‘He’s asked me to marry him,’ she announced.
There was a long silence between them. Finally Burnham said, ‘Then I’ll try to prevent it coming up before the full Court; there won’t be any purpose now.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Christ, how I wanted it to be somebody other than you!’ he exclaimed, suddenly angry.
There was no point in repeating the denial yet again, Jane thought. She said, ‘I’d have resigned anyway.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I’d have liked your best wishes,’ she said.
‘I should have liked to have given them,’ he said.
Chapter 33
The atmosphere lay between them, like mist stretched in a valley between two opposing hills, tangible yet amorphous. Hesitantly he offered his hand and with matching hesitation she responded, the briefest of contacts. Pike said, ‘On behalf of my Fund I want to thank you for the opportunity of this meeting.’
‘The feeling within my ministry was that there could be a useful exchange,’ said Lydia, smiling very slightly at his strained formality. She was nervous, a feeling unusual for her, irritated by a reaction which had come before she could control it; before she realized it was happening even. It was a ridiculous and unnecessary difficulty: something for which there wasn’t an index card.
She became aware that they were standing awkwardly in the centre of the room and gestured sideways. Her suite matched his, with the view of the lake and the same hunchback mountains. Couches were set in front of an artificial fireplace and on either side of a low long table. Coffee for two had been set out. Pike went to one couch and Lydia to the other, actually creating the dividing valley. She sat demurely, skirt hem properly to her knees, perfect legs tightly parallel and bent to one side.
‘I think we should establish some terms of reference,’ he said, still stiff. Pike was apprehensive of the woman, considering her an intrusion. Maybe even a danger. Didn’t the Soviets use sexual entrapment? The reflection annoyed him. Sexual entrapment to achieve what? And hardly with a government official.
‘Are there to be any?’ Lydia felt out through the fog for the firm ground of negotiation. She’d be safe there: just concentrate upon the negotiation he would expect.
Pike saw the immediate effort to put him into the position of the supplicant. ‘We’re going to need a framework, don’t you think?’
‘The communication we received from Washington talked of the need for contact,’ she said. This was a preliminary, a warm-up before the actual tournament.
Which your ministry considered could lead to a useful exchange,’ he reminded her. She spoke English with hardly any intonation: her voice was deep, for a woman.
‘An unofficial exchange,’ she said, knowing he would consider it a concession.
‘That’s an essential understanding,’ said Pike, glad the qualification came from her.
‘I can assure you that it is the understanding from my side,’ said Lydia. She was relaxing, finally. And trying, objectively, to consider what had happened when she confronted Pike. It had never been as strong as this. And in the last months there had been Malik, meeting the hitherto suppressed sexual needs, needs of which she had always been embarrassed. Ashamed, too. So what had happened here? Nothing, she decided positively: something to remain hidden and secret, like the other things of which she was uncomfortable.
‘And from mine also,’ said Pike. ‘A useful but unofficial exchange of views.’ The fact sheets and photographs hadn’t prepared him for Lydia Kirov: not the person. She was one of the most sensually attractive women he’d ever encountered. Another time, another place, another situation, he thought wistfully: definitely not this one.
‘We seem to have got our framework,’ said the woman, now confident enough to show some lightness.
‘It was a ministerial ranking which made us wonder at the level at which the Soviet Union were regarding the meeting,’ persisted Pike. It had been difficult enough for him to get here; he wasn’t going to leave without answers to any questions which might arise at subsequent meetings in Washington, London or anywhere else. He was damned sure people like Burnham would have a lot of questions.
She smiled and Pike noticed how perfect her teeth were, like everything else about her; he’d have to persuade Jane to get that tooth fixed. He put Jane from his mind, another unnecessary intrusion.
‘It is unofficial,’ she insisted. ‘Which means no aides or support secretariat. I have the language, which is essential. And I have a complete knowledge of the financal situation of the Soviet Union and the other Socialist Republics which was a requirement set out in the approach from your Fund. I was really the only person who could have been delegated.’
That was an irrefutable explanation if one were required, decided Pike. ‘I understand,’ he said.
‘We were, however, surprised to receive that approach,’ said Lydia; it was time to speed up the play.
But not too surprised to respond as quickly as you did, thought Pike; her concern put him in the superior position, whatever debating tricks she attempted. ‘We set out the discussion points in that approach,’ he said. ‘You’re aware of the membership of the Fund; and from what you’ve just explained, aware also of the mutual financial commitment between the membership and the Socialist republics.’
Lydia decided he’d been clever to use commitment rather than dependence: it showed he had prepared himself. ‘A departure from the past,’ she said.
A mistake! realized Pike. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not a departure from the past: the Eastern bloc have for a long time been Western borrowers.’
‘I expressed myself badly,’ said the woman, in apparent apology. ‘I was thinking of the degree of commitment.’
‘So is the Fund,’ said Pike, moving easily with the flow of the conversation. ‘The degree of commitment is substantial: far more substantial than ever before.’
‘To the benefit of lender and borrower alike,’ said Lydia.
Pike hadn’t expected her to retreat into cliché: but then her space for manoeuvre was limited.
