till angry. I cut myself a doorstep of bread with masses of butter and went along to see Romanov while I was eating it. I thought I’d better tell him how I’d turned his wife off.
His square white bedroom didn’t seem nearly so airy this morning. The window looked smaller. And I could have sworn that the spaces between his thrown-down clothes had almost halved since I was last in there. Romanov looked worse by light of morning. His hair was sticky with sweat, and his face looked dreadful because the brown tan of it had gone yellow on top of grayness. He didn’t move or open his eyes as I leaned over him.
Well, I thought, not too happily, flu usually gets worse before it gets better. “Want any breakfast?” I said. “Or can I find you an aspirin?”
He just turned over fretfully and didn’t answer. There was no way I could think of to get a doctor to him, so I just went quietly out again and shut the door.
My foot kicked the telephone on my way down the passage. I picked it up, jingling, in a buttery hand. It was a toy telephone, red and blue plastic, and there wasn’t even a flex in the wall or anything joining it to the yellow plastic receiver lying on the table. I stared at it a moment. “Cordless phone?” I said. “Heavily disguised mobile?” But I knew it wasn’t either of those. It was a toy. “That’s magic for you,” I said when I was in the kitchen hunting for a basket. “It’s all magic in this place. You just have to take a firm line with it, I suppose.”
I went out with the basket to see if the hens had laid any more eggs. They had. Eggs were hidden in all sorts of cunning clumps and crannies. I kept finding them.
“Oh, good!” Mini said, looming over me with her ears lifting anxiously. “I’d been so afraid of treading on one of those. What are they for?”
I looked up at her, meaning to explain about eggs, but I happened to see the garden wall beyond her. It was definitely lower now, and its bricks were old and crumbling away in places. It was also much nearer the house than I expected. “Mini,” I said, “has it struck you that this place is getting smaller?”
“Oh, it is,” she said. “It’s only a hundred steps over to the trees this morning. I’d been meaning to ask you why.”
“I think it may be because Romanov’s ill,” I said.
Mini wasn’t attending. Her ears and her trunk were both lifted toward the sky, somewhere behind the house. I craned round that way. The house was in my way, but I could hear something, a sort of whirring.
“What is it?” I said.
Mini’s eyes, wonderful gray, clever, innocent eyes, turned to meet mine. “Some kind of a flying machine,” she said. Her thick gray eyelashes fluttered nervously. “It—it doesn’t feel good.”
“Is it coming here?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
“In that case,” I said, “come and put yourself in front of the door to the house. I don’t think we want whoever it is going inside. Not with Romanov ill.”
TWO
After a bit, from where we stood, with Mini across the house door and me with my head just about touching the lowest bit of her gray, wrinkled stomach, I could see the flier, too, across her huge rump and the corner of the roof. It was just passing from a whitish slice of sky to a blue one. It crossed the line that divided the two sorts of sky with a kind of a blip, which seemed to slow it down. At any rate, it took longer than I expected to cross the blue slice, and when it came to the next line, there was another blip as it crossed into a slice that was all bulgy gray and silver clouds and went doggedly whirring across those. It took so long that I kept hoping it wasn’t coming here after all. But that was too much to hope, of course.
Five minutes later it circled deafeningly in over the house and came down at the top of the hill, beside the garden wall. It was like a helicopter without the big rotors, white and quite small. Mini curled her trunk up in disgust at the smell that came off it. The hens ran for their lives. I clutched my basket of eggs and stared at big numbers and letters on its pointed tail, and the goat came wandering up, chewing, and stared, too.
“I bet it’s Mrs. Romanov,” I said as the whirring stopped. “I made her really annoyed this morning.”
A door popped open, and two boys in embroidered jackets jumped down onto the grass. A man followed them out in a more stately way and stood staring around for a moment, tugging his embroidered coat down and putting his gold-rimmed glasses straight, before he snapped a curt word to the boys, and they all three began walking down the grassy slope toward the house.
My stomach sort of jumped. This was that Prayermaster I’d mistaken for Romanov in Loggia City, with his two kids. They must be here to have the law on me. I wondered if I could get Mini to kick their flier to bits so that they couldn’t drag me off back there.
“No, I will not!” Mini said. “What do you take me for?”
Then I’ll just have to throw eggs at them, I thought, watching them as they came. They were just like I remembered them. The Prayermaster had that stiff, self-righteous look, the look you learn to know and dread in teachers at school, and the boys were just as bad. The older one was dark and smug and saintly. The younger one was the ratty little sneak with fair hair and a pointed face who had pinched me and twisted the pinches.
They all three looked up at Mini and down at the goat and then shrugged and looked across at me. The Prayermaster unclosed his disapproving mouth to say, “Nick Mallory.” I nodded. I suppose he had got my name from the Loggia City police. “The unclean one,” he said, “known as Romanov—I take it he is inside this house.”
Unclean yourself! I thought. “What do you want to know that for?”
“Naturally, because we are here to eliminate him,” the Prayermaster explained, as if he was saying something very obvious to someone very stupid. “Kindly stand aside from the door and remove your animals as you go.”
I stared into his cool, straight face and his stern gray eyes inside their gold-rimmed lenses, and I wondered all over again how on earth I’d managed to mistake him for Romanov. And the way he put his explanation made me very suspicious. “Just a moment,” I said. “Did you by any chance offer Romanov money to eliminate me?”
They were so surprised that I knew I’d guessed wrong about that. Ratty’s little mauve face gaped, but he changed it almost at once to a jeer. The older boy blinked and stared. The Prayermaster looked stunned and then appalled and pitying. “That you should think such a thing of me,” he said, “that you should imagine that I would have money dealings with an unclean one, shows that you stand in serious need of guidance and correction, my boy. I shall take you to Loggia City and show you your errors shortly. Meanwhile, stand aside from that door.”
“But you did put some kind of spell on me, back in Loggia, didn’t you?” I said. “You must have done. It’s the only explanation.”