Midnight Plus One

by Gavin Lyall

I shrugged. It had seemed odd, but I hadn’t had anything else to believe.

  She went on: ‘We kept a boat down near Montpellier -where you and Lambert used to collect the guns they landed from Gibraltar and North Africa, in thefeluccas. And perhaps once a year, he would go out with some old friends, to do a little smuggling. Some tobacco from Tangier, perhaps, or coffee or motor parts for Spain. Not for much profit; just so that he did not grow old too quietly. But one time, the Spanish coastguard was more awake. They machine-gunned the boat. It was most unsporting – but possibly nobody told them he was doing it for the sport?’

  I just waved my head meaninglessly.

  She said quietly: ‘In the newspapers, he was caught in a storm. He was a Comte, of course, and a Resistance hero -so they found a storm for him. It was very kind. But even for him, there was the last dragon.’

  After a while, I said: ‘I’m not doing this for the sport.’

  ‘Perhaps – but why are you doing it?’

  ‘Because I was hired to do it. It’s my job.’

  ‘Whatare you now? You never became a lawyer?’

  ‘No, not in the end. After the war, and then my time with the Paris embassy-‘

  ‘You were in the British Secret Service there,’ she said, gently reproving. ‘We all knew.’

  ‘Iknow you all knew, damn it. That’s why I quit eventually.’

  ‘But, Louis, we thought it was so kind of London to send a spy whom we all knew and liked.’ A bland smile. ‘I’m sorry – please go on.’

  ‘Not much further to go. I had a lot of contacts over here. I knew quite a lot of European law, and as I was pretending to be one of the Commercial Attache’s people I was already getting asked about business problems. So I set up as a sort of business agent: putting people in touch with people, advising them, doing some legal work.’

  ‘And also some illegal work?’

  ‘No.’ I lit a cigarette, then remembered to offer her one. She shook her head. ‘No – it doesn’t have to be. There’s still a lot of help and advice a lawyer can’t, or won’t, give – and it doesn’t have to be illegal. Hell, it’s even legal to kill a man who’s trying to kill you, anywhere in Europe. But you try and get a lawyer to do it for you.’

  ‘So then one calls on Monsieur Cane and Monsieur Lovell?’

  ‘If you can’t get anybody better.’

  She smiled her half-sad smile. ‘I’m sure Monsieur Maganhard would take only the best to fight his fights.’

  I stopped dead and said very deliberately: ‘Ginette -Harvey and I were hired to keep Maganhard alive. Bernard was hired to kill him. There’s a difference; there’s a damnbig difference.’

  ‘Even with a man like Maganhard?’

  I shook my head angrily. ‘You don’t like Maganhard. All right – I don’t much like him myself. But in this, he’s in theright. He’s not trying to kill anybody – but somebody’s trying to kill him. And if Harvey and I hadn’t been along, he’d have been dead by now. That’s quite a decision to take.’

  ‘You did not have that decision.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘Maybe I did have it. Maybe if I believed that Harvey and I could get him through alive, then I had to believe that if we didn’t go, he wouldn’t get through alive. Once you’ve become a man like me, you can’t just step aside. That’s a decision in itself.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, not looking at me but staring out across the valley. ‘Yes – you believed that you, only you, could fight this dragon. And the next also. And the next. So you will never step aside. And so there will one day be the last one.’

  I said harshly: ‘I’m a professional. When Lambert took that boat out, he was an amateur; he’d been growing grapes for fifteen years. If I’d been in that boat, it either wouldn’t have sailed – or it wouldn’t have got sunk.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she nodded dreamily. ‘Yes, he was an amateur by then. Almost enough of an amateur to step aside, not to go.’

  Then she looked at me and smiled her sad half-smile and said: ‘I killed Lambert.’

  I said: ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘No. I could have stopped him going. But I believed I was doing a woman’s job – not interfering. And I also believed that it would never happen to him, not this time. Perhaps next time – but perhaps I believed there would never be a next time. You see? – I can also think like a gunman. I could have stopped him – but I let him go, so I killed him.’

  I moved my face stiffly in a lot of pointless expressions.

