Free XPD by Len Deighton Page B

newspapers and some magazines and letters, all unopened and unexamined.
    A servant showed Stein up to a bedroom on the first floor. Alongside a big mahogany bed with a cream silk duvet cover there was an antique table with fresh fruit in a bowl and a coffee-table book on vintage cars. Over the bed hung a painting by some Dutch eighteenth-century artist: sepia sailing barges, sepia water, sepia sky. The servant opened the windows to reveal a wrought-iron balcony just large enough to permit the window shutters to fold back fully and provide a view of the garden and the lake, colourless in the grey afternoon light.
    ‘Would you like me to unpack now, sir?’
    ‘No, I’m going to climb into a hot tub and get some of that travel dust out of my wrinkles.’
    ‘Very good, sir. You’ll find everything you need, I think.’ The servant opened the cabinet alongside the window. There were tumblers and wine glasses with some bottles of claret in a rack and an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s bourbon.
    ‘And in the ice box there’ll be branch water,’ said Stein delightedly. ‘The colonel never forgets a thing.’
    ‘That’s right, sir,’ said the servant. He paused respectfully and then said, ‘Dinner will be served at 7.30, sir. The colonel will have a drink in the study about seven. He would like you to join him there.’
    ‘I sure will,’ said Stein.
    ‘The bell is by the door should you require tea or coffee or anything to eat.’ He always said the same thing, but Stein did not interrupt, knowing that he preferred it this way: he was Swiss.
    ‘No, I’m just fine. I’ll see the colonel at seven, in the study.’
    With a short bow, the servant departed. Stein opened the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured some down the sink. He had long since lost his taste for bourbon, but there was no point in hurting anyone’s feelings. After flushing some bottled water after it, Stein held the whisky to his nose. That sweet smell brought the memories flooding back upon him. He marvelled at the silence and stood for a moment or two in the sunless light, holding the whisky and looking out across the mauve rippling surface of the lake. From the hall below there came the soft chimes of the colonel’s favourite clock. He remembered his mother quoting the old Polish proverb, ‘In a house of gold, the hours are lead.’
    Stein’s arrival at short notice meant that there were other guests for dinner. They were all casual acquaintances, people whom Pitman had met by way of business. A commodity broker from Paris on vacation with his wife and teenage daughter, and a French couple who owned a car-leasing agency in Zurich. The conversation was confined to polite banalities. So although Stein was able to outline the MacIver episode before the guests arrived, it was not until dinner was finished that Stein and Pitman were alone.
    ‘You’re looking well, Stein.’
    ‘You too, Colonel.’
    ‘What about a nightcap? Shall we see what we have in the cellar?’
    It was always the same ritual. They went downstairs into the neatly arranged basement, passing the coal storage and the gleaming racks of logs to enter the long corridor where the wine was stored. ‘Claret or burgundy?’ the colonel asked.
    ‘The wine we drank at dinner was delicious.’
    ‘We might be able to do better than that,’ promised the colonel, searching carefully through the ranks of dusty bottles. ‘For an old army buddy we serve only the best.’
    Behind the wine there was a storage area where old suitcases were piled. There were some stags’ heads and other hunting trophies there too, tusks and antlers grimy and cobwebbed. Stein remembered when they were the colonel’s pride and joy, but some of the boys from the battalion had made jokes about them at a party back in the late sixties, and the colonel had changed his mind about them. Colonel Pitman set great store by the opinion of his men. Perhaps sometimes he overdid this tendency.
    ‘Hermitage!’ said the