Tom, it’s me. Look, I don’t see why we’re bothering any more. Do you? I think what we really need is to face this thing and to make a formal move towards divorce. It’s obviously what you want …
There was a brief pause in the message, then silence. Kell pressed ‘9’ to save what he had heard, then moved to a second message. It was Claire again, picking up where she had left off.
For some reason we were cut off. What I was trying to say, what I was about to say, is that it’s what I want. A clean break, Tom.
She had probably been into her second bottle of red, a couple of gins, too, if history was anything to go by. There was another pause in the message, a gathering of thoughts. Kell knew what was coming. Claire had a standard game plan whenever she sensed that her husband was drawing away from her.
Look, Richard has invited me to go to California. He has a series of meetings in Napa and San Francisco and it only seems fair to tell you that I’ve booked my flight and intend to go. Or rather, Richard has booked my flight. He’s paid for the ticket. I’ll probably be gone by the time you get back, wherever you are, whatever’s going on. It’s your business, so …
Another cut-off. There was no further message. Kell, winded by shock and jealousy, put the phone in his back pocket as he was ushered forward by a moustachioed passport inspector with blond highlights in his hair. A quick glance at the passport and Stephen Uniacke was waved through. A consultant. A married father of two. Not a soon-to-be-divorced husband with a wife jetting off to California in the arms of another man. Not a childless spy on the trail of a friend’s secret son. Not Thomas Kell.
He was soon outside, into the heat and thrash of Marseille. At the perimeter of a congested traffic area – a temporary roundabout taking vehicles in and out of the docks – Kell looked around, knowing that invisible eyes, in cars, in windows, would be watching Stephen Uniacke. ‘There is no such thing as paranoia,’ an SIS elder had once told him, many years earlier, ‘there are only facts.’ It had sounded like a clever thing to say, but in practice it was meaningless. In counter-surveillance, there were no facts; there was only experience and intuition. Kell merely had to put himself in the shoes of the DGSE to know that they would tail him for his first few hours in Marseille. If his cabin had merited a break-in, his movements on the mainland would be more than worthy of attention.
Marseille. He took in the high blue sky, the distant cathedral of Notre-Dame de la Garde, the blaze of sunlight on slate and terracotta roofs. Then, directly in his line of sight as he lowered his gaze, François Malot. The Frenchman was standing with insouciant cool on the far side of the roundabout, climbing into a taxi driven by a man in his fifties who was almost certainly of West African origin. A seagull swooped low over the roof as Malot ducked into the back seat. Kell had a clear sight of the number plate and committed it to memory. There was a phone number on the side of the taxi and he tapped it into his mobile, just as a vacant cab swung into view. He raised his free hand to hail it, but two elderly foot passengers stepped in front of him and attempted simultaneously to flag it down.
‘My cab,’ he shouted out, in French, and to his surprise they turned and conceded the point. The vehicle was a Renault Espace, more than large enough to accommodate three passengers, and Kell offered to share the ride. It was a decision taken solely for the benefit of the DGSE; he wanted Uniacke to look like a nice, considerate rosbif heading into town, not a suspicious British spy with instructions to follow François Malot wherever he went.
The couple turned out to be Americans – Harry and Penny Curtis – both retired former air traffic control officers out of St Louis who had glimpsed the chaos in the skies and vowed never again to travel anywhere by aeroplane.
‘We spent a coupla weeks down in Tunisia, came back over with SNCM,’ said the husband, who had the quick eyes and broad, fattened build of a former soldier. ‘Visited the Star Wars locations, checked out the Roman ruins. You staying a while in Marseille, Steve?’
Kell concocted a story for the benefit of the driver, who might later be questioned by the DGSE. He had long since lost sight of Malot’s vehicle.
‘I think I’m going to stay in town for a night. Need to find a hotel. I met someone on the boat who promised to show me around and take me for bouillabaisse. I don’t have to be home for a couple of days, so I’m hoping we’ll spend some time together.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Harry. ‘You mean some kind of a lady friend?’
