“All women say that about their ex-lovers. It gives dead affairs significance.”
“I’d hardly say that about you, Francois.”
“I’m not dangerous?”
“No.”
“Please don’t be unpleasant again, dear. Or instructive.”
“You’re only dangerous because you’re without any concept of loyalty.”
He was still holding her hand. Smiling, he bent it slowly down towards the fleshy part of her forearm. She turned her head aside and closed her eyes. The tendons in her throat stood out.
“Well?”
She was silent.
“Well?”
The ugly conflict lasted no more than a minute. “Stop it,” she said quietly.
“And?”
“Please.” The word sounded small and cramped, as if it had been squeezed out of shape by the straining cords in her throat.
“Of course. I don’t like being childish, darling. But instruction exasperates me.”
She let out her breath slowly, but didn’t open her eyes.
“All right, forget the instructions. Forget everything, Francois, except that our lives depend on Peter Churchman. And that he is dangerous. We are going to make him do something that he will not want to do. We’ll have a tiger on our leash, not a tabby cat.”
He smiled. “I commanded a company in Algeria. One man is very much like another, I discovered; their breaking points are simply in different places.”
The phone in the suite rang. Angela hurried to answer it.
“Peter, darling!” she cried joyously. “How wonderful to hear your voice again. Do come right up.”
“Angela, how delightful.” Peter kissed her cheek. “How marvelous!” He kissed her other cheek, held her at arm’s length, beamed at her. “You found it! You must have! That fountain Senor de Leon was hunting for.” He smiled at Francois. “Ponce, of course?” Stop it, he thought, with a flutter of panic. Only fools giggle on cracked ice.
“Angela, I mean it! You look wonderful. You haven’t changed a bit.”
“It’s nice to hear, even if it isn’t true. And this is Francois Morel. Francois, Peter Churchman.”
“Can I get you a drink?” Francois asked him.
“Fine idea. Orange juice?”
“I’ll ring down for it.”
“Oh never mind. Just a glass of vodka
“A glass?”
“Yes, old man. With one ice cube.”
In the sunny, expensively cluttered suite, Peter felt as if he were walking a tightrope across a crocodile-infested gorge. The sea beyond the terrace winked with a thousand sunny lights, and fishing boats skimmed like white birds against the blue horizon. Angela and Francois looked rich and comfortable. Handsome luggage stood about everywhere.
A carton of cigarettes, a tin of caviare, a mink-lined raincoat were heaped cosily in the lap of a chair. A bottle of Moet et Chandon and a pair of evening slippers with rhinestone heels stood on a portable record player.
They were on the wing! Relief flooded through him, warming the cold knot of anxiety in his stomach. Smiling widely he accepted a glass from Francois.
“Now look. Am I going to be able to give you lunch? Or dinner? I imagine you’re just passing through, but still and all—”
He trailed off. Angela was watching him with an odd little smile. “No, we’re staying on, Peter,” she said.
“Grand,” he said, and drained the glass of vodka.
They were both smiling at him, he realised; appraisingly, confidently.
“Another drink?”
“Thanks, Francois. Thanks very much.”
Near the windows of the terrace stood a motion picture screen; a projector faced it from a table a dozen feet away. Somehow, their presence seemed ominous. Peter distrusted the incongruous, for he knew from experience how simple it was to trick people with unexpected juxtapositions of ideas or objects. All his antennae were quivering now, reading the winds for danger. He knew his alarm had been justified; the warm, fragrant air fairly cracked with tension.
Francois gave him a fresh drink and Angela settled herself comfortably on a lemon-coloured lounge. She wore a white linen beach coat, with a blue sash at the waist. As she crossed her legs, and allowed her body to compose itself gracefully on the pillows, Peter noted that the claws of time had been greedily at work on her features. Basic Angela was showing through, no doubt of it; the cupidity and corruption that had lain in wait so long and patiently under the creamy-white flesh was becoming bolder with the years, blurring and coarsening the rosy features, whose blandness and innocence had once prompted people to exclaim at the appropriateness of her given name, Angela.
“Peter, is this something new
“What’s that?”
“You didn’t used to drink in the daytime.”
“Oh. Well, just the odd sherry now and then.”
“Would you prefer sherry?” Francois asked with a smile.
“No, this is fine.”
Angela sighed. “Peter, this isn’t going to be pleasant. So I might as well get on with it. We need your help.”
“Things have been going rather well for me, as a matter of fact,” Peter said, although he realised bleakly it wasn’t money they wanted; he was stalling in a largely futile effort to gird himself for what was coming. “How much do you need?”
“This isn’t a touch,” Angela said. “You knew that, of course.”
“All right. What is it?”
“We need your help to rob a bank, Peter.”
“Ha, ha. Very good,” he said.
“Peter, dear. I wasn’t trying to be funny That was suddenly quite obvious to Peter. He managed a smile. “I presume you mean you’d like some advice. A few pointers. Very well. In the first place, I strongly recommend that you forget it. Put it right out of your mind.”
Angela smiled. Excitement glittered deep in her eyes. “We don’t want advice, Peter. We want much more than that.” She drew her fingernails slowly across her bare knee-cap where they left marks like tiny ski-trails on the snowy flesh, and, Peter recalled, with a premonitory pang, that the only times Angela savoured such perverse stimuli was when she held all the aces in the game.
He began pacing. The Frenchman smiled at Angela, who was watching Peter with the same clinical interest she might have accorded an insect struggling on a pin. “We want you to plan the job,” she said, quite amiably. “We want you to tell us who and what we’ll need. The timetable, the execution, will all be in your hands. And of course, Peter dear, we want you to lead us, to lead us as brilliantly and fearlessly as you did she began to smile with excitement in those days when you were known to Scotland Yard, to the Surete, to Interpol but only as that shadowy menace, the Black Dove.”
“Angela, you were never intelligent,” Peter said. “But neither were you stupid.”
“There’s nothing to worry about. I’ve told Francois all about you.”
“And I am as the grave,” Francois said with a bow, a smile.
Peter looked steadily at Angela. “I didn’t believe you could be this stupid. This foolish.”
“I’m not foolish, Peter. I’m very serious.”
“We are deadly serious,” Francois said. “You can save a lot of time and trouble if you remember that.”
Peter was still staring at Angela.
“Did you hear me?” asked Francois, a touch of colour in his cheeks.
“I heard you,” Peter said, without looking at him. “Now please shut up. I think, on what I admit may be insufficient evidence, that you’re a tiresome person. Angela, you’ve done a stupid thing coming here. A phase of our lives ended ten years ago. For you and me, for Bendell, for the Irishman, for Canalli. Each of us accomplished what we set out to. And we agreed to give it up. We agreed never to meet again. To keep away from one another, to put oceans between us. We’ve been lucky. But the police have a substitute for luck patience. They can wait, sipping hot coffee in their dusty offices, until someone makes a mistake. And you may have just made that mistake.”