Kit had begun to sweat again and this time it had nothing to do with recurrent malaria. For the first time, Kit saw the pistol handle sticking out of the waistband of Cauldwell’s corduroy trousers. But it wasn’t the gun that was making him sweat; it was the notebooks that Cauldwell was holding in his hands.
‘I was,’ said Cauldwell, ‘surprised that there were so many of them and that they went back so many years. Jennifer must have been jailbait when you started keeping them.’ Cauldwell smiled and began to flick through one of the notebooks. ‘I can hardly claim to be an aficionado of heterosexual pornography, but this stuff does seem pretty hot and imaginative and more than a little perverse – especially the sections that you’ve written in French and Spanish, you clever dog. And I really like your drawings too. Look at this one. You ought to add speech bubbles, something like, “Try, Jennifer, to breathe through your nose, it helps suppress the gag reflex.” At least, that’s what I tell my pals.’
‘Or they tell you.’
‘They don’t need to. I feel sorry for you, Kit, you don’t know anything.’
‘Then I can’t be much use.’
Cauldwell picked up another notebook. ‘It’s not all erotic fantasy. Jennifer’s more to you than an imaginary sex life – a substitute for the real one you never had. You really love her, don’t you? In fact, she means more to you than your career, your country – or your own life. Jennifer is your religion. You would die for her, you would go on crusades for her. You would kill for her. In some ways, it’s very moving – and almost cynical and immoral for us to use her to control you.’ Cauldwell laughed.
Kit looked at the cold concrete floor. ‘It is funny – in a way.’
‘It’s also tragic. Poor Kit, I wish that you could see your face. You look so drained and pale – like one of those sad saints lit by Lenten tapers in an Eyetie medieval church. You should have become a priest – or a pornographer.’
Kit looked at the notebooks: secret and black covered. He didn’t understand either so he couldn’t explain it to anyone else. When did the Virgin Mary become Mary Magdalene? Kit remembered the statue in the church in Managua. The Virgin, dressed in a gown of white and lapis lazuli blue, has rays of light emanating from her fingers. But when you kneel down in front of her, your face is inches away from her bare feet – and underneath her feet is a coiled serpent. The Managuan artist had painted her toenails scarlet red – and one beautiful foot seems to be trampling the serpent, but the other foot is stroking it. As a boy of thirteen Kit knelt before that statue and watched the serpent writhe beneath those beautiful feet in the flickering candlelight – hushed Spanish voices confessing their sins in the shadows – and as he raised his eyes the gown around her thighs seemed to part. And the Virgin was smiling, at him alone. You are my knight, my soldier. If you keep pure and slay my enemies, I will be here for you.
Cauldwell’s voice came like a brick through a stained-glass window. ‘Cousin Jennifer …’
‘Shut up.’
‘Wrong attitude, Kit, wrong attitude.’
‘Leave her alone, show her those books if you must, but leave her alone. I beg you.’
‘Kit, you’re crying.’
‘Listen, Jeffers, I plead with you – please, please don’t let anyone hurt Jennifer. I’ll do anything you want, but promise not to hurt her.’
‘You’re pathetic. You’ve lost your dignity too – and all because of your love for someone you don’t even understand.’
Kit wiped his eyes, but still felt dirty and debased. Once again he felt a raw burning pain in his lower half. He tried to regain some dignity. ‘I’m offering a deal – I provide information, you ensure that Jennifer doesn’t get hurt.’
Cauldwell laughed. ‘You really don’t understand a thing.’
Kit suddenly caught the meaning and felt his heart race. With his new moustache and black hair Cauldwell looked like a devil pimp rising rich and immaculate from a sewer. ‘How well do you know her?’
Cauldwell seemed to ignore the question. ‘By the way, Kit, one of the last things I did as cultural attaché was to cable my counterpart in the Paris Embassy. I asked him to send you a novel. It’s banned in Britain so he’ll be sending you a sealed copy in the diplomatic pouch.’
Kit was tired of playing Cauldwell’s game. ‘I want to go. Is that all right?’
‘That depends. But first, you listen and listen well. These are our conditions. You continue doing your job as if none of this has happened.’ Cauldwell paused and stared at Kit. ‘In fact, we’re both looking for the same thing – it’s just that you’re much closer to finding it than we are.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kit did know, but the caginess of the career diplomat spy was inbred.
