The Envoy

by Edward Wilson

  Kit could see hate, anger and madness in his cousin’s eyes. She wasn’t thinking rationally.

  ‘Look what’s happened in Japan – after the atom bombs, all those birth defects. They won’t tell us everything. There must be secret hospitals full of monsters – babies with two heads and no eyes, babies with flippers for arms and webbed feet. They want to throw us back in the sea.’ She suddenly looked hard at Kit. ‘You think I’m hysterical, don’t you?’

  ‘No, Jennifer, you’re sane. We’re the ones who are hysterical. We’re the ones who made those bombs at Los Alamos – and there weren’t any women politicians who decided to use them and there weren’t any women pilots who dropped them.’

  ‘But we would have, Kit. There are women who would have done that and more.’

  ‘But not you.’

  ‘No,’ Jennifer squeezed his hand, ‘and not you, Kit, not you.’

  Kit leaned forward and kissed her brow. ‘You’re very tired, Jennie, I think you should go to bed.’

  Later, Kit lay awake in the guest room and listened through the walls to hear his cousin’s breathing. It was a way of being close: different rooms, but alone under the same roof. He wished that the night would last forever.

  Kit thought about the things Jennifer had said. He wondered if it was possible that Brian’s sperm had been damaged by radiation. Kit also thought that it was an ugly coincidence that the loss of Jennifer’s baby had occurred at the same time as the nuclear accident – ‘the bent spear’ – at Lakenheath. Of course, if the bombs had actually gone off, then Suffolk would have become the English Hiroshima. How, he thought, how do you really get rid of those monsters?

  The first thing that Kit did when he got back to London was to check a rubbish bin in Kensington Gardens for a fresh chalk mark. There wasn’t one. Kit whispered, ‘Fuck,’ and continued walking. He came to a kiosk and bought a newspaper. He retraced his steps back to Kensington Gardens and sat on a bench near the Peter Pan statue. Kit opened his newspaper and wondered what he should do next. He felt that it was stupidly obvious that he was a spy trying to make contact with an agent. It was sort of funny: like the way a plain clothes policeman looks more like a cop than one in uniform. Kit looked at his watch, then began to read the paper. He’d give it ten more minutes.

  On the inside pages, there was a brief reference to the accident at Lakenheath. The press office at the base had released the names of the airmen who had perished. The press attaché had certainly done a slick job. The British journalists were treating the incident as a tragic, but pretty humdrum accident. Not the least suspicion that a large chunk of England had so nearly been fried and radiated – Nagasakied. Kit wondered how long they could keep the story under wraps. He had since heard that a large number of American airmen had fled the airbase in a blind panic. They had commandeered cars and bicycles and tried to put as much distance between themselves and the smouldering atom bombs as they could. Surely, some of the Suffolk people – ‘the indigenous personnel’ – must have seen that terror-struck exodus. What did they think was going on? In any case, it wasn’t the first time American troops had cut and run. Kit had done it himself – and the early days in Korea had been a disgrace. Americans, despite the Hollywood cover-up versions, were not very good soldiers. This was why they had to have nuclear bombs. No American army would have stood at Stalingrad. The Russian Army lost nine million soldiers – and fourteen million civilians – fighting the Nazis. What else can you say? How can anyone look a Soviet citizen in the face and not blush with shame?

  Kit turned the page and found another story based in Suffolk. It was, he thought, odd for so rural a county to be mentioned twice the same day in the national press. The story was a macabre tabloid one.

  CHAINED BODY FOUND ON BEACH.

  Suffolk police are trying to solve the mystery behind a chained naked body found on a remote Suffolk beach. The badly decomposed body was found by a woman walking her dog near the coastal village of Shingle Street. Detective Superintendent Tim Winter of the Suffolk Constabulary said: ‘There are many unresolved issues surrounding this incident and we are treating the death as suspicious.’ A Home Office pathologist has been called in to help determine the cause of death.

