by Robin Duval
‘Very dear friends from Geneva,’ said Fiona, returning from the kitchen with coffee and a Victoria sponge. Pleased in spite of herself that he’d noticed.
They sat down opposite each other.
‘So you came to see Marcus?’
‘Well. Yes. Partly.’
‘Of course you did, Bryn.’
‘Yes.’
‘Pity. I wish I knew where the fuck he was.’
‘He isn’t here?’
‘In London?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, Bryn.’
‘But he was here a couple of weeks ago.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Believe me, Bryn. I haven’t seen my husband since July. Business.’
She pronounced the word as though it were a term of abuse.
‘He’s in America,’ she added. ‘Probably.’
‘He certainly was in America. I saw him on the West Coast.’
‘Did you really?’
There was a pause. Marcus’s kind of pause. So long that he wondered if she had lost interest in their conversation.
‘Business or social?’ she said at last.
‘Oh. Social. Definitely. I ran into him in… in… ’
‘You can’t remember?’
‘San Francisco.’
It was a confusing game. A sort of battle of discretion – how much each could appropriately reveal to the other. But there was an additional subtext and Bryn thought he could guess it. Fiona’s next remark left him in little doubt.
‘Really? San Francisco. And who was with him?’
‘Oh. A colleague.’
‘Professional?’
‘Absolutely.’
She could not have made her scepticism more apparent if she had chalked it up on a blackboard.
‘You can tell me, Bryn. Did this particular state secret have long legs?’
He tried to suppress the colour rising to his temples.
‘I wonder if I could leave a message?’ he said.
‘You can try.’
‘Tell him I’m in Ealing again. Perhaps he could get in touch.’
He wrote down Dieter’s address and telephone number on a paper napkin and she folded it away under her coffee cup.
‘If I see him, I’ll tell him.’
As an experiment, Bryn thought he would return to Ealing on the Overground – the little-publicised, cross-London system used by the metropolis’s more sophisticated commuters. Hampstead Heath station was a couple of blocks away and the link to West London took less than twenty minutes. With a taxi for the last leg, he accomplished the journey in half the time it had taken him to travel in the opposite direction.
A window cleaner was packing up his ladders when he arrived. Bryn watched him while he sat in his cab, making calls on his mobile. He wished he’d had a German telephone number for Dieter – he could have discovered if the man had a contract with him. As soon as he was indoors he found Dieter’s copy of the Yellow Pages and looked up the name on the side of the vehicle. He could find no reference to it.
Late in the afternoon he went for a stroll. There was a park along the Brent river that he’d enjoyed in the days when the family had a dog. It seemed a good place to reflect on his predicament. And try and put his accumulating concerns into perspective. Consider what he should do next. And in the meantime try to think about Agnete rather than Marion.
A heavy shower set in – a phenomenon he’d not experienced since Bayreuth. He withdrew to the shelter of a pergola at the north end of the park and sat for a while gazing out through the curtain of rain. His thoughts wandered away – to a dead figure in the snow and an unforgettable image of a small hole in the base of a man’s skull. He shivered again at the memory of the murderer, hiding barely yards away. Waiting for an opportunity to complete unfinished business.
A man was coming towards him through the downpour. He wore a flapping, old-fashioned, belted raincoat and had pulled a grey trilby over his eyes. But this time Bryn recognised him before he had a chance to speak.
‘Hello, Marcus.’
His cousin settled on the bench beside him and shook the water from his hat.
‘I hear you’ve been to see Fiona,’ he said.
‘That’s correct.’
‘Bit unexpected.’
‘Are you here to tell me you’d rather I hadn’t?’
‘That’s entirely your affair.’
‘Hardly so, Marcus.’
Two dog-walkers joined them in the pergola and Marcus fell silent.
The rain began to ease and the dogs and the ladies moved on.
‘In any case,’ he said, ‘that’s not why I’m here.’
‘Why didn’t you phone me?’
Marcus shrugged his shoulders as if the question barely merited a response. He circled a finger round the brim of his hat and watched the water trickle from it to the ground.
‘How are you doing financially?’ he asked.
‘Fine.’
‘You have a joint account with Marion, don’t you?’
‘I do. As it happens,’ Bryn replied, irritated more than puzzled by the intrusive enquiry.
‘Judging from your response, you haven’t been checking it recently.’
‘Why should I? There’s plenty enough in it. More than I need.’
‘Oh, is there?’ said Marcus.
There was a pregnant pause as he waited for Bryn’s reaction. He stubbornly declined to comply.
‘So you will not be aware,’ Marcus continued, ‘that the other account holder two weeks ago cleared every last cent out of it. Every last penny.’
Bryn hated his cousin. Life was too short to enumerate the ways he had, in a single sentence, embarrassed and confounded him. And he had – no doubt of it – orchestrated this moment for one reason alone: to soften him up. To make him more amenable to whatever next he would require from him. He wondered what had happened to the ten thousand sterling Marcus had promised on the mountainside.
