Tightrope

by Simon Mawer

  ‘I just hope you’re not carrying on behind Alan’s back.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  She retreated to her bedroom to open the letter in private.

  Dear Mrs Walcott,

  Don’t you remember we met in Paris and then afterwards in London? Anyway, after a lot of travelling, here I am now, safe and sound in Switzerland. But I still travel quite often and maybe we could meet again in Lyon. Sometime this autumn? Or whenever is convenient for you. Lyon would appear the most convenient. Only I cannot always get there at short notice because of other commitments but given time I can certainly make arrangements. Naturally I will do whatever you think best – just let me know.

  Your friend,

  Anton Albrecht

  Lyon. It wasn’t the city; it was the hotel where she had stayed in Paris that time. Hôtel Lyonnais. She read the letter through once more looking for other clues and it took her some minutes before she noticed his joke. Foolish, of course, because it compromised the security of the letter and rendered it vulnerable to all but the most cursory examination. But a joke, nevertheless, amid the fear. She laughed out loud, a laughter fed by relief and a kind of happiness – the knowledge that so far he had beaten them. They were blundering around looking for him while he was safe somewhere in Switzerland, and making jokes, dangerous jokes in the circumstances, in his letter.

  Carefully she burned the paper in the ashtray in her bedroom, pulverised the ashes and flushed them down the lavatory.

  The next morning she took a taxi to the station, wondering if they had followed her all the way to Oxford, wondering if they were following her now. You didn’t always know, that was the trouble. Sometimes they were easy enough to spot; sometimes they managed to blend in with the crowds, like insects disguised as leaves or twigs. Perhaps that man on board the train who looked like an undergraduate going up to London for a job interview, or the other man who looked faintly down at heel, a travelling salesman with a leather case full of samples. Or that woman, who might have been a don’s wife, with her unkempt clothes and a distant look in her eye. The possibility of their using women came as something of a shock, as though until now she had only considered the possibility of half the public being a potential threat but now she had to accept that anyone, man or woman alike, might be against her.

  She posted a reply to Anton Albrecht the same day. We can meet in Lyon, she wrote, if that’s convenient. But I need some time to prepare. I’ll be in touch.

  At least a month, she thought, because she had much to do.

  ‘Anthony James Bright,’ Fawley said. She had arranged the meeting, not because she wanted to see him but because she needed information. Know your enemy. He’d had a doctor talk to her, a young man with lank hair and a prominent Adam’s apple, who had questioned her about what she remembered of that dreadful weekend, and talked about chloral hydrate in her gin and then an intramuscular injection, possibly of sodium thiopental. Later, he had suggested, they must have set up an intravenous line in her arm and maybe continued with the pentothal or maybe amytal or scopolamine. It was difficult to say at this distance. There was a new one called phencyclidine. All designed to lower the inhibitions and make you gabble the truth. At least, that was the intention although there was a great deal of debate about whether the things actually worked or not.

  ‘Bright was a captain in the Intelligence Corps,’ Fawley was saying. ‘That much is true. He served first with the 11th Armoured Division and was at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.’

  ‘He told me that. I remember him telling me that in Hamburg.’

  ‘And then he was transferred to the Control Commission at Bad Oeynhausen. By all accounts he did sterling work. But in May 1947 he went absent without leave. We believe that at that point he actually defected to East Germany.’

  ‘Defected?’

  ‘However, there was no definite evidence of this until his name appeared in an intelligence report in 1951. That’s all we have, but it does seem that by then he was working for an organisation called the Institute for Economic Research. That’s the Institut für Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Forschung if you’ll forgive my somewhat tortuous pronunciation. The IWF is a front organisation for the East German espionage agency.’

  ‘So he’s an East German agent?’

  ‘It does look that way. Obviously it was useful that he knew you.’

  ‘It was Bright who introduced me to Absolon.’

  ‘Really?’ Fawley’s eyebrows were raised. ‘Was this in Paris? You never mentioned it.’