  She said slowly: ‘So I was wrong. And so perhaps I was wrong in another way… I married Lambert because I believed, with him, the war would be over. With you – when you stopped being Caneton you went immediately into the Secret Service. Your war was not over.’

  I nodded vaguely. Maybe so.

  ‘I did not know then that it wasmy work to see that the war was over. So I should have gone with you, instead, and stopped you fighting your war.’ She looked at me steadily. ‘I wanted to, Louis, I wanted to.’

  My face felt as stiff as a stone post. It isn’t every day the only woman who ever mattered to you tells you she was wrong in marrying someone else – and is maybe telling you it isn’t too late yet. If you’re lucky, it happens just one day in a lifetime. And on the day you’re booked to haul a rich tax-dodger to Liechtenstein.

  I shook my head. ‘You were right first time, Ginette.

  With me – I’d have been off playing games with people like Maganhard or-‘

  ‘Pardon me, but you would bloody well not.’ I looked at her quickly; she seemed very calm, very certain. Maybe a bit too much so.

  ‘It was fifteen years ago,’ I said.

  ‘You believe you have changed so much in that time?’

  I scowled. ‘All right, maybe I haven’t changed enough: I’m still Caneton. But it’s too late to change that now. I’m too old to go back and start learning to be a lawyer and how to do legal things like getting film stars out of drunk-driving charges.’

  ‘You would not have to go back. There is work here: Clos Pinel needs a manager.’

  Just like that.

  The garden was quiet around us, as quiet as it ever gets in the south, with just the dull chirping of cicadas that you can’t believe even cicadas listen to. The sun was a flare of white light drifting towards the blue hills, and leaving just a hint of the faint burnt smell of summer. And all I had to say was Yes.

  But there were other hills: the green, misty damp slopes of Switzerland. And I’d said Yes to them three days ago.

  I said: ‘I’ve got a job, Ginette. One that I’m good at.’

  ‘I am not offering you charity, Louis. You would work very damn hard in this business.’

  ‘Would I have to learn to love Pinel?’

  ‘It would not be much more illegal than your work now.’

  I shook my head slowly. ‘I’ve still got a job.’

  ‘You would be good at it,’ she said rapidly. ‘We want your contacts, your experience of business and the law. We export everywhere now, to London, to-‘

  ‘Ginette!’ Her voice had had a hard brittle edge that in anyone else I’d have called fear.

  She held herself very still, her head up, her eyes tight shut.

  I took a step and put my arms round her and her body reached against me, hard and trembling. Her face lifted to mine.

  A pistol cracked in the Château.

  EIGHTEEN

  I was saying: ‘Nobody fires just one shot to kill a man; always two. And if he’d killed Harvey, there’d be Maganhard, or Maganhard if he’d killed Harvey. Tell me I’m right – quick.’

  She was crouched, too, down beside the laurels at the edge of the lawn. Old reactions die hard.

  ‘It’s your drunken friend Harvey shooting up the bottles in the Wild West saloon.’

  I’d guessed that, too, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Why should he stop at bottles? And I still wasn’t carrying the Mauser.

  I stood up reluctantly and walked
across the gravel towards the front door. It felt as wide as the desert.

  Inside the front hall three people were standing as stiff as a waxworks tableau. Harvey was leaning against the wall on my right, with the gun pointing vaguely down towards his own feet but not looking any less dangerous because of that. Maurice was backed up against the opposite wall, staring at Harvey with a look about as friendly as a hungry vulture. Miss Jarman was just standing. The phone was off its hook and lying on the floor.

  The gun twitched my way as I came in. I said: ‘Put that damn thing away. What’s happened here?’

  Harvey said: ‘I just kind of don’t like men attacking women – you know?’ His voice was carefully languid, but a bit thick, as if he was having to pick each word one at a time. Probably he was, by now.

  ‘Well, it’s over now. Get back to your bottle.’ I turned to Maurice.‘Pourquoi-‘

  Harvey said carefully: ‘I heard her yell so I came out and there was this guy fighting with her.’

  Miss Jarman said: ‘I was just trying to use the telephone, when-‘

  ‘Who to?’

  She stared innocently at me, eyes wide. ‘To… a friend. I thought-‘

  I took a couple of quick steps and picked up the phone.

