"They're for emergency purposes."
"Anything that gets as far as us is already an emergency. Rules are rules." He spoke to the receptionist about the phone and ordered two cups of tea. He then turned back to John. "I must say you're looking a lot better than you were last time I saw you."
"Thanks. And if you tell me I'm the image of Jim, I'll put a chair through your window."
"Then I won't tell you. I take it from what I heard, that your mission was a success."
"In some ways. In others, it just opened up some very big gaps in the top-secret information you gave me before I left."
"Really? I'm certain everything I told you was the truth."
John decided it would be a disaster to have Woods as a bridge partner. The man's face projected every thought that went through his mind. John couldn't believe he had ever succeeded in the field. Right now Woods projected that he’d been caught cheating. "Perhaps you could give me an example of one of these 'gaps.'"
"Well, for example, you led me to believe that Jim and Coletta met in Hungary."
"I did no such thing. I don't even recall mentioning the relationship between your parents." A slight 'you got me' smile turned up at the corner of his mouth. "And are you telling me they didn't meet in Hungary?"
"Are you telling me they did?"
Woods was rescued by the tea. It was delivered by a smaller version of the reception gorilla.
When she'd gone, Woods blew the steam from his tea and smiled again. "All right. Why don't you tell me everything you know."
"There isn't time for that. I already know everything I know. It's what I don't know that I've come here for. And, by the by, I was a little bit more sensible this time. Taking my memory away won't do you any good. I wrote out a full report of everything I learned in Burma and deposited a copy with a few people. They won't open it unless something happens to me. The report includes everything I found out about Coletta's Burma connection."
Woods was still smiling as he got to his feet. He sipped at his tea and said, "Impressive. I don't suppose you'd like to come and work for us would you? You really are jolly good."
"I want that in writing with a salary statement. But first, suppose you tell me everything you know about Burma."
"Yes. I really don't have much choice do I. . . ? Come on over to the sofa. This could take a little time."
They carried their teas to the library corner of the large office, and sat at either end of a paisley-print couch. John was impressed at how civilized espionage could be. Woods began to recount the history as if he were the official state storyteller:
"Your father was with us from his early twenties. He was recruited from university; good grades, political science, Eastern languages. He was the sort the service was looking for. By the late sixties, he was already one of the department's top field operators. Not surprisingly, with his background, and all the hell that was breaking loose in Southeast Asia, he spent most of his time there.
“One of our main concerns then, as it still is today, was the flow of drugs into the Soviet bloc. When communism was at its most rampant, it was very difficult for us to get in to curb the flow on into Britain. So we had to focus on the source, which was the north of Burma. As long as the Americans were in Vietnam, there was a very lucrative regional heroin market. But we were afraid that once Nixon pulled out, the market would shift to us.
“We got Jim stationed at the IIC office in Rangoon. How am I doing so far. . . ?"
"That's pretty much what I've got," John lied. "Now, Coletta enters, stage left."
"Very left. She was such a pretty girl. I was stationed in the region then. I remember her well. I tell you, if John hadn't fallen for her, I would have had a crack at her myself." He suddenly turned as red as the flag. "Oh, I say. I am sorry. This is your mother we're talking about."
"No problem. I'm sure it gets worse."
"Oh, it does. She was in her mid-twenties I guess, and already a very experienced operative; what we referred to as a 'jam tart'."
A doubting smirk came to John’s face.
"Yes, it's a rather crude simile, but that’s what we called them then. Most of the communist bloc used them. In country, they'd pose as office workers, wait at restaurants; generally get in a position where they could flirt with foreign diplomats before getting them into bed. In the—"
"Are you telling me Coletta was a whore?"
"Well goodness me, I assumed this was the part you'd worked out already. I am sorry. But in fact they weren't really whores. They were trained agents."
"Spies who slept with diplomats?"
"Right. The overseas legations took them as junior office clerks and secretaries, and dangled them in front of ministers. It was a good source of information, and even better for blackmail."
Given everything he'd heard lately, John assumed he'd become unshockable, but this news shot his kneecaps off. The commander wasn't finished:
"Coletta was in a very difficult situation. She’d been widowed by the communists. She had her two children back in Budapest, and the government was holding them as hostages to keep her in the Service. She'd been trying to get out for a long time."
"Coletta had two kids before she met Jim?"
"Yes."
"Whew."
"You didn't know that either? What exactly do you know?"
"Keep going."
"Coletta was supposed to seduce your father to find out what he, and we, knew about Hungary's involvement in the drug trade. It was a Mexican stand-off really. We knew she was a. . . ."
"Jam tart."
"Yes . . . jam tart. It's actually the image of being red and sweet and—"
"I got it."
"We knew what she was, and they knew about Jim. So nobody was really fooling anyone. Except Coletta had decided to use Jim to get herself out of the work, and her children out of Hungary. She was prepared to share and steal secrets for us in return."
"And she sucked Dad into falling for her."
