The snow obliterated the view through the doorway, like static on an old TV. Outside in St James’s Street, London’s traffic was jammed tight. Champion’s girl gave no more than the nod and smile that manners demanded. Her eyes were devoted to Champion. She watched him with the kind of awe with which an orphan eyes a Christmas tree. It was always the same girl. This one had the same perfect skin that Caty had, and the same soft eyes with which Pina had looked at him. Except that decades had passed since Caty or Pina had been this kid’s age.
‘Melodie,’ said Champion. ‘It’s a nice name, isn’t it: Melodie Page.’
‘It’s a lovely name,’ I said, in my usual sycophantic way.
Champion looked at his watch. ‘It’s a long time since we jawed so much,’ he told me. ‘My God, but you would have been bored, Melodie. We must be getting old.’ He smiled. ‘Melodie and Billy are taking me to the theatre tonight. They are going to repair one of the gaps in my musical education.’
The girl hit his arm in mock anger.
‘Rock music and pirates,’ Champion told me.
‘A potent mixture,’ I said.
‘Billy will be glad I’ve seen you. You always remember his birthday, he told me.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘That’s damned nice of you.’ Champion patted my arm.
At that moment, exactly on schedule, a black Daimler drew level with the entrance. A uniformed driver hurried across the pavement, opening an umbrella to shelter Champion and the girl from the weather. He opened the door, too. As the girl slid into the real leather seating, Champion looked back to where I was standing. The snow was beating about my ears. Champion raised his gloved hand in a regal salute. But when only three of your fingers are able to wave, such a gesture can look awfully like a very rude Anglo-Saxon sign.
2
I could see my report about Champion on Schlegel’s desk. Schlegel picked it up. He shook it gently, as if hoping that some new information might drop out of it. ‘No,’ said Schlegel. ‘No. No. No.’
I said nothing. Colonel Schlegel, US Marine Corps (Air Wing), Retired, cut a dapper figure in a lightweight houndstooth three-piece, fake club-tie and button-down cotton shirt. It was the kind of outfit they sell in those Los Angeles shops that have bow windows and plastic Tudor beams. He tapped my report. ‘Maybe you can shaft the rest of them with your inscrutable sarcasm and innocent questions, but me no likee – got it?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Champion was just seeing his kid, and buying stamps – there’s no other angle. He’s a rich man now: he’s not playing secret agents. Believe me, Colonel. There’s nothing there.’
Schlegel leaned forward to get a small cigar from a box decorated with an eagle trying to eat a scroll marked Semper Fidelis. He pushed the box to me, but I’m trying to give them up.
‘He’s in deep,’ said Schlegel. Puckered scar tissue made it difficult to distinguish his smiles from his scowls. He was a short muscular man with an enviable measure of self-confidence; the kind of personality that you hire to MC an Elks Club stag night.
I waited. The ‘need-to-know’ basis, upon which the department worked, meant that I’d been told only a part of it. Schlegel took his time getting his cigar well alight.
I said, ‘The story about the machineguns fits with everything I’ve been told. The whole story – the stuff about the uncut diamonds providing the money to start the mine, and then the fruit and vegetable imports – that’s all on non-classified file.’
‘Not all of it,’ said Schlegel. ‘Long after the file closes, Champion was still reporting back to this department.’
‘Was he!’
‘Long before my time, of course,’ said Schlegel, to emphasize that this was a British cock-up, less likely to happen now that we had him with us on secondment from Washington. ‘Yes,’ said Schlegel, ‘those machineguns were shipped to Accra on orders from this office. It was all part of the plan to buy Champion into control of the Tix set-up. Champion was our man.’
I remembered all those years when I’d been drinking and dining with the Champions, never suspecting that he was employed by this office.
Perhaps Schlegel mistook my silence for disbelief. ‘It was a good thing while it lasted,’ he said. ‘Champion was in and out of Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, arguing about his melons, carrots and potatoes, keeping his eyes open and dropping a few words to the right people, doing us all a power of good. And the way that Champion had scored – selling cannons to some freaky little terrorist outfit – all helped.’
‘So what was the fadeout?’
Schlegel blew a piece of tobacco off his lip, with enough force to make the bookcase rattle. ‘The feedback of information began to sag. Champion said the French were starting to lean on him, and it was getting too dangerous. It was a top-level decision to let him go. It was the right decision. You Brits are good at bowing out gracefully and you’d done all right out of Champion by that time.’
‘And now?’
‘A guy in German security trying to make a name for himself. He’s dug out some stuff about Champion’s financial affairs. They are asking questions about the guns at Accra.’
‘Bonn gets hysterical – and we have to join in the screaming?’
‘If the Champion business becomes a big scandal, they’ll say we were careless when we let him go.’
‘Perhaps it was a little careless,’ I suggested.
‘Well, maybe it was,’ said Schlegel. He picked up my report exonerating Champion. ‘But your whitewash job isn’t going to help matters.’
‘I’ll take another shot at it,’ I said.
He slid my report across the polished desk. Then from a drawer he got Perrier water and a tiny bottle of Underberg bitters. He shook the bitters into the mineral water and stirred it with a ballpoint pen to make it a delicate brown. ‘Want some?’
‘That’s just for hangovers,’ I said. ‘And even then it’s got to be a pretty damn bad hangover.’
‘I like it,’ said Schlegel, and drank it slowly, savouring each sip.
I took the report and stood up to leave. Schlegel said, ‘This is going to be a lousy rotten miserable bummer. I hate these jobs where we are shaking down our own. So you don’t have to give me a bad time, or give yourself a bad time for not covering up for him.’
‘I had that lecture at Indoctrine Four, when I went to the CIA Communications symposium in 1967,’ I said.
‘Champion saved your life,’ Schlegel reminded me. ‘If you can’t hack it, just say you want out.’
‘I know what kind of out I’d get,’ I said bitterly.
Schlegel nodded. ‘And I’d countersign it,’ he said. In a way, I preferred Schlegel’s New World directness: the others would have tried to persuade me that such a request would have had no effect on my career.
Schlegel stood up to look out of the window. It was still snowing. ‘This isn’t just some kind of fancy positive vetting job,’ he said. ‘This is a hot one.’ Schlegel scratched his behind, and reflected.
‘Someone across the street could lip-read you,’ I warned him.
He turned to look at me pityingly. It was Schlegel’s often expressed belief that we’d get more done here in London if we