Soldier No More

He wanted to ask her how she knew all this, but there wasn't time, and probably she wouldn't tell him, and it didn't matter because he believed her anyway, because what she had said fitted in with what he already knew.

Much more to the point, she had something to give him—she would know things about Audley and all the rest of them, but most of all about Etienne d'Auberon du Cingle d'Enfer, about whom neither the British nor the Russians appeared to know. For now he had something to offer her in return, to bargain with, and he only had to make the offer, that was all.

"Very well, Madame—I will hunt the thing for you—right?"

She had expected him to say that. "And in return, Captain?"

In return, you will make hunting-magic for me. You will make pictures for me."

XII

NEITHER OF THE girls objected very strongly when Roche told them that he was going to Neuville to make his phone dummy5

call.

"You could have phoned from the château, you know," said Jilly, demurring more for form's sake than from genuine irritation, judging by the kindness of her tone. "La Peyrony lets us phone."

"But she also listens in on the extension," said Lexy. "I distinctly heard the click when she did it last time—I jolly nearly asked her if she minded me speaking English on her line, just to let her know I was on to her. But then I thought

'what the hell', and I got my own back by referring to her throughout as 'that old witch'. . . no, I don't blame you one bit, David darling. The only thing is, we're late already and it's a quarter of an hour there if you step on the gas, and quarter of an hour back, so we'll be even later still—"

"Since when did you ever worry about being late?"

murmured Jilly. "You'll be late for your wedding, always supposing you get the day right."

"Chance would be a fine thing—if I should be so lucky!" Lexy tossed her head, and then grinned at Roche. "But she's right—

and Steffy's still absent without leave, so we can always blame her. . . and it'll give them time to get tanked up and good-tempered before we arrive—so what the hell!"

"It'll also give you time to bone up on Galla Placidia and the hairy Visigoths, Lexy dear," said Jilly, rummaging among a pile of books on the chair beside her. "A bit of last minute swotting among the footnotes in the back is what you need—I bet you haven't read them."

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"Oh— eff Galla- bloody-Placidia!" exclaimed Lexy.

"That's undoubtedly what they did—or King Ataulf certainly did—but there's no need to put it so crudely—" Jilly continued to rummage "— ah!! Here we are!"

"But I'm on holiday!" protested Lexy. "And I have a broken heart to mend!"

"Broken fiddlesticks! You have a job to do, and I intend to see that you do it— here!" Jilly tossed a book at Lexy.

Lexy made a clumsy attempt to catch the book, succeeding only in deflecting it onwards across the room to strike Roche painfully on the shin. "Oops! Sorry, David!"

Roche bent down to retrieve the book, which had become separated from its dust-jacket. As he reassembled the two his eye was caught by the jacket's design, which was dominated by the face and bare shoulders of a beautiful woman who appeared to be wearing only jewellery, and by two men, one heavily-bearded and blond and the other dark-haired and clean-shaven. All three were drawn in a mosaic background in which the title of the book itself was picked out in purple and gold— Princess in the Sunset by Antonia Palfrey. The whole effect was striking and yet somehow vulgar, oddly contrasting with the blurred photo of the bespectacled Miss Palfrey on the back flap.

The book itself had fallen open at its first page—

" I, Sidonius Simplidus, Bishop of Ephesus and sometime secretary of the most illustrious lady, Galla Placidia—"

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It was not Roche's kind of book, but it reminded him strangely of other scattered novels he had picked up from the ground, on the track leading to The Old House, which fitted David Audley's tastes no better than his own. And there was another narrow strip of stiff paper that had also come adrift, which had fitted round the dustjacket: TENTH

IMPRESSION: 250,000 COPIES SOLD! " 'Gone With The Wind' restaged in Imperial Rome" — Daily Express.

If it was not his kind of book he was clearly in the minority, thought Roche as he put the pieces together and handed them to Lexy.

"Thanks, David." Her arm sagged as she took the book from him. "Six hundred bloody pages!"

"Just the chapter notes at the back, dear," said Jilly sweetly.

"But nobody reads them."

"They're the only thing in the book worth reading."

"But—"

Roche left them to it.

To his surprise, Roche found himself talking to Thompson within a minute of establishing his credentials with the duty man.

"You took your time," said Thompson accusingly, as though he also had an orgy scheduled, for which he was now late thanks to Roche.

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"This isn't a metropolis—it's one of your sodding bastides,"

Roche snapped back. "I had to find a phone."

"You received the word about Bradford, the American?"

"Yes." If they were beginning to run scared in Paris, as he was already running in the back-of-beyond in Neuville, then it was time to accelerate them. "What about Stephanides?"

"Who's he?"

"She. Cypriot-Jewish. There's a he in London—her father. I was just wondering if he and she might not be Mossad, that's all."

"What?" The cat was now among the pigeons.

"And Stein." Roche threw in a fox for good measure. "He's a reserve colonel in the Israeli Air Force—ex-RAF

photographic reconnaissance. Do you know about him?"

"Stein? Stephanides? Hold on there!"

"I can't wait long. I'm due at an orgy, old boy."

"What?" Collapse of bastide-fancier . "Wait!"

It would have been invigorating, this speedy revenge, if it had not been so frightening, this discovery of their incompetence.

It was a basic truth that none of them were omniscient, certainly not the British, but not the Russians and not the Americans either. But basic and inevitable truths didn't protect the men in the field, the Poor Bloody Infantry of all three services who had to get up out of their slit-trenches in the hope that at this precise point there were no mines and machine-gunners ahead of them.

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Mutter-mutter-mutter. There was someone else there, and not the duty officer, just as there had been when he had phoned the other side.

Roche looked at his watch. "Oh—for Christ's sake, take your fingers out and get on with it!" he murmured into the muttering instrument.

"Roche?" the instrument squawked back at him instantly.

Who? Not the bastide- fancier —

"Sir?" he answered uneasily.

"Now . . . not to panic, Roche—" the new voice sounded almost kindly, almost reassuring, and was all the more unreassuring for that. "Are you listening?"

"You bet I'm listening." The new voice hadn't identified itself, it took it for granted that he could do that. But the distortion of the line confused Roche. "And I'm not panicking, I'm only terrified half out of my wits, that's all."

"Good, good—that's fine!" The line crackled an obscene chuckle at him, the owner of the voice mistaking his mixture of trembling fear and bitterness for British stiff upper-lip understatement of courage.

Oh— shit! thought Roche, despairing of being able to communicate the truth. "I'm listening."

"Fine, it's simply that the order of battle is changed a little.

Have you talked to Audley yet?"

"I haven't even met him yet, for God's sake!"

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"Don't worry—"

"I'm due to meet him as soon as I get off this phone."

"Good, good. And how do you rate your chances with him?"

Good, good— fine, fine— don't worry! The very imbecility of the reassurance sobered Roche. He could see, across the angle of the square, a French family at an outside corner table in the restaurant which had one star in the Michelin: the father was studying the menu calmly, dutifully watched by his wife and two impeccably-behaved children. Everything was right and well-ordered in their world in which the vital decision was confit d'oie chaud or confit de dinde mayonnaise, and their lives would go on untroubled regardless of his own agonies.

"I know one hell of a lot more about him than there is in the file."

"For example?"

The French father handed the menu to his wife and took up the wine list.

Well, as Lexy would say, what the hell! "He's the illegitimate son of a schoolmaster named Willis, who probably screwed his mother at a commem ball at Oxford in the twenties," he said brutally. "Will that do for a start?"

"Willis the Godfather?" inquired the voice politely. "Does he know?" Pause. "Audley, I mean."

The father closed the wine list. That decision was not within his wife's competence.

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"They all knew in the end. I suppose he was the last to find out. But I don't think anyone ever told him, actually."

Another pause. "So what?"

"They've been screwing each other since, in their own different ways." That wasn't fair so far as Wimpy was concerned: Wimpy had been suffering in too-late silence ever since; and Mr Nigel had died too early for Master David to achieve anything except the purely intellectual satisfaction of restoring what his official father had neglected.

"And knowing that will help you?" The voice, which was more likely Stocker's than Clinton's, was cheerfully sceptical.

"Well, at least it accounts for him being such a bastard." But then again, it wouldn't be too difficult to cherish The Old House for itself, so perhaps he was also being unfair to Audley. Except that the man's deliberate neglect of Wimpy over recent years, which might have been dismissed as unthinking youthful carelessness in anyone else, fitted the first image better: Mrs Clarke's lively, affectionate little boy had changed over the years into nothing if not a careful and calculating man, so it seemed.

"And that helps?" The Stocker-voice persisted, blandly devaluing his progress and rousing Roche's own contrariness.

"For Christ's sake, Major—let the dog see the bloody rabbit before you start whistling at it! I told you, I haven't even met the man yet!"

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The Frenchman was ordering his dinner now, and from the way he was placing the order, with precise gestures of the hand and the fingers, he was accompanying it with instructions about the cooking too.

Sheer envy roused Roche to further contrariness. "Don't you want him now, Major?"

"Of course we do." Stocker didn't deny the identification of rank. "But things have moved on a bit since you were briefed, and we're running short on time. So we've got to look to the next phase of the operation."

Ah! At last, the poor damn dog was about to be shown the wolf hiding in the thicket behind the rabbit!

"What next phase?" asked Roche obediently.

"We have a job for Audley to do down there. You didn't think recruiting him was the end of it, did you?"

The wine waiter was hovering over the Frenchman. "Roche

—"

"Yes, sir." Roche had no more precious time to waste. He had to show that the dog could bite back. "This second phase—

would it have anything to do with a Frenchman named d'Auberon?"

"What?"

"D'Auberon. D-apostrophe-A-U-B-"

"D'Auberon—yes," Stocker crackled the line. "What do you know about d'Auberon?"

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Roche wondered whether it would not have been safer to have let Stocker say his piece first rather than to have tried to impress the Major with his cleverness. Because that

'D'Auberon—yes' had only been an acknowledgement, not a confirmation, and if Madame Peyrony and Lexy were wrong. . .

"I said 'What d'you know about d'Auberon?' " repeated Stocker. "Well?"

The trouble was, he knew absolutely nothing about d'Auberon beyond Madame Peyrony's praise and Lexy's prattle. Until a few hours before, he'd never heard of the man.

"I know he's here, for one thing," he played for time, blessing the miles of telephone wire separating him from Stocker-in-the-flesh. The fact that d'Auberon was here, not half-a-dozen miles from Audley—and from all the rest of them, and not least himself—was all he really did know for sure. But try as he would, he still couldn't even place the man's name, never mind which particular Algerian row had sparked his resignation. The hijacking of Ben Bella from the Moroccan air liner on General Beaufre's order had caused a flurry of such resignations, but the date didn't quite fit. The oil discoveries or the building of the Morice Line were much better bets—

"Come on, man!" snapped Stocker. "What else d'you know?"

Not how but what, thought Roche. "Well, naturally I know what he was doing, Major," he said dismissively, as though to dummy5

state the obvious.

"But you weren't in Paris then, Roche."

Wasn't I? The months flashed before Roche's eyes. Except for the odd weekend—except for the long, boring communications course and his long leave which had together caused him to miss the whole ghastly excitement of the Suez crisis—

God! It wasn't Algeria at all— it was Suez!

"But I made up for lost time when I got back, naturally."

"Those meetings had nothing to do with your work, Roche."

What meetings?

"No, they didn't, I agree. And of course I don't know everything that went on in them ... I only know what I heard."

What meetings, for Christ's sake?

"You never reported what you heard," said Stocker accusingly. "Why not?"

What meetings had gone on during Suez? He'd been out of circulation for the best part of three months, sweating and fretting on the communications and instructional courses, and then on leave. There would have been dozens of meetings, political and military, during that last desperate revival of the moribund Entente Cordiale, attended by all the ghosts of 1914 and 1939 as well as everyone from Eden and Mollet downwards! But they had all been dust and ashes by dummy5

the time he had returned—ashes still hot with recriminations against perfidious Albion which he hadn't dared to rake over.

"Why not?" Stocker snapped the question at him again.

The quick answer to that was 'It had nothing to do with my work, like you said, Major', but the thought of Suez cautioned Roche against facetious answers. That wound was too raw, and too much pride and too many reputations had been lost over it, for that sort of reply.

"It was just gossip, sir—bazaar gossip . . . after-dinner coffee stuff. I didn't rate it."

"Gossip be damned! I should have thought any suggestion of a leak from the RIP sub-committee was worth reporting, gossip or not."

Lord God! thought Roche, thunderstruck. The RIP sub-committee! Sir Eustace Avery's own sub-committee!

"Well?" Stocker poked the question down the line fiercely.

"Sir?" But what was the question? And, whatever the question was, how was he going to answer it?

RIP.

"Well?"

Requiescat in pace.

Roche swallowed. "Yes, sir. It was ... in retrospect... it was an error of judgement, I admit. But it was just gossip."

Rest in peace—

"Of course it was an error. I don't mean that." Stocker clearly dummy5

wasn't going to let him rest in peace. "What do you know about it, is what I mean—what d'you know about it?"

Roche's flesh crawled. That was the precise question Jean-Paul had asked him when he'd finally got back to Paris last December, just before Christmas, when it was all over—

"What do you know about it?"

"The what?"

"The RIP sub-committee."

"What's that? I've never heard of it."

"Then start hearing about it. Whatever you hear, we want to know. Start earning your keep, Captain Roche—"

He hated Christmas, not because of the memory of Christmas Past, or even of the bleak image of Christmas-to-come, but because of his annual thought of Christmas-might-have-been—all the Julie-Christmasses that would never be, which made the food stick in his throat and the drinks taste of wormwood at the parties.

But this time it was earn your keep, Captain Roche—

"RIP, old boy? 'Rest in Peace'— Requiescat-in-bloody-pace for evermore." But Bill Ballance knew, because he always did know.

"I don't mean that, Bill. I mean—"

"I know what you mean. But that's what I mean too—dead and buried, never to rise again, more's the pity! Our dummy5

unknown top secret warriors . . . your glass is empty, old boy.

Fill it up and we'll drink to them. . . That's the spirit! So now

—to our unknown warriors—the men who got the right answer to the wrong question—RIP!"

"RIP, Bill? I can't toast a set of fucking initials."

"No? But they were fucking good, David—bloody incredible, when you think about 'em . . . everyone else was getting their sums wrong, and they were absolutely spot on right down the line—alpha double-plus . . . bloody miracle!"

"RIP, Bill?"

" 'Russian Intentions and Policy', for short. And if they'd only put 'em on to the Americans instead of the Russians, we wouldn't be drowning our sorrows here alone tonight like lepers . . . have you heard the story about Eden?"

"Which story?"

"When the telegram from Krushchev arrived. I was here in Paris ... I suppose poor old Mollet got the same message, more or less, but he was cool as a cucumber too—of course he'd got the same intelligence report as Eden had, so it's not to be wondered at, is it!"

"What telegram, Bill?"

"The one in which Kruschchev said if we attacked Egypt he'd bomb us all back to the stone age—that was when the second wave of our chaps was just landing, and the jolly old Fleet Air Arm was clobbering the Gyppo defences to hell. . . and when Ike got the news in Washingtom he wet his pants—or went to dummy5

church and prayed, or played a round of golf, according to which version you believe—"

"Bill—"

"—but Eden ... he just read the telegram once, and tore it in two, and went off muttering 'nonsense' to have his mug of Horlicks without turning a hair, same as Mollet—only he wouldn't have drunk Horlicks—don't you see?"

"No, I don't see at all—"

" Requiescat—or requiescant, to be exact... or should it be requiescaverunt? My Latin's a bit shaky nowadays . . . But no matter—the point is that everyone gives the two of them, Eden and Mollet, the credit for getting that right at least, even if they got everything else wrong—that the Russians were just bluffing ... Of course the Russians were bloody well blurring, with a few million angry Hungarians, and half the Hungarian army, shooting at them, so they wouldn't have cared less if we'd tarred and feathered Nasser and run him out of Suez on a rail, for all they could do about it except make loud threatening noises... but the point, dear boy, is that Eden and Mollet knew that for a fact, because the jolly old Joint Anglo-French Russian Intentions and Policy Intelligence Sub-Committee had told them so—that they could Rest in Peace so far as the Russians were concerned.

Which is what I've been saying all along—and which is really the whole tragedy, old boy, because what Eden really needed to know was not what the Russians would do, but what the Americans would do—our friends and allies—not Mr K., but dummy5

John Foster Dulles and Dwight D. Eisenhower, eh?"

Oh—ah—"

" Oh-ah indeed! Though maybe the RIP chaps might not have worked out what Ike was going to do, since Ike probably didn't know himself, so it might not have done us any good to have an inside man in the White House, like we did in the Kremlin—"

An inside man?"

"Stands to reason. You don't get one hundred per cent certainty by studying your navel and trusting to luck—you only get it when someone gives you the answers in the back of the book. RIP— quod erat demonstrandum, dear boy. And I think the French had him, because we certainly didn't—and don't, more's the pity. But I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when they met, all the same!"

Who was 'they'?"

"Lord knows! None of our people here, that's for sure . . . I thought you might have been one of them, young David—you weren't in circulation at the time, and you're a bit of a dark horse, writing all those non-event reports of yours all the time, to no possible purpose. . . . They came and they went, and but for one of 'em—that stuffed shirt Avery—Useless Eustace—I've no idea .... But it was the French who produced the information, Avery just took the credit. And we shall not look upon their like again, I fear—because the French will never speak up again, after what we've done to them, and I dummy5

can't say that I blame them. Have another drink—to your next report on the incidence of scurvy in the French Mediterranean Fleet, say—?"

RIP.

He had known that Jean-Paul would already have all that, even before he passed it on, and that he would not earn his keep with Bill Ballance's carefully indiscreet ramblings, just as he knew that it would be dangerous to push Bill further, beyond Bill's suspicion that his Christmas drinking might be the subject of an internal security check by the dark horse.

But that had been the last whisper he had been able to overhear about the near-legendary Joint Anglo-French Russian Intentions and Policy Sub-Committee, from Bill or anyone else. So he had never had a useful name to give to Jean-Paul, either British or French, let alone Russian.

But now he had a name.

"I heard d'Auberon mentioned in connection with it." He needed more time to think, but there was no time. "I'd never heard of him—he isn't an Army man." Stocker shouldn't expect him to place Quai d'Orsay names. "Until I got down here I didn't know he'd resigned."

But what the hell did Sir Eustace want with information about meetings which he had jointly chaired, for God's sake?

"Where did you get all this?"

"Sir?" Playing stupid was easy, once the role was accepted.

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"Who told you about RIP—and d'Auberon?"

"Bill Ballance told me about RIP, sir." Betrayal, always providing it wasn't himself he was betraying, was even easier than stupidity, and Bill didn't give a damn, anyway. "And one of the girls down here told me about d'Auberon's resignation

—she knows him socially—Lady Alexandra Champeney-Perowne." That bit of truth could do no harm, but he would keep Madame Peyrony up his sleeve. "She met him through Audley, I think . . . Anyway, with what she said and what I already knew, all I had to do was put two and two together."

He watched the Frenchman tuck into his potage. Whether or not Stocker was enjoying his omelette Roche equally, with its tiny truffle-specks of truth, could not be deduced from the silence at the other end of the line. But it might be as well not to let him test its quality too long in case he caught the flavour of lies in it too.

"I'm running out of time, sir. I was supposed to meet Audley five minutes ago."

"Yes." Stocker came to life instantly. "So you don't actually know what d'Auberon's got, then?"

D'Auberon had got something.

But of course d'Auberon had got something. If he had quit his job in anger and disgrace with top secrets merely locked up in his head he would never have got out of Paris alive, let alone been allowed to settle comfortably in the Dordogne: the SDECE's Bureau 24 would have seen to that, if 'Colonel dummy5

Lamy' hadn't simply farmed out the job to the West German contract assassin who was working his way through the foreign arms dealers at the moment. . .

