Later, I’d been only too pleased to benefit from the same flawed judgment. No one knew better than myself how guilty I was, but Uncle Percy had stuck by me and defended me when every other hand in the country was raised against me. I hadn’t realized how much I’d need a friend. Without him, even the small contact I’d preserved with Angelica might have been denied by my ex-wife whose keenness to clear herself of the Bessacarr taint, while hanging on to the Bessacarr money, had been phenomenal.
Now I needed a friend again. At the very least he might have some idea where Kate and Angelica had gone.
I approached the apartment with caution but I needn’t have bothered. One glance at Uncle Percy would have made me suspect the Brigadier had anticipated my visit here even if his greeting had not been, ‘Lem, they said you’d probably come. Step in, dear boy, step in.’
It was only a couple of months since I’d seen him but he seemed much older now. His face was as round and as ruddy as ever, but there was something hectic about his colouring. He led me into the book-lined living-room, musty with the smell of old paper and leather bindings and heated by an antique gas fire to an almost unbearable temperature despite the warmth of the summer night outside.
He said, ‘Lem, it’s good to see you, it really is. I was worried silly when I read about the kidnapping. I could hardly believe it when they told me you were back in England and might make contact.’
‘They?’ I said.
‘They’re very high up,’ he said unhappily. ‘People I respect. They have top-level authority.’
I nodded. He had been a Home Office civil servant all his life. They would know how to tighten the screws.
I said, ‘Listen, Uncle Percy. Whatever they told you, forget it. Here’s the truth. I’m dying of cancer. All I want to do is see Angelica before I die, but they won’t let me. They want me to become involved in some lunatic scheme to assassinate Pa! You’re the only person I can turn to for help.’
He shook his head disbelievingly. ‘Oh Lem, Lem. Cancer, you say? I’m so sorry, so sorry. And killing Billy? It’s a mad world. I never thought to live to hear such madness.’
His distress made me feel guilty for dumping this mess on his carpet, but I had to persist.
‘Kate and Angelica have disappeared. Do you have any idea where?’
He shook his head.
‘I’m sorry, Lem. I haven’t spoken to Kate since she told me about your phone call. She was very angry, very upset. Why didn’t you tell me about the cancer when you rang me the next day?’
‘Would it have made any difference?’ I said bitterly. ‘Percy, can you try to find out for me? You must still have contacts. These people have got them stowed away somewhere safe. You could winkle it out, I’m sure.’
He shook his head. He looked at the same time obdurate, ashamed, and afraid.
‘Percy,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake, they can’t have conned you into thinking it’s your patriotic duty not to help me.’
He shook his head again and said, ‘Please, believe me, Lem. There’s nothing I can do. Please go now.’
I was completely taken aback and the shock of rejection stung me to nastiness.
I said, ‘You’re afraid, Percy. What of? You used to be frightened of nothing. What have they threatened you with? Cutting off your index-linked pension?’
He looked at me in angry reproach and I was immediately overcome with shame as I recalled my long debt of gratitude to this man.
‘I apologize for that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean it. I’m overwrought.’
‘That’s all right, Lem,’ he said. ‘No offence, no offence.’
He hesitated, then went on. ‘A man came. He knew a vast deal about me. A vast deal. And about my friends. All my friends.’
I nodded, beginning to see the picture. Uncle Percy’s fondness for handsome young men was a Whitehall commonplace, hardly worth remarking on, indeed almost normal in some corridors of power. I could not see Percy bowing before blackmail attempts aimed at him personally, but …
I said gently, ‘This man hinted at … Unpleasantness for your friends?’
He nodded, distressed and ashamed.
I said, It’s OK. I understand. Really I do.’
‘Believe me, Lem, if I knew anything that would help, I’d still tell you, no matter what,’ he said, stuttering in his eagerness to convince me.
‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘I believe you. Goodbye, Uncle Percy. I’ll see myself out.’
I left him with tears in his eyes. Of all the nastinesses that were being perpetrated by the Brigadier and his chums, this was the worst yet.
