Ask No Question Page 7

  ‘I’ll have a beer—just to keep you company for a while.’

  A sullen young man in shirt sleeves and tight black trousers came to serve them and then slouched over to the woman and her companion. The other tables were occupied by local people. Mitchell sat back and anticipated pleasure to come. He made no plans; he never planned this kind of encounter, it was something that happened, or did not happen. If the woman went on her way with her companion, it would be a pity, but it would not greatly matter; there would be someone else, somewhere else. A sudden tremor went through him, the sweat cooling on the body, no doubt; but it changed his mood and he felt, as he often felt as he waited at such times, a sense of loneliness and desolation. Perhaps failure cast a long shadow. He took a draught of beer and reminded himself that romantic despair ill became him since others suffered most for his inconstancy. He glanced across at Burke who was looking sombre and was no doubt working himself into one of his own despairs. I am no more whole than he is, Mitchell thought in a moment of rare insight, and I have less excuse . . . Then he heard the woman’s voice raised in the corner and forgot Burke as he realized that she was picking a quarrel with her companion. How delightfully ruthless women were! Burke put down his glass.

  ‘I’ll leave you now.’ He looked round for the waiter and Mitchell, anxious to be rid of him, said:

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘It is my pleasure to buy you a drink,’ Burke assured him and disappeared beyond the shrubbery. When he came back he seemed to have shaken off his sombre mood and he bade Mitchell a particularly benign goodnight.

  Not long after Burke departed, the thin man left the woman and ran out of the courtyard; she laughed as he stumbled over the curb, a low, throaty laugh full of genuine enjoyment. Mitchell reflected sadly, as he walked across to join her, that she was cruel.

  The table where she was sitting was in a dark corner—not that this mattered, the clientele were not censorious. She talked rather too much in her throaty voice, giving him an account of her stay in Tamaro—which he was glad to note would be brief—until he placed his hand on the small of her back where the inadequate little blouse parted company with the inadequate little shorts. Her back arched as he slid his hand around her waist and he could feel her heart pounding against her taut ribs; as he caressed her breast she leant her head against his shoulder and gave a low moan, she was an ardent little creature; he whispered, ‘Where can we go?’ He was waiting eagerly for her reply when the waiter came to collect their glasses. Only it was not the waiter this time; it was the waitress, and the waitress was Miriam Kratz.

  He fumbled for money, feeling as cold as though he had just come out of the North Sea in winter. She said in her flat, unemphatic voice:

  ‘Your friend paid for your drink.’

  Damn Burke! No doubt he was dancing back to the hotel, gloating like the malevolent pixie he was. Mitchell paid for the woman’s drink. He watched Miriam Kratz walk away and then said:

  ‘Will you excuse me for a moment?’

  She was standing in the doorway of the hotel, leaning her hip against the wall, a tea cloth dangling from one limp hand. In the yellow light of the door lamp her face looked haggard. He felt angry with her for spoiling his pleasure.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

  ‘Working.’ She did not dispute his right to question her, she was not used to thinking in terms of her rights.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I have to work somewhere.’

  ‘Haven’t you got the fare back to Berlin?’

  ‘No.’

  It seemed quite imperative to get rid of her. He said, ‘I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘Thank you. But it is better not to go back yet. After a while, they will forget that I stole the money.’

  She bent down to loosen the strap of her sandal. He watched her impatiently. When she tried to straighten up she swayed and before he could support her she was on the ground. He knelt beside her, feeling exasperated and faintly ridiculous. She was not quite unconscious and she moaned as he touched her. He raised her in his arms. She clutched at him and sobbed, ‘Don’t let me go!’ He said, ‘No, of course not.’ He was embarrassed, but her appeal touched him. She pressed her head against his shoulder and whimpered like a tired child. This, too, touched him. He shouted for the waiter.

  ‘Get some water,’ he said when the young man appeared.

  ‘For her?’ The eyebrows were raised in insolent surprise.

  ‘If you don’t I’ll give you a beating you won’t forget!’

