"Tony, you're out of court. Are you pissed again?... Who is? Well, put him on. Why not?... All right, talk, if you want. I'll listen. Nothing to do with me, but I don't mind listening. ... Don't give me sob stories, Tony, not my kind of music. ..." But soon these surly interjections grew shorter, and the spaces between them longer, until Roper was listening in total silence, and his body lay alert and dead still.
"Just a minute, Tony," he ordered suddenly. "Hold it." He turned to her, not bothering to put his hand over the mouth piece. "Run a bath," he told her. "Go into the bathroom, close the door, run the taps. Now."
So she went into the bathroom and turned on the taps and lifted the rubberized extension, but of course he heard the water running and bawled at her to get off the line. So after that she turned the taps to a trickle and pressed her ear to the keyhole, until the door exploded in her face and sent her flying across the Dutch-tiled floor, part of their recent decoration scheme. Then she heard Roper call, "Go on, Tony. Little local difficulty."
After that she listened to him listening, but that was all she heard. She got into the bath and remembered how once it was his pleasure to get in the other end and shove a foot between her legs while he read the Financial Times and in return she would tease him with her toes and try and give him an erection.
And sometimes he would haul her back to bed for another round, soaking the sheets with bathwater.
But this time he just stood in the doorway.
In his robe. Staring at her. Wondering what the hell to do about her. About Jonathan. About himself.
His face was set in that stony stay-away-from-me frown that he wore very rarely, and never in front of Danieclass="underline" the one that made and broke whatever was necessary for his preservation.
"You better get dressed," he said. "Corkoran will be here in two minutes."
"What for?"
"Just dress."
Then he went back to the phone, started to dial a number and changed his mind. He laid the receiver back on its cradle with such immense control that she knew he wanted to smash it into fragments, and the whole boat with it. He put his hands on his hips and stared at her while she dressed, as if he didn't like what she was putting on.
"Better wear sensible shoes," he said.
And that was when her heart stopped, because on board nobody ever wore anything but deck shoes or bare feet, except in the evenings, when dress shoes could be worn by the women, though they were not allowed stiletto heels.
So she dressed and pulled on a pair of sensible rubber-soled suede lace-ups she had bought at Bergdorf's during one of their trips to New York, and when Corkoran knocked on the door, Roper took him into the drawing room and spoke to him alone for as much as ten minutes, while Jed sat on the bed thinking of the chink she had still not found, that magic formula for Jonathan's salvation and her own. But it wouldn't come to her.
She had fantasised about blowing up the boat with the arsenal stored in the forward hold ― a kind of African Queen job with everyone aboard, including Jonathan and herself; about poisoning the guards, or staging a dramatic denunciation of Roper's crimes before the assembled dinner guests, culminating in a search for the hidden prisoner; or simply holding Roper to ransom with a carving knife. Several other solutions that work so well in movies had occurred to her, but the truth was, the staff and crew were watching her all the time, several of the guests had remarked that she was in a nervous state, there were rumours she was pregnant, and there was not a single passenger on the boat who would believe her, do anything, or ― even if she did convince them she was right ― give a damn.
Roper and Corkoran came out of the drawing room and Roper threw on some clothes, not before stripping naked in front of them, a thing that had never bothered him, in fact he rather liked it, and for a bad moment she feared that he was going to leave her alone with Corkoran for some reason, and she couldn't think of a good one. To her relief Corkoran moved with him to the door.
"Stay in here and wait," Roper said as they left. As an afterthought he turned the lock on her, a thing he had not done before.
First she sat on the bed, then lay on it, feeling like a prisoner of war not knowing whether the right side or the wrong side is going to storm the camp. But somebody was storming it, she was certain. Even locked inside the stateroom, she could catch the tension of the murmured instructions to the staff, the quickening of light feet in the corridor. She felt the pulse of engines, and the boat leaned a little. Roper has selected a new course. She looked out of the porthole and saw the horizon turning. She stood up, saw to her surprise that she was wearing blue jeans instead of one of the million-dollar numbers Roper insisted on for cruises, and she remembered the magic of a last day of term, when you could get out of your hated grey convent uniform and put on something really daring, like a cotton frock, for the glorious moment when your parents' car came hobbling over Mother Angela's speed bumps to take you away.
But nobody except herself had told her she was leaving. It was her own idea, and all she could do was will it into reality.
She decided to put together an escape kit. If she needed sensible shoes, then she must need sensible other things too. So she grabbed her shoulder bag from the top shelf of her wardrobe and put in her sponge bag and toothbrush and some spare underclothes. She pulled open the drawers of the desk and to her amazement found her passport ― Corkoran must have given it to him. When she came to her jewellery, she determined to be high-minded. Roper had always loved to give her jewels, and there had been a possessors' code about which jewel and which occasion should be remembered: the rose diamond necklace for their first night together in Paris; the emerald bracelet for her birthday in Monaco; the rubies from Christmas in Vienna. Forget them, she told herself with a shudder: leave the memories in the drawer. Then she thought: To hell, it's only money, and grabbed three or four pieces as currency for their future life together. But no sooner had she put them in her shoulder bag than she fished them out and dumped them on Roper's dressing table. I'll never be your jewellery girl again.
She had no problem, however, helping herself to a couple of Roper's handmade shirts and silk underpants in case Jonathan was out of stock. And a pair of Gucci espadrilles that Roper was rather fond of, which looked as though they might be Jonathan's size.
Her courage spent, she flopped back onto the bed again. It's a trick. I'm not going anywhere. They've killed him.
* * *
Jonathan had always known that when the end came ― whatever end they had decided on ― they would come to him as a pair. His educated guess was that the pair would be Frisky and Tabby, because torturers, like anybody else, have their own protocols: this is my job, that is your job and the big jobs go to the biggest people. Gus had always been an adjunct. They had made a pair when they dragged him to the lavatory, they had made a pair when they sponged him down, which they seemed to do for their own fastidious reasons, not for his: they had never got over the time in Colón when he had threatened to soil himself, and when they were angry with him, they never failed to tell him what a filthy little bastard he was, even to think of it was a bloody liberty.