An Expensive Place to Die

Part I of a new novel

The Birds flew around for nothing but the hell of it. It was that sort of spring day: a trailer for the coming summer. Some birds flew in neat, disciplined formations, some in ragged mobs, and higher, much higher, flew the loner who didn't like corporate decisions.

I turned away from the window. My visitor from the Embassy was still complaining.

"Paris lives in the past," said the courier. "Manet is at the opera and Degas at the ballet. Escoffier cooks while Eiffel builds," he said scornfully. "Lyrics by Dumas, music by Offenbach. Oo-là-là, our Paree is gay, monsieur, and our private rooms discreet, our coaches call at three, monsieur, and Schlieffen has no plans."

"They're not all like that," I said. Some birds hovered near the window deciding whether to eat the seed I'd scattered on the window sill.

"All the ones I meet are," said the Embassy courier. He stopped looking across the humpty-backed rooftops, and as he turned away from the window he noticed a patch of white plaster on his sleeve. He brushed it petulantly, as though Paris was trying to get at him. He pulled at his waistcoat--a natty affair with wide lapels--and then picked at the seat of the chair before sitting down. Now that he'd moved away from the window, the birds returned and began fighting over the seed I had put there.

I pushed the coffeepot to him. "Real coffee," he said. "The French seem to drink only instant coffee nowadays." Thus reassured of my decorum, he unlocked the briefcase that rested upon his knees. It was a large black case and contained reams of reports. One of them he passed across to me. "Read it while I'm here. I can't leave it."

"It's secret?"

"No, our document copier has gone wrong and it's the only one I have."

I read it. It was a "stage report" of no importance. I passed it back. "It's a lot of rubbish," I said. "I'm sorry you have to come all the way over here with this sort of junk."

He shrugged. "It gets me out of the office. Anyway, it wouldn't do to have people like you in and out of the Embassy all the time." He was new, this courier. They all started like him. Tough, beady-eyed young men anxious to prove how efficient they can be. Anxious, too, to demonstrate that Paris could have no attraction for them. A clock chimed two P.M. and that disturbed the birds.

"Romantic," he said. I don't know what's romantic about Paris except couples kissing on the street because the city's so overcrowded that they have nowhere else to go. He finished his coffee. "It's terribly good coffee," he said. "Dining out tonight?"

"Yes," I said.

"With your artist friend Byrd?"

I gave him the sort of glance that Englishmen reserve for other Englishmen. He twitched with embarrassment. "Look here," he said, "don't think for a moment...I mean...we don't have you...that is..."

"Don't start handing out indemnities," I said. "Of course I am under surveillance."

"I remembered your saying that you always had dinner with Byrd the artist on Mondays. I noticed the Skira art book set aside on the table. I guessed you were returning it to him."

"All good stuff," I said. "You should be doing my job."

He smiled and shook his head. "How I'd hate that," he said. "Dealing with the French all day; it's bad enough having to mix with them in the evening."

"The French are all right," I said.

"Did you keep the envelopes? I've brought the iodine in pot iodide." I gave him all the envelopes that had come through the post during the previous week and he took his little bottle and painted the flaps carefully.

"Resealed with starch paste. Every damn letter. Someone here, must be. The landlady. Every damned letter. That's too thorough to be just nosiness. Prenez garde." He put the envelopes, which had brown stains from the chemical reaction, into his case. "Don't want to leave them around."

"No," I said. I yawned.

"I don't know what you do all day," he said. "Whatever do you find to do?"

"I do nothing except make coffee for people who wonder what I do all day."

"Yes, well, thanks for lunch. The old bitch does a good lunch, even if she does steam your mail open." He poured both of us more coffee. "There's a new job for you." He added the right amount of sugar, handed it to me and looked up. "A man named Datt, who comes here to Le Petit Légionnaire. The one that was sitting opposite us at lunch today." There was a silence. I said:

"What do you want to know about him?"

"Nothing," said the courier. "We don't want to know anything about him, we want to give him a caseful of data."

"Write his address on it and take it to the post office."

He gave a pained little grimace. "It's got to sound right when he gets it."

"What is it?"

"It's a history of nuclear fallout, starting from New Mexico right up to the last test. There are reports from the Hiroshima hospital for bomb victims and various stuff about its effect upon cells and plant life. It's too complex for me, but you can read it through if your mind works that way."

"What's the catch?"

"No catch."

"What I need to know is how difficult it is to detect the phony parts. One minute in the hands of an expert? Three months in the hands of a committee? I need to know how long the fuse is, if I'm the one that's planting the bomb."

"There is no cause to believe it's other than genuine." He pressed the lock on the case as though to test his claim.

"Well, that's nice," I said. "Who does Datt send it to?"

"Not my part of the script, old boy. I'm just the errandboy, you know. I give the case to you, you give it to Datt, making sure he doesn't know where it came from. Pretend you are working for CIA, if you like. You are a clean new boy, it should be straightforward."

He drummed his fingers to indicate that he must leave.

"What am I expected to do with your bundle of papers--leave it on his place one lunchtime?"

"Don't fret, that's being taken care of. Datt will know that you have the documents, he'll contact you and ask for them. Your job is just to let him have them...reluctantly."

"Was I planted in this place six months ago just to do this job?"

He shrugged and put the leather case on the table.

"Is it that important?" I asked. He walked to the door without replying. He opened the door suddenly and seemed disappointed that there was no one crouching outside.

"Terribly good coffee," he said. "But then, it always is." From downstairs I could hear the pop music on the radio. It stopped. There was a fanfare and a jingle advertising shampoo.

"This is your floating favorite, Radio Janine," said the announcer. It was a wonderful day to be working on one of the pirate radio ships: the sun warm, and three miles of calm blue sea that entitled you to duty-free cigarettes and whiskey. I added it to the long list of jobs that were better than mine. I heard the lower door slam as the courier left. Then I washed up the coffee cups, gave Joe some fresh water and cuttlefish bone for his beak, picked up the documents and went downstairs for a drink.

• • •

Le Petit Légionnaire ("cuisine fait par le patron") was a plastic-trimmed barn glittering with mirrors, bottles and pin tables. The regular lunchtime customers were local businessmen, clerks from a nearby hotel, two German girls who worked for a translation agency, a couple of musicians who slept late every day, two artists and the man named Datt, to whom I was to offer the nuclear-fallout findings. The food was good. It was cooked by my landlord, who was known throughout the neighborhood as la voix--a disembodied voice that bellowed up the lift shaft without the aid of a loud-speaker system. La voix--so the stories went--once had his own restaurant in Boul' Mich that during the War was a meeting place for members of the Front National.* He almost got a certificate signed by General Eisenhower, but when his political past became clearer to the Americans, he got his restaurant declared out of bounds and searched by the MPs every week for a year instead.

La voix did not like orders for steck bien cuit, charcuterie as a main dish orhalf portions of anything at all. Regular customers got larger meals. Regular customers also got cloth napkins but were expected to make them last all the week. But now lunch was over. From the back of the café I could hear the shrill voice of my landlady and the soft voice of Monsieur Datt, who was saying, "You might be making a mistake, you'll pay one hundred and ten thousand francs in Avenue Henri Martin and never see it come back."

"I'll take a chance on that," said my landlord. "Have a little more cognac."

M. Datt spoke again. It was a low, careful voice that measured each word carefully. "Be content, my friend. Don't search for the sudden flashy gain that will cripple your neighbor. Enjoy the smaller rewards that build imperceptibly toward success."

I stopped eavesdropping and moved on past the bar to my usual table outside. The light haze that so often prefaces a very hot Paris day had disappeared. Now it was a scorcher. The sky was the color of well-washed bleu de travail. Across it were tiny wisps of cirrus. The heat bit deep into the concrete of the city, and outside the grocers' fruit and vegetables were piled beautifully in their wooden racks, adding their aroma to the scent of a summery day. The waiter with the withered hand sank a secret cold lager, and old men sat outside on the terrasse warming their cold bones. Dogs cocked their legs jauntily and young girls wore loose cotton dresses and very little make-up.

A young man propped his moto carefully against the wall of the public baths across the road. He reached an aerosol can of red paint from the pannier, shook it and wrote "lisez l'Humanite nouvelle" across the wall with a gentle hiss of compressed air. He glanced over his shoulder, then added a large hammer and sickle. He went back to his moto and sat astride it surveying the sign. A thick red dribble ran down from the capital H. He went back to the wall and dabbed at the excess paint with a piece of rag. He looked around, but no one shouted to him, so he carefully added the accent to the e before wrapping the can in the rag and stowing it away. He kicked the starter, there was a puff of smoke and the sudden burp of the motor as he roared away toward the Boulevard.

I sat down and waved to old Jean for my usual Suze. The pin tables glittered with pop-art-style illuminations and click-clicked and buzzed as the perfect metal spheres touched the contacts and made the numbers spin. The mirrored interior lied about the dimensions of the café and portrayed the sunlit street deep in its dark interior. I opened the case of documents, smoked, read, drank and watched the life of the quartier. I read 93 pages and almost understood by the time the rush-hour traffic began to thicken. I hid the documents in my room. It was time to visit Byrd.

• • •

I lived in the 17th arrondissement. The modernization project that had swept up the Avenue de Neuilly and was extending the smart side of Paris to the west had bypassed the dingy Quartier des Ternes. I walked as far as the Avenue de la Grande Armée. The Arc was astraddle the Etoile and the traffic was desperate to get there. Thousands of red lights twinkled like bloodshot stars in the warm mist of exhaust fumes. It was a fine Paris evening. Gauloise and garlic sat lightly on the air, and the cars and people were moving with the subdued hysteria the French call élan.

