Shattered Read Free Page B

open much later than usual, I made endless dated bowls, plates and vases to please them, while Pamela Jane explained that they couldn’t be collected until the next morning, New Year’s Day, as they had to cool slowly overnight. No one seemed deterred. Irish wrote their names and told them jokes. There were hours of good nature and celebration.
    Priam Jones called in fleetingly at one point. When he had been at Martin and Bon-Bon’s house he’d found my raincoat lying on the backseat in the car. I was most grateful, and thanked him with New Year fervor. He nodded, even smiled. His tears had dried.
    When he’d gone I went to hang up my raincoat in my locker. Something hard banged against my knee and I remembered the package given me by Eddie, the valet. I put it on a stock shelf out of the way at the rear of the workshop and went back to satisfy the customers.
    Shop-closing time was elastic but I finally locked the door behind the last customer in time for Hickory, Irish and Pamela Jane to go to parties, and for me to realize I hadn’t yet opened the parcel that Priam Jones had returned in my raincoat. The parcel that had come from Martin ... he’d sat heavily on my shoulder all evening, a laughing lost spirit, urging me on.
    Full of regrets I locked the furnace against vandals and checked the heat of the annealing ovens, which were full of the newly made objects slowly cooling. The furnace, which I’d built to my uncle’s design, was constructed of firebricks and fueled by propane gas under pressure from a fan. It burned day and night at never less than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt most metals, let alone burn paper. We were often asked if a memento like a wedding ring could be enclosed in a glass paperweight, but the answer was sorry, no. Liquid glass would melt gold—and human flesh—immediately. Molten glass, in fact, was pretty dangerous stuff.
    I slowly tidied the workshop, counted and recounted and then enclosed the day’s takings in their canvas bag ready to entrust to the night safe of the bank. Then I put on my discarded clothes and eventually took a closer look at my neglected parcel. The contents proved to be exactly what they felt like, an ordinary-looking videotape, a bit disappointing. The tape was wound fully back to the beginning, and the black casing bore no label of any sort. There was no protective sleeve. I stacked it casually beside the money, but the sight of it reminded me that my videotape player was at my home, that I’d sold my car, and that rising midnight on a thousand years’ eve wasn’t the best time to phone for a taxi.
    Plans for my own midnight, with a neighborhood dance next door to my house, had disintegrated on Cheltenham racetrack. Maybe the Wychwood Dragon, I thought, not caring much, still had a broom cupboard to rent. I would beg a sandwich and a rug and sleep across the dark night into the new century, and early in the morning I would write an obituary for a jockey.
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    When I was ready to cross to the Wychwood Dragon someone tapped heavily on the glass-paned door, and I went to open it, intending to say it was too late, the year 2000 lay fifteen minutes ahead in Broadway, even if it had been tomorrow for hours in Australia. I unlocked the door and, prompted by inexorable courtesy, faced politely an unexpected and unwanted visitor in Lloyd Baxter, telling him with a half-smothered yawn that I simply hadn’t enough energy to discuss the disaster at Cheltenham or anything else to do with horses.
    He advanced into the brightest area on the threshold and I saw he was carrying a bottle of Dom Pérignon and two of the Wychwood Dragon’s best champagne glasses. The heavily disapproving expression, despite these pipes of peace, was still in place.
    â€œMr. Logan,” he said formally, “I know no one at all in this place except yourself, and don’t say this isn’t a time for rejoicing, as I