  ‘In Hamburg. The first time I met Absolon was in Hamburg. It was Bright who introduced us. We had a few drinks together.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘Because you never asked.’

  Fawley looked disappointed in her. ‘You should have told me, Marian. You should have told me everything. Anyway, there’s our connection: you were set up with Absolon as long ago as 1946 and you never realised it.’ He shrugged, as if it were of no consequence, whereas in fact it had all the significance of a punch in the face. With a deprecating grunt he turned to the other matter, the mock Tudor house called The Vale. ‘Officers from Special Branch have been to have a look at the place. As you say, it’s just an empty house, although one of the upstairs rooms had basic furnishings, a bed with a mattress and some kind of coverlet, a wardrobe.’

  ‘That was the room they kept me in.’

  ‘There was also a stand for an intravenous drip and a medical cabinet. I’m surprised they abandoned those. Perhaps they left in a hurry. There was also evidence of recent use of the kitchen. Otherwise, nothing. No fingerprints, even, except yours all over the bedroom. Apparently the estate agent had handed over the keys to a new tenant a few days ago and never saw them again. The police have a description of the couple but I doubt it’ll be of much use. They’ll have been back in Berlin long ago, along with our friend Bright.’ Admiration and a hint of envy crept into his otherwise impassive exterior. ‘It looks as though it was a very slick operation.’

  ‘And what were they after?’ she asked, but it was a stupid question to ask because the answer was obvious. They were after Absolon.

  ‘The question is,’ Fawley remarked thoughtfully, ‘how much did you tell them? And that rather depends on how much you know.’

  She looked at him, thinking of all those years, from that first meeting in his Oxford college when he had hijacked her mission to France, to this final encounter. Had she trusted him at the beginning? She couldn’t quite recall the motives and convictions of the naive girl she’d been then, but surely trust had been part of her armoury; now it wasn’t. ‘I’ve told you: I’ve received a postcard, posted from Munich, from someone I don’t know. That’s all. There’s nothing to tell.’

  Plan

  The things they taught her. In Scotland they taught her how to blow up a railway line, how to kill a man with a submachine gun, with a pistol, with a knife, and finally, with her bare hands. In Beaulieu they taught her how to pick locks and break into a house so that she left no trace behind her. They taught her how to open a safe and how to pick a pocket. They taught her about cover stories and false documents. They taught her to see and be unseen. Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés. To live happily, live hidden. That was the motto of one of the instructors. And another of them, a Londoner with a sly smile and a wandering hand, had told them a little trick that you could use, in Britain at least, if you needed to become someone else. ‘Dunno how it would work in France,’ he’d said. ‘But you could always give it a go.’

  So on her next visit to Oxford she spent the morning trawling through the death notices in the archives of the Oxford Mail. She didn’t find what she was looking for on that first occasion, nor on the next. It was on the third visit to the newspaper archive that she found what she needed, in an edition of August 1921: the announcement of the passing of dearest Emily Jane Goodhew who was sadly missed by her loving parents, having died at the tragically early age of f
ive months. No flowers, but donations to the paediatric unit of the John Radcliffe Hospital.

  Miss Miller looked askance when she asked for yet more time off but she didn’t give a damn. She didn’t really care if they sacked her from the Peace Union now. She knew what she was doing and where she was going. The next time in Oxford she went through the birth notices of March 1921 to find the announcement of Emily’s birth, the exact date and place. The happy event, to be followed with tragedy five months later, took place in a maternity clinic in Summertown, on the 27th March 1921. A subsequent visit to the Registry of Births and Deaths in the town hall yielded an official copy of Emily’s birth certificate; a fortnight later, two photos and a visit to the passport office in Petty France provided a passport in the name of Emily Jane Goodhew, now aged thirty-two, single, secretary, hair colour brown, eye colour brown, no special peculiarities.

  Names and cover names. At Beaulieu they’d taught her how to create a cover story, how to practise it and live with it. How to be, successively, Anne-Marie Laroche and Laurence Follette. Subsequently she had become Geneviève Marchal; and now she might be Emily Goodhew, known to her friends as Emmie.

