“Thanks,” I said dryly.
Greg asked a few things about our time in Japan. Had we enjoyed it, for instance. Very much, we both said. And did we speak the language? Yes, we did. Fred had been a first secretary in the commercial department, spending his time oiling the wheels of trade. My own job had been to learn what was likely to happen on the political scene.
“Peter went to the lunches and cocktail parties,” Fred said, “drinking sake out of little wooden boxes instead of glasses.”
The customs and cadences of Japan still flowed strongly in my head, barely overlaid by the month in Mexico City. It was always an odd feeling of deprivation, leaving behind a culture one had striven intensely to understand. Not exactly postpartum blues, but departing-from-post blues, definitely.
The diners in the restaurant had gradually drifted away, leaving the four of us as the last to leave. Vicky and Greg went off to pack up their equipment and as a matter of course Fred and I divided the bill between us to the last cent.
“Do you want it in yen?” I asked.
“For God’s sake,” Fred said. “Didn’t you change some at the airport?”
I had. A habit. Fred took the notes and handed me some coins in return, which I pocketed. The Foreign Office was permanently strapped for cash and our basic pay came nowhere near the level of status and responsibility given us. I wasn’t complaining. No one ever entered the diplomatic service to get mega-rich. Fred said he would run me back to the airport to save me having to pay for another taxi, which was good of him.
Vicky and Greg returned, she carrying a large white handbag aglitter with multicolored stones outlined in thin white cord and he following with a large squashy holdall slung boyishly from one shoulder. We all four left the restaurant and stood for a while outside the door saying goodnights, Vicky and Greg making plans to find me the following day.
On the wall beside the door a glassed frame held a sample menu flanked by two eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of the singers, both taken, it was clear, a long time previously.
Vicky saw the direction of my eyes and made a small sad moue, philosophical with an effort. Her likeness, a striking theater-type glossy with her head and shoulders at a tilt, bright light shining on the forehead, stars in the eyes, tactful shadows over the beginnings of a double chin, must have been from twenty years earlier at least. Greg’s no-nonsense straight-ahead smile had few photographic tricks and was very slightly out of focus as if enlarged from a none-too-clear print. It too was an earlier Greg, thinner, positively masculine, strongly handsome, with a dark, now-vanished moustache.
Impossible to guess at Vicky’s character from that sort of picture, but one could make a stab at Greg’s. Enough intelligence, the complacency of success, a desire to please, an optimistic nature. Not the sort to lie about people behind their backs.
Final goodnights. Vicky lifted her cheek to me for a kiss. Easy to deliver.
“Our car’s down there,” she said, pointing to the distance.
“Mine’s over there,” Fred said, pointing the other way.
We all nodded and moved apart, the evening over.
“They’re nice people,” Fred said contentedly.
“Yes,” I agreed.
We climbed into his car and dutifully fastened the seat belts. He started the engine, switched on the lights, backed out of the parking space and turned the car to the general direction of the airport.
“Stop!” I yelled abruptly, struggling to undo the hampering seat-belt buckle so easily done up.
“What?”
Fred said, jamming foot on brake but not understanding. “What the hell’s wrong?”
I didn’t answer him. I got the wretched belt undone at last, swung open the car door and scrambled out, running almost before I had both feet on the ground.
In the passing beam of Fred’s headlights as he’d turned the car I’d seen the distant sparkle of Vicky’s sequined tunic and seen also that she was struggling, falling, with a dark figure crowding her, cutting half of her from my sight, a figure of unmistakable ill-will ... attacking.
I sprinted, hearing her cry out shrilly.
I myself yelled “Vicky, Vicky” in an attempt to frighten off the mugger, but he seemed glued to her like a leech, she on the ground and kicking, he close on her, hunched and intent.
No sign of Greg.
I reached the man over Vicky, cannoning into him to knock him away. He was heavier than I’d thought and not easily deterred, and far from running from me he seemed to view me as merely another mug to be robbed. He jabbed a strong fist at my face, a blow I ducked from nothing but instinct, and I tried catching him by the clothes and flinging him against a parked car.
