Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  He sipped, closed his eyes, tried to make his mind a vacant place – a little chamber of Zen-like withdrawal which the woman couldn’t enter, where she couldn’t materialize in his head, where he wouldn’t have to dwell on what she’d done at the resort – but external noises kept disturbing him.

  The bedroom, at the rear of the flat away from the street, would be a better place to sit. He rose, carried his drink, wandered across the living-room – pausing a second to examine the bookshelves, thinking he might choose something in which to lose himself, but he’d developed a weird superstition about the books. They had belonged to Roxanne: the Penguin classics, the thin volumes of poetry – these were her books and he hadn’t opened one since her death, and he had the feeling that if he were to do so it would be tantamount to unlocking a vault of memories he didn’t need. So he passed the shelves by, and continued into the bedroom, on the threshold of which he stopped quite suddenly.

  He was beset by a fluttering sense that something wasn’t quite right. He looked round the room: whatever was different wasn’t immediately obvious. There was Roxanne’s photograph on the night-stand, the unmade bed, a couple of discarded shirts. A silly moment, he thought, the product of a mind that couldn’t get out of overdrive. And yet he felt strangely unnerved as he moved toward the bed and lay down, carefully holding the glass of malt whisky.

  He rearranged the pillows, raised the drink to his mouth, turned his face to the night-stand, froze. It was strange and terrible, he thought, how quickly the familiarity of things changed, how the commonplace bits and pieces of a life became charged with malign significance. A simple picture frame made of steel, a plate of glass, a signature across the bottom of the photograph: something he saw every morning of his life and didn’t pause to think about it.

  Now – now it was very different.

  6

  LONDON

  Victoria Station was a huge noisy cathedral filled with people in too much of a hurry to worship. Locomotives shunted, pigeons flapped under the great glass roof, announcements warbled in a liquid way from loudspeakers. Pasco, as instructed by James, had taken a taxi from the hotel to the station. From Victoria, he was to hire a second cab to carry him to an address in Kilburn that James had given him. He understood he was travelling through the narrow arteries of a private network to which James belonged, one of cryptic connections and affiliations.

  Cryptic – but there was nothing mysterious about the cash in the bank. Pasco had made certain of that as soon as he’d left the hotel. He’d even withdrawn some funds for carrying-around cash, fuck-you money – five thousand pounds. He’d purchased a small leather bag for his few new belongings, toothbrush, change of underwear, extra socks, a new shirt, and he’d bought an eelskin wallet he’d stuffed with crisp notes. Money boosted you: he had no doubt on that score.

  The address he’d been given in Kilburn turned out to be a redbrick house in a dead-end street. He rang the bell and the door was opened by a slender woman in her late thirties whose plainness was exaggerated by a shapeless floral dress, thick-framed glasses, drab prematurely greying hair. Her expression was unwelcoming. Pasco was reminded of a woman who’d once worked in Statistics at Langley, a sweetheart really, but one of nature’s spinsters. That’s how she was known around the place. The Spinster.

  He introduced himself as Richard Pasco. He told her she’d been recommended to him by somebody called Galkin, which was what James had told him to say. She hesitated only a second before she allowed him to enter the house, shifting her body slightly so that he could pass.

  She showed him into a sitting-room, furnished with inexpensive pieces, worthless bric-à-brac. Grubby lace curtains hung at the windows. The room looked to him as if it had been assembled quickly with items purchased at Salvation Army shops. She didn’t invite him to sit, which was what he really wanted to do, because his body ached.

  ‘Where did you meet Galkin?’ she asked.

  Pasco foundered a moment. The woman made him nervous. Even though James had rehearsed him for several hours, and he’d concentrated hard on everything he’d been told, he had one of those moments of panic in which his memory fractured like a brittle cobweb.

  ‘Where did you meet Galkin?’ she asked again.

  ‘I was in Russia,’ Pasco said.

  ‘And?’

