LITMIR.BIZ

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you were Count Shuvalov … would you be ready to confide in me now?’ She gave a little chuckle, and nibbled.

      ‘I’ll be damned! Been using me for net practice, have you?’ I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Experimenting on me, you little trollop – of all the sauce!’

      ‘Why not?’ says the shameless baggage, sitting up again and drawing on her scented weed. ‘If I am to learn his secrets, it is well I should know what … beguiles men of his age. After all, you and he are no longer boys, but mature, possibly of similar tastes …’

      ‘A couple of ageing libertines, you mean? Well, thank’ee, my dear, I’m obliged to you – as I’m sure Count Shovel-off will be, and if you pay him the kind of loving attention you’ve just shown me, I daresay he’ll be sufficiently captivated to gas his fat head off –’

      ‘Oh, he is captivate’ already,’ says she airily. ‘He has admired the notorious photograph … and we have met, and he has begged an assignation for tomorrow night.’⁷

      ‘Has he, now? That’s brisk work.’ Highly professional, too … by Blowitz? … by the French secret department? Certainly by the brazen little bitch sitting cool as a trout athwart my hawse, sporting her boobies and blowing smoke-rings while she mused cheerfully on how best to squeeze the juice out of her Russian prey.

      ‘You see,’ says she, ‘to captivate, to seduce, is nothing … he is only a man.’ She gave the little shrug that is the Frenchwoman’s way of spitting on the pavement. ‘But afterwards … to make him tell what I wish to know … ah, that is another thing. Which is why I ask you, who are experienced in secret affairs, Blowitz says. You know well these Russians, you have made the intrigues, you have made love to many, many women, and I am sure they have – how do you say? – practised their nets on you.’ She smiled sleepy seductive-like, and leaned down again to flicker the tip of her tongue against my lips. ‘So, tell me … which of them most appealed, to win your confidence? The fool? The task-mistress? The slave? L’ingénue? Or perhaps la petite farceuse who teases you with foolish jokes, and then …’ She wriggled, stroking her bouncers across my chest. ‘To which would you tell your secrets?’

      ‘My, you’ve studied your subject, haven’t you?’ I eased her gently upright. ‘Well, the answer, my artful little seductress, is … to none of ’em – unless I wanted to. But I ain’t Shovel-off, remember. From what I hear he’s the kind of vain ass who can’t resist showing off to every pretty woman he meets, so it don’t matter a rap whether you play the innocent or Delilah or Gretchen the Governess. Get him half-tipsy, pleasure him blind, and listen to him blather … but don’t try to come round him with jokes from Punch, ’cos they’d be lost on him. Tease him with a few funny bits from Tolstoy, if you like, or the latest wheezes from Ivan the Terrible’s Guffawgraph –’

      ‘Oh, idiot!’ She slapped me smartly on the midriff, giggling. ‘You are not serious, you! I ask advice, and you make game of me!’

      ‘Advice, my eye – mocking a poor old man, more like.’

      ‘Old? Ha!’ exclaims she, rolling her eyes – she could pay a neat compliment, the minx.

      ‘As if there was anything I could teach you about bewitching a man!’ I can pay a compliment, too. She gave a complacent toss of the head, arms akimbo.

      ‘Oh, one can always learn, from a wise teacher … I think,’ says she, assuming the depraved sneer she had worn in her photograph, ‘that since I do not like M. Shuvalov, I should prefer to be Gretchen the Governess, très implacable, sans remords!’ She made growling noises, flourishing an imaginary whip. ‘Ah, well, we shall see! And now,’ she hopped nimbly down, ‘I make supper!’

