Jonathan took his bag and climbed into the dark. There was rain in the air and a smell of resin from the pines. The chase car passed them, and for a dangerous second Jonathan saw the rear licence plate of her Pontiac. But Latulipe had his eyes on Jonathan.
"Here's your pay," he said, shoving a bunch of dollar bills at him.
* * *
She had driven back along the opposing roadway, then bumped across the centre strip to make a U-turn. They sat in her car with the light on. The brown envelope lay on her lap, unopened.
The sender's name was printed in the corner:
"Why didn't you hit him back?" she asked.
One side of her face was swollen, and the eye was closed. That's what I do for a living, he thought: I obliterate faces.
"He was just angry," he said.
"You want me to take you somewhere? Drive you? Leave you somewhere?"
"I'll just handle it from here."
"You want me to do anything?"
He shook his head. Then shook it again until he knew she had seen.
She handed him the envelope. "Which was better?" she asked harshly. "The fuck or the passport?"
"They were both great. Thanks."
"Come on! I need to know! Which was better?"
He opened the door and climbed out, and saw by the courtesy light that she was smiling brightly.
"You nearly had me fooled, know that? God damn it, nearly got my wires crossed! You were great for an afternoon, Jonathan. Anything longer, I'll take Thomas every time."
"I'm glad I helped," he said.
"So what was it for you?" she demanded, the smile still brilliantly in place. "Come on. Level. Scale of one to nine. Five? Six? Zero? I mean, Jesus, don't you keep a
"Thanks," he said again.
He closed the car door and by the glow of the sky saw her head fall forward, then lift again, as she squared her shoulders and turned the ignition. With the engine running, she waited a moment, staring hard ahead of her. He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. She drove onto the highway and for the first couple of hundred yards she either forgot her headlights or didn't bother with them. She seemed to drive on compass in the darkness.
A lorry pulled up, and he rode for five hours with a black man called Ed who had problems with his mortgage and needed to talk them through. Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere, Jonathan called the number in Toronto and listened to the cheerful gossiping of the operators as they passed his commission across the forest wastes of eastern Canada.
"My name's Jeremy, I'm a friend of Philip's," he said, which was what he had been saying each week from different pay phones whenever he checked in. Sometimes he could hear the call being rerouted. Sometimes he wondered whether it went to Toronto at all.
"Good
Till now Jonathan had imagined someone enlivening. This time he seemed to be talking to another Ogilvey, false and overbred.
"Tell him I've got my shadow and I'm on my way."
"Then allow me to offer the congratulations of the house," said Ogilvey's familiar.
That night, he dreamed of the Lanyon and of the lapwings flocking on the cliff, rising in their hundreds with stately wing-beats, then falling in a rolling twisting dive, until an unseasonable easterly caught them off their guard. He saw fifty dead and more floating out to sea. And he dreamed he had invited them, then let them die while he went off to find the worst man in the world.
* * *
This is the way safe houses should be, thought Burr. No more tin sheds full of bats in Louisiana swamps. Goodbye to bedsits in Bloomsbury, stinking of sour milk and the previous user's cigarettes. From now on we'll meet our joes right here in Connecticut, in white weatherboard houses like this one, with ten acres of woodland and leather-lined dens crammed with books on the morality of being mountainously rich. There was a basketball hoop, and an electrified fence for keeping out deer, and an electric zapper that, now evening was upon them, noisily cremated the bugs it lured with its sickly purple glow. Burr had insisted on manning the barbecue and had bought enough meat for several loyal regiments. He had removed his tie and jacket and was basting three enormous steaks in a violent crimson sauce. Jonathan, in swimming shorts, lounged beside the pool. Rooke, arrived from London the day before, sat in a deck chair, smoking his pipe.
"Will she talk?" Burr asked. No answer. "I said, will she talk?"
"What about?" said Jonathan.
"The passport. What do you think?"
Jonathan plunged back into the water and swam a couple of lengths. Burr waited till he had climbed out, then put the question a third time.