Outside in the street, I stood uncertain for a moment or two. It was getting late and I was very tired. Finally I shrugged. The least these bastards owed me was bed and breakfast. I hailed a taxi and told him to take me to the Abbotsford.
It turned out to be one of those discreetly classy hotels tucked away in St James’s. I was greeted with quiet enthusiasm and shown to my room where everything from toothbrush to bedroom slippers had been provided for me. There was even a bottle of Chivas Regal on the coffee table. I poured myself a nightcap and drank it in the shower. It was good and I was about to treat myself to another when a sharp pain in my gut reminded me I had a house-guest to look after. Quintero’s tablets were in my pocket. I took a couple, resisting the temptation to wash them down with more whisky.
Soon the pain subsided, but worry and fear kept me awake for some time before I finally swam into sleep and dreamt almost immediately I was being dragged under the dark waters by my drowning father.
5
… it’ll stand hot water …
When I awoke it was eleven a.m. and there was a tapping at my door. I opened it and a waiter brought in a trayful of breakfast. Two pints of strong Colombian coffee, hot croissants, unsalted butter, Morello cherry conserve and half a pint of fresh orange juice. Someone knew my habits.
My stomach felt normal again and working on the principle that a man’s only as sick as he feels, I set to with good appetite.
‘Breakfast to your taste, Mr Swift?’ said the Brigadier.
He was standing by the open door which I had locked behind the waiter. I said, ‘They might try tossing a few cherries into their monosodium glutamate.’
He came in followed by red Reilly. She had changed the grubby T-shirt for a St Laurent blouse in fine silk, but as this was topped off with a creased and frayed bomber jacket, the overall impression was the same. The jeans too.
The Brigadier wore a dark jacket and pin-stripes. He looked like a traditional city gent till you got in the way of his eyes. He used his gaze like a dentist uses a high-speed drill.
‘Have a seat,’ I said. ‘If we’re going to be chums, I’d better have something to call you.’
‘By chance you have hit upon the last military rank I happened to hold,’ he said, sitting on the bed. ‘Many people still use it, so I see no objection to your doing so. It was by chance, I take it?’
‘Omniscience is commoner than you think,’ I said. ‘And there doesn’t seem to be any bar to ubiquity these days either. Which brings me to the question: you’re so bloody clever, why do you want me?’
He leaned forward and fixed me with his gaze.
‘When did you last see your father?’ he said.
‘1963,’ I said promptly. As I’m sure you know.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He would be—what? Fifty-one then?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Now he’s nearly seventy. Well past retirement age.’
‘On the contrary,’ said the Brigadier. ‘He seems to be as active as ever. Yet we would very much like to see him retire.’
He let the words hang. I poured myself some more coffee.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You’ve given me a pretty good imitation of a man who can fix anything. What’s the problem in rubbing out a septuagenarian traitor slumming it in downtown Moscow?’
The Brigadier said, ‘You have a distorted picture of your father’s status.
He has been treated well, indeed he is a Hero of the Soviet Union and his defection has never been declassed from Category A—that is, the category into which all top political, military and scientific defectors are put, though often for no more than a couple of years. You look surprised.’
‘He’s a wanted criminal, a murderer,’ I said evenly.
‘Must run in the family,’ grated Reilly.
‘Please,’ said the Brigadier reproachfully. ‘You must at least have read about him, Mr Swift?’
I shook my head. In England, my associates had rapidly become conditioned to never mentioning his name. If I came across a reference to him in a newspaper or magazine I read no further. Even journalists eventually gave up chucking their impudent, insensitive questions at me. And in Venezuela I had stopped reading the English newspapers from the day it was confirmed that I could stay. I didn’t start again till Dr Quintero fed me his little dish of barium meal.
The Brigadier said, ‘Time is of the essence. No, I’m not referring to your condition, Mr Swift. What we want you to do is subject to an even stricter temporal limitation. Succeed, and you’ll be able to pursue your own concerns at your leisure.’