  It was absurdly melodramatic, but apparently effective; the waiter strolled away and returned with a smeared glass half-full of tepid water.

  ‘She’s no good,’ he explained, anxious to remove any misunderstanding. ‘She works here because she doesn’t pay her bill.’

  Mitchell gave Miriam the water while the waiter leant nonchalantly against the doorpost.

  ‘We get all sorts here in summer.’ He spat to give point to the statement. Someone called from a nearby table; he waited for a moment, as though hoping that Miriam might rise to answer the summons, before slouching away.

  Miriam had recovered; her face was white as lard, but she did not seem much disturbed by what had happened.

  ‘It is just that I have not eaten,’ she explained indifferently.

  There was a movement behind them. The proprietress was standing in the doorway.

  ‘She makes this an excuse because she does not want to work any more,’ she explained.

  ‘I’ve worked all day,’ Miriam said.

  They both addressed their remarks to Mitchell as though the other was not there. The proprietress went on:

  ‘She stayed the night and had two breakfasts . . .’

  ‘Dry rolls and cold coffee!’

  ‘How much does she owe you?’ Mitchell asked, anxious to escape.

  ‘Thirty francs.’

  ‘I don’t owe her anything,’ Miriam hissed.

  The woman swore at her. The waiter came back and said that Miriam had not worked hard; Miriam responded by saying that he spent his time in the cellar making love to the kitchen maid. They began to shout. Mitchell produced his wallet, but Miriam snatched it from him.

  ‘Don’t give her any money! I’ve worked all day. She owes me something!’

  The proprietress grabbed at the wallet but Miriam clung to it with surprising tenacity. Mitchell found himself wrestling with the two women. It was a preposterous situation; he lost his head and his temper. The waiter tried to intervene and Mitchell knocked him down. Then he turned on the proprietress. He could express himself well in Italian and by the time he regained possession of his wallet, Miriam had lost her job.

  ‘Go and get your case,’ he told her.

  She scurried away down a dark corridor leaving Mitchell and the proprietress to pick over the bones of their quarrel. There were a lot of people standing up to watch them by this time, but the woman in the dark corner was not among them. Mitchell scarcely noticed her absence. Miriam came back very quickly; it was obvious that she had no intention of letting her protector out of her sight for long. They went out of the courtyard watched with friendly interest by the small crowd that had collected. Miriam glanced up at Mitchell anxiously as they came into the street. He turned unhesitatingly to the left, not because he knew where he was going but in order to give her the impression that he had the situation well in hand.

  ‘You must have a meal and then we must find you a place for the night,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ She did not sound enthusiastic. She kicked at a pebble and muttered, ‘She owed me money.’

  ‘Not much, surely?’

  ‘It was a lot to me.’ She sounded more stubborn than pathetic; she had him at a disadvantage and she meant to make the most of it. ‘And there would have been more money if I had kept the job.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’ The knowledge that he had come badly out of this was galling to him. To redeem his dignity he went on, ‘You�
�re better out of that place, though.’

  She did not answer.

  ‘What you need is a rest, time to gather your strength.’

  She looked away and laughed; there was something contemptuously dismissive in the way she did it that stung him as much as if she had spat in his face. He said angrily:

  ‘I’ll give you money to stay here for a month or so. After all, I’m to blame for your losing the job.’

  ‘A month!’ She took him up quickly before he could change his mind. He felt her hand on his arm, the thin fingers had a surprisingly firm grip. ‘That would be a rest, wouldn’t it?’ Her manner was conciliatory now, but she added, so that there should be no misunderstanding, ‘A whole month without having to worry about money!’

  She did not question that he had the money. To her, having money was an absolute thing; you had enough or none at all. But Mitchell was thinking, as they walked slowly down from Tamaro Supra towards the lake, that money was going to present a difficulty. Pride forbade that he should use the Department’s money. He could draw his own money, of course; but the amount needed to keep even someone as undemanding as Miriam Kratz in Switzerland for a month would be considerable. Eliot might get to hear of it. Had it been another woman, Mitchell would not have minded, but he thought it better that Eliot should not know of his involvement with Miriam Kratz. He had no idea what he was going to do; he only knew, as he felt those thin fingers clinging to his arm, that it was too late to go back. Each time he saw Miriam Kratz he took another step down an unfamiliar road.