  The mechanics of revenge, Pasco thought. How goddam complicated they were. ‘I met Galkin in prison.’

  ‘How did he look?’

  Pasco remembered the photograph James had shown him. ‘He wasn’t in terrific condition.’

  The woman was quiet a moment. Her eyes had an interrogative intensity Pasco didn’t like. He had the feeling she could see straight through him. Don’t look away from her, James had said. It’s important you don’t feel overpowered by her.

  ‘Tell me more about Galkin,’ she said.

  Pasco said, ‘Mole on his left hand.’

  ‘And?’

  He scratches the mole a lot, James had said. He can’t keep from scratching it. Pasco said, ‘He never stops picking at the goddam thing. It bugs the hell out of him.’

  ‘And?’

  And what? Pasco wondered. He was filled with the urge to turn and walk out of here, forget the whole complicated situation, go back to the States and do the business himself, keep James’s money and to hell with all this clandestine crap – but he had the feeling James and his people wouldn’t be charitable in the matter of funds going astray. He had the distinct sensation that at the exact moment he’d withdrawn the five grand from Barclays Bank, he’d sealed an inexorable bargain, and there was no way out of it except in a rectangular box. What was more, he’d come to the conclusion that the people James represented were hard cases, gangsters, connected to that whole new breed of criminals Gorbachev had left behind in the turbulent wake of his reforms. They weren’t the sort of people who took prisoners. They preferred death by Uzi to incarceration every time. Corpses you could dump; prisoners you had to feed. James had hinted at the nature of his associates’ business quietly, nothing very specific, sure, but just enough for Pasco to get the general picture. What the hell, he was in now, he’d been dealt a hand of cards and all he could do was play them and swallow hard.

  ‘And, Mr Pasco?’

  ‘What else do you want to know?’

  ‘Galkin. More about Galkin. First name.’

  ‘Vladimir,’ Pasco said.

  ‘Besides the mole, what else?’

  ‘Other blemishes, you mean?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Pasco felt as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting in James’s lap. ‘No other blemishes I could see. He was doing time for currency manipulation. Black market stuff. Five years.’

  ‘Currency manipulation,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And you were what – in the same prison?’

  ‘Penal camp number six eight seven,’ Pasco said. It was one number he’d never forget. Not until he drew his last breath.

  The woman was quiet again. Her silences were like little hives buzzing with menace. Pasco wondered why he’d been sent to her, what was so important about this woman, what role she was supposed to play in the scheme of things.

  ‘Show me your passport,’ she said.

  He produced the document, handed it to her. She flicked the pages and said, ‘Old photo.’ She returned the passport. ‘What was your crime, Mr Pasco?’

  Be honest when she asks, James had said. Don’t lie about that one. He looked directly into her eyes and told her. ‘I worked for the CIA and …’ He faltered under her gaze. Despite his resolve, he felt a kind of withering.

  The woman remained impassive. ‘Go on.’

  ‘They sent me into Moscow ten years ago. It was a simple deal, they said. My front was the usual kind of thing, American businessman interested in exploring new markets for textile manufacturing equipment. I had glossy leaflets, brochures, specs of machines, samples. Everything the Agency could provide in the way of an authenti
c identity. My real purpose, they told me, was to contact some former Politburo clown and bring out a few documents. Don’t ask me what. I don’t know. I was only a glorified errand boy.’

  ‘And it all went wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, it went wrong.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I was smuggling fucking drugs, that’s what went wrong,’ he said. ‘I was set up and sent down the river without a paddle for ten years. Soon as I got off the plane in Moscow, they seized my luggage and ripped it open, and guess what? Fifteen kilograms of uncut cocaine. Fifteen, Christ. And I never even knew I was carrying the goddam stuff. But those Russian bastards did, because they’d been tipped off. They were waiting for me at the airport. Welcome to Russia, welcome to some real hard times.’ He heard a whistling sound in his ears. The memory of this treachery always unhinged him. Be controlled, James had said. Don’t lose it in front of her.

