Suddenly he stopped. Jackie Conquest had begun to cry. It was a stiff soundless weeping, two tears rolling out of her large dark eyes and dripping on to her tunic before she had time to catch them, then recovering almost immediately, with that look of embarrassed fury she had shown when she had been sick on the plane. For a moment Ryderbeit hesitated. Then he stretched out and touched her hand. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ He sounded almost gentle.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all!’ She sat shaking her head violently, reaching for a handkerchief.
‘Something I said?’ he asked: ‘Something about the Legion?’
‘La Légion,’ she repeated, in a curiously wooden voice. ‘My father was a commandant — twenty-two years with the Legion. He killed himself in 1961 after the uprising in Algiers. He preferred to die rather than face the shame of selling out to that long-nosed traitor, de Gaulle!’ She sat glaring round the table, her eyes suddenly dry again and very bright. ‘You see, I’m from Algérie. I was born in Oran — what we call a pied-noir, a “black-foot”.’ She gave a harsh laugh, her eyes grown wild now, and Murray wondered whether she were slightly drunk, or perhaps suffering from delayed shock. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything about La Légion!’ she went on; and Ryderbeit leaned over and refilled her glass. He was looking faintly confused. At the end of the table No-Entry Jones watched and listened behind his dark glasses. Murray felt a certain grateful confidence in him, sitting there still and quiet, and dead sober over a bottle of mineral water.
As for Jackie Conquest, her outburst had explained everything. The bold Mediterranean beauty, the unflinching devil-may-care attitude with which she’d boarded the C 46 — and now this sudden passion about her dead father, lost son of a lost empire. For after the final collapse in Algeria, it was not hard to see why she had fallen for marrying an American. But instead of the Great Society, she had found herself back in the wreckage of France’s previous colonial disaster, living in the claustrophobic squalor of an American Saigon. The only mystery was how she managed to be there at all. Wives of U.S. personnel were rare in Vietnam. Murray wondered how old Maxwell had swung it? Or how his wife had stuck it? Perhaps it was simply because she had nowhere else to go. For a girl reared since childhood on the beaches and boulevards of French Algeria, to have to resign herself, still in her twenties, to become a grass-widow of the CIA — inhabiting some neat little American suburb among the lawn sprinklers and two-car garages, bumping trolleys with the permed housewives in the local supermarket — must have been a dismal prospect indeed.
Ryderbeit was tossing more bourbon-soaked morsels to the fish — one of whom to his annoyance appeared to be stirring to life again — and was now telling about his ill-fated adventure in Europe. ‘I tried to sell an aircraft carrier in Genoa to the Syrians. Just imagine a Jew selling arms to the Arabs!’
Murry smiled bleakly: in Ryderbeit’s case he had no trouble imagining it at all. ‘What sort of carrier was it?’ he asked.
‘One o’ the big Yank jobs. Beautiful deal. I had it goin’ for only forty million bucks, on a two and a half per cent commission. Trouble was, y’see, the bloody carrier didn’t exist. I was sweatin’, I can tell yer — on speed-and-stress pills for a whole month until the deal fell through. Only that’s the last one that does fall through for Samuel D. Ryderbeit. The very last.’ His eyes, with their ugly glare at the edges, swivelled round and met Murray’s, holding them with a slow leer.
Murray did not look away; he remembered, through the miasma of bourbon, that back in the plane, before the final crisis, Ryderbeit had promised that they would talk more about their ‘business proposition’. How much, he thought again, did the man really know? How much had Finlayson told him, before arranging to have him contacted through Luke Williams? And supposing Finlayson had told him everything — as much as he knew himself from Pol — how much was Ryderbeit to be trusted?
Murray was feeling almost too drowsy to care. No-Entry had gone to sleep again, and Ryderbeit was regaling Jackie with more tales of adventure — this time in South America where he’d got a job catching snakes. If Murray had been more alert he would have read the danger signals in Jackie’s dark brooding stare. Her expression was not just one of dislike for Ryderbeit, but of deep, uncompromising, contemptuous loathing. But the Rhodesian — with less than two inches left in the bourbon bottle — seemed blissfully innocent of her reactions. Perhaps the knowledge that she was a Daughter of the Legion had blinded him to her more sensitive emotions. She would not quickly forget that coarse, evocative threat to thrash her — and she was not going to let him forget it either.
He was now telling her: ‘I used to sell ’em for two dollars apiece — not for their skins but their meat, which was canned as cocktail delicacies. I’d creep up behind the little bastards and snatch ’em up by their tails, then crack ’em like whips so their heads came off.’
Jackie Conquest interrupted: ‘May I ask you a question, Mr Ryderbeit?’
‘Anything you like, darling — providin’ it’s not hush-hush stuff for old Maxwell.’
Jackie stubbed out the cigarette she had just lit, and from the fixed look in