However unofficial the meeting might be, Pike felt he was negotiating from a position of strength. He was aware of the attitude of the administration: how far the President was prepared to go. He said, ‘The priority is maintaining that mutual benefit.’
‘I agree,’ said Lydia.
The speed of her reply, practically a glib acquiescence, off-balanced Pike. He’d prepared himself for manoeuvre and compromise, not this immediate acceptance. Fearing that he may have misinterpreted – or that she may have misunderstood – Pike said, ‘What exactly is it that you agree?’
He was quite good, thought Lydia: properly confident but cautious, too, careful with the words, refusing to hurry. Would he be gentle, coaxing, or rough, taking …? She halted the slide of her thoughts, slamming the secret door. Fool! she thought. ‘The need for an orderly, regulated monetary system,’ she said.
Pike was confident that he was concealing the excitement that churned through him. She’d been careful, making it appear a personal opinion, but he knew he was looking beyond Lydia Kirov into ministry and government thinking. An orderly, regulated monetary system, she’d said. Which is what he’d said, in all the analyses. Here, from an unquestionable source, was the confirmation that he was right in discerning an attitude of responsibility from Moscow. So Burnham and all the other doubters could go kiss his ass!
‘An orderly, regulated worldwide system?’ he explored, determined to get it right.
‘The international monetary links have crossed the ideological differences for years now,’ she said. ‘What else could it be but worldwide?’
Pike was aching physically from the concentration, as if he had been engaged in some strenuous exercise. But it was a satisfactory feeling because he knew he was winning.
‘It seems we don’t have any disagreement in principle,’ he said.
‘Did you expect a disagreement then?’
<
br /> ‘No,’ said Pike at once. Falling back upon her words, he said, ‘A useful exchange.’
It was a good recovery but he’d meant it, Lydia decided. So this session had gone on long enough: it would be a mistake to make everything look too easy. And there was the strain of proximity, too, from which she felt the need for some relief.
‘I forgot the coffee,’ she said, indicating the untouched pot.
‘I’d had some anyway.’
‘It’ll be too cold now.’ She’d have to be careful he didn’t misunderstand.
‘It’s lunchtime anyway.’ She couldn’t misinterpret social politeness for anything else.
‘Yes.’
‘I believe the restaurant has a view of the lake.’
‘I believe it has.’
‘Do you have an engagement?’
‘Without aides or secretariat,’ she reminded him. It would be good to get away from the confines of her room, into somewhere bigger and more public.
‘Join me then?’
‘That would be nice.’ She was agreeing to bring the meeting to an end, Lydia told herself: nothing more.
‘We can, after all, continue the discussion while we eat,’ said Pike, as if it were necessary to remind her of the reason for their meeting.
‘Of course,’ she said. Lydia thought she’d need the distraction.
The doctor didn’t attempt to disguise his approach but Janet didn’t turn to meet him. She stood at the gate, staring out beyond.
‘Wondered if I’d find you here,’ said Harris.
Janet didn’t reply.
‘Missed you at therapy this morning.’
‘That’s a pain in the ass and you know it,’ said the woman savagely. ‘I don’t want to come any more.’
‘It’s voluntary,’ said the man.
‘OK. So cross me off the list.’.
Harris came to stand beside her, looking out into the road. ‘Temptation?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she admitted, her voice less angry.
‘Wouldn’t it be a shame to throw away all the time you’ve spent here?’
She shrugged, disinterested. ‘You make it sound as if I’d achieved something.’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘You’re the doctor. You tell me.’
‘OK,’ said the man. ‘Let’s look at it, plus and minus. The plusses are that you haven’t used heroin or anything else for a long time and you managed to overcome the need without a substitute, which is important because it showed you’ve got the will power. The minuses are that you’ve treated everything with contempt and despised everyone here and constantly told lies at the therapy sessions….’
Janet turned, staring, at the honesty.
‘… and the tragedy of that is that because I don’t know what your problem is I can’t help you, and I’d guess that within a month of your getting out of here you’ll be looking for a connection. Maybe less than a month. You’re a sad case, Janet. Very sad.’
‘We’ve tried group therapy, now shock therapy,’ she said.
‘Why the hard-shell cynicism?’ he demanded.
‘Why not?’ she said, conscious of her child-like petulance.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said patiently.
She stood silently for a long time and he did nothing to hurry her, just standing beside her and looking out beyond the boundary. At last, so quietly that he almost missed it, she said, ‘He’s getting married.’
Harris, who knew from the case history of the dissolution of the Californian marriage and the student pregnancy said, ‘But he’s already got married.’
The woman snorted a laugh. ‘Not him, for Christ’s sake. It’s Tom who’s getting married. He told me when he came here.’
‘But you divorced him,’ probed the doctor gently.
She shook her head. ‘He divorced me,’ she said. ‘When I got involved with Hank and said I wanted to get married, Tom divorced me!’
Harris, daily accustomed to illogicality, kept any expression from his face and voice. ‘But you were telling him that you’d fallen in love with another man. A lot of people would have said he was doing a hell of a thing, making it easy for you.’
