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  Sighing audibly, she stood in the small entrance hallway for a moment, catching her breath, marvelling that she had neither drowned nor been blown to bits and pieces. She shook out the umbrella, pulled it into its miniaturized state, fastened its Velcro strap, and then reached into her handbag for her keys. They were lying on the bottom of the bag, alongside the muzzle of a Walther 9-mm Parabellum pistol. Casually, her hand moved the gun aside to get at the keys. She unlocked the glass-paneled inner door, and climbed the steps to the second floor of the building. There were two keys to the locks on her apartment door. She was home at last. She put her bag and the umbrella on the hall table, took off her soaking wet raincoat, hung it on the brass coatrack near the mirror, and then stepped out of her low-heeled walking shoes. Barefooted, she padded into the bedroom and began getting out of her wet clothes.

  The apartment was what they called a two-bedroom in this city, but which was in reality a one-bedroom with a small dining room that converted into either a second bedroom or what she used as a sitting room. The living room faced south and was quite sunny on good days, and the kitchen had been entirely redone only two years ago. There was only one bathroom, this off what was laughingly called the master bedroom, which—given its size—might better have been called the maid’s room. She unbuttoned her blouse, unzipped her skirt, yanked down her pantyhose, unclasped her bra, stepped out of her panties, and dumped the whole lot unceremoniously on the floor in a sodden little pile. Naked now, she looked at herself appraisingly in the full-length-mirror fastened to the closet door, dismayed as always to recognize yet another time that the good full breasts were beginning to sag ever so slightly, the once flat tummy was developing a most unattractive bulge. She supposed this was forty-nine. If so, she wondered what dread calamities fifty would bring. Eyes still a clear and penetrating blue, however, hair at least reminiscent of the blond it had been in her youth, silver threads beginning to show among the gold, but legs still long and lithe and shapely, a woman’s legs never changed. She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

  She was drying herself some fifteen minutes later when she heard the front door opening.

  She remembered all at once that she’d left her handbag on the table in the hall.

  Near the front door.

  Her pistol was in the handbag.

  “Yes?” she called.

  Silence.

  Perhaps she was mistaken.

  “Is someone there?” she called.

  More silence.

  And then a board creaking under someone’s footfall.

  She dropped the towel at once, stepped swiftly out of the bathroom, and was moving toward the bedroom where she kept a second pistol in the nightstand beside the—

  He loomed suddenly in the narrow hallway.

  A giant of a man wearing a black trenchcoat and a black rainhat pulled low on his forehead, black gloves, a black pistol in his right hand, it looked like a Colt, it suddenly exploded.

  The first bullet was low, he’d been going for her throat, the muzzle of the gun had been tilted up toward her head. It shattered her clavicle instead, sent her reeling back from the impact, colliding with the wall, bouncing off the wall in a frantic half-turn toward the bedroom, the gun, the spare gun in the—

  The second bullet took her in the back, high up between the shoulder blades. It knocked her stumbling forward through the entrance door of the bedroom, sent her falling to the floor beside the small pile of damp clothing she had removed not twenty minutes ago. On her knees, she scrabbled toward the bed, threw herself headlong across the bed, and was stretching to reach the night-stand on the far side when the third bullet took her at the back of her head. She did not feel this one. It blew out her forehead and spattered tissue and bone and brain matter onto the wall and onto the top surface of the nightstand where the Browning automatic rested on a pile of pink panties in the top drawer.

  The man leaned over her and fired again, unnecessarily, into what was left of her head. Then he hurriedly left the apartment and walked out into what was now a cold, slow, steady drizzle.

  2

  The next holiday would be the Fourth of July.

  Independence Day.

  It said so on the mimeographed sheet tacked to the bulletin board on the wall opposite Geoffrey’s desk. This was one of the easier ones. Like Christmas or Good Friday. Some of the others—like Martin Luther King, Jr., Day or Memorial Day—were a bit more difficult for an Englishman to remember, no less comprehend.

