“But you remembered.”
“Who of us will ever forget?”
They held each other off at arm’s length, and the years fell away between them. And as Simon laughed in the face of Antoine Louvois it was heart-warming for him to remember that this frail-looking gray man had been the redoubtable Colonel Eglantine of the maquis, whose exploits had perforated the intestinal tracts of Himmler’s minions with even more ulcers than bullets, and he thought again that only a French hero would have had the sense of humor to hide his identity behind the name of a delicate flower. Those days, when the Saint’s commission from Washington had been as tenuously legal as anything in his career, seemed very far away now, but it was good to still have such a friend.
“What brings you back, mon cher ami?” Louvois asked. “We shall have much to talk about.”
“Another time, Antoine. This afternoon I am in a hurry.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“That is why I came.”
Louvois relaxed into instant attention. As if not a day had passed, with a sobering of expression too subtle to define, he was again the sharp-witted, cold-blooded, efficient duellist of the last war’s most dangerous game.
“ Je suis toujours à ta disposition, mon vieux. ”
“Was there, in the Resistance, a man named Georges Olivant?”