      Which she did, very tasty: an omelette that was like a soufflé for lightness, with toast and a cold Moselle, fruits soaked in kirsch, and coffee Arabi style – black as night, sweet as love, hot as hell. Listening to her cheery prattle and bubbling laughter across the table, I found myself warming to Mamselle Caprice, and not only ’cos she was a little stunner and rode like a starving succubus and cooked rather well. I liked her style: no humbug, just Jezebel with a sassy twinkle and a fifth-form fringe, lightly touched by the crazy gods – as many politicals are; Georgie Broadfoot was daft as a brush. In her case it might have been a mask, a brass front over inner hurt; she was in a dirty business, and no doubt her male colleagues, being proper little Christian crooks, would make it plain that they regarded her as no better than a whore – I did myself, but I wasn’t fool enough to damp her amorous ardour by showing it. But no, ’twasn’t a mask; as we talked, I recognised her as one of these fortunate critters who (like yours truly) are simply without shame, and wouldn’t know Conscience if they tripped over it in broad day. She was fairly gloating at the prospect of wringing Shuvalov dry for the sheer fun of it – and the handsome fee Blowitz had promised her.

      ‘A hundred golden pounds!’ cries she gleefully. ‘You see, it is not a secret department matter, but personal to Stefan and his paper. And since he has friends in high places … behold, I am in Berlin!’

      ‘And that’s all that matters to me, my little Punch-fancier,’ says I, nuzzling her neck as we repaired to the couch. ‘As an Asian princess once said to me: “Lick up the honey, stranger, and ask no questions”.’

      ‘An Asian princess!’ She clapped her hands. ‘Ah, but I must hear of this! Was she beautiful? Did you carry her off? Were you her slave?’ and so on, so I told her all about Ko Dali’s dreadful daughter, and how she’d rescued me from a Russian dungeon, and filled me with hasheesh unawares, and dam’ near had me blown to bits, and was surpassingly beautiful (at which Caprice pouted ‘Pouf!’) but bald as an egg (which sent her into peals of delight). Whether she believed me, God knows, but she demanded particulars of a most intimate nature, inviting comparison between the Silk One and herself, and that inevitably led to another glorious thrashing-match which restored her amour-propre and left me in what I once heard a French naval officer describe as a condition of swoon.

      Only when I was taking my leave did we return to the subject of Shuvalov. His assignation with her was for eight the following evening, after the first day of the Congress, and she expected to have him off the premises by midnight, whereafter I would roll up to see that all was well, she would write her report, and we would enjoy a late supper and whatever else came to mind before I left with her despatch in my hat for transfer to Blowitz later in the day.

      She hadn’t counted on Shovel-off’s appetite for jollity, though. The clocks were chiming twelve when I sauntered up the Jager Strasse in the warm dark of the next night, and turned into her court only to see that her curtain was still closed – the signal we’d agreed if the Russian buffoon was still infesting her quarters. I took a turn up and down, thankful that it wasn’t winter; Berlin in June evidently went home with the milk, and there were open carriages carrying merry-makers up the Mauer Strasse to the Linden, sounds of gaiety and music came from the Prinz Carl Palace across the way, and beyond it I could see lights burning in the great ministries on the Wilhelmstrasse: understrappers of the Congress still hard at it while their betters waltzed and junketed – aye, and rogered away the diplomatic night, if Shuvalov was anything to go by. It was close on two, and I was in a fine fume, when a cloaked and tile-hatted figure emerged at last from Caprice’s court, taking the width of the pavement, damn him, and a moment later I was being admitted to her apartment by a furious harem houri clad only in a gold turban with a slave-fetter on one ankle, fairly spitting blood while she filled an antique bath-tub with hot water; the air was thick with steam and Gallic oaths which I hadn’t heard outside a Legion barrack-room.

      Count Shuvalov, she informed me, was a sacred perverted beast, a savage and a mackerel and a swine of tastes indescribable. He professed to have been so enraptured by her photograph that he had brought the turban and shackles for her to wear, describing himself as Haroun al-Raschid and demanding from her an Arabian Nights performance which I doubt even Dick Burton had ever heard of. He had also insisted that they smear each other all over with quince jam, to which he was partial, and while much of it had been removed in the ensuing frolic, I noticed that she still had a tendency to attract

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