I remembered my conversation with the man from the British Embassy. He seemed upset today, I thought complacently. I didn't mind upsetting him. Didn't mind upsetting all of them, come to that. No cause to believe it's anything other than genuine. I snorted loudly enough to attract attention. What a fool London must think I am. And that stuff about Byrd. How did they know I'd be dining with him tonight? Byrd, I thought, art books from Skira, what a lot of cock. I hardly knew Byrd, even though he was English and did lunch in Le Petit Légionnaire. Last Monday I had dined with him, but I'd told no one that I was dining with him again tonight. I'm a professional. I wouldn't tell my mother where I keep the fuse wire.

• • •

The light was just beginning to go as I walked through the street market to Byrd's place. The building was gray and peeling, but so were all the others in the street. So, in fact, were almost all the others in Paris. I pressed the latch. Inside the dark entrance a 25-watt bulb threw a glimmer of light across several dozen tiny hutches with mail slots. Some of the hutches were marked with grimy business cards, others had names scrawled across them in ballpoint writing. Down the hall there were thick ropes of wiring connected to 20 or more wooden boxes. Tracing a wiring fault would have proved a remarkable problem. Through a door at the far end there was a courtyard. It was cobbled, gray and shiny with water that dripped from somewhere overhead. It was a desolate yard of a type that I had always associated with the British prison system. The concierge was standing in the courtyard as though daring me to complain about it. If mutiny came, then that courtyard would be its starting place. At the top of a narrow creaking staircase was Byrd's studio. It was chaos. Not the sort of chaos that results from an explosion but the kind that takes years to achieve. Spend five years hiding things, losing things and propping broken things up, then give it two years for the dust to settle thickly and you've got Byrd's studio. The only really clean thing was the gigantic window through which a sunset warmed the whole place with rosy light. There were books everywhere, and bowls of hardened plaster, buckets of dirty water, easels carrying large half-completed canvases. On the battered sofa were the two posh English Sunday papers still pristine and unread. A huge enamel-topped table that Byrd used as a palette was sticky with patches of color, and across one wall was a 15-foot-high hard-board construction upon which Byrd was painting a mural. I walked straight in--the door was always open.

"You're dead," called Byrd loudly. He was high on a ladder working on a figure near the top of the 15-foot-high painting.

"I keep forgetting I'm dead," said the model. She was nude and stretched awkwardly across a box.

"Just keep your right foot still," Byrd called to her. "You can move your arms."

The nude girl stretched her arms with a grateful moan of pleasure.

"Is that OK?" she asked.

"You've moved the knee a little, it's tricky...Oh, well, perhaps we'll call that a day." He stopped painting. "Get dressed, Annie."

She was a tall girl of about 25. Dark, good-looking, but not beautiful. "Can I shower?" she asked.

"The water's not too warm, I'm afraid," said Byrd, "but try it, it may have improved."

The girl pulled a threadbare man's dressing gown around her shoulders and slid her feet into a pair of silk slippers. Byrd climbed very slowly down the ladder on which he was perched. There was a smell of linseed oil and turpentine. He rubbed at the handful of brushes with a rag. The large painting was nearly completed. It was difficult to put a name to the style; Kokoschka or Soutine came nearest to it, but this was more polished, though less alive, than either. Byrd tapped the scaffolding against which the ladder was propped.

"I built that. Not bad, eh? Couldn't get one like it anywhere in Paris. Are you a do-it-yourself man?"

"I'm a let-someone-else-do-it man."

"Really," said Byrd, and nodded gravely. "Eight o'clock already, is it?"

"Nearly half past," I said.

"I need a pipe of tobacco." He threw the brushes into a floral-patterned chamber pot, in which stood another hundred. "Sherry?" He untied the strings that prevented his trouser bottoms' smudging the huge painting and looked back toward the mural, hardly able to drag himself away from it. "The light started to go an hour back. I'll have to repaint that section tomorrow." He took the glass from an oil lamp, lit the wick carefully and adjusted the flame. "A fine light these oil lamps give. A fine silky light." He poured two glasses of dry sherry, removed a huge Shetland sweater and eased himself into a battered chair. In the neck of his check-patterned shirt he arranged a silk scarf, then began to sift through his tobacco pouch as though he'd lost something in there.

It was hard to guess Byrd's age, except that he was in the middle 50s. He had plenty of hair and it was showing no sign of gray. His skin was fair and so tight across his face that you could see the muscles that ran from cheekbone to jaw. His ears were tiny and set high, his eyes were bright, active and black, and he stared at you when he spoke to prove how earnest he was. Had I not known that he was a regular naval officer until taking up painting eight years ago, I would have guessed him to be a mechanic who had bought his own garage. When he had carefully primed his pipe, he lit it with slow care. It wasn't until then that he spoke again.

"Go to England at all?"

"Not often," I said.

"Nor me. I need more baccy; next time you go, you might bear that in mind."

"Yes," I said.

"This brand." He held a packet for me to see. "Don't seem to have it here in France. Only stuff I like."

He had a stiff, quarter-deck manner that kept his elbows at his waist and his chin in his neck. He used words like "roadster" that revealed how long it was since he had lived in England.

"I'm going to ask you to leave early tonight," he said. "Heavy day tomorrow." He called to the model: "Early start tomorrow, Annie."

"Very well," she called back.

"We'll call dinner off if you like," I offered.

"No need to do that. Looking forward to it, to tell the truth." Byrd scratched the side of his nose.

"Do you know Monsieur Datt?" I asked. "He lunches at the Petit Légionnaire. Big-built man with white hair."

"No," he said. He sniffed. He knew every nuance of the sniff. This one was light in weight and almost inaudible. I dropped the subject of the man from the Avenue Foch.

Byrd had asked another painter to join us for dinner. He arrived about 9:30. Jean-Paul Pascal was a handsome, muscular young man with a narrow pelvis, who easily adapted himself to the cowboy look that the French admire. His tall, rangy figure contrasted sharply with the stocky, blunt rigidity of Byrd. His skin was tanned, his teeth perfect. He was expensively dressed in a light-blue suit and a tie with designs embroidered on it. He removed his dark glasses and put them in his pocket.

"An English friend of Monsieur Byrd," Jean-Paul repeated as he took my hand and shook it. "Enchanted." His handshake was gentle and diffident, as though he was ashamed to look so much like a film star.

"Jean-Paul speaks no English," said Byrd.

"It is too complicated," said Jean-Paul. "I speak a little, but I do not understand what you say in reply."

"Precisely," said Byrd. "That's the whole idea of English. Foreigners can communicate information to us, but Englishmen can still talk together without an outsider being able to comprehend." His face was stern, then he smiled primly. "Jean-Paul's a good fellow just the same: a painter." He turned to him. "Busy day, Jean?"

"Busy, but I didn't get much done."

"Must keep at it, my boy. You'll never be a great painter unless you learn to apply yourself."

"Oh, but one must find oneself. Proceed at one's own speed," said Jean-Paul.

"Your speed is too slow," Byrd pronounced, and handed Jean-Paul a glass of sherry without having asked him what he wanted.

Jean turned to me, anxious to explain his apparent laziness. "It is difficult to begin a painting--it's a statement--once the mark is made, one has to relate all later brush strokes to it."

"Nonsense," said Byrd. "Simplest thing in the world to begin, tricky though pleasurable to proceed with, but difficult--damned difficult--to end."

"Like a love affair," I said. Jean laughed. Byrd flushed and scratched the side of his nose.

"Ah. Work and women don't mix. Womanizing and loose living is attractive at the time, but middle age finds women left sans beauty, and men sans skills; result--misery. Ask your friend Monsieur Datt about that."

"Are you a friend of Datt?" Jean-Paul asked.

"I hardly know him," I said. "I was asking Byrd about him."

"Don't ask too many questions," said Jean. "He is a man of great influence; Count of Périgord. it is said, an ancient family, a powerful man. A dangerous man. He is a doctor and a psychiatrist. They say he uses LSD a great deal. His clinic is as expensive as any in Paris, but he gives the most scandalous parties there, too."

"What's that?" said Byrd. "Explain."

"One hears stories," said Jean. He smiled in embarrassment and wanted to say no more, but Byrd made an impatient movement with his hand, so he continued. "Stories of gambling parties, of highly placed men who have got into financial trouble and found themselves..." he paused "...in the bath."

"Does that mean dead?"

"It means 'in trouble,' idiom," said Byrd to me in English.

"One or two important men took their own lives," said Jean. "Some said they were in debt."

"Damned fools," said Byrd. "That's the sort of fellows in charge of things today, no stamina, no fiber; and that fellow Datt is a party to it, eh? Just as I thought. Oh, well, chaps won't be told today. Experience better bought than taught, they say. One more sherry and we'll go to dinner. What say to La Coupole? It's one of the few places still open where we don't have to reserve."

Annie the model reappeared in a simple green shirtwaist dress. She kissed Jean-Paul in a familiar way and said good evening to each of us.

"Early in the morning," Byrd told her. She nodded and smiled.

"An attractive girl," Jean-Paul said.

"Yes," I said.

"Poor child," said Byrd. "It's a hard town for a young girl without money."

I'd noticed her expensive crocodile handbag and Charles Jourdan shoes, but I didn't comment.

"Want to go to an art show opening Friday? Free champagne." Jean-Paul produced half a dozen gold-printed invitations, gave one to me and put one on Byrd's easel.

"Yes, we'll go to that," said Byrd; he was pleased to be organizing us. "Are you in your fine motor, Jean?" Byrd asked.

Jean nodded.

Jean's car was a white Mercedes convertible. We drove down the Champs with the roof down. We wined and dined well and Jean-Paul plagued us with questions like, Do the Americans drink Coca-Cola because it's good for their livers?

It was nearly one A.M. when Jean dropped Byrd at the studio. He insisted upon driving me back to my room over Le Petit Légionnaire. "I am especially glad you came tonight." he said. "Byrd thinks that he is the only serious painter in Paris, but there are many of us who work equally hard, in our own way."

