The Envoy

by Edward Wilson

  The Dominican idyll came to an end in 1937 when Kit’s father confronted Trujillo directly about the massacre of Haitian migrants by armed Dominican vigilantes. His father was sure the army was involved – up to twenty thousand Haitians had been killed. There was a grotesque test to determine who was Haitian. A gunman held up a piece of parsley in front of a suspect. To a French-speaking Haitian, who knew it as ‘persil’, the Spanish equivalent, ‘perejil’, was unpronounceable. Rubirosa, to his credit, was not in any way involved for at the time he had been an undersecretary at the Dominican legation in Berlin, where he supplemented his salary by selling visas and passports to Jews. Meanwhile in Santo Domingo, Kit’s father was relieved of his post and sent back to Washington. It wasn’t the first time or last time that conscience would damage his career.

  Kit wasn’t only surprised to see Rubirosa at Abélard’s; he was surprised to see him in Paris at all. ‘I thought,’ said Kit, ‘you were Dominican ambassador to Argentina.’

  ‘Argentina, the polo is fantastic – the best in the world. But the peasants play this game called pato, where you ride a pony bareback and chase live ducks that you have to catch and kill with your bare hands. It’s very dangerous, especially for the ducks.’

  ‘But, Rubi, why are you not there? What brings you to Paris?’

  ‘Things haven’t been too good with Doris …’

  ‘What a pity,’ said Kit. Doris Duke, Rubirosa’s third wife, was reputedly the third richest woman in the world.

  ‘… and, to be honest, I don’t think Trujillo was very happy with the way I was doing my job in Buenos Aires. What about you, Kit? When are you going to become an ambassador?’

  ‘I’m not. I’m sailing back to the States tomorrow.’

  ‘From Le Havre?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Let me give you a lift in the new Ferrari.’

  The next morning Rubi really opened her up on the long straight on the route nationale between Pontoise and Rouen. The Ferrari was a road car, but a real racing machine too. There were no luxuries, the seats were canvas instead of leather. Everything nonessential was stripped out. Rubi was capable of purity too.

  Windblown, they stopped for a simple lunch in Rouen of foie gras and red wine. When Rubirosa got up to have a pee, Kit followed him to the pissoir – he had to see if it was true. And he might never have another opportunity to see the famous ‘Ding Dong Daddy from Santo Domingo’.

  It was a fine sunny day and the pissoir was in an open yard at the back of the cafe. It was, thought Kit, one of the nicest things about France – the way you could have a pee in the open air and watch the world go by. He tried not to make it obvious that he was leaning over to have a look. He even thought of making small talk about the route or the weather to try to prove he wasn’t really looking. But when Kit actually saw it, he was stunned speechless – it really was almost a foot long. But the impressive thing was its girth; it was as thick as a man’s wrist.

  Despite his dissimulation, Porfirio saw that Kit had stolen a look at his cock. Rubirosa began in English. ‘You know there’s an operation for these things. It’s called, reduction phalloplasty. It certainly would make playing polo and driving fast cars a lot more comfortable. Porfirio did up his flies and then pinched Kit’s cheek with his thumb and forefinger. ‘But boy, I don’t think your rich gringas would still want to sleep with me.’

  They followed the route départmentale for the rest of the journey. The road twisted and turned as it followed the sinuosity of the Seine valley. The sun was straight before them, blinding and leading. It made Kit think about power: Rubirosa’s power, Kennedy’s power. Theirs were obvious forms of power. But, thought Kit, what kind of power can I have, can I wield? He was about to cross a great ocean to find out.

  London: November 1951

  Lord Cherwell knew what sort of language appealed to the Old Man. And the importance of keeping it all on a single page, otherwise things didn’t always get read. As soon as the Prime Minister picked up the memo his eye was drawn to the key paragraph:

  If we are unable to make the bombs ourselves and have to rely entirely on the American army for this vital weapon we shall sink to the rank of a second-class nation, only permitted to supply auxiliary troops like native levies who were allowed small arms but no artillery.

