Across the table was Wemyss, notetaker. As always, he was meticulously turned out, pale and serious with three spare pencils lined up beside his notebook. He wouldn’t miss a word.
The parish notices were brief (a Treasury deputy secretary was staying at the residence overnight – no sign of extravagance would be shown, even at the ambassador’s table) and Bridger took the floor.
‘Sir.’
Flemyng wondered how long the old conventions would last, like the coal fires that were still banked up on demand for the likes of Bridger in their rooms in London looking out on the park. But he knew he should concentrate.
‘You will understand,’ said Bridger, his great bulk hunched over his papers on the table, ‘that NATO deployments are exceptionally sensitive as things stand. There is a Pact gathering in Warsaw coming up in the week – so we’re led to believe – and all the signs are that the panic in Prague has spread. Moscow knows that it’s a sticky wicket.’ He quoted from some of the reports Flemyng had already read, none attributed.
‘So what are their tactics?’ Bridger went on. ‘I can tell you truthfully, as a consequence of some long and serious discussions yesterday, that we just don’t know.’
Flemyng found it hard not to laugh. He imagined what Craven would have done in his seat, and realized that he couldn’t risk any display of incredulity – although it was the old man’s speciality – when Bridger was in mid-performance. A junior, he kept a serious face.
‘Here is our difficulty.’ Bridger’s account, he knew, would be banal by comparison with the telegram he had a read a few minutes earlier from Hinckley in Brussels, who had painted a lurid picture of turmoil: the French offside and grumpy, the Americans lost in their own trauma, London uncertain as a result and floundering. Above all, the West Germans in Bonn in a state of electric anxiety. Bridger was determined to be formal. ‘We must display calm fortitude – that was the foreign secretary’s phrase last Thursday, you will all remember – in the face of great uncertainty on the other side, and therefore potential danger for us. They are alarmed for their own security because of the Czechs. Understandable you may think, whatever our differences.’
Differences! Flemyng was enjoying himself.
‘I notice it is beginning to be called the Prague Spring in some quarters,’ Bridger said. At that he paused for effect, looking both ways along the table, and in the silence that followed Flemyng realized how much had been lost in the course of his rise. He couldn’t excite his men any more.
‘The consequence is that they are more watchful and nervous, and rather obsessed with us, in Berlin and other places of significance. A wrong move on our side would be problematic, because it would be misinterpreted. So’ – and he brought his hands together to indicate that he was making his bull point – ‘we must do as we were taught as boys – be prepared.’
And do nothing, Flemyng said to himself. His judgement was that the ambassador thought it as much of a vacuous performance as he did, because he addressed no question to Bridger and threw it open for discussion, by order of seniority. Flemyng came third.
‘Pierce is correct in speaking of misinterpretation on the other side,’ he said, nodding towards him. ‘It is the great unknown. They probably think that at a time of crisis we’re prepared to do something mad, when we aren’t.’ The ambassador shifted back and forth in his seat, to indicate that he didn’t approve of the word.
Flemyng went on, ‘My question is this. How much do they know – really know – about our options and our plans?’
He couldn’t resist annoying Bridger with a flourish, and gave an addendum for the ambassador’s benefit. ‘That is the fons et origo of the whole business.’
The ploy was deliberately aimed. Bolder was in London, and even as they spoke in Paris would be spreading his news – that he thought there was a leak, and that much more was known in the east than Bridger and his muckers suspected.
He watched the table. The ambassador was impassive next to him, keeping still, although he had murmured approval at the Latin tag. Bridger gave no sign that he recognized Flemyng’s comment as a reference to Bolder’s story. Therefore, he knew nothing. His chancery outriders were blank, and no one else contributed on the question, except the head of press who wanted to check that it would be fine to spread the word that the embassy was taking the lead in the NATO discussions. ‘Absolutely,’ Bridger said. ‘Vital. Thank you, Hargreaves, for the prompt. Because of the sensitivity of the French position – awkwardness, the pig-headedness at the Élysée one might say, sir, if you will forgive me – we are in the lead here. I shall circulate our embassies this afternoon to make the point.’
Wemyss was writing.
Prayers were almost over. The ambassador’s benediction singled out Flemyng heavy-handedly – ‘Freddy does look rather younger today, doesn’t he?’ – and they were free.
Bridger took the stairs beside him. ‘I wanted to be measured at prayers, Will. One is, you understand that. But the other side’s problems in Prague and so forth are for them to solve. We have no interest in making them worse. Our rule for life – never poke a stick at a bear when he has a sore head. That’s the alliance view, hot off the press.’ He swung round and was gone.
Fleming thought of Sandy Bolder as he went through the security door to the station’s rooms, and wondered if Craven had tracked him down yet. His mind turned to Quincy. He would clear Freddy’s papers within the hour and walk to the restaurant.
He was pleased with his choice, a small place where he was recognized and where the patron, who had a wicked smile and the belly of a Buddha, was pleased that he was bringing a new woman to lunch. And an American! He would do his best in the kitchen, and protect their quiet corner. He brought Flemyng an invigorating aperitif without being asked.
