The Moroccan Girl

by Charles Cumming

  The message acquired only a single gray tick.

  There were other texts—from his father, from various friends and acquaintances in London. Carradine combed his phone for a covert message or email from Bartok but found nothing. He listened to the voice mails, checked his Twitter feed and scrolled through Facebook looking for clues as to her whereabouts but knew that he was wasting his time. She was gone. He was no different to Stephen Graham and perhaps to countless other men who had fallen under her spell, only to be cast aside when their usefulness had passed.

  There were also no messages of any kind from Sebastian Hulse or the Russians. It seemed strange to Carradine that none of them had attempted to make contact, if only to pressure him into giving up information about Bartok’s whereabouts. Their absence only added to a burgeoning sense that what had happened to him in Morocco had been part of a dream, a fantasy of escape with no basis in reality.

  He spent the rest of the morning replying to emails from his agent and publisher and reading obituaries online of Ivan Simakov, each of them displaying the same photograph of the handsome, martyred revolutionary leader with the implicit visual implication that he was a latter-day Fidel or Che. No fewer than four articles suggested that Simakov had worked for Russian intelligence before setting up Resurrection. Reading the obituaries in his office, Carradine no longer cared who might be looking at his internet history or reading his private correspondence; at one point he even typed the name “Lara Bartok” into Google, finding various articles in which she was referred to as Simakov’s “former girlfriend” with little or no further biographical information provided. He was surprised both by how little had been written about her and by the scarcity of photographs of Bartok online: Carradine found only a cropped version of the picture he had seen in The Guardian and a yearbook photo of a teenage “Lara Bartok” who may or may not have been the same woman. Either Lara had been extremely careful about her digital footprint from a young age or—more likely—somebody had erased her history from the internet.

  Every now and again Carradine would check to see if his message to Mantis had been read. Each time he saw the same thing: a single gray tick beside the text, indicating not only that the message had not been read, but that it had yet to reach Mantis’s phone. He began to think that the meeting would not go ahead, but knew that he had no choice other than to appear at Lisson Grove at the allotted time.

  As he was leaving the flat, Carradine checked his mailbox on the ground floor. Beneath the piles of junk mail and freebie magazines he found two issues of The Week, two copies of The New Yorker, a letter from his agent in New York and a handwritten envelope containing what felt like an invitation to a party.

  He opened it.

  There was a postcard inside. The image on the front showed a four-section collage of photographs from Marrakech: the Koutoubia tower at sunrise; the Berrima Mosque at dusk; the Royal Palace at sunset; a carpet seller in the souk.

  There was a handwritten message on the back.

  Kit

  Great to meet you in Kech. I’m in London the next few days. Would love to meet up and talk about that girl. You can find me at the St. Ermin’s Hotel in St. James. Staying under Hulse.

  I may not be exactly who you think I am.

  Sebastian

  Carradine could feel his heart racing as he read the message a second time. Two things immediately occurred to him: Hulse knew where he lived but had elected to contact him via the postal service rather than by dragging him into the back of an Agency van. Secondly, he was being explicit about his interest in Bartok. The postcard seemed to suggest that Carradine had outfoxed the Agency. The tone of the message was conciliatory.

  Carradine looked at his watch. It had just gone midday. Even if his meeting with Graham lasted two or three hours, that would still leave him more than enough time to go to the hotel and to ask for Hulse. Better still, he could ring up to his room and—if necessary—leave a message. What did he have to lose? Better to make his peace with the Agency, to get Hulse onside, than to leave himself exposed to the threat from Moscow. It might even be the case that Hulse could help bring Bartok in from the cold.

  Carradine walked outside. He lit a cigarette. With the first taste of the tobacco, the sharp hit of nicotine, he felt an absolute confusion. I may not be exactly who you think I am. What did it mean? Was Hulse a freelancer? Another rogue agent like Mantis? Had he even sent the postcard or was it a trap set by the Russians to lure him to the hotel?

