from a particularly energetic personnel manager. This one was typed on onion-skin paper, carrying the logo of a small furniture factory in Memphis, Tennessee. Attached to it was an employee-record punchcard and a photo. It had been 'styled' to provide a cause-and-effect view of Hank Dean's life, instead of being, as the earlier sheets were, a list of dates and a terse summary.
And yet these sheets are always a poor substitute for sight and sound of the real person. What use was it to know that his middle name was Zacharias, and that some schoolfriends call him Zach. How many schoolfriends remain for a man who is nearly fifty years old? Dean had 'a drinking problem'. That had always struck me as an inappropriate euphemism to apply to people who had absolutely no problem in drinking. What Dean had was doubtless a sobriety problem. I wondered if that was anything to do with the break-up of his marriage. The wife was a New Yorker of German extraction, a few years younger than Dean. There was one child — Henry Hope Dean — who lived in Paris and spent his vacations fishing with his father.
I closed the file. Henry Zacharias Dean, Ph.D., 210 pounds at last dossier revision, soldier, company executive, failed C.I.A. agent, failed husband but successful father… here we come. And won't you wish you were back in that village near Cleveland, getting punched in the head by the local kids.
'Did you say something?' asked Mann.
'The no-smiling sign is on,' I said.
Mann poured the last of the champagne into our glasses.
One Christmas — so many decades ago that I can't remem ber when exactly — an aunt gave me a book about some children who were captured by the crew of a pirate ship. The pirate captain was a huge man, with a hooked nose and a magnificent beard. He drank rum in copious amounts, and yet was never obviously drunk. His commands could be heard from fo'c's'le to crow's-nest, and yet his footsteps were as deft, and as silent, as a cat's. That pirate captain's mixture of bulk and dexterity, cruelty and kindness, shouts and whispers, drinking and sobriety were also the make-up of Hank Dean.
He would need only a Savile Row suit, some trimming of the beard and a glass of sherry in his hand to be mistaken for a wealthy gynaecologist or a stockbroker. And yet, in this shaggy sweater, that reached almost to his knees, denim trousers washed to palest blue, and swilling Cahors, the local wine, round and round in the plastic cup that had once contained Dijon mustard, he would have had trouble thumbing a ride to Souillac.
'Should have done it years ago. Should have done it when I was eighteen. We both should have done it, Mickey.' Hank Dean swigged his wine and poured more. He closed the typescript of his comic detective novel
The heat from the big black iron stove disappeared up the huge chimney, or through the cracks and crevices that could be seen round the ill-fitting doors and windows. Only when Hank Dean threw some wax cartons and wrapping paper into the stove did it give a roar and a brief show of flame.
Dean lifted the frying-pan that was wanning on the stove. Two eggs or three?'
'I'm not hungry,' said Mann. 'Give me a piece of that salami.' He picked up a slice of the sausage on his fork and chewed at it.
Dean said, 'Jesus Christ, of course you're hungry. You've come all the way down from Paris, haven't you. And this is the greatest food in the world. You're having an omelette with truffles — it would cost you a king's ransom in one of those phoney New York traps — and that's not salami, goddamn it, it's pork sausage, smoked at the farm just up the hill there.'
Mann stopped eating the pork sausage and put his fork down.
'I miss the ball games,' said Dean. 'I'd be lying to you if I didn't admit to missing the ball games. But I can hear them on the radio sometimes.'
'Short-wave radio?' said Mann.
'And the Voice of America. On a good night, the Armed Forces Network from Germany. But I'm surrounded by high ground here, as you see.'
'Sure,' said Mann.
I wondered how much of that exchange was about baseball, and how much was about short-wave radio reception — and maybe transmission too. I took some sausage, and tore a crusty piece of bread from the end of the loaf. It would all go on a long time yet, I decided. Mann and Dean would pretend to talk about old times, while talking about new times. And Mann would pace up and down, looking into cupboards and assessing the length of drawers and the thickness of walls to decide whether something could be concealed behind them. He would judge it all on a basis of infallibility, while hoping for a careless mistake.
