‘There aren’t many of those here,’ he said.
He had a rather long, pale face and a long, undistinguished nose. His hair was dark but not black and a little long. Perhaps because of that he had the look of one of those conventional portraits of the soldiers of a particular family—the cousin who fought with Wellington at Corunna or the great-uncle who died at Ypres. The only strange features in this conventional, restrained face, the kind of face usually found in England or Scotland, were a full and mobile mouth and the very bright blue eyes. He poured her some wine and said, ‘I do know what you’re talking about. But eat now, and have some wine.’ He poured her a glass. He cut some veal from his own piece and held it out to her on the end of his fork. ‘You can’t help them here, if anyone can ever help them. Nibble a bit.’
Hannie, distracted, took the titbit in her mouth, but her eyes watched the slender white hands of the woman at a table opposite her. They glittered with fine diamonds as she toyed, conscious of the effect, with the stem of her glass, or gestured at her companion.
‘Those hands could save a thousand lives, we know,’ James remarked, as if reading her thoughts. ‘And she wouldn’t have to lift a finger—except to take the rings off.’ He turned and said, ‘Keep eating. You’re slacking.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘While I eat, tell me how you found me.’
‘I didn’t find you,’ he said. ‘Your friends started the hue and cry. Julie had a bad instinct when you left. She said she’d had a row with you. She started ringing your husband about three weeks after you’d left. He had no word of you and was embarrassed about the whole thing. A bit more time went by and your friend Margaret got on to him and made him ring the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office had no word. Then they really got to work. They put ads in the papers as well. They got hold of Davis and Spinelli as soon as they got back. From Spinelli they heard about you coming back to the camp with Kyte. They got on to Kyte, who told them his part of the story. At that point I came in. Among other things, they’d used The Times. There was a piece in it about you, a member of the British-Brazilian scientific expedition, being missing. I read it in Hong Kong, and I thought, Well, if my favourite star Hannie Richards is doing scientific research, then I’m a Dutchman. I got back a fortnight later and got in touch with The Times, which led me to your friends. By that time they were trying in vain to contact Duncan Kyte, who was trying equally hard to evade them.’
‘He knew where I was,’ Hannie said.
‘So it turned out,’ Jarnes said. ‘But there it was—Duncan Kyte had fled into paranoia and, quite honestly, his brother wasn’t much better. Truth is, they’re both peculiar. Roderick’s the good guy, but he’s obsessed with these flaming plants and all he could think about was how disobliging you’d been to him when you refused to withhold the plants from Duncan. Duncan’s obsessed by his rotten wealth and his rotten health and by these same utterly stinking plants, and, of course, they hate each other, which doesn’t help. Meanwhile, the Foreign Office, true to form, has lost all the papers due to Julian Critchley-Smith-Jones being off at an elderly aunt’s bedside or due to not wanting to imperil at that time a valuable trade deal between us and the Brazilians. Of course, nobody loves a drug-dealer; most governments won’t chuck themselves about to help one.’
‘I never did that, you know,’ said Hannie, through a mouthful of veal.
‘I thought not,’ he said promptly. ‘It didn’t seem like your style. Anyway, at this stage none of us knew where you were or even if you were still alive. Your friends asked me to come here and try to find some traces of you. I agreed, willingly. I told them I’d seen you around from time to time and would like to help.’
‘Did you tell them what you are?’ Hannie interrupted.
‘I told them what I had been,’ he said. ‘They didn’t care. They wanted to find you and they knew I had a better chance of helping than most—women are far more pragmatic than men in a crisis, I’ve noticed. But obviously I wasn’t going to set off for Brazil without any background. And we all knew that if Duncan Kyte had not been returning calls left on his answer-phone and was instructing his manservant to turn enquirers from the door, then it was likely he knew something. So I went down to his place late at night, entered his house and went upstairs and found him in bed, watching video with that corroded little blonde. I took a big shooter, to cut down on the time involved. It was faster than it would have been because the blonde told me everything straight away. God knows why he’d stopped anybody knowing where you were.’