No success. He connected with a fist to my chest that left me breathless and feeling as if he’d squashed my heart against my backbone. The face above the fists was a matter of darkness and narrow eyes: he was shorter than I and thicker.
I was losing the fight, which made me angry but not much more effective. It was hostility I was up against, I thought, not just greed. Behind the robbery, hatred.
Vicky, who had crawled away moaning, suddenly rose to her feet as if galvanized and came up behind our assailant. I saw her eyes momentarily over his shoulder, stretched wide with fear and full of determination. She took aim and kicked at him hard. He hissed fiercely with pain and turned towards her and I in turn kicked him, targeting nowhere special but hitting the back of his knee.
Vicky had her long scarlet nails up, her fingers bent like a witch. There was bright red blood in splashes down her tunic. Her mouth was stretched open in what looked in that dim light like the snarl of a wolf, and out of it came a shriek that began in the low register and rose to a fortissimo scream somewhere above high G.
It raised the hairs on my own neck and it broke the nerve of the thief. He took a stumbling step to go round her and then another, and belatedly departed at a shambling run.
Vicky fell weakly into my arms, the fighting fury turning fast to shakes and tears, her triumphant voice roughened and near incoherence.
“God. Oh God ... There were two of them ... Greg ...”
Headlights blazed at us, fast advancing. Vicky and I clutched each other like dazzled rabbits and I was bunching muscles to hurl us both out of the way when tires squealed to a stop and the black figure emerging like a silhouette through the bright beam resolved itself into the solid familiarity of Fred. The consul to the rescue. Good old Fred. I felt a bit light-headed, and stupid because of it.
“Is she all right?” Fred was asking me anxiously. “Where’s Greg?”
Vicky and I declutched and the three of us in unison looked for Greg.
He wasn’t hard to find. He was lying in a tumbled unconscious heap near the rear wheel on the far side of what turned out to be his and Vicky’s dark blue BMW.
There was a stunned moment of disbelief and horror. Then, crying out, Vicky fell on her knees beside him and I squatted down and felt round his neck, searching for the pulse under his jaw.
“He’s alive,” I said, relieved, straightening.
Vicky sniffed in her tears, still crying with distress. Fred, ever practical, said, “We’d better get an ambulance.”
I agreed with him, but before we could do anything a police car wailed with its siren down the road and drew up beside us, red, white and blue lights flashing in a bar across the car’s roof.
A big man in midnight blue trousers and shirt with insignia stepped out, bringing his notebook to the ready and telling us someone had just reported a woman screaming and what was it all about. Fast, I thought. Response time, spectacular. He had been cruising nearby, he said.
Greg began moaning before anyone could answer and struggled to sit up, appearing dazed and disoriented and startlingly old.
Vicky supported him round the shoulders. Looking at her with pathos and pain and gratitude, he saw the blood on her tunic and said he was sorry.
“Sorry!”
Vicky exclaimed blankly. “What for?”
He didn’t answer, but one could see what he meant: sorry that he hadn’t been able to defend her. It was encouraging, I thought, that he seemed to know where he was and what had happened.
The policeman unclipped a hand-held radio from his belt and called for the ambulance and then, with notable kindness, asked Vicky just what had occurred. She looked up at him and tried to answer, but the phrases came out unconnectedly and on jagged half-hysterical breaths, as if from splintered thoughts.
“Greg’s wallet . . . well, they banged his head on the car . . . shadows . . . didn’t see them . . . he was trying . . . you know, he was trying to take my
rings
. . . the plane tickets . . . it’s my daughter’s wedding . . . I’d’ve killed him . . .” She stopped talking as if aware it was gibberish and looked lost.
“Take your time, ma’am,” the policeman said. “When you’re ready.”
She took a visibly deep breath and tried again. “They were waiting . . . behind the car . . . I could kill them . . . They jumped on Greg when he went round . . . I hate them . . . I hope they die ...”
There were high-colored patches of extreme stress over her cheekbones and more strong flush marks on her jaw and down her neck. Blood on her neck, also; quite a lot of it.
“You’re doing good,” the policeman said.
He was about my age, I thought, with a natural kindness not yet knocked out of him by the system.