  It was impossible to know. Carradine was beyond the point at which he could even pretend to know what might happen to him or who could be lurking around the next corner. He hoped that Stephen Graham might be able to provide him with at least some of the answers.

  41

  Carradine deliberately followed the same route to Lisson Grove that he had taken a fortnight earlier. There was no reason to do so other than a rather melancholy desire to revisit Sussex Gardens and to try to make sense of what had happened to Lisa Redmond.

  He reached the intersection certain that he was not being followed. Vehicles were moving normally in all directions. Pedestrians were walking along the pavements and crossing the road at the lights. The cafés and restaurants were full, the shops were open and busy. To the naked eye there was no suggestion that, just two weeks earlier, a woman had been kidnapped and two men brutally assaulted within fifty meters of where Carradine was standing. He tried to recall what he had seen. He remembered the teenage girl jabbering away to her friend. I’m like, he needs to get his shit together because I’m, like, just not going through with that bullshit again. Yet Carradine’s memory was otherwise warped and confused: he had conflated his own recollections of the kidnapping with other eyewitness accounts. The photographs and videos of the attack later posted online had become a new version of his personal experience.

  He stopped at the pedestrian crossing where the girl had held him back. He checked his phone. The WhatsApp message to Mantis still showed a single gray tick. Carradine was convinced that their meeting would not now go ahead, but nevertheless continued to walk east toward Marylebone Road and the apartment block on Lisson Grove.

  He rang the bell. There was no answer so he rang it again. He looked at his phone. Still no response from Graham. Carradine pressed the bell a third time and waited another minute. He was sure that something had happened to him; Russian intelligence had worked out that Graham had betrayed them and he had “disappeared” as a consequence. Carradine was on the point of walking away when the door suddenly buzzed and a cheerful female voice said “Sorry!” on the intercom.

  “Hello?” he said, pushing the door ajar.

  There was no reply. He climbed the six flights of stairs to the third floor, arriving slightly out of breath and sweating under his shirt.

  “There was no need for you to come up.”

  A diminutive woman in late middle age was standing in the door of Graham’s flat. She was holding a yellow duster and a bottle of silver polish and spoke in a cut-glass accent.

  “I don’t understand,” Carradine replied.

  The woman looked confused. “Oh,” she said. “I thought you were the man from Amazon.”

  “Me?” He wondered if he had gone to the correct address but remembered the faux Dutch oil painting on the landing. “No. I’m not from Amazon. I was supposed to meet somebody here.”

  “Here?” Carradine could see various items of brown furniture inside the flat and a rolled-up carpet standing on its end in the hall. The empty room in which he had sat with Graham was in the process of being transformed. He found himself remembering the scene in Moonraker when Bond and “M,” expecting to find a control room filled with deadly toxins and lab rats, instead walk into a lavish Venetian drawing room wearing gas masks, only to be greeted by Sir Hugo Drax.

  “I may have made a mistake,” he said.

  The woman seemed anxious to relieve Carradine of any notion that his presence was an inconvenience.

  “Please don’t wor
ry, I’ve only just moved in,” she said. “Were you looking for Mr. Benedictus?”

  “Benedictus?”

  She picked up an envelope from a stool in the hall. She showed it to Carradine.

  “He lived here before me.”

  Carradine looked at the envelope. It was a charity circular made out to a “Mr. D. Benedictus” at the same address Graham had given to him two weeks earlier.

  “No, not him,” he said. “Did you know a ‘Mr. Mantis’ or a ‘Stephen Graham’?”

  The woman frowned.

  “I’m afraid not. You were supposed to meet them here today?”

  It occurred to Carradine that she was being unusually helpful. He wondered if she was working for Moscow.

  “I was,” he said. “Never mind.”

  He was about to turn around and head back down the stairs when she said: “Somebody else came yesterday.”