‘He thought I’d sign the specimens over to him faster if he promised me release,’ Hannie told him. ‘I don’t think people like that can refuse the chance to use leverage. Threats and promises get to be a habit. He wrote to me, but I was too far gone by then to reply.’
‘Over-calculation, that’s always a pitfall,’ James said.
‘Hadn’t we better start for the airport?’ Hannie asked.
‘Only if you want to be nearly an hour and a half early,’ replied James. ‘But I can see you don’t like this restaurant so—’ He signalled for the bill.
‘I don’t like Brazil,’ said Hannie.
‘Pity,’ said James. ‘It’s a wonderful country. I shall try to spend holidays here when I’m respectably settled in life.’
As they left the restaurant, he tipped the leader of the band, remarking, ‘Poor bastard. Fancy having to do that all day long.’
In the cab Hannie asked, ‘What will you do—if you’re getting out of trouble, so to speak?’
‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘My family’s mostly in the army, thus the fascination with weapons. That’s why I never felt too bad about my filthy trade, I dare say. What’s the difference between taking pay for selling them and taking pay for using them? With one you stand the risk of going to gaol and with the other you get knighted on the battlefield. Well, I’m just the classic sixties drop-out child of the respectable middle classes. When it comes down to it, I’ve got no qualifications and no training. I’m just fit to run a fairground shooting range.’
‘Travel agent,’ suggested Hannie.
‘Don’t laugh,’ said James Carter. ‘I suspect you’re out of a job, too. For one thing your face is getting too well known.’
‘And my nerve’s gone,’ Hannie said truthfully.
‘It sometimes comes back,’ he told her.
‘Can’t do it any more anyway,’ she said. ‘This was meant to be the last time, just to get a lot of money to take care of my children. I’ll be staying at home for a while. I won’t be able to shoot off at a moment’s notice and risk never coming back, or never coming back for eight years. That’s all over.’ She suddenly felt depressed.
‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘I didn’t half enjoy you—never knew where you’d pop up next or what you’d be up to. We’d have made a wonderful team. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’
‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ said Hannie.
‘Laurel and Hardy,’ he said. ‘Ah well, here we are.’
In the airport she said, ‘I’m sorry to have brought us here so early.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Let’s have some final Brazilian coffee. It’s like nothing else in the world.’
As they drank the hot black sweet coffee she said, ‘Why did they release me?’
James’s blue eyes sparkled. He said with enjoyment, ‘Insanity. Your friend Elizabeth did something terrible. You must never tell a living soul—a professional man’s reputation is totally in your hands.’
‘Go on,’ said Hannie.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘She had this analyst—right? Couldn’t get out of bed to do the housework so her husband found a shrink?’
‘Right,’ said Hannie. ‘You’re a terrible gossip. I can’t believe in you as constructor of secret deals. I should think everyone in the world would know if you sold a peashooter.’
‘Gossips hear a lot as well as telling a lot,’ James said. ‘But you’ve got a great deal to thank Elizabeth Lo
rd for, and you must never do it. She’s embarrassed and doesn’t want it mentioned. She didn’t tell me about this, but Julie did.’
‘There you go again,’ said Hannie. ‘Gossip, gossip, gossip.’ She peered at him. ‘What did she do?’
‘We had to produce a reason, if only a formal one, for why the authorities in Brazil should voluntarily release you. We were all sitting around in the Hope Club one night—’
‘You got into the Hope Club?’ said Hannie.
‘Through the back door. It was an emergency,’ he said gravely. ‘It’s a lot better than the men’s clubs. However, there we sat, trying to figure out a reason for them to let you go, and Margaret came up with the idea of insanity. If you’re mad you’re not culpable. And a lot of governments don’t like the idea of keeping mad foreigners, particularly women, in the gaols. The notion offends them. So that was fine—you were supposed to be mad. But we needed documentary proof, dating back over the years, to show that you had a history of serious mental illness. So Elizabeth—wait for it—compromised the quack.’
