Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  I chose a different phone box to the one I’d used before and dialed the memorized number. It rang twice and I heard the messageless tone. I spoke slowly and clearly in German.

  “Hello, it’s Roberto. I just wanted to let you know that Giorgio has been approached by the competition while traveling back from his trip to the factory. It seems that they are still having talks with him and he has probably been with them for two days. He may have had some of our samples on him, so they probably know about the new products he was bringing from the factory.” I also told him that I would be away for three days. That was to let him know that I would wait by a certain phone box tonight, the three days indicating which one. If he couldn’t ring me that night he would try again in the morning. We always stuck to a 6:30 p.m. or 9:30 a.m. call, and he had numbers for adjacent phones if the first one was busy or out of order. After leaving the message I dialed the speaking clock, just in case.

  With a few hours to fill before Abu Leila rang, I went up to my local library in Kentish Town and did some SOAS coursework. I had a week before the summer break and needed to hand in my final piece of work. Then, with the help of a librarian, I got the names and numbers of some letting agencies in Cambridge, as I needed to arrange a time to go up and view properties suitable for Abu Leila’s negotiation team. I usually used the Kentish Town Library exclusively for studying, but I wanted to have some progress to report when I spoke to him later. I had no doubt that things had to carry on despite Ramzi’s predicament—if anything, it probably added some urgency, although I knew of no connection between the Cambridge meeting and Ramzi’s activities.

  Sixteen

  Abu Leila didn’t ring that night so I had to go to the backup phone box the next morning. It was on a quiet residential square near Highbury & Islington underground station, where the people who occupied the big houses would never need to use a public phone. I got there just before 9:30, having checked my watch earlier against the BBC World Service time signal. I didn’t want to be hanging around in a residential area such as this, because the inhabitants tended to be vigilant against any potential threat to their property, and a foreign-looking gentleman (as Jack called me) loitering on their street could result in a call to the police. I picked the phone up on the first ring.

  “I know about Giorgio,” Abu Leila said, after some mechanical greetings. “You need to find out if he has the samples with him or whether his secretary brought them back. He was certainly given them when he left the factory.” I told him that I had tried to speak to his “secretary” but that she was upset at what had happened. “I am working on the assumption that he has them with him and is showing them to the competition, but I need confirmation as soon as possible,” he said. His tone was urgent, more urgent than I’d heard before.

  “I can let you know tomorrow,” I said, thinking I’d have to speak to Ramzi’s wife again or get into their house before morning.

  “Leave me a message before ten tomorrow morning,” said Abu Leila. “You should work on the assumption that the competition know about the samples, so if Giorgio doesn’t have them they will be looking for them. If his secretary has them you need to get them before they do.”

  I called Ramzi’s wife and let the phone ring for some time before remembering that she had smashed the receiver during my last call. I wanted to avoid going to their house, a small mid-terraced place in the East End of London, in case it was being watched. It was a possibility that they had let her come back to England for a reason. I recalled that she worked as a pathology technician at University College Hospital, but I didn’t know her name or whether she still worked there. But if she did, and since they were married and had probably taken his name, then the hospital would be a good place to start.

  Hospitals have no security to speak of. You can wander almost anywhere unchallenged, particularly if you don a white coat—best acquired from the doctors’ lounge in the A&E department. Or go dressed in a suit carrying a briefcase and pretend you are a drug salesman. I didn’t need either, as it happens. I went up to the pathology department and watched a noisy group of white-coated females coming out for lunch—none of them looked like they could be the woman I was looking for. I held the automatic door open with my foot while I asked one of the women if she knew Ramzi’s wife. The door had a keypad lock on it, one not capable of being picked.

  “You mean Fadia,” she said. “She works in cytology.” She rushed off to catch up with her colleagues before I could ask her where cytology was. Inside the department, I walked up the central corridor studying the signs on the doors until I hit the jackpot. Through a glass panel on one of the doors I could see four people sitting at benches working. There were tubes and microscopes and machines that looked like dishwashers everywhere. One woman, sitting at the back, looked promising. She had frizzy black hair and fine features, like the bust of Nefertiti I had seen in the Egyptian Museum in West Berlin. If that was her, I could see why Ramzi had married her and why his dedication to the cause was waning. She was sitting on her own with her back to the window, squinting into a very big microscope.

  No one took much notice of me when I went in—a big bearded man writing in a notebook glanced at me as I passed but then quickly returned to whatever it was he was concentrating on. The frizzy-haired woman looked up as I walked towards her and we held each other’s gaze. At first she looked at me with absent-minded curiosity, but then her dark eyes grew blacker and her face clouded and she stood up as I approached her from the other side of the laboratory bench.

  She was heavily pregnant and looked like she was going to give birth at any moment, but I was no real judge of these things. It rattled me though.

  “You’re Muneer,” she said in Arabic, not disguising her loathing. “I’ve been expecting you.” She stood with small fists clenched at her sides.

  “I just want to know about the case,” I said. “Did you bring it back?”

  “Get away from me!” she said loudly in English. I could hear a chair being scraped back on the floor behind me.

