Her flesh warm under my palm, I said, ‘Officially I’m supposed to be dead. You haven’t seen me. You won’t say anything to anyone about me. Okay?’
‘For a dead man, you look very healthy.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘have you heard from your father recently?’
‘No. You are still playing around with that old business?’
‘Yes, I am.’
I was disappointed. Freeman had got in touch with Jane Judd, and had paid Gloriana back and out of it had come Barcelona. I had hoped that Pelegrina might have made some semi-revealing communication to Letta.
She kissed me again and this time slid into my lap. ‘Tonight, after I come back from the Scherezade, I make you come alive again and forget all this business. I give you a key so that you can come in and wait for me, yes?’
With an effort I came back to the business in hand. ‘But you did lend money to your father for his last venture, didn’t you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, and positively for the last time. I made that clear. He’s a man who can complicate people’s lives. I like mine straightforward. Just like now. You and me.’
‘You called him on the phone from Tripoli at the Villa La Sunata, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, to ask him what the hell he was up to. You went there?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he is in trouble?’
‘Bad trouble.’
‘Something you can do nothing about?’
‘Would you want me to?’
‘Yes, if you could. After all, I am his daughter and, although he is such a stupid old fool, I have some feeling for him.’
‘You ever heard of a place called Tristan’s Bar or the Bar Tristan? Your father ever mentioned it? Or a place . . . house or something . . . whose initials might be V.V.?’
‘No. Such mystery. This, for you, is life, no? Always mysteries?’
‘It could be my death.’
I said it lightly, but I don’t think if I said it seriously it would have got through to her. Her lips were nuzzling the side of my neck and I needed all my willpower to keep my natural anxiety in the foreground. Up above the window Lilith lazily adjusted a couple of coils and eyed me biliously.
She didn’t know it but there was a prize guinea pig sitting down below her. Me. Manston had turned me loose, a human guinea pig, into an experiment which didn’t seem to have a hope of succeeding. And when it failed the chopping block would be waiting. It was this kind of thought that made it difficult for me to go along with Letta’s present mood. There’s nothing like worry to inhibit a man.
Before I left, she gave me a key to the apartment. I took it. Why not? I might feel a different man by the evening.
‘You come and sit and have a drink,’ she said. ‘Always I am back by half past one.’ She had her hand on the door when she turned back and went to a bureau.
She came back and held out the gold python bracelet.
‘You do me a favour?’
‘Of course.’
‘I have had a telephone call from your Mrs Stankowski. She is staying at the Georges Cinq. We talk about the price for the bracelet but do not agree. You go and see her and get for me three thousand pounds. Then I give you 10 per cent. She is fond of you, no? She will not haggle with you—’ she smiled—‘and I do not mind if you humour her a little to get the right price.’
I nodded and sighed. Women.
Letta laughed, reached forward, kissed me and said, ‘But you do not humour her too much. She likes you, I know. When we talk over the phone she asked if I had seen you. She sounded worried about you.’
So she might be. I had walked out of her flat, away from cold salmon, oysters, Montrachet and what could have been a pleasant aftermath, into limbo.
*
The thing about my kind of job which makes for the occasional success is the inability of the most intelligent human being, the Sutcliffe or Manston or Saraband Two types, to control or foresee every little circumstance that lurks on the fringe of a complicated affair. Somewhere somebody is going to make a mistake, and somewhere somebody is going to take advantage of it. Small things in the right place can have big potentials. Take a beer bottle, for instance; full of beer it has no room for anything else. Empty, well, it can be packed with all sorts of things. And master minds, thank the Lord, have occasional moods of uncritical acceptance like normal, uncomplicated people.
I didn’t indulge in this piece of pretty ordinary philosophy as I was going to see Gloriana. It came afterwards. If I’d had any sense I’d have taken it a step or two further—but I suppose at that time, after leaving her, I mean, I was in a deep state of uncritical acceptance of life.
Why I went to see her I don’t really know. I had time to waste until Olaf got in, and with time to waste I felt life was a vacuum unless I filled it. Though what I was going to do when Olaf got in I couldn’t think—except that I didn’t mean to hold his hand through any maudlin rum-drinking bout. I suppose, fundamentally, being a great believer in survival, I went to Gloriana to tidy up the python bracelet deal and make sure of my 10 per cent commission. Thinking about money, though it wasn’t any great sum, kept me from thinking about other things.
At the Georges Cinq the reception clerk rang through and asked Mrs Stankowski if she could see a Mr Duncan Hilton about her brother. Mrs Stankowski said she would and up I went.
Was she surprised to see me! Her beautiful cornflower blue eyes popped and she nearly dropped the dry martini she had