‘Don’t play games. Time is running out and you know it.’
‘The bomb.’
‘That’s right, Kit, the bomb, the Russian hydrogen bomb – the one that’s missing. We want to know where it is and the names of the traitors who provided it.’
‘Why don’t you ask Henry? He knows where it is.’
‘Henry did know – and that’s why he’s dead. And if you don’t tell us everything you know, I’m going to make one simple phone call and the same person who killed Henry is going to kill Jennifer too.’ Cauldwell took out a writing pad and a pen. ‘And you can begin with all the codes and agent names that you do know.’
Kit was surprised how easy it was to continue as if nothing had changed. He had been missing from the embassy for two days, but no one seemed to have taken much notice. Kit’s only interrogator, the DCM, was on leave – and the rest of the staff assumed, as always, that Kit must be engaged on the spook side of his job. Perry handled daily routine more conscientiously than his boss. Meanwhile Ethel, Kit’s secretary, covered his absences with convincing lies and credible excuses. No one, of course, dared speculate or whisper about Counsellor Fournier’s whereabouts. In one way, it was comforting to know that his office functioned without him. On the other hand, it was worrying. How long could he be missing before anyone would notice something was wrong? A week? Ten days? Kit had a chilling premonition of his body putrefying in a shallow grave while Ethel mouthed into the telephone: ‘Thank you for calling, but Counsellor Fournier is temporarily out of the office. He should be back soon and will return your call.’
Kit was impressed by Perry’s development as a diplomat and a political analyst. The deputy had such an excellent grasp of the unravelling Suez crisis that Kit allowed him to brief Ambassador Aldrich on the situation. Meanwhile, Kit had to prepare his own briefing – a top secret one – for Allen Dulles. Dulles was due to arrive in London in two weeks. It was going to be a difficult briefing. Kit was now working for two masters and couldn’t lie to either. It was a tricky business. In Germany, Horst hadn’t been the only agent who had tried working for both sides. There was another one who provided wonderful intelligence on the political opposition in East Germany. The stuff was fastidious in detail and totally reliable. It was so good the Russians wanted it too – so the agent gleefully sold his wares to both sides. His death hadn’t been a pretty one – the hammer blows kept falling, but he refused to die. The agent was now part of West Germany’s transport infrastructure.
The reverberations of Jeffers Cauldwell’s disappearance were more nuisance than problem. The embassy was overrun with young intense counter-intelligence officers: CIA, FBI and Military Intelligence too. Kit was interviewed five times and kept to the script. Ironically, the counter-intell types seemed more interested in Cauldwell’s sexuality than his ideology. It had recently been confirmed – thanks to a Home Office dental pathologist – that the body found on Shingle Street beach in Suffolk was that of Henry Knowles. There was an open verdict as to whether the death was suicide or murder. Some thought that Knowles had killed himself in such a bizarre way because he wanted to make it look like murder. The general assumption was that it was only a matter of time before Cauldwell’s body turned up too – probably in equally bizarre circumstan
ces. The counter-intelligence officers seemed to dismiss Cauldwell as too ‘lightweight’ to have been engaged in serious espionage. After all, he was only a ‘cultural attaché’ – and, as such, had no access to top secret information of relevance to national security. The visiting officers wanted to close the case and get back to an American summer. Meanwhile, thought Kit, Jeffers Cauldwell is holed up in a KGB safe house somewhere in Greater London waiting for London’s CIA Chief of Station to tell him where the Brits have stashed the missing Soviet H-bomb.
August was going to be a lousy month. July had ended with the lowest barometer reading ever recorded in a British summer. On the twenty-ninth, there had been violent gales on the south coast that had cancelled the yacht races at Cowes – and there were even winds of seventy miles per hour that had swept through London. The gale had struck London while Kit had lain comatose with acute recurrent malaria – as if the howling winds had been protesting his rape. It was the sort of thing that happened in a Shakespeare tragedy, dopey Lear out on the blasted heath. But Kit knew that it was just a coincidence because neither he nor his anal virginity was as important as a British king. Kit knew that the game was important – so important, that a misplaced card might mean the nuclear annihilation of millions of people – but that he was just a blundering bit player.
