‘Let’s make it a surprise,’ I said.
He looked at me with interest. Afterwards I wondered how much he knew about what was happening there, but he wasn’t the sort of man who makes free with good advice. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said.
I dropped the car keys on the table and then stepped down into the mud. It was a long way to the house, but as I got near there was enough light from the upstairs window to help me pick my way along the garden path, and across the apple orchard. The kitchen clock was at midnight, and I could see a tray, set with chinaware and flowers, all ready for next morning.
Softly, as if from miles away, I could hear voices, arguing loudly.
The kitchen door was unlocked – with so much security there was no fear of burglars – and I went in. I walked through the hall and into the lounge from which the voices came. There was an abandoned backgammon game in the middle of the carpet, and scatter-cushions on the floor. All was lit by the dusty blue light of the TV, and the voices were those of a TV quiz. There were a couple of chords from an electric organ and a round of applause from the studio audience. ‘… and, for ten thousand dollars … fingers ready on the buzzers all you nice people … In 1929, Douglas Fairbanks made his first all-talking movie. For this two-part question, I want, first, the name of his female star, and, for the second part, the name of the movie.’
On the air I could smell the mentholated cigarettes that Red smoked. I switched on the lights – two big Chinese vases with parchment shades – there was no one here. A log fire was dying in the hearth, and near by there was a jug of water and a bowl of melting ice. There was also a whisky bottle and two glasses; all of them empty. The TV contestants were deep in thought. It was during this silence that I heard the groans from upstairs. ‘Oh my God!’ It was a woman’s voice – Katerina Bekuv’s, and there was a shrill strangled cry.
I don’t know if I made much noise running up the stairs, two at a time; or if I shouted anything, or what I might have said. I can only remember standing in the bedroom doorway and looking at them: I remember how tanned was the nude body of Katerina Bekuv against the pale skin of Red Bancroft, who was kneeling over her. The groans I’d heard were not groans of pain. The scene is burned into my memory: Katerina Bekuv spread-eagled and limp, her head lolling back so that her long blonde hair almost reached the floor. Red tense, straightening her back to sit up and look at me, her eyes wide and fearful. From Katerina came a long orgasmic whisper. I stood there numb.
‘Get some clothes on, Ambrose,’ I said finally. ‘Come downstairs. I want to talk to you.’
When Red Bancroft arrived in the sitting-room she was wearing nothing but a silk kimono, and even that was left untied. Her hair looked more auburn than red under this light and it was still dishevelled. She wore no make-up, and her face looked like that of a young child, but her demeanour was not childlike. She strode across to the TV set. I had been sipping at a measure of brandy and staring at the TV screen with unseeing eyes but now that she was standing there I heard the master of ceremonies say ‘One of the most shocking crimes of the decade took place in 1929 in Chicago … Now here’s your question …’
‘Are you watching this?’ she asked with mock politeness.
I shook my head.
‘… four men, two of them in police uniforms …’ As she switched the TV off, the master of ceremonies fluttered like a burned moth and collapsed, into a small blue flame that disappeared.
‘St Valentine’s Day Massacre,’ she said. ‘Al Capone.’ She tore the cellophane off a packet of Kools, took one out and lit it.
‘Switch it on again and ask for your ten grand.’
She walked across to the cupboard, found a new bottle of Scotch and poured herself a generous measure. This was a different Red Bancroft to the soft sweet girl I’d fallen in love with. ‘Do you realize what kind of priority this investigation has got?’ she said.
‘Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your security guards,’ I said.
She drank a little of her drink, paced across the carpet and back, and then rubbed her face as if trying to decide what she wanted to say next. ‘I don’t know how much you’ve been told,’ she said, which was as good a put-down as I’ve yet come across, ‘but Mrs Bekuv is a KGB officer of field rank. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
She drank some more whisky. ‘You want a drink?’ she asked suddenly.
‘I helped myself already,’ I said indicating the glass of brandy that I’d left on the side table. She nodded.