‘That’s what people always say: what they said then!’ she shouted, clutching out for his arm. ‘Tom Pike, the good guy who always does the right thing! I wasn’t telling him I’d fallen in love with another man. I was telling him that I wanted to quit what we were doing, living out some crazy sexual experiment like in one of those books on the New York Times’ bestseller lists. I wanted him to say OK, I love you so please don’t leave me. Let’s cut out all this screwing on the side and be like proper people….’ She stopped, breathing heavily. ‘We were never proper people. I spent every hour of every day living out some fucking act, trying to be the sort of person I imagined he wanted.’
‘What made you think he might want to marry you again?’ said Harris.
‘We got together when I came back from California. It was good, for a long time. Like before.’
‘Before it was an act: you just told me,’ reminded Harris.
She began to cry, unchecked, then her nose began to run and she sniffed noisily. ‘I guess it was again,’ she admitted. ‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know how to behave when I’m with him.’
‘There’s only yourself,’ said the doctor. ‘That’s all there ever is, for anyone.’
‘I was frightened to hell he wouldn’t be interested in me if I was just myself. That’s what I’ve always been frightened of, since we were kids.’
Harris winced at the badly expressed inferiority. Her hand was still on his arm. He covered it with his own and said,’Why don’t we go back to the house? It’s getting late.’
Obediently she turned away from the road and began to walk back to the sanatorium with him.
‘Help me,’ she said pleadingly.
How? he wondered.
Chapter 34
Lydia and Pike kept using finance as the barrier to hide behind, like unseated picadors running to their wooden protection at the moment of danger. Sometimes they became distracted and made mistakes: Lydia, feeling increasingly uncomfortable, appeared to make hers towards the end of the meal, a chance remark pointing Pike in the right direction. With hindsight it was obvious, the logical explanation, but it hadn’t featured in any discussion in which he had been involved and Pike had come unprepared to Switzerland, without any statistics. For that reason he didn’t pursue the Russian’s remark: he had an analyst’s reluctance to move without the support of facts and information.
It was Lydia who suggested they should not meet during the afternoon, wanting to spend some time away from him. Pike wanted it too. For the same reason as the woman but equally to get the figures he needed. It was fortunate, he realized, that there was an IMF establishment in Switzerland and that they had been warned there might be the need to provide assistance. He made his initial contact by telephone, and by the time he returned to the hotel foyer the hire car was waiting.
Faced with a three hundred and sixty mile round trip to Geneva, Pike drove as fast as he could, bothering with the speed restrictions only through Berne, Fribourg and Lausanne. He used the speed, too, in an effort to expel the other tension. He knew he was too professional, too involved to let it happen. Just as she was. But it was a difficulty, an intrusion. Janet had that sort of sexuality, and a personal assistant called Miriam or Marion at the Chase, with whom he’d maintained a liaison for a few months after his marriage. But not very many others. If it had to be a woman, why couldn’t she have been a menopausal spinster with varicose veins and chin hair! There had been an advantage, though: if she hadn’t been feeling uncomfortable, Lydia wouldn’t have shown him the way.
It had been sensible to telephone ahead. When he arrived in Geneva the assessment was already underway, print-outs already spilling from the machines. The figures charting Third World indebtedness to the IMF and the World Bank were immediately available, already stored in their retrieval syst
em. Western bank consortia took longer and here, of course, there was guesswork, but it was still possible to make that guess fairly accurate.
It was with communist loans to the uncommitted nations of Africa, Latin America and Asia that the real speculation came into the analyses, the need to hunt through numbing statistics for announcements of a major industrial project or agricultural expansion which, by cross reference where possible to the committed loans from the West and then by simple subtraction, could be shown to be financed by Moscow.
Even with the use of sophisticated computers it was a slow, laborious job but by late afternoon the picture Pike was expecting began to emerge. There seemed, in fact, a surprising number of official announcements and under scrutiny Pike saw that some countries had actually named the Eastern bloc as bankers. Which was, he conceded, another oversight, like his failure to realize the short-term bunching of the Soviet loans. There was little surprise at the final figure against the Western banking structure, just over $500,000,000,000.
The revelation was in the figures Pike was most anxious to obtain, the Russian commitment.
It came out at $250,000,000,000.
He drove back to Zurich more slowly, subdued by the discovery, so preoccupied that he ceased thinking of the woman with whom he was going to resume the negotiations that night as anything more than a representative of a country that seemed to have over-loaned, as the West had over-loaned before them, to unstable, unpredictable debtors.
Pike was late returning but showered and changed before going once more to Lydia’s suite. She was already waiting, determinedly composed.
‘I’m sorry I’m not on time,’ he said. ‘I spent the afternoon considering what we’ve discussed so far.’
Lydia wondered if he would be surprised to know how she’d spent part of the afternoon. It had frequently been necessary before her involvement with Malik—and afterwards. ‘I called your suite,’ she said.
‘I went out.’ He saw she had changed, too. It was a formal dress, black, with a high collar and long sleeves. There was just a single diamond from a chain at her neck. If she’d intended a look of severity, she’d failed: Pike thought she looked spectacular.
Kremlin Conspiracy Page 25
