O. HENRY

I told Solomon everything. I had to.

Because, you see, he is a clever man, one of the cleverest I’ve ever known, and it would have been silly to try and stagger on without making use of his intellect. Until I saw these photographs, I’d been pretty much on my own, ploughing a lonely furrow, but now was the time to admit that the plough had wobbled off at right angles and run into the side of the barn.

It wasfour o’clock in the morning by the time I finished, and long before then Solomon had broken open his knapsack and pulled out the kind of things that the Solomons of this world never seem to be without. We had a thermos of tea, with two plastic cups; an orange each, and a knife to peel them with; and a half-pound of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.

So, as we ate, and drank, and smoked, and disapproved of smoking, I laid out the story of Graduate Studies from beginning to middle: that I was not where I was, doing what I was doing, for the good of democracy; I was not keeping anyone safe in their beds at night, or making the world a freer, happier place; all I was doing - all I’d ever been doing since the whole thing started - was selling guns.

Which meant that Solomon was selling them too. I was the gun seller, the sales rep, and Solomon was something in the marketing department. I knew he wouldn’t like that feeling much.

Solomon listened, and nodded, and asked the right questions, in the right order, at the right time. I couldn’t tell whether or not he believed me; but then, I’d never been able to do that with Solomon, and probably never would.

When I’d finished, I sat back and toyed with a couple of squares of chocolate, and wondered whether bringing Cadbury’s to Switzerland was the same as bringing coals to Newcastle, and decided it wasn’t. Swiss chocolate has gone badly downhill since I was a lad, and nowadays is only fit for giving to aunts. And all the while, Cadbury’s chocolate plods on and on, better and cheaper than any other chocolate in the world. That’s my view, anyway.

‘That’s a heck of a story, master, if you don’t mind me saying.’ Solomon was standing, staring at the wall. If there’d been a window, he’d probably have stared out of that, but there wasn’t.

‘Yup,’ I agreed.

So we came back to the photographs, and we thought about what they might mean. We supposed and we postulated; we maybeed, and what- iffed, and how- aboutted; until eventually, when the snow was just beginning to gather some light from somewhere and bounce it in through the shutters and under the door, we decided that we’d at last covered all the angles.

There were three possibilities.

Quite a lot of sub-possibilities, obviously, but at_ that moment we felt like we wanted to deal in broad strokes, so we swept up the sub-possibilities into three main piles, which ran like this: he was bullshitting her; she was bullshitting him; neither one of them was bullshitting the other, they’d simply fallen in love with each other - fellow Americans, passing the long afternoons together in a strange city.

‘If she’s bullshitting him,’ I began, for about the hundredth time, ‘it’s to what purpose? I mean, what is she hoping to gain by it?’

Solomon nodded, then quickly rubbed his face, squeezing his eyes shut.

‘A post-coital confession?’ He winced at the sound of his own words. ‘She records it, films it or whatever, sends it to the Washington Post?’

I didn’t like that much, and neither did he. ‘Pretty feeble, I’d say.’

Solomon nodded again. He was still agreeing with me rather more than I deserved - probably because he was relieved that I hadn’t gone to pieces altogether, what with one thing and about a million others, and wanted to massage me back into a reasonable and optimistic frame of mind.

‘So he’s bullshitting her?’ he said, putting his head on one side, eyebrows raised, ushering me through the gate like a subtle sheepdog.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘A willing captive is less trouble than an unwilling one. Or maybe he’s spun her some yarn, told her it’ll all be taken care of. He has the ear of the President himself, something like that.’

That didn’t sound too good either.

Which left us with possibility number three.

Now why would a woman like Sarah Woolf want to get together with a man like Russell P Barnes? Why would she walk with him, laugh with him, make the beast with four buttocks with him? If that’s actually what she was doing, and there wasn’t much doubt in my mind about it.

All right, he was handsome. He was fit. He was intelligent, in a stupid sort of a way. He had power. He dressed well. But apart from all that, what was in it for her? I mean, for Christ’s sake, he was old enough to be a corrupt representative of her government.

I deliberated on the sexual charms of Russell P Barnes as I trudged back to the hotel. Dawn was definitely pulling into the station by now, and the snow had begun to throb with an electric, new-fallen whiteness. It climbed the inside of my trousers, and clung, squeakily, to the soles of my boots, and the bit just in front seemed to say ‘don’t walk on me, please don’t walk… oh.’

Russell arsing Barnes.

I got back to the hotel and made for my room as quietly as I could. I unlocked the door, slipped inside and then, immediately, stopped: froze, with my windcheater half off. After the journey through the snow, with nothing but alpine air moving around my system, I was tuned to pick up all the nuances of indoor smells - the stale beer from the bar, the shampoo in the carpet, the chlorine from the basement swimming pool, the beachy sun-cream smell from just about everywhere - and now this new smell. A smell of something that really shouldn’t have been in the room.

It shouldn’t have been there because I was only paying for a single, and Swiss hotels are notoriously strict about this kind of thing.

Latifawas stretched out on my bed, asleep, the top sheet coiled around her naked body like a Rubens pastiche. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

She was sitting up now, the sheet tight round her chin, while I sat on the end of the bed and pulled off my boots. ‘For a walk,’ I said.

‘For a walk where?’ snapped Latifa, still crumpled with sleep, and angry with me for seeing her that way. ‘It’s fucking snow. Where do you walk in fucking snow? What have you been doing?’

I yanked off the last boot and slowly turned to look at her. ‘I shot a man today, Latifa.’ Except I was Ricky to her, so I pronounced it Laddifa. ‘I pulled the trigger and shot a man down.’ I turned away and stared at the floor, the soldier-poet, sickened by the ugliness of battle.

I felt the sheet relax under me. Slightly. She watched me for a while.