‘I don’t suppose you came all the way here through the rain to tell me that,’ said Bryn.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I thought you’d like an update.’
‘Not really.’
Marcus dug into a pocket of his raincoat. He pulled out a pewter hip flask and flicked off the screw top. The sweet aroma of fine cognac floated across the pergola. He took a sip and offered it over.
‘You’re breaking the bylaws, Marcus. No alcohol in the Park.’
He hung the flask out for a few seconds more. It was the usual test of power, and Bryn ignored it.
‘We under-estimated Strange,’ Marcus continued. ‘He laid us a false trail. Not just for us: everybody.’
He sipped again at the brandy. Bryn wondered if he had ever seen Marcus roughing it without some similar consolation to hand. Or maybe he did it for pure egotism: like an executive with a Montecristo cigar and leather braces. To remind himself he was important.
‘So you think he had other safe houses?’
‘Maybe. Maybe we got the wrong one.’
‘Or maybe he rumbled you, Marcus. Did you think of that?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Certainly it was not your fault, Bryn,’ he said briskly. ‘You did a fine job. We have nothing to complain about there.’
How soon before the other shoe dropped?
‘Actually,’ Marcus continued, ‘I think the problem was with his own security. He didn’t trust it enough. With some reason of course since that’s how we found out about the Professorville house. Bad luck the isotope didn’t happen to be there.’
‘So where is it? Exported already?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘On the cocaine route? ’
He glanced at Bryn sharply.
‘How would you know about that?’
‘You told me.’
Marcus frowned.
‘Did I? Well, things have moved on and if we don’t intervene very soon it will assur
edly be too late. The latest intelligence is that Strange has set up a deal and an exchange is imminent. I’m guessing it’s more than one deal, involving both sides because that’s how arms dealers work. Double your money and prevent one side being better armed than the other. After all you don’t want one of them to win the war. The whole Middle Eastern market would collapse.’
He glanced at Bryn again.
Bryn put out his hand and took the flask. It was predictably excellent. Light, smooth, aromatic. You could drink it forever. Wherever did he get his stuff from?
‘So – I’m guessing, Marcus – they’re moving the isotope and there’s an opportunity to slip in and steal it. And once again you need someone below the radar to do the job, am I right?’
‘I wouldn’t want you to do anything you were unhappy about,’ said Marcus smoothly.
‘Good,’ said Bryn. ‘Because “unhappy” would not begin to cover it.’
‘And yet,’ the other mused, ‘you did such an excellent job last time. Nobody knows you’re a player. It’s a chance to work with my assistant again… ’
Marcus’s expression was as inscrutable as hers had been.
‘There’s very little danger,’ he added. ‘All we want this time is for you to be a courier. No more break-ins or dramas. Why don’t you think about it?’
A small card materialised in his left hand and he tucked it into the breast pocket of Bryn’s jacket. The exact same gesture as Dieter’s when he had handed over those fateful Bayreuth tickets so many long weeks ago.
Bryn returned the flask.
‘You cannot seriously believe, Marcus, that I would fall into that trap again. Professorville was a one-time stupidity. You knew the dark place I was in. And how vulnerable I was to your schemes. But now that I am back home – in England – I will never do anything as insane again. And if it’s of any interest, I am through Marion now. I’m in the business of putting my life back together.’
‘Oh right. And I don’t suppose you’ve any idea what you are going to do next?’
‘None. Yet. But whatever I do, you will not be a part of it. You and I are over too, Marcus.’
How many ways did he have to tell him?
‘It’ll be a lot of money this time. And you have an opportunity to make a real difference, Bryn. Make history.’
‘Please, Marcus. It’s all so transparent. I don’t want any more manipulation. No more nasty tricks. I’ve learned more about your cousinly feelings in these last weeks than in the rest of our life together. And I do not like them. I do not like you, Marcus. I’m sorry. But that’s the way it is.’
‘You’re not going to help me?’
‘No. I’m not. I’m not going to help you. End of story.’
Marcus had so far appeared to absorb it all with his accustomed suavity. But now his face tightened into a mask and he jammed the screw top back onto his hip flask.
‘You will regret this, Bryn,’ he muttered fiercely. ‘Seriously regret this.’
There were no further words to be had. Bryn left him sitting alone. A lost soul, much more disturbed than he was. He wondered if the cousins would ever meet again. And whether, in the end, he was sorry – or glad – to be free of him.
Chapter 17
The first thing he did was to close their joint account. Marcus had not been entirely truthful. Marion had visited it once – a couple of weeks past – and cleared out everything bar a few dollars. But a more recent salary transfer had been left unmolested. He decided to move what remained into a fresh account, and at a different bank so there could be no confusion. For good measure, he chased up two or three small savings Marion and he had also shared, removing from each exactly half, and putting his own moiety into a single account in London.