‘When they realized that Bekuv had gone, and that we had him, Moscow panicked. They tried to kill him that night at the party. Then they changed their tactics. Mrs Bekuv was sent after him. Moscow sent her. She was sent to control him, monitor and modify what he told us.’
‘The stabbing,’ I said.
‘It was good that, wasn’t it?’ It was as if she took pride in the expertise of her lover. ‘She grabbed the sharp edge skilfully enough to cut herself, without doing too much damage to the ligaments. Then she did a couple of deep slash cuts into her coat.’
‘A bad cut in the abdomen … four stitches,’ I said.
‘This is a professional,’ said Red. ‘You don’t get field rank in the KGB if you’re afraid of the sight of blood.’ She put her glass of whisky to her face and smelled it delicately as one would an expensive perfume.
‘And Gerry Hart brought her out and delivered her to us.’
She looked at me with some disdain. ‘Gerry Hart has been working for the Russians for at least fifteen years. He’s a senior officer in the KGB – you know how they give these people military ranks and medals to make them feel important.’
‘So bringing Mrs Bekuv out of Russia was entirely a KGB operation?’
‘All the way, baby. All the way.’ She tied a knot in the cord of the kimono.
‘Does Mann know all this?’
‘I’ve only known it for thirty minutes,’ she said.
I heard Mrs Bekuv moving on the floor above us. I said, ‘You and … her. Was that something that just happened? Or was that part of the plan?’
‘It was the plan,’ she said immediately. ‘It was the only plan. You and Major Mann chasing here and there across the world were just diversionary. Holding Mrs Bekuv here, and turning her so that she’ll break Hart’s network, that was the real plan.’
I didn’t argue with her; all agents are told that their contribution is the most important part of the plan. I said, ‘But why not tell me?’
‘We fell in love,’ she said. ‘You and me – there was no disguising it. At first I wanted to call off everything else but I pulled myself together, and got on with my job. It was then that I discovered the effect that our love affair was having on Mrs Bekuv.’
‘You mean Mrs Bekuv was jealous of me?’
‘Don’t sound so incredulous. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. She won me away from you, and she was proud of herself for doing it.’
‘Well, thanks for the memory,’ I said.
Red came closer to me and touched my arm. ‘I loved you,’ she said. ‘I loved you. Remember that, won’t you.’
Overhead we heard Mrs Bekuv walk across the floor. ‘Just for a time I wanted out of this whole business.’
‘Out of this business? Or out of that business?’ I moved my head to indicate the upstairs room where Mrs Bekuv was still moving around.
‘I’m still not sure,’ said Red. She looked me full in the eyes and her voice was calm and level. ‘Don’t blame the Manns,’ she said. ‘They wanted the best for both of us.’
‘And what was the best for both of us?’
She didn’t answer. From upstairs I heard Mrs Bekuv sobbing. It was very quiet, the sort of sobbing that goes on for a long time.
‘You got paint on that nice leather coat,’ said Red. ‘When did you do that?’
‘Christmas,’ I said. ‘It’s not paint, it’s Mrs Bekuv’s blood.’
I picked up the glass of brandy I’d p
oured, and I drank it in one gulp. Then I picked up my ten-dollar box of fudge and left.
19
After the baroque night, a rococo dawn. A boiling sky of turbulent clouds, and a sun that bored a golden tunnel right through it. It needed only a Tiepolo to paint a busty Aurora there, and surround her with naked nymphs and some improbable shepherds.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘You stay in bed, Professor Bekuv. The doctor says you need a complete rest.’
‘This hospital food is terrible. Could you arrange for food to be sent in for me?’
‘That might be difficult, Professor. You are on maximum security now. The people cooking your food may not be graduates of the cordon bleu, but they are triple-star security cleared.’
‘So you think someone might try to poison my food?’
I counted to ten. ‘No I don’t think anyone will poison your food. It’s a routine precaution that always goes with maximum security … people.’
‘Prisoners,’ said Bekuv. ‘You were going to say prisoners.’
‘I was going to say patients.’
