Sir Denis performed a flat uninflected introduction: “Emil Grossbarger, may I present Baron Chase from Uganda. Baron Chase, Emil Grossbarger from Zurich.”
“Forgive me if I don’t stand,” Grossbarger said, gesturing at the walker beside his chair. “I’m not ze man I was.”
“I’m sure you are, Mr. Grossbarger,” Chase said, stepping briskly forward to bow slightly as he took Grossbarger’s hand. “The body may be less. I’d guess the mind is more.”
“Vat a compliment!” Grossbarger said, actually squirming with delight, pumping Chase’s hand. His mouth moved like a reflection in water, and to Sir Denis it seemed the old man really was taken with the flattery.
Releasing Grossbarger’s hand, Chase said, “May I sit?”
“Do! Do! Of course!”
The room had been arranged as if it were a stage set with Grossbarger backlighted so that his face was a dimly seen silhouette against the glare. But Chase, acting not as though to counteract that design but merely as though his own passionate interest made him want to be closer to Grossbarger, at once pulled another chair across the pale-blue carpet, leaving darker lines of ruffled nap, and placed the chair diagonally to Grossbarger’s right, so that now Chase would be facing him directly (without the window in his line of sight) while Grossbarger would have to turn his head somewhat.
But Chase didn’t immediately sit. He stood behind the chair, both hands on its back, like an agnostic listening to pre-dinner grace, while Grossbarger beamed at Sir Denis, saying, “Sank you for bringing zis chentleman to see me.”
“My pleasure,” Sir Denis said, but he could see that it was in truth Emil’s pleasure, that Emil saw in Chase another player of The Game, saw at once the possibilities for both conflict and mutual understanding available only to those who share the same secret life and world view. Professional tennis players and military leaders and politicians all are closer to their opponents than to anyone in the outside world. The off-duty policeman would rather talk shop with a burglar than mortgages with the next-door neighbor. In the same way, Emil Grossbarger was already closer to Baron Chase than he would ever be to Sir Denis Lambsmith, and Sir Denis recognized this fact with an inevitable twinge of envy and a reluctance to depart.
However, Grossbarger’s expression of thanks had been Sir Denis’s cue to leave, and so he did, saying, “Well, as you know, I can’t stay, but I was happy to be able to bring you together.”
“Delightful,” Grossbarger agreed, while Chase contented himself with a cold smile of dismissal.
As he was leaving the office, the door not yet completely closed, he heard Grossbarger say apologetically, “I am so sorry, Mr. Chase. My neck, ze strain. If you could move your chair just slightly. Sank you so much.”
He wanted me to hear him win that round, Sir Denis thought, and he walked back toward the elevator smiling.
There were fewer people in Harrods than during the holidays, but the customers were still primarily tourists from the Continent. Combining this fact with the high percentage of Pakistanis and Indians and other Commonwealth citizens among the store’s sales employees, there tended to be any number of comic vignettes going on at all times. Appreciatively Sir Denis watched the performance as a Norwegian woman attempted to pay a Pakistani salesgirl for a Japanese calculator in kroner, but he felt rather sorry for the Danish man with scanty English attempting to buy an Italian suit in the right size from a self-important Indian salesman who had apparently no English at all.
For the most part, though, Sir Denis ignored the passing vaudeville of sales transactions between pairs of people who lacked a common language or currency or agreement on clothing sizes. Instead, he concentrated on Patricia’s fashion show.
She was buying, as she had said she would, a great deal of clothing. She had been in her hotel room when Sir Denis had called her from the pay phone in the garage level of Grossbarger’s solicitor’s building, and she had clearly been delighted to hear from him. “Come with me to Harrods,” she’d said, “and help me choose my wardrobe.”
He had been happy to say yes. Grossbarger’s Daimler had returned him to the hotel on Basil Street, where he’d wondered if Patricia might invite him up to the room; but she’d come down instead, and they’d walked the few blocks to Harrods, and now he was having the time of his life, seated on a small but comfortable chair while Patricia paraded before him in dress after dress, sweater after sweater, blouse after blouse.
