‘They won’t like that answer,’ said Frank. ‘They are very keen to get it settled very quickly.’ The wind came again, fiercer now. When the wind abated it would rain.
‘I’ll bet they are. Well, we can get it settled very quickly, if that’s what they want. I’ll fax my story to the New York Times.’
For a moment Frank didn’t react. Then he rubbed his face and said, ‘Don’t make jokes like that, Bernard. I shudder to think of the damage that would be inflicted upon all of us if you did something silly.’
‘Okay, Frank. I’ll stop making jokes like that but you tell London that it’s my deal or nothing.’
He kept his voice low and measured. ‘I don’t know anyone who has your knowledge – and your instinct – for what’s happening here, Bernard. Your time in the field added to time on the German Desk in London makes you a key person, and so a prime target. You’ve seen the Department at work since you were on your father’s knee. Surely you can see why they worry so much.’
‘Yes, Frank. So you tell London that it’s my deal or nothing.’
‘They’ll not be threatened, Bernard.’
‘That has a sinister ring to it, Frank.’
‘Did it? I’m truly sorry, that’s not at all what I intended to convey. I was trying to point out that your approach is ill-considered. Their offer is made in good faith. Must you throw it back into their face?’
‘I’m not resigning.’
‘Go back to London. I’ll arrange everything. Go to the office and work normally. Let the resignation issue stand for the time being while I talk to the old man.’
‘There remains the question of Fiona,’ I said.
Frank flinched as if I’d struck him. ‘We can’t discuss your wife.’
‘I’ve got to know whether Fiona defected or went over there continuing to work for the Department.’
Frank stared at me. His face was like stone without even a flicker of sentience.
I said, ‘Very well: you can’t tell me officially, and I understand that, Frank. But it’s my wife. I’ve got to know.’
I waited for him to frame an answer that would comply with his sense of propriety but he still didn’t speak.
‘Fiona was sent, right? She’s working for us still?’ Frank’s face was the same Frank I’d known since childhood, but those pitiless eyes revealed a Frank that I’d always said did not exist. This tough unbending reaction to my question did not cause me to hate him: on the contrary it made me want his help and assistance even more. That of course was the secret of Frank’s success over these many years; I’d taken a long time to discover it. ‘Right?’ I seemed to see in his eyes an affirmative. I felt sure that Frank wouldn’t allow me to harbour the dangerous belief that Fiona was innocent if she was really a dedicated opponent.
After what seemed an age Frank said, ‘I forbid you to discuss Fiona with me or with anyone else. I told you I would do my best to find out what you want to know. Meanwhile you must keep completely silent. Put her out of your mind.’
‘Okay.’
‘And I mean it.’
‘I said okay.’
Frank relaxed a little. He said, ‘I take it you’ll want to go to London as soon as possible?’ I nodded. ‘You must have a lot of things to attend to.’
He looked at me for a moment before putting his hand in his pocket and putting a foolscap-sized white envelope on the table in front of me.
I looked at him and smiled. He’d outmanoeuvred me, and been so confident about being able to do so that he’d brought the airline ticket with him. ‘Checkmate in three moves, eh Frank?’ I smiled and tried not to sound too bitter.
‘I thought you would want to see Gloria and the children as soon as possible.’ He touched the ticket and moved it a fraction of an inch closer to me. ‘You’ll be with them tonight. Go in to the office tomorrow and work as usual. I’ll phone you at home to tell you what’s happening.’ He was careful to keep any note of triumph out of his voice. From his tone and demeanour you’d have thought we were fellow sufferers with the same misfortune.
‘Thanks, Frank,’ I said, picking up the ticket. ‘What happened to our colleague Teacher today?’
‘You won’t regret it, Bernard. I’m giving you good advice, the sort your dad would have given you.’ A pause as he breathed deeply and no doubt congratulated himself upon getting a chance to change the subject. ‘Teacher. Yes. A spot of bother,’ said Frank, picking up his pipe and touching it to his lips. ‘His wife skedaddled. An awfully nice girl. Extremely intelligent. Clementine: gorgeous-looking creature: wonderful figure. Ever meet her?’
