ten-franc notes on to the coffee tray. ‘Because if you are only half as naïve as you pretend to be … and if you have put your dabs all over some carefully chosen incriminating evidence …’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Then it could be that London are setting us both up for that big debriefing in the sky.’
‘You’ve picked up my matches,’ I said.
7
‘You’d sooner live in a dump than live in a nice home,’ said Schlegel accusingly.
‘No,’ I said, but without much conviction. I didn’t want to argue with him.
He opened the shutters so that he could see the charcuterie across the alley. The tiny shop-window was crammed with everything from shredded carrot to pig feet. Schlegel shuddered. ‘Yes, you would,’ he insisted. ‘Remember that fleapit you used to have in Soho. Look at that time we booked you into the St Regis, and you went into a cold-water walk-up in the Village. You like dumps!’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘If this place had some kind of charm, I’d understand. But it’s just a flophouse.’ For a long time he was silent. I walked across to the window and discovered that he was staring into the first-floor window across the alley. A fat woman in a frayed dressing-gown was using a sewing machine. She looked up at Schlegel, and when he did not look away she closed her shutters. Schlegel turned and looked round the room. I’d put asters, souci and cornflowers into a chipped tumbler from the washbasin. Schlegel flicked a finger at them and the petals fell. He went over to the tiny writing table that wobbled unless something was wedged under one leg. My Sony radio-recorder almost toppled as Schlegel tested the table for stability. I had turned the volume down as Schlegel had entered, but now the soft sounds of Helen Ward, and Goodman’s big band, tried to get out. Schlegel pushed the ‘off’ button, and the music ended with a loud click. ‘That phone work?’ he asked.
‘It did this morning.’
‘Can I give you a word of advice, fella?’
‘I wish you would,’ I told him.
For a moment I thought I’d offended him, but you don’t avoid Schlegel’s advice that easily. ‘Don’t stay in places like this, pal. I mean … sure, you save a few bucks when you hit the cashier’s office for the price of a hotel. But jeeze … is it worth it?’
‘I’m not hitting the cashier’s office for the price of anything more than I’m spending.’
His face twisted in a scowl as he tried to believe me. And then understanding dawned. ‘You came in here, in the sub, in the war. Right? I remember now: Villefranche – it’s a deep-water anchorage. Yeah. Sure. Me too. I came here once … a long time ago on a flat-top, with the Sixth Fleet. Nostalgia, eh?’
‘This is where I first met Champion.’
‘And the old doll downstairs.’ He nodded to himself. ‘She’s got to be a hundred years old … she was the radio operator … the Princess! Right?’
‘We just used this as a safe-house for people passing through.’
‘It’s a brothel!’ Schlegel accused.
‘Well, I don’t mind that so much,’ I told him. ‘The baker next door waves every morning when I leave. This morning, he winked.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather be in a hotel?’
‘Well, I’m going to ask the Princess if the girls could be a little quieter with the doors.’
‘Banging all night?’ said Schlegel archly.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘A cat house,’ mused Schlegel. ‘A natural for an escape chain. But the Nazis had them high on the check-out list.’
‘Well, we won the war,’ I said sharply. Schlegel would get in there, checking out the syntax of my dreams, if he knew the way.
‘I’ll call Paris,’ he said.
‘I’d better tell the Princess.’
‘Do we have to?’
‘We have to,’ I said. ‘Unless you want her interrupting you to tell you how much it’s costing, while you’re talking to the Elysée Palace.’
Schlegel scowled to let me know that sarcasm wasn’t going to help me find out who he was phoning. ‘Extension downstairs, huh?’
I went to the door and yelled down to the bar, at which the Princess was propped with Salut les Copains and a big Johnny Walker. ‘I’m calling Paris,’ I shouted.
‘You called Paris already today, chéri,’ she said.
‘And now we’re calling again, you old bag,’ growled Schlegel, but he took good care to keep his voice down. Already she’d made him apologize to one of the bar girls for saying goddamn.
‘That’s right,’ I told her.
‘Just as long as you don’t forget the money you’re spending, my darling.’
‘Darleeeng,’ growled Schlegel. ‘Will you believe that’s the first hearing-aid I’ve seen with sequins on it?’
He picked up his plastic case, put it on the bed and opened it. At first glance it might have been mistaken for a portable typewriter, permanently built into its case. It was the newest model of acoustic coupler. Schlegel began typing on the keys.
I said, ‘Anything fresh on the girl? Body been found, or anything?’
Schlegel looked up at me, sucked his teeth and said, ‘I’ll ask them what Missing Persons knows.’ When Schlegel finished typing his message he dialled the Paris number. He gave his real name. I suppose that was to save all the complications that would arise if he was phoning from a hotel that held his passport. Then he said, ‘Let’s scramble,’ and put the phone handpiece into the cradle switch inside the case. He pressed the ‘transmit’ button and the coupler put a coded version of what he’d typed through the phone cables at thirty or forty characters a second. There was a short delay, then the reply came back from the same sort of machine. This time Schlegel’s coupler decoded it and printed it on to tape in ‘plain English’. Schlegel read it, grunted, pushed the ‘memory erase’ button and rang off.
‘You ask those guys the time, and they’d tell you what trouble they’re having from the Records Office,’ he said. He burned the tape without showing it to me. It was exactly the way the textbook ordered but it didn’t make me want to open my heart to him about Champion’s version of the girl’s death.
But I told him everything Champion had said.
‘He’s right,’ said Schlegel. ‘He knows we wouldn’t be pussyfooting around if we had the evidence. Even if he enters the UK I doubt whether the department would let us hold him.’
Конец
