The Envoy

by Edward Wilson

  ‘I see.’

  In any case, Porfirio came over to say hello and we chatted amicably – in French, of course, to stop the caterers eavesdropping. We talked about racing cars and Trujillo, mostly racing cars. Trujillo, by the way, is developing a urine incontinence problem. Then Rubi was dragged away to meet the ladies – the women would have lynched me had I detained him any longer. So I was left all on my lonesome – and that’s when I saw her.’ Kit paused.

  ‘Who was it?’ asked Foster.

  Kit searched for words. ‘A mysterious woman, very mysterious.’

  The Director sniggered. ‘Did you fall in love?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  The older brother was getting restless. ‘What’s the point of this story?’

  ‘Don’t rush him, Foster.’

  ‘She was wearing,’ said Kit, ‘a red dress with a low-cut neck, but her cleavage was hidden by a feather boa. I don’t think she was drunk, but she didn’t seem very steady on her high heels. She was wearing little black lacy gloves and black lacy stockings to match.’

  ‘Was she beautiful?’

  ‘No sir, she was not beautiful. But the fact that she was surrounded by such beautiful people made me feel sorry for her. She wasn’t young either – late fifties. Now, my father used to say that a gentleman is someone who makes a fuss of such a woman, makes her feel the centre of attention – the young pretty ones don’t need any help. Ergo, I went over to have a chat.’

  ‘The model,’ smiled Allen Dulles, ‘of a US Foreign Service Officer.’

  ‘She smiled when she saw me coming over, nice dimples. I filled her glass with champagne – Rubi for some reason had left me holding a three-quarters full bottle. I began polite small talk. She didn’t say much; she just made little mewing noises. I wondered if she might be Brazilian. She had black eyes and, as far as I could tell, the skin beneath her make-up seemed dark.’

  ‘An ageing Latina,’ offered Allen, ‘did you consider she might have been a relation of Rubirosa?’

  ‘No, sir. For when I looked at her face – close up – I realised who she was. In fact, the truth of her identity hit me like a sucker punch in the solar plexus. I was out of breath and got the shakes. The woman could see it too and it made her face turn hard – she knew that I knew.’

  Allen Dulles was smiling behind his folded hands, enjoying the story. ‘What did you do, Kit?’

  ‘I wanted to run – out of the apartment, down twenty floors of service stairs across the Hudson River and all the way to the Canadian border. I knew something that I wasn’t supposed to know. But I couldn’t move. I just stood there holding the ball like a second string quarterback about to be trashed by some brick shit-house of a defensive end. I looked into those black eyes, saw the jowls tighten – and a hint of stubble under the face powder. Sir, I was no longer looking at a woman. I was face to face with J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI.’

  ‘Did Hoover know who you were?’

  ‘I think so. He told me to fuck off and that I was playing out of my league. I thought it best to clear off. I said goodbye to my friends and left.’

  ‘So you don’t know what happened next?’

  ‘I’ve since heard that the party turned pretty raunchy and that the blond boys gave Hoover a hand job – but I can’t confirm that part.’

  John Foster Dulles looked at his watch, told his brother that he’d won the bet and he owed him ten dollars. The meeting was over.

  It was almost midnight when Kit left the embassy. He’d stayed until all the FBI personnel had signed out. The officer in charge of embassy night security was a marine captain from a steel town in Pennsylvania. He came from a working-class Polish immigrant family. The captain was sharp and bright – and wanted a career in the intelligence branch. Kit advised the officer to train as a linguist. He liked the young captain and had pulled a few strings to help him get posted to the Defense Department Language School for his next assignment. The captain was planning to study Vietnamese. He’d heard that Southeast Asia was a hot tip for the future: ‘It’s where all the action’s going to be.’ Kit thought he was right.

