Читать книгу Ladies Won't Wait - Peter Cheyney - Страница 4

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I sat back in the driving seat of the Jaguar and relaxed. I was as happy as I ever am. I opened both windows; let the air come into the car.

There isn’t any place as comfortable as a car to think in. You can drive mechanically, and just as mechanically you can watch the panorama of the green fields, the trees, villages and the rest of it flash past. If I have to think—and I don’t profess to be very fond of the process—I’d rather think in my bath or in the Jaguar than anywhere else.

I put my foot on the accelerator. It was a long, straight road in a fine piece of Berkshire country. I watched the needle go up to seventy; then I checked down to forty; began to think in earnest.

I thought about myself, the Old Man, agents in general and life in particular, which seemed to me to be quite enough to go on with for the moment. First of all I was wondering about what the Old Man’s reaction would be to the episode of two days ago in Paris; just what he’d have to say about Madame St. Philippe. Maybe he wouldn’t be so pleased about that one. I thought the Old Man might even be quite acid on the whole subject. He was often acid, but out of his acidity and his peculiar frames of mind he produced some extraordinary results. Everybody admitted that—that is if they were still alive to tell the tale after they’d carried out some of his more difficult assignments with the knowledge that if the job wasn’t done they would have to undergo the appalling tongue-lashing which the Old Man could produce with extraordinary little effort.

“People put too much value on human life,” was one of his favourite remarks. “Everyone has to die sometime—why not now? After all, the world’s in a peculiar state and a few days or months or years don’t matter all that much. Also there is quite a possibility that the next world might be a darned sight more interesting than this one!”

And no one could accuse him of not having practised what he preached. In his younger days, during the earlier part of World War II, the Old Man had taken every sort of chance in every possible set of circumstances. He was in and out of Germany—very successfully too—five times. He’d been taken by the Gestapo twice and got out of it each time.

He was unique and thought that all his agents ought to be unique, too. If they weren’t, they disappeared to lesser organisations or helped run one of his myriad filing systems, with a chip on their shoulder for the rest of their lives.

I thought, quite dispassionately, that agents were odd fish. The fact that I was one myself didn’t seem to affect the matter very much. I was taking what I considered to be an objective point of view. Agents—the Old Man’s agents—were strange people. Each one of them—man or woman—had different reasons for getting into the oddest of all weird professions. Some of them had drifted into it; some of them had been pushed into it. One of them—a very good one who died in Hungary last year—had been blackmailed into it. I grinned. That was certainly between the devil and the deep sea. But I wondered why a woman like Madame St. Philippe had to be in the business.

Once on a time, one of the cleverest free lance agents that I’d ever met in my life—a man who worked for himself, discovered his own secrets and sold them where he could get most money—told me that the reasons for a man or a woman becoming a secret service agent of any sort, shape or description were exactly the same as the reasons which motivated murder. He said they were greed, jealousy, a desire for revenge or thwarted passion. I remember thinking at the time that he was just nuts. But afterwards experience taught me that there might be a certain amount of sense in what he said.

I looked at my strap-watch. It was ten-past four. Five minutes after that I was driving through Wantage, and then I came on to the straight country road. I slowed down as I approached the first turning to the right; swung the car; found myself in the lane that led up to the wide, white-painted gate. It was a nice spot. I remembered when I had visited it last, a long time ago; it was summer then, and the country smells and flowers were all as ripe as they were now. I stopped the car in front of the gate, got out, pushed the gate open and stood on the lawn that ran round both sides of the house.

It was an attractive house. Really, it was a large cottage with a lawn in front, narrowing as it stretched round the house, broadening at the back. It had a thatched roof. There was a kitchen garden and a flower garden, and a mass of rhododendron bushes towards one side of the house. It looked the sort of place that a retired business man might own. Then the idea of the Old Man as a “retired business man” occurred to me. It made me laugh....

I walked round the right-hand path and rang the front door-bell. The door was opened by a neat maid.

She said: “Mr. Kells? You’re expected, Sir. Will you come in?”

