Soldier No More Page 14

“What I want to know,” continued Steffy, “is what Jilly’s been saying to you. She’s not usually so gabby.”

  “How d’you know it’s me he’s got a pash on?” Lexy’s mental reflexes appeared to be sure, but slow.

  “Because he’s never seen anything like you before, Lexy dear.” Steffy looked at Roche. “You have to tell us, David.”

  “I was telling him about tonight, that’s all,” said Jilly.

  “About the orgy? I bet he didn’t believe it!”

  Roche blinked unhappily. Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for handling a situation like this.

  “I don’t wonder!” said Lexy. “I don’t believe it either—and I take part in it! And if I told Daddy about it, he wouldn’t believe it… but I shall never get the hang of it.”

  “That’s because you don’t prepare yourself properly. But you ought to be able to do better tonight, with a bit of last minute cramming—and your new David to cheer you on—“

  “Don’t bet on it. I’m just not cut out for that sort of thing, darling.”

  Roche felt the current drag at his knees. Even if he wasn’t imagining all this, how could he possibly report the gist of it to Genghis Khan in less than an hour’s time?

  “Darling—it’s easy!” chuckled Jilly. “You’ve just been reading all about Galla Placidia and her Visigoths—just lie back and imagine you’re her, being possessed by a great big hairy barbarian!”

  Roche let the river take him away.

  VIII

  EVEN WITHOUT BENEFIT of Thompson, Roche could see at a glance that Neuville belied its name: it was a lovely little honey-coloured bastide which hadn’t been a ‘new town’ since the 13th century judging by the look of medieval gateway and surviving walls.

  But Lady Alexandra allowed him no time to admire Alphonse de Poitiers’ original defences.

  “Do you really do something hush-hush, David?” It was a question she’d been working up to for ten kilometres.

  So he was ready for it. “Frightfully hush-hush, Lady Alexandra. And also frightfully dull.” And he also had his own question waiting for this opportunity. “Do you really take part in orgies in the Tower, Lady Alexandra?” he inquired politely.

  “Oh—phooey!”

  “Is that yes—or no?” He manoeuvred the Volkswagen through the gateway. “Where do I go from here?”

  “Straight ahead to the square. You can park there, and it’s quite near La Goulard’s shop.”

  He drove on slowly. “Was that yes … or no?”

  Lady Alexandra sniffed. “It was yes. But I bet your job isn’t as dull as our orgies.”

  “Sounds a funny sort of orgy.”

  “You can say that again! You just wait and see—park over there, under the trees.” She pointed. “And now you can help me do my shopping.”

  The prospect of the orgy certainly didn’t seem to inspire her in the way he would have expected, and from the sound of her voice the shopping wasn’t very popular with her either.

  He looked at his watch. “Sorry, but I’ve got to make a phone-call. Where’s the public call-box?”

  “A phone-call?”

  He shrugged and smiled at her. “One of the penalties of being hush-hush, Lady Alexandra. I have to let them know where I am each night.” He put his finger to his lips. “Top secret.”

  “Oh—you!! I suppose you’re calling your girl-friend, more like!”

  That had done the trick. “No. But they pass the information on to her, as a matter of courtesy.”

  “Okay! I asked for it!” Her vague smile returned. “The phone’s somewhere down there, beyond the war memorial, by the Post Office place … and La Goulard’s shop is back that way—come and bail me out of there when you’ve finished being top secret—“

  Roche felt the accumulated warmth of the day rising off the cobbles under foot as he made his way past the heroic bronze Poilu of 1914, whom some fool had placed on the spot where the revolting peasants of 1637 had been broken on the wheel, according to Thompson, and with fine disregard for the way the monument spoilt the view of the medieval arcade nearby.

  If he put his foot wrong now, he would be broken on some other wheel, but less publicly.

  Yet he had no choice, he had to give Genghis Khan Lady Alexandra and the Misses Baker and Stephanides, not to mention the Israeli and the American, because he needed all he could get about them, and quickly.

