The High Commissioner

by Jon Cleary

  “The minimum stake is five pounds, sir. We have plenty more chips when you need them.”

  “Thanks,” said Malone, hoping Madame Cholon would make her appearance in the next two minutes.

  Jamaica took fifty pounds’ worth of chips and Lisa changed ten pounds. Malone looked warningly at her. “You don’t have to go risking your money.”

  “I’m in this with you,” said Lisa, leading the way to the roulette table. “Whatever it is.”

  “They play the French wheel here,” Jamaica said, his voice low now that they were by the table. “It’s illegal in this country because it has the zero. But I gather the police never come into this club.”

  The croupier, a fleshless automaton with paper skin and marble eyes, waited for them to place their bets. Lisa put a chip on the red 8; Jamaica laid one on the black 9. Malone hesitated, aware of the icy impatience of the croupier. He had no feeling that to-night would be lucky for him, but he had to buy as much time as he could with his five chips. He remembered an explanation of roulette given him by a member of the Gaming Squad back home. He placed a chip at the top of the table, linking zero with 1. Then he straightened up and waited, watching the door to the room as closely as he watched the spinning wheel.

  The wheel spun its mesmerism, the silver centrepiece flashing a silent siren song, the black and red slots a blur that seemed to take the breath out of the watchers. Then the ivory ball began its slowly diminishing click-click: a hollow sound, thought Malone, that no mug ever takes as a warning.

  The ball came to rest, and Lisa said, “You’ve won! You get eight times your stake.”

  That buys me about another ten minutes, Malone thought.

  “Your lucky night,” said Jamaica.

  Malone had four more bets and four more wins. Lisa won once and Jamaica lost all his five bets. He said, “Maybe I should follow you more, eh, Malone?”

  I’m missing something here, Malone thought. There was something he was supposed to know; Jamaica had at last accepted him, but had forgotten to take him into his confidence. He looked at his watch. “What time were you expecting her?”

  Jamaica shrugged. “She’s from Viet Nam. Time doesn’t mean a thing to them. She mightn’t even come at all.”

  “If she doesn’t, I’d like a talk with you.” Malone grinned. “As an international friend and ally.”

  Jamaica nodded absently. He was looking about the room, which had now began to fill up as the serious gamblers began to arrive. There were people at all the tables, their faces turned into masks; anonymity was a form of leprosy, their faces would get blanker as the night wore on. An obscenely fat American sat next to an elderly over-painted Englishwoman, a pair of grotesques oblivious of each other; a Jewish diamond merchant sat across from a Syrian banker, each intent only on his number on the no-man’s-land between them. Jamaica had seen the same blank countenances before: at Las Vegas, where even the slot machines had more expression, at Monte Carlo, in Macao in the old days. Nothing ever changed at the tables, he thought cynically and sadly. Madame Cholon was gambling on the one sure thing about human nature: its addiction to gambling. He looked about the room, then at the door. And saw the manager, the smile gashing his face like a white wound, come in. Beside him was Superintendent Denzil.

  “I need some more chips,” Jamaica said to Malone, and moved towards the side room.

  “There’s Denzil now,” Malone said.

  He gathered up his sixth winning bet and he and Lisa moved across to-where Denzil and the manager stood looking as if they did not want to know each other.

  “The gentleman says he is from Scotland Yard.” The manager looked reproachfully at Malone and Lisa: this was a respectable club and he didn’t want the tone lowered, least of all by the police. Malone knew the type, had met them back home in the dingy illegal clubs around King’s Cross and Woolloomooloo. They would have welcomed Hitler, Genghis Khan and Nero to their clubs if they had had money to gamble. A gambler only lost his respectability in the eyes of club managers when the police, like black sheep relatives, intruded from the outside world.

  Malone smiled reassuringly. “It’s just a social call. Superintendent Denzil and I are old friends. He used to be a stockman for my father on our station. A cowpuncher, as the Americans would call him.” Malone was feeling a little light-headed: he had three hundred and forty-five pounds’ worth of chips, his luck was in to-night, Madame Cholon would walk in the door any minute.

