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says YES I’D BE GLAD TO ”; and Fred asked me what I was smiling at.
    “Nothing, really.”
    “Then you’ll wait a day?”
    “Yes, all right.”
    “Great. Great. I was sure you would. I told them I was sure you would. They can’t possibly go tonight, you can see that.”
    We were in his office at the time, in the consulate in Miami, on the day after the mugging. The night had passed undisturbed by marauders but it had been an exhausted pair that had pottered round the kitchen in dressing gowns that morning to assemble much-needed breakfasts. Vicky’s ear was throbbing, Greg’s forehead was dark with bruise and both were suffering from depression.
    “All my credit cards ...” Greg said wearily. “There’s so much to do .” He picked up the telephone and passed on the bad news to the companies.
    I thought of my bags sitting unattended in my unused room and phoned the hotel: no problem at all, I could pick up the luggage later but they would charge me for the past night regardless. Fair enough, I agreed.
    Once they were dressed, I drove Vicky and Greg to meet Fred and keep the police appointment, a session that taxed the Wayfields’ remaining stamina sorely. The only bright spot for Vicky was the return of her earring, though it would be a long time, she guessed, before she could wear it.
    “I don’t want to keep thinking of last night,” she said vehemently during the interview, but the friendly policeman carried on asking friendly persistent questions nonetheless. Finally they let all four of us go, and Fred in his car led the rest of us in the BMW across town to his official domain.
    The consulate proved to be a modest suite of offices high in a glass-walled tower. British firms and holidaymakers had clamored for it to be opened, but funding it, it was rumored in the service, Fred said, had meant closing its equivalent in some other place from where the tourist tide had ebbed.
    Arriving on the twenty-first floor, we squeezed through tall doors into a small entrance and waiting area already filled by an indignant family who’d been robbed at Disney World and a man in a wheelchair who’d been brought in by the police as he couldn’t remember where he was staying in Florida and had been found dazed and alone in the street repeating an English address.
    Behind a glass partition, two good-looking young women, trying to sort everything out, welcomed the sight of Fred with relief.
    “Bombproof glass, of course,” Fred said to me, and signaled the girls to let us in through the electronic glass door. “Carry on,” he said to them, which they did most competently, it seemed to me.
    Beyond the antiterrorist door, the available space had been cleverly divided to allow for all the familiar sections of embassy life, but in miniature. Records room, cipher room, conference room, individual offices, large busy secretaries’ room, kitchen and a more spacious office with the best view for the man in charge.
    This efficient layout was staffed by Fred himself, he said, along with the two super-secretaries and two vice-consuls, one of whom was involved in trade, the other, currently out on a job, in delicate areas like the unlawful movement of drugs.
    Fred parked Greg and Vicky in a conference room just big enough for a round table surrounded by dining chairs and then, his forehead sweating, beckoned me into his private sanctum and shut the door.
    “They won’t be able to leave today,” he said. “They” had become shorthand for Greg and Vicky. “Tickets, easy. But there’s her passport, and she has to go to the hospital and she’s only half packed, she said.”
    “And new locks for their house,” I agreed.
    “So you could stop another day and help them, couldn’t you?”
    I opened my mouth and shut it again and it was then that Fred had warmed to his persuasion.
    Fred and I were of equal rank in the service, consuls and first secretaries both being (if one equated things to the army) like colonels.
    As in