Maestro

by John Gardner

  “Alka-Seltzer and a long lie-down.”

  “Immediate thoughts about Gus.”

  “Impressions?”

  “Impressions, Herb.”

  “I believe he’s dead. I seen the car. I seen where he went off the road.”

  “But you have reservations?”

  “Many. Gus, or I presume Gus, was seen pulled off the road talking with someone a few minutes before it happened. No skid marks. Road as dry as dust. Deep ruts into the grass—not skids, but ruts. Heavy, like he drove straight off, then boom.”

  “Boom?”

  “Boom, as in, shit, I’m on fire and the car’s in little pieces. Shouldn’t be surprised if Gus was also in little pieces. When we get the medical stuff? Autopsy?”

  “Maybe later today. If we’re lucky.”

  “You think he was definitely pushed, then?”

  “’Course he was pushed. Old Gus wouldn’t just drive off a road only ten minutes from home and detonate himself into oblivion. If Gus wanted out, he’d make it stick like a real accident, if only for the insurance. For Carole.”

  “Then who’d want to do away with old Gus?” Worboys said it quietly, as though he were not really asking.

  “You want a head count?” Herbie prized himself out of his chair. “How many people did Gus put in the pokey during his long and varied career? How many secrets he take to the grave, eh?”

  Martin Brook turned back into the room. “He was writing his memoirs, Tony. People still alive, gentlemen in England, now abed, would possibly get their names all over the Sunday funny papers. There’s motive for you.”

  “Sure.” Herb sounded as though he did not believe a word of it.

  One of the six telephones on Worboys’s desk began to chirp.

  It was the Chief, calling from Warminster. Worboys covered the mouthpiece with his right hand and whispered, “Wants to talk with you, Herb.”

  “Yes, Chief.” There were no jokes and no tripping over his English. It was all business, a serious, sober Kruger. They all felt the change, and heard the grave note in his voice.

  At last Herbie put down the telephone and turned to look each of them in the eye. He blinked once before speaking. “He called me Herbie, and he’s new to the beat.”

  “He’s a quick study.” Brook grinned.

  “It seems that I am to be dear Gus Keene’s vengeance.” Even Worboys shuddered at the way Herbie spoke. Only a couple of times in his long dealings with Kruger had he heard the big man talk like this. On both occasions there was hell to pay.

  “The Chief says I can have anyone and anything I want as long as I find out the why and the who. I tell you exactly what I want, Tony. Okay?”

  “Okay, but you’ll get an anti-terrorist copper in tow, sooner or later. Possibly sooner.”

  “I’ll have to live with that, then, won’t I?”

  Kruger spent the night at a safe house he had known for years. A tall, narrow four-story place in a pretty little square behind Kensington High Street. It was there that, in his own way, he mourned the death of Gus Keene and reflected on his own mortality.

  Before going across the river to Kensington, he had spoken to the Chief, who called from Warminster. “I’m not going to ask you to sign on again, Herbie,” the Chief said. “Though we’ll give you anything you want. I’m just concerned about finding the truth of this business. You think it was an accident?”

  “No.” Herbie’s replies were now mostly monosyllabic.

  “Suicide?”

  “No. Someone had Gus killed, sir.”

  There was a noncommittal grunt at the other end of the line, and the Chief repeated that he could have any backing he wanted. Facilities, men—within reason—places to work. “Gus was just about the best interrogator we ever had. I want you to get to the bottom of it. Find the truth. Okay?”

  Herb was tempted to say “No problem,” but he held his peace and handed the telephone back to Young Worboys, who told the others that Herbie was in charge from now on.

  All of them looked at the big man as though he were Merlin and would solve puzzles in a minute flat. He took Worboys to one side and asked if he could stay in London overnight. Worboys nodded and went off to arrange things, and Big Herbie turned to Angus Crook, saying that he wanted Gus Keene’s jacket.

  The Scot broadened his accent, saying, “Gus Keene’s jacket hasnee been oot the Registry in my time, Hairb. Ye ken what I mean?”

  “Well, it’s got to be about eight inches thick.”

