by Hugh Laurie
And then I limped on to a bus and went home.
My flat was where I'd left it, but seemed smaller than I remembered. There were no messages on the answering machine and nothing in the fridge besides the half-pint of natural yoghurt and stick of celery that I'd inherited from the previous tenant.
My chest was hurting, as they'd said it would, so I took myself off to the sofa and watched a race meeting at Doncaster, with a large tumbler of I'm Sure I've Seen That Grouse Somewhere Before at my elbow.
I must have dozed off for a while, and it was the phone that woke me. I sat up quickly, gasping at the pain from my armpit, and reached for the whisky bottle. Empty. I felt really terrible. I looked at my watch as I lifted the receiver. Ten past eight, or twenty to two. I couldn't tell which.
'Mr Lang?'
Male. American. Click, whirr. Come on, I know this one.
'Yes.'
'Mr Thomas Lang?' Got it. Yes, Mike, I'll name that voice in five. I shook my head to try and wake myself up, and felt something rattling.
'How do you do, Mr Woolf?' I said.
Silence at the other end. And then: 'A lot better'n you, from what I hear.'
'Not so,' I said.
'Yeah?'
'My biggest worry in life has always been having no stories to tell my grandchildren. My time with the Woolf family should last them until they're about fifteen, I'd say.'
I thought I heard him laugh, but it could have been a crackle on the line. Or it could have been O'Neal's lot, tripping over their bugging equipment.
'Listen, Lang,' said Woolf, 'I'd like us to meet up some place.'
'Of course you would, Mr Woolf. Let me see. This time you'd like to offer me money to perform a vasectomy on you without you noticing. Am I close?'
'I'd like to explain, if that's okay by you. You like to eat Italian?'
I thought of the celery and the yoghurt and realised that I like to eat Italian very much indeed. But there was a problem here.
'Mr Woolf,' I said, 'before you name a place, make sure you can book it for at least ten people. I've a feeling this may be a party line.'
'That's okay,' he said, cheerfully. 'You got a tourist guide right by your phone.' I looked down at the table and saw a red paperback. Ewan's Guide to London. It looked new, and I certainly hadn't bought it. 'Listen carefully,' said Woolf, 'I want you to turn to page twenty-six, fifth entry. See you there in thirty minutes.'
There was a kerfuffle on the line, and I thought for a moment he'd hung up, but then his voice came back.
'Lang?'
'Yes?'
'Don't leave the guide-book in your apartment.'
I took a deep and weary breath.
'Mr Woolf,' I said, 'I may be stupid, but I'm not stupid.'
'That's what I'm hoping.'
The line went dead.
The fifth entry on page twenty-six of Ewan's comprehensive guide to losing dollars in the Greater London Area was 'Giare, 216 Roseland, WC2, Ital, 60 pp air con, Visa, Mast, Amex' followed by three sets of crossed spoons. One glance through the book told me that Ewan was pretty sparing with his three spoon motif, so at least I had a reasonable supper to look forward to.
The next problem was how to get there without towing along a dozen brown-raincoated civil servants behind me. I couldn't be sure that Woolf would be able to do the same, but if he'd gone to the trouble of the guide-book trick, which I have to admit I liked, he must have been fairly sure that he could move around without being bothered by strange men.
I let myself out of the flat and went down to the street door. My helmet was there, resting on top of the gas meter, along with a pair of battered leather gloves. I opened the front door and stuck my head out into the street. No felt-hatted figure straightened up from a lamppost and tossed away an unfiltered cigarette. But then again, I hadn't really expected that.
Fifty yards to the left I could see a dark green Leyland van with a rubber aerial sticking out of the roof, and to the right, on the far side of the street, a red and white striped roadmenders tent. Both of them could have been innocent.
I slipped back inside, put on the helmet and gloves and dug out my key-ring. I eased open the letter-box on the front door, brought the remote control switch for the bike alarm level with the slot, and pressed the button. The Kawasaki blipped back at me once to tell me that its alarm was now off, so I threw open the door and ran down to the street as fast as my armpit would let me.
