The Contract

by Gerald Seymour

  'Who sent you ? What do they want ?'

  'It would be better inside . . . it's not trouble, Mr Donoghue, nothing like that.' Pierce seemed the same age as Johnny and better equipped to communicate.

  He would have liked to send them away, liked to have spun them round and packed them away up the road, but they'd crucified him, hadn't they? A government matter, and that pricked his interest. He'd had his fill, the overbrimming cup, of men on government business. The army's Special Investigation Branch detectives who had taken his statement. The solicitor appointed to prepare his defence. The barrister paid out of public funds who represented him in court. The pin-striped suit who had come from Ministry of Defence and said that Guilty or Not Guilty there would be no place for him again in Intelligence Corps. But a government matter .. . and not trouble ... his curiosity won through.

  'You'd better come in.'

  Strange how a house could quickly lose its warmth when outsiders came. Johnny apologised for the size of the living room, scuttered forward to retrieve his cigarettes and matches, to empty last night's ashtray into the grate, to gather up yesterday's newspaper, to smooth down the cushions on the sofa. And he hated himself for his concern.

  'I'll go up and get dressed. Make yourself comfortable.'

  'Thank you, Mr Donoghue.' Pierce was conciliatory. 'We're sorry to be barging in so early.'

  Johnny nodded, then closed the door behind him and went up the stairs to his room. He dressed in the shirt hanging from his chair, the underclothes that were on the floor, searched for his shoes, took socks from the drawer. The shave would wait. Below him he heard a key in the door, the chatter of a farewell from his mother to a friend. He shoved the shirt-tail into his waist and went to the top of the stairs. The front door closed.

  'Mum,' he called.

  She stood small in the hallway, engulfed in her coat, wispy grey hair protected by a scarf, shopping bags around her. 'Have you done your breakfast, Johnny ?'

  'There's some men in the front, came to see me. I'm just dressing.'

  'Would they like some tea?' The thin piping voice. After all that had happened this woman could not believe that men who came to the house could be unwelcome.

  'They'll not be staying long enough for tea, don't bother, Mum.'

  Not having any bastards in dark suits with the whiff of London on them make his mother fuss round to get the best china out and rinse the milk jug and flap herself as to whether the room's tidy enough. He heard her go to the kitchen, and he came down the stairs and into the front room. They were where he'd left them, close together on the sofa and they smiled as if in a chorus act and stood up.

  'So how does a government matter affect me?' Straight into the eyes of Smithson, because he'd be the spokesman.

  'Quite right, Mr Donoghue, we shouldn't waste time. We shouldn't beat about the bush . . .'

  'Correct.'

  'Mr Pierce and I work for that part of the Foreign Office that concerns itself with intelligence gathering . . .'

  'Identity cards, I'd like to see them.'Johnny held out his hand, watched amused as the two dug in their wallets. He took the two plastic coated cards complete with the polaroid photographs. Access to Century House, London, Wl. Good enough.

  "Very wise, Donoghue,' Smithson said. 'With your background you will know of the work initiated at Century

  House. We've been asked to offer you a job, Mr Donoghue.'

  Johnny squinted across, slant-eyed, at the two men. Too bloody early in the morning to be concentrating.

  'Why me?'

  'In London they think you fit the scheme of things,' Pierce said quietly.

  'This is nothing to do with Intelligence Corps. Fresh faces, fresh work.'

  'What does it involve ?'

  'We haven't been briefed, not fully, only that it involves a show in Germany.'

  'And that's all you're going to tell me?'

  'That's all we can tell you,' Smithson said.

  'When do I have to make my mind up, by what time ?'

  Smithson looked at his watch. 'We're taking the lunch- time train to London. It's our hope that you'll accompany us.'

  Johnny slumped back in his chair, closed his eyes, blacked out the sight of the two men opposite him. Nothing more to be said was there?

