The Map
Page 10
‘No, none at all, Judith,’ he told her, surreptitiously reading her name off the nameplate on the desk. ‘Merely routine, his father asked me to check up on him. He’s the black sheep of the family.’
The receptionist’s relief was visible. ‘I understand, you’ll find him in Mr Sampson’s office, third floor, Room 20.’
‘Thank you, I won’t forget it.’ As he walked away from the desk Tyson checked his watch. The phrase ‘Keep him just ahead of you in your gunsight, remember he doesn’t even know you are here’ popped into his mind: something his father told him when they were out poaching cattle – in those terrible dust-filled hungry years. He’d give Winthrop a few extra minutes.
Cindy glanced at the desk clock. She had about half an hour before her boss would be back, scrubbed, relaxed and a lot more jovial than when he’d left. That was sex for you. She turned back to August.
‘I don’t know, last time I “helped” you I almost lost my job.’
‘C’mon, this is old history – harmless reportage – I just wanted to check on the story of an old buddy of mine. He claims he was in Spain in forty-five, I know he wasn’t – I have a wager on it.’ August slipped his hands down to her waist.
They felt good, large, firm and dangerously dexterous. Again she felt that tell-tale flush of warmth from her knees to her groin.
‘A wager?’
‘Five pounds – now that could buy you a good dinner.’
‘Okay, but you’ve got fifteen minutes, then you’re out of that office whether you’ve found the file or not.’
She went into her boss’s adjunct office, August followed.
‘No prying, stay by the door,’ she instructed him, as she opened a drawer behind the large desk to fish out a small brown envelope marked ‘Records office’. After taking the key out, she left the empty envelope on the desk.
‘You’re a trooper, Cindy.’
‘Like my mamma used to say, if you’re gonna fall, you might as well fall hard.’
The name Horatio Sampson was painted in small back lettering across the glass window of the office door – which, to Tyson’s surprise, was ajar. He stepped in. The outer room was obviously a tiny reception area doubling as a secretary’s office, the aroma of perfume lingered in the air, as well as the palatable sense that it had just been vacated. He walked swiftly and silently past the secretary’s desk and into the inner sanctum of Sampson’s office. A small brown envelope lay abandoned on the desk. Tyson picked it up, it was empty.
Cindy ushered August around to the records office like he was a visiting dignitary and she his guide, praying they wouldn’t encounter anyone she knew. They were lucky, it was still lunchtime and the corridor was empty. Cindy opened the door with a key and left him alone in the narrow room filled with nothing but spearmint-green metal filing cabinets lined up in rows like silent sentries. The whole history of the US – European operations was kept in here – locked up for future Americans to ponder the wisdom and diplomacy of their nation.
‘Fifteen minutes, August, not a minute longer.’
‘Thanks, Cindy, you’re a doll.’
‘I’m a sucker, is what I am.’
‘But a cute one.’
‘Get out of here,’ she joked, flattered despite her cynicism. It was hard not to be with August, he was just so damn charming. She left the office and, as an afterthought, locked the door behind her.
August studied the vast array of filed information, then, knowing from his previous visits, they were filed alphabetically, walked over to the file that would contain S.
He flicked quickly through until he found Spain – sandwiched between Sardinia and Suribachi. Within that file was a series of years running from 1933 to 1945. The subfile for 1945 contained twelve sections, one of which was entitled ‘October’.
1st June, 1945
I feel that now the war is over we should watch Franco and any inclination of the Spanish dictator to develop expansionist ambitions like his former ally Hitler. A fascist country left remaining in Europe is a potential threat to the new fragile peace. Franco’s unspoken support of the Axis during the war and his blatant exploitation of the strategic position of Spain in the European/North African theatre suggest a weak and corruptible character. Nevertheless, his ambitions cannot be underestimated. With isolated pockets of fascist battalions and movements scattered across both Western and Eastern Europe – not to mention the Soviet Bloc – now forced underground, I feel it necessary to adopt a policy to both train and ‘encourage’ those factions opposing the regime in Spain, with the intention ultimately to overthrow that regime and instate a democracy that would have the full support of (and be sympathetic to) both the US and its allies. It is proposed we set up a training camp for the Basque government now exiled in Paris to train both Basque soldiers and officers, with the potential to stage a successful coup. This has the blessing of President Truman.
