‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a fucking mousetrap.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘What’s it for? It’s for trapping mice — you know, little things, long tails, eeeek, eeeek — they come out of holes in the wall, run around, eat cheese.’
I picked up the bag, rummaged in it, found a pack of Marlboro and her Zippo lighter in its engraved platinum case. I took out a cigarette, flared the lighter and gratefully inhaled a long deep lungful of sweet smoke and petrol fumes. I sat down on the bed. I must have looked pretty damn frightful.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She came over, put an arm around me and sat down. ‘You’re all wet. You’re going to catch a chill like that. You don’t want to catch a chill.’
No. She was right. I didn’t want to catch a chill. I didn’t want to catch anything. She helped me pull my wet clothes off, and I crawled in between the snug clean sheets and shut my eyes. I was going to have a long, long sleep.
‘Pickpockets,’ she said.
‘Huh?’
‘Pickpockets. That’s what the mousetrap is for. Pickpockets.’
‘What do pickpockets want mousetraps for?’
‘Dummy. I set the mousetrap, put it in my purse, pickpocket puts his hand in, and snap — got his fingers.’
‘Who gave you that bright idea?’
‘Friend of mine. She’s been doing it for years.’
‘What happens if you forget — catch your own fingers?’
There was a long silence. I drifted off towards sleep. I never heard her reply.
7
It all started one morning in Paris a little over six years ago. It was the first really hot day of the year. Spring had been turning to summer for some weeks and that day it had finally turned. That day the whole of Paris felt good, you could sense it in the air. Cars moved a little slower, windows that had been closed for months were now flung open, beautifully fresh summer clothes appeared on their first outings. The cafes once more spilled out onto the sidewalks, with their Pernod ashtrays and shirt-sleeved waiters in black waistcoats.
I sat basking in it all at a table on the Champs Elysées. The coffee tasted good, the Marlboro tasted good, and of the girls walking down the street nine out of ten looked pretty damn good. A bit further down, in the parking lane between the sidewalk and the road, sat my car. She was an elderly but very fit Jaguar XK120. She was looking somewhat dusty but even so, crouched by the kerb with her roof open, more passing eyes stared down her 14½ feet of midnight blue bodywork than at either the 308 GTB Ferrari in front or the Turbo Porsche two cars behind.
She needed a lot of work on her to restore her to the full glory of her youth. She needed a complete respray and her bumpers and radiator grille needed rechroming. She looked smarter with her roof off, as the roof itself was a tatty patchwork of taped holes and rips. The engine needed a decoke, the tyres would have to be changed before next winter, and the interior needed a great deal of elbow grease. One day I hoped I would have enough money to afford it; for the time being she was going to have to stay as she was. Money was tight at the moment but I was confident something would turn up. It usually did, in odd shapes and places — but at least it usually did.
It was seven months since the British army had decided it could get along without me, a decision it had taken a shade under three years to reach. If it could have tolerated me for just a few months longer I could at least have left with a decent lump sum in my pocket. My parents had divorced early in my childhood and then, in rapid succession, got themselves killed in separate accidents in different parts of the world, leaving me in the charge of a not particularly interested, retired brigadier, who resided in Paris. He had one standing rule: that all male nephews, god-children, and any others, such as me, who came under what he considered to be his domain, who could successfully pass out of the British army officer’s training school, Sandhurst, his old stomping ground, would receive a cheque for £100,000 on passing-out day. He had also agreed to support me financially whilst I was at Sandhurst, which support had now been angrily withdrawn.
The army had taught me how to look after myself and how to kill people. Practical, perhaps, but not the best grounding for a business career, although some pundits might say otherwise. I decided to toss myself out to fate and see where she flung me. I had started advertising myself in the personal column of The Times in the following manner: ‘Young man. Ex-army. Willing to undertake any jobs of a personal bodyguard, investigative or security nature. Own car. Pilot licence. To be found weekday mornings between 11.00 and 1.00 at the Lido Cafe, Champs Elysées, Paris.’
The ad was starting into its second month and the response so far had been encouraging. I had escorted a couple on their skiing holiday; I had delivered some paintings to Dallas; I had for several days followed a woman suspected of having an affair who turned out to be doing nothing more than visiting a shrink in secret; I had delivered a couple’s Doberman Pinschers to their villa in the south; and there was one nervous British businessman, resident in Paris, whom once a week I had to escort to the doorway of a cheap prostitute in Rue St Denis — I then had to wait outside the door until they had finished as he was scared of being robbed by her pimp.
I sat back, holding up The Times conspicuously, and took another drag on my cigarette. Business had been slack for the last couple of days but I wasn’t worried. I had a fancy that a slender, tanned, gorgeous divorcee, loaded with money and in need of a no-strings-attached playmate to accompany her to her villa in Sardinia for a couple of weeks of fun, might take my bait.
The character who pulled up the other chair at the table and sat down didn’t exactly fit that bilclass="underline" he was wearing an old fawn mac fraying at the edges, a heavy bottle-green wool-worsted suit, with a thick woollen Vyella shirt and a club tie I didn’t recognise, in a particularly nasty shade of green.
His first action was to pull a filthy handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mop beads of perspiration from his brow. He was breathing heavily, not as a result of having done a sudden sprint for a bus, or anything like that, but in the manner of someone who regards his body as a handicap rather than a useful machine, of someone so unfit and overweight that the mere act of transporting it across a sidewalk on its own legs requires a special effort, of someone who has to strain to heave a forkful of food into his mouth or to raise a glass to his lips. His flesh was sallow, hung limply around his face, gave him a flabby treble chin. His eyes were dark and piggish in their fattened sockets; his hair, thinning and greasy, was plastered unevenly about his head. He obviously didn’t enjoy the heat.
I put him in his early fifties. He certainly wasn’t anyone’s idea of a fairy godmother. The act of getting to this table and sitting down at it had rendered him temporarily speechless. The way he looked, no self-respecting doctor could ever advise him to go out and buy a long-playing record.
‘Read your ad,’ he said after a long pause. ‘Name’s Wetherby.’ He proffered a hand and gave a surprisingly strong handshake. With the other hand he summoned the waiter and ordered a white coffee and a cognac.
He had an amiable voice: crisp, educated, old-school English. ‘Do you want to earn £500 for a morning’s work? Cash. No questions asked.’
‘What do I have to do?’ Quite frankly I didn’t care what I had to do. For that kind of money it would have taken a lot to deter me — even more than what he had to say next.