it is he sits on. I was at school with him. Why did he ring me up? He rang me up. On the telephone. He brings me back to town all this way and when we get here he says he can’t come to the villa after all, there’s been a coup.
‘I’ll take you back to the villa,’ Lise says. ‘Come on, get in the car with me. I’ve got a car outside.’
The man says, ‘Last time I saw the Sheikh it was ‘38. He came on safari with me. Rotten shot if you know anything about big game. You’ve got to wait for the drag. They call it the drag, you see. It kills its prey and drags it into the bush then you follow the drag and when you know where it’s left its prey you’re all right. The poor bloody beast comes out the next day to eat its prey, they like it high. And you only have a few seconds. You’re here and there’s another fellow there and a third over here. You can’t shoot from here, you see, because there’s another hunter there and you don’t want to shoot him. You have to shoot from over here or over there. And the Sheikh, I’ve known him for years, we were at school together, the bloody fool shot and missed it by five feet from a fifteen-foot range.’
His eyes look straight ahead and his lips quiver.
‘You’re not my type after all,’ Lise says. ‘I thought you were, but I was away out.’
‘What? Want a drink? Where’s Jenner?’
She gathers up the handles of her bags, picks up her book and looks at him and through him as if he were already a distant memory and leaves without a good-bye, indeed as if she had said good-bye to him long ago.
She brushes past a few people at the vestibule who look at her with the same casual curiosity with which others throughout the day have looked at her. They are mainly tourists; one exceptional sight among so many others does not deflect their attention for very long. Outside, she goes to the car park where she has left Carlo’s car, and does not find it.
She goes up to the doorman. ‘I’ve lost my car. A Fiat 125. Have you seen anyone drive off with a Fiat?’
‘Lady, there are twenty Fiats an hour come in and out of here.’
‘But I parked it over there less than an hour ago. A cream Fiat, a bit dirty, I’ve been travelling.’
The doorman sends a page-boy to find the parking attendant who presently comes along in a vexed mood since he has been called from conversation with a more profitable client. He owns to having seen a cream-coloured Fiat being driven away by a large fat man whom he had presumed to be the owner.
‘He must have had extra keys,’ says Lise.
‘Didn’t you see the lady drive in with it?’ the doorman says.
‘No, I didn’t. The royalty and the police were taking up all my time, you know that. Besides, the lady didn’t say anything to me, to look after her car.’
Lise says, opening her bag, ‘Well, I meant to give you a tip later. But I’ll give you one now.’ And she holds out to him the keys of Carlo’s car.
The doorman says, ‘Look, lady, we can’t take responsibility for your car. If you want to see the porter at the desk he can ring the police. Are you staying at the hotel?’
‘No,’ says Lise. ‘Get me a taxi.’
‘Have you got your licence?’ says the parking attendant.
‘Go away,’ Lise says. ‘You’re not my type.’ He looks explosive. Another of tomorrow’s witnesses.
The porter is meanwhile busy helping some newcomers out of a taxi. Lise calls out to the taxi-driver, who nods his agreement to take her on.
As soon as the passengers are out, Lise leaps into the taxi.
The parking attendant shouts, ‘Are you sure it was your own car, lady?’
She throws Carlo’s keys out of the window on to the gravel and directs the taxi to the Hotel Metropole with tears falling over her cheeks.
‘Anything the matter, lady?’ says the driver.
‘It’s getting late,’ she says, weeping. ‘It’s getting terribly late.’
‘Lady, I can’t go faster. See the traffic.’
‘I can’t find my boy-friend. I don’t know where he’s gone.
‘You think you’ll find him at the Metropole?’
‘There’s always a chance,’ she says. ‘I make a lot of mistakes.’
SIX
The chandeliers of the Metropole, dispensing a vivid glow upon the just and unjust alike, disclose Bill the macrobiotic seated gloomily by a table near the entrance. He jumps up when Lise enters and falls upon her with a delight that impresses the whole lobby, and in such haste that a plastic bag that he is clutching, insufficiently sealed, emits a small trail of wild rice in his progress towards her.
She follows him back to his seat and takes a chair beside him. ‘Look at my coat,’ she says. ‘I got mixed up in a student demonstration and I’m still crying from the effect of tear-gas. I had a date at the Hilton for dinner with a very important Sheikh but I was too late, as I went to buy him a pair of slippers for a present. He’d gone on safari. So he wasn’t my type, anyway. Shooting animals.’
‘I’d just about given you up,’ says Bill. ‘You were to be here at seven. I’ve been desperate.’ He takes her hand, smiling with glad flashes of teeth and eyes. ‘You wouldn’t have been so unkind as to have dinner with someone else, would you? I’m hungry.’
‘And my car got stolen,’ she says.
‘What car?’
‘Oh, just a car.