  Kit folded the newspaper and thought about the Suffolk corpse. He felt sorry for the poor woman who had found it. She had probably enjoyed walking her dog along that beach for years. He doubted if she’d ever do it again. Dead bodies spoil the countryside. There was a beautiful Chesapeake Bay creek that everyone had shunned after the putrefied body of a tramp had been found tangled in the branches of a fallen tree – the soft tissue of his face eaten away by crabs. And, for a long while, crab cakes were off the menu too. The newsworthy thing about the Shingle Street body was the chains. Wrapping a body in chains was a method commonly used by gangsters and intelligence operatives to deep-six a corpse – so that it didn’t become a ‘floater’. During his OSS days Kit had helped dispose of a double agent in the South China Sea. The difficult thing was getting all that weight over the gunwales: you needed five or six gorillas. But maybe the Suffolk business wasn’t murder at all. He’d heard about people committing suicide by weighting themselves down and walking into water. That’s the way Virginia Woolf did it.

  Kit leaned back and enjoyed the summer sun on his face. He wondered if Vasili had any of the chewing-gum left that Kit had given him. The fallback rendezvous signal was a piece of gum stuck on the inside windowpane of a phone kiosk on the Bayswater Road. It was, in fact, a far better way to arrange a meeting – but Vasili hated chewing gum. He said it made him feel like a Chicago gangster. Vasili simply preferred to chalk a Cyrillic ‘К’ – for Kit.

  Kit left the park and walked the short distance to the kiosk. It was occupied by a young woman who seemed content to talk away the afternoon. Kit crossed the road and entered an off-licence. The stock was limited to ale, whisky and gin. If you wanted wine, you had to bring your own bottle and they filled it from a cask of sweet sherry. The shop assistant was bent over a crossword and didn’t even look up. But Kit had the odd queasy feeling that someone else was looking at him. He went back into the street, almost running, and saw that the phone kiosk was free. He crossed the road, dodging big London buses and black taxis that seemed to be aiming at him like hired assassins. Kit felt the paranoia rushing back. He opened the kiosk door and pretended to make a call while searching for the chewing-gum. There wasn’t any gum, or a chalk mark, but there was a card stuck to the panel next to the phone. Was it Vasili’s idea of a joke? The card said EMBASSY MASSAGE – and had Kit’s own phone number. Kit was angry. It wasn’t just a lousy joke, it was a dangerous joke. He unstuck the card and turned it over. There was another message. Kit read the words and broke into a cold sweat: Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. The frightening thing was the realisation that it wasn’t a joke and that the card had not been left by Vasili. Someone else knew about his meetings with the Russian. And how much did they know?

  Kit started to walk back to the embassy as rivulets of cold sweat dripped down his spine and funnelled into his butt cleavage. He felt a mess. Kit knew that, with a gun in his hand, he could put on a convincing tough guy pose, but he also knew that he went wobbly when his own life was in danger. He felt waves of nausea sweep up from his intestines and shake the rest of his body. He wanted to lie down in a safe dark place away from the eyes that seemed to be tracking him.

  The rivulets of sweat had turned into a flood and Kit’s shirt was soaked with sweat. A half-remembered address began to appear on the edge of his mind and then vanished again. He needed a new shirt. Kit turned into Bond Street. At the first shop he was greeted by a tailor with a measuring tape around his neck who asked if he had ‘an appointment’? Kit smiled wanly and left. The next shop didn’t require an appointment, but only made shirts to measure and they wouldn’t be ready for a week. After being turned down by two more ‘bespoke shirt-makers’, Kit began to panic as waves of paranoia made him hyperventil
ate. He felt so dizzy he had to lean against a wall. Kit watched the people passing by. He envied them. They somehow belonged to the city and to England. He tried to explain in a faint pleading voice, ‘They won’t even let me buy a fucking shirt.’

  A woman, wearing a floral dress and a broad hat, gave Kit a cutting look and said, ‘Drunk in public. Disgraceful.’

  Kit looked up and was about to say ‘I’m sorry, I’m not very well’ when he realised he had seen the woman before. Hadn’t she been in the phone kiosk before him? But no, this one was older and wearing a hat. Kit wiped the sweat from his eyes, but when he opened them again the woman was gone.

  The address started teasing Kit’s mind again. It was somewhere near. Who had told him about it? A name began to form; then it was gone again. One half of Kit’s brain was still normal and was watching the other half screaming out of control down a steep mountain gorge. He wanted to grab the steering wheel, but the mad half was strong as hell and kept giving him a sharp elbow in the face. It was like watching the blood drain out of your body. You know you have to tourniquet the wound, but your arms won’t move. Kit closed his eyes and breathed deep. ‘I don’t care what they do. They’re not going to have my mind.’