It didn't matter—what mattered was what was obvious: Jilly's guess that d'Auberon had 'beans' to spill had been right, but she hadn't taken the guess to its logical conclusion . . . which was that those beans had to be in a can somewhere safe, rigged to spill in the event of d'Auberon's untimely demise. It was so obvious that Stocker hadn't bothered to add that two-and-two for Roche's benefit.

"No, sir." But now other twos-and-twos presented themselves in a natural progression, following that obvious one, plus what Bill Ballance had said at Christmas: it would be the name of the inside man—it must be that, nothing else fitted so well, nothing was more likely to arouse such greed.

That name would be worth almost any risk.

Any new department, starting out secure but in the cold, needed something hot to get things moving; and Avery of all people would have desired to get his hands on d'Auberon's can of beans, because Avery of all people would know its value—it had already turned him into Sir Eustace when his colleagues were being demoted or passed over or bowler-hatted. If he could lay his hands on the one intelligence source that was accurate and secure and came from the very top in the Kremlin, then he could write his own ticket in both London and Paris—the poor bloody French wouldn't have any choice, knowing that the perfidious British would shop dummy5

them otherwise.

"Now, listen here, Roche—"

Roche could feel his heart thump in his chest, not with fear and simple arithmetic but with the multiplication of excitement at last: not Avery— not Sir-bloody-Eustace— but he himself— poor-bloody-Roche— could write his ticket with that name anywhere in the world, from Washington to Moscow and back—

". . . this is why we have to get Audley . . ."

Audley! He had forgotten Audley!

"... because we have good reason to believe that he can supply us with the d'Auberon material."

Audley!

". . .we had originally intended for you to bring him back to us first, and then to take it off him as a bonus . . ."

The red flare cooled instantly into icy determination, all Roche's anger chilled into bitterness by Stacker's crude lie.

Perhaps they did want Audley, he seemed a natural candidate, sure enough; but what he had was what they really wanted, he was just the bonus. And Roche himself had originally been cast as the recruiter, not to be trusted with the important work and not to be given the full credit and the proper reward.

". . . but now we can't wait, Roche."

They couldn't wait because they hadn't bargained on the arrival of the Americans, let alone the Israelis, on the scene dummy5

ahead of them—probably ahead of them because Mossad and the CIA had also heard of Audley's peculiar virtue, and had moved more quickly to exploit it. "You understand?"

He was expected to understand about the Israelis and the Americans. What he didn't understand was why they were still so confident he could achieve all this. But Stocker would surely tell him that before long; and, more than that, any minute now he'd be offering back-up, with this sort of opposition.

"Yes, sir," said Roche.

"I'll get down to you as soon as I can. Not tomorrow ... I have things to do up here . . . but maybe the day after. Galles will look after you, anyway."

That wasn't the answer he'd been expecting—Stocker the day after tomorrow . . . and what use was Galles? He wasn't even sure that the Frenchman was still trustworthy, never mind capable.

But Clinton had said he had been very carefully chosen, and oddly enough that was easier to believe now than it had ever been before: quite simply, d'Auberon's 'material' was too important to be allowed to slip through their hands if there was the slightest chance of getting it—it was worth risking someone good in fact.

"There's just one thing, sir." There was no way now that he could ask those questions and get a useful answer. But there was another question which could be answered. "You said dummy5

you've got 'good reason' to rely on Audley—that he can obtain d'Auberon's . . . material. How d'you know that?"

Stocker was silent for a moment. "Mmm . . . 'how'—I'm sorry, Roche, the 'how' is off limits to you. All you need to know is that he's our man. But if you want to know why he is, I can give you that—because I was about to give it to you anyway."

The fine distinctions of the answer seemed almost indistinguishable to Roche.

"Can't you guess, man?" Stocker teased him. "I should have thought it was obvious enough, in all conscience."

Obvious enough?

All the emphasis was on Audley, not d'Auberon. It had been Audley, Audley, Audley. . . and then not d'Auberon, but

'd'Auberon's material'— Audley, Audley, Audley—and d'Auberon's material—and 'good reason', and 'he can get it', and 'he's our man', and in the end certainty?

"He's got it already—is that it?" The question had answered itself before he had whispered it into the mouthpiece: it would never have been enough for d'Auberon to hide away his can of beans in some safe deposit to which he had access, because Bureau 24 had ways of making people give such things up—ways the Gestapo had taught the French, plus all the refinements of cruelty Indo-China and Algeria had added. So the can would have to be at one remove from the owner, out of his hands and to be handed over only under certain controlled conditions of safety, back to him and no dummy5

one else. That was what he, Roche, would do in the same dangerous position— nothing else would combine self-preservation with security.

"Bravo!" exclaimed Stocker.

But the catch was, thought Roche bleakly, you needed a friend you could trust, willing to shoulder the risk for you.

"So now you know," said Stocker encouragingly.

Now he knew.

He knew that d'Auberon had such a friend, and that it was his job to engineer the betrayal of that friendship to save his own skin.

"Yes," he agreed. "It's not going to be easy."

It wasn't going to be easy, even though Sir Eustace Avery had chosen better than he knew—had chosen a real expert on betrayal, with a more urgent incentive than mere promotion to spur him on.

"I'll think of a way though," he murmured.

That was, Genghis Khan would think of a way, he thought grimly.

SKIRMISHING:

The Orgy in the Tower

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XIII

"BARBARIANS," SAID AUDLEY, perching himself on the stool.

"But Steffy's not here yet," said Lexy. "We can't start without her. And what about 'Tienne?"

"Lexy doesn't want to start at all," murmured Jilly. "She's playing for time."

"Lexy's just saying that Steffy isn't here," said Lexy. "But if Jilly doesn't shut up Lexy will say something nasty."

"Etienne won't be coming. But I agree Steffy isn't here," said Audley. "So our guest will take her place." He raised his glass towards Roche. "You are hereby summoned to this orgy, Captain Roche. Your attendance is requested and required, no longer as a mere onlooker, but as a participant, with all the rights and privileges and duties appertaining thereto.

Ave, Roche!"

Until that moment Roche had been in two minds about the soft light diffused by the paraffin lamp on the low table between them, for it veiled his expression no less than everyone else's. But now he wished that he could distinguish more of Audley than the man's voice and words revealed to him.

"Now come on, David—fair's fair." Stein stirred lazily on his nest of cushions beside the wine-rack. "He may not want to be summoned. He may prefer to on-look."

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"Or he may just think we're crazy." Bradford's contribution came from behind the bottles on the table; all Roche could see was his dark head shake agreement.

"And he could be right there," said Lexy. "Some orgy!"

"He doesn't have to play, surely?" said Stein.

"You can't turn him out into the night if he doesn't." The American's dark curls shook again. "The laws of hospitality forbid it—we took him in on your behalf."

But it wasn't the laws of hospitality which mattered here, in this weird place, thought Roche: it was play—he doesn't have to play—which was the operative word—Jilly had said as much—

"He may want... he may prefer ... he may think." Audley ranged his glass from one to the other, the lamp reflecting twin points of light like bright animal-eyes in his spectacles and throwing a huge shadow on the wall behind him. "He may even be right. But he will play, nevertheless."

"Why?" snapped Lexy. "Why should he?"

"Because I say so. And I am in the chair tonight. So I make the rules."

" You just have to argue with him— you have to debate the subject, whatever it is."

"What subject?"

" Whatever it is. We take it in turns, and he picks our brains.

With Davey— David Stein— it was paleolithic art, with Mike Bradford it was the Great American Novel, and what dummy5

Hollywood does to it. . . and with me it was the aftermath of the Korean War."

“It all sounds a bit juvenile."

" So it does— yes, you're right. . . a bit juvenile. . . It is."

“And they put up with it— Stein and. . . the American—

what's his name?"

“Mike Bradford? Yes, they do. I think they quite enjoy it, to be honest. You see, they're the same really— they all missed out on that— the juvenile bit. What they call now 'the teenage', don't they?"

“Missed out? How?"

" It's just a theory of mine. They grew up in the war, or just before— and as a result they missed out on something we had. Something we took for granted.''

"What was that?"

"I don't know, quite. . . They grew up too quickly, perhaps.

Or they had to grow up, rather. Because they were at war when they should have been at college."

"But they all came through.''

" That's right. Maybe they felt guilty about that— maybe they're too serious— or too frivolous— because ofthat. . . I told you— I don't know. All I know— all I think— is that you shouldn't be surprised that they don't behave quite normally, because they don't know how to. Because they don't have the same rules as we do, that's all."

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What rules do they have, then?"

" Don't ask me— I don't know! 'Give us back our teenage', perhaps. Only we can't— and they know it. It's just my theory. But..."

“But what?"

" Well. . . we were sitting in the Tower the first evening, the six of us, and . . . we'd been drinking. . . and I said, 'we'd better get back, otherwise La Peyrony will think we're engaged in an orgy', or something like that. And David said

— David Audley said—' That's a jolly good idea'. And I said I'd be damned if I was going to hand over my body to the three of them, just to spite La Peyrony..."

" Yes?"

" And then he said— I'll never forget what he said, because suddenly he was dead serious, and he didn't say what I expected him to say— he said 'Damn your body, Jilly— it's a perfectly good body, but I prefer Lexy's, it's more pneumatic and more my size, as well as being more available— but bodies are two-a-penny these days, and have been ever since '39 ... it's your mind I want to get into— if you can open that to me you can hold a penny tight between your knees for as long as you like!' And ... that's how it all started, anyway."

"Is that agreed and understood?" said Audley. "That I am in the chair tonight?"

"In the chair?" Jilly echoed him inquiringly, mock-dummy5

innocently. "But if you fall out of the chair are you still in it, David?"

That might be an explanation of the slight slur in Audley's voice, for all that the grammar and the syntax were still clear enough. But Roche had never heard that voice before, and so could not judge the degree of slur against previous experience, even if the rugger players of Cahors were as alcoholically inclined as their English counterparts.

"In—or on—or out—or off ... or under or beside ... I am still in it tonight, until cock-crow or the wine runs out, whichever comes first," said Audley defiantly. "And I say that he's summoned—and he plays. Right?"

Still he didn't look at Roche, and still Roche couldn't decide whether or not the faint slur was public-school-and-army-drawl or a sign that the speaker was loaded over the Plimsoll line. But it didn't matter, because Roche would play now whatever the game was—because now he had the chance of playing for what he needed to win the real game.

"He plays!" He lifted his glass towards Audley. " Moriturus te saluto!"

"And a classicist too, by God! Bravo!" Audley's teeth also caught the lamplight. "Fill the man's glass again, Lexy . . .

The wine of Cahors, Roche—they sent Cahors wine to Rome in classical times, did you know that?"

"I'm not a classicist. Just a soldier."

"Huh!" murmured Lexy, tipping the bottle inexpertly.

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"But not merely a soldier—if I heard a-right?" Audley cocked his head.

"I told you . . . he's a sort of historian,"said Lexy vaguely.

" Bastides and things..."

"So you did!" Audley wasn't letting go. "University?"

"Manchester," said Roche.

"A good school of history," Audley nodded patronisingly.

"I'm afraid barbarians are a bit out of my line, though."

Roche swallowed his pride. "Not my specialist field."

"That's what they all say." The Israeli spoke across the table to the American. " 'Not my field'. He's a historian right enough!"

"It all depends on what you mean by 'barbarians', as Professor Joad would have said," interposed Jilly. "We have to define our terms first."

"Latin— barbarus, barbari— a stranger, a foreigner . . .

anyone not a Roman or a Greek." The Israeli's voice carried an edge of bitterness. " 'Jews need not apply', even though they lived in cities before Rome and Athens were villages of mud huts."

"Oh, come now—that's a bit hard on the Romans," said Audley. "Roman citizenship spread wider than the mud hut circuit. The Jews were just . . . difficult, let's say."

"I hear tell they still are," said Bradford from the floor.

Stein swept a glance over them, the light catching the dummy5

surprising gold of his hair—the crazy contrast of the blond Jew and the dark, swarthy American, whose identities Roche had immediately confused, struck him again.

"Yes?" inquired Audley politely, yet insultingly. It was a game, Roche reminded himself. At the moment they were playing to bait each other with their opening moves.

"I'd say you've got a lot to learn," said Stein mildly. "We haven't half started yet."

"Yeah..." The American's dark head nodded. "I also hear tell you're in with the French on the nuclear testing site at Reggane in the Sahara, so you don't need to labour the point."

"I agree all this is barbarous" said Jilly. "But I don't see how it connects with barbarians."

"Quite right, dear." Audley bowed in Jilly's direction. "We have digressed—and just as Stein very properly related the barbari to Hillard and Botting!"

"Hillard and who?" The American reached for one of the bottles on the table.

" Botting, Bradford, B otting. Or maybe North and Hillard. Or A. H. Davis, MA, of revered memory. And if you were in receipt of their royalties—if you could write that sort of best-seller you'd be living high on the hog in Monte Carlo, swilling Château Latour with a bevy of starlets."

"What? Botting? North . . . ? What have they written?"

"Oh, sanctissima simplicitas— you are a rude barbarian if dummy5

ever there was one, Bradford! Tell him, Stein."

The target had switched from the Israeli to the American, thought Roche: that was the way they worked, not all for one and one for all, but all in turn against each.

"A. H. Davis!" murmured Stein. "There was a man for you—a great author!"

"Who published him? What does he write?" Bradford rose to the bait, transformed by the mention of royalties from a cool American into an envious author.

Stein ignored him, looking round the shadowy audience in the Tower at everyone else and settling finally on Roche himself. "You know A. H. Davis forecast it all—1914 and 1939? He was unbeatable on the Germans: 'They regard it feeble and stupid to get by the sweat of their brow what they can take by spilling their blood'! How's that, eh?"

"It was Tacitus who said that, actually," Audley disagreed.

"In his Germania."

"But Davis quoted him deliberately. And that's what history is all about—putting it all together," said Stein passionately.

"By God! Do you remember that ratty little friend of yours at school, selling us all the classics after Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia? Williams—Williamson? He was always quoting A. H. Davis at us!"

"For God's sake, one of you tell me—who's Botting?" said Bradford irritably.

"He was a schoolmaster," snapped Audley, turning towards dummy5

the American. "They all wrote Latin text-books—Latin and Greek— Latin Prose Composition and Greek Unseens and Graduated Latin Selections."

"Best-sellers?"

"Too bloody right! My Hillard and Botting was the fifteenth impression of the seventh edition, dated 1930. Can you beat that with any of your novels, old boy?" said Audley nastily.

Jilly gave another of her characterislic attention-drawing sniffs. "Or can you, David?"

"Yes—well, that wouldn't be difficult" Audley took the jibe well. "There simply isn't much popular enthusiasm for medieval history these days."

Roche decided to be interested. "That's what you're working on now?"

Audley nodded. "That's why I'm here."

"Here?"

"Yes. I'm putting Ihe final touches to the sequel to my worst-selling book on the defeat of the Arabs by the Byzantines in Ihe 8th century. This one is set at the other end of the Mediterranean. Here, in fact—early Carolingian France."

Roche ran his early French history through his memory at break-neck speed; this, after all, was one of the reasons why he was here, and he had to justify Sir Eustace Avery's confidence.

"Charles Martel?" That was a safe name lo remember.

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"That's right" Audley seemed pleased, but not surprised any more. "Battle of Tours—732. It always astonishes me to think that the Arabs got to within a hundred miles of Paris. And if it hadn't been for Charles Martel their next stop might have been the English Channel."

"They qualify as barbarians—the Arabs?" inquired Slein.

"The Arabs?" Audley sounded shocked.

"His prejudices are showing," murmured Bradford.

Audley coughed primly. "The Arabs in Spain used mostly Berber infantry—and in France—and the Berbers were rather barbarous. In fact, they really only went to Spain in the first place to pick up women and food for their Berbers. And one thing led to another."

"Franco used them in Spain too," said Bradford. "They were still barbarous."

"The French are finding that out in Algeria at the moment,"

said Roche.

"Yes, things don't change, do they?" Audley nodded. "But, of course, the Arabs had it easy in Spain. The Visigoths hadn't quite succeeded in making a go of it there—nearly, but not quite . . . And they'd persecuted the Jews there—"

"Just another bunch of Krauts on the loose—things don't change, you're damn right!" said Slein bitterly.

"The Visigoths!" exclaimed Lexy with a start.

Everyone turned towards the region of deepest shadow in which she had concealed herself.

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"Lexy, honey—you're awake!" said Bradford. "The Visigoths?"

"I haven't been asleep."

"Of course not. But what about the Visigoths, Lex?"

Nothing." She tried to shrink back into the darkness. "Don't mind me."

But we do mind you, Lady Alexandra," said Audley. "You mustn't hide your light under a bushel—you're supposed to be the chief questioner tonight. You drew the short straw last time—remember?"

"And obviously she knows about the Visigoths," said Bradford. "Are they barbarians, Lex honey?"

"Maybe she thinks they're rugger players," murmured Stein.

"Wasn't that your old team, Audley—the Visigoths?"

"Yeah, and they were barbarians," nodded the American.

"When they played there was blood everywhere."

"We haven't even defined what a barbarian is yet," cut in Jilly sharply, moving to Lexy's rescue. "All we've had is Hillard and Botting, and Charles Martel, and David's darling Arabs-who-aren't-barbarians." She sniffed. "A fine chairman you are, David Audley! You couldn't chair a cup of tea across a vicarage parlour!"

"And which barbarians, that is the question?" said Stein.

"Come on, David—Audley—which barbarians are you going to tell us about? Julius Caesar's ones—which I take it will dummy5

include your own woad-covered ancestors?"

"Boadicea's Ancient Brits, you mean?" inquired the American. "Like the statue near Big Ben, by the Thames—the chariot with the scythes on its wheels?"

Jilly leaned forward. "But I didn't think that was your period, David—I thought you were strictly medieval?"

Audley nodded. "So I am."

"So—"

Audley held up his hand. "So listen, my children, and you shall hear what you shall hear!"

"And know neither Doubt nor Fear?" murmured Roche.

"Ah!'' Audley stared at him, and rocked dangerously on the three-legged stool, the huge shadow dancing on the wall behind him. " You know then! 'I am born out of my due time'—remember? 'Five hundred years ago . . . five hundred years hence ... I should have been such a counsellor to kings as the world has never dreamed of." He tapped his head. " Tis all here . . . but it hath no play in this black age'—remember?

Puck of Pook's Hill?"

"De Aquila?" Roche was almost certain of the reference, and it was interesting to him that Audley identified himself with the cunning old blackguard. For either by accident or design Kipling had drawn a classic blueprint for the successful spymaster there, using a judicious mixture of force, blackmail, threats and torture to turn an enemy agent. It was an irony that he himself had identified with de Aquila's dummy5

victim, the faithless Fulke, envying him his chance of changing to the winning side with honour and profit.

Audley nodded back, the lamplight glinting in his spectacles.

" 'The Old Dog' himself. Good man, Roche!"

"Kipling lives again," murmured Bradford.

Audley drew himself up on the stool. "All right then—you barbarians, I'll give you barbarians . . . barbarians all the way from the Rhine and the Danube into the Sea of Grass in the east, to the Volga—Angles, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Thuringians, Burgundians . . . Alemanni and Marcomanni. . .

Quadi and Rugians and Gepids and Vandals and Goths—

Visigoths and Ostrogoths—"

"As far as the Volga?" Bradford emphasised the name disbelievingly.

"That's right. Stalingrad wasn't the first time the Germans were there. The Romans turned them away from the west, so they went east."

" 'Lebensraum', it's called." Stein nodded. "An old German custom."

"But then they came back." As ever, Jilly had her facts neatly cut-and-dried. "Third century AD? Fourth century?"

"Fourth'll do. Say . . . sixteen hundred years ago . . . give or take a few decades." Audley smiled. "Sixteen centuries ago we could all have been sitting here, nice and cosy, drinking our wine—the good wine of Cahors—" he lifted his glass "—

drinking our wine, and listening to ... Lady Alexandra's titbits dummy5

of scandal from the City, and Stein's news from Alexandria . . . and Jilly would be trying to convert us all to Christianity, probably—" the glass moved from one to the other of them "—and Roche. . .now what would Captain Roche be doing here, among us fat civilians?" The lamplight caught the blood-red of the wine. "On leave from the frontier, maybe? From the heather and the bare hills where the wolves howl and the clouds play like cavalry charging? What price Britannia, Captain? Will the frontier hold next time?"

