‘What smell do you use, Beatrice?’
‘Sous Le Vent.’
They have shot Hasselbacher, but I have no gun, Wormold thought. Surely a gun should have been part of the office equipment, like the safe and the celluloid sheets and the microscope and the electric kettle. He had never in his life so much as handled a gun, but that was no insuperable objection. He had only to be as close to Carter as the door through which the voices came. ‘We’ll go shopping together. I think you’d like Indiscret. That’s Lelong.’
‘It doesn’t sound very passionate,’ Milly said.
‘You are young. You don’t have to put passion on behind the ears.’
‘You must give a man encouragement,’ Milly said.
‘Just look at him.’
‘Like this?’ Wormold heard Beatrice laugh. He looked at the door with astonishment. He had gone in thought so far across the border that he had forgotten he was still here on this side with them.
‘You needn’t give them all that encouragement,’ Beatrice said.
‘Did I languish?’
‘I’d call it smoulder.’
‘Do you miss being married?’ Milly asked.
‘If you mean do I miss Peter, I don’t.’
‘If he died would you marry again?’
‘I don’t think I’d wait for that. He’s only forty.’
‘Oh yes. I suppose you could marry again, if you call it marriage.’
‘I do.’
‘But it’s terrible, isn’t it. I have to marry for keeps.’
‘Most of us think we are going to do that when we do it.’
‘I’d be much better off as a mistress.’
‘I don’t believe your father would like that very much.’
‘I don’t see why not. If he married again it wouldn’t be any different. She’d really be his mistress, wouldn’t she? He wanted to stay with Mother always. I know. He told me so. It was a real marriage. Even a good pagan can’t get round that.’
‘I thought the same about Peter. Milly, Milly, don’t let them make you hard.’
‘They?’
‘The nuns.’
‘Oh. They don’t talk to me that way. Not that way at all.’
There was always, of course, the possibility of a knife. But for a knife you had to be closer to Carter than he could ever hope to get. Milly said, ‘Do you love my father?’
He thought: One day I can come back and settle these questions. But now there are more important problems; I have to discover how to kill a man. Surely they produced handbooks to tell you that? There must be treatises on unarmed combat. He looked at his hands, but he didn’t trust them. Beatrice said, ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘A way you looked at him.’
‘When?’
‘When he came back from that lunch. Perhaps you were just pleased because he’d made a speech?’
‘Yes.’
‘It wouldn’t do,’ Milly said. ‘I mean, you loving him.’
Wormold said to himself, At least if I could kill him, I would kill for a clean reason. I would kill to show that you can’t kill without being killed in your turn. I wouldn’t kill for my country. I wouldn’t kill for capitalism or Communism or social democracy or the welfare state whose welfare? I would kill Carter because he killed Hasselbacher. A family-feud had been a better reason for murder than patriotism or the preference for one economic system over another. If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone’s global war.
‘If I loved him, why shouldn’t I?’
‘He’s married.’
‘Milly, dear Milly. Beware of formulas. If there’s a God, he’s not a God of formulas.’
‘Do you love him?’
‘I never said so.’
A gun is the only way; where can I get a gun?
Somebody came through the door; he didn’t even look up. Rudy’s tubes gave a high shriek in the next room. Milly’s voice said, ‘We didn’t hear you come in.’
He said, ‘I want you to do something for me, Milly.’
‘Were you listening?’
He heard Beatrice say, ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’
‘There’s been an accident, a kind of accident.’
‘Who?’
‘Dr Hasselbacher.’
‘Serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are breaking the news, aren’t you?’ Milly said.
‘Yes.’
‘Poor Dr Hasselbacher.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll get the chaplain to say a Mass for every year we knew him.’ There hadn’t, he realized, been any need to break a death gently, so far as Milly was concerned. All deaths to her were happy deaths. Vengeance was unnecessary when you believed in a heaven. But he had no such belief. Mercy and forgiveness were scarcely virtues in a Christian; they came too easily.
He said, ‘Captain Segura was here. He wants you to marry him.’
‘That old man. I’ll never ride in his car again.’
‘I’d like you to once more, tomorrow. Tell him I want to see him.’
‘Why?’
‘A game of draughts. At ten o’clock. You and Beatrice must be out of the way.’
‘Will he pester me?’
‘No. Just tell him to come and talk to me. Tell him to bring his list.
He’ll understand.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘We are going home. To England.’
When he was alone with Beatrice, he said, ‘That’s that. The end of the office.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Perhaps we’ll go down gloriously with one good report the list of secret agents operating here.’
‘Including us?’
‘Oh no. We’ve never operated.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’ve got no agents, Beatrice. Not one. Hasselbacher was killed for no
reason. There are no constructions in the Oriente mountains.’ It was typical of her that she showed no incredulity. This was a piece of information like any other information to be filed for reference. Any assessment of its value would be made, he thought, by the head-office. He said, ‘Of course it’s your duty to report this immediately to London, but I’d be grateful if you’d wait till after tomorrow. We may be able to add something genuine then.’
‘If you are alive, you mean.’
‘Of course I’ll be alive.’
‘You are planning something.’
‘Segura has the list of agents.’
‘That’s not what you are planning. But if you are dead,’ she said with what sounded like anger, ‘de mortuis I suppose.’
‘If something did happen to me I wouldn’t want you to learn for the first time from these bogus files what a fraud I’ve been.’ ‘But Raul… there must have been a Raul.’
‘Poor man. He must have wondered what was happening to him. Taking a joy-ride in his usual way. Perhaps he was drunk in his usual way too. I hope so.’
‘But he existed.’
‘One has to get a name from somewhere. I must have picked his up without remembering it.’
‘Those diagrams?’
‘I drew them myself from the Atomic Pile Cleaner. The joke’s over now. Would you like to write out a confession for me to sign? I’m glad they didn’t do anything serious to Teresa.’
She began to laugh. She put her head in her hands and laughed. She said, ‘Oh, how I love you.’
‘It must seem pretty silly to you.’
‘London seems pretty silly. And Henry Hawthorne. Do you think I would ever have left Peter if once -just once -he’d made a fool of UNESCO? But UNESCO was sacred. Cultural conferences were sacred. He never laughed…. Lend me your handkerchief.’
‘You’re crying.’
‘I’m laughing. Those drawings…’
‘One was a nozzle-spray and another was a double-action coupling. I never thought they would pass the experts.’
‘They weren’t seen by experts. You forget this is a Secret Service. We have to protect our sources. We can’t allow documents like that to reach anyone who really knows. Darling…’
‘You said darling.’
‘It’s a way of speaking. Do you remember the Tropicana and that man singing? I didn’t know you were my boss and I was your secretary, you were just a nice man with a lovely daughter and I knew you wanted to do something crazy with a champagne bottle and I was so deadly bored with sense.. ‘But I’m not the crazy type.’