  “Is everything all right, Fadia?” a man’s voice said from the same direction. Presumably it was the man with the beard.

  “I just need the case and I will disappear,” I said to her, not looking around.

  “You have ruined our lives and all you can think of is your stupid case?” she said, switching back to Arabic. “Is it going to liberate Palestine, this stupid case of yours?” She held her swollen belly and started breathing through her mouth.

  “Is this man bothering you, Fadia?” The big man with a beard came into my peripheral vision; I didn’t look at him—I didn’t want to engage with him unless I had to, as it would divert me from my goal.

  “I just need to know whether the enemy has the case,” I said to her in Arabic, keeping my voice low and my eyes on her.

  “If you tell me who you really are, I will tell you where the case is,” she sneered. I had to fight to maintain eye contact; her dark eyes affected my concentration. She turned to the man with the beard. “Yes, he is bothering me. He is making indecent suggestions while my husband is away.” Then she started crying—quietly though, dissipating the rage. I could feel the man’s hand on my shoulder, but it was a tentative grip. It took a lot of effort to pretend it wasn’t there.

  “More people could be imprisoned, or worse, if the Jews have the case,” I said to her in Arabic. “It is a real possibility. Do you want that on your conscience?”

  She jerked her head up. “You are all the same, you sons of whores, playing at revolution, ruining people’s lives. You are no better than the enemy. Why don’t you go the West Bank and throw some stones, join the Intifada? It might do more good.” I blinked at her and waited until her shoulders relaxed. She waved her colleague away. “I didn’t let him bring it over the bridge,” she said. “I carried it across myself. I have it here.”

  Seventeen

  Dead-letter drops, explained Vasily, are just a way of exchanging things with another person without havin
g to meet them face to face. You don’t even have to know who the other person is. You leave something for them and they pick it up soon after. It means that you are not in the same place at the same time and therefore less likely to be connected. My last week in Moscow was spent wandering the streets with Vasily, looking for suitable places to hide things. It was not as easy as I’d thought after my success with the countersurveillance training.

  “This is how our trainees collect their pay checks,” he’d said, and I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. I was stuffing a 35mm film canister into a wall cavity in an alley, hoping that I wasn’t being watched by the team on our tail. “Some agents can do these drops while under overt surveillance and not be spotted,” he said. He told me of an agent at the Russian London embassy who used to make a drop next to Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery. “He would take a walk there every day, right under the nose of MI5, and they saw nothing. What could be more natural than a Soviet citizen visiting the grave of Karl Marx?” He laughed out loud as I tried to replace the brick over the canister. It wouldn’t stay in. He declared my efforts a failure: I had taken too long. I told Vasily that I thought that this would all be redundant with the developments in personal computing.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “People will still need to take photographs of documents, and those negatives will still need to be transferred somehow.”

  I preferred the use of public buildings rather than holes in walls. Toilets are good. You can stick something in a bag in a cistern or on top of a condom machine without much risk of being seen doing it. Not all public toilets are suitable though. Department store toilets are good, or museums or hospitals, or even your doctor’s surgery. The latter is good because it is somewhere you can legitimately go, even if you are being followed. Somewhere like that, where you have a good reason to be, or regularly go, is best. Don’t use a park toilet unless you usually walk in the park. Don’t walk in the woods unless you always walk in the woods. A drug-dealing pub is no good either as the toilets are often used to do business in and sometimes undercover policemen lurk there. These are things you learn over time.

  I was standing in such a drug-dealing pub toilet, having come straight from Westminster Reference Library, where I’d filed a blow-by-blow account of my previous day’s encounter at the hospital. Last night I’d left a message for Abu Leila telling him I had the “samples” and asking him what he wanted me to do with them. I had recovered the case, which Fadia had in her locker at work, and in the false bottom sat a single, letter-sized white envelope, sealed with tape. It was fat with papers and I’d hidden it under the bath in Tufnell Park.

  In the toilets I handed over £300 to my dealer in exchange for a multipack of codeine phosphate tablets, each packet containing twenty-eight tablets of 30mg strength. It was still cellophane-wrapped and in its barcoded delivery pack. I put it in a plastic bag. I’d rung the dealer from near the pub, telling him to get there within the hour, which I’d spent watching the place before he arrived, then for half an hour after he went in—the last thing I needed was to be picked up by the police while buying prescription-only drugs.

  “If it’s not the real thing I will come back and find you,” I said, only half-joking.

  He pretended to look offended. Like so many English men he was badly dressed, in his case a shabby, ill-fitting suit. With his battered briefcase, he looked like an unsuccessful accountant. He scrunched up his pale and pimpled face. “Roberto, my friend, have I ever sold you anything that wasn’t pharmaceutically kosher?”

  No, he hadn’t, he was reliable in that respect. Some dealers had tried to sell me codeine combined with other drugs, which meant that to make it worthwhile you had to extract the codeine by dissolving and filtering the tablets. Outside the pub I was in Knightsbridge and bright sunshine. People sat at benches drinking beer. Some men had taken their tops off to reveal white chests, and the women were in sleeveless T-shirts and sunglasses, pulling their skirts up to brown their egg-white legs.