The American saved Roche with a grunt. "Huh! So where does a goddamn Yankee figure at the Court of King David?"

Jilly chuckled. "You don't, Mike—you're an anachronism."

"A who?" asked Lexy.

"A Visigoth, honey," said Bradford.

"And that's exactly right," said Audley quickly. "The hirsute Bradford doesn't fit in our Roman orgy—not sixteen hundred years ago. But if we make him a Visigoth and move on another hundred years . . . then he's here, by God!"

"The frontier didn't hold," said Jilly.

"You didn't do your goddamn job, Captain," said Bradford accusingly. "You let the Krauts in!"

He had to play—

"We didn't have enough men. It was the government's fault

—" he spread his hands "—you expected us to hold the line all the way from the Black Sea to the Irish Channel—"

"Excuses, excuses! You had a job to do, and you didn't do it, dummy5

soldier!" Jilly leaned forward towards Audley. "But I thought it was the Huns that were the cause of it all, not the Germans? I mean, they pushed the Germans westwards again, and the Germans were just shunted into the Roman Empire, running away from them?"

Lexy sat up. "I thought the Huns were the Germans?"

Oh, for God's sake, Lexy!" Jilly turned on her irritably.

"You've read the book—don't you remember? Germans—big and blond and hairy; Huns—short and dark and ugly."

"I read somewhere that if you were downwind of the Huns, you could smell them at twenty miles," said Stein. "Is that true? Or was it the Mongols?"

"Much the same article," said Audley. "But twenty-five miles, not twenty, if there were enough of them."

"Anyway, they forced the Germans back to the west," said Jilly firmly.

"If they smelt that bad I don't goddamn wonder," said Bradford.

"Well, the book didn't say they were different," complained Lexy. "They were just nastier, that's all."

"What book?" inquired Stein. "You haven't been actually reading a history book, have you, Alexandra?"

" No!" snapped Jilly irritably. " Not a history book—a historical novel, that's all."

"Well, it's like a darned history book, anyway," said Lexy.

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"It's got footnotes at the back, saying that it all really happened—all about this Roman princess, and how the Visigoths carried her off, after they sacked Rome, and how she had to marry the king's brother . . . At— At- something—"

"Ataulf." Audley sounded surprised. "Brother of Theodoric the Great?"

"That's him—Atwulf—" Lexy plunged on breathlessly "— and because of her he decided to save the Roman Empire instead of destroying it—"

"That's a large assumption," said Audley.

"Well, she said so."

"She?"

"This princess—Galla Placidia, of course. And she ought to know, after having been thoroughly screwed by Atwulf and his elder brother! Only their little son died, and the Romans got her back, and she married this great general, Constantine

—"

"Constantius."

"That's the one. And after he died she ruled the whole empire, with the help of her confessor, Simplicius—"

"Who?"

"Simplicius. He's the one who tells the story—who's in bed with who, and who's double-crossing who—"

"Lexy—there's no such person as Simplicius," Audley shook his head. "And Galla Placidia didn't leave any memoirs.

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You're talking fiction, pure and simple, nothing more."

"Huh!" grunted Bradford, from behind his bottles. "Maybe fiction, maybe not. But not pure and not simple, by God!"

"Eh?" The tone in the American's voice made Audley drop Lexy. "Not . . . ?"

"Not pure—damn right not pure, because the Hays Office threw a fit over it. And sure as hell not simple, because a million bucks isn't simple, old buddy." Bradford shook his head. "In fact, that was one dirty, crafty book, if you ask me.

And written by one crafty lady, too."

"What lady? What book?" Audley looked around him.

"Hell, David—are you really telling us you haven't heard of Antonia Palfrey and Princess in the Sunset!"

"I don't read historical novels."

Roche was glad of the shadows which masked his reaction to this most palpable and absolute untruth, the evidence of which he had seen scattered on Audley's own driveway. In the litany of the man's defects neither Wimpy nor even Oliver St.John Latimer had included intellectual snobbery, but here it was. And yet, even allowing for the envy of a non-seller for a best-seller, it struck an oddly discordant note.

"You missed out, then," said Bradford. "Because it wasn't at all bad, minus the purple passages about Ataulf pawing Galla Placidia's heaving bosom, and Constantius putting his hand up her toga."

"Oh yes?" Audley spread a disparaging glance over Bradford dummy5

and Lexy both. "As observed through the keyhole by the Right Reverend Sidonius Simplicius, presumably?"

"The New York Times gave it half a page, nearly," said Bradford. " 'Scholarship prostituted' was the theme."

"Scholarship?"

"Apparently." Bradford nodded. "It seems that when Miss Palfrey wasn't groping around below the belt she kept a pretty tight hold on her history .... You know, I'm really quite surprised you haven't read it—the Times man said it was a cross between Gone With The Wind and I, Claudius on one side, and Forever Amber and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the other, but I think it had Kipling undertones—not just your children's stuff, but the real McCoy short stories, like Love-o'-Women—"

"Good God!" exclaimed Audley.

"Oh yes—we Visigoths know our Kipling. And a lot better than most of your civilised Limeys, I'd guess. We haven't got your hang-ups about him, for a start."

"Not mine. I haven't got any hang-ups about Kipling." Audley was on the defensive, and clearly didn't like it. "But you seem to know a great deal about this—what's it called?— Princess of the Sunset?"

" In, not of." The American began to move the bottles again, and then thought better of it and shifted them off the table altogether. "Goddamn empties—we're running out of booze!

Let's have some more bottles out of the rack, Lex . . . In the dummy5

sunset—the sunset of the Roman Empire—you're damn right I know about it—the book anyway, if not the sunset. That's why I'm here."

"What d'you mean, Mike?" Jilly passed the corkscrew to Lexy. "I thought you were here to write?"

"Another Great American Novel," murmured Audley. "About how Patton liberated Europe in spite of Monty and me."

“Shut up, David," said Jilly. "Mike?"

"Yes . . . I'm writing—sure. But I also have this little job on the side, for a friend of mine." Bradford grinned at her. "A bit of intelligence work, actually."

Roche forced himself to watch Lexy struggle with the corkscrew.

"Intelligence work?" Stein leaned forward. "For whom?"

Lexy looked up. "Just like David, you mean?"

Not at all like David!" said Audley.

"Not you, David— that David—" she nodded towards Roche, and then addressed herself to the cork again "—how the hell does this thing work?"

Indeed?" Audley looked at Roche, whose astonishment had graduated to consternation. "Intelligence is your line, is it?"

Roche pointed at the corkscrew. "You screw it the other way, Lexy— clockwise." He shrugged at Audley, and shook his head, and hoped for the best from the shadows. "Nothing so romantic, I'm afraid. Just Signals liaison with NATO—

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because I speak fluent French."

"He jolly well does, too," agreed Lexy enthusiastically as the cork popped. "He had La Goutard eating out of the palm of his hand—you should have seen it!"

"Oh . . ." Audley sounded disappointed. "Jolly good . . ." He turned back towards the American. "So what's this cloak-and-dagger 'little job' then, Mike? A little something for Washington?"

The American chuckled. "Washington hell! Hollywood, I mean—"

For a film?" cried Lexy. "Mike—you didn't tell us! Are you going to make a film of your book? Gosh! Let me fill your glass—then you can discover me. I've always wanted to be discovered—"

"Shut up, Lexy—" Jilly waved her friend down "—it isn't his book, it's got something to do with Princess in the Sunset.

Right, Mike?"

Dead right, Miss Smartpants."

"Antonia . . . what's-her-name?" Lexy refused to be waved down. "Wow! Come on—tell us, Mike—"

"He's trying to tell us, if you'd only shut up! They're going to make a film of it?"

"Yeah. . .That is, they've bought it. . . . There are these guys I know in the studio—I was over here with one of them in

'44 . . . and I've done some script advising for them, and they sent me the Princess draft—that's how I know about it—"

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Bradford nodded to Audley "—there was this historical analysis from a history professor at Harvard, plus all the reviews from the papers, you see."

"A professor from Harvard? Big deal!" Audley's sniff of derision would have done credit to Jilly. "So what did he say?"

"Oh, he said the history was good. Like . . . well, it seems she really was beautiful, this Galla Placidia lady—beautiful and mean, like Scarlett O'Hara and Lucrezia Borgia rolled into one, with her pretty fingers in a lot of pies."

"Yes?" Audley prodded him.

"Well ... it was one hell of a time, with your barbarians flooding into the West, but the Romans still in there pitching

—Theodoric the Gothic king . . . and this guy Constantius, the Roman general, who forced the barbarians to settle down beside the Romans—he was big time as well. And after him there was an even bigger man, with an unpronounceable name—"

"Aëtius," murmured Audley. " The last of the Romans—yes, I think you could call him 'big time', Bradford."

"Right—and all the time the Huns are knocking on the door, ready to destroy everything if the Romans didn't line up with the Goths somehow. And all the while Galla Placidia was playing both ends against the middle—I tell you, it's one hell of a time, and one hell of a story."

"I don't think she was as bad as that," said Lexy. "She had a dummy5

lot to put up with—the way the Goths—the Visigoths—treated her, you know, Mike." She nodded wisely. "Simplicius describes it all."

Bradford laughed. "Yeah—the purple passages!"

"Who is Simplicius? I've never heard of him." Audley rotated on his stool.

"He's the one who tells the story. And 'Simplicius' is a joke-name, because he's a real crafty son-of-a-bitch—he's really the guy who pulls the strings, in fact."

"But not historical, eh?"

"Maybe not. But he comes over like a real person. For my money he's the best thing in the book. He ends up a bishop, but he's really another pagan bastard just using the Christians as his intelligence service."

Jilly held out her glass to be filled. "But. . . where do you come into all this, Mike?" She lifted the glass towards the bottle. "That's enough—I want to stay sober to hear about Mike's 'intelligence' assignment."

"Fill 'em all up, Lexy," ordered Audley. "And then open another bottle."

"Yeah . . . well, Antonia Palfrey is my assignment." Bradford paused for a moment to watch the last of the bottle's contents descend into his glass. "And Miss Antonia Palfrey's small print is my problem."

"In her book, you mean?" said Jilly.

"The purple passages, eh?" Stein chuckled wickedly. "The dummy5

Hays Office doesn't mind the barbarians murdering and looting, but they're drawing the line at rape?"

"She's just a simple little old spinster lady . . ." Bradford sighed and shook his head at no one in particular.

"They're always the worst ones," said Stein mildly. "They should have known better—your Hollywood friends."

"Damn right!" Bradford looked up suddenly. "Not the book though . . . though they should have read the damn thing more carefully—they should have figured anyone who dreamed up a character like Sidonius Simplicius would be tricky . . . but no, not the book." He grimaced. "Or not really the book."

"What then?" asked Jilly.

"The contract, of course!" Stein sat back.

Bradford nodded wordlessly.

"Oh—bloody good show!" The shadows on the Israeli's face creased into a delighted grin. "The little old spinster lady took the studio lawyers for a ride—did she?"

"It isn't so goddamn funny, Davey."

“I think it's hilarious, old boy!"

“Not with two million bucks riding on it, it isn't!"

“Which she gets?"

“If they make the movie she does."

“And if they don't?"

"She's already got half a million."

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Stein laughed. "What's she objecting to, Mike?"

The American grunted morosely. "Ostensibly ... to some minor changes in the plot—"

"You mean, you want to change the history from the way it really happened?" Stein pointed accusingly.

"And she can do that?" Jilly looked from one to the other of them. "I didn't think Hollywood let authors call the tune like that?"

"Especially little old spinster ladies," agreed Stein mockingly.

"Little old spinster ladies should know their place."

"They gave her half a million bucks, man," said Bradford.

"Of course! And who cares about the truth? So. . . they dangled another million-and-a-half in front of her, like the philanthropists they are— because they just love little old ladies—believing she'd take the money and cry all the way to the bank, and the hell with history and truth!" Stein's voice hardened.

Lexy looked out of the shadow at the Israeli's shoulder, to lean past him to deposit another bottle on the table.

"Oh—come on, Davey darling!" She brushed her cheek against his. "It's not Mike's fault—it's only Hollywood making a film in gorgeous technicolour. Don't take on so!"

Stein melted perceptibly, smiling up at her. "Lexy dear, I write about things fifteen thousand years before Galla Placidia, and I wouldn't change a word just to please dummy5

someone if I didn't think it was true." He shifted his glance to Audley. "I'm not being awkward—ask David there if you don't believe me, he's the chairman tonight .... What does the chair rule on truth?"

Audley looked down his Roman nose at them. "The chair rules that its glass is empty. Fill my glass, Lady Alexandra!"

Bradford raised himself up. "And I say—the truth isn't like that. It's a lot more complicated."

"So what is the truth, Mike?" asked Jilly.

Bradford turned to her. "The truth is, Jilly honey . . . first, there were two studios bidding for Princess in the Sunset—

and little Miss Simplicitas Palfrey had a smart shyster lawyer from back East playing one off against the other, selling each of them the idea that she was a greedy old bag who'd be a pushover once the contract was signed, and screw the history."

"But she wasn't—she isn't?"

Bradford stared at her for a moment. "Yeah . . . well, maybe so ... but my guess is she doesn't give a damn about the history, from the letters I've seen. She's just using that clause to get what she wants in another clause where she doesn't have the say-so—where they'd never have let her screw them . . . like, she's ready to have Attila the Hun in the action twenty years before he actually appeared on the scene—thirty years, more like, even—" he looked at Audley "—Attila, huh?"

Audley shrugged. "He crossed the Danube in 440—is that dummy5

what you want?"

"I mean the great battle—the one that settled the fate of Europe, darn it."

Another shrug. "The Mauriac Plain? Near Troyes—451?"

Audley clearly wasn't about to release much of his history just for Hollywood's benefit. "Romans and Visigoths versus Huns?" He made it sound like a rugger match.

"Yeah, that's it."

"I know all about that," said Lexy.

"Indeed?" said Audley. "Tell us?"

"It's all in the book, darling— Princess in the Sunset—" Lexy faltered "—remember?"

"I don't read such books—remember?" said Audley cuttingly.

Roche was simultaneously aware of why Audley had been so comprehensively disliked and that he wanted to help Lexy.

"They beat the Huns, didn't they?" He smiled encouragingly at her. "For the first time ever—they beat them?"

"On points," said Audley. "Strictly speaking, it was about 16-15 in tries and penalties, with no goals."

"But they beat them," said Roche, ignoring Audley.

"Oh yes!" Lexy's courage flamed up. "The Roman general—

Thingummy-what's-his-name—"

"Aëtius," Roche plucked the name out of recent memory.

"Him, yes— he got the Visigoths to help him fight the Huns...

but it was all set up by Simplicius really, so they'd all kill each dummy5

other."

It was a double-cross—or a triple-cross?" said Stein.

"It was a double-cross, that's for sure!" said Bradford. "Only it's Miss Palfrey who's doing the double-crossing. She doesn't give a damn for all this—it's the casting she's after. I think we could put George Washington into it for all she cares—just so she can say who's going to play him .... Those are her terms, and she's driving the studio nuts with people they've never heard of!"

"Who's going to play Galla Placidia?" asked Lexy eagerly.

"Huh! You may well ask! At the rate the negotiations are going probably no one."

"Let me guess!" Lexy plumped herself down alongside Roche, smiling up at him happily. "You know, I never expected the Dark Ages to be so interesting! But let's see now . . . Joan Fontaine—no . . . Janet Leigh —no . . . Jean Simmons—

maybe . . . Elizabeth Taylor—how about her?"

Audley growled something unintelligible.

"Not for the daughter of Theodosius the Great, Alexandra dear," said Stein quickly, with a seriousness which Roche was now able to identify as purely mischievous, aimed equally at Audley and Bradford. "You need someone more aristocratic—

say Deborah Kerr?"

Bradford opened his mouth, but Lexy was too quick for him.

"Not sexy enough, darling. You should read the book—Galla Placidia's hot stuff, I tell you! The way she fixes poor old dummy5

Atwulf—"

" Ataulf." Audley pronounced the name through gritted teeth.

"This is monstrous!"

"You're damn right it's monstrous," agreed Bradford bitterly.

"Because Lexy's got it plum on target—the studio was trying to line up Liz Taylor, after they'd finished shooting Raintree County—"

"Super!" exclaimed Lexy.

"Super hell! Miss Palfrey won't have her at any price. She wants Barbara Jefford, Lex honey."

"Barbara—?" Lexy sat up straight. "Barbara Jefford?"

"Barbara Jefford!" Astonishment replaced mischief in Stein's voice as he too sat up. Then he swung towards Lexy. "Now don't you dare say you haven't heard of her, young Alexandra!"

"Of course I've heard of her. But. . . she's an actress—"

"God save us!" Stein raised his hands. " 'She's an actress'!"

"I mean a stage actress—Stratford and the Old Vic, and all that, Davey—"

"And so do I. She's a splendid actress—" Stein switched to Audley.

"—you remember her from Stratford, David? Hotspur's Kate?

Marvellous!"

"Sure she is—marvellous," Bradford intervened. "I'm not arguing she isn't a great actress—they're all terrific—they're dummy5

all great... but who ever heard of them in Denver or St. Louis, for Christ's sake?"

"Heard of who?"

"Hell, man—Quayle and Badel. . . and Griffiths—"

" Hugh Griffiths?" Stein beamed. "But this is gorgeous, my dear fellow— Anthony Quayle and Alan Badel and Hugh Griffiths—she wants them in the film of her book, Antonia Palfrey does?" He paused for half a second. "And—don't tell me—Michael Redgrave?"

Bradford's mouth opened. "Who told you that?"

"Ah-hah! All is known to Stein ..." The Israeli wagged his head at the American, and then stopped suddenly as though an afterthought had struck him. "But what about young Burton? If she's got all the others she has to have him—" the afterthought was transferred to Audley "—Burton above all—

right, David?"

Audley frowned. "Burton who?"

"But you must remember! He was the fellow you liked so much once you found out he was a rugger-player. Didn't he have a trial for Wales, or something? And you said he'd come down in the world, to play the lead at Stratford?"

"Eh?"

"I don't know what you're talking about either," snapped Bradford. "But you're right about Richard Burton—in fact he's the only one they agree on, Palfrey and the studio. But who told you about him—the Palfrey cast list is supposed to dummy5

be ultra secret—who told you?"

"No one told me." Stein continued to look at Audley. "But David there knows. He's just playing dumb, that's all."

Audley drew himself up stiffly. "I am not playing dumb, damn it! Burton . . . yes, he was an actor from somewhere—

but I can't be expected to remember actors' names. I don't go to the theatre."

"You did once. In fact, you did several times—with me—to Stratford. . . in fact. . . in fact, I taught you to drive that summer, in that terrible old car of yours—'50, or '51—and we were staying with those girls in that cottage near Banbury . . .

and you drove home every night drunk as a lord—damn it, David . . . the Stratford season we went to—" Stein spread his hands and looked around for support "—he had these tickets for the Stratford Shakespeare season, and there were these two girls—and he had this car he couldn't drive, and I was teaching him . . . and we saw the whole season— Richard II, with Redgrave as Richard, and both parts of Henry IV and Henry V, with Burton as Prince Hal—and The Tempest with Redgrave as Prospero—and he was also a cracking good Hotspur in Henry IV—" he rounded on Audley "—damn it, David . . . you had these matinee tickets, and we were stuck in the middle of this schoolgirl outing, from Benenden or some such place—and Redgrave was massaging his wife's right buttock and left breast like mad on stage, and these little schoolgirls were ooh-ing and aah-ing at every squeeze in the audience alongside of us—you have to remember that!"

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Roche covertly observed the lamplight shadows twitch on Audley's face as the circumstantial tale unfolded around him, and found himself questioning why the big man continued to resist it.

