‘A friend of yours has come.’
She moved aside, and Kristof smiled from the sofa.
SEVENTEEN
The morning light had come up before Kristof left the apartment. Flemyng opened a window to clear the air and the chatter of congregating birds filled the room. They could smell bread from the bakery across the way and hear the distant clatter of the street sweepers. Maria lay on the sofa where she had been for most of the night and Kristof coiled up in the most comfortable chair, shoes off and shirt open, and looking to Flemyng like a young man for the first time. ‘I will leave you now. I have a long walk ahead.’
He touched Maria’s hand when he had dressed, and she smiled. She didn’t rise, bringing familiarity to the scene, as if they were a family. ‘Thank you. Until we meet again.’ She allowed Flemyng to take him out. They would want to talk together, without her.
As the two men reached the front door, Flemyng took Kristof by both shoulders, almost pushing him against the wall. Insistent, but gentle. ‘I want to express my gratitude. I’m in your debt.’
Kristof, whose smile had lightened their night and their darkness, said he understood. ‘I would never mention your brother in the presence of anyone else. I am glad you appreciate that. Perhaps it is evidence that you can trust me.’
Flemyng didn’t reply.
Kristof said, ‘I have told you that I may need help from you. The time may be coming.’
‘I can’t, and you know it.’
‘But we’re friends now. I know your apartment. We’re involved in the death of someone we both know, and that makes us close. Whether you like it or not.’
Flemyng absorbed his words. He let Kristof open the door and leave the building on his own. The concierge hadn’t yet arrived, and he made sure that he wasn’t seen. Standing back in the shadows of the lobby, he saw Kristof close the door behind him, without a last goodbye. Back in the living room, Maria said, ‘I watched the street. No one.’
A few minutes passed before they were ready to talk it through. Flemyng made a fresh pot of coffee, and cleared away the glasses and two empty wine bottles. Kristof had filled the bowl that was his ashtray and as Flemyng swilled it out under the tap he called to Maria through the door from the kitchen, ‘You start.’
She was ready. All pretences between them had fallen away, and they were sworn as comrades without need of ceremony. In the depths of the night, feeling the cold, she had found an old shirt of Flemyng’s hanging in the hall and she still had it round her shoulders on the sofa, her feet tucked up and two fat cushions gathered around her. She was a picture of comfort, although her face was serious. ‘Let’s go over what he said, from the beginning.’
Kristof’s story had begun with an explanation of how he learned that Grace Quincy was dead. They reconstructed what he had told them, hearing his voice in their heads again.
He had described a knock in the night. ‘I have a friend – let’s call him that – who found the police at the door of his apartment this evening. It is far from here, in a different part of the city. But they came. I cannot say why – an address, a telephone number? Something in Miss Quincy’s possessions, certainly, because they told him what had happened, and that his name had been found. I know this because afterwards he called me. He was a worried man.’
At this point, Flemyng had considered whether he should make a show of asking Maria to leave the room. But the assumption that they shared secrets was there from the start. Why pretend? He wouldn’t break the spell.
Kristof gave no more details about his friend, but he spoke of the speed with which the news had spread. ‘We knew of her, of course. She has been writing from Berlin, Prague, everywhere. I think she understands – understood – everything. I should say that I have met her.’
‘Been in her company or spoken with her?’ Maria sounded sharp.
‘Oh, we have spoken together, more than once.’ Flemyng looked as if he had received more bad news.
Maria let it pass, and for a while Kristof talked of the fear that his friends carried with them, all the time. The uncertainties that surrounded them. ‘You Americans’ – this to Maria – ‘are living with your own chaos. Ours is a different kind – we can’t give it a name – but it infects us. We have the same fever.’
They spoke for two hours before each of them, in turn, dozed off. Maria and Flemyng let him describe his feelings for Paris and the West. He asked no question that was awkward for them. They never had to raise a hand and say – stop there. He talked about his country and the system, a visit to Moscow, life in East Berlin, the alarms from Prague, Vietnam. But about his family and himself there was nothing.