"Being in the navy," I said, "is probably not the best of training for a painter."

"There is no training for a painter. No more than there is training for life. A man makes as profound a statement as he is able. Byrd is a sincere man with a thirst for knowledge of painting and an aptitude for its skills. Already his work is attracting serious interest here in Paris, and a reputation in Paris will carry you anywhere in the world."

I sat there for a moment nodding, then I opened the door of the Mercedes and got out. "Thanks for the ride."

Jean-Paul leaned across the seat, offered me his card and shook my hand. "Phone me," he said, and--without letting go of my hand--added, "If you want to go to the house in the Avenue Foch, I can arrange that, too. I'm not sure I can recommend it, but if you have money to lose, I'll introduce you. I am a close friend of the Count; last week I took the Prince of Besacoron there--he is another very good friend of mine."

"Thanks," I said, taking the card. He stabbed the accelerator and the motor growled. He winked and said, "But no recriminations afterward."

"No," I agreed. The Mercedes slid forward.

I watched the white car turn onto the Avenue with enough momentum to make the tires howl. Le Petit Légionnaire was closed. I let myself in by the side entrance. Datt and my landlord were still sitting at the same table as they had been that afternoon. They were still playing Monopoly. Datt was reading from his Community Chest card, "Allez en prison. Avancez tout droit en prison. Ne passez pas par la case 'Départ.' Ne recevez pas Frs. 20.000." My landlord laughed, so did M. Datt.

"What will your patients say?" said my landlord.

"They are very understanding," said Datt; he seemed to take the whole game seriously. Perhaps he got more out of it that way.

I tiptoed upstairs. I could see right across Paris. Through the dark city the great red neon arteries of the tourist industry flowed from Pigalle through Montmartre to Boul' Mich, Paris' great self-inflicted wound.

Joe chirped. I read Jean's card. "'Jean-Paul Pascal, artist painter.' And good friend to princes," I said. Joe nodded.

• • •

Two nights later I was invited to join the Monopoly game. I bought hotels in Rue Lecourbe and paid rent at the Gare du Nord. Old Datt pedantically handled the toy money and told us why we went broke.

When only Datt remained solvent, he pushed back his chair and nodded sagely as he replaced the pieces of wood and paper in the box. If you were buying old men, then Datt would have come in a box marked White, Large And Bald. Behind his tinted spectacles his eyes were moist, and his lips soft and dark like a girl's, or perhaps they only seemed dark against the clear white skin of his face. His head was a shiny dome and his white hair soft and wispy, like mist around a mountaintop. He didn't smile much, but he was a genial man, although a little fussy in his mannerisms, as people of either sex become when they live alone.

Madame Tastevin had, upon her insolvency, departed to the kitchen to prepare supper.

I offered my cigarettes to Datt and to my landlord. Tastevin took one, but Datt declined with a theatrical gesture. "There seems no sense in it," he proclaimed, and again did that movement of the hand that looked like he was blessing a multitude at Benares. His voice was an upper-class voice, not because of his vocabulary or because he got his conjugations right but because he sang his words in the style of the Comédie Francaise, stressing a word musically and then dropping the rest of the sentence like a half-smoked Gauloise. "No sense in it," he repeated.

"Pleasure," said Tastevin, puffing away. "Not sense." His voice was like a rusty lawn mower.

"The pursuit of pleasure," said Datt, "is a pitfall-studded route." He removed the rimless spectacles and looked up at me, blinking.

"You speak from experience?" I asked.

"I've done everything," said Datt. "Some things twice. I've lived in eight different countries in four continents. I've been a beggar and I've been a thief. I've been happy and sad, rich and poor, master and manservant."

"And the secret of happiness," mocked Tastevin, "is to refrain from smoking?"

"The secret of happiness," Datt corrected, "is to refrain from wishing to."

"If that's the way you feel," said Tastevin, "why do you come to my restaurant almost every day?"

At that moment Madame Tastevin came in with a tray holding a coffee jug and plates of cold chicken and terrine of hare.

"There's your reason for not smoking," said Datt. "I would never let tobacco mar the taste of the food here." Madame Tastevin purred with delight. "I sometimes think my life is too perfect. I enjoy my work and never wish to do less of it, and I eat your wonderful food. What a perfect life."

"That's self-indulgent," said Tastevin.

"Perhaps it is--so what? Isn't your life self-indulgent? You could make far more money working in one of the three-star restaurants, but you spend your life running this small one--one might almost say for your friends."

"I suppose that's true," said Tastevin. "I enjoy cooking, and my customers appreciate my work, I think."

"Quite so. You are a sensible man. It's madness to go every day to work at something you do not enjoy."

"But suppose," asked Madame Tastevin, "that such a job brought us a lot of money that would enable him to retire and then do as he wishes?"

"Madame," said Datt. His voice took on that portentous, melodious quality that narrators on arty French films employ. "Madame Tastevin," he said again, "there is a cave in Kashmir--Amarnath cave--the most sacred spot on earth to a worshiper of the Hindu god Siva. The pilgrims who journey there are old; sometimes sick, too. Many of them die on the high passes, their tiny tents swept away by the sudden rainstorms. Their relatives do not weep. To them this does not matter; even the arrival--which must always be on a night of full moon--is not more vital than the journey. Many know they will never arrive. It is the journey that is holy, and so it is to existentialists: Life is more important than death. Whatever they do, men are too anxious to get to the end. The sex act, eating a fine meal, playing golf, there is a temptation to rush, gobble or run. That is foolish, for one should move at a relaxed pace through life doing the work one enjoys instead of chasing ambition helter-skelter, pursuing one's ultimate death."

Tastevin nodded sagely and I stopped gobbling the cold chicken. Datt tucked a napkin in his collar and savored a little terrine, pursing his lips and remarking on the salt content. When he had finished, he turned to me. "You have a telephone, I believe," he said, and without waiting for my reply was already on his feet and moving toward the door.

"By all means, use it," I told him, and by a burst of speed was able to get upstairs before him. Joey blinked in the sudden electric light. Datt dialed a number and said, "Hello, I am at the Petit Légionnaire and I am ready for the car in about five minutes." He hung up. Datt came over to where I was standing with Joey. "It's my belief," said Datt, "that you are making inquiries about me."

I didn't answer.

"It would be a fruitless task."

"Why?"

"Because no matter what you discover, it will not harm me."

"The art of Zen in clandestine behavior?"

Datt smiled. "The art of Zen in having influential friends," he said.

I didn't answer him. I pushed open the shutters and there was Paris. Warm streets, a policeman, two lovers, four cats, 50 dented deux-chevaux cars and a pavement full of garbage bins. The life of Paris centers on its streets; its inhabitants sit at the windows gazing down upon people as they buy, sell, thieve, drive, fight, eat, chat, posture, cheat or merely stand looking, upon the streets of Paris. Its violence, too, centers on the streets, and outside the public baths the previous night M. Picard, who owned the laundry, was robbed and knifed. He died twitching his own blood into ugly splashes that could still be seen upon the torn election posters flapping from the ancient shutters.

A black Daimler came down the road and stopped with a tiny squeak.

"Thank you for the use of your telephone," said Datt. At the door he turned. "Next week I should like to talk with you again," he said. "You must tell me what you are curious about."

(continued on page 144)Expensive Place To Die(continued from page 132)

"Any time," I agreed. "Tomorrow, if you wish."

Datt shook his head. "Next week will be soon enough."

"As you wish."

"Yes," said Datt. He walked out without saying good night.

After Datt left, Joey took a brief swing. I checked that the documents were still in their hiding place. Perhaps I should have given them to Datt a few minutes before, but I looked forward to seeing him again next week. "It seems to me, Joe," I said, "that we are the only people in town who don't have powerful friends." I put the cover on him before he could answer.

• • •

Faubourg St. Honoré, 7:30 P.M. Friday. The tiny art gallery was bursting at the seams. Champagne, free champagne, was spilling over high suede boots and broken sandals. I had spent 25 minutes prizing triangular pieces of smoked salmon away from circular pieces of toast, which is not a rewarding experience for a fully grown human male. Byrd was talking to Jean-Paul and rapping at one of the abstract panels. I edged toward them, but a young woman with green eye shadow grabbed my arm. "Where's the artist?" she asked. "Someone's interested in Creature Who Fears the Machine, and I don't know if it's one hundred thousand francs or fifty." I turned to her, but she had grabbed someone else already. Most of my champagne was lost by the time I got to Byrd and Jean-Paul.

"There's some terrible people here," said Jean-Paul.

"As long as they don't start playing that dashed rock-'n'-roll music again," said Byrd.

"Were they doing that?" I asked.

Byrd nodded. "Can't stand it. Sorry and all that, but can't stand it."

The woman with green eye shadow waved across a sea of shoulders, then cupped her mouth and yelled to me. "They have broken one of the gold chairs," she said. "Does it matter?"

I couldn't stand her being so worried. "Don't worry," I called. She nodded and smiled in relief.

"What's going on?" said Jean-Paul. "Do you own this gallery?"

"Give me time," I said, "and maybe I'll give you a one-man show."

Jean-Paul smiled to show that he knew it was a joke, but Byrd looked up suddenly. "Look here, Jean-Paul," he said severely, "a one-man show would be fatal for you right now. You are in no way prepared. You need time, my boy, time. Walk before you run." Byrd turned to me. "Walk before you run, that's right, isn't it?"

"No," I said. "Any mother will tell you that most kids can run before they can walk; it's walking that's difficult."

Jean-Paul winked at me and said, "I must decline, but thank you anyway."

Byrd said, "He's not ready. You gallery chappies will just have to wait. Don't rush these young artists. It's not fair. Not fair to them."

