I was saying: 'Nobody fires just one shot to kill a man; always two. And if he'd killed Harvey, there'd be Maganhard, or Maganhard if he'd killed Harvey. Tell me I'm right – quick.'
She was crouched, too, down beside the laurels at the edge of the lawn. Old reactions die hard.
'It's your drunken friend Harvey shooting up the bottles in the Wild West saloon.'
I'd guessed that, too, but it didn't make me feel any better. Why should he stop at bottles? And I still wasn't carrying the Mauser.
I stood up reluctantly and walked across the gravel towards the front door. It felt as wide as the desert.
Inside the front hall three people were standing as stiff as a waxworks tableau. Harvey was leaning against the wall on my right, with the gun pointing vaguely down towards his own feet but not looking any less dangerous because of that. Maurice was backed up against the opposite wall, staring at Harvey with a look about as friendly as a hungry vulture. Miss Jarman was just standing. The phone was off its hook and lying on the floor.
The gun twitched my way as I came in. I said: 'Put that damn thing away. What's happened here?'
Harvey said: 'I just kind of don't like men attacking women – you know?' His voice was carefully languid, but a bit thick, as if he was having to pick each word one at a time. Probably he was, by now.
'Well, it's over now. Get back to your bottle.' I turned to Maurice.'Pourquoi-'
Harvey said carefully: 'I heard her yell so I came out and there was this guy fighting with her.'
Miss Jarman said: 'I was just trying to use the telephone, when-'
'Who to?'
She stared innocently at me, eyes wide. 'To… a friend. I thought-'
I took a couple of quick steps and picked up the phone.
'Qui et-' But the line was dead by now. I slammed it back.
'I put a security blackout on the use of this phone,' I said. 'Maurice was just interpreting that for me. Call it a misunderstanding. All right -who were you ringing?'
'A friend. ' Her chin was up and she had the girls' boarding-school expression on her face. She wasn't telling who put frogs in the Latin mistress's bed.
'All right,' I said again. 'But if you're selling us out, remember the methods they've used so far: you stand as good a chance of stopping a bullet as anybody. Maybe better, If they don't get me with the first shot.'
Harvey had straightened up off the wall. 'And kind of what the hell are you talking about?'
I swung round. I'd had just about enough of him and his thirst and his tendency to pull his gun on the wrong people. Maybe he wouldn't get his gun up level before I'd broken his wrist for him…
Ginette said: 'Give Louis the gun or I will kill you.'
We both looked. She was standing in the shadows at the back of the hall, leaning stiffly against the wall, with the Mauser held in both hands out in front of her.
'It is on automatic, Mr Lovell,' she added.
'You wouldn't fire that thing in here,' he said slowly. He studied her carefully: the way she was holding it meant she knew what she was holding – and he could see that.
She said contemptuously: 'Bet your life on it, then.'
He took a long breath. A gunman believes he can never be beaten – but he knows damn well when he has been. She had the Mauser aimed low, to allow for the kick. Whatever he did now, he'd get filleted like a fish if she pulled that trigger.
He tossed me his gun.
Ginette said: 'Thank you. Please remember I have the exclusive shooting rights in my own house. Where did that bullet go, Maurice?'
He indicated a hole in the wall near the telephone.
Ginette came up to us and offered me the Mauser. I shook my head. 'It's over now. I'll get him to bed.' I stuck his gun in my pocket.
Harvey was watching me with a faraway look and a twist of cynical amusement at the edge of his mouth. 'I could take you even without a gun,' he offered.
I shrugged. 'Maybe. We've both been through unarmed-combat school. It wouldn't prove anything.'
He nodded and started towards the stairs. I said to Miss Jarman: 'Get whatever bottle he was using.'
'Don't you think he's had enough?' She was still back in the fifth-form dormitory.
I shook my head wearily. 'It doesn't matter what you or I think. Just get the bottle.'
I followed Harvey upstairs. At the top we met Maganhard; Harvey pushed straight past without seeming to notice him. Maganhard gave him a steely look that turned immediately into a suspicious glare. He turned to me and seemed about to say something – but I pushed past as well.
In his bedroom, Harvey yanked the silk cover straight off the bed and dropped face down on to it, all in one movement. After a moment or two he rolled on his back. It took an effort.
'Maybe I'm tired.' He sounded faintly surprised.
Behind me, Miss Jarman came in with a bottle of Queen Anne whisky and a glass. I took the bottle; from the weight, he'd been working on it hard.
She asked: 'What are you going to do? '
'Get him ready for tomorrow.' I poured a small dose into a glass.
'With that?'
'It's what he usually gets ready for tomorrow on.' I gave him the glass. She stared at him, then me. 'You don't really care, do you?'