  The Prime Minister adjusted his reading glasses and went back to the top of the page:

  The McMahon Act (1946) forbids Americans to disclose any atomic secrets to foreigners.

  Churchill then picked up a pen and drew a question mark next to the offending passage. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘by “foreigners”, they do not mean us. What about our wartime agreements?’

  ‘They have been superseded. We should gain nothing, Prime Minister, by referring to them now.’

  ‘Are you really saying,’ Churchill’s voice was ringing with indignant irritation, ‘that the Americans would refuse to give us any information about bomb design, still less an allocation of bombs?’

  ‘Whether we like it or not,’ Cherwell spoke softly but firmly, ‘this seems to be the present position.’

  The Prime Minister frowned and regarded the memo’s final point. The words seemed to taunt him like a cold-eyed gambler offering another card.

  A decision is wanted now.

  Eniwetok Atoll, US Pacific Proving Ground: 1 November 1952 (Catholic Liturgical Calendar: The Day of the Dead.)

  Operation Ivy; device codename Mike, M for megaton. At a half-second before seven-fifteen a.m., Mike, the world’s first hydrogen bomb, was detonated. The explosion yielded 10.4 megatons, a force 693 times more powerful than the atom bomb that had devastated Hiroshima. The fireball was three and a half miles in diameter; the mushroom cloud rose to a height of twenty-five miles and spread to a width of a hundred miles – one hundred million tons of radioactive material was blasted into the atmosphere. The ground zero islands disappeared completely and were replaced by a crater large enough to contain fourteen Pentagons.

  Leighton Fournier, Kit’s father, witnessed the explosion from the deck of the USS Estes. He had used his position as a member of the ABCC, Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, to wrangle an invitation to the test. His obsession with the new bombs was one of the reasons why his colleagues whispered that he ‘had gone funny’.

  At sea

  Near Eniwetok

  Marshall Islands

  1 November 1952

  Día de los Muertos

  Dear Kit,

  I’ve just attended a preview of the end of the world. They gave us bigwigs radiation badges and dark glasses like welders wear, but the ordinary sailors had nothing. A few seconds before the end of countdown, everyone without protective glasses was ordered to go to the other side of the ship and face away from the blast. It was scary; my frightened animal self wanted to go with them. The last seconds of the countdown seemed to take forever as if Time had stopped in its tracks and was asking us to reconsider what we were doing. As soon as the flash occurred I instinctively covered my eyes and saw all the bones in both my hands. I turned away and faced the ship. All the ladders, the superstructure and all the gun turrets had turned from grey into sepulchre white – as if the Estes had become a ghost ship. When I turned my eyes back to the blast, the fireball was forming into a mushroom cloud. At first like a giant puffball streaked with red, then a white mushroom with a stem. The frightening thing was the way it just kept growing and growing. About fifteen or twenty seconds later the shock wave hit us and rocked the ship from stem to stern. My ears popped and popped again and then there was a boom behind us as the shock wave passed through us and headed out to sea. By now I thought it was all over, but that explosive cloud kept growing. It was now more like a giant doughnut then a mushroom. It was turning dark grey and black and heading towards us. A few minutes later, the skipper ordered us all below and the ship was completely buttoned up – every hatch and porthole secured. We were steaming away from the test site at full speed and the ship’s topsides were being
washed down with high pressure hoses and sprinklers. Gosh.

  I arrived on Eniwetok Atoll four days before the test (long bumpy flight in a MATS C-54 Skymaster) and was treated with more hospitality than my humble status merited. I was feasted on steak and lobster and boated out to coral reefs to snorkel in clear turquoise waters amid shoals of brightly coloured fish. (Un paradiso terrestre? Yes, Kit, I am aware of the irony.) The scientists treated me like visiting royalty and proudly showed off their pet monster. The Mike device wasn’t a ‘bomb’ such as you drop out of a B-29: it was a small factory, the size of a two-storey house bristling with cylinders, tubes and refrigeration units holding reservoirs of liquid deuterium (a form of heavy hydrogen that boils at – (minus!) 417 degrees Fahrenheit). But, my new friends assured me that once the principles of releasing that apocalyptic power are understood, it will take only months to produce a ‘weaponised’ miniature version of Mike.

