‘Why did they call you “pieds-noir”?’ he asked.
She whispered something he didn’t catch, still holding him to her, gripping him with her thighs, trying not to let him escape out of her; and when he did, she gave another small agonised cry and her nails bit into him again, painfully this time. ‘Pieds-noirs,’ she murmured: ‘It was the name the Bedouins gave the first settlers who came to Algeria because of the black shoes they wore.’
They lay on top of the sheet listening to a breeze stirring the banana leaves outside the window. ‘I wonder if the bear will wake us,’ she said suddenly: ‘Wake us with his growling?’
‘It’ll be more likely Ryderbeit growling.’
‘He should be in a cage. He’s a terrible man — un affreux.’
Murray smiled. Les Affreux, the Terrible Ones, had been the nickname given to the white mercenaries in the Congo. ‘He isn’t quite as terrible as he makes out,’ he said. ‘He plays the comedy a lot of the time.’
‘You think so? Just because he saved our lives? Ah!’ She made an angry gesture in the dark and sat up. ‘He was saving his own life. You talk about him as though you were friends.’
Murray shrugged: ‘That Negro Jones puts up with him. I don’t suppose they have to fly together. Ryderbeit may be un affreux, but he must have some qualities.’
She leant down and kissed him, wide-mouthed, her tongue rolling luxuriously round inside his mouth. ‘You have qualities,’ she said at last, allowing him to breathe again. ‘Magnificent qualities.’
He pulled her on to him, pressing her breasts hard against him, his hands sliding down her long back, over the soft curve of her buttocks, feeling her warm and wet between the thighs — this strong, dark, beautifully-made pied-noir who belonged to him, in that moment, completely. And he thought, with uneasy satisfaction, I’ve cuckolded the CIA. He wished to God he could hate the CIA — that they had done him some irreparable wrong so that he could hate them as much as he could love this girl. And he realised, with a catch of misgiving, that he could love her very much.
Sometime later he asked her: ‘Do you love your husband?’
‘Don’t talk about him. Please. Not now.’
They slept heavily after that, for several hours, before Murray woke suddenly. There was a confusion of voices outside, muffled and heavy, then a banging on the door. ‘Murray Wilde, you evil bastard!’
He sprang up, putting himself between the girl and the door. A French voice broke in, quiet and rapid; then came a crash on the door, low down as though someone had kicked it. ‘Get out o’ there, you sneaky copulator!’ Ryderbeit yelled, hammering with both fists. ‘You selfish thievin’ bastard!’
One of the French voices began again, ‘Alors mon vieux, vas te coucher.’ And Jones repeated, ‘C’mon Sammy, let’s go to bed.’
Jackie had woken too and whispered, between the hammering, ‘What’s happened?’
Murray stood naked in front of the door and said loudly, ‘Ryderbeit, go to bed, as Jones tells you. Go to bed and shut up, or I’ll set the bear on to you.’
There followed what sounded like a scuffle, then a great howl of anguish: ‘I wanna talk, I wanna drink, I wanna talk t’yer Wilde, you greedy thievin’ copulator! And I’m all ’lone…!’ His voice receded with a shuffle of feet and muttered voices.
Murray went back to the bed. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘he should be in a cage — with the bear.’ He lay down and kissed her on her mouth and cheek and under the ear. ‘He’s just drunk.’
‘He knows I’m in here. How do you think he knows? He looked in my room, I suppose. He’s a pig.’
‘He’s only drunk.’
‘It’s not good, if he talks — if those pilots and the Negro talk — and my husband finds out. There are no secrets in this country.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ he whispered, without conviction. ‘He probably won’t even remember in the morning.’
They lay as they had slept, his arm round her shoulder and hand between her legs. Then, in the dark silence, he felt her sobbing. ‘It is so humiliating! It’s always the same,’ she cried, ‘hiding away, in dirty hotels in this dirty continent, full of dirty drunken misérables!’
He held her tightly, beginning to rock her like a child: ‘Don’t worry, just sleep. Sleep and forget.’
But he could not forget. What had she said, always the same? How many times the same, in how many hotels? — dirty furtive hotels in Vientiane, Bangkok, Saigon? Couldn’t he take her away, rescue her from the whole ugly scene, run like hell with her? What was there to stop him? His job as a writer allowed him almost unlimited freedom of movement, his talents were not exclusive to one organisation. He could run faster and further than Maxwell Conquest.
There was nothing to stop him, except a mythical fifth of one billion U.S. dollars.
CHAPTER 2
They woke early, with the light splintering through the banana leaves outside. The fan had stopped sometime in the night and already they were beginning to sweat. They did not speak at all as they came together again, with a steady synchronised passion that left them drained and happy, sweating freely now, their minds still empty of the hard realities ahead. Ryderbeit and Jones. The plane at noon. Vientiane and the mean-mouthed husband in the CIA.
They stood together under the shower and in the shafts of sunlight Murray studied her in detail, then began systematically to kiss her whole body from her mouth down to the inside of
