by Gavin Lyall
The Sergeant said smartly: ‘Yessir. That is what counts.’
‘You see?’ the man by the fire said. ‘It’s the man that counts.’
I was getting that floating feeling that comes with an influenza fever or trying to understand tax laws. I groped around for a chair. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s just take it that I can count.’
The old boy let out a rasping gurgle that could have been a chuckle. ‘You know, Sergeant – I don’t think he knows who I am.’
I sat down. ‘I just guessed. You’re General Fay.’ The man I’d come to Montreux to see.
In my line of business, the General had been a legend for a long time, but I hadn’t realised just how long. He was some relic of the First World War who’d somehow got himself running a business intelligence network. If you wanted to know whether a company was going bust, was ripe for takeover, or was about to raise new share capital, the General would find out for you – at a price. His prices were something of a legend, too; that was why I’d never had any dealings with him before. But if you were in his price bracket -and a lot of people in Montreux were – the legend said he gave good value.
He gave another rasping chuckle. ‘Right. And this is Sergeant Morgan, me driver.’ Once you got used to the sheer age in his voice, you could spot the out-of-date British upper-class accent that uses ‘me’ for ‘my’ and says ‘orf for ‘off’. ‘And who are you?’
Sergeant Morgan said: T think he followed me from the caféwhere I saw Mr Maganhard, sir.’ He was standing in a stiff at-ease position, hands behind his back, and lowering at me. It was going to take him a lot of work to learn to love me, and so far he wasn’t even trying.
‘Ah.’ The General’s half-hooded eyes fixed on me again. ‘So you’re something to do with that damn fool Maganhard, are you? Who are you, boy?’
‘Call me Caneton.’
‘Ah – then I’ve heard of you. Special Operations Executive, eh? Good, tough, tricky bunch. Thought you couldn’t have been real army – wouldn’t have had the gumption to point a gun at an old man like me. Lot of old women in the last war – weren’t they, Sergeant?’
Morgan said smartly: ‘Yes, sir, they were that.’
‘Lot of old women. You know they pulled a regiment out of the line when it had less than twenty per cent casualties? In our day, it had to be eighty per cent.’
I nodded vaguely. The cross-talk act was getting me dizzy again, and the jungle temperature of the room wasn’t helping. I could have done without my raincoat, jacket, and shirt, and still been sweating. But I’d already pointed a gun at him, then sat down before being asked. Even Special Ops manners don’t allow yanking off all your clothes, unless there are ladies present.
I shook my head and tried to get back to within shouting distance of reality. But the General did it for me. ‘All right. So you saw the Sergeant see Maganhard, and followed him. Not difficult. Morgan’s a damn fool at this slippery-secret stuff. Very good. What’s your offer?’
‘For what?’
‘For not telling the police, you damn fool.’
I must have been wearing my dazed look. We were back to reality with a thump. Now I had a nice little case of blackmail on my plate. I was beginning to see how the General managed to maintain a permanent suite of rooms with his own furniture in the Victoria – and why his first thought had been that I’d come up to kill him.
I stalled: ‘Have the police been asked to pick up Maganhard?’
The half-hooded eyes watched me steadily. Then he husked: ‘Good question. No fool, this man. Police can’t arrest and extradite without an official request from somebody abroad. Can’t act just on a story in the Journal de Genèvealone. Unless’ – and the hoods lowered just a fraction – ‘unless he crossed the frontier illegally. That would mean he’d committed an offence in Switzerland, wouldn’t it?’
‘If they could prove it.’
‘You’re more of a fool than I thought, boy. Maganhard must have crossed illegally: he was seen in France only yesterday.’
‘You mean by somebody who’s still alive?’
He just looked at me – ‘stared’ is too strong a word for what those wet, pale eyes could do, but it was a steady, straight look. Then he grunted. ‘Ah. Wondered if that shooting up in the Auvergne yesterday was something to do with you. So I was right first time. You’re a killer but not a fool. Sergeant! knock “illegal entry” off the bill. We’ll let you have that free. Back where we started: have the Swiss police had an official request? Sergeant!’
