The House of Cards Complete Trilogy

by Michael Dobbs

  Reluctantly his finger sidetracked, diverted to the outside of the thigh and then was gone. “Not this,” he muttered. “You came to me for help. About the graves.”

  “Sure,” she said, “but why the sudden hurry?” She sought his hand but he rolled back to give them both some breathing space.

  “We have little time left,” he continued. “If we don’t get an answer during the next eight weeks, before the peace agreement is signed, it will never happen. After that no one will be interested, not in this country. Something else will be in the news. They’ll say they’ve done their job, wash their hands. Cyprus will go back to being a faraway island where it might be nice one day to take a holiday in search of young wine and old ruins. Nothing more. It must be now, or we’ll never find the answer.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We make a fuss. Put on some pressure. Try to stir up a few old memories.”

  Instinctively, as she thought about his words, she pulled the sheet up to her neck. Over the last few days she’d tended to forget the reason why she had originally sought his help, distracted by the discovery of how versatile his help could be. They had made love in his kitchen chair that first time and in her exuberance she had torn off the arms. After they had finished laughing she had volunteered to take it back to Habitat, but then she changed her mind, deciding she would never be able to keep a straight face when inevitably they asked how it had happened. Somehow she felt sure everyone would guess simply by the way she smiled. So they’d pushed the pieces into the corner and tried the other kitchen chair, and the Chesterfield in his study where her damp skin stuck to the leather and made a ripping sound as it peeled off. He’d only invited her to bed—his wife’s bed—when it seemed there was something more than sweating flesh behind his willingness to see her. He’d not offered help in exchange for sex any more than she had offered sex for his help, but their separate motives were becoming more intertwined and confusing, so much so that she’d had to be reminded of her original purpose in knocking on his door. She felt a pang of guilt, but orgasms could be so distracting. And such fun.

  “If only I’d met you while I was still Foreign Secretary this might have been so much easier,” he said wistfully. “I could’ve unlocked some doors from the inside rather than having to kick them down from out in the street.”

  “But then you would be deceiving me officially instead of personally.”

  “What do you mean deceiving you personally?” He sounded affronted.

  “That cup of tea you offered me the first day we met and you invited me into your kitchen? I still haven’t had it.” She leaned over and kissed him before rolling out of bed.

  “Now get up, Makepeace. There’s work to be done.”

  ***

  Evanghelos Passolides sat alone in his darkened restaurant. The last diner had long gone and he’d made a perfunctory effort at cleaning up, but had been overcome with melancholy. He felt deserted by everything he loved. He hadn’t seen Maria for days. And his own Government in Nicosia was about to give away a large chunk of his beloved homeland to the Turk. Was this what he had fought for, what George and Eurypides had died for?

  He sat among all the memorabilia, drunk, an empty bottle of Commanderia at his elbow. A glass was lying on its side, the tablecloth stained red with droplets of what many years before might have been blood. He sobbed. In one hand he held a crumpled photograph of his brothers, two tousle-haired boys, smiling. In the other he held a much burnished Webley, the pistol that had been taken from the body of a British lieutenant and with which he had always promised to exact his revenge. Before he had become a cripple.

  Now it was all too late. He had failed in everything he had touched. Others were heroes while life had stripped him of honor and all self-respect. He sat alone, forgotten, an old man with tears coursing down his cheeks, remembering. Waving a pistol. And hating.

  Twenty

  Leadership is about change. Breaking things. Breaking people. Their hearts, their backs, and, when necessary, their lives.

  A man’s place in history is no more than that—one place, a single point in an infinite universe, a jewel that no matter how brightly it may be polished will eventually be lost among a treasury of riches. A grain of sand in the hourglass.

