Дональд Уэстлейк - Castle in the Air

The driver lowered his paper and lifted his eyes to the rearview mirror: “Yes, Guv. Where to?”

“Hello, Bruddy,” Sir Mortimer said, with a cheery smile. “Just around the park a bit while we talk.”

The driver, Bruddy Dunk by name and plug-ugly by profession, twisted around and looked with surprise — but not pleasure, nor displeasure either; merely surprise — at his passenger: “Well, blow me down,” he said. “Sir Mortimer himself, in the flesh.”

“ That’s right, Bruddy.”

“Let me get it away from here,” Bruddy said, and faced front again to put the cab in gear and drive out onto Park Lane, turning left toward Hyde Park Corner.

A small but hard-muscled man of about thirty, Bruddy Dunk had the face of a sport who’d never backed away from an argument but hadn’t in every single case won his point. His nose looked like a large peanut in the shell; his mouth when open revealed tooth gaps wide enough to slide a Ritz cracker through; and his cloth cap appeared to be sewn to his head.

Sir Mortimer waited while Bruddy negotiated the tricky chaos of Hyde Park Corner then took the Carriage Road between the beauty of Hyde Park on the right and the grimness of Kensington Barracks on the left; then he said, “Your sister told me where I’d find you.”

“Did she?” Something about the manner in which Bruddy sounded thoroughly noncommittal suggested he was in fact a bit disgruntled that his sister should be bandying his location about.

Sir Mortimer was uninterested in Bruddy’s familial quarrels. “I thought I might have use for you,” he went on, “in a very nice bit of smash-and-grab, but you appear to have turned yourself into an honest cabman.”

“Tell the honest truth,” Bruddy said, “I stole this cab this very morning.”

“In that case,” Sir Mortimer said, “why not drive me to my country place while we talk?”

“Meter on, or special out-of-city rates?”

“Ho, ho,” Sir Mortimer said. “You will have your little joke.”

Crosshatches of sunlight, Mondrian’d by the struts and supports of the Eiffel Tower, dappled the exhausted tourists walking beneath its splayed legs. Among these, none was more indubitably a tourist or more obviously exhausted — to the point, apparently, of panic — than Andrew Pinkenham. A fiftyish, mild-featured, plumpish man with a distracted manner, Andrew Pinkenham was the very embodiment of the English civil servant, but in fact he was not an English civil servant, he was something entirely different.

However, this seeming tourist, ostensibly exhausted and worried, a putative middle-class civil servant, approached in a tentative and superbly appropriate manner a particular pair of tourists, on whom he’d had his eye for several minutes. These too were quite clearly English, but working class and probably in their forties, a married couple with a shy-but-delighted look to their faces as they gazed about at this foreign soil.

Andrew Pinkenham placed himself diffidently in their path. “I do beg your pardon,” he said, “but would you by any stroke of magnificent luck happen to be English?”

The couple looked surprised, though they shouldn’t have. “Yes, we are,” the man said.

“Oh, thank the good Lord,” Andrew said. “I’m at such a loss when surrounded by foreigners.”

“Always glad to be a mate to a mate,” the man said. “Got to stick together when we’re abroad, don’t we?”

“Oh, that we do, that we do.”

“What’s the problem, then?” The man was definitely a take-charge sort, and his wife watched him admiringly.

“I came out today without a farthing,” Andrew confessed. “Or a franc, I suppose I should say. Whatever it was, I didn’t bring it.”

The woman of the pair was instantly sympathetic: “You poor man. You have no money?”

“I’m stony, I’m afraid.”

Becoming slightly suspicious, the man now said, “And you want to borrow some, is that it?”

“Oh, good heavens, no,” Andrew said, apparently shocked. “I’m no beggar. But if you have the cash to spare, could I possibly write you a check? On my London bank, of course. Nat West.”

“A check?” The man’s suspicions were not yet entirely allayed. “For how much?”

“Oh, just enough to see me back to my hotel.” Carefully gauging the potential resources of the marks, Andrew suggested, “Say, five pounds?”

The man relaxed with a relieved smile. “Oh, I think we could do that,” he allowed, becoming expansive, while his wife beamed beside him.

“Wonderful,” Andrew said. “I’ll just write you out a check here—”

And he did so, leaning against a girder, pausing to say, “To whom shall I make it out?”

“Richard Coe.”

“Right you are.”

Finishing the check, Andrew waved it in the air a second to dry the ink, then handed it over to the man, who smiled at it, withdrew from his pocket a well-worn wallet, took out a five pound note and handed it over, saying, “And there’s your fiver.”

“You’ve absolutely saved my life,” Andrew told him clutching the note.

“Think nothing of it,” the man said. “I know how things can be on holiday. In fact, I’m on holiday myself.”

Losing interest, preparing to leave, Andrew said, “Oh, really?”

“Yes,” the man said. “From Scotland Yard.” And suddenly his hand was on Andrew’s elbow, and was holding very, very tightly. And suddenly the man didn’t look such a fool after all. He was brisk and purposeful as he said to his wife, “You go whistle up a gendarme, love, while I keep an eye on this chap.”

“Right,” she said, and she was brisk and purposeful too, as she hurried off.

Andrew, his heart simultaneously sinking and rising into his throat, sputtered and spluttered: “What? Really, you... Surely you don’t think—”

“Yes, well,” said the man, “we’ll sort it all out at headquarters, won’t we?”

“But... I can’t think why you’d... But...”

Andrew was on the very brink of abandoning pretense, was in fact seriously considering kicking this officious officer in the knee and trying to make a run for it (though he was dreadfully out of condition and hadn’t run in thirty years or more), when suddenly a new person appeared, and it was with utter astonishment that Andrew realized he was looking at the mangled face of Bruddy Dunk. Also, that Bruddy was dressed as a chauffeur. And finally, that Bruddy was saying words to Andrew — Andrew did his best to listen.

What Bruddy was saying was as follows: “Yes, sir, the car’s waiting right over there.”

Car? Waiting? But before Andrew could ask any stupid questions, Bruddy turned his ugly-but-calm face toward the policeman, frowning at the check still held in the policeman’s free hand (the hand not holding Andrew’s elbow). “What’s this?” Bruddy said. “Borrowing from strangers, sir?” And he plucked the check right out of the policeman’s hand, making it disappear immediately inside his chauffeur’s jacket, while at the same time saying, “No, sir, not while I’m around.”

“See here!” the policeman said, letting go of Andrew in his agitation. “Give back that check!”

“You go to the car, sir,” Bruddy told Andrew calmly, “while I sort this out.”

Gratefully Andrew backed away.

“Here, now,” the policeman said, pointing at Andrew. “You just stay where you are.”

Bruddy moved, stepping between the policeman and Andrew, saying, “That’s five pounds, isn’t it, sir?” And from an inner pocket he withdrew a wallet every bit as old and disreputable as the policeman’s had been.

“Just a minute now,” the policeman said.

“In the first place,” Bruddy told him, now sounding just as hard and brisk and sure of himself as the policeman did, “you’re no more a copper this side of the water than I am. And in the second place, you don’t have the check. Now, you want the five quid or not?”