Morgan took a couple of heavy steps towards the white telephone on the far side of the fire. I said: ‘Hold it.’
He stopped. Both of them looked at me.
I said: ‘Let’s get my position clear. I’d like that information, and I’m ready to pay for it. But let’s forget any idea of you selling out Maganhard to the cops if I don’t play your game.’
There was a silence. Then the General said calmly: ‘And why shouldn’t I? I sell information for a living. I’m just giving you a chance to bid against the police, as it were. I’m a businessman.’
‘So am I. And I agreed to get Maganhard to Liechtenstein, for a fee. I’m going to do that.’
‘It won’t be your money, lad. Maganhard will pay. Just tell him there’s a special toll for coming through Montreux.’
I took a deep breath and said: ‘General, you don’t get the point. I’m running this trip, not Maganhard. I won’t even ask him to make a decision on this: making decisions is my job. I’ve decided that if your sergeant picks up that phone and says anything dangerous to the police, I’ll kill both of you.’
There was another silence. Then the General said: ‘Waste of time threatening an old man like me. Only one flicker of the candle left in me, anyway. Could be snuffed out by natural causes tomorrow, so I haven’t got much to lose.’
I nodded gently. ‘Only as much as anybody else: the rest of your life. I don’t mind how short it is.’
The silence grew long and thick, and the cloying heat of the room began to crawl up my back on wet, prickly feet. But I had to sit still and watch that crumbled ruin of a face and guess at the foxy mind behind it, counting the last of its shares in a company called Life.
I knew I was going to win. Point a gun at a young man and he’ll jump you because he can’t believe in himself dying. But an old man has thought about it. He’s seen the crack in the door widen and felt the draught come through.
I shook my head and tapped the little gun impatiently on my knee. ‘Well?’
The General raised his head slowly and the pale eyes looked into mine. ‘Damn you,’ he said. ‘All right – you can keep your Maganhard.’
Then the sides of his mouth began to crawl slowly up, and up, into the faint memory of a smile. ‘Damn you,’ he rasped again, ‘the Special Ops people would be proud of you.’
I leered weakly at him. I wasn’t proud of anything.
He jacked his head round to the man by the telephone. ‘Sergeant! Get out a bottle of the Krug. My friend and I have things to discuss.’
Morgan looked at his watch. ‘But, sir-‘
‘Sun’s over the yard-arm in the Tibetan navy,’ the General squawked. ‘Get me my champagne, dammit.’
Morgan shook his head severely, said, ‘Very good, sir,’ and went through to the next room.
It had all had an odd, practised sound, as if it were a little ritual they went through at this time of every day. Probably it was.
The General turned slowly back to me. ‘I hope you drink champagne in the mornings, sir?’
‘Rather than at any other time.’
‘Quite right. After lunch, it becomes a drink for little girls.’ His eyes closed slowly, then opened again. ‘Not that I used to mind little girls, after lunch. Not too soon after, of course.’
I nodded feebly and stood up and took off my raincoat and jacket, opened my shirt neck, and took another look around the room. There was a big, oval dining-table surrounded by expensive-looking antiq
ue chairs at the far end, a number of small writing-tables and tall brass lamps, and, hung over the fireplace, about a dozen antique pistols.
I don’t know much about old pistols since I’ve never had the money to spend on them or the sort of wall to hang them on, but even I could see that these came off the very top shelf. If there was anything as cheap as wood and iron in them, it was well covered up with mother-of-pearl, gold, silver, brass, or merely engraved steel panels. One had a butt of ivory, carved as a head of a Roman soldier and the hammer shaped like an Imperial eagle. The rest weren’t far behind.
‘Probably the best collection for its size in the world,’ the General said contentedly. ‘Eighteenth-century flintlocks, as you must know, sir.’ I just nodded again. I hadn’t known anything of the sort. He went on: ‘I’ve got a Cazes there, and a Boutet, and-‘
Morgan came back with a bottle and a couple of tulip glasses on a silver tray.
