Krysalis: Krysalis

by John Tranhaile

  “Tell me.”

  “Gustav Mahler.”

  “Good lord!”

  “You’ve got this high forehead and a studious face, you see. And with those spectacles …”

  “How extraordinary. Well, there’s one mystery solved, then.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Hoping I’d run across you.” A look of genuine sympathy softened Albert’s intense expression. “You’ve been suspended. Bad luck.”

  “Yes.” David stared at him. “How did you know? They’ve only just—”

  Albert knew because he had been present when Brewster gave the order. He had also been privy to the loud and long telephone protests put up by the Superintending Under-Secretary, outside whose office they were now standing. Words like “brilliant,” “outstandingly gifted,” and “the most extraordinary brain of this generation of high fliers” had been used, often more than once. Brewster had been left in no doubt of the official Foreign & Commonwealth Office view: that he was making a particularly stupid mistake.

  Albert did not see it in quite that light. He needed a lever. This amiable and, Albert suspected, essentially harmless civil servant was hardly likely to help supply it unless put under intolerable pressure. He regarded David’s suspension as regrettable, but also as ground for hope.

  “I think it’s time we had a talk,” he said, deliberately overriding the other man’s question. “Look, it’s a nice day, we could go for a stroll …?”

  David looked at his watch. “I’ve got an appointment later. At six.”

  I know, Albert thought. And I wouldn’t want you to miss that for the world. But what he said was: “Oh, it won’t take long. Let’s go.”

  They walked across Horse Guards into St. James’ Park under a watery sky, half gray and half blue. It was just warm enough to enable them to sit in deck chairs, not far from the bandstand, where they could enjoy an outsider’s view of David’s former domain. Albert spent the walk trying to gauge how he must appear in David’s eyes—apart from apparently being a dead ringer for Mahler, that is. In the end he concluded that the simplest way of finding out was to ask.

  “I expect you’re wondering what I’m up to,” he said.

  David wrenched his gaze away from the Palazzo’s rock-solid facade. “Frankly, yes.”

  “It’s tough for you chaps when security marches in wearing hobnail boots.” Albert spoke with apologetic concern, as if it were all his fault.

  “So you’re with security?”

  “No, I’m an army officer. Well, yes and no’s the answer to your question: military intelligence. My regiment would be first in the firing line if your file surfaced in the East. We’d have to hold the fort—literally.”

  “I see. What’s your rank?”

  “Oh, just a humble captain,” said Albert, who in truth had been the youngest officer ever to be promoted to lieutenant colonel by the British army, because he was that good.

  “But what are you actually … doing?”

  Albert interlaced his fingers and extended both hands in front of him, palms outward. “Blowed if I know. Bloody waste of time, if you ask me.” He cast a sideways look at David, who, to his relief, was plainly swallowing it. “You’re worried to hell about your wife, aren’t you?”

  “I’m worried, yes.” David stared at the ground. “And I’m angry, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Is that meant to be a serious question?” David burst out. “She goes off, the file’s missing, my career’s ruined, wouldn’t it make you angry if all that happened to you?”

  Albert thought that on the whole it would, especially if strangers like himself insisted on asking questions about it. He found himself coming dangerously close to liking David Lescombe again. “You’re assuming she took the file,” he said quickly.

  “I’m assuming nothing. My wife, my file, they’re both missing, that’s all I know. I can’t believe Anna would …”

  Spoken like a man who doesn’t want to believe, Albert told himself. “Aaah …” He made a scornful face. “None of it hangs together.”

  “But she’s gone, hasn’t she?” David’s voice was bitter. “So’s the bloody file.”

  There was a long pause. Albert had to induce David to come up with a lot of answers very quickly, there was room for neither failure nor error, and he was stuck for a way in.

  “What do you want to talk to me about?” David asked at last. “Look, I’m sorry to keep on, but who are you?”

