He’d no idea how long Jordan would need. Even if the house was spotless by now, he didn’t feel like going home to it yet. Checking into a hotel was good advice. It might be as well if he did. It was gone four a.m. when he got back into London. He walked away from Victoria Station, into night and fog, picked up a cab in Buckingham Palace Road, suffered more cabbie wisecracks about being lost, and checked into the Ritz.
Just before nine he called room service, ordered breakfast, and then he called Anna.
“I hear you have a day off.”
“Oh. It’s you. Yes. Ten of them, a sort of loose transition between the NHS and Harley Street. Angus calls it my demob leave. As though I’d done National Service without the capital H. Thanks, by the bye, thanks for sending him home.”
“I need you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I need your professional services.”
“Oh, my God, what’s wrong? You’ve been shot!”
“No, I haven’t. I just need a little TLC and I’d rather it were you than Kolankiewicz. Bring your bag of tricks. I’m at the Ritz. Room 323. Don’t be long, I’ve ordered breakfast for two.”
Over bacon and eggs she told him he had two cracked ribs and a broken toe on his left foot. The ribs would heal naturally as long as he did nothing strenuous for a week or two. The toe would be fine, it just wouldn’t bend where it was meant to bend.
“Your TLC was understatement, wasn’t it. You’ve had the shit kicked out of you. It’s your internal organs that worry me. The bruising on your chest and abdomen is awful. I’ve never seen so many shades of black. Are you peeing okay?”
“So far.”
“No blood?”
“No.”
“And nothing when you cough?”
He didn’t think he’d coughed lately, but that, too, she took as a good sign.
“Well, perhaps you’ll live. How many of them were there?”
“Three or four.”
“Bloody hell! You’re lucky they didn’t kill you. Will I be reading about this one in the papers?”
“No. No, you won’t. Nobody will ever know about this.”
Her hands paused on the open bag. It seemed to Troy that she might have worked out why no one would ever know. That if they had not killed Troy, perhaps it was because Troy had . . .
He watched the invisible veil wrap itself around her, with its gift of silence. He told her he needed sleep.
She closed her bag, ruffled his hair, kissed him lightly on the forehead, and said exactly what she’d said in nineteen forty-four when she’d visited him in the London hospital, “I always knew you were a fool.”
What was it Fish Wally had called him, not a fool . . . a dreamer?
He was woken from the dream—a host of cellos as mad and malevolent as Mickey Mouse’s barmy broomsticks—by the sound of the telephone. He looked at his watch. Four p.m. He’d been asleep for about five hours.
Jordan’s voice saying, “Troy?”
And then his own saying, “How did you find me?”
“What? Did you think Intelligence was somehow an arbitrary name for the service?”
“I’m rather tired right now . . .”
“We need to talk and there are things I can’t say on the phone.”
Troy shrugged this off, “I’m sure the Ritz has learnt to keep its secrets.”
By which he meant he was damn sure any spooks on the Ritz switchboard were British spooks.
“Jordan, I’ll be home this evening. Come ’round after six.”
Jordan was silent for a moment. Troy listened to him breathe, thought it a sad sound, and silently berated himself for imagining too much, then Jordan said, “It’s thanks to me you can go home this evening, you mad bugger. It’s all clean, although if I were you I’d consider redecorating that room. And if your neighbours mention a gas leak, just nod and look as though you know what they’re talking about. We had to explain our presence and get them out of the way somehow. Four body bags and a wheelbarrow take some disguising.”
He hung up.