  The mimeographed notice had been sent round at the beginning of the year, two copies to each registry, intended to be seen by all staff in the Hong Kong Office, the Embassy in Washington, the North America Department FCO, the UN Department FCO, the Resident Clerk FCO, and all Consular Posts in the USA. It was flanked on Geoffrey’s bulletin board by another mimeographed sheet listing the addresses and telephone numbers of all British Consulate General offices in the United States and yet another sheet listing all the police precinct telephone numbers here in New York City.

  Actually, Geoffrey was not at the moment the least bit interested in any of the mimeographed information fliers. He was, instead, consulting a properly printed sheet that had been produced by the Cartographic and Map Section and distributed early last year to every British Consulate in the world, including the one here in New York. Its headline, boldly marching across the top of the page the way the redcoats must have done at Lexington or Concord, read:

  STANDARD TIME ZONE EQUIVALENTS AT FCO OVERSEAS POSTS WHEN 12 NOON (GMT) IN LONDON

  The letters GMT stood for Greenwich Mean Time.

  The letters FCO stood for Foreign Consular Office.

  The FCO for which Geoffrey worked here in New York was called the British Consulate-General, and it was located on the ninth floor of an office building on Third Avenue, between Fifty-first and Fifty-second streets. From Geoffrey’s corner office, he could look south for quite a ways downtown, and he could also look west across Third Avenue to the front of the Seventeenth Precinct across the street. He was, in fact, looking east this morning, if spiritually rather than actually; he was consulting the printed Overseas Posts chart to ascertain what time it was in Kathmandu.

  It was now 9:00 A.M. on a bright Monday morning, the twenty-second of June. Adjusting for Daylight Savings Time, which had last month sprung the clocks ahead both here and in London, Greenwich Mean Time was now 2:00 P.M., which made it 6:40 P.M. in Kathmandu, which did not adjust its clocks to suit the seasonal fashions, and which was rumored to be the second worst foreign post to which a person could ever be assigned.

  At 5:00 P.M. Kathmandu time, Alison would have taken her leave of Snuffy, as Her Majesty’s Consul-General there was familiarly called (although his proper name was Sherwood Spencer Hughes), and would by now be showering and dressing before leaving for dinner at either the Del Annapurna or the Soaltee Oberoi, both five-star hotels. He would give her a bit more time to put on the finishing touches, and then he would call her at 10:00 A.M. sharp here in New York, which would catch her at 7:40 P.M. before she left her apartment. There in the shadow of the Himalayas, they dined late.

  The worst foreign post, of course …

  Well, actually, there seemed to be several.

  Saudi Arabia. Oh, dear Lord, the stories he had heard about that place! Or the Ivory Coast. And long-time foreign servants had told him it was a toss-up between Ceylon and Ulan Bator as to which was the most utterly boring. But they all agreed that Dakar had to be the absolute worst in the world, perhaps the entire uni—

  The telephone rang.

  For a brief delirious moment, he imagined it might be Alison calling him!

  He turned from the bulletin board and the benign gaze of Queen Elizabeth staring at him from a poster above it, snatched the receiver from its cradle, and said somewhat breathlessly, “British Consulate, Turner speaking.”

  “Yes, hello,” a man’s voice said. Nasal and veddy veddy British. A Colonel Blimp adrift in Manhattan, the first Distre
ssed British National of the week.

  “Yes, sir, how may I help you?” Geoffrey asked.

  Three minutes past nine on a Monday morning, and already a DBN on the line.

  “Yes, hello, can you hold a moment, please?” the man said.

  “Certainly,” Geoffrey said, and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  He was about to hang up when the man came back on the line.

  “Yes, sorry,” he said, “my wife was bending my ear. What I need to know, young man …”

  Geoffrey wondered how the man knew he was young.

  “… is how a person would go about establishing residency in the U.K., do y’follow me?”

  “Are you a British national, sir?” Geoffrey asked.

  “I am indeed. Born and bred in Manchester.”

