Grofield shrugged. “I know you,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to try to con you.”
Marba smiled again, and waggled a finger in gentle reproof. “Grofield, Grofield, you’re trying to con me now.”
“How? I’m telling you the truth.”
“It wouldn’t be, would it, that you came to me because you knew I already knew the truth?”
Grofield sat back, studying Marba’s face. “I must have a bad reputation with you,” he said.
“On the contrary, my opinion of your abilities is very high.”
“Would it do any good to say I didn’t know you were onto me?”
“None. You can read signs as well as anyone. When Vivian didn’t return to question you again, when I showed no further interest in you, it had to mean I’d investigated in other ways and learned enough to know what you were up to.”
“You’re right,” Grofield said. “I should have realized that’s what it meant. I guess I was too busy with everything else that was going on.”
Marba smiled and shook his head. “It won’t do, Grofield,” he said. “Drop the denial, it will only cause bad feeling between us.”
Grofield shrugged. “Consider it dropped.”
“Good,” said Marba. “Now tell me what you really want.”
“Sure. I want two things. First of all, did you people kill Carlson?”
The girl made a sharp sound, and when Grofield turned his head to look at her she was staring at him in amazement. “That’s a goddamn thing to say!”
“A little softer, dear,” Marba said gently.
She looked quickly at him, then up at the driver’s back. “I’m sorry,” she said, much more softly, “but the arrogance of this man... ”
“From his point of view,” Marba told her, “it is a sensible question, and one he must ask.” He looked at Grofield. “No, we did not. Murder has no part in our plans here this weekend. Nor has espionage, if we can possibly avoid it.”
“You’re bugging my room, aren’t you?”
Marba smiled again. “A shot in the dark? Yes, you’re perfectly right, we have a microphone in your room.”
“Then you know who did kill him.”
“We have his voice, of course. But not his name, or his face. Would you like to hear the tape?”
“I’d love it,” Grofield said.
“When we get back, I’ll arrange it.”
The girl said something fast and low, in a liquid language Grofield had never heard before, but Marba answered her in English, saying, “Mr. Grofield isn’t a threat to us, dear. And of course he knows we have him under surveillance. There’s really no problem about playing that tape for him.”
Grofield said to her, “And it’s rude not to talk in English when I’m around.”
The successful blind date had been packed away in a trunk again, and the girl who was sitting beside him now was once more cold and aloof and disdainful, coming on just as she had back in the hotel lobby. And in his room earlier today. She said, “It’s rude of you to be in our company without learning our native tongue.”
“Children,” said Marba soothingly, the word and the manner oddly inaccurate from such a thin, controlled man. “We really don’t have time for spats. Mr. Grofield, you said you wanted two things. The murderer of your friend was the first. What is the second?”
Grofield considered correcting the notion that Henry Carlson had been his friend, and then decided to let it go. He said, “I need a story. I personally don’t care what you people are up to, I really don’t believe it can be anything of life and death importance to the United States, but I’m going to have to give these espionage people a believable story before they’ll let me go away and mind my own business again.”
“You want me to give you a story to tell?”
“I’d like the two of us to work on it together,” Grofield said. “You know what sort of thing you people could be here for, you know the sort of high-level political stuff that would sound right.”
“What is my motivation for helping you?” Marba asked him.
“If I fail,” Grofield told him, “the people who aimed me at you won’t let it go at that. They’ll try bugging your rooms, following you around, taking movies through keyholes, bribing waiters, all that sort of thing. They’ll be a constant source of irritation all weekend even if they don’t learn anything. But if you and I cook up a good believable story now, one they’ll swallow and one that will soothe them about your purpose here, they’ll go away and leave you alone and you’ll have the weekend to yourselves.”
Marba laughed, loudly enough to make the driver falter in his oral guidebook. The driver cleared his throat and went on, picking up his sentence again where he’d left off, and Marba said, “Grofield, I admire you, I truly do. You always find the most compelling reasons for everyone else to do the things that will benefit you.”
“What’s good for me is good for you,” Grofield said. “I’m just lucky.”
“Very lucky. All right, let me talk things over with some others, and I’ll contact you again later on. I have no doubt your reasoning will win the day.”
“Good.”
Marba turned to the girl. “Vivian, when you return to the hotel, take Mr. Grofield up to the monitor room. I’ll have called them by the time you get there to let them know you’re coming.”
Frowning, she said, “Is it good to let him see... ?”
“It’s perfectly safe,” Marba assured her. “Mr. Grofield won’t do anything to endanger our alliance.”
The girl shrugged irritably. She didn’t seem entirely convinced, and she sat there with her arms folded and a stubborn look around her mouth.
The cab was just turning into Rue St. Louis, heading down the long one-way street at the far end of which was the hotel. Marba stood up and said, “I’ll get in touch with you later, Grofield.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Marba nodded, and stepped down lightly from the cab while it was moving. Grofield waved to him, and then the cab went on, the horse clop-clopping on the stones, and Marba was out of sight. Three cars passed in the next minute, and he wondered idly which one of them contained Marba.
The girl hadn’t changed her posture or the look on her face. She was staring straight ahead, angry and disapproving. Grofield, trying to pick up the blind date improvisation again, leaned toward her and said, “That motel on the right was built by the Algonquin Indians in 1746, in honor of the Blessed Virgin of Guadaloupe. In the basement there’s the finest collection in North America of the eyeballs of martyred missionaries.”
There was no response. She continued to glower, with folded arms.
Grofield said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?”
She gave him an ice-cold look. “I don’t like you,” she said, and faced front again.
Grofield said, “How come? On the way up everything was very pleasant.”
She faced him again, still frozen-eyed. “If you must know,” she said, “on the way up I thought you were a patriot. I thought you were working for your country out of conviction. A patriot might be my enemy, if his country was my country’s enemy, but at least I would be able to respect him. But you aren’t a patriot, you were forced to be here and you don’t care at all that you are betraying your country. You don’t care for anything but yourself, you don’t understand the existence of anything larger than yourself. I despise you, Mr. Grofield, and I do not want to talk to you any more. And I don’t want you to talk to me.” She faced front again.
“Some day, Miss Kamdela,” Grofield said, “we’ll have a nice long talk about patriotism versus the draft. In the meantime, I’m going to take care of my own skin whether you approve or not.”
Throughout the remainder of the ride back to the Place d’Armes and the hotel, he had plenty of silent time to consider the inadequacy of that response.