Perhaps that was partly why he’d married Marius’s younger sister. And perhaps it was partly why the marriage had now fallen apart.
We both watched the far end of the room, where two Socialist Cabinet Ministers exchanged jokes about their golf handicaps and tips about the stock exchange. Champion reached into the waistcoat of his beautifully cut chalk-stripe suit. He flipped back the cover of the gold hunter that had belonged to his father and his grandfather, looked at the time, and then signalled a club servant to bring more drinks.
‘The divorce came through,’ he said. ‘Caty and me – it’s all over. Nowadays I live all the time in France.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Why?’ said Champion.
I shrugged. There was no point in telling him that I liked them both, and enjoyed what had once been their happy marriage. ‘Those weekends at the house in Wales,’ I said. ‘Where will I go now to get French cooking like Caty’s?’
‘Well, Caty still lives there,’ said Champion. ‘And she’d love to see you again, I’m sure.’
I looked at him. I would have expected him to invite me to his new house in France rather than to that of his ex-wife in Wales, but Steve Champion was always unpredictable. Even more so since he’d become a wealthy businessman. He lit a fresh cigarette from the dog-end of his old one. His hand trembled; he had to steady it with the one on which he always wore a glove – to hide the absence of the fingertips he’d left behind in an interview room of St Roch prison in wartime Nice.
‘You never thought of going back?’ he said.
‘To live in France?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘To the department.’
‘Hah! It’s a thought, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t, Steve, and I’ll tell you why.’ I leaned a little closer to him, and he glanced round the room with no more than a flicker of the eye.
I said, ‘Because the department never asked me to, Steve.’
He smiled soberly.
‘And I’ll tell you something else, Steve,’ I added. ‘There are people who say that you never left the department. Whenever we get together like this in London I wonder whether you are going to try recruiting me.’
‘Now you’re laughing at me, boyo,’ said Champion, in his stage Welsh accent. He reached into his pocket and produced a clear plastic envelope. Inside it were five picture postcards. Each depicted an airship or a balloon, and in the foreground were men in straw hats and women in leg-of-mutton-sleeved dresses, inhabitants of an innocent world that had not quite learned to fly. On the other sides of the cards was a tangle of greetings to long-forgotten addressees, and curious old postage stamps.
‘A philatelic auction in Bond Street,’ said Champion. ‘That’s why I came to London. I just couldn’t resist these.’
I looked at his purchases. By now Champion should have realized that I was a lost cause as far as his obsession with airmail stamps was concerned. ‘And Billy?’ I asked. I handed his airships back to him.
‘Yes, I’m seeing a lot of Billy this week,’ said Champion, as if visiting his young son was no more than an afterthought. ‘Caty has been very good about letting me see Billy.’
He went through the postcards one by one and then put them away with exaggerated care. ‘The night Billy was born,’ he said, ‘I was up to the neck in bank loans, promissory notes and mortgages. I was sure I’d done the wrong thing … did I ever tell you how I started: with the uncut diamonds?’
‘I’ve heard stories,’ I admitted.
He inhaled carefully on his cigarette. ‘Do you know Accra?’
‘No.’
‘The arse-hole of West Africa. I was flat broke, and working hard to buy a ticket home. I was translating export permits for cocoa traders and wangling customs forms for importers – all of them Arabs. My Arabic has always been good, but by the time I finished working with those jokers I could have done the sports reports for Radio Cairo. When I think of it!’ He clasped his hands tight as if to stretch the joints. ‘I took the bumpf down to the customs sheds one day – June, it was, and bloody steamy, even by Accra standards. I made the usual golden obeisance to the officials and loaded ten crates of Renault spares on to the truck I’d hired. But when I uncrated them back in the cocoa warehouse, I find I’m knee-deep in French MAS 38s, complete with cleaning kits, and spares and instruction booklets.’
‘Sub-machineguns,’ I said.
‘Go to the top of the class.’
‘But could you get the Long cartridge?’
‘Am I glad you weren’t involved, old boy! No, you couldn’t get them. But the kids who bought them were too young to remember the MAS 38, so they think they are MAT 49s, for which there is 9 mm stuff ready to be nicked from a local police or army unit. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘But I’m getting ahead of the story. Imagine me – the only man in Accra who’d sooner have Renault spares than sub-machineguns, sitting on ten cases of them. All of them customs cleared, rubber stamped and signed for. It was tempting.’
‘But you didn’t succumb?’
‘Oh, but I did.’ He took a drag on his cigarette and waved the smoke away. ‘Two hundred and thirty-five dollars each – American dollars – and I could have doubled it, had I sold them to the loudmouths with the fuzzy-wuzzy haircuts.’
‘Ten to a case?’ I said. ‘About ten thousand pounds profit.’
‘I had to stop my client going down to the customs and raising hell about his Renault spares. I owed a bit of money, I had to get an exit permit, and clearance from the tax office: it all costs money.’
‘You came home?’
‘I went to buy my air ticket from a crooked little Portuguese travel agent. I started bargaining with him, knowing that he could unload my US dollar bills at a big premium. To cut a long story short, I ended up giving him all my American money in exchange for a bag of uncut diamonds from Angola and a boat ticket to Marseille.’
‘You went to Marseille?’
‘Old man Tix had just died, his whole set-up was for sale. Caty’s sister told me about it. But the Algerian fighting was still on, and the Tix fruit and vegetable importing was no more than a ream of headed notepaper and a couple of fleabitten offices in Constantine.’
‘And the quarry was defunct.’
‘The quarry – yes.’ Champion smiled. We’d both hidden in the quarry during a big German round-up, when old man Tix had chased a German officer out of the house shouting ‘Sale Boche’ at him, crossing himself as he did so. ‘The quarry was finished. They’d mined, too, but it was costing so much to dig that the old boy did better on unemployment benefit.’
‘But you sold your diamonds and bought the Tix place from his widow?’
‘That