"She was very lovely. And to be honest, although it's hard to tell with women like . . . like that . . . I do believe she had feelings for him. Jim had been a very unattached person before Coletta, even though he was a good-looking chap. He was certainly head-over-heels about her. Who knows? They could really have been in love."
"So?"
"So, through Coletta, Jim got introductions to all the Tatmadaw involved in drugs. Most of them dealt illegally with producers in the top end of the Golden Triangle. She was able to convince them that John would be a good ally. He put contacts their way."
"He helped them sell?"
"It was necessary to establish trust."
John chewed over the facts so far. One horrific thought came to him. "You don't suppose Coletta and Bohmu Din were. . . ?"
"Oh, I doubt that very much. He was a very small fish when she was there. Barely worth baiting the hook. But he was certainly involved, and he was a messenger to the Hungarian Embassy, so they must have known each other. He didn't start to make serious drug money until the eighties when the Eastern European cartels became more powerful than their governments."
"So you did know about him?"
"We only made the connection after you got his real name. We knew of General Din, but we had no way of knowing he was Te Pao."
"But you knew Jim was going inside Burma to meet his drug contacts."
"Yes."
"Thanks for telling me all this. What happened to Coletta?"
"Something of a tragedy I'm afraid. We kept up our end of the bargain. The information she got us was very useful. We located her children and planned to smuggle them out at the same time as Jim and Coletta returned to England. Jim seemed delighted that he’d have an instant family. Coletta was over the moon that she’d be reunited with her sons.
"I saw them just before they left Rangoon. They appeared to be so content with each other. I was quite envious. I suppose that was the only time they were really happy."
"Something went wrong."
/>
"Drastically. It should have been the simplest thing. Our Hungarian agent was to pick the kids up at their school during the day. They weren't under guard or anything. They walked to the school from the government boys' home they were staying at. He contacted them on their way home and told them to expect to be called for a medical check-up the next day. He told them they’d be going to see their mother and that this had to be a secret.
"Well, I’m afraid the youngest boy was so excited he told his best friend, and word got to the director. When the agent arrived at the school, the secret police were there waiting for him. After some horrendous punishment he told them about Coletta's escape. The Hungarian Embassy missed her at Rangoon airport by ten minutes.
"And the children?"
"A lot of women had been coerced into the same type of work in the same way. Many of them had children in state homes. I suppose the secret police wanted to make an example of Coletta's children so others wouldn't try the same thing."
"Oh, God."
"It was rumoured that their throats were cut."
"Coletta must have been devastated.
"She reacted as any mother would have. Jim offered her what support he could. He blamed us for the disaster. He even considered leaving the Service. Coletta was naturally very bitter. In order to stay in Britain she had to marry Jim, as had been stipulated in the Immigration documents. He gave her the option to live apart, but she found she needed to be close to someone at that time. Your father was the only one to have shown her any genuine kindness. We gave him an extended leave to be with her. "
"So they were close."
"At that time, yes. And you were the result of that closeness. They hoped that having other children would help her get over her loss. It was a precarious psychological decision. A lot of people argued against it, but Jim was convinced they could make a go at being a happy family. Sadly, he was wrong. She couldn't bond with you at all. She was naturally afraid that getting close to you would leave her open for more heartbreak. She was very cruel to you at times. There was—"
"Wait. Please." John was winded. He needed a rest from the punches that were giving him little time to think.
So much was becoming clear. His hatred for Coletta now had a backdrop. So much about his childhood suddenly made sense. He had blamed her for his sadness, when in fact she had been the victim. He was just the recipient of her misery—not the cause of it.
He reached, without thinking, for his gnarled ear. As he touched it, the events leading up to it flashed in front of him like the opening reel of an 8-mm home film. It was like he had always known. . . .
He is almost five. Susan is just a baby. Jim's final attempt at happiness lays neglected in her cot, just had John had done before her. But John could be her protector. Knights were protectors, so he is her knight, and knights have swords. His sword is a rusted bread knife he rescued from the rubbish and sharpened on a stone. He keeps it hidden under the carpet beneath his bed.
He is woken in the night by his mother's screams from the next room. She is being killed. Even if she is a wicked mother, she needs a knight. Still half-in and half-out of sleep, he takes his sword and goes to her room.
Coletta is being murdered by a naked man. John is afraid, but he knows that as the protector of Susan and the house, he has to kill the man. He climbs onto the bed in the dark and attacks him with his sword.
There is confusion. Coletta's screams wake her dog. The dog comes to her aid and attacks the attacker. . . .
Woods was still sitting patiently with him, waiting for the end of John's day-nightmare; his daymare.
He looked at the Commander with disbelief on his face. "I . . . I just remembered. It's unbelievable. I could see the scene as if it had just happened. My bloody ear. I had no idea what happened to it."
Woods edged towards him. "You were very brave, lad. At that age, it's unlikely you were acting out of malice. It was a game that got out of control. If I recall the doctor's report, you made a number of holes in your mother's lover, killed the dog, and fought like blazes when she locked you in the wardrobe."
"Woody, I remember. I was in there for some time wasn't I."
"Several days before they found you."
"I remember . . . the smell."
