The High Commissioner

by Jon Cleary

“Kill me?” The thought seemed to amuse Madame Cholon; she was afraid of nothing, not even death “Are you threatening me?”

  Joseph looked again at Pham Chinh: the Vietnamese had straightened up, taking the gun with its fitted silencer from his pocket. Joseph uncrossed his legs, straightened the crease in his trousers and looked back at Madame Cholon. “No, madame. I’m just stating my side of the bargain. Whatever way Mr. Quentin is disposed of, I don’t think either of my other employers is going to have much use for me in the future. I’ll be, to say the least, suspect. Not only to Moscow and Peking, but to Scotland Yard, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and any other security organisation you care to mention. In other words, I shall have to look around for a new life. And for that I shall need what the Americans call a stake.”

  “How much?”

  Well, he thought, if I’m going to the I may as well do so with dreams of wealth. “Twenty-five thousand pounds.”

  It was Madame Cholon’s turn to lose poise. “Out of the question!”

  “Had you intended paying me at all?” She hesitated, then nodded. “How much?”

  “Perhaps five thousand pounds.”

  Joseph smiled. He had become fatalistic; he was going to be killed anyway, if not by this woman, then by the Russians or the Chinese. “That, too, is out of the question. Madame, when the Chinese approached me they blackmailed me, just as you are doing. But they also knew they could trust me, well, just a little, if they paid me a figure that put a fair value on what I was doing for them.” He sighed, looked around the richly furnished room. He knew the number of agents who spent their lives in mean surroundings; he had been one of the fortunate ones. “I’ve become accustomed to good living, madame. And even though I was to go on being a butler, according to my employers’ plans, I should have been living in a beautiful house, eating the best of food, drinking the best of wine and whisky. If I have to vanish – as seems probable – after Mr. Quentin has been, er, disposed of, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a shabby room in some remote South American village, exchanging reminiscences with some ex-Nazi.”

  “Where would you go—Australia?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Hardly, madame. No, I have several retreats in mind. One always has them in mind, just in case.” He looked at the gun in Pham Chinh’s hand, than back at Madame Cholon. She, too, was a beautiful woman, but in her way she looked just as ugly now as Sheik Quentin had looked this morning. This woman was ugly inside and she would order him to be killed without being in the least disturbed. He had nothing to lose by holding out for as much as he could get “I shall need a minimum of fifteen thousand pounds. Payable in cash on a Swiss bank – I take it you have money there?” She nodded, just as he had guessed she would. The Russians and the Chinese paid him through Switzerland: neutrality had its uses. “I’ll take the cheque with me today.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  He sat back, playing his biggest bluff. “Then you will have to find someone else to do your dirty work. And you will have the trouble and inconvenience of disposing of me.” The Hungarian in him came to the surface, the weakness tor gestures; he would even the with sang froid. “It might not be so easy.”

  “It would be no trouble at all,” said Madame Cholon, thinking of the dead man upstairs. It would be no more difficult to dispose of two corpses than to dispose of one. She wondered if the Chinese would appreciate the joke if she planted a Russian spy, as well as an American one, on their doorstep. The Chinese sense of humour had changed since the Communists had taken over, but perhaps some of the older men would laugh behind their hands at it. She stuthed Joseph, tempted by the idea of the vengeful joke on Chen and Pai; then she dismissed it, she hadn’t come all this way to play jokes. “Fifteen thousand, then,” she said, and saw Pham Chinh lift his head. His price would go up now, but she could deal with him. It would be even less trouble to dispose of him than of Joseph and Jamaica. Dead men were always floating down the Mekong River. “But how will you kill Quentin?”

  “I thought you would have had that planned,” said Joseph. “You seem to have command of so much else. How did you first get on to me? Did the American proffer the information voluntarily?”

