by Alex Dryden
“Santé,” Logan responded. It was a very good burgundy indeed, he thought, and Plismy saw his reaction.
“I’ve been promoted!” the Frenchman said, unable to contain the good news. “My superior died in an air crash in the Côte d’Ivoire.”
“Congratulations, Thomas,” Logan replied, and raised his glass again. “To dead men’s shoes,” he toasted him.
Plismy laughed again, the short, staccato sound. “You have a tasteless humour I find so sadly lacking in your compatriots,” he said, and drank thirstily.
They drank the bottle steadily, like two professional drinkers rather than connoisseurs. The talk ranged from the forthcoming presidential elections in America—who did Logan think was going to win?—to the Russian invasion of Georgia; from the stock markets to the Olympic Games in Beijing. By the time they’d finished the bottle, like true drinkers they were beginning to comprehend the state of the world in all its futility. But unlike Plismy, Logan remained clearheaded, as he usually did unless he’d decided to drink alone, for a lonely reason. He saw that Plismy had already been drinking, probably celebrating at the office before they met.
Good, he thought. A loose tongue in a euphoric head was a most reliable recipe for the one-way exchange of confidences.
When they’d finished the bottle, they took a taxi to a place Plismy knew—and that knew him. Located near the Gare de Lyon, it was a small, family-run restaurant, with excellent Alsatian cuisine. Plismy talked all the way through the depleted August traffic about his new responsibilities, his new salary, and the new perks that came with the job.
Logan might have been more envious of Plismy’s secure employment position had he not been entirely focused on how, this evening, he could exploit Plismy’s garrulous desire to impress him. Lead him on, Logan, he told himself. That’s all it takes.
The waitress, a daughter, Logan assumed, brought two plates of something concealed beneath a rich-looking cream-coloured sauce. Plismy had insisted on ordering for both of them. He knew everything tonight; he was completely full of himself, Logan was pleased to see.
“Surely you must have been thinking about retirement?” Logan inquired. “Before the promotion, I mean. Haven’t you had your fill of the world’s secrets?” Plismy was twenty-five years older than him, at least.
“Before my promotion? Maybe, yes. A little.” Plismy beamed with pleasure. “But now, why should I retire? I have even greater power, Logan. Access. The secrets behind the lies, the lies behind the secrets. Something you and I know all about. And also I have bigger allowances, a higher pension, and a new car,” he boasted.
A fat pension sounded nice. But it was an equation that had never quite convinced him. The longer you worked, the bigger the pension, the less life you had to freely spend it. Illogically, having a cut-price pension suddenly made him feel better.
Logan wasn’t sure whether Plismy knew about his fall from grace back in the 1990s. They’d both worked out in the East, Plismy in Russia, Logan in the Balkans. They’d met during the western standoff with Russia over the Serbian war. But if Plismy did know, he’d never mentioned it. Plismy didn’t think a great deal about other people, however. Whether he knew or not, Logan wasn’t going to supply the information.
“Don’t you get trapped by it, though?” Logan persisted. “I sometimes feel I do. There are so few people to talk to about what the world isn’t supposed to know. You’ve been at this game for—”
“Thirty-three years,” Plismy said expansively. “And counting. I’ve seen a lot, believe me. And now? Now things are just getting more interesting.”
Get him onto Russia, Logan told himself. That’s his speciality. That’s where the game has squarely shifted once again.
“What happens to your old desk, then?” Logan said. “Some young Russian expert taking it on?”
“Nobody has my experience,” Plismy said grandly. “I’ve been there through it all. Before the Wall, when the Wall came down, and after the Wall. You know I was in Moscow through the whole period, almost. And when I wasn’t, I was running agents from here.” He paused. “No, I’ll keep my interest in the Russian desk. In fact, I’ve recently returned from a very interesting trip out East.”
“Chasing hookers round the nightclubs of Samara?” Logan asked. “Isn’t that where you tell me the real beauties come from?”
Plismy looked torn between telling Logan some hooker story for a laugh, or demonstrating his own importance in the thick of things, at the centre of power. He chose the latter.
