The Envoy

by Edward Wilson

  ‘Yes, but I can’t remember how they work?’

  ‘Dead simple – and the perfect code too, totally unbreakable if you haven’t got the decryption key.’

  ‘Are you still trying to recruit me?’

  ‘Not really, but I remember how much you liked cipher work.’

  ‘I always liked decoding – it cleared the brain. I can just about remember the polyalphabetic – you used it with one-time pads.’

  ‘That’s what you are supposed to use. The trouble with one-time pads is that they kind of give the game away. Ordinary Joes don’t walk around with flash paper pads containing randomly generated letters in groups of four. If the local ‘policie’ find one of those in your possession, it’s off to the torture chamber. Ergo, I prefer books – provided they have at least three hundred and sixty-six pages.’

  ‘One for each day of the year.’

  ‘You’d make an excellent spy.’

  ‘So page one is your encryption code for 1 January.’

  ‘No, that’s too obvious. It’s better to begin the year with a date that’s only known to the agent and his handler – say, when one of them lost his or her virginity.’

  ‘The date would only be secret if they lost their virginities with each other.’

  Kit smiled. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. So, as far as we’re concerned, we’d better find another date. When’s the baby due?’

  ‘The beginning of September.’

  ‘Good, so page one of The Portrait of a Lady will be 1 September. But if we were encoding a message for today we would need to know how many days have passed since 1 September – our New Year’s, so to speak.’

  Jennifer fetched a calendar from the dresser and counted. ‘Two hundred and three.’

  ‘Good, let’s go to page 203 and find our encryption key.’ Kit found the page and laughed. ‘How serendipitous.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘“She would do the thing for him, and he would not have waited in vain.”’

  Jennifer smiled. ‘Sometimes I think you’re the devil.’

  ‘No, but he pays my salary. Now, let’s say that one of the “jays” was caught in flagrante with the French assistante at St Ignatius School for Boys.’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘True, but all the more reason to send a secret message to the Curia Generalizia. My job now is to encrypt the name of the unfortunate Fifi.’

  ‘Mademoiselle La Touche.’

  ‘That’s the one. To encode FIFI, I use the first four letters on our page of the day which are SHEW.’ Kit took a notebook and pencil from his coat pocket. ‘There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, which means that F is five.’

  ‘You’re wrong, F is the sixth letter.’

  ‘No, my dear, you are wrong. You forgot that A is zero – so B is one and F ends up five. A lot of recruits make that mistake. At any rate, when you encrypt, you add the letters – S, eighteen plus F, five equals twenty-three and the twenty-third letter is X. Likewise, H plus I equals fifteen or P, E plus F becomes J – but after that we have a problem, W plus I comes out as thirty.’

  ‘And there isn’t a thirtieth letter of the alphabet.’

  ‘Which means you have to loop back to the beginning – A is twenty-six, B is twenty-seven, therefore thirty is E.’ Kit wrote down the figures to demonstrate the calculation.

  Jennifer looked at the notebook. ‘The encrypted message you send me would be XPJE.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘How do I decrypt to discover the name of the poor La Touche girl?’

  ‘You subtract the key – SHEW – from the encrypted message. In other words, X, twenty-three minus S, eighteen becomes five or F.’

  Jennifer took the pencil. ‘But when E, four has W, twenty-two deducted you end up with minus eighteen.’

  ‘When you have a minus sum, you have to add twenty-six, thus minus eighteen becomes eight.’

  ‘And letter eight is I – and that makes FIFI! This is fun!’

  ‘Good. The beauty of the polyalphabetic cipher is that the encryption code changes every day.’

  ‘What happens when you run out of pages?’

  ‘We choose another book – Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, say.’

  ‘I prefer Isabel Archer, she didn’t commit adultery.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘She wasn’t like that, Isabel was a good girl.’ Jennifer stroked the novel. ‘I do love this book.’ She opened it to the last page and read, ‘“She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path …”’ Jennifer looked up. ‘But the ending is left up in the air. The book doesn’t tell us where Isabel’s “straight path” is heading.’

