Old Enemies

by Michael Dobbs

  Whizz things through the computer? She wanted to scream. The pillock was trying to patronize her and she’d have been happier pouring the bloody coffee into his lap, but they had already lowered their heads and were back to their discussions, leaving her outside the circle. Unsuitable work for a woman. She left them, returned to the kitchen, rummaged through several drawers and a cupboard, and finally found what she was looking for. She lit one of J.J.’s cigarettes. She hadn’t smoked in years.

  Workmen were in the early stages of erecting a lofty Christmas tree as Harry entered the covered streets of Leadenhall Market in the City of London. He was glad to get here, beneath the glorious wrought-iron and glass canopies that kept the place dry. It was raining hard outside, threatening sleet from a steel-grey sky, and his sock hadn’t yet dried. Leadenhall was a place of bustle, of butchers and cheesemakers and purveyors of provender that was little different from when the Romans had gathered on this spot at the heart of ancient Londinium. In the passage of years since then the market place had been burned, abandoned, looted, bombed, but always rebuilt, most magnificently by the Victorians who had filled it with cobbles, soaring columns, imperial pomp and a large number of watering holes. It was to one of these that Harry was now headed. ‘Brokers’ was a first-floor wine bar overlooking the centre of the market. Harry found a seat at a window and watched the struggle of the workmen. They had just finished erecting the tree and were decking it out with lights when a man in a broad chalk-stripe suit, extravagant shirt cuffs and a pronounced limp placed a large glass of something white in front of him.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ Jimmy Sopwith-Dane – ‘Sloppy’ to those he recognized as friends – declared as he sat opposite.

  Harry ignored the comment. He wasn’t in the mood, and never much was at this time of year. Christmas as a child had always proved to be a perilous festival, when his father would return, often after an absence of weeks, with an abundance of presents to fill the many gaps and missed dates that had marked the previous twelve months. At the age of thirteen Harry had discovered that most of his father’s gifts had been chosen by a secretary of Scandinavian origin who had managed to misspell his name on the labels. ‘It’s with a y, Dad, not i,’ he’d rebuked his father, but not in front of his mother. Even at the age of thirteen, Harry had learned to tread with extreme care around the suggestion that his father had another life.

  ‘To survival,’ Sopwith-Dane said, raising his glass.

  ‘Hope springs eternal,’ Harry responded, pursing his lips in appreciation of a fine Burgundy.

  It was easy to misjudge Sopwith-Dane. He had a manner that some would regard as foppish, almost Edwardian, and the limp slowed him down, but only physically, yet those who underestimated Sloppy normally ended up trailing far behind. He had served with Harry in the Life Guards and forged their friendship in the bandit country of Armagh. One night on patrol he had taken a bullet intended for Harry; it had made a monumental mess of Sloppy’s knee, and with it his military career. ‘No more arse-kicking for me, I suppose,’ was all he had ever said by way of complaint. So he’d taken his gammy leg and Etonian humour off to the City where, with an extravagant smile and a deft hand, he’d managed to carve out a big enough niche to salvage both his marriage and the ancestral home. He also kept a close watching brief on Harry’s very considerable investments.

  ‘So, dear boy,’ he declared as a waitress placed a bowl of whitebait in front of them, ‘how the blazes are you?’

  ‘On the scrounge, Sloppy.’

  ‘Good. Glad to see that nothing’s changed. What is it this time? The car, the villa, the wife – no, Harry, I draw the line at any of the daughters, even for you, old chap.’ His eyes sparkled along with his cufflinks.

  ‘J.J. Breslin. Know him?’

  ‘The newspaper chappie, you mean? Met him a couple of times. Rather dour, not the ideal companion for a long voyage, if you ask me. Surprisingly worthy for a media tycoon. Remember his wife rather better, though. Oh, yes, desperately distracting, that one. In a word – hot!’

  ‘What about the newspaper?’ Harry asked, hoping he hadn’t visibly flinched.

  Sloppy’s brow wrinkled. ‘Ah, not so hot. The man is Napoleonic in ambition but desperately overextended. Currently engaged in the long retreat from Moscow and got himself firmly stuck in the snows, by all accounts. Assets on the point of being frozen. Wolves snapping at his heels.’