  The captain was grateful to Kit and didn’t hesitate to let him into the cramped basement closet where the FBI kept their tape machines. The marine officer knew that Kit could be more useful to his career than a couple of FBI agents who wore white socks with black suits and spoke with mid-Western accents. The tape was easy to find. It was still on the reel-to-reel machine, obviously the only recording the FBI had done that day. It also looked certain that the recording had been done automatically and unmonitored by a human listener – good. Kit pulled on a pair of surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints and rewound the tape. He put on the headphones and then fast-forwarded to the Hoover conversation. He then cut out the incriminating section with scissors. Kit knew that the Dulleses would, to an extent, protect him, but he didn’t want a lifetime of FBI harassment just because Allen Dulles wanted to piss off Hoover. Kit finished the job by splicing in blank tape to replace the section he had removed. He then rewound to the beginning and erased the rest of the tape, making it look as if the technician had made a mistake. Kit knew that the agent concerned, unsuspecting foul play, would then send the tape to a lab in Washington that had the technology to recover the lost recording. The lab would probably think that FBI London had done the splicing themselves. When the London jerks got the tape back and discovered the empty spliced-on bit, they would think that the lab had fucked up the tape and was trying to hide the fact. Kit smiled in anticipation of the bureaucratic shit-flinging fight that would follow.

  When Kit got back to his flat it was one o’clock in the morning. Unlike the other embassy staff, he lived in a working-class borough of the East End. In fact, it was ‘a manor’ controlled by a well-known family of villains. It suited him perfectly. Kit paid ‘the brothers’ a few pounds a month ‘to keep an eye on his place’ – and they did so with a vengeance. The Manor was full of eyes and ears that instantly picked up anything out of place. That brand of surveillance and assurance of safety was better than anything Scotland Yard’s Diplomatic Protection Squad could offer. But the villains and Cockney neighbours who kept an eye on Kit and his flat had no idea that he was a diplomat. As far as they were concerned he was François Laval, a Canadian shipping agent from Montreal.

  The flat, in a rabbit warren of run-down streets, was a safe house that he paid for with his own money – in Canadian dollars. Kit’s ‘official address’, where everyone at the embassy supposed he lived, was on the top floor of a Georgian terrace in Pimlico. He had sublet it to a junior doctor who, because of her hospital schedule, was seldom there. The doctor knew that she was paying less than half the going rent. In exchange, she had to follow a script if anyone turned up looking for Kit or made enquiries. She had to give the impression that she was a secret girlfriend – possibly one that was cheating on her husband – and pretend to be very embarrassed and a bit angry too. Meanwhile back in the East End, anyone who snooped around looking for ‘the Canadian geezer’ was in for a nasty surprise. The Montreal shipping agent was a perfect cover – it explained his American accent and fluent French – and his irregular comings and goings. And ‘the brothers’, of course, assumed the shipping agent stuff was ‘pure porkie’ and that Kit was a fellow villain engaged in smuggling.

  Kit loved his bolthole. As soon as the got in, he took off his tie and draped it around a plaster death mask of Baudelaire that he’d found in a junk shop on the rue Saint Jacques, not far from the Panthéon. He poured a brandy and bade a toast to the pale mask of the French poet.

  The room shook as a train rumbled past. Kit’s flat backed on to a railway embankment. All the embassy staff on similar pay grades rented smart townhouses in Kensington, Chelsea or Hampstead, but Kit preferred the rough edges and accents of the East End. He liked to get away from people like himself: educated, arrogant, privileged assholes.

  Most days, the couple in the downstairs flat were the only sane people he eve
r met. The husband was a reserve centre forward for a first division football club. He had to supplement his football wages by working as a draughtsman and a signwriter. He also played the clarinet and went to Labour Party meetings – mostly to complain about Gaitskell wanting ‘to sell out the workers’. His wife, an immensely strong and shrewd woman, had become a seamstress in a fashion house after leaving school at fourteen. The proprietors noticed that she had an eye for colours and began to trust her with commissioning designs. Kit found the wife reserved and a little suspicious, but the man was always friendly and open. He called Kit ‘old china’. What’s that mean? China plate? Must be slang for mate. Kit smiled: ‘We’re mates.’ They had two kids under five – and the wife was pregnant again.