  The Comrades were obviously the best bet for all of them; their records were better and much more extensive than anything the British were likely to have. Indeed, the very fact that the British had supplied him with so little information, which they bloody-well ought to have known in advance with Galles down here, was proof of their incompetence.

  Indeed … maybe the Comrades already had useful messages for him, which would help him to put the right questions to the British, to make them think all the better of him, as well as helping him forward.

  The thought brightened him: that, after all, was the way he had planned it all—

  He didn’t recognise the voice on the other end of the line, but he hadn’t expected to. All he had hoped for was the correct recognition sign and the ‘clear’ word to go with it, to indicate that it was safe to go ahead.

  Any messages?

  No, there were no messages. Had he made contact with the client yet?

  Roche decided to hold that one back for the moment. Instead he inquired rather brusquely whether anyone was watching over him.

  Why did he want to know that?

  Because the other side was probably watching him too—he deliberately didn’t elaborate on that possibility; it covered Raymond Galles if they knew about him, but if they didn’t then there was no percentage in mentioning him at this stage—and he didn’t want heavy-footed Comrades falling over them, or leaving their pug-marks for all to see.

  There was a pause while the voice consulted higher authority at its elbow, and then an assurance that he had nothing to worry about on that score, he was on his own until he called for back-up, or until higher authority decided he needed it. But had he made contact yet?

  No—but things were going according to plan. There was this woman—

  “Baker—Gillian Baker … she’s with the Foreign Office, a straight civil servant, just doing what she’s told—“

  The way he felt about Jilly, with the memory of the slender feel of her and the smell of her hair, he wasn’t going to suggest otherwise. They would check up on her anyway—they would assume she wasn’t straight, and if she wasn’t, and if her cover wasn’t good enough, then it was hard luck on her and better that he should know about it—but that was the least and the most he could do for her in return for that memory.

  And Lexy—Lady Alexandra Perowne … P-E-R-O-W-N-E … the General’s daughter, and the daughter of the Regiment, Audley’s old regiment, no problem there—

  And Steffy—Meriel Stephanides … S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-D-E-S … they liked names because names were facts, and easy to check—Steffy, friend of Lexy, no problem there either—

  “The names I want checked as quickly as possible are Stein—S-T-E-I-N … David … and Bradford—“

  He repeated what little Jilly had told him in the river, but also Genghis Khan’s own words about the dangers of asking too many questions in the wrong places.

  “—I don’t want anyone alerted that we’re interested in these people, remember. I think it’s very unlikely that they’re not what they seem. It’s just … if we’ve got anything on record about them already, I’d like to know. Then I can get the British working on them for me. Right?”

  Again the voice paused for consultation, and Roche wondered idly whether it was Jean-Paul making the decisions, because he had been his controller in France, or whether Genghis Khan had taken over regardless of station boundaries. On balance he decided that it would be Genghis Khan, because the penetration of Sir Eustace Avery’s new group was his baby, and also because this was an important operation and he was the senior o
f the two, at a guess.

  Then the voice came back, deferring to him as before. They would check at their end, here in France, and that would be only a matter of minutes. The checks in Tel Aviv and Washington would take longer, but if he would call back in an hour they would be able to tell him when that information should be available.

  Roche felt positively euphoric, almost Napoleonic then: he had never been treated like this before, with this whole huge communications apparatus at his beck and call. It hadn’t occurred to him that they would go as far as Israel and the United States at the drop of a couple of names, falling over themselves to be helpful without his asking. And that… that could mean only one thing—his knowledge of how slow and bureaucratic they were normally, British and Russians alike, to clear such decisions, and how grudging they were in general with communications time for such inquiries, and how much more grudging in particular with small fry like himself… all that triangulated his position exactly, beyond reasonable doubt.

  Jean-Paul had told him, and Genghis Khan had told him, and he had told himself over and over again, and yet had never quite believed it in his heart-of-hearts—and Sir Eustace Avery had also told him, and so had Colonel Clinton, and he still hadn’t quite believed them, either. But here at last was the practical proof of it, demonstrated dramatically in a form he could appreciate—in man-hours of communication time at the peak period of routine transmissions when all the day’s general material was scheduled, they were clearing the way for his slightest whim, unasked!

