Part 22 (2/2)

At length he took a deep breath and said, 'As you see, I could shoot off your hand. Nothing easier. But I'm probably not going to. Not today.' He paused. 'Are you listening?'

I nodded the merest fraction. My eyes were full of gun.

His voice came quietly, seriously, giving weight to every sentence. 'You can give me your a.s.surance that you'll back off. You'll do nothing more which is directed against me, in any way, ever. You'll go to France tomorrow morning, and you'll stay there until after the Guineas. After that, you can do what you like. But if you break your a.s.surance... well, you're easy to find. I'll find you, and I'll blow your right hand off. I mean it, and you'd better believe it. Some time or other. You'd never escape it. Do you understand?'

I nodded, as before. I could feel the gun as if it were hot. Don't let him, I thought. Dear G.o.d, don't let him.

'Give me your a.s.surance. Say it.'

I swallowed painfully. Dredged up a voice. Low and hoa.r.s.e.

'I give it.'

'You'll back off.'

'Yes.' 'You'll not come after me again, ever.'

'No.'

'You'll go to France and stay there until after the Guineas.'

'Yes.' Another silence lengthened for what seemed a hundred years, while I stared beyond my undamaged wrist to the dark side of the moon.

He took the gun away, in the end. Broke it open. Removed the cartridges. I felt physically, almost uncontrollably, sick.

He knelt on his pin-striped knees beside me and looked closely at whatever defence I could put into an unmoving face and expressionless eyes. I could feel the treacherous sweat trickling down my cheek. He nodded, with grim satisfaction. 'I knew you couldn't face that. Not the other one as well. No one could. There's no need to kill you.' He stood up again and stretched his body, as if relaxing a wound-up inner tension. Then he put his hands into various pockets, and produced things.

'Here are your keys. Your pa.s.sport. Your cheque book. Credit cards.' He put them on a straw bale. To the chums, he said, 'Untie him, and drive him to the airport. To Heathrow.'

CHAPTER EIGHT

I flew to Paris and stayed right there where I landed, in an airport hotel, with no impetus or heart to go further. I stayed for six days, not leaving my room, spending most of the time by the window, watching the aeroplanes come and go.

I felt stunned. I felt ill. Disorientated and overthrown and severed from my own roots. Crushed into an abject state of mental misery, knowing that this time I really had run away.

It was easy to convince myself that logically I had had no choice but to give Deansgate his a.s.surance, when he asked for it. If I hadn't, he would have killed me anyway. I could tell myself, as I continually did, that sticking to his instructions had been merely common sense: but the fact remained that when the chums decanted me at Heathrow they had driven off at once, and it had been of my own free will that I'd bought my ticket, waited in the departure lounge, and walked to the aircraft.

There had been no one there with guns to make me do it. Only the fact that as Deansgate had truly said, I couldn't face losing the other one. I couldn't face even the risk of it. The thought of it, like a conditioned response, brought out the sweat.

As the days pa.s.sed, the feeling I had had of disintegration seemed not to fade but to deepen. The automatic part of me still went on working: walking, talking, ordering coffee, going to the bathroom. In the part that mattered there was turmoil and anguish and a feeling that my whole self had been literally smashed in those few cataclysmic minutes on the straw.

Part of the trouble was that I knew my weaknesses too well.

Knew that if I hadn't had so much pride it wouldn't have destroyed me so much to have lost it.

To have been forced to realise that my basic view of myself had been an illusion was proving a psychic upheaval like an earthquake, and perhaps it wasn't surprising that I felt I had, I really had, come to pieces.

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