Quiller's Run

13 Zabaglione

Bolognaise. 'Too much garlic?" 'Not for me. It's excellent.'

'I didn't think you'd come.'

'Why not?'

She spilled some spaghetti from her fork. 'God, I've always been a messy eater. Because you put me through the third degree the other day at the embassy.'

'That day I wouldn't have trusted my own mother.'

Day of the plane crash.

'Yes, I understand that now, but it took a bit of time. I was furious when I left there.'

'Then it didn't show.'

'That's not bad, for me. Have you still got a mother?'

'What? Oh. No.'

'Father?'

'No.'

'I thought not.' She gave me her level stare, her blue-grey eyes narrowing as they focused. 'You come across like an orphan.'

What can you say to a thing like that?

The shutters were still open to the last of the daylight; if I asked her to close them now it'd be too early. She was looking particularly sensual this evening, not exactly looking but behaving, with slight body movements, bringing her thin shoulders forward in that now-familiar way, her head tilting in brief gestures as she left things unsaid, her hand brushing the air when she couldn't find the word she wanted. Sensual because intimate, knowing I trusted her again.

'Did you lose them when you were young?'

Mother, father. 'I don't remember.'

She puffed out a little laugh. 'Or anything about your past at all. Sorry.'

A shutter or something banged on the other side of the street and she caught my reaction and said quietly, 'Martin, do you enjoy living like that?'

'It's not that I'm paranoid, it's just that everybody's trying to get at me.' But she didn't think it was funny.

I poured her some more wine.

'You sure you won't have any?'

'Not just now.'

'You're safe here, darling.' Then she said, 'Or are you?' She turned to glance across the windows.

'I wouldn't have come near you if I weren't.'

'I don't mind catching some flak.'

'I'd rather you didn't.'

I'd given it a whole hour before I'd rung the bell downstairs, taking it street by street, house by house, melting and emerging and melting from cover to cover, drawn blank. It had surprised me; I'd thought I'd pick up ticks and have to get clear and call her with an excuse. It told me a lot about Shoda: all she could think about was killing off any kind of opposition. The women she used for tagging were good, once they'd seen the target, but there was no real field work. They should have tagged Katie too, the day we'd had lunch at Empress Place, and seen where she worked and put a peep on her night and day on the assumption that she'd meet me again. That was basic surveillance work.

Sayako was different.

'You go to the Thai Embassy quite a bit, don't you?'

She looked at me steadily. 'We liaise with them. Why?'

'Do you talk about me there?'

'I'm not exactly a gossip.'

'I know. But don't assume that because I'm in with them they can be totally trusted to look after me.'

It was the closest I could go to the truth.

Her glass remained poised halfway to her mouth. 'This is important, isn't it?'

'Fairly.'

'All right.' She put down her wine and put a thin ringless hand on the table for me to take. 'So you really do trust me now.'

Was that true? I wasn't sure. 'I don't think you'd do me any intentional damage.'

She took her hand away and I saw that her eyes were moist. 'You really are a bastard,' she said lightly. 'I'd do bloody well anything for you.'

'I can't think why.'

'Because of what you are.' She pushed her plate away and wouldn't look at me for a moment, furious, I thought.

Probably hard up for a man. Four months into the divorce and he'd been 'fantastic in bed', so forth, too much of a lady to take the first man she could find, too much pride or just too hurt, bugger them, I hate them all.

The phone rang and she got up to answer it. The flat was small, understated, a few bamboo chairs and a chaise-longue, stereo, poinsettias in a Chinese vase, worn silk rugs, half a wall full of books, mostly paperbacks, a lot of them re-read, ragged.

'I can't do it now,' on the phone, her slender body arched backwards against the wall, leaning, examining the nails of her right hand in the light from the windows. 'Look, ring up Holli and ask her if she can pop round there – she's always terribly willing to help. I'll ask her about it in the morning.'

I finished my tomato juice and left the table and went across to the alcove to look at the water-colours: Romney Marsh; The Shore at Rye; Lewes Crescent, Brighton. Delicate, wistful, blues and greys.

'I'm awfully sorry, Martin. Had you finished?"

'Yes. Did you do these?'

'All my own work.' She stood beside me, faintly scented, but it was more her skin.

'They're charming.'

'Honestly? There's some zabaglione.' She took my hand.

'Are you having some?'

'I don't know. Perhaps later. You'll be wanting to know about the homework I did for you.' She turned and went across to finish her wine, and then curled up on the floor with one arm on the chaise-longue. 'I've written it out for you and you can take it when you go. Don't you want a chair?'