'Who were you ringing?'
She glared. 'Perhaps one day you'll know.' She slammed the door as she went out.
Harvey raised his glass to me, and sipped. 'You honestly think she's selling us out?'
'Somebody is.'
'I kind of hope not,' he said thoughtfully. 'She's a nice kid.'
'It's mutual. She wants to cure you.'
'I noticed.' He sipped again. 'And you don't care?' He watched me with his little cynical smile.
'Not my business. After tomorrow, you and I daren't meet. You know that.'
'I know.' He emptied the glass.
I stretched out my hand for it. 'More?'
He shrugged his shoulders on the pillow. 'I guess so.'
I walked back to the bottle on the dressing-table. He said: 'If I'm a good boy, do I get my gun back?'
'Sorry; I'd forgotten.' I'd been hoping he'd remind me. I took out the little revolver, swung the cylinder, and poked out the empty cartridge. 'Got any more rounds?'
'Coat pocket.'
His jacket was hung on a chair. I got my back to him and groped in both side pockets. I got a fresh cartridge with one hand, and a bottle I hoped was his sleeping pills with the other. I slid the round into the gun, closed it up, and tossed it on to the foot of the bed.
By the time he'd reached for it, checked it over just as I knew he would, as any gunman would after somebody else had handled his gun, there were three tablets at the bottom of his glass. I didn't know just what they were, or what dose they should have been; Idid know that mixing two depressants like alcohol and barbiturates isn't a good idea. But it was less risk than he'd meet tomorrow if he finished off that bottle tonight.
I poured whisky on top and gave it a moment to dissolve them by going to find a glass of my own over by the washbasin. A bit of cloudiness wouldn't show through the cut glass tumbler, and by now his sense of taste would be shot.
I poured my own drink and gave him his.
'You're an understanding sort of bastard,' he said slowly. 'Or maybe you're just a bastard. Understanding somebody is a pretty lousy thing to do to him.' He turned his head wearily and looked up at me. 'Well, you're the Professor, and here I am on the couch. D'you want me to tell you my dreams?'
I sat down on the chair with his jacket slung over the back. 'Could I stand them?'
'Maybe. They ain't fun, but you get used to them.'
'D'you get used to how you feel in the mornings?'
'No. But you can't remember how bad it was, ever. Still, if you thought tomorrow was as important as today, you wouldn't be a – a drinker, would you?'
'You're over-simplifying,' I said. 'You want to think you're basically different in outlook from everybody else. You aren't. You just drink more, that's all.'
By now the pill bottle was back in his jacket pocket.
He smiled. 'That's good head-shrinking, Professor. But you want to know the worst thing? You don't taste it any more. That's all. You just don't taste it.' He sipped and held the glass up to the light and stared through it. 'You just remember going into some place in Paris where they know how to mix a real martini. Get in there around noon, before the rush starts, so they'll have time to do it right. They like that: they like a guy who really cares about a good drink – so for him, they get it right. Mix it careful and slow, and then you drink it the same way. They like that, too. They don't have to think you're going to buy another one. Just once in a time they like to meet a guy who'll make them do some real work and appreciate it when they've done it. Pretty sad people, barmen.'
He took a gulp at his drink and went back to watching the ceiling. His voice was slow and quiet and he wasn't talking to me and perhaps not even to himself. Just to a door that had closed on him a long time ago.
'Just cold enough to make the glass misty,' he said softly. 'Not freezing; you can make anything taste as if it might be good by making it freezing. That's the secret of how to run America, if you want to know it, Cane. And no damn olives or onions in it, either. Just a kind of smell like summer.' He moved his head on the pillow. 'I haven't had a martini in an elephant's age. You don't taste it. Now – now all you think of is the next one. Christ, but I'm tired.'
He stretched an arm to put the tumbler on the bedside table, missed, and it thumped on the carpet, spilling a few drops.
I stood up. His eyes were closed. I put down my own glass and moved softly towards the door. I had my hand on the knob when he said: 'I'm sorry, Cane. Thought I could last it out.'
'You lasted. It was the job that stretched.'
After a few moments he said: 'Maybe… and maybe if I hadn't got hit--Probably not, though.' Then he turned his head and looked at me. 'You said something back there: that I wasn't basically different from anybody else. I kill people, Professor.'
'You could give it up.'
He smiled very slowly and wearily. 'But not until after tomorrow – is that right?'
After a few more moments, I went out. I felt as noble and helpful as the spilled dregs on the carpet.
Maganhard and Ginette were standing at the top of the stairs looking as if they'd been trying to find something polite to say to each other but not getting far. Maganhard swung round as I came along and forgot about politeness.
