of bitchiness and distrust, Foster dear?’
‘Yes, you probably do.’
He looked at the bottle and poured himself another. ‘Drink will be the death of me,’ he said. ‘I was tiddly, of course, but it seemed such a good joke at the time. Although, Foster amigo, I won’t deny that I should also have been interested to see what your angle on the affair was going to be.’
‘My angle was and is that your little man in the Propaganda Ministry was Brankovitch.’
He giggled. ‘Who told you they played that trick? Georghi?’
‘Not Georghi.’
He giggled again. ‘Oh dear! Not Georghi, you mean, but someone else whose name you don’t want to mention in case I’m a Ministry spy who might get him into trouble. Oh dear, oh dear! I do see. I played right into your hands, didn’t I? No wonder you were so maddening. The thing was that they’d tried it on me days before. I could send anything I wanted if I knew how. That was the line. It would cost a bit, of course, but that was to make it sound right.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t like being taken for a fool, do you? I was a bit vexed, so I decided to amuse myself. I thought at first of pretending I’d fallen for it and sending a really dreadful story I’d heard about Vukashin’s sex life. Then I sobered up and thought again. In the end all I did was to lift their dialogue and try it on someone else. Georghi was my first customer and I frightened him out of his wits — or he pretended I did. And that was the crazy part of it; because it wasn’t until I saw him looking at me with those big brown eyes of his and got a breath of that subtle perfume that I remembered where I’d seen him before. Do I convince you?’
‘By no means.’
He gazed upwards soulfully. ‘It’s so sad. I can never make the truth sound convincing. Of course, I look so shifty. I should stick to lying, shouldn’t I?’
‘Where was it you saw Pashik before?’
‘Ah, I have your interest. If only I can keep it until the knock-out drops that I slipped into your drink begin to work, all will be well.’
Involuntarily I looked down at my glass.
He grinned. ‘You’re really very tiresome, aren’t you, Foster dear? If I didn’t want badly to know what makes you worth killing, I wouldn’t say another word.’
‘It’s late. I’m very tired. And-’
‘And it’s always so upsetting to be shot at,’ he said quickly. ‘How inconsiderate of me not to remember that!’
‘I wasn’t apologizing.’
‘Of course you weren’t. You were just hoping that I’d cut the cackle. I do understand. These affectations of mine are such a bore. All right. Let’s talk about Georghi Pashik — why he exists and in whose image he is made. What has he told you about himself?’
‘He was expelled from Italy for writing something Mussolini didn’t agree with. He did his military service in Austria. He admires Myrna Loy. The last item I deduced for myself from a picture in his office.’
‘She must be his spiritual mum, don’t you think? All right, here it is. Technically, a stateless person. Born in the Trentino, of Macedonian Greek parents who were themselves of doubtful national status. He takes Hungarian nationality. Treaty of Trianon muddle. He does his military service in Austria. He goes eventually to Paris and works for Havas as a messenger. Intelligent, ambitious, a worker. He writes odd pieces. He gets on. Eventually they give him a job in the Rome office. He gets important. Then he’s expelled, which is all very difficult because he’s married an Italian girl and the squadristi make it hot for her family. He has a lot of trouble squaring things. After a bit his wife dies and he returns here to the home of his forefathers with very peculiar ideas about the way the world ought to be run.’
‘What sort of ideas?’
‘I’m coming to that. Well, the war breaks out and in 1940 Georghi skips to Cairo. For a time he’s on a newspaper there, then he decides that it’s time to do a little war work and gets taken on as an interpreter by the British. Later on, when the United States Middle East contingent arrives, he is transferred to them. In 1945 he turns up in an American Civil Affairs unit in Germany.’
‘Still as an interpreter?’
‘Still as an interpreter. Only by now he has a bastard sort of uniform and is working in a DP camp near Munich. He worked under an American Major named Macready. I had business there, and that’s where I first saw Georghi and got to know about him.’
‘What was your business?’