I nodded. Frank had a sharp eye for desirable young females with wonderful figures. His eyes stared into the distance as he remembered her.
‘She went off with some flashy Yankee film producer. Met him for the first time ten days ago. Women are so impulsive aren’t they? What provokes a young wife to such a headstrong act?’ The wind had dropped now. The sky had darkened. At any moment it would rain.
‘Poor old Teacher,’ I said. ‘He seemed to be very fond of her.’ Now I realized why the beautiful Clemmie had become so agitated when I had lunch there on Sunday. Never mind her shouting about me being a pariah, my guess is that she thought the Department had got wind of her plans and sent me to spy on her.
‘This wretched American has taken her to a film festival in Warsaw. Warsaw! Alarm bells started ringing I can tell you. London overreacted: the telex got red-hot! “Do this; don’t do that; disregard previous message; provide present whereabouts.” You know. Luckily Mrs Teacher must have realized what trouble she was causing us. She phoned me from her hotel in Warsaw and explained, in guarded terms, that it was just a domestic rift. She had, she said, fallen in love for the very first time. Deep sighs and all. Says she’ll never go back to her husband. They plan to fly on to a film festival in Japan and then to America. She wants to live in Beverly Hills. She said that I was not to worry.’ Frank blew through his pipe and gave me a worried smile. ‘So I’m not worrying.’
So that was what the Duchess and co. had been so excited about. They’d been talking about the Teachers: not about me and Fiona. ‘And London?’
‘London Central have professional worriers on the staff. But there’s no way we can have our chaps lock their wives in the broom cupboard while they’re out at work, eh?’ He began to push tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘It’s a pity in some ways we can’t.’
There was the gentle noise of rain dabbing the windows. At first there were huge raindrops that came at measured intervals but soon the drops dribbled and joined and made rivulets and bent the trees and distorted the outside world beyond recognition.
6
I am not paranoid. That is to say I am not paranoid to the extent of distrusting everyone around me. Only some of them. When I went into the office next morning all seemed normal: too normal. When I’d finished looking at my own desk, I was summoned upstairs. Dicky Cruyer, German Desk supremo and my immediate superior, was in a singular mood that I could almost describe as jovial.
‘Good morning, Bernard!’ he said and smiled. He was a slim bony man with pale complexion and a golliwog-style head of curly hair that I suspected he regularly had permed.
During my few weeks of living rough in Berlin I’d reconciled myself to the idea that I would never again see this office. Never again see England, in fact. So now I looked round Dicky’s office and marvelled at it as if seeing it all for the first time. I examined anew the magnificent rosewood table that Dicky used instead of a desk, and behind it the wall filled with photos, mostly of Dicky. I inspected the soft black leather Eames chair and matching footstool and the slightly mangy lion skin on the floor which I noticed he’d positioned less obtrusively. I looked at it all with a feeling of wonder.
‘I hope you’re in a mood for hard work,’ said Dicky. ‘There is plenty to do now your holiday is over.’ He leaned forward, elbows on table with fingertips touching. He was in shirt-sleeves with bright red braces and a floral
patterned bow tie. The Deputy had objected to Dicky’s denim and leather and now he wore suits in the office, but the newly acquired loud ties and bright braces were a subtle erosion of these dress restrictions.
I looked at him. ‘Yes, I am.’ He smiled. Did he really think I’d been on holiday? There was no way I could tell from his warm relaxed friendly smile. But the way he touched his fingertips together in a rapid succession of staccato taps betrayed what I judged to be an underlying nervousness.
‘The Deputy Controller Europe wants a pow-wow at ten-thirty. You’d better come along too. Take notes.’
‘What about?’ The Deputy Controller Europe was an Australian named Augustus Stowe. Dicky imperfectly concealed his envy of Stowe and usually referred to him by his title, with sarcastic emphasis as if the position Stowe occupied was self-evidently unsuited to the man’s abilities. This attitude to Stowe, complete with whispered doubts about his competence, was shared by some of Dicky’s immediate circle. Stowe, a formid able childhood prodigy, had stayed on to teach Logic at Perth University, and some now slightingly referred to him as ‘Doctor Stowe’ as if a man with a doctorate was too unworldly for the Department.
