right,’ she said. ‘But you must promise to give it back after you have finished with it.’
I promised, and Caroline smiled at her.
We left the Schumann residence at five to two having been cajoled by Dorothy into staying for a ham and cheese sandwich lunch. We were late. I swung the Buick back on to I-94 and put its engine to the test. It was a hundred miles to Chicago and Caroline’s rehearsal with the orchestra was at four o’clock. And she had to get to the hotel first to collect her dress for the evening and her beloved viola. It was going to be tight.
‘So what do you think this is?’ Caroline asked. She sat in the car’s passenger seat and tossed the shiny metal ball from hand to hand.
‘I have no idea what it’s for,’ I said. ‘But if it has anything to do with Komarov, then I’m interested in finding out.’ I accelerated past another huge eighteen-wheeler truck that was thundering along in the centre lane.
‘Don’t get a speeding ticket,’ Caroline instructed.
‘But you said …’ I tailed off. She had said that her arse would get roasted if she was late.
‘I know what I said.’ She laughed. ‘But don’t get stopped or we really will be late.’ I eased off the accelerator slightly and the speedometer came back within the limit. Well, it almost did.
‘Something to do with polo ponies,’ I said. ‘That’s what Mrs Schumann said.’
‘Perhaps it’s for table polo.’ She laughed out loud at her joke. It did look a bit like a metal table-tennis ball, but perhaps it was a fraction bigger than that. ‘Does it open, I wonder?’ she said.
The ball had a slight seam around its equator and Caroline took it in both hands and tried to separate the two halves. She tried to prise it open by pushing her thumbnail in the seam but without success. She tried to twist one half off the other. In fact, it wasn’t difficult at all, when you knew how. The two halves screwed together with an anti-clockwise thread.
I briefly looked at the two hemispheres sitting in Caroline’s hands.
‘I’m none the wiser,’ I said. ‘But I do know that it’s not a toy. It’s not easy to make those screw threads on a spherical object as thin as that. Especially one that fits so tightly together. Quite a piece of precision engineering is involved. If Mrs Schumann is right about Rolf having a big box full of them, then they must have cost a packet to produce.’
‘But what are they for?’ said Caroline.
‘Perhaps they are to put something in that mustn’t leak out,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know what.’
We made it back to the hotel with five minutes to spare. Caroline grabbed her dress and viola and rushed away with a kiss. ‘See you later,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave a ticket at the box office.’ She skipped out of the hotel and into the waiting bus taking the orchestra to the hall. The door closed behind her and off they went.
I stood in the lobby and felt lonely. Would I ever get used to saying goodbye to her even for just a few hours? While she had rushed off with such excitement at the prospect of rehearsal and then performance, I was left feeling abandoned and jealous. How could I be so green-eyed about a musical instrument? But I shivered at the thought of her wonderful long fingers caressing Viola’s neck and plucking her strings when I wanted Caroline to do it to me. It was irrational, I knew, but it was real nevertheless.
‘Pull yourself together,’ I said to myself, and went in search of the concierge.
‘Lake Country Polo Club?’ he repeated as a question.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think it’s near Delafield in Wisconsin.’
He tapped away on his computer for a while. ‘Ah,’ he said finally, ‘here it is.’
His printer whirred and he handed me a sheet of paper with the directions. The club was about five miles nearer to Chicago than Delafield. In fact we had driven right past it twice today, as, according to the directions, it sat just off the interstate highway on Silvernail Road. I thanked him and arranged to keep the rental car for another day.
I thought the Thursday concert was even better than the previous evening. For a start I could see Caroline, and she knew it. The hall had been sold out completely with not so much as a spare stool for me to be found in