The worst thing was that he didn’t know – in the purest moral and ethical sense – what was the right thing to do. Nuclear bombs were immoral and illegal weapons of indiscriminate and mass destruction, but countries had the right to defend themselves against these weapons – and, ultimately, the only way to do so was to have nuclear weapons of your own. But maybe that wasn’t completely true. There was no way that the Soviet Union could attack Western Europe – the Russians were fully stretched controlling Eastern Europe. And Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin’s ‘grave abuse of power’ had changed everything. In fact, it was doubtful for how much longer Moscow could control the Soviet Union itself. All the intelligence analysts and Soviet specialists knew this – but it had to be kept secret. If the ordinary people knew the facts, they would kick their rulers out of office and put them in jail. The arms race was a profiteering racket run by big business, a massive confidence trick. Everyone in the power elite knew this – except for the cretins who believed their own propaganda. Eisenhower knew it, and even said so in public: ‘Beware the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.’ It was like Satan warning people about sin – it didn’t matter, they never listened. But Kit had a job to do. He had to find a missing Soviet hydrogen bomb. But what then?
Kit arrived in Suffolk on a day of thunderstorms and hail. Bad omens for a brief sailing break. When he stopped at Jennifer’s cottage to pick up his oars and oilskins – which he kept in a garden shed – the hail lay six inches deep on the ground. Kit crunched through the ice to the kitchen door. He looked through the window and was surprised to see Brian sitting at the table – it was early afternoon on a weekday. Brian seemed unaware of his presence. The scientist was staring at a pencil-drawn sketch containing various coils and formulae. There was a slide rule on the table and an open briefcase full of files with yellow security tags. Kit knew at once that he was staring at an intelligence goldmine. He backed away from the door – sure that Brian hadn’t noticed his eavesdropping – and walked back to his car. There was a noisy farm tractor labouring down the lane. In order to mask the sound of his own engine, Kit waited for the tractor to pass the cottage before he turned the ignition key. He knew that someone was watching him. He looked back to the house. Jennifer was staring at him from her bedroom window. Kit put a finger to his lips; he sensed that Jennifer had nodded agreement; he put the car in gear and slunk away behind the tractor.
The Jolly Sailor was a good observation post. From a table by the window Kit could observe all traffic going to and from Orford Quay – and, more importantly, to the ferry to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment on Orford Ness. The pub was full of fishermen and farm workers sheltering from the unseasonable weather. Kit knew he was an object of curiosity, but used his newspaper to avoid eye contact. He finished an article about the evacuation of British dependents from Egypt and then began the correspondence page. ‘Letters to the Editor’ are, as any intelligence officer knows, a more valuable source of information than the actual news articles. These pages provide, not only insight into what the ‘educated classes’ are thinking, but also contact names. It’s a good way, once you’ve sifted out the cranks, to find useful agents. There were several letters complaining about the way Eden had compared Nasser to Hitler and Mussolini. Kit recognised the names of many of the anti-Suez correspondents – two were founding members of CND.
Kit folded the paper and pretended to begin the crossword, but was really eavesdropping on the conversations around him. He knew one of the men at the next table because he worked on the estate that owned Jennifer’s cottage. His name was Jack and he was head groom. Farming on the estate was now mechanised and there were no more working horses – only nimble Arab polo ponies, big hunters and point-to-point thoroughbreds. But Kit knew that Jack’s first love were the Suffolk Punches, those great grey giants of the plough. He had once overheard Jack describe the Suffolk as, ‘A horse with a face like an angel and a backside like a farmer’s daughter, the gentlest animal I’ve ever known.’ Kit liked hearing Suffolk people talk. You had to listen carefully, for their voices were soft and quiet. There was a ghostly stillness about them. Often, sitting in his boat on a gentle evening, Kit would be startled by a head suddenly appearing next to him as a fisherman or eel catcher passed close by leaning on silent muffled oars. They seemed to always be watching – the silent guardians of the sea frontier. Kit was a watcher too – but he hardly looked up as Brian’s new Austin Devon motored by on the way to the Orford Ness ferry. Kit finished his drink and headed back to see Jennifer on her own.
‘I’ve got something for you.’