Alicia, whom he had loved absolutely, had never given him this treat, had never even led him to suspect that such gratification existed. Her own clothes buying had been done almost exclusively in solitary twice-a-year campaigns; forays against the shops organized as by a general brilliant in tactics, from which Alicia invariably returned exhausted and triumphant. That the expedition could instead have a wonderful languorous hint of the harem about it, Sir Denis had never guessed; again his gratitude toward Patricia informed his more carnal feelings.
After an hour or so, during which Patricia selected a variety of garments and instructed they all be delivered to the hotel, she suddenly said, “I’m famished. Come upstairs, let me give you lunch on my expense account.”
It was just lunchtime, and the broad, cream-colored, low-ceilinged room on the top public floor was half-filled, mostly with middle-aged women. Patricia selected their wine and guided Sir Denis in his choice of entrée with that easiness of manner that had only recently come to women; the motherly waitress seemed to admire it from afar, as though she found Patricia’s manner as unattainable as her beauty.
Over glasses of Chablis, Sir Denis said, “When do you have to see your American Embassy man?”
“Oh, not till tomorrow. We’re forbidden to do business the same day we arrive. Jet lag, you know.”
“Chase seemed untroubled by jet lag.” Sir Denis was chagrined to hear the jealousy in his voice: of Chase and Patricia? Chase and Grossbarger?
“Oh, Chase,” Patricia said dismissively. “He isn’t human, he’s a cat. Do you know, he slept from the instant he boarded that plane until the announcement to fasten our seat belts for landing?”
“Did he really? I envy that.” It was pleasant to find a safe outlet for the expression of his envy.
“He’s so cold,” she said, and shivered.
“He is that.”
Suddenly much more serious, she leaned forward, reaching across to cover his hand with hers. “You ought to look out for Baron Chase,” she said.
“Oh, I agree.”
“No, I mean it.” She hesitated, then plunged forward. “I can tell you things now that I couldn’t say in Kampala.”
Immediately there flooded into Sir Denis’s mind the memory of his unguarded conversation with Patricia that first night she had come to his room. The next day he had been astounded at the openness with which he’d answered everything she’d asked, particularly given his memory of Chase’s earlier warning that the rooms were undoubtedly wired. He was not a stupid man, and it had occurred to him to wonder if she had doped him with that wine, but ultimately he had decided she had not. He wanted to believe in her—that was the most important thing—but he had other evidence as well: the fact that he was a businessman dealing with businessmen and not a spy dealing with spies; the fact that his secrets were all so small and unimportant and mercantile; and the fact that she had come back to him the next two nights, when there had been no questions and no loose talk.
Now, in confirming to him again the warning that the rooms at the Presidential Lodge were bugged, she re-aroused that worry, and gave it an additional wrinkle of complexity. Was she guilty after all, and speaking to him now out of the subtlety of the spy? Or was her reference to the eavesdroppers the final proof of her innocence?
Exploring that ambiguity, as one pokes one’s tongue experimentally against the aching tooth, Sir Denis said, “I seem to remember I told you far too many things in Kampala.”
She closed her eyes as though embarrassed, her hand clenching on his. “Oh, I know,�
� she said, and opened her eyes to stare at him. “We were too excited, my darling, and we got a little drunk. The next day I remembered—And how I led you on—Thank God you didn’t say anything against Amin.”
That possibility had never even crossed Sir Denis’s mind; he’d been too concerned about his merchant’s secrets. But if he’d said disparaging things about Idi Amin? If he’d made fun of the man? Less than two years ago, Amin had imprisoned a British writer named Dennis Hills for having said in a book that Amin was a “village tyrant.” Hills had been sentenced to death, and had been released only when British Foreign Minister James Callaghan flew to Uganda to plead personally for Hills’s life. (That time, Amin had been seated in a hut with a very low door, so Callaghan had to bow as he entered Amin’s presence.)
Patricia smiled reassuringly, squeezed his hand once more, and said, “Well, it’s over. We were lucky, my dear, and we didn’t let it happen again.”