"Yes . . . well—" Audley rocked on his stool as though embarrassed by the return of the memory "—we did see the Histories season at Stratford, I grant you. But I don't remember any schoolgirls wetting their pants next to me . . .

and I certainly don't see what that's got to do with Bradford's curious obsessions now, either."

Nor do I," said Bradford.

"But I do." Jilly ignored him. "They were all in the Stratford season— you're right, Davey. I only saw Richard II and The Tempest... but they were all in it—"

"Richard Burton's yummy," said Lexy. "I've seen him in something in the West End—and in a film. He'd be scrumptious with Elizabeth Taylor, I should think. And I wouldn't mind him tackling me in a loose scrum!"

"Shut up, Lexy "admonished Jilly. "Davey—she's cast the film from the Stratford season, is what you're saying—is that it?"

Stein nodded. "That's exactly it. Quayle played Falstaff, and Badel was Pistol . . . Griffiths was Glendower . . . plus Redgrave and Burton and Jefford—coincidence just doesn't stretch so far, it has to be intention."

"She saw the plays, of course," said Jilly. "And she liked what she saw."

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"Which is not to be wondered at—it was pure magic, that season," said Stein. "Quite unforgettable!"

"Well—so what's all the fuss about?" Lexy looked around. "I mean, if they're all so marvellous and magic and unforgettable—?" She zeroed in on the American. "Mike?"

Bradford sighed. "Maybe . . . But it doesn't work like that."

You mean Hollywood doesn't work like that," said Jilly. "I mean you can't pick names out of a hat," said Bradford heavily. "It's who's available, and who's under contract, and who's box office—and you can't just cast a Hollywood movie straight out of Shakespeare hits from Stratford-upon-Avon, England, no matter how good the cast was—or how wet the schoolgirls' pants were. It's a crazy idea."

"Olivier did it with Henry V and Hamlet," countered Jilly.

"But they were Shakespeare plays—this is a goddamn epic."

So why not make it in England?"

"Like Caesar and Cleopatra? Honey, you must be joking!"

Bradford reached for a bottle.

Stein leaned forward. "But Miss Palfrey isn't joking."

"The hell she isn't!" Bradford refilled his glass. "Just a simple little old spinster lady living in seclusion with the blinds drawn to keep out the sunlight. . ." he drank deeply.

"What's she really like?" asked Jilly.

"Huh! That would be telling!"

"Tell us, Mike," asked Lexy.

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"Sure. For five thousand bucks on account, and twenty thousand to come . . . she's a two-timing, double-crossing, obstinate, secretive, avaricious, scheming old hag, who'd make your Madame Peyrony look like Florence Nightingale, Lex honey." Bradford drained his glass. "Or ... to put it another way ... I haven't the faintest idea. Okay?"

"What d'you mean—you haven't the faintest idea?"

"And where does five thousand dollars—or twenty thousand—

come in?" asked Stein. "It's what they're paying you? For what?"

"Twenty thousand doesn't come in, the way it's looking—"

Bradford nodded at Audley "—unless David there can pull the rabbit out of the hat." The nod was converted into a slow shake of the head. "Because you're my last hope, Old buddy."

"Then you've got no hope, old buddy." Audley looked down his nose at his friend. "It's not my field, the so-called

'historical' novel."

"Archie Forbes said you could."

"Archie Forbes at Cambridge?" said Jilly suddenly. " That Archie Forbes, d'you mean?"

"Yeah— that Archie Forbes—Dr Archibald Forbes of Rylands College—" Bradford gave Audley another nod "— his old tutor and drinking buddy."

"My old brigadier and eminence grise," said Audley. "Why don't you split your bounty-money with him, for God's sake—

and leave me alone!"

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"Because he doesn't know—that's why. And you do."

"Know what?" asked Jilly.

"Crap!" exclaimed Bradford. "All you have to do is think—"

Roche stirred himself. "Think what? Know what?"

Bradford turned towards him, screwing up his eyes in the darkness. "I took the goddamn book to Forbes at Cambridge

—"

"But why?" asked Jilly.

"Because he's an expert on medieval history, honey. They gave me his name in UCLA—they said whoever wrote it is a historian."

"But Antonia Palfrey wrote it, Mike."

Bradford spread his hands. "And who the hell's Antonia Palfrey? It's just a name on a book jacket—a nom-de-plume name, not a real one."

"But there's her picture—"

"Sure. But with no address. And she just turns up at intervals, out of the blue . . . sometimes in London, but mostly in New York . . . and then disappears again before the press can catch her. Or anyone else."

"But her publishers must know where she lives, Mike."

"And her lawyers," said Stein.

"Huh! Well... if they know, they're not telling me!"

“There are ways of finding out," said Stein.

"Sure there are ways." Bradford pointed at Audley. "He's one dummy5

way—"

But why David?" Jilly looked from one to the other.

"Why indeed!" murmured Audley. "Because that vindictive old swine Forbes set him on to me, of course! He hates my guts."

But you were his favourite pupil, David," said Stein.

"Favourite? That's rich!" Audley rocked on his stool.

"But you were, old boy," said Stein. "When you won the Hebden he even gave a party for you. I was there."

"So you were. And so I was ... so long as I danced to his tune." He nodded at Stein. "I took the Hebden Prize from a chap at King's—Bodger, or Badger, or some such unlikely name—who was the pet student of old Professor Hedley, whom Forbes cordially detested . . . After which I had great plans for myself. And so did Forbes." He rocked again.

"Unfortunately . . . unfortunately for me, that is ... the plans did not coincide.

"What plans?"

"Oh—the usual sort of thing," said Audley airily. "After my doctorate, a fellowship. There was one timed just right for me at Rylands, in medieval history. Number Two to Forbes, in fact."

Jilly cocked her head. "But David, if that was Professor Forbes's plan, why didn't you—"

"My dear Jilly, that wasn't Forbes's plan—that was mine."

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The lamplight caught Audley's teeth again as he smiled, but for once the shadows seemed to Roche to betray his true expression in a mask of pain. "Bodger—Dr Bodger—got the fellowship."

For a moment no one spoke, then Stein emitted a sympathetic grunt. "And what was Forbes's plan?"

"Oh. . .that was. . . rather different."

What was it?" Stein persisted. "More wine, Alexandra!"

An excellent idea!" said Audley heartily. "And then we shall toast all the Forbeses and Bodgers of this world, that they may receive their just reward." He held out his glass to Lexy.

"Fill it up, m'lady."

"Not until you've told us Forbes's plan," said Lexy. "You can't leave us with only half a story."

Audley waved his glass. "I only tell that half when I'm drunk, Alexandra Champeney-Perowne."

"But you are drunk, David."

“Am I?" Audley looked around for confirmation.

"Sufficiently," said Stein.

Audley shrugged. "Well... I suppose it's no great secret."

“What is?"

"I did a few months in Intelligence at the end of the war.

Nasty, dirty, unchivalrous work." He nodded. "Absolutely fascinating too."

Yes?"

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Another shrug. "Forbes wanted me to go back to it, that's all.

He said it was my patriotic duty—he said 'Of those to whom much is given, much is required'. And 'One must always risk one's life, or one's soul, or one's peace—or some little thing'.

And, finally, 'Go where glory waits, Audley my boy'. The old, old story, in fact."

"Yes?" Stein's voice had lowered to a whisper.

Another shrug. "I was young. And I was in love with Cambridge—and history. . . And I was also stupid—I thought he was asking me, not ordering me ..." Audley shook his head. "And the pay was rotten—and I needed money at the time rather badly, as it happened."

Roche thought of The Old House.

"I reckoned I could do better for myself by following my own plans. So I told him to stuff his patriotism and his secret service where the monkey put the nuts— and I said the same, only more so, to the perfectly ghastly individual they sent to recruit me ... Which, dear friends, was a mistake—not showing myself a pure-souled, high-minded youth—a fatal error."

"He blocked your fellowship?" said Stein.

"Oh—he did more than that, the lusty old blackbird. He fixed me good and proper—and permanently, what's more. And not a stain on his character, either."

"How?"

"How?" The agonised smile came back. "There was this girl dummy5

turned up—while I was putting the finishing touches to my doctoral thesis . . . absolutely gorgeous—the girl, I mean—the thesis was gorgeous too, even he couldn't do anything about that . . . but she was nonpareil in beauty and wit—all that a young idiot could desire—Cordelia-Viola-Miranda-Juliet-Portia . . . Or, as she turned out, Goneril-Regan-Lady Macbeth-Mata Hari."

"She was one of his, you mean?" said Stein.

" No, I do not mean—you underrate the man! Just the opposite, was what my Juliet was!"

"What d'you mean—the opposite?" said Jilly.

"Exactly that, Jilly dear. He'd put the word out—and the KGB

picked it up." Audley laughed. "I was just about to propose to her—we were punting on the Backs, all white flannel and silk

—only she popped her question first." Audley spread his hands. "And we had a row. And she fell into the river—"

" She proposed to you—?" Lexy sounded thunderstruck.

"She certainly did! She proposed that, since I didn't want to serve the filthy, capitalist, war-mongering fascist beasts, then how about the other side? And, I tell you, Lexy love, the pay's better—a lot better, so it seems. A man could employ a lot of builders and carpenters and plumbers and tilers just for the downpayment."

"Good God!" exclaimed Stein.

"Not so good," said Audley. "Because then he put out the word a second time. Only it was a different word, because my dummy5

ex-Juliet was a known agent, who took the next plane back to Moscow after her swim in the Cam." He surveyed his audience. "It's what's called 'Guilt by association', you see. It put my name on the red side of the ledger— Not to be employed in a position of trust. . . quite unofficially, of course. But with the Cold War hotting up 'quite unofficially'

was quite good enough to scupper me."

"But that's awful, David!" said Lexy. "If I tell Daddy about that he'll talk to them for you—he'll sort them out—"

"Don't bother, Lexy love," Audley shook his head.

"But—you could try Oxford, David. Daddy's a fellow of All Souls—sort of honorary, or something—and he meets the Prime Minister there— he could get you a fellowship."

"I said don't bother" Audley's voice sharpened. "I don't want a bloody fellowship now—at Oxford, or Cambridge, or anywhere else. They can stuff their fellowships."

But—"

"What I want, Lexy love, is the one thing your daddy can't give me. And not even Macmillan can give me either, if he's doing his job right—that's the whole delicious irony of the thing, really."

What is?" said Stein.

"Irony?" echoed Jilly.

Audley's eyes travelled across them, settling finally on Roche.

"You wouldn't understand— he might, but you wouldn't—if what you say about him is right."

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"Me?" squeaked Roche, caught unawares.

"It probably isn't right, my dear chap. But if you've got anything to do with intelligence work . . . would you employ me?"

Roche swallowed. "I beg your pardon?"

Audley shook his head. "I beg yours, Captain. I shouldn't have asked the question . . . but if you were—which I'm sure you're not—and you wouldn't admit it if you were, anyway—

but if you were, you wouldn't. That's all." He rocked on the stool. "But don't bother to answer, Captain—it was just a hypothetical statement."

"I don't understand a word you're saying," said Lexy. She looked at Roche. "What's he saying, David?"

Roche understood exactly what Audley was saying, but still couldn't believe what he had heard, because luck didn't come to anyone packaged so neatly, not in a million years.

"David—" began Jilly.

"Don't worry, Captain," said Audley. "Have another drink and forget every thing I said."

"No!" snapped Jilly. "David—are you saying that you'd like to go back to intelligence work?"

"That's exactly what he's saying," said Stein. "But why, David, for God's sake? The sewage doesn't smell any sweeter these days—if anything it's dirtier, I should think."

"Dirtier for sure, old boy," agreed Audley. "Everything gets dummy5

grubbier with time, it's a natural process. No more worlds fit for heroes, no more capitalist heavens or socialist Utopias."

"And no more British Empire," said Stein. "You wouldn't be playing Kipling's 'Great Game' in the high passes any more—

no more Bengal Lancers, old boy. No more glamour."

"There never was any glamour."

"No money either. You said they were stingy before—they'll be even stingier now. You'll spend half your time trying to cook your expenses." Stein shook his head sadly.

"Oh . . . that wouldn't worry him, darling." Lexy surfaced again. "He's positively rolling in the stuff, you know that!"

"Maybe he doesn't like being on the losing side," said Bradford. "Losing isn't his style."

Roche knew he couldn't let that pass—not with what he still had to do. "We're not damn well losing."

Audley shook his head. "Oh—but we are, my dear chap.

We're losing very thoroughly and comprehensively—Mike's right." He nodded at the American. "Ever since we won we've been losing. Suez merely broadcast the message: no more

'Rule Britannia', no more Thin Red Line, no more Civis Britannicus Sum. The gateway in the wall has been bricked up, and John Foster Dulles has scratched 'Finish' on the plaster. You're just commanding the rearguard, Roche."

Roche scoured his wits for a reply. The trouble was that it was all true, and he was living proof of it, and all he wanted was to be on neither of these two sides, losing or winning—a dummy5

plague on them both. And a plague on rearguards too, for that matter!

"The rearguard usually gets cut to pieces," said Stein, smiling at him across the table. "It's the place of honour, but the honour's not quite your style either—now, is it?"

"Wrong again!" Audley revolved on his stool. "I told you—if Roche was recruiting, I'd be his man. Like that fellow Burton said— if it be a sin to covet honour I am the most offending soul alive."

"Hogwash!" said Bradford, the embers of his recent anger glowing through the word. "Not you, David. Mischief—

maybe. But not honour."

Stein chuckled. "I wouldn't put it as strong as that, Mike.

But . . . not honour, I agree."

Audley continued to revolve from side to side, as though he preferred to present a moving target. Yet he didn't seem to be offended by the insults. 'Well, maybe I was joking. But it's all academic anyway—thanks to dear Archie ... So let's get back to my barbarians. I particularly want to tell you about the Vandals, a people for whom I have great sympathy—a people much misunderstood, like myself ... In fact, when Izzy Collins and I started our rugger club, I wanted to call us the Vandals.

But Izzy wouldn't have it—he said we might as well call ourselves the Hooligans, and have done with it. So we settled for the Visigoths in the end, and—"

"No, David!" said Jilly. "We haven't finished with you yet."

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Good girl, thought Roche gratefully.

"With me, Jilly love?" Audley stopped rotating.

"That's right," said Lexy. "You still haven't told us why you want to serve Her Majesty again, darling."

"Won't 'Honour' do?" Audley cocked his head at her.

"No," said Stein.

"The Vandals are much more interesting. King Gaiseric is right up your street, Stein—"

"And it isn't the money," said Lexy. "We've established that—

it's poor, old Mike there who needs the cash, not David—"

Gaiseric," said Audley. "King of the Vandals—"

Oh, do shut up, David!" said Lexy. "We're on to something interesting now—really interesting. I've always wanted to know what makes you tick." She rested her elbow on the table, and then her chin on her fist, and gazed at Audley fixedly. " Not honour . . . and not money . . . and it isn't as if he'd get a pretty uniform to wear, like he used to in Daddy's old regiment... so why this sudden rush of patriotism to the head, then? That's what we have to find out."

"Not the power and the glory," said Stein drily.

"No?"

Lexy swivelled her chin on her fist. "Why not, Davey?"

“Precious little power. The Russians and the Yanks have all of that between them. The British are losers now—he said so himself." Stein folded his arms. "And no glory, because it dummy5

isn't that sort of game. Not like rugger."

"Not like rugger?"

Stein nodded. "You win in private, but you lose in public when things go wrong. And he doesn't like losing." He grinned wickedly at Audley. "Of course, you could try the KGB again, David. At least you'd have a better chance of winning with them."

"Gosh, no, Davey darling!" exclaimed Lexy. "He wouldn't like them— they wear frightful blue suits, all shapeless and bulgy, with brown shoes. Daddy pointed out two of them to me at a reception we were at. They were awful!"

"Okay . . ." The Israeli shrugged. "Maybe Mike can fix up an introduction to the CIA. They wear better suits . . . Mike?"

Bradford stirred uneasily.

"I knew a lovely boy in the CIA," said Lexy. "At least, I think he was in the CIA."

"I'm told they're always looking for volunteers in England,"

said Stein. "It's part of the 'special relationship', I suppose."

"He was in something incredibly secret, anyway," said Lexy dreamily. Then she sighed. "But Daddy didn't like him."

"Daddy didn't like his particular idea of the special relationship, you mean," murmured Stein. "Well, Mike?"

"Yeah." Bradford cleared his throat. "I know a couple of guys . . ." He eyed Audley for a moment. "I could give you names and addresses. You just give me Antonia Palfrey's name—real name—in return. And her address, huh?"

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"Oh, Mike!" Lexy rounded on the American. "Why must you keep harping on Antonia Palfrey? He's told you he doesn't know her."

"And I've told him I don't believe him."

"But why! Not just because of what ... of what Professor Archie Whatnot says, Mike?"

Bradford shook his head. "Forbes just pointed me at the facts."

"What facts?"

"Honey. . . " Bradford continued to stare at Audley ". . .that goddamn woman is an expert in a very small field. UCLA says so, and Forbes says so, and I know so—because I've checked the field out. And there's no one fills the bill, just no one."

"So what?"

"So ... so maybe she isn't an expert. Maybe she's gotten herself a tame expert—someone who knows the difference between an Ostrogoth and a Visigoth and a Vandal, all about 5th century Christians and heretics and pagans. And also someone who knows about fighting, the way Miss Antonia Palfrey seems to know about it—"

"That doesn't follow, Mike," said Jilly quickly. "Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage—"

" Crap! She's picked somebody's brains, honey. Somebody who knows about being scared and about . . . barbarians."

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Bradford paused. "You know anyone here fills that bill, huh?"

Roche watched Audley, aware that everyone was doing the same.

"Fills the bill?" Audley sighted the American down his nose.

"Dr Bodger, of Rylands College, Cambridge, fills the bill, for a start, old boy."

"More crap. Bodger never fired a shot in his life, old buddy.

He worked for the Ministry of Information. He had rheumatic fever when he was a kid. I told you—I've checked out the field. He was never even called up for military service." Bradford shook his head again. "Also, he doesn't commute to Zurich regularly."

"Zurich?" Lexy looked from Audley to Bradford.

" He does. And that's where the elusive Miss Palfrey lives."

Bradford pointed at Audley.

Audley tossed his head. "This is ridiculous. I've been to Zurich once or twice in the last three months, I have an account there. It isn't a crime yet, for God's sake!"

Stein chuckled. "No flies on our David!"

" Flies is right—" Bradford sat up "—flies is exactly right. Eh, David?"

Audley grimaced at him. "What d'you mean? F-f-flies?"

That's what I mean: 'f-f-flies'." Bradford pounced on him. "

'F-f-flies'. Big ones, little ones—fat ones, black ones, green shiny ones—squashy ones— flies, David—"

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"Don't be disgusting, Bradford!" Audley hunched his shoulders.

Lexy tossed the hair from her face. "Now you're being beastly, Mike—"

Not at all, honey—"

"You are so! We all know David hates flies, he's told us so.

But so do I and so do you—" she gave Audley a quick, sympathetic glance, and then carried on to the Israeli "—and when we talked about them . . . Davey there said there were more flies in that desert of his—"

"Sinai." Stein nodded. "Sinai is the fly capital of the world."

For Christ's sake!" said Audley.

Bradford nodded at Roche. "There you are, Captain. We don't like 'f-f-flies'—but he's obsessive about them!"

Roche observed Audley's face contort, though whether with disgust or anger the shadows didn't tell.

"So . . . just get the book, and I'll prove my point," went on Bradford. "Lexy—?"

"What point?" asked Jilly. "What book?"

Lexy blinked. "Book—?"

Bradford gestured dismissively. "It doesn't matter—you can take my word for it, I can give you chapter and page—

chapters and pages, rather— it's all there to be seen . . . and heard—they buzz around from battlefield to battlefield to annoy Simplicius, and from corpse to corpse on the dummy5

battlefield. On one page she has a whole paragraph about the Devil being 'lord of the flies', and how each fly is a black soul from Hell sent to plague the faithful—"

"Flies!" Lexy buried a hand into her tangled hair. "Of course—

yes, you're absolutely right, Mike—and the flies in the food at the wedding banquet, when she's forced to marry Atwulf—

Galla Placidia—"

Ataulf—" Audley corrected her automatically.

