A Foreign Country

by Charles Cumming

  32

  François Malot finished his dinner, paid the bill in cash and made his way to the entertainment lounge on the upper level of the ship. He wanted to meet a woman and yet he did not want to meet a woman. It was a strange split in his mood, a confusion of desires. He felt a need to be outside himself, to engage with a stranger, yet he did not want to become involved in the tiring and complicated rituals of seduction. In any event, what were the chances of meeting a girl on a ship like this? A ferry halfway across the Mediterranean was not the same as a nightclub in Paris or Reims. He would be better off waiting until Marseille and buying a girl, if he could get away with it. He couldn’t have risked a prostitute in Tunisia, not with the laws as strict as they were, but a couple of times at the Ramada he had been so starved of sexual contact that he had booked himself in for a massage in the therapy centre, just to feel a woman’s hands on his skin. It wasn’t the same when Amelia did it, rubbing suntan lotion on to his back beside the pool. That wasn’t what François had wanted. That sort of behaviour confused him.

  He had been seated at the bar in the lounge for about ten minutes when he became aware of a man standing beside him, trying to attract the attention of the barmaid. François recognized him as the passenger he had seen in the restaurant reading a copy of Time magazine. They had nodded at one another and François had felt his gaze once or twice as he ate his pasta. He assumed, by the man’s pale complexion and slightly unkempt appearance, that he was British. The collars of his shirt had lost their stiffness, he was sporting at least a day of stubble and his shoes were brown and scuffed. Before he knew it, he had caught the man’s eye again and they were making conversation.

  ‘Impossible to get a drink round here.’

  François shrugged. Though he understood English, he was in no mood to stagger through a stilted conversation with a stranger. Besides, he loathed the British assumption that all foreigners could be spoken to in English. The stranger seemed to detect his reluctance and said: ‘Vous êtes français?’

  ‘Oui,’ François replied. ‘Vous le parlez?’

  It transpired that the man’s name was Stephen Uniacke and that he spoke excellent French. At first, François was slightly worried that he might be gay, but early in the conversation Stephen vouchsafed that he was ‘happily married’ and was making his way back from Tunisia after spending a week at a hotel in Hammamet.

  ‘How did you find it down there?’

  ‘Package tourism distilled to its essence,’ Stephen replied. ‘Kids on inflatable sausage rides, fish-and-chip shops, sunburned Anglo-Saxons everywhere you look. I might as well have stayed in Reading.’

  The barmaid eventually came over. François had reached the bottom of a gin and tonic. He wasn’t surprised when Stephen offered to buy him another one and felt that he could not refuse.

  ‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’

  ‘My pleasure. Are you travelling on your own?’

  Perhaps he was gay. Perhaps Stephen Uniacke took holidays in Hammamet because he liked picking up boys on the beach.

  ‘I am,’ François replied, wondering whether he would be obliged to tell Amelia’s story all over again. He was bored even of thinking about it.

  ‘And you live in Marseille?’

  ‘Paris.’

  The deliberate brevity of his answer seemed to convince the Englishman that he should change the subject. He had settled at a stool alongside and now cast his eyes around the room, perhaps while thinking of something to say.

  ‘This place looks like it was decorated by Grace Jones with a hangover.’

  It was a very good description, very apt. François laughed and looked across the lounge. A man of about fifty was squeezed into a disc jockey booth with a pair of headphones clamped to his scalp. He was trying to entice a group of over-excited Marseillaise housewives on to the dance floor, but so far only a young boy of about ten seemed interested. One of the housewives had looked at François once or twice, but she was fat and lower class and he had paid her no attention. The lighting design was retro-purple, a disco ball spinning blurred stars around the lounge. The DJ started playing ‘Let Me Entertain You’ and Stephen mock-coughed into his drink.

  ‘Oh Christ.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘On behalf of my countrymen, can I just apologize for Robbie Williams?’