Leaning across the table to indicate a confidence was about to take place, he said, “Do you know that we are going to take all the lovely Russian oil from the British and the Americans?”
“What? You and me, Thomas?”
Plismy pulled away sharply, cross that Logan wasn’t taking his confidential leak more seriously. He poked his fork across the table at the young American.
“I was there,” he said, mysteriously, and then filled the fork and put it decisively in his mouth. For a while he chewed his food thoughtfully, and Logan made no attempt to prompt him.
“The French have always known how to handle the Russians. With subtlety,” Plismy explained, when there was room in his mouth to speak.
“Like when they burned Moscow to the ground?” Logan said.
“Particularly then.” Plismy smiled. “Napoleon knew how to deal with the Russians.”
“And the Russians, I seem to remember, subsequently knew how to deal with him,” Logan said, with too much acidity in his voice.
But Plismy just laughed. He glowed at the memory of Napoleon’s two-hundred-year-old victories and forgot the defeats.
“So the French are taking lots of Russian oil?” Logan prompted this time. “Good luck to you.”
“Oil fields. New ones. The biggest. I tell you, I was there. In Sochi, down on the Black Sea, three weeks ago. Then in Moscow. Putin, Medvedev, Ivanov—we met them all. I was one of the team out there with ‘one of France’s major oil companies.’ ” Plismy winked coyly at the anonymity. “And we all sat around the same table with the men of power, the siloviki. Cover name, of course, cover position in the company. Usual rules.”
Plismy threw his head back like a horse and then dipped in towards Logan again.
“The Russians are going to hand us—France—the big Siberian oil fields, take them away from the Americans and anybody else. The biggest fields, Logan. The Sakhalin fields in particular, the biggest prize of all.”
“Sounds like a good day’s work,” Logan replied.
“It was a couple of days, actually,” Plismy said, blithely unaware of the foolishness of his own self-importance.
Logan now saw that Plismy didn’t know about his fall from grace. He was taunting him with what French aplomb and acumen could do, as opposed to American ham-fistedness—as Plismy saw it, anyway. Plismy thought he was still CIA.
“Look, Thomas, dinner’s on me,” Logan said suddenly, and smiled openly. “I want to be the first outside your office to congratulate you on the new job.”
“Well. That’s good of you,” the newly enriched Plismy replied. It was this sort of respect that a man like him, in his new position, could only expect.
They took a taxi back into the centre when they’d finished dinner. Plismy knew a place, which he and similarly ranked Parisians from different professions attended for what he called “late evening delights.” It was off the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, at the smart end, Plismy noted.
“It is where the French elite from the grandes écoles go for discretion,” Plismy said—though he was not, Logan knew, one of them. He’d come up from the rough banlieues of Marseille, where he’d learned his hatred of other, “lesser” races.
In the taxi Plismy returned to the Russian theme. Russia had been on everybody’s minds since the Kremlin’s show of aggression in Georgia. Putin had been photographed with the invading troops, openly displaying his power over the nominal president, Dmitry Medvedev.
“Top secr
et,” Plismy said. “The Russians captured some American special forces troops fighting with the Georgians. They told me that in Moscow. Very embarrassing for your people, I’d have thought.”
“I know nothing about it.” Logan grinned, in order to give the impression he knew exactly what Plismy was referring to.
But Plismy went off on another self-congratulatory tack, around the role he’d played in Moscow for many years, which now seemed to be bearing such rich fruit.
“The Americans, the British, they took the early, easy pickings in Russia,” Plismy said pompously, as if he were giving a lecture at the Hautes Etudes Commerciales. “But the French are the ones the Russians trust now. Perhaps for that reason. We weren’t in there like you, stripping the place in the nineties. But now France is coming up, just as Russian power expands. It couldn’t be a better moment. It will be a good few years, Logan, believe me, a profitable few years ahead. And don’t think our oil company doesn’t appreciate my own role in their giant strides in Russia,” he added, and winked across the seat of the taxi.
