Seeming to wake from a deep dream. Burr allows himself a cautious smile. "Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, Joe, is a leading English shit. His financial embarrassment is one of the major joys of the current recession." His smile spreads. "Unsurprisingly, he is also a former partner in crime of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper." He warms to his theme. "As a matter of fact, Joe, if you and I were fielding the all-English team of shits, Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw would feature high on our batting list. He also enjoys the protection of some other highly placed English shits, some of whom work not too far distant from the river Thames." The relief shone through Burr's strained face as he broke out laughing. "He's alive, Joe! You don't check a corpse, not by yesterday! Head-to-toe background, he says. Well, we've got it all ready for him, and nobody better suited to provide him with it than Tony bloody Joyston Bradshaw! They want him, Joe! He's got his nose into their tent! You know what they say, the Bedouin? Never let a camel's nose into your tent, because if you do, you get the whole camel."
But while Burr was rejoicing, Strelski's mind was already on the next practical step.
"So Pat goes ahead?" he said. "Pat's boys can go bury the magic box?"
Burr sobered at once. "If it's okay by you and Pat, it's okay by me," he said.
They agreed on the very next night.
* * *
Unable to sleep, Burr and Strelski drove to an all-night hamburger joint called Murgatroyd's on U.S. 1, where a sign said: no shoes, no service. Outside the smoked-glass windows sat shoeless pelicans in the moonlight, each to his mooring-post along the wooden jetty, like feathery old bombing planes that might never bomb again. On the silver beach, white egrets peered forlornly at their reflections.
At four a. m. Strelski's cellular phone peeped. He put it to his ear, said "yes" and listened. He said, "So get yourselves some sleep." He rang off. The conversation had taken twenty seconds.
"No problem," he announced to Burr, and took a pull of Coke.
Burr needed a moment to believe his ears. "You mean they made it? It's done? They cached it?"
"They beach-landed, they found the shed, they buried the box, they were very quiet, very professional, they got the hell out. All your boy has to do now is speak."
Jonathan was back in his iron bed at army school after they ripped his tonsils out ― except that the bed was huge and white, with the soft down pillows with embroidered edges that they used to have at Meister's, and a small herb pillow for the fragrance.
He was in the motel room one truck ride out of Esperance, nursing his battered jaw with the curtains drawn and sweating out a fever after telephoning a voice that had no name to say he had found his shadow ― except that his head was bandaged, he was wearing crisp cotton pyjamas, and there was a stitched device on the pocket that he kept trying to read by Braille. Not M for Meister, not P for Pine or B for Beauregard or L for Linden and Lamont. More like a Star of David with too many points.
He was in Yvonne's attic, listening for Madame Latulipe's footfall in the half-light. Yvonne wasn't there, but the attic was ― except that this was a bigger attic than Yvonne's, and bigger than the attic in Camden Town that Isabelle had painted in. And it had pink flowers in an old Delft vase, and a tapestry of ladies and gentlemen out hawking. A punkah dangled from a roof beam, making stately turns of its propeller.
He was lying beside Sophie in the apartment in the Chicago House in Luxor while she talked about courage ― except that the smell tickling his nostrils was of potpourri, not vanilla.
He made out closed shutters slicing sunlight into blades, and layers of fine white muslin curtain. He turned his head the other way and saw a Meister's silver room-service tray with a jug of orange juice, and a cut-glass goblet to drink it from, and a lace cloth covering the silver tray. Across a thickly carpeted floor, he distinguished through the blur of his reduced vision a doorway to a large bathroom, with towels of ascending sizes folded along a rail.
But by then his eyes were streaming and his body was hopping the way it had hopped when he was ten and caught his fingers in somebody's car door, and he realised he was lying on his bandage, and his bandage was on the side of his head that they had smashed and Dr. Marti had repaired. So he rolled his head back to where it had been before he started his close observation, and he watched the punkah going round until the light-spots of pain had cleared and the undercover soldier's gyroscope inside him had begun to right itself.