The bike started first time, as Japanese bikes tend to do, so I slid it to half-choke, popped it into first gear, and eased out the clutch. I also got on it, in case you were worried. By the time I passed the dark-green van I must have been doing forty miles an hour, and I amused myself for a moment with the thought of a lot of men in anoraks banging their elbows on things and saying shit. When I reached the end of the street, I could see, in the mirror, the lights of a car pulling out after me. It was a Rover.
I turned left on to the Bayswater Road within shouting distance of the speed limit, and stopped at a traffic light that's never once been green in all the years I've been coming up to it. But I wasn't bothered. I fiddled with my gloves and visor for a while, until I sensed the Rover crawling up on the inside, and then I glanced across at the moustachioed face behind the wheel. I wanted to tell him to go home, because this was about to become embarrassing.
As the light switched to amber, I closed the choke fully and eased the throttle to around five thousand revs, then shifted my weight forward over the petrol tank to keep the front wheel down. I dropped the clutch as the light turned green and felt the Kawasaki's gigantic rear wheel thrash madly from side to side like a dinosaur's tail, until it found the grip it needed to sling me forwards down the road.
Two-and-a-half seconds later I was doing sixty, and two-and-a-half seconds after that the street lamps were melting into one, and I'd forgotten what the Rover driver looked like.
Giare was a surprisingly cheerful place, with white walls and an echoing tile floor that turned every whisper into a shout and every smile into a howling belly-laugh.
A Ralph Lauren blonde with huge eyes took my helmet and showed me to a table by the window, where I ordered a tonic water for myself and a large vodka for the pain in my armpit. To pass the time before Woolf arrived, I had a choice between Ewan's guide-book or the menu. The menu looked slightly longer, so I started on that.
The first item was fighting under the name 'Crostini of Mealed Tarroce, with Benatore Potatoes' and weighed in at an impressive twelve pounds sixty-five. The Ralph Lauren blonde came over and asked me if I needed any help with the menu, and I asked her to explain what potatoes were. She didn't laugh.
I'd just started to unravel the description of the second dish, which could have been poached Marx Brother for all I know, when I caught sight of the Woolf at the door, clinging determinedly to a briefcase while a waiter peeled off his coat.
And then, at exactly the same moment that I noticed our table was laid for three, I saw Sarah Woolf step out from behind him.
She looked - and I hate to say this - sensational. Absolutely sensational. I know it's a cliche, but there are times when you realise why cliches become cliches. She wore a plain-cut dress in green silk, and it hung on her in a way that all dresses would like to hang if they got the chance - staying still at the bits where it ought to have stayed still, and moving at the bits where movement was exactly what you wanted. Just about everybody watched her travel to the table, and there was a hush in the room while Woolf pushed the chair in behind her as she sat down.
'Mr Lang,' said Woolf major, 'good of you to come.' I nodded at him. 'You know my daughter?'
I glanced across at Sarah, and she was looking down at her napkin, frowning. Even her napkin looked better than anyone else's.
'Yes of course,' I said. 'Now let me see. Wimbledon? Henley? Dick Cavendish's wedding? No, I've got it. Down the barrel of a gun, that's where we last met. How nice to see you again.'
It was supposed to be friendly, a joke
even, but when she still didn't look at me, the line seemed to curdle into something aggressive, and I wished I'd shut up and just smiled. Sarah adjusted the cutlery into what she obviously thought was a more pleasing formation.
'Mr Lang,' she said, 'I've come here at my father's suggestion to say that I'm sorry. Not because I think I did anything wrong, but because you got hurt and you shouldn't have. And I'm sorry for that.'
Woolf and I waited for her to go on, but it seemed as if that was all we were going to get for now. She just sat there, rummaging in her bag for a reason not to look at me. Apparently she found several, which was odd, because it was quite a small bag.
Woolf gestured for a waiter, and turned to me.
'Had a chance to look at the menu yet?'
'Glanced at it,' I said. 'I hear that whatever you're having is excellent.'
The waiter arrived and Woolf loosened his tie a little.
'Two martinis,' he said, 'very dry, and...'
He looked at me and I nodded.