'I like it here.'

'It's something I learned as a child, or taught myself, found out, I don't know which. When you're on the floor, you can't fall any farther. Anyway, it's about Mariko Shoda. I – don't want that bitch to hurt you, so I dug up everything I could.'

'You do a lot for me.'

'I told you, I'd do anything.'

'Because of what I am. What's that, exactly?' I didn't know if she meant because of what I did, how much they'd told her at the Thai Embassy. But of course she was a woman, and I'd missed the point.

'Tough as hell on the outside, but vulnerable, endangered, hence dramatic, hence sexy.' She brushed the air, feeling for the words she wanted. 'Pushing yourself to some kind of brink all the time. And therefore' – she looked away – 'doomed, I suppose. So I just want to help you' – her fair hair swung as she looked back at me, her eyes resting on mine, gravely -'while there's time.'

Piano wire.

Random image, unimportant.

This man succeed to kill, always.

Ignore.

'Anyway,' Katie said, 'this is roughly the picture. Her father was Prince Shoda Phomvihane of Cambodia, and in 1975 the Khmer Rouge stormed his palace – that was when they were sweeping across the whole country, as you know. She was eight years old at that time, and when the communists attacked the palace her father tried to get her to safety. She was in her father's arms, coming down the steps of the palace, when a sabre cut his head in two and Shoda fell, with his blood all over her. I got this from an eyewitness, an old woman in one of the refugee camps we help to look after. A man picked her up and ran with her through the melee and got her clear – but then lost track of her the same night in the jungle. This I got from someone who used to know her, after she reached safety.' She stretched out a stockinged leg, smoothing it. 'Sometimes we don't know the half of what other people go through, do we?'

Her face was losing definition – dusk was down, with equatorial suddenness.

'Do you mind pulling the shutters across?'

'What? All right.' She turned, halfway across the room. 'But you said -'

'Just routine.'

She came back, switching on the big oil-jar lamp in the corner, turning down the rheostat. 'Is that too dim?'

'No.'

I like dim light, shadows, darkness, night, invisibility. Going to ground soon, have to, because of Manif Kishnar.

'Are you all right?'

'Yes.' There'd been nothing in my face, in my eyes; she was picking up vibrations again. That'd be so dangerous in an enemy.

'Well,' curling up on the floor again, 'she was seven months in the jungle, alone.'

'At the age of eight.'

'Yes.' Her shoulders lifted an inch. 'I don't think it's just legend, although there are plenty of legends about her. I mean, it's feasible, plausible, that a woman like Mariko Shoda, vicious and powerful and so on, could easily have been that kind of child – resourceful, adaptable, savage, especially after losing her father like that in a literally bloody rite of passage. Wouldn't you think?'

I said I would.

'Or to put it the other way round – that a resourceful, savage child could have become what Shoda is now. Someone asked her how she could possibly have managed to survive seven months in the jungle, and apparently she said it was easy, once you became an animal. She watched the monkeys, and ate only the berries and things they ate, so as not to get poisoned. She killed a tiger.'

'How?'

'When she found out which berries were poisonous, she stuffed a half-dead marmoset with them and dropped it from a tree near the tiger's beat.' She pulled her hair back. 'That sort of thing. Is this of any use, Martin? I mean -'

'It's vital to me.'

'Oh.' She touched my arm. 'That makes me feel -' leaving it, looking away – 'Johnny Chen didn't give you any of this?'

'No.'

'He's terribly cut up, you know, about losing his best friend. That pilot.' Her eyes levelled, focussing. 'He's genuine, Martin. You can trust him. And I wouldn't say that unless I were a million times certain. I wouldn't want to do or say anything that might hurt you. I'm beginning to wish I'd never met you, as a matter of fact. It's such a responsibility.' She leaned and tugged at a loose thread at the fringe of the rug, her fair hair falling across her face. Quietly, 'Just joking. Well, anyway, when she got out of the jungle she fell foul of the Pol Pot forces again, and went through five years of torture, starvation, terror, repeated rape, and an epidemic of cholera. Hundreds of thousands like her didn't survive. She was at the infamous execution centre at Tuol Sleng but got away. When -'

The telephone began ringing and she looked around. 'That'll be the office again. Unless it's for you?'

'No one knows I'm here.'

