by Ross Thomas
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.
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.
Wes Cagle landed on the railing of Waterloo Bridge, hung there for a moment, and then went over the side down into the Thames. He screamed all the way down and made a very large splash. After that he didn’t scream anymore.
Eddie Apex leaned over the railing and looked down. Then he turned toward me and I saw that he was clutching his stomach. There was blood on his hands. He leaned against the railing of the bridge and then he started sliding down awkwardly, much like Robin Styles had slid down the side of the Volkswagen. Like Styles, Eddie Apex landed in a sitting position with sort of a plop.
I didn’t want to watch Eddie Apex die. I didn’t want to listen to his last words. I was sick of last words. I didn’t want to watch anybody else die that night with a quip on his lips so that he could be remembered as having died well, the way you’re supposed to. I knew that when I died, unless it was in my sleep or instantaneously, I would die cursing and screaming and blaming somebody, the doctors probably, and demanding all the sympathy that
there was around. That’s the way I had come into the world. And that was no doubt the way I would leave it.
The Rolls pulled up alongside and old Tom poked his head out. “Get an ambulance and the cops, Tom,” I said.
“Is he hurt bad, sir?”
“I don’t know. I think so. The knife got him.”
Tom looked as if he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t. He turned the big Rolls around and sped off.
I squatted down by Eddie Apex. “How bad is it?” I said.
“Bad. It hurts like hell. Where was it?”
“What?”
“The sword. I never got upstairs at Curnutt’s.”
“He split his Christmas tree and hid it in there.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Who killed him, Cagle?”
“Sure. Killed his son, too. The old man got cold feet and was talking about going to the cops. The son was almost as bad. I tried to talk Wes out of it, but it was no go. He got greedy. They all got greedy.”
“I talked to your wife,” I said.
“I know. She told me. She got greedier than anybody. We could have worked it with the three swords, if they’d just listened to me.”
“What do you mean three swords?”
Eddie Apex made himself grin. “You’re not sure now, are you?” he said. “You’re not sure which one you tossed into the river.”
“What three swords, Eddie?”
“There were three swords, not two,” he said, still grinning. “Tick-Tock has the third one.”
“Tick-Tock’s dead.”
“When?”
“At Curnutt’s. I tripped and the sword went through him.”
“No shit?” he said, smiling at the news. Then the blood gushed out of his mouth and like almost everybody else that night, English Eddie Apex died.
There were some other questions that I wanted to ask him, of course. Such as which sword was in the river and which one did Tick-Tock have, and now that Tick-Tock was dead, where was that sword? But Eddie was answering no more questions, so I squatted there beside him with the small crowd that had formed, halfway across Waterloo Bridge, and waited for the ambulance and the cops to arrivé.
