Quiller Salamander q-18 Read online

  Then I saw the doll.

  It was life-size, its pale porcelain face perfect and unmarked, and it was being carried by a half-starved middle-aged woman who seemed hardly to have the strength. The doll was in a worn rattan basket that concealed its legs, and as I watched, the woman made to hitch the thing higher, but her companion — younger and stronger, perhaps her daughter — took it from her, lifting it out of the basket and holding it tight against her, and I saw that in fact it had no legs — they'd been broken, I suppose, and taken off. The older woman walked beside her, stroking the hair of the doll. Both were smiling, as if they were sharing joy in having this toy to carry around with them, and then I saw the toy smile too, suddenly and sweetly. It wasn't a doll after all, with that perfect porcelain face, but a child, a little girl with a blanket wound around her hips and nothing below, no legs.

  And watch out for trip mines, the man in the Trans-Kampuchean office had told me, the Khmer Rouge are still blowing up whoever they can find — military, civilians, women and children, you name it, they'll kill it.

  I watched the two women, their backs to me now as they neared the exit doors, the small bobbing head of the child lost from sight; but I could still see — went on seeing, would always see, forever — that sweet sudden smile.

  'Yes,' I told Pringle.

  'I'm Sorry?'

  'Yes,' I said again. He gave it a moment, absorbing the unexpected.

  'You agree to go ahead?'

  'I said yes, for Christ's sake, didn't I?'

  In the corner of the cafe the mah-jong pieces clicked like broken bones.

  Pringle sat back from the table. 'Very well. I'm glad I was able to brief you so successfully. We — '

  'It's nothing to do with your bloody briefing.'

  He tilted his head and brought it down an inch, raised it again in a gesture of concession. 'Whatever your reasons, I'll be delighted to signal Control tonight with your decision. And as your director in the field, is it too soon to ask if you've any idea how you'll start Salamander running?'

  'You speak French?'

  'Yes.'

  I pushed the grey, cheaply-printed newspaper across the table for him so that he could read the lower headline; it was the paper I'd seen and bought on my way in here through the hall, La Vie Cambodge.

  'Apparently I killed a man last night,' I said, 'so I'm going to start things running at his funeral.'

  5: SALAMANDER

  There'd been a moon tonight, a thin curved blade of light cutting through the haze across the city. The rain had stopped in the late afternoon, giving way to a stifling moist heat as twilight came.

  'Are they in trouble?' I asked Gabrielle. One of the ferries on the Tonle Sap was drifting in midstream, butted and nudged by two or three smaller boats.

  'They're always in trouble.' She uncorked the bottle of red wine she'd brought with the other things in the brown paper bags — a tin of smoked salmon and some escargots, a hunk of Brie and a loaf of pain de seigle. I'd asked her how she'd managed to find stuff like that in a place like this, and she'd just smiled and said she had French blood.

  I'd phoned her room from the lobby of the Royal Palace Hotel an hour ago to ask if she could join me for dinner somewhere, so that I could return her hospitality.

  'Tonight?' She'd sounded cautious.

  'If the spirit moves you.'

  'Well yes, I–I'd like that. But you don't mean here at the hotel?'

  I thought that was interesting. There were good reasons why I didn't mean here at the hotel, but she wasn't expected to know them.

  'Somewhere more private,' I said.

  The caution was still in her voice but she said in a moment, 'The most private place I know is a pension along the river, in Hassakan Street. I'll bring something for us to eat. Will you give me a little time?'

  We'd met here ten minutes ago, and she'd said a few words in Khmer to a shy little woman with only a few teeth but a heartbreaking smile, and we'd climbed the half-lit stairs to this small room at the top of the house with its window looking east across the river.

  Pouring the wine Gabrielle said, 'I didn't expect to see you again so soon.'

  'I haven't the patience to wait long for my pleasures.'

  She didn't smile, gave me a studied look in the light of the cheap brass lamp. 'I think you have. You are a very disciplined man.' The note of caution I'd caught over the phone at the hotel hadn't quite left her voice, or it had changed to a hint of reserve. She was different from last night in the restaurant, less open.