  Couldn't be anything else. Of course they wouldn't travel north and march into the front room of a terraced home and then talk matters of National Security. All that would be in London, and there was no way of finding out more about what was asked of him without getting on the train to the big city. And the more they tell you the harder they'll make it for you to escape. Step onto that train, Johnny, and you're in, the clock hands will turn back . . . and they're asking for you, all nice and polite and they're asking for you. Sent these men up to this Godforsaken town on a Saturday morning because it's Johnny Donoghue they want, because Monday's too late for them.

  What to do, Johnny?

  He sat a long time and the quiet burrowed through the room. He'd been kicked bloody hard in the teeth by the establishment. But now they wanted him back. They wanted the man from Cherry Road. He'd never live with himself if they walked back to the station empty-handed.

  Johnny smiled, open and wide, the trace of a laugh.

  'If I'm to go to London I'd better finish shaving,' he said.

  The door was closed on the messenger and Doctor Otto Guttmann carried the suitcase back through the hall of the flat and into the small, pinched living room. He placed it on the floor, in the centre of the carpet and stood quite still and gazed down at the black leatherette case. He saw on its handle the baggage tag for Geneva, and attached by string was a cardboard label that carried the name and address written in a familiar and beloved hand. He looked up then at the plain wooden cross hung from the wall, contemplated it, as if it were a guarantor of strength.

  Otto Guttmann was tall, well shouldered, a large and imposing figure, but the sight of the suitcase magnetised his eyes and bowed his body.

  The messenger had known what he brought, had hurried to deliver the case and be away.

  Memories bounced into Otto Guttmann's mind. Memories of a small boy laughing and bickering with his father and mother on picnics on the Lenin Hills outside the city. Memories of a child dressed and scrubbed for school. Memories of a teenager complaining of lack of attention.

  Memories of the adulthood of his son and the pride of the boy that by his own efforts he had achieved selection to the interpreter school of the Foreign Ministry.

  Such a short time ago, it seemed, since Otto Guttmann had seen the case open and the clothes and trivial possessions placed in it and then its top pushed down and zipped and the lock fastened, and he heard again the laughter and excitement before the departure to the airport. The first time that one of his children had left the nest that he had made of the flat after the death of their mother. He stared down at the bag and in his hand was the key that the messenger had given him and he knew that by himself he lacked the will to open the fastenings. Old men can cry, are permitted to weep, it is the young who must not demonstrate their feelings of sorrow at bereavement. The tears came slowly and then rained on and on.

  Why had Willi been out on the lake in the darkness?

  Why had he taken a boat when the harbours were deserted? Why could they not even produce a body for a father to bury?

  His daughter had come into the room behind him, quiet as a gazelle, respectful of his mood. He started and shook himself as her hand linked under his arm and her fingers gripped at his elbow. A girl nearly as tall as himself. As the daughter of an old man should be, the prettiness of a picture, the strength of a buttress. She eased up on her toes and softly kissed his tearstained cheek.

  'I heard the bell, but I didn't think it would be this, not so early.'

  'They said that they would bring it today, they said that in the letter from the Ministry.'

  The letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had scarred him. Hand delivered as the telegram had been fiv
e days previously. The letter had been confirmation of the unthinkable and had irrevocably destroyed the chance that some terrible mistake had been woven around the family.

  'You want to open the bag, Father?'

  'We should.' His voice had a husked control.

  'The car will be waiting

  'This once let it wait.'

  Erica Guttmann carried the suitcase to her brother's bedroom, and her father followed. It was a tiny cubicle of a room that Willi had used, but then there had been no com- plaints; a three-bedroomed flat was a rare privilege, was the evidence that Otto Guttmann had been accepted into the elite of the establishment. A poster from the Olympic Games took pride of place on the wall in front of them, the symbol of the yachting competitions fought out in the Baltic city of Tallin. On another wall was a large framed colour photograph of a crew at work in the interior of a Soyuz space craft. A desk that was bare and cleaned. A radio with chrome finish on a low table and the pile of cassettes neatly stacked beside it. Curtains that had been drawn in the awful moments after the telegram had arrived. The single bed with gaudy coverlet where Willi would have slept the last two nights if he had returned with the delegation from Geneva.