I followed her across the hall into the library. She went away and shut the door behind her. I stood just inside the doorway looking at the Old Man. He was sitting in a big chair set beside one of the leaded-paned windows at the end of the room. The window was open, and the sunlight and a little breeze from the flower garden came into the room. I thought the scene looked almost pastoral.

The Old Man sat upright in the chair. God knows how old he is, I don’t. But he’s been over a lot of grass in his time. His thin face is lined. His deep-set eyes are still of a peculiarly vital blue and he has the largest and bushiest eyebrows I have ever seen. His eyebrows are definitely forbidding. Someone once told me he’d been suffering from a liver disease for the past ten years; that that might be an explanation of his bad temper. But the Old Man has never been particularly bad-tempered with me—only slightly acid.

I said: “Good afternoon. Did you get my message?”

“Of course I did, you damned fool. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been here now, would you?”

I smiled at him. “Agreed. Let me put it another way. Did you read my message?”

He said: “Yes, I read it. What’s it all about?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m looking for information. Not giving it. You know as much about it as I do.”

He brought out a cigarette case and lighted a cigarette. Then he threw the case towards me. I caught it; drew up a chair and sat down opposite him.

I said: “I didn’t know there was anything afoot. I was just running the garage and minding my own business. Then the thing happened to Olly. I didn’t know whether the man Janey was responsible for it or not. I still don’t know. I should think he might be. Then there was the woman. I didn’t like that very much.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would.” He went on: “Tell me something, why did you think this woman was working for me?”

That surprised me. “Of course she was working for you. She had the code word Ladies Won’t Wait!”

He said: “Does that mean that I gave it to her? There are half a dozen people could have given her it.”

“Really?” I raised my eyebrows. “Why?” I asked.

He said: “For God’s sake be your age. You know what it’s like these days. Our sort of secret service has almost gone to the dogs. In the old days it was a gentleman’s profession. Somebody caught an agent on the wrong side of the fence and he disappeared. They just shot him, cut his throat or threw him into a nearby river—something decent like that. Now they don’t. They use all sorts of persuasive methods, as you ought to know. The result is that all I can do is to appoint agents for areas just as you’re one working in France and Germany. But I don’t tell you who you get to work for you. I don’t know if you pick a bad one.”

I said: “What you’re trying to tell me is that this woman wasn’t working for you, and that somehow or other she got the code word?”

He said: “That’s what I’m telling you. At least that’s what I’m telling you at the moment. I might have something different to say later on. I have a dozen women agents working in Europe, and they don’t telephone through every morning to say that they’re still alive. Maybe something will turn up eventually, but at the moment I don’t know anything about your Madame St. Philippe.”

I said: “That’s damned funny. She was English, and she was a remarkably beautiful woman.”

“Many female agents are beautiful,” said the Old Man. “In some cases that’s their only qualification for the job.”

I said: “This makes it very interesting—very interesting indeed. I wonder what it was she was trying to tell me.”

The Old Man said: “How the devil would I know? And who said she was going to tell you something? Maybe she wanted to get something out of you. Having got that code word maybe she thought you’d trust her.” He grinned cynically.

“Like hell ...!” I said. “You’ve known me too long to think I belong to the trusting type.”

He grunted. “I must say you’ve been pretty hard-boiled.”

There was silence for a moment. I thought the Old Man was being very argumentative.

I said: “Well, the general idea is that I want to know whether I go back and go on running the garage until I hear from you, or whether I try to do something about this.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “There’s no harm in you trying, Kells.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “You know all this thing stems from Rockie.”

I said: “I gathered that.”

The Old Man got up. He began to walk about the room. I noticed with admiration the straightness of his back, the set of his shoulders. I thought some time—a long time ago—the Old Man had been a soldier, and I bet he was a good one, too.

He said: “The whole thing stems from Rockie. I sent Rockie into Germany a year ago on both sides of the line. He did very well. Anybody who says you can’t bribe the Russians ought to have seen Rockie at work. He was just as welcome in their zone as he was in ours. He was pretty good. He had a lot of money of his own and he regarded his job with us as a sort of sport. He was the mouse who liked to put his head in the lion’s mouth just to see if one day the lion would get angry and bite it off. Well, it looks to me as if the lion got angry.”