  Kit lit the gas fire and settled in an armchair with his brandy. He liked the neighbourhood; he even liked the brothers. Sometimes he met them for a drink at the Blind Beggar – they never let him buy a round. Maybe they were cultivating him as a future gang member. The thought was flattering. The brothers were bad guys, very bad, but certainly weren’t the worst. A new gang was surfacing in Stratford who, it seemed to Kit, were truly evil. The brothers, of course, were evil too, but they compensated with a certain sleek beauty and style. The new gang had no beauty, no style: nothing but raw psychopathic cruelty. Their idea of a ‘don’t try that again warning’ was to nail their victims to the floor with six-inch nails and cut off their toes with bolt cutters. In any case, their protection rackets were nudging too close to the Manor – and there were dark rumours down at the Blind Beggar.

  There was something about dangerous men that was queerly thrilling. Kit found this thrill in the presence of the two younger brothers, both of whom were boxers of almost professional standard. When you looked into their eyes there was nothing there; nothing but black bottomless wells of emptiness. Not the faintest glint of fear, humour or doubt. If they decided they had to kill you, they were going to kill you. Asking for mercy or forgiveness was as pointless as feeding a dead cat. Kit was beginning to understand that the Brits were a hard people – capable of violence as well as endurance. But they were quiet about it. North and South Americans were violent too, but in a more affable way. Once, when he was a boy, a drunk had stumbled from a bar in Managua and embraced him hard. The drunk breathed rum fumes into his face and spoke Spanish with a strong Nica accent. He whispered into Kit’s ear: ‘What’s the difference, chico, between cutting up a gringo and cutting up an onion?’

  Kit was frightened. He looked around for his parents, but they were buying something from a flower stall a hundred yards away. He was so terrified that he feared wetting himself. He tried not to tremble and to be polite. ‘I don’t know, señor, what is the difference?’

  ‘When you cut up a gringo, you don’t cry.’ The drunk then threw his head back and roared with laughter before disappearing back into the bar.

  It was a turning point. Ever since that day, Kit had felt deep shame. He had nearly peed himself: he was a coward. When he went back to boarding school, he gave up cross-country running for American football and learned to box. He had to prove that he wasn’t a coward after all. And volunteering for the OSS had been part of the same pattern. Kit knew deep down that it wasn’t just the Kennedy confrontation that had caused him to volunteer for the Agency – he had been heading that way in any case.

  The induction course for new agents was just as much about forming the minds of the recruits as it was about imparting spycraft. You were first told that the United States government will never ‘order or authorise assassination in a clandestine operation’. Kit remembered the intense look on the instructor’s face as he said those very words. The instructor then paused and examined the eager upturned faces of America’s future spy elite. ‘And, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘that – along with “the cheque is in the post” and “I promise I won’t come in your mouth” – is one of the world’s three biggest lies.’ What the ban on assassination really meant was that you never write anything down. All planning and coordination must be mental and deniable.

  Later they learned to refer to killings as ‘wet ops’. The ideal assassination, of course, was one that could be passed off as an accident. And the most efficient form of ‘accident’ is a fall of more than seventy-five feet. (‘Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. Ideally, try to ensure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.’)

  Kit’s first attempt at a ‘wet job’ took place in Germany during his last posting. Horst had turned out to be a double agent: double in the sense that he seemed to be taking money from both the Stasi and the CIA. It was impossible to turn him over to the West German authorities: a court process would have compromised agents in the field. Kit and a major from the US Army Intelligence Corps decided to take Horst for a drive along the Rhine in Horst’s own car at two in the morning. The German’s hands and feet were bound and he must have thought they were planning to kill him by making it look like he had fallen asleep and driven over a cliff – and he was determined to make sure it didn’t happen that way. As they were driving along an autobahn, Horst’s car sputtered to a stop. ‘Fuck,’ shouted Kit, turning to Horst in the back seat, ‘your fucking gasoline gauge doesn’t work.’

  Horst smiled: he had been waiting for Kit to find out.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ said the major.

