I opened the car door and reached inside as if I was finding something, but I was actually getting it out of my pocket. I turned around and held the shiny steel ball out to Kurt in my open palm, like giving a piece of sugar to a horse.
He was dumbstruck. He stared at the ball and then at my face, as if searching for words.
“Where the fuck did you get that?” he said. He made a grab for it, but I closed my hand and easily beat his grasp.
“Tell me what is it and I’ll tell you where I found it,” I said.
“You give me that back right now,” he said, winding himself into a rage.
“You can have it back if you tell me what it is,” I said, sounding like a teacher who has confiscated some type of electronic gadget from a miscreant schoolboy but doesn’t know what it is.
Without warning, the big guy swung the polo mallet and struck me on the forearm. He was partially behind me, and I didn’t see the mallet coming until the very last millisecond. I had no time to avoid it, but, thankfully, I had time to relax as he hit me. Otherwise, I think he would have broken my arm completely in two. As it was, it wasn’t great. The mallet caught me just above my right wrist. There was a sharp crack, and my arm went instantly numb. I dropped the shiny metal ball. It rolled away towards Kurt. As he stooped to pick it up, I dived into the car, slammed the door and pushed the central locking button.
My right arm wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get the key in the ignition, which was on the right side of the steering column. I spent valuable seconds trying and failing before leaning completely over to my right and getting the key into the slot using my left hand. I turned the key, started the car and threw the automatic gearshift into reverse with my left hand. The rear window of the Buick disintegrated behind me. I ignored it. I looked through the space where the glass had been and gunned the engine. The car leaped backwards towards the mallet-wielding maniac behind me. Surprisingly, he deftly sidestepped the car and swung the mallet again in my direction. The passenger’s door window shattered, showering me with tiny squares of glass. Kurt was at the driver’s door, banging on the window and hauling on the door handle, but he had no mallet and his fist was no match for the toughened glass.
I braked hard to a stop and shoved the gearshift back into drive with my elbow. But the mallet maniac hadn’t finished. As the car accelerated forward towards the gate and the highway, he took one last swing. The business end of the mallet came right through the laminated windshield in front of the passenger’s seat, and stuck there. I didn’t stop. I caught a glimpse of the look of panic on the man’s face as I shot off with the mallet head stuck firmly through the glass. He had his hand equally firmly stuck in the twisted leather loop on the handle end.
In the rearview mirror, I saw the loop pluck him off his feet. I heard him strike the side of the vehicle somewhere low down on the nearside rear door, but I wasn’t going to stop, not even if I had to drag him all the way back to Chicago. As it was, he somehow disentangled his hand and dropped away before I turned out onto Silvernail Road and sped away towards the relative safety of the thundering eighteen-wheelers on I-94, the polo mallet still sticking out sideways from the windshield.
After a mile or so, I pulled over to the shoulder and managed to extricate the mallet. The leather loop on the handle had broken. I hoped that the wrist that had so recently been in it would be broken as well. I threw it on the backseat and set off again, glad that I wouldn’t now have to explain to any highway patrol why I had a polo mallet stuck out of my windshield. The Buick was missing two windows completely, and had a two-inch-diameter hole plus multiple cracks in the windshield, but I could live with that. The fact that I was alive at all was what really mattered to me.
“Damn,” I shouted out loud. Not only had I got my arm injured, and I was pretty sure that a bone had been broken by that blow, but I had also lost the shiny metal ball.
I’ll have to go and get another, I thought, and turned the car around at the next junction. I just hoped that Dorothy Schumann hadn’t had second thoughts about lending me one of the balls since Caroline and I had been at her house the previous day.
My trip to the Lake Country Polo Club had taught me two useful pieces of information. First, the balls were significant. How exactly they were significant, I hadn’t yet worked out. And second, if some of his staff were anything to go by, Mr. Komarov was definitely not on the side of the angels.
BY THE TIME I got back to the Hyatt Hotel, my arm was hurting like hell. I pulled up at the valet parking booth and received some very strange looks from the staff. I ignored them, picked up the polo mallet from the backseat and went into the lobby. I tossed the car keys to the concierge and explained to him that some of the glass had got damaged and would he deal with it with the rental company.
“Certainly, sir,” he said. He looked briefly at the polo mallet. “Right away, sir.” Absolutely nothing fazes a good concierge.
I went up in the elevator and lay on Caroline’s bed. The bedside clock showed me that it was three o’clock. The orchestra were just starting their second rehearsal. I realized that I wasn’t very comfortable, so I removed everything from my pockets and put it all on the bedside table: wallet, money, room key, handkerchief and a shiny metal ball about the size of a golf ball and made in two halves that was somehow crucial to the bombing of Newmarket racetrack some four thousand miles away.
Mrs. Schumann hadn’t been at all pleased to hear that I had already lost the ball that she had been so insistent that I should keep safe. However, I eventually managed to coax her into handing over another ball, but only after I had convinced her that it would be decisive in finding out why her Rolf had been so injured.
Maybe I had been convincing myself too.
17
C aroline returned between the final rehearsal and the evening performance to find me still lying on her bed, and in a bad way. In spite of me swallowing copious painkillers, my arm was so sore that every movement caused me to wince.
“You need a doctor,” Caroline said. She was very concerned, and not a little frightened.
“I know, but I don’t want to use my credit card to pay for it,” I said.
“Do you really think someone can trace you from your credit card?” she said.
“I’m not taking the chance,” I said. “Especially after today. Who knows what Komarov is capable of? I think he’s somehow responsible for killing nineteen people at the Newmarket races. He won’t worry about killing one more.” Or two, I thought, and I didn’t like it. “How long have you got before the performance?”
“About an hour before I have to go,” she said.
“It will have to be enough,” I said. “Come on, let’s go, and bring your credit card with you.”
“How do you know they can’t trace mine as well?” she asked, suddenly alarmed.
“I don’t,” I said. “But I think it’s less likely that they will search for Miss Aston when trying to find Max Moreton.”
We went by taxi to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital emergency room on Erie Street, with me biting back a scream with every bump, with every pothole.
As at any accident-and-emergency department in England, there were endless forms to fill out and lots of waiting time. Here, though, as well as the appointments with the medical staff there was also the all-important one with the hospital cashier.
“Do you have insurance, Mr. Moreton?” asked the casually dressed young woman behind the counter.
“I believe I do have some travel insurance, but I can’t find the details,” I said.
“Then I’ll put ‘no’ down on the form,” she said, and check-marked it accordingly. “Do you therefore intend to self-pay for your treatment?”
“Yes,” I said. “At least for the time being.”
She worked away for a while. “As you are a non-U.S. citizen, I will need full prepayment of this estimate before you can be treated,” she said.
“How much is it?” I asked her. She pushed a piece of paper towards me with her final figure at the bottom. “I only want my arm seen to,” I said, reading it. “I don’t want to buy the whole damn hospital.”
She wasn’t amused. “Full prepayment of this estimate will be needed before any treatment is given,” she