'My kids went to camp this Christmas,' Mann told Dean. 'It cost me an arm and a leg. How I'm going to pay for them when they go to college, like your boy, sometimes scares the arse off me.'
Dean was cutting a large truffle into slices as thin as a razor blade. He was using a wooden-handled folding knife, of the type the Wehrmacht issued to special units that had to cut sentries' throats.
'Living here costs me practically nothing,' explained Dean. 'The company pays me five hundred bucks a month, and I'm still getting ten dollars a week for that ball-game injury back when we were kids. The team carried insurance and that was lucky for me.' He lifted the bread-board and carefully bulldozed the truffle slices into the beaten egg, then stood up and walked to the stove.There was a limp in his left leg. Whether this was for our benefit, because he'd been thinking of it, or simply a result of sitting too long I could not be sure.
'But didn't you say your boy went to some kind of private college in Paris? Doesn't that really cost?'
Dean stirred the egg, and checked the heat of the frying-pan by tossing a scrap of bread into it. It went golden brown. He forked it out, blew on it and ate it before adding some salt and pepper to the egg mixture. Then he stood with the bowl of egg poised above the stove. 'You must have got it wrong, Mickey,' he said. The boy went to an ordinary French technical school. There were no fees.'
With a quick movement, and using only one hand, he closed the knife and slipped it back into the pocket of his, jeans. He said, 'My old Renault will do more miles per gallon than any automobile I ever used. The running repairs I do myself. In fact, last month I changed the piston rings. Even with the present price of gas, I spend no more than the ten bucks a week that my injury provides — I figure I owe my leg that car.'
He turned round from the stove and smiled. 'As for the rest; that little restaurant next door sells me my lunch for about what I could buy the ingredients for. I don't know how they do it. In the evening I manage on a bit of char-cuterie, eggs, bread and stuff. For special occasions, one of these twenty-franc truffles…' He smiled. 'Of course if my book hit the jackpot…'
'How often do you manage to get to the big city?' Mann asked him. Dean tipped the egg mixture into the pan. The sudden splutter of the egg in the hot fat made Mann turn his head.
'Paris, you mean?' said Dean.
'Or New York,' said Mann. 'Or London, or Brussels — even Berlin.' He let the word hang in the air for a long time. 'Any big city where you can do some shopping and see a show.'
'I haven't seen a show — or even a movie — in a lot of years, Mickey,' said Dean. He dragged at the egg with urgent movements of a wooden spoon, twisting and turning the pan, so that the uncooked egg would run on to the hot metal that he uncovered. 'No time, and no money, for those bourgeois pastimes.'
In another place, and at another time, such comment would have passed unnoticed but now Dean bent low to the pan, and watched the egg cooking with a concentration that was altogether unmerited, and I knew he could have bitten his tongue off.
Dean turned the pan up, so that the giant omelette rolled on to a serving-dish. He divided it into three equal ' parts and put it on our plates. Above the table the lamp was a curious old contraption of brass and weights and green shade'. Dean pulled at the strings so that the lights came low over the dining-table.
We ate the meal in complete silence. Now that only the table was illuminated, it gave everything there an artificial importance. And the three sets of busy hands, under the harsh light, were like those of surgeons co- operating in some act of dissection. In spite of his protests about not being hungry, Mann gobbled the omelette. When there was no more than a few smears of uncooked egg on his plate, he took a piece of bread and wiped up the egg with obsessional care before putting the bread into his mouth.
'The reason we came down here to see you, Hank…' Mann took another piece of bread, tore it into pieces and ate it piece by piece, as if trying to find reasons for not continuing.
'You need no reasons, old buddy,' said Dean. 'Nor your friend either. Hank Dean — open house. You know that by now, don't you? In the old days, I've had parties where they've slept under the table, and even in the
