'How is any flight from Moscow, in a TU-154?'
Cagey as hell, didn't even admit he'd come from Moscow. I wasn't going to be wasting my time. He'd tested Gabrielle to see if he could speak Russian freely in front of her, and didn't admit to any French, so that I would feel free to say anything I liked to her, anything I didn't want him to understand. He was in the top echelon, I knew that — I'd been in signals with Pringle today. All the top arms dealers make it their business to swat up a bit of French, English, German, Spanish if it's not their native tongue; their trade is international and they don't want interpreters listening in.
Pringle had done well. I'd telephoned him from the post office, gone straight there after I'd booked in at the hotel. 'How soon can you contact Moscow?'
He couldn't have been ready for that but he didn't react, got straight on with it.
'I can go through the Russian telecommunications satellite direct, but it'll depend on the traffic.'
'I need an updated coverage of the top Russian arms dealers and their networks, particularly those who might be supplying or intending to supply our target.'
'Understood. This is interesting.'
'Yes.' A couple of Khmer Rouge rebels came in from the street cuddling their AK-47s and I turned to face the wall. 'A Russian flew in half an hour ago and he was met at the airfield by Colonel C. He's now booked in at the Hotel du Lac.' This amounted to interim debriefing, and yes, this time Pringle had something for London. 'Colonel C.,' I told him, 'was carrying an attache case, something like half a million US dollars in size. He left the hotel twenty minutes later, without the case.'
'What is the visitor's name?'
'He booked in as Boris Slavsky, and I've no reason to think it's a nom de geurre.' Arms dealers, especially those who wear flashy suits and eau de Red Square, are proud of their names and their reputations for selling megadeath in the marketplace.
'So you need information specifically on him.'
'Yes. By this evening if you can.'
'I shall make every endeavour.'
Pringlese for try like hell and we shut down the signal.
It took him less than two hours to contact our chief agent-in-place, Moscow, and when I phoned Pringle at six o'clock he had what I wanted, even down to a recent bit of scandal concerning Slavsky's involvement with one Fifi Dufoix, the daughter of the French ambassador to Spain: Slavsky had jumped, of necessity, from a third-floor balcony right into a garbage truck to avoid the attentions of her fiance, a national hero of the bullring at that moment murderously enraged. This I would use, but the main briefing concerned the Dmitrovich organization.
'I heard on the grapevine,' I told Slavsky now, 'that you'd be coming to town.'
He swung his head away from watching Gabrielle, and his eyes changed, blanked off. 'Which grapevine?' I knew he'd have to ask: there could have been a leak, and leaks are unwelcome in any extensive enterprise, can wreck a deal, cost money.
'There are so many grapevines,' I said, 'aren't there?' I turned to Gabrielle and said in French, 'Would you excuse us? This is business, and Boris doesn't have any French.'
'But of course.'
She was sitting stiffly in her chair, and Slavsky noticed. 'She's had an injury?' he asked me.
'Apparently she was getting a heavy video-camera off a shelf, and it swung down and bruised a rib.'
'She's a beautiful woman.'
'Isn't she? I wish I could see more of her, but I'm flying out tomorrow, and I don't want to spend tonight — you know — getting involved.' I spread my hands flat on the table. 'So many grapevines, we were saying, weren't we? Look, I'm with Dmitrovich.' I waited, watching him.
His eyes didn't change. 'Who is he?'
I sat back, leaving my hands on the table, ignoring his question. He knew the Dmitrovich group perfectly well — they controlled almost half the underground arms trade in Russia. 'The thing is,' I said, 'your client approached us first for what he needed, but our price was too rich for his blood. As you know, we choose not to be competitive, since we can always guarantee the supply and can often obtain merchandise difficult for others to acquire. Also, your client gets his pocket-money from Beijing, but that's about all it is. So, frankly, when we heard you were meeting his proposals, Dmitrovich was quite pleased.' I leaned forward again. 'It's in our interests that this particular client succeeds in reversing the status quo in Cambodia — or should I say Kampuchea? — and we're quite confident that you'll be able to help him.'
I let him think about that, and turned to Gabrielle, saying in French, 'Even if you could understand us you'd be just as bored, business being business in any language.'
'I'm not bored,' she said with a smile. 'I'm playing a game, picking out the das and the nyets, which are the only words I know. He seems a very nice man,' she added.
I'd briefed her at the mission that Slavsky spoke French but might pretend otherwise. She knew he understood what she'd just said, and that was why she'd said it.
'He's interesting,' I nodded, 'yes. Women find him attractive. Excuse us again.' I looked at Slavsky and switched to Russian. 'She's quite taken with you, I think. And by the way, you know who I ran into last week in Madrid? Little Fifi Dufoix! She married that awful matador fellow, did you hear?'
His eyes changed now. He could have killed me. Some men might have laughed it off, seen the funny side of it by this time, but not this one, not Boris Slavsky; he didn't like to have people picture him wallowing among the ripe and reeking contents of a Spanish garbage truck. But the mention of little Fifi had done its job, as I knew by the next thing he said.
'If you people turned down my client's offer in the first place, why has Dmitrovich sent you to Cambodia?'
Gloves off now.
'I wasn't actually sent. It was my own idea to come here.' Leaning forward again: 'As I say, we have every confidence in you, but as you know as well as I do, accidents happen — the source suddenly dries up, or official suspicion is aroused, supply lines are compromised, even the weather can be a problem: remember when our group was trying to deliver some goods to Serbia a couple of years ago and the transports ran into mud slides because of the rain?'
'That was Plechikov?'
I looked at him steadily, frowning.
'Plechikov?'
'Running that assignment.'
I shook my head. 'We haven't got any Plechikov with us.'
We watched each other. He'd left it late, and I'd started waiting for it, listening for it — a word or a name thrown in to check me out. I was on to it at once because it was a stock trick: he knew there was no one working with Dmitrovich called Plechikov, and so did I.
'Someone else,' he said at last.
'Actually,' I said, 'it was me. Mud up to our ears, I can tell you — and you know what those fucking Serbs tried to do to us? They gave us counterfeit German Marks!'
He lifted his head an inch, levelling his eyes. 'So somebody got shot?'
'How well you know us,' I said softly. 'Two of them, in fact, the minister and his aide. Dmitrovich offered me the pleasure of taking care of it personally.' In a moment he looked down, having seen enough of what I'd put into my eyes for his attention. 'But anyway,' I said, 'you get my point, I'm sure: in any enterprise, however well-managed — as I know yours always are — there can be problems. And I am here, with Dmitrovich's approval, to offer you our full support should you need it at any time.'
In a moment: 'Why?' He didn't like this. The door-to-door megadeath salesmen don't support one another, they cut one another's throats, and everybody knows where they are.
I shrugged. 'If you fall down on it, we'll pick it up and deliver. At your price.'