  The room of Otto Guttmann's son, the room of Erica Guttmann's brother.

  She lifted the bag onto the bed.

  'It is best that it's done now,' she said.

  The key turned smoothly in the lock. The top garments spilled out and across the bed cover and with a careful discipline she began to make piles around the suitcase. Trousers and jackets, shirts and vests and underpants, ties and handkerchiefs. The shoes she put on the floor. She felt the brooding, wretched presence of her father, but did not look round at him, continued with her task, and then she sighed as she reached the bottom of the bag and the thick, dear plastic sack in which her brother's personal possessions had been packed. She bit at her lip, and emptied the contents onto the bed. A wallet that had been his father's present for his eighteenth birthday. A silver ink pen that had been Erica's gift at the last Christmas. A photograph frame that held in its three compartments pictures of father and sister and the three together in the sunshine of the Archangelskoye Park with Willi shining in his happiness and rising half a head above those who looked down at the picture. The girl heard her father's choked breath and his hand came to rest on her shoulder.

  'Go and get your work ready, Father. I will finish it.'

  He obeyed and the door closed behind her. She slid the clothes into the drawers of a chest, shovelled the possessions back into the sack and found room for it under the bed, hidden by the fall of the coverlet. Time when she came home for her to be more thorough. It was horrible for her father that there was nothing tangible for him to fasten to. No funeral, no rites, no burial. .. and if at some future date the remains of Willi were recovered from the water and returned to them then the wound could only be reopened and the pain reawakened. The stupidity of the boy but she must not think ill of him, not now, not ever again.

  She walked out into the hall, easy and graceful on her feet, swung back her head loosening the shoulder length of corn silk hair and pulled on her coat. Otto Guttmann waited by the door with his overcoat, gloves and scarf, and wearing on his face the conquering burden of age and extreme tiredness. For a moment they embraced, tight and clinging, arms close around each other, and then she had the key in her hand for the front door and they went out onto the landing and she shut the door of their home and locked it.

  Henry Carter knocked tentatively at Mrs Ferguson's sitting room door, was told to enter, but stood in the doorway to deliver his message to the lady who rested her sewing across her lap to hear him out.

  'Mr Mawby's just been on the telephone. There's going to be a bit of a party here for the next few days. He will be back himself and there's three more coming tonight, they'll all be in time for dinner ... if that's possible? Mr Mawby asked me to apologise for not having given more notice.'

  'It'll be no trouble.'

  'Something a little unusual, I think,' Carter confided.

  'I like the house full. It's such a waste when it's empty.'

  'It'll be a bit like the old days.'

  'And that'll be welcome,' she said placidly.

  Carter closed the door on her privacy. He walked into the main sitting room and pondered his own instructions, changed again by London. The boy, Willi, was to talk about his father. His personality, not his research work. Everything about the man himself, his habits, his interests, his life-style. Another blow at the consistency that Carter had been trained to believe was the hallmark of the debrief.

  Could they really be thinking of bringing Otto Guttmann out of East Germany? The repercussions if it went sour, by God. Carter felt his knees weaken and flopped into an armchair. Perhaps he was going too fast. Perhaps, but where else did the trickle of circumstantial information point?

  Chapter Four

  Because of the very stillness of the house Johnny woke early.

  Noise didn't concern him, not after the dawn bustle of a day starting in Cherry Road and the grind of the buses in Willow Lane, and the farther thunder of the fast trains through the town. Not after the daily rumble of Mrs Davies forcing her man out of bed beyond the common wall, and his mother on the move for the first of the kettle boilings, and the children pitched on to the pavements because it was a long walk to the new comprehensive school. He could stomach that. But the quiet was a killer, a destroyer.

