‘Thanks,’ I said.
It had the big red international signs for fragile contents – a drinking glass in jagged pieces – and Via Air Bag markings, and the elaborate Courier Service rubber stamp, with date and clock-face to record receipt. There were also the instantly recognizable Foreign Office Inward Bag Room marks crossed through with decisive strokes of blue pencil, as if in angry denial that it had even arrived there. ‘Try Cruyer – SIS’ was written in neat penmanship underneath it. My name was not in evidence anywhere.
‘It came last night… in the bag from Warsaw,’ she said, stroking the top of it. ‘I know you both went to Poland last week.’
‘I’ll see Dicky gets it.’
‘I shouldn’t have come in and yelled at you, but I’ve just lost my job.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your wife has got what she wanted.’ Gloria’s face was bright red, or at least bright pink. Whether this flushed countenance was due to exertion, embarrassment or anger I was not sure. Despite the intimacy that living with her had provided, she still had me guessing. Perhaps it was her Hungarian background, perhaps it was the generation gap, perhaps it was my chronic failure to understand women, perhaps it was all those things and perhaps that was what made her so alluring. ‘I’m going to work in Budapest. I’m there as from the beginning of next month. I’m taking time off to straighten things out before I leave. I won’t be in the office any more.’ She gave a smile that lasted only a split second before adding breathlessly: ‘So it’s goodbye.’
‘Goodbye? I’d heard that you were going to be working for Bret Rensselaer. I heard you were going to be promoted to be some kind of big-shot trouble-shooter on the top floor.’
‘Haven’t you heard? We’re all going before a Review Board. They’re going to decimate the Department: twenty-five per cent staff reductions. Going to the Budapest embassy is my chance to escape.’
‘Sit down, Gloria. Who told you that?’
‘They will make a position for me there. No diplomatic status, of course, but I’ll be near my dad.’
‘I see.’
‘I’ll be living in Budapest as a private citizen. My office job in the embassy will be just a nine-to-five arrangement. So I won’t need diplomatic protection.’
‘Your father’s still there?’
‘I worry about him,’ she said.
‘But he’s okay?’
‘He was a field agent for years, Bernard. He should never have gone back to live in Hungary. No matter how badly the Russians treated us, there will always be some Hungarians who see what Daddy did as treachery.’
‘Your father can look after himself.’
‘He’s getting old, Bernard.’
‘We all are. Except you, of course,’ I added hurriedly. ‘So you turned down the job with Bret?’
‘Bret couldn’t believe I didn’t want to work with him.’ She gave another tight-lipped grin. ‘He insists that I think it over. But I’ve thought it over.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Gloria. Forget Budapest and all those embassy buggers. If you are working here, as a personal assistant to Bret, you can stop worrying about the Review Board.’ When she didn’t respond I persisted: ‘No timeserving zombie on a Review Board is going to risk firing anyone’s personal staff, and certainly not bouncing someone recently appointed to the personal staff of the Deputy D-G.’
She looked at me, thought about it, and then said: ‘Too late now.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway I’ve begun to fancy the idea of living in Budapest.’
‘Stay here in London Central, Gloria. You’ll be no better than a supernumerary over there. You’ll have no job security whatsoever. These embassy pen-pushers have all got PhDs in self-preservation: they’ll dump you the moment they are told to cut back. And if you get into any sort of problems with Hungarian officialdom, you’ll find yourself all on your own. I know how it works. It’s not unlike what happened to me.’
‘I don’t want to stay in London.’
‘Sometimes you have to do things you don’t like,’ I said, and immediately heard echoes of my father’s voice.
She looked at me. She was so very young and she brimmed over with life and energy. Like so many animated people she subjected the world around her to a constant examination. I knew every mood and every signal. That zany tight-lipped grin, when fleeting, was a harbinger of delight. But the same grin held for a few extra seconds was a reproof. And when accompanied by a flicker of the eyelids was imminent trouble. So it was now. ‘You’re not human, Bernard. You’re just a bloody machine.’
‘Don’t cry, Gloria. For God’s sake… What’s wrong?’