  “No.” Madame Cholon could not help boasting: “I had a visit this morning from your Chinese employers. They did not give their names, but it wasn’t difficult to find out who they were. All I had to do was call a friend in another embassy, describe them, and he gave me their names. They told me, though not in so many words, that they had someone working for them. It was not hard to guess where that someone was. They knew all about the attempts on Quentin’s life – What’s the matter?”

  “I just hope I am more successful than you have been,” Joseph said. “The attempts so far don’t seem to have been very professional.”

  “Oh, they were made by professionals,” said Madame Cholon with a contemptuous glance at Pham Chinh, whose face remained expressionless. “But as you say, they were not successful. Where was I? Oh, yes. It was not hard to guess that they must be getting their information from someone inside Quentin’s house. There were not many to choose from. We eliminated Malone, the cooks, the housemaid, the members of the delegation. It could have been Mrs. Quentin, but why should she want to betray her husband? That left either you or the secretary. Then Mr. Jamaica paid us a visit and we questioned him about you.”

  “The Russians or the Chinese could use you.”

  “Thank you. The prospect doesn’t appeal to me at all. I like being my own boss.” She stopped for a moment; a sense of power coursed through her like a drug. Then she went on, as calmly as before: “It was not difficult to contact you. Pham Chinh has been watching the Quentin house for the past two weeks. He has a key to the garden in Belgrave Square. He began life as a pickpocket in Saigon, didn’t you, Pham?” Pham Chinh nodded, still expressionless. He’s thinking about that fifteen thousand pounds, she thought; then turned her back on him again. “No one knows him and it has been easy for him to sit there in the gardens among the nannies and the children, reading a book and watching your house. The English have a pleasant habit of minding their own business if you mind yours.”

  “What did he discover while he was busy minding his own business in the gardens?”

  “That you are a man of habit. Every afternoon, even on your afternoons off, you emerge from the house at the same time and go for a walk. Pham Chinh has never bothered to follow you until today. I hope bringing you here has not kept you from some appointment? Perhaps with one of your other employers?” She smiled. “You must be one of the most employed men in London just now. Four bosses. I wonder what the British Minister for Economic Affairs thinks of that?”

  “I had no appointment,” said Joseph, and held up the brown-paper bag. “I was just taking this alarm clock to be fixed. It belongs to Mr. Quentin.”

  Madame Cholon held out her hand and after a moment’s puzzlement Joseph handed her the bag. She took out the small clock in its blue leather case and stuthed it Then she want out of the room and Joseph heard her on the phone. He caught only the word “bomb,” but it was enough. When she came back into the room he knew what she was going to suggest.

  “Leave the clock with me. It will be mended. Pham Chinh will meet you to-morrow morning and return it with instructions. I shall phone you at ten o’clock.”

  Joseph stood up. “There is one more thing. I shall take the cheque now.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, as if debating whether the gamble she was taking on him was too big. Then she moved to a desk in one corner of the room, wrote out a cheque and brought it back to him. “There has to be a certain amount of trust in this, monsieur. I must confess it is not a condition I usually accept”

  “Nor I, madame,” said Joseph. “We are each in a position of being able to doublecross the other. But each of us, I think, could soon repay the other. I think you have become desperate. That’s why you need me. And I” – he kissed the cheque, another Hungarian gesrture – “ I need this
. Good-bye, madame.”

  His poise had left him as soon as he had left the house. He had noted the address, then walked down Avenue Road to Regent’s Park. He had sat in the park all afternoon, taking out the cheque time and again to look at it, not with appreciation but with something like fear, as if the cheque itself might blow up in his face. At last he rose and walked on through the park, hearing the lions roaring across in the zoo, listlessly and bronchially, liked tired old men who knew their rage was hopeless. Young mothers, proud as mares, manes bright in the sun, strode by with their children; old lathes peg-legged by with their brood of dogs. He had come to like England and its way of life; the English amused him with their self-deception but at least they were civilised. He would have been sorry to leave London when the order came for him to move on to Washington.