  No one moved beneath him and he lay in his bed soaking up the silence, alert for any noise. An uncanny vacuum of sound, as if he were alone. But that couldn't be true because he'd seen a man who introduced himself as Henry Carter on his way to bed, and he'd climbed the stairs with Smithson and Pierce, and there was also the boy who was spoken of as Willi, and the shadow at his back, his minder. He hadn't actually seen the boy, but he had been told of him. And there was the housekeeper too.

  But none of them had stirred in Johnny's hearing that morning.

  He had cantered out of Lancaster almost without a backward glance.

  He had kissed his mother firmly on both cheeks, told her that he had been offered something special, that he would be away for a while, that the money was going to be good and could she be sure to give this envelope to the Prentice boy to take to the Tech - that he was turning the corner on the past. He had left her confused and struggling for composure, standing on the front doorstep shyly waving as he walked away.

  A couple of whiskys had been downed the previous night and there had been sporadic talk with Carter and Smithson and Pierce weighing him, and Johnny turning his concentration at them, evaluating their capabilities. But Johnny had it over them. He had the high ground. A contract man was only brought into the tight web structure of an operation to fulfil a pinnacle role. If it were too easy, too simple then one of the pension scheme men could have been recruited. When the going would be rough they looked for the contract man. Rough and dangerous, Johnny.

  Abruptly he swung his legs out of the bed and padded across to his bag. No need to pack for a lifetime, Smithson had said. A few shirts and underclothes, a spare pair of shoes, his army boots, his washing bag.

  He'd turned himself out well enough when he was in uniform, but that was back in the dark ages. Who looked at him now? He put on a shirt and knotted the old boys tie of the Grammar School, pulled up the trousers that were creased at the back of the knees, eased into his shoes that he should have polished before leaving home. The clothes he would have worn to the Technical College to take the German class.

  He let himself out of the bedroom and went carefully down the stairs.

  A wide, curved staircase with a polished wooden banister. He walked around the hall, and his feet sank into the pile of the carpet, his eyes on the pictures that were strewn over the timber panelling. They'd have plotted the subverting of the Bolshevik revolution in a place like this.

  Nothing would have changed. Extraordinary people, these hidden creatures of the Service. Perhaps the pond t
hey now looked into was too filthy, too slimed for their own hands, and so they needed a contract man to do their work, they'd have an outsider in for the job. And afterwards they'd let him wash and perhaps they'd wave a polite farewell and perhaps they would say he had done well and let him stay for more.

  ' I hope you slept well, Mr Donoghue?'

  Johnny spun round. Caught off balance, caught dreaming. Henry Carter was standing in the doorway that led to the dining room.

  'Thank you, yes ... I didn't know anyone else was up . . .'

  'We didn't want to disturb you, we thought we'd let you wake in your own good time.'

  Johnny looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes to eight. He blushed.

  There's some breakfast in here, if you'd like it,' Carter said. 'We don't usually have much at lunchtime. It'll keep you going till the evening. Mr Mawby's coming down then.'

  Carter showed Johnny into the dining room. They sat down by the window.

  Of the four other tables only one was occupied. A boy with a face that once had known the sun and a man opposite him who toyed with his teacup, heavily built and expressionless. Neither spoke.

  The housekeeper emerged from a far door, advanced across the linoleum floor.

  'Eggs and bacon for Mr Donoghue, I should think, Mrs Ferguson,'

  Carter said.

  Johnny agreed. That was the way it was going to be. He would be told his rest hours, told his work, told what to eat. Carter leaned forward, conspiratorial. 'Over there, that's the lad we're working on. Junior interpreter on the Soviet delegation of the disarmament chat in Geneva.

  Defected a bit over a week ago because the English girl he was taking out said she was pregnant and life couldn't go on without the two of them being together. It's not him that interests us. His father's the prime one.

  Dad was taken to the Soviet Union after the war along with a truckful of scientists and he's made his name there on the ATGW programme . . .