  She sliced the bread with a plastic knife she'd brought and offered me butter, using a give-away tin-opener on the smoked salmon before I could help, arranging everything with the formality the French practise even at a picnic.

  'Did you get any pictures today?' I asked her.

  Her dark blue eyes clouded. 'Fifty or sixty. I take fifty or sixty every day, and put them on the first plane the next morning. Cripples, weeping widows, fatherless children playing at soldiers in the ruins. I think in English you call it "sob stuff". I call it getting the message across. Or at least trying.'

  I cut some more bread. 'It used to be the pen that was mightier than the sword. Today it's the camera.'

  We both looked across at the window as a splash sounded from the river. In the glow of light from the city we could see a man overboard from the terry. Shouting broke out us others leaned over the rail to help him back.

  'He should be careful,' Gabrielle said. 'There are snakes in the river. They swim across at night — the light attracts them, and the rats.' She drank some wine, still watching the scene out there. 'Especially the hanuman — do you know it?'

  'Bright green?'

  'Yes, the bright green one. Quite small but more deadly than the cobra, even the king cobra. Some more wine?' She tilted the bottle, but I stopped her.

  'No, it'll make me sleepy. I've got some work to do later.

  She studied me for a moment. 'I cannot ever imagine you being sleepy. It would be quite out of character.'

  The lamp began flickering and in a moment went out; below the window the streets had gone dark, and the lights on the ferry out there seemed brighter, reflecting across the black water.

  'Is your husband in the media?' I asked Gabrielle. Tonight she'd changed from her paramilitary khaki into a simple white dress, with no jewellery except for the plain gold ring.

  'I am a widow.'

  Close as we were at the little table we could hardly sec each other now; we had become voices.

  'For how long?' I asked her.

  'Three years.'

  'Did it happen out here?'

  The silence went on for a little and then she said with a soft roughness in her voice, 'No. It happened in Paris, after we had been married only six months.' I wished now that I hadn't asked about him; I thought she was having to hold back tears, or wasn't managing.

  'I'm sorry I — '

  'It is quite all right. It helps, to talk about him, not to make him a secret.' Her English was so formal; I wished she'd use her native tongue: there was a need for its subtle nuances just at the moment. 'It was cancer. "An unromantic and ungallant way of departure," as he said. You can imagine how much I loved him.'

  'And how much he loved you.'

  The lamp and the lights in the street below began flickering, and we waited, both embarrassed, I think, by the tawdry intrusion. When the light steadied Gabrielle said with a rueful laugh, 'I didn't realize how bright it was, before.' Her eyes were glistening with the tears that hadn't come, and I switched off the lamp altogether.

  'It is nice,' she said, 'like this.' We sat in the soft light rising from the street. 'You are sensitive, for a man of action.'

  'A man of action?'

  'Wasn't it you who saved the life of the Minister of Defence last night?'

  This was why she seemed cautious this evening, wasn't sure now what kind of company she was keeping. In my copy of La Vie Cambodge they'd reported that shots were fired in the vicinity of
Minister Leng Sim's automobile, but that 'a mysterious and fortuitous accident' enabled him to escape harm. A passenger in another vehicle died from his injuries.

  Gabrielle was waiting.

  'Not as far as I know,' I told her.

  'Vraiment? But in the restaurant last night you asked one where the Pol Pot agent was sitting, and you asked me who the other man was, and I told you. Then when they both left there you went to make your telephone call.' She put her hand on my arm 'You can trust me you see, but I am not asking for your confidence if you do not wish to give it to me.'

  She started to take her hand away, symbolically, I suppose, but I put mine over it and she didn't withdraw. 'It's not a question of that, Gabrielle. I know when I can trust people and when I can't.' It was, in point of fact, why I'd phoned her this evening: to find out more about Flockhart if I could, see if it looked all right to give him my trust at last, or at least some of it. Gabrielle had seen something of him when they'd met in Paris, but in London I'd only ever passed him sometimes in the corridors, seen him sometimes in the signals room, never spoken.

