“Good,” Kathleen answered. “For a moment there, I thought you had no common sense left at all.”
“Hrmp,” he said in mock dudgeon. He’d draped his clothes neatly on a chair. As he walked over to it, Kathleen rose from the bed to go over to the chest of drawers. He reached out and swatted her lightly on her bare backside when she bent to open a drawer. She straightened with an indignant squeak. “There, you see?” he said. “If you insult me, I beat you.”
“And here I’d been thanking God I left Anthony Rothrock behind in Charleroi,” she said, pulling out a pair of cotton pyjamas comfortable and sensible for someone traveling by herself. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Shall I scream for the police?”
“If you do, you’ll probably find an officer close by,” he answered. They both laughed, as easy with each other as if they’d been together a long time. Bushell took that for a good sign. Now, he thought, if the damned case would only give me one . . .
Several large, muscular men stood in front of the lifts when Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery walked over to them to do downstairs for breakfast. They did not have the look of men waiting for a car themselves. After a moment, Bushell recognized one of them. “Hullo, Scriver,” he said. “What’s all this in aid of?” He spoke as softly as he could; the paracetamol he’d gulped in his first waking action hadn’t yet started taking the edge off a headache that bored through his skull like the electric bandsaw slicing into a seam of coal deep down under Charleroi.
The RAM who’d driven him to Lansdowne Street answered, “We’re here to keep the reporters away from your room, sir. Major Harris asked the hotel to stop incoming calls last night, too, to give the three of you some rest. But you’d better know there’s a great ravening pack of newspapermen down in the lobby, just waiting for you to show your faces.”
Bushell groaned. “They would be there, wouldn’t they?” Samuel Stanley said. “Death by gunfire, hand grenades - all sorts of juicy things to put on the front page.”
“Right,” Bushell said in a tight, controlled voice. The prospect of facing the press never sent him into transports of delight. Facing them with a hangover, and with them standing between him and several cups of black coffee - He groaned again. What did Marlowe have the devil say in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus? Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it: that was the line. At the moment, he had considerable sympathy for the devil.
“Shall we go back and ring down for room service?” Kathleen asked.
Bushell thought of the devil again, this time as tempter. Reluctantly, he shook his head - only a little, because it hurt. “Go ahead, if you like,” he told her. “You’re not officially part of the case. Me, I’d have to face them sooner or later anyhow. It might as well be now.” With a martyred sigh, he turned back to Scriver. “Tell Major Harris I only regret I have but one life to lose for His Majesty.”
“Er - right sir,” Scriver said. “It won’t be so bad as that.”
“No - it’ll be worse.”
“I’ll come with you,” Kathleen declared, in a tone that said she didn’t want him to go down there and die alone. It touched him absurdly; he wasn’t used to having anyone but Sam cover his back. A bell clanged and a light came on to signal the arrival of the lift. Scriver and his companions let Bushell, Kathleen, and Stanley board ahead of them, then climbed on themselves. On his little stool in one corner of the car, the operator muttered something about crowding. When no one paid him any attention, he sighed, closed the doors, and let the lift descend to the lobby.
More RAMs guarded the bank of lifts down there. Bushell idly wondered how a genuine guest of the Parker House was supposed to get up to his room. He found out when one such guest used his doorkey as a talisman to get him past the warders of the way up.
Bushell had hoped he wouldn’t be recognized the instant he stepped out of the lift. That hope proved forlorn. “There he is!” half a dozen voices cried from all parts of the lobby, and reporters stampeded toward him. The Boston RAMs got in front of him like rugby forwards battling to keep the nasty devils on the other side away from the three-quarterback with the ball.
Getting from the lifts to Parker’s was a pretty fair approximation of a scrummage. Elbows flew; some of the reporters were as big and burly as the RAMs. Neither Jerry Doyle nor Michael Shaughnessy was, but the two reporters from Common Sense made up in stridency what they gave away in pounds and inches.
“How does it feel to be a murderer of innocents?” Shaughnessy screamed into Bushell’s ear.
“I don’t know,” Bushell answered. “If I ever try it, you’ll be the first to hear.”
“Most places I go to, innocents aren’t in the habit of carrying hand grenades,” Samuel Stanley said.
“Or throwing them at people,” Kathleen added. Shaughnessy sent her a pained look, perhaps because she’d abandoned a cause he thought she held, or perhaps because the foot Bushell was stepping on belonged to him.
“Why were you armed when you went in search of Joseph Kilbride?” a reporter asked, notebook poised to receive Bushell’s pearls of wisdom.
“If you’re trying to arrest a gun runner, there is some small possibility that he might have a gun - or some other bit of nasty pyrotechnics - concealed about his person,” Bushell answered.
“Pyro - “ the reporter muttered, and sent Bushell a wry grin. “Why the devil didn’t you pick a word I can spell?”
“Why the devil can’t you spell the words I pick?” Bushell retorted. The reporter was only a little more than half his age. He rubbed it in: “Sorry state our schools have got to these days, isn’t it?”
“I did that story last week, pal,” the reporter said, not a bit put out. “You’re what’s news today.”
Another newshound said, “What’s the connection between Kilbride, Venable, and Cavendish on the one hand and The Two Georges on the other?”
“We’re still investigating that,” Bushell answered, a reply that had the twin virtues - as far as he was concerned - of being true and altogether uninformative. He’d hoped none of the reporters would make the connection, but what you hoped for and what you got too often had only the most distant relationship to each other.
“What’s this I hear about your firing at poor Kilbride without even the slightest reason for it?” Jerry Doyle shouted.
“What is it?” Bushell said. “It sounds like a lie to me.”
His voice an angry growl, Samuel Stanley added, “I suppose you think we dropped the hand grenade that blew Cavendish’s face to bits. I hate to tell you, Mr. Doyle, but hand grenades aren’t standard RAM issue - and how would we know to have them handy after Venable flung the first one at us?”
“ If that happened,” Doyle said stubbornly.
“Of course, if,” Bushell agreed, reaching out to pat the man from Common Sense on the shoulder.
“And if the sun goes down tonight - just on the off chance, mind you - it’ll get dark in Boston.”
“Give it up, Jerry,” one of the other reporters told Doyle, his tone half amused, half sympathetic. “It really happened, and there’s damn all you can do about it but take your lumps and come out fighting the next time.”
Doyle frowned and didn’t say anything. Michael Shaughnessy did: “If it was a RAM told me the sun was setting, I’d step outside before I believed him.”