Yesterday's Spy

Chapter 30

‘And do you know what I say?’ said Schlegel for the tenth or eleventh time.

‘You say “crap”,’ I replied. I was tired. As I wiped a hand across my forehead I smelled my scorched clothes and my scorched hair. And I looked at the burns on my hand.

‘Don’t go to sleep on me,’ said Schlegel. ‘There’s a whole slew of paperwork for you to finish before you sack out. Yes, that’s right: I say crap. And if it wasn’t for Dawlish being so soft, I’d have your arse in a sling.’ He nodded to me, and scowled at the same time. ‘I wouldn’t let my own mother come out of the other side of this one unscathed.’

‘I believe you, Colonel,’ I said.

‘Well, now we can see why the girl sent that picture postcard of the Zeppelin. She got on to it too early for Champion’s liking. But how could you be sure it was filled with hydrogen? No one fills blimps with hydrogen any more.’

‘Helium is too difficult to get.’

‘Helium would have left you looking pretty damned stupid, fella,’ said Schlegel. ‘Non-flam helium would not have burned. That would have left you with egg on your face. It would have given Champion a big laugh, and you a tail filled with lead.’

‘You would have preferred that, perhaps,’ I said.

‘I would have preferred that. No perhaps about it.’

He picked up a newspaper that had just arrived by messenger. The headline said, ‘Gas Leak Kills Twelve’, with a subhead that said it had happened at a ‘remote chemical plant’ owned by Tix Industries. Schlegel held the paper up and flicked it with the back of his hand, so that it made a loud noise. ‘A lot of trouble went into getting us that newsbreak the way we wanted it,’ he said.

Schlegel opened a new box of cigars and selected one. He didn’t offer them to me. ‘Atomic shells!’ said Schlegel. ‘Would it interest you to know that Champion had not even tried to dig a passage to the artillery school?’

I didn’t answer.

‘You pleading the Fifth Amendment?’ said Schlegel. ‘Or did you just go to sleep? The whole thing was a bluff. And you fell for it …’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Do you realize what you did?’

‘OK,’ I told him. ‘It was a bluff. But let me tell you what kind of bluff it was. Champion was going to fly that blimp to North Africa — there’s no doubt about that.’

‘So what?’

‘He would have claimed to have stolen atomic shells.’

‘And the French would have denied it.’

‘And which of them would we have believed?’ I asked him.

‘I would have believed the French,’ insisted Schlegel primly.

‘Well, the Israelis might not have believed the French. And if you were the Israeli negotiators at the treaty talks, perhaps you’d have had your doubts, too.’

‘And lost out in the negotiations, you mean?’ Grudgingly, Schlegel conceded an inch to me. ‘Champion wouldn’t put his head on the block just to provide psychological advantages for those goddamned Cairo politicians.’

‘He wasn’t putting anything on the block,’ I said. ‘It was an aircraft, registered in Cairo, flying over France without permission. Who was going to press the button?’

‘Nukes in French air space … and the Quai d’Orsay in a panic …? Champion would be taking a big risk, I’d say.’

I said, ‘Champion knew they’d phone the artillery commandant and find that there were no atomic artillery shells missing. They sign those things in and out, every shift: a thirty-second response.’

Schlegel didn’t answer.

I said, ‘All along, I was puzzled by the way that he let us know it was going to be a nuclear device. I wondered why he didn’t try to disguise the object of the operation as well as the method.’

Schlegel nodded. It was beginning to get through to him. ‘He did it so that you would strong-arm me into alerting every damn official in NATO. When the Egyptians claimed to have got a nuke, there were going to be a lot of our top brass saying where there’s smoke there’s fire.’

‘It was a neat idea, Colonel,’ I said. ‘And since we were going to keep on denying that any kind of bomb had been stolen, Champion could come back and live in France, get Billy again, and even go to London for his stamp auctions.’

‘Knowing that any attempt to hit or hassle him would look like a confirmation that he’d got the damned thing.’ Schlegel nodded a grudging concession to Champion’s cleverness. ‘The only thing he didn’t figure was that the Melodie Page kid would put the boot in.’

‘And that I would put the boot in, too.’

‘Umm,’ said Schlegel. He rubbed his chin. He’d not shaved for forty-eight hours and his suit was filthy from poking around in the embers of the fire.

Out of the window, I could see Nice railway station. It was dusk, and the lights were on. Facing it was the Terminus Hotel. Once this had been a fashionable place to stroll and to sit, but now the great hotel was dark and empty, its windows dirty and its fine entrance boarded up. I remembered the café, with outdoor tables and fine cane chairs. I’d been sitting there, that day in that war so long ago. I’d waited for Champion, and seen him arrested by the Germans as he emerged from the station. He knew exactly where I would be, but he didn’t look in my direction. Steve was a pro.

Now Steve was dead. The hotel was dead, and the café was gone. The chairs and tables were replaced by a corrugated iron hoarding. Upon it there was layer upon layer of posters, advertising everything from Communist Party candidates to go-go clubs and careers in the Foreign Legion. Across them, someone had daubed ‘Merde aux Arabes’ in red paint.

‘Are you listening?’ said Schlegel.

‘Yes,’ I said, but I wasn’t.