lieutenants, and all three heads bowed as her white pointed shoes nimbly followed the triple rhythms and superimposed discords of a cha cha cha.
‘Don’t make any mistake, Jimmy,’ Dalby was speaking directly to a staff-brigadier. ‘Where your military system has the direct support of commerce and industry, you are absolute world beaters. This whole atoll is an unrivalled feat: but it’s a feat of logistics and organization that you’ve had a lot of practice in. There is not much difference between creating, at a speed fast approaching the Biblical record, a Coca-Cola plant with a shooting gallery for employee recreation, and creating a shooting plant with a Coca-Cola gallery for recreation.’
‘So does it matter, Dalby?’ The Brigadier, a bigboned athlete of sixty or more, hair grey and one eighth of an inch long, spectacles with their fine gold frames glinting as the reflections of a hundred fairy lights ran across his eyes. ‘Who cares where the credit lies. If we can make the biggest damndest greatest bang no one is going to give a damn about details. They’re just going to stay well clear of Uncle Sam.’ Finding something lacking in the audience reaction, he hastily added, ‘And well clear of NATO too. The whole free world in fact.’
‘I don’t think that’s what Dalby means,’ I said. I was always explaining to people what other people meant. ‘He grants you the ability but is unsure if you will use it correctly.’
‘You’re going to give me the old “Europe: home of diplomacy” stuff, eh boy?’ The Brigadier turned his huge grey head to face me. ‘I thought Khrushchev tactics had brought you guys up to date on that stuff.’
‘No, merely that Europeans have a firm and fearful knowledge of what happens when diplomats fail,’ I told him.
‘Diplomats and surgeons never fail,’ said Dalby. ‘They have too strong a union ever to have to admit it.’
I went on, ‘Americans are not noted for assuming failure to be possible before starting something.’
‘Oh heck, relationships between any rival business outfits are the same as between nations.’
‘I think that was true at one time, but now the destructive capabilities are such that, to extend your analogy, we must think in terms of cartels. Rivals must unite to live and let live.’
‘You Europeans always think in terms of cartels. That’s one of your worst failings. An American guy figures out how to make a ballpoint pen, he figures on selling them at a nickel a throw. In Europe when you first had speed-balls I saw them on sale nudging two English pounds! The difference is: the English guy makes three and a half
A tall, very thin girl with large teeth and a streak of silver hair across the crown of her head came up behind the Brigadier and touched her elegantly manicured and varnished nails to his mouth. In front of the musicians, a wooden dance floor as big as a gramophone record was as crowded as a magnet dipped in iron filings and only half as comfortable. The Brigadier was led off in that direction. Dalby and I stood submerged in the sea sounds, the wind in the trees sound, the chatter and ice and ‘Lady Be Good’ and hand-hitting-shoulder sounds, passing police jeep and ‘Why don’t we drive out there while it’s a lovely moon,’ and pebble in the sea sounds, glassful down uniform, and ‘if he’s a very close friend of yours’ and flattened sevenths and ‘you do that up this very minute’ sounds, and Dalby said, ‘Americans are funny.’ Getting no response from me he went on, ‘Americans are much too brutal while they are trying to make money, and much too sloppily sentimental and even gullible after they make it. Before: they think the world is crooked. After: they think it quaint.’
‘Which category does your Brigadier friend come into?’ I asked.
‘Oh neither,’ said Dalby, and little decisions about saying more filtered through his eyes. ‘He had one of the best brains I have ever come across. He owned a small publishers in Munich between the wars and then after the war, was in and out of all kinds of things. Three times, so the stories go, he’s had a million dollars, and twice he’s had only the battered old Riley car he runs around in, and a suit. A couple of months ago he was heading into the ground very quickly, when the army conscripted him into this project! An extraordinary fellow isn’t he?’
I could see the Brigadier now: his dark-green tie, tucked neatly into the opening of his light-buff shirt, a slab of ribbons as large as a half-pound of chocolate, and his big beat-up face with pockets of light and shadow running across it as he performed the slow motion ‘running on the spot’ movements of the dance.