“No, we didn’t.” With his free hand, Sir Denis lubricated his dry mouth with wine.
“The point is,” Patricia said, returning to earnest seriousness, “Baron Chase is up to something.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”
“I suspect,” she said, “he’s planning to betray Amin in some way.”
“If so,” Sir Denis said, “he’s either a braver or a more foolhardy man than I am.”
“Please don’t repeat this,” she said, looking very tense and worried. “Not to anybody.”
“You have my word.”
“And don’t let him involve you. Whatever it is he’s doing, don’t let him convince you to help him.”
“Certainly not.”
“Do you know why he’s in London?” Then, obviously seeing the quandary in Sir Denis’s face—should he mention Grossbarger or lie to her?—she laughed and patted his hand, saying, “I know about Emil Grossbarger.”
“Good,” he said, smiling back, relieved.
She released his hand to sip wine, then didn’t take his hand again. “Officially,” she said, “he’s come here to talk with the Grossbarger Group—which of course means Grossbarger—”
“Of course.”
“—about the planes for the coffee airlift to Djibouti.”
Sir Denis lifted an eyebrow: so that was Chase’s story. “I see.”
She had been watching him keenly. Now she smiled again and said, “No, you don’t believe it, either.”
“I don’t?”
“It’s too small a mission,” she said. “Anyone could have done it. I could do it. Chase could even have done it with a phone call.”
“I agree.”
“But Grossbarger requested the meeting personally,” she said, “and asked for Chase.”
“Direct action,” Sir Denis commented admiringly.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. “I think Chase is trying to make some sort of deal of his own with Grossbarger. Remember, in Uganda he wouldn’t tell you what his message to Grossbarger was?”
That was one of the things he’d babbled away about that first night. Wincing at the memory, he said, “Yes, of course I remember.”
“Well, somehow he did get his message through to Grossbarger, and Grossbarger is interested, and now they’re trying to work out some sort of deal together.”
“I daresay you’re right,” Sir Denis said; what he didn’t say was that he knew for a fact she was right. Wondering if she knew more than he did, he said, “What sort of deal do you think it is?”
Unfortunately, she shook her head. “I have no idea. Could it have something to do with coffee? But Grossbarger has other interests, hasn’t he?”
“Of course. Grossbarger is an investor, in whatever looks safe enough and profitable enough. The Grossbarger Group is venture capital at a very high level.”
“But he’ll talk with Baron Chase,” she said, frowning with the intensity of her bewilderment. “What on Earth could Chase be offering him?”
“I’ve asked myself that same question a dozen times,” Sir Dennis said, “without finding a satisfactory answer.”
“Is he selling Uganda?” That had been said facetiously, but then she frowned again, saying, “I wonder. Is he selling Uganda?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Revolution,” she suggested. “Could Chase be talking to Grossbarger about financing a revolution? There’d certainly be profit in it if the revolution succeeded.”
Sir Denis shook his head. “I know Emil Grossbarger fairly well,” he said. “I imagine he’s capable of very many things, but he wouldn’t touch a revolution.”
“Not under any circumstances?”
“Not under any circumstances. Revolution is emotion, and Emil Grossbarger won’t put his money on another man’s emotion.”
Patricia laughed, in surprise as much as pleasure. “You read people very well,” she said. “I wonder what you think of me.”
“You know what I think of you,” he said, and was gratified to see that special sensual smile touch her lips.
The motherly waitress was bringing their food at last. Patricia said, “I’ve done enough shopping for today. After lunch, I’d love to go back to the hotel and just rest awhile, but I don’t want to run into Chase.”
“Come to my hotel,” he suggested, trying to be casual but already feeling the heat of arousal in his body.
“Delicious idea,” she said, smiling again in that same way.
The waitress walked off frowning, glancing back over her shoulder at the stylish young black woman and the distinguished elderly white man.