  It had been a long-range plan, this planting of him as an ‘illegal.’ The three years as a waiter in the Hotel Duna, doing the occasional small job for Western espionage agents but always letting his Russian bosses know; the manufactured ‘escape’ during the 1956 rebellion; the several years with the innocent lord and duke; then the position with the Australian High Commissioner. The eventual aim was for him to be taken on at one of the principal embassies in Washington, the British, French or German; it might take years, but Moscow had been prepared to wait that long. And he, too, had been prepared to wait: after all, he could have been planted as a mechanic and spent the waiting years in some dirty garage in the Midlands. But now all the Russian plans for him were finished, even if Moscow did not yet know. In two days’ time, for he had now made up his mind, he would be on his way to South Africa. It was not what he would call a civilised country, but its wines were good, he would be able to afford a servant to look after him, and it was a country where Russian agents found it difficult to operate. And he did not want his retirement interrupted by some agent from Moscow seeking revenge.

  Now this morning he was waiting for Madame Cholon’s telephone call. He got up, began to take some of his clothes out of a closet. He folded them neatly, putting tissue paper round each garment; he had learned his job well as butlervalet, took pride in it. He packed only his best things: the Sulka shirts, the Peal shoes; it had been one of his nightmares that he might be recalled for duty in Moscow, would be reduced to wearing Russian-made clothes. He looked around his room at the items he had collected: the small Dresden piece, the three pewter mugs, the old matching pistols. They would have to be left behind, along with the leather-bound set of The Thousand and One Nights, the good Gauguin print and the small Persian rug. If a man was going to start a new life, he should start it with no identification at all. He already had a new name and a new passport. They were a precaution the Russians had known nothing about; another old Hungarian saying (he smiled to himself, recalling the conversation with Malone) was, “Just in case …” He would bequeath his belongings to the Spanish housemaid: they might wean her away from the cook and Radio Caroline.

  Then the cook knocked on the door and snapped, “You’re wanted on the phone. Some woman.”

  II

  The Rolls-Royce, the small Australian flag fluttering from its tiny mast on one fender, sailed majestically through the rapids of traffic up past Buckingham Palace. Other cars gave way to it. Malone, sitting in the back seat, could not tell whether the other cars were being deferential or just prudent; after all, a lightweight Ford would be foolish to take on something that weighed over two tons. But he enjoyed the feeling of being given way to; not even police cars got this sort of respect in Sydney. Then the slight feeling of pleasure thed at the thought of home. He looked at his watch: seven o’clock. In a little over sixty hours from now the man beside him would be stepping into a police car in Sydney.

  “Something troubling you?” Quentin said.

  The two men were alone in the back of the car and the division separating them from Ferguson was closed. Malone nodded and said, “Yes. You. Are you going to persist in leaving your wife out of this altogether?”

  “Don’t let’s discuss it, Scobie. I’ve made up my mind.” He looked at Malone, shifting in the seat so that he directly faced him. His voice was flat, neither threat nor plea: he wanted to hope, but thought it fruitless: “You’re not going to tell them in court what you heard last night?”

  Malone shrugged. He did not mean to be non-committal; he honestly did not know what he would do when the time came. “Depends what questions they ask me.”

  “But you won’t proffer the information voluntarily?” His words were stiff, an echo of the conference table.

  “I don’t know. I like to see justice done, that’s all.”

  “You mean you want to see my wife punished? That you don’t believe what she did was an accident?”

  They were caught in the pack-ice of traffic at Hyde Park Corner. A bus stood right alongside them: dozens of people stared in at them, trying to lip-read what was being said behind the glass. “No, I believe her. And I don’t want her to be punished – I mean I’m not vindictive. All I mean is, I don’t think you should chuck your life away. Tell them the truth. They might believe it.”

  “The way you say that proves you don’t think they will. No, Scobie.” He shook his head, looked out at the passengers in the bus. “There’s a jury for you. Do you think they would believe the story? Look at that woman in the pink hat, the one with all the feathers. Do you think she would ever have any compassion for a man’s mistress?”