  Bistro

  And then one evening, after I had imbibed enough Dutch courage in the pub, I rang Marian’s number. The very idea of having to speak to the Spitfire pilot who had never shot down a German almost put me off the project from the start, but to my relief it was Marian herself who answered. Her voice seemed distant and rather expressionless, as though she could barely be bothered to pick up the receiver let alone speak into it.

  ‘It’s Sam,’ I said. ‘Sam Wareham. I was just ringing to see how you were.’

  ‘Oh, Sam. Yes, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Because I read about that business in the papers, and my mother told me—’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s all over now, isn’t it? I’m fine now. Thank you.’

  ‘Good. Well …’

  The conversation, difficult enough when conducted over sixty miles of electric wire, stalled. ‘Look, Sam,’ she said, ‘I can’t talk now but I’ll get in touch, OK? Soon. Promise.’ And the line went dead.

  What was I left with? The single word ‘promise’, which can seem so empty. The world of ordinary discourse is littered with the ghosts of promises. And yet she kept her promise, that was the remarkable thing. She did get in touch, two weeks later, with a phone call to my digs one evening, a call from a public phone box, which I thought strange at the time. I heard the operator telling the caller she was through and the coins going down in the machine and then Marian’s voice sounding loudly in my ear, almost as though she were standing there beside me in the hallway and talking into my ear. Could we meet up for lunch somewhere? she asked. She wanted to talk things over. It’d be better if I came up to London. Could I manage that, perhaps next weekend?

  Of course I could. And when we had finished I replaced the receiver with care, in case it might explode and take with it all my dreams.

  We met in a restaurant that she suggested, in a side street off Shaftesbury Avenue, a small place that was, to my inexpert eye, the perfect simulacrum of a Parisian bistro. I had to follow strict instructions, to get there first and find the table booked in the name of Geneviève.

  ‘Geneviève?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter why. That’s the name.’

  And I was to wait for her.

  When she finally appeared she seemed out of breath, as if she’d been hurrying. She tossed her coat over an empty chair and sat down opposite me. ‘Did anyone see you come in?’ Her question sounded mad. I presumed dozens of people might have seen me enter the restaurant. It was a busy London street, for God’s sake. But who would give a damn?

  She gave a hurried smile. No one would give a damn. Of course not. Slowly she began to relax, glancing round at the place and beckoning the waiter over with a little blizzard of French that I could barely comprehend. We discussed the menu together and finally decided on onion soup and magret de canard, which was the first time in my life that I had eaten duck, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which was the first time I knew that popes had castles in France.

  ‘And now I must apologise,’ she said when the soup had been served. ‘For what happened last time. Sometimes things get out of control, don’t they?’

  ‘There’s nothing to apologise for,’ I assured her. ‘I loved it. And—’

  ‘And?’

  I shrugged, not knowing quite what to say. ‘No harm was done, was it?’

  She, who knew so much about harm, wondered about that. She reached across the table to take my hand for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t want our friendship to be compromised, Sam.’

  It hadn’t, I insisted that it hadn’t. And it wouldn’t be, whatever happened.

  ‘But you don’t know if something is compromised until you discover it has been.’

  Was she feeling guilty? It didn’t seem to go with the insouciant, audacious woman I knew. ‘It’s all right,’ I insisted. ‘Everything’s all right.’

  Once that little difficulty was over, we talked, ate, drank the wine of the Pope’s new castle and when I broached the subject of her recent disappearance she batted the question away with a dismissive wave, like someone executing a backhand at table tennis. ‘Forget it. It’s all over and things are fine. Just forget it.’ What she preferred to talk about was what she was going to do in the coming years – go to France, go to America, get out of this grey, grim city – and what I might do after I had finished my language course and gone through university. ‘I can see you as a diplomat, Sam,’ she said. ‘Smooth and clever and maybe cynical. Don’t become cynical. You can be the other things, but don’t become a cynic.’