"So you have read the book, David!"

"I have not read the book." Audley closed his eyes. "I do not want to read the book—I will not read the book. I know perfectly well what happened during the period without having to read any semi-pornographic historical novel."

"I'll bet you do," said Bradford. "Flies included."

Audley opened his eyes. "I ... happen to have particularly unpleasant memories about. . . flies." He pronounced the word carefully. "Wartime memories, not historical ones. I'd prefer not to remember them, if it's all the same to you, Bradford."

"You remembered them for Antonia Palfrey."

Shut up, Mike," said Jilly.

"The hell I will!" Bradford's voice was obstinate. "If you think I—"

However . . ." Audley's own voice was obstinate too, and louder ". . . however ... I will tell you one thing you want to know, if it'll make you feel better."

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"Oh, goody-goody!" exclaimed Lexy. "He's going to tell us something that'll make us feel better!"

Audley's mouth twisted. "It won't make you feel better. It's all about barbarians—"

"Oh— merde!" Lexy's shoulders slumped.

"But it does answer your question, nevertheless—"

"What question?" Lexy cocked her head. "How—"

"Sssh, dear!" Jilly hushed her. "He's about to tell us how he ticks. Go on, David."

"Barbarians make him tick?" Lexy blundered on. "Oh—come on, David—"

" Lexy—" Jilly's tone became dangerous.

"Okay! Okay!" Lexy raised her hands. "Barbarians make you tick, David—anything you say!"

Audley stared at her. "They did—yes. After the war . . . during the war for that matter . . . they say war's a great leveller, and so it is. It levelled Aachen—Charlemagne's Aix-la-Chapelle . . . and Cologne . . . Colonia Agrippina . . . all in a good cause, of course—I levelled one little Norman church myself, with a few well-placed shots at a discreet distance—

there was this brave bugger with a panzerfaust in it, who'd just incinerated a friend of mine in the tank ahead of me . . .

good causes don't come any better than that."

"David—" began Lexy.

He was drunk, thought Roche. But not totally drunk, because dummy5

there still wasn't a word out of place, and not stupid drunk either. He simply hadn't liked the drift of Bradford's interrogation—the piling up of circumstantial evidence against him, piece by piece—and was seeking instead to divert it with the one thing he had to give them which might intrigue them more.

"Go on, David," said Jilly.

"Where was I?" Audley blinked owlishly.

"You were demolishing Germany," said Stein.

"In a good cause," said Lexy. "And it had something to do with barbarians."

"Ah ... of course, they crossed the Rhine from East to West—

the Franks, and then the Vandals and all the rest ... but we crossed it from West to East, as the Romans did, complete with hostile Germans on the other side." Audley nodded at Stein. "And I remember thinking . . . 'This time we'll get it right, the conquest of Germany—we won't fluff it, like the Romans did'. But, of course, it didn't work out like that, with the Russians—I was escorting one of the T Force groups ferreting out German technological secrets, and we ran into them doing the same thing straight off, and I knew then what sort of brave new world we were heading for." He paused.

"Nine months of fighting Nazis . . . and others . . . and eighteen months of fighting Russians . . . and others—that was my war. Uncomfortable, but highly educational, you might say." Another pause. "Then I went up to Cambridge, into the tender care of Professor Archibald Forbes—" he dummy5

raised his glass, only to find that it was empty; and then that the bottles on the table, tested one after another, were also empty, and focussed finally upon Lexy "—another bottle, pot-girl!"

"Don't you think you've had enough, David?" said Jilly.

"Huh!" Audley grunted derisively. "My dear Gillian, I haven't started to drink yet—not by rugger club standards, anyway."

Lexy drew another bottle from the rack.

"Make it two—or three, seeing as how the night is yet young . . . Stein—Bradford—Captain Roche ... fill your glasses! Let us drink to our dead youth—you remember your Kipling, Roche? Parnesius and Pertinax on the Great Wall, with the barbarians on the warpath?" Roche held out his glass obediently.

Audley grinned back at him. "A libation is what we should make—" he looked around, his glance finally settling on the potted plant at his elbow "—just a drop for my lost opportunities, then—" he inclined his glass carefully "—but not too much! Roche?"

Roche leaned forward to bury his own glass among the leaves. "And for mine too!" He tipped as much of his wine as he dared into the heart of the plant.

"Good man!" Audley beamed at him. "Stein—Bradford?"

"I don't sacrifice," said Stein.

"And I don't waste good wine," said Bradford.

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Audley shrugged. "Well. . . that's your funeral. I mocked the gods once, and I was punished for my hubris—appropriately punished, too."

"What hubris, David?" asked Jilly.

"I thought I knew better," said Audley. "I turned Forbes down when he offered me the real world, and chose the other Dark Ages instead. I thought I was uniquely well-placed to interpret them—I thought I had an insight denied to lesser mortals after my wartime education."

"Why the Dark Ages?" asked Jilly.

"Because that was the other time when the world changed, love—the other barbarian age—from the fall of the Roman Empire to when the Arabs were three days' march from Paris, or thereabouts. After which nothing was ever the same again—I found it fascinating." Audley shook his head. "What a time to live in— fascinating—"

"Ugh!" Lexy shivered. "Sidonius Simplicius didn't think it was fascinating—he thought it was dreadful! Like the beginning of the end of the world, he said."

"So it was—of his world." Audley grinned at her. "But, don't you see, that's what makes it so interesting—the world turned upside down and history speeded up. What an age to live in!"

"You're just like Sidonius Simplicius," said Lexy. "He decided in the end that it was interesting, once he'd worked out how to play both ends against the middle. Then he said it was all the will of God, anyway. But he hadn't been raped in the dummy5

process, of course."

"Indeed?" Audley half shrugged. "But. . . well, that's what I thought, at all events, mes amis: I really believed that I could lose myself in the past, in the old dark ages, using my understanding of the uncomfortable present as the key to it all ..." his expression twisted "... from the comfort of a senior common room at Cambridge, naturally—that goes without saying."

The man's bitterness went without saying also, thought Roche. He was eaten up with it, beneath his self-mockery.

"But you didn't get a fellowship," said Bradford brutally.

Audley bowed to him over his glass, which was empty again.

"Hubris, my dear fellow. And it was a rather juvenile theory, anyway."

"Oh, come on, David! You haven't done too badly," Lexy's natural instinct, once she had realised the concealed wound, was to apply soothing ointment to it.

"Yes," Stein nodded. "And, come to that, you could probably get a fellowship somewhere now, if you wanted to. That book of yours was well reviewed in the TLS—the Byzantine one . . .

Maybe not Oxbridge, but one of the newer places. Or the States—"

Audley winced. "I don't want a bloody fellowship in one of the newer places—or the States. . . or Oxbridge, damn it."

"Yeah—of course! You told us. You want your old job back."

Bradford twisted the blade. "Maybe you should go crawling dummy5

back to Forbes, and ask for forgiveness."

"Mike!" admonished Jilly. "Lay off!"

The American shrugged unrepentantly. "Tit for tat, honey.

Just being helpful."

"Helpful!" Jilly gestured impatiently. "But why, David? You still haven't explained why."

"Haven't I?" Audley blinked at her. "I thought I had."

"You haven't, darling," said Lexy. "Not a word. But—"

"Sssh!" Jilly waved her down too. "Go on, David."

Audley shifted on his stool uneasily, as though unwilling to strip his seventh veil at the last.

Stein chuckled darkly behind his glass. "The great David doesn't want to admit the truth."

"What truth?"

"He's bored, Jilly dear—plain, old-fashioned bored . . . Bored and lonely—lonely and bored!" The Israeli nodded to himself, and then to Audley. "And it's a dangerous combination, that—

in a man like you, my friend. It makes you ripe for any mischief, any wickedness in this wicked world." He looked around at the rest of them. "Such men are dangerous, believe me. We would do well to leave him alone—to leave now, before it is too late . . . or he will drag us down with him into some fatal adventure of his."

"Bored?" Lexy echoed the word incredulously. "But he can't be bored— with all he's got. . . And he can't be lonely—he's dummy5

got us, Davey."

"My dear—we're merely the ingredients of his boredom.

Boredom isn't just not having anything to do. It's not being able to do what you want to do. If you can't do that, then everything else is weary, stale, flat and unprofitable—believe me, I know."

"How do you know, Davey?" asked Jilly.

"Because it's an infection, Jilly dear—a parasite in the blood that never leaves you once it's there. It can lie dormant for a few years, but it's there waiting for you to weaken. I know because I've got it too, you see—maybe not David's particular bug, but my own special bug."

What bug, Davey?" asked Lexy.

"None of your business, Lady Alexandra," said Stein.

"He likes to fly planes," said Bradford. "A common bug."

If you say so," Stein shrugged. "But I'm not complaining."

Audley laughed. "You've got nothing to complain about. You get your jollies from the poor damned Egyptians at regular intervals. All I get to do is write books. And they're no substitute for the real thing, I've discovered.''

Lexy sat up once more, this time almost as though pricked.

"Simplicius!" she exclaimed.

"I beg your pardon, Lexy love?"

"You're Simplicius—you really are! Sidonius Simplicius to the life, darling—sort of in reverse."

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Lexy love—"

"No, you are—it's quite weird, darling!" Lexy turned to Jilly

"You've read the book, Jilly—you tell him, he'll believe you!"

Tell him what?"

"You remember! How he's always on about wanting to write a book about that boring old saint who was martyred by some emperor or other— Saint Somebody-or-other of Somewhere—"

"Saint Vinicius of Capua? The one Diocletian parboiled?"

That's him! And he's always saying—Simplicius is always saying—that Vinicius lived in much more interesting times ..." Lexy spread her gaze round them "... but of course he never does write the book, because he's far too busy running the whole show from behind Galla Placidia's skirts, which is much more interesting."

Jilly nodded. "You're quite right. That's the whole point of the book— 'What the Lord God, our Emperor, and Jesus Christ, his Caesar, purpose for Their servants'—that's right."

"Huh! Audley grunted derisively. "This fellow Simplicius sounds . . . doctrinally unsound!"

"I don't know about that, darling—all your heresies and things are beyond me. But what he's saying is that taking part in the real world now is the only proper job for a real man. Right, Jilly?" Lexy turned from Jilly to Bradford.

"You've read the book, Mike—isn't that so?"

"Yeah. He sure as hell didn't regard life as a spectator sport.

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He wanted to run with the ball."

"That's exactly what I mean." Lexy turned back to Audley.

"And you want to run with the ball too, David—and get your head down in the scrum, and do all those other beastly things you get so worked up about. So you're Simplicius, don't you see, darling?"

Roche saw.

And, suddenly, in seeing, saw more than that.

Saw Lexy, enchanting Lexy, half embarrassed at the sound of her own voice, the lamplight catching the slight sheen of perspiration on her face—

Saw Jilly . . . and on Jilly's plain little features it was the sheen of intelligence which animated that face into something close to beauty—

Saw the handsome blond Israeli, the compulsive pilot; and the dark angry American . . . both his adversaries—

But saw Audley most of all, and at last.

"Here's Steffy!" Lexy held up her hand, listening. "I can hear her on the steps outside."

"And about time too!" said Audley irritably. "I just wish she'd regulate her love life more thoughtfully—" he cut off suddenly, frowning at the scrape of hobnails on stone, which was followed by a thunderous knocking. "But that's not our Steffy, by God!"

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Jilly peered at her wrist-watch. "It's past midnight, David."

"So what? We argued until three last time over Stein's esoteric prehistoric gobbledegook, and Madame didn't turn a hair."

"She thinks there's safety in numbers," said Lexy, smiling up at Roche. "She believes we wouldn't call it 'an orgy' if it really was one."

The knock was repeated, even more heavily, and they looked at each other like guilty children, each waiting for the others to move.

"Well, someone bloody answer it," snapped Audley. "I'm too far away."

"Yeah. Well, someone's got to," said Bradford. "Otherwise she'll think we really are screwing around."

The knock was repeated a third time.

"All right, then," Stein stood up. "Muggins does it."

Roche craned his neck round Lexy to get a better view, but the angle was awkward and the light confusing.

"Gaston?" Stein injected a masterly mixture of ninety per cent innocent inquiry and ten per cent surprise, as any man with two girls but a clear conscience might employ after midnight. "It's old Gaston," he called unnecessarily over his shoulder.

"Old Gaston?" Audley's equally unnecessary repetition substituted a rather forced heartiness for Stein's tenth of surprise. "Well—don't stand there, man! Ask him in! Get dummy5

another glass, Lady Alexandra."

But Old Gaston did not seem disposed to be drawn into the Tower. Rather, he drew the Israeli out into the darkness beyond with an urgent, indecipherable mutter of words.

"What's he want, for God's sake?" Audley called through the doorway, at Stein's back. "Stein?"

Mutter-mutter-mutter. Stein took no notice of the question.

"Gaston's Madame Peyrony's odd-job man," said Audley across the table to Roche. "He stokes the boiler, and does the repairs, and digs the garden, and that sort of thing."

Digs the garden sent a shiver down Roche's spine. If Old Gaston dug Madame Peyrony's garden from way back, then he had planted more than roses in it, for sure.

"Stein!" Audley's voice had lost its heartiness. "What does he want?" There was a touch of bluster about it now, and under that uneasiness. "Stein?"

The Israeli turned round suddenly just beyond the doorway, but then stood there for a moment in silence, without moving. "Well?" snapped Audley.

Stein straightened up—until he did so Roche didn't realise that his shoulders had slumped—and came back into the light. "Well?" said Audley again.

Stein looked at Jilly. "Get your wrap, dear. We've got to go."

"What's happened?" asked Lexy.

"There's been an accident."

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Steffy?" Lexy stood up quickly. "To Steffy?"

Jilly had risen just as quickly, pulling her wrap from the back of her chair on to her shoulders.

"Not you, Lady Alexandra," said Stein. "Jilly will do."

Lexy had started to move, but now she stopped. "What sort of accident?" She knew, of course. They all knew, thought Roche—they knew without the fractional pause before Stein gave up trying to edit the answer.

"She's dead, Lexy," said the Israeli.

XIV

ROCHE'S TRAVELLING CLOCK woke him to order before dawn, into blind man's darkness inside the Tower.

Against all the odds of alcohol and exhaustion, and the too-few hours the night's events had left him, he became fully aware of all the co-ordinates of his mind and body long before the tiny bell mechanism had exhausted itself beneath the folds of his shirt, with which he had deliberately muted it.

He had to get up and get on with the job. Thinking about Steffy— knowing just so much, and nothing at all—only brought back the sour taste of nightmares which he shouldn't remember, like the taste of last night's alcohol.

He fumbled for his torch under the camp-bed; found the torch, and found the matches on the table beside him; put down the torch and struck a match to light the candle Audley dummy5

had left for him—the flaring match and the sputtering candle-flame illuminated the tower room around him, sending thousands of shadows everywhere creeping into their holes, in the great rack of bottles—the bottles winking and blinking at him.

Before he could think more about it, he forced himself out of his sleeping bag and set his bare feet on the floor. And he saw, as he did so, the slim red gold-embossed book which he had pulled out of his hold-all, with his torch and his little alarm clock—which he had tried to read for a few moments in that same candlelight so few hours before, wanting to sleep and needing to sleep, but fearing to do so ... Wimpy's gift, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill . . . and thought of the old Roman general on the Great Wall, with his world falling in ruins around him, listening each morning to his sword and saying to himself 'And this day is allowed Rutilianus to live'. . .

He drew his shirt over his head, and hauled his trousers on to his legs; and pulled on his socks and pushed his feet into his shoes, and tied up the laces; and, just as automatically, picked up the torch and acquiesced in the Plan of Action he had formulated the half-night before, as he had assembled the camp-bed and unstrapped the sleeping-bag.

The very automation of these simple actions carried him beyond the getting-up which had been no more than the reverse of lying-down. What the Tower had once been, before Audley had worked on it, he still wasn't sure: it was the size dummy5

of a great dovecote or a small defensive donjon . . . but there was nothing now in it to indicate which it had been, if it had been either of those, only the new wooden floor beneath his feet and the new wooden ceiling twelve feet above his head, with the smell of the fresh timber faint in his nostrils.

He flashed the torch-beam around him. Well. . . maybe it had been both those things in its time: in the bad old days Aquitaine had been famous for its petty barons, who had all needed their castles, and this Quercy region of it had also been celebrated for its dovecotes and pigeon-lofts, over which the avaricious peasants had litigated endlessly to establish their rights to the valuable bird-droppings. On balance, judging from the thickness of the wall in which the doorway was set rather than from the total lack of windows in the room, he was inclined to guess castle bastion originally, even though he had seen nothing outside very clearly in the yellow beam of the Volkswagen's headlights to support that theory; most of his attention had been caught by the little cottage in the trees just below, which the lights had transformed into another Perrault fairy-tale house, with its dormer windows and pantile roof.

Not that it mattered either way—whether this was the last remnant of the Beast's castle or Beauty's father's pigeon-loft; what mattered now was that it was Audley's tower, remodelled for his purposes—for his argumentative orgies down below and . . . according to Jilly, for his writing work-room above, up that ladder and beyond that trap-door.

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Of course, the odds were long against there being the sort of final evidence he required for certainty up there, waiting to be found, especially if Audley had so little suspicion of Captain Roche that he was happy to let him bed down in the Tower . . .

He raised the trap-door cautiously, until he felt it lodge against something.

Books everywhere . . . books and learned-looking periodicals

—a stack of English Historical Reviews, and another of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society beside it, right under his nose, just above floor level— books and periodicals and mounds of type-written papers covered the floor of the work-room. Either Audley hadn't got round to having bookshelves made, or the round walls of the Tower had defeated his carpenter.

It had been a defensive tower, not a dovecote, that was for sure: on one compass-bearing the archer's embrasure had been opened up into a full-size window, and Audley had had his work-desk built there, to give him light for his work, but the three surviving arrow slits gave the original game away.

Only that wasn't the game he was playing now . . .

He found, and quite quickly from the filed papers and the card-index system, that the man's researches fell neatly into the two parts he had expected—so neatly, so eloquently, that an inner glow of self-satisfaction began to warm away his early morning self-doubting.

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Really, it was quite perfect . . . the contrast between the magisterial— almost ponderous—scholarship on Charles Martel and his 8th century Franks and their Arab-Berber adversaries in Western Europe, and the very different notes on King Gaiseric and his 5th century Vandals, who had popped up in the central Mediterranean like the wrath of God two hundred years before the Arabs.

Except for the identical hand-writing, which was curiously childish and unformed, and the passion for logical and meticulously recorded detail, it might almost have been the work of two different men: the painstaking and respectable Dr Jekyll-Audley, who never strayed outside the facts, and the Mr Hyde-Audley, who slavered over Vandal atrocities in North Africa, with scandalous conjectures about their sexual habits . . . and was plainly and unashamedly committed to the Vandal Cause, where Jekyll-Audley maintained a lofty impartiality appropriate to the author of The Influence of Islamic Doctrines on Iconoclasm in the 8th Century.

But, at the same time, there were distinctive and tell-tale similarities which betrayed the consubstantiation of the two Audleys. Both were fascinated by religion (though, typically, Hyde-Audley inclined towards the Vandals' Arian heresy), and they shared an equal obsession for military detail, Jekyll-Audley's notes on Prankish and Arab weaponry and tactics being equalled by Hyde-Audley's on the development of King Gaiseric's navy—

Hyde- Palfrey-Audley—

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With a start, Roche realised suddenly that he was no longer reading by the light of his torch: while he had been burrowing into the papers and the index, drawn ever deeper into them by his study of the two Audleys, the dawn had crept up on him out of the dark to fill the window right in front of him. Below him the morning mist had already started to fall away from the ridge. It still filled the whole valley, blanking out everything to within fifty yards of the tower, with the shapes of small junipers and scrub oaks indistinct on its nearest margin.

