Yesterday's Spy

Chapter 15

It was my idea that Gus — Champion’s contact in the Valmy depot — should get a local contractor’s pass for me. He had doubts about it, but the application went through within seven days and they gave me the pass the following Monday. With it I was able to crisscross the whole military zone. Providing Gus came down to the door of the administration block, I was also permitted to enter the buildings there.

From the top floor I saw the flash of the guns far away on the other side of the range, and I could look down to the bottom of the old fault on the edge of which Valmy was built. On the firing days, yellow helicopters scoured the range for warheads and the striped dummy atomic shells. They clattered across the rift to deliver the target-graphs to the administration block’s front lawn — that is to say, the wind-scoured piece of scrubland where stood two ancient field guns, an old missile ramp, and a sign saying ‘No Admittance’.

‘The French are being very co-operative,’ said Schlegel.

‘Too bloody co-operative,’ I said. ‘When that pass came through within seven days, this fellow Gus couldn’t talk about anything else.’

Schlegel stopped pacing up and down and looked at me. He recognized other unspoken criticisms in my voice.

‘We’ve got to keep in contact,’ said Schlegel defensively. ‘And this was the only place.’

I didn’t pursue the argument. Schlegel was right. He looked at his watch. ‘Mustn’t keep you too long, or our friend Champion might wonder where you are.’ He put the papers that Gus had given me into my document case and clicked the locks closed. ‘Worthless,’ he pronounced. ‘If Champion can sell that to the Arabs, he deserves every penny he gets!’

‘A dummy-run perhaps. Just to see if I’m going to blow the works.’

‘What for?’ said Schlegel. ‘Who needs you, one way or the other? Why try to convince you that he trusts you — where’s the percentage?’

‘That’s right,’ I agreed.

‘Now don’t go all hurt on me. Champion doesn’t need you, or any other cut-out. He’s met Gus — Gus knows his face — Jesus! It doesn’t make sense, does it?’

I blew my nose. Then I walked over to the window and looked down at the other buildings. I was suffering the first symptoms of influenza, and the weather promised nothing but thunder and lightning and endless torrents of rain. I put my hands on the radiator and shivered.

‘Come away from that window, bird-brain,’ said Schlegel. ‘You want your pal Gus to see you?’

‘It could make sense,’ I said, moving away from the window. ‘It would make sense, if there was something very big coming up. Something that the French don’t want to talk about.’

Schlegel pulled a horrified face and waved his flattened hands at me to warn me to stop.

‘I know, I know, I know!’ I said. I looked round at the soft furnishings, the hand-tinted portraits of nineteenth-century generals and the faded plastic flowers. Such a reception room — in such a place — was sure to have electronic plumbing, but I continued anyway. ‘If they are putting something really important through the Atelier in the near future, Champion will get his hands on it.’

Schlegel shrugged at what most people in the department would have considered a major breach of security. ‘Not if our pal Gus goes into the cooler. That’s the way they’d reason.’

‘And perhaps that’s the way Champion hopes they will reason.’

Schlegel sucked his teeth in a gesture that was as near as he ever came to admiration. ‘You have your lucid moments, fella. For a Brit, I mean.’ He nodded. ‘You mean he might have two contacts here.’

‘Champion was brought up on second network techniques.’

‘Well, you should know. You were with him, weren’t you.’ He walked over to the plastic flowers, took one and snapped its petals off one by one, tossing them into an ashtray. ‘There are still some questions, though.’ He looked down at the broken pieces of plastic that remained in his hand and dropped them as if they were red hot. ‘I’m trying to give up smoking,’ he said. ‘It’s tough!’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Schlegel pulled a face, trying not to sneeze; sneezed, and then wiped his nose carefully. He went over to the radiator to see if the heat was on. It wasn’t. ‘You want to give me one of those aspirins? I think maybe I’m getting your virus.’

I gave him two tablets. He swallowed them.

He said, ‘Champion has been made a colonel in the Egyptian Army.’

I stared at him in disbelief.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘It’s not promulgated, or even distributed, but it’s official all right. You know how these army chiefs like to get their claws into promising sources.’

I nodded. The army would want to get the allegiance of a man like Champion, rather than let his reports go back to the politicians. Giving him a colonelcy was a simple way of doing it.

‘A colonel of the propaganda division, with effect from January the tenth.’ Schlegel folded his handkerchief into a ball and pummelled his nose with it, as if trying to suppress another sneeze. ‘Propaganda division! You think that could be on the level? You think this could all be a propaganda exercise?’

‘Propaganda? A sell so soft that it’s secret, you mean?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘He’s not through yet,’ said Schlegel, with some foreboding.

‘That’s true,’ I said.

‘You’d better move,’ said Schlegel. ‘I know Champion likes you back there in time to dress for dinner.’

‘You’re a sarcastic bastard, Colonel.’

‘Well, I’m too old to change my ways now,’ he said.

There was a tiny mark on Schlegel’s face, where I had punched him in the fracas at Waterloo Station. ‘That other business …’ I said.

‘My Waterloo,’ said Schlegel. He smiled his lopsided smile, and explained, ‘That was Dawlish’s joke.’

‘It wasn’t like me,’ I said apologetically.

‘Funny you should say that,’ said Schlegel. ‘Dawlish said it was exactly like you.’