Overtime Read Online Free PDF Page A

sword from under his desk, and went through the door.
    Â 
    Guy was at a party.
    More like a reception, actually. In the split second before his appearance, walking backwards brandishing a revolver and causing the seventy-four people in the room all to stop speaking at once, Guy thought he heard several languages and the characteristic hyena-like yowl of diplomats’ wives laughing at the jokes of trade attaches.
    He froze.
    The men, he observed, were all wearing dinner jackets, the women posh frocks. They were holding wine glasses. Women in waitress outfits were holding trays of bits of minced-up fish and tiny impaled sausages. There was no band.
    A woman screamed, in isolation. Being English and of the social class brought up to believe that being conspicuous is the one crime which even God cannot forgive, Guy began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. He tried to smile, found that he was having problems with his facial motor functions, and looked down at the revolver, which was pointing at the third waistcoat button of a tall, stout gentleman who Guy felt sure was a charge d’affaires.
    â€˜Er,’ he said.
    â€˜M’sieur,’ said the charge d’affaires. It was the way he said it that made Guy’s bowels cringe; also the fact that he said it in French. Guy was no linguist, and the thought of trying to apologise, or say, ‘Sorry, I thought this was the Wilkinson’s fancy-dress ball’ in a foreign tongue, was too much for him. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth so effectively that he might as well have forgotten not only Jerusalem but Damascus and Joppa as well.
    He was just about to shoot himself, as being the civilised way out of it all, when a familiar figure appeared behind him. A figure in red and yellow trousers and chain mail, holding a sword, handing a piece of tattered parchment to the toastmaster.
    â€˜Monsieur le Président de la République,’ announced the toastmaster.
    There was a brief, thrilled murmur from the distinguished guests, and Guy realised that they’d forgotten all about him. They were forming an orderly queue.
    De Nesle, smiling brightly, stepped forward to start shaking hands. As he passed Guy, he hissed, ‘Go back through the door you came in by, quickly,’ out of the corner of his smile and passed on.
    Guy needed no second invitation. Despite the fact that the door was marked Défense d’entrer, he pushed through it and found himself back in de Nesle’s peculiar study. He sat down heavily in the chair and began to shake.
    â€˜I warned you.’
    De Nesle was standing over him, a comforting grin on his face. A small part of Guy’s mind toyed with the idea of pointing the revolver at him, but was howled down by the majority. He put the gun on the table and made a small, whimpering noise in lieu of speech.
    â€˜Don’t worry,’ de Nesle went on, ‘I said that you were a new and rather over-zealous security guard.’
    Guy found some words. They wouldn’t have been his first choice, but they were there.
    â€˜Are you the president of the republic?’ he asked.
    â€˜Good Lord, no,’ said de Nesle. ‘I don’t go in for politics much, I’m afraid. Not deliberately, anyway. I think you’d better have another drink, don’t you?’
    This time, Guy felt, it would be churlish to refuse; and besides, he needed a drink, dead wasps or no dead wasps. To his surprise, however, de Nesle produced a bottle of brandy from a drawer of the desk and poured out a stiff measure into two balloon-shaped glasses.
    â€˜You must excuse my offering you mead just now,’ de Nesle was saying. ‘I forgot that you don’t drink mead any more, and it can be something of an acquired taste. Cheers.’
    He drank and Guy followed suit. It was very good brandy.
    â€˜Now then.’ De Nesle sat down on the edge of the desk and stroked his thin moustache with the rim of his glass. He was