Yesterday's Spy (9 page)

‘You were a fool to come here. And so was I.' He pushed the bowl of cornflakes away untouched.

‘You came because you knew I'd make plenty of trouble for you if you didn't come. I came because I had to.'

‘You came for yourself! This isn't official; it's just for yourself. And it's bloody dangerous!' His upper-class voice was pitched high and slightly querulous, like some customer complaining about the caviare in Harrods.

‘Well, it's too late now, Aziz.' I poured some tea for him and he gave me a wintry smile. Aziz was working for the World Meteorological Organization headquarters on the Avenue Giuseppe-Motta. His masters here in Geneva would have been astonished perhaps to discover that he was a senior analyst for Egyptian Intelligence. But certainly his masters in Cairo would have been devastated to hear that he'd been on London's payroll for nearly ten years. ‘And anyway,' I said, ‘this one is
going
to become official. Believe me, it is.'

‘You said that in New York.'

‘That was different,' I said. ‘You got nineteen thousand dollars out of that one. This time it's free.'

‘I'm glad you told me,' said Aziz. He sniffed. He was a bird-like little man, with thinning hair, large eyes and a nose like a ploughshare. His dark skin was inherited from the Sudanese peasant girl who bore him, while the chalk-stripe worsted, the hand-made shoes and public-school tie were worn with the aplomb he'd learned from the Egyptian mine-owner who acknowledged the boy as his son. The small turquoise pinned into his tie was taken from a mine that has been worked since the first dynasty of Egyptian kings. For such a man it is not easy to adapt to the stringencies of a nationalized land and high taxation. ‘There will be no money this time?' He smiled. ‘Surely you are not serious.'

‘Champion,' I said. ‘Steve Champion.' I gave him a few seconds to think about that. ‘I need help, Aziz, I really need it.'

‘You must be mad.'

I pushed him a little. ‘London's request for the Libyan trade figures, the Sinai supplementaries, the Kissinger stuff and the analysis you did in December. That all came through me. You must have stashed away a quarter of a million dollars over the last three years, Aziz. And most of that stuff was a doddle, wasn't it? It's the easiest money you ever earned, Aziz. And all of that came through me.'

‘What are you fishing for – a percentage?' He poured himself more tea, and took a long time spearing the slice of lemon, but he never drank the tea. He toyed with the thin slice of lemon, and then dipped it into the sugar, popped it into his mouth and looked up guiltily. I smiled.

‘You'd better let me phone the office,' he said. He looked at the gold quartz chronometer on his wrist, and touched his diamond cufflinks to make sure they were still in place. I suppose that must be the problem with diamond cufflinks, apart from the way they slash the red silk lining of your Savile Row suits.

‘Go ahead,' I said. ‘I don't care how long it takes. We'll have room service send lunch up here. I've spent half the night checking this room for electronic plumbing.'

He looked around the austere Swiss hotel room that cost as much per night as the average British worker received per week. He shuddered. ‘It won't take that long,' he said.

‘This time I've got more to lose than you have.'

He looked me up and down, from shoes to haircut. ‘I don't think so,' he said finally. He sniffed again.

‘Just Champion?' he said. All these people who sell us information are like that. They categorize it, and husband it, and let it go only grudgingly, as a philatelist disposes of bits of his collection, and tries to get rid of the dud stamps first. Aziz smoothed his hair across the crown of his head. There wasn't much of it, and he patted it gently. ‘You've always played fair with me,' he said. ‘I'd be the first to admit that.' I waited while he persuaded himself to tell me what I wanted to know.

‘It's the same tedious story that we know only too well,' said Aziz, in his beautifully modulated English public-school accent. ‘London put Champion into some of the rougher bits of the small-arms trade …'

‘Terrorist weapons.'

‘Terrorist weapons. And eventually Champion makes contact with our people.'

‘Political Intelligence.'

‘Political Intelligence,' repeated Aziz, and nodded. Why the hell he still called them his people, when he'd spent a decade selling them out, was strictly between him and his analyst, but I let him continue uninterrupted. ‘London must have seen what would happen,' said Aziz. ‘Ask yourself … Champion's father spent his whole life in Egypt. The Academy gave him a banquet when he retired. Nasser was a student of the old man, you know, as was Sadat. Even the younger Champion has better Arabic than I can put my tongue to.'

