‘To live in France?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘To the department.’
‘Hah! It’s a thought, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t, Steve, and I’ll tell you why.’ I leaned a little closer to him, and he glanced round the room with no more than a flicker of the eye.
I said, ‘Because the department never asked me to, Steve.’
He smiled soberly.
‘And I’ll tell you something else, Steve,’ I added. ‘There are people who say that you never left the department. Whenever we get together like this in London I wonder whether you are going to try recruiting me.’
‘Now you’re laughing at me, boyo,’ said Champion, in his stage Welsh accent. He reached into his pocket and produced a clear plastic envelope. Inside it were five picture postcards. Each depicted an airship or a balloon, and in the foreground were men in straw hats and women in leg-of-mutton-sleeved dresses, inhabitants of an innocent world that had not quite learned to fly. On the other sides of the cards was a tangle of greetings to long-forgotten addressees, and curious old postage stamps.
‘A philatelic auction in Bond Street,’ said Champion. ‘That’s why I came to London. I just couldn’t resist these.’
I looked at his purchases. By now Champion should have realized that I was a lost cause as far as his obsession with airmail stamps was concerned. ‘And Billy?’ I asked. I handed his airships back to him.
‘Yes, I’m seeing a lot of Billy this week,’ said Champion, as if visiting his young son was no more than an afterthought. ‘Caty has been very good about letting me see Billy.’
He went through the postcards one by one and then put them away with exaggerated care. ‘The night Billy was born,’ he said, ‘I was up to the neck in bank loans, promissory notes and mortgages. I was sure I’d done the wrong thing … did I ever tell you how I started: with the uncut diamonds?’
‘I’ve heard stories,’ I admitted.
He inhaled carefully on his cigarette. ‘Do you know Accra?’
‘No.’
‘The arse-hole of West Africa. I was flat broke, and working hard to buy a ticket home. I was translating export permits for cocoa traders and wangling customs forms for importers – all of them Arabs. My Arabic has always been good, but by the time I finished working with those jokers I could have done the sports reports for Radio Cairo. When I think of it!’ He clasped his hands tight as if to stretch the joints. ‘I took the bumpf down to the customs sheds one day – June, it was, and bloody steamy, even by Accra standards. I made the usual golden obeisance to the officials and loaded ten crates of Renault spares on to the truck I’d hired. But when I uncrated them back in the cocoa warehouse, I find I’m knee-deep in French MAS 38s, complete with cleaning kits, and spares and instruction booklets.’
‘Sub-machineguns,’ I said.
‘Go to the top of the class.’
‘But could you get the Long cartridge?’
‘Am I glad you weren’t involved, old boy! No, you couldn’t get them. But the kids who bought them were too young to remember the MAS 38, so they think they are MAT 49s, for which there is 9 mm stuff ready to be nicked from a local police or army unit. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘But I’m getting ahead of the story. Imagine me – the only man in Accra who’d sooner have Renault spares than sub-machineguns, sitting on ten cases of them. All of them customs cleared, rubber stamped and signed for. It was tempting.’
‘But you didn’t succumb?’
‘Oh, but I did.’ He took a drag on his cigarette and waved the smoke away. ‘Two hundred and thirty-five dollars each – American dollars – and I could have doubled it, had I sold them to the loudmouths with the fuzzy-wuzzy haircuts.’
‘Ten to a case?’ I said. ‘About ten thousand pounds profit.’
‘I had to stop my client going down to the customs and raising hell about his Renault spares. I owed a bit of money, I had to get an exit permit, and clearance from the tax office: it all costs money.’
‘You came home?’
‘I went to buy my air ticket from a crooked little Portuguese travel agent. I started bargaining with him, knowing that he could unload my US dollar bills at a big premium. To cut a long story short, I ended up giving him all my American money in exchange for a bag of uncut diamonds from Angola and a boat ticket to Marseille.’
‘You went to Marseille?’
‘Old man Tix had just died, his whole set-up was for sale. Caty’s sister told me about it. But the Algerian fighting was still on, and the Tix fruit and vegetable importing was no more than a ream of headed notepaper and a couple of fleabitten offices in Constantine.’
‘And the quarry was defunct.’
‘The quarry – yes.’ Champion smiled. We’d both hidden in the quarry during a big German round-up, when old man Tix had chased a German officer out of the house shouting ‘Sale Boche’ at him, crossing himself as he did so. ‘The quarry was finished. They’d mined, too, but it was costing so much to dig that the old boy did better on unemployment benefit.’
‘But you sold your diamonds and bought the Tix place from his widow?’
‘That was only a down payment,’ said Steve, ‘but Madame Tix wanted me to have it. She waited a long time for the rest of the money. It was a gamble for all concerned. We were betting on a peaceful settlement of the Algerian war.’
‘You were always a good guesser, Steve,’ I said.
‘The peace between France and Algeria meant immigrant labourers – that got the mine back into profit.’
‘Lower wages,’ I said.
‘But still higher than any they could get in their own country.’
‘But you closed the mine and the quarry – you sent the men home.’
Champion smiled. He said, ‘It was the idea of cheap labour in the mine. That’s what enabled me to get my capital. Avaricious little hairdressers with their hands in the till … contractors fiddling their tax, and hard-eyed old bastards from the merchant banks. They came to see my quarry and the Arabs sweating their guts out. They liked it – that was the kind of investment those little sods could understand. That was the way their grandfathers – and their friends’ grandfathers – had made a fortune in Africa a hundred years ago.’
‘And you put that money into the fruit and veg.’
‘Much more than money … soil analysis, a professor of botany, a programme of seeding techniques, long-term contracts for the farmers, minimum price guarantees for seasonal workers, refrigerated warehouses, refrigerated transport and contracted refrigerated shipping. I put a lot of money into the Arab countries.’
‘And now they have oil as well.’
‘Oil is a one-crop economy,’ said Champion.
‘A gilt-edged one,’ I said.
‘That’s what they said about coffee and tea and rubber,’ said Champion. ‘I truly believe that North Africa must trade with Europe, right across the board. The Arab countries must have a stake in Europe’s well-being. The economics must link, otherwise Africa will let Europe die of inflation.’
‘I never thought of you as a crusader, Steve.’
Champion seemed disconcerted at the idea. He picked up his glass to hide behind it.
Two men came downstairs: one was a famous poet, the other a peer of the realm. They were arguing quietly and eruditely about the lyrics of an obscene Eighth