  'And you believe,' her voice came softly in the shadows, 'that you can trust me?'

  'Yes.' This was true: I can spot an actress fifteen miles from the footlights. What I didn't trust was what Flockhart might have put into her mind in Paris, because it could affect Salamander, and I didn't want to take this mission blindly into the dark. 'It's more a question of my becoming a danger to you,' I told her, 'the more you know about me. But for the record, yes, there was a hit of a dust-up in the street last night, and — '

  'A dust-up — '

  'Un fracas.' I went on in French now, because for secret reasons alone we didn't want tiny misunderstandings. 'And I preferred not to let the minister get shot. Rut there wasn't anything political in it. I mean on my part.'

  'Very well, it was a "fortuitous accident", as it said In the paper. But if you are in Phnom Penh to take any kind of deliberate action against the Khmer Rouge, you should know that you are putting your head in the lion's den — '

  'Mouth.'

  'Pardon?'

  'Never mind.'

  She switched to French now too, taking the hint, and the stiff formality went out of her speech. 'Listen,' she said softly and quickly, 'it's just that if I don't try to make you understand what you're taking on, I might regret it later. I might regret it bitterly.'

  Pringle had given me much the same kind of warning at the airport this afternoon: 'We acknowledge quite freely, of course, that the personal risk you'll be taking is very high. Very high indeed.'

  I'd thought about that. 'You mean I'm expendable?'

  He hadn't looked away. 'Let's say that if we didn't think you had a reasonable chance of pulling this one off, we wouldn't have offered it to you.'

  'All right, but if I crash, are you going to replace me?'

  He watched me steadily. 'For an operation like this, we believe you are irreplaceable.'

  'So this is a one-shot thing?'

  'I think you described it just now as "shit or bust". I can't hope to put it more accurately.'

  I thought about that too, because this was another first: I'd taken over God knew how many missions when the executive in the field had crashed. I'd walked so many times in a dead man's shoes and every time I'd been sent out with a brand new mission I'd known perfectly well that if I came unstuck they'd shake the dice in London and send the next man in. This was a brand new mission but if I couldn't bring it home they'd write it off in the records: E'xecutive failed, mission abandoned,

  It had never happened to me before, and it gave me a heady feeling of control, of identity. I wasn't working a mission I wasthe mission. I was Salamander.

  Flockhart was breaking every rule in the book: he wanted me to operate with a single, unassisted control — himself — with no board opened in the signals room, no signals crew, no emergency supervision by Chief of Signals if a wheel came off, and no awareness, even, on the part of anyone else in the entire Bureau that there was a mission running at all. Just this isolated, ultra secret triumvirate operating in the shadows behind the scenes; control, a director in the field and the ferret. Correction, yes — the salamander.

  The lights flickered again in the streets below the small high room, bringing me back to the present with a new thought flashing through my mind — I was trying to decide whether or not I could trust Flockhart, but for Flockhart to run this operation successfully on those terms he had to rely on me to honour his confidence. He had to trust me. Totally. And that was what he was doing now. He had no choice: I could pick up a phone and go through the government communications mast at Cheltenham and ask for Croder, Chief of Signals, and tell him that Flockhurt was running a rogue operation on his own and perhaps he ought to check it out, and Flockhart could be hauled upstairs to explain himself to those soulless ghouls in Administration and then get himself thrown into the street.

  The lights steadied again and there was some shouting out there on the river; I think they'd got the ferry going again because there was a chugging noise coming across the water.

  Another thought flashed across the dark and I caught it in time and looked it over, looked it over very carefully because so much depended on whether I got this thing straight or not, whether I went into the mission knowing everything I needed to know or risked crashing it through ignorance.

  Did Flockhart really have no choice but to trust me?

  No.

  It was I who had no choice. He knew he could trust me, and totally, and we both knew why. I needed the mission. I'd been desperate for this one, for anything they felt like throwing me in London, and now I'd got what I wanted, and nothing could make me call the Chief of Signals because I'd never survive the flak. If I blew Flockhart out of existence I'd blow Salamander with him.

