‘OK,’ he says, forking a strand of tagliatelle out of the water. Then, more quietly: ‘Whatever.’
At half past ten, with the main course out of the way, Fortner makes his move.
Saul, Dave and Susannah are having a conversation about the latest cinema releases, which to me is always the sign of a bad dinner party. Fortner interjects to ask if anyone has seen Mission Impossible, and Susannah says yes she has and tells a boring story which reveals only that she has misunderstood the plot. More summer blockbusters are discussed - Independence Day, Die Hard With a Vengeance, one with Schwarzenegger I haven’t heard of called Eraser - and everybody gets to share their views about whether or not Arnie is past his prime. Dave plays the arthouse card by revealing that he has seen ‘the new Bertolucci’. As far as I can tell, it’s just a story about a bunch of seedy British ex-pats sleeping around in Tuscany. In the middle of all this, Katharine says simply:
‘Honey, have you taken your medication?’
Which is Fortner’s cue.
‘Dunno why I bother,’ he says, getting up from the table with the slowness of a geriatric. His voice is a low grunt. ‘Goddam pills never do any good.’
And with that he lumbers towards the entrance hall. He makes this look so natural that the others would never suspect a thing. Dave carries on.
‘I often think, would Bernardo Bertolucci have half the reputation he has if his name was Bernard Bell or… or Bob Bower or something?’
From the hall I can hear the slap of my briefcase falling on to the carpet, and the successive snaps of the brass catches flying open.
‘I mean don’t you think that the success he’s enjoyed has something to do with the allure of the name “Bernardo Bertolucci”? He already sounds like a great movie director before he’s even shot a frame of film.’
There’s a rustle of papers in the hall, clearly audible to all of us and not at all like the sound of a pill bottle or a foil pack of antibiotics. Then the briefcase is closed. Almost immediately another case, clearly Fortner’s, is opened. The sound of this is much fainter; only someone who was deliberately listening out would hear it. Fortner must have held the catches with his fingers, drawing them up slowly to smother any sound. I look at Saul and Susannah, but they have been sidetracked by Dave, who has segued into Last Tango in Paris. I listen for further noises, but Dave’s voice smothers everything. Katharine catches my eye but the expression on her face does not change. Then, at a convenient break in the conversation, Saul says:
‘I’ll get pudding. Will Fortner want any, Kathy?’
This could be dangerous: if he heads out into the hall, he may see Fortner. I try to think of a way to delay him, but Katharine reacts quicker.
‘Hey,’ she says, thinking on her feet. ‘Before you do that, just tell me about something. It’s been bugging me all night. You see that book there?’
‘Which one?’
Saul is wavering near the door, looking back at her.
‘On the second shelf.’
‘Here?’
Saul points to a book with an orange spine, coming back into the room.
‘No, just a little further along. To the right.’
‘The one by James Michener?’
‘That’s it, yes.’
By now we are all swivelled and looking at the book in question.
‘That’s right. Now was he British?’
‘Michener?’
‘Yes,’ Katharine says.
‘I don’t know,’ Saul admits. ‘Why?’
‘Because I have an ongoing argument with my father that he’s from Connecticut.’
Saul doesn’t know that Katharine’s father is dead.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Dave says. ‘I’m fairly sure he’s British.’
Fortner comes back into the dining-room.
‘No idea about what?’ he says confidently, a spring in his step. Everything must have gone smoothly.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ Katharine tells him, settling back into her chair with a faint grin. ‘D’you want any dessert, honey?’
There is pudding, there is cheese, there is coffee.
My sense of relief at the success of the handover has made adrenalin gradually dissipate from me like a deep, muscle-softening massage. For the first time in hours I begin to relax. But out of this comes a tiredness which flattens me towards eleven o’clock like jet-lag. Katharine notices this and offers me more coffee. I drink it and pick at the pudding, a chocolate goo which goes some way to restoring my energy. But it’s difficult to involve myself in the party. I am always outside it, looking in.
At midnight, Katharine herself begins to fade and she is soon making excuses to leave which Fortner is only too keen to pick up on. He came here for the briefcase, after all, not the conversation. Having stood up, he walks over and kisses Susannah twice on the cheek and shakes Dave’s hand, telling them what a pleasure it’s been to make their acquaintance.
‘Goodbye young man,’ he says to me, placing his arm on my shoulder. ‘We’ll be seeing you soon, I hope.’
‘I asked him for supper next week,’ Katharine says, disengaging from her farewell to Dave.
‘Terrific. See you then.’
Saul then walks them to the front door - I remain where I am, listening to Dave talk about his job - and he sees them out. When Saul comes back he smokes a joint with Dave in the sitting-room while Susannah makes a vague attempt at clearing up. By one o’clock the two of them have gone, out into the hall arm-in-arm with warm smiles and promises of meeting again that I do not deserve and do not believe.
Saul now goes for a pee and I sit on the sofa. But it’s late and he’s stoned and when he comes back he doesn’t want to talk. I was expecting a long, involved chat into the small hours, but he just wants to sit in front of the television watching a recording of Match of the Day. As the cassette is rewinding he asks me what I thought of Susannah, and I say how nice she seemed, how funny and smart and easy, and that seems to satisfy him.