"She locked the dog's body in there with you as a lesson."
"I was four or five years old."
"She was a very disturbed woman then, John. The second birth had dropped her into some dark pit. When Jim left for Asia, she was thrashing around . . . lost. They took her away to a home."
"No wonder I'm so fucked up."
"You could have been much worse, John Jessel . . . much worse."
*
Sitting in his car in the car park, he was still winded. He was shaking and smiling, and tears were in his eyes not knowing whether to be joy tears or sadness tears. Some programme in him was going back through his memory, knocking down old myths—standing up and dusting off old corpses.
As his past slowly re-arranged itself, so the present took on a whole new shape and feel. Who he was there and then was different to who he had been an hour earlier. He had gone to see Woods expecting to get a few details that would make him feel badly about his parents. What he got was a new mother and an even better father.
Anyone who had suffered as Coletta did would need time to evacuate the misery. With counseling and drugs, Coletta had mellowed out of hatred and into a more consistent sourness. But she was never to know happiness again.
When the wars in Southeast Asia had burned down to embers, Jim was called upon to renew the contacts they had made together in Burma. The old friends who remembered him and Coletta as young lovers were anxious to hear about her and his family. To protect them, the cover the Foreign Service came up with was that in giving birth late in life to Jim's third child, both mother and child had died. The truth was that most of her had died before giving birth to his first. Then Bohmu Din finished her off.
He tried to imagine how that could have happened.
She gets a call from Bohmu Din. She has no reason to associate this man from her past with the maniac pursuing her family. They talk socially on the telephone. Perhaps he reminds her of the receptions at the ministry in Rangoon. She tells him she still has photographs from one of them. He says he’d like to see them, perhaps get together?
So, because I'm in the hospital, Coletta comes to retrieve her own case. She invites Bohmu Din to her apartment. She opens the door to him and. . . .
"Coletta," John said, looking into his rear-view mirror at her ghost. "Your death was as much of a tragedy as your life. I'm sorry, old girl."
His trembling fingers bungled the job of turning on his mobile and activating the beeper. He'd almost forgotten both of them when he was leaving the building. Once it was on, the message on the beeper slapped him back: “To Em’s—Urgent.” It was from Shirley.
He first called Shirley's, then Susan's phones, but both were switched off. He'd told them not to for any reason. Why were they off? He called Emma but she was in court. She'd left the phone with a clerk, who promised to give the message when she came out.
He called back into Woods' office to tell him what had happened, and gave him the address. Something had to be wrong. He didn't want to call the police and have the address broadcast to cars in the area, just in case Bohmu Din was listening in. There was no choice but to drive down to Emma's place. He prayed that whatever had been so urgent was a false alarm.
The adrenaline helped him take control of the wheel and drive out into King Charles Street. He turned left and headed past the mews where the prime minister was taking afternoon tea. Two Asian tourists had come to watch from a distance. They hurriedly put down their cameras, ran to their car, and drove off after John's old Peugeot. They had finally received the order they'd been expecting: “Eliminate Angel One.”
54
Susan slowly came around, the fumes from the chloroform were still burning and heavy in her nostrils. Her first thoug
ht had been to take Eddo out of the house through the front door, but Bohmu Din was standing in the hall behind the kitchen door. She saw the briefest flash of cloth, felt a strong hand on her neck, and heard Eddo shout for her. That's all.
Now her eyes were wet and puffy, and she was shivering from the cold. She squinted to see where she was. She recognized the back bedroom at Emma's where she and Eddo slept. She was on the cold floor and slowly noticed through her dizziness, that her bathrobe was wide open, revealing her nakedness. She looked at her belly, moved her legs slightly, but saw and felt no evidence of rape. She immediately pulled the robe shut, and clumsily tied the belt.
She pulled up her knees to a fetal position, but her right ankle tugged against something metallic. She was joined to the long-abandoned metal radiator with leg irons—the type they put on convicts in Asian gaols.
She breathed deeply to clear her nausea, and looked slowly around the blurred room. Two small legs poked out from beneath a large overcoat on the bed.
"Eddo! Eddo wake up. It's mummy." But there was no movement.
"I'm afraid I've killed him. I'm terribly sorry." The man's voice came from a point outside the doorway.
Susan took some time to understand.
"No! Oh, God. No. It's not true. Eddo!" She tried to stand, to walk, but the chain. . . . She couldn't catch her breath. She kicked and kicked against the leg iron until the skin on her ankle split, and blood covered the chain. Crying deeply, she fell to the floor. "Eddo. Please wake up." From where she lay, she could just see beyond the doorway.
The man from the photographs, Bohmu Din, had pulled the lounge armchair as far as the bedroom door. It had been too wide to fit through the doorway, so he sat in the hall, frustrated.
He saw her looking up at him. "Sometimes I forget my own strength."
Susan found a second burst of energy. "No. No. Eddo! Mummy's here. It's all right." She crawled on her hands and knees to the radiator and, still crying, grabbed it with both hands and used all her strength to try to wrench it from the wall.
Evil in the Land Without Page 22