‘Do you want to light that cigarette?' I said, ‘or do you prefer waving it around?'

He smiled and caught the matches I threw to him. He seemed surprised to find they burned as brightly as a gold lighter. ‘We turned him, of course.' He blew smoke and took a piece of tobacco off his lip with a long fingernail. ‘At first it was all quite straightforward; London knew he was a double, Cairo knew he was a double. It was a convenient method of communication between Egypt and you …'

‘When was that?'

‘Let's say until the summer before last. It was just before the Fleet exercises that he delivered the
NATO
wavelengths to us. That was not part of the plan – as far as London was concerned. They found out when Damascus got the wavelengths. London got a rocket from
NATO
, or so I heard. Yes, Champion burned his boats when he did that.'

‘Champion did it for money?'

‘My dear fellow …' he protested. ‘What else?'

‘You seem pretty certain about all this, Aziz. Even you have been known to make a mistake.'

‘Have I?' He frowned. ‘I certainly don't remember one.'

I got up and went back to the window to watch the lake again. I said, ‘Are you just giving me the gossip from the Cairo Hilton?'

‘This is all top-level stuff, old boy. There's a very limited circulation for Champion's material – top bloody secret, all the way.'

‘How did you get it?'

‘My brother-in-law, of course.'

‘Of course,' I said. His brother-in-law was a one-star general in Cairo's Department of Political Intelligence that fills – and overflows from – a seven-storey building in Heliopolis.

Aziz was watching me closely as I turned away from the window. ‘I can get you Xerox copies of anything special,' he offered. ‘But it will take at least two weeks.'

‘We'll see, Aziz.'

‘Oh, yes, Champion's deep into it.' He stubbed out the cigarette and watched me as I figured out what to do next. ‘It's upset you, hasn't it,' said Aziz, with more friendliness than I would have thought him capable of. ‘I'm sorry about that, but Champion has gone a lot too far for London to be running him still – he's Cairo's man. He's ours.'

Ours, I thought, good old Aziz, consummate schizoid, that's the way to be. I sat down on the leather armchair and closed my eyes. ‘There's got to be a better way than this to earn a living, Aziz,' I said. I had to be back in Villefranche that evening. It was a long drive and I was suddenly very, very tired.

‘No doubt about that, old boy,' said Aziz. ‘Trouble is … a chap's got to have a little bread, while he's figuring out what the better way is.'

He was wearing a short fur coat, and a black kerchief knotted cowboy-style, right against the throat. It was a measure of their subtlety that they sent along a man so unlike any policeman I'd ever seen. This youngster was completely different from the wrestlers of the Police Judiciaire in Marseille, or the hatchet-faced PJ boys who work in Nice. I'd noticed him the previous evening. He'd been drinking straight cognac at the far end of the bar when I went in to ask the Princess for the key of my room. It was a bad sign – cognac, I mean; I like my cops to stick to rot-gut.

He was in the same seat next morning, drinking coffee and smiling apologetically, as if he'd been there all night. ‘Monsieur Charles Bonnard?' he said.

That was my wartime name: I thought I'd seen the last reel of that one, but now the nightmares came back. He didn't wait for my reply. ‘My name is Fabre. Inspector Fabre, Renseignements Généraux, Lyon.'

‘That's a relief,' I said. ‘Just for a moment I thought you were from the Gestapo.'

He smiled again. ‘We weren't quite sure what name you'd be using this time.'

‘Well, I'm glad to hear someone wasn't,' I said.

‘You'll have to come to Lyon, I'm afraid,' he said.

He could have been no older than twenty-five, but his youth, like his bizarre outfit, made him a likely recruit for the political undercover work of the RG. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but the slim hips would have suited a dancer or acrobat. His handsome bony face was white. In the north it would have gone unremarked, but here in the Riviera it seemed almost perverse that anyone should so avoid the sunshine.

He rubbed his fingers nervously. ‘You'll have to come with us,' he said apologetically. ‘To Lyon,' he told me again. He stopped rubbing his hands together for long enough to reach into an inside pocket for a tin of throat lozenges. He tore the silver wrapping from two of them, and popped them into his mouth in swift succession.