I was just going to straighten things out when a short, thickset Frenchman with a légion d'honneur in his buttonhole came up and began to talk to Byrd.

"Let me introduce you," said Byrd. He wouldn't tolerate informality. "This is Chief Inspector Loiseau. Policeman. I went through a lot of the War with his brother."

We shook hands, and then Loiseau shook hands with Jean-Paul, although neither of them showed a great deal of enthusiasm for the ritual.

The French, more particularly the men, have developed a characteristic mouth that enables them to deal with their language. The English use their pointed and dexterous tongues, and their mouths become pinched and close. The French use their lips, and a Frenchman's mouth becomes loose and his lips jut forward. The cheeks sink a little to help this, and a French face takes on a lean look, back-sloping like an old-fashioned coal scuttle. Loiseau had just such a face.

"What's a policeman doing at an art show?" asked Byrd.

"We policemen are not uncultured oafs," said Loiseau with a smile. "In our off-duty hours we have even been known to drink alcohol."

"You are never off duty," said Byrd. "What is it? Expecting someone to make off with the champagne buckets?" Loiseau smiled slyly. A waiter nearly passed us with a tray of champagne.

"One might ask what you are doing here?" said Loiseau to Byrd. "I wouldn't think this was your sort of art." He tapped one of the large panels. It was a highly finished nude, contorted in pose, the skin shiny as though made from polished plastic. In the background there were strange pieces of surrealism, most of them with obvious Freudian connotations.

"The snake and the egg are well drawn," said Byrd. "The girl's a damn poor show, though."

"The foot is out of drawing," said Jean-Paul. "It's not well observed."

"A girl that could do that would have to be a cripple," said Byrd.

Still more people crowded into the room and we were being pushed closer and closer to the wall.

Loiseau smiled. "But a poule that could get into that position would earn a fortune on the Rue Godot de Mauroy," said the Chief Inspector.

Loiseau spoke just like any police officer. You can easily recognize them by their speech, to which a lifetime of giving evidence imparts a special clarity. The facts are arranged before the conclusions, just like a written report, and certain important words--bus-route numbers and road names--are given emphasis so that even young constables can remember them.

Byrd turned back to Jean-Paul: He was anxious to discuss the painting. "You've got to hand it to him, though, the trompe-l'oeil technique is superb, the tiny brushwork. Look at the way the Coca-Cola bottle is done."

"He's copied that from a photo," said Jean-Paul. Byrd bent down for a close look.

"Damn me! The rotten little swine!" said Byrd. "It is a bloody photo. It's stuck on. Look at that!" He picked at the corner of the bottle and then appealed to the people around him. "Look at that, it's been cut from a colored advert." He applied himself to other parts of the painting. "The typewriter, too, and the girl..."

"Stop picking at that nipple," said the woman with green eye shadow. "If you touch the paintings once more you'll be asked to leave." She turned to me. "How can you stand there and let them do it? If the artist saw them, he'd go mad."

"Gone mad already," said Byrd curtly. "Thinking chaps are going to pay money for bits cut out of picture books."

"It's quite legitimate," said Jean-Paul. "It's an objet trouvé..."

"Rot," said Byrd. "An objet trouvé is a piece of driftwood or a fine stone--it s something in which an artist has found and seen otherwise unnoticed beauty. How can an advert be found? How can you find an advert--the damned things are pushed under your noses every way you look, more's the pity."

"But the artist must have freedom to--"

"Artist?" snorted Byrd. "Damned fraud. Damned rotten little swine."

A man in evening dress with three ballpoint pens in his breast pocket turned round. "I haven't noticed you decline any champagne," he said to Byrd. He used the intimate tu. Although it was a common form of address among the arty set, his use of it to Byrd was offensive.

"What I had," interrupted Jean-Paul--he paused before delivering the insult--"was sauterne with Alka-Seltzer."

The man in the dinner suit leaned across to grab at him, but Chief Inspector Loiseau interposed himself and got a slight blow on the arm.

"A thousand apologies, Chief Inspector," said the man in the dinner suit.

"Nothing," said Loiseau. "I should have looked where I was going."

Jean-Paul was pushing Byrd toward the door, but they were moving very slowly. The man in the dinner suit (continued on page 328)Expensive Place to Die(continued from page 144) leaned across to the woman with the green eye shadow and said loudly, "They mean no harm, they are drunk, but make sure they leave immediately." He looked back toward Loiseau to see if his profound understanding of human nature was registering.

"He's with them," the woman said, nodding to me. "I thought he was from the insurance company when he first came."

I heard Byrd say, "I will not take it back; he's a rotten little swine."

"Perhaps." said dinner-jacket tactfully, "you would be kind enough to make sure that your friends come to no harm in the street."

I said, "If they get out of here in one piece, they can take their own chances in the street."

"Since you can't take a hint," said dinner-jacket, "let me make it clear--"

"He's with me," said Loiseau.

The man shied. "Chief Inspector," said dinner-jacket, "I am desolated."

"We are leaving anyway," said Loiseau, nodding to me. Dinner-jacket smiled and turned back to the woman with green eye shadow.

"You go where you like," I said. "I'm staying right here."

Dinner-jacket swiveled back like a glove puppet.

Loiseau put a hand on my arm. "I thought you wanted to talk about getting your carte de séjour from the Prefecture."

"I'm having no trouble getting my carte de séjour," I said.

"Exactly," said Loiseau, and moved through the crowd toward the door.

I followed.

Near the entrance there was a table containing a book of newspaper clippings and catalogs. The woman with green eye shadow called to us. She offered Loiseau her hand and then reached out to me. She held the wrist limp, as women do when they half expect a man to kiss the back of their hand. "Please sign the visitors' book," she said.

Loiseau bent over the book and wrote, in neat neurotic writing, "Claude Loiseau"; under "Comments" he wrote "stimulating." The woman swiveled the book to me. I wrote my name, and under "Comments" I wrote what I always write when I don't know what to say-- "uncompromising."

The woman nodded. "And your address," she said.

I was about to point out that no one else had written their address in the book, but when a shapely young woman asks for my address, I'm not the man to be secretive. I wrote it: "c/o Le Petit Légionnaire, Rue St. Ferdinand, 17ième."

The woman smiled to Loiseau in a familiar way. She said, "I know the Chief Inspector's address: Criminal Investigation Department, Sureté Nationale, Rue des Saussaies*."

• • •

Loiseau's office had that cramped, melancholy atmosphere that policemen relish. There were two small silver pots for the shooting team that Loiseau had led to victory in 1959 and several group photos--one showed Loiseau in army uniform standing in front of a tank. Loiseau brought a large M 1950 automatic from his waist and put it into a drawer. "I'm going to get something smaller," he said. "This is ruining my suits." He locked the drawer carefully and then went through the other drawers of his desk, riffling through the contents and slamming them closed until he laid a dossier on his blotter.

"This is your dossier," said Loiseau. He held up a print of the photo that appears on my carte de séjour. " 'Occupation,' " he read, " 'travel-agency director.' " He looked up at me and I nodded. "That's a good job?"

"It suits me," I said.

"It would suit me," said Loiseau. "Eight hundred new francs each week and you spend most of your time amusing yourself."

"There's a revived interest in leisure," I said.

"I hadn't noticed any decline among the people who work for me." He pushed his Gauloises toward me. We lit up and looked at each other. Loiseau was about 50 years old. Short, muscular body, with big shoulders. His face was pitted with tiny scars and part of his left ear was missing. His hair was pure white and very short. He had plenty of energy, but not so much that he was prepared to waste any. He hung his jacket on his chair back and rolled up his shirt sleeves very neatly. He didn't look like a policeman now, more like a paratroop colonel planning a coup.

"You are making inquiries about M. Datt's clinic on the Avenue Foch."

"Everyone keeps telling me that."

"Who for?"

I said, "I don't know about that place, and I don't want to know about it."

"I'm treating you like an adult," said Loiseau. "If you prefer to be treated like a spotty-faced j.v., then we can do that, too."

"What's the question again?"

"I'd like to know who you are working for. However, it would take a couple of hours in the hen cage to get that out of you. So for the time being I'll tell you this: I am interested in that house and I don't want you to even come downwind of it. Stay well away. Tell whoever you are working for that the house in Avenue Foch is going to remain a little secret of Chief Inspector Loiseau." He paused, wondering how much more to tell me. "There are powerful interests involved. Violent groups are engaged in a struggle for criminal power."

"Why do you tell me that?"

"I thought you should know." He gave a Gallic shrug.

"Why?"

"Don't you understand? These men are dangerous."

"Then why aren't you dragging them into your office instead of me?"

"Oh, they are too clever for us. Also, they have well-placed friends who protect them. It's only when the friends fail that they resort to...coercion, blackmail, killing, even. But always skillfully."

"They say it's better to know the judge than to know the law."

"Who says that?"

"I heard it somewhere."

"You're an eavesdropper," said Loiseau.

"I am," I said. "And a damned good one."

"It sounds as though you like it," said Loiseau grimly.

"It's my favorite indoor sport. Dynamic and yet sedentary, a game of skill with an element of chance. No season, no special equipment..."

"Don't be so clever," he said sadly. "This is a political matter. Do you know what that means?"

"No, I don't know what that means."

"It means that you might well spend one morning next week being lifted out of some quiet backwater of the St. Martin canal and traveling down to the Medico-Legal Institute* where the boys in butchers' aprons and rubber boots live. They'll take an inventory of what they find in your pockets, send your clothes to the Poor Law Administration Office, put a numbered arm band on you, freeze you to eight degrees centigrade and put you in a rack with two other foolish lads. The superintendent will phone me and I'll have to go along and identify you. I'll hate doing that, because at this time of year there are clouds of flies as large as bats and a smell that reaches to Austerlitz Station." He paused. "And we won't even investigate the affair. Be sure you understand."

