Second Wind Read online

  Apart from the folder of Loricroft’s German papers and copies, they chiefly contained Vera’s originals, my camera and my wallet. Camera contained Trox Island mud, but the wallet, more helpfully, disgorged passport, credit card, check, phone card, international driver’s licence and a fistful of cash borrowed from Jett.

  As soon as lights came on in a nearby photo shop which boasted of its eight o’clock “instant passport photos,” I was knocking on its door, aiming to test the abilities of the sloppy-looking teenage boy in charge, who astonished me by actually waking up to interest when I asked if he knew anywhere that I could get specialty work done at this early time of day. He looked at the camera and peered more closely at me.

  “I say, aren’t you Perry Stuart?” he said. “Something wrong with your face, isn’t there?”

  “It’s getting better,” I said.

  “I can lend you a razor,” he offered, absentmindedly prodding the camera with a pencil. “Do you want to see if there are still O.K. exposures under this muck?”

  “Do you know anyone who could do it?”

  “Do me a favor!” He took my question as an affront. “I spent four years in night school learning this job. Come back in an hour. And it’s an honor to do your work, Mr. Stuart. I’ll give it my best shot.”

  My expectations sank. A sloppy voice; a sloppy mouth. I wished I’d gone somewhere else.

  There were more advantages, though, than drawbacks in a face. When I went back an hour later I found a tray, laid with a cloth, bearing a pot of coffee, a basket of hot rolls, and many other comforts. Even a cleaned electric razor in a folded and frilled paper napkin. I thanked the shop’s incumbent for his thoughtfulness and then had to listen to multiple detail while he told me how to resurrect negatives from a cow-pat tomb.

  I ate, I shaved, I admired his skill sincerely. I watched him make expert color prints, and I signed autographs for him by the dozen when he refused to be paid any other way. His name, he said, was Jason Wells. I shook his hand, speechless, and asked for a card with an address.

  “It’s my uncle’s shop.” he said. “I’ll get my own, someday. Do you mind if I take a photo of you, so I can hang it on the wall?”

  He snapped and snapped away, and seemed to think himself well rewarded for the thirty-six clear clean negatives and the amazing enlargements I presently bore away.

  12

  In some strange way the adulation and respect shining out of Jason Wells’s sloppy face, together with his professionalism and dedication, reawoke in me the feelings of self-worth that had slept through a wretchedly debilitating illness and had for far too long let a brain used to ten thousand revs a minute waste time looking for one across.

  Jason Wells might find that a sloppy exterior was right for him, but it didn’t match my normal onscreen self. It was time, I decided, for the onscreen self to go to work.

  My grandmother’s grand tweed cape-coat wasn’t just Edwardian, it was splendid; it had presence. My clean-shaved chin was after all much better smooth. My hair, recombed, fell naturally again into its usual shapely BBC cut. I bought enough in a pharmacy for cleanliness, and a shirt, tie and pants in an outfitters, in order to look pressed. I acquired an overnight bag to contain everything, and some films, a new camera and batteries from Jason Wells.

  All I needed after that was to stand up straight, give out my name, explain my needs and ask. Never mind that I still felt uncomfortably queasy. I’d forgotten, during the past battering weeks, the extent of my clout.

  I wish to take a train to Heathrow airport, I said.

  “Certainly, Dr. Stuart, this way. We have the Heathrow Express which takes fifteen minutes nonstop to the airport.”

  I want to fly to Miami.

  “Certainly, Dr. Stuart. First class, of course?”

  I need to deposit this check with the credit card company in order to be in funds for the whole of my trip.

  “Certainly, Dr. Stuart. the credit card company will send a representative to the first-class lounge at once to arrange it. And you’ll need some dollars, of course.”

  I have time for a shower before boarding.

  “Certainly, Dr. Stuart. Our Special Services Department will see to your every need.”

  I have to make a phone call to my publishers in Kensington, and I would like to use a private room for a business meeting.