‘Intelligence — the British lot.’ He caught a glance I gave him. ‘Oh dear me, no! Not any more. I was just the wartime variety, uniform and everything. I was liaising with an American who was on the same job as me — checking up on the bad boys who’d gone to earth in the DP camps and then digging them out — and it was this man who told me about Georghi. Another drink?’
‘I think I will.’
‘That’s good. There’s another bottle in there if we run short or if Georghi comes home. All right, then. We go back to the time Georghi went over to the Americans in Cairo. Almost the first thing that happened was that he was sent up to a small hill town in the Lebanon with a Lieutenant, a Tech Sergeant, and an enlisted man. The job was to operate a radio station monitoring an intelligence network operating in the Balkans. I believe there was some short-wave oddity that determined their position, but that’s not important. The thing was that our Georghi was stuck out in the wilderness for nearly a year with three Americans who didn’t like it either and talked about home. I don’t know anything about the Sergeant and the enlisted man, but the Lieutenant was a radio engineer named Kromak and he came from Passaic, Jersey. Do you know the Lebanon?’
I shook my head.
‘In the evenings the sky is like wine and the shadows falling across the terraces have purple edges to them. Overhead, vines — grape and other things with big flowers and a wonderful smell. Everything is very still and warm and soft. It’s the kind of atmosphere in which myths are born and the pictures in your mind’s eye seem more real than the chair you’re sitting on. I wax lyrical, you see. However, the point is that Lieutenant Kromak talked about Passaic, New Jersey, and read aloud his wife’s letters while Georghi listened. He heard about Molly’s graduation and Michael’s camp counsellor, about Sue’s new baby and the seeding of the front lawn. He heard about the new refrigerator and the shortage of gasoline, about his friend Pete Staal, the dentist, and the Rotary Anns. He heard about the mouse in the cedar closet and the new screens that had been bought for the porch. And when the weekly letter was exhausted, the reminiscences would begin. “Pete Staal, Pete Staal,” Kromak would say dreamily, “a good dentist and a lovable son-of-a-bitch, but what a crazy guy! I remember the night Kitty and me, the Deckers, and the Staals went to Rossi’s — that’s an Italian restaurant at the far end of Franklin Street — and had ravioli. Ever had ravioli? At Rossi’s they make the best ravioli in the world. Well, we didn’t want to take two cars, so we rode down in mine. A Dodge I had then. Well, right after we’d eaten, Helen said she wanted to go over to the Nutley Field Club. That made Pete mad and he said that if she was going to Nutley he was going to fly down to Wilmington to see his mother. Of course, he knew what Helen really wanted — to see Marie and Dane Schaeffer — I told you about them, remember? Well…” And on he went while Georghi listened and drank it in. Do you know Passaic, New Jersey?’
‘No.’
‘Chemical plants and some light industry and the homes of the people who have to work there. But to Georghi Pashik, looking through the eyes of Lieutenant Kromak, who wanted so much to be back with the wife and kids, it must have represented a paradise of domestic security and gracious living. You know how it is? Lots of quite intelligent Europeans have fantastic notions about the way most Americans live. Sitting on that terrace in a Lebanon hill town, poor, unhappy, exiled Georghi must have been a pushover for the American way of life. Just to put it in terms of food — reason might tell him that the ravioli he’d get in Rossi’s on Franklin Street, Passaic, would not be as good as he’d eaten already in Rome and Florence, but Rossi’s ravioli had become the desirable ones. They had the approval of those legendary figures the Staals, the Deckers, and the Schaeffers, and that was what mattered. He began to understand why the Americans didn’t like the Lebanese they came in contact with. Lebanese standards of sanitation and behaviour are not those of Passaic, New Jersey. Georghi heard local ways that he had accepted or failed even to notice condemned quite angrily. He was troubled and began to question himself. You see what was happening, of course? Along with his dream of Passaic, New Jersey, he was beginning to acquire an American conscience.’
