Violent Ward. Len Deighton

could see it wasn’t all flab; the bulge under his armpit had square edges.

      ‘I run a team of twenty.’

      ‘Does Petrovitch need twenty bodyguards?’

      ‘I’m not a bodyguard. I have guys to do the day-to-day work. I’m head of security for Petrovitch Enterprises International. I’m responsible for the vice presidents and everything in the continental U.S. It’s a big job.’ He gave me one of his business cards.

      I looked at it and put it in my pocket. ‘Is that why you’re drinking Pepsi?’

      ‘Mr Petrovitch cracks down on drinking by staff on duty. He’ll tell you that.’

      ‘I might find that a little difficult to adjust to,’ I said.

      ‘Not after Mr Petrovitch has talked to you, you won’t.’ Goldie took a sip of his cola and looked me over. ‘It’s the cost. When he takes over a company he strips all the surplus fat from it and makes it into a lean and trim earnings machine.’ Goldie looked at me as he said it with relish. It sounded like something he’d read in a prospectus, and I didn’t like it. And what kind of lean and trim earnings machine was Goldie?

      ‘You want to lend me your phone, Goldie?’ I said, eyeing the cellular clipped to his belt. ‘I need to get hold of my partner in Phoenix. I’ll call collect.’

      ‘Haven’t you got a phone in your car?’ said Goldie.

      ‘Are you crazy? I drive a beautiful ’fifty-nine Caddie with the original interior and paintwork. I don’t want some guy drilling holes in her and bolting phones and batteries into the bodywork.’

      ‘There’s a phone upstairs,’ said Goldie. ‘Come with me, or you won’t get past my security guys.’

      Goldie led the way to a messy little office with a fax machine and word processors and a bulletin board displaying half a dozen bounced checks, a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Pizza Hut, and a signed photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He lingered out in the hallway for a moment. I thought he was being discreet and allowing me a little privacy, but I should have known better. He came right in.

      ‘Make your call and let’s get out of here.’ He seemed to disapprove of my looking around the place, but that was just my natural curiosity.

      I sat down behind the desk, picked up the phone, and was about to start hitting the buttons when I noticed there was an extra wire coming from the phone and going into a hole freshly drilled in the desktop, a hole marked by a trace of sawdust. ‘Goldie,’ I said, ‘you got a scrambler on this phone or something? What’s this wiring deal? Are you bugging someone’s calls?’

      ‘Don’t hit that button!’ he barked, showing an alarm in sharp contrast to his previous doleful demeanor. ‘Stay where you are. Put the phone down on the desk and let me come round there.’ He grabbed me by the shoulder as I got to my feet. Then he grabbed the scissors from the desk and cut all wires leading to the phone.

      ‘What is it?’

      ‘Jesus!’ said Goldie, talking to himself as if he’d not heard me. ‘The bastards!’

      ‘Is it a bomb?’

      ‘You bet it is,’ said Goldie. He followed the wires that went through the desk and kneeled down on the floor under it. I crouched down to see it too. He tapped a brown paper package that had been fixed to the underside of the desk. ‘See that? There’s enough plastic there to blow us both into hamburger,’ said Goldie. Carefully he stripped the sticky tape from the woodwork and revealed the detonators. It looked as if he had done such things before. ‘Maybe it was set to make a circuit when triggered by the buttons, or maybe it was one of those tricky ones that detonate with an incoming call.’

      ‘What’s it all about, Goldie?’

      ‘Say an extra prayer when you go to mass tomorrow morning,’ said Goldie. He was still under the desk fiddling with the bomb. ‘Go back downstairs and circulate. I can deal with this.’

      ‘Are you sure you don’t want the bomb squad?’

      His glowering face appeared above the desktop. ‘Not a word about this to anyone, Mickey. If a story like this got into the papers, the shares would take a beating and I’d pay for it with my job.’

      ‘Whatever you say.’ I decided to leave my call to Phoenix for some other time and went back to the party for another drink. I could see why Goldie was so jumpy about publicity. The media crowd was well in evidence. Some of them I recognized, including two local TV announcers: the guy with the neat mustachio who does the morning show and the little girl with the elaborate hairdo who stands in for the weatherman on the local segment of the network news. They were standing near their cameras, paper napkins tucked into their collars like ruffs and their faces caked with makeup.

      The one I was looking around for was Mrs Petrovitch. When I knew her we were both at Alhambra High, struggling with high school mathematics and preparing for college. High school friends are special, right? More special than any other kind of friends. In those days she was Ingrid Ibsen. I was in love with her. Half the other kids were in love with her too, but I dated her on account of the way she lived near me and I could always walk her home, and her dad knew my dad and did his accounts.

      She lived only a block from me on Grenada. We used to walk down Main Street together, get a Coke and fries, and I’d think of something I had to buy in the five-and-dime just to make it last longer.

      In my last year Ingrid was the lead in the senior play and I had a tap dance solo in the all-school production of The Music Man. I remember that final night: I danced real well. It was my last day of high school. It was a clear night with lots of stars and a big moon so you could see the San Gabriel Mountains. Dad let me have the new Buick. We were parked outside her house. I’d got my scholarship and a place at USC. I told her that as soon as I graduated I was going to come back and marry her. She laughed and said, ‘Don’t promise’ and put her finger on my lips. I always remembered the way she said that: ‘Don’t promise.’

      Ingrid spent only one semester at college. She was smarter than I was at most subjects, and she could have got a B.A. easily, but her folks packed up and went to live in Chicago and she went with them. I never did get the full story, but the night she told me she was going, we walked around the neighborhood and I didn’t go home to bed until it was getting light. Then I had a fight with my folks, and the following day I stormed off and joined the Marine Corps. Kidlike, I figured I’d have to go to ’Nam eventually and it was better to get it over with. Now I’ve learned to put the bad ones at the bottom of the pile and hope they never show up. It was a crazy move because I was looking forward to going to college and almost never had arguments with my folks. And anyway, what does joining the service do to solve anything? It just gives you a million new and terrible problems to add to your old ones.

      The next I heard of Ingrid was when her photo was in the paper. Budd Byron, who’d known us both at Alhambra, sent me an article that had been clipped from some small-town paper. It was a photo of Ingrid getting married. That was her first husband, some jerk from the sticks, long before she got hitched to Zachary Petrovitch. It said they’d met at a country dancing class. I ask you! I kept the clipping in my billfold for months. They were going to Cape Cod for their honeymoon, it said. Can you imagine anything more corny? Every time I looked at that picture it made me feel sorry for myself.

      Soon after I met Betty, I ceremonially burned that clipping. As the ashes curled over and shimmered in the flames I felt liberated. The next day I went down to Saturn and Sun, the alternative medicine pharmacy where Betty worked, and asked her to marry me. As a futile exercise in self-punishment it sure beat joining the Marine Corps.

      Then in the eighties I heard about Ingrid again when she upped and married Petrovitch. I knew the Petrovitch family by name; I’d even met Zach Petrovitch a few times. His father had made money from Honda dealerships in the Northwest, getting into them when they were giving them away, a time when everyone was saying the Japanese can maybe make cheap transistor radios, and motor bikes even, but cars?

      The