  ‘I think I know.’

  ‘No, Kit, you don’t know.’

  ‘Let me help you clear things away.’

  Just as Kit was about to go off to the guest bedroom, Jennifer said, ‘What do you want?’

  He looked at her. She was facing him squarely. There was nothing coy or seductive in her stance: it was completely open and honest. Kit looked away; he was frightened. ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘I wish I could help you.’

  Kit knew that he had said the wrong thing, that he had missed something and that it wasn’t going to come around again.

  When Jennifer spoke again, her voice had changed. ‘I might send you a few messages just to see if the cipher works. At least, I can play at being your spy.’

  When Kit woke he could hear Jennifer bustling about in the kitchen. He looked at his watch: it was just after six. He hoped it was like that when Brian was there too. He hated the thought of her lingering in bed to please him. Why, he thought, do men wake up with erections: the dawn hard-on? Were they visited by succubi and incubi who teased them in the dark watches of the night? As he dressed he tried to remember his dream: something about Jennifer’s oldest brother. Not just rescuing him and getting him to the airfield in time, but actually digging up the body and bringing it back to life. There were different versions of the dream before – but they always ended the same. The brother, Peter, always went floppy and dead again – like an inflatable dinghy with a bad leak – before he could get him back to Jennifer. If he could only get Peter home in time, Jennifer could pump him up again. Kit wondered if it had something to do with early morning erections. It all seemed Freudian as hell.

  Kit washed, dressed and went to the kitchen. A big kettle was gurgling on the Rayburn and toast was browning under a gas grill. ‘I believe,’ said Jennifer, ‘that you’ve become a tea drinker.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve gone native. I go to soccer games too.’

  ‘Goodness, they might have to reclassify you as an indigenous personnel.’

  ‘We try to blend in with the locals.’

  ‘Whom do you support?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. I went to see Queen’s Park Rangers play Ipswich, and I much preferred Ipswich. Maybe I could watch them when I come up here. What about Brian?’

  ‘He’s a Manchester United fan – tribal loyalty.’

  ‘I can’t stand them.’

  Jennifer poured the tea. ‘Isn’t it odd, a couple of Americans like us talking about English soccer teams?’

  ‘Proletarian sport is one of the nicest things about their culture. I could become obsessed by it.’

  ‘Kit, when you say things like that you sound an even worse snob than you are.’

  ‘I must change.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Jennie?’

  ‘No eggs.’

  ‘I don’t need an egg.’

  ‘But I insist. I won’t be long – the man at the end of the lane keeps hens. Five minutes.’

  Before he could protest, Jennifer was gone. But as soon as she was out of the house, Kit was searching the marital bedroom. He checked all the drawers for documents, diaries or address books. Not a thing. He went to the wardrobe and searched the pockets of Brian’s suits and jackets, but there was nothing othe
r than old ticket stubs and petrol receipts. He then began to check the chest of drawers where Jennifer kept her things. He opened the top drawer: it was where his cousin kept her stockings and underwear. He gently extracted articles of the most intimate lingerie and buried his face in the fine silk. He wanted to breathe the most private and secret essences of Jennifer into his lungs, but there was so little time.

  As he returned Jennifer’s underwear to the drawer, Kit noticed some other things lurking at the back – half hidden. They were not ‘normal’ or even conventionally ‘sexy’ articles of underclothing. The strange apparel and other objects belonged to a completely different order of things. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘my God. Who would have thought this?’ At first, Kit was shocked to his core. Then he was oddly excited by the discovery – and then ashamed that it did excite him. He closed the drawer: it was like closing the first half of his life.

  Chapter Four

  When Kit got back to London, he found it difficult to get Jennifer out of his mind. Her face kept materialising like an apparition on official documents and memos. It was a long day that had ended with a late-night clandestine meeting with the cabinet minister he had compromised in a honey trap. The woman in question was stunningly beautiful, but needed elocution lessons. She had also begun ‘dating’ someone on the other side – bad news.