  “Somebody who was looking for Mr. Benedictus?”

  “No,” she said. “For your Mr. Mantis.”

  Carradine hesitated. The revelation was not, of itself, particularly alarming. No doubt Graham had used the flat in order to meet all kinds of people.

  “Do you remember much about him?” he asked.

  The woman wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead. She was wearing three-quarter-length tweed trousers and her hair was cut in a messy, knife-and-fork bob.

  “Not particularly,” she replied. “As I was saying, I let you in because I thought you were the man from Amazon. I’m waiting for a microwave oven.”

  There seemed no point in continuing the conversation. They would only go around in circles. Carradine took a last look inside the flat—remembering how the plastic wrap on the cream leather sofa had made him sticky and hot—and apologized for wasting the woman’s time. It was only as she was shutting the door that he decided to take a chance. He tapped the four-digit pin into his phone and opened up “Photos.”

  “If you could just give me two seconds,” he said.

  The woman lingered in the doorway, throwing the Benedictus envelope onto the ground. Carradine searched for the pictures he had taken in Casablanca and found the photographs of Ramón and Hulse.

  “These two guys,” he said, showing the woman the shots from Blaine’s. As he flicked through them he was conscious that two provocatively dressed Moroccan women were prominent in several frames. “Was it either of them?”

  The woman took the phone and looked through the album. She seemed interested in what Carradine was showing her.

  “How do you make it bigger?” she asked.

  “Which one?” Carradine replied.

  “This one,” she said, pointing at the photograph of Carradine with his arm around Hulse, their glasses raised in a toast.

  He moved his fingers apart on the screen so that Hulse’s face was enlarged. He realized that his hand was shaking as he held the phone.

  “Him?” he asked.

  The woman stared at the screen. Hulse’s features were slightly blurred but she seemed to recognize him. She took the phone from Carradine. She held it farther away from her face. His longsighted father did the same thing with menus when he had forgotten to bring his glasses to a restaurant.

  “Could he have been American?” Carradine asked.

  That was the breakthrough. The woman looked at him as if he had solved a particularly taxing clue in a crossword.

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “I remember now! Rather good-looking. Isn’t he well-dressed? Came yesterday, about the same time. Asked for this Mr. Mantis. I only saw him through the camera at the front door, but it was certainly him. Unmistakable accent. American. I could listen to it all day.”

  Carradine thanked her and walked down the stairs, trying to work out what Hulse had been doing at Lisson Grove. How did he know about Mantis and why had he sent the postcard to Carradine’s flat? He wanted to find a blank piece of paper and—in the style of the great conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s—draw a diagram that would make sense of all the names and places and theories he had encountered since his first fateful meeting with Stephen Graham on Bayswater Road. He sat on the stairs and tried to organize his thoughts but found that it was pointless; only a meeting with Hulse at the St. Ermin’s Hotel could potentially resolve the myriad puzzles in his mind.

  He opened the door onto Lisson Grove. A tall, bespectacled man wearing an ill-fitting lounge suit was staring up at the building. As Carradine came out he smiled at him and raised his hand.

  “Mr. Carradine?” he said. “Mr. Kit Carradine?”

  Carradine was bewildered. He wondered distractedly if the man was a fan of his books.

  “Who’s asking?” he said.

  “The name’s Somerville.” It was hard to pick the man’s age or to place his accent. “Julian Somerville.” His voice had an adenoidal quality and the lenses in his round wired glasses were smudged. “I wondered if we might have a little chat?”

  “A little chat about what?”

  Somerville had lost much of his hair. Carradine found that he was shaking his hand.

  “Oh, about Robert Mantis. About Stephen Graham. About Lara Bartok. About everything, really. Why don’t you follow me? I’ve got a car parked just around the corner.”

  42

  The car was a Jaguar parked near a fish restaurant off Lisson Grove. Somerville opened the back door and invited Carradine to get in.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “Where are you from?”