  “No trouble at all, Dr. Stuart. Our business center is in the Executive Club lounge.”

  Cosseted in every way I found myself inevitably watching a television set. Equally inevitably, someone had switched on a channel showing the weather in store across the Atlantic.

  “Bad weather ahead in Miami, Dr. Stuart,” I was told, with happy nods. They thought bad weather was naturally the motive for my journey, though only my last call, to the Met Office, had given me even a five-day notice of coming trouble.

  Standing in front of Heathrow’s best accurate weather update I heard that a weak cyclonic system might be developing in the Caribbean very late in the season. If it developed, which on past probability was unlikely, it would be designated tropical storm Sheila.

  At present the millibar pressure of 1002 looked bound for a fizzle-out, but then so had Odin not so very long ago.

  An announcer was explaining how modem methods of storm prediction saved money and lives. Preparedness, he said, couldn’t deflect a storm but it could lessen some of its effects. Knowing in advance was invaluable.

  A world-weary businessman standing beside me, glass with ice in hand, looked with cynicism at real advances in atmospheric technology, and in boredom said, “So what else is new?”

  Doppler radar was new, I thought, and research had led to new satellites and computer generated three-D models ... and there were idiots like hurricane hunters who flew into hurricane eyes and all but drowned. All those tremendous efforts had been made so that bored cynical businessmen could keep their gin and tonics dry.

  Special Services collected me from there, offering armchairs, things to eat, newspapers with crosswords ... London area telephone calls. I punched in my grandmother’s number and, as I’d rather hoped, found my call answered by Jett, who’d started her week there and sounded relieved to hear my voice.

  “Where did you get to last night?” she asked anxiously. “Kris says he has been looking for you everywhere. I was talking to him just ten minutes ago. He thought you might be here.”

  “And I don’t suppose.” I said regretfully, “that he was at all pleased with me.”

  “I wouldn’t have told you, but no, he was very very angry. So where are you, anyway?”

  I thought: if I can swim through a hurricane I can find my way through a labyrinth. I’d begun to understand where I was going, and I felt a shade reckless and lightheaded.

  “Wait for me,” I said, smiling. “Forsaking all others ...”

  “You’ll be lucky!”

  “Keep thee only unto me.” Why in hell, I thought, did I ever say that?

  “For as long as we live? Do you know what you’re quoting from?”

  I answered her this time with conviction. “For better or worse.”

  “Are you sure?” she said uncertainly. “Or is this just, a joke?”

  “No one jokes about marriage on a Monday morning. No or yes?”

  “Then ... yes.”

  “Good! Tell my gran that this time it’s for keeps ... and ... er ... if I solve that crossword I’ll be back later this week.”

  “Perry! Is that all? It’s not enough.”

  “Take care of yourselves. both of you,” I said, and put down the receiver as she said protestingly, “Perry!” not wanting me to go.

  Did I mean it, I thought wildly? Did one really coolly suggest marriage on a Monday morning? Was it a stupid impulse or a forever sort of thing? Impulses like that, I answered myself, that seemed to come from nowhere, they weren’t really impulses at all, they were decisions already made but waiting for an opportunity to be spoken aloud.

  While I daydreamed ab
out Jett both John Rupert and Ghost traveled to Heathrow, finding their way to the business center, and both, from their expressions, were unprepared for the grandeur of my grandmother’s cape-coat and the tidiness, strength of purpose and revived power of Stuart P.

  I smiled. How did they think I had ever climbed the meteorology ladder? And, thinking about ladders, were my publisher and my ghostwriter on rungs going up or going down?

  On the telephone I had promised them an interesting package if they would drive to Terminal 4, and when they arrived I gave them the German orders and invoices, and also fresh copies I’d just made on the machines all around us.

