Reluctantly Murray handed the Beretta back to Pol, following him as he limped out across to the door, repeating the same operation as before — calling ‘Come in,’ and turning with the gun behind his back, watching as the waiter wheeled in a trolley laid with plates of hors d’oeuvres and cold meats, telling him to leave it inside, to keep it away from the flies — watching until the man had left, closing the door behind him. Then he turned, wrinkling his nose at the food. ‘The usual American picnic!’ he scowled. ‘They have brought to this city the eating habits of barbarians. You know what they gave me for breakfast this morning? — a hamburger with sauce béarnaise!’ He had put the gun back in his trouser pocket and was picking at some slices of dry fish.
‘You’re not worried that it’s poisoned?’ Murray asked, not quite without irony.
Pol grinned: ‘If they’re the people I think they are, the methods of Lucrecia Borgia are not their style.’
‘So you do think you know who they are?’
Pol shrugged, carrying a plate of tinned artichoke hearts out on to the balcony and sinking into his chair with a loud crack of cane. ‘I can tell you one thing, my dear Murray — they were certainly not the same people who killed George Finlayson.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because for a start, as I just said, their styles are so different. Secondly, there was not the same motive.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I had information.’
‘Secret information — through your work in Cambodia? Or am I being indiscreet?’
‘Oh, there are no indiscreet questions, my dear Murray — only indiscreet answers. But for a man in my position there must be certain matters —’
Murray cut him short: ‘All right, I’ll take your word for it. But for a moment you had me worried. I thought it was you who’d killed Finlayson.’
Pol sat back with his champagne and chuckled playfully. ‘Oh but it was, my dear Murray. Or rather, I had him killed. It was the only way.’
CHAPTER 3
Murray blinked at him, conscious of an angry pain in one eye — the glare of refracted light, the champagne burning high and sour in his throat. ‘You bastard,’ he muttered, in English. ‘You fat murdering bastard!’
Pol shrugged lazily, putting his plate on the floor so that his hand would be free for the gun. ‘It was necessary, I promise you. A necessary killing in the line of duty.’
Murray closed his eyes. It was not easy to lose one’s temper with a man while you drank his champagne. Especially when he also had a gun. ‘But why?’ he said at last. ‘What had he done?’
‘He was planning to betray us,’ Pol said evenly. ‘To ruin our beautiful little plan, even before we had begun putting it in operation. A painless process of tipping off the British and American Intelligence Services and getting you and the others expelled from Laos and Vietnam before you could make trouble.’ He sat back munching an artichoke. ‘You guessed, perhaps, that George Finlayson was working for British Intelligence — what you call D.I.5?’
‘I didn’t know. How did you find out?’
‘Oh I’ve known for some time — almost since I first met him.’
‘And you still trusted him?’
‘Not at all. In fact, I was never very happy about Monsieur Finlayson from the start. He was too comfortable — too bourgeois in his outlook. After all, twenty thousand dollars a year with no tax, and living on expenses, is a very agreeable life — especially if you’re a man without much imagination or ambition.’
‘But you still told him the plan?’
‘I still hoped he might be seduced — for the promise of perhaps a hundred million pounds Sterling. Even for a bored banker, that’s a lot of money. And besides, at the time he was the only person I knew who was capable of finding out the necessary information.’
Murray clenched his teeth, trying hard not to lose his temper. Was this what Pol meant by ‘romantic idealism’? Poor dull Finlayson, he’d never trusted Pol either. Never trust a man with a beard, he’d said — cloven hoof and hairy heel. But white men had to stick together. Couldn’t go round slitting each other’s throats, or nailing one another down to beds. Not a white man’s trick at all. ‘And who did you get to do it?’ he said, his voice stiff with repressed rage.
Pol wagged his head. ‘Secrets of the trade, my dear Murray.’
‘And how can you be sure he hadn’t already tipped off the British and the Americans?’
‘I’m sure — that’s all you have to know.’
‘Through someone else in British Intelligence? An old man called Hamish Napper, for instance?’
‘Ah Murray! Now that’s what I do call an indiscreet question.’
Murray nodded, lifting his champagne. Naughty little Napper, he thought: Whitehall had left him out in the East just a little too long after all. Hamish Napper and Charles Pol — two oddball expatriates with eccentric habits and a shared dislike of the Americans, but a common love of the dollar. He looked out across the city, at the storm clouds coming closer, piling up high and dark along the edge of the sky. ‘So if Finlayson was the only person who could find out the information, but is now dead — where does that leave us?’
Pol did not reply at once. He stretched out and refilled his glass, watching the bottle bobbing back into the half-melted ice. ‘Does “Lazy Dog” mean anything to you?’ he said suddenly, pronouncing the phrase ‘Low-see dowg.’
Murray frowned back at him. ‘Yes, it’s a weapon they use in Vietnam. A beastly contraption that fires millions of needles over a wide area, destroying everything in sight.’ Then he remembered something Finlayson had told him