  Kit felt a hand on his elbow. He opened his eyes. A man of middle-eastern appearance was smiling at him ‘Are you looking for a shirt-maker?’

  Kit nodded.

  ‘My name is Youssef. I’ve been expecting you. My shop is just around the corner.’

  Kit liked the shirts. They were well cut with the sort of long luxurious tails that hang down well below crotch and genitals. Shirttails like that stay tucked in and make you feel safe. They weren’t Irish linen, but rich Egyptian cotton. The tailor was proud of his material and said that Egyptian was the best cotton in the world. ‘But,’ he said, raising his hands in a gesture of world-weary sadness, ‘I don’t know how much longer …’ His voice trailed away. Kit sensed that the tailor, like himself, felt a stranger in a hostile land and didn’t want to give too much away.

  ‘Suez.’ Kit whispered the word as if it were a secret code.

  The tailor smiled and nodded.

  ‘In that case, I’d better have two of them – no, make it three, it’s best to stock up.’ Kit felt dizzy again and smiled inanely. He sat down on a stiff-backed chair while the tailor carefully folded his purchases and wrapped them in brown paper.

  Despite the origins of his cotton cloth, Youssef wasn’t Egyptian; he was Syrian. When Kit tried to pay, Youssef motioned him to stay seated and to wait. The tailor pushed aside a brocade door curtain and said something in Arabic. A minute later, a tray arrived with an elaborate silver urn, plain glasses and a plate of Turkish Delight. As Youssef poured the mint tea, he said that he had been born in Aleppo. Kit tried to follow the conversation, but there was a buzzing in his ears. As Youssef recited a litany of place names – from Thessaloniki to Marrakech – Kit began to forget where he was. The street sounds of London seemed to vanish. There had also been a Syrian tailor in Saigon, but his name had been Sharif. The OSS officers had used him to alter their field uniforms into a smarter cut: appearances mattered. Kit looked out the shop window and half expected to see trishaws pedalling past instead of black taxis. He wanted to be back in Vietnam, in the opium den in Cholon with Sophie, la métisse, making his pipe. Sophie used to sing to him in a voice so soft that you could barely hear the words.

  The rest was a half-remembered dream.

  The plasmodium falciparum is a cunning beast that sponges off both mosquitoes and humans to complete a life journey of wanton destruction. Falciparum is an unwanted guest, a parasite, that attacks red blood cells for their haemoglobin like an alcoholic drinking his way through your wine cellar. If you take your chloroquine primaquine, like you’re supposed to, you’ll probably get better. You’ll probably even think that your bloodsucking visitor has packed his bags and left – but you’re wrong. After drinking the best of your red stuff, he’s decided to doss down in your liver cells. You won’t know he’s there because this is one drunk plasmodium that can pass out for a long time – years. And then one day, when you least expect it, plasmodium falciparum wakes up and decides he needs another drink. And once he’s blotto on vintage haemoglobin, he decides to get laid – and, before you know it, your bloodstream has turned into a teeming nursery for falciparum’s bastard brats. And suddenly you don’t feel very well. You’re burning with fever and pouring with sweat – and then you get the chills. You’re freezing and can’t get warm again. You want to lie down and curl into a ball. And then, for some reason, you try to get up again – and all the lights go out. You’ve lost consciousness because of orthostatic hypotension, a sudden decrease in blood pressure owing to low blood glucose levels. The malaria parasites have sucked the life out of your blood. You’re pallid, faint and anaemic – you might even die.

  When Kit woke up, he was lying on a narrow cot beneath a single white sheet – Egyptian cotton. The ceiling above him was grey and stained. He seemed to be in some sort of storeroom stacked high with shelves holding bolts of material. He was naked and his body felt dry and pleasantly cool. The fever and chills had gone, but there was a raw pain in his lower region. Kit closed his eyes again and tried to piece together what had happened. He remembered shirts, Syrians and mint tea – and worst of all, the card he’d found in the phone kiosk: Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.