  ‘Listen, Roger, would you mind walking back to the village to chase up some gas – or a telephone – while I look after this piece of shit.’

  Kit listened to the major’s feet as they crunched away into the darkness. After five minutes Kit got out of the car to have a pee. Just as he started pissing, a voice began to shout from the other side of the autobahn. ‘Horst, kommt hier – macht schnell!’ Somehow Horst had managed to undo the ropes that were binding his feet and hands. Before Kit could even do up his flies, Horst was out of the car and running towards the voice.

  Kit shouted, ‘Fuck,’ and took off running after his prisoner. He was still ten feet behind when Horst climbed over the autobahn guardrail to get across the central reservation to reach whoever was calling to him from the opposite lanes. Except there wasn’t a central reservation: they were on a viaduct. Neither Kit nor his German counterpart from the BfV, the West German FBI, heard the body land on the gravel streambed two hundred and fifty feet below. They waited for five seconds; then the BfV colleague called across the dark void. ‘Kit, you still want me to drive around to pick up you and Roger?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  It was textbook perfection. The police and local press reported it as a ‘tragic accident’ – motorist ran out of fuel and fell to his death while seeking help. Two days later workmen were busy raising the barriers to prevent such an accident from happening again. There were, however, other repercussions. Kit’s cover was blown – and he was never sure how. In the end, there were more deaths and Kit had to leave Germany – which was one of the reasons he preferred sleeping in a safe house in the East End.

  ‘How long is Brian going to be away?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jennifer looked out to sea and the wind blew a twist of hair across her mouth. ‘He couldn’t say for certain – at least a week, maybe two.’

  Kit skipped back as a breaker crashed and surged over the shingle. The wind was blowing the tops off the waves. ‘Bracing,’ he said.

  ‘I love it. It clears the head.’ Jennifer pointed to a black hull that was rising and plunging against the stiff south-westerly gusts.

  Kit tightened his jacket against the cold wind. ‘What’s this desolate place called again?’

  ‘Dunwich. It used to be one of England’s biggest cities, but it fell into the sea. Coastal erosion.’

  ‘It is spooky here.’ Kit suddenly halted and pointed to the top of the sandy red cliff, ‘Look at that.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Jennifer turned away and shut her eyes. ‘I’m not going to look.’

  Kit cont
inued to regard the ribcage of a human skeleton that hung like a tree root out of the cliff face. ‘Should we tell anyone?’

  ‘No, it happens all the time. It’s the last remaining corner of the churchyard. One more winter of cliff-fall and all the graves will be gone.’

  ‘When Caddie was in her first year at medical school, they gave her a brown wooden box containing an entire skeleton. None of the bones were stuck together – it was like a jigsaw puzzle.’

  ‘I remember. She used to ask me to pick bones at random out of the box and hold them up so she could guess what they were. I hated it – but I wasn’t going to show her I was chicken.’

  ‘Remember that time she took us to the medical museum at Johns Hopkins – all those bottled foetuses …’

  ‘Please, Kit, that’s enough … not at a time like this.’

  Kit wondered what she meant, but didn’t ask.

  ‘Have you got much more work to do?’ said Jennie, changing the subject.

  ‘I’ve got to go back to the airbase tomorrow – boring ODA stuff.’

  ‘ODA?’

  ‘Office of the Defense Attaché. It’s not even my job – the assistant attaché who should be doing it has the flu.’

  ‘Have you got to count the atom bombs?’

  ‘God no, it would take too long. No, I’ve got to give a talk on the Status of Visiting Forces Agreement.’ Kit paused and pretended to look cross. ‘Who told you we’ve got atom bombs in the UK?’

  ‘No one, just a guess. So what is this visiting forces thing?’

  ‘It has to do with legal jurisdiction in matters concerning US military and indigenous personnel.’

  ‘Indigenous personnel?’

  ‘That’s anyone who isn’t an American. In this case, the British.’

  ‘So Brian is an “indigenous personnel”.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And when I have my ba…’ Jennifer stopped and faked a cough to cover her verbal slip.