I got up and went after her, cursing myself because, at the time I had spoken, I had forgotten all about her story and had tossed, without malice or intent, a hard truth at her.
When I had almost caught her up, she turned and waited for me.
I said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
She nodded her head. “I know.” Then, unexpectedly, she put her hand in the bend of my elbow lightly, hardly touching me, and we walked on.
We went right around the island, which took about ten minutes, and came back on to a high loggia terrace above the main outer stairway that ran up to the hotel entrance from the quay. The hotel motor-boat was just coming back from the far lakeside where the bus dumped passengers for the hotel. It pulled into the quayside under the lights. A man jumped ashore and made it fast and then turned back and helped a man and a woman from it. I caught the flash of a silver-knobbed cane, and then the man and the woman were moving across to the stone steps, the boatman behind carrying their cases.
I said to Vérité, “That’s Herr Walter Spiegel and his wife. You keep your door locked tonight and the chair in place.”
I passed an undisturbed night. So did Vérité. I checked before I went down to breakfast. She had breakfast in her room. To allay her curiosity about Spiegel, I told her that he was a gent I recognized from some past work I had done on a political case in London, and that I doubted whether he would be on Mljet just for his health. She could let Malacod know this in a letter. There was no telephone at the hotel. I didn’t tell her that I was sure he was no German.
I had breakfast in the sunshine on the quay. Afterwards I found a magazine in the hotel lounge and wandered up the slight slope behind the hotel into a terraced garden and sat on a seat beneath an olive and settled to idle the morning away.
I was joined after about twenty minutes by Herr Walter Spiegel. It was a stone seat, about six feet long, with a decorated, stone-carved back; no doubt the old monks, after a spell in the garden or the distillery or a long stint in the chapel, used to come up here, flop back, and wonder what it was all about. He sat at one end and I sat at the other. And some instinct warned me just how he had me figured out. Their research departments never slip up. So far as I was concerned there was a big sterling symbol over my head like a twisted halo. Sometimes I think it is the only thing that makes me useful to people like Sutcliffe and Manston. The other sides don’t walk warily around me as though I were a puff adder.
He laid the silver-knobbed cane down between us, sighed a little with the heat, and then lit a long thin black cigar which smelt as though a hundred acres of good steppe were going up in flames. I lit a cigarette.
He said, “Poor Howard Johnson has a broken arm.”
“Clumsy fellow.”
He laughed gently. He had a very distinguished face, the skin grey and grained like pumice stone, wore a brown tussore suit, and a panama which sat on his head dead in line with the horizon. He could have been a Berlin family lawyer on holiday. Maybe he wished he were.
“May I talk frankly, Mr Carver?”
“Just as long as you keep it simple.”
He nodded, and then said, “Oh, I forget. All this stupidity ... I should say, Mother Jambo. That is the correct introduction, eh? You will forgive me. I have been in this business so long that I forget or find tiresome all the archaic paraphernalia.”
“You want to watch your language. Simple, I said.”
He blew a cloud of smoke at a cloud of midges and the midges moved off.
“It has been decided,” he said, “between London and Moscow that this should become a combined operation. The decision was taken at high level, naturally. Where else are such decisions taken? Frankly, I’m glad. This uneasy pursuit of separate courses towards a common end only leads to confusion, double work, and – more unfortunate – distrust. It makes me very happy. Why? Frankly, because I am getting old, and it is pleasant to have a young, active man to do the ... how shall I say?”
“Donkey work is a good phrase. Try it.”
“Donkey work, yes. But no disparagement meant. Also – since it is intimated that you are specifically not on the establishment, but a private individual, co-opted because of special talents, then you are naturally concerned with the remunerative aspects.”
“You mean money?” Perhaps he was too old for the job, because he was giving it far too much. Or maybe he had just gone gaga with the strain. I’d met someone who had once. Or maybe he was a furlong ahead of me and about to pretend to pull a tendon. God knows. Sometimes I got real homesick for simple insurance recovery.
“Money, ah, yes.... As I was saying – co-operation has been decided on, so frankness becomes possible. In retrospect you will forgive Howard Johnson for his rather clumsy stratagem.”
“I’ll forgive him anything, if the money is right.”
“Splendid!” He brought out an envelope and delicately put it alongside the silver-knobbed cane.
I didn’t rush. I could match delicacy with delicacy, too, when it came to deceit. Mother Jambo. He was going to feel foolish when his ciphers’ link got around to letting him know about Ringmaster. I just let the envelope rest, and said, “And my instructions?”
“Exactly the same. We all want to know where Mrs Vadarci is going, and you have – vive l’amour – a special contact there. Just keep in touch, that is all we have to do. Though, naturally, when I leave this seat we will act as