'Vodka martini,' I said. 'Incredibly dry. Powdered, if you've got it.'
The waiter pushed off, and Sarah started looking round the place, as if she was bored already. The tendons in her neck were beautiful.
'So, Thomas,' said Woolf. 'Mind if I call you Thomas?'
'Okay with me,' I said. 'It's my first name, after all.'
'Good. Thomas. First of all, how's your shoulder?'
'Fine,' I said, and he looked relieved. 'A lot better than my armpit, which is where I got shot.'
At last, at long last, she turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were much softer than the rest of her pretended to be. She bowed her head slightly, and her voice was low and cracked.
'I told you, I'm sorry,' she said.
I wanted desperately to say something back, something nice, and gentle, but I came up empty-headed. There was a pause, which might somehow have turned nasty if she hadn't smiled. But she did smile, and a lot of blood suddenly seemed to be crashing about in my ears, dropping things and falling oven I smiled back, and we kept on looking at each other.
'I suppose we have to say it could have been worse,' she said.
'Of course it could,' I said. 'If I was an international armpit model, I'd be off work for months.'
This time she laughed, actually laughed, and I felt like I'd won every Olympic medal that had ever been struck.
We started with some soup, which came in a bowl about the size of my flat and tasted delicious. The talk was small. It turned out that Woolf was also a fan of the turf, and that I'd been watching one of his horses race at Doncaster that afternoon, so we chatted a little about racing. By the time the second course arrived, we were putting the finishing touches to a nicely-rounded three-minuter on the unpredictability of the English climate. Woolf took a mouthful of something meaty and sauce-covered, and then dabbed his mouth.
'So, Thomas,' he said, T guess there are one or two things you'd like to ask me?'
'Well, yes.' I dabbed my mouth in return. 'I hate to be predictable, but what the fuck do you think you're doing?'
There was an intake of breath from a nearby table, but Woolf didn't flinch and neither did Sarah.
'Right,' he said, nodding. 'Fair question. First of all, in spite of whatever you may have been told by your Defence people, I have nothing whatsoever to do with drugs. Nothing. I've taken some penicillin in my time, but that's it. Period.'
Well, that obviously wasn't good enough. Not by a long shot. Saying period at the end of something doesn't make it incontrovertible.
'Yes, well,' I said, 'forgive my tired old English cynicism, but isn't this a case of "you would say that wouldn't you"?' Sarah looked at me crossly, and I suddenly thought I might have overdone it. But then I thought heck, beautiful tendons or not, there were some things that needed to be straightened out here.
'Sorry to bring it up before you've even got started,' I said, 'but I assume we're here for plain talking, so I'm talking plainly.'
Woolf had another bite at his food and kept his eyes on his plate, and it took me a moment to realise that he was leaving it to Sarah to answer.
Thomas,' she said, and I turned to look at her. Her eyes were big and round, and went from one side of the universe to the other. 'I had a brother. Michael. Four years older than me.'
Oh cripes. Had.
'Michael died half-way through his first year at Bates University. Amphetamines, qualudes, heroin. He was twenty years old.'
She paused, and I had to speak. Something. Anything.
'I'm sorry.'
Well, what else do you say? Tough? Pass the salt? I realised I was hunching down towards the table, trying to blend with their grief, but it was no good. On a subject like this, you're an outsider.
'I tell you that,' she said eventually, 'for one reason only. To show you that my father,' and she turned to look at him while he kept his head bowed, 'could no more get involved in the traffick of drugs than he could fly to the moon. It's that simple. I'd bet my life on that.'
Period.
For a while, neither of them would look at each other, or at me.
'Well, I'm sorry,' I said again. 'I'm very, very sorry.'
We sat like that for a moment, a little kiosk of silence in the middle of the restaurant din, and then suddenly Woolf switched on a smile, and seemed to get all brisk.
'Thanks, Thomas,' he said. 'But what's done is done. For Sarah and me, this is old stuff, and we dealt with it a long time ago. Right now, you want to know why I asked you to kill me?'
A woman at the next table turned and looked at Woolf, frowning. He can't have said that. Can he? She shook her head and went back to her lobster.
