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When a secret agent gets a new, urgent and extraordinary assignment, he deserves to relax before a crackling fireplace in the arms of an exotic beauty, whispering smutty little jokes in Korean or Russian, Swahili or German into his ear. Naturally, he transforms himself into the practised lover, but shortly before he leaves her satin sheets he reverts to type, a double-agent, and gives his lady-of-the-night the 53rd glass of Dom Perignon – with which, incidentally, she had wished to knock him out. At that point, her body first rises up in all its splendour and then sinks back into the cushions like an unconscious olive-brown doll, defeated by masculine guile. Just before he quits the ski-hut to parachute back to base, he nimbly places a long-stemmed rose between her pearly toenails of her feet «Baby, you were a spectacular piece, devious but fine.»

To be sure, there were some exotic beauties in Hektor Maille's life along with the occasional Dom Perignon. Two years earlier he had almost decided to spring down with a parachute despite his slight fear of heights. At the moment, though, he sat in his garden in Senpuav in the west of Port Louis, drinking tea with a shot of rum, watching a frog gliding through the leaves in the inky-black lily pond. He could hear the chirping of insects in the forest nearby and inhale the fragrance of wild jasmine that crept over the wall of the house towards the kitchen, where he had just called out to Odette to prepare the evening meal. Then the telephone began to trill, and Maille knew at once that it was the «department» calling. He stared into his tea and it seemed to him as though the brown liquid was dragging him inexorably into the tiny ceramic cup. He felt a faint dizziness and a weariness, which pressed like warm moist pads against his eyelids. He let the phone ring. He would call back later, perhaps in the morning. After eight years in the Deuxième Bureau, the official name for Santa Lemusa's secret service police, he had learned to make himself scarce.

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