  Easy for you to say, James. You didn’t spend ten years in the tundra, did you? You didn’t wake up every goddam day with acid burning in your gut and your bones aching and ulcers bleeding in your mouth, and you didn’t catch your flesh on some rusted old piece of barbed-wire and it turned eventually to gangrene and you didn’t undergo crude surgery and waken during the operation to hear the sound of the fucking saw grind through your bone, did you, James, whoever you are?

  ‘Why were you betrayed, Mr Pasco?’ she asked.

  You were traded, James had told him. Langley wanted a man out of Russia, and you were the currency of the exchange. Tit for tat. Pasco realized he was sweating. His hands had begun to tremble. He said, ‘It was a swap. They had somebody Langley wanted. I was considered expendable. Fourteen years in the Agency, fourteen years I spent setting up complicated computer networks and satellite links, and I was suddenly expendable. Not incompetent, not dim-witted, not senile, and certainly not a security risk – none of that. Expendable. Big E.’

  ‘Cruel,’ she said, but without any judgement in her voice. ‘Why tell me your story? Why come here and tell me?’

  ‘Galkin,’ he said. ‘Galkin told me to contact you.’

  ‘What exactly did Galkin say?’

  Pasco heard James’s words in his head. Remember this, don’t forget Galkin’s exact words, they’re very important. Get it wrong and you’re going nowhere. But his memory was fogged again, as if it were glass against which steam condensed. He was afraid of faltering. His lips were dry. The woman’s spectacles caught sunlight and resembled two big slot-machine tokens.

  ‘Galkin said, look for Carolyn. When you need her, look for Carolyn. She knows which way the ball rotates.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  The paper, James said. Don’t forget to show her the paper. He put his hand in his pocket and from a compartment of the eelskin wallet drew out a weathered slip of cheap, rough-fibred paper. He passed it to the woman, who took it and regarded it slowly.

  ‘He gave me that,’ Pasco said.

  She said nothing, just studied the paper. Then she handed it back to him.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said.

  He felt he’d passed part of a test. The preliminary. There was more to come.

  The woman showed him up to an attic room with sloping walls and a skylight, a narrow metal-framed bed, outdated copies of Newsweek on a bedside table. An old black-and-white TV set in the corner.

  ‘You can stay here,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk later.’

  When the woman had gone, Pasco lay on the bed and stared at the skylight, a red rectangle of sunstruck glass. The space was stuffy but he didn’t have energy to get up and open the skylight. For a long time he didn’t move, conscious of how his breath came in gasps and a chill entered his bones.

  He slept a half-hour, drifted, dreamed he was standing in the watch-tower looking down at a frozen white compound surrounded by an electric fence. When he woke he wondered what it meant, why he should be a guard and not a prisoner.

  The chill had lifted from his body and he was breathing with some ease. He’d fallen asleep with the slip of paper still in his hand. He looked at it, read the words. Caro. Provide the bearer with every assistance, for old time’s sake, Vlad. It was like some kind of currency, a promise to pay. He wondered what sort of world he’d fallen into – old messages on slips of paper, strange phrases about the rotation of a ball. A world of passwords, he thought. OK, he should have been used to that because that was the kind of world they taught him at Langley, but he’d been away for ten years, and you got out of old habits. You forgot stealth, you forgot the nature of secrecy, your nerve wasn’t what it used to be, the iron inside you had turned to rust, and you weren’t going to get a blue ribbon in the health department. Anyway, you’d had other things on your mind for ten years. You had good excuses for forgetting how that world of secrets operated. You had the best of excuses.

  Caro, he thought. Was the plain bespectacled woman Caro, or some kind of intermediary? And Vlad, who the hell was Vlad? Too many questions. James had warned against asking himself too many questions. Either you go all the way with this, or we back off now. And so he’d trusted James, because that’s what it came down to in the end, trust, a concept he never thought he’d use again in his life. But here he was, trusting a man he hardly knew – and on what basis? Half a million bucks and a new passport and the promise of assistance, that was the basis. Shit, you had to admit that was some kind of reassurance.