He’d taken off his raincoat and was down to a plain black uniform with a row of 1914-18 medal ribbons. As he bent over to pour the champagne, he developed a hard bulge in his hip pocket, so the General’s collection of pistols hadn’t stopped at the end of the eighteenth century. I decided to let him keep it: if I took it off him, he’d only find something else and be a lot more tricky hiding it.
Morgan passed me a glass. The General stirred his with a gold swizzle stick and explained: ‘Old turn can’t take the bubbles these days. Your health, sir.’
We drank, and I remembered not to tell him I thought it was good stuff; he belonged to the days when everybody served only the best and to remark on it would suggest you’d expected something worse.
Instead, I said: ‘How did you come into this work, General?’
‘Ha.’ He put his glass down with a careful, shaky hand. ‘Shall we tell him, Sergeant? Give him our credentials and experiences before we start dealing? We might frighten him off.’
Morgan grinned back at him. I had an idea he’d have liked to see me frightened. He resented my threatening his master a lot more than the master himself did.
The General said: ‘Well, no matter. We’ve been here since 1916, and we’ve only gone up one rank since. We were Colonel and Corporal then. I was on Haig’s intelligence staff, and he sent us over to start our own spy ring. He didn’t trust the civil secret service. Damn fool didn’t trust anybody -didn’t trust us as soon as we were over the border. Did he, Sergeant?’
Morgan shook his head gravely.
‘Damn fool,’ the General said again, and I assumed he still meant the Field-Marshal, not the Sergeant. ‘I gave him Ludendorff’s artillery planand his idea of using picked stormtroopers for the 1918 push. And he didn’t listen. So that’s why he got surprised in March. Damn fool never forgave me being right about that. Gave us both new ranks and kicked us straight out. We must have been the first people demobilised, weren’t we, Sergeant?’
Morgan grinned again. ‘Just about, sir.’
‘Ha. So we just took up being what we’d been pretending to be – a retired old fogey and his chauffeur looking for a quiet life and good investments. Used the spy ring we’d started and switched it over to business information.’
He picked up his champagne again and gave a long, careful sip. ‘Now, we’d better earn our lunch, hadn’t we, Sergeant? I think we need some little pink cards here. You know which ones.’
Morgan said: ‘Yes, sir,’ and stumped out.
The General and I watched each other across our champagne glasses.
After a while Morgan came back with a handful of pink cards each about twice the size of a packet of cigarettes. The sort you use in little desk-top filing drawers.
The General dealt himself what looked like a patience hand on to the top of his invalid table, then jammed a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez on his nose and started sorting it over. Morgan poured me some more champagne.
Then the General looked up at me. ‘At least I know who you are, now.’ He read off one of the cards: ‘Lewis Cane. Wartime codename, Caneton. Ha. I see we’re in rather the same sort of business.’ He shoved the card aside.
I frowned. I should have dropped the Caneton years ago.
He was looking at me again. ‘Well, Mr Cane – have you decided what you want to buy?’
The phone rang.
Morgan picked it up, said ‘Yes?’ and listened for a moment. Then he turned and nodded to the General. The old boy reached down beside his chair and picked up a second receiver.
He said a few words in perfectly good French, but mostly just listened. Then he put the phone down and turned slowly back to me.
‘Pity I didn’t make you buy sooner, Mr Cane. Your friend Maganhard’s just been arrested.’
I thought of asking something stupid like ‘Are you sure?’ -then started thinking what sort of profit the foxy old pirate could be making from tipping the police off to Maganhard. I couldn’t think of anything. The local cops wouldn’t pay much for a mere tip-off, and the General was far too much of a solid successful citizen, in a town which exists for such citizens and no others, to need to give them something free.
I gave up and asked a sensible question: ‘Where did they pick him up?’
Tn the Cafédes Grottes. That was the proprietor who rang me.’
Morgan said: ‘That wasn’t where I saw him, sir.’
I asked: ‘Would it be the next caféup, on the same side?’
He calculated. ‘Yes, that’d be it.’
I nodded. ‘It sounds like Maganhard, all right.’ Harvey must have moved them, as I’d told him to, but probably hadn’t managed to get Maganhard to degrade himself by combing his hair differently. So he’d got nicked.