There was a pile of magazines in a rack beside his table – most of them out of date – and Flemyng picked up Paris-Match from the previous week. The cover showed a flaming jet on the runway at Heathrow, from which the passengers had scrambled from disaster, and inside there was another American gallery of pictures. All the world had now seen the grainy black and white images of the cortège in Atlanta, with the coffin on its wooden cart – une charrette du pauvre – surrounded by the faces of the famous, set in agony. The portraits of burnt-out streets in Washington and Baltimore, with helmeted soldiers and the National Guard gazing at the ruins with useless guns in their hands. He remembered Quincy’s essay, with its effort to find a spirit of innocence and belief.
Then she was there. In white shirt and jeans, she was greeted by the patron as a vision that lit up his little corner of the city. Shepherded to her place with simple ceremony, she slid round the table to kiss Flemyng on both cheeks. ‘When in Paris,’ she said, and put two hands on his.
Flemyng’s humour was high. They ate, laughed and spoke of Paris. At first Quincy avoided direct questions about his life – he had expected that kindness after their joust at Hoffman’s party – but they both knew that the moment would come. For Flemyng, the conversation sped by and made him happy. She was funny and quick, full of stories from Vietnam and the American street, absorbed in the story of Prague, where she’d marched with dissenters and watched the citadel shake. Not for the first time Flemyng wondered whether he should have been a reporter. All his antennae were alert; he was lifted by the talk of a natural observer, and ready for anything.
It came. ‘Let’s be honest with each other, Will. You don’t have to tell me what you do. I’ve been round this racetrack often enough.’
To his surprise, she added, ‘And you couldn’t have been where I’ve been through the years and not heard of Freddy Craven, a master. I wish I knew more. Meet him?’
He shook his head. Over the years he had deployed different stratagems to deal with the question, knowing that the blank denial was never enough for Quincy’s kind. With her it was clear that while she would not expect him to break his code, because she respected it, they both had an instant and relaxed understanding
that the truth lay between them, and would lie there undisturbed.
As a result, they would have fun. He told stories of Vienna in the cold, and of games on the front line in Berlin, well edited to reveal almost nothing but bristling with atmosphere. She described her last adventure with the Czechs, and the difficulty she had in fending off the lunges of a politburo apprentice whose friendship she wanted to cultivate but whose bedroom habits she didn’t want to explore. They spoke as if they had known each other for months, and tried to find experiences they had in common, in the old habit of potential lovers searching for crossing points that led them to common ground.
‘Here’s one for you’, she said. ‘Last time I was here – January – I caught Jimi Hendrix at l’Olympia. Beat that. Are you young enough?’
Flemyng’s eyes sparkled. ‘I am, and I was there. Don’t be surprised. It’s safe to say I was the only member of the British embassy on parade. I even remember the date – 29 January, a Monday. It was my girlfriend’s birthday.’
Then he added, almost too quickly, ‘She’s away now, in New York.’
‘For good?’
‘For good.’
‘I’m sorry. But you’re not going to find it difficult to have fun in Paris,’ she said, ‘maybe in a purple haze’, and they both laughed.
He responded with a suggestion that they should have dinner the following night. Could they meet at his apartment? Quick, exhilarating and definite. She said yes, and satisfaction surged through him. They raised glasses and touched them across the table.
Then, as if the conversation had been a necessary prologue, Quincy turned serious. It was done gracefully, with confidence that enough of a relationship had been established for it to be safe. They were at the beginning, and would be travelling together. Fleming was ready, expectant.
‘Help me, Will.’
‘With what?’
‘I’m going to be frank. I know that you of all people won’t tell.’
He laughed. ‘You’re dead right.’
‘I’m watching some interesting people, and I think folks like you underestimate them.’
‘How do you know?’ he said.
‘I’m hearing an astonishing story, learning it. From French friends.’ She drank. ‘And others, from everywhere. You’d love it.’
‘You intrigue me,’ Flemyng said.
Quincy said that they could make discoveries together.
‘About whom?’ he said.
‘The East Germans, that’s who.’
Flemyng gripped his wine glass so hard that it nearly cracked in his hand.
FOURTEEN
The three men of the Paris station were unsettled, thinking about each other.
Freddy Craven had accepted Mungo’s offer of sanctuary in his study on the first floor at Altnabuie and he had spent much of Tuesday afternoon on the phone. On Wednesday morning he was preparing to track Sandy Bolder’s movements with the help of friends whom he’d alerted. Despite the warmth of the morning scene from the window, the bright flicker on the loch and the patchwork hills beyond, the prospect was irritating. Bolder himself had succeeded in assembling a meeting of East European foot soldiers in the office conference room, but was troubled by the sharp question that had been relayed by a friend, straight from the chief: was Craven in the picture? And at the embassy, Flemyng, whose anxieties had led him to open the locked drawer in Craven’s desk, was wondering how to deal with what he had found inside.
He tried to suppress his guilt, using the dubious justification that he was in charge of the station for a day or two, and at a moment of alarm. But he felt a flood of shame.
In front of him was Freddy Craven’s secret diary.
