There was a pub on the other side of the avenue. They reached it by crossing a footbridge. The rush hour traffic thundered beneath them; the cold, plump raindrops seemed to go with it. The bridge trembled to the drumming of the cars. The pub was Tudor with new horse brasses and a ship’s bell very highly polished. Leiser asked for a White Lady. He never drank anything else, he said. “Stick to one drink, Captain, that’s my advice. Then you’ll be all right. Down the hatch.”
“It’s got to be someone who knows the tricks,” Haldane observed. They sat in a corner near the fire. They might have been talking about trade. “It’s a very important job. They pay more than in the war.” He gave a gaunt smile. “They pay a lot of money these days.”
“Still, money’s not everything, is it?” A stiff phrase, borrowed from the English.
“They remembered you. People whose names you’ve forgotten, if you even knew them.” An unconvincing smile of reminiscence crossed his thin lips: it might have been years since he had lied. “You left quite an impression behind you, Fred; there weren’t many as good as you. Even after twenty years.”
“They remember me then, the old crowd?” He seemed grateful for that, but shy, as if it were not his place to be held in memory. “I was only a kid then,” he repeated. “Who’s there still, who’s left?”
Haldane, watching him, said, “I warned you, we play the same rules, Fred. Need to know, it’s all the same.” It was very strict.
“God Christ,” Leiser declared. “All the same. Big as ever, then, the outfit?”
“Bigger.” Haldane fetched another White Lady. “Take much interest in politics?”
Leiser lifted a clean hand and let it fall.
“You know the way we are,” he said. “In Britain, you know.” His voice carried the slightly impertinent assumption that he was as good as Haldane.
“I mean,” Haldane prompted, “in a broad sense.” He coughed his dusty cough. “After all, they took over your country, didn’t they?” Leiser said nothing, “What did you think of Cuba, for instance?”
Haldane did not smoke, but he had bought some cigarettes at the bar, the brand Leiser preferred. He removed the cellophane with his slim, aging fingers, and offered them across the table. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “The point was, you see, in the Cuba thing the Americans knew. It was a matter of information. Then they could act. Of course they made overflights. One can’t always do that.” He gave another little laugh. “One wonders what they would have done without them.”
“Yes, that’s right.” He nodded his head like a dummy. Haldane paid no attention.
“They might have been stuck,” Haldane suggested and sipped his whisky. “Are you married, by the way?”
Leiser grinned, held his hand out flat, tipped it briskly to left and right, like a man talking about airplanes. “So, so,” he said. His tartan tie was fastened to his shirt with a heavy gold pin in the shape of a riding crop against a horse’s head. It was very incongruous.
“How about you, Captain?”
Haldane shook his head.
“No,” Leiser observed thoughtfully, “no.”
“Then there have been other occasions,” Haldane went on, “where very serious mistakes were made because they hadn’t the right information, or not enough. I mean not even we can have people permanently everywhere.”
“No, of course,” Leiser said politely.
The bar was filling up.
“I wonder whether you know of a different place where we might talk?” Haldane inquired. “We could eat, chat about some of the old gang. Or have you another engagement?” The lower classes eat early.
Leiser glanced at his watch. “I’m all right till eight,” he said. “You want to do something about that cough, sir. It can be dangerous, a cough like that.” The watch was of gold; it had a black face and a compartment for indicating phases of the moon.
The Under Secretary, similarly conscious of the time, was bored to be kept so late.
“I think I mentioned to you,” Leclerc was saying, “that the Foreign Office has been awfully sticky about providing operational passports. They’ve taken to consulting the Circus in every case. We have no status, you understand; it’s hard for me to make myself unpleasant about these things—they have only the vaguest notion of how we work. I wondered whether the best system might not be for my Department to route passport requisitions through your Private Office. That would save the bother of going to the Circus every time.”