And straightaway ran out of momentum. There was something deeply enervating about unpicking the accessories of a marriage. At least (he told himself) there was no house to sell or young family to be concerned about. Their two children had long since grown up and scattered. They had – nevertheless – been the centre and purpose of pretty well his entire married life. Telling them it was over was, for the moment, unimaginable.
And Marcus had been right yet again when he doubted he’d any idea what to do next. He fell into a pattern of sleeping, walking in the park, eating in pizza restaurants, and watching the news till he fell asleep again. He stopped worrying about inquisitive strangers or officialdom or the crackling telephone line or his cousin; or about anything particularly at all.
Disengagement as complete as this was a new experience. As time passed, it began – a little – to intrigue him. He had all his life been a busy person, fearful of the moral vacuum that the alternative represented. How long might it be possible to embrace this drug of idleness – this listless state that in the middle ages they called accidie – before it consumed him and became a life style? How fragile indeed were the conventions of work?
And yet at his lowest ebb he recognised that something was still ticking over inside. As he slouched in front of the television, with a takeaway and a bottle of red wine on the table beside him, he found he was turning more obsessively than ever to the breaking news. To images of a world outside going to hell in the proverbial hand cart.
Not that there were any echoes in North Ealing. The old ladies still walked their dogs, mothers took their children to the little school by the park, the hairdresser and the fishmonger stood outside their shops on the Pitshanger Lane gossiping with the passers-by. It was a world as impenetrably tranquil as the electronic version was demented.
At the centre of events, as so often, were the Middle East, and America. Secret State Department correspondence, leaked on the internet, had revealed a network of deceit, of diplomats intriguing with both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide in an attempt to preserve a neutralising balance of power. Trust had collapsed, and been replaced by threats and ultimata. There were rumours of a lethal new generation of weaponry in the hands of Islamic militants, sourced variously (according to the latest story) from Burundi, Armenia or even California. Israel had threatened unilateral military intervention if no action was taken by its allies.
On the other side of the Atlantic the President had eyes and ears exclusively for domestic affairs. But a speech by her Vice President, praising New Left principles of non-interventionism, was widely taken to be a signal that the President would oppose any form of American military action in the Middle East, however critical matters became.
Meantime, she had battles enough of her own. Her proposal to introduce a beefed-up version of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, to prevent the banks gambling with depositors’ money, had incited Wall Street to a new level of outrage. A threat to move financial operations to unregulated Moscow was being taken seriously by the pundits.
He watched a Fox News programme devoted to a panegyric of the Muscovite oligarch life. More stretch limos and traffic jams than Hollywood. Hotel lobbies with as much mink and sable as a furriers’ convention. Headdresses glittering with diamonds. Bodyguards with ten thousand dollar watches. Apartments of Italian marble and polished chrome. An annual ‘Millionaire Fair’ for oligarchs only. The commentator explained that Moscow now had more than fifty billionaires, while the millionaires were uncountable. The last rash official who’d attempted to impose bank regulation in Russia had been gunned down in 2006 as he left a football match. What was there not to like?
And then there was the White House’s stubborn determination to impose political balance on the American media. Dissension within the President’s own party meant that her ‘Fairness’ Bill was in danger of being filibustered – unless she agreed to open up some of the National Parks to mining companies so they could ease the nation’s critical shortfall in mineral resources. One of the Parks targeted for exploitation was Lassen.
Bryn took his usual early walk through the park. Overnight downpours had left the sky clear except for some light clouds at its western edge. Its china blue bowl was marred only by the vapour trails of Boeings and
Airbuses sliding in towards Heathrow. The air was warm and fresh and he sat down on a bench at the furthest end to enjoy it.
Half a mile away, poking through the trees, was the steeple of a church. Behind him, the quiet drone of the A40: the susurrus of ceaseless traffic. The sun had brought the midges out from the woods by the River Brent – with their own competing murmuration, higher and fainter than bees, and more irksome. The park was empty and busy at the same time, small and intimate and embracing. A possible metaphor for England in general. He made a note for later use.
He closed his eyes and dozed.
When he awoke, a small film crew had assembled a couple of hundred yards away, where the river curved sharply to the north-east. It was a common enough occurrence: there was a new university a mile to the south, with performing arts and media courses and doctorates in cinema semiology. The students were probably shooting the week’s assignment. He had always been struck by how long they took to achieve a single brief scene. So much discussion, camera adjustment, checking of light.
Today was the same. Two of the group wandered off into the woodland, another sat on a log with his ear to a mobile phone, while the shortest student mounted the camera on a tripod and swivelled it around looking for angles. Bryn watched the wandering couple till they melted out of sight amongst the horse chestnuts and tangles of ivy, down a path he had travelled himself many, many years ago. In a different world.
He realised that the young man with the tripod was now photographing him. Or at least had settled on an angle which placed him dead centre of his frame. The morning idyll was over and he hauled himself up from the bench. By the time he reached the path leading towards the park’s iron gates, the young couple were already returning across the grass and the cameraman had begun to pack away his equipment.