‘You'll need overnight things,' he said.

I smiled. The Princess came in and put my coffee on the counter. She looked from one to the other of us and left without speaking. ‘Why not pay your bill now?' he said. ‘I'll make sure they hold your room for a few days. I mean, if you are not back tonight, why pay these hotel bastards?'

I nodded and drank some more coffee. ‘Have you worked very long for the RG?' I asked.

He swallowed his throat lozenges. ‘Forget checking me out,' he said. ‘I don't know anybody important there. That's why I get lousy jobs like bringing you in.'

There was no sign of the Princess. From behind the cash register I took the handful of cash slips that were marked ‘Charles'. I added fifteen per cent and signed. ‘No need to hold the room,' I said. ‘They are not expecting a tour-bus.'

He looked around the bar. There was enough daylight to expose the sleazy fly-blown wallpaper and the cracked lino. He smiled, and I smiled back, and then we went up to get my baggage.

Once inside my room, he became more confidential. ‘You must be someone important,' he told me, ‘judging by all the teleprinter messages and what I hear about the cabinet du préfet complaining to London.'

‘Why are you telling me?' I asked.

‘Cops should stick together,' he said. He opened the door of the battered wardrobe, and spent a moment or two looking at his brown-speckled reflection. ‘Last year I followed a suspect to Aachen, in Germany. I grabbed him and brought him back across the border in my car. There was no end of fuss. But luckily the Aachen CID lied their heads off for me. Cops have to stick together; bureaucrats arrest only pieces of paper.'

He pulled my suit out of the wardrobe and folded it carefully while I packed my case. ‘They'll take you up to Paris, I think. If you want to make a quick phone call, I won't hear you.'

‘No, thanks,' I said. I went into the bathroom and threw my shaving gear into the zip bag. His voice was louder when he next spoke and I could tell he'd started a new throat lozenge. ‘And if you have a gun, I'd get rid of it. It will just give them something to hold you for.'

‘I don't carry a gun,' I called from the bathroom. I could hear him going all through the drawers of the wardrobe.

I closed the bathroom door. Then I released the plastic bath panels with my knife. I reached into the dust and dead spiders to get the plastic bag I'd hidden there. I didn't have to swing out the cylinder, I could see the 125 grain round-nosed bullets that I'd loaded into the .38 Centennial Airweight. I stuffed the pistol into the waistband of my trousers and quickly replaced the panel. Then I flushed the toilet and emerged from the bathroom. It had taken me no more than ten seconds.

Fabre said, ‘Because if they find a pistol anywhere in the room here, they can hold you under the new emergency laws – one month it is.' He slammed the last drawer closed, as if to punctuate the warning.

‘I don't carry a pistol. I don't even
own
a pistol. You know English policemen don't have guns.'

‘I was forgetting,' he said. ‘And you have
habeas corpus
and all that crap, too. Hell, what a life for a cop. Are you sure you don't want to make a phone call? Call London if you want, but make it snappy.'

‘Are you in traffic?'

‘Renseignements Généraux,' he said. ‘I told you I was from RG. Why?'

‘Because you come on like a courtesy cop,' I said.

He smiled. ‘I'm one of the graduate entries,' he said. He gave a self-conscious smile. ‘I don't believe in rough stuff, unless it's absolutely necessary.'

‘Have you got a car here?'

‘And a driver. We must stop in Nice, at the Palais de Justice. I must sign the forms and go through the formalities. You don't need gloves: it's not that cold.'

‘I've got a circulation problem,' I said.

It was a black Citroën. The driver was a mournful Negro of about fifty. He took my case and locked it in the boot. His skin was bluish black and his eyes heavy-lidded. He wore a shabby raincoat and battered hat. He hardly looked at us as we got into the car. The young one continued talking. ‘The other day someone said that we were the Jews of Western Europe. Palais de Justice, Ahmed.'

‘Who?' I said.

‘Cops. The Jews of Western Europe; we're blamed for everything, aren't we? Everything, from traffic jams to strike-breaking – it's convenient to have someone to blame.'