  The manager looked at Denzil. “I’m afraid I can’t allow you to play, sir. It might look bad – for you and the club. You understand, of course?”

  Denzil’s smile was as painful as the manager’s own. “I’ll just watch. And I’ll try not to look too much like a policeman.” He glanced at Malone. “Or a cowpuncher.”

  The manager flinched the smile once more and went away. Then Denzil said, “We’ll discuss the cowpuncher bit later. Is our lady friend here?”

  “Not yet,” said Malone. “But Jamaica is. Maybe you’d like a word with him?”

  But Jamaica had gone. Malone went into the side room but there was no one there but the giant panda behind the bars. No, he hadn’t seen the coloured gentleman. There was another door just there that led to the men’s room . . . Malone didn’t bother to go looking for Jamaica; he knew he would be already out of the building. He went back to Denzil and Lisa. “I just hope he doesn’t get in touch with Madame Cholon and tell her not to come.”

  “Does he know where she is?” Denzil asked.

  Malone shrugged. “I don’t know. But if he does, why all the rigmarole of turning up without her and having us here to meet her? Why didn’t he just tell us where to find her?”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t want her to know he’s turned informer on her. If she had turned up here and we’d got on to her, he could have acted surprised. What’s his game anyway?”

  “That’s a good question,” said Lisa, and Denzil looked at her with surprise and a sort of amused tolerance. He belonged to a dying breed of Englishmen, the sort who called his wife “old gel” and treated her as one of the more privileged of the other ranks. Women were jolly good sorts in the right places, but they weren’t expected to have opinions. “He says he’s an exporter of Thai silk, has his business in Bangkok. I wonder how many successful Negro businessmen there are in the Far East?”

  “He could have been an ex-G.I.,” Malone said. “Some of them stayed on around the Pacific after World War Two and the Korean show.”

  “I prefer to be suspicious of him,” said Denzil. “He’s up to no good. Just as I suspect this Madame Cholon is.”

  “What are you going to do if she does turn up?”

  “Ask her along to the Yard for a little chat.” Denzil grimaced. “But I never enjoy questioning women. That was one good thing about Kenya – very rarely had anything to do with women. No offence, Miss Pretorious.”

  “Women never enjoy being questioned,” said Lisa. “Least of all by men. No offence, Superintendent.”

  Denzil looked at her out of the corner of his eye, but said nothing. He is not going to enjoy Madame Cholon, Malone thought; she will tear strips off him. Maybe we should enlist Lisa for the night as an interrogator.

  They waited an hour for Madame Cholon, retiring to a small annexe to nibble at the free caviare and smoked salmon: no patrons of this club would ever be allowed to collapse at the tables from starvation. The main room filled with people and smoke, one just a pattern in the other; personality and substance seemed to have been checked at the door with the coats and wraps. But no Madame Cholon, the face Malone now knew he would recognise even in a stadium of Oriental faces, came in to break the pattern.

  “She’s not coming,” Denzil said at last. “Either Jamaica got on to her or she never intended coming. At least not after this afternoon.”

  “How will you be able to prove she did have something to do with the bomb explosion?” Lisa asked.

  “We won’t be able to,” Denzil said. “Our best witness against
her went up with the bomb.”

  “There’s the other bloke,” Malone said. “The one who drove him to Aldwych.”

  “He’s probably with Madame Cholon, half-way back to where she came from.”

  “If they are,” said Lisa, “then our troubles are over, aren’t they?”

  “In Special Branch, Miss Pretorious, our troubles are never over. If it’s not someone deadly serious like this crowd, it’s a crank. The worst of it is that we have to treat them all as deadly serious until we prove otherwise.”

  Malone went away to cash his chips, then came back. “I won three hundred and twenty quid. The night hasn’t been altogether unprofitable.” He looked at Lisa. “Do you approve or are your moral hackles rising?”

  “Chicken feed,” said Lisa. “My social conscience doesn’t stir under five thousand.”

  Malone whistled and grinned. “That’s the world I’m after. Where poverty begins below five thousand quid.”

  “I wonder what stakes Madame Cholon plays for?” Denzil said. “Can I give you a lift back to Belgravia?”

