The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (14 page)

‘And he'll do the follow-up?' Georges asked.

‘I think he'll try. If anybody can find his way among all these MI fives and sixes and the odds and sods who don't belong to MI at all, I suspect that he can.'

‘Did you mention Irata? He needs help too.'

‘I certainly did not! I had a talk with Irata the night before last when I got home. He's restless. Who am I working for and what are my intentions? Good Lord, I wouldn't mind spending a couple of days down there with Daisy's cold pies and some bottles. What suspicious blokes communists are, Zia!'

‘They'd better be. Does he know he is wanted for the murder of Fyster-Holmes?'

‘Not yet. What he wants is reassuring. Daisy does her best. But he is waiting for someone—preferably in uniform with a few medals and a gun—to say: “Diego Irata, arise from your tomb!” Well, I must be off. About time I had a silent night in the country. Spring has my number if he wants me. And you two juvenile delinquents had better remain here where I can get hold of you quickly.'

Zia and Georges went out to dinner. It was the first time they had been alone together under anything like peaceful conditions. She wished she had something more alluring to wear than the summer print he had already seen on her arrival at Thame. His eyes showed an interest which was satisfactory but conversation remained on a comradely plane, each of them searching for details of that unknown past before Karel Kren had brought them together. His manner remained very chivalrous and attentive—so much so that she was faintly exasperated until she realised that it was not specially assumed for her but his normal attitude to the opposite sex.

‘And no girl friend?' she asked.

‘They try, you know. The mothers, I mean. But I'm not much of a catch. And they are all so pink and white. The daughters, I mean.'

‘Haven't they any ideas but marriage?'

She really implied that hadn't he.

‘I dare say. I dare say. But between business all day and customers and cafés in the evening one never seems to have any time.'

‘So there has never been anybody?'

‘Well, there was a Spanish girl once.'

‘Tell me about her!'

‘Nothing to tell. A secretary and learning French. I was inclined to be—well—attracted. But h'm . . .'

Georges's embarrassment was plain. In fact the lady in question had been a frequent attendant at a
maison de rendezvous
—allowing slightly more illusion than a brothel though presents did pass and, Georges remembered, plenty of them. He had been infatuated with his firm-fleshed, flamboyant beauty until she left to try out her secretarial and off-duty accomplishments in Barcelona.

‘What was she like? Very Spanish?'

‘On the surface. New international model. All much the same except you.'

And that was no idle compliment. He had spoken as if it was unquestionable that she was different to all other women.

‘What's so special about me?'

‘I don't know. You're very lovely and very brave. And you're Zia.'

And
your
Zia, she said to herself, but that would be much too frank for him.

‘You don't find a Magyar very foreign?'

‘Foreign? Heart of Europe!'

‘Daisy told me she wouldn't be surprised if you turned up with Siamese twins.'

‘Daisy! Daisy has a sexpot mind, Zia, and is a darling. All old ladies in English villages have either got religion or sexpot minds and frequently both. She always hoped I'd start rolling in the hay with some other fourteen-year-old. As a matter of fact I was in love with the pretty teacher at the Infants' School, but that was my secret.'

‘Do you always keep it secret when you fall in love?'

‘If it's hopeless.'

‘How do you know when it's hopeless?'

‘Well, wrong. Leading nowhere. One has no right to take advantage of circumstance . . . defenceless . . . er . . .'

Intolerable man! Old-fashioned, over-chivalrous bourgeois morality! Dominant male overcoming scruples of unprotected female! Well, it could be played his way, if that was what he wanted. She still was not at all sure how far she should go. He simply would not take a hint. Returning to the hotel in a taxi she arranged some casual physical contact but all she got was a brotherly arm round her shoulders. One might as well try to seduce some charming and sensitive homosexual. An attempt to slide his goodnight peck accidentally on to her lips failed miserably.