  “Then, sir, why would you need …?”

  “No, no, this is for a friend of mine,” the man said. “A Yank. Plans to move to Kent, lovely spot, d’you know it? Hawkhurst? Quite lovely.”

  “Yes, sir, quite lovely indeed.”

  “My friend’s sixty-seven years old, been retired for some time now. Can you tell me what the requirements would be?”

  “To apply for entry clearance as a person of independent means?”

  “Well, yes, I should imagine that’s what he’d be. Is that what you call it? A person of independent means?”

  “Yes, sir. If, in fact, that’s what he is. In which case, he would need to prove that he has under his control, and disposable in the U.K., a sum of not less than a hundred-and-fifty thousand pounds …”

  “That much, eh?”

  “Yes, sir, or income of not less than fifteen-thousand pounds a year.”

  “I should imagine he gets at least that much in retirement pensions, shouldn’t you think? Fifteen-thousand pounds?”

  “I have no idea, sir.”

  “Well, I shall have to ask him then, shan’t I?”

  “Yes, sir, that would seem a good idea. And then, if he wishes to apply, he can write to this office for the proper forms.”

  “Thank you so very much, young man. You’ve been most helpful.”

  “Happy to’ve been of service, sir,” Geoffrey said, and put the receiver back on its cradle, still wondering how the man had known he was young. Something in his voice? His telephone manner? Surely, if the DBN had been standing here before him, looking at him across the desk, he’d have seen nothing about Geoffrey to indicate he was but twenty-four. For this was no callow-faced pimply youth growing a sparse mustache in a vain bid for maturity. Rather, here were the lean good looks of someone whose forebears were part Welsh and part Scottish, the smoldering dark eyes, the high cheekbones and thrusting jaw, the thick black hair, somewhat tousled now at a quarter past nine in the—

  The telephone again.

  He picked up the receiver.

  “British Consulate,” he said, trying to make his voice deeper. “Turner here.”

  Another DBN, a woman this time, reporting that her handbag had been stolen, along with all her money, her credit cards, and her passport. Not an unusual distress call. Geoffrey took at least one of these every day of the month, more of them in June, which was the busiest month. He asked the woman where she was staying, gave her the telephone number of the police precinct closest to her, and advised her to report the crime there and then to come directly here to file an application for a new passport.

  He hung up wondering whether the stolen passport activity was heavier in a city like Chicago or Houston. Detroit. That was probably the worst of the lot, but there wasn’t a British Consulate there. New York was a choice post, he still marvelled at the good fortune that had landed him such a plum as his second assignment. First crack out of the box had been Dublin, but one didn’t join the foreign service to be sent directly around the corner.

  He had entered the service as a vice consul at the age of twenty-two, with a good university degree—a first in History, actually—and coming in as a Grade-9, which paid a starting salary of twelve-thousand quid a year. This had been more than enough in Dublin, one could live there like a king on that amount of money. Here in New York, though, where he was living “on-Manhattan” as opposed to somewhere in the boonies, everything was much more expensive, and he could barely make ends meet at thirteen-five, his new Grade-8 salary.

  And he had to admit that the glamour of the city sometimes paled beside the incessant tiresomeness of the daily routine here in the Passport and Visa Section. Process some thirty-thousand visas annually, and another thirteen-thousand passports, and one could with justification call the repetition deadly dull. And when it got to be June, as somehow it always did, one might say the routine became numbing. He sometimes felt that if he never saw another Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Ghanaian, Indian, or Afghan applying for a visa to—

  And yet, there were times when New York …

  Well, not now. Certainly not now. The temperature had been insufferably hot since the beginning of the month, and now that the expected humidity was here—the Yank forecasters quaintly called it the Three H’s, for Hazy, Hot & Humid—there was no relief except out at the Hamptons, which seashore required hours of motoring to reach and tons of money to enjoy. He wondered abruptly if there was a chance in hell that Alison would join him on her holiday. He would ask her again tonight, when he—

  But why on earth wait? It was now a quarter to ten, and with a nine-hour and forty-minute—damn it, even Dakar didn’t have such a peculiar time-zone difference. Forty less fifteen came to … yes, it was seven twenty-five in Kathmandu, where Alison was undoubtedly all lipsticked and lovely. He would wait another five minutes and call her at seven-thirty on the Dorothy.