  “I’m muscle.” Albert smiled bleakly. “Not-very-chief cook and bottle washer. Typical, of course. Minor public school, undergraduate cadetship to Oxford, a first in English, posting to Northern Ireland, and now here I am. You’ve no idea how these things work, have you?”

  “Not much.”

  “MoD has a policy of putting square pegs in round holes and calling it flexible response, also known as shambles. When a file as vital as Krysalis goes missing, when somebody really important goes over the wall, lots of people are affected. So everyone wants a finger in the pie, to check their interests don’t get overlooked. That’s where I figure. Because there isn’t much for me to do at present, they’re using me to run around and do odd jobs.”

  David stared at him. “It’s so different from what I would have expected,” he said at last.

  “It always is.” Good, Albert told himself. But this won’t bring quick results. Move! Try anything, try intimacy … “Look, David … may I call you David, incidentally?”

  “If you like.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. You watch the telly, you read the posher spy books, and you think, ‘So that’s what it’s like, on the inside, really like….’ But the truth is, the people who work for MI5 are civil servants. Which means they’re fully stretched at the best of times, and when there’s a panic, there’s one chap for every ten jobs. So they bring in part-timers.”

  “And your job is to talk to me.” David’s voice became defensive. “They sent you.”

  “Of course.” Albert took off his spectacles and polished them with a silk handkerchief. They were shallow, shaped like a double sycamore seed flattened across the top, and tinted with just the merest tinge of pink. Cellophane-thin, they gave the impression of being more a protection against light than an aid to vision. In fact, they were a minimal but highly effective form of disguise.

  “If I talk to you, will it help them to find my wife? Or only the file?”

  “Both, I hope.” Which are you most concerned about I wonder, Albert mentally added, your wife or your career? Let’s find out…. “I’d like us to discuss the personal aspects, I’m afraid. The difficult bits.”

  “Personal?”

  “Love and death and sex. The Woody Allen things. You a fan of his?”

  David shook his head.

  “They’re kind of tricky. The problem is that at some point you’re going to have to provide the answers to certain very embarrassing questions about your life with Anna. You can wait for the board of inquiry, if you like. But you just might find it easier to talk about them to me, sitting here, in the fresh air. I’ll pass on the answers, and then there’s a good chance you won’t have to cover the same ground again.”

  David hesitated. “Go on,” he said at last.

  “Let’s start with a real tough one.” Albert suddenly wasn’t sure how to go on, finding it an unexpectedly joyless task to manipulate this distressed, pleasant man. “Do you love your wife?”

  “Of course.”

  “No.” Albert made himself sound infinitely patient and understanding. “No, I’m sorry, you haven’t quite got the flavor of this yet. I’m going to ask you some serious questions and you’re going to answer them in the same way. It’s not Trivial Pursuit.”

  “But of course I love my wife!”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Eight, nine years.”

  Albert waited. He knew that David’s brain would now inevitably serve up the question: How can you love her if
you don’t even know how long you’ve been married? Sure enough—“Nine and a quarter years,” David said sheepishly.

  “No children.”

  “No. We couldn’t. The doctors never found out why.”

  “Yet she had a child by her first husband.”

  David laughed in spite of himself. “Yes. Juliet.”

  “So perhaps you didn’t really want children?” Seeing David open his mouth Albert sharply interjected,

  “Think.”

  A pause. “There were six of us kids in my family. It put me off.”

  “Did she know you weren’t keen?”

  “I was careful never to let her know.”

  Neither man spoke for a long time. Albert guessed what David must be thinking: these questions had begun to give off a sickly aroma, children, impotence, his sex life, Anna’s sex life, the antics they got up to in bed …

  Now, looking squarely at David, Albert had an inkling that it wasn’t just Anna’s loving personality and warm smile her husband missed at night. They had a real sex life. They did remarkable things together in bed. Perhaps … yes, perhaps if David had read about those things in a book before meeting Anna he’d have been fascinated, even a little repelled, thinking anyway that they were nothing to do with him.

