“At least you’ve got a good appetite.” She lifted her glass in a gesture of toast that hadn’t been used since Charles Boyer stopped playing romantic leads: eyes half-lidded, lips moist and parted. Suddenly she laughed. “I’m a little tight. Or high—I never got the distinction straight. I saw a movie on TV last night and I’ll bet I can stump you. The Great Sioux Uprising. Do you know who wrote the screenplay?”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“It was a terrible movie. Whoever wrote it had the sense to use a pen name. The screenplay was written, it says in great big flaming red letters, by Fred C. Dobbs.”

It took him two seconds and then he laughed. She looked hurt and petulant. Lime did a Humphrey Bogart snarl: “Liften, nobody putf nuffin over on Fred Fee Dobbf.”

“I didn’t think you’d get that one. I really didn’t.”

“Somebody really used Fred C. Dobbs for a pen name?”

“Scout’s honor.”

He laughed again. Dobbs was the Bogart character in Treasure of the Sierra Madre—the greedy one who would do anything for gold.

They took the dishes out to the sink. Lime trapped her against the counter. She gripped his tie and pulled his head down; her tongue was very hot. They left the candles burning, went into the bedroom; Lime sat down and began to unlace his shoes, watching her. Since she disdained underwear she was unclad before he was; she unbuttoned his shirt and pulled him by the hands to the bed. He made love to her slowly and knowingly.

They shared a cigarette. “Ça va mieux?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

“Say it with conviction, darling.” She had a bright hard shiny-eyed look.

Lime inhaled the smoke fiercely; it made him dizzy. “Yeah,” in a tone laced with anger.

“What’s the matter now?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

Her feet were tangled in the twisted sheets; she kicked free. “Just hang in there, man.” She disappeared into the loo. Lime lay on his back, belly rising and falling with his breath, smoke hovering around him.

She came back and sat on the side of the bed and stroked his hair. He said, “I apologize.”

“For what?”

“Mein weltschmerz, I guess. I don’t mean to play Hamlet all the time.”

“You’re going through a bad patch, that’s all. The bombing didn’t help.”

“You could say that. It didn’t help anybody.”

“Well what’s the answer to it then?”

He shook his head back and forth on the pillow. “It’s sheer innocence to believe there’s an answer for every problem. There’s no answer to this one short of eliminating all terrorists on suspicion.”

“That’s farfetched.”

“Not really. It’s standard procedure in most of the world. Here we still pretend totalitarian solutions are unacceptable, but we’re learning.” He smiled vaguely. “Revolution doesn’t self-destruct automatically. You have to kill it.”

“But you’d rather not have to.”

“I committed something to memory a few years ago. A quote that’s kind of revealing. Verbatim—‘The earth is degenerating, there are signs that civilization is coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are rampant, violence is everywhere. Children no longer respect and obey their parents.’”

“A Russian bigwig?”

“Not even close. It’s from an Assyrian tablet that’s about five thousand years old.”

She came into the bed and snuggled close with her fists together against his chest, one knee hooked over his waist. Her hip was mounded high, her hair spread on the pillow. “My darling Oblomov.”

“All right.”

“You’re too cautious, David. You’re a big tragic bear, but it’s tragedy not from what you suffer but from what you don’t feel.”

“Then you shouldn’t bother with me.”

“You were born believing in things, but everything you were taught seems beside the point now.”

“Yes Doctor,” Lime murmured.

“Nothing really matters, is that right?”

“That does seem to be the problem, Doctor.”

“That’s my point,” she said. “It matters to you that nothing matters. That’s the point David—that’s a beginning.”

MONDAY,

JANUARY 10

10:15 A.M.Continental European Time The sky was weak lemon in color and Perdido loomed above the hotel, powder snow blowing off its peak in little gusty clouds. Eleven thousand feet of mountain and nothing to do but ski. The lodge was huge with a heavy-handed massiveness that failed to create the kind of rusticity it was evidently intended to provide. The Germans had built it just last year—the Germans, who built everything in Spain. They had hacked a road up the mountain and built Perdido Spa out of Krupp steel and Hilton plastic, and endeavored to give it the quaint appearance of logs. It was an abomination.

Liam McNeely stood outside the lodge on a wooden deck the size of a football field, open to the sky. Ordinarily it would be crowded with little tables occupied by lunching skiers but today there were no tourists. Premier Perez-Blasco had shelled out of the Spanish treasury enough to hire Perdido Spa for the duration of President-elect Fairlie’s skiing visit. The tables had been removed and Fairlie’s Navy helicopter squatted there on its skids, motionless rotor blades drooping.

Fairlie had originally planned to ski here but he had no interest in skiing now—not after the bombing. Yet the Spanish plans were not easily or quickly changeable. Fairlie was waiting here, resting, en route.

Early this morning Torres, the Foreign Minister, had arrived from Madrid in a black Seat limousine. As Fairlie’s aide-de-camp and chief factotum McNeely had met Torres’s party at the car-park steps and ushered them quickly into the banquet room which the hotel had set aside for Fairlie’s meetings.

Torres had with him his interpreter and two underlings and a squat brigand named Dominguez who turned out to be the director of the Guardia Civil. McNeely produced the aides and Meyer Rifkind, who was head of the Secret Service detail assigned to Fairlie, and they had all sat down in a little group near one side of the enormous empty room. Stiff and hesitant, as if they were the only people left from a crowded party that had broken up an hour ago.

But Torres was congenial and they had ironed out the schedule for Fairlie’s visit to Madrid. Dominguez had done most of the groundwork; it remained mainly to coordinate Secret Service operations into the Spanish security arrangements.

These visits always required intricate and voluminous preparation. The precise time of arrival, the precise spot where the helicopter would land and be met by Perez-Blasco and the civil guardsmen, the motorcade route from helicopter to palace. Dominguez went over the maps for more than an hour with Meyer Rifkind. Here—a stubby finger jabbed the map—Perez-Blasco and Fairlie would make an “unscheduled” stop to pop out of the limousine and shake hands with members of the crowd. Guardianos were clearing the block in advance, screening every storefront and window and rooftop, posting themselves to enfilade the area.

Here, television cameras would be posted along the boulevard to cover the motorcade. There would be good camera shots of Fairlie and Perez-Blasco when they made a “spontaneous” stop to accept roasted chestnuts from a street vendor.

It was all contrivance, the game of personal diplomacy.

A Guardiano would drive the limousine and a United States Secret Service agent would sit beside him on the front seat. Two more, similarly paired, on the limousine’s jump seats facing the dignitaries. Guardianos in their taut uniforms and hard tricorner hats would ride the running boards. Cars ahead and behind would carry security men.

At three-fifteen the motorcade would arrive at El Pardo palace; Fairlie and Perez-Blasco would dismount, the Guardia would form a flying wedge around them, they would enter the palace with Secret Service agents following in a fan.