  Malone told him Lisa’s car was over in the underground garage. When they were outside the house Malone took the keys from Lisa. “Would you stay here with her, Superintendent, while I get the car? We’d curse ourselves if Madame Cholon turned up just as we’d both left.”

  “My pleasure.” Denzil did his best to look gallant, at one o’clock in the morning and after only five hours’ sleep in the last forty-eight. “Do you like your job, Miss Pretorious?”

  Malone, grinning, walked away. Lisa had said women never enjoyed being questioned, but Denzil had kept the conversation going by asking her the most boring question a woman would want to hear. But then, Malone told himself, Lisa did like her job. Or anyway the man she worked for; and for a lot of women, he guessed, that was their job. She hadn’t come on this wild-goose chase to-night just to get the wind in her face after a day in the Rolls and the office. She had come because Quentin meant something to her.

  He went under Park Lane through the subway, deserted now but for the bearded derelict trudging with dead eyes towards a destination he had long forgotten. Poor bastard, Malone thought; and put out a hand and stopped the man. “Here,” he said, and pushed five pounds into the grimy hand that came up in a frightened defensive gesture. “Just don’t blow it all on plonk. Have a bath and a shave. You might find another man underneath all that dirt and hair.”

  But he knew the man wouldn’t. The derelicts of the world were all alike: they wanted to forget, not rediscover. He watched the man shamble off along the subway; maybe the down-and-out was lucky. He had succeeded where Quentin had failed: he had buried his real self for ever. Then Malone was angry with himself: why the hell do I worry so much over Quentin? And, like the derelict, didn’t dig for the truth. Charity and justice, he had learned long ago, were often uncomfortable bedmates.

  When he walked into the garage he was struck for the first time by its vastness. Two hours ago it had been almost full of cars; now it was virtually empty. The low-roofed cavern seemed to stretch for miles into shadows beyond the glow of the pale lights that were still switched on; the grey concrete pillars stood like long open ranks of headless petrified men. He paid the attendant, who went back to his copy of Playboy and his dreams of the better life; he walked on down between the widely spaced pillars, his footsteps sounding like rhythmically tapped bones in the huge low echo chamber. Lisa’s car was parked at the far end of the garage beyond the shallow pools of light; he could see the dim white shape of it, like a calcified beast. He suddenly felt tired and he began to hurry towards it, wanting to get home to bed.

  He heard the car start up somewhere over to one side of him, but he didn’t look towards it: it was only a growling noise somewhere in the shadows. He heard it coming towards him, the driver shifting up into second gear; he turned his head casually, just to make sure that the driver could see him in the grey gloom. Then suddenly he was flooded in light and he heard the angry whine of the car as it accelerated. He stood for a moment blinded and stupefied; then he flung himself to one side as the car hurtled past. As he lurched up against a pillar he saw the car stand almost on its nose as the driver slammed on the brakes. It was a red Mini-Minor; and he remembered the car he had followed this morning from Lancaster House. It reversed, swung round and came speeding back at him; he ducked behind the pillar as it scraped past with a screech of metal. It went round in a tight circle, engine snarling, tyres shrieking, and came back at him as he raced towards another pillar. The car went by as he tried to swerve away from it; it caught him a glancing blow and he went tumbling along the concrete floor. He hit a pillar with a sickening thud and lay there for a moment. Far away he could hear a voice yelling; it echoed and re-echoed in the vast empty space like a choir of furies. He heard the scream of tyres again, the clashing of gears, the protest of the engine as it was revved too quickly; then he was flooded in light again. He got up on one knee, crouching like a boxer who knows he can’t beat the count, knowing he was about to the; he stared into the lights as they came towards him, trying to look beyond them into the face of his killer. He was aware of the pillar behind him and he got a swift peculiar satisfaction from it. When the car smashed him against the pillar, the driver also was going to be hurt, might even be killed. If you had to the, it would be some negative compensation to take your murderer with you.

