CHAPTER FIFTY
Fright
If a winger had been able to hover outside the fifth floor window of Dicky Baudgew’s apartment and see past the faded maroon damask curtains, he might have thought he was witnessing an aging actress auditioning for the part of a dowager princess in a Chinese court drama. Dicky’s cheeks, forehead and chinlet are colored a whitish green from a thick covering of some emollient. He has clipped back tufts of his remaining hair to keep them safe from the cream. As he paces back and forth in his living room, the agitation of his steps make his bright paisley robe billow and flare. If the windows had been open on what was proving to be a warm, blue-skied day—the kind of day that entices all but the darkest of souls to come out, and once outdoors, to enchant them to slow their lives—through those open windows would have come the shuffle slap of Dicky’s ancient red Moroccan leather slippers and the clicking sound his nervous tongue makes as it snaps against his worn cider-colored teeth.
Dicky’s feet and tongue, and even the tips of his fingers, are moving fast. Dicky is moving all these things to distract himself from what he really wants to do. The ancient sprite paces and clucks and huffs and sighs, but, finally, all of these efforts fail.
With a dramatic flounce of the skirts of his robe, a flaring of material that would have done a matador proud, Dicky Baudgew plops into his favorite suede chair and begins to cry. His hands go to his cheeks and his agitated fingers began to smear the cream they find there as Dicky sobs and sobs.
Dicky Baudgew loves a puzzle…, but he hates to lose. Oh, how he hates to lose.
And lost he has and lost he is. As are Edgee and Whir.
It has been four days since his two…assistants… have gone beyond the Pale to capture the girl. Four days and he has heard nothing. Nothing! One day with no communication was to be expected and two could be explained. Four days, too, could be explained, too, but only by one word: disaster. The girl is gone, and Dicky Baudgew’s ideas of what to do next are gone with her.
Because the girl is gone, but death remains.
The very idea of death has enraged Dicky as far back as he can remember.
Five years old, wide awake in an ice cold bed in a colder room where the idea of It, Death, the End, swells over him like an equinoctial tide. He splutters, but in rage, not fear. What force can be so malign, or, if not malign, then stupid, or, if not stupid, then horribly, horribly short-sighted as to want Dicky Baudgew dead?
It has taken decades of boredom and being ignored and enduring poor health and a limited wealth that feels like poverty, and more ill-health, that small, niggling, sap dripping kind of ill-health, before Dicky could even think about The End without being blinded by a bloody rage. But, when kind fate, in retrospect, a suspiciously kind fate, offered him the key to two more centuries of living, Dicky first had felt relief and, then, a giggly euphoria. But, then…but, now…. No word for four days and what could be the word, but Disaster?
Dicky Baudgew feels like a man condemned to death who, having been stood against the wall, is miraculously pardoned by some unknown benign force. Pardoned, yes, but only for a few seconds before being slapped back against the unforgiving wall with a bullet.
IT ISN’T FAIR.
Dicky Baudgew, who loves a puzzle, who loves a puzzle, but doesn’t like to lose, HATES to lose…poor Dicky is sobbing and the colors in his robe, wet from tears, are running and that is what Dicky wishes he could do, too.
…But, Dicky knows that he cannot run because he has known since he was just a wee boy of five, that running just brings Death glee.