He replaced everything very carefully into the semi-confusion in which he had found it, the topmost file, Town plans of Hippo Regius, Carthage, Leptis Magna, Ostia Antica, Rome— c.500, slightly askew. A trained man would know it had all been picked over, and there were innumerable precautionary traps Audley could have set to betray such tampering at a glance if he was of a mind to be suspicious. But it didn't really matter now, because now and at last Audley himself was next on the agenda, and after that he would take it for granted that Captain Roche had pried around his work-room during the night.

He looked round the room one last time, more out of habit than necessity after that last thought. If he had still been working for one side or the other, for Genghis Khan or Sir Eustace Avery, perhaps Audley wouldn't have been next—

perhaps the burden of responsibility would have driven him to consult with at least one of them first. . . and not Genghis dummy5

Khan, because by now he would already be on the way to their rendezvous. But now he was working for himself, and instinct ordered him to keep one jump ahead of both of them.

His eye came round, past the open trapdoor and the arrow-slit embrasures, over the piles of books and the card-index boxes which he had just closed, to the work-table with its files

— Town plans of Hippo Regius, Carthage—to the window on the world of junipers-and-scrub-oaks-in-the-mist—

The juniper tree moved!

Or ... it didn't move—it couldn't move—but it widened first on one side, then on the other, as David Audley passed in front of it, striding across the rough pasture. Even as Roche watched, the mist started to swallow him.

Now? Roche thought. Why not now? And then thought simplified into action.

The morning chill hit his cheeks, then filled his mouth and throat and lungs as he drew it in. It surprised him that it could be so cold, where he had seen huge yellow butterflies and hovering humming-bird hawk moths busy with the buddleia outside Lexy's cottage in the late afternoon of yesterday. But— now, while instinct and morning courage were in alliance— now he had no time for butterflies and buddleias and hawk moths—

At this level, cheated of the bird's-eye view from the tower dummy5

window, he was no longer sure which juniper tree was the right one, on which to orientate himself.

"Audley!" he raised his voice into the silence of the morning.

The stillness closed back quickly on the sound, damping it down without an echo, like a pebble thrown into mud on the edge of a pond, sending out no ripples beyond its fall.

Roche drew in his breath to try again.

"Hullo there!" The answering words came faintly to him, more distant and at a much more acute angle as though Audley had zig-zagged back on himself, against the fall of the ridge. "Hullo!"

"My dear fellow!" Audley loomed up ahead of him out of the mist as he brushed through the fringe of scrub oaks. "You're up early!"

He watched Roche advance the last few steps. "Couldn't you sleep?" He shook his head at his own question. "Of course, it wasn't a night for untroubled sleep after . . . what happened, I agree—a bad night tor everyone, I'm afraid. Worse for us, but bad enough for you too." He shook his head again.

"Steffy . . ." he sighed, and steadied his scrutiny of Roche,

"But you didn't know her, of course."

"I did meet her—briefly." Roche didn't want to talk about Meriel Stephanides. "Just briefly, down by the river, with Lady Alexandra and Miss Baker yesterday . . ."

"You did?" Audley nodded politely, without the least interest dummy5

in the information. "What a waste . . . what a damn waste—

that's all I can think of, you know."

"Yes." He had to turn the conversation from Steffy. "You didn't sleep either, then?"

"Me? Oh . . . I'm always up early." Audley started to move again, waving downhill into the mist. "First job of the day is to collect the bread and croissants for breakfast. Old Fauvet's boy leaves it in a box down by the road at the bottom—I save him the journey and get my morning exercise while my house-guests are lapped in swinish slumber." He shrugged.

"No point in changing the routine."

"No." Now. "About last night. . ."

"Last night?" Audley frowned at him sideways. "What about last night?"

Roche searched for a moment for his opening gambit, and found Lexy offering it to him, generous as ever. "Do you remember what Lady Alexandra said—about me." He kept in step with Audley. "Well, she was . . . right."

"She often is. She's a clever little girl... or clever big girl, I should say . . . in her own peculiar way," agreed Audley unconcernedly.

"You remember what she said?"

Audley grimaced at him. "Yes . . . well, to be honest, no. I have this bad habit of not always listening to what Lexy says, you see."

There was no help for it, he had to bite the bullet. "I work for dummy5

British Intelligence, Dr Audley."

Audley continued walking, not looking at him, almost as though he hadn't heard. But he had heard.

"Yes," he said finally, this time almost as though merely agreeing with a statement of the obvious. "You have the stretched look of some of the field men I once knew ... or maybe over-stretched, from being too long in the field— some foreign field, that is forever England. That's what stretched them."

Roche shivered involuntarily at such a deliberate foot-fall on his grave, but before he could react to it Audley turned towards him.

"My dear fellow! Forgive me—I shouldn't have said that, to you of all people!" He raised his hand to forestall a reply.

"And when I should be grateful, too! Quite unpardonable!"

"Grateful?" Roche stumbled on a tussock, almost measuring his length.

"That's right." Audley caught his arm to steady him. "Aren't you about to tell me that you'll put in a good word for me up above, with your controller—or whatever they call them now?

That I'm ready and willing? That I've seen the error of my ways? That they won't ever again have recourse to Section Nine—or Section Ten, or whatever it is today?"

"Section Nine?" managed Roche.

"Or whatever. It was Section Nine in the 1914 Manual of Military Law I inherited. Of course, they never actually dummy5

threw it at me, not in '46... but it was an awful thing I did—

they must have felt like M'Turk did in Stalky, when Colonel Dabney's keeper took a shot at the vixen: 'It's the ruin of good feelin' among neighbours—it's worse than murder'. And quite right too, they were, that's the pity of it."

Somehow the opening Roche had expected seemed to be eluding him. "But I don't see what was so terrible, about refusing in the way you did—"

"You don't? Then you damn well ought to!" Audley had no mercy on himself. "It was the moment of truth, and I fluffed it. It's . . . it's like the specimen charge in the back of the Manual, for Section Nine: The accused, Captain D. L. Audley

—name, rank, number and regiment. . . how do the words go?

—is charged with, when on active service, disobeying a lawful order given personally to him by his superior officer in the execution of his office—I think I've left out something about 'disobeying in such a manner as to show a wilful defiance of authority'. . ."

"But you didn't disobey anyone—you refused to come back in, that's all," interrupted Roche quickly.

"I refused in '51." Audley raised a finger. "I disobeyed in a wilfully defiant manner in '46 ... when personally ordered to take up his rifle and fall in did not do so, saying 'You may do what you please, I will soldier no more' —and that's exactly what I told them . . . I'll soldier no more! " Audley threw him another of his characteristic half-bitter, half-mocking smiles.

"For them—the unpardonable crime. So don't waste your dummy5

time with me, old boy," concluded Audley. "I'm out. And that's that."

No," said Roche. "You're quite wrong."

Audley looked at him again, sidelong, one eyebrow raised, which seemed to split his expression into two, half of it curious to know why he was wrong, the other half contemptuous of that possibility.

"They want you back," said Roche. "That's why I'm here."

The raised eyebrow dropped back into position, but otherwise the man's face suddenly became blank, as though shutters had been lowered behind his eyes.

"They want you back," repeated Roche.

Audley took two or three more paces, and then stopped so abruptly that Roche's own stride carried him on down the hillside for two more, and he had to check himself and swing round.

"Oh yes?" said Audley, and his voice was as blank as his expression. "Third time lucky." Roche was reminded of what Oliver St. John Latimer had said about Audley; and then it occurred to him that although he had been thinking of the man in Jekyll-and-Hyde terms, perhaps only now was he witnessing the true Hyde metamorphosis. "Oh yes?" Audley looked through him.

Latimer was right, yet he mustn't let that daunt him. It was the Hyde-Audley he wanted, not the Jekyll-Audley or the self-pitying show-off from last night.

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But he couldn't afford to jolly the Hyde-Audley—that had been an error. He must take the whip to the Hyde-Audley.

"Does the name Avery mean anything to you?"

Avery?"

"Sir Eustace Avery."

Audley shook his head. "Never heard of him."

Clinton, then?"

Audley studied him for a long moment, then he relaxed his mouth into some sort of smile. Stage Two with Audley would be when he realised that to show no expression at all might be identified as a sign of weakness, and although he couldn't control his eyes he could do something with his lips.

"Colonel-Frederick-Clinton." Audley worked on his face to give it back to Jekyll. As with Genghis Khan, that name wasn't just ringing one bell, but a tocsin strong enough to shake the bell-tower. "Yes, I remember him. He was one of the organ-grinders . . . and I was one of the monkeys. I remember him—yes. "Audley nodded. "I remember him. . .

rather well."

Good. Now—"

"You are one of his monkeys, is that it?"

This wouldn't do at all, to have Audley remembering the dark past when he should be rejoicing in the happy present and the exciting future.

"There's a new department being formed, Audley. I'm here to offer you a place in it. A senior place. In fact—"

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" You. . . are saying that he . . .wants me. . . back?"

"Sir Eustace Avery—"

"Bugger Sir Eustace-bloody-A very! Clinton wants me back?"

It had been a mistake to let the big man get above him on the hillside; with the extra couple of inches he had on the level he towered over Roche now. Roche set his teeth. "I told you.

There's a new department starting up—"

Bugger the new department too! You asked me if I remembered Colonel Frederick Clinton—Colonel Frederick J.

Clinton—J for Joseph— Joseph of the coat-of-many-colours, that's what I remember. So ... why does he want me?"

The trouble with that, thought Roche, was that it was a very fair question. "He scares you, does he?" He recalled Genghis Khan's sarcasm.

"Yes. He does." Audley brushed the gambit aside.

"You've changed your tune since last night. If I recollect correctly—"

“No! I haven't moved an inch. Last night Mahomet wanted to go to the mountain. But now the mountain has come to Mahomet. And Mahomet mistrusts miracles, Captain Roche

—that's all."

Roche lost his last doubts about David Audley, and about Clinton and Avery at the same time. Last night had made it a little too easy, like another miracle—which he also ought to have mistrusted. But Clinton had known, even in knowing that Audley was wide-open for recruitment, that it wouldn't dummy5

be so easy.

"Or, shall we say ..." Audley started, and then trailed off "...

shall we say that I'm beginning to put things together?

Things . . . and people?"

Now that he thought about it, Roche understood that Audley was running exactly true to form, and that any other reaction would have been out of character. So what he would expect in return was the authentic crack of Clinton's whip. Nothing else would do.

"We want the papers d'Auberon gave you for safe-keeping, naturally."

“Of course!" Audley's smile acknowledged. "And that's my dowry, isn't it? I sell you 'Tienne—my old friend 'Tienne—you know all about him, naturally!"

Roche nodded. The truth was that he didn't know enough about any of them for safety, but there was no time left for the normal precautions, only for half-truth and bluff.

"Naturally."

"You know he saved my bacon?" Audley came back to him from miles I away. "You know ... I was stuck in the middle of France in '44—and wet behind the ears, and hotter than a chestnut in a charcoal brazier . . . But 'Tienne helped to get me out, via the good Madame Peyrony and her private army.

Only I suppose you know all about that too, of course . . . God only knows how, but it's the sort of thing Colonel Frederick J.

Clinton would know, naturally."

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Roche said nothing. They were far off the script now, with the news that Audley owed d'Auberon this old debt of honour. And yet, even if Clinton hadn't known about it, it was a reasonable deduction that Audley had to owe the man something, to be entrusted with that life insurance.

Audley was frowning at him. "Only Clinton reckons I'd sell him out for a nice cosy job, organ-grinding . . ." he watched Roche narrowly for a moment, and then smiled—"A nicely-calculated temptation . . . but unfortunately an academic exercise now."

The big man's sudden brightness struck a chill in Roche.

"What d'you mean?"

"What do I mean!" Audley beamed at him. "I mean, my dear fellow, that for once Colonel Frederick J. Clinton has miscalculated. It's very sad really—here he is ... or here you are . . . offering me marriage—remarriage—with the old firm, and my past crimes forgotten . . . and maybe it is just possible that I might have sold dear old 'Tienne down the river in the process—who knows?" The smile became icy.

"But I must refuse—that's what I mean, Roche. Because I haven't got what you want."

“You haven't got it?"

"That's right. Twenty-four hours ago we just might have done business. But not now. You're a day too late, old boy."

Roche swallowed. "You've given it back?"

"Right again. The trip to Cahors yesterday wasn't to chat up dummy5

my rugger-playing Frog pals, it was to open my safe deposit there. 'Tienne dropped the word yesterday morning, before you arrived on the scene. And I dropped everything and got it, and gave it back to him last night before I came back to the Tower. That's why I was late ..." the hands spread eloquently again ". . . we had a jar or two for old times' sake. And that's why I was half-stoned when we first made our acquaintance—

I usually manage to stay more or less sober until sundown."

He paused. "The funny thing is ... we don't actually like each other. In fact ... we hate each other as only an Englishman can hate a good Frenchman. He has elevated ideas of honour, and the ancestors to go with it ... whereas I like to think that I'm a pragmatic sort of bastard, you know."

Bastard was right. The truth cut deep inside Audley, to confuse the Kipling-bred ideals.

"I can give you some idea of the contents, if that's what you want," said Audley lightly. "Free of charge, of course."

"You've read it?" Roche was beyond astonishment.

"My dear chap—I may be a good Samaritan, but I hope I'm not a complete idiot! Besides which, when 'Tienne took me in back in '44 he picked my brains something horrid to make sure I wasn't doing la belle France down, so fair's fair . . .

And, also besides which . . . if I'm required by old times' sake to sit on a bomb I like to know what sort of bomb it is... So I took a quick peek at it."

Roche could only stare at him.

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"The end part was still cyphered, or it may have been a report of some kind in a sort of appendix, I don't know. But the main body was a transcript—in French of course—of a series of meetings in the Kremlin . . . only it was all pretty much ancient history from last summer and autumn. Mostly Hungary, plus Suez."

The key material of the RIP sub-committee exactly, in short.

"What I'd guess. . ."Audley pursed his lips ". . . is that the French have got one of the special advisers in their pocket—

one of the experts they wheel in—probably an Eastern European specialist by the look of it. Quite a smart fellow, too."

"Yes?" said Roche huskily.

"Well, I didn't read the stuff carefully once I'd established it was private Franco-Russian history." Audley waved a hand.

"And in retrospect it wasn't all that explosive ... It was just that the Russians were shit-scared of what was happening in Eastern Europe then, and particularly Hungary, and they reckoned the West knew all about it ... In fact, they reckoned we were stirring it in order to give ourselves a free hand in Egypt, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it.

Hungary was so important to them that they more or less decided just to make loud noises about anything we did in the Middle East, but nothing more than that. In short, Nasser could take his chances, but if we moved one tank towards Hungary the balloon would go up ... Oh, and a fellow called Andropov was usually chairman."

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"Yuri Andropov?" Christ!

"Just Andropov. They didn't run to Christian names. Who's he?"

"He was their Hungarian ambassador. Top brass KGB." One of my bosses. "He probably organised the Hungarian business."

"Sounds like the chap. Anyway, that's about the sum of what I was able to read, if it's any help to you . . . Which I assume it isn't, because the Frogs must have passed a good deal of it on to your people by way of encouragement. And it's all ancient history now, as I say—" he stopped suddenly.

"Except . . . there's always the identity of their Moscow man, of course."

"The satellite specialist?"

"That was my guess. It could be one of several people, but it wouldn't be too difficult to track him down—just a matter of textual analysis and elimination . . . Is he what you're after?

Or the encyphered stuff?" Audley eyed him speculatively.

"But you'd need the full text, either way, and that's obviously what you want, judging by that sick look."

"Does d'Auberon know you looked at what he gave you?"

"I shouldn't wonder. He merely put me on my honour not to get it photocopied, that's all ... the transcripts and the encyphered stuff—you want 'em both, so one probably complements the other ..." Audley was thinking aloud.

"You didn't get it photocopied, by any chance?"

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Are you trying to be offensive? I told you—I owe the man my skin." All the same, Audley spoke mildly, as though he was only giving Roche half his attention while the other half was engaged in more important matters. "So what's your position now?"

Roche persisted. "My position?"

"Would you be willing to help me try and get it?" Audley stared at him vaguely. "That's what I'm thinking about at this precise moment."

"You mean . . . you would?"

"Oh yes. Now that I've given it back, and fulfilled my bargain, I don't owe the blighter anything. And I'd still like to be an organ-grinder, you know ..." He focussed on Roche. "How long have you known I had the d'Auberon stuff?"

"Why d'you want to know?"

"Not long?" Audley crushed the counter-question aside.

"Only a few days?"

"I'd guess . . . not very long," admitted Roche. "If you mean how long has Clinton known . . . But why d'you want to know?"

"Timing . . . it's the timing. You popped the question to me at the first opportunity—now, even before breakfast. So Clinton must be pushing you like hell, to go ahead. Am I right?"

Roche nodded. It was almost time to tell Audley about Meriel Stephanides, and the question mark beside Bradford's name.

But he might as well see how far Audley could get unaided.

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"Timing?" he prodded Audley gently.

"That's right: you were damn quick but you were still too late, Roche. Which means that my old friend 'Tienne knew the cat was out of the bag, and he didn't trust me to resist temptation any more. And that's only the beginning of it, by God! Don't you see, man?"

Roche forbore to let slip that in his opinion it was d'Auberon's placing of the documents in Audley's care in the first place which was surprising, not his hasty recovery of them at the first sign of danger. And yet it seemed that the Frenchman had judged his Englishman just about right in the end.

"Or are you holding out on me?" Audley gave him a sharp look.

"Holding out?"

"Who else knows about d'Auberon—and me? My God—if the British know, and d'Auberon's got the wind up, then half the world probably knows!" Mr Hyde was back again.

"What's the matter?" The Hyde-look alarmed Roche.

"Steffy," snapped Audley.

Roche manned his defences. "I don't know."

"Don't know if it was an accident? Who was she working for?

The Israelis?"

"Yes. And Bradford is with the CIA, we think."

"Are you suggesting that Mike had her run off the road last dummy5

night?"

"I'm not suggesting anything. I don't even know that it wasn't an accident!" Roche snapped back.

"You know far too little for my peace of mind. If Steffy worked for the Israelis—"

"She did. No 'if'."

"All right. Let's put it together then. Steffy worked for Mossad, and she showed up ten days ago. Mike may be cloak-and-dagger for the CIA as well as Hollywood, and he arrived a week before she did. And you finally made it trop tard yesterday." Audley's voice became grimmer with each arrival.

"So what about the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti?"

Audley's Russian accent was worse than his French, but there was nothing wrong with his logic, thought Roche equally grimly.

"What about them?"

"Running little girls off the road is more their style, or it used to be in my young days. If the Yankees didn't do it—and I can't see them getting violent over the d'Auberon papers, which don't involve their security . . . and your lot didn't do it, because the same applies . . . and the French themselves didn't need to do it, because they would have simply run her out of the country as an undesirable . . . and the Israelis wouldn't want to cause the French trouble anyway. And that just leaves the KGB, who also happen to have the best reason of all for wanting the papers, to find out who was telling tales dummy5

out of school... So what about them, then?"

Roche was uneasily aware that this was one question to which he had the exact answer, but one which he still could make no sense of.

"You're not about to tell me once again that you don't know?"

Audley mistook his unease for embarrassment.

"We haven't spotted them if they are here." Unbelievable was more like it: with the way the Comrades had French security sewn up it was unbelievable that they hadn't known about d'Auberon long ago. And yet, if Genghis Khan wasn't playing some other, much deeper game, he had no choice but to believe the unbelievable.

"Well, if they aren't it's a bloody miracle," said Audley. "And if it is a miracle it isn't going to last much longer, because if they've got Steffy on their books they'll be likely to want to know why she ran out of road. And then they'll start picking up names . . . and then this place will become extremely unhealthy ..." Audley's eyes unfocussed as the probabilities unfolded ". . . in fact, I'm damn glad I'm not safe-keeping

'Tienne's wretched insurance policy any more—it's about to transmogrify into his death certificate, I shouldn't wonder."

