by R. J. Dillon
‘A dreadful mess,’ the old man said, shaking his head. ‘Hetty,’ he pointed to his wife. ‘Angina. Lucky it didn’t finish her.’
‘I’ll go and have a word,’ suggested Nick as Rossan crouching, tried to explain their presence to a very frail woman.
A long-case clock marched Nick down the hall, gracefully keeping pace with his steps. In a back room facing the garden, Ruth Parfrey sat upright on a hoop-back Windsor armchair at a writing desk of light oak polished until it shone. She had that sort of English transient beauty that would leave her a little plainer after each child, though for Parfrey that had never been a consideration; she also had both wrists heavily bandaged, gauze dressings covering self-inflicted wounds made with one of her father’s razor blades. Above her head a large photograph glued to card, its rough edges finished with dark strips of tape. Surrounded by laughing children her parents posed sternly for the camera, their arms round a child apiece, but there was no warmth in the embrace. In the background a tin mission with a huge wooden cross dominating a blistering African sky. From where Nick stood the cross appeared to have been rammed right through the mission’s roof, as though angrily staking a claim on behalf of God.
‘Hello Ruth,’ said Nick as Lumb, a female officer with serious eyes took herself out of the room. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Oh… Nick, thanks for coming,’ she answered not bothering to lift her face, and Nick wondered if she’d been prescribed tranquillisers or painkillers and how much blood she might have lost.
From the kitchen Nick heard the rattle of cups and clank of a tray as Danny set about the refreshments. ‘What can I do for you?’ Nick asked, sitting across from her.
‘I wanted to tell you about working for Moscow,’ Parfrey said, staring at her wrists. ‘It’s only now when I’ve had time to reflect, that I recognise how much damage I’ve caused.’
‘You want to share it, Ruth?’
But before she could begin Danny knocked once, bringing in a metal tray leaving two cups of tea on a beaten copper table too low to be of any practical use. Out of an immense canvas bag Parfrey pulled out her cigarettes and a box of matches; defiantly, in childish sweeps of her hand she lit one, holding it at the very tip of her fingers to keep them clear of the smoke that slunk away to the ceiling.
‘It began when I was a student, I suppose. I’d a vague left wing sympathy, a fellow traveller is how I would be described, a useful idiot in our terminology. I tended to ignore the ideological pull, thought I’d outgrow it. Then you meet someone who shares a parallel world view, and that’s it, no blinding light, just a realisation,’ she said slowly, ‘I’m not going to provide dates and names now,’ she added.
‘So how did you know that Lubov was on to you?’
Stubbing out her cigarette she turned her head away, in profile its classic lines more beautiful than ever, but when she faced him again there was a grimace on her pale lips that just stopped short of being a scowl. ‘Just the mention that he’d struck gold.’
‘And that was it?’
‘I suppose.’ She reached for her cup drinking her tea automatically, her gaze set on a missionary chart depicting colonial Africa, its border spotted with tufts of mould. Around its edges small photographs of 1950s missionaries with neat hand and ruler lines joining them to their destinations; their churches all probably forgotten, a good few of the young faces probably dead. Over Nick’s voice asking if she understood, she heard the sea in the distance, and somewhere inside her head a voice of her own urging caution.
‘What more did I need?’ she said with no particular emotion, a plain everyday statement, and slipped back into a protracted silence as though determining if she could actually go ahead with her story.
Nick let the silence develop, a temporary break to increase the pain. Looking at Parfrey then away, he sensed she was trying to shut him out completely. Along the hall the clock chased away another hour, and the bungalow settled back on its dusty haunches in preparation for another dull afternoon. A cold wind came up off the sea and gusted inland, strumming telephone wires and playing down the roof, only the television penetrated the stillness with a screeching of tyres and sirens from New York.
‘After years of Lubov delivering just enough for us to continue his payments, I knew he’d struck lucky, hit the big time,’ she said abruptly, ‘I was correct I guess.’ And she trailed off again dumping her cup on the table with a bang.
