I took a taxi to the Union Station and checked my suitcase into the left luggage, then stood in line and got two tickets to Niagara Falls. I bought a new suitcase into which I flung a few magazines from a trashcan, and after that little bit of survival business went by taxi to the Grand Park Hotel. On arrival I stepped out with a duty free cigar in my mouth and a plastic bag of clinking booze-bottles as if I had come straight from the airport. My Burberry seemed like paper in the sharp wind and I was glad to reach the lobby, where they told me at the desk that my room was waiting. When I got up it was plain that Pole Axe Tours looked after those who did Moggerhanger’s donkey work. There were two beds, a desk, wardrobe, bathroom and — I could hardly believe that the future was coming true so quickly — a big colour television which would produce blue movies if I phoned down to the cable clerk. A list of titles in a booklet showed a few choice stills, and I salivated over whether to ask for The Story of O, The Beauties of Coral Island or Devil. Take the Hind Leg.
A ringing telephone suggested that other matters were in the offing. I was informed that a Mr Harrow in the coffee shop would like to see my samples, so I picked up the bag and went down, pleased at the speed of events — though there was enough power in the bumping of my heart to run a steam engine.
With his little goatee beard he should have been selling fried rabbit. I met the glare of his teddy-bear glassy eyes, and held out my hand to be shaken. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Harrow.’
His whitewash brush of a beard twitched. ‘I’m his clerk. No need of names. Harrow’s that guy over there, wearing the red and white scarf.’
A fair-haired chap of about thirty sat before an empty plate a couple of tables away. ‘Five seconds after he moves,’ Goatee said, as if his warbling throat contained a miniature tape recorder, ‘get up and follow him to his Lincoln Continental parked outside. He’ll drive you down University Avenue. You don’t need to engage him in conversation. When he stops at a traffic light get out, but leave your bag in the car. Your job’s done. Walk north, back towards the hotel. You’ll be free to leave. Repeat what I’ve said.’
I told him to bollocks. ‘I’m too old to play such games.’
He stood up. ‘I hope not — if you want to be older. But good luck and have a nice day, tomorrow.’ He walked into the lobby while I kept an eye on Harrow with the red scarf. I liked travelling, though often felt desolate till I got to such high points of action as this. Harrow stood up and, when the sweep second hand of my watch passed over five divisions, I followed. The commissionaire opened the back door to the Lincoln and I put a dollar into his hand. The afternoon rush hour seemed to be on, unless it was always like that. I only saw the back of Harrow’s head, and two eyes when he looked in the mirror to make sure I wasn’t poking a gun at his neck and asking him to drive me to Vancouver.
He stopped at a traffic light halfway down University Avenue. I got out, and set off north as ordered. But, as I cannot emphasise too often, I wasn’t born yesterday, not even in North America, because at the first intersection I turned right onto Yonge Street, and hopped a taxi to Union Station.
Agnes was waiting at the entrance to the platform and we rushed towards each other like young lovers who hadn’t been to bed for a week. I was trembling with passion and fear, wondering how long my clockwork would go on being better than the clockwork of those who would be after me as soon as they opened my bag and saw they had been paid in forged currency. On the other hand, I couldn’t be certain there was anything wrong with the transaction, only that I’d got scabies on my heels due to a primitive fear in my stomach.
The train pulled out, shuddering and rattling through a sea of lights, a scintillating air-conditioned rainbow-land all around. Agnes was by my side, and I didn’t think about making love, as if we had known each other long enough to have put that kind of thing behind us already. Perhaps the unimaginable had happened, and I was growing up, or getting old, as we went towards the land of freedom and opportunity.
‘Shall I tell you something?’ she said after we had been on our way for an hour. I nodded. ‘I think I’ve fallen in love. Don’t answer. I don’t mind what you say, but I think you should know how I feel. I first knew when I was alone in that Boeing toilet throwing my stomach out — the old one. Isn’t it funny that it should have begun at that moment?’
I snuggled close. ‘It had to start some time.’
‘And life’s been so interesting with you that I haven’t thought once about my boring old problems.’
‘I do my best,’ I said.
‘I’ll confess something else. I decided that while I was away I’d try to get pregnant.’
My eyes kept their look of adoration, and at the same time searched out the emergency exit. There wasn’t a door in sight. ‘Really?’
‘Maybe it won’t work. Perhaps it was my husband’s fault, and not because of me, that I was never able to have a child. But who can say? Anyway, I thought that if I met a halfway decent man during my holiday I’d go to bed with him and hope to get pregnant. I’m thirty-eight, and if I don’t try now it’ll be too late.’
I may have been nature’s gentleman, but I was also flabbergasted. It was usually me who said I was in love, and pressured the woman by a flow of stupid chatter to come to bed. Agnes’s gambit of saying she only wanted to make love so as to get pregnant was as perfect as any I could have thought up to get a woman into bed. I again regretted I had no hat to take off to her, because what man could refuse such a sincere and heartfelt request?
‘Now that we’ve come away together,’ she went on, ‘I thought I’d be fair and let you know what you were in for. If I do get pregnant you needn’t bother about the responsibility. I’ll look after everything. You just happen to be the one I’ve chosen.’
‘It’s a rare honour,’ I said. ‘I accept your terms unconditionally, but I hope you don’t mind if I make one or two comments on the matter. I mean, if you do have a kid — and the way we feel about each other you might well — what are you going to tell him, or her, when he or she gets to a certain age and asks about his or her father? It’s bound to be an intelligent little bastard who’ll ask awkward questions from very early on. Then again there’s the matter of supporting yourself, not to mention a hungry and demanding child.’
She laughed. ‘You can leave all that to me.’ I felt we would have no bother reaching Niagara now. Maybe she had sensed my worry, and invented this matter of getting pregnant so as to ease my mind, a kind of return for what she considered I’d done for her. The sweat in my groin wasn’t exactly the sort to give me an erection, but I must admit that she had pushed Moggerhanger and all his works out of my mind for a few minutes at least. But on realising this, the prospect of being killed in the next hour by the gang I had double-crossed came back to me. I was also sad at having been so callously sacrificed. Not that I’d ever thought there was any friendship between Moggerhanger and me. Outside his family he recognised no such thing. All the same, he could have sent Cottapilly or Pindarry, or some other expendable agent to do his dirty work. But he had to have someone halfway competent to bring off a coup like this and so had chosen yours truly, as if I would appreciate the honour of having a certificate of merit drawing-pinned onto the lid of my expensive coffin before it was let down into the hole and covered with wet soil. He had nothing if not style. He might also have suspected my avowal to get my own back at the first opportunity for the dirty trick he’d played ten years before — and what better way of forestalling me? Fortunately it was something I’d been on the lookout for from the beginning, a state of mind which activated my own warning lights on the aeroplane.