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 predinner 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 zo 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 welclass="underline" 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.)