Quiller Salamander

Did Flockhart really have no choice but to trust me?

No.

It was I who had no choice. He knew he could trust me, and totally, and we both knew why. I needed the mission. I'd been desperate for this one, for anything they felt like throwing me in London, and now I'd got what I wanted, and nothing could make me call the Chief of Signals because I'd never survive the flak. If I blew Flockhart out of existence I'd blow Salamander with him.

And I was Salamander.

I felt Gabrielle's hand stirring under my own. 'I thought I'd leave you,' she said, 'to your thoughts.'

I got up and went to the window and looked down into the Street and across to the river bank, letting my eyes roam the shadows, seeing nothing that shouldn't be there. I'd checked the environment when Gabrielle had come here, checked it again before I followed.

I went back to sit with her again at the little table. 'If ever I decide,' I told her, 'to do anything against the Khmer Rouge, I'll remember your warning. But tell me about M'sieur Flockhart — you said you did him a service in Paris. Or is it personal?'

'Oh no. I was waiting in the street across from the Hotel d’Alsace about a week ago — my editor wanted me to get some shots of the British delegates to the Anglo-French Conference on the Arts as they came down the steps. But something unusual happened. A man came out of the hotel, obviously English, and I thought he was one of the delegates, so I started my camera running.' She just called it 'something unusual', I suppose — not 'terrible' or anything — because here in Cambodia she'd got used to seeing people blown to bits; she meant unusual for Paris. 'But there was a car bomb incident, and I had to spend a few hours in hospital with concussion — and it was there that M'sieur Flockhart made contact with me.'

'He followed you there?'

'Yes. He saw the incident himself, and — '

'He wasn't hurt as well?'

In the dim light from the window she turned her head to look at me. 'I suppose he must have seen it from inside a building. I hadn't thought of it before.'

Covert surveillance, yes. 'Go on.'

'He told me he was a security official with the British contingent, and asked if I would give him the film I'd taken. I told him he'd have to put the request through L'Humanite, but he said he didn't want to go through "all that red tape".' She was watching me again. 'He's very charming, your M'sieur Flockhart.'

For a tarantula. 'Yes,' I said, 'he is.'

'He told me that if I cared to have a quiet little dinner with him we might come to some arrangement. I was a bit surprised, hut he was in security, so — '

'And that's what happened?'

'Yes. He promised to let me have the story, once he'd got to the bottom of the bomb incident by having the film analysed in London.' With a little shrug: 'Either there was no story, or they haven't finished their analysis yet. But he gave me a very sumptuous evening, and we made a lot of jokes in "Franglais".'

'A la Major Thompson.'

She laughed lightly. 'Absolument!'

Jesus, you've got to hand it to Flockhart. Except for him, the mount of charm you'll get out of the entire senior Bureau staff above the third floor would fit comfortably under a microdot.

'And you told him,' I said, 'that you'd be coming out to Phnom Penh shortly?'

'Yes. He seemed quite interested in the situation here.'

So he'd asked her to 'settle me in' when I arrived. Didn't miss a trick, friend Flockhart.

The sticky air moved into the little room from the window, tainted now with diesel exhaust gas from the ferry as it rumbled across to the bank on the far side.

'Are you going straight back,' I asked, Gabrielle, 'to the Royal Palace when you leave here?'

'Yes.'

'I've moved from there.'

'I didn't know.'

'You mustn't be seen with me again.'

'Because of the man who was killed last night in the "accident"?'

'Partly.',

"There were others who might have seen you?'

'Possibly.'

'You must got rid of your car — '

"There's another thing, Gabrielle. Unless I ask for your help as an interpreter, l don't want you involved in any action I might decide to take against the Khmer Rouge. That would be extremely dangerous. I know you're here in Phnom Penh to get pictures, but wherever I go and whatever I do will be strictly off-camera.'

It was after curfew when she got into her car and drove west away from the river along Hassakan Street, and I tailed her far enough to make sure she was completely clear and then peeled off.

6: RAIN

The air was rich with incense.

The coffin, decorated with red and gold embellishments and intricately-carved Buddhas, was being carried into the temple by six yellow-robed monks, with the waxen face of the deceased open to the view of the mourners and the body enrobed in coloured silks.

People were still coming into the temple, all of them Asian except for a couple of women in sunglasses and headscarves, tourists, I would have said, or Foreign Aid Service workers, here for the local colour.

I was kneeling below the rough stone wall at the back, in a shadow created by two of the oil-burning lamps below the east oriels. Most of the light in here came from the rows of candles brought into the temple by the mourners, who had placed them below the gilded Buddhas along the wall.

The pallbearers lowered the coffin onto the silk-covered trestle in front of the principal shrine, and the mourners began forming a line behind the three women and two men who were standing nearest the coffin. I put them down as the mother, wife — or sister — and daughter of the deceased, and his father and brother.

It was the brother who interested me.

I'd come here straight from the house in Kralahom Kong, a narrow street leading to the jetties on the Tonle Sap, not far along from where, last night, we'd watched the ferry in trouble out there on the water, Gabrielle and I. Before I'd left Pringle yesterday afternoon at the airport I'd told him to use a local sleeper agent to keep up the daily payments on the Peugeot so that the clerks at the General Directorate of Tourism wouldn't report it as missing. I'd picked up a Mazda 626 LX from one of the black market dealers for twice the normal rate.

The house in Kralahom Kong wasn't strictly a hotel — there was no name or sign outside — but it had rooms for rent behind its scarred walls and its peeling shutters hanging at an angle above the street. It was the third place like this I'd checked out, and I chose it because there was a picture of King Sihanouk over the rickety little desk and because the proprietor was one of the hundreds of cripples in the town. A cripple with Sihanouk's picture in his house would kill Pol Pot if he ever got the chance, With his bare hands, and slowly, if he could be sure it wouldn't land him in one of the Khmer Rouge torture cells before they finished him off.

The abbot was intoning the prayer for the dead, but I understood only a word here and there — Buddha, heaven, departed, words like that, and only then because they were repeated so often and I was able to work out the context.

The incense lay heavy on the stifling air, filling the lungs with perfume.

The line of mourners began moving now, filing past the catafalque, many of them in robes, all of them scooping holy water from the stone basin to trickle into the upturned hand of the deceased. When his family began moving slowly towards the east wall of the temple on their way back to their places, I joined the two Caucasian women in the line of mourners, the only cover there was available. I couldn't have stayed where I was, against the wall; everyone had come in here to pay their respects to the dead, and a round-eyed observer would have stood out a mile.