  ‘Bad as that, eh?’

  ‘You know what the newspaper industry’s like, robbed blind by the Internet, blood everywhere. He’s not as big as the other players, doesn’t have as much fat to live off in these harsh times. Mr Breslin needs the luck of his Irish ancestors, otherwise my fellow looters and pillagers will be upon him and he’ll be belly up by next spring. Off to a prolonged exile in St Helena with his Josephine.’

  ‘Terri,’ Harry muttered distractedly as he rolled his glass between his palms.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s called Terri.’

  ‘Is she, by golly? I can think of worse ways to spend my old age.’ He was chuckling once more, but his keen eye had spotted the firm set of Harry’s face. ‘You all right, old chap?’

  ‘Of course,’ Harry lied, but not well, looking out of the window and examining the ancient meat hooks for the rabbits, ducks and pheasants that still hung above a butcher’s window.

  ‘In need of some distraction, eh?’

  ‘Something truly sinful.’

  ‘Oh, dear, the wife’s going to be no use to you there, I’m afraid.’ He sighed in disappointment. ‘But I know a young lady at a nearby art gallery who—’

  ‘Just keep an eye on it, will you, Sloppy?’

  ‘My very great pleasure.’

  ‘No, you bloody idiot, Breslin’s company. Let me know if you hear any rumblings, pick up any rumours.’

  ‘A little light reconnaissance? My pleasure. But hope you’re not in too much of a hurry.’ He raised his glass and emptied it. ‘Got the rest of the bottle to finish.’

  So they took care of the bottle, and another. Sloppy owned a chunk of the wine bar and was anxious to deal with ‘a couple of rather exotic bin ends’, as he put it, ‘to make space for the Christmas rush’.

  And Harry was grateful for the diversion. The workmen had finished decorating the tree and the lights from around the market were beginning to burn more brightly as the afternoon faded into an early winter’s evening. Harry’s mood soaked up some of the rising festive spirit as he relaxed with his old friend. Then his phone rang. It was Mary Mishcon. Applying her own brand of gentle pressure. The Prime Minister anxious to hear about his decision . . .

  ‘Mary, can’t hear you well, the signal’s terrible here,’ Harry exaggerated, distracted, knowing he’d had too much to drink to tackle that particular obstacle course. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he promised.

  ‘You used to be much better at lying,’ Sloppy chided as Harry put the phone down on the table.

  ‘Hell, I used to be better at lying to myself.’

  Sloppy looked at him quizzically. ‘That’s all rather cryptic. I’m almost afraid to ask,’ he said, reaching for the bottle and pouring with a heavy hand, ‘but I will. Tell me about her.’

  Harry sighed. Sloppy was a persistent bugger, and Harry didn’t want to lie to him, too. He reached for his phone, intending to switch it off and avoid further disturbance, yet he hadn’t even touched it when it began vibrating again. In frustration Harry glanced at the screen, then muttered another colourful Arabic oath.

  It was Terri.

  Gingerly Ruari ran his fingers around his face. The swelling was slowly beginning to subside, but not the fear, least of all the choking sense of humiliation. His sight was improving as the puffiness around his eyes faded, and at last they had relented and given him one or two things to help him pass the time, a couple of old National Geographic magazines and a chess set with three black pawns missing. He didn’t mistake this as an act of kindness, he knew it was nothing more than a means of keepi
ng him distracted and quiet. They had no desire to find themselves with a hysterical teenager on their hands.

  What he was finding more difficult to deal with was the increasing pain from his wrist caused by his shackles – handcuffs that tethered him to a heavy chain, which in turn was fixed to the metal frame of the bedstead. Right from the first he’d tried to test it for any sign of weakness, but whenever he moved it rattled and chafed, leaving abrasions on his wrist that had already cut deeply through the skin. The chain allowed him to move no more than three feet, just enough to roll over in bed, or sit up, or use the red plastic bucket that was all he had as a toilet.