Fascinated, August read on – so Jimmy van Peters had been right. It seemed that Truman’s primary concern immediately after the surrender of Germany was the possibility that the remnants of fascism – including some of the Nationalist movements in Eastern Europe, who, at the promise of independence, had aligned themselves with Hitler – might reunite and rise up again. Franco, as a fascist leader who’d remained unconquered during the war, was an obvious candidate and Truman was not willing to take any chances.
The last page of the subfile was entitled ‘Operation Lizard’. August’s chest tightened in anticipation – this was Jimmy’s outfit, exactly how he had described it, now lying in front of August confirmed in neat official font. The report described how the US Army had sent both arms and officers to train the remnants of the Basque Army then exiled in free France, with the intention of staging a coup, but these were withdrawn following Potsdam, when Truman, after encountering Stalin, decided Communism was a far bigger threat to the post-war world. President Truman issued orders to withdraw the Americans from the Basque camps. On the tenth page several telegrams had been stapled:
14TH SEPTEMBER 1945, WASHINGTON.
ORDERS FOR THE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL US OFFICERS AND AGENTS FROM THE BASQUE CELLS WITHIN FRANCE AND THE BASQUE REGION HAVE BEEN ISSUED – ALL OPERATIONS HAVE COMPLIED EXCEPT FOR OPERATION LIZARD. AWAITING COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMANDER CODENAME: JESTER.
18TH SEPTEMBER 1945, WASHINGTON.
STILL NO CORRESPONDENCE FROM AGENT JESTER. THIS IS A CONCERN GIVEN THE FACT THAT OPERATION LIZARD IS TAKING PLACE WITHIN HOSTILE TERRITORY.
URGENT
4TH NOVEMBER 1945, WASHINGTON. RE: OPERATION LIZARD UNSUBSTANTIATED REPORTS RECEIVED OF AN INCIDENT OF CRIMINAL NATURE ON THE 31ST OF OCTOBER INVOLVING THE OFFICER CODENAME JESTER – CONSIDERING THE NATURE OF THE OPERATIONS AND CURRENT RELATIONS WITH GENERAL FRANCO, LEAK MUST BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS. CONFIRMED THAT ALL TRACES AND POSSIBLE REPORTAGE OF THE INCIDENT HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFULLY CONTAINED TO BISCAY. UNTIL A FULL REPORT AND EXPLANATION FROM JESTER PURSUANT, PROVING HIMSELF TO HAVE BEEN AN OFFICER AND SOLDIER OF EXEMPLARY REPUTATION, OPERATION IZARD TERMINATED.
Stunned, August stared down at the document – so Jimmy had been labouring under the wrong impression for all those years. The order to execute La Leona and her men had not been given by the US government after all, the order had simply been to vacate. So why had Agent Jester – Damien Tyson – ordered the massacre? To what purpose? And why go to the trouble of eliminating all other witnesses over the years?
The ancient elevator shuddered to a halt at the basement level. Tyson pulled the iron gates open and stepped out into the narrow corridor. Last time he’d been in the embassy was just after the end of the war and before he got sent into Spain – to brief the ambassador on who was to be trusted in Churchill’s post-war cabinet and who wasn’t. Tyson’s visit had not been popular, and he’d found the labyrinth-like corridors of the Georgian building an unpleasant but accurate metaphor for the insidious complexity of British politics. Noting that he was probably in what was once the servants’ quarters, he fe
lt that old sense of claustrophobia return. He knew the records office lay to the left, beyond the end of the long corridor. He started towards it, just then the murmur of voices – a man berating another in broad cockney – floated down the passageway. Tyson glanced quickly up and down – there was a door, barely visible, set into the wall. Tyson stepped behind it and clicked it shut, narrowly missing the caretakers, who, unaware of his proximity, continued arguing as they walked past outside. Standing there in the pitch dark, Tyson fought a wave of revulsion as he realised he’d stepped into a toilet.
August was interrupted by the sound of Cindy turning the key in the door outside. Swiftly, he removed the last page of the subfile and slipped it into his shirt. Composing himself, he swung around to greet her.
