Quiller's Run

Mother, father. 'I don't remember.'

She puffed out a little laugh. 'Or anything about your past at all. Sorry.'

A shutter or something banged on the other side of the street and she caught my reaction and said quietly, 'Martin, do you enjoy living like that?'

'It's not that I'm paranoid, it's just that everybody's trying to get at me.' But she didn't think it was funny.

I poured her some more wine.

'You sure you won't have any?'

'Not just now.'

'You're safe here, darling.' Then she said, 'Or are you?' She turned to glance across the windows.

'I wouldn't have come near you if I weren't.'

'I don't mind catching some flak.'

'I'd rather you didn't.'

I'd given it a whole hour before I'd rung the bell downstairs, taking it street by street, house by house, melting and emerging and melting from cover to cover, drawn blank. It had surprised me; I'd thought I'd pick up ticks and have to get clear and call her with an excuse. It told me a lot about Shoda: all she could think about was killing off any kind of opposition. The women she used for tagging were good, once they'd seen the target, but there was no real field work. They should have tagged Katie too, the day we'd had lunch at Empress Place, and seen where she worked and put a peep on her night and day on the assumption that she'd meet me again. That was basic surveillance work.

Sayako was different.

'You go to the Thai Embassy quite a bit, don't you?'

She looked at me steadily. 'We liaise with them. Why?'

'Do you talk about me there?'

'I'm not exactly a gossip.'

'I know. But don't assume that because I'm in with them they can be totally trusted to look after me.'

It was the closest I could go to the truth.

Her glass remained poised halfway to her mouth. 'This is important, isn't it?'

'Fairly.'

'All right.' She put down her wine and put a thin ringless hand on the table for me to take. 'So you really do trust me now.'

Was that true? I wasn't sure. 'I don't think you'd do me any intentional damage.'

She took her hand away and I saw that her eyes were moist. 'You really are a bastard,' she said lightly. 'I'd do bloody well anything for you.'

'I can't think why.'

'Because of what you are.' She pushed her plate away and wouldn't look at me for a moment, furious, I thought.

Probably hard up for a man. Four months into the divorce and he'd been 'fantastic in bed', so forth, too much of a lady to take the first man she could find, too much pride or just too hurt, bugger them, I hate them all.

The phone rang and she got up to answer it. The flat was small, understated, a few bamboo chairs and a chaise-longue, stereo, poinsettias in a Chinese vase, worn silk rugs, half a wall full of books, mostly paperbacks, a lot of them re-read, ragged.

'I can't do it now,' on the phone, her slender body arched backwards against the wall, leaning, examining the nails of her right hand in the light from the windows. 'Look, ring up Holli and ask her if she can pop round there – she's always terribly willing to help. I'll ask her about it in the morning.'

I finished my tomato juice and left the table and went across to the alcove to look at the water-colours: Romney Marsh; The Shore at Rye; Lewes Crescent, Brighton. Delicate, wistful, blues and greys.

'I'm awfully sorry, Martin. Had you finished?"

'Yes. Did you do these?'

'All my own work.' She stood beside me, faintly scented, but it was more her skin.

'They're charming.'

'Honestly? There's some zabaglione.' She took my hand.

'Are you having some?'

'I don't know. Perhaps later. You'll be wanting to know about the homework I did for you.' She turned and went across to finish her wine, and then curled up on the floor with one arm on the chaise-longue. 'I've written it out for you and you can take it when you go. Don't you want a chair?'

'I like it here.'

'It's something I learned as a child, or taught myself, found out, I don't know which. When you're on the floor, you can't fall any farther. Anyway, it's about Mariko Shoda. I – don't want that bitch to hurt you, so I dug up everything I could.'

'You do a lot for me.'

'I told you, I'd do anything.'

'Because of what I am. What's that, exactly?' I didn't know if she meant because of what I did, how much they'd told her at the Thai Embassy. But of course she was a woman, and I'd missed the point.

'Tough as hell on the outside, but vulnerable, endangered, hence dramatic, hence sexy.' She brushed the air, feeling for the words she wanted. 'Pushing yourself to some kind of brink all the time. And therefore' – she looked away – 'doomed, I suppose. So I just want to help you' – her fair hair swung as she looked back at me, her eyes resting on mine, gravely -'while there's time.'

Piano wire.

Random image, unimportant.

This man succeed to kill, always.

Ignore.

'Anyway,' Katie said, 'this is roughly the picture. Her father was Prince Shoda Phomvihane of Cambodia, and in 1975 the Khmer Rouge stormed his palace – that was when they were sweeping across the whole country, as you know. She was eight years old at that time, and when the communists attacked the palace her father tried to get her to safety. She was in her father's arms, coming down the steps of the palace, when a sabre cut his head in two and Shoda fell, with his blood all over her. I got this from an eyewitness, an old woman in one of the refugee camps we help to look after. A man picked her up and ran with her through the melee and got her clear – but then lost track of her the same night in the jungle. This I got from someone who used to know her, after she reached safety.' She stretched out a stockinged leg, smoothing it. 'Sometimes we don't know the half of what other people go through, do we?'

Her face was losing definition – dusk was down, with equatorial suddenness.

'Do you mind pulling the shutters across?'

'What? All right.' She turned, halfway across the room. 'But you said -'

'Just routine.'

She came back, switching on the big oil-jar lamp in the corner, turning down the rheostat. 'Is that too dim?'

'No.'

I like dim light, shadows, darkness, night, invisibility. Going to ground soon, have to, because of Manif Kishnar.

'Are you all right?'

'Yes.' There'd been nothing in my face, in my eyes; she was picking up vibrations again. That'd be so dangerous in an enemy.

'Well,' curling up on the floor again, 'she was seven months in the jungle, alone.'

'At the age of eight.'

'Yes.' Her shoulders lifted an inch. 'I don't think it's just legend, although there are plenty of legends about her. I mean, it's feasible, plausible, that a woman like Mariko Shoda, vicious and powerful and so on, could easily have been that kind of child – resourceful, adaptable, savage, especially after losing her father like that in a literally bloody rite of passage. Wouldn't you think?'

I said I would.

'Or to put it the other way round – that a resourceful, savage child could have become what Shoda is now. Someone asked her how she could possibly have managed to survive seven months in the jungle, and apparently she said it was easy, once you became an animal. She watched the monkeys, and ate only the berries and things they ate, so as not to get poisoned. She killed a tiger.'

'How?'

'When she found out which berries were poisonous, she stuffed a half-dead marmoset with them and dropped it from a tree near the tiger's beat.' She pulled her hair back. 'That sort of thing. Is this of any use, Martin? I mean -'

'It's vital to me.'

'Oh.' She touched my arm. 'That makes me feel -' leaving it, looking away – 'Johnny Chen didn't give you any of this?'

'No.'

'He's terribly cut up, you know, about losing his best friend. That pilot.' Her eyes levelled, focussing. 'He's genuine, Martin. You can trust him. And I wouldn't say that unless I were a million times certain. I wouldn't want to do or say anything that might hurt you. I'm beginning to wish I'd never met you, as a matter of fact. It's such a responsibility.' She leaned and tugged at a loose thread at the fringe of the rug, her fair hair falling across her face. Quietly, 'Just joking. Well, anyway, when she got out of the jungle she fell foul of the Pol Pot forces again, and went through five years of torture, starvation, terror, repeated rape, and an epidemic of cholera. Hundreds of thousands like her didn't survive. She was at the infamous execution centre at Tuol Sleng but got away. When -'