But there’s her passport, and she has to go to the hospital and she’s only half packed, she said.”

“And new locks for their house,” I agreed.

“So you could stop another day and help them, couldn’t you?”

I opened my mouth and shut it again and it was then that Fred had warmed to his persuasion.

Fred and I were of equal rank in the service, consuls and first secretaries both being (if one equated things to the army) like colonels.

As in the army, the next step up was the big one. First secretaries and consuls abounded, but counselors and consul-generals and ministers led towards the peak of the pyramid: there were at least six hundred consuls and probably more first secretaries around the world but only about a hundred and fifty ambassadors.