  Chapter Nine

  Eliot stood on the balcony of his flat which overlooked one of the pedestrian bridges that arched like the thread of a gigantic spider’s web across the lower part of the town. Lausanne was a tiered town and Eliot’s flat was at the top of the top tier. This he liked. The microscopic view of humanity appealed to him. Many men who have no feeling for their fellows have other emotional outlets which are said to make them recognizably human and fallible. But Eliot was exceptional in this; he had no beloved cat, he was not fond of white mice, he was unmoved by the plight of hungry birds and he could view fishes gasping in inadequate tanks with equanimity. He liked desert places, not for their soul-purging purity but for the sparseness of life. If he had had a choice he would have been born a Bedouin—if he had had to be born at all. Life was a cross, he could go this far with the Christian myth; particularly, it was a cross if each time you drew breath a knife turned in your chest, a knife that would kill you one day, but very, very slowly.

  He turned away from the window and the movement hurt him. They had told him he should go to a sanatorium; there was a good one near Montreux, Sir Stafford Cripps had been there. But that would have meant mixing with fellow sufferers and being pawed by doctors and nurses. Eliot preferred the pain.

  He went into the room and picked up the bundle of papers on his desk. There was a cutting from a local paper giving a brief account of an inquest. He was glad to see, from notes prepared by his assistant, that this incident had not been reported in any other paper. So that was that. At least no damage had been done, even if nothing had been gained. Nevertheless, it annoyed him to have to cut his losses; he preferred success and so did London.

  London was agitating again. A further report on Alperin was wanted. What contemptible muddlers the London people were! If they felt so strongly about Alperin, why had they given him permission to leave the country? The answer to that, of course, was that Sir Harry Gethryn was a friend of the P.M. and Sir Harry had wanted Alperin out of the way for a while. Now the P.M. was getting worried. He was not concerned about what Alperin knew—fortunately the P.M. had only the vaguest ideas on this subject—what worried him was that he could not afford a security scandal just now. He had said a lot of harsh things about security arrangements when he was in opposition.

  Eliot picked up the reports, few enough, that he had received from his operators. Alperin appeared to be taking things quietly at Maggiore. No doubt London’s fears could be allayed for a time. London had a great respect for Stephen Mitchell; If Mitchell said that Alperin was taking things quietly then as far as London was concerned that was the end of it.

  Eliot pushed the papers aside and sat back in his chair. He coughed and it hurt; he coughed again and it hurt still more. He went into the bathroom and found a glass. The basin was filmed with grey scum and there was a dead fly in the glass. He went along to the kitchen. The odour from the greasy sink did not offend him in the least, but nevertheless he ran the water for a long time; he was fussy about drinking water, he liked it to be very cold and fresh. That was one thing he would have found trying in the desert.

  He went back to his room and pulled down the map. He looked at Lake Maggiore, trying to visualize what was happening there. He had noted from the reports that Huber had arrived. He wondered what he would do. Huber was a good operator, he had a mind uncluttered by taboos and inhibitions, traditions and principles. He was lazy, but not when he was being well paid and Eliot happened to know that he was being well paid.

  Chapter Ten

  Alperin was indeed taking things quietly. The date of the conference was drawing near. He remembered the feeling he had had as a child at the end of the long summer holidays when the days ran out desperately fast. When he was very young he had believed that something would happen to save him from the ordeal of returning to his hated prep school. When he grew older he became wiser. It was the dreams that vanished when you rounded the bend of time; the ordeals were there, waiting for you. A curtain seemed to come down over his mind at this point, a great inertia seized him; he told himself that he had been doing too much, that the heat was considerable and getting worse every day. During the time that remained he must rest. He took to sitting most of the day on the esplanade, staring vacantly across the glittering lake.