  Anna had changed all that. Suddenly Albert felt sure of it. And the perception changed his view of what David might now be capable of doing to help and protect her.

  To his astonishment, Albert felt a twinge of wholly uncharacteristic jealousy.

  “What’s the point of this?” David suddenly rasped.

  “You see, we need to build up a profile of your wife, then use it to project her probable actions.” Albert spoke softly, using his voice to massage David’s ruffled feathers flat again. “One thing that could affect her is how she sees you. Do you understand?”

  David nodded unwillingly.

  “I warned you the water would be a bit choppy. Now. Does she love you?”

  “I’m sure she does.”

  “Does she ever tell you?”

  “Yes.” A smile stole across his face. “Oh yes.” Albert waited.

  “My wife and I, we … we found each other rather late in the day. I don’t think either of us really expected …”

  “No. I see.”

  “I met her on a sailing weekend. She was with a party moored in the next berth….”

  Albert could sense that David’s mind had drifted back to something that mattered to him even more than his present quandary.

  “We got talking. Exchanged addresses. Next weekend we went to a concert together.” David drew a deep breath and expelled it in a shuddery sigh. “Beethoven. After that, we started to go out together regularly.”

  When he fell silent, Albert knew better than to speak.

  “Opera. Movies. Dinners. And then …” David looked down at his lap, “Turandot.”

  “Ah.” Albert almost felt annoyed with David for complicating things so. “My favorite,” he reluctantly admitted.

  “Really?” David treated the other man to a mingled look of shyness and liking. “There’s this wonderful moment when Calaf sings, ‘No, no, Principessa altera’ …”

  “‘Ti voglio tutta ardente d’amor,’ ‘I would have you aflame with love.’”

  David gazed at him in astonishment. “Yes! And I … I was sitting six inches above my seat, you know that feeling? And I reached out for her hand and she took it between both her own and I couldn’t breathe.” David swiveled until he was facing Albert, as if appealing for, demanding, empathy. “And then I knew … I knew I loved her,” he said simply. “And the feeling never went away. It never left me. Whenever I’ve been with Anna since, I’ve been … been sitting six inches above the chair. All the time.” His voice slowed, subtly telling Albert that he had given up all hope of ever explaining to another human being how he felt.

  A memory came into Albert’s mind, astonishing him with its singular inappropriateness.

  The worst four days of his life, spent undercover in Teheran. For a mercifully short few minutes he had been forced to stand within a foot of one of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s most powerful clergymen. Looking into his eyes, Albert saw something that he ever afterward styled “the sacred flame.” It had been his job to extinguish it, which he’d done, but he never forgot the sight. He hadn’t seen anything even remotely resembling it. Until this moment.

  Examining David from under lowered lids, Albert realized that perhaps the memory was not so anachronistic, after all.

  “When was the last time?” he ventured at last.

  “Mm?”

  “The last time Anna told you she loved you, when?”

  David wiped a hand across his face. It was as if Albert had addressed him in a foreign language and he was still catching up. “Last weekend, on the phone. Saturday.”

  “Three days ago … so you expressed your affection to each other often, is that right?” Interesting …

  “Yes.”

  “She didn’t have anyone else?”

  “A lover, you mean?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  This response nettled Albert, he’d been doing well up until then. “You can answer me straight, or you can have it wrung out of you, under oath.”

  David breathed in and out sharply, once. “No lover that I’m aware of.”

  But Albert, sensing blood, couldn’t leave it alone. “There may have been, in other words?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “But it was a cagey answer, ‘no lover that I’m—’”

  “Oh, this is insane! All I meant was, I didn’t spend every second of every day in Anna’s presence. Of course she might have had a lover; it was logistically feasible. But I don’t believe it for a moment. Besides, the things you’re asking about are purely personal.”

  “In a case like this, nothing is purely personal.”