‘Just as I thought, the guy was total baloney. The operation he claimed he was on? Doesn’t exist.’
‘Glad to be of service, as usual, so dinner and dance at the Trocadero?’
‘Sure, sweetheart, whenever you want.’
Outside they heard the sound of a door slamming and footfall. They both froze as whoever it was paused outside the door then walked on. Cindy stared wide-eyed up at August, and when the sound of the footsteps faded away she hurried him to the door.
‘You better get out of here.’
After he left she glanced around the filing cabinets. There was one on the far side whose drawer was open by a crack, as if someone had just been rifling through it. Cindy walked over. The files were dislodged like they’d just been looked at. One sat higher than the others. ‘Spain 1945’ – page ten was missing. Cursing her own weakness, she replaced the file hoping the next time anyone noticed would be decades away, then realised August hadn’t set a time or day for their date.
Then she heard the click of the door behind her. Startled, she swung around.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.’ The man – short and muscular, somewhere in his early fifties, with a shock of prematurely white hair and strangely pale green eyes – smiled at her, his capped teeth too white and too even and strangely carnivorous. He sounded East Coast – Washington perhaps – and he was wearing an expensive suit by a Manhattan designer she recognised immediately. Assuming he was some official who’d just flown in, she straightened herself, deliberately turning her back to the cabinet. ‘Not at all, I was just looking up some information for my boss.’
‘Your boss?’ His voice was low and disorientating somehow, the tone making it difficult for Cindy to concentrate.
‘Mr Sampson … he covers all Mediterranean operations,’ she volunteered then cursed herself for it. It wasn’t as if she instinctively trusted this man – quite the opposite, he frightened her, there was something profoundly absent about his presence, like he had no scent or shadow, and yet she had felt compelled to answer him.
‘I see.’ He stepped sideways towards her, a curious almost unnatural movement. Cindy’s chest tightened, she felt like screaming, yet backed up against the filing cabinet, she couldn’t move.
‘That’s the S cabinet, isn’t it?’
‘It is, S as in Switzerland,’ she finished, lamely.
‘You know …’ He slid closer, now she could feel the heat of his body radiating from under the starched white shirt, the heavy woollen suit. ‘I was just outside and I swore I heard voices in here, yours and another man’s, a man who might also be interested in S?’ He smiled again, and Cindy was reminded of a band of shark’s fins circling closer and closer. ‘Am I right?’
She stared at him, fascinated, still unable to move. Just then a door slammed outside in the corridor and the spell was broken.
‘Sorry, I’m needed at the office,’ she said, pushing past him.
Pity, Tyson thought, the image of her retreating buttocks and stockinged legs a collage of moving verticals that still burned on his retina. Such a pretty girl, such pretty flushed skin. What he could do with that skin. He licked his lips, cracked and dry from the flight, then remembered a prostitute he used once on a trip to London before. He would ring her later that night.
He swung back to the cabinet and pulled open the drawer for Spain. It took less than a minute to discover the missing page. He had no illusions as to why it had been stolen. So Winthrop likes solving mysteries, he thought, recalling the handsome confident face he’d seen with van Peters in the photograph; an ex-spy, classicist, botanist – someone who knew Spain better than he did, someone with a lateral mind and more than a layman’s interest in the occult, a privileged dilettante playing at being historian. Tyson laid his hand flat on the page and concentrated on the man, on the lingering presence, a slow hatred forming at the back of his throat, like a taste, an acrid tang.
Tyson had always suffered the indignation of looking in, of belonging to that subset of humanity who through circumstance endured the humiliation of watching others given opportunity, privilege, promotion seemingly effortlessly. He recognised August Winthrop as such a creature, born into extraordinary entitlement, born behind that imaginary window of the imaginary mansion through which Tyson felt he was always looking, no matter how successful, how powerful he himself became. It was a question of authenticity. If he was honest with himself (and he was, brutally), he never felt at ease, he never felt legitimately powerful. It was a sensation he did his utmost to hide from others, and he’d killed men for less.