'Then it can go on ringing. When she reached a refugee camp on the Thai border she looked like a skeleton and couldn't even speak – it took a year to get her back to something like normal. I got this from the actual camp administration. There were thousands there – still are – but she gradually began standing out from the crowd, helping with the work and the organisation. She was about fourteen by then, and she'd already had something of an education as a princess of the royal house, up to the age of eight.' She swung her head, 'That bloody phone -' then it stopped ringing. 'There's a gap after that, but someone else said that by the time she was seventeen she was helping them to administrate the whole camp. That was when she killed one of the officers for trying to mess about one night in the sleeping quarters. There was an enquiry, but nothing was proved against her, not enough even to have her charged.

The woman I spoke to was a witness, but refused to give evidence – like Shoda, she'd been through absolute hell and felt that any man who started any funny business ought to be shot. Then a year later there was a camp guard found knifed, and very expertly. The next day Shoda was missing. So are you getting the picture, and would you like some zabaglione now?'

We went back to the table and she brought it in and talked some more about Mariko Shoda. 'A Thai police inspector told me that so far she's killed off fifteen of her top competitors in the drug trade, taking care of six of them personally and using her crack hit man for the others – he's from Calcutta and his name's Kishnar.' She went to put on some music, kicking off her snakeskin shoes. 'Any questions?'

I asked her for the Thai police inspector's name and phone number and she gave them to me.

'Anything else?'

'Yes. Have you heard of a woman, probably Japanese, named Sayako, who could be in the Shoda organisation?'

'How do you spell it?'

I told her.

'No. Where does she come in?'

'It was just something I picked up.'

'I'll keep my ears open.' She came over to me slowly in her stockinged feet, and it struck me that the effect made by a woman taking her shoes off has been underrated. 'We'll go on talking about Shoda,' she said, 'for as long as you want to, Martin; I asked you here to give you all the information I can. But do you feel like a brief interlude? Un petit apres-zabaglione?'

'My God, I've never seen so many scars on a man's body. All I've got is this little one.'

'Caesarian?'

'Yes.' She looked away. 'But he died. One of those bloody cot deaths. The thing is, he might have kept the marriage together, and that would have been awful. Do you believe things like that work themselves out in life?'

'I believe we create our own reality.'

'You mean we decide to mess everything up?' She lay against me again, one leg dangling off the divan onto the cushions she'd thrown down. 'How did you know I like it very slowly?'

'I didn't.'

'But I mean, I never knew foreplay could be so absolutely mind-blowing.' She began moving her hands again, stroking the sweat on the skin. 'I felt like a goddess or something. Do you always -' she left it.

The light was soft in the room; the record-player had shut itself off, hours ago. The phone had rung twice and she'd let it go on ringing. The overhead fan was turning slowly in the middle of the room, spreading the humid air. I hadn't meant to stay; looking back, I thought it was probably because I didn't want to return to the reality I'd created for myself outside. He's from Calcutta, and his name's Kishnar…

'I wish,' she said slowly, 'we could've met before.' I began playing with her again, very gently: she liked karezza. 'But I suppose it wouldn't have worked out. I mean our -' she left it, then said, 'Oh my God… do you know what that does to me?'

Through the kitchen doorway I could hear the fridge cutting on and off; the only other sounds were the sounds we made. She used pompoir, and delightfully, which I hadn't expected from her.

'Martin, will you stay the night? There's not much of it left anyway.'

'I'd like to.'

'Keep back the dawn. Wasn't that the tide of something?'

Sometimes we slept a little, and then there was a flush of rose light between the slats of the shutters, and she made coffee and we sat facing each other on the floor, sharing the discovery we'd made.

'I was absolutely wrong,' she said, 'he wasn't fantastic in bed after all — he hadn't got a bloody clue.' A sleepy laugh. 'Was I all right, a bit?'

'Exquisite.'

Then the shutters brightened, throwing silvered light across the ceiling where the fan still turned, and Katie made eggs and toast for us, not smiling very often now, not even talking much.

'I suppose what you need most,' she said at one time, 'is to know what her Achilles' heel is. Shoda's.'

'That would be useful.'

The cushions were still all over the floor when I left, and Katie was in a thin kind of nightie, looking like a child, barefooted and soft.

'Martin, I'm a bit telepathic sometimes, have you noticed? I pick up vibes.' She came as far as the door with me, lifting her thin arms to hold me and kiss. At last she said, 'It's going to be so bloody dangerous out there for you, isn't it?'

I don't remember quite what I said, something about my luck lasting, I think.

'Do something for me, will you?' Her eyes were very steady now, and dark. 'For God's sake, if and when you can, pick up a phone and call me, so that I'll know things are still all right.'

Then it was too late to go to ground because an hour after I got back to the Red Orchid I saw they'd thrown surveillance around the hotel and knew I was trapped.