He was in his hell-bent mood. Restless, questing eyes, flaring at anything, spoiling for collision.
‘Do you take requests?’ he yelled at the bandleader while they danced.
‘Whatever Madame desires, Señor.’
‘Then why not take the night off?’ Andy suggested as Fran swung him smartly out of earshot.
‘Andy, that’s not tempting God, that’s asking to get us killed,’ she told him severely while he paid for dinner with damp fifty-dollar bills dragged from the inside pocket of a new linen jacket by his local tailor.
In the first casino he sat at the big table, watching but not playing, while Fran stood protectively behind him.
‘Got a favourite colour?’ he asked her over his shoulder.
‘Isn’t that for God to decide?’
‘We do the colour, God does the luck. Rule o’ the game.’
He drank more champagne but didn’t place a bet. They know him, she thought suddenly as they left. He’s been here before. She could tell by their faces and knowing smiles and come-again-soons.
‘Operational,’ he said curtly when she taxed him.
At the second casino a security guard made the mistake of trying to frisk them. Things would have turned ugly if Fran had not produced her diplomatic card. Once again Andy watched the play but took no active part, while two girls at the end of the table kept trying to catch his eye and one even called to him, ‘Hi, Andy.’
‘Operational,’ he repeated.
The third casino was in a hotel she’d never heard of, in a bad part of town she had been told not to enter, in room 303 on the third floor, knock and wait. A huge bruiser patted Andy down and this time he did not object. He even advised Fran to let the man inspect her handbag. The croupiers stiffened as Fran and Andy entered the second room and a serious hush fell, turning heads and ending conversations: which was not surprising when you realised that Andy was asking for fifty thousand dollars’ worth o’ chips in five hundreds and thousands, don’t need those little ones, thanks, you can put ’em back where they came from.
And the next thing Fran knew, Andy was sitting at the croupier’s side and she was again standing behind him, and the croupier was a doughy, voluptuous whore with thick lips and a low halter-dress and small fluttery hands with red fingernails cut like claws and the wheel was spinning. And when it stopped Andy was ten thousand dollars better off because he was backing red. He played, so far as she could afterwards establish, eight or nine times. He had changed from champagne to Scotch. He doubled his fifty thousand dollars, which was apparently what he had set God as a target, then gave himself one last fling for a bit o’ fun and picked up another twenty thousand. He asked for a carrier bag and a taxi at the door, because he thought it would be silly to walk down the road with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in a bag and said Shepherd could fetch the bloody car tomorrow or give it away, he hated it.
But the sequence of these events remained disordered in Fran’s mind because all she could concentrate on while they were unfolding was her very first gymkhana when her pony which like every other pony in the world was called Misty took the first fence perfectly then bolted four miles down the main road to Shrewsbury with Fran hanging onto its neck and the traffic going past in both directions and nobody seeming to give a damn except herself.
‘The Bear came to my flat last night,’ Marta said, having closed Pendel’s cutting room door behind her. ‘He brought a friend in the police.’
It was Monday morning. Pendel sat at his worktable, adding the finishing touches to an Order of Battle of the Silent Opposition. He put down his 2H pencil.
‘Why? What are you supposed to have done?’
‘They wanted to know about Mickie.’
‘What about him?’
‘Why he comes to the shop so much, why he calls you at such crazy hours.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘They want me to spy on you,’ she said.