‘There are a number of things,’ said Dicky vaguely. It was Dicky’s way of admitting that he hadn’t the slightest idea. I suspected that Dicky was intimidated by Stowe, who had a savage temper when any short-comings were uncovered and so Dicky’s meetings with him were sometimes less than convivial. ‘Coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’ Whatever shortcomings Dicky had they did not extend to his talent for self-preservation or to his coffee. Chagga, from Mr Higgins’ new shop in Duke Street. Dicky sent motorcycle messengers to collect it. One day someone would ask what urgent secret dispatches were coming in aromatic brown packets from Mr Higgins two or three times a week.
‘Capital!’ said Dicky as his secretary brought in a polished wooden tray with steaming glass jug, the Spode chinaware and creamer. The cups contained hot water: Dicky said warmed cups were a vital contribution to the flavour. He tipped the hot water into a bowl and poured out his own coffee first. When tasting it he frowned with eyes half-closed and jug held poised. ‘Even better than the last lot,’ he pronounced.
‘Is Stowe gunning for me?’
‘He’s gunning for someone,’ said Dicky.
Dicky looked out of his window while he drank. The weather system that had Berlin still gripped in winter temperatures had loosened its hold on England, where a succession of highs had provided enough warmth to coax the trees into bud and bathe the streets in a deceptively golden morning sunlight. It was a false summer, the sort of day when a man leaves home without an overcoat and comes back with pneumonia.
At ten-thirty I made my way to the room of the Deputy Europe. I remembered this room when it was decorated to the expensive and somewhat avant-garde taste of Bret Rensselaer – chrome, glass, black leather and deep carpet – but now all that was gone. To say it was bare would be a gross understatement. It was even without floor covering. The walls still had the coat of grey-green underpaint that marked Bret’s departure. Where once there had been an exquisite Dürer, now hung the standard portrait of the Queen. Stowe’s desk was a metal one of the sort used in the typing pool, and his chair was of the back-breaking design that the Ministry of Works used to discourage vis itors from sitting too long in the reception area downstairs.
Dicky Cruyer was already there. He’d put his jacket on over his bright red braces, which I interpreted as a gesture of deference. Possibly their meeting had started earlier. Dicky liked to arrange an opportunity for a confidential chat before the real business started. He was perched on a metal chair with uneven feet so that it moved a fraction of an inch when he shifted his weight. All three of the visitors’ chairs in this room had the same defect. I’d heard someone say the Deputy Controller had arranged for the chairs to be bent but I thought, it unlikely that Stowe required any such psychological devices for discomforting his visitors.
Augustus Stowe had jet-black hair. As well as supplying an abundant moustache, this same black hair grew from inside his ears and straggled from his nostrils; it appeared in tufts on his cheeks and great tangles of it covered the backs of his hands. Strange then that he was so bald. The carefully combed hair, and the sideburns, only emphasized the perfect shiny pink dome of his head.
‘No good sitting there scratching your arse, Dicky. Some bugger will have to go,’ said Stowe with the antipodean directness of manner that had earned him few friends in the Department. ‘You could go yourself,’ he suggested in a way that implied that this would be a last and desperate resort.
‘Leave it with me, Gus,’ said Dicky.
Although it wouldn’t be his style to comment on such a thing, I had the feeling that Stowe didn’t like being called Gus. I wondered if Dicky failed to realize this, or whether it was deliberate provocation. ‘No, Dicky,’ said Stowe. ‘When I leave things with you, they end up back in my tray six weeks later – flagged urgent.’
Dicky pressed his fingers against his thin bloodless lips, as if suppressing a temptation to smile at such a good joke. ‘Bernard could go,’ Dicky offered. ‘He could manage it.’
‘Manage it!’ scoffed Stowe in his flat Australian growl. ‘Of course. That’s just what I’ve been saying. Any bloody fool could manage it.’
‘Bernard knows Vienna,’ said Dicky.
It wasn’t true by any means but I didn’t contradict Dicky, and he knew I wouldn’t. It simply wasn’t done to contradict your boss in front of a superior. ‘Do you, Bernard?’ said Stowe. There was a fat old fly buzzing round his head. He waved it away with a rather regal gesture.