I said, ‘If that’s the case, you’d better start being precise, Brig. So far, I’m not even sure what time of day it is.’
Reilly said, ‘This creep’s no use to us. Lock him up somewhere till he starts shitting blood.’
I smiled at her.
‘Listen, you Celtic hermaphrodite,’ I said. ‘I could easily forget the one per cent of you that’s female and crack that prognathic skull wide open.’
We were like children squaring up to each other with a long mileage of sneers to cover before we reached blows. But looking into those contemptuously vivid blue eyes, I didn’t feel it was an impossible destination.
‘Please,’ said the Brigadier again. ‘Mr Swift, I cannot begin to give you details until I am sure of one thing. Could you do it?’
I didn’t say, what? I knew what he meant. The time for evasions and delays was over.
Could I kill my father?
Twenty years ago the answer would have been easy. Now in the morning light, in this plush hotel bedroom, with a half-eaten croissant in my hand, the question seemed grotesque.
But it had to be answered.
The phone rang.
Reilly picked it up, listened, handed it to the Brigadier. He listened, said, ‘When?’ looked at his watch, said, ‘All right,’ and dropped the receiver on to the rest.
He said, ‘I have to go for a while. No more than half an hour.’
Reilly asked, ‘Shall I come?’
He shook his head.
‘No. You stay and keep Mr Swift company. I’ll want his answer when I return.’
He left and I finished my croissant. The butter had congealed.
I said, ‘You make a habit of catching me in my night clothes, Reilly.’
She shrugged and said, ‘I wouldn’t sell tickets.’
I drank the lukewarm remains of my coffee and said, ‘Now I’m going to shower and get dressed. Why don’t you step outside?’
‘I don’t mind. I’ve got a strong stomach,’ she said.
I said, ‘I meant, outside the window.’
She didn’t smile. She didn’t even look offended. I was beginning to be pretty pissed off with Red Reilly.
I said, ‘OK. I’ll settle for the door. Anywhere, so long as you’re out of sight.’
I took her arm and tried to lead her gently—well, fairly gently—to the door.
She chopped the other edge of her other hand sharply against my wrist. It wasn’t much of a blow but I thought she’d broken it.
‘Jesus!’ I said, letting go.
‘Don’t touch me again,’ she warned, ‘without you want to make it a full-scale fight.’
I said, ‘Touch you if I could help it? You’ve spent so long in your Killarney bog that your brain’s gone fibrous. Just go. Or at least get out of my way.’
She was standing between me and the bathroom door. I took a step towards her and she said in her low husky voice, ‘I’ve warned you. Touch me and you’ll pay for it. Not that you’ll be able to recall the last time you touched a woman without paying for it.’
I swung the flat of my hand at her face. She ducked easily, seized my arm, and used my own momentum to fling me across the bed. I kept on rolling and came up on my feet on the other side.
‘Reilly,’ I said, ‘forgetting you’re a lady is easy. Much more of this and I could forget I’m a gentleman.’
She said, ‘Crap, Swift. You’ve been a cockroach for twenty years, mebbe all your life. All this gentleman crap is because you’re a scared cockroach.’
I did a standing jump on to the bed and used it as a springboard to get height for a side-kick at her neck. I was barefooted but it would have laid her out like a pole-axe.
She caught my foot and twisted. I went with the twist—the only alternative was to hear my ankle snap—and somersaulted on to my breakfast tray. Again I kept going and came up with the coffee-pot in my hand. She was coming after me in an expert-looking attack crouch so I threw the coffee-pot at her.
To my surprise she turned away in a very womanly fashion so that the pot hit her on the back and spilled grounds down her grubby bomber jacket.
‘Hold it,’ she said. ‘If it’s going to get rough, I don’t want to risk any serious damage.’