I said, "I understand, all right. I've become an expert at recognizing threats, no matter how veiled they are. But before you give a couple of cops tape measures and labels and maps of the St. Martin canal, make sure you choose men that your department doesn't find indispensable."

"Alas, you have misunderstood," said Loiseau's mouth, but his eyes didn't say that. He stared. "We'll leave it like that, but--"

"Just leave it like that," I interrupted. "You tell your cops to carry the capes with the lead-shot hems and I'll wear my water wings."

Loiseau allowed his face to become as friendly as it could become.

"I don't know where you fit into M. Datt's clinic, but until I do know, I'll be watching you very closely. If it's a political affair, then let the political departments request information. There's no point in us being at each other's throat. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"In the next few days you might be in contact with people who claim to be acting for me. Don't believe them. Anything you want to know, come back to me directly. I'm 22.22.* If you can't reach me here, then this office will know where I am. Tell the operator that 'Un sourire est différent d'un rire.'"

"Agreed," I said. The French still use those silly code words that are impossible to use if you are being overheard.

"One last thing," said Loiseau. "I can see that no advice, however well meant, can register with you, so let me add that, should you tackle these men and come off best"--he looked up to be sure that I was listening--"then I will personally guarantee that you'll manger les haricots for five years."

"Charged with...?"

"Giving Chief Inspector Loiseau trouble beyond his normal duties."

"You might be going further than your authority permits," I said, trying to give the impression that I, too, might have important friends.

Loiseau smiled. "Of course I am. I have gained my present powerful position by always taking ten percent more authority than I am given." He lifted the phone and jangled the receiver rest so that its bell tinkled in the outer office. It must have been a prearranged signal, because his assistant came quickly. Loiseau nodded to indicate the meeting was over.

"Goodbye," he said. "It was good to see you again."

"Again?"

"NATO conference on falsification of cargo manifests, held in Bonn, April 1956. You represented B.A.O.R., if I remember rightly."

"You talk in endless riddles," I said. "I've never been in Bonn."

"You are a glib fellow," said Loiseau. "Another ten minutes and you'd convince me I'd never been there." He turned to the assistant, who was waiting to conduct me downstairs. "Count the fire extinguishers after he's left," said Loiseau. "And on no account shake hands with him; you might find yourself being thrown into the Faubourg St. Honoré."

When I left, I walked toward the Faubourg St. Honoré looking for a taxi. From the gratings in the road there came the sound of a Métro train, its clatter muffled by four huddled clochards anxious for the warmth of the sour subterranean air. One of them came half awake, troubled by a bad dream. He yelled and then mumbled.

On the corner an E-type was parked. As I turned the corner, the headlights flashed and it moved toward me. I stood well back as the door swung open. A woman's voice said, "Jump in."

"Not right now," I said.

• • •

Maria Chauvet was 32 years old. She had kept her looks, her gentleness, her figure, her sexual optimism, her respect for men's cleverness, her domestication. She had lost her girlhood friends, her shyness, her literary aspirations, her obsession with clothes and her husband. It was a fair swap, she decided. Time had given her a greater measure of independence. She looked around the art gallery without seeing even one person that she really desired to see again. And yet they were her people: the ones she had known since her early 20s, the people who shared her tastes in cinema, travel, sports and books. Now she no longer wished to hear their opinions about the things she enjoyed and she only slightly wished to hear their opinions about the things she hated. The paintings here were awful, they didn't even show a childish exuberance; they were old, jaded and sad. She hated things that were too real. Aging was real; as things grew older they became more real, and although age wasn't something she dreaded, she didn't want to hurry in that direction.

Maria hoped that Loiseau wasn't going to be violent with the Englishman that he had taken away. Ten years ago she would have said something to Loiseau, but now she had learned discretion, and discretion had become more and more vital in Paris. So had violence, come to that. Maria concentrated on what the artist was saying to her. "...the relationships between the spirit of man and the material things with which he surrounds himself..."

Maria had a slight feeling of claustrophobia; she also had a headache. She should take an aspirin, and yet she didn't, even though she knew it would relieve the pain. As a child she had complained of pain and her mother had said that a woman's life is accompanied by constant pain. That's what it's like to be a woman, her mother had said, to know an ache or a pain all day, every day. Her mother had found some sort of stoic satisfaction in that statement, but the prospect had terrified Maria. It still terrified her and she was determined to disbelieve it. She tried to disregard all pains, as though by acknowledging them she might confess her feminine frailty. She wouldn't take an aspirin.

She thought of her ten-year-old son. He was living with her mother in Flanders. It was not good for a child to spend a lot of time with elderly people. It was just a temporary measure and yet all the time he was there she felt vaguely guilty about going out to dinner or the cinema, or even evenings like this.

"Take that painting near the door," said the artist. "Holocaust, Quo Vadis? There you have the vulture that represents the ethereal and..."

Maria had had enough of him. He was a ridiculous fool; she decided to leave. The crowd had become more static now and that always increased her claustrophobia, as did people in the Métro standing motionless. She looked at his flabby face and his eyes, greedy and scavenging for admiration among this crowd who admired only themselves. "I'm going now," she said. "I'm sure the show will be a big success."

"Wait a moment," he called, but she had timed her escape to coincide with a gap in the crush and she was through the emergency exit, across the cour and away. He didn't follow her. He probably already had his eye on some other woman who could become interested in art for a couple of weeks.

Maria loved her car, not sinfully but proudly. She looked after it and drove it well. It wasn't far to the Rue des Saussaies. She positioned the car by the side of the Ministry of the Interior. That was the exit they used at night. She hoped Loiseau wouldn't keep him there too long. This area near the Elysée Palace was alive with patrols and huge Berliet buses, full of armed cops, the motors running all night in spite of the price of petrol. They wouldn't do anything to her, of course, but their presence made her uncomfortable. She looked at her wrist watch. Fifteen minutes the Englishman had been there. Now, the sentry was looking back into the courtyard. This must be he. She flashed the headlights of the E-type. Exactly on time; just as Loiseau had told her.

• • •

The woman laughed. It was a pleasant, musical laugh. She said, "Not in an E-type. Surely no whore solicits from an E-type. Is it a girl's car?" It was the woman from the art gallery.

"Where I come from," I said, "they call them hairdressers' cars."

She laughed. I had a feeling that she had enjoyed my mistaking her for one of the motorized prostitutes that prowled this district. I got in alongside her and she drove past the Ministry of the Interior and out onto the Malesherbes. She said:

"I hope Loiseau didn't give you a bad time."

"My resident's card was out of date."

"Poof!" she scoffed. "Do you think I'm a fool? You'd be at the Prefecture if that was the case, not the Ministry of the Interior."

"So what do you think he wanted?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Who can tell? Jean-Paul said you'd been asking questions about the clinic on the Avenue Foch."

"Suppose I told you I wish I'd never heard of the Avenue Foch?"

She put her foot down and I watched the speedometer spin. There was a screech of tires as she turned gently onto the Boulevard Haussmann. "I'd believe you," she said. "I wish I'd never heard of it."

I studied her. She was no longer a girl--perhaps about 30; dark hair and dark eyes; carefully applied make-up; her clothes were like the car, not brand-new but of good quality. Something in her relaxed manner told me that she had been married, and something in her overt friendliness told me she no longer was. She came into the Etoile without losing speed and entered the whirl of traffic effortlessly. She flashed the lights at a taxi that was on a collision course and he sheered away. In the Avenue Foch, she turned into a driveway.

"Here we are," she said. "Let's take a look."

The house was large and stood back in its own piece of ground. At dusk the French shutter themselves tightly against the night. This gaunt house was no exception.

Near to, the cracks in the plaster showed like wrinkles in a face carelessly made up. The traffic was pounding down the Avenue Foch, but that was over the garden wall and far away.

"So this is the house on the Avenue Foch," I said.

"Yes," said the girl.

The big gates closed behind us. A man with a flashlight came out of the shadows. He had a small mongrel dog on a chain.

"Go ahead," said the man. He waved an arm without exerting himself. I guessed that the man was a onetime cop. They are the only people who can stand motionless without loitering. The dog was a German shepherd in disguise.

We drove down a concrete ramp into a large underground garage. There were about 20 cars there of various expensive foreign makes: Ford GTs, Ferraris, a Bentley convertible. A man standing near the lift called, "Leave the keys in."

Maria slipped off her soft driving shoes and put on a pair of evening shoes. "Stay close," she said quietly.

I patted her gently. "That's close enough," she said.

When we got out of the lift on the ground floor, everything seemed red plush and cut glass--un décor maison fin de siecle--and all of it was tinkling: the laughter, the medals, the ice cubes, the coins, the chandeliers. The main lighting came from ornate gas lamps with pink glass shades; there were huge mirrors and Chinese vases on plinths. Girls in long evening dresses were seated decorously on the wide sweep of the staircase, and in an alcove a barman was pouring drinks as fast as he could work. It was a very fancy affair; it didn't have the Republican Guard in polished helmets lining the staircase with drawn sabers, but you had the feeling that they'd wanted to come.

Maria leaned across and took two glasses of champagne and some biscuits heaped with caviar. One of the men said, "Haven't seen you for ages." Maria nodded without much regret. The man said, "You should have been in there tonight. One of them was nearly killed. He's hurt; badly hurt."

Maria nodded. Behind me I heard a woman say, "He must have been in agony. He wouldn't have screamed like that unless he had been in agony."

"They always do that, it doesn't mean a thing."

"I can tell a real scream from a fake one," said the woman.

"How?"

"A real scream has no music, it slurs, it...screeches. It's ugly."