  The call went through without a hitch, miracle of miracles.

  Her voice sounded as clear and as sharp as if she were in a phone booth on Madison Avenue, rather than in a room thousands of miles away.

  “Are you coming to New York?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said.

  “Allie, please, you’ll love it here.”

  “It’s just that I miss London so terribly much,” she said.

  “Don’t you miss me?”

  “Of course, I do, Geoffrey, but … can’t you possibly time your holiday to coincide with mine? So that we can both go to London?”

  “I’ve been to London,” Geoffrey said. “I joined the foreign service to get away from bloody London.”

  “I just don’t know,” Alison said.

  “New York is a wonderful city,” he said. “It’s enchanted, Allie, you’ll love it. Especially during the summer. Even with the Three H’s. And …”

  “The three what?”

  “The Three H’s. Happiness, Humor and … uh … Halvah. Besides, don’t you want to help Mrs. Thatcher celebrate?”

  “Who? What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Mrs. Thatcher! She’ll be here on a personal visit, Allie …”

  “Well, who cares about that? I’ve seen her thousands of times on the telly. Even here in Nepal.”

  “Ah, yes, but have you ever danced in the same room with her?”

  “Done what?”

  “Danced, my dear. The light fantastic. There’ll be a big ball on the first, and we’re both invited.”

  “We are?”

  “Indeed. I’ve been handling a great many of the arrangements, you see …”

  “You have?”

  “Mmm, yes.”

  “And you say we’ve been invited to …”

  “Yes, she extended the invitation personally.”

  “Geoffrey, are you pulling my leg?”

  “Have I ever lied to you, darling? Our beloved former Prime Minister will be arriving at the end of the month, just before the Americans start their yearly celebration in honor of our eviction. Attila the Nun, the Iron Maiden, the Redoubtable Maggie, will be here in lieu of Mr. Major a day or two before you get here! So what do you say now, luv? Care to join us?”

&nbs
p; There was a long pause on the line.

  He waited for what seemed a lifetime.

  Then a voice said, “Excuse me, sir, you asked me to interrupt at …”

  “Yes,” he said, “just a moment, operator. Allie?”

  “Yes, Geoff.”

  “Anyway, sir, it’s three minutes.”

  “Thank you. Allie?”

  “Yes, Geoff.”

  He hesitated.

  “Please say yes.”

  There was another long pause.

  He thought he would die.

  He waited.

  “I don’t know, Geoffrey,” she said, at last. “It’s just that I really had my heart set on London, truly. I just miss London so terribly much.”

  “Well … think about it, would you?” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, will that be all right?”

  “Snuff’s having a party for staff tomorrow.”

  “I’ll call you after the party, all right?”

  “Well, try me, but I may be late. Goodbye, Geoff, I have to run now.”

  “Allie? Allie, wait a …”

  There was a click on the line.

  “Damn,” he said, and jiggled the rest bar. When the operator came on, he asked her for time and charges, and then leaned back in his chair and wondered why on earth he’d lied to Alison.

  His expertise, such as it was, lay in passports and visas, in which section he worked with a consul and three other vice consuls, all of them women, all of them British, all of them ugly. Normally, such a lowly serf would have had nothing whatever to do with the impending visit of someone so lofty as the Nun. But because this was a rare occasion for the consulate—her visits normally took her to California, to see her old buddy Ronnie—every available man and woman had been pressed into service to smooth the arrival and ease the passage of the former Lady from Number Ten. Even so, the extent of his involvement had been minimal at best. He had hardly, as he’d claimed to Alison, handled “a great many of the arrangements.” In fact, all he’d done …