'You didn't tell me Mr Lovell was a drinker.'
'I didn't know myself until after we'd started.' I leant against the bannisters and reached for a cigarette.
'Then I will speak to Merlin about this. I could have been killed just because-'
'Shut up, Maganhard,' I said wearily. 'We've lived through yesterday and today, and if you don't think that's an achievement, then you didn't know what was going on. We couldn't have done more with anybody else. Now go to bed.'
'I have not had my dinner yet,' he said huffily. He had Austrian blood in him, all right.
Ginette said soothingly: 'Maurice will serve you very soon, Herr Maganhard: He will give you a drink now, if you wish.'
He gave me a stare that he'd been keeping at the back of the freezer compartment, then marched downstairs, his back very straight.
I stayed leaning on the bannisters, found my matches, and lit the cigarette. 'I'd forgotten dinner. I thought today had gone on long enough already.'
'Is that the way the Agency Cane usually treats its clients?'
'Pretty usual. I told you I didn't have to like them.'
'I think you had better take the work here – quickly.'
I looked at her, but she didn't meet it. She just propped herself against the bannisters beside me; the movement brought her hands up in front of her, and she seemed to notice that she still had the Mauser.
She looked it over. 'Do you remember, Louis, what these once meant to us? Liberation… freedom… words like that?'
'I remember.'
'Perhaps things have changed since then.' She sighted the gun casually down the stairway, her thumb sweeping instinctively over the safety catch and the single/automatic button. She knew about Mausers.
'Pistols haven't changed.'
'You believe the Resistance was always just pistols – not the words?'
'Nothing is ever just pistols; men don't die by guns alone. Guns always need words behind them, telling them they're doing the right thing.'
She glanced quickly at me. Maybe I'd sounded a little sour; maybe Iwas a little sour, thinking of riding north at midnight and the state Harvey would be in then. And perhaps wishing it wasn't all just to save a man like Maganhard from a few deaths, a few taxes.
Or maybe I was just feeling old and tired.
'In the war,' she said thoughtfully, 'we never asked if we were right. The answer was too easy. But – perhaps sometimes we were wrong. We helped make men like Bernard, and Alain.' She lowered the gun. 'You believe because your Maganhard is right, you must be right? '
I said cautiously: 'Something like that.'
But she just nodded to herself. After a while she said: 'But perhaps your next Maganhard will be wrong – and you will not have stepped aside.'
It wasn't a new idea; it was an old familiar ghost at the back of my mind, that I remembered only when I was feeling tired and low. On the nights when you dream of the faces of men you knew and who are dead.
I'd been right about Maganhard. I'd trusted Merlin and Maganhard himself and my own judgement – and I'd been right. But one day, I could be wrong. One day I'd have a client as crooked as a mountain road and the men jumping up in ambush would be plain-clothes cops…
A lawyer can say his client deceived him. But I'd be standing there with the Mauser warm in my hand.
I shook my head wearily. 'Maybe, Ginette. But not this time. And next time is next time.'
'There is going to be a next time?' She was watching me with her steady sad eyes, with the glint of lamplight on her chestnut hair, like the sheen of old, polished wood.
'Ginette – it's fifteen years. You aren't in love with me.'
'I do not know,' she said simply. 'All I can do is remember, and wait – and perhaps make sure you do not get killed.'
'I'm not going to get-' I knew it was the wrong thing as soon as I'd said it.
But she said: 'No – tell me it won't happen. That it can't, not to you, not to Caneton.' And her fight was over. If I was going on, then she wanted to believe it could never happen to me; that if there had to be dragons, there would never be a last one. She wanted to think like a gunman -again. And forget that she had believed it before – and been wrong.
I winced. I should never have come back. Fifteen years I'd stayed away from this quiet house where she had tried, so hard, to find an end to war. And when I'd come back, it had only been because I was still at war.
'You can't be sure,' I said slowly. 'In the end, it depends on me.'
'I know.' She nodded and smiled gently. 'I remember.'
There were footsteps on the stairs. Maurice was walking carefully up, carrying a loaded tray, including a bottle in a wicker cradle.
I said: 'Harvey won't want anything. He's probably asleep already.'
She straightened up from the bannisters, moving with the lazy grace of a cat. 'I told Maurice you and I would have dinner in my room.'
I stared at her, then opened my mouth. She shook her head. The argument is over, Louis. You are going on; I understand. That is all.'
There were a thousand reasons why not – but suddenly I couldn't remember any of them. Only that I'd been away so long.
'I'll come back,' I said thickly.
She smiled her half-sad smile. 'Don't promise anything, Louis. I am not asking for promises.'
She walked down the corridor after Maurice. After a moment I followed.