The Hunting Trip (43 page)

The countess, who did not like being left to stand alone, half trotted across the field to the airplane, arriving there just as Ginger, who
did not like being left to sit alone in her private plane, came down the stair door.

The countess recognized Lieutenant Colonel Sir Brathwaite T. Smythe.

“Smitty,” she inquired, “what in the bloody hell is going on here?”

“Not now, Maggie. Except that the fate of the British Commonwealth of Nations is at peril if things go wrong.”

“But I want—”

“Honey, you heard what Smitty said,” Ginger said. “Why don't you cool it?”

“How dare you call me Honey!” the countess said.

“Okay,” Ginger said agreeably. “Maggie, why don't you cool it?”

“How dare you call me Maggie!”

“Why not? Smitty just did.”

“Smitty is Lieutenant Colonel Sir Brathwaite T. Smythe, a fellow aristocrat, and you're . . . I don't know who you are. Who are you?”

“I have recently become the love of Phil's life.”

“Isn't that a little awkward, inasmuch as Phil is already married to a bloody awful Viennese hoofer, with whom, I just recalled, he has a daughter about your age?”

“Phil is worth a little awkwardness.”

“Actually, Phil's a pretty good chap. I like him so much that he can call me Maggie instead of Your Ladyship. Which gives me the moral right to ask this, or more accurately, to deliver this warning: If you're after Phil's money, I won't let you get away with it.”

“That's my private plane,” Ginger replied. “But I am touched by your concern for my Phil, so perhaps you're not quite the unmitigated
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that you at first appeared to me to be.”

“And I am touched by your saying you are attracted to Phil for who he is, warts and all, than for his money, so perhaps you're not quite the
expensive hooker I thought you must be when I noticed when you were getting off the airplane that you are not wearing a brassiere.”

“Thank you,” Ginger said. “Nothing personal, of course, Your Ladyship, but I don't need support for my boobs.”

The countess started to reply, but then changed her mind and instead said, “I have an idea.”

“Glad to be of help,” Ginger said graciously. “If you've got them, flaunt them, I always say.”

“What I meant to say,” the countess said, just a bit coldly, “is that what we were doing out here was waiting for a dozen of your co-countrymen, who are willing to pay through their bloody noses . . .”

“The Dames of Runnymede?”

“You know about them?”

“I know if they get their hands on my Phil, they are going to kill him.”

“Over my dead body, they will!” the countess said. “What did Phil do to annoy them?”

“If you could dig up a taste of Famous Pheasant for me, I'll tell you all about it.”

“I'll tell you all about Famous Pheasant,” the countess said. “It's distilled right here on the lands of Castle Abercrombie. Most of what we distill here we sell around the world as Famous Pheasant. The really good stuff, the forty-eight-year-old Old Pheasant, we of course keep for ourselves. What do you say, Ginger, let's go in the house and have a sip, and then discuss how we can keep Phil out of the hands of the Dames of Runnymede?”

“I'm starting to like you,” Ginger said, “so much that that I'm willing to go along with your ‘Your Ladyship'
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”

“You can call me Maggie, Ginger. Any true friend of Phil's is a friend of mine.”

[ THREE ]

O
ver the next hour and a half, in the game room of Castle Abercrombie, so called because it housed the stuffed hunting trophies—an elephant, a rhinoceros, two lions, a giraffe, and an assortment of smaller fauna—the present earl had brought home from his service in the former British Crown Colony, now the People's Democratic Republic of Chongo—Ginger and Maggie got to be great friends.

Three-quarters of a bottle of forty-eight-year-old Old Pheasant helped, of course, but so did the sense of freedom the countess now felt after she had adopted Ginger's
If you've got them, flaunt them
philosophy and hung her upper torso intimate undergarment on the left tusk of the stuffed
Loxodonta africana
, or African bush elephant, which stood to the left side of the fireplace across from the stuffed
Diceros bicornis
, or hook-lipped rhinoceros, on the right.

