Midnight Plus One

Her chin came up. 'I like him.'

'You didn't yesterday. You thought we were a couple of Hollywood gangsters.'

'I've changed my mind abouthim.' Then her eyes became worried. 'No, I'm sorry. I was wrong about both of you. But you know him – can't you help him?'

I shook my head. 'I'm part of his old life. Two days ago I didn't know him from Abou Ben Adhem, but I'm still part of it. He connects me with guns; if they have to go, so do I.'

She stood for a moment, arms folded and hugging herself tightly, staying very still and staring sightlessly down the long lawn. Then she suddenly unfolded. 'I'm going back to – to talk to him.' She turned.

I said quickly: 'He knows all this himself. He stayed dry for three days up to now, because he knows he can't mix guns and booze. So he's not fooling himself: he knows the way out. All he needs is a good enough reason to take it Just stopping killing may not be enough.'

'What do you mean?'

'Just why a man becomes an alcoholic doesn't always matter much. Alcohol becomes a cause on its own. So he needs a reason to stop – not just no reason to go on.'

Her eyes searched my face. Then she nodded slowly, and walked away and into the Château.

SEVENTEEN

Ginette watched her go. 'Were you trying to tell her to become his reason, Louis?'

I shrugged. 'Just telling her you don't dry a man out with a couple of church pamphlets and a cup of cocoa.'

'And is it really true, there is no cure?'

'One in a hundred, they say. That many they can send back to normal drinking. But they don't know how or why. Should I have told her that?'

She shook her head thoughtfully. 'No. I do not think she believed you, anyway. She is young enough to believe in miracles. Perhaps even young enough to perform them.' She looked at me. 'And is he one in a hundred, Louis?'

'He's one in several million already. How many people become bodyguards – and as good as he is? He's rated the third best in Paris.' Then I remembered. 'Second best, I suppose now, with Bernard dead.'

She gave me a hard look. 'If he remembers that himself, it may not help him.'

I just nodded. She was right – and it wasn't something Harvey was likely to forget.

She started walking around the edge of the coarse lawn. I dropped into step beside her.

'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.