  For Urquhart, this was a hallowed scene: the shiny leather bench scuffed by the digging of anxious nails, the Dispatch Box of bronze and old buriri polished by the passing of a thousand damp palms, the embellished rafters and stanchions that, if one listened carefully and with a tuned ear, still echoed with the cries of great leaders as they were hacked and harried to eclipse. Every political career, it seemed, ended in failure; the verdict of this great Gothic court of judgment never varied. Guilty. Condemned. A place of exhortation, passing approbation, and eventual execution. Only the names changed.

  In recent days, whenever he turned away from the lights, there were voices in the shadows that whispered it would one day be his turn to fall, a matter only of time. As he sat on the bench they were at it again, the whispers, growing assertive, impertinent, almost heckling him. And through them all he could hear the voice of Thomas Makepeace.

  “Is my Right Honorable Friend aware”—the constitutional fiction of friendship passed through Makepeace’s lips like vinegar—“that the Greek Cypriot community in this country is deeply concerned about the existence of graves that still remain hidden from the time of the war of liberation in the nineteen fifties…?”

  Old memories like embers began to revive, to flicker and burn until the crackle of flames all but obliterated the words with which Makepeace was demanding that the British Government lay open its files, reveal all unreported deaths and burial sites, so that the tragedies of many years ago could finally be laid to rest?

  For a moment or two the House observed the unusual sight of the Prime Minister sitting stiffly in his seat, seeming unmoved and unmoving, lost in another world before cries of impatience caused him to stir. He rose stiffly to his feet, as though age had glued his joints.

  “I am not aware,” he began with an uncharacteristic lack of assertiveness, “of there being any suggestion that graves were hidden by the British…”

  Makepeace was protesting, waving a sheet of paper, shouting that it had come from the Public Record Office.

  Other voices joined in. Inside his head he heard contradiction and confusion, talk of graves, of secrets that would inevitably be disinterred with the bones, of things that must remain forever buried.

  Then a new voice, more familiar. “Fight!” it commanded. “Don’t let them see you vulnerable. Lie, shout, wriggle, abuse, rabbit punch on the blind side, do anything—so long as you fight!” And pray, the voice might have added. Francis Urquhart didn’t know how to pray, but like hell he knew how to fight.

  “I believe there are great dangers in opening too many old cupboards, sniffing air that has grown foul and unhealthy,” he began. “Surely we should look to the future, with its high hopes, not dwell upon the distant past. Whatever happened during that ancient and tragic war, let it remain buried, and with it any evils that were done, perhaps on all sides. Leave us with the unsullied friendship that has been built since.”

  Makepeace was trying to regain his feet, protesting once more, the single sheet of paper in his hand. Urquhart silenced him with the most remorseless of smiles.

  “Of course, if the Right Honorable Gentleman has anything specific in mind rather than suggesting some stampede through old archives, I shall look into the matter for him. All he has to do is write with the details.”

  Makepeace subsided and with considerable gratitude Urquhart heard the Speaker call for the next business. His head rang with the chaos of voices, shouts, explosions, the ricochet of bullets; he could see nothing, blinded by the memory of the Mediterranean sun reflecting off ancient rock as his nostrils flared and filled with the sweet tang of burning flesh.

  Franci
s Urquhart felt suddenly very old. The hourglass of history had turned.

  ***

  “Go for it, Franco,” the producer encouraged. He sat up in his chair and dunked his cigarette in the stale coffee. This could be fun.

  Behind a redundant church that had found a new lease of life as a carpet warehouse in a monotonous suburb of north London lies the headquarters of London Radio for Cyprus, “the voice of Cypriots in the city,” as it liked to sign itself, ignoring the fact that the four miles separating it from the City of London stretched like desert before the oasis. Describing the basement of Number 18 Bush Way as a headquarters was scarcely more enlightening—LRC shared a peeling Edwardian terrace house with a legitimate travel agency and dubious accounting practice. It also shared initials with a company manufacturing condoms and an FM wavelength with a Rasta rock station that fractured ears and heads until well after midnight. Such are the circumstances of community radio, not usually the cradle for budding radio magnates and media inquisitors. LRC’s producers and interviewers struggled hard to convey to their small but loyal audience an air of enthusiasm even while they did daily battle with second- and thirdhand equipment, drank old coffee, and tried hard to remember to turn on the answering machine when they left.