  I said, “These copies are enough to madden Oliver Quigley and Caspar Harvey, the Traders who are searching for them day and night. The originals were the collected works of George Loricroft, Trader deceased. He collected these orders from customers who met him for the purpose on racecourses, mainly in Germany. If he hadn’t died he would have distributed these orders, one by one, to those who could either fill the order themselves, or pass it to someone who could. I suppose the contents of these folders are always nuid—I should think the number of buy or sell items is sometimes small, but this time, by good luck, there are fourteen.” I briefly paused. “Belladonna Harvey,” I said, “doesn’t know what’s going on. Nor does my fellow meteorologist, Kris Ironside. If you have any influence at all with whoever you call in to unzip the Traders, see if you can keep those two out of trouble.”

  My “authorities” said they would try: but even if they succeeded, I thought, I’d lost two friends for ever.

  I looked at John Rupert and at Ghost with respect and growing affection. Few enough people gave their time as they did, living double lives without recognition. Ghost, as if feeling for me something of the same emotion at the same time, said he hoped we really would, one day, get to writing Storm.

  “You’d better, after that huge advance,” John Rupert said with irony.

  Ghost, with a sudden urge, broke all secret-operative rules. “Perry,” he said, his face full of private liking and professional indiscretion. “Feel better, your friends aren’t likely to be prosecuted. Nor are Harvey or Quigley, unless they do something foolish. Our superior officer has decided to leave those two in place to start again. What we actually stalk the Traders for is what you’ve just given us, the written lists of the materials they are currently expecting their clients to buy and sell. If we manage to acquire a list—like this one, pure gold—we send each order, each component of the package, to our counterparts in Germany or wherever the activity is taking place, and they prosecute or close down or use whatever force they like. We, John Rupert and I and some others, we see our job as identifying Traders (or whatever they happen to be calling themselves this year, this month, whatever) and then from that identification we set out to obtain or copy their requisitions, preferably without them knowing. Very often, like we’ll do this time, we leave the Traders in place and active, so we can steal from them again. Those German letters you’ve found for us will put all those people who wrote them, who aimed to buy or sell—it will put all those people in court or out of business, some in a violent way, and it will collect and put into safe storage the materials they were offering for sale. Acquiring papers like those you have just given us, that is our job. That’s how we choke off acts of terrorism, even before the terrorists get as far as their own detailed planning stage. You can’t make a nuclear bomb if you can’t get the hot stuff.”

  He stopped, but not from regret at what he’d said: more in satisfaction.

  John Rupert, the one who might more likely have disapproved of this frank disclosure and have tried to stop Ghost’s abandonment of “need to know”—even John Rupert was nodding in approval.

  “You’ll see now that we know more about uranium and so on than we admit to,” he confessed. “We hide behind ignorance to be safe. We wanted to enlighten you on Friday in the hospital. Our superior officer won’t be pleased that we have.”

  “Don’t tell him.” I said.

  I shook their hands, one by one, with commitment and warmth.

  John Rupert said, “What we’re always looking for are red-hot letters like those in the folder you first came to tell us about. All those foreign scripts!”

  “As far as we know they’ve never resurfaced,” Ghost said. “They are so sensitive they must be in someone’s safekeeping. Funny if they’re back where they started.”

  John Rupert thought the idea frivolous. Ignoring it, he said, “There are antiterrorist governments in Russia and in Germany and of course in many other countries. They wet-come what we can send them. We never know exactly when we prevent sabotage or blackmail, but we receive intense expressions of thanks.”

  “But.” Ghost warned, “do you remember we told you about the man in the Everglades?”

  “The one who was shot for seeing too much?”

  “That’s right,” Ghost said. “We knew him. So take care, Perry. The Traders are sometimes not lethal, as you know, but the basic bomb merchants, the ones who physically write their orders for enriched uranium, they almost always are.”

  Before I could make any promise the Special Services man bustled up kindly to fetch me, and he set off at a fast walk, carrying my holdall and telling me the airplane had boarded all except for me.

  I waved briefly to John Rupert and my ghost. They’d told me for certain what I’d mostly surmised. The Traders were middlemen, and John Rupert, Ghost and others like them. were middlemen catchers.