  “Just hop inside, Kit. There’s a good chap.”

  Carradine felt that he had no choice. He looked inside the car. There was another man in the backseat. As he climbed in beside him, the man turned. To Carradine’s consternation, he saw that it was Sebastian Hulse.

  “Kit!” he said, slapping him on the back. “How you doin’?”

  As though in a dream where he wanted to speak but was unable to sound the words, Carradine stared at Hulse. All he could summon was the word: “You?”

  “Me.”

  Hulse laughed his seductive laugh, smiled his seductive smile.

  “You’ve given us quite the ride the last few days,” he said.

  There was a driver in the front seat, staring ahead with both hands on the wheel. Somerville climbed in beside him and they pulled away.

  “I don’t understand,” said Carradine. “Where’s Mantis? Where’s Stephen Graham?”

  Somerville turned. He had taken off his spectacles and removed his suit jacket. The transformation in his appearance was striking. Carradine had thought that he was completely bald, yet he could now see that Somerville’s hair was merely shaved close to the scalp. He had guessed that he was most likely in his late forties but realized that he was closer to thirty-five.

  “Stephen Graham is dead,” he said. Hulse wound down a window. “The man you knew as Robert Mantis has been murdered. Pushed under a train at Oxford Circus.”

  Carradine felt as though he had thrown a cigarette out of the window and the butt had blown back into the car to burn him. He stared at Hulse. He was somehow hoping that the American would deny what Somerville had told him.

  “What? Who killed him? Why?”

  “The Moscow men. Who else?”

  The car made a sharp turn in the direction of Marylebone Station. Carradine was pushed back in his seat. He assumed that if Hulse was Agency, Somerville was Service, but anything was possible in the looking-glass world into which Stephen Graham had thrust him.

  “He was killed by his own side?”

  “Now that is a revealing question,” said Somerville, looking immensely pleased that Carradine had asked it. “How would you know that Mantis wasn’t one of us? How did you work that out?”

  Carradine’s father had always told him that the best policy in life was to tell the truth, even if you thought it was going to get you into trouble. “Be honest,” he would say. “That’s what I learned from my time in the Service. People can stand anything except being lied to.” In recent weeks Carradine had grown used to the business of lyin
g. He remembered deliberately misleading Mantis about the Redmond kidnapping. He recalled how wretched he had felt drinking Patrick’s Rioja and eating Eleanor’s food night after night while blatantly deceiving them about “Lilia” and their life together in London. It was time to take his father’s advice.

  “Lara told me,” he said.

  “So you did find her?”

  Hulse looked impressed. Carradine was astonished that the Agency still did not know that he had made contact with LASZLO.

  “I did,” he said, with an odd surge of pride.

  “And?” said Somerville.

  “And what?”

  “And what happened next?”

  So Carradine told them.

  * * *

  More than two hours later they were in the Members’ Room at the Royal Academy drinking tea and eating scones. The driver had dropped them off in Piccadilly. Somerville had confirmed that he was an intelligence officer with the Service, showing Carradine a photo ID and handing him a business card almost identical to the one he had been given by “Robert Mantis.” Hulse had produced what appeared to be a bona fide security pass for Langley, allowing Carradine to study it closely. It was the first time in his life that he had seen an ID of that kind. A few weeks earlier it would have been a buzz, like handling a moon rock or a first edition of Casino Royale; now he didn’t trust the evidence of his own eyes. Somerville explained that Stephen Graham had been pushed in front of a train by two assailants who had been conveniently disguised to evade CCTV and sufficiently well-trained to vanish from Oxford Circus station without a trace. The murder had been blamed on a mugging gone wrong, but the Service had learned through a contact in Moscow that Graham had been killed by his own side. His attempts to warn Bartok of the threat against her constituted an act of treason, a breach of omertà for which he had paid with his life. Carradine suspected that Hulse was hearing much of what Somerville was telling him for the first time.