A waist-high bookcase sat in a corner set aside for reading, under a green Anglepoise dipping its head; Dickens, Austen, Eliot, Trollope and Goethe fought for room with atlases, encyclopaedias and dictionaries.
‘Take your time,’ Nick suggested, though he knew that commodity was what they lacked the most.
‘Then Bensham confirmed it didn’t he. Bensham said Lubov had run into evidence of the Oktober Projekt. I realised that if Lubov had any brains he’d already have unearthed a financial genealogy for it. If he had that, he had me, so to speak. Simple, that’s all I needed, that’s all I’d been waiting for.’
If only everything about Lubov and his treasure was so simple and neat, thought Nick as Parfrey slumped back, her energy exhausted. He stared blankly through French doors to a strip of lawn running at a curious angle; next to it a greenhouse still thawing from the night’s frost, a compost heap rising wildly by its side. Dumped beside it a cast iron roller eaten with rust; across its splintered handles someone had strung a ‘My Other Car’s A Roller’ sign for a bit of a laugh. Turning his attention back into the room, Nick noticed prints of bible classes hung in sad groups forever waiting to be converted, all their eyes fixed accusingly on him from the facing wall. And by the door on a rosewood table, an engraved panorama of Hong Kong taken at night had slipped and gouged into the veneer.
‘That’s why I didn’t fully brief you,’ she said drawing on an inner reserve, her expression animated, her eyes alight with a strange passion. ‘Lubov had to be prevented from passing on his sample of gold.’
‘And so you just gave all this to your handler?’ Nick proposed. In an adjoining garden a fire clouded the air with spirals of damp wood smoke.
‘Poor Lubov. He must have been scared out of his wits when his GRU superiors launched a track and terminate operation inside the Defence Ministry,’ she said, rhythmical rocking in her chair.
And some more, thought Nick. ‘So you had no concern that Foula and me were walking into a trap?’ Nick wanted to know. ‘Jo Lister’s murder meant nothing to you either?’ Nick pushed her as close to the facts that he dared to go; not prepared to reveal how much he knew about Lubov’s concerns.
‘There were always going to be casualties.’
A sense of urgency had become apparent in both of them. It brought Nick to the edge of his chair, and as a paradox drove Parfrey deeper into hers; as if the weight of questions had become physically too much for her.
‘Jo, your wife, Alistair, the others, I never wanted any of that.’
‘But none of them deserved to die, did they?’ Nick curtly reminded her.
‘No,’ Parfrey agreed, ‘Jo probably suspected that I’d sabotaged the collection, she was killed because she would eventually link me to blowing Operation Salvage.’
‘Did you get a bonus?’
Nick’s accusation had awoken something deep in her and she stared at Nick with a real hatred. ‘I just did what I believed was necessary to protect myself. I never thought they’d come after your wife.’
‘But they did,’ Nick said, calling for Lumb.
In the hall Nick leant wearily against an anaglypta papered wall, massaging his neck as Rossan strode along to join him.
‘Do you believe her?’
‘It’s all bollocks,’ said Nick.
‘So why is she doing it?’ Rossan asked.
‘To protect someone she cares for, someone she suspects is Moscow’s source, someone she told about Lubov and his Oktober gold. Though I don’t think she knew then they were working for Moscow.’
‘And we
do what?’
‘Move her to a safe house, get her some medical attention, sweat her until she changes her story.’
‘I’ll call ahead,’ Rossan promised. ‘Better let her parents know that’s she’s coming with us.’
Finally after a long hour of inertia they were ready to leave, Nick nodding Parfrey out with Lumb and Montford on either arm. Nick even walked them down the hall, escorting them through the door to the end of the path where Danny would cross them to the car. Nick had barely closed the door when he heard the scream and knew it came from Lumb. He ran followed by Rossan, but they were already too late.