  As the hours turned to days, his routine became set. They brought him three meals a day – porridge and pasta mostly, no meat, nothing that would need a knife or fork; he had to make do with a spoon. They also left him a bottle of tap water. And whether he ate, drank, peed, crapped, cried or slept, there was always a Romanian on guard, well armed, sitting in a chair on the far side of the room by the window.

  Occasionally de Vries would descend upon them on a tour of inspection. He kept the guards on a tight leash, insisting they concentrate only on Ruari, snatching away the portable media players and reading material they used to while away the monotony. Harsh words were thrown in both directions. The guard was changed every two hours, but still they resented the South African’s interference. Whenever these arguments erupted, Ruari kept his head down, feigning sleep, afraid the guards would be tempted to take their frustration out on him, but none did. They were too afraid of the South African to risk that.

  No one spoke to Ruari, not a word, unless it was to complain about the bucket that the guards were forced to empty. Having already failed with both English and French, Ruari tried swearing at them to force some sort of reaction, but he got nothing more than a painful kick in the leg for his troubles. That was from Cosmin, whose face was swollen and blotchy and had turned vivid shades of yellow and blue. That gave Ruari a little satisfaction, even though he guessed his own face looked far worse.

  His mind ran back to a film he’d once watched on his laptop, after lights out when he was supposed to be asleep, about a young girl named Patty Hearst. She was a Californian newspaper heiress who’d been kidnapped and had her mind filled with so much gunk by the pigs who snatched her that she’d flipped and gone over to their cause, even helped them rob a bank. That sort of behaviour had a name – the Stockholm syndrome. To Ruari it seemed like a form of madness. Identifying with your abductors was supposed to be a common affliction but that wouldn’t happen to him, he vowed, no, never to him. Looking across the room at Cosmin, with his scraped knuckles, Ruari concluded there were many, many things he’d like to do for the bastard, but helping him wasn’t anywhere on the list.

  During the endless hours he spent lying tethered on a soiled mattress beside that stinking bucket, Ruari tried to fathom the meaning of what they were doing to him. He had an analytical mind that wandered across the landscape inspecting many possibilities, but at the end of these journeys he arrived back at the same point. They wanted to keep him alive, at least for the moment. The one thought that jarred against this was the fact that none of his captors used a facemask or disguised their features in any way; he could identify every one of them down to that bastard Cosmin’s last pockmark and crooked tooth. If a day of reckoning ever came, they wouldn’t want him picking them out and providing testimony, and perhaps from the start they never intended he should see that day, planned to do away with him before this was all over. He hoped there was another explanation. Perhaps they were simply arrogant, calculating that the world was more than big enough to swallow them without trace.

  His life depended on all this, on the inner thoughts of these men. Ruari had lost his innocence, no longer assumed he was indestructible. Any lingering sense of his own immortality had been wrenched from him along with Casey and Mattias. He knew his plight was desperate. Then came the moment when Sandu arrived to relieve Cosmin and started swearing – Ruari had just used the latrine bucket and the atmosphere in the room was vile. Sandu moved his chair closer to the window and flung it wide open, lit one of his throat-searing cigarettes, staring into – what? Ruari realized he had no idea what lay beyond that window, had no idea where in the world he was.

  Slowly the cool air of early winter began to reach into the room, even as far as Ruari’s prison bed, bringing with it new aromas. He could smell something sweet-sour, and remembered the aroma from the pastures above Villars. It was rotting cow shit. And on top of that there was a tang of something sharper. Fermenting cheese, perhaps? During the day the window was usually tightly closed and muffled the sounds from outside, but during the stillness of the previous night he had heard strange animal cries and the screech of hunting birds. The picture came together. He was deep in the countryside. There was still a world outside his cell.

  That knowledge made Ruari determined to escape. Whether they were planning to kill him eventually, or to keep him alive, it seemed to him he had nothing to lose by trying to break out. He couldn’t be much worse off than he was now. So that’s what he would do. Escape.

  Trouble was, he hadn’t an idea in hell how to do it. Not yet, at least.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Meet me,’ she had said.

  ‘For God’s sake, why?’ Harry had muttered.