I asked: “Did they get him?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose so. He disappeared. He disappeared about four months ago, since when nobody has heard anything of him at all. I put out the usual feelers and tipped off such agents as I could get at who were working in the area to try and get a line on what had happened to him. But up to now nothing has come to light.”

I said: “Well, that’s just another agent who’s disappeared, that’s all.”

He grunted again. “I don’t mind agents disappearing. I don’t like it, especially if they’re good ones, but I don’t mind it if it’s been worth while. After all——” he looked at me sideways—“you’ve got to regard agents as being expendable people. You’ve got to be prepared for them to disappear or be found in a gutter somewhere with their necks broken or something like that. You know that.”

I nodded.

“The devil of it was,” the Old Man went on, “that Rockie was on to something. I told you he disappeared about four months ago. Two or three weeks before that he got a message back to me. He was on to something pretty big. He didn’t indicate what it was, but he did indicate that it was necessary that he talked to me about it. It was too big to commit to any messenger or telephone or post. He wanted to see me.”

I asked: “Have you any ideas as to what was in his mind?”

“No, I haven’t the remotest idea. It may have been a lot of things. It might have been Korea. That broke soon after I heard from him. It might have been something even more important than that.”

“What was he doing, and where was he when he disappeared?” I asked.

He said: “You ought to know. You were up there. You saw him several times. He was in Frankfurt. He was supposed to be playing around there having a good time. He had his sister with him.”

I said: “She was the woman whom Janey told me about—the beautiful sister. Is she beautiful?”

The Old Man said: “I think she’s a knock-out from what I’ve heard.”

I asked: “Did she know anything about Rockie? Did she know that he worked for you?”

“I don’t know. If she did the only person who’d have told her would have been Rockie. I can’t see him telling anybody except under duress.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

He said: “Well, if Rockie was in a hell of a spot; if he’d thought that they were going to knock him off or grab him, or do whatever they’ve done, he might have talked to his sister. He’d trust her. He’d know, or he’d hope, that she wouldn’t let him down.”

I asked: “Have you seen her?”

He shook his head. “Why should I? She came back to England via France about two weeks after Rockie disappeared. When he didn’t turn up at the hotel she raised a terrific commotion. All the hospitals were searched—the usual thing. Military Intelligence came into it and tried to discover if Rockie had been playing around in the Russian zone or somewhere. They got damned little help from the Russians. Maybe he’s in a concentration camp.” He grinned. “I can’t see Rockie in a concentration camp, any more than I could see you in one. I should think he’d make himself so damned objectionable that the least they could do would be to kill him.”

I said: “The sister made no attempt to get into touch with you or see you?”

He shook his head.

“Then,” I said, “it’s a stone certainty Rockie said nothing to her. If he’d told her what he was doing, or made any sort of suggestion about being in danger, he’d have told her your name and she’d have tried to get in touch with you.”

He nodded. “That’s what I thought. She hasn’t tried to get in touch with me, so I imagine she knows nothing.”

I said: “I want to come back to Madame St. Philippe. She rather upsets things a little, doesn’t she?”

“How does she upset things?” he asked.

“Work it out for yourself,” I said. “If Madame St. Philippe were working for you, or for one of your people, even if you knew nothing about her, it would be obvious for her to try and get in touch with me. If somebody on the other side, somebody who knew about the Rockie affair, connected her with that, it would be quite on the cards that they would want to kill her before she got a chance to talk to me, and it would be all very reasonable and logical if she were working for you. But she’s not working for you, so why was she killed?”

The Old Man said: “I don’t know. I could make a couple of guesses.” He grinned at me rather unpleasantly.

“All right,” I said. “Make a couple of guesses for my benefit.”

He said: “Look, this woman, who is beautiful and well-dressed and glamorous, picks you up in the street in Paris. She gives you the code word of the month. She wants to talk to you. The business is so urgent and so very important that she wouldn’t write to you or talk to you on the telephone, or go round to your apartment. Damn it, she could have gone to see you at the garage. But no, it’s all much too important for that. You have to see her at this address. And you walk round there because you’re too clever even to take a taxicab, and when you get there someone’s just about to kill her, or has killed her. And this somebody disappears very quietly—so quickly and quietly that you don’t even get a look at her. And you’re left holding the baby.”