  Once again, it was past midnight when Kit got back to his flat. He’d had to stay late for a top secret briefing about the results of the most recent hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific. The briefing had been given by Sterling Cole, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. Cole’s message was chilling. The H-bomb test on Bikini had been three times more powerful than the scientists had predicted. The crew of a Japanese fishing boat – ‘eighty-five miles outside the declared danger zone’ – had been afflicted with serious radiation sickness. After Cole finished, the press attaché gave a talk about how important it was to stop ‘H-bomb panic’ from spreading through the British press and to the public at large.

  Kit lit the gas fire that had been installed in the old Victorian hearth. It hissed and spat under the mantlepiece before it settled down. There were still London homes with coal fires – and the fumes still killed. The Great Smog of 1952 killed over four thousand Londoners in ten days; there were even cattle asphyxiated at Smithfield Market. But the Clean Air Act was on its way – those coal fires were going to be history. Pity in a way, thought Kit. He liked to think of Falstaff fondling a wench at the Boar’s Head warmed by a ‘sea coal’ fire. Four thousand Londoners killed by coal smoke. How many would an air burst over St Paul’s finish off?

  An H-bomb over St Paul’s wouldn’t just melt Wren’s great bronze dome: it would vaporise it. In one second the temperature of the blast would reach a hundred million degrees Celsius. A fireball, a mile in diameter, would unleash a wall of wind sweeping all before it at seven hundred and fifty miles per hour. Cars, trucks and buses would be tossed into the air like autumn leaves – tyres alight and petrol tanks exploding. Gulls in flight over the Thames estuary would drop from the sky in flames. Ten seconds later, the suction from the blast would reverse the wind direction and create a vast mushroom cloud. A super-heated three-hundred-mile per hour hurricane would boil the Thames into a cauldron of steam. At three miles distance clothing would burst into flames or melt. No living thing would survive within sixty-five square miles. That was one H-bomb – and yet Kit knew that London was targeted with eight.

  And London was, in megaton-speak, ‘lucky’. Kit remembered a Pentagon briefing that had started as surreal, then quickly took off into the absolute unreal. It began turning funny when General Curtis LeMay pointed to a map of Moscow pinpointed with four hundred H-bomb targets. Four-fucking-hundred! A junior White House staffer had the temerity to ask why. Kit remembered how LeMay puffed his cigar and smiled. ‘The Russian bear’s a big beast. We need,’ said the general, ‘to take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let’s take off his testicles too.’ Kit remembered how fond his father was of quoting St Thomas Aquinas. It wasn’t only a matter of Jus ad Bellum, but of fighting a ‘Just War’ with ‘Just Means’. If, thought Kit, twelfth-century ignoramuses were able to work that one out, what does that say about us? When did our own savagery begin? Sherman marching through Georgia? Hamburg and Dresden? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? When did deliberately killing civilians become an acceptable means to achieve military and political goals? Collective punishment. You can’t get the top brass, so you kill little kids instead. Why is it OK for us to do it, but not the other guys?

  Kit poured himself another glass of brandy. None of those qualms mattered. He was a servant of the State and had a job to do. He remembered how the DCI had faulted him for not having recruited any journalists to spout the American line. It was a subtle game. The strategy was to target progressive and centre-left publications. No sense in preaching to the converted. An anti-American paper changing its tune was the more effective form of propaganda. And you shouldn’t ignore book reviewers and publishers either – they were often strapped for cash and vulnerable. Good reviews for ‘good’ writers and vice versa. Sometimes it verged on the ridiculous. His predecessor had ‘subsidised’ a London house to publish a Swahili translation of the complete poetry of T.S. Eliot. If that doesn’t stop Africa from going communist, nothing will.

