Craven smiled. Malachy was a favourite of his.
‘I did, however, find him very useful,’ Bolder said.
Then he had spent the rest of Saturday on calls to London on a variety of pretexts, making sure that Flemyng’s name came up in every conversation. He assured Craven that he had been exceptionally careful in concealing his purpose. He and his wife had also given Sunday lunch to two younger embassy men who lived alone and needed weekend hospitality, and afterwards Bolder had led them on a brisk walk round the Île de la Cité which had got them talking.
‘I’ve one question to begin with, Sandy,’ Craven said. ‘Why Malachy?’
There was only a slight hesitation. ‘Ah. He’s deep in the NATO business, and an old mucker of Will’s, as you know better than anyone, Freddy. He watches Moscow’s men, shall we say, with an eagle eye.’ He fluttered a hand to suggest it was obvious enough to need no further explanation.
‘Carry on,’ Craven said without comment.
As for the embassy colleagues, Bolder said that he been careful to make sure that Flemyng was never the subject of a direct question, nor a dominating figure in their exchanges. ‘No one would have guessed my interest, Freddy, I promise you. No one.’
‘Bridger?’ Craven said.
‘Hardly saw him,’ Bolder replied, and moved on quickly. Flemyng had been a presence in all his conversations, his moods and his comings and goings woven easily into the weekend social round. Bolder had later found reason to ring two French friends at home before they had dressed for dinner on Saturday, he said, so Freddy could tell that he was leaving nothing to chance. He had then spent an hour with a recently acquired friend in a café two streets from his own. Some last calls to London late on Sunday, and he had assembled his thoughts. ‘I have a picture,’ he said.
Having heard enough, the old man raised a hand to stop him.
‘So you think Will is lying.’
Bolder shook his head, and spread out his short arms. ‘Lying? No. A terrible word. I wouldn’t use it of Will.’ He ruffled his hair as if he was trying to get rid of an infestation.
‘But?’ said Craven.
‘But I worry about him. There are signs.’
‘Signs.’ Craven sighed, and said that he’d better hear what they were.
‘Malachy says he’s been exchanging cables with him on the NATO business and that Flemyng’s been terse. Monosyllabic. Wemyss tells me that in the last week he’s been working in the library away from his desk and keeping himself apart. I hear from London that he’s gone quiet. Bridger said the same thing after church. Not that Pierce has the advantage of knowing all that we know. Naturally.’
‘Naturally,’ said Craven.
Bolder delivered his conclusion. ‘Not Will’s style at all. And I’ve asked myself why.’
Craven said that he supposed the reason that Sandy had come to see him first thing on a Monday morning was that he had come up with an answer to that question. Shouldn’t he reveal what it was?
But Bolder was not ready to advance. He took a step backwards, like a fencer in retreat. Wiping his mouth again, he said, ‘No such luck, Freddy. I merely say that it’s curious, and curious to a degree.’
Craven, who had known Bolder for more than twenty years since he was a boy in the office after the war and went to Berlin for the first time, said nothing. He lit a cigarette and looked towards the window, inhaling with a wheeze. Bolder was standing in front of the desk, his hands clasped in front of him as if he were about to ask a favour. Craven took a few deep, rasping breaths.
After waiting for the old man to turn his head back towards him, a signal that they could resume, he said through the cloud of Craven’s smoke that there was one piece of news he’d picked up over the weekend that had greatly added to his feeling of discomfort. ‘A coincidence,’ he said.
Again Craven said, ‘But?’
‘But one that’s hard to ignore.’
Craven had stubbed out his cigarette in his Johnny Walker ashtray and was pulling another from the packet. He made no effort to direct Bolder, nor to hurry him along, but instead sank back into his own haze, his shoulders dropping and his chin almost touching his chest. To an outsider he would look like a man shrinking into himself; to all those who knew him, he was in the posture when he was most alert, missing no change in the atmosphere, no unexpected word. Far from abandoning the world, he was preparing to take it on again.