"The cuisine," said a voice behind me, "can be superb; the very finely sliced smoked pork served hot, cold citrus fruits divided in half, bowls of strange hot grains with cream upon them. And those large eggs that they have here in Europe skillfully fried crisp on the outside and yet the yolk remains almost raw. Sometimes smoked fish of various kinds." I turned to face them. The speaker was a middle-aged Chinese in evening dress. He had been speaking to a fellow countryman and as he caught my eye he said, "I am explaining to my colleague the fine Anglo-Saxon breakfast that I always enjoy so much."

"This is M. Kuang-t'ien," said Maria, introducing us.

"And you, Maria, are exquisite this evening," said M. Kuang-t'ien. He spoke a few lines of soft Mandarin.

"What's that?" asked Maria.

"It's a poem by Shao Hsün-mei, a poet and essayist who admired very much the poets of the West. Your dress reminded me of it."

"Say it in French," said Maria.

"It is indelicate, in parts." He smiled apologetically and began to recite softly:

"Ah, lusty May is again burning,

A sin is born of a virgin's kissx;

Sweet tears tempt me, always temptme

To feel between her breasts with mylips.

Here life is as eternal as death,

As the trembling happiness on awedding night;

If she is not a rose, a rose all white,

Then she must be redder than thered of blood."

Maria laughed. "I thought you were going to say, 'she must be redder than the Chinese People's Republic.' "

"Ah. Is not possible," said M. Kuangt'ien, and laughed gently.

Maria steered me away from the two Chinese. "We'll see you later," she called over her shoulder. "He gives me the creeps," she whispered.

"Why?"

" 'Sweet tears,' 'if she isn't white she'll be red with blood,' death 'between breasts.' " She shook away the thought of it. "He has a sick, sadistic streak in him that frightens me."

A man came pushing through the crowd. "Who's your friend?" he asked Maria.

"An Englishman," said Maria. "An old friend," she added untruthfully.

"He looks all right," said the man approvingly. "But I wished to see you in those high patent shoes." He made a clicking sound and laughed, but Maria didn't. All around us the guests were talking excitedly and drinking.

"Excellent," said a voice I recognized. It was M. Datt. He smiled at Maria. Datt was dressed in a dark jacket, striped trousers and black tie. He looked remarkably calm, unlike so many of his guests, his brow was not flushed nor his collar wrinkled. "Are you going in?" he asked Maria. He looked at his pocket watch. "They will begin in two minutes."

"I don't think so," said Maria.

"Of course you are," said Datt. "You know you will enjoy it."

"Not tonight," said Maria.

"Nonsense," said Datt gently. "Three more bouts. One of them is a gigantic Negro. A splendid figure of a man with gigantic hands." Datt lifted one of his own hands to demonstrate, but his eyes watched Maria very closely. She became agitated under his gaze and I felt her grip my hand tightly, as though in fear. A buzzer sounded and people finished their drinks and moved toward the rear door.

Datt put his hands on our shoulders and moved us the way the crowd went. As we reached the large double doors, I saw into the salon. A wrestling ring was set up in the center and around it were folding chairs formed up in rows. The salon itself was a magnificent room with golden caryatids, a decorated ceiling, enormous mirrors, fine tapestry and a rich red carpet. As the spectators settled, the chandeliers began to dim. The atmosphere was expectant.

"Take a seat, Maria," said Datt. "It will be a fine fight; lots of blood." Maria's palm was moist in mine.

"Don't be awful," said Maria, but she let go of my hand and moved toward the seats.

"Sit with Jean-Paul," said Datt. "I want to speak with your friend."

Maria's hand trembled. I looked around an d saw Jean-Paul for the first time. He was seated alone. "Go with Jean-Paul," said Datt gently.

Jean-Paul saw us; he smiled. "I'll sit with Jean-Paul," said Maria to me.

"Agreed," I said. By the time she was seated, the first two wrestlers were circling each other. One was an Algerian, I would guess; the other had bright dyed yellow hair. The man with straw hair lunged forward. The Algerian slid to one side, caught him on the hip and butted him heavily with the top of his head. The crack of head meeting chin was followed by the sharp intake of breath by the audience. On the far side of the room there was a nervous titter of laughter. The mirrored walls showed the wrestlers repeated all around the room. The central light threw heavy shadows under their chins and buttocks, and their legs, painted dark with shadow, emerged into the light as they circled again looking for an opening. Hanging in each corner of the room there was a TV camera linked by landline to monitor screens some distance away. The screens were showing the recorded image.

It was evident that the monitor screens were playing recordings, for the pictures were not very clear and the action of the screen took place a few seconds later than the actual fighting. Because of this time lag between recording and playing back, the audience were able to swing their eyes to the monitors each time there was an attack and see it take place again on the screen.

"Come upstairs," said Datt.

"Very well." There was a crash: They were on the mat and the fair man was in a leg lock. His face was contorted. Datt spoke without turning to look. "This fighting is rehearsed. The fair-haired man will win after being nearly throttled in the final round."

I followed him up the magnificent staircase to the first floor. There was a locked door. Clinic, Private. He unlocked the door and ushered me through. An old woman was standing in the corner. I wondered if I was interrupting one of Datt's interminable games of Monopoly.

"You were to come next week," said Datt.

"Yes, he was," said the old woman. She smoothed her apron over her hips like a self-conscious maidservant.

"Next week would have been better," said Datt.

"That's true. Next week--without the party--would have been better," she agreed.

I said, "Why is everyone speaking in the past tense?"

The door opened and two young men came in. They were wearing blue jeans and matching shirts. One of them was unshaven.

"What's going on now?" I asked.

"The footmen," said Datt. "Jules on the left. Albert on the right. They are here to see fair play. Right?" They nodded without smiling. Datt turned to me. "Just lie down on the couch."

"No."

"What?"

"I said no, I won't lie down on the couch."

Datt tutted. He was a little put out. There wasn't any mockery or sadism in the tutting. "There are four of us here," he explained. "We are not asking you to do anything unreasonable, are we? Please lie down on the couch."

I backed toward the side table. Jules came at me and Albert was edging around to my left side. I came back until the edge of the table was biting my right hip so I knew exactly how my body was placed in relation to it. I watched their feet. You can tell a lot about a man from the way he places his feet. You can tell the training he has had, whether he will lunge or punch from a stationary position, whether he will pull you or try to provoke you into a forward movement. Jules was still coming on. His hands were flat and extended. About 20 hours of gymnasium karate. Albert had the old course d'échalote look about him. He was used to handling heavyweight, overconfident drunks. Well, he'd find out what I was; yes, I thought: a heavyweight, overconfident drunk. Heavyweight Albert was coming on like a train. A boxer; look at his feet. A crafty boxer who would give you all the fouls: the butts, kidney jabs and back-of-the-head stuff; but he fancied himself as a jab-and-move-around artist. I'd be surprised to see him aim a kick in the groin with skill. I brought my hands suddenly into sparring position. Yes, his chin tucked in and he danced his weight around on the balls of his feet. "Fancy your chances, Albert?" I jeered. His eyes narrowed. I wanted him angry. "Come on, soft boy," I said. "Bite on a piece of bare knuckle."

I saw the cunning little Jules out of the corner of my eye. He was smiling. He was coming, too, smooth and cool, inch by inch, hands flat and trembling for the killer cut.

I made a slight movement to keep them going. If they once relaxed, stood up straight and began to think, they could eat me up.

Heavyweight Albert's hands were moving, foot forward for balance, right hand low and ready for a body punch while Jules chopped at my neck. That was the theory. Surprise for Albert: my metal heelpiece going into his instep. You were expecting a punch in the buffet or a kick in the groin, Albert, so you were surprised when a terrifying pain hit your instep. Difficult for the balancing, too. Albert leaned forward to console his poor hurt foot. Second surprise for Albert: underswung flat hand on the nose; nasty. Jules is coming, cursing Albert for forcing his hand. Jules is forced to meet me head down. I felt the edge of the table against my hip. Jules thinks I'm going to lean into him. Surprise for Jules: I lean back just as he's getting ready to give me a hand edge on the corner of the neck. Second surprise for Jules: I do lean in after all and give him a fine glass paperweight on the ear-hole at a range of about 18 inches. The paperweight seems none the worse for it. Now's the chance to make a big mistake. Don't pick up the paperweight. Don't pick up the paperweight. Don't pick up the paperweight. I didn't pick it up. Go for Datt, he's standing, he's mobile and he's the one who is mentally the driving force in the room.

Down Datt. He's an old man, but don't underrate him. He's large and weighty and he's been around. What's more, he'll use anything available; the old maidservant is careful, discriminating, basically not aggressive. Go for Datt. Albert is rolling over and may come up to one side of my range of vision. Jules is motionless. Datt is moving around the desk; so it will have to be a missile. An inkstand: too heavy. A pen set will fly apart. A vase: unwieldy. An ashtray. I picked it up. Datt was still moving, very slowly now, watching me carefully, his mouth open and white hair disarrayed as though he had been in the scuffle. The ashtray is heavy and perfect. Careful, you don't want to kill him. "Wait," Datt says hoarsely. I waited. I waited about ten seconds, just long enough for the woman to come behind me with a brass candlestick. She was basically not aggressive, the maidservant. I was only unconscious 30 minutes, they told me.

• • •

I was saying, "You are not basically aggressive" as I regained consciousness.

"No," said the woman as though it were a grave shortcoming. "It is true." I couldn't see either of them from where I was full length on my back. She switched the tape recorder on. There was the sudden intimate sound of a girl sobbing. "I want it recording," she said, but the sound of the girl became hysterical and he began to scream as though someone were torturing her.

"Switch that damn thing off," Datt called. It was strange to see him disturbed; he was usually so calm. She turned the volume control the wrong way and the sound of the screams went right through my head and made the floor vibrate.

"The other way," screamed Datt. The sound abated, but the tape was still revolving and the sound could just be heard; the girl was sobbing again. The desperate sound was made even more helpless by its diminished volume, like someone abandoned or locked out.