By which he meant, Logan knew, that Plismy was getting a slice of the action on the side.
“Look at what’s happened over Georgia,” Plismy continued. “The Russians march in—provoked by that madman Georgian president. The Americans do a lot of huffing and puffing. But it’s Sarkozy, our leader, who goes in and does the deal with Putin.”
“You mean Medvedev.”
“Medvedev may be president, but Putin pulls all the strings. Him and his cronies have it all sewn up. I’ll tell you a story.”
Plismy sat back in his seat and opened the window a little wider.
“Go on, tell me, Thomas—as long as it doesn’t reflect well on you, you old bastard.”
Plismy laughed and punched Logan’s arm. He was quite drunk, Logan noted.
“Up in Moscow, on this deal, I spoke with a very beautiful woman,” he said. “She’s in the Russian parliament, the Duma. Ex ice-skater. She was very attentive to me.”
I’ll bet she was, Logan thought. And I bet ice-skating skated over her real reason for giving you the time of day.
“She told me,” Plismy continued, “that the president of Uzbekistan came up to meet Medvedev in the Kremlin. In the course of much discussion, about many things, Medvedev asked why the political opposition in Uzbekistan disliked Russia so much. The president replied that they didn’t dislike Russia, they disliked Putin. Medvedev leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘I know how they feel,’ he said.”
Plismy clapped his hands with delight at the story, but mainly, Logan observed, because he knew it. He knew an insider’s tale of a conversation between the president of Russia and another national leader that had taken place in private, in the heart of the Kremlin, the heart of power.
“I know how he feels!” repeated Plismy, way off his usual vocal register. “The president of Russia is terrified of Putin. Medvedev’s just Putin’s poodle, you know I’m right about that. But don’t think we’re in Russia’s pocket for a second,” Plismy cautioned, as if Logan had been thinking such a thing. “We’re not like the Germans, handing out pipeline contracts that the Russians alone will benefit from. No. France is going to reap a rich harvest from these oil fields, but we’ve kept our independence intact. We play both sides with the Russians, Logan. We carry a stick, and we dangle a carrot. We have plenty up our sleeve in France, if the Russians ever get nasty.”
“And they will, believe it,” Logan said, to Plismy’s irritation.
Plismy leaned in towards Logan so that the taxi driver wouldn’t overhear. Logan could smell the hours of alcohol on his breath.
“We have some very important, very senior anti-Putin officers from the KGB under our protection. Here. In France,” he said. “We keep them up our sleeve, so to speak, for a rainy day. They have a great deal of compromising information about Comrade Vladimir. Bank accounts in Switzerland and so on. We keep our own kompromat against the Russians, just as they do against each other. We are well prepared.”
“Really? How senior?” Logan said. He knew they were approaching their destination, and it tempted him to take a leap.
But just as Logan thought Plismy was about to unburden himself a little more, the taxi drew up at the kerb.
“Oh, yes, France is looking after herself,” Plismy said importantly. And as he opened the taxi door, he veered off the subject completely, possibly recalling an earlier motif. “And the damn Jews in London and New York deserve everything they get,” he said randomly.
Two and a half hours later, after Plismy had been sated by a bottle of 1986 Krug champagne and the “most beautiful eighteen-year-old philosophy student you ever saw,” Logan found himself in another taxi with the Frenchman, on the way to another bar.
“So,” the Frenchman breathed, heavily and too close to Logan’s face. “What have you got for me, Logan? What’s the meaning of our meeting?”
It had taken Plismy nearly five hours to reach this point. He really believed that Logan enjoyed his company, Logan realised. Just like all the others. But Logan saw too that the cunning in Plismy’s eyes, even through the hours of drinking, was still engaged.
“You may need to use some of these KGB defectors you have up your sleeve here, Thomas,” he said.
“Oh, yes? And why is that?”
Logan decided on telling the background from truth, and then adding the big lie under this camouflage to hook in Plismy.
“It’s from our station in Vienna,” he said.
He saw Plismy watching him avidly.
