‘Okay. I lock the door.’
‘I’ll give three light knocks, then a loud one. Got it?’
‘Am I going to remember that?’
‘Of course you are.’
Then, because she was so much happier, he thought he would complete the cure by turning her round and making her admire their great achievement: nice clean walls and floor and furniture and, instead of a dead lover, just another Guararé firework casualty in an improvised bandage, sitting stoically by the door with his good eye open while he waited for his old pal to bring up the four-track.
Pendel had driven the four-track at a snail’s pace through the angels and the angels had slapped it as if it were a horse’s rump, and shouted Gee-up, gringo! and thrown fireworks under it, and a couple of lads had jumped on the rear bumper, and there had been an unsuccessful effort to get a beauty princess to sit on the bonnet, but she was scared to get her white skirt dirty and Pendel did not encourage her because it wasn’t a time to be giving lifts. Otherwise it had been an uneventful journey that gave him a chance to fine-tune his plan because, as Osnard had drummed into him in the training sessions, time spent in preparation is never time wasted, the great trick being to look at a clandestine operation from the point of view of everybody who was going to take part in it and ask yourself: what does he do? what does she do? where does everyone go when it’s over? and so on.
He gave three light knocks and one loud one but nothing happened. He did it again and there was a gay call of ‘Coming!’ and when Ana opened the door – half way because of Mickie being behind it – he saw by the glow from the square that she had brushed her hair down her back and put on a clean blouse that left her shoulders bare like the other angels, and that the verandah doors were open to encourage the smells of cordite and get rid of the smells of blood and disinfectant.
‘There’s a desk in your bedroom,’ he told her.
‘So?’
‘See if there’s a sheet of writing paper in it. And a pencil or a pen. Make me a card saying ambulance that I can put on the facia of the four-track.’
‘You’re going to pretend you’re an ambulance? That’s really cool.’
Like a girl at a party she skipped away to the bedroom while he took Mickie’s gun from its drawer and put it in his trouser pocket. He knew nothing about guns and this was not a big one, but it was fat for its size, as the hole in Mickie’s head had testified. Then as an afterthought he selected from a drawer in the kitchen a knife with a serrated edge and wrapped it in paper towelling before hiding it. Ana came back triumphant: she had found a child’s drawing book and some crayons and the only problem was that in her enthusiasm she had left out the T at the end, so the sign read ambulanca. But it was otherwise a good sign so he took it from her and went down the steps to the parked four-track and laid the sign on the facia and switched on the winking emergency lights to quell the people who were stuck in the street behind him, hooting at him to get out of the way.
Here humour also came to Pendel’s aid, for as he started to go back up the steps he turned to his critics and with a smile for all of them put his hands together in a praying gesture for their indulgence, then raised one finger to crave one minute, then pushed the door open and switched on the hall light to reveal Mickie with his bandaged head and one eye. At which most of the hooting and yelling subsided.
‘Put his jacket over his shoulders when I lift him up,’ he told Ana. ‘Not yet. Wait.’
Then Pendel stooped into the weightlifter’s crouch and remembered that he was strong, as well as treacherous and murderous, and that the strength was in his thighs and buttocks and stomach and across his shoulders, and that there had been enough occasions in the past when he had had to carry Mickie home and this was no different, except that Mickie wasn’t sweating or threatening to be sick or asking to be taken back to prison, by which he meant his wife.