She woke up as determined as Appinger to get to work on him. Words, distant allusions, eyes downcast or conveying the message directly into his, he nobly resisted the lot. Perhaps it was due to the dull sameness of her appearance last night. A more primitive approach was needed like that of his nasty, coarse Spaniard. Well, there was certainly nothing sisterly about her strawberry bedjacket with its neckline plunging to the belt. If that didn't work, she thought while touching up lips and eyes, Georges Rivac deserved to have coffee and rolls by himself for the rest of his life and good luck to him! She called him on the internal telephone, saying she had slept very badly and was worried. Would he come and have breakfast with her?

When he came in she was carefully posed at the little round bedroom table with another chair next to her own. He was shaken all right. He exclaimed ‘Zia!' and quickly added: ‘I am sorry you had a bad night.'

‘I'm so much alone.'

‘Yes, it's hard. Well, thanks to Paul, here's a day more when we can be together. A pity I'm too young to pass as General Fanshawe!'

‘I could always pretend you are.'

‘Splendid! Keep it in mind the next time you can't sleep!'

‘I don't think it would help,'

‘Wouldn't it? Then dream of your mother and uncle and Budapest. You'll get back, you know, and nobody any the wiser.'

The waiter entered and placed the tray of breakfast on the table. Georges moved the chair and sat down. Perhaps the diaphanous proximity of legs had bothered him, but it wouldn't do him any good. The view from the opposite side of the table was far more provocative when she leaned forward to pour coffee.

‘You're so good to me,' she said, holding out a hand to him.

He kissed it and when it was not withdrawn kissed the whole cool length of the bare arm.

‘Zia! Lovely, lovely Zia!'

Another Georges! A Georges flaming with desire, more passionate than she ever imagined he could be. She responded, and then with a desperate effort remembered that for her nervous thoroughbred the mate should be demure and timorous.

‘No, Georges, no!'

She held the bedjacket over the other breast which remained to be kissed, but the pretty gesture, the last of gestures it was going to be, was interrupted by the insistent buzzing of the telephone. They fell apart.

‘Yes?'

‘Paul here. I've been trying to get Georges. It's very urgent. Is he with you?'

She handed him the telephone, tidied herself and sat beside him.

‘Paul, I just came in to see if she was all right.'

Faintly she could hear the reply!

‘Like hell you did.'

‘Nothing of the sort, Paul! Now what the devil do you want? . . .Spring's office . . . yes, of course I am dressed . . . yes, I can be there in twenty minutes.'

He turned to Zia, still as a statue except that she was breathing a little quickly, due he thought—and quite rightly—to his behaviour.

‘I am sorry. Just as well. I should apologise but I don't. Such a pity when I love you so much.'

Georges left his breakfast and took a taxi to Lower Belgrave Street while Zia hurled the empty pillow to the floor and stamped on it. Paul had said that he was not invited; it must be made clear to him later in the day that he had merely called on Zia at her request. He was very angry with Paul and with himself, though muddled as to whether it was because he had overwhelmed his unprotected Zia or because he hadn't. Just ten disastrous days had passed since he met her and seven of those wasted in being too busy to realise what he thought of her. Saturday morning—what right had Herbert Spring to be at the office?

Run off with her—that was the thing to do. Where to? How? All the utter impossibilities came crowding back. This third visit to Bridge Holdings might result in anything at all—protection or arrest for murder or deportation to Lille where he would never be able to visit the office of a new and unknown customer with any confidence that he wouldn't wake up on the wrong side of Europe. His finger did not want to ring the bell. Paul had given away far too much. Rebuking finger for disobedience and dithering, he pressed the button so firmly that the bell was as audible as a burglar alarm.

He murmured his name. The door opened. The usual manservant received him at the door of the flat and ushered him into Herbert Spring's office. Far from appearing in the passage with his customary cordiality Spring was sitting at his desk accompanied by a grey-faced, black-coated civil servant in his early fifties—a frightening man with firm mouth and commanding blue eyes. A judge off duty was Georges's first impression. But no! In spite of the sun-starved, paper-bound complexion he looked as if he had once been a soldier.

‘Sit down, Mr Rivac! You will be glad to hear that my visit to Prague proved nothing but was suggestive.'

