The Night Watch

by Julian Dinsell

  Often in the small hours of the morning, frame by frame, he studied the anger and the raw courage of the crowds and towards the end, he saw the light of victory in their eyes.

  Within a year, Communism was declared dead and the nations of the Soviet Empire rushed to bury the corpse. While CNN hailed The march of freedom, for Thornhill, the most important thing was what the viewer did not see and which no political commentator pointed out. The victorious crowds in the streets were not a conquering army, but a people marching into a vacuum.

  Not long afterwards, he was invited to deliver the Churchill Memorial Lecture whose purpose was to look into alternative political and social futures for the Western world in the 21st century.

  “Peace without purpose is all too often a void into which new conflicts are drawn,” was how he had tried to sum up his misgivings. “Political structures may come and go, but the human condition remains unchanged…” Speech making did not come easily and he had laboured long to make his thoughts sound less reactionary. Now as he spoke, he quickly realised how far out of tune he was with an audience high on political euphoria. “In Russia, the revolution before this one started with the overthrow of a thousand years of authoritarianism alleviated only by periods of tyranny. The reformers lasted a matter of months, then the Bolsheviks took over and one age of oppression seamlessly followed another. Significantly, all that happened to the secret police was that the name was changed – several times. The new state was more efficient than the old one. It industrialised the means of controlling the population.”

  Of course, they had heard it all before and could see no reason for it to be said again now. Thornhill was glad that the end was in sight. “Whatever comes next will be the child of our times; times in which the predominant force is not political or national ambition as it was with the Bolsheviks or the Nazis, but economic power in a moral vacuum.” Thornhill could read the audience’s faces. None was engaged with his thesis. “In the West, democracy has become the servant of economics. In the Islamic world, to our great puzzlement, we have seen a violent tide of rejection of these principles.” The argument needed passion and he knew he did not do passion well. He ended: “In the face of this changing world, our economic superiority is both fragile and insufficient. At best, it can only solve economic problems. The dangers that we face now, most especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, lie not at the frontiers of nation-states but deep in the nature of humankind.” They had listened politely and applauded briefly. In retrospect, Thornhill realised that the response was inevitable. Though his definition of the problem was sharply resolved, he could supply no better answers than anyone else. He was not used to feeling inadequate, and remembered the experience with discomfort.

  Not long afterwards, Kloptik’s first message came; newspapers and television news were full of speculation about a world summit, possibly in Geneva. ‘A World Without War’ was the slogan.

  In the face of global terrorism, it felt as if the world’s major powers were ‘getting the wagons in a circle’ as Thornhill put it. There was much speculation about a Treaty of Friendship: something new in the history of the world, bringing together the nations of Western Europe and North America with the new Russia, and the other states that had emerged from the former USSR. ‘From the Rockies to the Urals’, the Daily Telegraph said.

  “How wise to leave out California,” Thornhill remarked to a friend as he left the office at midday.

  Chapter 6 - Bach

  Once every two weeks, Thornhill allowed himself a visit to the lunchtime concert in St John’s Smith Square, a deconsecrated baroque church used by the BBC as a music-recording studio. It was there that he was confronted with half-forgotten encounters from the past. His routine was normal. He bought a salami sandwich and a double espresso from the Italian café in Vauxhall Bridge Road and ate along with an attentive audience of office workers from the Department of Transport and nurses from Westminster Hospital, both less than five minutes away. The music was joyful, the Bach Suite No. 2 in B minor for Flute and Orchestra. Thornhill remained preoccupied with the memory of the music as the audience moved slowly through the door and out into the angular winter sunshine.

  “Kloptik says you will understand.” It was a female voice on the steps behind him. The code name, even after so long, had the power to stop him dead. Thornhill was used to controlling impulses.

  Not wanting to display surprise, he turned slowly. She had the fair hair and blue eyes of someone whose family history lay in the Baltic. He had never seen her before, either in person or in the endless videos that London Briefing supplied to Section Heads. Almost all the comings and goings of the numerous former Eastern Bloc embassies, trade missions and cultural organisations strung out across London were on tape. But she was a newcomer.

  “I am called Anya,” she said, as if her name explained everything.

  Thornhill recovered his composure and smiled as if to a favourite niece. “How very nice to see you again. Do you have time for a stroll?” He moved off without waiting for an answer.

  As they reached the bottom of the steps, he deliberately walked through a bed of leaves fallen from the many plane trees in the square. They felt soft underfoot and exposed a spectrum of mellow colours as his polished brogues ploughed through them.

  “London can be beautiful at this time of year, don’t you think?” He wanted to keep up the small talk until they reached the main road a hundred yards away. He sensed her nervousness, but she seemed to understand.

  They crossed Vauxhall Bridge Road, turned left and walked towards the river. If they were being monitored, the sound of heavy traffic on the Embankment would make the task of the listeners difficult or, with luck, impossible. She spoke first. Her English sounded as if it was not used often. Her accent was Slav, Thornhill thought.

  “Things are not what they seem. The great meeting…” she said with urgent uncertainty.