"What is it?" asked the maidservant. She shuddered but seemed reluctant to switch off; finally she did so and the reels clicked to a standstill.

"What's it sound like?" said Datt. "It's a girl sobbing and screaming."

"My God," said the maidservant.

"Calm down," said Datt. "It's just for amateur theatricals. It's just for amateur theatricals," he said to me.

"I didn't ask you," I said.

"Well, I'm telling you." The servant woman turned the reel over and re-threaded it. I felt fully conscious now and I sat up so that I could see across the room. The girl Maria was standing by the door, she had her shoes in her hand and a man's raincoat over her shoulders. She was staring blankly at the wall and looking miserable. There was a boy sitting near the gas fire. He was smoking a small cheroot, biting at the end, which had become frayed like a rope end, so that each time he pulled it out of his mouth he twisted his face up to find the segments of leaf and discharge them on the tonguetip. Datt and the old maidservant had dressed up in those old-fashioned-looking French medical gowns with high buttoned collars. Datt was very close to me and did a patent-medicine commercial while sorting through a trayful of instruments.

"Has he had the LSD?" asked Datt.

"Yes," said the maid. "It should start working soon."

"You will answer any question we ask," said Datt to me.

I knew he was right; a well-used barbiturate could nullify all my years of training and experience and make me as cooperatively garrulous as a tiny child. What the LSD would do was anyone's guess.

What a way to be defeated and laid bare. I shuddered; Datt patted my arm.

The old woman was assisting him. "The Amytal," said Datt, "the ampule and the syringe."

She broke the ampule and filled the syringe. "We must work fast," said Datt. "It will be useless in thirty minutes; it has a short life. Bring him forward, Jules, so that she can block the vein.Dab of alcohol, Jules, no need to be inhuman."

I felt hot breath on the back of my neck as Jules laughed dutifully at Datt's little joke.

"Block the vein now," said Datt. She used the arm muscle to compress the vein of the forearm and waited a moment while the veins rose. I watched the process with interest, the colors of the skin and the metal were shiny and unnaturally bright.

Datt took the syringe and the old woman said, "The small vein on the back of the hand. If it clots we've still got plenty of patent ones left."

"A good thought," said Datt. He did a triple jab under the skin and searched for the vein, dragging at the plunger until the blood spurted back a rich gusher of red into the glass hypodermic. "Off," said Datt. "Off or he'll bruise. It's important to avoid that."

She released the arm vein and Datt stared at his watch, putting the drug into the vein at a steady one c.c. per minute.

"He'll feel a great release in a moment, an orgastic response. Have the Megimide ready. I want him responding for at least fifteen minutes."

M. Datt looked up at me. "Who are you?" he asked in French. "Where are you, what day is it?"

I laughed. His damned needle was going into someone else's arm, that was the only funny thing about it. I laughed again. I wanted to be absolutely sure about the arm. I watched the thing carefully. There was the needle in that patch of white skin, but the arm didn't fit onto my shoulder. Fancy him jabbing someone else. I was laughing more now, so that Jules steadied me. I must have been jostling whoever was getting the injection, because Datt had trouble holding the needle in.

"Have the Megimide and the cylinder ready," said M. Datt, who had hairs--white hairs--in his nostrils. "Can't be too careful. Maria, quickly, come closer, we'll need you now; bring the boy closer; he'll be the witness if we need one." M. Datt dropped something into the white enamel tray with a tremendous noise. I couldn't see Maria now, but I smelled the perfume--I'd bet it was Ma Griffe, heavy and exotic, oh, boy! It's orange-colored, that smell. Orange-colored with a sort of silky touch to it. "That's good," said M. Datt, and I heard Maria say orange-colored, too. Everyone knows, I thought, everyone knows the color of Ma Griffe perfume.

The huge glass orange fractured into a million prisms, each one a brilliant, like the Sainte Chapelle at high noon, and I slid through the coruscating light as a punt slides along a sleepy by-water, the white cloud low and the colors gleaming and rippling musically under me.

I looked at M. Datt's face and I was frightened. His nose had grown enormous, not just large but enormous, larger than any nose could possibly be. I was frightened by what I saw, because I knew that M. Datt's face was the same as it had always been and that it was my awareness that had distorted. Yet even knowing that the terrible disfigurement had happened inside my mind, not on M. Datt's face, did not change the image; M. Datt's nose had grown to a gigantic size.

"What day is it?" Maria was asking. I told her. "It's just a gabble," she said. "Too fast to really understand." I listened, but I could hear no one gabbling. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. She asked me my age, my date of birth and a lot of personal questions. I told her as much, and more, than she asked. The scar on my knee and the day my uncle planted the pennies in the tall tree. I wanted her to know everything about me.

" 'When we die,' my grandmother told me, 'we shall all go to heaven,' she surveyed her world, 'for surely this is hell?' 'Old Mr. Gardner had athlete's foot, whose was the other foot?' Recitation: 'Let me like a soldier fall...'"

"A desire," said M. Datt's voice, "to externalize, to confide."

"Yes," I agreed.

"I'll bring him up with the Megimide if he goes too far," said M. Datt. "He's fine like that. Fine response. Fine response."

Maria repeated everything I said, as though Datt could not hear it himself. She said each thing not once but twice. I said it, then she said it, then she said it again differently; sometimes very differently, so that I corrected her, but she was indifferent to my corrections and spoke in that fine voice she had: a round, reed-clear voice full of song and sorrow like an oboe at night.

Now and again there was the voice of Datt, deep and distant, perhaps from the next room. They seemed to think and speak so slowly. I answered Maria leisurely, but it was ages before the next question came. I tired of the long pauses eventually. I filled the gaps telling them anecdotes and interesting stuff I'd read. I felt I'd known Maria for years and I remember saying "transference," and Maria said it, too, and Datt seemed very pleased. I found it was quite easy to compose my answers in poetry--not all of it rhymed, mind you, but I phrased it carefully. I could squeeze those damned words like putty and hand them to Maria, but sometimes she dropped them onto the marble floor. They fell noiselessly, but the shadows of them reverberated around the distant walls and furniture. I laughed again and wondered whose bare arm I was staring at. Mind you, that wrist was mine, I recognized the watch. Who'd torn that shirt? Maria kept saying something over and over, a question perhaps. Damned shirt cost me £3 10s. and now they'd torn it. The torn fabric was exquisite, detailed and jewellike.

Datt's voice said, "He's going now: It's very short duration, that's the trouble with it."

Maria said, "Something about a shirt, I can't understand, it's so fast."

"No matter," said Datt. "You've done a good job. Thank God you were here."

I wondered why they were speaking in a foreign language. I had told them everything. I had betrayed my employers, my country, my department. They had opened me like a cheap watch, prodded the mainspring and laughed at its simple construction. I had failed and failure closed over me like a darkroom blind coming down.

Dark. Maria's voice said, "He's gone," and I went, a white sea gull gliding through black sky, while beneath me the even darker sea was welcoming and still. And deep, and deep and deep.

• • •

Maria looked down at the Englishman. He was contorted and twitching, a pathetic sight. She felt inclined to cuddle him close. So it was as easy as that to discover a man's most secret thoughts--a chemical reaction--extraordinary. He'd laid his soul bare to her under the influence of the Amytal and LSD; and now, in some odd way, she felt responsible--guilty almost--about his well-being. He shivered and she pulled the coat over him and tucked it around his neck. Looking around the damp walls of the dungeon she was in, she shivered, too. She produced a compact and made basic changes in her make-up; the dramatic eye shadow that suited last night would look terrible in the cold light of dawn. Like a cat, licking and washing in moments of anguish or distress. She removed all the make-up with a ball of cotton wool, erasing the green eyes and the deep red lips. She looked at herself and pulled that pursed face that she did only when she looked in a mirror. She looked awful without make-up, like a Dutch peasant; her jaw was beginning to go. She followed the jawbone with her finger, seeking out that tiny niche halfway along the line of it. That's where the face goes, that niche becomes a gap and suddenly the chin and the jawbone separate and you have the face of an old woman.

She applied the moisture cream, the lightest of powder and the most natural of lipstick colors. The Englishman stirred and shivered; this time the shiver moved his whole body. He would become conscious soon. She hurried with her make-up, he mustn't see her like this. She felt a strange physical thing about the Englishman. Had she spent over 30 years not understanding what physical attraction was? She had always thought that beauty and physical attraction were the same thing, but now she was unsure. This man was in his late 30s, she'd guess--and his body was uncared for. Jean-Paul was the epitome of masculine beauty: young, slim, careful about his weight and his hips, artfully tanned--all over, she remembered--particular about his hairdresser, ostentatious with his gold wrist watch and fine rings, his linen precise and starched and white, like his smile.

Look at the Englishman: ill-fitting clothes rumpled and torn; look at that leather wrist-watch strap and his terrible old-fashioned shoes--so English. Lace-up shoes. She remembered the lace-up shoes she had as a child. She hated them, it was the first manifestation of her claustrophobia, her hatred of those shoes, although she hadn't recognized it as such. Her mother tied the laces in knots, tight and restrictive. Maria had been extra careful with her son, he never wore laced shoes. Oh, God, the Englishman was shaking like an epileptic now. She held his arms and smelled the ether and the sweat as she came close to him.

He would come awake quickly and completely. Men always did, they could snap awake and be speaking on the phone as though they had been up for hours. Man the hunter, she supposed, alert for danger; but they made no allowances. So many terrible rows with men began because she came awake slowly. The weight of his body excited her, she let it fall against her so that she took the weight of it. He's a big ugly man, she thought. She said "ugly" again and that word attracted her, so did "big" and so did "man." She said "Big ugly man" aloud.