‘It was very good of you to go,' Georges replied in much too high a voice and added in too low a one, ‘may I know what happened?'

‘Exactly what your friend Mr Longwill predicted. Three weeks ago our agent there was approached by a Mr Karel Kren of Intertatry who wished to know how to get in touch urgently with what he called the British Secret Service. The natural course would have been to apply to our Military Attaché but Kren was aware that he might be under surveillance and did not dare go near a western embassy. Why he should have thought a commercial agent was a good introduction I cannot imagine, but he did. Our man told him to call on me and take it from there. Kren did not mention your Lukash. British Secret Service, you see, is a very vague description of a number of departments. This gentleman represents one of them which is called MI5. You may have heard of it.'

‘Of course! Of course! The British CIA,' Georges replied, having read a dozen descriptions of its supposed iniquities by over-imaginative French journalists.

‘It is not in the least like the CIA. But I am always forgetting you are a Frenchman. MI5 is more or less the French Deuxième Bureau.'

The grey-faced man opened fire:

‘Now, Mr Rivac! I have had full reports from the police who know nothing of you unless I choose to tell them. I also have from Mr Spring as much as your friend reported: that is to say, your action in Lille and that there was an attempt to smuggle you abroad from the house of Mr Fyster-Holmes. Was it you who killed him?'

‘Accidentally. Yes, I'm afraid it was.'

‘Do you wish to confess the whole story?'

‘Well, not yet. Later of course when somebody understands that I have been forced into all this from a sense of—well, Europe is what I tell myself. I mean . . .'

‘We will leave on one side for the moment the whole question of Kren and his engine handbook, Mr Rivac. We'll cross that bridge if we ever have evidence that yours is not a case for civil police. Meanwhile I want your Mr Appinger. That is my only interest in you.'

‘It shouldn't be difficult.'

‘No? We have only your description of him and I could find you half a dozen people in the street outside who correspond to that. We do not know the name on his passport, where he is staying, when he entered the country and how and where he will leave it.'

‘You're going to run him in?'

‘You sound as if it alarmed you, Mr Rivac.'

‘Not in the least. Not in the least. I just wondered.'

‘About what?'

‘About the trial.'

‘We do not necessarily try these friends from over the way. We sometimes return them in exchange for similar facilities of various sorts. As things stand, you are much more likely to be tried than Appinger.'

‘But, I say . . .'

‘You must understand, Mr Rivac, that if I am to compound one certain felony and one probable, I risk going to gaol myself. I must be absolutely sure what my duty is. My instinct is to believe you, but the facts are against you. I cannot give you any protection. The best I can do for you is to know nothing—as yet—of you and Miss Fodor. The rest is up to you.'

‘But Fyster-Holmes! Aren't you going to follow up his connections?'

‘My dear fellow, are you really as guileless as you seem? Might it not be convenient if we had no idea that Fyster-Holmes was a traitor and believed that Irata murdered him?'

‘But what about Irata then?'

‘That is also up to you.'

‘But do you want these people to kill him for you?'

‘What a lot of “buts”, Mr Rivac! I fear there always are in Security.'

It was blackmail. All that this shady, double-dealing crook offered was a half promise of neutrality if he exposed himself to Appinger and a threat of prosecution if he didn't.

Georges Rivac lost his temper—internally, that is. If he was supposed to take the initiative, he bloody well would. He could attack as satisfactorily as the next man and a nice change it would be from defence. He was tired of being pushed around by the lot of them; of running away, accepting lifts from kind strangers, being chased by dogs, patronised, disbelieved, telephoned before breakfast and threatened by their damned, British, uncompromising respect for Law.

‘I shall return to Alderton,' he said. ‘That's enough to bring Appinger on to me.'

‘I doubt if it will. He'll assume it is a trap. Obviously we can pick up any foreigner in a country district who is not known to the locals.'

‘It won't be a foreigner who watches my movements. There's that boatman and two drivers and probably others. You tell me the brochures don't matter. Well, they matter to Appinger. He's got to have them. If you are not convinced, I am. And he knows they are almost certainly in Alderton.'