Whiff Of Money

When the connection was made, Girland said, 'I think our Soviet friends have become interested in our movie. I have Drina on my tail.' Dorey knew Drina as he knew every Soviet agent operating in Paris.

' You have the film on you?'

'Of course.'

'Where are you?'

Girland told him.

'I'll send two men down to cover you. Stay where you are.'

'Hitch up your suspenders!' Girland said impatiently. 'I can handle this. Wake up! You can't send two of your jerks down here to cover me unless you make this official.'

Dorey swallowed this, knowing Girland was right.

'But if they jump you and get that film...!'

'They won't get it. Stop laying an egg! I'll lose this fat slob and I'll call you later. I just thought I'd increase your blood pressure,' and Girland hung up.

When he returned to his table, his steak was placed before him. It looked very good. He made a leisurely lunch, paid the bill, then wandered out onto the busy boulevard.

Drina gave him a few metres start, then went after him. Girland wandered along, taking his time. Satisfied now that Girland hadn't spotted him, Drina loafed along in the rear.

Girland was an expert at losing a tail. When he came upon a crowd of people staring at a TV programme showing in a radio shop window, he stepped around them swiftly and into a doorway. The movement was so quick Drina didn't see it.

Suddenly Girland had vanished. Drina paused, people pushing by him. In a panic, Drina rushed past the doorway in which Girland was standing to the cross-roads. He looked frantically to right and left.

Watching the panic-stricken face of the fat agent, Girland grinned.

Three

On the top floors of most of the older apartment blocks in Paris there are a number of small rooms known as chambres de bonne where servants who worked for the owners of the apartments below used to live. But now servants were almost impossible to find, the owners rented these miserable little rooms to students or to those unable to afford higher rents.

Vi Martin lived in one of these rooms on the eighth floor of an old-fashioned block in Rue Singer. The room was equipped with a toilet basin, a portable electric grill, a bed, one small battered armchair and a plastic wardrobe. There was a table under the attic window on which stood a small transistor radio that never ceased to churn out swing music from the moment Vi woke to the moment she went to sleep. She just could not imagine anyone not living in the perpetual din of swing music.

There were eight other little rooms on her floor. Four of them were occupied by elderly women who went out early every day on cleaning jobs. There were two Spanish couples who worked as servants in the apartments below and two elderly widowers who worked at the post office, a few doors down the street.

These people had the habit of leaving their doors open so they could converse with their neighbours without leaving their rooms.

These conversations were carried on at the top of their voices so the din, plus Vi's transistor, was a nightmare bedlam of noise.

Vi shared her room with Paul Labrey. They had met at a Left Bank party and Vi had immediately fallen for Labrey. She thought he was terribly with it with his green tinted glasses and his long hair. He told her as they were dancing that he was sharing a room with a Senegalese who was planning to get married and he would have to move out. Did she know of a cheap room he could rent? Under the influence of six large gins and feeling sexually aroused by the way he was holding her, Vi suggested he should move into her pad and share the rent.

Labrey's hands moved down her back as he regarded her. He decided ' he could do a lot worse and moved in the following day, bringing with him an old battered suitcase and a few tattered paperbacks.

When Vi asked him what he did for a living, he grinned. 'I sell dirty postcards on Place de la Madeleine. It's a good racket. I catch the tourists when they leave Cook's.'

She didn't believe this, for often he wouldn't return to the room until well after 03.00 hrs. and sometimes he would rush off, swearing, before 08.00 hrs. She was sure he did some shady work - probably in drugs - but she didn't care. Vi was that kind of a girl. At least he always seemed to have a reasonable amount of money and wasn't mean with it. After a little persuasion, and after living with her for two months, he even agreed to pay the whole of the rent, and when they ate out at the bistro in Rue Lekain, he always picked up the tab.