Gavin Lyall - The Secret Servant

The waiter poured them three glasses of wine and hurried away. The music stopped, and the girl clapped loudly. "Et donc, c'est Pauline."

A tubby girl danced onto the stage, did a perfunctory striptease to a new record, then stood there managing to make her loose breasts rotate in opposite directions. A handful of customers who had never seen this before squealed with admiration.

In a far corner a single shadowy figure sat down, and stopped the waiter lighting his candle for him. "Professor," Maxim said.

"Harry, we're paying for it, we may as well watch it." Tyler lit a small fat cigar he had collected at the buffet. The girl beside him gave Maxim a cool look.

Another record, another stripper, this one thin and worn-looking. Halfway through her act she stopped and said something in German that got a laugh, then translated it quickly. "After her, I must look like a couple of aspirins on an ironing board."

The British and American customers howled. Maxim watched the figure in the corner, then Tyler, as he reached for and gripped the girl's hand.

He sipped his wine cautiously, but it was a pleasant cool Moselle type. The evening was heading for disaster. He could hear George's incredulous voice: 'You let him do what?'

The stripper finished, the disc jockey shouted: "Encore de boogie!" and started another record. One couple started dancing.

Maxim leaned across the table and said: "Professor, you have got to get out of here. I really mean that."

"Harry, I'm not taking orders from you. I'm sorry, but Fm no longer subject to Queen's Regulations and DCTs, and I'm not breaking any contract or the Official Secrets Acts. I'm a private citizen. You don't have to share my bed."

"Would there be room?"

"I certainly hope not."

They glared at each other through the wavering candlelight. Maxim tried for the last – the next-to-last – time. "Professor, just for the sake of the talks, of Number 10, everything – can't you sleep alone tonight?"

Tyler gazed vaguely upwards, breathing smoke. "I don't think so, thank you, Harry."

The girl was watching Tyler but spitting occasional glances at Maxim. She might not understand English, but she understood a threat to her night's income.

"What are you trying to prove?" Maxim demanded.

"I'm not trying to prove anything."

"Then probably it was just something you ate."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Something you ate. A long time ago."

There was a timeless silence, full only of quadrophonic boogie, the babble of the customers, the clattering-of the waiters.

Tyler let go of the girl's hand and started stroking his tie between two long fingers. His glasses were two pale flickering pools of expressionless light.

He is wondering if he can kill me, Maxim thought. And in this town, with its bridges and cliffs, there could be a chance. But perhaps he is also wondering if I am a burning fuse, to be nipped out, or the first crack of light through a door that will never be closed again.

Or maybe he is just realising that even if he lay with every woman in the world he would still wake with only one memory.

Tyler stood up and started dealing thousand-franc notes onto the table in front of the puzzled girl. The waiter came wiggling across…

In the corner, a figure lifted his hand to call his own waiter.

The Avenue de la Gare was wide, bright and empty. An occasional taxi zoomed past, but the rest of the time it was quiet enough for Tyler's footsteps to echo. Maxim wore soft-soled shoes.

"This doesn't seem to be a mugger's city," Tyler said, "and in any case – I do keep forgetting – you are, as our American friends say, 'carrying'. That always has connotations of pregnancy for me. What is it that you carry?"

"A lightweight Charter Arms revolver, five-shot 38." It was in his hand, in his coat pocket. Neither Tyler nor the cloakroom girl had seen that happen.

"May I ask, Major-" the 'Harry' was gone, now, "who else shares your knowledge?"

"George Harbinger, the PM, at least one man from the Cabinet Office and I wouldn't know who else, by now."

Tyler nodded and let put what might have been a sigh of relief. At least he needn't any longer be thinking of pushing Maxim off the bridge ahead.

"Yet they still let me come here?"

"As George said, Moscow rather forced their hands."

It must be a strange feeling when the emperor realises that he actually has no clothes on at all.

Tyler was silent until they reached the long curling bridge at the top of the road. As they paused at the cross-road, Maxim looked back to what might have been a figure stepping into a doorway, and a distant car with only its side lights on, crawling by the kerb.

"I have a feeling that it was you who somehow discovered this… happening, Major. Can you tell me…?"

Carefully and slowly, ready to be interrupted, Maxim said: "Bob Etheridge wrote a letter when he realised he was dying, that was in Canada, two years or more ago. He got the letter sent to Gerald Jackaman…"

"So Bob's dead? What happened to the letter?" Maxim speeded up. "We don't know. Etheridge died under a new name, but when we found out who he was, I went to see Colonel de Carette."

Tyler stopped dead. "You saw Henri? You can't tell me that Henri told you anything."

"He tried not to. But he didn't know I'd been in the desert as well. He's dying, by the way. Lung cancer."

Tyler gazed down the ravine. A diesel freight clanked and hooted mournfully across the railway arches, black against the stars a quarter of a mile down stream.

"I must go and see him. Major… would you say one other name, just for my peace of mind?"

"Soldat de la premiиre classe Gaston Lecat"

"Thank you, Major." Maxim might have been telling him the time. They began walking again.

After a time, Tyler said: "I made a balls of that patrol. But I still can't see what else… It went wrong step by step, you never knew where… What would you have done, Major?"

"Relied on my seventeen years of soldiering instead of your – what was it? – three, by then?" Tyler chuckled. "Yes. What else can you say?"

"I might have left Lecat at the village, to be captured."

"Yes, that of course. But I was afraid Henri might walk out on me. I don't now think he would have, but at the time I'd only known him for about a week. And perhaps I just wanted the poor boy along as evidence that we'd actually contacted the French. To salvage something… But when we were there in the sand – then what would you have done, Major?"

"I don't know. I'd have stayed out of the sand."

"I suppose so. Shall we try and get a taxi?"

As they climbed in, Maxim thought he saw a figure separate from the darkness of the bridge and move back towards a slow-moving car.

They got out across the square from the hotel, with a wide space of cafй chairs and tables and a concrete bandstand in between. A few spiky leafless trees stuck up into the cold lamplight. Tyler hesitated, restless and unassuaged, and sat down abruptly on one of the cafй chairs. His long legs sprawled spiderlike from his short thick coat.

"I suppose I ought to thank you for saving me from that… woman tonight. She wasn't really Cleopatra, was she? But Major – how are you going to save me tomorrow? Really the situation hasn't changed. Number 10 isn't going to broadcast my wartime past, no matter what I do." He began to laugh quietly.

"Don't you want these talks to go well?" Maxim hadn't sat down.

"I do, yes, But-"

Maxim swung around, placed his hands on the table, and very nearly lost his temper. "Then stop worrying about Number 10 and start worrying about me, because I know you killed Mrs Jackaman and they don't. Not yet."

"I… now really, Major, I'd like to see you prove I was in Ireland when-" He stopped suddenly.