  François laughed again. It felt good to be engaged in a normal conversation with somebody who was bright and funny. Amelia was all those things, but their time together had been different, more like a series of interviews or business meetings in which they were working one another out. One evening in Tunis, when Amelia had gone to bed, François had felt like going out and had taken a taxi to a club in La Marsa. But the local nightlife had not been to his satisfaction. He had sat alone at the edge of a dance floor watching Tunis’s smug, idle young rich trying to seduce Muslim girls who would surely never sleep with them. Sex in Islam was the ultimate sin for a woman before marriage. The boys wore big watches and preened their hair with vats of gel. One of the girls, wearing too much eyeliner, had flirted with François, and he had thought about approaching her for a dance. But you never knew who might be watching; he never knew what he could or could not risk. The Tunisian men all looked slightly overweight and sported sinister moustaches. One of them might have been her boyfriend or brother. He had felt sorry for the girl and wondered what would become of her.

  ‘How did you find the food in Tunisia?’ Stephen was asking.

  He could tell that the Englishman was struggling for conversation, but this was a subject about which François was enthused. He replied that he had enjoyed an evening with his mother at an open-air fish restaurant in La Goulette, but that they had both been disappointed by the couscous at an undeservedly famous Tunisian restaurant in Sidi Bou-Said.

  ‘I had a disastrous time with the food,’ Stephen revealed. ‘Ordered “merguez” in one place thinking it was fish, but ended up with a sausage. Tried to play it safe the next night by ordering “tajine”, but that turned out to be some kind of omelette. Hadn’t been within a thousand miles of Morocco. You said your mother lives in Tunis?’

  Now François was trapped. He would have to say something about Amelia or it would seem rude.

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  Stephen looked at his drink, looked at the disco ball, looked at François. ‘I’ve got all night.’

  So he told him. The whole thing. The murder in Egypt. Trying to contact Amelia through the adoption agency. Their reunion in Paris. Then he described the week they had spent together in Gammarth. It was like telling a favourite anecdote; he embellished certain elements, skipped over the parts that no longer interested him, tried to depict Amelia in the best possible light. Stephen, as François had anticipated, was by turns appalled at the tragedy in Sharm-el-Sheikh and delighted that mother and son had been brought together so quickly in its aftermath. Yet François soon began to tire of his sympathy and questions. By eleven o’clock he had reached the bottom of a second drink, the one he had been obliged to buy for Stephen in thanks for the first, and wanted desperately to be free of him so that he could return to his cabin. It was just a question of finding a way to escape. Thankfully, a woman on the opposite side of the bar had been staring at them for some time. At first, François could not tell with whom she was flirting. She was an attractive, if severe woman in her late thirties; he had seen her on the ship in the afternoon, reading a newspaper in the lobby. Usually, he would have assumed that any available woman on board would have preferred his company to that of the Englishman, yet increasingly she seemed to be directing her attention towards Stephen.

  ‘Looks like someone likes you,’ he said, flicking his eyes in her direction.

  ‘Who?’ It appeared that Stephen had not even noticed the woman.

  ‘Across the bar. The lady with the dyed blonde hair. You want me to invite her over?’

  Stephen looked across, startled. François noted a flush of embarrassment in his cheek
s as he caught her eye. She looked away.

  ‘I think she’ll almost certainly be more interested in you,’ Stephen replied.

  It was a flattering observation but it was also the opportunity François had been waiting for. His glass was empty. There was a long day ahead. He had every excuse to leave.

  ‘No,’ he said, rising from his stool. ‘I will leave you to her.’ He shook the Englishman’s hand. ‘It was interesting to meet you. I enjoyed our conversation very much. Perhaps we will see one another again in the morning.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Stephen replied, and with that the two men parted.

  33

  It had been a long time since any woman had given Thomas Kell the eye and he was suspicious immediately. Why now? Why on the boat? As soon as Malot left, the woman went full throttle with her disco seduction: a comely smile, an eyelash enticement, even a smothered, schoolgirl laugh when the middle-aged disc jockey in his sparkly booth started playing ‘Billie Jean’ at top volume. The approach was so gauche that Kell began to think she could only be a run-of-the-mill civilian: surely no intelligence officer – state-sponsored or private sector – would ever make such an obvious and direct approach?