‘No one tells me the truth.’
I turned to face him. I found it difficult to feel sorry for him. The breakfast of which he had complained so bitterly had been entirely eaten. He was now munching expensive black grapes from the fruit-bowl. On the other bedside table his hi-fi controls had been arranged. His condition was a tribute to modern medicine or to the circumspection of his attempt at suicide. Bekuv slotted a cassette into the player. Suddenly four giant loudspeakers, that had been arranged round his bed, filled the little hospital room with the opening bars of the Rosenkavalier waltz.
I walked to the table and switched the music down.
‘I want to listen to the music,’ said Bekuv. ‘I am not feeling well enough to continue talking.’
I looked at him and considered all kinds of responses but I didn’t use any of them. ‘OK,’ I said. I went downstairs to talk to Jonathan.
The Strauss music could still be heard. ‘Tell me again about the suicide,’ I said.
‘He’s in good shape, isn’t he,’ said Jonathan anxiously.
‘Are you sure he took an overdose?’
‘They pumped him dry and analysed it.’
‘You’d better tell me everything that happened just before that.’
‘I told you. It was the same routine as every other morning. He got up at six, when the alarm went. He took a shower, shaved and we sat down to breakfast at seven.’
‘An hour to shave, shower and dress?’
‘He listens to the news and reads his mail.’
‘You let him have mail?’
‘Hi-fi magazines, Newsweek, Time, two sci-fi magazines advertising crap from the places he bought his record-player and stuff, little notes from his wife, a Russian-language weekly from New York, all of it goes via the accommodation address of course …’
‘You keep a photocopy of the notes from his wife?’
‘And then the envelope is resealed – he doesn’t know, I’m sure.’
‘Let me see it.’
‘Do you read Russian?’
‘And hurry it along, will you.’
‘You’d better come down to the microfilm reader.’
The letters from Bekuv’s wife – and even all the pages of the magazines etc. – were recorded on microfilm.
‘The translator looked at it. He looks at everything. He said it was just the usual sort of thing.’
The spidery writing in the labyrinth of Russian script was made even more difficult to decipher when projected in negative upon the glass screen of the reader.
My love,
I hope you are well. Don’t take sleeping tablets every night or you may become dependent on them. A milk drink used to be all you ever needed to sleep, why not try that again.
Here the weather is very cold and there is much rain, but they are being very kind to me. I was wrong about Miss Bancroft, she is a really wonderful girl. She is doing all she can to arrange that you and I can have a serious talk but for the present it is better we are separate. It is important, Andrei.
Your ever loving K.
I read a rough translation aloud to the man they called Jonathan.
‘Nothing there – right?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘You don’t sound very convinced. You think that they might have some sort of code?’ he said.
‘Every man and wife talk in code,’ I said.
‘Don’t go philosophical on me, pal. I majored in chemistry.’
‘It might mean something to him,’ I said.
‘Mean something that would make him want to take that whole jar of goofballs?’
‘Could be.’
Jonathan sighed. From next door there came the buzz of the telex alarm and the chatter of the printer. He went to answer it.
I began to see Andrei Bekuv in a new light, and I felt a little guilty at the way I’d treated him. His querulous complaints, and the studied interest in music and hi-fi equipment, I saw now as desperate attempts to prevent himself thinking about his lesbian wife, and how much he needed her. This letter would be more than enough to tell him she was in love with Red Bancroft.
Jonathan interrupted this line of thought with a telex that he’d torn off the printer. It was coded and headed-up with the arranged cipher, but the signature was in clear triplicate.
MESSAGE BEGINS MOVE FABIAN TO AIRPORT IMMEDIATELY FOR AIR MOVEMENT FOXGLOVE STOP CIA REPRESENTATIVE AT TERMINAL STOP AMBROSE WILL TAKE LUCIUS THERE STOP YOU WILL TAKE CHARGE STOP AT YOUR DISPOSAL LIKEWISE AMBROSE JONATHAN AND STAFFS STOP WAIT FOR ME AND TAKE ORDERS FROM NO OTHER PERSON STOP HOLD THIS AS YOUR AUTHORITY STOP MESSAGE PRIORITY SANDMAN OPERATION PRIORITY PRESIDENTIAL REPEAT PRESIDENTIAL MESSAGE ENDS MANN MANN MANN ACKNOWLEDGE
‘Acknowledge?’ said Jonathan.