  “Near sexteen inches, Hairb.” Crook cackled. For a relatively young man, his laugh was a strange croak, as though some older ghost inhabited his body.

  When he brought the printout back to the office, it was only around an inch thick. “It’s just the outline of his life, Hairb,” Angus told him. “The full thing’ll take a bit longer.”

  After that, he was driven to the safe house, where he saw that nothing had changed since he had last been there. Same decor, which reached back to the 1970s. The fridge had been filled, and it was here that Herbie mourned his old friend. He even thought he could see him: tall, leathery face, features of a Gypsy, sucking at his pipe, with an unruly piece of his black hair falling across his forehead. Gus was sixty-nine years old, with not a gray hair on his head.

  Herbie felt the agony of loss, wondered how Carole was taking it, and almost wept, feeling that someone should sing a requiem for the old Confessor.

  Instead, he sat in the main room of the house, toying with hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes, his great brow wrinkled as he tried to think it through. Why Gus? Why now at this point when he was out and writing his memoirs?

  Softly and tunelessly, he sang a snatch of a song he had learned sometime over the years:

  “And here we sit, like birds in the wilderness,

  Birds in the wilderness,

  Birds in the wilderness.

  And here we sit, like birds in the wilderness,

  Down in Demerara.”

  Later, he looked at the part of Gus Keene’s jacket that Angus had passed on. It turned out to be a neat précis of the stepping-stones of Gus’s life. Education at a grammar school, several notches down from what the Brits called a public school and the Americans referred to as a private school. Service during World War II with the Intelligence Corps, where he was awarded a Military Cross, which meant he had done something relatively spectacular.

  After the war they gave him a grant to read law at Oxford. Herb remembered Gus speaking of Oxford as “the city of dreaming spires—or really the city of drunken squires.” He heard Keene laugh, somewhere upstairs, and felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle.

  Towards the end of the 1940s, Gus had given up law and married a short, blond, sexy girl called Angela, who turned out to be a very flirtatious lady. Someone had once said that Angela Keene would claim she had committed adultery only once—with the band of the Life Guards. Herb remembered her vividly, for he had groped her, and done more at a Christmas party. Angela put it about, as they say. He saw her vividly now, and recalled she wore a gold ring on a chain around her neck. Never took it off.

  In the end, Gus began leading his own life. He joined the Metropolitan Police and was quickly shunted into what used to be called Special Branch, which was hand in glove with the Security Service. Eventually, the Office headhunted him and within a few years the great Gus Keene became their leading interrogator. He also started to spend a lot of time with one of his juniors, Carole Coles. Inevitably, the lady Angela found out. There was a quiet divorce and Gus married Carole. Marriage of a lifetime, everyone said.

  Lord, Herb thought, Carole had loved Gus as though he were her sun, moon and stars. In his mind he saw them together. Gus in his old tweed jacket, looking like a Gypsy prince, with a smile that would draw even the hardest case into his confidence.

  Aloud, and to nobody, Herb said, “Was it the curse of the Gypsies, Gus? That your downfall?”

  He wanted to weep over what remained of Augustus Claudius Keene, whose fath
er had been an expert on ancient Rome. Augustus Claudius Keene. Down in Demerara—whatever that meant.

  In his head Herbie Kruger was almost praying to Gus: Help me. Show me the way. Light the path and I’ll examine all you’ve already written in your memoirs. I’ll dig out every friend and every enemy, and put them to the question. That’s what you used to call it, Gus. Putting people to the question. People said that you had an unhealthy interest in torture. I wonder, old friend, did it go too far?

  He hardly slept that night, with the shade of Gus Keene hovering on the edge of his mind.

  As Herbie Kruger tried to clarify his thoughts and mourn his old friend’s death, Detective Chief Inspector Olesker could not sleep. None of them could work out how the FFIRA Active Service Unit had vanished from a house they had under surveillance and planted a couple of damned great bombs at two of London’s busiest railway stations. DCI Olesker would be lucky to get away with it after the inquiry.

