'If you're sure,' said Gloria.

'You might have to close your ears,' I warned. I meant of course that there would be things said that I might later officially deny, that Cindy might later deny and that, if Gloria was going to be there, she'd have to be prepared to deny too. Deny on oath.

I think Gloria understood. 'I'll make a trip to the Ladies, that will give her a chance to say anything confidential.'

In the event Gloria decided not to come after all. I suppose she just wanted to see whether I'd say no, and how I would do it. I knew these little 'tests' she gave me were all part of her insecurity. Sometimes I wondered whether her plan to go to university was a test, designed to push me into a proposal of marriage.

Meanwhile, that Friday evening, I went to meet Cindy alone. It was just as well. Cindy was not in the best of moods. She was rather distracted, and it would not have improved her humour to see Gloria tagging along behind me. Cindy regarded her as a very junior civil servant who had come trespassing on the old friendship we'd once had.

'Your blonde interlude' is how Cindy referred to Gloria. It summed up what she thought of the relationship: its participants, its incongruity, its frivolity and its impermanence.

I let it go. She smiled in a fashion that both gave emphasis to what she'd said, and noted my passive acceptance of the judgment she'd passed. Cindy was an attractive woman, sexy in the way that health and energy so often are. But I'd never envied Jim. Cindy was too devious and manipulative and I was not good at handling her.

She was in a room on the second floor, sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette. Beside her there was a tray with a teapot and milk and cup – just one cup – and a big Martini ashtray with lots of lipstick-marked cigarette butts. Cindy's attempt to give up smoking seemed to have been abandoned. She asked me if I wanted a drink. I should have said no but I said I'd have a Scotch and I gave her the box with the photos of the tomb inscriptions and the deciphering attempts, or rather I tried to give it to her. She waved it away with a world-weary flick of splayed fingers. 'I don't want it.'

'Gloria said…'

'I've changed my mind. Keep it.'

'There's nothing there that will shed any light on Jim or his work,' I told her. 'I'll stake my life on that.'

She shrugged and touched her hair.

We wasted a lot of time getting the hotel staff to supply drinks, and while we waited we passed the time talking about nothing in particular. It was not my idea of an enjoyable evening out. Cindy had chosen the venue; The Grand & International, a seedy old hotel standing on the northern edge of Kensington Gardens, and hiding behind the Chinese restaurants of Queensway.

She'd coped with getting the room, paying in advance and arranging to occupy it without luggage and entertain a male visitor for an hour or so. I looked at her in her smart green and black plaid jacket and matching skirt. A boxy imitation fur coat was thrown across the bed. She wasn't tall and graceful in the way that Gloria was but she had a shapely figure and the way she was lounging across the pillows did everything to emphasize it. I wondered what they made of her downstairs at the desk. Or had reception clerks in this part of the town stopped wondering about their clients?

It was probably one of their best rooms, but it was a squalid place by any standards. A flyblown mirror surmounted a cracked blue china sink. The bed was big with a quilted headboard and grey sheets. Cindy said it was suitably anonymous but I think she was confusing anonymity with discomfort – many people did. But if 'The G and I', an amalgamation of two Victorian monoliths, was somewhere that Cindy was in no danger of seeing anyone she knew, the same could not be said for me.

I'd been in this place many times. I'd brought a lovely old Sauer automatic pistol to the bar there back in 1974. I'd sold it to a man named Max, who died saving my life during the last 'illegal' border crossing I ever made. It was a good little gun: its blueing had worn but it had been little used. At the time its double action was better than anything else manufactured, but I suspect that Max selected it because during the war it had been the favoured side-arm of high-ranking German officers. Max was as anti-Nazi as anyone I knew, but he had a healthy respect for their choice of weapons.

There was hardly a day went by when I didn't think of Max. Like Dodo, he had been one of 'Koby's Prussians', an American Prussian in this case, for Max was one of those curious men who drift from place to place and from job to job. And somehow the towns they go to are all troublespots, and the jobs they find are always violent and dangerous jobs, and usually illegal too. But Max was different to all the others, an ex New York police detective who fretted and worried and looked after everyone he worked with, especially me, the youngest member of his team.

Max had the most amazing memory for poetry, and his quotes ranged from Goethe to Gilbert & Sullivan librettos. I could usually keep up with his Goethe: 'Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?' but his Gilbert was what I always remembered him for:

'When you're lying awake with a dismal headache,

and repose is taboo'd by anxiety,

I conceive you may use any language you choose

to indulge in, without impropriety.'

and of course, sung with verve and derision, for Max was not an uncritical admirer of his British allies:

'For he might have been a Roosian,

A French, or Turk, or Proosian,

Or perhaps Ital-ian!

But in spite of all temptations

To belong to other nations,

He remains an Englishman!'

Some of Gilbert's phrases were too cryptic for Max. As the only Englishman with whom Max was regularly in contact, I was expected to decipher all the 'Britishisms' and explain such Gilbertian inexplicables as 'A Sewell & Cross young man, A Howell & James young man'. Poor Max, I never did find out for him.

And yet there was nothing so inexplicable as Max himself. He was his own worst enemy, if my father was to be believed, but my father detested Max. In fact he detested 'Lange' Koby and all of what he called 'the American freebooters' in Berlin. That's why my father stayed clear of them.

'Are you listening, Bernard?' I was jolted from my memories by Cindy.

'Yes, Cindy, of course I am.' I suppose I hadn't nodded and smiled frequently enough while listening to her small-talk.

'I'm going to Strasbourg,' she said suddenly, and she had all my attention. With the cigarette still in her hand, she made a movement that left a thin trail of smoke. Then she touched her hair; it was shiny and curly and looked as if she'd been to the hairdresser. Her hair always looked like that.

'On holiday?'

'God-a-mercy! Don't be stupid, Bernard. Who would go to Strasbourg on holiday?' She waved the cigarette in the air, and a long section of ash fell on the bedcover.

'A job?'

'Don't be so dense, Bernie. The bloody European Parliament is there, isn't it?' As if angry about the marked bedcover, she stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray, pushing it down in a punitive action that deformed its shape and left it bent and broken.

'And that's who you'll be working for?' I wondered why the hell she hadn't mentioned it earlier, when we'd been talking about the weather and how difficult it was to get seats for the Royal Opera House unless you knew someone. But then I realized that she didn't want to tell me until I'd had a drink.

'The pay is terrific and I'll have no trouble selling my place in London. The estate agent is putting an ad. in next Sunday's papers. He says I'll have hordes of people after it. He said that if I spent a bit of money on the kitchen and bathroom he could get another fifteen grand but I just don't have the time.'