  He glanced at his watch, trying to calculate how long Lexy would be. Not that it mattered, he could stall her with any cock-and-bull story and she would probably be slow anyway, and they had plenty of time, and the longer he had to pick her brains (what there were of them) the better. He could spare them an hour, no sweat—

  “Not an hour, I can’t hold on that long here.” Roche smiled into the mouthpiece. Let the bastards sweat a bit for past slights, and more recent ones too—Jean-Paul and Genghis Khan, it didn’t matter whom, in conceding the importance of this assignment they had still treated him with tjje identical thinly-veiled contempt, like aristocrats with a pools winner. So let the bastards sweat! “Half an hour at the outside, that’s all I can spare without compromising my position. So I’ll call back in thirty minutes—right?”

  Another pause, and this time he savoured every petty second of it, while they sweated out his ultimatum.

  “Very well—half an hour.” Click.

  He returned to Lexy happily then, basking in his new self-importance.

  Contrary to his expectations, she had almost finished her shopping expedition. But one earful of her atrocious dog-French, which she delivered unselfconsciously to the little swarthy Frenchman who bobbed attendance on her, confirmed Roche’s guess that her success was due more to French gallantry than to any proficiency she might have with the language after umpteen years of expensive private education.

  “Can I be of assistance?” Roche hastened to offer his own expertise, to impress her.

  “Dear David—thank you—but no, I’m doing fine. They don’t understand a word I say, but they’re so sweet and helpful …” Lexy flashed a dazzling smile at the little Frenchman, who glowed appreciation back up at her from shoulder level, oblivious of the sour expression on the face of Madame, his wife, in the background.

  “I’ve just got to buy the wine—“ Lexy transferred a piece of the smile to Roche, exerting the same sexual force in his direction unconsciously “—you can advise me there. It’s all just red or white, sweet or dry, to me. Father’s tried to teach me what’s what, but ever since I opened a bottle of his Chateau Something-Somewhere for an old boyfriend of Mother’s when we were having bangers-and-mash he gets all tight-lipped and upstream and troutish when we talk about wine. All I’ve managed to grasp is the shape of the bottles—like that’s claret, and the tall brown ones are hock and the green ones are Moselle—or the other way round, maybe—and I can tell a shampers bottle of course … we’ve had a bottle of that before, and I quite liked it—“ she pointed at the most expensive champagne on the shelf “—and this dear little man recommended it, too.”

  Roche shot a quick jaundiced glance at the dear little man, whose gallantry was evidently firmly based in avarice, and the dear little man managed an infinitesimal man-to-man shrug, not without difficulty, but also with a nuance of frank man-to-man envy, transmitting the encoded message if all this gorgeous jeune milady anglaise is yours, m’sieur, and I have a living to make and a cold, hard bed in which to sleep, is there not room to make a small sacrifice to your good fortune, eh?

  “What are we eating tonight?” he compromised.

  “Darling—it’s my turn to cook … so we’re having bacon and eggs and mushrooms and bags of pommes frites, and bread and oodles of butter—the famous ‘Lexy Special’, though it isn’t really a Lexy Special without sausages, but I can’t get proper sausages here, not English sausages—so what ought we to drink with that, David?”

  The question threw Roche utterly. The Lexy Special sounded more like a cross between breakfast and high tea, in the life-style of the lower middle-Class Mr and Mrs Douglas Roche, deceased, than that of Lady Alexandra Perowne, daughter of—if she was a ‘Lady’ it had to be the Earl of Somewhere, at the least; and the proper beverage at those Roche meals was tea, as supplied by the Co-operative Wholesale Society, not vintage Moët et Chandon.

  “Father always says you can drink shampers with anything,” said Lexy helpfully, pointing to the champagne again, “even with breakfast.”

  Well, that was close to the mark in this case, thought Roche. And who was he to go against the advice of the Earl of Somewhere? And especially when Her Majesty was going to pay?