Anne wasn’t using the farm in Sussex that weekend, so on Saturday Sir Denis and Patricia drove down there in a rented Ford Escort. On the way, they talked together easily, comfortably, each dipping into that store of anecdote freshly available with the advent of a new partner. They touched on the question of Grossbarger and Chase only once, and glancingly, when Patricia said, “Why did you have to meet Chase at the airport?” He explained then his role in introducing the two men, and she said, “So you’re the go-between.”
“I suppose I am, in a way.”
“I’m surprised they wouldn’t tell you what it was all about.”
“They think I’m too sort of honest,” he said, with a self-deprecating smile.
She studied him sharply for a few seconds, then smiled, visibly relaxing, saying, “And of course they’re right.”
“Thank you,” he said.
At Foxhall (pronounced Foxell or, when the natives were trying for wit, Fossil) Sir Denis turned left onto the small macadam road, barely two lanes wide, that led after several miles to the farm. “That’s my land there,” he said, nodding at the freshly turned earth under the cloud-filled sky.
“You farm it?” She sounded amazed and delighted.
Unfortunately he had to say, “No, I lease most of the land to local men. All I keep for myself is the house and the woods.”
He had been hesitant at first about bringing her up here, but the closer they got to the place the more he knew he was doing the right thing. In the old days he’d had a great deal of pleasure and contentment here, but in the years since Alicia’s death the farm had taken on a different meaning in his life; it had become a solitary place, where he could work and read, but not particularly a place of joy or serenity. Introducing Patricia to the farm would shake it up, renew his relationship with it. And perhaps with himself.
Leading from the road to the house was a quarter-mile gravel lane between fields; the one on the left recently plowed, the one on the right still with its spring stubble of dead stalks and fresh weeds. At first the house was invisible, its presence indicated only by the cluster of evergreens at the end of the lane, standing there like a Swiss Guard in uniforms of dark green. The house itself stood in their midst, a low two stories, half-timbered, with beams of so dark a brown they seemed black against the white plaster. Faintly visible behind and to the left were a springhouse and the nearest barn, both lumpy humble structures of
native stone.
“It’s beautiful,” Patricia said, leaning forward to smile at the house through the windshield. “It’s a fairy tale.”
Sir Denis smiled. A house of this design, nestled alone in the woods, always made people think of fairy tales. He normally responded to comments like that by saying, “If you owned it, you wouldn’t think so. For me, it’s plumbing problems, mildew, cracking plaster, field mice, and outrageous taxes.” But with Patricia he forbore; he wasn’t of a mind to spoil the mood.
The Kenwyns were a local farm couple who leased some of his land and who also took care of the house during those long periods when neither he nor his daughter was in residence. Sir Denis had phoned them from London this morning, so when he and Patricia entered the house, it had been aired out to some extent (though the mustiness of disuse remained faintly discernible) and most of the surfaces were dusted. The central heating (still considered a luxury in this corner of England) had been turned up, and a fire had been laid in the beam-ceilinged living room. Mrs. Kenwyn having asked if Sir Denis was bringing a guest, two of the bedrooms upstairs would have been readied; to avoid shocking local sensibilities, he would have to remember to muss up the guest-room bed before departure on Monday.
They carried the luggage upstairs, where Sir Denis pointed out the woods visible from the master-bedroom windows, stretching away for more than a mile into the countryside. “Later on,” he said, “if you feel like it, we can go for a walk. I’m sure I have wellies you could wear.”
“That’s later,” she said. “Right now, I very much want to be made love to.”
“I am at your command,” he said, and she took him at his word.
They never did get outdoors again that day. Between napping and lovemaking, Saturday was nearly at an end before they came back downstairs, he in his mildew-tinged old maroon silk robe, Patricia looking like a sexy, wayward little girl inside the massive quilted pink folds of an ancient robe of Alicia’s. They made a supper out of tins, and Sir Denis lit the fire the Kenwyns had prepared in the living room. Seated on the long sofa facing the fire, they drank a Saint-Émilion from his cellar and talked about their lives from before they’d known each other, and the darkness beyond the windows was unbroken by any sort of light.
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