Our Game

"You are rich?"

"Rich enough."

"Perhaps you gave it to her because you didn't love her. Perhaps love is a threat to you, something to be paid off. Perhaps it is in competition with your other ambitions."

I had faced Pew-Merriman. I had faced Inspector Bryant and Sergeant Luck. Facing Dee was worse than any of them.

"You have one more flight to climb," she said. "Have you decided what you came for?"

"I'm looking for my friend. Her lover."

"So that you may forgive him?"

"Something like that."

"Perhaps he must forgive you?"

"What for?"

"We human beings are dangerous weapons, Mr. Timothy. And most dangerous where we are weak. We know so much about the power of others. So little about our own. You have a strong will. Perhaps you did not know your own strength with him." She laughed. "Such an inconstant man you are. One minute you are looking for Emma, the next you are looking for your friend. You know what? I don't think you wish to find your friend, only to become him. Be careful with her. She will be nervous."

* * *

She was. So was I.

She stood at the end of the long room, and it was a room so like her side of the house at Honeybrook that my first thought was to wonder why she had ever bothered to change it. It had the attic look she liked, with a high-timbered ceiling rising to an apex, and the views she liked, down to the river at either end. An old rosewood upright piano occupied one corner, and I supposed it was the sort of piano she had coveted in the Portobello Road at the time I had bought her the Bechstein. In another corner she had a desk—not a kneehole but more in the style of her prosaic desk in Cambridge Street. And on the desk stood a typewriter, and over it and on the floor lay a re-creation of the papers I had plundered. So that there was a look of proud resurgence about them, as if they had valiantly regrouped after a frightful pounding. If a tattered flag had flown from them, it would not have been surprising.

She had her hands at her sides. Black half-gloves as on the day we had first met. She was wearing a crushed linen smock, and it had the appearance of a habit: of a deliberate renunciation of the flesh; and of me. Her black hair was bound in a ponytail. And the improbable effect of this was that I desired her more urgently than ever before.

"I'm sorry about the jewellery," she began in a sort of lurch.

Which hurt me, because I didn't want her thinking, after everything that I had been through on her account—the anguish and the battering and the deprival—that I had any concern left for something as trivial as jewellery.

"So Larry's all right," I said.

Her head flung round eagerly, eyes wide with anticipation. "All right? What do you mean? What have you heard?"

"I'm sorry. I just meant in general. After Priddy."

Belatedly she understood my point. "Of course. You tried to kill him, didn't you? He said he hoped all his deaths would be so comfortable. I hate him talking like that, actually. Even joking. I don't think he should. Then of course I tell him, so he does it again, just because he's been told not to." She shook her head. "He's incurable."

"Where is he now?"

"Out there."

"Out where?" Silence. "Moscow? Back to Grozny?" More silence. "I suppose that's up to Checheyev."

"I don't think anyone moves Larry around like dry goods. Not even CC."

"I suppose not. How do you get hold of him, actually? Write? Call? What's the drill?"

"I don't. Nor do you."

"Why not?"

"He said that."

"Said what?"

"If you came after him, asking for him, not to tell you even if I knew. He said it wasn't that he didn't trust you. He was just worried that you might love the Office more. He won't phone. He says it's not safe. Not for him, not for me. I get messages. 'He's all right....' `He sends love....' `No change....' `Soon....' Oh, and 'Miss your beautiful eyes,' of course. That's practically standard."

"Of course." Then I thought I'd better tell her in case she didn't know. "Aitken May's dead. His two helpers were killed with him."

Her face turned abruptly from me as if I had slapped it. Then her whole back turned on me.

"The Forest killed them," I said. "I'm afraid your warning came too late. I'm sorry."

"Then CC will have to find a substitute," she said at last. "Larry will know somebody. He always does."