‘Stop a bus — they got fire extinguishers,’ said a voice.
‘Little late for that, I reckon,’ said another.
‘Anyone in there?’
‘I sure hope not.’
‘What the hell happened to that?’ There were voices everywhere.
‘Must have been a short in the wiring.’
‘Buick isn’t it? I had a Buick caught fire once. Damnedest car I ever had.’
‘That was no short in the wiring.’
‘Hell no — you hear the explosion?’
The car was literally ripped to shreds; the doors had been blown away and the roof was torn from the front pillars and was swaying up and down on the rear pillars like a grotesque drawbridge. The flames roared, vividly illuminating the parking lot.
The fire engines turned up and then the ambulances. Ambulance men rushed around and seemed distressed that there weren’t any bodies, mutilated or otherwise, to be found; they spread out and searched the vicinity, like some bizarre game of hunt-the-thimble.
Eventually the crowd started to disperse, and I dispersed with them. I walked and kept on walking. I was feeling very sick indeed, at the thought of the near miss, at not having checked the car, at the knowledge that somehow, someone had followed me here to Boston and I hadn’t noticed. I walked into a bar and ordered a large bourbon, straight up.
I leaned against the counter, took a gulp and lit one of my new cigarettes. The bomb must have been attached to the exhaust or part of the engine; with a heat trigger device. I thought hard. I had hired the car on one of my false licences, so no one would be able to trace it back to me. How the hell did anyone know I was in Boston? Nobody knew where I was going — except Sumpy; and no, it just wasn’t possible — there was no way she could be involved. And yet… nobody could have tailed me, so someone knew, unless by a million to one shot someone had spotted me in Boston. Possible, but unlikely, and then they wouldn’t have known my car, unless they’d actually seen me drive into the parking lot. No. It wasn’t possible; and yet, equally, it wasn’t Sumpy. But someone knew. In Belfast a mistake could have been made, a bomb put under the wrong car; but car bombs weren’t a feature of American life and the coincidence was just too much to swallow. No way.
Someone was going to an awful lot of long lengths to get rid of me and I wanted to know who, because when I found out who, then I might be able to find out why, and when I had found out why, I figured I might be able to cure them of this unpleasant craving.
Right now it was ten o’clock at night; I had no change of clothes and I was in an even stranger than usual city; I felt pretty damn uncomfortable. I left the bar and hailed a cab to the airport, and watched out the back window for a long way before I could be sure we weren’t being trailed and I could relax a little.
The bourbon began to give me an agreeable lift, and at the airport I discovered that the last flight to La Guardia, New York, had been delayed due to engine trouble and there was a seat available.
12
As we taxied down the runway I churned over every detail I could remember about Sumpy, from the time I had first met her. I wondered whether that first encounter could have been a set-up: it was at a preview drinks party at the Frick Gallery, to which I had been invited by an old schoolfriend who was working for Sotheby Parke Bernet in New York.
The exhibition was of erotic surrealism; in my view it was the art world’s way of having an exhibition of hardcore pornography and calling it respectable. Sumpy had felt much the same way, as we both found ourselves staring at the same set of very overgrown organs. ‘Jealousy will get you nowhere,’ she had said.
Unless the numerical puzzle of my little plastic friend contained a king’s ransom in the form of a computer program for producing perfect original Cezannes, I couldn’t think of any reason Sumpy could have for wanting to get rid of me. Right now, as I wondered idly whether the plane would succeed in lifting off the ground and up into the sky, or whether it would plummet into the two-storey housing estates beyond, and as I wondered idly about my myriad of other problems, the one and only certainty I had was that Sumpy was for real.
The seat belt and no smoking sign went off, and the air started filling with cigarette smoke. The plane was full of tired and fed-up-looking businessmen, a few of whom knew each other and held murmured conversations, but most were either reading or sleeping.
I retraced yesterday’s procedure of renting the Buick, driving back to the Travelodge, collecting Sumpy and then dropping her off to meet Lynn, and then I realised: it was her goddam lipstick. I’d forgotten all about it. On the way to Lynn, Sumpy was putting on her lipstick; I’d swerved hard to avoid a cab driver who thought he was in a one-way street, and the lipstick had rolled onto the floor and vanished out of sight. She said not to bother after I’d groped under the seats for a couple of minutes, she didn’t care for the shade too much anyway.
Whoever was after me had obviously figured that by bugging her, they’d keep a tab on me, since they figured I wouldn’t be too far away. It must have been a damn powerful bug for them to have tracked me to Boston, since sure as hell no one had tailed me from New York to there. The lipstick would have been the ideal hiding place for a bug, and the bug could have been planted in it at any time without her knowledge; equally, she could have known all about it, and dropped it deliberately. I didn’t know what to believe; in my heart of hearts I didn’t believe Sumpy could be involved, but at the same time I was sufficiently long in the tooth to know that in my game anything could be, and frequently was, possible.
‘Can I get you a drink, sir?’
She was gorgeous. She could have got me anything in the world. It was clear from her disapproving stare that she didn’t feel the same way about me. I had no idea what I must have looked like, but I was pretty damn sure that it wasn’t too hot. I ordered another bourbon; she even took my money in advance.
I lowered my tray, then pushed the button in the armrest to recline the seat-back. A white plastic label in front of me told me I was sitting in seat 8B. The empty seat next to me, by the window, was 8 A. The other side of the aisle, the seats were 8C and 8D. I was in a Boeing 737, one of the smaller of the passenger jets in general commercial use. I idled some minutes away working out the number of passengers the plane could seat. But my reckoning it was 114, plus a few jump-seats for the crew. And then the penny dropped.
It dropped making about the same noise as a truck loaded with plate glass colliding with a nitroglycerine tanker, during which time the gorgeous iceberg had come and put my drink down and gone away again and I hadn’t even noticed. 14B. Airline seats? Rows of four seats; rows of six seats; rows of eight seats. Small airliners had four seats, like this and the Douglas DC9. Larger ones, like the DC8 and the Boeing 707 had six seats across — three and three — and the Jumbos — the Boeing 747, Tristar, DC10 and Airbus — had ten seats across — three by each window and four in the middle. It did fit but it still didn’t make any sense. I wanted to check further and summoned the iceberg back. ‘How many seats are there in this plane?’
‘One hundred and fifteen, sir.’ She was off again down the aisle before I could say anything else. I’d been one out. Not bad.
The iceberg’s team-mate wasn’t so pretty, but at least she was human. She took my list of questions to the flight deck and came back with the answers. The numbers of seats on every commercial airliner in current service corresponded exactly with the information from my plastic chum.
I took a walk down the aisle and found seat 14B. Its occupant looked like an ex-Harvard law student who was rapidly on his way to becoming a partner in a Manhattan firm. About 32, square tortoiseshell glasses, hair short and neat, good-looking with strong Jewish features, he was talking earnestly and seriously to an awkward-looking man on his left, either a colleague or a client. They were wading their way through a thick pile of photocopies, which, as I walked back past them again, I could see to be a real estate transaction. The man in 14B looked tough enough to take on any other lawyer, but not tough enough to have killed someone for the seat he was sitting in.