  The heat really was considerable now. It made Burke feel ill. He enjoyed staying in southern Spain; but there it was a fierce, angry heat that he found stimulating, a heat that stabbed at you, while here it sickened and suffocated. He woke at night, his head throbbing, his heart straining. He was glad to take things easily, to sit and read outside a café with a cool drink close to hand. He always had one of Dostoevsky’s novels with him; this time it was The Brothers Karamazov. In his teens, when he had been hopeful and rather surprisingly pure, he had been enchanted by the love poems of John Donne; but when he discovered that this kind of love was not for him, he turned to Dostoevsky. He always avowed a profound respect for Dostoevsky, although he had never managed to finish one of the major novels. Now, as he turned the pages of The Brothers Karamazov he found the weight of the book rather daunting: his intellectual ardours burnt bright but not for long.

  Huber slid in and out of the pattern, cool and quiet as a lizard. He was not much in evidence during the day, but sometimes in the evening he would appear at one of the tables outside the hotel, drinking an aperitif before returning to his own hotel for dinner. Occasionally he would ask Alperin to join him, but only occasionally; more often, he seemed quite uninterested in Alperin.

  Mitchell alone was active. He had become excessively restless and was never content to stay long in one place. If the heat affected him at all, it showed only in the shortness of his temper; he was much more easily roused, particularly by jibes about Miriam Kratz. The Alperin affair, he treated with contemptuous negligence. Burke, who had himself decided that the whole thing had been dreamt up by someone in London who had to justify his appointment, was surprised at this change in Mitchell’s attitude. He had always associated Mitchell with a rather tedious sense of responsibility in such matters.

  ‘The time will come, and that right soon, when Eliot will feel that you are expendable,’ he said as Mitchell joined him one evening after rather a long absence.

  ‘Eliot is the one who is expendable.’

  ‘I doubt if London would agree with you.’

  ‘He’s expendable as far as I’m concerned—and London is a long way away.’

  B
urke, who liked to think that he had a monopoly of the rebellious spirit, was shocked. The remark had been made in a way that invited no argument; there was no panache, no venom, just a statement dry as the end of a chapter in a dusty book. He wondered idly whether Mitchell had a touch of the sun or whether the concussion had been more serious than the doctor had imagined. Mitchell had not eaten so much lately and his consumption of wine had declined noticeably. His expense account, had he bothered to keep one, would have resembled the inverted triangle so familiar to tourists at the end of the holiday. Burke noted all this without drawing conclusions. It was too hot for conclusions.

  That evening Burke sat at one of the tables outside the hotel and drank iced Campari. Alperin was alone and Huber did not appear. Huber was playing a waiting game; Burke doubted whether these were the right tactics to adopt with a tentative creature like Alperin. Mitchell went into Locarno. He had never evinced any liking for Locarno until recently, but now he went there often. Burke wondered whether he had a woman there.

  Mitchell gambled at Locarno. He was out of luck and he had the sense to stop, but not before he had lost more than he could afford. Things were going badly for him. Of course, he could arrange to draw his own money, it was ridiculous not to do this; but he could not rid himself of the feeling that it would not be wise. It seemed he had lived so long in the twilight world of fear and mistrust that he had become infected without knowing it. Quite when this had happened, he was not sure. He worried about the money. He had been in many kinds of trouble in his life, but he had scrupulously avoided money troubles. This was a matter which deeply affected his pride and he was not in the best of spirits when he visited Miriam Kratz late one afternoon.

  She was staying at a pension on the way to Brissago. To the front of the pension was the main road, overhung by a shelf of rock; to the rear, the land sloped steeply down to a clutter of stone cottages at the lake’s edge. It was a pleasant place to be if you had a boat, but it offered nothing else in the way of entertainment. Mitchell wondered how Miriam Kratz occupied herself. On this occasion he found her sitting on a wooden bench overlooking the lake. There were deck chairs on the terrace at the back of the pension and one or two women were stretched out sunbathing. He had noticed before that she never sat on the terrace with the other guests.