  Malone and the woman stared at each other through the windows of the car and the bus; she pursed her lips, then turned away with something that looked like resentment. The bus moved on, going up towards Knightsbridge, taking the woman on to the home that she would defend tooth and nail against besieging mistresses. The Rolls turned down Grosvenor Place towards the mistress now besieged by the ghost of a wife. Malone sat farther back in the seat and changed the subject: “How did it go today?”

  Quentin was not accustomed to having younger, junior men turn the conversation on him. There was a momentary spark of anger, but it thed quickly. He, too, sat farther back in the seat, almost slumping. His time of authority was over; he and Malone were not even equals. He spoke listlessly: “It’s finished. We meet to-morrow morning, but it’s just a formality to draw up the communiqué.”

  “Did it turn out the way you wanted?”

  “Couldn’t have gone worse.” He looked sideways at Malone, permitted himself a little malice: “Can I trust you to keep quiet, at least till to-morrow?”

  Malone tried a little malice of his own: “You know who’s been the one to be trusted these past few days.”

  Quentin flinched, then nodded. “Don’t let’s quarrel.”

  The two men were silent for a while, each regretting his moment of malice. It was as if each knew he was tarnishing something that had never been valued but had shown promise.

  Then Quentin went on: “That African I told you about yesterday, the one with the Chinese accent, he got up today and spilled the works. Said that the Americans had plans, if the conference failed, to build up their forces in Viet Nam for a large-scale war. He knew all about it, even used an American term. Said they were going to ‘escalate’ the war.”

  “And are they?”

  Quentin nodded. “That’s their idea. But no one was supposed to know it but ourselves, the British and the South Vietnamese.”

  “What effect did it have when everyone else learned of it?”

  “The natural one. No one trusts the Americans any more. The irony is that the Viet Cong were probably planning exactly the same thing. It’s just plain common-sense insurance. But the Viet Cong kept their secret better than the Americans. Now they’re sitting back smug as cats and saying ‘I told you so.’ The whole conference folded up in a matter of minutes. There were a dozen so-called neutral delegates on their feet at once, all of them shouting that this proved the Americans didn’t want any sort of terms in Viet Nam but their own. We tried arguing, but we might just as well have tried arguing that our dei
n was the same colour as theirs. The room was suddenly divided into the ‘imperialists’ and the ‘independents.’ And the ‘imperialists’ were out-numbered ten to one.” He sighed on a personal note. “I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, with a small I. I really have been sympathetic towards the new countries, thought they’ve had a poor deal in the past and tried to do something for them. I’ve worked harder than anyone to make the Colombo Plan a success in Asia. But today they branded me, called me principal spokesman for the ‘imperialists.’”

  “They know that’s not the truth.”

  “Circumstantial evidence.” He looked up as the car drew up in Belgrave Square. “It’s a hard thing to beat, don’t you think?”

  Chapter Eleven

  “The English have conveniently short memories,” said the Indian, choosing caviare in preference to curry. “That way they can enjoy only the better aspects of their history.”

  “He’s so charming,” gushed the wife of the junior Foreign Office official. “Of course, he’s not civilised enough yet to be bad mannered.”

  “Importance is a matter of occasion,” said the man from the American State Department. “A king sitting on a john is only a man on a hollow throne.”

  “She calls it cleavage,” said the wife of a Cabinet Minister, “but at her age I think it looks more like erosion.”

  Malone listened to the remarks, some obviously rehearsed, others flung with sparkling spontaneity, as if the speakers were surprised by their own wit or wisdom. He kept one ear cocked for a remark on Australia and was not disappointed.

  “Australian women are so crudely unsophisticated,” said the man from Commonwealth Relations; he had been transferred from the Foreign Office as not being virile enough. “I do believe they use Airwick as a perfume.”

  Righto, mate, I’m going to do you, thought Malone; and moved forward. But Lisa came out of the crowd and caught his arm. “Careful, Scobie. Don’t break up the Commonwealth.”