‘My coincidence’ – Bolder was always proprietorial – ‘involves a fellow at the Quai d’Orsay, whom I see from time to time. We do business, not much to be honest, but I’ve found him useful at some of our difficult moments. I don’t think you know him.’ Then, in case Craven might be piqued, he added, ‘Quite junior, Freddy.’
He raised a finger straight up to make his point. ‘But he’ll always guide me away from a misunderstanding. He’s my man on the mood. My barometer.’
Craven said nothing.
‘So I tapped the glass, you might say. I was in touch over the weekend. Managed to catch him on Sunday afternoon, and said I wanted to arrange one of our lunches. We spoke over a coffee. Not on the telephone.’
If he was impatient at Bolder’s pace, Craven didn’t show it. His spaniel eyes were watery and still, and he seemed to have all the time in the world.
‘He’s well connected elsewhere.’ Even with Craven, Bolder observed proprieties that weren’t required in his presence, and often used the euphemisms he and his kind had to deploy outside the office. ‘Knows some of the strangers in town.’ Then he added, unnecessarily, ‘Of the sort that we’re led to believe have approached Flemyng.’
Bolder said that he had spoken to his man about NATO troubles and suggested that they meet later in the week at their usual brasserie on Place des Ternes. ‘Naturally I didn’t mention anything from our end, our private business so to speak.’ Realizing that he might be revealing more about the scope of his weekend efforts than he meant to, he speeded up to cover any embarrassment. ‘And that’s when I had my lucky moment.’
‘Tell me,’ Craven said.
‘It came out of the blue.’ Bolder sounded as if he might be about to wander again. But he had reached a climax, and couldn’t stop himself.
‘He asked me whether I’d heard of stories circulating, that might reach the press.’
‘And you couldn’t help?’ said Craven.
‘Not exactly. I was intrigued, that’s all.’ ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Sandy.’
‘It chimed with something I’d heard from an American friend, that’s all. One of the better correspondents.’
He took a few steps backwards as Craven got up. Behind his desk, beside the mechanical doll, was a hat stand on which he’d hung his black bowler hat, never worn in Paris but usually taken on visits to London, and he reached for a mahogany walking stick that dangled from one of the other pegs. He was preparing for a walk. But first he went to the window, and stood with his back to the room, leaning on the stick like a countryman in the field. His breathing was rough, and he coughed before he began to speak.
‘Very thin gruel, Sandy. Here’s the question I ask myself. Are we at the start of a new game? Or are we getting a glimpse of something that’s been taking shape without us knowing? Maybe a game directed against us. Have you considered that?’
He turned slightly to catch Bolder’s eye. ‘That means trusting each other.’
And suddenly on those words, with a sharp movement that caused Bolder to jerk himself to attention again, Craven delivered a hammer blow to the floor with the ferrule on the end of his walking stick. The sharp crack might have been an alarm bell. Craven’s apparent torpor was broken, and when he turned his eyes were full of life. He raised the stick and jabbed it at Bolder.
‘You can say nothing – nothing – that suggests there is any worry about Will.’
And Bolder, shaking his head, responded with words that surprised even him. ‘I’m sorry, Freddy, but I have no such worry. And I make it my business to ensure that
no one else does. But I need to know what to think. You’re master in this house.’
‘Have you seen Will since Friday?’ Craven was quite still.
Bolder smiled because he was prepared for it. ‘Briefly, last night. I thought it was right to be reassuring. We dined at Lipp, and we said nothing about Friday’s conversation. Nothing.’ He turned away from the steady gaze of his boss.
Craven’s voice was quieter when he spoke, and he changed tack. ‘Sandy, you must realize how much I’m hearing from home. They can’t make head nor tail of Prague yet, but they know the cracks are widening. The student business in Warsaw is another puzzle, and there’s a Pact gathering there this week, with all the old warhorses on hand. Moscow making a show. America’s in flames, and troubled in the gut. And here, in this city – what can we expect? The old order shaking? Maybe. And the Americans worry about us, too, as well as themselves. The London demonstration was a whopper. We all know their war’s going wrong. We, you and I, like predictability. But it’s slipping away.’