‘I was there with Harry Lime,’ I said.
Stowe gave me a brief disparaging smile. ‘Vienna is only part of it,’ he said. He was not an easy man to fool, although perhaps that wouldn’t have been so evident to anyone meeting him for the first time. Stowe was wearing a grey three-piece suit of curious weave, a lumpy knitted tie and zip-sided high boots. All of his clothes looked like theatrical costume rummaged from the hamper of some long-defunct repertory company. Even his wristwatch was an unusual trapezoid shape, its crystal discoloured brown, so that to see the time he had to bring his wrist close up to his face.
To peer at his watch he’d taken off his heavy tortoise-shell glasses. The stylish spectacles were an incongruous aspect of Stowe. One would have expected him to wear small circular gold-rimmed glasses, bent and perhaps secured with a piece of flesh-coloured sticking plaster. These spectacles were expensive and modern, and after looking at his wrist-watch he brandished them as if wanting to make the most of them.
‘And Bernard has good Russian,’ said Dicky.
‘They will all speak English,’ Stowe said, looking again at his watch.
‘Not amongst themselves,’ said Dicky. ‘Bernard will be able to understand what they say to each other.’
‘Ummm,’ said Stowe. ‘What’s the time?’ He was twisting the crown of the watch to adjust the hands.
‘Ten fifty-two,’ said Dicky.
‘You’re not empowered to make any concessions,’ Stowe told me solemnly. ‘Listen to what these hoodlums have to say. If you think it’s all baloney, come back and say so. But no deals. And come straight back. No sightseeing tours on the blue Danube, or tasting the May wine at the heuriger houses in Grinzing. Right?’ Even Stowe could not resist telling us he’d been there.
‘Of course,’ said Dicky. The fly buzzed round Dicky now. Dicky gave no sign of noticing it and it flew away.
‘And lastly, I don’t want any of our bloody Yankee friends mixed up in it,’ said Stowe as he opened a folder and turned its pages. Dicky looked at me and gave me a fleeting smile. I saw then that Dicky was not intimidated as much as dis composed by Stowe. He didn’t know whether to respond with Stowe’s same bar-room vernacular or keep him at his distance with deference and good manners.
‘How would they get mixed up in it?’ asked Dicky.
Stowe referred to his notes.
The fly alighted on a page and walked insolently across the heading. ‘They’ll be on to any of our people arriving in Vienna. They’ll be on to them right away.’ With a surprising speed his hand shot forward. His fingers flicked and closed tightly upon the fly, but when he opened his fingers there was no fly.
‘Do you think so, Gus?’ said Dicky.
He gave a crafty smile. ‘I’m bloody sure so. I worked with the Yanks in Korea. Corps headquarters: I know what they’re like.’ He wiped his hand on his trouser leg just as if the remains of the fly had been upon it. Perhaps it itched.
‘What are they like?’ said Dicky, dutifully providing the cue for which Stowe waited.
Stowe looked at Dicky, and sniffed in the contemptuous manner of a practised lecturer. ‘It is in the character of your average American, an aspect of his history, that he is curious by nature, resourceful by upbringing and empirical by training,’ said Stowe. ‘In other words: Yanks are nosy interfering bastards. Stay clear of them.’ He made an unsuccessful grab at the fly, and then waved at it angrily as it flew away. ‘And I don’t want one of you big spenders checking into the Vienna Hilton with your dark glasses on, and asking the desk clerk if they have a night-safe and telex facilities. Got it?’
Dicky, whose tastes for expense-account high living were directed more to the grandeur of the Imperial, nodded agreement.
Stowe must have guessed from the look on my face that Dicky hadn’t told me much about the subject under discussion. In fact Dicky had told me nothing. Stowe said, ‘You’re having one of those off-the-record meetings with people from the other side.’ Facing my blank look he added, ‘Russkies, I mean. Don’t ask me who or how or where, because I’m not allowed to tell you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘Top priority, so we can assume they have some bloody complaint to whine about. There will be threats too if I know anything about the way these bastards operate. Stonewall all the time, and don’t get ruffled.’