For a second I wondered if this was some kind of surrender, but next moment she slipped her jacket off, very carefully removed the silk blouse, went to the wardrobe, put it on a hanger and closed the door.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
She wore a cutaway bra, more cutaway than bra. There was nothing ambiguous about her breasts. Suddenly she was wholly a woman to me, which was what made it so easy for her to crash the point of one of her stylish little court shoes under my knee-cap, and as I screamed, to stifle the sound in my throat with the angle of her elbow.
‘What’s up, creep?’ she said. ‘Like what you see, is that it? Mind on other things, all of a sudden? Tell you what. Anything you can take, you can have. No yells, no court case. Creep like you must have been an old-time rapist before you came into money. What do you say?’
‘Reilly,’ I gasped, ‘the prize isn’t worth spit.’
I turned my back on her, kept turning and came round to find that her guard had slipped sufficiently for me to get a left hook high to her temple. She staggered sideways and I drove my left again into her kidneys. After that it should just have been origami with me folding her as I pleased like a sheet of rice paper.
But she was a tough cookie. As she went down she drove her head at my crotch. Six inches lower and the damage might have been decisive. As it was, she caught me at the base of my solar plexus and it was my turn to fold.
I was still the first to recover, but only just. She went scrambling away from me over the bed, and inflicted some superficial damage with a couple of vicious back-heels. My uncharacteristic outburst of temper had already abated and I had no desire to hurt her any more. Even less did I have any desire to screw her, but it somehow seemed important to establish my victory, symbolically at least, and evading the kicking legs, I grabbed the waistband of her jeans and yanked back till the zip burst open and they began to slide over the swell of her buttocks. After a while she relaxed and suddenly rolled over on her back. Dishevelled and distressed, she looked younger, the lines of her face softer.
I looked down at her warily, suspecting a renewed assault.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘OK?’ I echoed.
‘Yes. OK. You win. You’re the champ.’
I was still doubtful, still suspicious.
She said, ‘Jesus, what are you waiting for? The national anthem?’
This should have been the moment when I really finished her off by telling her No, thanks, I’m a bit choosy. But I found I couldn’t. My bullshit reason was that I felt it would be unchivalrous. My asshole reason was
that
I’d earned it. What my real reason was I don’t know, but I stood up, in every sense of the phrase, and peeled her faded jeans off her shapely well-fleshed legs.
Her bush was the same electric red as her hair.
‘Is that real?’ I said wonderingly.
‘It’ll stand hot water and anything you can give it, mister,’ she said challengingly.
And it did.
6
… the hard …
Post coitum fessum est.
I’d kept myself pretty fit on Margarita, working out two or three times a week with one of Luis’s boys. But I was nearly forty, and hadn’t been in a real fight for years till first Hunnicut’s lads and now this mad Mick had roughed me up.
It was all right as we lay locked together in that timeless post-eruptive trance which even volcanic lava banging at the door can’t disturb. But when finally she sighed and gave a small wriggle and I, like a good little gent, rolled my weight off her, my back felt like it had been rearranged by a jackboot.
‘Holy Mary, what a weak thing is an Englishman,’ she said when I groaned. ‘If you’d caught me at my peak, I’d have killed you for sure. Lie on your belly now.’
I obeyed. She rose up, straddled my buttocks and began to massage my back. Her fingers were strong and pliant and knew where to probe. I groaned again but this time in pleasure.
‘Reilly,’ I said, ‘I take back five per cent of everything I’ve thought about you.’
‘Don’t get ideas,’ she warned. ‘You’ve got to beat me three times to get to keep me. And I don’t think you’re in shape.’
‘That seems to be the popular medical opinion,’ I said.
The fingers paused for a moment.
‘Not that it bothers me, Swift, but that wasn’t my meaning. I just forgot for a sec.’
‘Me too, Reilly,’ I assured her. ‘That’s a great anti-mnemonic you’ve got there.’
‘Is that what they call it?’ she said, resuming the massage. ‘Tell me something that puzzles me, Swift. For a man who’s so fond of forgetting, why did you come back to England?’
Traitor's Blood Page 4