  But the instinct to survive was too strong, in both himself and the driver of the car. As he flung himself to one side, rolling over and skidding along the floor in a pool of oil, the car went by on the other side of the pillar. It skidded and for a moment looked as if it was going to topple over; it scraped by another pillar and there was the sound of metal being crunched. The driver wrestled with it, steering it close by yet another of the concrete posts; then it was speeding down the garage, past the yelling attendant as he came running down from his office. Its sound thed away and then there was only the light thump of the attendant’s running feet.

  Malone picked himself up and stood trembling. He wanted to curse, but he knew it would only sound like a whimper; relief and shock had turned him into jelly. He swayed, took two faltering steps and leaned against a pillar; the concrete hardness of it seemed to give him some strength, and he straightened up as the attendant came running up. He shook his head as the man, face as white as his overalls, incoherently asked what the bloody hell was going on.

  “Some drunk showing off—” Malone was surprised at how calm his voice sounded. He had been involved in fights and brawls before and twice he had had to arrest a man at gunpoint; but no one had ever tried deliberately to kill him before. He was still weak and sick, his legs quivering like an old man’s but his voice was a stranger’s, that of a good-humoured man who had tolerance towards drunken drivers. “Forget it.”

  “But how did he get in here? I’ve checked out everybody who’s come in in the last hour. He must of been sitting in his car all night, just getting drunker – You sure you’re all right? Cripes, he’s made a mess of your clothes.”

  Malone looked down at the new blue suit, covered in oil and dirt and with a gaping hole in one knee. “I was due for a new one, anyway.” How can I be so bloody easy-going? he wondered. He looked up and about at the huge emptiness. He wanted to scream abuse at the killer in the red Mini; but the garage was empty and silent. He looked back at the attendant. “Forget it, Jack. If ever I see him again, I’ll thump him one and take the money off him for a new suit.”

  “Did you get a look at him?”

  Malone shook his head; but he knew what Pallain looked like. “No, nor his number, either.”

  The attendant walked down with Malone to the MG. “You sure you don’t want me to report this?”

  “What’s the use?” Don’t be public-spirited, mate: go back to Playboy and the girls with big breasts.

  The attendant shrugged. “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. You’re an Aussie, aren’t you? Bet you wished you’d stayed home.”

&
nbsp; “Yes,” said Malone, and got into the MG and drove it slowly and carefully out of the garage and up the ramp into Carriage Road. He paused at the top of the ramp, waiting to be ambushed; but the killer had gone home, the jungle was safe again. He eased the car out into the sparse traffic, drove up to the first turn-off and swung back down Park Lane. He had the feeling he was being watched, that he was still a target; but there was nothing he could do about it. His life, perhaps even his fate, was becoming more and more entwined with that of Quentin. He wondered why he should no longer feel any resentment of the fact.

  II

  “I think we should wake up Mr. Quentin,” Lisa said.

  Malone shook his head and flinched as she bathed the cut on his knee. His trouser-leg was rolled up and he had taken off his shoe and his bloodstained sock. There were abrasions on both his elbows, the cut on his chin had been opened again and he felt as if his body was one great bruise. “Don’t bother him. He’d stay awake the rest of the night. He’s got enough on his mind without worrying about me.”

  They were sitting in the big kitchen. A bowl of water stood on the formica-topped table; beside it were the Dettol bottle and the tin of Band-aids. The fluorescent ceiling light added to the antiseptic atmosphere; they were in their own small casualty room. “This is getting to be a habit, mending your cuts and bruises.”

  “What’s that perfume you wear?” She was leaning close to him to wipe away the dried blood on his chin.

  “Arpège. Why?”

  “I like it, even mixed with Dettol.”

  She smiled, the sort of woman’s smile that he had never solved; women had always been a mystery to him, even his simple old Irish mum. “Whom have you got back home to miss you? I mean, if to-night—?”

  “Just my mum and dad. And I suppose one or two mates.” How could you name who would regret your passing, measure someone else’s regard for you?

  “No girl?”

  “No particular one.” There were a dozen who might grieve for him for a week or two, but none whose heart would be broken. Christ, he thought, I’ve made no dent in anyone. He had felt lonely before, but now suddenly for the first tine he felt alone. And that was much, much worse.