‘I mean a lady friend,’ Kell replied, and flourished a knowing smile.
He was thinking, of course, of Madeleine, whose napkin-scrawled number was still nestled at the bottom of his suitcase. With Malot evaporated into the Marseille traffic, she was now his best lead. He wondered if she would call. If Madeleine hadn’t made contact by the evening, he would try the number on the napkin. Most probably there would be no answer, in which case he would head out to the airport and try to run Malot to ground in Paris.
‘We got a train leaving Marseille at five,’ said Harry, scratching what looked like an infected mosquito bite on his forearm. ‘TGV up to Gare Lyon.’
‘Lee-on,’ said Penny, because her husband had rhymed ‘Lyon’ with ‘lion’. Kell smiled and she returned his grin with a wink. ‘Then a whole week in Paris, can you believe it? The Louvre. Musée d’Orsay. All those shops …’
‘… all that food,’ Harry added, and Kell had a sudden, sentimental desire to join them on the five o’clock, to hear their stories of St Louis, to share in their joy at being in Paris.
‘I hope you both have a wonderful time,’ he said.
37
It did not take long for Amelia Levene to clean up the loose ends of her truncated visit to France. There was a chambermaid at the Hotel Gillespie who had agreed, for the sum of two thousand euros, to say nothing about Madame Levene’s prolonged absence from her room. Amelia had paid her half in advance on the morning of her flight to Tunis and now settled the debt as she packed her belongings, the chambermaid having made a special visit to her place of work in mid-afternoon from her home in the suburbs of Nice.
Next, Amelia put a call through to the Austrian divorcee who had organized the painting classes. Brigitta Wettig accepted Amelia’s effusive apologies for abandoning the course after less than two days, but assumed that she had been ‘sick or something’ and seemed concerned only that Mrs Levene would now demand a refund.
‘Of course not, Brigitta. And one day I hope to be able to return. You really do have the most wonderful set-up here.’
Three hours after landing in Nice, Amelia was on her way back to the airport, having retrieved her personal effects from the boot of the hire car in Rue Lamartine. By eight o’clock she was in London, en route by cab to Giles’s house in Chelsea. They had arranged to eat supper together. Amelia had told her husband that she had something ‘important’ that she wished to discuss with him.
They picked a favourite Thai restaurant at the western end of King’s Road. Giles ordered a green curry, Amelia a chicken and basil stir-fry. It was late on a Saturday evening and there were perhaps a dozen other customers in the restaurant, none within earshot and most on the point of asking for the bill.
‘So you had something you wanted to say,’ Giles began, hoping to get the more awkward part of the evening out of the way so that he could enjoy his curry in relative peace. Whenever Amelia called a summit meeting of this kind, it was usually to confess that she had ‘slipped up again’ with Paul Wallinger, her long-term lover. Giles was long past caring and, frankly, would have preferred not to know. It irritated him that his wife always chose one of their favourite restaurants in which to vouchsafe her indiscretions, thereby preventing him from giving expression to his rage with a full-scale row.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely honest with you about something in my childhood.’
That was a new line. Usually it was: ‘I’m afraid I’ve behaved rather unkindly,’ or: ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be pleased.’ This time, howe
ver, Amelia had opted for the enigma of her past.
‘Your childhood?’
She dabbed her face with a napkin, swallowed a prawn cracker.
‘Not my childhood, exactly. My teenage years. My early twenties.’
‘You mean Oxford?’
‘I mean Tunisia.’
And so it came out. The story of her affair with Jean-Marc Daumal; the birth of their child; the boy’s adoption by Philippe and Jeannine Malot. Giles’s curry arrived but he found that he could not eat it, so great was his sense of shock and near-revulsion. The first ten years of his marriage to Amelia had been a prolonged nightmare of fertility tests, of third trimester miscarriages, of interviews with adoption agencies which had offered the shattering verdict that Giles and Amelia Levene, despite their impeccable professional and personal credentials, were considered too old to take on the responsibility of caring for a young child. And now here was Amelia calmly informing him that, at the age of twenty, she had given birth to a healthy baby who had surfaced in Paris more than thirty years later to steal her heart and to draw her away from him still further. Giles wanted, for the first time in his life, physically to assault a woman, to send the whole edifice of their sham and sexless marriage crashing to the ground.
