Midnight Plus One - Lyall Gavin - Страница 28

'And where do they rate you nowadays, Louis?'

'I'm not a gunman,' I said coldly.

'Ah – of course. You are a general now. Not just the man who carries the gun. You tell them where to have the gun-fights. Perhaps you think it is not the same battle? – that in the end it will not eat you, too?

'You see,' she said, 'by now I know how gunmen think. That they can never be beatert. Like the fighter pilots. Like the knights in armour, always looking for the next dragon. Always – until the last dragon. And always there is a last. Both Lambert – and you.'

'I'm still not a gunman, Ginette.'

'Neither was Lambert. Did you know how Lambert died?'

'I read in the papers. A sailing accident down near Spain.'

'Did you believe that, Louis?'

I shrugged. It had seemed odd, but I hadn't had anything else to believe.

She went on: 'We kept a boat down near Montpellier -where you and Lambert used to collect the guns they landed from Gibraltar and North Africa, in thefeluccas. And perhaps once a year, he would go out with some old friends, to do a little smuggling. Some tobacco from Tangier, perhaps, or coffee or motor parts for Spain. Not for much profit; just so that he did not grow old too quietly. But one time, the Spanish coastguard was more awake. They machine-gunned the boat. It was most unsporting – but possibly nobody told them he was doing it for the sport?'

I just waved my head meaninglessly.

She said quietly: 'In the newspapers, he was caught in a storm. He was a Comte, of course, and a Resistance hero -so they found a storm for him. It was very kind. But even for him, there was the last dragon.'

After a while, I said: 'I'm not doing this for the sport.'

'Perhaps – but why are you doing it?'

'Because I was hired to do it. It's my job.'

'Whatare you now? You never became a lawyer?'

'No, not in the end. After the war, and then my time with the Paris embassy-'

'You were in the British Secret Service there,' she said, gently reproving. 'We all knew.'

'Iknow you all knew, damn it. That's why I quit eventually.'

'But, Louis, we thought it was so kind of London to send a spy whom we all knew and liked.' A bland smile. 'I'm sorry – please go on.'

'Not much further to go. I had a lot of contacts over here. I knew quite a lot of European law, and as I was pretending to be one of the Commercial Attache's people I was already getting asked about business problems. So I set up as a sort of business agent: putting people in touch with people, advising them, doing some legal work.'

'And also some illegal work?'

'No.' I lit a cigarette, then remembered to offer her one. She shook her head. 'No – it doesn't have to be. There's still a lot of help and advice a lawyer can't, or won't, give – and it doesn't have to be illegal. Hell, it's even legal to kill a man who's trying to kill you, anywhere in Europe. But you try and get a lawyer to do it for you.'

'So then one calls on Monsieur Cane and Monsieur Lovell?'

'If you can't get anybody better.'

She smiled her half-sad smile. 'I'm sure Monsieur Maganhard would take only the best to fight his fights.'

I stopped dead and said very deliberately: 'Ginette -Harvey and I were hired to keep Maganhard alive. Bernard was hired to kill him. There's a difference; there's a damnbig difference.'

'Even with a man like Maganhard?'

I shook my head angrily. 'You don't like Maganhard. All right – I don't much like him myself. But in this, he's in theright. He's not trying to kill anybody – but somebody's trying to kill him. And if Harvey and I hadn't been along, he'd have been dead by now. That's quite a decision to take.'

'You did not have that decision.'

'I don't know,' I said slowly. 'Maybe I did have it. Maybe if I believed that Harvey and I could get him through alive, then I had to believe that if we didn't go, he wouldn't get through alive. Once you've become a man like me, you can't just step aside. That's a decision in itself.'

'Yes,' she said quietly, not looking at me but staring out across the valley. 'Yes – you believed that you, only you, could fight this dragon. And the next also. And the next. So you will never step aside. And so there will one day be the last one.'

I said harshly: 'I'm a professional. When Lambert took that boat out, he was an amateur; he'd been growing grapes for fifteen years. If I'd been in that boat, it either wouldn't have sailed – or it wouldn't have got sunk.'

'Oh yes,' she nodded dreamily. 'Yes, he was an amateur by then. Almost enough of an amateur to step aside, not to go.'

Then she looked at me and smiled her sad half-smile and said: 'I killed Lambert.'

I said: 'You're crazy.'

'No. I could have stopped him going. But I believed I was doing a woman's job – not interfering. And I also believed that it would never happen to him, not this time. Perhaps next time – but perhaps I believed there would never be a next time. You see? – I can also think like a gunman. I could have stopped him – but I let him go, so I killed him.'

I moved my face stiffly in a lot of pointless expressions.

She said slowly: 'So I was wrong. And so perhaps I was wrong in another way… I married Lambert because I believed, with him, the war would be over. With you – when you stopped being Caneton you went immediately into the Secret Service. Your war was not over.'

I nodded vaguely. Maybe so.

'I did not know then that it wasmy work to see that the war was over. So I should have gone with you, instead, and stopped you fighting your war.' She looked at me steadily. 'I wanted to, Louis, I wanted to.'

My face felt as stiff as a stone post. It isn't every day the only woman who ever mattered to you tells you she was wrong in marrying someone else – and is maybe telling you it isn't too late yet. If you're lucky, it happens just one day in a lifetime. And on the day you're booked to haul a rich tax-dodger to Liechtenstein.

I shook my head. 'You were right first time, Ginette.

With me – I'd have been off playing games with people like Maganhard or-'

'Pardon me, but you would bloody well not.' I looked at her quickly; she seemed very calm, very certain. Maybe a bit too much so.

'It was fifteen years ago,' I said.

'You believe you have changed so much in that time?'

I scowled. 'All right, maybe I haven't changed enough: I'm still Caneton. But it's too late to change that now. I'm too old to go back and start learning to be a lawyer and how to do legal things like getting film stars out of drunk-driving charges.'

'You would not have to go back. There is work here: Clos Pinel needs a manager.'

Just like that.

The garden was quiet around us, as quiet as it ever gets in the south, with just the dull chirping of cicadas that you can't believe even cicadas listen to. The sun was a flare of white light drifting towards the blue hills, and leaving just a hint of the faint burnt smell of summer. And all I had to say was Yes.

But there were other hills: the green, misty damp slopes of Switzerland. And I'd said Yes to them three days ago.

I said: 'I've got a job, Ginette. One that I'm good at.'

'I am not offering you charity, Louis. You would work very damn hard in this business.'

'Would I have to learn to love Pinel?'

'It would not be much more illegal than your work now.'

I shook my head slowly. 'I've still got a job.'

'You would be good at it,' she said rapidly. 'We want your contacts, your experience of business and the law. We export everywhere now, to London, to-'

'Ginette!' Her voice had had a hard brittle edge that in anyone else I'd have called fear.

She held herself very still, her head up, her eyes tight shut.

I took a step and put my arms round her and her body reached against me, hard and trembling. Her face lifted to mine.