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of chauvinistic scruple.”
    â€œIt could be that. Who knows.” When Kendig had learned the game he’d had Truman and the Yaskovs had had Stalin; it had been easy enough to discern which of them wore the white hat and which the black hat. Now there was none of that left. The only distinction was that the West’s leadership wasmore petty than the East’s. It wasn’t even a game for the intelligence operatives any more; it was only a nihilistic exercise, going through the motions out of habit, answering not to any sense of mission or principle but only to the procedural requirements of bureaucracy. There was no point to it any more. But Yaskov might be right; Kendig might have hated his side too long to be comfortable with the idea of working for them. He didn’t know; he didn’t really care.
    Yaskov brooded toward the enormous monolith of the Radiodiffusion which cowed the right bank beneath it. “Well it was an intriguing idea to me. I did hope you would take an interest.”
    â€œYou’d better forget it. I’d be no good to you—I’d put my foot in it anyway.”
    â€œCertainly you would if the work didn’t excite you. I won’t press you again but you might bear in mind that I won’t have closed the offer.”
    It meant only that the idea of recruiting him had been Yaskov’s own. Probably he hadn’t cleared it with his superiors. Therefore its failure would not reflect on Yaskov. It meant Kendig was in no danger from them; there’d be no retribution. Somehow the realization angered him.
    Yaskov stood up and prodded the cement with his cane. “You were one of the very best. I feel quite sad.” Then he walked away.
    He sat on the bench without stirring. Pigeons flocked around, then drifted away in disappointment when he had nothing to feed them. Yaskov’s high narrow figure dwindled along the quay and was absorbed. Traffic was a muted whirring humon the pont ; a thin haze drifted across the sky and Kendig stared among the trees with empty eyes. Recollections drifted through his mind. Lorraine—a dreadful woman with a dreadful name. The caper along the Danube when they’d brought Rozhsenny out in the rain with the Soviet guns spitting blindly in the night. The old man, and the idea of suicide that had hung around him always. Kendig had no scruple against it. A man always ought to have the right to remove himself from the world at his discretion.
    But it had no appeal. There was no challenge; it was too passive. He didn’t want to be dead: he was already dead. Yaskov had strummed a chord there. To be alive might be the goal. But it was harder to find, all the time. He’d done everything to provoke his jaded sensibilities. High risks: the motor racing, skiing, flying lessons, the gambling which had been satisfying until his own capacities had defeated its purpose: he’d always been professional at whatever he did and his skills were the sort that took the risk out of it after a while. He’d bent the bank at Biarritz a month ago and since then he’d lost all interest in it. And he’d long since given up the athletic challenges. They’d all got to looking the same way—the way bowling had looked when he’d been a college freshman. As soon as he’d discovered that the object of bowling was to learn how to do exactly the same thing every time, he’d lost interest.
    He thought part of it was the fact that there was no human antagonist. There was no “other side” with which to compete. He had a quarter century of playing the running-dog game and it had educated his palate to its own flavor; his appetite hadbeen trained to crave human conflict: the chess game of reality with stakes that weren’t tokens, rules that weren’t artificial.
    At one time he had tried to get reinstated.
    They’d sent him into the Balkans on a very chancy mission but the objective had some