I said: “I see....”

“Precisely,” said the Old Man. “Maybe it was intended that you should be discovered with the dead woman. Perhaps the idea was to have you run in on a murder charge. Maybe the plan went wrong and whoever it was was intended to turn up and catch you with this unfortunate, battered female didn’t do it, which was very lucky for you. By the way, did you find anything that was used on the dead woman—a spanner or a club or anything?”

I said: “No, there was nothing. It had been taken away.”

“Exactly,” said the Old Man. “If somebody was trying to frame you, obviously they’d take the murder weapon away. It would have had fingerprints on it. That would be all right. If you were caught with the body you might have got rid of the weapon, concealed it or something. But,” he went on, “all this is guessing, isn’t it?”

I said: “Yes. It all seems very unsatisfactory to me, except that I’m rather pleased at not having been discovered with the once beautiful corpse.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But somebody may know about it. They may still try to do a little blackmail.” He grinned again. He went on: “I said ‘try’ I should hate to blackmail you, Kells.”

I said: “It’s been tried before like everything else. Well, what am I supposed to do about all this?”

He said: “I don’t mind. Rockie was rather a friend of yours, wasn’t he? It might be interesting to discover what it was he’d found out; what it was he wanted to see me about. It might be interesting to discover what happened to him if such a process is possible.” He looked at me wryly. “Perhaps you might like to find those things out in your odd moments.”

I grinned at him. “All right. Is there anything else?”

He said: “No. You do what you like. You can go back to Paris or you can go to Frankfurt, or you can stay here. If you don’t find somebody out, I think you’ll find somebody will find you out.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

He said: “My dear feller, whoever it was put that woman on to you is not going to rest content with the situation. They’re going to do something else, aren’t they?”

I said: “I suppose so.”

The Old Man looked at his watch. “I have an appointment in twenty minutes, and I don’t want you here. You’ll find a bottle of whisky next door in the dining-room. Have a drink and get away from here, will you? And good luck to you, Kells.”

I said: “Thanks a lot. I’ve an idea I’m going to need it.”

He said, airily: “You never know. You’re all right about drawing money and things like that, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes, that part’s all right.”

“Well, be careful,” said the Old Man. “I should hate to have to try to replace you. I think that once or twice since you’ve been working for me you’ve been very good.”

I said: “I’d like to tell you exactly what I think about you, except I can’t think of enough really strong language. So long!”

I went out, had the whisky and soda in the dining-room. Then I drove back to London. I went back on a different road from the one I’d come on.

*****

When I woke up next morning the sun was shining. I yawned; got out of bed; began to walk about my bedroom and drawing-room in my bare feet, rather enjoying the sensation. I had an apartment in Knightsbridge—one of a dozen which were kept specially for the use of people like me who were working for the Old Man. I rang down for coffee, lighted a cigarette and tried to do a little straight thinking.

One of the disadvantages of my sort of job is that you never really know what you’re doing, and if the Old Man is ever good enough to give an indication it is usually so vague it doesn’t mean anything at all. Which, when you come to think of it, is rather clever on his part. Running a job like his must be hell. Especially when you realise exactly what he was up against. He just couldn’t trust an agent all the way, not because he didn’t want to trust him but because the more definite the information in the possession of the agent the more the other side could get out of him, by some means or other. The Old Man knew just as well as you or I know that everyone has a breaking point and there are all sorts of clever processes by which the toughest egg can be made to talk—even if he really doesn’t want to and is trying hard not to. Now they’ve got a new one—the “sleep treatment” under which a man can be persuaded to open up and talk whilst he’s asleep and, when he wakes up, knows nothing about it.

Then there was another angle. The Old Man might, for all I knew, know plenty more about the Rockie business, but it just didn’t suit his book at the moment to tell me. Firstly, because they might get me and try to make me talk ... I said try ... and, secondly, because it was on the cards that he had three or four other people on this job, each working in a different sector, and the Old Man would, from time to time, pass on to the agents concerned scraps of information that might assist them in their part of the job.