  Yet this item had legs. The girl was good, somewhere behind those lips and ivories was a brain, and the old man was a fragment of radiophonic magic, his voice ascending scales of emotion like an opera singer practicing arias. Passion gave him an eloquence that more than made up for the thick accent; what was more, in its own way the story was an exclusive.

  “Remember, you’re hearing this first on LRC. Proof that there are graves left over from the EOKA war, which are buried deep within the bowels of British bureaucracy…”

  The producer winced. Franco was an arsehole from which a stream of incontinence poured forth every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, but he was cheap and his uncle, a wine importer, was one of the station’s most substantial sponsors.

  “So what do you want?” Franco asked the pair.

  “We want as many people as possible to write in support of Thomas Makepeace and his campaign to have the full facts made public. We can prove the existence of two graves, those of my uncles. We want to know if there are any more.”

  “And you, Mr. Passolides?”

  There was a pause, not empty and mindless but a silence of grief, long enough to capture the hearts of listeners as they imagined an old man rendered speechless by great personal tragedy. Even Maria reached over to touch his hand; he’d been behaving so oddly in recent days, morose, unshaven, digging away within himself, changes that were ever more apparent since she’d been spending more time away from him. When finally his voice emerged the words cracked like a hammer on ice.

  “I want my brothers.”

  “Great, really great,” Franco responded, shuffling his papers in search of the next cue.

  “And I want something else. The bastardos who murdered them.” The voice was rising through all the octaves of emotion. “This was not war but murder, of two innocent boys. Don’t you see? That is why they had to burn my brothers’ bodies. Why they could never admit it. And why this miserable British Government continues to cover it up. Wickedness! Which makes them as guilty as those men who pulled the trigger and poured the gas.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Franco stumbled, scratching his stubble, unused to anything more heated than a weather report. “So I suppose we’d all better write to our MPs and give Mr. Makepeace a hand.”

  “And crucify the bastards like Francis Urquhart who are betraying our island, selling us out to those Turkish poustides…”

  The producer was second generation, not familiar with all the colloquial Greek covering the various eccentricities of human anatomy, but the intonation was enough to cause him alarm, especially with license renewal coming up. Uttering a prayer that no one from the Radio Authority was listening, he made a lunge for the fade control. And missed. The cup of stale coffee tipped everywhere, over notes, cigarettes, his new jeans. Havoc. Evanghelos Passolides, after an armistice of almost fifty years, was back at war.

  Twenty-One

  All opposition requires retaliation. I prefer to get my retaliation in first.

  The French Ambassador had begun to feel a strong sense of kinship with General Custer. Since the elevation of Arthur Bollingbroke to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, business had degenerated into bloody war, waged by the Frenchman against insuperable odds and a foe who had dispensed with diplomatic trimming in favor of wholesale scalping. Monsieur Jean-Luc de Carmoy had no illusions about the fact that the Court of St. James’s had become distinctly hostile territory. The Ambassador preferred to pursue his campaign with strawberries and champagne rather than the .44 caliber Winchesters of the U.S. cavalry but, like the blond American general, he had made the deeply personal decision that if he were going to die he would do so surrounded by friends. They milled about him as he stood directing maneuvers from the lawn of his official residence overlooking Kensington Gardens.

  “Enjoying the quiet life, Tom?”

  Makepeace cast his eyes at the garden crowded with guests. “As much as you.”

  “Ah, but there are differences between our lives,” de Carmoy sighed, lifting his eyes in search of the sun that shone over his beloved Loire. “I feel at times as though I have been sold into slavery, where every rebuke must be met with a smile and every insult with humility.” He paused as a butler with hands resembling black widow spiders supplied them with full glasses before taking Makepeace by the arm and leading him toward the seclusion of a nearby lime arbor. There were obviously things to discuss.