  The odd thing about the scientists was not just their intelligence, but their civilised awareness of the enormity of what they were doing. One of them said to me: ‘Five billion years of evolution has led to this: the capability to destroy everything time has bought. And why? To threaten obliteration on a former ally that we have turned into an enemy – because we don’t like their economic system.’ I suppose, Kit, that we’re all the same: willing pawns manipulated by the vast currents of history. Only maybe, we shouldn’t be quite so ‘willing’.

  Much love,

  Your silly old dad

  PS The name of the island that we just blew up was Elugelab; ‘Flower’ in Micronesian dialect.

  Leighton folded the letter and put it in his bag. He knew that it would be weeks before he could post it. All communication and news from the test site was embargoed for the next sixteen days. It was feared that the news might affect the US presidential election that was only a week away. Two days after the explosion Leighton took part in a flight over the test area for the purpose of taking air samples and monitoring radiation levels. The plane never returned.

  Notes from the 1953 Bermuda Conference

  The American proposal to drop atomic bombs on North Korea if the truce broke down shocked the British delegation. Churchill regarded the bomb as something new and apocalyptic; but for President Eisenhower nuclear weapons were nothing more than the latest ‘improvements’ in military weapons. The President was polite and friendly, but never smiled or laughed. Churchill was gloomy and full of pent-up anger and resented the way that John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State, behaved as if he was running the show. Every time that Churchill broached the idea of a summit with the Soviet Union to try to reduce the danger of nuclear war, Dulles put on a stern preacher face as if the Prime Minister was suggesting a deal with Satan.

  There was, of course, something that everyone thought about, but no one dared say. At least not in public, for it would be a tactless breach of diplomacy. What would happen, say, if a hawkish Washington decided to end the Soviet problem with a pre-emptive nuclear strike? And it was a tempting option, for the US military planners knew that the Russians still lacked the capability to retaliate across the Atlantic. But … they could reach Britain – and that’s where the revenging Soviet bombs would fall. The British people would bear the brunt of American rashness – and most of them would die.

  London: June, 1954

  The Defence Policy Committee authorises a British H-bomb programme.

  Chapter One

  London, 1956. Mice, thought Kit. Not tiny rodents, but MICE: money, ideology, coercion, excitement. Basic training for case officers: the four means that you use to recruit an agent or persuade someone to betray their country. MICE, he thought, how apt an acronym. It wasn’t always that simple. The ‘E’ could stand for ego as well as excitement, but ego could cause problems – like bragging. Of the four, most station chiefs preferred ‘money’. When you get someone to take a bribe you have a paper trail for blackmail, then you get ‘coercion’ as a bonus – and that’s even better than greed.

  Kit turned up his collar and thrust his hands deep in his overcoat pockets. He felt a used Underground ticket, a mint, loose change – he liked English money, big and solid compared to greasy American nickels and dimes – and deeper down, the heavy lump of a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .32. The London evening that swirled around him was dense fog and shadow. It was the worst smog of the winter and smelled of sulphur. A bus, led in front by a conductor waving a torch, rose out of the gloom. He remembered the gas-lit streets of his Baltimore childhood: Victorian gothic with negroes and armed cops. But this was another country and the past was dead – or almost dead. When Kit turned left off Oxford Street into Poland Street, it was like descending into a mine shaft.