Craven’s face was a mask of weariness, his jowls drooping and his grey hair clinging to his scalp with sweat beginning to moisten his cheeks. It was mid-morning, and he looked as if he had already suffered a long, hard day.
He still spoke gently. ‘We think our trust is so strong. It holds us together and sees us through. But it’s fragile, Sandy. We’re more vulnerable than we like to think.’
He stepped towards Bolder, who didn’t move.
‘That’s what I’ve learned, and why I worry.’ He snapped his fingers, a hypnotist jerking Bolder out of his silence.
And knowing there was more to come, Bolder responded, ‘Tell me, Freddy.’
‘Coincidences,’ said the old man. ‘Like troubles, they never come alone, do they?’ And because the conversation had tired him, he went back to his chair and sat down with a bump.
‘You had a busy weekend and so did I. I’ve been asking around, here and at home. Listening.’
‘And what did you hear?’ said Bolder, leaning across the desk for the first time.
Craven hesitated. He kept silence, then cocked his head to indicate that he had made a decision. It seemed to come reluctantly. ‘A whisper that intrigued me.’
Bolder brought his head closer to Craven’s to hear the secret. It came softly.
‘Will’s brother has been posted to London, and in a hurry. I smell trouble.’
NINE
While they were talking, Maria Cooney was lying in her bath and thinking of Abel Grauber. Another part of the city, a different trigger for the thought, but the same man. Flemyng’s unexpected appearance at Hoffman’s party had brought him to mind, because they had already shared so much, and he had been her companion throughout the weekend, a spirit on her shoulder.
She knew him to be Flemyng’s brother, and had learned from him how he had come to use his mother’s maiden name in New York. In the years of their companionship in the same cause, a robustly American one, the story had taken shape. She knew there would be other layers to be revealed, so the family had become a fascination for her. And Maria was certain that Will Flemyng was unaware of how much she knew. It pleased her.
Abel was dark, like his brother, but his features lacked the sharp lines that could give Flemyng a stern profile in the flick of an eye, because the furrows on the older brother’s cheeks could deepen quickly, and his mouth turn down. For all his cheerfulness – and the eyebrows that were usually raised, the easy hands with those long fingers that he ran through his black hair – there was mournfulness near the surface. She knew it for what it was. Abel had softer lines, and had told her that he resembled his brother Mungo more closely, although he had always been a skinny boy and would never have the confident roundness of the oldest of the three. Maria had never met Mungo but in her mind he was the picture of a beaming Edwardian, comfortable and benign – unhurried by the world, and always the stabilizer. Abel had a straight back and a near-military crew cut, by contrast with her picture of Mungo, and Maria enjoyed imagining him allowed to relax into a style that might fit their age and his time. But they both knew that the moment hadn’t come. His orders wouldn’t let him.
She pulled the chain that released another torrent of water into the tub, and heard the clanking from the pipework above. Her apartment had high ceilings and crumbling cornices, and plumbing that had been left on its own since the twenties, but she played to the strengths of the old place with furniture that she’d picked up in forays to a run-down emporium in Montparnasse where she found sofas and two chaises longues that were scuffed and wobbly but could be brought to life with piles of richly coloured cushions and covers, and she softened the creaky floors with thick rugs. A warm nest. And in contrast to the contemporary posters that were on the walls, she liked the antique locks that took an extra turn to open, the rusty iron bar that crashed into place behind the front door to the building, and the brass lamps that were in every room. Unlike her space in rue de Nevers, the apartment was full of colour and light. She liked to think it had no dark corners.