  In another part of the city, the members of Intiqam’s London cell quietly celebrated their first victories. They had been in touch with their leaders back home. They had asked if they should issue a statement and were firmly told not yet. Give it a few months with more successes in Europe, then, before the big day, you can issue as many statements as you like.

  Hisham, the very tall and muscular member, was the leader of the London cell, and the only one who had any reservations about what had occurred that morning. Four days previously he had traveled to Dublin in the Republic of Ireland and met, in the Gresham Hotel, with a short, well-dressed young man from the North called Declan. Declan Was the FFIRA’s officer in charge of foreign operations—which basically meant that he chose targets and sent out Active Service Units to mainland Britain, which he referred to as “across the water.” He was also Assistant Quartermaster General, which gave him access to arms, equipment and explosives.

  Hisham had dined With Declan and taken a step that he knew might be dangerous. “We both have the same aim,” he told Declan, who remained impassive, neither acknowledging the remark nor confirming it. “I am telling you, as a courtesy, that we are about to hit two, maybe three targets in and around London.” Hisham kept his eyes on the Irishman, trying to read something in his face. He then gave him the date they expected to carry out their attacks, saying that should the FFIRA be about to carry out similar actions, it would do both of them some good, from the point of view of publicity. At the time, Hisham thought his own masters would welcome some kind of press release.

  In the event, they had refused, forcing the FFIRA to make a separate statement denying the car bombs, which were the work of Intiqam. Earlier that evening, Hisham had taken a telephone call from an FFIRA contact in London. This man had suggested that his council in Belfast expected that, in future, Intiqam would claim responsibility for all their actions. The FFIRA was expressing its displeasure, implying a vague threat against Intiqam.

  One of the reasons Hisham had been chosen as the leader of the British Intiqam group was that he had spent time in Europe. Two years based in London but traveling around the Continent, mainly to Paris and various parts of Switzerland—1983 and ’84. His masters knew this, though members of the group did not. Later, they were surprised at the ease with which he moved about the city and the country.

  Hisham, in an attempt to diminish the ghost of the threat, took Dinah, the better-looking of the two girls, to bed. She was the tallest of the women who had come out with the teams to Britain and the U.S.A. At almost six feet—more with Western dress and high-heeled shoes—she stood out as a beauty. Slender; a kiss as cool as a cucumber, which could turn hot as a red pepper; and legs that appeared to be those of a contortionist. She could be fast and accurate with a gun, just as she could be slow and painstaking when it came to pleasuring a man. She had no desire for the so-called liberation of Western women—though she was already liberated, working for her country, but mainly in the West. For her, using a pistol with great accuracy was as pleasurable as using her female parts to subjugate a man and so, by subjugation, give him exquisite pleasure. After a while neither Hisham nor Dinah was bothered by the noisy jokes and laughter coming from the celebration in the adjoining room.

  3

  THE CALL FROM SALISBURY came at around seven the next morning and was immediately patched through to Herbie in the Kensington house. He had not slept well, floating just under the first layer of consciousness, the world only a bedsheet away, his mind preying on the various permutations surrounding Gus Keene’s death.

  Never assume anything, they always said, but Herb had already assumed that someone had put Gus away and blasted him into the permanence of death. The question was why would anyone do that? His half-conscious mind decided it was unlikely that it had connections to the past history of the Cold War. So what was left? Merely the old motives for murder and sudden death: revenge, money, women. The staples of foul play.

  Had Gus stolen his child bride, Carole, from another? That all happened in the sizzling sixties, so why would a previous lover wait three decades to seek recompense? Money he would have to look at closely, while revenge, in the nonsexual sense, was something else altogether. Maybe revenge had come out of the past and thumped Gus into oblivion.

  Around six he dropped deeper into sleep and dreamed, so that the telephone hauled him from a wild colorful fantasy in which he was cavorting with elephants dressed in tutus to the music of Berlioz’s Requiem. It might have been a scene straight out of Fantasia, but that did not mean a thing because Herb had never seen Fantasia.