‘Wanted to borrow you for a year,’ Dalby said. We both continued to look at the dance floor.
‘Did he get me?’
‘Not unless you particularly want to go. I said you’d prefer to stay with Charlotte.’
‘Let me know if I change my mind,’ I said, and Dalby gave me the slanted focus.
‘Don’t let the last few days put a scare into you,’ Dalby said. The plump little girl in white was still demonstrating dance steps. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, really. It was planned to keep you on the hook for a day or so,’ Dalby went on, since I hadn’t replied, ‘but they were anxious to take the heat off a high-ranking suspect, so they did a phase two on you so he’d stick his neck out helping to clobber you. Just grin and bear it for a little while longer, and look like you’re suffering.’
I said, ‘Just as long as the executioner is in on our cosy little secret,’ and I headed across to the girl in white for a cha-cha lesson.
By twelve-thirty I was loaded with anchovy, cheese dip, hard egg and salmon, and about 300 geometrically shaped pieces of cold toast. I cut out by the side entrance of the garden, across the service road at the side of the post office. Blue light glowed from within the sorting office, and a radio played soft big band music which jarred against the music and laughter from the General’s garden. Beyond the post office a white quonset hut stood alone. Inside, behind the counter, a young blond PFC with an almost invisible moustache handed me two cablegrams that had arrived since I last saw him at 6.30.
‘A spy has no friends’ people say; but it’s more complex than that. A spy has to have friends, in fact many sets of friends. Friends he’s made by doing things and by not doing other things. Every agent has his own ‘old boy network’ and like every other ‘old boy network’ it cuts across frontiers, jobs and every other loyalty — it’s a sort of spy’s insurance policy. One has no specific arrangement with anyone, no code other than a mutual sensitivity to euphemisms.
I opened the first cable. It was from a man named Grenade.[19] He was a political man now, and of high enough rank never to have it used as a prefix to his name. The cable said, ‘YOUR NOMINEE REDUNDANT STOP 13BT1818 WILL PAY BERT.’ It had come from the main post office in Lyons and there was no way of associating it with Grenade except that I had monitored some stuff when he was working for French Intelligence, and Bert had been his cover name.
The PFC lit a cigarette for me and coughed his way into the harsh French tobacco of one of mine. I looked at the other cable. It was an ordinary civilian cable handed over a post office counter, and paid for in cash. It had originated at Gerrard Street post office, London. It said: ‘READING A PAPER IN JC ON 3rd OF SECOND.’ It was signed: ‘ARTEMIDORUS.’
I looked at the two sheets of paper. Each sender had implied his message in different ways. Grenade was clearly telling me that I was for the high jump, but that I could use the funds he’d stacked at that number bank account in Switzerland. To find which bank would be easy enough, since they had different codes, and anyone quoting the number can draw without too much trouble. I smiled as I wondered whether this account was the result of the American Express forgeries he had once been involved with. It would be ironic if I was clamped for being an accessory when I tried to draw on it. The second cable was from Charlie Cavendish, who was an undercover man for C-SICH.[20] He liked me because I’d been in the Army with his son. When his son was killed, I’d told him, and had got on so well with the old man that I saw him often. He had a great and devastating sense of humour that illuminated dark corners and prevented him getting a senior position. He lived in a poky Bloomsbury flat, ‘to be near the British Museum,’ he said, and probably had trouble finding the few bob to pay for the cable. It was the most sobering of all my messages.
Back at the party, globules of people were clinging together. I smiled at a very young soldier sitting on a frame chair outside the room the General used as a second office.
‘The General is definitely not to be disturbed, eh, soldier?’ I leered. He smiled back in an embarrassed way, but made no attempt to stop me going into the library. I moved with a studied lack of hurry and lit another cigarette.
The General’s set of Shakespeare were pigskin, hand-tooled, a pleasure to handle. I didn’t need to look up Artemidorus in the third scene of Act 2
The library was lit by a signal rocket and a hundred ‘Ahs!’ lay lethargic on the air. In the anticipatory silence a voice outside the window said, ‘They just don’t make corks the way they used to.’ Then followed a giggle-giggle of