  As soon as François had left she was coming over, slipping off her stool, walking around the bar. Kell looked away in the direction of the portside windows, but there was soon a slice of dyed blonde hair in his peripheral vision, then the bottom of a skirt, a slash of thigh. She was standing beside him. Late thirties, slim, no wedding ring. Their eyes met and she produced a knowing smile.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

  He didn’t. The accent was scrambled, originally French, but with long periods of exposure to North America. He had no idea where or when they might have met. Did she know him as ‘Thomas Kell’, or as another man, one of the myriad pseudonyms he had adopted down the years? Was he a spy to this woman, or a consultant? Was he a lawyer or a civil engineer? Had he met her when he was ‘attached to the Ministry of Defence’ in London or was she a student from his long-ago days at Exeter University? He could not remember anything about her, and was usually expert at such things. Perhaps she was connected to him via Claire: Kell had always had a blind spot for his wife’s colleagues, her cousins, her friends.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t …’

  ‘It’s Madeleine. You remember? DC?’

  Kell tried to keep his composure as his memory ran a showreel of highlights from numerous visits to the American capital: interminable meetings at the Pentagon; a rainy afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial; guided tours of the National Museum of American History; the firing range at Langley, where an over-excited training officer on the Farm had tried to instigate a shooting competition between SIS and the CIA. At no point could Kell recall a slim, bottle-blonde French woman with a scrambled accent playing any part in these proceedings.

  ‘DC?’ he repeated, buying time.

  Had he met her at a dinner, in a bar, in a nightclub? Kell knew the names and faces of the eleven women he had been to bed with in the course of his life and this lady wasn’t one of them.

  ‘It’s Michael, isn’t it?’ she said.

  He knew then that she had made a mistake. He had never used the legend ‘Michael’. Stephen, yes. Tim, Patrick, Paul. Never Michael.

  ‘I think you may have confused me with somebody else,’ he said. ‘I’m Stephen. Stephen Uniacke. From England. Good to meet you.’ Kell extended a friendly hand, because he did not want to embarrass her. It was perfectly plausible that she had invented an entire phantom story simply to break the ice.

  ‘How strange,’ she replied. ‘Are you sure?’ Her neck flushed red and the thump of ‘Rolling in the Deep’, the energy in the bar, seemed to isolate her. ‘I was certain it was you. I’m so sorry …’

  She began to back away, heading towards her seat, as though she had asked a boy to dance and he had refused her. The barmaid seemed to be enjoying the atmosphere of embarrassment and was staring at the woman, probably storing up an anecdote for the later amusement of the crew. Kell was aware that any number of possibilities was still in play: ‘Madeleine’ could be part of a surveillance team watching François. If French Intelligence had found out about Malot’s relationship with Amelia, they would almost certainly have sent people to track him. Kell’s lengthy conversation with François at the bar would have been noted. Madeleine, on post in the entertainment lounge, would have known that she had a responsibility to find out more about him. Hence her ridiculous story about Washington: she had not had the time, nor perhaps the expertise, to think up a better cover.

  ‘Please, let me buy you a drink,’ he said, because it was now important for him to ascertain precisely who she was. He could not remember seeing Madeleine at either of the hotels in Tunisia, but that was of little consequence. Even a half-decent DGSE team would have remained under the radar.

  ‘I don’t want to bother you,’ she said, with an expression of neediness on her face that precisely contradicted that statement. ‘Are you sure?’

  The barmaid was pretending to arrange glasses but was self-evidently still listening in. Kell was curt with her, ordering two red wines and hoping that they would be left in peace. He offered Madeleine the same stool that Malot had only recently vacated. If she was a spy, he could expect several things. Forensic initial questioning about his legend. Who are you, Stephen? And what do you do for a living? Then, perhaps, a period of small talk in which Kell would be able to relax and encouraged to drink more alcohol. Then further exchanges that would subtly test the integrity of his cover. For example: if he told Madeleine that Stephen Uniacke was a marketing consultant, he might expect later questions about the details of his job. If he mentioned Reading as his place of residence, an experienced spy would almost certainly say that she had visited the city and perhaps ask questions about local landmarks. If Kell hesitated on any answer, or was ignorant on a point of detail, it would untangle his legend.