  And I was Salamander.

  I felt Gabrielle's hand stirring under my own. 'I thought I'd leave you,' she said, 'to your thoughts.'

  I got up and went to the window and looked down into the Street and across to the river bank, letting my eyes roam the shadows, seeing nothing that shouldn't be there. I'd checked the environment when Gabrielle had come here, checked it again before I followed.

  I went back to sit with her again at the little table. 'If ever I decide,' I told her, 'to do anything against the Khmer Rouge, I'll remember your warning. But tell me about M'sieur Flockhart — you said you did him a service in Paris. Or is it personal?'

  'Oh no. I was waiting in the street across from the Hotel d’Alsace about a week ago — my editor wanted me to get some shots of the British delegates to the Anglo-French Conference on the Arts as they came down the steps. But something unusual happened. A man came out of the hotel, obviously English, and I thought he was one of the delegates, so I started my camera running.' She just called it 'something unusual', I suppose — not 'terrible' or anything — because here in Cambodia she'd got used to seeing people blown to bits; she meant unusual for Paris. 'But there was a car bomb incident, and I had to spend a few hours in hospital with concussion — and it was there that M'sieur Flockhart made contact with me.'

  'He followed you there?'

  'Yes. He saw the incident himself, and — '

  'He wasn't hurt as well?'

  In the dim light from the window she turned her head to look at me. 'I suppose he must have seen it from inside a building. I hadn't thought of it before.'

  Covert surveillance, yes. 'Go on.'

  'He told me he was a security official with the British contingent, and asked if I would give him the film I'd taken. I told him he'd have to put the request through L'Humanite, but he said he didn't want to go through "all that red tape".' She was watching me again. 'He's very charming, your M'sieur Flockhart.'

  For a tarantula. 'Yes,' I said, 'he is.'

  'He told me that if I cared to have a quiet little dinner with him we might come to some arrangement. I was a bit surprised, hut he was in security, so — '

  'And that's what happened
?'

  'Yes. He promised to let me have the story, once he'd got to the bottom of the bomb incident by having the film analysed in London.' With a little shrug: 'Either there was no story, or they haven't finished their analysis yet. But he gave me a very sumptuous evening, and we made a lot of jokes in "Franglais".'

  'A la Major Thompson.'

  She laughed lightly. 'Absolument!'

  Jesus, you've got to hand it to Flockhart. Except for him, the mount of charm you'll get out of the entire senior Bureau staff above the third floor would fit comfortably under a microdot.

  'And you told him,' I said, 'that you'd be coming out to Phnom Penh shortly?'

  'Yes. He seemed quite interested in the situation here.'

  So he'd asked her to 'settle me in' when I arrived. Didn't miss a trick, friend Flockhart.

  The sticky air moved into the little room from the window, tainted now with diesel exhaust gas from the ferry as it rumbled across to the bank on the far side.

  'Are you going straight back,' I asked, Gabrielle, 'to the Royal Palace when you leave here?'

  'Yes.'

  'I've moved from there.'

  'I didn't know.'

  'You mustn't be seen with me again.'

  'Because of the man who was killed last night in the "accident"?'

  'Partly.',

  "There were others who might have seen you?'

  'Possibly.'

  'You must got rid of your car — '

  "There's another thing, Gabrielle. Unless I ask for your help as an interpreter, l don't want you involved in any action I might decide to take against the Khmer Rouge. That would be extremely dangerous. I know you're here in Phnom Penh to get pictures, but wherever I go and whatever I do will be strictly off-camera.'

  It was after curfew when she got into her car and drove west away from the river along Hassakan Street, and I tailed her far enough to make sure she was completely clear and then peeled off.

  6: RAIN

  The air was rich with incense.

  The coffin, decorated with red and gold embellishments and intricately-carved Buddhas, was being carried into the temple by six yellow-robed monks, with the waxen face of the deceased open to the view of the mourners and the body enrobed in coloured silks.