"Now, I don't blame him one bit, Mr. Roper. You can be very mean when you want to be. I've seen it before, you know I have. Mean and devious, and very,
Roper dozed, so Jonathan obediently dozed too, listening to the chirrup of the MacDanbies' laptops over the roar of the engines. He woke, Meg brought the ritual champagne and smoked-salmon canapés, there was more talk, more laughter, more doze. He woke again, to find the plane circling above a Dutch toy town shrouded in a white heat haze. Through the haze he saw the slow bursts of artillery fire as the flare stacks of Willemstad's oil refinery burned off their surplus gas.
"I'll be hanging on to your passport for you, if you don't mind, Tommy," Frisky said quietly as they walked across the shimmering runway. "Just pro tem, right? How are you off for cash at all?"
"I haven't any," said Jonathan.
"Oh, right, then. We needn't bother. Only, those credit cards old Corky gave you, they're more for show, you see, Tommy. You wouldn't get a lot of joy, not
Roper had already been spirited through customs and was shaking hands with people who respected him. Rooke was sitting on an orange bench, reading the inside pages of the
* * *
Their hotel was a horseshoe of red-roofed houses at the edge of town, with two beaches and an outdoor restaurant that looked onto a choppy, windswept sea. In the centre house ― the proudest of them ― in a run of large rooms on the top floor, the Roper party made its village, with Roper in one corner suite and Derek S. Thomas, executive, in the other. Jonathan's drawing room had a balcony with a table and chairs, and his bed room had a bed big enough for four, and pillows that did not smell of wood smoke. He had a bottle of Herr Meister's complimentary champagne, and a bunch of complimentary green grapes, which Frisky ate in handfuls while Jonathan settled in. And he had a telephone that was not buried two feet underground and rang while he was still unpacking. Frisky watched him pick up the receiver.
It was Rooke, asking to speak to Thomas.
"Thomas speaking," Jonathan said in his best executive voice.
"Message from Mandy. She's on her way up."
"I don't know Mandy. Who is this?"
Pause while Rooke on the other end of the line affects to do a double take. "Mr.
"No. I'm Derek. Wrong Thomas."
"Sony about that. Must be the one in 22."
Jonathan rang off and muttered "Idiot." He showered, dressed and returned to the drawing room, to find Frisky slouched in an armchair, combing the in-house magazine for erotic stimulus. He dialled room 22 and heard Rooke's voice saying hullo.
"This is Mr. Thomas in 319. I've got some laundry to be collected, please. I'll leave it outside the door."
"Right away," said Rooke.
He went to the bathroom, took a bunch of handwritten notes that he had wedged behind the tank, wrapped them in a dirty shirt, put the shirt in the plastic laundry bag, added his socks, handkerchief and underpants, scribbled a laundry list, put the list in the bag and hung the bag on the outside door handle of his suite. Closing the door, he glimpsed Millie from Rooke's training team in London stomping down the corridor in a stern cotton dress to which was pinned a name badge saying "Mildred."
* * *
The Chief says to kill time till further orders, Frisky said.
So to Jonathan's delight they killed time ― Frisky armed with a cellular phone and Tabby trailing sulkily behind for added killing power. But Jonathan, for all his fears, felt lighter of heart than at any time since he had set out from the Lanyon on his odyssey. The improbable prettiness of the old buildings filled him with a joyful nostalgia. The floating market and the floating bridge enchanted him exactly as they were supposed to. Like a man released from prison, he gazed dotingly on the boisterous throngs of sun-pink tourists and listened in marvel to the native chatter of Papiamento mingling with the startled accents of the Dutch. He was among real people again. People who laughed and stared and shopped and jostled and ate sugar buns in the street. And knew nothing, absolutely nothing, of his business.
Once, he spotted Rooke and Millie drinking coffee at a pavement restaurant and, in his new mood of irresponsibility, nearly gave them a wink. Once, he recognised a man called Jack who had shown him how to use impregnated carbon to make secret writing at the training house in Lisson Grove.
Jack, how are you? He glanced round, and it was not Frisky's head or Tabby's that was bobbing along beside him in his imagination, but Jed's chestnut hair fluttering in the breeze.