But the Old Man’s general technique is very simple. The idea is that if sufficient agents get themselves into sufficient trouble in sufficient places something quite tangible is going to emerge, and when it does emerge he can do something about it. In the meantime one feels about in the dark, probing for tender places in the enemy’s line, supposing you know who the enemy is and if he’s got a line.

I thought about my conversation with him. I could develop an active or a passive frame of mind about this Rockie business. If I wanted to be active I could go back to Frankfurt, try and dig up some of Rockie’s old connections there, do a little travelling, call a great deal of attention to myself and probably get knocked off by some enterprising Russian in the Soviet Sector for sticking my neck out, and once those boys do get you it’s a toss up whether you ever come back or not. You might even find yourself working in a salt mine or something.

That was one active angle. The second one was I could go and see Rockie’s sister—this beautiful and alluring lady I’d heard so much about. Just at the moment it seemed commonsense not to do that. If she’d known what Rockie was doing; if she’d had any idea what had happened to him, she’d have talked to somebody about it. If Rockie had told her about the sort of work he was really doing she’d have had enough sense to have got into touch with one of the M.I. Departments—M.I.5 or some of those boys.

But my guess was that Rockie talked to nobody; that he hadn’t talked to her. And I was basing my guess on my knowledge of Rockie. That boy was as tough as hell and as hard as nails, and he trusted nobody outside the very small group with which he was working. He certainly wasn’t the sort of person who’d trust his own sister with a hell of a big story merely because she was his sister.

But of course you never knew. When a man’s an extremist he’d do all sorts of things—even Rockie. Just for the moment I played with the idea that she might know something about it, and for reasons best known to herself she had kept her information to herself. I didn’t see why she should have done that, but supposing she had. Why would she behave like that? I shrugged my shoulders. There certainly wasn’t any answer to that one at the moment. Also, in any event, it didn’t matter all that just at this time. Maybe, sometime or other, I’d get around to taking a long look at Rockie’s sister even if only to satisfy my curiosity about the woman that Janey thought was such a marvellous person.

I came back to the passive angles. I could just sit quietly where I was and do nothing about it (except possibly take a week-end now and again in Paris to see how the garage was going), and wait for something to happen. The Old Man’s theory was that whoever it was had tried to contact me through the charming Madame St. Philippe would want to do it again. I was intrigued of course because the Old Man said he didn’t know anything about her. I knew perfectly well that no responsible agent was going to give a woman about whom he knew little the code word, and get her to contact me, unless he was in a pretty bad way or unless the situation was fairly desperate. That might have happened, but I was disinclined to believe it.

On the other hand somebody might have put her in just to make a mess of things for me by telling me some odd story that had been concocted, or getting me off to some place. But I wondered why they should be particularly interested in me at the moment. I hadn’t even been doing anything relatively important. I wasn’t actually working on any particular angle for the Old Man. I was simply in the position of being his chief field agent in Paris, waiting there, ostensibly running my garage, until something broke and he needed me.

You never knew with women. For two very good reasons. One, women always manage to start something if they’re good-looking and attractive—even if they are on your side. The second thing is that immediately women arrive on the scene everyone begins to use their imagination like hell and very often creates the most alarming situations out of nothing.

I remember one time I was working in Poland with a man who was doing an important job for the Old Man. This man—his name was Clissel; he’s dead now—was to await the arrival of an Englishwoman who was to give him certain carefully concealed information. Eventually, she arrived and it was only five days afterwards that Clissel realised that, so far as he was concerned, she was the wrong woman! She was just a distant relative he hadn’t seen for years. She’d recognised him and started a conversation with him to satisfy herself that he was her relative.

And she was damned difficult to get rid of. Clissel passed her on to me, and it took four hard days’ work to persuade her to get out of Danzig before fur began to fly.

But at the back of my mind was the definite idea that the appearance of the alluring Madame St. Philippe, my rather peculiar meeting with Janey who said he’d got my address at The Travellers’ Club and hadn’t, my just as sudden meeting with Marcini, all on the same day, finishing up with the murder of the woman, for some reason which I could not determine, tied the whole thing in with Rockie. I was certain it all had something to do with Rockie. I remembered what Janey had said about Rockie’s sister, about her living in Sussex; about my going down there to see her. It looked as if he was rather wanting me to do that. I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe, when the time came, we’d try it on.