‘She what?’ cried Hannie. ‘Compromised the doctor—Elizabeth? How?’
‘How do you usually get compromised?’ demanded James. ‘I’m telling you, she compromised him sexually.’
‘Elizabeth?’ said Hannie. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Well, she did,’ James said. ‘Never underestimate a friend. Once she had—well—compromised him, as it were, she put it to him that she needed his help over a document saying that you had been his patient for many years, and he had no hesitation in stating that in his medical opinion you were right round the bend. And it was dangerous to keep you locked up without proper attention.’
‘Poor Elizabeth,’ said Hannie. ‘How awful for her.’
‘She didn’t mind,’ James asserted. ‘Honestly, she laughed about it. You see, women are pragmatic.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ said Hannie. ‘Fancy Elizabeth doing that for me.’
‘She didn’t do it for herself, that’s for sure,’ James said. ‘Nor is her account of it is to be trusted. On the other hand,’ he continued cheerfully, ‘perhaps she did get something out of it for herself. Harmless revenge. From what I gather her husband, a perfectly nice man and naturally desperate for a clean shirt and a wife who doesn’t keep on crying all the time, sent her to this analyst to sort her out. And the analyst, who saw the thing in much the same terms as the husband, tried to make her into a good wife and a happy woman, without spotting that she needed more than that. And she, confused by then, felt more confused and also guilty, because she couldn’t manage to meet the demand. Also her husband was paying for the results he wasn’t getting. After that she managed to put herself together all by herself and realized they’d been wasting her time and energy and making her feel worse by sheer stupidity—perhaps she didn’t really mind making fools of both of them, briefly. They’d told her a lie, after all—that she was a poodle and all she had to do was get adjusted to a poodle’s life—so she probably felt better when she tricked them in return.’
‘Does he mind—Elizabeth’s husband—now she’s doing all this work at the Club?’ Hannie asked.
‘Not so far,’ James said. ‘It seems like voluntary work to him. And it seems practical. He can still be the family brain. But wait till he finds out how far it’s gone. There may be a ruckus then.’
‘What’s gone far?’ asked Hannie. ‘Is it the Club?’
‘I’ll leave them to tell you,’ he said. ‘They want to talk to you about it all.’ He lit a cheroot. Hannie put out her hand for it, and he gave it to her, then lit another for himself. ‘Brandy?’ he asked. She nodded. They were very confidential now. Hannie stared at him. He stared back. The blue eyes were blank in his long, ordinary face.
‘How do you know all this?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘They told me,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But why? They’ve confided in you like the district nurse—Julie said this and Elizabeth said that and you tell me what Elizabeth thought about the analyst—’
‘You mean I became one of the girls?’ he said. He looked around the room and said, ‘You’re right. There’s a lot men and women only talk about to members of their own sex. It’s partly trade secrets the opposition’s not supposed to know. And partly that there are things men just don’t understand about women and vice versa. No point in talking to someone who doesn’t understand the language. But I’ve got four older sisters. My parents were after a boy—for the army, you see. I’ve been a disappointment. I was meant from an early age to become some corner of a foreign field that would be for ever England. Anyway, I suppose four sisters are an education in themselves. You pick up a lot of information.’ He paused, thinking, then said, ‘I suppose a Freudian would say that’s why I became an arms trader—to prove I wasn’t a girl. Although living with them was like training with the SAS. Or it could have been my father making me learn to strip down and reassemble machine guns when I was five.’
‘Certainly looks as if you were predestined, one way or the other,’ Hannie said.
‘So what turned you into a smuggler?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Hannie said. ‘I wondered about it while I was mad in gaol. “Where did all this begin?”—that sort of thing. My mother’s always been ill. I think that had something to do with it. And then I found I was a pregnant woman, waiting for my husband to come home all the time. I couldn’t bear being that woman, hanging about, trying to make ends meet, keeping a candle in the window. We were short of money.