  ‘Qui et-‘ But the line was dead by now. I slammed it back.

  ‘I put a security blackout on the use of this phone,’ I said. ‘Maurice was just interpreting that for me. Call it a misunderstanding. All right -who were you ringing?’

  ‘A friend. ‘ Her chin was up and she had the girls’ boarding-school expression on her face. She wasn’t telling who put frogs in the Latin mistress’s bed.

  ‘All right,’ I said again. ‘But if you’re selling us out, remember the methods they’ve used so far: you stand as good a chance of stopping a bullet as anybody. Maybe better, If they don’t get me with the first shot.’

  Harvey had straightened up off the wall. ‘And kind of what the hell are you talking about?’

  I swung round. I’d had just about enough of him and his thirst and his tendency to pull his gun on the wrong people. Maybe he wouldn’t get his gun up level before I’d broken his wrist for him…

  Ginette said: ‘Give Louis the gun or I will kill you.’

  We both looked. She was standing in the shadows at the back of the hall, leaning stiffly against the wall, with the Mauser held in both hands out in front of her.

  ‘It is on automatic, Mr Lovell,’ she added.

  ‘You wouldn’t fire that thing in here,’ he said slowly. He studied her carefully: the way she was holding it meant she knew what she was holding – and he could see that.

  She said contemptuously: ‘Bet your life on it, then.’

  He took a long breath. A gunman believes he can never be beaten – but he knows damn well when he has been. She had the Mauser aimed low, to allow for the kick. Whatever he did now, he’d get filleted like a fish if she pulled that trigger.

  He tossed me his gun.

  Ginette said: ‘Thank you. Please remember I have the exclusive shooting rights in my own house. Where did that bullet go, Maurice?’

  He indicated a hole in the wall near the telephone.

  Ginette came up to us and offered me the Mauser. I shook my head. ‘It’s over now. I’ll get him to bed.’ I stuck his gun in my pocket.

  Harvey was watching me with a faraway look and a twist of cynical amusement at the edge of his mouth. ‘I could take you even without a gun,’ he offered.

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe. We’ve both been through unarmed-combat school. It wouldn’t prove anything.’

  He nodded and started towards the stairs. I said to Miss Jarman: ‘Get whatever bottle he was using.’

  ‘Don’t you think he’s had enough?’ She was still back in the fifth-form dormitory.

  I shook my head wearily. ‘It doesn’t matter what you or I think. Just get the bottle.’

  I followed Harvey upstairs. At the top we met Maganhard; Harvey pushed straight past without seeming to notice him. Maganhard gave him a steely look that turned immediately into a suspicious glare. He turned to me and seemed about to say something – but I pushed past as well.

  In his bedroom, Harvey yanked the silk cover straight off the bed and dropped face down on to it, all in one movement. After a moment or two he rolled on his back. It took an effort.

  ‘Maybe I’m tired.’ He sounded faintly surprised.

  Behind me, Miss Jarman came in with a bottle of Queen Anne whisky and a glass. I took the bottle; from the weight, he’d been working on it hard.

  She asked: ‘What are you going to do? ‘

  ‘Get him ready for tomorrow.’ I poured a small dose into a glass.

  ‘With that?’

  ‘It’s what he usually gets ready for tomorrow on.’ I gave him the glass. She stared at him, then me. ‘You don’t really care, do you?’

  ‘Who were you ringing?’

  She glared. ‘Perhaps one day you’ll know.’ She slammed the door as she went out.

  Harvey raised his glass to me, and sipped. ‘You honestly think she’s selling us out?’

  ‘Somebody is.’

  ‘I kind of hope not,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘She’s a nice kid.’

  ‘It’s mutual. She wants to cure you.’

  ‘I noticed.’ He sipped again. ‘And you don’t care?’ He watched me with his little cynical smile.

  ‘Not my business. After tomorrow, you and I daren’t meet. You know that.’

  ‘I know.’ He emptied the glass.

  I stretched out my hand for it. ‘More?’

  He shrugged his shoulders on the pillow. ‘I guess so.’

  I walked back to the bottle on the dressing-table. He said: ‘If I’m a good boy, do I get my gun back?’