For Flemyng it was a performance of skill and grace, and he wondered where he had learned his trade.
About four o’clock, with the first light brightening the window ledge, Kristof said that he wanted to give them something that might be helpful. ‘I hope so,’ he said. Maria pulled Flemyng’s shirt around her on the sofa, and he sat still at Kristof’s side, watching his hands and his eyes.
He took them to the cemetery. ‘Père Lachaise is one of the strangest places in Paris. You may know this fact, or perhaps not. In the grounds are some hiding places where messages can be left. It happens. Sometimes I wonder if everyone uses it, from many places around the world, and the visitors to the graves are mostly spies, going about their business. It is an amusing picture. All of us, waiting to be alone with the dead so that we can collect our mail.
‘I know where Miss Quincy was found, and I am aware that one of these places is close to that spot. It is a favourite of some friends of mine. I have used it myself from time to time. I don’t think it would be a good idea for either of you to accompany me there, but I can describe it. As you will know, the instructions for such places are easy to remember. That is the point.’
And he gave them directions, repeating them quickly to leave no doubt.
‘You will ask me whether Miss Quincy knew of its existence. Perhaps. All I will say is that my friend who found himself talking to the police is a man whom I have not known to be afraid before. Tonight he was terrified.’
Recalling the conversation with daylight brightening the room and Kristof gone, Maria said that he had taken a great risk in coming to Flemyng’s apartment. ‘You tell me that he’s been to this door before, to meet you, but never came inside. I just invited him to wait for you. He didn’t hesitate. Thinking how I would do this, if it was some kind of set-up – they hear Quincy’s dead and try to draw you into some kind of trap – I just can’t see why they would do it like this. When I spoke with him here before you got back from the embassy – for a half-hour maybe? – I was sure he was genuine. He didn’t interrogate me, just talked.’
Flemyng said that he wanted to hear about their first words. ‘How did you explain yourself?’
‘I didn’t. Said I was a friend of yours, and he was welcome to wait here. It seemed natural, and that was the odd thing. He assumed that we were together, and that I knew your business. So he didn’t hold back, but never asked me to give him my story. Told me who Quincy was, and that you knew her, and that she was dead. I said I knew her, too, because I was a reporter and we were off. I played along. I think he wanted to believe he was safe, and was scared to test me.’
Flemyng nodded. ‘You’re right. He wants reassurance. So anxious that it doesn’t go wrong that he’s thrown the rule book away. For us, it could be a prize.’
‘Pure gold,’ she said. ‘Later we need to try to write it all down, both of us. Then we’ll compare notes. Get the best version. A deal. OK?’
‘OK.’
Such gifts seldom came without a little mystery attached, Flemyng said. ‘He knew I was acquainted with Quincy, and that’s why he came. Did he say how he knew?’
‘No.’
Flemyng said, ‘He’s given us some help. I wonder what his price is going to be.’
Through the horror of Quincy’s death, they’d shared the strange excitement of Kristof’s appearance, and
his willingness – Flemyng thought it was closer to desperation – to talk. When he had said everything he knew about Quincy, and his suspicion that her death was connected to the people he called friends, he had taken them into his own world. Their minds went back a few hours and they heard his voice again, recalled their own reactions and their questions: ‘I am protected by Russians, but in another way I am alone. Almost stateless. Although I am loyal, I hope to escape. I trust my friends, and I fear them.’
Most of all, he said, he had sympathy with his fellow foot soldiers who did their duty because their instinct was to believe in friendship and not to betray. But they knew that a crisis was coming. Prague? The Czechs wouldn’t turn back. Students in Warsaw were having to be driven from the streets. Who would trust the Hungarians? And in East Berlin everyone was watching TV programmes from the other side of the Wall. Could Flemyng and Maria imagine what it was like to feel the thump of artillery on the castle ramparts?
‘Think of it. The fear.’