At eleven o’clock I stopped pondering on these weighty matters; bathed, shaved, dressed myself carefully and went down to the watchmaker’s shop near St. John’s Gate. It was open. In the little compartment at the end of the long counter, with the watchmaker’s glass screwed into his eye, was Silenski. Silenski is interesting enough for me to tell you a little about him.

He’d been working for the Old Man since the Germans went into Poland, and he had had some of the most extraordinary things happen to him. Some Poles are very tough, but I’ve never known anybody as tough as Silenski. He’d only one eye—somebody had put the other one out. He was burned all over. But he was a fellow who’d never had enough. He was always prepared to have another go when it was desired of him. Actually, the Old Man, who I suppose had some sort of sympathy deep down in the bottom of his acid stomach, had kept him in London for quite a time. Silenski ran the watchmaker’s shop near St. John’s Gate and acted as a sort of general liaison for anyone who was operating in London. I thought he might be useful to me.

I went into the shop, walked along the counter, put my head in his cubby-hole, and said in Polish: “Well, how’s it going, Silenski?”

He looked up at me. He said: “For crying out loud ... Mike ...! So you’re still alive?”

I said: “It looks like it.”

“Everything is very quiet,” said Silenski. “I sit here and I repair watches. I’ve seen one or two of the boys—Grigor, who is a Pole and whom I think you know. He was here three weeks ago. Then he went away and has disappeared. Rosanski, the White Russian, whom you also know, is dead.” He grinned. “Everybody seems to be dying before their time.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If they wait a little while, in a minute there will be a nice fat war. Then everybody can die. The things that are going on ...” Silenski continued, “I promise you, Michael, that nobody would believe them.”

I nodded. What he said was, of course, quite true. Nobody does believe them. And people are not curious any more. I suppose they’re too busy minding their own business and trying to solve their own problems to worry too much about satisfying their curiosity. Or maybe they read too many detective stories to believe in anything at all.

To-day the strangest things happen everywhere—including England. But nobody worries. Events pose the most amazing questions but nobody takes any notice.

I remember when I was crossing from France on the Invicta someone lent me a copy of an English newspaper. I read an extraordinary story (maybe you read it too) of an old man who kept a sweet shop in some little village in England, who had been murdered, quite obviously not for gain, because there was quite a little money in the till which the murderer had not touched. The police wished to question two men about it. They got one man who didn’t want to talk, so they went after the second man. This boyo, through the services of a foreign embassy in London, had managed to get himself smuggled aboard a ship. When the ship was stopped at sea by the British authorities, the Captain—who was a foreigner—refused to give the man up although he didn’t refuse to give him up when the ship was stopped a day or two later by a Russian tug. The Russians took the man away and that was that. A nice story with interesting implications. Except that nobody seemed to bother sufficiently to find out what they were.

I said to Silenski: “How’s the girl friend?”

He smiled. “Carla is very well. Don’t you want to talk to her? She’s upstairs.”

I said: “I’ll go and talk to her.”

I went through the little room at the back of the shop and up the stairs. At the top of the stairs was a sitting-room. A cosy, comfortably furnished room with flowers tastefully arranged. Carla was sitting in an arm-chair reading The Tatler.

I tell you she was something. She was one of those women at whom you take a quick glance and then look again just to make certain that you aren’t dreaming. She was a Pole, and when Polish women are beautiful they really are, if you know what I mean. She was Polish and passionate and lush. When she looked at you there was that indefinable question in her eyes.

Carla exuded passion like a bottle of Chanel No. 5 exudes perfume. She was as cool as cucumber, as wicked (if need be) as a snake and filled with the most extraordinary conglomeration of complexes where men were concerned. With control she was the ideal woman agent. I said with control. Without it she was just another lovely sick headache.

I can only explain what I mean by trying to give an example. Thus, supposing Silenski wanted to obtain some information about another Pole in the old days he used to put Carla on to the man’s best friend. Carla would start by falling in love with this man or at least giving a very good impression of it, and she would put everything she knew into the business of adoring this individual until she had found out what she wanted; then she’d press another button and become entirely disinterested in him. A very good type of woman agent to have working with you, but not very good to have against you.