‘It doesn’t affect you, does it? You say hello Gloria, and you give me your advice about my job and say you like my new hair-do. But that’s all you care about.’
‘Your hair-do? What else should I care about?’
‘I hate you, Bernard. I really do. I can’t take it any longer.’ She got out her handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘It’s tearing me apart, seeing you every day and trying not to care that you go home to your wife each night. But I do care. I can’t just stop loving you, the way you evidently can stop loving me.’ She got up and turned away so that I would not see the tears in her eyes. From next door there came the relentless noise of the copying machines groaning, sighing and clanking.
‘Wait a minute, Gloria. You’ve got it wrong…’ But then I stopped. I felt the water grow deeper as I waded onwards.
‘Or didn’t you ever love me?’ she said, without turning round to look at me. ‘Was it all just an act? Another of your highly skilled cover stories?’
‘No, it wasn’t an act.’
‘We have a saying in Hungary: When you dine with the rich man, you wind up paying the bill.’
‘How could I know she was coming back?’ I said, only just managing to conceal the exasperation I felt.
She turned to face me. ‘You are the rich man, Bernard. And now I am left paying the bill.’
In other circumstances I might have thought it was some roundabout way of telling me she was pregnant, but I knew it wasn’t that. It was all too long ago for that. ‘Please, Gloria,’ I said. Her eyes were blobby with tears and she looked pitiful. Every cell in my body was telling me to embrace her, dry her tears and comfort her, but my brain said that it would only make matters a thousand times worse. And my brain was right.
‘I’ve got to get away from you,’ she said. ‘I’ll do something desperate if I stay here, working in places where I meet you and hear you.’ She sniffed, in a childlike way that brought back a thousand memories.
‘I was going to Berlin anyway,’ I said in a desperate attempt to stop her crying. I might have been able to cope with an all-out screaming exchange of insults and recriminations but this surrender to grief affected me. ‘Frank has suddenly decided that he can’t manage over there without some kind of helper.’
She said nothing but I could see she was making a big effort to pull herself together. She bent her head over her handbag, fiddled with a mirror and dabbed at her eyes carefully enough to avoid smudging her make-up. It was because she was facing that way that she noticed the man walking along the corridor. ‘Who is that man?’ she said.
My so-called office was little more than a corridor. In a desperate attempt to allow some daylight to penetrate into it, some unknown architect had built the upper part of its interior wall with small panes of glass. At one time they had been frosted glass, but over the years, due to careless slamming of doors, many of the glass panes had been shattered and replaced with clear ones.
‘A messenger I suppose,’ I answered.
‘Yes. Did you hear about Jennifer phoning Dicky last Saturday morning, trying to find out where he’d left the keys to the filing cabinet?’ Gloria smiled, trying to show me how cheerful she could be. ‘When she got through to him on his mobile phone Dicky didn’t recognize Jennifer’s voice. He said: “I’m over here by the fish, darling. Do hurry.” He was shopping in Safeways with Daphne. They bot
h have mobile phones.’
‘I hope that wretched girl Jennifer hasn’t gone round telling everyone that story. It doesn’t help to have Dicky made into a figure of fun.’
Gloria held up her hand in a gesture of submission. ‘My mistake.’ Then in a different voice she said: ‘There he goes again. He’s walked past three times now. I saw him in the street when I came out of the FO. He’s following me.’
‘That bearded freak? Are you sure?’
‘Call Security. Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Let me tackle him,’ I said. I was sure it was just some new messenger.
As I was saying it, the door opened and Dicky came in. Dicky’s attire had changed since his trip to Poland. Still the trendy Wunderkind, he’d forsaken his cashmere and silk for a more proletarian image. He was wearing a scarred leather jacket with a coarse grey roll-neck and battered corduroy trousers.
Dicky said: ‘Do you know anything about architectural structures, Bernard?’
‘Not a great deal,’ I admitted.
‘I think I’ve hit upon a perfect solution for us,’ he said. ‘I knew I’d crack it. It was just a matter of sitting down and thinking seriously about what we’re trying to do.’ He said this as if it was likely to be a recourse as entirely new to me as it was to him. I nodded.
