I couldn’t begin to guess what sort of a deal they’d struck with him. Or with the Dutch government, come to that. Certainly no one was going to put themselves out telling me. Maybe he’d been coming up for his sabbatical, or his retirement, or his sacking - or maybe they’d caught him in bed witha dozen ten -year-old girls. Or perhaps they’d just given him a lot of money. I understand that sometimes works with people.
However they did it, Dirk was going to have to lie pretty low for the next couple of months, for his sake as well as mine. If he popped up at an international conference next week, pronouncing on the need for a flexible exchange-rate mechanism amongst the north European states, it was going to look distinctly odd, and cause questions to be asked. Even CNN might have followed that one up.
Dirk didn’t make his apologies, and left. The grey-haired woman squeezed him out through the door, and he and the Very Short Man disappeared into the night together.
‘How are you feeling, sir?’
It was me on the chair now, and Solomon was pacing slowly round me after our de-briefing, measuring my morale, my fibre, my drunkenness. He had one finger held to his lips, and pretended not to be watching me.
‘I’m fine, thank you, David. How are you?’
‘Relieved, master. I would say. Yes. Definitely relieved.’ There was a pause. He was doing a lot more thinking than talking. ‘By the way,’ he said at last, ‘I am to congratulate you on a very fine shot, sir. My American colleagues want you to know.’
Solomon smiled at me, in a slightly sickly way, as if he’d now reached the bottom of the Nice Things To Say Box and was about to have to open the other one.
‘Well, I’m delighted to have given satisfaction,’ I said. ‘What now?’
I lit a cigarette and tried to blow rings, but Solomon’s pacing was spoiling the playing surface. I watched the smoke drift away, streaky and misshapen, and eventually realised that Solomon hadn’t answered me.
‘David?’
‘Well yes, master,’ he said, after a pause. ‘What now? That’s certainly an intelligent, pertinent question, and one that deserves the fullest kind of answer.’
Something was definitely wrong. Solomon didn’t normally talk like this. I talk like this, when I’m drunk, but Solomon never does.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘Do we wrap it up? Job done, bad guys caught with their hands in the till, scones and knighthoods all round?’
He stopped, somewhere behind my right shoulder.
‘The truth, master, is that things get a little awkward from now on.’
I turned to look at him. And tried to smile. He didn’t smile back.
‘So what would be the adjective to describe the way things have been up to now, do you think? I mean, if trying to hit someone in the middle of a flak jacket isn’t awkward…’
But he wasn’t listening to me. That wasn’t like him either. ‘They want you to go on,’ he said.
Well, of course they did. I knew that. Catching terrorists was not the object of this exercise and never had been. They wanted me to go on, they wanted it all to go on, until the setting was right for the big demonstration. CNN right there on the spot, cameras rolling - not arriving four hours after the event.
‘Master,’ said Solomon, after a while, ‘I have to ask you a question, and I need you to answer me honestly.’
I didn’t like the sound of this. This was all horribly wrong. This was red wine with fish. This was a man wearing a dinner jacket and brown shoes. This was as wrong as things get.
‘Fire away,’ I said.
He really did look worried.
‘Will you answer me honestly? I need to know before I ask the question.’
‘David, I can’t tell you that.’ I laughed, hoping he’d drop his shoulders, relax, stop frightening me. ‘If you ask me to tell you whether or not you’ve got bad breath, I will answer you honestly. If you ask me… I don’t know, practically anything else, then yes, I will probably lie.’
This didn’t seem to satisfy him much. There was no reason why it should have done, of course, but what else could I say? He cleared his throat, slowly and deliberately, as if he might not get the chance to do it again for some time.
‘What precisely is your relationship with Sarah Woolf?’
I was really thrown now. Couldn’t make head or tail of this. So I watched while Solomon walked slowly backwards and forwards, pursing his lips and frowning at the floor, like someone trying to broach the subject of masturbation with his teenage son. Not that I’ve ever been present at such a session, but I imagine that it involves a lot of blushing and fidgeting, and the discovery of microscopic specks of dust on sleeves of jackets that suddenly require a huge amount of attention.
‘Why are you asking me, David?’
‘Please, master. just…’This was not Solomon’s best day, I could tell. He took a deep breath. ‘Just answer. Please.’
I watched him for a while, feeling angry with him and sorry for him in just about equal parts.
"‘For old times’ sake," were you about to say?’
‘For the sake of anything,’ he said, ‘that will make you answer the question, master. Old times, new times, just tell me.’
I lit another cigarette and looked at my hands, trying, as I’d tried many times before, to answer the question for myself, before I answered it for him.
Sarah Woolf. Grey eyes, with a streak of green. Nice tendons. Yes, I remember her.
What did I really feel? Love? Well, I couldn’t answer that, could I? Just not familiar enough with the condition to be able to pin it on myself like that. Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless. No, I’ll have to come back to that one, if you don’t mind.
What about pity? I pity Sarah Woolf because… because what? She lost her brother, then her father, and now she’s locked in the dark tower while Childe Roland fumbles about with a collapsible step-ladder. I could pity her for that, I suppose; for the fact that she gets me as a rescuer.
Friendship? For God’s sake, I hardly know the woman. Well what was it, then?
‘I’m in love with her,’ I heard someone say, and then realised it was me.
Solomon closed his eyes for a second, as if that was the wrong answer, again - then moved slowly, reluctantly, to a table by the wall, where he picked up a small plastic box. He weighed it in his hand for a moment, as if contemplating whether to give it to me or hurl it out of the door into the snow; and then he started rummaging in his pocket. Whatever he was looking for was in the last pocket he tried, and I was just thinking how nice it was to see this happening to someone else for a change, when he produced a pencil torch. He gave me the torch and the box, then turned his back and drifted away, leaving me to get on with it.
Well, I opened the box. Of course I did. That’s what you do with closed boxes that people give you. You open them. So I lifted the yellow plastic lid, actually and metaphorically, and straight away my heart sank a little lower still.
The box contained slide photographs, and I knew, absolutely knew, that I wasn’t going to like whatever was in them.