  “You mean the summit?” asked Thornhill.

  “Yes, in Geneva. It is not reality.”

  Thornhill played for time. “Of course not, there’s no fixed date for it yet.”

  She continued as if he had not spoken. “The reality is otherwise. It is very destructive. It is fatal. It is what he told you about a long time ago.”

  Thornhill said nothing.

  “He said you would understand,” she added with rising anxiety. But Thornhill did not understand, and it was important not to let her realise it.

  “I need to speak to him,” he said.

  Beside the river, they walked on in silence; Thornhill knew that she was deciding whether she could trust him with the next part of what she had been told to say. It was clear that she was disturbed by his non-recognition of the message. He judged it prudent to remain silent. The traffic roared by, covering the fallen leaves with a layer of grit and diesel soot. Eventually, she made her decision.

  “He is travelling to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. Give me an address. I must reach you personally. The office is not good,” she said.

  Thornhill gave her the address of the safe house in Lambeth.

  “I’ll have him met at the airport,” he said cheerfully.

  “No.” Her reply was firm. “Air travel is too easy to trace.”

  Nobody in Europe had talked like that for a long time. Was it paranoia?

  They turned away from the river and drew closer to Pimlico underground station. She turned to go inside.

  At the top of the escalator she spoke. “Tell him: ‘I will bring reality with me’. He told me to say that.”

  Keen not to betray his lack of comprehension, Thornhill hesitated. “How can I reach you?”

  She did not reply, and in a moment was gone.

  Should he have tried to stop her? Could he have discovered more? He examined his decisions carefully. The answer to both questions had to be no. He was sure that she did not yet have the information that she had spoken of. Holding on to her would only separate her f
rom the source.

  He strode quickly back to his office. As he entered the building, he passed by Sergeant Willis without his usual greeting. But his haze of preoccupation was penetrated as he passed the transport office at the end of the corridor. One of the drivers was talking.

  “Old Prickly has taken to chatting up the birds. I saw him with this blond at lunchtime, a right looker she was…”

  So they were being watched. Thornhill smiled as he walked on. When he got to his office, he cleared the desk of everything: the computer terminal, files, letters and trays of documents. He took a pad of plain paper and with his battered Waterman began, piece by piece, to re-construct what happened when he first met Kloptik.

  The one thing that had kept the encounter alive in his memory was that, even now, he did not know if what had happened was accidental or planned. If it was not coincidence, the degree of insight into his character had been astonishing. The event had to be the result of pure chance or great precision, one or the other; the facts did not fit anything in between.

  He had come upon Kloptik during one of his regular visits to Hamburg, on this occasion to resolve a squalid dispute between field personnel that had led inevitably to the red light district of St Pauli.

  “Another triumph of the late-lamented German economic miracle, Europe’s most efficient hypermarket for the sale of human flesh.” He was trying to get a smile out of Koenig, the humourless signals officer, as he left the office for a day of meetings.

  Coming up for air, in the late afternoon, he had more than an hour and a half to spare before his next appointment. It had been raining heavily, but now the air was clear and he decided to walk towards the Alster, a string of lakes in the centre of the city. It was a walk he always enjoyed. ‘For anyone with prejudices about the German national character, Hamburg is a great day out,’ someone had said at an Embassy party the previous evening. He was reminded of the observation as he watched a procession of overweight and overdressed elderly couples perform their afternoon ritual: a promenade past the windows of banks, each with a display of video screens showing the rise and fall of shares and commodities on the world’s major markets. Nothing that happened in Tokyo or New York was without interest, so long as it had an effect on share values. One large couple, complete with a small dog on a long lead, looked so much like the creation of a cartoonist that Thornhill’s natural courtesy was overcome and he laughed out loud. They did not notice. Like lovers, their concentration was total, not on each other, but on the prices.

  Thornhill came alongside the St Michaelis Kirche, whose spire is to Hamburg what St Patrick’s twin spires are to Manhattan, or Westminster Abbey is to London. A large billboard offered an organ recital. Thornhill knew it was an instrument with an international reputation. He hesitated, weighing up how he should invest the next hour – reflectively by the lake, or listening to Bach. The opening notes of a fugue drew him inside.

  The hard high-backed pews were made of solid oak. By habit, he chose the first row from the entrance that already had an occupant. He wanted to be close enough to the door to leave without being noticed, yet be less conspicuous than he would be by sitting entirely alone. Thornhill thought that it was such matters of detail which separated the excellent from those who were merely good at the job. Slowly he turned to look at his neighbour, a small grey-haired man in a creased raincoat, damp from the recent downpour. The old man sat rigidly upright, with his hands holding a shapeless hat that rested on his knees. The interior of the church was like nothing Thornhill had seen before. Protestant builders in this northern city, being denied the religious imagery of the Catholic south, had carved a sea fantasy. The centrepiece was the pulpit, a giant oyster shell borne on the pinnacle of a breaking wave, all in grey-green marble. Thornhill supposed that the preacher, or perhaps the preaching, was intended to be seen as a pearl. It was only the beauty of the materials and the quality of the craftsmanship that saved the work from looking like Disneyland.