The eyes focussed on Roche again. 'In fact, since I can no longer work my passage back into the old firm . . . and I have no wish to be caught in your cross-fire ... I think I'm just about to remember some pressing business a long way from here, Roche." He started moving downhill once more, without another word.

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"No—wait!" Roche swivelled to follow him. "Where are you going, Audley—"

"To get the bread, of course." The words were thrown back at him over Audley's shoulder. "Breakfast first—then a prudent retreat, old boy."

"But you can't go—just like that!" Roche started after him, accelerating desperately to overtake him.

"You just watch me. I think I'll get Bradford to take me to see Hollywood. That should be far enough."

Everything seemed to have crumbled into ruins just when it had all seemed in his grasp, thought Roche wildly: Audley was quite wrong, but there was no way that he could tell him so. Or was he wrong?

The mist had almost swallowed up Audley. Above him, but far beyond, the crest of the ridge on the other side of the valley rose up out of the misty sea, the trees on it standing out sharply against the deepening blue of the sky. It was going to be a fine, hot day—a fine, hot, cloudless, utterly disastrous day.

Audley's figure hadn't disappeared yet. Just when it was losing definition altogether it had firmed up again— Audley was coming back!

Roche watched the big man stumping uphill towards him, a ghostly figure regaining the substance of life with every step, even at last to the expression on his face.

It was a curious face, he thought: the big nose, which looked dummy5

as if it had been broken more than once in rough scrimmages on the rugger field, divided a boxer's chin from the high forehead. And yet it was the mouth and the eyes, with their manic changes, which dominated these permanent hereditary features—the same features he had seen in the picture on the staircase in The Old House.

The mouth smiled at him. "Our deal is still on, is it?"

Roche nodded.

"If I show you how to get the papers . . . I'm back in?"

Roche nodded again.

"With seniority? I have your word on it?"

Yes." Roche could just about manage that word.

"Jolly good! Because I've just had second thoughts."

Second thoughts?"

"Yes. I don't know about Avery— Sir Eustace—but Clinton was always a man of his word. So I accept." Audley nodded.

"I'm afraid you'll have to do the work—I insist you don't mention my name, in fact . . . that might well turn him against you. But I'll tell you what to say. Okay?"

It wasn't an occasion for caution. "Okay."

“Okay. So we have our deal: if we succeed I'm in, if we fail I shall work for Mike Bradford, who will undoubtedly pay me better. Heads—I win . . . tails—I don't lose. That's the sort of deal I like, old boy."

Arrogant, selfish, ruthless and cunning, Latimer had said, dummy5

among other defects. But that would be Avery's problem in the future, if there was one.

"So what's your plan, Audley?" Clinton and Avery were both welcome to this bastard, thought Roche.

"My plan? All you have to do is to make him an offer he can't refuse." The smile was pure Hyde now. "If the KGB isn't here yet it soon will be, and that's our lever. If he gives the stuff to us, we'll let them know we've got it—and we'll get the French off his back. That won't be difficult. And if he won't play, we'll feed him to the KGB."

The bastard! "Straight blackmail, you mean?"

"Blackmail?" Mr Hyde continued to smile. "My dear chap, we're saving his life for him!"

BATTLE:

No plan survives reality

XV

ROCHE ARRIVED AT the southern gateway of Neuville exactly on time.

Below him, the old military road along which help or trouble had marched to Neuville from Cahors ran away into the farmland, empty except for two children playing in the dust dummy5

with a dog and a ball. The first flush of morning had passed, and the sun was rising fast into its cloudless sky. God was in His heaven, and Jilly Baker was at Les Eyzies, or Le Bugue, or wherever the formalities of death had to be transacted, with Davey Stein along for moral support; and Lexy was still in her bath, for all the good bathing would do her; and Audley was packing, ready for whichever master he would be serving tomorrow, in London or Hollywood, and grunting instructions for the maintenance of the cottage to Bradford, who was staying on to continue his quest (or not, as the case might be, according to which of those masters Audley finally served . . .).

There was positively nothing he could see to make him nervous, and the children's voices grew fainter as their ball drew them away into the country, so he sauntered from one side of the gateway to the other, recalling the cold summer wind on the garage forecourt in Sussex, opposite Genghis Khan's church.

The van arrived five minutes later, drawing in close beside the left-hand bastion of the gateway.

Still remembering Sussex, Roche watched it half-hopefully, half-fearfully, out of the corner of his eye, only to have his half-hopes swiftly dashed as its occupants unloaded boxes of fresh peaches from the rear, each carrying an armful through the gateway into the town, with no more than the typical glance at him which the working peasant reserved for the idle dummy5

foreign tourist, of boredom lightly iced with envy.

Five more minutes dragged by, then the two men returned to exchange empty boxes for fresh ones. Roche's half-fears began to strengthen at their inconvenient presence, which must surely account for the delay in Genghis Khan's appearance. At the best of times the moment of contact was charged with doubt and uncertainty, but here in the open, with miles of countryside below him and a hundred upper-storey windows watching him over the old wall, the dangers were multiplied.

He turned away from them to scan the street again, aware of a prickle of sweat under his shirt which was not caused by the sun's warmth on his back. But this time, as he moved to give them a wider berth, the elder of the two peasants detoured to pass round him, his face half-obscured by the peach-boxes.

"The van," half the mouth whispered.

Beneath the three-quarter rolled-up canvas flap at the back, the interior of the van looked hot and dark, and still full of peach-boxes. Several wasps were already buzzing above the lowered tail-board, attracted by the scent of the peaches and working up their courage to leave the safety of the sunlight.

"Look away—don't look in here," said Genghis Khan's voice out of the boxes and the darkness. "Look towards the country."

Roche looked away quickly, down the Cahors road and over dummy5

the children, to the fields which the medieval Neuvillians had once tilled when they had been frontier farmers.

"If you can hear me, don't nod—just say so. You understand?" Roche almost nodded. Every night they had returned to the security of their walls, those old farmers, like the earliest colonists of the Americas. That was how bastides worked.

"Yes," he addressed the fields. He hadn't realised until now how deliberately the place had been sited; but, of course, Alphonse de Poitiers had taken the high ground for his new town, like any good commander.

"From time to time, walk away, as though you are still waiting for someone . . . And if you see anything you don't like, walk away and don't come back. You understand?"

Again Roche very nearly nodded. It was an unnatural way of conversing, almost like talking to an incubus within him, which was whispering inside his head.

"Yes." With an effort of will he drove out the dark thought, to join Alphonse de Poitiers. "I understand."

"Then listen. We know now where Audley's money comes from—"

"So do I. He wrote Princess in the Sunset," interrupted Roche quickly. Another advantage was that the memory of that face was less daunting than the actual sight of it: he had to envisage Genghis Khan as he was now— imprisoned in sweaty peach-sweet darkness, with wasps buzzing around his dummy5

ears, not as the descendant of the Mongols and the out-rider of the next race' of conquerors.

"He told you?"

"No." Better to think of the man in there as a Hun than a Mongol: Audley's Aëtius, the Last of the Romans, and his half-civilised Visigothic allies had beaten them not far from here fifteen hundred years back. So it could be done—it wasn't impossible if he kept his head.

"What?" The sound of a slight movement inside the van, above the wasp-buzz, encouraged Roche.

"I said 'no'—he didn't tell me. He doesn't want anyone to know he's Antonia Palfrey. It wouldn't do his image as a serious historian any good . . . among the serious historians."

Roche smiled at the fields of Neuville as he thought of what Dr Bodger would make of Antonia Audley. In any last resort there was a weapon to hand there.

But not a weapon to use against Genghis Khan. "What's more, he's writing another novel—he's writing two books, actually: there's a novel about the Vandals in the 5th century, which I think he's finished . . . and there's a history of the Arab invasion of these parts in the 8th century. Which is why he's here now—" the weapon he needed for Genghis Khan fitted snugly into his hand "—all of which I think Colonel Clinton and Sir Eustace Avery already know. . . among other things," he lowered his voice deliberately, to make it more difficult for Genghis Khan to hear, for tactical reasons as well as pure sadism.

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"What? Clinton knows?" The surprise in the muffled voice was balm to Roche's soul. The thing was working—Genghis Khan could be tweaked into a human reaction, he wasn't invincible: Aëtius, when he saw the sun shimmer on the lance-points of the Gothic army coming to his aid must have felt like this!

"He didn't want to make it too easy for me. It's a test for me

—" Caution quickly counter-balanced confidence: it was Steffy about whom he needed to know, not the source of Audley's wealth "—at least, it was until things started going wrong, anyway."

"Too easy?" To Roche's disappointment, Genghis Khan shrugged aside things going wrong. "Why too easy?"

"Audley wants to come back, he only had to be asked in the right way. I think Clinton knew that—that was never the real thing they were after." He weakened slightly, remembering Genghis Khan's interpretation of the assignment. "You were right there."

"You are sure about Audley?" Genghis Khan also brushed off the olive branch.

"Of course I'm sure." Nothing less than certainty would do for Genghis Khan, even if nothing would ever be certain about David Audley.

Only wasp-buzzing came from the darkness and peach-boxes. It was high time to walk away, and make like a tourist waiting for his girl-friend, but he couldn't leave it at that dummy5

now, he had to qualify it somehow.

"That's my reading of him, anyway. I'd need much more time to tie it up—and professional advice. But we haven't got any more time," he snapped.

"But you are prepared to stake your life on it?"

So that was what he was doing: One must always risk one's life, or one's soul, or one's peace— or some little thing!

"I know he's bloody bored, and that's a fact!" said Roche bitterly, from the heart.

"Bored? "The incubus-voice relaxed. "Ah, yes! Bored. . ."

Roche sensed that he had to keep the initiative. "But what I want to know is ... what happened to Meriel Stephanides," he snapped at the bastide- fields.

"Where is she now?" There was a harsh edge to Genghis Khan's voice. "Have you lost track of her?"

He didn't know about Steffy! The realisation jolted Roche that the Comrades were as criminally incompetent as the British.

"She's dead, damn it!" He needed time to think, and there was one very simple and overdue way of taking it.

He moved away from the van, towards the bastion on the far side of the arched gateway. The street was still empty, and the dog had got the children's ball at last, with which it was joyfully baiting them as they screamed at him to give it back.

Just an accident after all? Or if not an accident, and not the dummy5

Comrades. . . then who!

The sun blinded him for a moment, and he felt another long trickle of sweat run down his back again under his shirt. . .

And if Genghis Khan didn't know, then how much else didn't he know? And how much were events pushing him, as Roche himself felt pushed by them, to make assumptions, and to act, and to take risks which would normally be rated as unacceptable?

"Are you there?" Genghis Khan's voice was back to normal.

"How did she die?"

A wasp zoomed out of the darkness, gorged on peach-juice and flying somewhat erratically. "Her car ran off the road last night—" Roche ducked to avoid the wasp "—she broke her neck, apparently."

"Were there any witnesses?"

That wasn't the right question. "No."

"What do the police say?"

That wasn't the right question either. "They're not confiding in me. They told Miss Baker it was an accident. The car went off the road and she broke her neck. That's all I know."

"Good! And you haven't reported to Clinton yet?"

The drift of the wrong questions was plain enough. What Genghis Khan wanted was time, not his trusted man's opinions.

"No, not yet. I haven't reported to anyone yet—except you."

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He shaded his eyes against the glare, and looked intently at nothing. He had given himself a breathing space, but it had been Genghis Khan who had used it to better purpose.

He scrunched away from the van again, glancing over his shoulder at imaginary strangers.

If Genghis Khan knew who had killed Steffy then the Comrades must know about d'Auberon. It was still inexplicable that they hadn't known long ago, but they must know now, and that was why Genghis Khan was here in person.

He reached the far side of the gateway. The children had disappeared, presumably in pursuit of the dog, and there was still nothing else in sight.

He turned round. The immediate question was . . . did the Comrades rate the d'Auberon papers as more important than placing Captain Roche in Sir Eustace Avery's new group? If they did, then Captain Roche would be well-advised to cash in the chips he already possessed, in the hope that they might be enough to buy him safety with the British.

He eyed the van speculatively. Whatever happened to the d'Auberon papers, he could bring Audley in, that was no problem; but then, because Audley wanted to come back, that would hardly count in his favour in any reckoning.

Genghis Khan, on the other hand, might be worth quite a lot; and even Jean-Paul, betrayed to the British, could be traded off to the French in exchange for a bit of badly-needed goodwill.

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Yet, viewed dispassionately, even together they hardly outweighed half a dozen years' high treason—or insufficiently to ensure that Avery and Clinton wouldn't condemn him to the certain death of remaining in post in Paris as their treble traitor, untrusted and expendable.

In fact, as things stood, if he couldn't deliver those damned d'Auberon papers to the British, then he might be even more well-advised to remain a loyal Comrade, at least for the time being, until another opportunity presented itself. . .

True or false? It only took an instant to test the possibility, and feel it crumble. Over the last few days he had committed himself in his heart too far and too absolutely to turn around again. And he could never go back to where he'd started because the wasting disease within him was very close now to the point where it would become plainly visible to everyone.

Already Jilly and Madame Peyrony had both sensed something wrong, and—

He was aware suddenly that something had cut through the concentration of his fear, just when it was shaking his knees.

It wasn't a sound, it was a movement: it was the van beside him rocking on its springs as its balance changed. And then, following almost instantaneously on the movement, it was also a sound—

Genghis Khan was swearing—explosively, and in Russian—

or maybe it was in Polish, or in some black language unknown to civilised man, or in no language at all, except dummy5

that it was also in the universal language of pain.

Genghis Khan had been stung!

The van steadied and the oaths carried no echo: five seconds or less encompassed the whole disturbance inside it.

But the earth had turned in those five seconds, shrinking the van back from the Joseph Stalin tank it had been in Roche's imagination to just a van again, rather battered and rusty, with worn tyres which left only smooth tracks in the dust; and, in the reduction of the van, the man within it had been diminished also to human proportions.

"Are you okay in there?" Roche inquired. Grunt. Roche hoped devoutly that the sting had been on the tip of Genghis Khan's index finger, where the concentration of nerves would ensure the greatest discomfort. And at the same time he wished the stinging wasp its escape in the darkness, and a safe flight home.

"The point is, things have changed rather, down here, since I last spoke to you." He listened to his own voice critically, and was satisfied with it. "Also . . . I'm beginning to get the impression that you haven't been as helpful as you said you'd be. It's bad enough to be put through the hoop by Sir Eustace Avery and Colonel Clinton, but at least they hinted they were testing me. I did think you were on my side."

Still no reply. But he had burnt his boats now, and that gave dummy5

him bloody-mindedness, if not confidence.

"You told me about Miss Stephanides. And about Bradford and Stein. But you somehow omitted to tell me about Etienne d'Auberon. Or have you never heard of him?"

"Don't be clever with me, Roche. It doesn't suit you." A few moments earlier that would have stopped him in his tracks.

And maybe it wasn't bloody-mindedness any more than it was real confidence— maybe it was the nerveless desperation which lay on the other side of cowardice, long after courage had been exhausted.

"It may not suit me. But you're sitting snug in there—" he mustn't laugh at his own joke "—and I'm out here in the open. And if I'm not clever I'm going to end up in the Tower of London—or somewhere less picturesque. And that suits me even less."

"What do you know about'd'Auberon?" This time there was no delay.

"I know what Sir Eustace Avery wants me to know." Roche fished unashamedly for more information. "Do you still want me to go ahead?"

Genghis Khan digested the question in silence, while Roche observed the two children and the dog reappear in the distance.

"Do you still want me to go ahead?" Roche sharpened his voice to emphasise the question. If Genghis Khan had any lingering doubts about his loyalty, that ought to put them dummy5

finally at rest: it was exactly the sort of question a loyal Comrade should ask, offering a willingness to fail the British, and lose his chances of promotion, on the Comrades' behalf.

"Avery and Clinton expect the man Audley to obtain one of the copies d'Auberon took ... of certain documents—that is correct?" Once again Genghis Khan bypassed half a dozen of the questions Roche had expected.

"That's right." So the Comrades did know all about d'Auberon

—but were considerably less well-informed about Audley!

"What makes them so sure that he can do this for them?" It was slightly disconcerting to hear genuine uncertainty in the man's voice.

"Yes. . . well, there's a bit of a problem there." But at least the questions were coming in the right sequence this time. "It was going to be easy, they thought—"

Easy?"

So they thought. But maybe it wouldn't have been so easy, at that."

"How—easy?" Genghis Khan brushed aside Roche's doubts.

"What was he going to do?"

"He was just going to get them out of his bank—or wherever they were—and hand them over."

"Audley?"

"That's right. In return for letting him back into the service—

with promotion backdated, and all that . . . That was what they were banking on all along, of course . . . But I'm inclined dummy5

to think it wouldn't have been quite as straightforward as that

—"

" Audley had one of the copies?" Genghis Khan was still struggling with information which plainly astonished him.

Well—so much the better! An astonished Genghis Khan was almost as vulnerable as a wasp-stung one.

"You didn't know that? He owed d'Auberon a big favour, from back in '44, during the war—d'Auberon saved his life apparently, and this was the repayment . . . And that's why it might have been difficult, getting him to sell the man out to the British. I think it could have been done. . . strictly in d'Auberon's best interest, you know, now that the cat's out of the bag." It struck Roche as ironic that the arguments he might have used on Audley were almost identical with those Audley was proposing for d'Auberon. "It might have worked." It might have worked with Audley, anyway; but the very fact Audley wanted him to do the dirty work with d'Auberon, with no mention of his part in the plan, cast further doubt on it now. "You didn't know Audley had a copy, then?"

He listened to his own words, and they were still exactly the right mixture of arrogance and obsequiousness.

"What has he done with the documents?" It was to Genghis Khan's credit that his voice was back in neutral so quickly.

"He's given them back—d'Auberon asked for them. That's what I've been trying to tell you. I don't think I was intended dummy5

to be in on the d'Auberon part of the operation—I suspect they were going to get Audley to London, and then pop the question to him there. But someone's been talking, and the British had to accelerate things . . . and I was here, on the spot. . . But they were still just a few hours too late, as it turned out. That's my reading of what's happened—especially after Meriel Stephanides ran out of road."

At once, and quite naturally, the question he had left behind appeared in front of him again, like an open goal-mouth rewarded to him by attacking play. "Which reminds me . . .

you never did get round to filling me in on that little matter, did you? Or do I have to settle for a tragic accident?"

The children were back on the road again, chasing the dog, which still had the ball clenched between its jaws.

"Well?" In this changed situation the man's silence emboldened him to press his advantage. "I can't stand here forever like a spare prick, old boy. Either brief me or de-brief me, or let me go and try my luck with Clinton's man—he'll be a damned sight more forthcoming than you are, I hope."

The dog dropped the ball between its paws and taunted the children noisily. At least it was enjoying the game more than the man in the van..

"He-gave-it-back?" Genghis Khan spaced the words with doubt.

"D'Auberon asked for it back. So he gave it back." Roche shrugged at the children. "What's so surprising about that?"

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"You're sure he had it?" Doubt still nagged at Genghis Khan.

"He wasn't bluffing?"

"Why the hell should he be bluffing?" Roche decided to become irritable. "Clinton's man said he had it—that was what they were banking on, I told you. And he certainly knew all about it, because he'd looked at it—"

"He'd looked at it?"

"Oh—come on!" He let the irritation flare into anger. "This is Audley we're talking about—not a bloody Sunday School teacher! Do you seriously think a nosey bastard like Audley could resist looking at it? Of course he bloody-well did!"

Roche was no longer frightened: Genghis Khan stung into any sort of emotion was thereby further diminished. "That is the point—what sort of man Audley is ... that's what Avery and Clinton set me to find out, because everything else was plain sailing, they thought— they thought he wanted to come back, and they were right . . . and they knew he had the d'Auberon papers, even though they didn't know time was running out on them . . . But they also knew from past experience that Audley's a difficult and contradictory bastard, and if they sent down someone stupid to make the contact—like the time before—then he just might get bloody-minded again, out of sheer perversity . . ."

