“Whining?” David said, picking up on the one word. “If you were in as much pain as I was you’d be complaining too.”
“What happened to your leg?” Edi asked, and as she said it she remembered how she’d gone underwater and loosened the screws, and how she’d kissed him to give him air.
For a moment their eyes met, as he seemed to be thinking about the same thing, but he broke away and pulled up the leg of his trousers. “Your genera
l, that Satan you work for, decided that an uninjured man traveling around England would rouse too many suspicions, so he had me disabled.”
Edi looked at the bottom half of the brace and at the round hinge she knew well, and she couldn’t help it, but she started to laugh.
“I don’t see anything funny about this,” David said. “I have blisters all over my leg where it rubs against me and—Will you please stop laughing?”
“I think he did it to protect me,” Edi said, still laughing. “He’s like an old sultan, and he thinks of all of us women who work for him as his vestal virgins.”
David stopped frowning. “Yeah, he does have the most beautiful of all the women.”
“Half of them are idiots,” Edi said. “I hired a woman who could type a hundred words a minute without an error, but that old bulldog fired her because she was ugly. He said he wasn’t going to survive bombs and ugly women.”
David laughed. “She isn’t the one who works for Colonel Osborne, is she?”
Edi nodded. “She can do more work than three of Austin’s girls.”
“Except you.”
“Except me,” Edi agreed, “but I get stuck with trying to deal with all of them. One day I almost got hit by a falling roof when one of the girls ran back to get her lipstick. I told her that gunpowder was the best eye shadow there was and she was going to get plenty of it if she didn’t get moving. And you know what? She believed me!”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. You know Lenny…?”
“Escobar?” David’s eyes widened. “I saw him taking the powder out of some shells. It wasn’t for—?”
“It was.”
Laughing, David moved back on the bed and lifted his leg onto it. “Okay, so now all we can do is wait until Aggie shows up and hope she has the magazine. In the meantime, I think Hamish means for you and me to stay busy.”
“What does that mean?”
“He had me in the barn this morning…” He looked away, and Edi thought maybe his face was red.
“In the barn doing what?”
“Remember the cow?”
“I will go to my grave remembering that cow,” Edi said. “What about her?”
“‘Her’ is the key word.”
“Oh,” Edi said, smiling. “He had you milking.”
“And mucking. I think that’s the proper term for using a pitchfork to remove manure.”
She looked at him. “How did you do that with an arm in a sling and your leg like that? Can you move it?”
“Not at all. I think the hinge rusted.”
“We’ll have to get it off you,” Edi said. “Maybe this man has an Allen wrench.”
“No,” David said sadly. “No Allen wrench that will fit, no anything that will fit. I was in the barn at four A.M. this morning because it seems that that’s when cows want to be milked and horses have to have their floors swabbed. I tried every tool the old man has, but nothing worked. The screws are set deep into the steel, they’re rusted, and nothing will touch them. You didn’t by chance…you know…”