Desmond Bagley - The Tightrope Men / The Enemy

‘Give me a cigarette, darling,’ she said.

He patted his pockets and found he had left the cigarette case and lighter in the room. Not being a smoker it had not occurred to him to put them in his pocket along with the rest of Meyrick’s personal gear. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any with me.’

‘My!’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me the great Professor Meyrick has stopped smoking. Now I will believe in cancer.’

Professor!

He used the pretext of illness again. ‘The one I tried this morning tasted like straw. Maybe I will stop smoking.’ He held his hand over the table. ‘Look at those nicotine stains. Imagine what my lungs must be like.’

She shook her head in mock sorrow. ‘It’s like pulling down a national monument. To imagine Harry Meyrick without a cigarette is like trying to imagine Paris without the Eiffel Tower.’

A Nordic waitress came to the table; she looked rather like Jeanette MacDonald dressed for an appearance in White Horse Inn. Denison raised his eyebrows at his companion. ‘What will you have?’

‘The usual,’ she said indifferently, delving into her handbag.

He took refuge in a paroxysm of coughing pulling out his handkerchief and only emerging when he heard her giving the order. He waited until the waitress left before putting away the handkerchief. The woman opposite him said, ‘Harry, that’s a really bad cough. I’m not surprised you’re thinking of giving up the cancer sticks. Are you feeling all right, darling? Maybe you’d be better off in bed, after all.’

‘I’m all right,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked solicitously.

‘Perfectly sure.’

‘Spoken like the old Professor Meyrick,’ she said mockingly. ‘Always sure of everything.’

‘Don’t call me Professor,’ he said testily. It was a safe enough thing to say regardless of whether Meyrick was really a professor or whether she was pulling his leg in a heavy-handed manner. The British have never been keen on the over-use of professional titles. And it might provoke her into dropping useful information.

All he got was a light and inconsequential, ‘When on the Continent do as the Continentals do.’

He went on the attack. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘You’re so British, Harry.’ He thought he detected a cutting edge to her voice. ‘But then, of course, you would be.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Oh, come off it. There’s nobody more British than an outsider who has bored his way in. Where were you born, Harry? Somewhere in Mittel Europa?’ She suddenly looked a little ashamed. ‘I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have said that. I’m being bitchy, but you’re behaving a bit oddly, too.’

‘The effect of the pills. Barbiturates have never agreed with me. I have a headache.’

She opened her handbag. ‘I have aspirin.’

The waitress, Valkyrie-like, bore down on them. Denison looked at the bottles on the tray, and said, ‘I doubt if aspirin goes with beer.’ That was the last thing he would have thought of as ‘the usual’; she did not look the beery type.

She shrugged and closed the bag with a click. ‘Please yourself.’

The waitress put down two glasses, two bottles of beer and a packet of cigarettes, said something rapid and incomprehensible, and waited expectantly. Denison took out his wallet and selected a 100-kroner note. Surely two beers and a packet of cigarettes could not cost more than a hundred kroner. My God, he did not even know the value of the currency! This was like walking through a minefield blindfolded.

He was relieved when the waitress made no comment but made change from a leather bag concealed under her apron. He laid the money on the table intending to check it surreptitiously. The redhead said, ‘You’ve no need to buy my cigarettes, Harry.’

He smiled at her. ‘Be my guest,’ he said, and stretched out his hand to pour her beer.

‘You’ve given it up yourself but you’re quite prepared to pay for other people’s poison.’ She laughed. ‘Not a very moral attitude.’

‘I’m not a moral philosopher,’ he said, hoping it was true.

‘No, you’re not,’ she agreed. ‘I’ve always wondered where you stood in that general direction. What would you call yourself, Harry? Atheist? Agnostic? Humanist?’

At last he was getting something of the quality of Meyrick. Those were questions but they were leading questions, and he was quite prepared to discuss philosophy with her – a nice safe subject. ‘Not an atheist,’ he said. ‘It’s always seemed to me that to believe in the non-existence of something is somewhat harder than to believe in its existence. I’d put myself down as an agnostic – one of the “don’t know” majority. And that doesn’t conflict with humanism.’

He fingered the notes and coins on the table, counted them mentally, subtracted the price of two beers based on what he had paid for a beer in the hotel, and arrived at the price of a packet of cigarettes. Roughly, that is. He had an idea that the price of a beer in a luxury hotel would be far higher than in an open-air café.

‘I went to church last Sunday,’ she said pensively. ‘To the English church – you know – the one on Møllergata.’ He nodded as though he did know. ‘I didn’t get much out of it. I think next time I’ll try the American church.’ She frowned. ‘Where is the American church, Harry?’

He had to say something , so he took a chance. ‘Isn’t it near the Embassy?’

Her brow cleared. ‘Of course. Between Bygdøy Alle and Drammens Veien. It’s funny, isn’t it? The American church being practically next door to the British Embassy. You’d expect it to be near the American Embassy.’

He gulped. ‘Yes, you would,’ he said, and forbore to mention that that was what he had meant. Even a quasi-theological conversation was strewn with pitfalls. He had to get out of this before he really dropped a clanger.

And an alarming suspicion had just sprung to mind, fully armed and spiky. Whoever had planted him in that hotel room and provided him with money and the means to provide all the necessities of life – and a lot of the luxuries, too – was unlikely to leave him unobserved. Someone would be keeping tabs on him, otherwise the whole operation was a nonsense. Could it be this redhead who apparently had qualms about her immortal soul? What could be better than to plant someone right next to him for closer observation?

She opened the packet of cigarettes and offered him one. ‘You’re sure you won’t?’

He shook his head. ‘Quite sure.’

‘It must be marvellous to have will power.’

He wanted peace and not this continuous exploration of a maze where every corner turned could be more dangerous than the last. He started to cough again, and dragged his handkerchief from his pocket. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘I think you’re right; I’d be better off in bed. Do you mind if I leave you?’

‘Of course not.’ Her voice was filled with concern. ‘Do you want a doctor?’

‘That’s not necessary,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right tomorrow – I know how these turns take me.’ He stood up and she also rose. ‘Don’t bother to come with me. The hotel is only across the road.’

He picked up the packet and thrust the maps back into it, and put the handkerchief into his pocket. She looked down at his feet. ‘You’ve dropped something,’ she said, and stooped to pick it up. ‘Why, it’s a Spiralen Doll.’

‘A what?’ he asked incautiously. It must have been pulled from his pocket when he took out the handkerchief.

She regarded him oddly. ‘You pointed these out at the Spiralen when we were there last week. You laughed at them and called them tourist junk. Don’t you remember?’