  The voice at the distant end identified itself as Hard Luck, and Herb volleyed back with Incinerator. Why they still had to play tradecraft games was beyond him, but that was what the Chief had laid down, so who was he to argue? He reflected that Doris Day, many years ago, had defined the current status quo: “Our secret’s not a secret anymore.”

  Hard Luck was one of their bomb specialists. A person of macabre and bizarre humor, he was a gallows man who had risked death a hundred times in dealing with the terrorist bombs of the past three decades; a fellow of infinite jest where the minutiae of explosives and their triggering mechanisms, not to mention shattered corpses, were concerned. He had been sent down to Salisbury, with another of his ilk, during the previous afternoon when the Chief was busy issuing orders from Warminster.

  “So?” Herb asked.

  “So, I think you’d better come down. Gus was puffed, providing it was Gus in the car.”

  “I don’t think there’re any doubting Thomases on that score.”

  “Can’t get an ID. No way.”

  “A rag, a bone and a hank of hair? Kipling,” Herb provided.

  “Strictly speaking, that’s a woman, sir. But no, there’re no rags or hair. Charred bone, a bit of metal that could be from a spectacle case, something that was once a watch, and a couple of other odds and ends. There were three separate explosions which went off as one.”

  “How?”

  “Well, it’s not the ubiquitous Semtex, and the handwriting isn’t that of the boyos from our friends the FFIRA. Whoever did this used good old-fashioned industrial dynamite. A few sticks of the stuff here, another four there, and at least four right under the driver’s seat—literally inside the car. There was also a lot of gas in the trunk as well as the tank. Come and take a look. I think you should.”

  “Sure. Sure, I’ll check it out.”

  “We’ll be here for a couple of days. Nice town, Salisbury.”

  “Do a good line in cathedrals, ja?”

  “And in dispatch. Death in fragments; death by fire.”

  Herb called the Office, but nobody of importance was in yet. He showered, shaved and did the other thing. Then dressed and drank coffee, nibbling on a piece of toast as he again dialed the Office. This time Worboys was in.

  “You have everyone’s blessing,” said Worboys a shade too perkily. “The Chief’s dashed off to high-powered meetings in Europe. Told us you were in charge and that you could talk to Carole, but not
a full inquisition. He’s left Bitsy with her.”

  “Bitsy Williams who does Guest Relations?”

  “The one with the legs up to her armpits. GR and safe houses—which is not a full-time occupation these days.”

  “Never met her, but I’m told she’s good. Well over forty, but good.”

  “I know people who claim she’s better than good. Anyway, she’s to keep Carole company until after the obsequies.”

  “After the which?”

  “Funeral, Herb.”

  “Never heard that—obsequies. Is good. Nice long word. But these obsequies have to come after the ID, and I am told there’s little to ID.”

  “Your problem, Herb. You’re the man in charge.”

  Herbie gave a deep sigh, reminiscent of an old steam appliance. “Get me a car and a good driver. Pick me up here, half an hour, okay?”

  While he waited, Herbie called Registry and found Angus at his desk. The conversation was difficult and lengthy, with Kruger attempting to translate Angus’s accent, and Angus allowing his brogue to get thicker all the time—possibly an act of malice. Heads of Registry are, in a way, similar to librarians. Their charges are like children and they are not happy to see anything go out of the house beyond their control.

  Herb was after the methods used by Gus to research his memoirs and, between the “ayes” and “ochs” and “didnas” and “kens,” he gathered that Gus had taken only a minimal number of printouts from the building. It seemed that, for the most part, he had come in, read the stuff and made notes.

  “How far had he got?” Herbie asked, enunciating carefully.

  “Around 1969. He wasnee a fast laddie when it came to the resairch, ye ken.”

  Herb kenned and put the telephone down, reflecting on a comment made sometime ago by Young Worboys: “Old Angus is a Scot of the Music Hall variety. You expect him to break into ‘I Love a Lassie, a Bonnie Heeland Lassie’ any minute.”

  It was all very confusing to Herbie, who had perfected his own version of fractured English, which he often used to great effect. In Angus he had almost met his match.