But Giles Levene was not the demonstrative type. He lacked physical courage and he hated making a scene. If he had been a more self-analytical man, he might have acknowledged that he had married Amelia because she was emotionally stronger than he was, intellectually at least his equal, and his social passport to the high tables that would otherwise have been denied him. Taking a sip of his white wine and a first mouthful of curry, he found himself saying: ‘I’m glad you’ve told me this’ and thought how much his own conciliating voice sounded like his father’s. ‘How long have you known?’
‘About a month,’ Amelia replied, and took his hand across the tablecloth. ‘As you can imagine, I don’t know how I’m going to work things out with the Office.’
This astonished him. ‘They don’t know?’
Amelia chose her words carefully, as though picking out the chillies in a stir-fry. ‘I decided never to tell them. I didn’t want it on my record. I thought it would affect any chances I had of making a success of my career.’
Giles nodded. ‘Obviously nothing turned up during the vetting process.’
‘Obviously.’ Amelia felt the need to expand. ‘The adoption was arranged through a Catholic organization in Tunis. They had links back to France, but my name was never recorded in the paperwork.’
‘Then how did François find you?’
More out of habit than calculation, Amelia decided to protect Joan Guttmann’s identity.
‘Through a friend in Tunis who helped me during that period.’
Giles leaped to a conclusion. ‘The boy’s father? This Jean-Marc?’
Amelia shook her head. ‘No. I haven’t seen him for years. In fact, I’m not sure he even knows that François exists.’
As the meal progressed, Giles’s temper subsided and Amelia told him of her plans eventually to bring her son to London. They had talked about it at the hotel in Tunisia. With his parents murdered, François felt that he no longer had much of a life in Paris and would welcome a change of scene.
‘What about his friends?’ Giles asked. ‘Is there a wife, a girlfriend? A job?’
Amelia paused as she recollected all that François had told her.
‘He’s never had a serious relationship. You might call him a bit of a loner. A rather melancholy soul, if I’m honest. Prone to the odd mood swing. Not unlike his father, in fact.’
Giles wasn’t interested in pursuing this line of enquiry and asked how Amelia was going to clear things with SIS.
‘I think the best thing is to present him as a fait accompli. It’s hardly a sackable offence to have given birth to a child.’
Giles saw how proud she was to have uttered these words and felt the revulsion again, the returning sense of his own miserable isolation.
‘I see. But they’ll want to know that he’s the real thing.’
It was the closest he could come to wounding her. Amelia reacted as though he had spat in her food.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, surely they’ll want to vet him? You’re about to become the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Amelia. They can’t have a cuckoo in the nest.’
She pushed her plate away from her, a sound of crockery meeting glass.
‘He’s mine,’ she said, hissing the words as her napkin hit the table. ‘They can test him all they fucking want.’
38
The cab driver dropped Kell at a three-star hotel en route to the Gare Saint-Charles. He bid the Americans goodbye, handed a twenty-euro note to Harry, waved away Penny’s objections that he was paying ‘way too much’, then stood on the pavement with his bags while taking a non-existent call on his mobile. Turning to face the oncoming traffic, Kell looked carefully for vehicles pulling over, of possible watchers on foot or bike, for furtive movements of any kind, all the time reciting some favourite lines from Yeats into the receiver to give the impression of an ongoing conversation. When he was satisfied that there was no apparent threat, he walked into the hotel, booked himself a bed for the night, rode the lift to the third floor and unpacked his bags in a room that smelled of detergent and stale cigarettes.