Afterwards he replayed the scene numerous times in his mind, picturing how he found Lumb tucked into a privet hedge, her hands clamped firmly over her eyes, screaming. In the road, Parfrey under the front wheels of a milk tanker as Danny knelt by her. Montford sitting crumpled on the pavement, repeated how hand in hand they had started to cross when he believed Parfrey had stumbled. Except she’d broken free, deliberately running into the path of the tanker. Nick had to slap Lumb three times to stem the screams. Leading her roughly back by the hand, he forced her smartly into the bungalow and by the time he had calmed her, the sirens no longer came from the television, but were very close and very real. Rossan organising and commanding had control of the scene, a role he took extremely seriously as he rehearsed his words before going into see Parfrey’s parents.
As the front room door opened behind Nick, a gale of hysterical laughter rushed out from the television, followed by studio cheers and a ripple of glitzy music. A retired afternoon on the coast he thought; time to unwind, forget the week gone and the one to come; forget who we are and how many lives we’ve ruined.
Fourteen
Antiques and Dirty Work
Hamburg, December
Nick flew out of Heathrow using a passport in the workname of Ingol on a late afternoon flight. Before checking in he dawdled with the well-timed patience of a seasoned fieldman, lingering in concourse shops with no intention of buying a thing, paying more attention to his back than making a purchase. From Stockholm he flew to Germany using a different name, aware how far the stakes had been raised.
At Kiel-Holtenau airport he entered a Germany of a different age; a former military base, a home to flying schools, clubs and small planes, it was still adapting to the novelty of commercial flights. Nick headed into its Balkan restaurant the furniture laden with wax and middle-aged waitresses buttoned up in black. He sat at a table overlooking the runway ordering beer and schnapps, settling back, unhurried, as though awaiting a friend. He had a perfect view of the door but let his attention drift to a panoramic window. Out on the runways planes taxied along tarmac belts ringed by conifers, disappearing in a dull roar into the charcoal sky. In defiant bits the last of the day fled through the trees without a fight, the runway lights glittering like gold bars. He remained for another thirty minutes, his gaze not far from the door. I’m getting soft Nick told himself, you’ve proved you’re unmarked so move.
Which he did.
Onto a train to Hamburg and into a taxi smelling of stale leather that let him down on ABC-Straße the temperature low, the freezing air leaving a salty smear on his skin. He traversed through a late crowd of drinkers their breaths billowing behind them in white trails, the cold gripping his bones cutting right through the glow of the schnapps, and he shook at its bite. Soon it would snow he decided.
Petra’s antiques shop was on Speckstraße and charged New York prices for common junk. Its window display held liberated tat like lacquered tables and poor canvases covered by heavy second coats of oil, alongside ships in dusty bottles, pitchers and basins pilfered from Baltic wrecks. The door had a night bell set on the lintel and it brought Petra Speyer to answer its call, taking him in like an orphan, making a fuss of him, determined to appear elated.
‘Nick this is good, but my God, look at you. When was the last time you slept? I got your message, and of course, I haven’t mentioned your arrival to anyone. Fantastic.’
She kissed him; left cheek, right cheek. ‘Hello Petra.’
‘Come through, come on, let’s get you warm,’ she said, taking him by the hand into a corner of the shop. ‘Sit, sit, tell me all the news. Coffee? Of course you must drink.’ When she smiled her whole face burned with the effort, and her auburn hair layered short and cut in from underneath gave Petra a youthful charm.
She made coffee adding whisky to it and when the coffee ran out, they set about drinking the whisky neat under the coral globe of a desk lamp giving them both a rosy glow. In her youth Speyer had tried her hand at modelling, once quite seriously tempted towards following it as a career. Carrying her beauty into middle age it had become something of a talisman against the onslaught of age, and only recently had it begun showing the fragile signs of wear. Now Nick could see the scars from laughter run into her gentle face, the deeper creases in the corner of each eye, a chilling blue that endlessly quizzed him.
‘Jack did ask me to let him know if you turned up,’ she announced after they had exhausted the small talk.
‘Did he?’
‘Jack’s fishing, up to no good,’ she decided. Petra, a Service resident for a good few years, used the Hamburg shop as cover for a ragtag network in the port that mostly brought in useless gossip that occasionally led to a valuable truth. When she inherited Jack Balgrey as her official arm, Petra somehow lost her enthusiasm. Jack, her support, working out of the office of Venlag & Co. GmbH, a one-man company wholly owned by the Service as its Hamburg base, purportedly dealing with imports and exports as well as property management, though its core business was spying.