“As you know, the Russians have increased their operations there tenfold,” Logan said. “It’s back to Cold War levels.”
“It’s true, they’re trying to march across Europe again,” Plismy agreed. “Money is no object for them now.”
And now Logan embarked on the embroidered story he had prepared for the Frenchman.
“Last week,” Logan continued, “a man was abducted in Vienna, in the trunk of a car hired by a KGB sleeper who works in an Austrian bank. He was taken to the outskirts of the city, roughed up by a couple of KGB hoods, threatened with worse, and ordered to do a job for the Russians.”
“What job?” Plismy asked.
“To cause a run on one of your biggest banks,” Logan said. “To crash it, effectively.”
“So the man abducted is a banker.”
“Yes. A very influential foreign banker.”
Plismy whistled softly. “They haven’t abducted people like that since before Gorbachev came to power,” he said. “Since the early eighties.”
“Right. They’re turning to the attack.”
The taxi drew up at yet another bar, in the seedy district below the Sacré-Coeur. It was after one o’clock in the morning, and Plismy now needed a little help getting to his feet. Logan led the way into the bar and ordered a coffee to clear his head. Plismy had a cognac. They withdrew to the farthest table, though the bar was almost empty.
Plismy wasn’t going to ask which French bank, or which influential banker had been abducted, Logan noted. Not yet. He would know there was a trade involved.
As the time wore on towards one thirty and Plismy’s roaming conversation was broken up by numerous interruptions, it turned out that the French did have some very senior KGB officers on the run from Putin’s regime. There were two or three, perhaps, Logan guessed, correctly assessing Plismy’s propensity for exaggeration.
Plismy was talking about women in general—a subject he constantly returned to—and then about one woman in particular.
“You should see her!” the Frenchman said, apropos of nothing. “Every inch a Russian princess. They say Gosfilm in Moscow was always trying to get her into the movies. But she was already taken for greater things. KGB father, uncle inside the Kremlin. She trained at Yasenevo for the SVR, right in the heart of the Russian foreign intelligence operations. Department S. She’s a gold mine, believe me.”
“You didn’t get her into bed, did you?” Logan said with a fa
bricated leer.
“No, no. Not yet, anyway. She’s still grieving the loss of her husband. British. Very peculiar. One of our kind, he was, Logan. SIS. I’m hands-off with her for now. But who knows? One day maybe. One day when she needs a favour, she’ll have to come through me.”
“You mean her Brit husband walked off?” Logan said, feeling a heat rising inside him, an instinctive feeling that he was close to something very important.
“He didn’t walk off!” Plismy scoffed, as if he’d already told Logan all about the woman, a fact that Logan noted. “He was killed. Here in Paris. By the Russians, of course.” He leaned in at the small table by the window. “Nerve agent,” he muttered. “On the steering wheel of his car. All hushed up from the press, of course.”
“No wonder she needs protecting,” Logan said. “They must be after her too. She defected to you, to the French, did she?”
“The Russians are after her, and yes, she should be very grateful to us.”
“Why didn’t she go to the British?” Logan said.
“Because her husband had, let’s say, blotted his copybook with London. Gone out on his own. But we have her safe and sound, tucked up under our wing now. Not far from where I grew up, actually.”
Plismy was from Marseille.
“You won’t hide her from the KGB for long,” Logan said.
“Oh, but we will. It’s a very out-of-the-way spot in the garrigue. In the ‘Midi moins le quart.’ ”
The garrigue, Logan knew, was a local expression for the aromatic scrubland covering the limestone plateau on the far side of the Rhone from Marseille; people there jokingly called the area north of Nîmes and west of Avignon the Midi moins le quart.
“We should pay her a visit, by the sound of it,” Logan said. “She sounds fabulous.”
Plismy took on the look of exaggerated surprise that only a man who’s drunk too much can manage.
“To the village,” Logan prompted. “Where you have her.”
Logan saw Plismy putting up his guard. No matter how much Plismy drank, he had a line over which he never stepped.