  Of course, this worked both ways. Kell had been presented with a similar opportunity to make an assessment of Madeleine. What did you do in Tunis? Why are you coming back on the ferry? If the alcohol on her breath was anything to go by, she might prove easy to break down. It was just a matter of asking the right questions.

  And so it began. The game. The dance. Yet for the best part of forty-five minutes Madeleine Brive exposed Stephen Uniacke only to the full glare of her blatant sexual desire. She was divorced. She had been on a ‘boring’ holiday in La Marsa with an ‘alcoholic’ friend whose husband had left her for a younger woman. She part-owned a clothing store in Tours that sold designer labels to rich Loire Valley housewives and was worried that her fourteen-year-old son was already smoking ‘a lot of fucking cannabis’. Kell was struck by the extent to which she seemed almost entirely interested in her own personality and circumstances, rather than in asking questions of her own. He gave Madeleine ample opportunity to probe Stephen Uniacke for details about his profession, his marital status, his home, but she did not seize any of them. Instead, as a second glass of wine slipped down, quickly becoming a third, the clock drifted past midnight and she made it clear that she wanted to go to bed with him, even to the point of touching his knee, in the manner of a guest on a talk show trying to ingratiate herself with the host.

  ‘I have a cabin,’ she said, a little hiccupy giggle accompanying the pass. ‘It’s very big.’

  ‘Me too,’ Kell replied, trying to kill the offer at source. ‘Mine is very small.’

  It was a depressing, even emasculating feeling, but he had no desire to sleep with this woman, to thrash in the night on a bed only fractionally larger than a yoga mat. No cat small enough to swing. Madeleine Brive was beautiful, and lonely, and her perfume was the memory of other women. When she smiled at him, Kell felt the rush of her flattery, the relief of being taken for a normal man in normal circumstances engaged in the age-old cut-and-thrust of sex and desire. But his heart wasn’t in it. His heart was still attached to Claire. He was a still-married man
on a boat in the middle of the sea with a responsibility to honour his estranged wife.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been sleeping lately. Will you forgive me if I slip away?’ It was an embarrassing excuse, but perhaps not out of character for Uniacke. ‘It was so interesting to meet you. Maybe we could have lunch in Marseille?’

  To his surprise, Madeleine appeared almost relieved.

  ‘I would love that. I love Marseille. Will you be staying a night there?’

  ‘I haven’t decided.’ This, at least, was the truth.

  So they swapped numbers – on a napkin and pen proffered by the frowning barmaid – and made tentative plans to meet for breakfast in the canteen. Madeleine knew the finest restaurant in Marseille for bouillabaisse and promised to take him there.

  She left the disco before he did. The barmaid watched her leave and glowered at Kell, as if she had seen it all before. You think nobody knows what’s going on? She’s given you the number of her cabin. You’ll head down there in five minutes when she’s had time to get into her negligée. Kell flicked her a look and she went back to arranging her glasses.

  Five minutes later he was in the bowels of the ship, close to the spacious cabin of the tempting Madeleine Brive, but standing at the door of his own room, tapping in his four-digit code.

  An unsettling feeling was upon him, as though he had been tricked or humiliated. Something was not right. Kell cast his mind back to what he had seen at dinner, to the strange encounter between Luc and Malot. Why had the two men ignored one another when François had walked into the restaurant? Because they did not want to eat together – or because they did not want to be seen in one another’s company? François himself had turned out to be an unusually remote and delicate man, sensitive and vain, yet possessed of a quick intelligence and an underlying melancholy that Kell put down to grief. Had he been approached by Luc that afternoon? Was that what Kell had seen – an offer of recruitment from the DGSE? Six figures to tell us everything you know about Amelia Levene? Stranger things had happened. Of course, it was probable that there was zero threat on the ship. Most likely Madeleine was exactly who she said she was: the owner of a clothes shop in Tours looking for a quick fuck on the high seas. And Luc? Who was to say that he and François had not simply shared a run-of-the-mill conversation on the sun deck and then gone their separate ways? Yet as Kell opened the door of his cabin, something felt out of place, something as yet unknown to him. Something was wrong, yet he could not identify precisely what it was.