He slid the chair back and threw his legs up so that his feet rested on the edge of his desk, a desk piled untidily high with the debris of the last month’s reports, press releases and stories. Without taking his eyes from Bannerman, he took out a match and stuck the end in one corner of his mouth, allowing himself a small, humourless grin. He wore his self-assurance sloppily, like he wore his clothes. ‘Neil Bannerman, I presume,’ he said at last in a voice gravelled by years of drink that showed clearly in the red veins on his nose. ‘Someone been having a go at you?’ He was looking at the yellow bruising down Bannerman’s face. The hostility in his voice was as identifiable as the smell of liquor on his breath. It was always the same. If you had a reputation then either people respected you for it or they tried to knock you down.
‘I fell,’ Bannerman said. ‘Maybe if I was drunk like you I’d have bounced and been none the worse for it.’ He could feel Mademoiselle Ricain’s discomfort without having to look at her. He knew her face would be flushed. People usually felt sorry for drunks and tolerated them. But any fool can be a drunk. Not a muscle moved on the crumpled face. The grin remained fixed.
‘Smart bastard, eh? That figures.’ He moved the match from one corner of his mouth to the other. ‘I heard about you the other day. Shooting your mouth off at some of the lads like you were God Almighty.’
Bannerman flicked ash from his cigar on to the floor. He was in no mood for exchanging wisecracks with a drunk. All the same, he said, ‘Maybe I am. And maybe some of the lads need a good kick up the arse.’ He paused. ‘Palin, isn’t it? Eric Palin. London Herald, ageing hack sent out to grass and pickle what remains of his liver.’
Palin snorted and his amusement seemed genuine. ‘You can think what you like.’
‘Oh, I do. And I will. I know you’re good, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Some of the best reporters around are drunks. They don’t operate at a hundred percent unless they’re half-steamed, and when they operate they’re good, damned good. But I don’t see why I should tell you that.’
‘You just have.’
‘The trouble is,’ Bannerman said, ‘it doesn’t matter how good you are, if you’re a drunk you’re only half a man. And half a man is no damned good to anybody. You can’t trust him. Your editor knows that. He’s taking a calculated short term risk in sending you out here. You’ll keep it up for a year, maybe two, then you’ll start slipping, because people like you always do. And then you’ll be out of a job so damned fast you won’t know where you’re next half s coming from.’
Palin was sharp enough to know the truth when he heard it, the truth that a man like that will never admit to himself. It hurt, because the truth usually does. ‘Go to hell,’ he snapped, taking his feet off the desk. He took the match from his mouth and leaned across the desk. ‘Think you know it all, eh?’ Amidst the anger, there was a smugness in his voice. ‘Well, you don’t know half of it, Mr. God Almighty Bannerman.’ He tapped his nose knowingly.
‘You’d better watch that,’ Bannerman said. ‘You might burst a blood vessel.’
Palin grinned his humourless grin. ‘We’ll see who it is that bursts blood vessels,’ he said.
Bannerman got up and slipped his notebook in his pocket. ‘Be seeing you.’
‘You’ll be going to the press conference, then?’ Palin asked.
‘Which one is that?’
Palin’s grin widened. ‘Tomorrow at the Rue des Quatre Bras. Minister of the Interior on the Slater deaths. Didn’t you know?’ He knew Bannerman could not have known. It had only been circulated half an hour before. Mentally he notched one up.
‘I do now,’ Bannerman said. He nodded at Mademoiselle Ricain and left. He walked the length of the corridor slowly. Palin worried him. His smugness, his self-assurance. He knew something. And not just about the press conference. He had worked in the same office as Slater for nearly a year. You don’t work as closely with someone for that length of time and not get to know something about them. However obnoxious Palin might be, he was still a good journalist. It would worry him for a while.
Palin watched the door close, anger and alcohol hardening the line of his mouth. He took out a cigarette and lit it with an unsteady hand before turning to Mademoiselle Ricain and catching the pity in her eyes. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he snapped. ‘What are you looking at?’ She flushed deeply, lowering her head quickly and starting back with her typing. ‘Take a powder, love,’ Palin said a little less harshly. She was all right. He shouldn’t have spoken to her that way. Without a word she collected her bag and left.
Palin sat for several more minutes, undecided. Then he went to the filing cabinet, unlocked it and began going through Slater’s files. They were gone. God dammit. Bannerman must have taken them. He stood up and looked quickly around the room. Then he crossed to Slater’s desk where Bannerman had been sitting and opened the top drawer. Ah, there they were. He took a flask from his hip pocket, laid back a quick snort and smiled a sort of nasty smile.
He lifted out Slater’s contacts book, shut the drawer and picked up a phone. He got an outside line, found the number he wanted and dialled. A voice reached him from the other end. He spoke French slowly and clearly. ‘Give me Monsieur Jansen’s secretary.’ He waited quite a while before another voice burned in his ear. ‘I’d like to speak to Monsier Jansen... No, he won’t know me. Just tell him I worked with a man called Timothy Slater and that I have some information to sell him. I think he’ll speak to me.’
II
The Boulevard de Waterloo was thick with people wrapped in heavy coats and brightly-coloured rainwear. They clutched umbrellas and briefcases and shopping bags, hurrying, heads bowed, through the darkness and the big white flakes of snow that fell brightly through the lights from the cafés and shops. The snow was wet and was not lying on the pavement. It came drifting in lazily over the tops of tall buildings, dark against the orange glow reflected in the thickly clouded sky, turning white in the light of the street, slapping softly against faces like the merest touch of icy fingers.
The rush hour traffic on both sides of the boulevard crawled noisily in frustrated fits and starts, carrying weary bread-winners home after long, noisy, frustrating days in anonymous offices. It was just another dark January evening in an undistinguished European capital.
Bannerman walked west from the Metro at the Porte de Namur, brushing the shoulders of people hurrying the other way, getting wet from the snow and catching the drips from passing umbrellas. It was odd, he thought, how you were no more a stranger in a busy street at the rush hour in a foreign city than you were in your home town. They were the same faces you passed anywhere. The same people you didn’t know that lived the same lives in which you played no part. He might have been just like them.
There was a time when he might have married, raised a family, mortgaged a nice house in the suburbs, taken a nice safe job in the city and been hurrying home along some city street with nothing more to worry about than what TV programme he would select to while away the night. There had been a time; but that had long since passed. He had made his choices, and some of them had been made for him. He hardly ever regretted it, though there were times when he lay alone in the dark listening to dogs barking to each other in the night and wondered how it might have been if he had followed the well-worn path, how it might have been to have had someone to come home to, someone to share a life with. But thoughts like those came only in the darkest hours, and usually he would decide it was as well things had turned out the way they had.