  Kit could now think clearly again and knew that it was all over. He’d been doubled, crossed and compromised. In a way, he was relieved. He lay back and felt the tension drain out of his body. The elaborate high wire act was over.

  Kit longed to hear Sophie’s soft voice and feel her body curling against his own. But the next words he heard were far from the sweet lilting French of Saigon. ‘The photographs would have been much better if we had managed to wake you up.’

  Kit opened his eyes and saw Jeffers Cauldwell seated on a chair beside him. He knew who it was even though the cultural attaché had dyed his hair black and grown a moustache. But Cauldwell’s greatest disguise was a new face: one that was cold and devoid of expression. He had ceased to be a dandy affecting a camp Deep South accent. Cauldwell was what he had been for years: a serious player and Soviet spy.

  ‘You were in a very deep coma. At one point we thought we were going to lose you. I told Youssef that necrophilia photos would be pretty damned kinky, but not much good for blackmail – you can’t blackmail a corpse. When your pulse rate got down to thirty-eight, Youssef suggested we give you an intravenous adrenalin shot. I said, “No, let the bastard die.” Youssef looked very distressed, I think he likes you. But you stabilised – and started to twitch about as if you were having a bad dream.’ Cauldwell paused. ‘What are you thinking, Kit?’

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘Touché indeed. I’m glad, Kit, that you’re not taking it personally. Would you like to see the photos?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? What if you’re pregnant? Wouldn’t you like to know who the father is?’

  ‘Can I have my clothes please?’

  Cauldwell picked up a brown-paper package and tossed it to Kit. ‘You ought to try one of your new shirts. I knew that you’d eventually come to Youssef’s. I’d been telling you about his shirts for ages. In the end, you were going to come here for a fitting whether you liked it or not.’

  ‘You were following me?’

  ‘Of course. And if it hadn’t been for your serendipitous attack of recurrent malaria, Youssef would have put a double dose of chloral hydrate in your mint tea. Go on, get dressed.’

  Kit saw Cauldwell look away as he began to dress. Humiliation turned to anger. He wanted to attack Cauldwell while his back was turned and break his neck or choke him with his belt, but Kit wasn’t sure they were alone in the shop. Or that the umbrella that Cauldwell was leaning on didn’t have a ricin spike.

  Cauldwell turned to face Kit. ‘You deserve this, you bastard.’

  ‘What happened to Henry Know
les?’

  There was a hard glint in Cauldwell’s eyes. ‘You don’t seem to have gotten the message, Kit. You’re no longer the one who asks the questions. From now on, we tell you what you need to know and what you need to do.’

  Kit knew it wasn’t in his interest to show defiance. He wanted to stay alive and this meant he had to pretend that he was going to give in to blackmail. Why pretend? Kit thought about his job. It didn’t matter: it was insignificant compared to whether he lived or died. But in his own mind, he had begun to draft a secret ‘eyes only’ cable to Allen Dulles confessing all his sins and explaining everything that had happened. Kit knew that his career was over. Not only was his cover blown, but his unauthorised and unreported meetings with Vasili lay somewhere on the misconduct scale between instant dismissal from the service and an indictment for treason. But the important thing now was to stay alive – and Jennifer too.

  ‘By the way,’ said Cauldwell, ‘Vasili wasn’t altogether pleased about the photos. He said he liked you and was sad about “the lack of dignity”. He also wasn’t sure that the photos, the ones of you I mean – even on top of all the unauthorised secrets you passed to the Sovs – are enough to compromise you. Vasili reckons that you’re in so thick with Allen that you can ’fess up to everything and still bound free and smelling of lavender-scented Vaseline.’

  Once again, Kit had the uncanny feeling that he had a neon sign on his forehead that kept flashing his thoughts.

  ‘“Well, Vasili,” says I, “you don’t know the American system as well as you think. If a few backwoods American Congressmen become apprised of what Kitson Fournier has been up to, the shit is going to hit the fan. In those cases the boss always sacrifices the subordinate.” Sadly, Vasili still didn’t seem convinced that you could be turned. It was only then that I suggested the nuclear option – “Kit’s dirty little secret”. I suspected it for a long time – and it only took a burglary and simple search of your flat to find the evidence.’