The Ruler’s stare was black and unblinking. ‘I have no knowledge of the case, beyond what I too have read in the Press.’
‘The man’s name was Pierre-Baptiste Chamaz. Before his accident, he had been following me for several days, and had taken photographs of myself and my accomplices. Those photographs were fortunately intercepted.’
The Ruler gave a bored shrug. ‘You should report such information to the police, not me. I am not interested.’
‘It is perhaps as well that I have not reported it to the police, Your Majesty. By the way, why was Chamaz wearing an identity bracelet?’
‘I do not know. Many people wear St Christophers. You are beginning to waste my time, Monsieur Pol.’
‘St Christophers, Your Majesty, are not usually made of heat-resistant alloy. However, it certainly ensured that poor Monsieur Chamaz got his name in the papers.’ Pol’s face softened into a grin. ‘Your Majesty, may I ask you a question?’
The Ruler waited, expressionless. Pol went on: ‘Why, precisely, did you hire me to kill you?’
There was a pause before the Ruler replied. ‘Monsieur Pol, it seems I must give you some advice. You are like a man who puts his hand into the fire to see if it will get burned. You enquire into matters which do not concern you. However, I suspect that you are also a man who could prove more troublesome if your curiosity is not satisfied. Let it be sufficient for me to say that I have recently had cause to question the loyalty of certain of my subjects. By allowing them to know that my life might be in danger from foreign assassins, I was able — by a relatively simple ruse — to test their loyalty, and find it wanting.’
‘An expensive ruse,’ Pol murmured, without enthusiasm. He was too old a hand to be impressed, let alone daunted, by the fantastic machinations of this inflated modern satrap. But Pol was also too careful to let any such disbelief show. He waited for the Ruler to continue.
‘But a small price to pay for the security of my State.’ He paused again, his eyes not moving from the Frenchman’s face. ‘Monsieur Pol, I must remind you once more that it is unwise to become too concerned in the affairs of a country like mine. I have been reluctantly obliged to implicate you, and certain other outsiders, in what has strictly been a matter of internal politics. Unfortunately, once outsiders become involved, they find themselves in a quicksand — the more they struggle, the deeper they are sucked in, until they are buried. Let your accomplices struggle, Monsieur Pol. You relax and listen to what I now have to say.’
From the moment that he walked out of ‘Le Soupir du Soleil’ and entered the chauffeur-driven car that was to take him back into Klosters, Pol knew that he was frightened.
It was not a rational fear; for Pol had learned to distinguish degrees of fear as the police distinguish types of crime. As the Ruler’s dossier had said, the Frenchman had tangled with some of the roughest outfits in the game. Not just hoodlums, but the real professionals. Yet all these organizations — the Falange, the Gestapo, the OAS and CIA and KGB — all had one common characteristic. They employed craftsmen. They had a job to do: a job to extract and evaluate information; sometimes they paid for that information with cash, asylum, immunity from arrest, sometimes by sparing their clients the maximum pain, mutilation, death.
But his Serene Imperial Highness, the Ruler of the Emerald Throne of the Hama’anah, belonged to another breed altogether. And as the car drew up outside the Silvretta Hotel, and Pol stepped out into the dry cold air, he realized that the Ruler was probably the one man of whom he had ever been really frightened in his life.
The Ruler was not merely a tyrant; nor even a simple megalomaniac. He was a mortal living in the centre of a fantastic dream, which had been turned to reality by billions of barrels of oil, and by his capacity to hold, single-handed, the intricate economies of the Western world perpetually hostage to his slightest whim. His domestic politics, in which he had temporarily involved Pol, he treated as no more than a casual game; and Pol — who, as the Ruler had accurately observed, loved to play games himself — was all too aware of the frivolous menace of such a man.
The fact that Pol had already deposited detailed accounts of his dealings with the Ruler at two banks — one in Switzerland and one in France — and a separate copy with a highly placed friend in the Palais de Justice in Paris, would not, he realized dismally, cause the Ruler much discomfort. Pol’s reputation, both in France and abroad, was not, unhappily, without blemish.
He felt tired and cold as he entered the lobby, and thought he might have a chill coming on. At the desk he left some lengthy instructions, including an order for a double club sandwich to be sent up to his room, where he did not wish to be disturbed until 6.30.
Upstairs he poured a stiff brandy which he drank in the bath; but afterwards, as he sat naked on the bed, he felt no better. The first bite of the sandwich had made him feel queasy and he had put the tray outside the door. He sat and watched the sweat trickling over the rolls of flesh, gathering in a salty pool in his massive navel and spilling over into his pubic beard, above the withered suture between his legs where a series of surgeons had spent months repairing what was left of his manhood.
Besides his own safety, what worried him most was how to protect Packer long enough for them to come to some
