"Davey?"
Lexy snorted. "Yes—I can see life's going to get rather complicated, with all these different Davids . . . Davey Stein, I mean—Colonel David Stein— every time the Israelis have a war, they put him up a rank, so he'll be a general next time, David says—oops! I meant David Audley that time— sorry!"
"He's in the Israeli air force?" Roche judged that a little intelligent interpretation of Lexy's stream-of-consciousness monologues would not go amiss.
"Well—no. I mean . . . he's not a regular, like you. What David
—David Audley, darn it!—what David says is, every time Davey hears gunfire in the Middle East he just grabs the nearest plane and takes off... But he was in the RAF during the war, taking pictures—he flew Spitfires and things, you know..."
"He was in photographic reconnaissance?"
"Uh-huh, something like that. Shooting pictures, not people, is how David puts it, anyway."
What David Audley said, and how he put things, appeared to dominate Lexy's views.
"He smokes a perfectly foul pipe, but apart from that he's rather a poppet," continued Lexy. "You'll like him—he's frightfully clever, of course. But then they're all bloody clever
—Mike too, in his own quiet way. I'm the only dumb one—the mechanic—" she exhibited her hands to prove it.
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"Mike Bradford—the engineer?"
"During the war he was an engineer. With the American Army—he's an American, did I tell you?"
Roche shook his head.
"Well, he is. And he was an engineer, though I rather think he was more a blower-up of things than a builder-up, from what he says, if you know what I mean. But he's a writer now
—novels about the war with rude words in them which make a lot of money for him—the novels, I mean, not the rude words ... Or maybe it's the rude words that make the money—
David says they're authentic, anyway. Or almost authentic, because in fact it seems every other word they said in the war was a rude one, and Mike hasn't gone quite that far." She frowned at him. "Although I can't imagine Father effing and blinding all the time . . . But I suppose it was all different then . . . Anyway . . . Mike writes his books and Davey digs up old bones, and then photographs them."
Roche nodded. The logical thing was to ask her about Audley now, but a more oblique approach would be preferable there.
"I see. And they all first met during the war then, did they?"
"Did they?" She brushed at the tangle again with that characteristic gesture of hers. "I don't know . . . Were you in the war, David?"
"Do I look old enough?"
She examined him carefully. "Mmm . . . the question is, are you young-old or old-young? But probably not—not quite."
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Roche half-smiled. "Not their war. Mine was the Korean War."
"Oh ..." She sounded almost disappointed. "That was all that negotiating at Pan-mun-something, wasn't it?"
Could memories really be so short? thought Roche bitterly.
"I mean, it was a little sort of war," said Lexy.
"Not so little." The dark past rose inside Roche. "Not for all the people who died in it. It was a very big war for them."
"Oh—yes, of course!" Her face fell, and it was like the sun going behind a cloud. "I'm sorry, David—that was silly of me.
Forgive me."
With an effort, Roche pasted the half-smile back on his face.
"There's nothing to be sorry about. Compared with theirs it was a little war. And a long way away."
And besides, the wench is dead! The same words always came back to him when he was with another woman, sooner or later.
She looked at him uncertainly, still contrite.
"Mind you, it could have been a big war." He couldn't quite bring himself to change the subject, but he could drive it forward, like a barbed arrow in his flesh which could only be extracted by pushing it clear through him. "It could have been the biggest of all—if MacArthur had dropped the Bomb on the Chinese."
"The bomb?"
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"The atomic bomb. He wanted to, you know. But fortunately he got the push instead."
Lexy brightened. "Instead of dropping the Bomb, he got dropped!" she exclaimed.
The half-smile wasn't so difficult now. "Who says you're dumb? That's good."
She grinned at him ruefully. "It may be good, but it isn't me—
it's David. And the trouble is, I ought to be an authority on your Korean War. We had a whole orgy on it a few days ago—
it was Jilly's orgy, because she was mixed up in all those endless talks at Geneva or somewhere, not long after she joined the Foreign Office or whatever, and she knows all about it... Only . . . only, the minute she started talking I went straight to sleep, and I didn't wake up until the end almost, when David was on about General MacArthur getting dropped instead of the atomic bomb." She shook her blonde tangle at Roche. "You've got to face it, David—I'm hopeless, absolutely hopeless."
Roche was feeling helpless, rather than hopeless. The idea of a whole orgy on the Korean War, as observed by a very junior Foreign Office clerk just down from Oxford University, boggled his mind. Clearly, whatever activities transpired at the Orgies in the Tower, they were far removed from those of Nero and Caligula.
He looked at his watch, and discovered that he was late for his second contact.
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The second contact was a different one, and it was quite unmistakable, even allowing for the distortions of distance and technology. Accentless, passionless, almost sexless.
Genghis Khan.
"This is Johnnie—you understand?"
Absurdly, Roche smelt a faint fragrance of roses—a foully-cloying memory-smell of the spray of blooms under the lancet window of the little Sussex church, from behind which Genghis Khan had stepped. And it was the wrong church—it was too little and respectably Victorian, and altogether too far from the Genghis Khan reality: the bastide fortress-church of Saint-Maur de Neuville was Genghis Khan's church
—not where he would have worshipped, but which he would have stormed and desecrated and burnt in the midst of dead children and screaming women, better dead—
"Are you there? Do you hear me?" Still no passion, no anger, even though the questions should have contained some emotion, urgency atjhe least.
"Yes." Even with nothing to signpost it, this was a very different voice from the obsequious and deferential voice of the first contact.
"Then listen. Once only I will say. First, there is a man to beware— Raymond Galles—G-A-L-L-E-S—garage proprietor of Les Mustiques, near Les Ezyies. He was a British agent, he may still be one."
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Oh— shit!
"Yes?"
"Very well! Subject— Stein, David Aaron, reserve colonel, Heil Avir Le Israel—"
Genghis Khan wasn't wasting any time.
"—formerly flight-lieutenant, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, DFC 1944; at present Fellow of Rylands College, Cambridge, university lecturer in Paleolithic Art; nothing known—"
"Nothing known?"
"—I say once—"
"But, damn it—he was flying last year—he was with the Israelis at Suez!" protested Roche.
"And I say nothing known. Ends," snapped Genghis Khan.
" Subject, Bradford, Michael LeRoy; United States Army, 1942-46, captain 758th Combat Engineers, European theatre; visiting lecturer in English Literature and Language, Hawkins College, California; novelist; occasional script-writer, various Hollywood studios; extensive travel, Europe, Middle East, 1951 to date; known contacts CIA London, Paris, Beirut, Cairo, unconfirmed Rome, Bordeaux, Lyons.
Category 'C 1952, updated 'B' 1955. Ends."
That was better. Or not exactly better, but more predictable.