Gavin Lyall - Midnight Plus One

Maganhard swung round on the old man by the fire. 'All right. How much? I will pay you one-third now.'

The General said: 'Ten thousand francs. And half now.'

Maganhard said: 'Five thousand and I will give you half.'

'Ten thousand. But I'll take one-third.'

'I'll pay you one-third of seven. What plan is it?'

'A damn good plan. I'll take a third of nine.'

I said: 'Give him a third of seven and a half.'

The General said: 'I'll take a half of six.'

Maganhard said quickly: 'Right. Three thousand now and the same if we get through.'

The General's head moved in a fractional nod; he closed his eyes and sighed. 'I'm getting old. All right, Maganhard. Give me a cheque on one of your Swiss banks, and make it cash. Sergeant! I want the file on the Upper Rhine.'

Morgan stumped off into the next room. Maganhard hauled a sheaf of cheque-books out of an inside pocket, and started sorting through them. 'Geneva?' he asked. The General nodded again, and Maganhard started writing the cheque.

Harvey was looking at me curiously. I winked at him, and he turned away and stared out of the window down across the grey windswept lake.

Morgan came back with a green folder, and the General started sorting through it. Finally, he came up with a large sheet folded double. He opened it, stared at it, then carefully tore a corner off it.

Maganhard finished writing the cheque and dropped it on the General's table. The General gave him the paper in exchange.

'Show that to Cane. He may make some sense of it.'

For a moment it seemed unlikely. It was a large photostat of a drawing: a number of wavering, curling lines, overlaid by hard geometric lines: zigzags, rows of little triangles, lines with crosses every half inch. And wandering across the whole thing was one red ink line.

I stared at it. Then it snapped into place: a plan of the modern St Luzisteig defences. The wavery lines were the contours, the geometric ones the trenches, barbed wire, tank traps. And the red line- The General said: 'Well? D'you know what it is?'

'I think so. We follow the red ink and find the end of the rainbow. Just whatis that?'

'Patrol path. To let out the patrols.'

I waggled my head and kept a slightly doubtful look on my face. 'This plan's probably twenty years out of date-'

'Damn fool. They haven't changed those defences in twenty years. Why should they?'

Maganhard was peering over my shoulder. 'Is it worth anything?' he asked suspiciously.

'It's genuine, all right. Why should he keep a faked one lying around? He's probably had this on file since 1940, waiting for somebody to sell it to.'

The General let out his rasping chuckle.

Maganhard fingered the torn corner of the plan. 'What did you tear off here?'

'Name of the man I got it from,' the General said.

I folded the plan up and shoved it in a pocket. 'Okay,' I said briskly. 'So we can get across once we're there. But how do we get to the frontier?'

He leant back in his chair with his eyes closed. 'All in the same price. Morgan drives you there.'

'Yes? And what's so wonderful about that? I could hire a car down the road.'

His eyes stayed closed. 'And tell them exactly what car you're in. They'll check up on that first thing. But they'd never stopmy car. And they all know it.'

Harvey said: 'Must be some car.' He was looking suspicious. So was Maganhard, but with him it was congenital.

The General said calmly: 'It is "some car", as you put it.'

I was ready to believe him. And even if I wasn't, we still stood a better chance in his car than in any one we hired. Switzerland's a small country, and the area you can drive across before the southern passes melt is even smaller. Whatever we did, we were going to have to drive down the central valley which includes almost all the big cities -Fribourg, Bern, Luzern, Zürich – and that gave us a choice of only about three main roads.

Harvey said slowly: 'Look, I'm not sure I like the idea-'

'I'm running the ideas department,' I snapped. 'Shut up and look at the pretty pistols! '

He stopped as if I'd slapped him in the face. Then he turned slowly away, and went back to staring at the guns over the mantelpiece.

Miss Jarman glared at me.

Maganhard said: 'Shouldn't we be starting?'

I looked at my watch: nearly noon. Three hundred kilometres to go. Say five hours' driving.

'We're not in too much of a hurry,' I said. 'We can't cross the frontier until it's dark, after half past eight. And we don't want to spin out the road journey – we're safer sitting here.'

'Then you'll join me for lunch?' the General asked.

Maganhard said: 'We will not be in Liechtenstein until nine o'clock, then? We are cutting it very fine. What if the car breaks down?'

'Sergeant!' the General called. 'When did the car last break down?'

Morgan stiffened and started considering. 'We had the silencer trouble in 1956, sir. But that wasn't a real break-down. I think the last time was the electrical problem in – that would be in '48.'

I grinned. 'All right. Lunch up here?'

'Of course,' the General said.

The lunch arrived on the table at the other end of the room. Morgan took the trays at the door and handed round the food – presumably so that the waiters wouldn't set eyes on Maganhard. My first idea was that this would make them doubly suspicious, but then I remembered the General had been in this hotel over forty years. Forty years isn't enough to stop waiters being suspicious, of course, but it's time enough for them to learn to be forgetful when the police come asking questions.

We had troutau bleuand a straightforward veal escalope that was as soft as butter: the General obviously didn't belong to the overdone-roast-beef movement that most of Montreux's English guests insisted on. He went on with his glass of swizzled champagne, but the rest of us got a crisp cold Ayler Herrenberg.

It was a quiet meal, except for the General's eating. Maganhard was worried about the time factor, and annoyed that the right thing to do was just wait. Harvey was quiet and morose. He drank a glass of wine – no more – but he took it in three big gulps, and fiddled with his glass a lot, counting the seconds until he could take the next gulp.

Just before half past one, Morgan was pouring coffee. The General asked if we'd like a liqueur and I said No, fast, to pass the hint to Harvey. He gave me a twisted little smile and said No in his own time. No customers for liqueurs.

I tried to think of something to say to spin things out a bit – and to stop Maganhard and the General insulting each other and cocking up the whole deal.

Before I could think of anything, the General looked at Harvey and said: 'Understand you're a bodyguard. What d'you think of me collection?'

Harvey glanced back at the guns over the mantelpiece. 'Pretty expensive, I'd guess.'

'One of the best collections in the world. For its period. But' – and the old face dragged itself into the ghost of a smile – 'I thought perhaps you see another value in 'em.'

Harvey shrugged. 'As pistols, you'd be better off throwing rocks. As art, the trouble is they're pistols. Junk like that stopped gun development dead for two hundred years. And I don't suppose it helped art much, either.'

I said: 'Hold on. You could never get handcrafting like that on a gun these days.'

'Thank Christ for that. Or somebody, anyhow.' He jerked his head at the display. 'Take a real look at them: with all that carving the butts are lousy grips, and I'll bet most of them are muzzle-heavy. Sure, some of the cheaper stuff was better – duelling pistols had real grips and a good balance. But when the top men were doing this sort of stuff, the rest were trying to follow. So they spent two hundred years putting more engraving and gold wire on pistols. If they'd known their jobs they'd have learnt a bit of chemistry and invented percussion caps and cartridge loading two hundred years earlier.