  I walked into the humming engine noise of the almost full airplane to be greeted by a chorus of knowledgeable eyes staring and elbows going nudge-nudge, and I wondered how many million years made up the half-life of a Trader-hunter.

  The Special Services Department had outdone itself by arranging a rental car to be ready for me to collect at Miami, and the one I picked up had the added unexpected blessing of a talking map display. “Turn left at the next intersection for the Federal Highway to Sand Dollar Beach ...”

  I twiddled knobs and found a radio weather channel busy with things to come.

  An extremely rapid voice rattled off, “There has been a weakening trend and a change in the direction of the upper winds over the western end of the Caribbean, with a consequent strengthening of the cyclonic system further east, which we have just heard has now officially been designated tropical storm Sheila, with sustained winds of over fifty miles an hour. Coordinates of Sheila, as of four o’clock Eastern Standard Time this afternoon, were sixteen degrees north, seventy-eight west, moving northwest at approximately ten miles an hour. Now we’ll bring you your local forecast, after these messages ...”

  The voice sounded as if he were uninterested, except for trying to complete the weather bulletin as quickly as possible, so as to get back to the commercials, always (as the source of the channel’s income) more important than the formation of gale-force winds.

  The coordinates given put Sheila about four hundred miles southeast of Grand Cayman Island; not enough of a threat yet for Michael and Amy Ford to nail onto their huge house panels of sea-repelling plywood.

  I switched channels.

  “Continue down Federal Highway, straight ahead over the next intersection, take the left fork ahead ...”

  The car took me to the street and a memory for numbers took me to Robin Darcy’s spreading house.

  It was dark by then. I rang the bell with a feeling of stepping off a cliff.

  It wasn’t Robin himself who opened the heavy medieval-type front door. Evelyn, slender in floor-length black and iridescent with long ropes of bugle beads and pearls, had been expecting someone else. Her welcoming smile faded to a shrewd inspection of me from toes to eyebrows while she acknowledged unwillingly to herself that she knew my name, that I’d been a guest in her house three weeks earlier and that she now regretted it. “Perry Stuart,” she said accusingly, “why are you here? Surely Robin can’t be expecting you.”

  Robin himself appeared, framed in a double doo
rway across the marble-floored hall. There was an essential stillness in him, none of the flutter of host toward valued guest.

  “Yes,” he said calmly. “Perry Stuart. Yes, I was expecting you. Maybe not tonight; maybe tomorrow; but yes, expecting you. How did you get here?”

  “British Airways and Hertz,” I said. “And you?”

  He smiled faintly. “Come in,” he said. “American Airlines and wife.”

  I walked forward into the center of the entrance hall and stopped under the lit chandelier. Ahead, as I remembered, lay the sitting room, with, beyond that, the terrace where we’d sat in the evening, and below that, the pool. Standing where I was, I had the bedroom I’d slept in on my right. Robin and Evelyn inhabited unmapped regions to my left, along with kitchens by the square mile and, in its furthest reaches, the big room allotted to Kris.

  “Well?” Darcy asked.

  Behind me, unmistakably, Evelyn cocked a handgun.

  “Don’t shoot him.” Darcy said it without heat. “It would be unwise.”

  Evelyn protested, “But isn’t he the one ... ?”

  “He’s the one,” Robin Darcy agreed, “but he’s not much use to us dead.”

  I was wearing the new white shirt and dark gray pants, but not the Edwardian greatcoat, and in general looked as I had at Caspar Harvey’s lunch.

  Robin too, conventional, unimpressive, chubbily round, Robin with tepid eyes behind the black owl frames—he too looked as if his day-to-day business occupation, his propagation of sods, made up the total pattern of his life.

  I stood quietly under the chandelier thinking I would have miscalculated disastrously if his curiosity wasn’t strong enough to keep me alive. After a tense little pause he walked round to his wife, and although I couldn’t stifle an involuntary swallow altogether, I managed not to move or speak.