Then I was in Bloomsbury and slithering around Russell Square, if a VW can slither, but going the right way for once on a one-way street, and trying to decide where to go next. South, I decided for no good reason, south across the river to Lambeth or Southwark or even Bermondsey. I wasn’t quite sure where Bermondsey was. All I knew about it was that they once sold a lot of leather there.
I cut down Bedford Place to Bloomsbury Square and then I went due south, cutting back and forth in that rabbit warren of streets that surrounds Covent Garden until I came out on the Strand and turned left. It was a straight stretch and I didn’t like that because the Rolls started moving up effortlessly, the way that an ocelot might overtake a tortoise with a touch of emphysema.
So I turned again, a sliding skid of a turn that brought me out onto Lancaster Place and headed straight for Waterloo Bridge. It was a mistake, of course. There were no corners to turn on Waterloo Bridge and it was just what the Rolls and the leechlike Jensen needed if they wanted to box me in at the curb, or even smack up against the bridge railing.
I did the only thing I could do, something that I had once seen done before down in Virginia. I doubleclutched the VW and slammed it into first gear, not quite stripping it. I spun the steering wheel and the VW yawed around and almost went over, but not quite, and then I was heading back in the same direction from which I had come. I was on the wrong side of the bridge now and aiming a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Volkswagen bang on at approximately thirty thousand dollars’ worth of Rolls-Royce.
The Rolls would have to give way, of course. Economics dictated it. If it didn’t, it would crash into the VW and the tailgating Jensen would smash into the Rolls’s rear and there would be the tearing of expensive metal and loud screams and much blood and gore. As I said, economics dictated it. Economics and good sense.
But I forgot who was driving the Rolls. I didn’t really forget. I just made the mistake of thinking that I could win playing chicken with a septuagenarian without nerves who had once led Fangio for three laps, and after that had enjoyed the reputation of being the best getaway driver in Soho.
I think old Tom smiled at me through his windshield. I’m still not sure, but I think he did. I was going fifty by then and he was going at least sixty, the Jensen right on his rear bumper, and unless he gave way we were going to run into each other halfway across Waterloo Bridge with a loud smack that would be like hitting a stone wall at 110 miles per hour.
Call me chicken. I spun the VW steering wheel when I did because I wanted to keep on living. Old Tom knew that I did and as I flashed past him I knew that I saw him grin. It is what happens when a rotten amateur goes up against a gifted professional. The amateur loses.
But I had made some gain. They would have to turn around and there was the chance that I could get to the end of the bridge, turn right, and duck into the River Police station before I got shot. Then I could explain all about the old sword with its traces of fresh blood.
It happened then, of course. I ran out of gas. The VW’s engine coughed, sputtered, caught again, then coughed once more, a little apologetically, I thought, and then it went out. I remembered that I hadn’t checked the gas gauge. I had let Robin Styles do that. Then I had told him to go take a long ride in the country. Or find a girl. I suppose I should have told him to fill up the gas tank, but one can’t think of everything.
I remembered then that a Volkswagen has a reserve tank. All you have to do is twist a lever that’s down underneath the dash and that cuts into the reserve tank that holds a spare gallon, I think. It only takes a minute or so, but I didn’t have a minute. I didn’t even have thirty seconds because the Rolls was already backing up. I stopped the coasting Volkswagen, grabbed the sword, jumped out, and ran across the bridge to its west side.
The Rolls kept on backing up until it was well past the VW. The Jensen stayed where it was. I was boxed.
So I stood there and watched Eddie Apex get out of the Rolls and start toward me. When I got tired of watching him I looked at the Jensen. Somebody got out of that, too. He was a big man, huge really. It was Wes Cagle. I should have known. A Jensen would be his kind of car.
They both started walking toward me. Then they started to trot. I took the sword and held it by its hilt with two hands. It was a bastard grip, I remembered being told. You could wield it with either one hand or two. I thought that they must have had big hands back then.
I saw something appear in Wes Cagle’s right hand. It glittered a little, but it wasn’t what he had used to kill Robin Styles and shoot at me with earlier. It was a knife, a switchblade, I assumed.
There was no place to run. I could stand and fight, of course, laying about me with the Sword of St. Louis, going for the legs first. I understand that that’s how it was done back then. They went for the legs beneath the shields. Or I could surrender.
I started swinging the sword above my head, around and around. I swung twice, then thrice, and on the fourth time I let it go and then I turned and watched because I had never seen three million pounds fall into a river before.
It went up in the air about thirty feet, seemed to hang there longer than it really should have, and then it fell straight down into the black waters of the Thames. It didn’t make much of a splash.
I turned back. Eddie Apex was no longer trotting toward me. I had counted on that. He had stopped and there was a rueful smile on his face. He held out his hands, palms forward, and shrugged. For him it was all over.
A good con man is, I think, the ultimate realist. He has to be because he can’t afford any illusions in his business. If he has any illusions, especially about the layers of greed that are wrapped around the human heart, then he couldn’t be a con man — not a successful one. And when a deal has gone sour and the mark has somehow sniffed the rat, there is nothing for the confidence man and ultimate realist to do but smile and shrug and steal away. There’s always another mark halfway down the next block.
So when I tossed three million pounds’ worth of sword into the Thames, English Eddie Apex shrugged and accepted his loss because there was nothing else to be done. As an ultimate realist, I don’t think that Apex really understood what vengeance meant.
But Wes Cagle was no ultimate realist. He was a one-time professional football player turned professional gambler and professional gamblers are notoriously bad losers, if they think they’ve been cheated. Wes Cagle didn’t just think he had been cheated. He knew it. He had seen me cheat him out of three million pounds by tossing it into the Thames.
He roared first. It was rage, I suppose, and anger and also frustration. Then he started toward me and he came fast, two hundred seventy pounds of six foot seven ex-tight end, moving faster than he had ever moved for Princeton, or for the St. Louis Cardinals, coming straight at me with the switchblade knife held low and down to one side as if he knew that that was exactly where it was supposed to be held, which was something no Princeton man should really know.
I backed up. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I could jump into the Thames, but I don’t swim all that well. So I backed up until I couldn’t back anymore because the bridge railing wouldn’t let me.
Then something streaked past me. It was Eddie Apex, going in low and fast, trying to get under the knife. Cagle saw him and tried to fake him out. Cagle had good moves, but his mind didn’t work like Eddie’s because Eddie had anticipated the fake. It was what he had learned from life. He hit Cagle low and Cagle went up, all two hundred seventy pounds of him, up high into the air, the way it happens every autumn Sunday afternoon, and the coaches see it and turn their heads away because they really don’t want to see how they land.