The Bohemian Girl

‘So he was. But like you pointed out, General, black bowlers is tuppence a hundred.’

‘Well, red moustaches aren’t. And at New Scotland Yard! Hell’s bells, that’s brazen.’

He had shouted his way up the stairs and into the sitting room, had shucked himself out of his overcoat and tossed it at Atkins, thrown his hat at a table and flung himself into his armchair before Atkins managed to say, ‘You got a telegram. Telegram from her, eh? On the sideboard.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you say so?’

Atkins muttered something that sounded like ‘Just listen to yourself’ and wandered away with the coat. Denton tore the telegram apart and read:

TOMORROW 5 PM ABC BARBICAN STOP JANET STRIKER

His heart jumped, even though the message was as impersonal as a military order. He tried to remember his own message to her. Had it been as heartless? Had he started them off wrong? He threw himself down again. He remembered her choice once before of an ABC — a shop of the Aerated Bread Company, cheap and faceless. Five tomorrow — twenty-four hours more, good God.

Returning, Atkins said, ‘You’ve a parcel, too.’ He was standing now behind Denton’s chair; next to him, Rupert was cleaning his private parts. Atkins handed Denton a battered package. ‘From the garden of Central Europe.’ He had been holding it with both hands; Denton took it, found why: it was heavy. Atkins wasn’t leaving, his posture said; he wanted to see what was in the package. To make sure that he did, he held out his pocket-knife, already open.

The package was tied with heavy string that had been stuck down with sealing wax in six places; the paper, brown, cheap, had been so battered in its travels that it looked like lizard skin, but the string had held everything together. The stamps were triangular, green and purple, now peeling. Denton cut the string, then enlarged a tear in the front of the package to reveal something like a tea box, which the knife made quick work of — the small nails in the lid could be prised up — and Denton dumped the contents into his chair: a tied packet of envelopes with British stamps, the name Striker in the upper left corners (his heart lurched); two objects wrapped in the same brown paper and tied with the same string, one long, one short, both heavy; and, in a separate envelope, a photograph and a sheet of embossed notepaper. ‘From Colonel Cieljescu,’ he said.

‘The Transylvanian Napoleon.’

‘Now, now-’ Colonel Cieljescu had subjected Denton to long, almost nightly monologues about ‘culture’, most of which Denton hadn’t understood because he didn’t know Central European history, but the gist of it had been that English was a barbaric language and America was a desert. ‘I think it was the Colonel who got us sprung from that hole.’

‘Katya said it was God’s will.’

‘Yes, but the Colonel had the keys. Somebody left the doors open, and if you tell me it was an angel, I’ll fire you.’ He pocketed the letters from Janet Striker, then tore open the two heavy wrappings: one was his Navy Colt, the other his derringer.

‘Must be he don’t fancy antiques,’ Atkins said.

Denton pulled out the note. Under an embossed double eagle and the name of the prison where they had almost starved was the date in blue ink — three weeks before, a month after their ‘escape’ — and a message:

My dear American friend Denton,

Now you read this I am believing you are in your own bed. I am desolated to not have you my guest any more for our long chats anent art. For remembrance, herewith is new photo of me for you. Also I am forced by duty to keep your writings which you say is fiction but may be espionage, one day you must read Alfons Duchinatz a real author. Plus some letters I am sending you were overlooked in giving to you during your stay with us. Your vehicle I have with gratest regret empounded for military contrabandage. Hoping you are found good in health, Your esteamed friend, Cieljescu, Anton-Pauli, Colonel, Imperial Corps of Mounted Infantry and Guards, by the Grace of His Imperial Highness, Franz Joseph, Archduke of Austria and Hungary. .

Denton picked up the photograph. A large man in uniform, recognizably the Colonel, was sitting in the passenger seat of a motor car, recognizably Denton’s Daimler 8. The man was smiling. Beside him, a driver, less clear, sat with both hands grasping the wheel as if to keep it from flying away.

Denton burst into laughter. ‘It’s our motor car! He sent back my guns and he kept the car!’

Atkins looked over his shoulder. He groaned. ‘That’s Katya beside him. That’s Katya!’

‘God works in mysterious ways.’

Atkins snatched his knife from Denton’s hand and turned for the stairs. ‘I’m sure there’s an explanation. She was to me an angel!’ He strode away, and Denton heard him mutter as he closed the door, ‘The bitch-’

Denton found himself filled again with something that felt good — contentment, perhaps, even happiness. At once, with the two pistols in his lap, he read Mrs Striker’s letters. Written weeks before, they were about trivia — her job with the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women, her alcoholic mother, the weather, her piano — but they delighted him. More than that, the fact of them delighted him. The last letter was dated well after they had left the prison, so she had gone on writing even when he hadn’t. Never intimately, never warmly, always signing herself ‘your friend’, but she had written.

He loaded the derringer —.41 black-powder Remington, wildly inaccurate but horrific at a foot or two — and put it in its old place in the box on the mantel, then took the Colt up to the attic and laid it in its case. Somebody in Transylvania had screwed the balls out and dumped the gunpowder and cleaned it. Closing the lid on it now, he thought, was like closing a coffin — the pistol, which he had picked up on a Civil War battlefield and carried through his early years in the West, which he had used to kill the man who had been threatening to slash Janet Striker’s throat only six months before — the pistol had earned a rest. Obsolete, big, it had become a relic. He loved the Colt, but sentiment has its limits.

Downstairs again, he clapped his hands together and walked up and down his bedroom. It was all right. Everything would be all right. Her message had seemed curt because that was the nature of telegrams. The ABC could be quickly got over. Or out of. He was back, he was free, he was going to see her. What were twenty-four hours after all these weeks?

He put the photograph and Cieljescu’s letter in an envelope to go to his publisher, Gweneth; if that didn’t settle the matter of the motor car, the hell with him.

CHAPTER THREE

On the second morning back, Atkins said as he presented his coffee, ‘Garden’s a jungle.’

‘What, out back?’

‘Yes, that one. I thought I’d hang your suits out there. What a hope! Need a map to find the garden wall.’

‘Start weeding.’

‘My hat.’ Atkins was many things but not a gardener. He poured Denton’s coffee and said, ‘Find us somebody with a strong back and a deal of patience.’

‘Aren’t there gardening agencies?’

‘There’s everything; this is London. You want an egg? I had one. Quite good. Or a kipper.’

‘Why do you buy kippers? You know I don’t like them.’

‘I do.’

‘Poached, on toast, bacon.’

‘If you care, the parlourmaid next door but one says the madam there complains that the seeds from our weeds are spoiling her garden.’

‘I’ll get somebody — dear God, we just got back!’

‘Middle-class respectability. Weeds not respectable. Preserve with your toast?’

‘Is that the same as jam? Yes, jam.’

Atkins padded off downstairs — he affected Prince Albert slippers in the house — with Rupert puffing behind him. Until his breakfast came, Denton worked on the novel, a writing tablet in his lap, the words coming faster than he could move the pen. It would be all right now: the book was still in his head, perhaps with a vividness it had