On the sofa, beer in hand, Saul follows the match between Chelsea and Manchester United with the attentiveness of the lifelong fan. I half-watch it, my mind wandering back through the events of the day. Fortner will be home by now, going through the contents of the file, preparing the information before handing it over to his case officer in the morning. Will Katharine help him with this, or leave him to it? A car horn sounds long and hard in Queen’s Club Gardens as a Manchester United player is tracked closely down the wing by a defender stooped low like a piano player.
‘Andy fucking Cole,’ Saul mutters. ‘I know battery hens who are more creative in the box.’
Ten minutes later, as I am getting up to go to bed, Saul mutes the sound of the television and looks up at me.
‘Alec?’ he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘Sorry I had a go at you before. About Abnex. I think it’s great you’re doing so well there, doing something you believe in. A lot of people would give their arse to be in your position.’
‘Don’t bother…’
‘No, hear me out,’ he says, raising his hand. He’s more drunk than I had realized. ‘I don’t have any right to criticize you for working hard, for spending time with people in the business. And I like Fort and Kathy, they’re not the issue. I’m just reacting to how little time all of us have now, away from our careers. It’s taken me a while to adjust to the fact that we can’t always be fucking about like we used to. I don’t really know when the fun stopped, you know? We’ve all had to get a lot more serious.’
I nod.
‘Truth is, I admire you,’ he says. ‘You were in a bad place after not getting into the Foreign Office and you sorted yourself out.’
Now is when it is most difficult. Now is when none of it seems worthwhile at all.
‘Thanks,’ is all I can say. ‘That means a lot to me.’
He leans back and I decide to call it a night.
‘I’m bushed,’ I tell him. ‘Going to get some sleep.’
&nbs
p; ‘Sure,’ he replies. ‘See you in the morning.’
And he turns back to the TV.
I sleep in the room where I always stay, a study with a futon in it, the walls lined with paperbacks and hefty academic tomes left over from Saul’s days at LSE. I take down a paperback copy of Out of Africa and climb into bed, wearing boxer shorts and an old white T-shirt. From down the hall I can hear the roar of a goal-celebrating crowd and Saul quietly shouting ‘Yes!’ to himself as someone scores. I lie there for a while, trying to read, but my eyes grow tired after a single page and I put out the bedside light.
Then, of course, I cannot sleep.
Every night now for more than a year the pattern has been the same: an urgent need to rest ignored by my wandering mind, raking over every imaginable thought and anxiety, solving nothing. To sleep so little, so agitatedly, has become commonplace, yet somehow my body has adjusted to being starved of rest. On a daily basis I still manage to work, think, exercise, lie; but at some basic level I have forgotten how to feel. The jadedness is gradually erasing my better instincts, any capacity I once possessed to evaluate consequence and implication. It is as if every time I am woken up at three in the morning by that awful, gradual, caving sense of worry creeping around my subconscious, some better part of me begins to fail. Even a few straight hours of unbroken sleep will always be ended before dawn by mind-racings, concerns somehow magnified by the quiet and black of the night.
So, as ever, I turn to sex to try to shut it all out, lying there in the dark with the noise of the TV in the distance and some girl fucking me to sleep. She’s never anyone I care about, never Kate. Only the ones I tried to have, but couldn’t, even some woman I saw at a bus-stop who gave me the eye. Every now and again I relive an actual sexual encounter and try to make it better than it was: screwing someone from years back, or Anna again. Tonight it’s her, with her showered skin and tits bouncing uselessly above me, that look of sated lust in her eyes which I failed to recognize as malice. Nothing works, though. I hear Saul shut off the TV at around two o’clock and follow the noise of his footsteps going up and down the passage. He visits the bathroom, washes, then turns out all the lights. The flat is quiet.
I find myself thinking back to when I broke up with Kate. Saul and I would spend long hours in a Brazilian bar in Earls Court trying to dream up ways for me to win her back. These talks were, for the most part, serious and full of regret, as the realization that I had thrown away my one pure chance of a kind of happiness gradually dawned on me. But they were also good conversations, punctuated with laughter and optimism. This was all down to Saul - I was a mess. Quietly and selflessly over the years, he had watched and understood Kate and me to a point where he knew us both intimately. And now that understanding was paying off: he could explain her apparent cruelty, he could see when I was allowing a particular line of thought to become warped or exaggerated. It was uplifting in itself just to talk to somebody who also knew and loved Kate. And he never once tried to make me get over her; in his heart he knew that we should be together, and he wasn’t about to conceal that from me. I respected him for that.
Three months later, with ridiculous symmetry, Saul’s long-term girlfriend turned round and told him that she was seeing another man. And so we went back to that same bar, only now it was my turn to be the good friend, to be as wise and understanding as Saul had been to me. We sat down with our bottles of beer, late-night traffic sliding by outside, and tried to make sense of what had happened. From his coat pocket Saul took out a letter she had written to him, parts of which he allowed me to read. ‘How sad that two people who once cared for each other so much can end up like this,’ it said, ‘Take care of yourself’ and ‘I will always love you.’ The awful platitudes of separation.
