smiled with more deference than humour and withdrew backwards, muzzle last.
‘Take him out, Robert,’ repeated Datt.
‘Maybe you think you don’t,’ said Jean-Paul earnestly, ‘but you’ll find …’ His words were lost as Robert pulled him gently through the door and closed it.
‘What are you going to do to him?’ asked Maria.
‘Nothing, my dear,’ said Datt. ‘But he’s become more and more tiresome. He must be taught a lesson. We must frighten him, it’s for the good of all of us.’
‘You’re going to kill him,’ said Maria.
‘No, my dear.’ He stood near the fireplace, and smiled reassuringly.
‘You are, I can feel it in the atmosphere.’
Datt turned his back on us. He toyed with the clock on the mantelpiece. He found the key for it and began to wind it up. It was a noisy ratchet.
Maria turned to me. ‘Are they going to kill him?’ she asked.
‘I think they are,’ I said.
She went across to Datt and grabbed his arm. ‘You mustn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s too horrible. Please don’t. Please father, please don’t, if you love me.’ Datt put his arm around her paternally but said nothing.
‘He’s a wonderful person,’ Maria said. She was speaking of Jean-Paul. ‘He would never betray you. Tell him,’ she asked me, ‘he must not kill Jean-Paul.’
‘You mustn’t kill him,’ I said.
‘You must make it more convincing than that,’ said Datt. He patted Maria. ‘If our friend here can tell us a way to guarantee his silence, some other way, then perhaps I’ll agree.’
He waited but I said nothing. ‘Exactly,’ said Datt.
‘But I love him,’ said Maria.
‘That can make no difference,’ said Datt. ‘I’m not a plenipotentiary from God, I’ve got no halos or citations to distribute. He stands in the way – not of me but of what I believe in: he stands in the way because he is spiteful and stupid. I do believe, Maria, that even if it were you I’d still do the same.’
Maria stopped being a suppliant. She had that icy calm that women take on just before using their nails.
‘I love him,’ said Maria. That meant that he should never be punished for anything except infidelity. She looked at me. ‘It’s your fault for bringing me here.’
Datt heaved a sigh and left the room.
‘And your fault that he’s in danger,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘blame me if you want to. On my colour soul the stains don’t show.’
‘Can’t you stop them?’ she said.
‘No,’ I told her, ‘it’s not that sort of film.’
Her face contorted as though cigar smoke was getting in her eyes. It went squashy and she began to sob. She didn’t cry. She didn’t do that mascara-respecting display of grief that winkles tear-drops out of the eyes with the corner of a tiny lace handkerchief while watching the whole thing in a well-placed mirror. She sobbed and her face collapsed. The mouth sagged, and the flesh puckered and wrinkled like blow-torched paintwork. Ugly sight, and ugly sound.
‘He’ll die,’ she said in a strange little voice.
I don’t know what happened next. I don’t know whether Maria began to move before the sound of the shot or after. Just as I don’t know whether Jean-Paul had really lunged at Robert, as Robert later told us. But I was right behind Maria as she opened the door. A .45 is a big pistol. The first shot had hit the dresser, ripping a hole in the carpentry and smashing half a dozen plates. They were still falling as the second shot fired. I heard Datt shouting about his plates and saw Jean-Paul spinning drunkenly like an exhausted whipping top. He fell against the dresser, supporting himself on his hand, and stared at me pop-eyed with hate and grimacing with pain, his cheeks bulging as though he was looking for a place to vomit. He grabbed at his white shirt and tugged it out of his trousers. He wrenched it so hard that the buttons popped and pinged away across the room. He had a great bundle of shirt in his hand now and he stuffed it into his mouth like a conjurer doing a trick called ‘how to swallow my white shirt’. Or how to swallow my pink-dotted shirt. How to swallow my pink shirt, my red, and finally dark-red shirt. But he never did the trick. The cloth fell away from his mouth and his blood poured over his chin, painting his teeth pink and dribbling down his neck and ruining his shirt. He knelt upon the ground as if to pray but his face sank to the floor and he died without a word, his ear flat against the ground, as if listening for hoof-beats pursuing him to another world.
He was dead. It’s difficult to wound a man with a .45. You either miss them or blow them in half.
The legacy the dead leave us are life-size effigies that only slightly resemble their former owners. Jean-Paul’s bloody body only slightly resembled him: its thin lips pressed together and the small circular plaster just visible on the chin.
Robert was stupefied. He was staring at the gun in horror. I stepped over to him and grabbed the gun away from him. I said, ‘You should be ashamed,’ and Datt repeated that.
The door opened suddenly and Hudson and Kuang stepped into the kitchen. They looked down at the body of Jean-Paul. He was a mess of blood and guts. No one spoke, they were waiting for me. I remembered that I was the one holding the gun. ‘I’m taking Kuang and Hudson and I’m leaving,’ I said. Through the open door to the hall I could see into the library, its table covered with their scientific documents: photos, maps and withered plants with large labels on them.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Datt.
‘I have to return Hudson intact because that’s part of the deal. The information he’s given Kuang has to be got back to the Chinese Government or else it wasn’t much good delivering it. So I must take Kuang too.’
‘I think he’s right,’ said Kuang. ‘It makes sense, what he says.’
‘How do you know what makes sense?’ said Datt. ‘I’m arranging your movements, not this fool; how can we trust him? He admits this task is for the Americans.’
‘It makes sense,’ said Kuang again. ‘Hudson’s information is genuine. I can tell: it fills out what I learnt from that incomplete set of papers you passed to me last week. If the Americans want me to have the information, then they must want it to be taken back home.’
‘Can’t you see that they might want to capture you for interrogation?’ said Datt.
‘Rubbish!’ I interrupted. ‘I could have arranged that at any time in Paris without risking Hudson out here in the middle of nowhere.’
‘They are probably waiting down the road,’ said Datt. ‘You could be dead and buried in five minutes. Out here in the middle of the country no one would hear, no one would see the diggings.’
‘I’ll take that chance,’ said Kuang. ‘If he can get Hudson into France