  Kit went to the bedroom to undress. The walls were bare, except for a statue on a plaque of the Virgin Mary. Pepita, the Indian woman who looked after Kit when the family had been stationed in Managua, had given him the statue. She was his favourite of several nannies. The statue was pure Latino tat. The Virgin was painted with luminous white so that her image glowed in the dark. A symbol of purity. Pepita would always say, ‘Remember, Kit, she is always looking at you.’ A few years later, Kit realised that Pepita’s words were a veiled warning about masturbation. The warning worked. Puberty arrived as a horny storm, but Kit was always dissuaded from self-love by the glowing nocturnal image of Pepita’s Virgin. She’s watching. Then somehow, the Virgin became an object of desire and that desire became manifest in the person of his cousin, Jennifer. Jennifier – body, mind, soul, voice – became Kit’s Holy Virgin. And then Jennifer went with another man – and did strange things. Kit poured another brandy, a final one he hoped. It was all complicated in a way that he could never explain to anyone, could never explain to himself.

  Kit stared into the mirror above the chest of drawers. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had the drawn look of a monk in an ascetic order. Maybe that was his role: a modern Knight Templar serving the Holy State. But he wasn’t any good. He hadn’t recruited a single journalist or publisher. And worse, he hadn’t spotted Burgess and Maclean. He’d worked closely with both of them when they were stationed in Washington, but hadn’t detected a whiff of treachery. Sure, Guy was a queer and a drunk, but that isn’t particularly unusual in the trade. And Maclean, a devoted family man, seemed an even less likely traitor. Kit still blamed himself. He had been briefed about them, but he trusted his intuition and his intuition was shit. A year after he defected, Donald Maclean made a statement to the press. Kit kept a copy of it taped to the corner of the mirror: I am haunted and burdened by what I know of official secrets, especially by the content of high-level Anglo-American conversations. The British Government, whom I have served, have betrayed the realm to Americans. I wish to enable my beloved country to escape from the snare which faithless politicians have set. I have decided that I can discharge my duty to my country only through prompt disclosure of this material.

  As Kit sat over his morning tea and toast, he opened his first-edition copy of The Portrait of a Lady to the appropriate page. He found a piece of lined paper and wrote out the message in standard four-letter groups for encoding. IWAN TTOB UYAS MALL BOAT TWEN TYTO TWEN TYFI VEFE ET. He then copied out the encryption key for the day from the novel: ONES COUS INAL WAYS PRET ENDE DTOH ATEO NESH USBA ND. Kit encoded quickly. He didn’t need to add up; he knew the seven hundred and thi
rty-six combinations of the tri-graph by heart. He then wrote the encoded message, WJEF VHIT … on a blank sheet of paper and popped it in an envelope. It was risky sending it that way. If Brian opened the envelope he would never be able to break the code, but he would know that someone was communicating in code. Next time he met Jennifer, Kit would show her how to hide encoding within a seemingly innocent letter. For example, lay out the letter so the left-hand margin contains the encoded message.

  Kit put on his best lounge suit, white shirt and grey silk tie. It was St Patrick’s day and there was a reception at the Irish Embassy. He wondered if he should wear a green tie or green socks or a green jockstrap. It was all so stupid. He supposed they’d all have to wear cardboard shamrocks in their lapels or something similar. It was one of the most drunken occasions of the diplomatic year. Everyone enjoyed watching the Brits trying to interact with their hosts as if the Easter uprising and partition had never happened. That bit was always great fun and almost made it worth going. The Russians were fun too – and really did get drunk, no olive-oil prophylaxis beforehand. Irish whisky was too good to waste.

  There was a lot of traditional Irish food to soak up the booze: so most people stuck to the booze. Vasili, Kit’s counterpart in the Soviet Embassy, raised a Waterford crystal tumbler of single malt to greet the American. Kit had known Vasili for ten years. The Russian was now KGB Chief of Residency, the Soviet equivalent of CIA Chief of Station. At the top level, there was no coyness or pretend secrecy about one another’s job or identity. They were all members of the same club, even though they went out on the court to thrash each other. And, like gentleman players, they were polite to each other in the clubhouse afterwards. And, like aspiring professionals in any sport, they charted each other’s progress through the rankings. Vasili had done much better since the death of Stalin and the execution of Beria; likewise, Kit had profited from the replacement of Dean Acheson – a pompous ass largely responsible for teeing up the Cold War – by Foster Dulles, who was an even worse ass but less hostile to Kit’s career.