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 COAT SHAD 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.
It wasn’t that people liked Grahame Coats, or that they trusted him. Even the people he represented thought he was a weasel. But they believed that he was their weasel, and in that they were wrong.
Grahame Coats was his own weasel.
The telephone on his desk rang, and he picked it up. “Yes?”