Claire’s message still scratched at him like the bite on Harry’s arm, a calculated insult to his pride, to his fidelity. Richard Quinn, the hedge fund bachelor with two ex-wives and three sons at St Paul’s, was the primary weapon in Claire’s extra-marital armoury, a background threat to whom she would turn whenever Kell looked like leaving her on a permanent basis. Richard knew of Kell’s background in MI6 and plainly viewed it as an affront to his ego, as though Her Majesty had made a grave error of judgement in failing to recruit him into the Secret Service some thirty years earlier. Now fifty-five and rich beyond imagination, he regularly tried to lure the newly single Claire to five-star hotels in Provence and Bordeaux, whenever his so-called ‘professional interest in wine’ took him overseas. In an unguarded moment, returning from one such trip to Alsace, Claire had begged Kell for forgiveness and confessed that she found Quinn ‘boring’.
‘Then why the hell do you fuck him?’ Kell had shouted, to which his estranged wife, so shattered by unhappiness, had replied: ‘Because he is there for me. Because he has a family.’ Kell could summon no adequate response. The logic of her grievances was so chopped, her despair so wretched and apparently incurable, that he had simply run out of ways to console her. Quinn could no more give her a child than any of the other men she had turned to in her desperate promiscuity; the infertility was hers, not his. Kell loved her more deeply than perhaps he had ever said, but had reached the conclusion that their only viable future lay apart. The thought of such a failure, the thought of divorcing Claire, was enervating.
His mobile was ringing. Only a handful of people had the number.
‘Stephen?’
The accent was unmistakable.
‘Madeleine. How nice to hear your voice.’
‘Of course!’ It sounded as though she was calling from a residential street. Kell heard the wasp buzz of a passing moped, the larger echo of the city. ‘So you would like to meet for dinner, as we talked about? Are you free? I can take you to have la bouillabaisse.’
‘Sounds great. I’d love to. I’ve just checked into a hotel …’
‘… Oh, which one? Where are you?’
Kell told her, because he had no choice in the matter. Luc and his pals would now have a fix on his position and would surely lose no opportunity in taking another crack at Kell’s laptop. Though he was certain that the computer could not incriminate him, he would have to carry it with him and remove anything sensitive from his room whenever he left the building.
‘I’ve got no idea what street it’s on,’ he said. ‘A cab dropped me at the edge of the Arab quarter, about half a mile from the station …�
�
‘Never mind,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘I can find it. I will come to pick you up at seven o’clock and we can walk to Chez Michel. It’s on the other side of the port. Not far.’
‘Seven o’clock,’ Kell confirmed.
That gave him five hours. After eating lunch in a café two blocks from the hotel, Kell returned to his room and used the telephone beside his bed to ring the backstop number for Uniacke’s family, a line that existed solely as an answering service for the benefit of snooping spooks. Kell heard the pre-recorded voice of a female colleague at SIS masquerading as Uniacke’s wife.
Hello. You’ve reached Stephen and Caroline Uniacke. We’re not at home at the moment, but if you’d like to leave a message for us, or for Bella and Dan, please speak after the beep.
Kell did what he had to do.
Hi, sweetheart, it’s me. Are you there? Pick up if you are. [An appropriate pause] OK. I just got off the boat and wanted to see how you are. I’m going to stay in Marseille tonight, then perhaps stop off in Paris on the way home. There’s a client I want to see, but he doesn’t know whether he’s going to be in town. I might get a flight back to London tomorrow and be home for supper or I might be in Paris for a couple of days. Anyway, I’ll let you know. Beautiful weather here, going for bouillabaisse tonight. Call my mobile if you get the chance or try the hotel. Cheaper that way. It’s the Montand. I’m in room 316.
He left the number of the hotel, blew a kiss to his phantom wife, told her that he loved her and that he missed ‘Bella and Dan’, then hung up and changed into a fresh shirt.
Five minutes later, carrying his laptop and mobile phones in a shoulder bag, Kell was en route to La Cité Radieuse, a Marseille landmark for architecture buffs, and the perfect place for the auto-didact in him to kill a couple of hours before meeting Madeleine at seven. The twenty-something cab driver he flagged down on Rue de la Republique was new in town and had never heard of Le Corbusier, so Kell put him in the picture.
A Foreign Country Page 15