The Glory Boys

'They'll huff and puff a few more hours, then they'll call for surrender, and we'll do nothing, then they'll have a bash at u s… Switch the light off!' His voice was suddenly urgent, incisive. When the room was in darkness again she could listen. Close by, down the road, there was a roar of a heavy engine as if the driver was pumping his foot up and down on the accelerator. Across from the window muffled shouts. She eased the curtain back, giving herself visibility of the road immediately in front of the house.

'There's nothing moving there,' she said.

There was some brightness from a street light, aug-mented by the searchlight beam, and though his face was half in shadow she could make out the line of his features.

'Why is it necessary to do what you have done to my parents?'

He anticipated her. 'They stay tied, and they stay separate.'

'They couldn't do anything, they couldn't hurt you.'

'I said they stay like that… '

'You said the police would break in. How soon?'

'Not for a day or so. They'll want time to work out a plan. Take them half a week.' He reached forward with his left hand and took hold of her arm, then pulled her so that she stretched across the width of the bed, and his head sank into her lap where her thighs came together. He remembered the afternoon in the park. Not thirty hours before, yet half a lifetime. In the darkness his breathing slowed and he lay still. Had to rest, had to go back to Cullyhanna, had to climb the hills again.

'Why didn't you use anything yesterday?' she said.

'I don't know,' said McCoy. 'I don't know.'

SEVENTEEN

Once the doctor had gone they left David Sokarev alone in his room.

The tablet he had taken, washed down with tap water from the tooth mug, had taken effect quickly, bringing on the drowsiness that conquered the terror of the earlier part of the evening. After the noise-filled, siren-blasting convoy had carried him to the hotel they had hurried him to his room, aided his undressing and readied him in his bed for the arrival of the Jewish doctor. Elkin had hovered close and maternal as the doctor bent over his patient, but Sokarev could see that his bodyguard's calm acceptance of the situation was waning, to be replaced by a morose silence. The lion had lost its mate. The two men had hunted together, worked, planned, eaten and rested together, bound in their opposites by comradeship. That was all destroyed now, by a pathetic and harmless-seeming grenade.

The assurance and confidence around the scientist when they had left for the university was another casualty of the attack, replaced with a diffidence that alternated with the fraying tempers. The Englishman should have been there, the one Sokarev remembered above all others, the one with only a given name and with the old suit. He was the one who had promised he would be beside Sokarev, who had made a joke of it all, who had laid his professionalism out for all to see in the very relaxation he had demonstrated since they had met. But he was absent, the one who was needed now. The man among all others in whom Sokarev had believed, in whom he had placed his trust.

There had been a promise.

Sokarev felt a great helplessness, isolated and remote when he spoke from his bed, the neatly folded hotel blankets high up against his striped pyjamas and across his chest.

'Where is the Englishman, the one who called himself Jimmy?' It was an interruption and cut across the low-pitched conversations that were being pursued out of his earshot across the width of the room.

'He left in chase,' said Elkin. 'After Mackowicz was killed he ran for the door. He had been shooting, there is no word of him since then.'

'He said he would be with us. Continuously.'

'Well, he's not here. No sign of him. Running the streets, no doubt, trying to pull back something from the chaos.

But something dramatic it has to be, after what has happened. The security was like a sieve. Disorganized, unprepared. A shambles they made for us.'

He came close to the bed, words barely under control, spitting his anger. 'You can understand, Professor, that from now it will be we who supervise all movements.

There will be no more outsiders making decisions, no more delegation. The Englishman that you want beside you made a grand speech about "responsibility" to Mackowicz. Where is Mackowicz now? Where is the man who gave those orders?'

The Special Branch Inspector, already feeling the ice wall that divided him from the Israelis, made no comment.

Irretrievable situation. No verbal points worth scoring, and short of currency anyway.