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Chapter 45

 

 

When Davidson-Jones's doctors got Marlene out of the hospital I was sitting in the ambulance, waiting for her. She looked terrible. She was tiny. A lot of her hair had fallen out. Her face was like death itself. She was in a coma, all right, and she didn't speak to me.

But when the Kekketies were gently lifting her into the box on the yacht I kissed her and whispered to her that everything was all right, and at least her eyelids flickered.

When the limo was taking us to the hotel Henry Davidson-Jones was silent. "Don't you have any instructions for me?" I demanded bitterly as we turned into Lexington Avenue.

"You give the instructions now, Nolly," he told me. "Just don't forget to make those telephone calls. Then, if you want to, come down to the office and you can get started. I'll be there. The car will come back and wait for you; it's your car now."

And I got out and stared after him as the limousine drove away.

It was early-evening dark. The streets were full. The hotel lobby was busy with well-dressed men and women intent on their own concerns.

They hardly glanced at me. They didn't know who I was—who I had suddenly become.

I had never been in charge of anything bigger than a six-person accountancy office, but I acknowledged that it was true, as Davidson-Jones had ordered, that money was money and if you knew how to handle a sum it didn't matter how many zeroes were at the end of it.

The second thing to do, I told myself, was to sit down with Irene Madigan and the telephones and call up each of the people we had sent those documents to to explain that they shouldn't open them, because they were a mistake, and someone would come around to collect them.

That wouldn't be too hard. The first thing would be harder.

In the elevator I found myself wondering whether I would ever have time to sing again, as I was trying to figure out how to explain to Irene Madigan that Narabedla was now ours—that the world was ours—to do with as we would and, most of all, to be responsible for.

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Framed