A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (13 page)

I remember freezing beneath the sheets, quite afraid to move.

A mistake, of course. Someone had mistaken the room. I should ignore the knock, and the visitor would shortly realize his error and stumble off (one naturally assumed he was drunk) to the room that contained the lady of his choice.

But there is something so imperative about a knock on one's door, so pregnant with opportunity. One is drawn irresistibly to wonder what is on the other side. The sensible course, naturally, is to pretend an uninvited visitor does not exist. But human beings
are not always sensible, are they? Particularly during the midnight hour. Just as we convince ourselves to play dead, the urge rises inside us to come alive. To discover what exists on the other side of the door: waiting, knocking, rattling your doorknob.

Opportunity or disaster.

So, in the spirit of recklessness, now enhanced by a tumbler of fine French brandy, I tightened the belt of my dressing gown and marched across the room in the direction of the summons.

“Nonsense,” I said. “We are inhabiting a room inside the finest hotel in Athens, not a back alley.”

I turned the knob and flung open the door, and there in the dim electric glow of the hallway stood a handsome dark-haired man in monochrome dinner dress, every detail crisp and immaculate and identical to the gentlemanly kit of Lord Silverton, except for the small gold stud that adorned the lobe of his left ear.

“Miss Truelove?” he said, and I had just enough time to recognize his accent as that of America, before his right hand appeared from behind his back to reveal a slim black pistol such as I had never seen before.

I stumbled backward. “Good God!”

“Just as I thought,” said a bored English voice behind me, and a pair of long arms took me by the shoulders and set me firmly aside from the doorway.

The intruder's face registered shock; he had not, presumably, expected Miss Truelove to be entertaining a male visitor at this late hour. (A reputation for virtue, I have often maintained, has innumerable uses.) Silverton wasted no time to press his advantage.
He knocked the pistol from the man's hand in one quick blow, and in the second, delivered almost immediately with his left fist, struck the jaw of the man himself.

Under the surprise of this assault, the intruder spun and crashed into the doorjamb. The impact, a rather sickening crunch, caused him to lose his feet and crumple to the floor. I screamed and ran for the brandy bottle. I am not sure whether my original intent was to drink or to strike.

I found, however, that the bottle was empty, which made my decision straightforward. I turned back to the doorway, where his lordship had hauled the intruder upward by his lapels and flung him, groaning, into a chair. “For God's sake, Truelove,” he said, chest heaving, “would you kindly restrain yourself, in future, from opening your door to strange men in the middle of the night?”

“How could I have known that he had a gun?” I bent to pick up the pistol.

“Don't touch that. Because it is the middle of the night, and because at least two men have already died in connection with this affair. A healthy sense of caution, my dear, is all I ask.” He placed his hands on his hips and stared at the stranger, who lay sprawled in the chair with his head canted awkwardly to one side, exposing the gold earring to the light. “At least we have him now, however.”

My heart still struck against my ribs. I glanced back down at the gun on the floor. “You see? If I hadn't opened the door—”

“Yes, yes.” Silverton leaned closer to peer at the earring. “Come look at this, Truelove. Tell me what you see.”

I stepped carefully around his lordship and bent, squinting, in the direction of the intruder's ear.

“It is an ax, I believe. A double-bladed ax.”

“What I thought. Right-ho. Let's see about this gun, then,” he said, and bent over to pick it up from the floor.

In the instant he turned away, the intruder's eyes flew open.

“Watch out!” I shouted, lifting the brandy bottle, and Silverton whipped around just as the intruder launched himself from the chair.

I am sorry to say that his lordship was caught flat-footed, despite my warning. The two men went sprawling across the floor, Silverton beneath, while the stranger wrestled to get in a blow. He struck once, on Silverton's chin. I brought down my brandy bottle, which glanced against that dark-haired skull and rolled to the floor. Silverton swore and heaved upward, but while his lordship was longer and perhaps even stronger, the other man enjoyed a heavy burliness that Silverton could not quite shake off. They rolled instead, over and over across the rug, like an ungainly pair of mating insects, grunting and swearing at each other. The room filled with the sweat of masculine combat. I found the brandy bottle and swung it again, just missing Silverton's shoulders, but the momentum of the swing caused me to lose my balance and tangle my legs in the voluminous folds of my dressing gown, and I went down in an inglorious tumble of damask and cotton.

When I lifted my head an instant later, I saw that the intruder—now underneath—had taken hold of the brandy bottle in his large palm. Silverton saw it, too, and uttered a vulgarism I shall not dare to record. I heaved myself forward, reaching for the bottle, but I had too little leverage from my tangled legs, and only succeeded in deflecting the man's silky black arm as it descended, armed with bottle, toward the back of Silverton's head.

The bottle shattered, I screamed, the men rolled over, and the intruder leapt to his feet. My foot nudged against something hard:
the gun. I bent down, grasped the handle between my palms, and brought it up before me almost as if I knew how to fire it.

“Stand back!” I said sharply, and the man jumped around and gazed at me, eyes wide and wary. In that instant, Silverton leapt to his feet and delivered a crunching blow to the left side of the intruder's jaw.

