Slater was eyeing Bannerman with distaste. What was his game?
‘You can bloody well get stuffed!’ Kearney’s voice rose angrily and some heads turned in their direction. ‘It’s all right for you. You can just float in, fling the mud around and then bugger off. You’ve got no pitch to queer. Smart-assed bastard.’
‘Struck a sore point, have I?’ Bannerman asked.
‘Let’s get out of here.’ Slater took Bannerman firmly by the arm and steered him away from the bar towards the door. In the corridor he stopped him. ‘What the hell are you playing at, Bannerman?’
Bannerman lit another cigar. ‘Just pricking a few reporters to see if they bleed.’ He looked at the distraught Slater, a small man — five feet eight or nine — painfully thin, curly red hair and beard, an open-necked white shirt with the collar out over a faded blue denim jacket. And he relented a little. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m just a bit pissed off at being here at all. How about lunch?’
II
Kale got his holdall down from the rack and pulled on his coat as the train braked coming into the Gare du Nord, drawing up alongside great long trolleys that sat along the platform piled high with mail bags. A sullen youth who had sat smoking Gauloises all the way from Ostend, and a fat ruddy-faced Belgian peasant woman whose knitting lay in a shapeless grey heap on her lap, both watched him curiously. He was a foreigner. They knew that, even though none of them had spoken through the hour and a half to Brussels when dark had fallen over northern Belgium. A wordless communion had passed between the youth and the old woman, two Belgians in a railway carriage with this stranger who carried about him an air that was more than just foreign. Both felt something akin to relief when Kale slid the door open and stepped out into the corridor. A strange tension that had been a presence among them, like the clicking of the old woman’s needles or the impatient tap of the youth’s foot, seemed to blow away with the cold rush of air that swept into the carriage with the opening of the door. The old woman smiled at the youth who shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and lit another Gauloise, turning his sullen stare out of the window.
Kale shivered in the cold night air and walked the length of the platform. He seemed to be the only passenger to alight here. A guard nodded and the railwayman at the barrier waved him through. Down steps into a shopping concourse and out through glass doors into a great empty marble hall, his footsteps echoing back at him. He followed a sign out into the Rue du Progrès and headed north along the dark, cobbled street past tall crumbling tenements with steel-shuttered windows and doors. A tram emerged from an underground tunnel that led to the Pré Metro and rumbled past below the railway line that ran along the top of the embankment. Three scruffy kids on bicycles raced past in the opposite direction.
Along this street one window was lit below a neon BAR sign. A hefty middle-aged woman in a short, low-cut dress from which she bulged at all points, sat in the window looking bored and smoking a cigarette. She raised a semihopeful eyebrow when the figure of Kale passed, but it fell again into its set boredom when he did not stop. At the end of the street the lights from a café spilled out across the pavement. Kale pushed open the door and stepped into the smoky warmth.
Working men in grey jackets and cloth caps looked up from their beers and eyed him suspiciously. He was not a regular and nobody but regulars drank here. Kale drew up a chair at an empty table and dropped his bag on the floorboards. The crude wooden table rocked unsteadily, one leg shorter than the others. The barman came out reluctantly from behind the counter. ‘Monsieur?’
Bloody foreigners, Kale thought. Why can’t they speak English? ‘Bière,’ he growled and lit a cigarette. The barman poured a half litre of draught Stella and sloshed it down on Kale’s table. Kale looked at the beer that had spilled across the wood and then turned his gaze on the barman. The Belgian hesitated a moment. Normally he wouldn’t have bothered. But there was something compelling and slightly sinister in the stranger’s dark eyes. He took a cloth off the counter and lifted the beer to wipe the table and the bottom of the glass before replacing it on a cardboard beer mat.
‘Trente-cinq francs.’
Kale remained impassive and made no move to pay and the barman shifted uncomfortably. Finally he took out a pad and scribbled 35F and tore it off the sheaf, laying it down in front of the stranger. Kale looked at it, nodded, and peeled a one hundred franc note from a wad in his wallet. The barman took it and counted the change from his pocket. The half dozen other clients in the café watched in silence, a silence that became oppressively obvious. A younger man turned his gaze away from Kale and began playing the pinball machine. Subdued conversations were struck up, but the atmosphere was heavy and there were frequent glances across at the stranger.
Kale was oblivious. The beer tasted cool and good after the long eight hour journey from London. It was impossible for him now to fly anywhere on a job. The international airports were all equipped with sophisticated anti-terrorist equipment through which it would be almost impossible to carry his hardware undetected. Damn the hi-jackers, he thought. He could not understand men who would risk their lives for political ends, and they had only made life more difficult for him.
It had been a dreary trip. The ferry from Dover to Ostend had been full of winter tourists heading for ski resorts in Germany and Switzerland and Austria. A girl with long, dark hair and a careless laugh. Perhaps she would spend the cold January nights in some ski lodge drinking Schnapps with friends round a log fire. For she was sure to have friends. A girl like that. She had not noticed him sitting in a corner on a lower deck, listening uncomfortably to the innocent ramblings of an elderly German lady who remembered days in Paris after the War, and the death of her husband nine years before on holiday in Majorca. She did not seem to have felt his sour presence as others always did, as maybe the girl had and pretended not to notice. Kale had gone up on deck to escape the old lady’s innocence. There was no place for innocence in his life. It troubled him.
There had been few people on deck and it suited him better. White paintwork streaked wet with rust, the flaking varnish on the empty rows of wooden deck benches, the lifeboats that had never left their cradles. The cold, clean air had been good to breathe, the wind stiff in his face, the strange warmth of the sun on this unusually mild January day. Seagulls cawed and wheeled overhead against the palest of winter blue skies. The wash of the sea was green in their wake, England having faded from sight, the Belgian coast not yet in view. He had remained there, huddled in his coat, a solitary figure among the empty deck chairs, away from the warmth below where children wailed and ran between the benches, where their parents drank duty-free spirits and smoked duty-free cigarettes, and young people laughed carelessly, like the girl, and talked earnestly about life. His exile from life, their life, was self-imposed, he thought with some satisfaction, and for always. That way he could be almost at peace with himself in his empty existence.
He finished his beer and left the café with all its staring eyes, turned hard left into the Rue Masui, and walked another hundred metres to the dark little hotel where he had booked a room. The streets were as familiar to him as if he had lived there all his life. Every area of operation in the city had been studied carefully on the town-plan map. Each street and alley he might use were painstakingly etched in his memory.
Kale dropped his passport on the reception desk and watched as the clerk took him in and then glanced at the document. It had been carefully forged by a contact in London. A small, bespectacled jeweller near Leicester Square who was one of the few remaining true artists in his profession. Utterly discreet. Kale would have trusted no-one else.