  “Let’s have that, then,” he nodded quickly at her. “But only if you let me buy it for you.”

  “No, David!” She waved negatively at him. “Besides, I’ve got to stock up for several days, and—“ her eyes left him momentarily, returning with a different expression in them “—oh golly!”

  “Bonjour, m’sieur-dame?”

  From the way the dear little man quailed and strove to de-materialise himself, Roche knew who was speaking before he turned towards the speaker.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous désirez?” Madame embraced them both with her disapproval, even while directing her question like a spear-thrust at Lexy.

  “Madame …” Lexy didn’t quail, but she did swallow nervously. “Yes … well now …”

  Roche saw instinctively where both honour and duty lay, and self-interest too. Up to now he had hardly distinguished himself, but here was a chance of demonstrating a bit of the old cavalry élan which Lexy apparently admired so much.

  “Bonjour, madame,” he said, drawing her attention deliberately. For a moment, as she appraised him frankly, he felt more like an infantryman who had unwisely left the safety of his trench than a dashing cavalryman answering the trumpet-call to glory. But the euphoria of his victory over the Voice on the Telephone encouraged him to single combat.

  She was all of six inches taller than her husband, almost to his own eye-level, and once upon a time she’d been a beauty, with Meriel Stephanides’ colouring in Lexy’s measurements. Imagining away the lines and the wrinkles, and the sag of sallow skin which had once been firm and creamy, Roche wondered what had yoked her to the dried-up shrimp at his back—had it been simple peasant avarice, her beauty in exchange for his money? Or had her boy marched away to Verdun and the Chemin des Dames forty years ago, with all the other likely lads, to Mort Homme and Fort Douaumont, and when he didn’t come back, it didn’t matter?

  Well, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she wasn’t giving him her sour look now, that she was thawing under his appraisal, even that they were exchanging thoughts out of time—might-have-beens in which memory and imagination out-voted the years.

  “M’sieur?” She cracked an almost-smile, showing yellow teeth, and not too many of them.

  “Madame—“
he plunged into his best idiomatic French, the words coming easily, and then more easily still, to sketch what he surmised were Lexy’s requirements, only omitting that it was for bacon-and-eggs that the champagne was needed.

  “Ah …” she nodded, her eyes ranging over the bottles, then coming back to him, caressing him.

  The dried-up shrimp, emboldened by the change in her, made a suggestion, indicating Lexy’s choice, and was instantly silenced with a frozen glance.

  —That wine was not good, not of the best. That wine (at two-thirds of the price) was better …

  Roche ordered a dozen bottles. Madame was kind to advise him— perhaps she could recommend a claret? And (a wine for Lexy—a seducer’s vintage?) a white wine, even a sweet wine?

  —M’sieur speaks French like a Frenchman! And, by the accent, from Paris … But M’sieur is an Englishman? And en vacances?

  Roche warmed to his task. M’sieur was not on holiday, but on leave. M’sieur was of the British Army, with the honour of serving with the French Army—serving in Paris, Madame’s ear did not deceive her—but also a student of French history, of which there was so much hereabouts, in the most beautiful region of France—

  (M’sieur was also aware of Lexy, wide-eyed beside him, and that Madame was also aware of Lexy.)

  —and, as an old comrade of M’sieur Le Due, Milady Alexandra’s father, as he was passing through, it had been his pleasure to call on Milady Alexandra, of course …

  (Bandying words with a shopkeeper’s wife, such words, was hardly necessary. But it was all good practice, and it was clearly impressing Milady Alexandra mightily.)

  (And, when Madame had digested it, and had acknowledged Milady with a little nod, it impressed Milady even more; because, if the nod was not yet quite approving, it was no longer altogether disapproving, and that was undeniably impressive.)

  (It never failed, thought Roche with a mixture of cynicism and bleak self-knowledge, and satisfaction: the French were so accustomed to their contempt of the average Englishman for his halting use of their wonderful language that they were disarmed and flattered into helpfulness by any stray anglais who could distinguish a subjunctive from a hole in the road—the women no less than the men, and perhaps even more so.)