Abel had seen it only once, on a swing through Paris earlier in the year when he had been bound for a difficult encounter in Rome. He’d been sent to plug a leak that might have become a scandal. Maria knew how much it had cost the office, and, in the course of silencing a political operator who had turned from friend to foe, Abel had sacrificed the friendship of a colleague who, they both knew, had begun to believe in his own invincibility and drank too deep from the fountain. His tongue had loosened, and as a result he would never work for the boss again. Abel had stopped off on the way to gather his strength for the confrontation in Rome, and he and Maria had visited some of his old Paris haunts. They walked in the woods, and spent a long evening together in a restaurant where she knew there was no chance of seeing anyone from the embassy. Afterwards, with Abel stretched out on cushions on her floor, they spoke of the war and their private despair.
The next morning, Abel had visited the embassy to make his courtesy calls and reported afterwards that nothing seemed to have changed since his departure, except the ambassador. ‘Did anyone ask for me?’ she asked.
He reassured her. ‘Course not. They know you not, except as a reporter.’
Now Abel’s name had surfaced again. She went through her brief conversation with Flemyng before he left the party, when he had appeared anxious. His questions had surprised her. Had anyone asked about Abel? Were people making inquiries?
Maria was confident that Flemyng’s knowledge of the details of her precise connections and the routine of her days was incomplete. But he knew her as a friend of Abel’s, and his partner in some of the battles in which they were all joined. They had an agreement that had never been negotiated, because that would have unsettled them both, but allowed them to know that they were secret allies, without the freedom to be open about their lives. One day, Maria believed, they would find themselves operating together arm in arm from the same bunker, though she couldn’t say when.
When Flemyng had spoken to her at the party, his first question had been straightforward and delivered with a typical touch. She was a newspaperwoman, he’d said with a smile. Was Abel in the news?
There hadn’t been much more. Flemyng had spoken of other things – presidential primaries, fire in the ghettoes, students in Paris, the east – but left one restless question in her mind.
Why was he worried about his brother?
She had no doubt that his conversation sprang from anxiety: mention of Abel at a party had been dangerous. Even a show of their obvious familiarity in that company carried a risk. Flemyng had turned his charm on Quincy – she had watched him carefully and thought she had missed nothing – but with Maria herself he had been unable to conceal a touch of concern. His habit of rubbing his shoulder, as if groping for his troublesome scar, was always a sign that he was tense, and she used to joke that he would never make a poker player, because a shadow of seriousness always came across on his face when he felt personal pressure. His
words never gave anything away. His face did, a little more often than it should.
As she climbed from her bath and towelled herself dry, Maria tried to remember when she had last heard Abel’s name in Paris. Nothing in her office, where there was no one who knew him. She didn’t know details of any operation in which he was now engaged, in Europe or at home. Yet Flemyng was alarmed – she had seen it. Abel hadn’t been in Paris recently, because even if he had passed through quickly without a chance to see her he would have sent a message. And in her careful contacts with the few French officials who were her special friends, his name hadn’t been mentioned. As for his circle in the city from the embassy days, no one had been in touch with her. And if they had, she reflected, she’d have hoisted a storm cone because her cover had always been assumed by Abel and herself to be deep enough to give her all the protection she needed.
There were two possibilities. That Flemyng had been unsettled by an inquiry about his brother, leading to his question about whether Abel was in the news. Or that he was sending a warning. But if so, why use her? In his time in Paris, Flemyng had only once revealed any knowledge of her position and had done so in an elliptically elegant way that left no doubt, but no trace either.
One conclusion.
Flemyng was in danger, and knew it.
TEN
Freddy Craven had a pattern for his journeys to London which he took trouble not to break. It began before noon, when he would take a corner table in a restaurant a few streets from Gare du Nord which acted as a refuge for a rolling roster of men of his own age who liked to have lunch alone, or were obliged to. There were always half a dozen of them at their single tables in two rows in the small ground-floor salon, all in shirt and tie, facing each other like a guard of honour for the families who were steered to the noisy dining room upstairs. They kept a code of silence, eating seriously but without hurry, and seemed content in their solitude. Their eyes would meet, and familiar faces got a nod of recognition but little more. Craven fitted in and enjoyed the routine. By two o’clock he would be walking to the station. The ferry and the Dover train would get him to London in time for a late supper at his club.
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