The girls also solved between them the problem of how to handle the Dames of Runnymede, and The Tuesday Luncheon Club Ladies, and at the same time satisfy Phil's desire for revenge on Mr. Randolph C. Bruce.

When the earl and the generalissimo and the field marshal and the general of the army and Smitty finally staggered into the small reception room, weary and thirsty from their having marched back and forth for an hour and a half, reliving the happy military days of their youth, Ginger and Maggie said they wanted to outline for them what they had come up with.

“But before we get into that, where's my Phil?” Ginger asked.

“I saw him come into the house,” Smitty said. “He said the marching and saluting he'd done as a youth in his own military service was enough for a lifetime, and he had no desire to march down military memory lane with us.”

“But where is he?” Ginger persisted. “Can we can send someone to look for him?”

“God only knows in which of the three hundred eleven rooms of our little home he's in,” Maggie said. “When Phil wants to be found, he'll come out, but not before. That bloody ballet dancer we were talking about before once hunted for him for five days without success.”

“Okay, Maggie, if you say so.”

When they had finished explaining the plans, Generalissimo Sir Montague Obango asked if he might dare to offer a suggestion that would solve all of the problems quickly and efficiently and once and for all time.

“What I propose is that Field Marshal Percy Dingo meet the plane carrying the Dames of Runnymede here and shoot them all as they debark. He will then see that all the bodies are buried on the moor. Then, when the other ladies, the Lunch Ladies, arrive at the Dungaress Royal Hotel in Dungaress, with their husbands, General of the Army Ethelbert Jones will shoot all of them and consign their remains to the moor. And as a personal favor to my new friend Mr. Phil Williams, I will personally cut the heart out of Mr. Bruce before we bury him out in the moor.”

It was hard to dissuade Sir Montague from his plan. He was after all generalissimo and president for life, and back home people who dared disagree with, or even question, any suggestions he might make rarely lived more than an hour or two.

By the time they had dissuaded him, it was time for Phase One of the Plan to be executed. This was to house the Dames of Runnymede in rooms along one corridor in an upstairs wing and then to station Field Marshall Percy Dingo at the foot of the stairway leading to that wing. That would be enough, Maggie reasoned, to keep them in their rooms and from killing Phil until the banquet.

Phase One went off without a hitch, although there was a moment when one of the ladies—no names here—didn't seem nearly so terrified to see the field marshal as the others and could even have been smiling shyly at him.

Phase Two was to have the invitations to the Ducal Banquet printed and distributed to both the Dames and the Lunch Ladies when they arrived late that night at the Dungaress Royal Hotel. The invitation stated that Mr. Randolph C. Bruce requested the honor of their presence the next night at a formal Ducal Banquet under the patronage of the Earl and Countess of Abercrombie at Castle Abercrombie.

It did not mention the menu would be haggis. If anything would redirect the ire of the Ladies and the Dames away from Phil and toward Randy, haggis would do it.

“Frankly,” Maggie said, “I think what Ginger and I came up with is pure genius. I'm only sorry Phil can't hear of it.”

“Phil has heard of it,” Phil said, and came out from behind the stuffed rhinoceros where he had been hiding. “But I have been thinking.”

“Thinking of what, Precious?” Ginger inquired.

“Thinking that if that duplicitous
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Randy had not asked me to go shooting pheasants in Scotland while he was randying about with Carol-Anne Crandall, I would never have met you, my love.”

“That's true, my precious.”

“I'm not finished,” Phil said. “So, because the duplicitous
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did invite me and I did meet you, is it fair of me to do to the duplicitous
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what he so richly deserves to have done to him? And that doesn't even get into the subject of my wife and children, including the one who is nearly as old as the love of my life and which, frankly, I don't have a
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clue how to deal with.”

“One problem at a time, my precious,” Ginger said. “Try this
vis-à-vis
your feelings of guilt toward Randy. He didn't know we would meet, or what would happen if we did, as indeed it did. So you owe him nothing in that regard and can sock it to the
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as hard as you want with a clear conscience.”

