To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

shaky. Even my hands had been steady on the whisky. The shakes were all inside.

“Well, Mr C has cleverly located the other door to the apartment. In light of this, perhaps you would like to go back there? I mean, accompanied of course. And free of all charge. It seems he – your enemy-friend – is elsewhere.” (I almost blurted something when he said this. But I didn’t). “Perhaps we might go there tonight. As you are already on your way up to London.”

“I have a business meeting.”

“Do you? So late.” Silky, he looked at me. It was a flirtatious look, which said, Oh come now, I know you have nothing of the sort. “Just an hour from your urgent schedule. He pronounced this skedule, as Americans do.

I thought, This is some form of so-far unfathomable blackmail. I’d better agree. I can delay the journey, start early tomorrow from Waterloo… pray no one is looking for me right there… If I offend him, refuse, God knows.

We’d stopped at two or three stations meanwhile, and gone on. I hadn’t noted them. We might have been in a foreign country, not France: somewhere I couldn’t begin to decipher the signs. Hell, perhaps.

“OK,” I said. “If you want.”

“It will, I am sure, be mutually helpful.”

In the window’s black night glass, our shades sat in the amber of the light. I didn’t look afraid, I saw. But then, I didn’t look quite like me either.

He said, “That’s good, you see. Now we are coming into Waterloo.”

What was striking was the silence of the flats. I’d been expecting blasts of bad music, even though now it was almost midnight.

A few dim lights were on in various rooms. Everything however, the terrace, the street, the surrounding city, seemed still and relatively silent. Among the shrubs and trees of the park, old rain glittered, catching streetlamps which, here, had stayed shell white.

Cart had brought us here by cab. He himself had paid for this. Now he produced a key to the main door.

I’d anticipated keys, for no doubt the talented Mr C would have managed that.

The door undone, and discreetly shut behind us, we walked up the flights of stairs, I carrying my two bags.

Reaching the landing where flat 5 showed its door in total noiselessness, Cart, surprising me if I were yet capable of surprise, knocked lightly on the wood.

After a moment the door to flat 5 was opened.

A big man, overweight and ruddy, with thick greying hair, looked out at us. He wore a dark blue T-shirt with two lines of script which read: Tell me how long you’ve been a swan.

Cart laughed. “Hi, Leo.”

“Hi, Cart.”

“This is our Mr Phillips.”

“Hi, Roy, good to meet you,” said Leo who wanted to know about swans. “Come in. Liberty hall here.” He had a London accent and clear diction. He knew my first name.

I went first, because Leo stood aside and Cart waited for me. As soon as I was in the flat’s hall I got myself in over the threshold of the larger space of a big room. The layout was not dissimilar to No 6 above, the empty flat that lay below the roof apartment.

But Leo had furnished this one, and the hall too, what I’d seen, in an uncluttered, comfortable style. He had the things one expects people to have who live in the Western world – carpet, couch and chairs, TV and obviously powerful music centre, even shelves with books, and a fruit bowl with oranges and plums and a bottle of diet Coke standing on a table. “Like a drop of the hard stuff, boys?” asked Leo.

“Sure,” said Cart.

“Roy?” politely asked Leo.

I didn’t speak, and Cart said, as if proud of me, “He is a whisky man.”

“Great. So’m I. Best drink you can get. I’ll break out the new Scottish malt.” To me he added, “Just dump your gear anywhere.” He meant my bags. Tired by now of holding them, perhaps wanting my hands free, I let the bags go. And he went into the kitchen, which here was through a door, and had white and pine units and clean-looking lino on the floor. He returned with an unopened bottle.

“See this, Roy,” he said, showing me the label.

It was highly prestigious. I’d heard of but never tasted it in my life. So far as I’d known, you couldn’t even buy it, over the border.

“I am of the Clan McCallum,” said Leo. “Friends in the Highlands.” And suddenly in broadest Scottish, “Ye’ll no be averse t’a wee dram?”

Cart laughed again. “To listen to him, we must think he is truthful. In fact he’s no more Scots blood than I.”

“Huish,” said Leo sternly. He had got the bottle open and produced three clean glasses from a place on the bookcase among paperbacks and volumes with old black covers.

When he handed each of us a filled glass, Cart said solemnly, “One moment, Mr Phillips – see, I drink. Now, you take this glass, I yours.” And handed me the glass he had sipped from twice.

That was when I knew.

I knew it as the tidal wave is known, rushing in. Without syntax, without hope.

Leo called the toast. To me it sounded as if he cried “Hrarnaschy!”

And we drank. Bottoms up.

It was a good, a beautiful whisky. If I could have tasted it.

It was about twenty minutes later that Leo let us all, (me holding the bags again, refusing his offer to carry one), through the door at the end of the corridor in flat 5, the area that, above, was occupied by the small spare room. The stair was quite wide, with sturdy shallow steps. It would have been a challenge to get a piano, or the heavy couches up, but it should have been possible, and demonstrably, had been.

At the top Cart knocked once more on another white door.

The woman who flung the door dramatically open was known to me, but I had been waiting – if not for her – for one of