runway after a mission. He emphasised the tragedy of it slightly, even grunting as he walked. The other cars parked in the square were a shabby bunch. Removing his gaze from his own egotistical landscapes, he saw this part of the cathedral square had been bought up as a used car lot. There were prices in francs painted to one side of each windscreen, as if denoting the worth of the driver rather than the vehicle.
The Hotel des Invalides had a brass handle to its door. Charteris dragged it down and stepped into the hall, into unmitigated shadow. A bell buzzed and burned insatiably until he closed the door behind him. He walked up the corridor, and only with that motion did the hall take on existence. There was a pot plant dying here beside an enormous piece of furniture – or it could be an over-elaborate doorway into a separate part of the establishment. On the walls, enormous pictures of blue-clad men being blown up among scattering sandbags. A small dense black square figure emerged at the end of the passage. He drew near and saw it had permed hair and was a woman, not young, not old, smiling.
‘Haben Sie eirt Zimmer? Ein persortn, eine Nacht?’
‘Jahr, jahr. Mil eine Dusche oder ohne?’
‘Ohne.’
‘Zimmer Nummer Zwanzig, Monsieur.’
German. The lingua franca of Europe.
The madame called for a dark-haired girl, who came hurrying and smiling with the key to room twenty. She led Charteris up three flights of stairs, the first flight marble, the second and third wooden, the third uncarpeted. Each landing was adorned with large pictures of Frenchmen dying or conquering Germans in the first world war.
‘This is where it all began,’ he said to the back of the girl.
She paused and looked down at him. ‘Je ne comprends pas, M’sieur.’
No windows had been opened for a long while. The air smelt of all the bottled lives that had suffered here. Constriction, miserliness, conservation over all. He saw the red limbs leaping again as if for joy within the bucketing autostrada cars. If there were only the two alternatives, he preferred the leaping death to the desiccating life. He knew how greatly he dreaded both, how his fantasy life shuttled between them. One more deadly mission: blast Peking, or spend ten years in the hotel in Metoz.
He was panting on the threshold of Zimmer Twenty. By opening his mouth, he did so without the girl hearing him. She was – he was getting to that age when he could no longer tell – eighteen, twenty, twenty-two? Pretty enough.
Motioning to her to stay, Charteris crossed to the first of two tall windows. He worked at the bar until it gave way and the two halves swung into the room.
Great drop on this, the back of the hotel. In the street below, two kids with a white dog on a lead. They looked up at him, becoming merely two faces with fat arms and hands. Thalidomites. He could not shut away the images of ruin and deformity.
Buildings the other side of the alley. A woman moving in a room, just discerned through curtains. A waste site, two cats stalking each other among litter. A dry canal bed, full of waste and old cans. Wasn’t there also a crushed automobile? A notice scrawled large on a ruined wall: NEUTRAL FRANCE THE ONLY FRANCE. Certainly, they had managed to preserve their neutrality to the bitter end; the French experience in the two previous world wars had encouraged that. Beyond the wall, a tree-lined street far wider than necessary, and the Prefecture. One policeman visible.
Turning back, Charteris cast a perfunctory eye over the furnishings of the room. They were all horrible. The bed was specially designed for chastity and early rising.
‘Combien?’
The girl told him. Two thousand six hundred and fifty francs. He had to have the figure repeated. His French was rusty and he was not used to the French government’s recent devaluation.
‘I’ll take it. Are you from Metoz?’
‘I’m Italian.’
Pleasure rose in him, a sudden feeling of gratitude that not all good things had been eroded. In this rotten stuffy room, it was as if he breathed again the air of the mountains.
‘I’ve been living in Italy since the war, right down in Catanzaro,’ he told her in Italian.
She smiled. ‘I am from the south, from Calabria, from a little village in the mountains that you won’t have heard of.’
‘Tell me. I might have done. I was doing NUNSACS work down there. I got about.’
She told him the name of the village and he had not heard of it. They laughed.
‘But I have not heard of NUNSACS,’ she said. ‘It is a Calabrian town? No?’
He laughed again, chiefly for the pleasure of doing it and seeing its effect on her. ‘NUNSACS is a New United Nations organisation for settling and if possible rehabilitating war victims. We have several large encampments down along the Ionian Sea.’
The girl was not listening to what he said. ‘You speak Italian well but you aren’t Italian. Are you German?’
‘I’m Montenegrin – a Jugoslav. Haven’t been home since I was a boy. Now I’m driving over to England.’
As he spoke, he heard Madame calling impatiently. The girl moved towards the door, smiled at him – a sweet and shadowy smile that seemed to explain her existence – and was gone.
Charteris put his case down on the table under the window. He stood looking out for a long while at the dry canal bed, the detritus in it making it look like an archaeological dig that had uncovered remains of an earlier industrial civilisation.
Madame was working in the bar when he went down. Several of the little tables in the room were occupied. He could tell at a glance they were all local people. The room was large and dispiriting, the big dark wood bar on one side being dwarfed and somehow divorced from the functions it was supposed to serve. A television set flickered in one corner, most of those present contriving to sit and drink so that they kept an eye on it, as if it were an enemy or at least an uncertain friend. The only exceptions to this were two old men at a table set apart, who talked industriously, resting their wrists on the table but using their hands to emphasise points in the conversation. One of these men, who grew a tiny puff of beard under his lower lip, soon revealed himself as M’sieur.
Behind M’sieur’s table, and set in one corner by a radiator, was a bigger table, a solemn table, spread with various articles of secretarial and other use. This was Madame’s table, and to this she retired to work with some figures when she was not serving her customers. Tied to the radiator was a large and mangy young dog, who whined at intervals and flopped continually into new positions, as though the floor had been painted with anti-dog powder. Madame occasionally spoke mildly to it, but her interests were clearly elsewhere.
All this Charteris took in as he sat at a table against the wall, sipping a pernod, waiting for the girl to appear. He saw these people as victims of an unworkable capitalistic system dying on its feet. The girl came after some while from an errand in the back regions, and he motioned her over to his table.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Angelina.’
‘Mine’s Charteris. That’s what I call myself. It’s an English name. I’d like to take you out for a meal.’
‘I don’t leave here till late – ten o’clock.’
‘Then you don’t sleep here?’
Some of the softness went out of her face as caution, even craftiness, overcame her, so that momentarily he thought, she’s just another lay, but there will be endless complications to it in this set-up, you can bet! She said, ‘Can you buy some cigarettes or something? I know they’re watching me.’
He shrugged. She walked across to the bar. Charteris watched the movement of her legs, the action of her buttocks, trying to estimate whether her knickers would be clean or not. He was