But now things were different, and in more ways than one. No longer was Rudy able to make his entrée into an assemblage, perhaps unfamiliar to him, and unfamiliar with him, as a family man with a beautiful wife, and a hardly less beautiful daughter, moving slowly and gracefully maturing, through her adolescence. No longer could he divert the attention of the company from him to them, while he had a quiet talk with someone he wanted to have a word with, and who might want to have a word with him. He didn’t exactly take refuge behind them; but they were his cards of identity; while they were around, engaging the others in conversation, he didn’t have to wonder much if people were looking at him.

Now all this was changed. The semi-social life on which so much of his success as an agent (an agent for whom? for what?) depended, had lost its context.

Rudy was a man of action, and action, such as it was, and wherever it was, involved a good deal of danger. This he not only accepted, he welcomed it for he was made that way; but being a professional, he didn’t go in search of it; to avoid it was as much a matter of self-training and self-discipline as to confront it when it came.

These two complementary qualities had helped him to get out of a number of tight places. His wife and his daughter had helped him, too, not physically, for he never wanted them to run unnecessary risks; but by their mere presence, which gave him an air of respectability and solidity which deceived a good many people.

How far he valued them for themselves, and not just as adjuncts to his appearance and personality—his image—he himself would have found it hard to say. While they were with him it was a question he did not even ask himself: he took their presence, and what they did for him, and what he did for them, for granted. They were reciprocal services in a good cause. The cause of what? Freedom perhaps, though freedom is such an elastic term; and some of his co-adjutors wondered which side he was on. But business is business, and as someone has said, a lie in business is not a lie. Rudy had availed himself, cautiously of course, of this precept.

Now he had to explain himself. It wasn’t difficult to explain that his wife was tired of travelling, which was true, and was now living in Warsaw, which was not true. For his sake, as well as Trudi’s and Angela’s, he did not want their whereabouts to be known. He also explained, which was true, that Angela was married and expecting a baby—he did not say where, for who knew where, or where not, a baby might be born?

This freedom from family ties gave him as a man who was still attractive to women, a good many opportunities which he was not slow to take; not only from the amorous angle, whatever that might be, but from the information sometimes supplied. He knew that information was double-edged, but he relied on getting more than he gave.

But he was not heartless, and though not yet forty, he sometimes thought rather wistfully in the loneliness of his leaking tent, pitched between somewhere and somewhere, or between nowhere and nowhere, eating his viands, on which he relied so much, out of a tin, or tins, in his solitary confinement, of the domestic amenity and seeming security he had once enjoyed. Those softer moments! When he came back tired and hungry from some mission, and smelt from afar the smell of a delicious dish that was cooking for him on the little oil stove, and heard, from nearer to, the gentle muffled swish and a rustle, so different from a man’s direct and decisive movements—loudly proclaiming their object instead of trying to conceal it—of the participants who were preparing his evening meal! Mouth-watering prospect! And more than living up to its promise. While he was eating he didn’t talk much; just a word here and there escaped the otherwise inarticulate smacking of his lips. But afterwards, full-fed, finishing the bottle of wine or spirits, if they were in funds, for he could drink at a sitting a bottle of brandy or sligovitz, or vodka, or grappa, or calvados or whatever might be the spirituous tipple of the country; then he became expansive, and told them a little, but not (for their own sakes) too much of what he had been doing during the day—the contacts he had made, the possible development, and their probable next destination. To all this they listened eagerly, even avidly, and fondly watched his face as (unknown to him) its taut features slowly relaxed to reveal a husband and a father.

And afterwards, when the dividing curtain was drawn he could hear their lowered voices (whispers meant not to disturb him rather than to prevent him hearing what they said), after which he dropped off in a genial alcoholic haze, with a sense of protective influences round him, and replete in every sense, he slept like the proverbial log, till dawn, or until the clock in his subconscious mind (as reliable and less noisy than an alarum clock) told him it was time to get up. Even if he had possessed an alarum clock he would not have used it, for it would have disturbed the slumbers beyond the curtain (not the Iron Curtain) and sometimes he was off before day-break.

Comfort! Comfort! He might not have admitted it to himself, but it was comfort that he missed, and business, however much it may sharpen the other faculties, does not always warm the heart.

He had had many surprises in his life, his life as an international spy, but the greatest and the most unforeseen was when almost simultaneously his wife and his daughter decided to leave him. He had always been ready, as indeed he had to be, to accept facts—but he could hardly credit this one. Leave him, after twenty years of wifehood, and perhaps longer still of daughterhood? He couldn’t and didn’t blame them; blame didn’t come into his code of behaviour, in which success and failure were his only criteria. He knew he hadn’t been a good husband and father, but there were many worse; he might have treated them as camp-followers but they were willing to be so treated; he had shared his good times as well as his bad times with them, and set aside some money for them, which was no doubt one reason why they had left him. He had counted on their loyalty, not on their love; love was a thing he didn’t take into account, except in the crudest way, as leading to someone or something.

All the same, in those lonely nights in the tent, when he heard no whispering of women’s voices, and smelt no smell of the creature comforts they were preparing for him, he knew he was missing something. It never entered his mind that they might be missing something too.

He didn’t often sleep now, as aforetime he used to, in the comfort of a luxury hotel; but sometimes he did, and it was there that the unexpected happened. In the middle of dinner, with a bottle of wine half empty on the table, two men touched him on the shoulder and before he had time to pay his bill, or anyone had time to pay it for him, he was marched away and bundled into a waiting car, not his car, which was outside in the car-park. ‘Can’t I get my things?’ he asked in the language of the country. ‘No, we’ve got all your things that matter,’ was the reply, and no more was said until he found himself, handcuffed, in a small cell, seven feet by five with a grated window at the top, admitting the air, and a grated window in the door, admitting a dim light from the passage. An unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling showed him a straw mattress in the corner, and one or two pieces of furniture which might have been made out of the same substance as the cell.

Here they left him; but presently a warder came in with a small bundle of clothes which he recognized as his. ‘This is all you’ll want,’ he said, ‘we’ve got the rest. I’ll show you where the place is,’ and unlocking the door he indicated where Rudy could relieve himself. ‘But you’ll have to knock on the door—there’s always me or one of us in the passage. Lights out at ten o’clock. Breakfast at six. These handcuffs are a bit tight, I’ll give you some second-grade ones, and you can stretch your arms a bit. No fooling about, mind. Good-night.’