'In a nutshell,' I said.
'Well it's very simple,' he said. 'I wanted to know what kind of person you were.'
He looked at me, his mouth closed in a nice, straight line.
'I see,' I said, not seeing anything at all. This is what happens, I suppose, when you ask for things in a nutshell. I blinked a few times, then sat back in my chair and tried to look cross.
'Anything wrong with ringing my headmaster?' I said. 'Or an ex-girlfriend? I mean, that all seemed too dull, I suppose?'
Woolf shook his head.
'Not at all,' he said. 'I did all of that.'
That was a shock. A real shock. I still get hot flushes about having cheated in Chemistry O-Level and scoring an A when experienced teachers had anticipated an F. I know one day it's going to come out. I just know it.
'Really,' I said. 'How did I do?'
Woolf smiled.
'You did okay,' he said. 'A couple of your girlfriends reckon you're a pain in the ass, but otherwise you did okay.'
'Nice to know,' I said.
Woolf continued, as though reading from a list. 'You're smart. You're tough. You're honest. Good career in the Scotch Guards.'
'Scots,' I said, but he ignored me, and went on.
'And best of all, from my point of view, you're broke.'
He smiled again, which irritated me.
'You missed out my watercolour work,' I said.
'That too? Hell of a guy. The one thing I needed to know was whether you could be bought.'
'Right,' I said. 'Hence the fifty thousand.'
Woolf nodded.
This was starting to get out of hand. I knew that at some point I ought to have been making some kind of hard man speech about who I was, and who the hell did they think they were, prodding around in who I was, and just as soon as I'd had the pudding I was going right back to who I was - but somehow the right moment never seemed to come along. In spite of the way he'd treated me, and for all his nosing around in my school reports, I still couldn't bring myself to dislike Woolf. He just had something I liked. And as for Sarah, well, yes. Nice tendons.
Even so, a glint of the old steel wouldn't do any harm.
'Let me guess,' I said, giving Woolf a hard look. 'Once you've found out that I can't be bought, you're going to try and buy me.'
He
didn't even falter.
'Exactly,' he said.
There. That was it, and this was the right moment. A gentleman has his limits, and so do 1.1 tossed my napkin on to the table.
'Well this is fascinating,' I said, 'and I suppose if I was a different sort of person I might even think it was flattering. But right now I really have to know what this is all about. Because if you don't tell me, now, I'm leaving the table, your lives, and possibly even this country.'
I could see that Sarah was watching me, but I kept my eyes fixed on Woolf. He chased the last potato round his plate and ran it down in a pool of gravy. But then he put down his fork and started to speak very quickly.
'You know about the Gulf War, Mr Lang?' he said. I don't know what happened to Thomas, but the mood certainly seemed to have changed somewhat.
'Yes, Mr Woolf,' I said, 'I know about the Gulf War.'
'No, you don't. I'll bet everything I have that you don't know the first damn thing about the Gulf War. Familiar with the term military-industrial complex?'
He was talking like a salesman, trying to bulldoze me somehow, and I wanted to slow things down. I took a long sip of wine.
'Dwight Eisenhower,' I said eventually. 'Yes, I'm familiar. I was part of it, if you remember.'
'With respect, Mr Lang, you were a very small part of it. Too small - forgive me for saying it - too small to know what you were a part of.'
'As you like,' I said.
'Now take a guess at the single most important commodity in the world. So important, that the manufacture and sale of every other commodity depends on it. Oil, gold, food, what would you say?'
'I've a feeling,' I said, 'that you're going to tell me it's arms.'
Woolf leaned across the table, too quickly and too far for my liking.
'Correct, Mr Lang,' he said. 'It is the biggest industry in the world, and every government in the world knows it. If you're a politician, and you take on the arms industry, in whatever form, then you wake up the next day and you're no longer a politician. Some cases, you might not even wake up the next day. Doesn't matter whether you're trying for a law on a gun ownership registration in the state of Idaho, or trying to stop the sale of F-16s to the Iraqi Air Force. You step on their toes, they step on your head. Period.'