‘It’s better Jack doesn’t know I’m in Hamburg,’ said Nick, pouring them both another generous glass.
‘What do I need to know?’
So Nick laid out a story, Speyer dipped forward her elbows on her knees barely moving, dissolving everything with long blinks and brief nods. Afterwards she sat back lighting a cigarette, expelling the smoke in a sharp plume up at the ceiling where it fanned slowly out winding through cheap parrot cages and ships’ lamps held aloft by wire. A clock rounded the hour, its delicate strokes of brass cymbals floating into the dusty vaporous light. ‘You need to be kept in the clear, Harry Bransk will do all the legwork,’ he concluded.
She considered him through the smoke; a lengthy sideways glance, shrewd and uneven. ‘Bransk is trouble, he’s not somebody that I would trust,’ she said, not even able to look at Nick.
‘I need him,’ he said, his hands clamped tight round his glass.
Her two-piece business suit showed off her legs and she consciously smoothed down the hem over dark blue tights. She stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray belonging to a shipping line, its colours hauled round the edge in limp pennants.
‘You better watch your back.’
‘He’s made all the connections once before.’
‘He’s slime.’ She spread out her pretty hands, their smooth palms to Nick in an appeal.
‘I need somewhere to stay,’ he said, wandering through overpriced vases and brass plant holders that would always stain green. ‘Until I find a local base.’
‘Why not a month, a year, forever? Then you help me sell all this trash?’ she laughed, straining at the effort.
Resigned, persuaded, numbed by his silent eyes, Petra led him through to the back of the shop, to a stockroom piled high with tea chests full of Dresden porcelain packed in bubble wrap for shipment, and a fake Baroque writing table with cabriole legs already sold to a Japanese dealer. The last clear space taken by a folding bed with a sleeping bag, pillow and blanket arranged neatly. Ready, she told him, for the nights she didn’t go home because there was a story to be bought, or if someone needed shelter, or for the nights she quarrelled with Hans, her sometimes husband. She showed him the toilet, the knack of flushing it on the third go, also the temperamental kettle, store of coffee, tea and dried milk on a stockroom shelf. Then she handed him the keys and set off for a meeti
ng with another bored agent, an elderly captain from Rostock, who never had anything to offer but a promise of marriage that Petra always politely declined.
• • •
Harry Bransk impatiently silenced the car radio, his progress along Altsädter Straße on this bitter December night frustrated by a lane light dangling off a wire like a Christmas lantern. He mouthed a long silent curse at the chaos around him, at the salt air carrying the fresh scent of approaching snow, at being rudely summoned by Nick Torr. The green light gave the all clear across Mohlenhofstraße and leaving his disgust in the rising clouds of fumes, he eased back the clutch sending the Audi forward. He had memories of countless drives such as this, dying a hundred times during them, waiting for the move that would never be your own, the one mistake that you could never predict. Now once again he became lost in his old habits, routines that made sleep a sanctuary.
He took in the city from the window, his heavy rutted Slavic face worn down by disappointment counted off the turnings. For Harry Bransk’s life consisted of several wrong turnings, all of them singularly painful and in one form or another removing him further from the crumbling shell of a Yugoslav village outside Maribor, where all those lives ago he had begun his apprenticeship to the secret world. An inauspicious start as it was, running messages across the Austrian border, it nevertheless prepared him for a life of deceit and treachery, of not having a shadow to call your own.
Through his mirror he watched for any signs of being followed, but so many thoughts clouded his mind that he had trouble concentrating. A car broken down in front had brought the traffic to a slow line creeping by the old Elbe tunnel, the urgency made him burn. His hands slipped on the steering wheel, he wanted to break from the queue to make up lost time, but he did nothing to attract attention. On the move again and the St. Pauli landing stages slipped past, bold against the river, stark like scaffolds, then the orange flashes of the breakdown truck were behind him.