  ‘Sorry; I’d forgotten.’ I’d been hoping he’d remind me. I took out the little revolver, swung the cylinder, and poked out the empty cartridge. ‘Got any more rounds?’

  ‘Coat pocket.’

  His jacket was hung on a chair. I got my back to him and groped in both side pockets. I got a fresh cartridge with one hand, and a bottle I hoped was his sleeping pills with the other. I slid the round into the gun, closed it up, and tossed it on to the foot of the bed.

  By the time he’d reached for it, checked it over just as I knew he would, as any gunman would after somebody else had handled his gun, there were three tablets at the bottom of his glass. I didn’t know just what they were, or what dose they should have been; Idid know that mixing two depressants like alcohol and barbiturates isn’t a good idea. But it was less risk than he’d meet tomorrow if he finished off that bottle tonight.

  I poured whisky on top and gave it a moment to dissolve them by going to find a glass of my own over by the washbasin. A bit of cloudiness wouldn’t show through the cut glass tumbler, and by now his sense of taste would be shot.

  I poured my own drink and gave him his.

  ‘You’re an understanding sort of bastard,’ he said slowly. ‘Or maybe you’re just a bastard. Understanding somebody is a pretty lousy thing to do to him.’ He turned his head wearily and looked up at me. ‘Well, you’re the Professor, and here I am on the couch. D’you want me to tell you my dreams?’

  I sat down on the chair with his jacket slung over the back. ‘Could I stand them?’

  ‘Maybe. They ain’t fun, but you get used to them.’

  ‘D’you get used to how you feel in the mornings?’

  ‘No. But you can’t remember how bad it was, ever. Still, if you thought tomorrow was as important as today, you wouldn’t be a – a drinker, would you?’

  ‘You’re over-simplifying,’ I said. ‘You want to think you’re basically different in outlook from everybody else. You aren’t. You just drink more, that’s all.’

  By now the pill bottle was back in his jacket pocket.

  He smiled. ‘That’s good head-shrinking, Professor. But you want to know the worst thing? You don’t taste it any more. That’s all. You just don’t taste it.’
He sipped and held the glass up to the light and stared through it. ‘You just remember going into some place in Paris where they know how to mix a real martini. Get in there around noon, before the rush starts, so they’ll have time to do it right. They like that: they like a guy who really cares about a good drink – so for him, they get it right. Mix it careful and slow, and then you drink it the same way. They like that, too. They don’t have to think you’re going to buy another one. Just once in a time they like to meet a guy who’ll make them do some real work and appreciate it when they’ve done it. Pretty sad people, barmen.’

  He took a gulp at his drink and went back to watching the ceiling. His voice was slow and quiet and he wasn’t talking to me and perhaps not even to himself. Just to a door that had closed on him a long time ago.

  ‘Just cold enough to make the glass misty,’ he said softly. ‘Not freezing; you can make anything taste as if it might be good by making it freezing. That’s the secret of how to run America, if you want to know it, Cane. And no damn olives or onions in it, either. Just a kind of smell like summer.’ He moved his head on the pillow. ‘I haven’t had a martini in an elephant’s age. You don’t taste it. Now – now all you think of is the next one. Christ, but I’m tired.’

  He stretched an arm to put the tumbler on the bedside table, missed, and it thumped on the carpet, spilling a few drops.

  I stood up. His eyes were closed. I put down my own glass and moved softly towards the door. I had my hand on the knob when he said: ‘I’m sorry, Cane. Thought I could last it out.’

  ‘You lasted. It was the job that stretched.’

  After a few moments he said: ‘Maybe… and maybe if I hadn’t got hit—Probably not, though.’ Then he turned his head and looked at me. ‘You said something back there: that I wasn’t basically different from anybody else. I kill people, Professor.’

  ‘You could give it up.’

  He smiled very slowly and wearily. ‘But not until after tomorrow – is that right?’

  After a few more moments, I went out. I felt as noble and helpful as the spilled dregs on the carpet.

  Maganhard and Ginette were standing at the top of the stairs looking as if they’d been trying to find something polite to say to each other but not getting far. Maganhard swung round as I came along and forgot about politeness.