The man staggered back, turned, and ran out the door.

“You're bleeding!” I exclaimed.

“The devil take it!”

Silverton snatched the gun from my hands and ran after the man, disappearing around the edge of the doorway in a flash.

I uttered an exclamation of my own, which I fear does me no credit, and hesitated between following the two men into a public hotel corridor in a state of undress, and finding the telephone to ring the front desk. (To tell them
what
, I was not quite sure.)

I had just chosen the former course of action and spun around the corner of the doorway, when a shattering bang reached my ears, unlike any sound I had ever heard, so precise and mechanical and
terrible
that I stopped where I was, impaled by mortal terror, recording the crash of my heart in my fingertips and unable to move a single limb.

I cannot determine how many minutes I stood there in the hallway. It was perhaps not even one, but it seemed like hours. The hotel had gone quiet in shock. Not even the floorboards dared to creak. I smelled something faintly acrid.

Silverton?
I whispered, or perhaps I only said the word in my head. I started forward down the corridor, but I had only taken a few steps when the marquess himself trotted around the far
corner, shaking his head, examining the gun in his hands. He looked up, and I gasped at the sight of his face, smeared about the neck with bright blood.

“He's gone,” said his lordship.

“Dead?” I gasped.

“No, just gone. Away. Fled round the corner. I knocked away most of a pilaster with this, however.” He stopped before me and turned the pistol in his palms. He reeked of copper, of blood and pipe tobacco and brandy and
smoke
, that awful scorched smell.

“You're hurt.”

“I'm all right. Come along.” He took my arm and pulled me back into the hotel room and shut the door in a bang behind us. I jumped. He tossed the gun onto the bed and turned to me. “Are
you
all right, Truelove?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“No, you're not. You've never been in a fight before, have you? A real one, I mean, not that dustup on the road today.” He took out his handkerchief, wiped his neck, and frowned at the result. “Might I perhaps enjoy the use of your lavatory sink?”

“Of course.”

When he emerged a minute or two later, his jacket off and his collar pink and loosened, I was sitting on the extreme edge of the slipper chair, staring at the gun where it sat on the bed.

“My collar's ruined,” he said, “but I believe Brown can save the shirt. It's a shame we drank all the brandy already. You look as if you could use a glass or two.”

“Yes. I mean no. I don't want any brandy.”

He grinned. “First thing tomorrow, I'm going to instruct you in the proper swing of a brandy bottle. In the meantime, pack your things.”

“Pack my things?”

“We're leaving for Piraeus this instant. I'll wire the ship so they can get the steam up by the time we've arrived.” He crossed the room to the bed and picked up the gun.

I felt that faint, wobbly enervation that follows a great shock, and I only wanted to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head. “This instant? It can't wait until morning?”

“What do you think, Truelove?”

“I don't know what to think.”

His lordship ran a finger along the barrel of the pistol. His jacket was slung over one elbow. Beneath his white waistcoat, his shoulder blades appeared and disappeared with the movement of his arms. He said, without looking at me, “Either we leave tonight, my dear, or I sleep in your room with this gun in my lap, cocked and ready to fire. Does that clear up the matter for you?”

I thought,
A man just tried to kill us.
But the words did not quite penetrate my understanding. Like the blow from the goatherd this morning, it was all too unreal: a story one had heard but not actually experienced for oneself. I put my hand to my cheek, which had begun to throb.

“Quite clear. Obviously the matter has grown quite—quite urgent. It's just that I don't understand why. Why Mr. Haywood's affairs have become a matter of such—of such deadly earnest.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “It's a damned peculiar case, that's all. I find I've become a trifle anxious to see my old pal Max standing safe and sound before me, wondering what all the bloody fuss is about. You'll pardon my language.” He slipped the gun into a jacket pocket and turned around. “You're worried, Truelove. Don't worry. Leave it all to me.”

“I can't do that. For one thing, I suspect you can't see past your nose without those spectacles.”

His smile blinded me. “I shan't let anyone hurt you, you know.”

“It's easy for you to say. You're used to all this.”

Silverton shook his head slowly and took a step in my direction. The jacket still hung from his arm, weighed down by the newly acquired gun, and his smile had begun to fade, like a falling sun. When I found his eyes, I saw that they had lost their brightness, that he looked as if he had lived in them forever.

“My dear Truelove. One never gets used to this.”

A firm voice came from the corner of the room:
Just as I warned you, Miss Truelove. You're losing your head already.

But no. That was ridiculous. If that voice had really spoken, Lord Silverton would surely start and turn in amazement, and he did not. No, he did not even twitch that flexible left eyebrow at the words I heard so clearly. So it was all in my imagination, wasn't it? A figment, a hallucination of my disordered brain.

I stood in the center of the room: silent, white, trembling. Lord Silverton was looking at me as if he expected me to speak. When I didn't, he reached out and placed a heavy, warm hand on my shoulder.

“Now pack your things, before the hotel staff comes out of its shock and bursts into this room. We've got enough explaining to do already, eh?”

I turned around to gather the photographs from the white-clothed table, and thought,
You have no
idea.