"Go on, David."
If it was so, then he was really midway between the frying pan and the fire, both equally unforgiving. " Go on—"
"I like it," said Genghis Khan finally. "It has the mark of the man himself about it—the man you have described, and the man we are beginning to know also."
"What?" Then Roche remembered that Genghis Khan's first offer had related to the identity of Antonia Palfrey. And, in any case, it was foolish to assume that the Comrades had been idle while he had been so busy: they had been digging discreetly but deeply in their own way into both d'Aube-ron dummy5
and Audley these last forty-eight hours, that was certain.
"Using us as the threat, to save his friend—and using you to make the offer—"
"He said d'Auberon would deny it, if I mentioned him—"
“He doesn't want to take any risks, of course! If he has nothing to lose, so much the better. And if you fail, he has lost nothing. His good name as an honourable man will be safe. I like it!"
"But can it work?" Roche forced himself not to look at the van.
"He's clever—he could cause us trouble in time. But he will cause the British trouble too, while he lasts—they do not like cleverness."
Roche was astonished by the clear drift of what Genghis Khan was saying. "You think it will work?"
"On the contrary ... it will most certainly not work. There is not the slightest chance that d'Auberon will consider giving anything to the British."
"Why not?" Roche found himself taking the devil's advocate's position against his own judgement. "If d'Auberon thinks that everyone has found out about him, then he hasn't got anything to bargain with—he must get rid of it to someone strong enough to protect him."
"That would be prudent—yes," Genghis Khan agreed. "So he provided for that possibility—naturally. But not for the benefit of any foreign power. He is, after all, a Frenchman—
dummy5
perhaps he dislikes us more than the British, but that is only a matter of degree. And you are forgetting why he resigned, also."
"Over Algeria, you mean?" Roche recalled Madame Peyrony's version of the d'Auberon scandal.
He realised that he had answered his own question: a man who quit the service for patriotic reasons would hardly be likely to hand over its secrets to another country. So Audley had totally—and rather strangely— miscalculated there. And yet, at the same time, d'Auberon himself had acted out of character in entrusting his insurance policy to the Englishman to pass on to some third and safely French party.
"Politically, he is a Gaulliste," said Genghis Khan. "If it were not for his 'sense of honour'—whatever that is—he would have already revealed the documents to his Gaulliste friends, regardless of his safety. And if anything should happen to him, in any event, it is the Gaullistes who will get the documents now. But that is of no importance."
"No importance?"
"That is one reason why it won't work," said Genghis Khan.
"Because he's had his sealed copies lodged all along with two senior Gaulliste deputies, men we wouldn't dare touch. Not even if we wanted to."
"You knew—" Roche steadied his voice "—about them?"
"We've known from the beginning—about them." Genghis paused. "But not about Audley. It would appear that dummy5
d'Auberon took an extra precaution there."
"You knew?" Roche struggled with the contradiction.
"But all is not lost, even though your so-clever Dr Audley has contrived to get almost everything wrong . . . Even, I think, there is much to gain now," said Genghis Khan.
At least the relative importance of the d'Auberon papers compared with his own future career had been established, thought Roche. But somehow that was no longer so reassuring.
"And he did get one thing right, in a way. He is relying on us to do his work for him, and we mustn't let him down. But we shall have to act very quickly."
"How—" Roche stumbled over the word, jostled from behind by a new mob of doubts and fears.
"How are we going to help him? Why—we shall give him our copy of the d'Auberon documents, David."
XVI
LEXY RAISED THE top third of herself up off the towel on her elbows and gazed at Roche pensively, cradling her face in her hands.
"Yes?" Lexy almost totally uncovered was somehow less disturbing than the accidental and unplanned vistas she was accustomed to present when fully clothed, he thought.
"It's all right, David—I'm not about to try and buy your dummy5
thoughts again for another penny. It isn't a day for buying other people's thoughts."
A sympathetic half-smile was all he could manage. It wasn't a day for smiles either. "Mine aren't worth a penny, Lexy."
"I bet they're more interesting than mine! I have such dull, ordinary thoughts, that's the trouble. That's what David Audley says . . . and what makes it worse is that he's right, the wretch!"
"Huh!" The irony made play-acting unnecessary. "I'll bet you . . . more than a penny . . . that he can be stupid too, you know."
"Yes—but at least he'll be cleverly stupid—'too clever by half', that's what Davey and Mike say. And that's better than being plain stupid."
She wasn't stupid at all, thought Roche. Even she made it a day for a full smile, in spite of everything. "Let's say I'm thinking about you—and you couldn't be plain anything, even if you tried to be—" he caught his tongue too late as her face fell "—what's the matter?"
"Now that's a bloody-David-bloody-Audley-thought! Not good for nothing—just good for bloody-screwing!" She burnt him up with a scowl. "So you can keep your thoughts, bloody-David-bloody-Captain Roche—I wouldn't buy one of them if you paid me!"
Before he could reply, she had slumped herself back on the towel, presenting only pink shoulders and tangled half-dried dummy5
blonde thatch in an uncompromising rejection.
Roche stared at her for a moment, and then gave up. He hadn't intended to offend her, but he had also screwed his own chances nevertheless. But then he had never had any luck, and that was the story of his life.
He frowned past her at the river, where the sun caught the ripples on the same stretch of broken water in which he had sported with all three of them yesterday—Lexy and Jilly and Steffy—when the world was young.
He could never do that again, never with Steffy and never with the same water, they had gone down to the sea together.
When it came to screwing, nobody had ever screwed anyone more thoroughly than the Comrades had screwed the British and the French, by Christ!
Hypnotised by the rippling light on the water, he put together the d'Auberon papers at last—
It wasn't just that the Comrades had known about d'Auberon and his precious documents all along, and hadn't worried about them at all—about the alleged traitor in their midst, who had fed back to Paris every thought the Kremlin had had, through Hungary and Suez, and every word of it nothing but the truth, checkable and double-checkable from every other Anglo-French intelligence source.
dummy5
Of course they hadn't been worried! Not about that. What they had been worried about, regardless of the British and the French . . .was the truth of those reports about the undercurrents of dissent which had been swelling ever more fiercely in their Eastern European colonies—through East Germany, still disaffected from the Berlin riots, through Poland, where patriotism and religion were inextinguishable, to Hungary, which had been primed to explode any minute by the irreversible tide of hatred even among good Comrades of the appalling Rakosi regime. And not the men in the Kremlin alone, by God! Even dear old Bill Ballance—red-nosed, superannuated, indiscreet, but always well-informed—