Maria said he should remember that she was an American, living with her own nightmares. That produced his observation of despair that seeped across the divide. He asked her about home. Flemyng admired the delicacy of her answers, which hid so much of the truth.
Gesturing to the window and the river, he said, ’The government, over there. What are the old men thinking? Remember – this is a city of revolution. It knows its history.’
Another shower of rain had come, and the dampness on the roof across the street gleamed in the early sun.
Kristof turned to the places he knew at home, and Flemyng shared memories of Berlin. ‘Did you grow up there?’
‘I am a country boy, from a place you wouldn’t know,’ Kristof said. He returned to his commitments. ‘I accept that there is a price to pay. My choice.’
‘Choice?’ Flemyng said. ‘The word surprises me.’
‘It’s the one I use, that’s all.’
Flemyng asked, ‘Your English is remarkable. Have you lived with someone from London?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Kristof, and dismissed the question with a smile.
‘How old are you?’ Maria asked.
‘I am thirty-four.’
‘So you remember the Russians coming, in the war,’ she said.
Kristof said they were times he would rather not remember. They took his lead, and turned to other things.
For a while they spoke about music, and films Kristof had seen in Paris. Maria told him of the coincidence that she and Flemyng had both heard Jimi Hendrix not far away at l’Olympia, though neither had been aware of the other’s presence – ‘Quincy too. She told him’ – and Kristof’s eyes brightened. ‘So you don’t live or work together?’
‘We’re friends, that’s all,’ Flemyng said. ‘You understand the way.’
When the light came and it was time for him to go, the three found themselves grasping at the illusion of normality that they had created in the night. Just as they couldn’t allow themselves to be flattened by Quincy’s death, so the strangeness of Kristof’s arrival, and the mysteries he trailed behind him, had to be managed without panic or drama. They felt the presence of danger, but it was more important that he became part of their lives like any new friend, with no alarms. They would take their time, and deal with him together.
With Kristof gone, and when it became obvious that she would have to leave, Maria asked Flemyng to sit at the table. ‘Go back to Quincy, and what she said to us. There’s something serious I want to say. I am not sure yet what it means, but she told me she was working on a story that was big, might change our lives. Must have been something more than student leftists.’
Turning his own cards over, Flemyng said that she had given him the same indication at lunch. ‘She wanted my help with something, and I think it took her on to Kristof’s territory.’
‘That’s where we are,’ Maria said.
‘We are, and it means we have to make a journey together,’ he said.
Maria smiled. ‘To the cemetery.’
‘Of course,’ said Flemyng. ‘But not yet. The place will be crawling with police, and half the reporters in Paris, for a few days.’
He helped her on with her coat. ‘We wouldn’t want to be caught in the act, would we?’
EIGHTEEN
Bridger’s call with news of Quincy’s death came to Craven at the end of the second day of his stay at Altnabuie, where he had found rest.
He had offered no resistance to Mungo’s invitation to take a bed for a night or two, and without fuss he abandoned his plan for a visit of only a few hours. There was a sleeper to London every night – why rush? He had begun the journey with a tingle of urgency, then relief took over.
On Tuesday evening he and Mungo had shared a hotpot and talked history for a while, each of them aware that most of the personal business to be done might make more sense in the morning, and would be easier after a pause for breath. Craven laid the ground with hints about Flemyng’s dark moods, and left the thought to mature with Mungo overnight.
He got strength from surroundings with such a capacity for peace. The advancing weakness that everyone was watching in the embassy had been less obvious, as if it had decided to allow him a little more time. When they tramped towards the hill after breakfast the next morning, his grey hair flying free and his blood up, he was aware that he had cut his moorings and might sail away. He was matching Mungo’s tread, step for step.