  “I envy you, Tom.”

  “The freedom of the wilderness. You envy that?”

  “What would I not give at times to share with you the liberty to speak my mind.”

  “About what in particular?”

  “Your Mr. Urquhart.” His face had the expression of a leaking milk carton.

  “Scarcely my Mr. Urquhart.”

  “Then whose, pray?”

  Around them the branches of the pleached limes twisted and entangled like a conspiracy. They were both aware that the Ambassador had crossed beyond the frontiers of diplomatic etiquette but, caught in the crossfire between Bollingbroke and the Quai d’Orsay, de Carmoy was in no mood for standing still.

  “Tom, we’ve been friends for a long time now, ever since the day you summoned me to the Foreign Office to administer a formal mutilation”—the Frenchman brushed some invisible piece of lint from the sleeve of his jacket—“after that confidential computer tape went missing from British Aerospace.”

  “Along with two French exchange technicians.”

  “Ah, you remember?”

  “How could I forget? My first week at the Foreign Office.”

  “You were frightfully severe.”

  “I still suspect the clandestine hand of some official French agency behind the whole thing, Jean-Luc.”

  The shoulders of the Ambassador’s well-cut suit heaved in a shrug of mock Gallic confusion. “But when you’d finished you sat me down and plied me with drink. Sherry, you called it.”

  “Standard Foreign Office issue. For use only on open wounds and Africans.”

  “I think I tried to get Brussels to reclassify it as brush cleaner.”

  “Didn’t stop you finishing the whole damned decanter.”

  “My friend, but I thought it was meant to be my punishment. I remember I was swaying like a wheat field in an east wind by the time I returned home. My wife consoled me, thinking you’d been so offensive I’d had to get drunk.”

  Like old campaigners they smiled and raised glasses to toast past times and dig over old battlefields. The Frenchman took out a cigarette case packed with Gauloises on one side and something more anodyne on the other; with a quiet curse Makepeace took the Gauloise. He’d started smoking a
gain, along with all the other changes in his personal habits. God, he’d left her only an hour ago and knew that in spite of the aftershave he still reeked of her. Pleasure and pain. So much was crowding in on him that at times he had trouble finding space to breathe. Slowly the trickle of humor drained from his eyes and died.

  “How is Miquelon?” he asked.

  “Blossoming. And yours?”

  “Teaching. In America.” He gave his own impression of the Gallic shrug, but without the enthusiasm to make it convincing.

  “You sound troubled. Let me ask…”

  “As Ambassador? Or as an old friend?”

  “About politics. I have no right to pry into personal matters.” In any event, the Ambassador didn’t have to. At the merest mention of his wife, Makepeace’s face had said it all. He’d never make a diplomat, no inscrutability, all passion and principle. “I hear many expressions that the era of Francis Urquhart is drawing to its close, that it is only a matter of time. And much discussion of who, and how. Many people tell me it should be you.”

  “Which people?”

  “Loyal Englishmen and women. Friends of yours. Many of the people here this afternoon.”

  Makepeace glanced around. Among the throng was a goodly smattering of political correspondents and editors, politicians and other opinion-formers, few of whom were renowned as Urquhart loyalists. From a distance and from behind a tall glass, Annita Burke was staring straight at them, not attempting to hide her interest.

  “You’ve been getting pressure,” de Carmoy stated, knowing it to be a fact.

  “Nudges aplenty. I suppose I’m meant to be flattered by so much attention. Now’s the moment, they say, step forward. But to be honest, I don’t know whether I’m standing on the brink of history or the edge of a bloody cliff.”

  “They are your friends, they respect you. Virtue may be a rare commodity in politics; it may speak quietly at times, but no less persuasively for that. It sets you apart from others.”