By the way he’s hissing my name I know I don’t want to turn around… but Campari and curiosity make a devilly cocktail, so I deign to shoot him a glance. Public nudity: not a tremendous surprise, strictly speaking, although I was expecting it to take a few days. Looks like I owe my sense of foreboding a Coke.
Spats is holding his apértif badly and is in any case suitably distracted by some piece of resident totty, so it’s no great trouble to disengage. I groove On Down to where Fournier’s… how to describe it? skulking in a fierce kind of huddle, and I ask him what’s afoot.
We’re speaking sideways – hard to look a man in the eye when he’s smuggling the crown jewels – and he’s gritting his teeth, and I’m mostly occupied with how I might turn this to my advantage, so I don’t entirely follow what he’s on about. Something to do with beards and arithmetic. How a man in his position can summon the dignity to use a word like “arithmetic,” I don’t fathom.
“Aren’t you going to offer me your jacket?” he adds, glaring. Never mind that this is, by at least three independent accounts, the jacket Olé Godiva was wearing when the left side of his body stopped working. Spats is still occupied however, so I rather magnaminiously liberate his coat instead. Fournier shoves it aboard in bad humour and retreats to the stairs.
