Standing up, he reminded Neil of the man in the Michelin tyre advertisement: his great body bulged out of a shiny blue suit and balanced on a pair of delicate feet in soft slippers like ballet shoes. He was sweating heavily and the hair on the back of his head grew in damp rings like a whirlpool.
He stood slopping whisky into three cut-glass tumblers, adding ice from a thermos bucket. ‘Now we can behave like free men!’ he cried, trotting back with three huge golden drinks. ‘These policemen are bores! They are also stupid. They wanted to arrest you formally and take you to headquarters for questioning. It was my idea you came here!’ He beamed at them both and took a deep drink.
‘You are not a policeman?’ said Van Loon suspiciously.
‘Merde, non! I’m a businessman. I run a supermarket behind the Gare St. Lazare.’
Neil smiled. ‘Would it be indiscreet,’ he said, ‘to ask what you’re doing here in Athens?’
The fat sweating face became suddenly sly. ‘Monsieur Ingleby, for a man with a secret there are never indiscreet questions, only indiscreet answers.’ He chuckled and finished half his drink: ‘Now, breakfast! They do a very good Greek dish here — or you can have bacon and eggs.’ He clapped Neil on the shoulder. ‘Le bon breakfast anglais avec du Johnny Walter!’ he cried, with his peal of girlish laughter.
‘I’ll settle for the Greek dish,’ said Neil. Van Loon chose the same, winking at Neil over his drink, as Pol waddled back to the table and spoke into one of the white telephones. Neil wondered who was paying for the suite: was it the Deuxième Bureau or the Paris housewives who shopped at the supermarket at St. Lazare?
‘Monsieur Ingleby, how long are you staying in Greece?’ Pol asked, coming back from the table after refilling his drink.
‘A month perhaps. And you?’
‘Ah, that rather depends on our friend Colonel Broussard, alias Monsieur Martel.’ He squinted quizzically at Neil across his glass: ‘In any case, we shall be seeing something of each other, I hope?’
There was a knock at the door. A waiter wheeled the breakfast in on a trolley: jug of sweet, burnt-black coffee, bowls of yoghourt covered with a yellow crust and fat green figs wrapped in vine leaves.
The three of them ate with silent concentration: it was the first civilized food that Neil and Van Loon had tasted for more than two weeks. Pol shovelled it in at a ferocious rate, yoghourt dribbling into his beard, washed it all down with another tumbler of Johnny Walker and returned to his row of telephones. ‘If you want a bath and shave,’ he called, ‘it’s straight through.’ He dialled a number and began a long conversation in French. From what Neil could hear from the bathroom he was giving a series of urgent instructions. His voice held a note of authority that had nothing to do with a cheerful businessman gorging himself on an expense account.
Neil sank into the bath, finished his second whisky, scrubbed himself with the scented soap until the water turned grey, and decided there were worse ways to spend one’s first morning in a strange city. He shaved with Pol’s razor and dabbed on one of Pol’s aftershave lotions, noticing that the bathroom shelves were crowded with bottles of Eau de Cologne, creams, talcum powders, deodorants and vitamin pills. It amused Neil to realize that the man was vain.
Back in the sitting-room Pol was listening excitedly on the phone, another full whisky in his hand. He motioned Neil into a chair, while Van Loon went through to the bathroom.
‘Oui! … Oui! Entendu! That’s all we can do for the moment, except wait.’ He hung up, came back streaming with sweat, and collapsed into his chair by the window. For a moment the two of them sat in silence, sipping their drinks and feeling the warm breeze stir through the blinds from the Aegean. It was Pol who spoke first: ‘Would you be interested in this affair professionally, Monsieur Ingleby?’
‘Of course. I’m going to write a piece about Broussard on Athos, if that’s what you mean.’
‘That is a good little story, I agree. But I was thinking of something that might be even more interesting.’ He paused.
Neil sensed a sudden electric tension spring up between them. He said warily, ‘What sort of thing?’
Pol made an ambiguous gesture with his pink hands: ‘I’m afraid I can’t be very precise at this stage. But I think, if my guess is right, that things will shortly be happening over in North Africa.’ He clinked the ice cubes in his glass. There was another pause, full of irrelevant sounds: a horn from the Piraeus, Van Loon in his bath.
Pol wiped his brow, careful not to disarrange the kiss curl: ‘When I saw the name in your passport, Monsieur Ingleby, I recognized it at once. I have read several of your articles — they were reprinted in Le Canard Enchaîné.’
Neil inclined his head, flattered.
‘There was one I particularly liked — about the crisis in the Protectorate last year.’
Neil remembered the article. It had been a facetious piece written while General Guérin was threatening to drop paratroopers over Paris. Neil had suggested that one way to avert the danger, as well as effectively to humiliate the rebels themselves, would be for loyal French pilots to fly the paras across the Mediterranean, but instead of Paris, to drop them over Wigan and Blackpool and let them find their own way back.
Pol chuckled and took a