  I put half of the codeine in my safety deposit box in the basement of Harrods department store and took the remaining packets back to Tufnell Park. I was considering taking a couple of tablets for an afternoon nap when I heard someone (definitely not Helen) on the stairs, then a key was tried in her lock. Someone knocked on her door. It was a gentle knocking but persistent, with some urgency to it. Then the sound of a man’s voice, a low, pleading tone. I put an ear to my own door to hear better.

  “Please, my love, let me in,” the voice was whispering. “S’agapo, Elena. Let me in, agapi mou,” he was saying. So he was Greek, her tutor, her lover or ex-lover. He didn’t want to go back to his wife, that was certain, or more likely he still wanted Helen as well as his wife. I wondered how he’d got in the front door.

  I opened my door quickly to surprise him. He was talking into where the door meets the frame and his right hand was tapping continuously against her door in a rhythmic accompaniment to his pathetic whispering. He stopped when he saw me and pushed himself away from the door, standing up straight with some difficulty. He pulled at his jacket and smoothed back his thick hair, which was shiny with oil or gel. It curled up slightly before it met his shoulders, but was graying at the temples. He couldn’t do anything about the two-day growth of stubble and the drinker’s eyes: watery and unfocused.

  “I don’t think she’s in,” I said, folding my arms and leaning sideways onto my own door frame. He looked more respectable than when I’d last seen him, mainly because he was clothed, but I could smell the alcohol from where I was standing, just an arm’s length away. He didn’t speak but knocked more firmly on her door, like he’d just arrived. I waited with him for an answer. “I’m sure she’s not there,” I said. I was tempted to say something in Greek. Instead I said, “Shall I give her a message?” He started to go down the stairs. “Who shall I say called?” I said to his back. He turned to give me a long look, as if to remember my face, but I met his stare until he looked down at the carpet. I knew then that he was no real threat. When he turned back around he stumbled on a bit of frayed carpet, nearly tripping headlong into the front door before finding his feet. “Be careful!” I shouted after him.

  Back in my room I lay down again and two minutes later heard a tapping on my own door. Helen was outside in her white T-shirt, jeans and big watch. She had just come out of her room and was barefoot. She tilted her head.

  “Do you like jazz?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never heard any.”

  Eighteen

  It turned out that no, I didn’t like jazz, at least not the style she took me to hear; she assured me jazz was a broad church. We’d walked down to Camden Town and the club was so crowded and smoky and loud that I was glad to be out walking by the canal afterwards. I found the music chaotic and startling. Helen said that was the whole point, that it could go anywhere. It was a bit like those Impressionist paintings Abu Leila told me to see in Paris, swirly and unfocused. She’d enjoyed it though. She’d drunk four glasses of wine and it showed in her languorous stride. Since it had been too loud in the club for us to talk much, I’d spent the evening watching her, or, more particularly, watching other men watching her. She appeared oblivious, though, to their attention. Some women are self-conscious about that sort of thing and you can tell they are pretending it isn’t happening. Others, although they may not consciously encourage it, would be troubled if it didn’t happen, as if defined by their attractiveness. With Helen it was as if she was immune to the attention. I didn’t believe that she wasn’t aware of it, she’d have to be obtuse not to be, and I’m sure she’d been told how attractive she was, but she just carried on regardless. I know that women have to be careful that their signals are not misread, because on the whole men like to interpret things to their own advantage, but Helen didn’t care; after all, it was our own fault if we saw something we wanted to see. It came to me later that the men weren’t ogling her exactly, more hoping that she would notice them, in the w
ay that a dog desperately craves the attention of its master. But she gave them nothing, not even a glance. I wondered how she chose the men she wanted to be involved with, whether, as she’d intimated, not much thought went into it. I didn’t know her enough yet to distinguish what she told me from what she actually did.

  “Perhaps we should have started with something more accessible,” she said. She took my arm, and it felt good, walking along like that. We passed a drunk propped up against the wall, wrapped in a coat and scarf despite the warm night. He held up a bottle to us as we passed. Helen had a silk scarf tied around her neck and was wearing big dangly earrings, then just a man’s white shirt over her jeans and flat shoes. I got a hint of expensive scent; I could smell it when she drew close, as she did now. She still had that watch on.

  “So what are you going to do about your PhD?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought he was your supervisor. Won’t you need a new supervisor?”

  She let go of my arm. “I can’t exactly change supervisors at this stage, not without getting him into trouble.”

  I wasn’t sure why she cared if he got into trouble. “But how can you still work with him? He obviously hasn’t accepted the situation.” She didn’t speak. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”

  “He just needs time to understand that I’m serious,” she said.

  “And are you serious?” I asked.

  She laughed and put her arm through mine again. “Michel! I think you’re jealous.” Her remark caught me off guard and I was glad that she couldn’t see my face in the dark.

  “I just worry that he’ll turn up drunk and uninvited, like this afternoon,” I said. It was the first time we’d mentioned the incident.