Midnight Plus One

'I know.' He emptied the glass.

I stretched out my hand for it. 'More?'

He shrugged his shoulders on the pillow. 'I guess so.'

I walked back to the bottle on the dressing-table. He said: 'If I'm a good boy, do I get my gun back?'

'Sorry; I'd forgotten.' I'd been hoping he'd remind me. I took out the little revolver, swung the cylinder, and poked out the empty cartridge. 'Got any more rounds?'

'Coat pocket.'

His jacket was hung on a chair. I got my back to him and groped in both side pockets. I got a fresh cartridge with one hand, and a bottle I hoped was his sleeping pills with the other. I slid the round into the gun, closed it up, and tossed it on to the foot of the bed.

By the time he'd reached for it, checked it over just as I knew he would, as any gunman would after somebody else had handled his gun, there were three tablets at the bottom of his glass. I didn't know just what they were, or what dose they should have been; Idid know that mixing two depressants like alcohol and barbiturates isn't a good idea. But it was less risk than he'd meet tomorrow if he finished off that bottle tonight.

I poured whisky on top and gave it a moment to dissolve them by going to find a glass of my own over by the washbasin. A bit of cloudiness wouldn't show through the cut glass tumbler, and by now his sense of taste would be shot.

I poured my own drink and gave him his.

'You're an understanding sort of bastard,' he said slowly. 'Or maybe you're just a bastard. Understanding somebody is a pretty lousy thing to do to him.' He turned his head wearily and looked up at me. 'Well, you're the Professor, and here I am on the couch. D'you want me to tell you my dreams?'

I sat down on the chair with his jacket slung over the back. 'Could I stand them?'

'Maybe. They ain't fun, but you get used to them.'

'D'you get used to how you feel in the mornings?'

'No. But you can't remember how bad it was, ever. Still, if you thought tomorrow was as important as today, you wouldn't be a – a drinker, would you?'

'You're over-simplifying,' I said. 'You want to think you're basically different in outlook from everybody else. You aren't. You just drink more, that's all.'

By now the pill bottle was back in his jacket pocket.

He smiled. 'That's good head-shrinking, Professor. But you want to know the worst thing? You don't taste it any more. That's all. You just don't taste it.' He sipped and held the glass up to the light and stared through it. 'You just remember going into some place in Paris where they know how to mix a real martini. Get in there around noon, before the rush starts, so they'll have time to do it right. They like that: they like a guy who really cares about a good drink – so for him, they get it right. Mix it careful and slow, and then you drink it the same way. They like that, too. They don't have to think you're going to buy another one. Just once in a time they like to meet a guy who'll make them do some real work and appreciate it when they've done it. Pretty sad people, barmen.'

He took a gulp at his drink and went back to watching the ceiling. His voice was slow and quiet and he wasn't talking to me and perhaps not even to himself. Just to a door that had closed on him a long time ago.

'Just cold enough to make the glass misty,' he said softly. 'Not freezing; you can make anything taste as if it might be good by making it freezing. That's the secret of how to run America, if you want to know it, Cane. And no damn olives or onions in it, either. Just a kind of smell like summer.' He moved his head on the pillow. 'I haven't had a martini in an elephant's age. You don't taste it. Now – now all you think of is the next one. Christ, but I'm tired.'

He stretched an arm to put the tumbler on the bedside table, missed, and it thumped on the carpet, spilling a few drops.

I stood up. His eyes were closed. I put down my own glass and moved softly towards the door. I had my hand on the knob when he said: 'I'm sorry, Cane. Thought I could last it out.'

'You lasted. It was the job that stretched.'

After a few moments he said: 'Maybe… and maybe if I hadn't got hit--Probably not, though.' Then he turned his head and looked at me. 'You said something back there: that I wasn't basically different from anybody else. I kill people, Professor.'

'You could give it up.'

He smiled very slowly and wearily. 'But not until after tomorrow – is that right?'

After a few more moments, I went out. I felt as noble and helpful as the spilled dregs on the carpet.

Maganhard and Ginette were standing at the top of the stairs looking as if they'd been trying to find something polite to say to each other but not getting far. Maganhard swung round as I came along and forgot about politeness.

'You didn't tell me Mr Lovell was a drinker.'

'I didn't know myself until after we'd started.' I leant against the bannisters and reached for a cigarette.

'Then I will speak to Merlin about this. I could have been killed just because-'

'Shut up, Maganhard,' I said wearily. 'We've lived through yesterday and today, and if you don't think that's an achievement, then you didn't know what was going on. We couldn't have done more with anybody else. Now go to bed.'

'I have not had my dinner yet,' he said huffily. He had Austrian blood in him, all right.

Ginette said soothingly: 'Maurice will serve you very soon, Herr Maganhard: He will give you a drink now, if you wish.'

He gave me a stare that he'd been keeping at the back of the freezer compartment, then marched downstairs, his back very straight.

I stayed leaning on the bannisters, found my matches, and lit the cigarette. 'I'd forgotten dinner. I thought today had gone on long enough already.'

'Is that the way the Agency Cane usually treats its clients?'

'Pretty usual. I told you I didn't have to like them.'

'I think you had better take the work here – quickly.'

I looked at her, but she didn't meet it. She just propped herself against the bannisters beside me; the movement brought her hands up in front of her, and she seemed to notice that she still had the Mauser.

She looked it over. 'Do you remember, Louis, what these once meant to us? Liberation… freedom… words like that?'

'I remember.'

'Perhaps things have changed since then.' She sighted the gun casually down the stairway, her thumb sweeping instinctively over the safety catch and the single/automatic button. She knew about Mausers.

'Pistols haven't changed.'

'You believe the Resistance was always just pistols – not the words?'

'Nothing is ever just pistols; men don't die by guns alone. Guns always need words behind them, telling them they're doing the right thing.'

She glanced quickly at me. Maybe I'd sounded a little sour; maybe Iwas a little sour, thinking of riding north at midnight and the state Harvey would be in then. And perhaps wishing it wasn't all just to save a man like Maganhard from a few deaths, a few taxes.

Or maybe I was just feeling old and tired.

'In the war,' she said thoughtfully, 'we never asked if we were right. The answer was too easy. But – perhaps sometimes we were wrong. We helped make men like Bernard, and Alain.' She lowered the gun. 'You believe because your Maganhard is right, you must be right? '

I said cautiously: 'Something like that.'

But she just nodded to herself. After a while she said: 'But perhaps your next Maganhard will be wrong – and you will not have stepped aside.'

It wasn't a new idea; it was an old familiar ghost at the back of my mind, that I remembered only when I was feeling tired and low. On the nights when you dream of the faces of men you knew and who are dead.

I'd been right about Maganhard. I'd trusted Merlin and Maganhard himself and my own judgement – and I'd been right. But one day, I could be wrong. One day I'd have a client as crooked as a mountain road and the men jumping up in ambush would be plain-clothes cops…

A lawyer can say his client deceived him. But I'd be standing there with the Mauser warm in my hand.