That settles one question,’ the General growled. ‘Have the police been asked to arrest Maganhard? Yes, they have. Pity. I’d planned making some money by finding out that for you.’
‘You still can,’ I said. They just might have got the idea out of the Journal de Genève. Can you find out – without tipping them off that you know he’s been picked up?’
The General just looked at me. Then: ‘Sergeant, I don’t think he was listening when I told him we’d been doing this since 1916.’
I grinned. ‘Sorry. Anyway, I’ll buy that. Did he say if anybody else had got arrested, too?’
‘Only Maganhard.’
‘Okay. I’ll be down at that café. I’ll ring you from there.’ I dived out of the room before he could start haggling over prices.
TWENTY-FOUR
It took me about five minutes to reach the Cafédes Grottes. Harvey and Miss Jarman were still there. I sat down beside them.
Harvey said: ‘It’s the end of the line, Cane. Maganhard’s-‘
‘I know. Just tell me how it happened.’
He shrugged. ‘I got them up here. He didn’t buy that idea about changing his hair-style, but I got his glasses off. Lot of damn use that was.’
I nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘I stayed by myself, playing American tourist. A cop came in for a quick coffee, and I guess he spotted Maganhard then. Then Helen’ – he nodded at Miss Jarman – ‘she went out to do some shopping. Ten minutes later the cop and a sergeant came back, picked Maganhard up, and carted him off.’
‘What did you do?’
His face was quite expressionless and his eyes were staring at me but not seeing me.
‘Nothing,’ he said calmly.
He had enough self-respect, and enough respect for my intelligence, not to offer any explanations.
Miss Jarman looked at me. ‘And where wereyou all this time?’
‘Drinking a morning glass of champagne. Come to that, what had happened to you?’
‘If you recall, Mr Cane, you made us leave all our luggage behind in France. I had to buy some things.’
‘And maybe make a few phone calls, too?’
She stared at me. After a time, she said in a small voice: ‘Perhaps.’
Harvey slumped back in his chair. ‘I could use a drink,’ he said, softly but very
positively. The girl jerked a scared look at him.
I said: ‘Not here. Get on up to the Victoria – just above the Quai des Fleures, you know? Get up to room 510, and say I sent you. You’ll find a character who looks as old as the Devil’s grandfather, and about twice as crafty. Name’s General Fay, and I’ll tell him you’re coming.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Harvey asked.
‘See if there’s a chance of bailing Maganhard out.’
When they’d gone, I walked over to the counter. Seeing me coming, the proprietor went through a mime of never having noticed me come in. He’d been watching the three of us like a nervous cobra.
I tossed a hundred-franc note on the counter.‘C’est de la part du Général, avec ses remerciements.’
He looked blank at me, and hungry at the note. I smiled reassuringly, but it wasn’t the smile which convinced him.
I nodded at the telephone on the end of the bar and asked:‘Vous permettez…?’
He smiled and bowed.‘Monsieur…’
I dialled the Victoria’s number and asked for General Fay – good and loud. I was sure he must have a private line as well, but any man whose work is collecting and selling information could never refuse any phone call.
The proprietor glanced at me and I held a finger alongside my nose and he did the same, both of us sharing a big secret and neither of us having the faintest idea of what it was.
The old voice whispered tinnily down the wire: ‘Must be losing me grip. Occurred to me after you’d gone that I could have sold you the information that Maganhard was in the coop.’
‘Well, I’ve just done you a good turn, too. I tipped the chap here a hundred francs.’
‘Far too much. Don’t expect me to refund it. D’you want to know what I found out?’
‘Go on.’
‘How much?’
‘Put it on the bill. There’ll be more yet.’
‘All right. There’s been no official request to arrest Maganhard. So they did it offtheir own bat. So we may be able to-‘
‘I’ll do it. I want you to ring the duty inspector in ten minutes: say you’ve heard he’s nicked Maganhard and you want to confirm it. Then let slip you know the French haven’t asked for it. Say you’ve heard rumours they’re dropping charges. Just get him worried. By the way – who’s the duty inspector likely to be?’