  “I’ve got nothing more to say.” David’s voice was stony, matching his expression.

  “At the inquiry—”

  “I’ll cope with questions then.”

  David’s limbs were trembling. He suddenly stood up and moved a few steps away from Albert, keeping his back to him. When he turned around again, the water was clearly visible in his eyes.

  “Sorry.” His voice came out uneven. “Not the emotional type, usually.”

  Albert saw that he wasn’t going to get any further, and suppressed his resentment with difficulty. “It’s understandable,” he conceded.

  “Yes.” A shiver interrupted David’s next words; after a pause, he tried again. “If you want the truth, I miss her … too much.”

  Albert frowned. “Too much …?”

  “I can’t manage without her. Childish …”

  Albert allowed the pause to go on a little longer, again pitted by that odd flash of hitherto unencountered jealousy. Then he said, “I think you’ve answered my question, but just for the record, did you or do you have a mistress?”

  “Certainly not. To both questions.”

  “So.” Albert tilted his head backward until he was staring at the sky. “Whatever she was running away from, it wasn’t an unhappy marriage.” No easy answers here. Damn!

  “I don’t get that.” David had recovered from the weakness of a moment ago, his tone was harsh. “What makes you so sure she ran away?”

  Albert brought his head forward again. “You seemed to be saying that yourself.”

  “Oh, look, I’m sick of this. My wife’s missing, the police don’t want to know, your people don’t care, it’s like a nightmare.” David’s voice cracked. “What has to happen before someone does something? Eh? You just tell me, what!”

  He was shaking. Albert looked up at him with detached professional interest. “What are you going to do?” he said.

  “I’m going to find her. In my way, and without any help from you.”

  “I think that’s an excellent idea.”

  David had
already stalked off, but on hearing those words he stopped and wheeled around.

  “You know a lot more people it might be worth talking to than we do,” Albert said, standing up. “Eddy, for example. Anna’s first husband. Unless, of course …” He appeared struck with his own flash of brilliance. “Unless you felt like letting me share the labor.”

  He already had a hand through David’s elbow and was guiding him toward the Mall. “We should talk about that,” he said. And then suddenly his resentment at liking this man against his will boiled over into needless brutality, making him show more of his hand than he’d intended. “There’s still time,” he rapped, “there’s still time for a discussion of that before your appointment with her head of chambers this evening.”

  David’s expression of shock on realizing how much the other man knew about his private affairs was Albert’s only real consolation for a drawn match.

  CHAPTER

  13

  By lunchtime on Tuesday, the day after their flight, the BBC world service still had nothing to say about Anna Lescombe’s disappearance. Gerhard, in a peevish mood, turned off the radio with undue vehemence, toppling it over.

  Iannis must have sent the fax by now. How much did London want their file? What would Barzel be doing?

  Barzel didn’t know about this villa, no one did. Gerhard, who had dedicated half his life to finding out other people’s secrets, knew how to keep his own. But given enough time, enough resources, HVA would find him.

  How long before MI6 made up their minds? How much time before Barzel came here and killed them?

  Gerhard, needing a distraction from the terror that had begun to grind in his guts, got up and went to stand by the balustrade.

  Anna had found something to intrigue her in the rocks clustered at the foot of the cliff below the church. From his vantage point on the terrace, Gerhard could sometimes see her, sometimes not, as she swam in and out of his vision. It was ever so, she had always presented herself to him in fits and starts.

  He remembered the first time he’d met her as if it were yesterday.

  Sixteen years ago she had come into his consulting room, dragging her steps, and she had looked around with a bored look, as if to say, “Go on, then, show me.” When her eyes did at last become still, he had smiled into them, acknowledging her as a person who commanded his full attention, but she had not returned the greeting. He recognized straightaway that, no matter how far she might neglect herself (and it was very far, then), she appealed to his sense of all that was superb in a young woman. Nothing could contain such a spirit, once it began to soar. That was his task: to set her free.