'Don't know yet,' I said.
'Really? What about here? There's a bed here, if you like.' He crunched his teeth across half a piece of toast and ate it in one gulp. 'You could answer your own phone calls. Makes sense.'
'Well,' I said. 'For a night or two… very grateful.'
'Settled then.' He grinned cheerfully at Cassie. 'My daughter will be pleased. Got no wife, you know. She scarpered. Miranda gets bored, that's my daughter. Sixteen, needs a girl's company. Stay for a week. How long do you need?'
'We don't know,' Cassie said.
He nodded briskly. 'Take things as they come. Very sensible.' He casually picked up the paperknife and began cleaning his nails with it, reminding me irresistibly of Jonathan who throughout my childhood had done his with the point of a rifle bullet.
'I thought I'd go to Ireland at the weekend,' I said, 'and try to make peace with Donavan.'
Mort gave me a blinding grin, 'I hear you're a turd and an ignorant bastard, and should be dragged six times round the Curragh by your heels. At the least.'
The telephone standing on the table by his elbow rang only once, sharply, before Mort was shouting 'Hullo?' down the receiver. 'Oh,' he said, 'Hullo, Luke.' He made signalling messages to me with his eyebrows. 'Yes, he's here right now, having breakfast.' He handed over the receiver, saying, 'Luke rang your number first, he says.'
'William,' Luke said, sounding relaxed and undemanding. 'How are the new yearlings?'
'Fine. No bad reports.'
Thought I'd come over to see them. See what you've gotten me. I feel like a trip. Listen fella, do me a favour, make me some reservations at the Bedford Arms for two nights, fourteenth and fifteenth October?'
'Right' I said.
'Best to Cassie,' he said. 'Bring her to dinner at the Bedford on the fourteenth, OK? I'd sure like to meet her. And fella, I'll be going on to Dublin. You aiming to go to the Ballsbridge Sales?'
'Yeah, I thought to. Ralph Finnigan died… they're selling all his string.'
Luke sounded appreciative. 'What would you pick, fella? What's the best?'
'Oxidise. Two years old, well bred, fast, a prospect for next June's Derby and bound to be expensive.'
Luke gave a sort of rumbling grunt. 'You'd send it to Donavan?'
'I sure would.'
The grunt became a chuckle. 'See you, fella, on the fourteenth.'
There was a click and he was gone. Mort said, 'Is he coming?' and I nodded and told him when. 'Most years he comes in October,' Mort said.
He asked if we'd like to see the second lot exercise but I was anxious to be finished at the cottage so Cassie and I drove the six miles back to the village and stopped first at the pub. Mine host, who had been invisible earlier, was now outside in his shirtsleeves sweeping dead leaves off his doorstep.
'Aren't you cold?' Cassie said.
Bananas, perspiring in contrast to our huskies, said he had been shifting beer barrels in his cellar.
We explained about going away for a while, and why.
'Come inside,' he said, finishing the leaves. 'Like some coffee?'
We drank some with him in the bar but without the ice cream and brandy he stirred into his own. 'Sure,' he said amiably. 'I'll take in your mail. Also papers, milk, whatever you like. Anything else?'
'How absolutely extravagantly generous are you feeling?' Cassie said.
He gave her a sideways squint over his frothy mugful, 'Spill it,' he said.
'My little yellow car is booked in today for a service and its road test, and I just wondered…'
'If I'd drive it along to that big garage for you?'
'William will bring you back,' she said persuasively.
'For you, Cassie, anything,' he said. 'Straightaway.'
'Plaster off this afternoon,' she said happily, and I looked at her clear grey eyes and thought that I loved her so much it was ridiculous. Don't ever leave me, I thought. Stay around for ever. It would be lonely now without you… It would be agony.
We all went in my car along to the cottage and I left it out in the road because of Cassie wanting Bananas to back her little yellow peril out of the garage onto the driveway. She and he walked towards the garage doors to open them and I, half watching them, went across to unlock the front door and retrieve the letters which would have fallen on the mat just inside.
The cottage lay so quiet and still that our precautions seemed unnecessary, like crowd barriers on the moon.
Angelo is unpredictable, I told myself. Unstable as Mount St Helens. One might as well expect reasonable behaviour from an earthquake, even if one does ultimately wish him to prosper.
REMEMBER TIGERS.
There was a small banging noise out by the garage. Nothing alarming. I paid little attention.
Six envelopes lay on the mat. I bent down, picked them up, shuffled through them. Three bills for Luke, a rate demand for the cottage, an advertisement for books and a letter to Cassie from her mother in Sydney. Ordinary mundane letters, not worth dying for.
I gave one final glance round the pretty sitting-room, seeing the red check frills on the curtains and the corn dollies moving gently in the breeze through the door. It wouldn't be so long, I thought, before we were back.
The kitchen door stood open, the light from the kitchen window lying in a reflecting gleam on the white paint: and across the gleam a shadow moved.
Bananas and Cassie, I thought automatically, coming in through the kitchen door. But they couldn't. It was locked.
There was hardly time even for alarm, even for primaeval instinct, even for rising hair. The silencer of a pistol came first into the room, a dark silhouette against the white paint, and then Angelo, dressed in black, balloon-high with triumph, towering with malice, looking like the devil.
There was no point in speech. I knew conclusively that he was going to shoot me, that I was looking at my own death. There was about him such an intention of action, such a surrender to recklessness, such an intoxication of destructiveness, that nothing and no one could have talked him out of it.
With a thought so light-fast that it wasn't even conscious, I reached out to the baseball bat which still lay on the window sill. Grasped its handle end with the dexterity of desperation and swung towards Angelo in one continuous movement from twisting foot through legs, trunk, arm and hand to bat, bringing the weight of the wood down towards the hand which held the pistol with the whole force of my body.
Angelo fired straight at my chest from six feet away. I felt a jerking thud and nothing else and wasn't even astonished and it didn't even a fraction deflect my swing. A split second later the bat crunched down onto Angelo's wrist and hand and broke them as thoroughly as he'd broken Cassie's arm.
I reeled from the force of that impact and spun across the room, and Angelo dropped the gun on the carpet and hugged his right arm to his body, yelling one huge shout at the pain of it and doubling over and running akwardly out of the front door and down the path to the road.
I watched him through the window. I stood in a curious sort of inactivity, knowing that there was a future to come that had not yet arrived, a consequence not yet felt but inexorable, the fact of a bullet through my flesh.
I thought: Angelo has finally bagged his Derry. Angelo has taken his promised revenge. Angelo knows his shot hit me straight on target. Angelo will be convinced that he has done right, even if it costs him a lifetime in prison. In Angelo, despite his smashed wrist, despite his prospects, there would be at that moment an overpowering, screaming, unencompassable delirium of joy.
The battle was over, and the war. Angelo would be satisfied that in every physical, visible way, he had won.
Bananas and Cassie came running through the front door and looked enormously relieved to see me standing there, leaning a little against a cupboard but apparently unhurt.
'That was Angelo!' Cassie said.
'Yeah.'
Bananas looked at the baseball bat which lay on the floor and said, 'You bashed him.'