More than anything else, I think, Saul was astonished by the speed with which it had finished. They had been together, on and off, since school. To my knowledge she was the first girl he had ever slept with.
What he needed then was for me to keep my mouth shut and just drink a beer with him. But I felt some sort of obligation to cure and began bombarding him with half-baked advice and banalities. I tried to tell him that all of his fears and insecurities were not worth worrying over, that he should try to ignore and shut out all the mental pictures of her infidelity. I told him that the anguish we feel in the immediate aftermath of heartbreak only dissipates in time into prejudice and misinformation. Best to ignore it. None of this seemed to make any impression on him; he looked at me almost with pity. I wanted, absurdly, a transcript of the advice he had given me to read out to him.
The truth of that situation was that he had already made up his mind what to do. He had stopped loving her the moment she had told him about her affair: very quickly she had become reprehensible to him. Saul’s numbness gave way to a strange kind of relief in a matter of days, as if he was pleased to be rid of someone who was so devoid of basic decency. This strength astonished me. I had thought it would be years, literally, before he got over her, that the break-up would be something from which he would never properly recover. But I was wrong.
This memory is in my head for the best part of an hour, all the sides of it, the implications. Then I review the night’s events once again, unable to shut them out, unable just to put it all to one side.
I do not once look at my watch - I learned that long ago - but it must be after four when I finally manage a few hours’ sleep.
Early next morning I call Hawkes at his house in the country from a telephone box in Barons Court.
‘Could I speak to Paul Watson, please?’
‘You have the wrong number,’ he says, following procedure. Then he calls back immediately, using a secure line.
‘Alec. What is it?’
He sounds remote, detached.
‘I needed to ask you something.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever get caught up in the drama of it?’
‘What do you mean?’ he says, as if the question were ridiculous.
‘Did you ever do things in the course of your work that you didn’t really need to do? Did you make things more difficult for yourself because you were deceived by the glamour of espionage?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not following.’
‘Let me give you an example. Last night, I made the first drop…’
‘Yes,’ he says nervously. He has always been wary of who may be listening in. His has been a lifetime of paring words back, of bending them into ambiguities and codes.
‘I was only following instructions, but the Americans seemed to have made things more complicated, more risky than was necessary. Maybe it was a test. I brought a briefcase to Saul’s flat…’
‘Alec, we can’t talk about this.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask, and my voice must sound petulant and spoiled. Like the game is over.
‘It is not advisable for us to speak any more.’
‘Since when?’
‘I’m going to be out of contact for some time. You’ll be all right. Just retain anonymity. You’ve been told what to do in an emergency: go to Lithiby. Do not contact me again. You’re doing fine, Alec. You must learn how to do this thing on your own.’
24
Final Analysis
The year draws to an end.
There are four more drops, one roughly every month, for each of which I am paid ten thousand pounds sterling, deposited in an escrow account in Philadelphia. I will have access to the money when the Americans have the data from 5F371.
The first handover takes place at a West End theatre, a simple exchange almost as soon as the house lights have gone down. The next two occur at my flat in Shepherd’s Bush, and the fourth inside Fortner’s car on the way to the Andromeda Christmas party. That was last week.
Were they straightforward? Yes and no. The actual transactions with the Americans are always fairly simple: well planned-out, isolated, unobserved by third parties. There is the small problem of obtaining suitable information, or of get
ting freely available documents home to a secure place where I can make copies. There are security systems to be circumvented at Abnex, random checks on packages leaving and coming into the building.
So JUSTIFY has become routine, just as it was supposed to, just as we had planned it all along. Yet something in me will not rest. When they asked me to do this, to give over the next two, possibly three years of my life, I agreed to it with the private acknowledgement that things would be difficult at times, occasionally even intolerable. But the long-term gain, the promise of a settled and fulfilling future, outweighed any immediate reservations I had about conceding to a constant duplicity. The hard fact of being caught between two sides was presented to me as a relatively simple arrangement: it was just a question of maintaining balance.
That is easier than it sounds. A third party was never foreseen. We reckoned without Cohen; we did not factor him in. I was ready to feel on edge, watchful and suspicious, but I expected that to be attended by feelings of elation and personal fulfilment. Instead, because of his constant, nagging presence at Abnex, I feel isolated and consumed by an apprehensive solitude which I am increasingly unable to control.
To give an example. In mid-October I began to notice that black rubbish bags were being taken from the outside of my building as often as three or four times a week. No other garbage is removed from the road with the same frequency: the council truck is scheduled to come only on a Thursday morning. I could not mention the problem to anyone, for fear of worrying them about the security of JUSTIFY. It was conceivable furthermore that it was American agents who were going through my bins as a way of checking up on the validity of their agent. This is common practice.
But that was not all. At around the same time in October I made a telephone call to BT requesting a second copy of my itemized phone bill; the first had been mislaid and I was late paying the balance.
‘Haven’t we already sent you one?’ the operator asked. ‘Didn’t you request an itemized bill last week? I’ve got a note here on my screen.’
A Spy by Nature (2001) Page 26