‘Is there anyone there at the other end?’
‘Only the operator.’
‘Acknowledge it. Then ask Langley to give us scrambled telex facilities at the airport and some back-up. What have you got here?’
‘Two cars and fourteen men, but six are on three-day lay-offs.’
‘Armoured cars?’
‘Windshield and gas tanks – the usual agency design.’
‘We’ll need more cars. Get a couple of your people to use their own. Don’t tell Bekuv what’s happening.’
‘What is happening?’ he asked.
‘We’re moving, that’s what’s happening.’
‘You know what I think,’ Jonathan said. ‘I think this is an alarm. I think the Russians are going to hit this place and try snatching the professor from us.’
‘Send the acknowledge.’
‘You mean don’t let Bekuv know until we’re ready to go?’
‘I mean don’t let Bekuv know. You’re setting up this wagon-train, and I want you to make it look really impressive. Bekuv will be travelling with me in the Stingray and we won’t be anywhere near you.’
‘I’ll want that in writing, you know. It’s dangerous. And on your own, you might have trouble getting Bekuv to move his ass.’
‘I don’t see why I should,’ I said. ‘He’s going to see his missus, isn’t he?’
20
Incoming flights were being diverted and delayed. Planes were circling and stacked all the way from Chesapeake Bay to the Allegheny Mountains. Outgoing flights were hours behind their scheduled times. The terminal buildings were a noisy chaos of irate travellers but we were half a mile away, and the airport seemed very still from the service area where Mann had improvised an emergency control room. There were half a dozen phones there, constantly ringing as CIA clerks lied to the press and deflected official inquiries. A quarter of a mile along the apron an Algerian Airways Ilyushin jet was parked. It was surrounded by service vehicles, and men were topping up its kerosene, pumping its sewage, loading hundreds of plastic meals, respooling its movies, generating its electricity, removing its baggage and loading its freight.
I delivered Bekuv to a CIA man and went into Mann’s makeshift office.
Mann was making monosyllabic noises into a phone when I went into the room. ‘What’s going on?’ I said.
He indicated a chair and, when he’d hung up the phone, he said, ‘Gerry Hart is out there, with a Cold Combat Magnum in one hand and Senator Greenwood’s necktie in the other.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Yeah, I’m kidding – it’s only a Centennial Airweight.’ We watched a jumbo lumber past us round the perimeter.
‘You made him run then.’
He gave me a sour smile. ‘He’s taking the four o’clock direct flight to Algiers, and I do mean taking it. He wants the Bekuvs with him, and he’s threatening to blow Greenwood’s head off if they are not delivered to him.’
‘You’re going to hand them over?’
‘I’m not going to call his bluff. Everything points to Hart as a long-time commie agent. He’s a pro – I believe he’d do it, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I pulled a chair close to where he was sitting at the desk. ‘This is not an escape. A guy like Hart must have a dozen good passports under the floorboards. And using Greenwood’s name he could bump his way on to any Air Force jet.’
‘So why is he in there with a cannon and leaping around like a vitamin pill endorsement?’ said Mann. He put his hand-made English shoes, and their overshoes, into the middle of his paperwork, leaned back in the swivel chair and blew a smoke-ring at the ceiling.
I said, ‘He wants the Bekuvs – you told me that – he’s waiting for the Bekuvs.’
‘Moscow won’t give him a medal for this circus,’ said Mann. ‘This doesn’t fit into the détente crap that the Russians are hard-selling Washington.’
I took off my leather overcoat and helped myself to one of Mann’s cigarettes. ‘If Hart wants the Bekuvs, then Moscow wants the Bekuvs,’ I said.