  ‘Ruari’s gone. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Meet . . . but where?’ he had replied, more cautiously.

  ‘Our usual place.’

  ‘Stop talking in riddles.’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Why all this bloody mystery?’

  ‘I can’t talk on the phone. I think it may be bugged.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Who the hell would—’

  But the phone had gone dead, leaving Harry fuming in frustration. He had no intention of moving, not an inch, least of all of seeing her again. Her husband had been right, it was none of his bloody business. He was going to stay here on his comfortable seat and continue enjoying the company of both his friend Sloppy and the bottle that stood between them. And yet he couldn’t help casting his mind back to the last time they had been together . . .

  Paris. Lapérouse, a restaurant that had stood on the Left Bank of the Seine since even before the Revolution, a place full of dark wood and discreet corners, of gilded mirrors and painted ceilings, of carved cherubs and dreams. How many lovers had met here, how many whispers had its walls soaked up and its waiters forgotten? That’s why Harry had chosen it for another of their stolen weekends, with excuses and lies left scattered in his wake. Yet it hadn’t turned out like the others. They had arrived separately, from different destinations. Harry had booked into the hotel on his own while she had come straight from the Gare du Nord. She’d arrived late, with a lame excuse about a delayed train, and no light in her face. It had been almost three weeks since they’d last seen each other and Harry thought she looked strained, was worried she was sickening for something. She had ordered distractedly and even before the first course had arrived she told him she wouldn’t, couldn’t, see him again. She wouldn’t explain why, wouldn’t look him in the eye, and he had started to protest but they had been interrupted by the waiter, and she had made an excuse to visit the ladies’ room. She had never returned.

  A man in the midst of an intense affair rarely has full control of either his thoughts or his emotions, and it had taken Harry many distracted months to recover, even with Julia’s forgiveness, yet despite that forgiveness, and perhaps even because of it, he had never been able to forgive Terri, and least of all himself. Now she was back, along with echoes of so much pain.

  Where the hell was he supposed to meet her anyway? Once more his mind dug into the old days, the memories came roaring back on a flood tide, and he knew.

  It was still there, beneath the railway arches on the South Bank, the cramped bar with the vaulted brick ceiling and the incessant rumble of trains passing overhead. It meant the patrons had to lean close to c
atch each other’s words. That had been an advantage, back then. Both the lease and decor seemed to have passed through several different sets of hands since Harry had last been here; he’d remembered dark wooden tables but now there was nothing but glass and brushed aluminium, while the prices were unrecognizable, yet the atmosphere was still much the same, close, intense, private. Harry sat at the bar, distractedly making patterns with the rings of condensation from his glass of over-chilled wine. A second glass waited beside him, empty, with the bottle dribbling dampness close at hand.

  ‘Hello, Harry.’

  He poured without asking.

  ‘Pinot Grigio. You remembered,’ she said with a catch in her voice.

  ‘I remember too much.’

  She could sense his hostility. She sipped silently for a while, trying to decide where to start. ‘They’ve taken over, Harry, those men who came out of the blue, the risk assessors. They don’t know me, they’ve never even met Ruari, yet somehow they’re now in charge. Of everything. My dining table has become the centre of what they call their Operations Room, my kitchen is like an army mess, there’s a goon with a shaved head and no neck standing at my front door.’ She caught her breath. ‘Everything’s such a mess. I don’t seem to have a home or a family any longer.’

  As she spoke, staring into her glass, he studied her profile, the lips that left their mark on the rim of her glass, the point of her nose that bobbed as she talked. He noticed a small mole just beneath her jaw. Had she had that when . . . ? He couldn’t remember, and told himself he couldn’t care less.

  ‘I’m supposed to tell them my every move, every time I leave home, where I’m going. I didn’t, not this time, of course. I don’t want J.J. finding out.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked, trying to sound disinterested, yet chiding himself for being churlish.

  ‘Everything’s so rough at home, Harry. Stifling. I can’t breathe. I had to get out. J.J.’s under such pressure.’ She sighed, a mournful sound that came from deep inside. ‘If he knew I was here he wouldn’t understand.’