  He walked blindly into utter blackness, led only by the sound of laughter and shouting from the pub. A door opened and a powdered woman tumbled out framed by a ring of rancid yellow light. The scene reminded Kit of an Eliot poem. He ignored the pasty woman who asked for a light, and entered the warm fug. The pub had high ornate ceilings with Edwardian mouldings. The plaster was stained yellow by decades of tobacco smoke. It was easy to spot Driscoll. He stood out like an Olympic weightlifter in a consumption clinic. The unnecessary ID prop, a copy of Merchant Shipping News, was curled up in Driscoll’s massive fist. Driscoll looked tense and uncomfortable. A half-finished pint of beer rested by his elbow. Kit made his way through the pub crowd, smugly aware of how well he blended in, until he was next to Driscoll. He pointed to the pint: ‘Can I get you another one?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Kit was surprised at the way Driscoll seemed to shrink within himself. Then Kit caught the eye of an artistic looking middle-aged man standing two paces behind Driscoll. The man – wearing a tweed jacket and black polo neck – smiled and gave Kit a conspiratorial wink that seemed to welcome him into Soho’s world of furtive pleasure.

  Kit winked back. The man mouthed, ‘Good luck.’ Kit had learned a few Gaelic phrases. He leaned close to Driscoll’s ear and whispered the Republican motto, ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá.’ It meant ‘Our day will come’.

  A cloud seemed to pass over Driscoll’s face and he clenched his fist. ‘You think it’s funny?’

  ‘No, I hope your day will come – and sooner than you expect.’

  Driscoll unclenched his fist, but still looked suspicious. ‘What’s your name?’

  Kit gave his alias without blinking. ‘Shaw. What are you drinking?’

  ‘Not this piss.’

  ‘Guinness?’

  ‘Their Guinness is crap too. I wouldn’t mind a Jameson.’

  Kit ordered two doubles and studied Driscoll out of the corner of his eye. He was good at watching people without appearing to look. Driscoll had the body of a superb athlete on the way down; one that had just started to turn blowsy and a bit paunchy. On the other hand, Driscoll’s file was textbook perfect. Born in County Kerry, he came from a family with a strong Sinn Féin history. In 1950 Driscoll immigrated to the United States where he joined the US Navy and trained as a frogman. He won a medal in Korea. Afterwards, Driscoll left the navy convinced that he could make a fortune as a property developer in California. A business partner swindled Driscoll out of his life’s savings and ran off with his wife. Driscoll then descended into alcoholism, petty crime – and not so petty crime too – and suicidal desperation. Finally, he came back home and joined the IRA – and that turned sour too. It was, thought Kit, almost a film script. An alarm bell faintly sounded. This guy’s profile is just too perfect – he must be a plant. But who planted him? He could be from MI5, SIS, Scotland Yard Special Branch or even MoD police. It was all a big game. Allies spied on allies and agencies spied on agencies. You scored a goal when you caught someone with cum stains on their cassock.

  Kit watched Driscoll down the whisky in one gulp – almost like a Russian. Kit finished his own drink and ordered another round of doubles. He knew that he wouldn’t get drunk because he’d swallowed a wineglass full of olive oil before setting out. The oil coat
ed the stomach lining and prevented the alcohol from being absorbed. It was essential ‘tradecraft’ for anyone, agent handler or diplomat, who had any dealings at all with Russians – so much good vodka wasted. Kit watched beads of sweat form on Driscoll’s brow as he drank. He almost felt sorry for him – Driscoll had a problem. ‘How do you like London?’ said Kit.

  ‘London is shite.’

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Kit.

  The fog had lifted and the outside air had turned cold and clear. The pair headed north through a warren of side streets towards Regent’s Park. Kit sensed that Driscoll was more relaxed in the open. ‘I’ve read your citations from Korea, Mr Driscoll, you’re a very skilled professional.’

  ‘No big deal.’ If anything, Driscoll had enjoyed the Inchon operation. It was better than being cooped up on ship smelling farts and sweat. Driscoll’s underwater demolition team had cleared mines and laid beacons to guide the marines on to the sea wall. He won the Navy Cross for bravery, but after that everything turned to shit. Driscoll didn’t even know what he’d done with the medal.