“It wasn’t magic,” said Spider, offended. “It was a miracle.”
Fat Charlie pushed past him and stomped up the stairs. He walked into the bathroom, put in the plug, and turned on the taps. He leaned out into the hall. “I don’t care what it’s called. You’re doing it in my house, and you stopped me coming home last night.”
He took off the day-before-yesterday’s clothes. Then he put his head back around the door. “And the police are investigating me at work. Did you tell Grahame Coats that there were financial irregularities going on?”
“Of course I did,” said Spider.
“Hah! Well, he only suspects me, that’s what.”
“Oh, I don’t think he does,” said Spider.
“Shows all you know,” said Fat Charlie. “I talked to him. The police are involved. And then there’s Rosie. And you and I are going to have a very long conversation about Rosie when I get out of the bath. But first of all, I’m going to get into the bath. I spent yesterday night wandering around. I got the only sleep of the night in the backseat of a taxi. By the time I woke up it was five in the morning and my taxi driver was turning into Travis Bickle. He was conducting a monologue. I told him he might as well give up looking for Maxwell Gardens, and that it obviously wasn’t a Maxwell Gardens kind of night, and eventually he agreed so we went and had breakfast in one of those places taxi drivers have breakfast. Eggs and beans and sausages and toast, and tea you could stand a spoon up in. When he told the other taxi drivers he’d been driving all around last night looking for Maxwell Gardens, well, I thought blood was going to be spilled. It wasn’t. But it looked a pretty close thing for a minute there.”
Fat Charlie stopped to take a breath. Spider looked guilty.
“After,” said Fat Charlie. “After my bath.” He shut the bathroom door.
He climbed into the bath.
He made a whimpering noise.
He climbed out of the bath.
He turned off the taps.
He wrapped a towel around his midriff and opened the bathroom door. “No hot water,” he said much, much too calmly. “Do you have any idea why we have no hot water?”
Spider was still standing in the hallway. He hadn’t moved. “My hot tub,” he said. “Sorry.”
Fat Charlie said, “Well, at least Rosie doesn’t. I mean, she wouldn’t have—” And then he caught the expression on Spider’s face.
Fat Charlie said, “I want you out of here. Out of my life. Out of Rosie’s life. Gone.”
“I like it here,” said Spider.
“You’re ruining my bloody life.”
“Tough.” Spider walked down the hallway and opened the door to Fat Charlie’s spare room. Golden tropical sunlight flooded the hallway momentarily, then the door was closed.
Fat Charlie washed his hair in cold water. He brushed his teeth. He rummaged through his laundry hamper until he found a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that were, by virtue of being at the bottom, practically clean once more. He put them on, along with a purple sweater with a teddy bear on it his mother had once given him that he had never worn but had never got around to giving away.
He went down to the end of the corridor.
The boom-chagga-boom of a bass and drums penetrated the door.
Fat Charlie rattled the door handle. It didn’t budge. “If you don’t open this door,” he said, “I’m going to break it down.”
The door opened without warning, and Fat Charlie lurched inward, into the empty box room at the end of the hall. The view through the window was the back of the house behind, what little you could see of it through the rain that was now lashing the windowpane.
Still, from somewhere only a wall’s thinness away, a stereo was playing too loudly: everything in the box room vibrated to a distant boom-chagga-boom.
“Right,” said Fat Charlie conversationally. “You realize, of course, that this means war.” It was the traditional war cry of the rabbit when pushed too far. There are places in which people believe that Anansi was a trickster rabbit. They are wrong, of course; he was a spider. You might think the two creatures would be easy to keep separate, but they still get confused more often than you would expect.
Fat Charlie went into his bedroom. He retrieved his passport from the drawer by his bed. He found his wallet where he had left it in the bathroom.
He walked down to the main road, in the rain, and hailed a taxi.
“Where to?”
“Heathrow,” said Fat Charlie.
“Right you are,” said the cabbie. “Which terminal?”
“No idea,” said Fat Charlie, who knew that, really, he ought to know. It had only been a few days, after all. “Where do they leave for Florida?”
GRAHAME COATS HAD BEGUN PLANNING HIS EXIT FROM THE Grahame Coats Agency back when John Major was prime minister. Nothing good lasts forever, after all. Sooner or later, as Grahame Coats himself would have delighted in assuring you, even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked. While his planning had been good—one never knew when one might need to leave at a moment’s notice—and he was not unaware that events were massing, like gray clouds on the horizon, he wished to put off the moment of leaving until it could be delayed no longer.
What was important, he had long ago decided, was not leaving, but vanishing, evaporating, disappearing without trace.
In the concealed safe in his office—a walk-in room he was extremely proud of—on a shelf he had put up himself and had recently needed to put up again when it fell down, was a leather vanity case containing two passports, one in the name of Basil Finnegan, the other in the name of Roger Bronstein. Each of the men had been born about fifty years ago, just as Grahame Coats had, but had died in their first year of life. Both of the passport photographs in the passports were of Grahame Coats. The case also contained two wallets, each with its own set of credit cards and photographic identification in the name of one of the names of the passport holders. Each name was a signatory to the funnel accounts in the Caymans, which themselves funneled to other accounts in the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein.
Grahame Coats had been planning to leave for good on his fiftieth birthday, a little more than a year from now, and he was brooding on the matter of Fat Charlie.
He did not actually expect Fat Charlie to be arrested or imprisoned, although he would not have greatly objected to either scenario had it occurred. He wanted him scared, discredited, and gone.
Grahame Coats truly enjoyed milking the clients of the Grahame Coats Agency, and he was good at it. He had been pleasantly surprised to discover that, as long as he picked his clientele with care, the celebrities and performers he represented had very little sense of money and were relieved to find someone who would represent them and manage their financial affairs and make sure that they didn’t have to worry. And if sometimes statements or checks were late in coming, or if they weren’t always what the clients were expecting, or if there were unidentified direct debits from client accounts, well, Grahame Coats had a high staff turnover, particularly in the bookkeeping department, and there was nothing that couldn’t easily be blamed on the incompetence of a previous employee or, rarely, made right with a case of champagne and a large and apologetic check.