‘I mean, look at this place –’ As he turned to indicate the peeling paintwork, and the widening cracks in the ceiling, he caught sight of Gloria. ‘Gloria! Darling! What are you hiding from behind the door?’
‘You, Mr Cruyer,’ said Gloria.
Dicky laughed. ‘My God, but you are looking fabulous these days. What are you doing? New hair-do. New coat.’
‘It’s an old coat,’ said Gloria, and smiled. She knew as well as I did that Dicky’s outburst was his standard greeting for nubile female staff, but that didn’t seem to lessen the boost it gave her.
‘It looks wonderful on you,’ said Dicky. ‘And I love those boots. Sexy!’ She gazed at him adoringly as he turned back to me and studied the ceiling again and said: ‘We’ll get the whole building condemned.’ He turned to Gloria and said ‘condemned’ again. To me he said: ‘You get it, don’t you?’
‘I believe I do,’ I said. I’d spent long enough with Dicky and his devious schemes to guess how his mind was working.
‘We’ll get some friendly surveyor to write a long and fearsome report… We’ll say it’s about to collapse on to the swimwear factory next door.’
‘Is next door a swimwear factory?’ I said.
‘Bernard, Bernard. Are you the spy or am I?’ said Dicky, and turned to Gloria and winked. Gloria nodded. Dicky said: ‘Yes, I checked out the whole street. I know which occupiers are leaseholders and which are the freeholders. And I know the “use and purpose” as defined by the owners and permitted by local by-laws. You never know when you might want to jump on your neighbours for misuse. I always do that when property is involved. Yes, a swimwear factory.’
‘You’ll ask for another building?’ I said.
‘Yes, and if Treasury want this place, let them come in and get it back into shape. There’s a lovely little building the Education Ministry have in Mayfair that would suit us perfectly.’ Dicky looked at Gloria and at me; I heard the ratchets grinding in his brain. ‘Is this a tryst?’
‘No,’ I said hurriedly, too hurriedly.
Dicky gave us his Cheshire-cat smile: ‘You both can rely on my discretion. Bernard knows that already,’ he told Gloria. ‘Your secret is safe with me.’
‘Gloria was looking for you,’ I said.
‘Well, as long as I’m not intruding.’ He gave another smile to show that he now considered himself a party to our conspiracy. Then saw the polystyrene box.
I said: ‘Gloria brought this package. She was looking for you. It came in the pouch from Warsaw.’
Dicky lifted it briefly to estimate its weight. Then he picked up my Swiss army folding knife, which, when Gloria arrived, I’d been using to prise open a catering-sized tin of powdered coffee. He used my knife to slash the sticky paper which sealed the two halves of the polystyrene box and the pieces fell apart to reveal a large jar. It was a preserving jar, the sort of heavy glass container used in kitchens back when wives stayed at home and cooked things, sealed at the top with a heavy wire clip and a red rubber washer. Its contents were completely hidden by a large label wrapped around the jar. ‘It’s in Polish,’ complained Dicky as he tried to read the typewritten label. Having given up on it he ripped the label off to see for himself what he’d been sent from Warsaw. ‘What’s that say?’ he asked, pushing the label at me.
Dicky said afterwards that he fully expected it to be a kilo of caviar, which he’d discovered to be relatively cheap and relatively plentiful in Warsaw. If so, the shock must have been all the greater as he impatiently ripped away the remaining parts of the label and held the jar aloft. It was filled to the top with liquid, almost clear liquid, apart from a few large specks of organic matter disturbed by the sudden movement. Held so close to the overhead light the jar shone brightly. The thickness of the glass distorted and elongated the shape of the contents but the clarity of the liquid provided a good view of the severed human hand that was suspended in it, with shreds of skin and tendon swinging and swaying in the glittering preservative.
‘Ahhh!’ said Dicky. His face contorted in disgust and he almost dropped it. Gloria took a step back. I was the last to look up and react because I’d been trying to decipher the typewritten label. ‘George Kosinski, it says,’ I told Dicky. ‘It’s an excerpt from a post-mortem report dated last week.’