They had talked about his brother, and Craven told Mungo more than he had ever known about the life he had chosen. In the afternoon, Mungo gave him time and let Craven read in the library. He found Flemyng’s complete set of R. L. Stevenson, the Tusitala edition, which he had collected and valued enough to keep safely at home, though the thin dark-blue volumes were made for a traveller. Craven lost himself in Treasure Island. Rest came easily, and afterwards he made two telephone calls from the hall, with Mungo taking a diplomatic walk through the garden while he spoke. Later, over Babble’s simple supper, Mungo spoke about their family, happy to have a listener who encouraged him to delve deep. Craven confessed that he had expected to be on the way to Paris already. ‘But I’ve discovered I needed this. Thank you. No doubt I’ll pay for it eventually.’
The two were enjoying a late-night dram together when Bridger’s call came.
Mungo closed the door to the hall while Craven spoke to Paris. It was some time before he returned to the sitting room. He picked up his pipe and his glass, and his eyes were bright. The tiredness he’d brought north with him had gone. ‘I’ll be leaving for Paris tomorrow, on the night train from London. You’ve met Pierce Bridger, he tells me. That was a summons of a sort. I’m afraid the embassy is in a tizzy. But I would like a last turn round the loch if we can in the morning. Do you mind a very early start?’
He added, ‘I should tell you, Mungo, that I’ve just had a word with Will, too. There was something he needed to know – although he’d got there before me. Don’t fret. He’s fine.’
Mungo went upstairs a worried man.
But Craven spent a dreamless night in Flemyng’s bedroom, with his friend’s books at the bedside and one of his mother’s landscapes on the wall, waking with the exhilarating feeling that he had snapped out of a trance, refreshed and restored. He prepared himself quickly, putting on a pair of Flemyng’s boots. Mungo lent him some rough tweed trousers because of the thorns, and the two men set off in the early light, their senses sharpened by the chill of the morning.
Mungo led him to a favourite trail that took them the short way through the woods, then to a path running between the fields that rose steeply from the southern side of the water. Craven had a long day of travel ahead but he was enthusiastic when they set off, the grass heavy with dew and swirls of mist coiling low over the water. Under the canopy of the trees, where the freshness in the air took on the sharp odour of pine and fir, they felt the musty damp of moss and fern in the shadows where sunlight never fell, and Craven was alert to every sound and smell as they move
d from light to darkness and back again. Having left the trees and tramped to the top of a rise where they could look through a pass between the hills to the mountains beyond, they turned to follow a dry stone dyke down to the waterside, on a narrow path lined by wild flowers, through high clumps of willow and hazel, with a spiky hedge stretching ahead of them and marking out their route. Everything glistened with the moisture of the morning. By the time they reached the loch, and paused at an old upturned boat beside the wooden jetty, Craven said he felt as if he had sipped an elixir that cleared his mind and lifted his spirits. ‘Bring him home when you can,’ he said to Mungo. ‘I’ll help. He needs this.’
The breeze was lifting the mist away as they watched, and Mungo found himself released from his last inhibitions. Craven sensed the change and returned to the subject he’d raised gently the night before.
They spoke about Flemyng without embarrassment or reserve. At the kitchen table the night before, Mungo had expressed his worries, and the anxiety he felt at being unable to discuss his brother’s business. ‘I understand,’ Craven had told him. ‘I’ve known it all my life, from the other side. We have to live with it, and it’s our choice, so I know not to let it gnaw at me.’ He had added, ‘Why should I complain? This is what I’ve always wanted.’
Mungo spoke about Abel – the decision as a young man to root himself in New York, where he felt his mother’s flame still burning, and his own awareness of the circle of secrets that surrounded a second brother. The move to Washington. Abel’s passionate nature, and his commitment. ‘I’m sure he’s never let a friend down in his life,’ Mungo said.
‘You’re the one who didn’t choose a secret life. Does that make you feel alone?’ Craven’s question was gentle, with no obvious edge.
Mungo spoke as if he had prepared for the question. ‘Yes. I just remind myself that I’m the lucky one, being here.’
‘It’s terribly important, Mungo, that you tell me anything that might help to explain Will’s anxiety about Abel. Anything at all.’
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