  He shuddered at what the result might have been if fibreglass and plastics had been in the architectural lexicon of the 17th century.

  The music was magnificent, all possessing. Thornhill closed his eyes and listened. The preposterous marble seascape now put him in mind of the real thing. The sound swept into the mind, like surf breaking on a rocky shore, seeking out and filling every empty crevice. At the end, he sat for a moment in silence, eyes still closed. As he rose to his feet, the aisle was blocked with people talking about the performance. He turned to leave the pew in the other direction and saw that the small, dignified man with the grey hair was crying. He sat perfectly still, his dignity strangely enlivened by tears. Thornhill was flushed with English embarrassment at the sight of a grown man weeping. As he went to step past him, the man spoke without turning his head.

  “Here is reality…” He looked directly at Thornhill. “The rest is vanity.”

  With the music still ringing in his ears, Thornhill had some feeling for what he meant.

  The man fumbled for a handkerchief, wiped his eyes, smiled and continued. “I am an expert in vanity. Would you care for a consultation?”

  Thornhill was intrigued and he still had half an hour to spare. Was the man an eccentric? A defector perhaps, or just lonely? Thornhill felt conspicuous and sat down.

  “That would depend on the fee,” Thornhill said.

  The man looked him directly in the eye and spoke very deliberately.

  “I am not a merchant, I am a student.”

  Thornhill said nothing. Early in his career he had learnt that, sometimes, silence is the most probing form of question.

  “I am called Kloptik,” the man said, extending his hand, “a student of human frailties.”

  Thornhill shook the outstretched hand; it was small and bony but had a spring-like resilience. He looked around to see if they were being watched, but the church had emptied. Together, they began a slow circuit of the interior.

  The man spoke slowly and with care. “I said I am an expert, and so I am. My home is Poland, so I have had a front-row seat in the theatre of vanity. We Poles have observed many virtuoso performances: Hitler and the Nazis, Stalin, the Red Army and the Workers’ Paradise that they brought with them. And now…” His voice trailed away, and then he changed tack. “And you, my silent friend, what of you?”

  Thornhill thought fleetingly that only foreigners, usually Americans, used the word ‘friend’ in that way.

  “Me? I’m just an administrator.”

  “An administrator?” The man turned the word over carefully like a jeweller holding a fake gem up to the light. “I have known many administrators. Yours is a sinister profession.” The Pole suddenly laughed and Thornhill half-heartedly joined in. “Let us see the last of the daylight. The moments before nightfall are always to be savoured, don’t you think?”

  Thornhill didn’t reply but moved in the direction of the door. The older man followed. In the street he gestured to a café across the busy street.

  “A game of chess perhaps? The chess café is close by and they serve excellent coffee.”

  “No,” said Thornhill.

  “Don’t you play?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t time.”

  “Some service to perform, something to administer?”

  “Yes.” Thornhill didn’t like being interrogated, even in minor matters.

  “This evening perhaps?”

  Thornhill thought of the alternative – another Embassy reception and then Wagner.

  “Very well, eight thirty?”

  “Eight thirty it shall be.”

  Thornhill shouldered his way through the rush-hour crowds to the office behind the Kunsthalle. He went to the third floor in the ornate brass and wrought-iron elevator.

  Behind his borrowed desk he went over the incident carefully from start to finish. If he had not known he was going to end up at the recital, how could anybody else have predicted it? He chose to sit where he did. The Pole was already in place; how could it be a set-up?<
br />
  He checked the registry and called London on the secure line. While waiting for replies, he remembered a chance remark made by a wise old soldier: ‘Nothing ever happens by accident’. But for that to be true there was someone out there who knew Thornhill better than he knew himself. Someone who knew he would choose the recital, rather than a walk by the lake; someone who even knew where he would sit. It was unnerving.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the network printer in the next office. Koenig, the Duty Signals Officer, came in with the brief message: no trace. Koenig was a short, well-groomed man with a reputation for being none too bright.

  “Anything I can help with, sir?” he asked over-eagerly.

  “Do you believe in accidents, Koenig?”

  “Depends on who they happen to, sir.” Not so dim after all.

  *

  Eight-thirty found Thornhill at the chess café. The Pole was already seated at a small corner table.

  “You came!” he exclaimed with mock surprise.

  “Yes,” Thornhill said curtly as he sat down. ‘Always say less than your opponent,’ was advice he frequently gave to others. Now he remembered it himself.

  The waiter came and the Pole ordered a beer for them both.

  “Do you play well?”

  “No,” he replied truthfully.

  The game began.

  “You enjoy Bach?” The man across the table continued without waiting for an answer. “In Warsaw we have a Bach circle – academics and scientists.”

  Thornhill wondered which his opponent was, an academic or a scientist.

  The Pole continued. “In my experience, if you share a love of Bach with someone, you share a regard of many other things; certainly that is how it began for us in Warsaw.”

  “Who in Warsaw?” Thornhill interrupted.

  “For us, the Night Watch.”