‘With gold rings still on his fingers?’ said Dicky, as if refusing to believe it was a human hand at all. He’d put the jar on the table by now, and was keeping his distance from it.
‘Fingers too swollen to get the rings off,’ I said. ‘They must have decided not to amputate the fingers if it was going back to the relatives.’
‘This will be definitive,’ said Dicky, plucking a succession of paper tissues from the box on the table and wiping and rewiping his fingers with them. ‘Now we’ll stamp out all this argument about Kosinski not being dead.’ He dropped the tissues into a waste-bin and looked at me.
It was while we were looking at the jar – our backs turned towards the door – that it opened and the bearded man stepped in. ‘I’ll take that,’ he said, and reaching forward took the jar from the desktop and backed out through the door.
With the glass jar tucked under his arm, he put his other hand into the pocket of his jacket and pointed it at Dicky. ‘I don’t want anyone to get hurt,’ he said. ‘You just stay there and stay quiet.’ Then he backed out into the corridor, closed the door, and moved away still watching us through the glass panes.
As soon as the intruder was beyond our vision, Dicky was pulling the door open and racing after him along the corridor and out of sight. There came the sound of a shot.
‘I’ve got the bastard!’ shouted Dicky. When I got to the corridor I was amazed to see Dicky posed in that legs apart, knees bent posture that they started teaching at the training school when they replaced the traditional circular targets with ugly drawings of pugnacious humans. Clasping both hands together, Dicky was holding a revolver, another one of those old ‘Official Police’ models, and aiming along the corridor at the fleeing man. ‘Come on!’ said Dicky and fired, although by the time the shot rang out the bearded man had disappeared down the stairs.
Dicky raced along the corridor and I followed him. By the time I reached the far end of the corridor the bearded man had made the most of his good start. He was a small lightweight fellow, and in an excellent state of physical fitness, judging by the sound of his feet echoing in the narrow space of the stairwell.
I glimpsed Dicky as he raced down the flights of stairs but I couldn’t see the man he was chasing. As I got to the next level a shot rang out, and two flights lower I passed a long smear of blood on the wall and spots of it on the stairs. Then there was the sound of another shot. The sound of
the footsteps continued uninterrupted, which made me guess that Dicky was firing as he ran and his quarry was simply running. There were more blood smears at the next level; one of them was a smudged handprint dribbling with shiny-wet blood.
As I got to the ground floor Dicky was flattened with his back against the corridor wall holding his .38 Colt at arm’s length. His face was flushed and glistening with sweat, his chest was heaving and his hand trembling.
But whatever shape Dicky was in, one glance along that long corridor, which led past three rubbish-bins and the double back doors, made every fibre in my body go out to the poor devil who was trying to escape through the exit door alive.
‘Stop shooting, Dicky!’ I called loudly. ‘Let him go.’ But Dicky was past reasoning or listening or thinking. The adrenalin was pumping, his sinews stiffened, blood summoned up, and his eyes opened wide. He couldn’t stop. I know what it’s like, I’d been there.
Before I could claw at Dicky’s arm the crack of his gun deafened me. There was a whine followed by a doleful clank as the spent round ricocheted and hit a metal bin. It was the subsequent shot that brought the fleeing man down. It hit him somewhere about the middle of the back and threw him full-length, as effectively as a footballer grabbed by his ankles in a flying tackle. He crashed to the wooden floor with a sickening thud that would have hospitalized most men.
The jar flew from his clasp, went tumbling through the air and smashed against the wall, so that a sudden smell of ether and formaldehyde was added to the faint smell of the burned powder. But the little man got up from the spreading puddle of blood and chemicals. He staggered forwards a couple of steps and with a superhuman effort of will threw all his weight against the doors. His weight on the crush-bar was enough to activate the fastenings, and the door banged open as he fell through it into what must have been someone’s waiting arms, for there came the almost immediate roar of a revving car engine. Before Dicky or I could reach the back yard they were burning rubber on the far side of the car park. The parked cars were in the line of fire and there was only a blurred glimpse of the speeding car as, with horn blasting, it accelerated through the open gates and recklessly forced its way into the London traffic.