Оливер Блик - The Highbinders

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.

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.