“When I arrive in Abyla who is the first person I see?” said Marie Amaral. “Your harmless friend.”

“He was a gunrunner?” said Wavery, astonished. “For those fascists?”

“He must have told you.”

“No, madame, he’s never talked about you.”

“Not about his friend Major Merimée?”

“Not at all.”

“He hasn’t told you I am an illegal immigrant.” After all, a diplomat was a diplomat. Silkleigh might have traded his knowledge of her illegality for some favour.

“No. No. No.”

Marie Amaral nodded to herself. “He may be a spy and a shit and a gunrunner. He may have done all those things in my husband’s country. Neverthless, I esteem him for his discretion.”

Wavery, pouring the tea, said, “How do you take it?”

But she was sobbing. Periclito’s accident. The General’s tree. The Consul General’s teapot. Silkleigh. It was too much. She had not wept since Oran. And now some little breeze at the wrong moment had dissolved her proud shell. She was shaken by the fact she had exposed Silkleigh. Also impressed, she had to admit, by the discovery that he had revealed nothing.

“Marie, Marie!” said Wavery and he came towards her as if he was David about to lift her in his arms. That evening Wavery became the second person Marie Amaral told about Major Merimée.

The Frenchman dragged her from the window, out of the light. He was nervous. He tried to whistle. He whistled “Strasbourg, Strasbourg, You Lovely, Lovely Town” as he closed the door of her room. She wanted to tell him to stop whistling but terror silenced her. Major Merimée unbuttoned his shirt. The buttons were white except for one which must have come off and been replaced with a yellow button. The thread was sticking out. His touch was delicate. His palms had been torn by razor blades, hidden in the pockets of Arabs he had searched.

She told Wavery, “I wanted to meet a Frenchman and the first Frenchman I met raped me.” She remembered only the smell in the room. It was a familiar smell. She had smelled it issuing from small restaurants on the Rue Narbonne, and once at a barbecue beneath her father’s lemon trees. Afterwards Merimée’s confidence returned. He did not appear concerned that the car outside might be identified, or the body it contained. It if he knew no one would come knocking. He crossed an arm behind his dyed head and talked. About St-Cyr. Vietnam. Oran. He had been responsible for the bomb which blew Colonel X through his ceiling. He would like to do the same to his president. De Gaulle was a Jew. A drunk. A traitor. “I’d make him swallow his medals. One after the other,” he said, and then he hit her across the face. Her nose began to bleed. Some drops of blood fell on his stomach. He picked her skirt from the floor and wiped them off.

“Here,” he said, screwing her skirt into a tight bundle and giving it to her. She thanked him.