There were children's cries in one ear, and only the wasps'

endless buzzing in the other.

"He's a Jekyll-and-Hyde character, that's why. It was Dr Jekyll who took the papers, because he owed d'Auberon a dummy5

debt he had to repay, as a matter of honour. . . and it was Mr Hyde who looked at them, to protect himself— and to see how valuable they were."

"What did he make of them?" Genghis Khan slashed the question at him instantly.

"He thought they were ancient history. But I think Clinton was right—he would have done a deal with us. Mr Hyde would have out-voted Dr Jekyll." It occurred to Roche belatedly that Genghis Khan might not know Jekyll and Hyde from Laurel and Hardy; he was probably an illiterate sod.

"Yes. Clinton . . .Clinton. . ." Genghis Khan was speaking to himself, nodding to himself in the darkness in there, whispering the name of the man whom he saw as his real adversary.

"That's right," Roche encouraged him. "Audley was the key—

Clinton knew that." If Genghis Khan fancied he understood Clinton, his own stock-in-trade was understanding Audley, and he must press that advantage to the full. "Maybe he still is the key."

"What do you mean? If he no longer has the documents—?"

"Yes. . .But without them I'm never going to get on to the Eighth Floor, alongside Clinton. Turning in Audley won't be enough by itself—I'd guess that Sir Eustace Avery has set his heart on getting those papers, and he's not the man to reward failure. Nor is Clinton." This was a language Genghis Khan dummy5

understood only too well, not least because his own superiors spoke it even more implacably; and in another moment, after Roche had hooked them both together, he would understand it even better.

"So?" Genghis Khan accepted the cold logic so far.

"So this is where I need your help, old boy. And rather quickly, I suspect. Because if I can get my hands on d'Auberon's little nest egg, then we win hands down—I can make a copy of them for you and I get my promotion to where you want me to be. But if I can't, then I'm pretty damn sure someone else soon will. And then we shall both be in trouble, I think—eh?"

He was aware, as he delivered the final threat, which was barbed to lodge irremovably in Genghis Khan's soul, that he was raising his voice against all the competing noises—the dog (which had at last lost the ball), and the children, and the wasps, and the awakening town itself.

"Audley's got a plan, you see," said Roche. "Only I don't think it will work. What I need to know is whether you can maybe make it work."

"Audley has a plan? What plan?"

Roche drew a breath. "Oh . . . just a simple little mixture of bluff and bribery. He's a ruthless bastard, Audley is: now Dr Jekyll has paid his debt, Mr Hyde is in charge."

"Go on."

Roche decided to try again. "Just who did kill Miss dummy5

Stephanides, by the way?"

The dog and the children had gone again. Only the wasps, his friends and allies, buzzed on regardless.

"I do not know for sure. I can guess, but I do not know, David."

The 'David' surprised Roche. "Then guess for me."

"No. There is no time for guessing. It will be attended to—be satisfied with that. Go on."

Roche was past arguing. Also, there was a horrible thought rising inside him, like a bloated corpse which had freed itself from the weight of his illusions about the British: it was only Steffy's death which gave substance to Audley's bluff, and if the Comrades weren't responsible for that, could it be that Clinton—?

"Go on, David."

If it was so, then he was really midway between the frying pan and the fire, both equally unforgiving. " Go on—"

"I like it," said Genghis Khan finally. "It has the mark of the man himself about it—the man you have described, and the man we are beginning to know also."

"What?" Then Roche remembered that Genghis Khan's first offer had related to the identity of Antonia Palfrey. And, in any case, it was foolish to assume that the Comrades had been idle while he had been so busy: they had been digging discreetly but deeply in their own way into both d'Aube-ron dummy5

and Audley these last forty-eight hours, that was certain.

"Using us as the threat, to save his friend—and using you to make the offer—"

"He said d'Auberon would deny it, if I mentioned him—"

“He doesn't want to take any risks, of course! If he has nothing to lose, so much the better. And if you fail, he has lost nothing. His good name as an honourable man will be safe. I like it!"

"But can it work?" Roche forced himself not to look at the van.

"He's clever—he could cause us trouble in time. But he will cause the British trouble too, while he lasts—they do not like cleverness."

Roche was astonished by the clear drift of what Genghis Khan was saying. "You think it will work?"

"On the contrary ... it will most certainly not work. There is not the slightest chance that d'Auberon will consider giving anything to the British."

"Why not?" Roche found himself taking the devil's advocate's position against his own judgement. "If d'Auberon thinks that everyone has found out about him, then he hasn't got anything to bargain with—he must get rid of it to someone strong enough to protect him."

"That would be prudent—yes," Genghis Khan agreed. "So he provided for that possibility—naturally. But not for the benefit of any foreign power. He is, after all, a Frenchman—

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perhaps he dislikes us more than the British, but that is only a matter of degree. And you are forgetting why he resigned, also."

"Over Algeria, you mean?" Roche recalled Madame Peyrony's version of the d'Auberon scandal.

He realised that he had answered his own question: a man who quit the service for patriotic reasons would hardly be likely to hand over its secrets to another country. So Audley had totally—and rather strangely— miscalculated there. And yet, at the same time, d'Auberon himself had acted out of character in entrusting his insurance policy to the Englishman to pass on to some third and safely French party.

"Politically, he is a Gaulliste," said Genghis Khan. "If it were not for his 'sense of honour'—whatever that is—he would have already revealed the documents to his Gaulliste friends, regardless of his safety. And if anything should happen to him, in any event, it is the Gaullistes who will get the documents now. But that is of no importance."

"No importance?"

"That is one reason why it won't work," said Genghis Khan.

"Because he's had his sealed copies lodged all along with two senior Gaulliste deputies, men we wouldn't dare touch. Not even if we wanted to."

"You knew—" Roche steadied his voice "—about them?"

"We've known from the beginning—about them." Genghis paused. "But not about Audley. It would appear that dummy5

d'Auberon took an extra precaution there."

"You knew?" Roche struggled with the contradiction.

"But all is not lost, even though your so-clever Dr Audley has contrived to get almost everything wrong . . . Even, I think, there is much to gain now," said Genghis Khan.

At least the relative importance of the d'Auberon papers compared with his own future career had been established, thought Roche. But somehow that was no longer so reassuring.

"And he did get one thing right, in a way. He is relying on us to do his work for him, and we mustn't let him down. But we shall have to act very quickly."

"How—" Roche stumbled over the word, jostled from behind by a new mob of doubts and fears.

"How are we going to help him? Why—we shall give him our copy of the d'Auberon documents, David."

XVI

LEXY RAISED THE top third of herself up off the towel on her elbows and gazed at Roche pensively, cradling her face in her hands.

"Yes?" Lexy almost totally uncovered was somehow less disturbing than the accidental and unplanned vistas she was accustomed to present when fully clothed, he thought.

"It's all right, David—I'm not about to try and buy your dummy5

thoughts again for another penny. It isn't a day for buying other people's thoughts."

A sympathetic half-smile was all he could manage. It wasn't a day for smiles either. "Mine aren't worth a penny, Lexy."

"I bet they're more interesting than mine! I have such dull, ordinary thoughts, that's the trouble. That's what David Audley says . . . and what makes it worse is that he's right, the wretch!"

"Huh!" The irony made play-acting unnecessary. "I'll bet you . . . more than a penny . . . that he can be stupid too, you know."

"Yes—but at least he'll be cleverly stupid—'too clever by half', that's what Davey and Mike say. And that's better than being plain stupid."

She wasn't stupid at all, thought Roche. Even she made it a day for a full smile, in spite of everything. "Let's say I'm thinking about you—and you couldn't be plain anything, even if you tried to be—" he caught his tongue too late as her face fell "—what's the matter?"

"Now that's a bloody-David-bloody-Audley-thought! Not good for nothing—just good for bloody-screwing!" She burnt him up with a scowl. "So you can keep your thoughts, bloody-David-bloody-Captain Roche—I wouldn't buy one of them if you paid me!"

Before he could reply, she had slumped herself back on the towel, presenting only pink shoulders and tangled half-dried dummy5

blonde thatch in an uncompromising rejection.

Roche stared at her for a moment, and then gave up. He hadn't intended to offend her, but he had also screwed his own chances nevertheless. But then he had never had any luck, and that was the story of his life.

He frowned past her at the river, where the sun caught the ripples on the same stretch of broken water in which he had sported with all three of them yesterday—Lexy and Jilly and Steffy—when the world was young.

He could never do that again, never with Steffy and never with the same water, they had gone down to the sea together.

When it came to screwing, nobody had ever screwed anyone more thoroughly than the Comrades had screwed the British and the French, by Christ!

Hypnotised by the rippling light on the water, he put together the d'Auberon papers at last—

It wasn't just that the Comrades had known about d'Auberon and his precious documents all along, and hadn't worried about them at all—about the alleged traitor in their midst, who had fed back to Paris every thought the Kremlin had had, through Hungary and Suez, and every word of it nothing but the truth, checkable and double-checkable from every other Anglo-French intelligence source.

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Of course they hadn't been worried! Not about that. What they had been worried about, regardless of the British and the French . . .was the truth of those reports about the undercurrents of dissent which had been swelling ever more fiercely in their Eastern European colonies—through East Germany, still disaffected from the Berlin riots, through Poland, where patriotism and religion were inextinguishable, to Hungary, which had been primed to explode any minute by the irreversible tide of hatred even among good Comrades of the appalling Rakosi regime. And not the men in the Kremlin alone, by God! Even dear old Bill Ballance—red-nosed, superannuated, indiscreet, but always well-informed—

even Bill had been worried—

"Have another drink—to your next report on the incidence of scurvy in the French Mediterranean Fleet, say? The Froggies may hate us now—and the Yanks may distrust us even more than before—and the rest of the world may despise us for being a third-rate bunch of paper-hangers . . . but I can play Dr Pangloss to your Candide, young David, for this is still the best of all possible worlds, and I feared very much that it wasn't going to be—I was very worried that it wouldn't be!"

"What d'you mean, Bill?"

"I mean, young David, that we are alive and drinking, and not taking part in the Third World War—Leibnitz was right, and Voltaire was wrong. So I shall retire and teach dummy5

metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology in my old age, like Pangloss. Because, for our sins, we have been delivered from war and pestilence and famine—but chiefly war."

"War?"

"Ah—but of course you've been away, on that smart course of yours—so you missed all the fun. Suez saved us, young David

—Suez and Hungary together! So it was all for the best in this best-of-all-possible-worlds."

"How, for God's sake, Bill?"

"Why, very simply, dear boy. If there hadn't been any Suez—

if Hungary had blown up when everything was sweetness and light between us and the Americans—us and the French and the Americans . . . with what those CIA fellows were up to in Budapest—Christ! It could have been Poland in '39

again!. . . . Instead of which we took our chance at Suez, and offended the Yanks . . . and left the Russians a free hand in Hungary, thank God! But it was much too close for comfort, the Third World War. Much too close!"

"Over Hungary, Bill? Not over Suez?"

"Who'd want to die for Suez? Not the Russians. But they would have fought us over Hungary, no question—it's the one thing they're bound to fight over, to hold that frontier of theirs in the West, come hell or high water—that's why I was so bloody worried, young David. Because I've done my share, and I want to see old age and come safe home. And now at least I'll see peace in my time—"

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Yet even shrewd old Bill had only seen the half of it, through the rose-tinted spectacles of a grateful survivor.

He had seen it all as a marvellous slice of luck—the Joint Russian Intentions and Policy sub-committee feeding back the vital and authentic information which had nerved the British and the French to chance their arm in Egypt in the certain knowledge that the Russians would only bark, and not bite, because of what was happening in Eastern Europe . . .which, in turn, was happening precisely at the time of an American presidential election.

But it hadn't been a slice of luck at all, it had been stage-managed from start to finish.

Because, turned round, it was Suez and the collapse of the Western alliance—however temporarily—which had been perfectly timed for the Russians, giving them the free hand they needed to bring the East Europeans to heel. . .

Even, now he thought about the final bungling efforts of Rakosi to suppress dissent. . . even that could have been stage-managed to coincide with Suez—turning the inevitable explosion into a controlled blast.

They'd all been set up— the British and the French and the Americans. . . and the poor bloody Hungarians, who had been shot down in the streets by the thousand, most of all!

"David. . ."

"Yes?" He didn't raise his head to look at her this time, dummy5

because the thing was still continuing inside his brain, like a film which refused to end after the denouement.

"I'm sorry, David. I shot off my big mouth again." That wasn't the end of it: he was part of it now—part of the continuation of the screwing process.

No wonder Genghis Khan was so pleased, and so determined to help Captain Roche to do his duty: he wouldn't only be placing the said Captain Roche—Major Roche to be—right inside Sir Eustace Avery's operation as a trusted officer who had proved his worth, he would also be planting a source of deliberately-leaked information at the highest level, an unimpeachable source as proved and trusted as the new Major himself!

The possibilities were endless—and irresistible—

"David..."

Damn the girl! Just as he was getting into his stride!

He raised his head and looked at her, and melted again immediately. And after all, he could afford to melt, for he had it all now, with the crowning opportunity of making a deal with the British which they couldn't resist either.

"Lexy?"

At least ... he had it all if Genghis Khan and Audley now did their different jobs right. That thought brought him down to earth again with a bump.

"You're angry with me. I can see it in your face. But I don't dummy5

blame you—I shot my stupid mouth off." She stared at him contritely. "I told you I was stupid."

"I'm not angry." That wasn't what she'd seen in his face: it was the face of treachery-in-doubt that she'd seen, poor kid.

"And you're not stupid." And anyway. . . there was no reason why both men shouldn't do their jobs right: they each had sufficient incentive, by God!

"You looked black as thunder."

"I was thinking dark thoughts, that's why. But not about you." Once again, she relaxed his over-stretched nerves. And, in preparation for what was to come, they needed relaxing. "I couldn't think dark thoughts about you."

"What sort of thoughts—damn! I'm doing it again, aren't I!"

"Doing what?" He surrendered to the game.

"Sowing ideas. And I usually reap—or rape, as David Audley says— where I sow. But I'm tired of reaping and raping, even though I can't seem to stop sowing. So don't let's bother with thoughts, David darling."

"No bother. Sad, maybe . . . but no bother—my thoughts about you."

"Sad?"

"Unattainable, let's say." Because he had just been thinking of Bill Ballance, who had left half his right hand by the roadside between Nijme-gen and Arnhem in '44, the war came to his rescue. "Speaking as a soldier . . . a bridge too far

—or several bridges, possibly."

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Me? Unattainable?" Her eyes widened.

Her humility irritated him. It hadn't been the loss of Julie which had brought him to this pass—he could have lost her in any one of a hundred ways, and still not been vulnerable to the Comrades' offer after her death .... It was the waste of Julie which had been unforgivable—it was for that he had wasted his own life in an empty and foolish protest.

A ball splashed into the water, a yard from where he lay, where a sluggish back-current from the fierce flow in the centre caught it, turning it slowly.

A small boy, thin and brown as an Indian, tripped across the stones on small feet which made light of discomfort, to retrieve it. The boy picked up the ball and looked shyly at Roche. "Pardon, m'sieur!" Roche nodded dismissively.

"M'sieur—la-bas—" the boy spoke breathlessly, nodding towards the trees on the bank beyond the expanse of stones on the flood-plain of the river and trying to keep his voice down to an urgent whisper at the same time "—M'sieur Galles vous attend!"

Roche stared back at him for a moment, observing that he held the ball one-handed now to keep whatever coin Galles had given him safe.

He nodded again, but solemnly this time, to keep the great secret between them intact, so that the coin would be fairly earned.

The boy looked back at him for another moment, huge-eyed dummy5

with surprise that he hadn't immediately followed the direction of the nod, and then scampered away across the stones.

Roche looked at his watch on the towel beside him, and then slid it back on to his wrist. It was later than he had imagined, and he was glad of that because time had dragged on him, ticking away too slowly to H-Hour. Training and racial memory from a thousand battles in which he had never fought had prepared him for action at dawn, but never for combat over an early evening drink. But in the end God disposed the minute of the hour, and for the purposes of this great battle Genghis Khan was God, with Audley and Raymond Galles attending to the details in all innocence.

But he had to do it right: custom decreed that, and with Lexy there, almost at arm's-length, custom and inclination both—

and even something more than that, maybe even Audley's Kipling-bred, self-denying honour. He looked at his watch again, and still didn't look at the trees on the bank—he didn't need to look at them, he knew Galles was there waiting for him—but looked instead at Lexy.

The unattainable Lady Alexandra Mary Henrietta Champeney-Perowne, pink-and-blonde in her unsuitable scarlet bikini: she had heard what the little boy had said to him in that childish treble whisper, which mocked the secrecy he had been trying to achieve for half-a-crown in francs. Probably she had already looked where the boy had nodded, and she wasn't stupid, no matter what she said.

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She didn't know—couldn't know the tenth of it, never mind the half of it. But it didn't matter now, whatever she guessed, or didn't guess, because he had nothing to lose now, anyway.

The last thought armoured him against any reaction she could have against what he was about to say, because he was at last truly angry with her.

He raised himself up on the towel.

"I've got to go—I've got work to do. You go back to the Tower

—don't worry about my car, I'll collect it later—you go back and tell Audley I'm getting what he wants, and he's to wait for me there. Do you understand?"

Yes, David." She sat up to match him, hair every-which-way, and busting-out-all-over-like-June, and cornered by realities she couldn't possibly comprehend; but neither subservient, nor concerned to vex him with silly questions about anything

—least of all about herself.

"Your trouble, Lady Alexandra, is that you're selling yourself cheap, to clever bastards like Audley—and cheapskates like me. What you want to do is to sell yourself dear, to someone who understands your true value, damn it—if you want to be dear to anyone, then force the price up ... be as expensive as you really are, Lady Alexandra!"

He turned from her, grabbed his clothes and headed for the gap in the trees, beyond the parked cars, towards which the little boy had nodded.

There was no one there, but he saw the little grey corrugated dummy5

Citroen parked just off the track further down, near the main road, yet half-hidden by bushes.

So Galles was at pains not to advertise himself more than necessary now. But perhaps that was understandable, after what had happened to Miss Stephanides last night.

He looked at his watch again, trying to judge minutes against distances. As usual on such occasions, time was behaving erratically: it had gone slowly at first, and then it had speeded up while Lexy had taken his mind off it. But it was still too early for his final contact with Genghis Khan, and that was what mattered. Unless and until he could be sure that the man had superimposed his own plan on Audley's, he had to take things easily.

So ... trousers first, and then socks and shoes . . . because a man without trousers couldn't face the world, and a man without shoes couldn't run away from it.

Then shirt and tie: shirt to make him respectable, tie to add formality, because a man in a Royal Signals tie was ready for anything and anywhere, even Le Château du Cingle d'Enfer.

He slung his coat over his shoulder, feeling the comforting weight of passport and wallet (a man with those could run faster and further), tucked his bastide- book and notes under his arm, and advanced in Full Service Marching Order towards the Citroen.

The engine was already running.

He bent down to the window. "What's all the hurry?"

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Galles scowled at him. "Get in the car, m'sieur."

The little Citroen eased forward slowly, protesting at the potholes on the track, laboured up the incline on to the road, and then slammed him back in the seat as it accelerated away.

"What's all the hurry?" repeated Roche.

"No hurry, m'sieur." Galles had his foot down on the floor.

"M'sieur Audley wishes me to say that he has telephoned M'sieur d'Auberon, and that M'sieur d'Auberon awaits your visit with the keenest interest, at 6.30 if that is convenient."

"Are we being followed?" inquired Roche, even though the question was superfluous, since Galles was already staring fixedly into the wing mirror.

"M'sieur Roche—" Galles continued to study the mirror "—I have been followed ever since I picked you up at the station yesterday. And I should guess that you have also been followed. Have you not noticed?"