Tick-Tock’s wrinkled, young-old face was working itself about, the mouth twisting down and then up, the eyes closing and opening. His hands were working, too, I noticed in the light from the torch that Styles still held. Tick-Tock’s hands were working on the blade of the Sword of St. Louis which had gone right through him, just below his breast bone. He was trying to pull the sword out, or maybe just trying to make it hurt less. He looked up at me again and said, “It hurts. It hurts bad.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say or anything to do. So I did nothing. I just sat there on the bottom step and stared down at Tick-Tock. He tried a grin, or maybe it was a grimace, and when he was through with that he said, “I always was an unlucky bastard.” Then he died. I knew he was dead because I saw him die and because I could smell him.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Robin Styles said.
“He’s dead,” I said. I stood up carefully. There was nothing broken, but there was a lot that was bruised. I held out my hand and tried, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.
“Here,” Robin Styles said, “let me.” He planted his left foot firmly on the dead Tick-Tock’s chest, wrapped his right hand around the hilt of the sword, and pulled it out. Then he methodically wiped its bloody blade on Tick-Tock’s black turtleneck sweater. He did it all with one easy flowing motion, gracefully and well, as he did almost everything. He handed me the sword again. “Here,” he said. “I’ll drive.”
We hurried to the door that led to the alley. It was open. We had left it closed. I used my palm to smear its knob. “Wait a second,” I said to Styles. “There may be somebody else out there.”
“I’ll go first and get the engine started. I left the keys in the ignition. Then you can hop in the other side and we’re off.”
It sounded like a sensible plan, even to a suddenly deposed leader. Anyhow, it was the only plan there was. Styles dashed for the Volkswagen and got the door open. When the door opened, of course, the interior light came on and somebody shot at him. He had a choice. He could slam the car door shut and duck back into the shop with me, or he could gamble on making it inside the car with the interior light staying on until he got behind the wheel and closed the door.
He gambled on getting into the car and, as always, he was a rotten gambler. Whoever was shooting at him shot three more times, using the interior light of the Volkswagen to aim by. It must have been all the light that was needed because Styles was hit three times.
The first shot seemed to strike him in the shoulder and the second one in the leg. By then whoever was shooting had zeroed in and the third shot slammed into his side. Still on his feet somehow, Styles staggered toward me, then fell back against the car door, closing it, and extinguishing the interior light. Then he started sliding down the outside of the Volkswagen until he landed, with a kind of a plop, in a sitting position on the alley pavement, his back against the car. He held his side as well as he could with one hand because it seemed to hurt the most.
His face was very white in the gloom and I could just see the smile that he made his mouth stretch itself into. And then very casually, he said, “Sorry. I really hate to let a chap down.”
Like almost everything else he did, he died well, sitting there, trying not to make a fuss about it.
There was a sound behind me. It was the sound of breaking glass. It was the front door of the shop and somebody was coming through it. The front door was no longer an alternative exit. So I took the only one left.
I dashed for the Volkswagen and threw the sword into the rear seat. At virtually the same time I threw myself headfirst through the car door’s open window. It’s not as hard to do as it sounds, not if somebody’s shooting at you, and that’s what somebody was doing at me, although they didn’t have the interior light to aim by.
I scrambled around inside on the front seats of the Volkswagen, finally getting myself right side up, but still cursing the gearshift. I hunched over the wheel and started the engine, slammed into first, threw out the clutch, and roared off, as fast as a Volkswagen will go, which really isn’t very fast at all.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. About fifteen or twenty yards behind me I could see a man, his feet spread wide apart. He was crouched down into what might be somebody’s notion of what a pistol shooter’s position should be. He was crouched next to a low, wide car. It looked like a Jensen, the one that costs more than I like to think about.
He shot once more, but he didn’t hit anything. At least he didn’t hit me. I was concentrating on what was in front of me now. There was another car parked just at the end of the alley. It was a big car, but it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Just as I got to it, I switched on my bright lights, trying to blind anyone who might be inside.
There was a man at the wheel of the car, which I saw was a gray Rolls. It was old Tom, Eddie Apex’s chauffeur, and he put a hand up to shield his eyes as I went by.
Chapter Twenty-Six
If my eight-year-old son ever has children, I can tell them of that May night when, across half of London, I led the man who had once led Fangio for three laps. I needn’t tell them how it all ended.
It started well enough, I in my Volkswagen and old Tom at the wheel of the gray Rolls with Eddie Apex beside him on the front seat. At least, I assumed it was Eddie. And behind the Rolls came the Jensen, driven by whoever it was who had killed Robin Styles. I didn’t have any friends who drove Jensens. Not in London or anywhere else.
My grandchildren will probably think that I’m lying when I tell them that I drove that Volkswagen halfway across London, as fast as it would go, turning at almost every corner, going the wrong way down one-way streets, climbing up on sidewalks sometimes when it seemed appropriate, and doing all this pursued by about fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Rolls-Royce and Jensen, and yet never spotting a cop. Not one. My grandchildren will smile and nod, anxious to be off, and a little embarrassed by the sloppy way that Grandpa wolfs down his milk toast and the equally sloppy way that he lies.
I don’t think I ever got that Volkswagen into third gear. I kept it in second, its engine keening into the May night, as I skidded around corners into dimly lighted streets that I had never heard of, streets such as Bute Gardens and Edith Road and Gunterstone Road and May Street and Seedlescomb Road, turning sometimes south and sometimes north, but always east, trying to leave the West End.
I stopped at no stop signs, I slowed at no corners, and I nearly killed myself a dozen or more times. And always behind me, never more than half a block away, was the gray Rolls, old Tom probably driving with one hand while trying to tune in some light traveling music with the other. Behind the Rolls, stuck there like a black leech, was the Jensen, occupied by the man who had a gun that he wanted to shoot me with.
As I spun into Half Moon Street I thought about skidding up to the American Embassy and running up its steps with the Sword of St. Louis clutched in my arms. I also thought about dying halfway up those steps with a bullet in my back. The U.S. Marines would be there, of course, and if they weren’t too high on pot, they might help drag my body inside.
By the time I got through with that fantasy I was out of Mayfair and into Shaftesbury Avenue in one of whose shops Robin Styles’s father years ago had picked up his three-million-pound sword for twelve-and-six and started the chain of events that had led me to my present mess.