‘It started when I suggested we take our boat across the Channel and pick up some wine and brandy like classic British smugglers. It was sort of adventurous in a thoroughly traditional way—watch the wall my darling while the gentlemen go by. The next thing was that someone in the district said that some friends of theirs had taken their cat to France in a boat, but the boat had packed up. They had to come back by train and, obviously, they couldn’t bring the cat back without having to put it in quarantine for six months. This would break the cat’s heart, the children’s hearts and so on and so forth. Of course, I shouldn’t have done it in case the cat had rabies, but in that part of the country, especially among boat-owners, the regulations get bent. After that there was another call, and another, and another. I got connections, trade built—that explains how I came to do it. It may not explain why. Why don’t you tell me how you got the authorities to release me? Did they just accept the certificate of madness for which Elizabeth traded her virtue?’
‘No,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘I’ll make it brief. We’ll have to start boarding soon. By the way, what was your husband doing while you stood at the helm of a storm-tossed craft?’
‘Sometimes he was with me,’ Hannie said defensively. ‘Sometimes he was busy with the farm.’
James said nothing about this. As they drifted slowly to the barrier, he remarked cheerfully, ‘Yes, the business of you being mad—well, obviously in these situations you should never use one angle when two would be better. Luckily, I had some connections.’ Standing in the queue, he said, ‘Nice to be here with nothing on our minds, eh?’ Then, in a lower voice, ‘So, with my certificate in one hand and a nasty little photo in the other, I went to see an influential friend at the Ministry of the Interior. The photo, I’m sorry to say, showed a young man in a peaked hat and very shiny boots giving the order for some soldiers to fire at some scruffy-looking characters lined up facing a wall. Jews, in short, in Warsaw, forty years ago. The photo’s in a book, in fact. As you probably know, Brazil’s run partly on medieval lines, under the surface. There are a few very powerful and influential families, interconnected and very rich. The man I saw was a member of one of those families, married to a beautiful wife, whom he loves dearly. Her father lives on the family estancia, a dear old white-haired gentleman, very fond of his grandchildren but, unfortunately, the former Oberstleutnant Bremmer, a famous name in the Warsaw Ghetto, so long ago. Naturally the wife, her
husband and the rest of the family have forgotten all this. They certainly don’t feel they want any interfering person informing the Jewish Agency in Vienna about the whereabouts of this desirable person. Or Jewish agents turning up and kidnapping him or killing him. I’d saved up this item of information in case I ever needed help at a later date.’
As they walked across the tarmac, he said philosophically, ‘I have a feeling there won’t be many more later dates. Anyway, a few hints about the earlier career of the father-in-law and the production of a document stating that you were mad but otherwise blameless, and the authorities decided, with creditable speed, that it would be nothing short of inhumane to keep you banged up like that. It’s a pity really. I was quite looking foward to being out of the game, in no need of blackmail weapons, and shopping the old Nazi.’
‘You still could,’ Hannie said.
‘You know better than that,’ he said. ‘Information should only be used once, like teabags.’
They sat in a corner. She breathed more freely after take-off. They were travelling first class. ‘What did it cost to bail me out?’
‘Nothing on my side,’ he said. ‘I’ll stand the cost of the odd plane fare for the fun of it. I’ve been fascinated and entertained by you for years. “How does she get away with it?” I used to ask myself.’
‘But they hired you?’ she said.
‘I did it as a friendly act,’ he told her. ‘And as an act of solidarity. The truth is you’d flown one mission too many. We’ve all done that. Slight fatigue, followed by slip-up, followed by the consequences—it’s just the sort of thing I know about. Occupational hazard caused by living off their wits for too long. Like a window cleaner falling off his ladder.’
‘All I can say,’ said Hannie, ‘is thanks.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ he said. ‘You’re serious about those drugs being planted?’
‘Why would I lie?’ Hannie asked.
Hannie Richards Page 22
