Then he sat down with a cup of coffee. "How's Corporal Blagg?"
Maxim took a handful of kitchen paper and began to dismantle and dry the revolver. "Coming along. It must have been only a 7.65 that got him. It nicked a lung and probably cracked a rib, but it didn't open the abdomen. The doc drained air and blood from hispleuralcavity and…"
"Harry!" George held up a wavering hand. "For God's sake, I didn't ask for allthat. Pleuralcavities. At breakfast. Jesus. " He slopped coffee into his mouth.
"The important thing is, he didn't lose enough blood to need a transfusion, so no hospital."
"Good. I'm sure you'd have related it to me drop by drop. Did you get anything out of him about… about anything?"
"No. He was hardly conscious most of the time, and I didn't want to put any more strain on him. I'll try him this evening. "
George got up and put bits of breakfast onto a plate. "Is that his gun you're field-stripping? – and if so, hadn't it better really be thrown away now? They've already got at least one bullet from Rotherhithe they could match to it. "
Maxim looked at the clutter of parts in front of him and realised how right he'd been in saying soldiers hate to throw away guns, even cheap Spanish ones. "I suppose… but half that stuff about matching bullets to guns is scientific malarkey. Juries only believe it because it always happens in TV cop shows. Anyway, you could scratch up the rifling with a file and steel wool so that it would never give the same markings on a bullet again."
'It's still an unlicensed weapon," George said, sittingdown. "And while you're still working at Number 10, atouch of Caesar's wife might be appropriate."
Agnes gave a snort of laughter. "After all he's been up to? You have to be joking. "
"He could get stopped and searched for some quite other reason. It would still be a scandal even if it was quite a separate scandal."
Maxim had been reassembling the cleaned and dried gun. He stopped and thought for a moment. "Okay. Should I leave it here with you?"
"All right." George nodded amiably. "Nobody'll search this place."
"Get some sewing-machine oil off Annette to -"
"You're _both_ just little boys!" Agnes wailed.
Chapter 14
Maxim woke slowly, sweaty and dry-mouthed and with no idea of what day or time it was. Then fragments of memory floated slowly to the surface like debris from a sunken ship, and along with them the aches and twinges of a busy night. By the time he climbed stiffly out of bed he knew it was just past noon and had the events of Rotherhithe roughed out in his mind like a draught report. It had also occurred to him that if he wrote that report it would be the last thing he ever did in the Army.
The day was cooler and still fresh after the night of rain. He cobbled together a brunch of cold remains from the fridge, with lemon tea. Living by himself, he had stopped taking milk: he never got through half a bottle before it went sour, since he drank coffee black and seldom ate cereals. But he'd have to drop the lemon tea lark when he went back to the Battalion; it would be like turning up wearing a frock. Or maybe he'd deliberately keep it on, as the endearing eccentricity of a senior major. But then he knew he wouldn't, because he would be doing it for just that reason even if he really preferred tea with lemon.
Why do I have to think like that? he wondered. I know dozens of officers with their own quirks of taste, dress and behaviour and they're just real people who'd be incomplete without such little fads. Why do I have to conform, to feel real only when I'm being normal? You conforming? he could hear George and Agnes shout in disbelief. But that's not what I mean, he would reply; why can't I just be myself?
But who am I? I used to be Harry Maxim, then I was me and Jenny, and now I just don't know and it'll take more than lemon tea and a pink silk handkerchief in my sleeve and reading Goethe over breakfast to tell me.
George rang. "Get your conscience clean, bright and slightly oiled: it's when-did-you-last-see-your-father time."
"Them?"
"Them. It had to happen."
They met in an undistinguished office blockjust off the Euston Road, two floors of which were used as secure neutral territory for committees and meetings between Government departments who would lose face by visiting the other fellow's wigwam. George didn't bother to explain the process by which he had deflected the first demand-that Maxim go round to Century House by himself- by a counter-offer of Number 10("As it's a Saturday, we could use the Cabinet Room; think how that would look in your memoirs") – or one of his clubs, naming the one that had been effectively the HQ of the Intelligence Service in the heady days of World War II, and finally agreeing on this no-man's-land. Somewhere in the hassle he had got what he really wanted: to go along himself.
"You took your time," he grumped at Maxim.
"I stopped to make a phone call, and I thought I'd better drop off some clothes at the dry-cleaner's." He was wearing his green blazer again.
George, usually a sloppy dresser at weekends – in an expensive sort of way – had on a weekday suit in his usual Prince-of-Wales check and a Dragoon Guards tie. That meant he was expecting trouble. "Any news of our patient?"
"Had a good night, barely any temperature, eating a drop of soup."
They began filling in forms for security passes at the little reception desk while a faded old man in a messenger's uniform rang number after number to find out where the meeting was being held. He couldn't.
"It's because it's Saturday, see," he said. "They could have fixed it while I was out at lunch and they never tell you, not if it's Saturday."
"Perhaps it's secret," Maxim suggested.
"Oh yes, sir, it's all secret, but the trouble is they don't tell you about it."
"Where does the Intelligence Service usually meet?" George demanded.
"The gentlemen attached to the Foreign Office," the old man corrected him, "usually use interview rooms 23Cor 23D. But they haven't got phones, see. "
They found them in 230.
It was a square plain room, painted pale green below the cream above, in gloss, which showed up every unevenness in the plaster. The lower half of the window was frosted glass, and the furniture could have been hauled out of store five minutes before. A small gravy-coloured carpet, a trestle table in front of the window and five folding chairs, three of them behind the table and occupied. It was all very deliberate, keeping the interrogators' faces dark against the bright window, and it made Maxim grin.
George kicked one of the spare chairs across against the wall and sat heavily on it. "I thought we were only playing two a side, but never mind. Do you all know Major Maxim?"
Maxim had met Guy Husband before, once. The younger man smoking a cigarette, and whose ashtray was already half full, turned out to be Dieter Sims. The woman with a wide face and carefully frizzed hair was Miss Milward from the Foreign Office. Nobody shook hands.
Husband shot his crisp pink cuffs and laid his forearms fastidiously on the scarred tabletop, bracketing a small heap of files. This time, all the home team had paperwork with them. "We are agreed that there shall be no minutes, that this is all off the record?" he asked, just for the record.
"Oh, I can't promise that, " George said. "If the Headmaster wants to know what's going on, it's my job to tell him. I don't necessarily have to get him over-excited, mind, but the decision has to be mine. "
Husband and Miss Milward swapped what might, in that light, have been surprised looks. The very idea of being 'off the record' was nonsense, since the room was almost certainly wired, but George should still have stuck to protocol and said something polite like Oh yes, of course.