A self-made son of a small-town insurance salesman who’d dragged his family around the Midwest during the dust-bowl years, Tyson had begun as a clerk in the Office of Strategic Services and finally got noticed through a propensity for languages and ruthless strategy. Within three years he had reinvented himself – then the war came and Tyson flourished. Men like him – men born without empathy – did in conflict. It was his natural habitat, his evolutionary raison d’être. When that war stopped he found another hidden war to operate in. Unencumbered by relationships, or even the notion of relationship, he was a good operative, his only weakness a tendency to be a little too independent of Central Office. But he was obsessive, meticulous and could kill utterly without hesitation or remorse. This trait made him invaluable to the organisation and he knew it.
He leaned against the cabinet, the cold edge of the metal digging into his back. He liked the pain; it sharpened the moment. Disparate pieces of information floated above him like cards waiting to be shuffled into exactly the right order, an espionage game of solitaire. Let him; let him be your puzzle master, your unwitting translator, was the answer that came back. He glanced down at the file with its missing page. Now he had enough bait to catch the scent of the trail.
‘The trail that is going to lead August Winthrop to a place I’ve been looking for more than half my life,’ he said out loud, then snapped his fingers as if to break a neck.
Driving back through Russell Square, then through the back of Lancaster Gate towards Kensington, August noticed a black Morris Minor following him. He checked his side mirror. The driver appeared to be a middle-aged woman, her long hair tucked under a silk scarf. She looked like an artist of some sort. Am I becoming as paranoid as Jimmy? he asked himself, not quite believing his eyes. He swung the car sharply into a lane that ran along the back of a neat line of mews cottages. To his horror the Morris Minor was waiting for him at the other end, parked at the kerb. After a discreet distance had opened between them the car pulled out from the kerb and started following him again.
Who was she? She certainly didn’t look like any embassy official, and her shadowing skills were amateurish enough to dismiss any possibility she was MI5. The inconceivable yet disturbing idea occurred to him that she might be the mother of some girl who felt wronged by him. Was that possible? Surely not. As far as he knew he’d always taken precautions and had let his conquests down gently but firmly. Nevertheless, the mysterious woman’s persistency disturbed him, and there was something familiar about her handsome but severe profile glimpsed briefly in the mirror. Where had he seen her before? Swerving, he doubled back and lost her three blocks from the apartment.
Again, he read the pages, in which Shimon Ruiz de Luna introduced himself to the reader. Fluid and ornate, the passages listed his qualifications and skills as a physician and alchemist, but also hinted at more pagan practices and a strong belief in the occult. Here the calligraphy became a little less scrawled and more leisurely in its swirls and arcs – as though the chronicle had started its life as a personal confession.
I was but twenty-three years of age when exiled from Córdoba, my town of birth, for ten years hence. My father, mother and sisters were lost to me, tried and found guilty by the Inquisitional police, for the sin of practising their natural religion. Betrayed by a woman who ingratiated herself into my father’s house to steal my family’s greatest treasure, an ancient manuscript that had once been the property of Elazar ibn Yehuda, physic to the Caliph Al-Walid and medic to the moor invader Tariq ibn Ziyad. I myself escaped arrest when our dwelling was searched, by the means of a sewer. But before I fled I took Yehuda’s ancient manuscript with me. My father had always told me to guard this work above my life and the lives of my family as it contained directions to a secret that would secure the fortunes not only of myself but all who followed in my lineage. And thus I fled from the cries of my condemned family with the manuscript wrapped under my cloak.
August pushed his plate away and wiped his hands on a serviette. He understood why the book’s real message was so very carefully hidden. Ruiz de Luna had been concealing his true religion as well as his pursuit of Elazar ibn Yehuda’s mysterious ‘treasure’. In Spain in the early seventeenth century to be found to be a Jew was death sentence enough, without the added charge of witchcraft. August himself had met several Spaniards fighting in the Republican Army who revealed to him that they were Marranos – secret Jews – their families practising the remnants of a religion that had been forbidden centuries before. August hadn’t really known what to do with these strange and incongruous confessions. It was as if they felt they could tell him, a foreigner without judgement, and not their comrades. One of the men had been killed in battle and for years August had felt weighed down by his friend’s confession. Reflecting on the paradoxes and prejudices that had shaped history, he turned back to the page he’d been reading.