Kit took a Hershey bar out of his jacket pocket. ‘Look at this, American chocolate – I scooped up a dozen bars at the airbase.’
‘I thought that you didn’t like chocolate.’
‘I don’t. But I know that you do – your only vice.’ Kit hid a smile as he handed over the packet. They had taken advantage of a brief sunny spell to have tea in the garden.
‘You spoil me.’
‘Have the rest of them.’ As Kit pulled the Hershey bars out of his pocket, something metallic clattered on to the patio stone. ‘Damn, where’s it gone?’
Jennifer bent down and picked up a small rectangular object with aluminium casing. ‘What’s this,’ she said, ‘a make-up case?’
‘It’s a camera.’ Kit seemed embarrassed.
‘It seems an awfully small camera.’
Jennifer’s hand shook as she held it, as if it were something about to explode. ‘Do you take pictures of me when I’m not looking?’
‘No, it’s for copying documents.’
‘Oh.’
Kit put the Minox III spy camera back in his pocket.
Jennifer looked across the garden into the dark wood dank with summer rain. The silence was eerie. There was no birdsong, only the chitter of swallows as they swooped and wheeled. She poured the last of the tea and gestured at the sky. ‘Do you think those birds are evil spirits?’
‘No, I think they are beautiful.’
‘Don’t be naive, Kit, you know as well as I do that evil can be beautiful – devastatingly beautiful. That’s why the nuns made us cover our bodies.’ Jennifer undid a button of her dress and looked inside. ‘Do you think my breasts are nice? I think Brian wishes they were bigger. They plumped up nicely when I was pregnant, but now,’ she put a hand inside her bra, ‘they seem to have shrunk back to small apples.’ She left the button undone and looked again at the diving swallows. ‘They come all the way from Africa. Can you imagine how? They’re so tiny. It must be witchcraft that brings them all that way.’ Jennifer touched Kit’s arm and whispered. ‘Our cleaner is a Norfolk woman. She says t
hat at the end of summer, when you see the swallows all perched together on the church roof, it’s because they have to decide who in the parish has to die before they come back in the spring.’
‘Spooky.’
‘Not as spooky as the Russians.’
Kit looked closely at Jennifer. Her pupils were dilated and her lower lip was quivering. ‘What about the Russians?’ he said.
‘In the old days …’
Jennifer’s voice sounded so creepy – like a voice over for a horror film – that Kit began to smile. But when he looked into her eyes, he realised that she wasn’t joking – that she was close to madness. He reached out and put a hand over hers; her flesh felt clammy and feverish.
‘In the old days,’ she repeated, ‘the Russians believed that swallows were dead children coming back to visit their parents.’ Jennifer’s eyes were shining with tears. Her arm swept an arc at the swallow-woven sky. ‘Which one, Kit, which one is he?’
Kit knelt down beside her chair and put his arms around his cousin. He felt her lips gently kissing the back of his neck.
‘Poor Kit,’ she said, ‘poor Kit. No one ever looks after you. What can I do for you – to make you happy.’
Kit stood up, trembling and unsteady. The garden around him seemed to be spinning out of control.
‘Kit,’ she said.
He never knew who moved first. He remembered only how their hungry mouths touched and everything else dissolved into a blur.
Promises were made, but not with words. As they lay together in bed, Kit knew – they both knew – that nothing else mattered. Everything that he had ever wanted lay alive and breathing within his arms. His career was an irrelevance. The worlds of diplomacy and espionage were already fading into half-remembered pantomimes. The missing Russian H-bomb could damn well stay missing; US Foreign Policy was a gangster racket best left to other gangsters; Allen and Foster Dulles were a pair of talking pigs’ bladders on sticks – and the Brits could shift for themselves. Kit’s only concern was planning an escape route and finding some place they could live. Where? It had to be somewhere beyond the reach of the KGB, the CIA and the British Secret Service. Kit closed his eyes and imagined a map of the world scrolling past. There wasn’t a lot to choose from. Aside from Tito’s Yugoslavia and Mao’s China, there was only Albania. And how safe would any of those places be? It would be bad enough, if he was alone – but how could he expect Jennifer to live the gilded prison life of a Western defector cut off forever from family and friends?
The Envoy Page 25