“My ear hurts,” Vicky said violently. “I could kill him.”
I supposed we’d all noticed but not done much about the source of the blood on her tunic. One of her lobes was jaggedly cut and steadily oozing. She turned her head slightly, and the other ear shimmered suddenly in the car’s lights, revealing a large aquamarine ringed by diamonds.
“Your earring,” Fred exclaimed, fishing his pockets for a handkerchief and not finding one. “You need a bandage.”
Vicky put a finger tentatively to her torn ear and winced heavily.
“The
bastard
,” she said, her voice shaking. “The bloody bastard. He tugged . . . he just
ripped . . .
he’s torn right through my ear.”
“Shouldn’t earrings come off more easily than that?” the policeman asked uncritically.
Vicky’s voice, high with rage and shock, said, “We bought them in Brazil.”
“Er . . .” the policeman said, lost.
“Vicky,” Fred said soothingly, “what does it matter if they came from Brazil?”
She gave him a bewildered look as if she couldn’t understand his not understanding.
“They don’t have butterfly clips on the back,” she told him jerkily. “They have butterfly screws. Like a nut and bolt. So they don’t fall off and get lost. And so people can’t steal them ...” Her voice died away into a sob, a noise it seemed suddenly that she herself disapproved of, and she sniffed again determinedly and straightened her shoulders.
Hanging on to her courage, I thought. Seesawing towards disintegration, hauling herself back. Agitation almost beyond her control, but not quite.
“And another thing,” she wailed, misery and anger fighting again for supremacy. “They stole my handbag. It’s got my passport . . . and, oh
hell,
my green card . . . and our tickets . . .” A couple of tears squeezed past her best resolutions. “What are we going to
do?”
The distress-filled plea was answered pragmatically by Fred, who said he wasn’t consul for nothing and he’d get her to her daughter’s wedding willy-nilly.
“Now, ma’am,” the policeman said, uninterested in travel arrangements, “can you give a description of these two men?”
“It was dark.” She seemed angry with him suddenly. Angry with everything. She said furiously, “They were dark.”
“Black?”
“No.” She was uncertain, besides angry.
“What then, ma’am?”
“Dark-skinned. I can’t think. My ear hurts.”
“Clothes, ma’am?”
“Black ... What does it matter? I mean ... they were so quick ... He was trying to pull my rings off . . .”
She extended her fingers. If the stones were real they were worth stealing.
“My engagement ring,” she explained. “Bastard didn’t get it, thanks to Peter.”
The urgent whipping siren of a dazzlingly lit ambulance split the night and paramedics spilled out purposefully, taking charge with professional heartiness and treating Vicky and Greg like children. The policeman told Vicky he would be following them to the hospital and would take a proper statement once her ear and Greg’s head were fixed, but she didn’t seem to take it in.
Two more police cars arrived fast with flashing lights and wailing sirens, disgorging enough blue-clad figures to arrest half the neighborhood, and Fred and I found ourselves with our hands on the car roof being frisked while explaining insistently that we were not in fact the muggers but instead the British consul, friends and witnesses.
The kindly original cop looked back fleetingly and said something I couldn’t hear in the bustle, but at least it seemed to blunt the sharpest of suspicions. Fred loudly reiterated his identity as British consul, a statement he was this time asked in a bullish fashion to substantiate. He was allowed to fetch out an oversized credit card, which announced—with photograph—his diplomatic status, thereby inducing a reluctant change of attitude.
Greg was on his feet. I took a step towards him and was stopped by a midnight blue arm.
“Ask him for his car keys,” I said. “If his car stays out here all night it will be stolen.”
Grudgingly the midnight blue presence yelled over his shoulder, and presently the information percolated back that Greg had dropped the keys by the car when he was attacked. Midnight-blue went to look, found the keys and, after consultation, gave them to Fred.
The uniforms seemed to be doing things at great speed, which no doubt came from much practice and was a regular pace for such an occasion. Vicky and Greg were helped into the ambulance, which at once departed, followed immediately by the first policeman. Other policemen fanned out into the surrounding area to search for the muggers should they still be around and hiding. Fat chance, I thought.