“That makes sense,” Phil agreed.

“And so far as your wife is concerned,” Generalissimo and President for Life Sir Montague Obango said, “no problem at all, Friend Phil. Give me your address and the field marshal will see that she is dealt with as we deal with difficult wives at home.”

“But, Sir Montague, buddy, she's the mother of my children.”

“So what? What's that got to do with anything?”

Thirty minutes later, Phil was still trying to convince the generalissimo why he didn't think his tribe's traditional barbaric rituals would work on the Angry Austrian—she was indeed a formidable one—when there came the sound of a jet aircraft flying low overhead.

“I wonder who that is apparently about to land?” someone asked.

“Send someone to find out, Bertie,” the countess ordered. “If it's the Lunch Ladies, tell them to take a hike into the village.”

It wasn't the Luncheon Ladies.

It was Moses Lipshutz, L.L.D., Mrs. Rachel Lipshutz, and with them was Dr. Waldo Pfefferkopf.

“
Et tu
, Moses?” Phil said. “
Et tu
, Rachel? I thought you were my friends and here you are with this Austrian gentleman who wants to talk to me about my wife, which is the last
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thing I want to do right now. How could you do this to me?”

“Call it tough love, Phil,” Rachel said. “Listen to what Dr. Pfefferkopf has to say.”

“Moses?” Phil asked.

“Listen to Rachel, Phil. Listen to what Dr. Pfefferkopf has to say. I considered it so important that I chartered a jet to bring him here.
If this turns out the way I think it will, you'll get a bill. Now talk to him!”

“Not in front of all these people, certainly!”

Three minutes later Phil was alone with Dr. Pfefferkopf, everybody else having left them alone in the game room.

“All right, let's have it, Pfefferkopf,” Phil said, biting the bullet.

“May I speak frankly?”

“Why not?”

“The time has come for you to end the suffering your Brunhilde has been suffering all these years since she let her lust run away with her in Paris.”

“How would I do that?”

“Sign these papers.”

“What are these papers?”

“They state that you are willing to allow Brunhilde to divorce you and also to take with her to Vienna your minor child, Franz Josef, which she can't do without your permission. Once I get the signed papers to Vienna, I am assured by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who has always deeply regretted marrying you in the first place, that the divorce will be practically instantaneous.”

“What's Franz Josef going to do in Vienna?”

“He wants to become a ballet dancer.”

“Dr. Pfefferkopf, what makes you think Franz Josef wants to go to Vienna to become a ballet dancer?”

“May I speak frankly, man-to-man?”

“Why not?”

“I managed to have a chat with Franz Josef.”

“Did you indeed?”

“Yes, I did. And after getting his word that he wouldn't quote me, I admitted that the rumors that most of the male dancers in the Corps de Ballet are
poofters
are sadly all too true.”

“You have the
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effrontery to tell me that my son wants to become a
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ballet dancer in the Corps de Ballet because all the other guys are
poofters
?”

“That is exactly what I'm telling you.”

“Think it through, Precious,” Ginger said, coming out from under the stuffed elephant where she had been hiding.

“You're not supposed to be in here,” Phil protested.

“If we are going to skip down life's path together, Precious, you better learn not to tell me what I'm not supposed to do.”

“Fräulein, having heard you call Herr Williams ‘Precious,' may I assume that you're more than casual acquaintances?” Dr. Pfefferkopf asked.

“You can bet your Austrian
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we are. Not that it's any of your business.”

“In that circumstance I will confide in you that since we were six years old, I have been in love with Brunhilde, and I have never stopped loving her even after she lost control of her lust and had to marry Herr Williams.”

“That's very interesting, but what I want to talk about right now is my Franz Josef and the
poofters
,” Phil said. “He's never shown any signs of that sort of thing that I have noticed.”

“I told you before, Precious, to think it through.”

“I'm having great trouble doing that.”