East of Desolation by Jack Higgins

away.
    “Oh, Mr. Martin.” The receptionist came out of heroffice quickly. “You’ve forgotten your mail.”
    She held out a couple of letters. One was a bill, I could tell as much without opening it. The other was postmarked London and carried the name and address of a firm of solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn. There was a slight, hollow feeling at the pit of my stomach, but I slipped the letter into my pocket and managed a big smile.
    “Thanks very much.”
    “And there was a message,” the girl said. “A Mr. Vogel would like you to contact him.”
    “Vogel?” I frowned. “Never heard of him.”
    “I believe he booked into the hotel early this afternoon,” she said. “I didn’t see him myself.”
    I nodded. “All right—I’ll attend to it.”
    Probably a wealthy tourist looking for some good hunting and prepared to pay through the nose for it. Not that I had any objections to that, but for the moment I had other things on my mind.
    I think I must have sat on the edge of my bed staring down at that envelope for at least five minutes before I finally decided to open it. The letter inside was beautifully typed, short and very much to the point. It informed me that my wife had been awarded a decree nisi in the Divorce Court on the grounds of desertion, that she had decided to waive her right to any maintenance and that a sum of two thousand, three hundred and seventy-five pounds, my share of the proceeds of the sale of a flat in the Cromwell Road, jointly owned, had been credited to my account in the City Branch of the Great Western Bank.
    It was all very sad, but then the end of somethingalways is and I sat there for a while remembering things as they had been once upon a time when the going was good and each day carried a new promise.
    But even in that I was being consciously dishonest, forgetting quite deliberately the other side of the coin which had also been present from the beginning. Still, it was over now, the cord finally cut, and there was no bottle to reach for this time, could never be again. Let that be an end to it.
    I didn’t bother to change and simply took off my parka and flying boots and pulled on a pair of reindeer hide slippers. As I went out, Arnie Fassberg came up the stairs and turned along the corridor towards me, a bottle of schnapps in one hand.
    “And what might you be up to?” I asked.
    He grinned. “Gudrid’s giving me a little supper party in her room.”
    “What’s wrong with your place?”
    “She’s on duty till one a.m. tonight. I couldn’t wait that long.”
    He’d had a drink or two already, so much was obvious and swung me round like a schoolboy. “It’s a great life, Joe. A wonderful life as long as you learn the big, big secret. Take whatever’s going because you can never count on tomorrow.”
    At that moment the door behind him opened and a woman emerged. Arnie cannoned into her and her handbag went flying. She was strikingly beautiful and could have been anything between thirty and thirty-five, with the sad, haunted eyes of a Renaissance Madonna. He stood there gaping at her, that well-known expression onhis face and she smiled suddenly, the sort of smile that comes easily to an attractive woman when she realises that the man before her is putty in her hands.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    He dropped to one knee, reaching for the handbag at the same moment that she did and she almost lost her balance so that I had to catch her.
    “Thank you,” she said, glancing over her shoulder and then took her handbag gently from Arnie’s hands as he stood there staring at her like a lovesick schoolboy. “Mine I think.”
    As she walked along the corridor, her shoulders were shaking with laughter.
    “What a woman, Joe,” Arnie breathed. “What a woman.”
    “Aren’t they all, Arnie?” I said and left him standing there and went downstairs.
    Desforge was already seated at a table in the far corner of the dining room and I moved towards him. The place was pretty