Much more to the point, she had something to give him—she would know things about Audley and all the rest of them, but most of all about Etienne d'Auberon du Cingle d'Enfer, about whom neither the British nor the Russians appeared to know. For now he had something to offer her in return, to bargain with, and he only had to make the offer, that was all.
"Very well, Madame—I will hunt the thing for you—right?"
She had expected him to say that. "And in return, Captain?"
In return, you will make hunting-magic for me. You will make pictures for me."
XII
NEITHER OF THE girls objected very strongly when Roche told them that he was going to Neuville to make his phone dummy5
call.
"You could have phoned from the château, you know," said Jilly, demurring more for form's sake than from genuine irritation, judging by the kindness of her tone. "La Peyrony lets us phone."
"But she also listens in on the extension," said Lexy. "I distinctly heard the click when she did it last time—I jolly nearly asked her if she minded me speaking English on her line, just to let her know I was on to her. But then I thought
'what the hell', and I got my own back by referring to her throughout as 'that old witch'. . . no, I don't blame you one bit, David darling. The only thing is, we're late already and it's a quarter of an hour there if you step on the gas, and quarter of an hour back, so we'll be even later still—"
"Since when did you ever worry about being late?"
murmured Jilly. "You'll be late for your wedding, always supposing you get the day right."
"Chance would be a fine thing—if I should be so lucky!" Lexy tossed her head, and then grinned at Roche. "But she's right—
and Steffy's still absent without leave, so we can always blame her. . . and it'll give them time to get tanked up and good-tempered before we arrive—so what the hell!"
"It'll also give you time to bone up on Galla Placidia and the hairy Visigoths, Lexy dear," said Jilly, rummaging among a pile of books on the chair beside her. "A bit of last minute swotting among the footnotes in the back is what you need—I bet you haven't read them."
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"Oh— eff Galla- bloody-Placidia!" exclaimed Lexy.
"That's undoubtedly what they did—or King Ataulf certainly did—but there's no need to put it so crudely—" Jilly continued to rummage "— ah!! Here we are!"
"But I'm on holiday!" protested Lexy. "And I have a broken heart to mend!"
"Broken fiddlesticks! You have a job to do, and I intend to see that you do it— here!" Jilly tossed a book at Lexy.
Lexy made a clumsy attempt to catch the book, succeeding only in deflecting it onwards across the room to strike Roche painfully on the shin. "Oops! Sorry, David!"
Roche bent down to retrieve the book, which had become separated from its dust-jacket. As he reassembled the two his eye was caught by the jacket's design, which was dominated by the face and bare shoulders of a beautiful woman who appeared to be wearing only jewellery, and by two men, one heavily-bearded and blond and the other dark-haired and clean-shaven. All three were drawn in a mosaic background in which the title of the book itself was picked out in purple and gold— Princess in the Sunset by Antonia Palfrey. The whole effect was striking and yet somehow vulgar, oddly contrasting with the blurred photo of the bespectacled Miss Palfrey on the back flap.
The book itself had fallen open at its first page—
" I, Sidonius Simplidus, Bishop of Ephesus and sometime secretary of the most illustrious lady, Galla Placidia—"
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It was not Roche's kind of book, but it reminded him strangely of other scattered novels he had picked up from the ground, on the track leading to The Old House, which fitted David Audley's tastes no better than his own. And there was another narrow strip of stiff paper that had also come adrift, which had fitted round the dustjacket: TENTH
IMPRESSION: 250,000 COPIES SOLD! " 'Gone With The Wind' restaged in Imperial Rome" — Daily Express.
If it was not his kind of book he was clearly in the minority, thought Roche as he put the pieces together and handed them to Lexy.
"Thanks, David." Her arm sagged as she took the book from him. "Six hundred bloody pages!"
"Just the chapter notes at the back, dear," said Jilly sweetly.
"But nobody reads them."
"They're the only thing in the book worth reading."
"But—"
Roche left them to it.
To his surprise, Roche found himself talking to Thompson within a minute of establishing his credentials with the duty man.
"You took your time," said Thompson accusingly, as though he also had an orgy scheduled, for which he was now late thanks to Roche.
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"This isn't a metropolis—it's one of your sodding bastides,"
Roche snapped back. "I had to find a phone."
"You received the word about Bradford, the American?"
"Yes." If they were beginning to run scared in Paris, as he was already running in the back-of-beyond in Neuville, then it was time to accelerate them. "What about Stephanides?"
"Who's he?"
"She. Cypriot-Jewish. There's a he in London—her father. I was just wondering if he and she might not be Mossad, that's all."
"What?" The cat was now among the pigeons.
"And Stein." Roche threw in a fox for good measure. "He's a reserve colonel in the Israeli Air Force—ex-RAF
photographic reconnaissance. Do you know about him?"
"Stein? Stephanides? Hold on there!"
"I can't wait long. I'm due at an orgy, old boy."
"What?" Collapse of bastide-fancier . "Wait!"
It would have been invigorating, this speedy revenge, if it had not been so frightening, this discovery of their incompetence.
It was a basic truth that none of them were omniscient, certainly not the British, but not the Russians and not the Americans either. But basic and inevitable truths didn't protect the men in the field, the Poor Bloody Infantry of all three services who had to get up out of their slit-trenches in the hope that at this precise point there were no mines and machine-gunners ahead of them.
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Mutter-mutter-mutter. There was someone else there, and not the duty officer, just as there had been when he had phoned the other side.
Roche looked at his watch. "Oh—for Christ's sake, take your fingers out and get on with it!" he murmured into the muttering instrument.
"Roche?" the instrument squawked back at him instantly.
Who? Not the bastide- fancier —
"Sir?" he answered uneasily.
"Now . . . not to panic, Roche—" the new voice sounded almost kindly, almost reassuring, and was all the more unreassuring for that. "Are you listening?"
"You bet I'm listening." The new voice hadn't identified itself, it took it for granted that he could do that. But the distortion of the line confused Roche. "And I'm not panicking, I'm only terrified half out of my wits, that's all."
"Good, good—that's fine!" The line crackled an obscene chuckle at him, the owner of the voice mistaking his mixture of trembling fear and bitterness for British stiff upper-lip understatement of courage.
Oh— shit! thought Roche, despairing of being able to communicate the truth. "I'm listening."
"Fine, it's simply that the order of battle is changed a little.
Have you talked to Audley yet?"
"I haven't even met him yet, for God's sake!"
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