• • •

I awoke, but the nightmare continued. I was in the sort of dungeon that Walt Disney dreams up, and the woman was there saying "Big ugly man" over and over. Thanks a lot, I thought, flattery will get you nowhere. I was shivering, and I came awake carefully; the woman was hugging me close; I must have been cold, because I could feel the warmth of her. I'll settle for this, I thought, but if the girl starts to fade, I'll close my eyes again; I need a dream.

It was a dungeon, that was the crazy thing. "It really is a dungeon," I said.

"Yes," said Maria, "it is."

"What are you doing here, then?" I said. I could accept the idea of my being in a dungeon.

"I'm taking you back," she said. "I tried to lift you out to the car, but you were too heavy. How heavy are you?"

"Never mind how heavy I am," I said. "What's been going on?"

"Datt was questioning you," she said. "We can leave now."

"I'll show you who's leaving," I said, deciding to seek out Datt and finish off the ashtray exercise. I jumped off the hard bench to push open the heavy door of the dungeon. It was as though I were descending a nonexistent staircase and by the time I reached the door I was on the wet ground, my legs twitching uselessly and unable to bear my weight.

"I didn't think you'd get even this far," said Maria, coming across to me. I took her arm gratefully and helped myself upright by clawing at the door fixtures. Step by difficult step we inched through the cellar, past the rack, pincers and thumbscrews and the cold fireplace with the branding irons scattered around it.

"Who lives here?" I asked. "Frankenstein?"

"Hush," said Maria. "Keep your strength for walking."

"I had a terrible dream," I said. It had been a dream of terrible betrayal and impending doom.

"I know," said Maria. "Don't think about it."

The dawn sky was pale, as though the leeches of my night had grown fat upon its blood. "Dawn's should be red," I said to Maria.

"You don't look so good yourself," she said, and helped me into the car.

She drove a couple of blocks from the house and parked under the trees amid the dead motorcars that litter the city. She switched the heater on and the warm air suffused my limbs.

"Do you live alone?" she asked.

"What's that, a proposal?"

"You aren't fit enough to be left alone."

"Agreed," I said. I couldn't shake off the coma of fear, and Maria's voice came to me as I had heard it in the nightmare.

"I'll take you to my place, it's not far away," she said.

"That's OK," I said. "I'm sure it's worth a detour."

"It's worth a journey. Three-star food and drink," she said. "How about a croque-monsieur and a baby*?"

"The croque-monsieur would be welcome," I agreed.

"But having the baby together might well be the best part," she said.

She didn't smile, she kicked the accelerator and the power surged through the car like the blood through my reviving limbs. She watched the road, flashing the lights at each intersection and flipping the needle around the clock at the clear stretches. She loved the car, caressing the wheel and agog with admiration for it; and like a clever lover, she coaxed it into effortless performance. She came down the Champs for speed and along the north side of the Seine before cutting up through Les Halles. The last of the smart set had abandoned their onion soups and now the lorries were being unloaded. The forts were working like looters, stacking the crates of vegetables and boxes of fish. The lorry drivers had left their cabs to patronize the brothels that crowd the streets around the Square des Innocents. Tiny yellow doorways were full of jostling painted whores and arguing men in bleu de travail. Maria drove carefully through the narrow streets.

"You've seen this district before?" she asked.

"No," I said, because I had a feeling that she wanted me to say that. I had a feeling that she got some strange titillation from bringing me this way to her home. "Ten new francs," she said, nodding toward two girls standing outside a dingy café. "Perhaps seven if you argued."

"The two?"

"Maybe twelve if you wanted the two. More for an exhibition." She turned to me. "You are shocked."

"I'm only shocked that you want me to be shocked," I said.

She bit her lip and turned onto the Sébastopol and speeded out of the district. It was three minutes before she spoke again. "You are good for me," she said.

I wasn't sure she was right, but I didn't argue.

That early in the morning the street in which Maria lived was little different from any other street in Paris; the shutters were slammed tight and not a glint of glass or ruffle of curtain was visible anywhere. The walls were colorless and expressionless, as though every house in the street were mourning a family death. The ancient crumbling streets of Paris were distinguished socially only by the motorcars parked along the gutters. Here the R4s, corrugated deux chevaux and dented Dauphines were outnumbered by shiny new Jags, Buicks and Mercedes.

Inside, the carpets were deep, the hangings lush, the fittings shiny and the chairs soft. And there was that symbol of status and influence: a phone. I bathed in hot perfumed water and sipped aromatic broth, I was tucked into crisp sheets, my memories faded and I slept a long dreamless sleep.

When I awoke, the radio was playing Françoise Hardy in the next room and Maria was sitting on the bed. She looked at me as I stirred. She had changed into a pink cotton dress and was wearing little or no make-up. Her hair was loose and combed to a simple parting in that messy way that takes a couple of hours of hairdressing expertise. Her face was kind but had the sort of wrinkles that come when you have smiled cynically about 10,000,000 times. Her mouth was small and slightly open, like a doll, or like a woman expecting a kiss.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"It's past midnight," she said. "You've slept the clock round."

"Get this bed on the road. What's wrong, have we run out of feathers?"

"We ran out of bedclothes; they are all around you."

"Fill her up with bedclothes, mister, and if we forget to check the electric blanket, you get a bolster free."

"I'm busy making coffee. I've no time to play your games."

She made coffee and brought it. She waited for me to ask questions and then she answered deftly, telling me as much as she wished without seeming evasive.

"I had a nightmare and awoke in a medieval dungeon."

"You did," said Maria.

"You'd better tell me all about it," I said.

"Datt was terrified that you were spying on him. He said you have documents he wants. He said you had been making inquiries, so he had to know."

"What did he do to me?"

"He injected you with Amytal and LSD. It's the LSD that takes time to wear off. I questioned you. Then you went into a deep sleep and awoke in the cellars of the house. I brought you here."

"What did I say?"

"Don't worry. None of those people speak English. I'm the only one who does. Your secrets are safe with me. Datt usually thinks of everything, but he was disconcerted when you babbled away in English. I translated."

So that was why I'd heard her say everything twice. "What did I say?"

"Relax. It didn't interest me, but I satisfied Datt."

I said, "And don't think I don't appreciate it, but why should you do that for me?"

"Datt is a hateful man. I would never help him, and anyway, I took you to that house, I felt responsible for you."

"And...?"

"If I had told him what you really said, he would have undoubtedly used amphetamine on you, to discover more and more. Amphetamine is dangerous stuff, horrible. I wouldn't have enjoyed watching that."

"Thanks," I said. I reached toward her, took her hand, and she lay down on the bed at my side. She did it without suspicion or arch looks; it was a friendly, rather than a sexual gesture.

She lit a cigarette and gave me the packet and matches. "Light it yourself," she said. "It will give you something to do with your hands."

"What did I say?" I asked casually. "What did I say that you didn't translate into French for Datt?"

"Nothing," Maria said immediately. "Not because you said nothing, but because I didn't hear it. Understand? I'm not interested in what you are or how you earn your living. If you are doing something that's illegal or dangerous, that's your worry. Just for the moment I feel a little responsible for you, but I've nearly worked off that feeling. Tomorrow you can start telling your own lies, and I'm sure you will do it remarkably well."

"Is that a brush-off?"

She turned to me. "No," she said. She leaned over and kissed me.

"You smell delicious," I said. "What is it you're wearing?"

"Agony," she said. "It's an expensive perfume, but there are few humans not attracted to it."

I tried to decide whether she was geeing me up, but I couldn't tell. She wasn't the sort of girl who'd help you by smiling, either.

She got off the bed and straightened her dress over her hips.

"Do you like this dress?" she asked.

"It's great," I said.

"What sort of clothes do you like to see women in?"

"Aprons," I said. "Fingers ashine with those marks you get from handling hot dishes."

"Yes, I can imagine," she said. She stubbed out her cigarette.

"I'll help you if you want help, but don't ask too much, and remember that I am involved with these people and I have only one passport and it's French."

I wondered if that was a hint about what I'd revealed under the drugs, but I said nothing.

She looked at her wrist watch. "It's very late," she said. She looked at me quizzically. "There's only one bed and I need my sleep."

I had been thinking of having a cigarette, but I replaced them on the side table. I moved aside. "Share the bed," I invited, "but I can't guarantee sleep."

"Don't pull the Jean-Paul lover-boy stuff," she said, "it's not your style." She grabbed at the cotton dress and pulled it over her head.

"What is my style?" I asked irritably.

"Check with me in the morning," she said, and put the light out.

She left only the radio on.

This is The First Publication of A New Spy Thriller by The Author of "The Ipcress File"--Copyright © 1966 by Vico Patentverwertungs Und Vermogensverwaltungs Ges. M.B.H.

*Politically mixed but Communist-dominated underground anti-Nazi organization.

*France has a particularly complex police system. The Sureté Nationale is the police system for all France that operates directly for the Minister of the Interior in the Ministry at Rue des Saussaies. At Quai des Orfèvres, there is the Prefecture, which does the same job for Paris. There is also the gendarmerie--recognized by their khaki coats in summer--who police the whole of France under the orders of the Army Ministry and are, in effect, soldiers. As well as this, there are special groups--Gardes Mobiles and C.R.S. (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité) companies--which are highly mobile and have violent striking power. Loiseau worked for the first-named, the Sureté Nationale, who, as well as all standard police work, also attend to counterespionage, economic espionage (unions and potential strikes, etc.), frontier policing and gaming. The 60 C.R.S. units are also controlled by one of the directorates (Public Security) of the Sureté Nationale.

*An old building on a prison site adjacent to Mazas Square near Austerlitz Station. It is used as a mortuary.

*Senior police officers in France are assigned their own private lines.

*A small whiskey.

This is the first installment of a new novel by Len Deighton. Part II will appear next month.