She was tall, curved in all the right places, looked very well in her clothes. She had jet black hair, and peculiarly luminous eyes of an odd amethyst colour. Actually, I was never quite certain what colour her eyes were. She spoke four languages perfectly, and reserved her Polish accent when speaking English only for somebody whom she wished to impress.

She got up from the chair quickly and gracefully. She threw her arms round my neck and kissed me on the mouth and when I say kissed I mean kissed.

She said: “Michael, this is like all my old dreams coming true. Life has been for me a desert until to-day. Now I see you and I am happy.”

I said: “Look, how do you think this would go with Silenski—the one downstairs who is playing with the innards of a watch?”

She stood away from me. She looked at me hard. She said: “Michael, you should know that Silenski understands me. He knows my strange nature. He knows that quite a lot of the time I think about him and all the rest of the time I only think about you.”

I grinned. “Of course. And who else?”

“Nobody else,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing particularly. Just hanging around. But I thought I’d come down in case I needed a little assistance during the next week or so. From you or Silenski or anyone else you’ve got on the books in London and not working. Anybody I know?”

She nodded. “There’s Mrs. Vayne. She’s not doing anything, and she’s living in Kensington. And there’s that nice man from Devonshire—the one with the accent—Glyder. You know, the one with the finger missing from his left hand. And there’s the young man who was in the Brigade of Guards—Terence Maydew.”

I said: “A nice selection—Mrs. Vayne—fair, fat and forty, Maydew, who’s not awfully experienced, and Glyder, who certainly is. Besides which there’s Silenski, myself and”—I laughed at her—“if things become very serious—you.”

She said: “Of course, Michael. You know perfectly well that for you I’d lay myself down under a tram.”

“That’s nice of you, but I don’t see it’d do me any good.” I picked up my hat. “Well, it’s been nice seeing you, Carla. Write down your telephone number for me.”

She wrote it down. She said: “There’s always somebody here—someone you can trust—either Mrs. Vayne or Silenski or myself. There’s always someone to answer the telephone.”

I asked: “When did Silenski see the Old Man last?”

“He hasn’t seen him. He heard from him yesterday on the telephone. He said he thought you might be calling in. Did you know he’d telephoned?”

I shook my head. “No. He must be a mind-reader. So long, Carla.”

I picked up the piece of paper with the telephone number on it; went downstairs.

I said so long to Silenski. He took the jeweller’s glass out of his eye. He said: “You saw Carla?”

I said: “Yes, she’s looking very well.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Silenski. “I don’t like the new lipstick she’s wearing, and there’s a lot of it on your face. So long, Mike.”

I wiped the lipstick off my mouth and went out.

*****

I spent most of the day hanging around. I had lunch and tea, went into the club for a drink, read the newspapers. I was quite happy. I’ve always found it’s a good thing not to be in too much of a hurry about anything, never to be afraid of marking time for a bit. Also at the back of my head I had an idea something would happen fairly soon. I’ve always found if you wait for something to happen it always does. It happened all right.

I went home about half-past seven. My idea was to change my clothes, drink another cocktail, have dinner somewhere and go to bed and sleep the sleep of the just. This seemed a fairly good idea.

When I got to the flat I opened the door and saw the invitation card. It had been pushed under the crack of the door and lay there looking up at me. I picked it up. It was a nice card with a gilt edge and of an exotic pinkish colour with violet lettering on it, and it said that Madame Olga Volanski—Haute Couture, Furs and Model Gowns—would be honoured by my presence at her cocktail party at 23 Crestwick Court, St. John’s Wood. The card was perfumed. The perfume was very nice. I wondered who Madame Volanski was. I thought I bet she’s a good one. I was very glad she hoped to be honoured with my presence. Anyway, she was pretty well covered. The card was one of those things giving people invitations to dress shows or parties connected with dress. It was perfectly simple for one of them to have got under the wrong door. I knew that delivery agencies were often employed to deliver such invitations almost promiscuously.

But I didn’t think it was a mistake. I thought that Madame Volanski might be very interested in me.

I thought we might have a lot to say to each other.