  Cynic seemed a rather good option to me, although I wasn’t cynical about her when she leaned forward and lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘Sam, I need your help.’

  I felt a sudden jolt, something physical, almost as though I had been punched in the stomach. Of course she could have my help.

  Apparently, she wanted a break, somewhere out of the city. Her husband would be away shortly. He was often away from home, travelling round the damned country pursuing his sales targets, but this time it was to Scotland and she was damned if she was going to hang around on her own. What about Furze Cottage? Could I get the key? Was anyone using it? That would be ideal, wouldn’t it?

  Furze Cottage? My instincts were suddenly awake to every possible implication.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  I was, of course, stunned – almost literally: my senses confused, my mind slow to comprehend. I drank more wine and looked at the woman who sat across the tiny table in front of me (her lips were stained purple) and part of me thought that I was being readmitted through the portals of heaven. ‘Am I invited?’

  She laughed, holding her hand to hide her mouth. ‘Of course you are. I need you to drive me. You can drive, can’t you?’

  Being able to drive, possessing a driving licence was a passport to adulthood; being able to admit that I could (I’d passed my test three months before) seemed to be an assertion of my maturity almost as great as losing my virginity. I’d drive her wherever she wanted.

  ‘And when we’re there?’

  A wry little smile. ‘We’ll take things as they come. A fling, let’s call it that. Une passade.’

  A passade was all right by me. I was a pauper, prepared to beg for crumbs, and here she was offering me half the loaf. ‘Tell no one,’ she said. ‘Let’s keep it to ourselves. And for God’s sake, not a word to your mother. She’d skin me alive.’ Then she paid the bill, gave me a kiss, une bise that strayed from cheek to the corner of my mouth, whispered ‘à bientôt,’ and left.

  I was, I’m ashamed to say, completely taken in. We were going away together for a weekend, that was enough. A weekend with the object of most of my dreams, the woman who had insisted I call her by her first name from the very beginning, who had treated me like an adult from the start, who had held my hand
all the way to the hospital when I broke my collarbone, the woman who, on the very night she had attempted suicide, had sat with her arm around me, as though to bring me comfort. I watched her, heard her, loved every movement she made and, at that moment, believed everything she said.

  Days passed in a state of priapic anticipation. It was easy enough to get the keys to Furze Cottage. A quick visit to my parents was sufficient, combined with some cock-and-bull story about a couple of mates from Cambridge going down to the cottage for a weekend of Pimm’s and Pushkin. My mother thought that sounded ever such fun, having herself once been to C. S. Lewis’s Beer and Beowulf evenings in Magdalen. Perhaps she thought I might be turning into a proto-academic rather than into the young goat I had already become.

  The keys to the house were three in number, two Yales and an ancient mortise key all attached to a lump of cork in case they should be dropped from a boat. Throughout the following week they sat on the mantelshelf in my room, the keys to the gates of paradise rather than the keys to a rather rundown cottage by the sea with damp mattresses and sagging bedsprings. My imagination was rampant.

  Furze Cottage

  In the meantime …

  There’s always a meantime, isn’t there? The ordinary hours and days, even weeks, that fill out one’s life between the scarce moments of interest. There’s an awful lot of meantime in an agent’s existence, believe me.

  In the meantime … Marian Sutro pursued her work with the Peace Union as though nothing had changed. No hint was given of what was to come. No hint could be given, she knew that well enough. She dealt with her husband as she always dealt with him, with a distant affection and a certain intimate impatience. ‘Oh darling, not again? Very well, if you must.’ She went for her weekly talk to the psychiatrist in Oxford, staying that night with her parents as always. She went to visit her brother in the cottage near Harwell and told him that the connection with the Soviet side was irrevocably broken and the flow of information had ceased. They would never know whether it had been a success or not, nor even how to measure success. That was so often the way with the clandestine world – you never knew whether what you had done had made a jot of difference. Ned was relieved to see it end, but sad for her. ‘Does that mean he’s gone for good, Squirrel? The man you were fucking?’