There were several volumes, in a deep box which he had opened with the second, smaller key on the ring Craven had given him. He could see that they were a spy’s travelogue – two books marked ‘Vienna’, three more for Berlin, the London interludes placed between them in date order. Earlier, thinner books traced his first exploits in Helsinki and Prague. With the dark thrill of a voyeur, he picked up the book on the top of the pile, ‘Paris’ written in block capitals on the black cover.
The entries were a mixture of sketches and reflections, people and places, in Craven’s clear copperplate, with long loops. But most passages were rendered in skeletal form, with only a few names spelt out, and those pages looked at first like random jottings with no linking narrative. But a few minutes spent with the entries from March, applying his own memory of events, allowed Flemyng to crack the shorthand, and translate. He realized quickly that Craven intended the record to be confusing to outsiders but daylight-clear to him.
They each had a number of work names to be used outside the office when some cover was required, just as operations were routinely coded, and from their abbreviated forms in Craven’s notes he could piece together a story, week by week. Having also worked out the identifiers for his restaurants, his friends and embassy staff, his contacts in London and a few other embassies, Flemyng saw the picture swimming into focus. Times and places, the round of useful friends, and a map of Craven’s days. He noticed that his meeting with Kristof made a heavily disguised appearance on the previous Friday, the 19th, with no names.
But through the excitement that he still carried from the previous day’s encounter with Quincy, and the prospect of their dinner to come, Flemyng felt the pain of regret. This was the book he was meant to read after Freddy Craven’s death.
His guilt was compounded by the memory prompted by the diary, Kristof’s promise to prove – in his words – his suspicions of Abel. Whatever the accusation turned out to be, Flemyng knew that he would have to tell Craven in the end, who would know how much he had been concealing. The old man might be merciful, but would feel the hurt.
His phone rang. The clock showed eleven as he sat back in Craven’s chair and answered, with the notebook on the desk.
‘Mr Flemyng, Pamela here.’ Bridger’s office. ‘Might you be able to pop along a little later? Are you lunching?’
‘No.’
‘Shall we say at two?’
‘Say to Pierce that I look forward to seeing him. Thank you, Pamela.’
He pulled open the bottom drawer, but before he put the book away he read, for the first time, the pages for the previous few days.
‘April 21 – AG to G soon,’ he read. Then a version of one of Flemyng’s own work names, with two question marks and ‘x’, all underlined twice.
From his reading of earlier pages he knew that Craven used ‘G’ to represent the American embassy in London. The references in the diary to the anti-war demonstration that had choked Grosvenor Square on 17 March made that clear. Elsewhere, Flemyng had worked out from his own knowledge of office business that Craven placed ‘x’ after a name when a piece of information had been concealed from an individual or held back, or sometimes in relation to a fact that was unknown or couldn’t be verified.
Everything was open to him, and he felt a tremor in his hands from the shock. The connection between ‘G’ and Flemyng was something unknown to him, contained in the letters ‘AG’.
Abel Grauber.
He was coming to London. Craven knew it, and Flemyng didn’t.
He locked the book away, put on his jacket and went to sit in the garden.
*
Maria spent the morning preparing for May Day, a week away. She had spoken to three trade unions in the previous few days, and with one more call she was ready to write a despatch predicting that the annual marches in all the big cities would be powerful anti-government protests. She got the necessary words from the president’s office and the interior ministry and wrote a brief, cool account of what was planned, laying out the prospect that with some students playing their wild cards for the first time, the May parades would be a physical challenge to the authorities. The campus revolutionaries and the factory workers might have little in common in style and discipline, she wrote, but even that unlikely alliance could be powerful.
&nbs
p; She had filed by twelve. New York would be happy to have a piece in hand before breakfast.
In the afternoon, she would go to the strategy love-in at Nanterre, and hoped that Quincy would remember her invitation to come along. She did know that she’d meet her English friend, Edward Abbott. She had managed a brief word at Hoffman’s party about his two-day train journey from Prague and caught his excitement. Working for a Sunday newspaper, he was able to play a longer game than most of their colleagues: there were no daily deadlines and scrambles in the evening, although in the weeks when London came late to a story on a Friday his life turned turtle. He was feeling lucky. His paper thought Paris was pregnant with possibility for the weekend, and he could expect a page to himself.
Maria enjoyed him because his conversation, like his prose, was measured and his romantic streak glowed when he found himself in political tumult. He wrote beautifully because he was connected to events. When the tide raced, he surrendered to its force and never swam away.
Ringing him earlier at his hotel in Oberkampf, they’d agreed to meet at the café on Maria’s corner and drive out to the Nanterre campus.
She left the office and took the metro across the river, reaching rue de Nevers quickly. Within a few minutes she had a line to Washington and it was arranged that Abel would ring her back. She was curled on the sofa with her feet tucked under her, reading Mailer in Esquire, when his call came through.
He was down. The office was infected by the cloud of despair that had darkened the skies and wouldn’t clear away. She knew of Abel’s private feelings about the war – Hannah’s brother had been drafted at Christmas and had been thrown into the chaos that came with the Tet offensive as soon as he got to the front line. Abel spoke of a month of despair and uncertainty at home. But there was something he could pass on that would cheer them both up. ‘I’m coming to Europe. A posting.’
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