  The woman made a phone call to a number in Biarritz. She was connected after an insufferable length of time to a man who announced himself as Galkin.

  ‘Caro,’ she said.

  He spoke in Russian, his voice calm. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Yes, it has.’ She used English.

  ‘This is so unexpected,’ he said.

  ‘I have an enquiry,’ she said.

  ‘Are we going to speak the same language or do you insist on using English?’

  ‘I’ll speak whatever I please, Vladimir.’

  ‘Combative as ever,’ he said. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Somebody brought me an interesting piece of paper, Vlad.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He calls himself Pasco. Richard Pasco.’

  ‘Ah, yes, poor Pasco. A victim of injustice.’

  ‘You gave him the note?’

  ‘Of course, dear lady. I gave him the note.’

  ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘We were obliged to keep one another company in a certain penal institution. We became close. He confided in me.’

  ‘Describe him.’

  ‘Pale, not very interesting to look at. His hands are scarred. He’s missing his left leg.’

  ‘You trust him?’

  ‘It’s his hatred I trust. And since that’s all there is of the man – well, yes, I trust him.’

  ‘I don’t approve, Vlad. I don’t like anyone coming here. I don’t like the idea of you sending this man to me. I happen to value my privacy.’

  ‘Send him away then. It’s up to you.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, and hung up.

  Later, the woman brought Pascoe tea on a tray, and digestive biscuits he washed down with the milky tea. She said, ‘When you finish, come downstairs,’ and then she left the room.

  He sipped the tea, flicked the pages of the old magazines. The world had changed in the years of his imprisonment. People he’d never heard of had been elevated to fame. New politicians, as fucked-up as the old ones, ran the planet. New entertainers, sillier than before, had come to prominence. But beyond that, nothing seemed to have changed: people still killed each other in unholy numbers. Wars were abundant. The Cold War was a memory, and hot new wars had replaced it.

  The world didn’t interest him. His focus was narrow. He gave up on the magazines. What happened next? What was the next step? A coughing fit seized him, and the inside of his chest felt as if it were lined with corrosive fluids. He had to get up, couldn’t lie flat on his back and cough up his lungs. He rose, walked the room, stifled
the fit.

  Out of nowhere he had a memory of his departure from Dulles Airport, July 1986. He remembered Sandy kissing him goodbye outside the departures gate. He remembered the smell of her lipstick, the breathless way she had of speaking. I’ll miss you, hon, she’d said. Still, it’s only ten days. (Ten days, right. Sandy had drifted out of his life, vanished into the shadows, probably married by now, and who could blame her after his prolonged absence?)

  He remembered turning back as he passed through the gate, raising his arm in a farewell gesture. Sandy was waving in that frantic, motorized way she had. You’d think she’d wave her arm out of its socket.

  And then he remembered how his eye had been drawn a moment past Sandy’s face and beyond, to the crowd of people saying their goodbyes, and he’d seen Grimes standing a little way back from the throng, unsmiling in his lightweight seersucker suit, frowning like a man confronted by a sandwich of maggots. Grimes, a ten-year-old snapshot he’d never quite forgotten. Grimes had come to see him vanish through the departures gate. He’d come to preside over his disappearance.

  He’d thought a lot about the seersucker during his time in the tundra. He’d thought about Grimes, and all the others, and the places where they trained agents, and how they recruited them – and all these thoughts and recollections formed a massive knot inside his brain. And that knot, so intricately tight, had to be undone.

  It was time to go downstairs.

  He opened the door. He stepped from the room, stood on a landing. The house was perfectly silent, a dead clock. He descended.

  He entered the sitting-room where he’d been earlier. The woman sat in a large wine-coloured armchair. She held her hands rather primly in her lap. ‘How much money do you have?’ she asked.

  ‘Enough,’ he said.