by Chris Petit
It would take one move to get from the end of the era of the Cold War to the new age of terror, via the destruction of 103, and Orwell’s prophecy of permanent wars, but always somewhere else, never where you were, a TV event, although one day he believed the pigeons would come home to roost.
It was necessary to create from what had been destroyed. Through transgression came love and understanding. He was in the embrace of God’s endless forgiveness.
He was not a Pharisee. He was a consorter of thieves and whores; his progress through the world was biblical. He maintained a dialogue with his maker. He was intimate with the parables. He stared for hours at the word prodigal on a translucent page of the Bible. In his heart he was humble and submissive. He wished only to serve. His meddling with the greater scheme had been undertaken as the most reluctant of duties. There was no hubris. He feared judgement and apocalypse.
Sheehan subscribed to the belief that no one was innocent.
The boy was not innocent.
Sheehan, grand juggler, paranoia fizzing in his digestive tract, flaring his irritated bowel, nerves humming like an electrical charge, sketched the boy into the plot, and saw the blackness of his conspirator’s heart.
He had deceived with false approval, for the idle thrill of wrecking lives, as the boy had ruined his daughter’s; from his fornications the bastard pregnancy.
Sheehan, as superstitious as Macbeth, regarded murder of the unborn the unpardonable sin, yet better his daughter mourn than ruin her life so young. Behind her back he arranged a date for termination; with the boy gone she would be persuaded. In Sheehan’s own damnation, her future; what greater sacrifice?
While governments hung in the balance, he slipped the boy into his plans, feigning reconciliation while telling his daughter, ‘I am happy for you.’
As a refinement and a precaution, as part of the deeper game, he cast the boy as history’s understudy, the second patsy, the substitute suspect, the card in reserve to be played if necessary, were the Khaled scenario to come unstuck, the boy’s body to be removed from the crash and held on ice, in the coffin brought up for the occasion.
Part of him was desperate for his daughter to know, so he could say, ‘See what I was willing to do to protect your future happiness, twist the world on its axis and alter its boundaries.’
It hadn’t been so hard to arrange. Few thought to try.
In Frankfurt came the terrible realization that he might be sending everything he most cherished to her death. He had tried in desperation to cancel the operation.
Word came back the decision was irreversible.
His search was fruitless. It was God’s punishment for him that she was on the plane.
The boy’s father had been a surprise, a ghost of a surprise, saved by premonition. They had something in common, he and the unsuspecting father. It was the start of his daring to hope in her survival.
He pitied the man, yanked from his dull, ordinary life and thrown into the pit by not staying on the plane but surviving instead to watch it all unravel. He turned the father into a specimen of curiosity. He sensed untapped compassion, a reserve of emotion. He wanted to know how Collard would respond to his life turned upside down; fall apart or become resolved. In one of those moments of neat inspiration that came along too rarely, he understood how much he needed the father to find his son, who would be with his daughter.
His great underlying fear was that the father had been sent. He could hear Nigel Churton’s prissy Oxford tones, feigning indifference. ‘Find out about our American friend. It sounds like the sort of mad thing he gets up to. Didn’t he shoot a policewoman once and blame the Libyans?’
Worse, what if Churton had somehow manipulated the boy on to his daughter? He rejected the idea as unthinkable. Churton was not smart enough to come up with the equation that the way to fuck with him was to fuck with his daughter. Only Sheehan could have done that. On whisky-bottle nights he wondered if he wasn’t running operations against himself, wanting, in the end, to be the target of his own destruction.
The Last Supper
Collard was forced to persevere with his charade, to show his wares to an appreciative Brennan Jarrald while Sheehan played Remington, toying with Collard’s assumed name, Troughton, placing it in the lightest quotation marks. Jarrald asked him if he was related to the actor who had played Dr Who in the British TV show, which was a favourite.
They ate in the kitchen, a salad prepared earlier by the cook, whose night off it was. Jarrald apologized for the ad-hoc arrangement. The meal consisted of cheap, sweating supermarket ham, iceberg lettuce and tomato, with mayonnaise from a bottle. They drank Pepsi Cola. Collard chewed slowly and failed to detect any exchange of looks.
‘Where are you staying?’ Jarrald asked, making it sound like standard politeness.
‘In a motel.’
Sheehan named the motel. Collard said nothing.
Sheehan carried on, sounding equable. ‘That’s where I am. I saw your car.’
Jarrald asked, ‘Did you see a lot of police on the road on the way here?’
Collard said he hadn’t.
‘They’re hunting a man who murdered his own child.’
‘As opposed to killing a lot of innocent people,’ Collard said, watching Jarrald’s face. There was a splash of mayonnaise on his chin.
Jarrald asked Collard if he played golf.
‘Not often.’
‘Join me next time. I just knock it around.’
‘Where do you play?’
Jarrald named the country club where he went every Tuesday and asked if Collard was familiar with it. Collard knew it was Jarrald’s way of saying he had no intention of him being alive come Tuesday.
‘Perhaps Mr Remington would care to join us.’
Sheehan inclined his head and Collard asked what he did, curious to know how he would answer.
‘I work as a consultant.’
‘Consulting in what?’
‘Problem-solving, mainly.’
‘Come now,’ Jarrald said. ‘That’s a tad disingenuous. Mr Remington is in the extermination business. Pests and rodents, isn’t that right?’ He looked at Collard. ‘Do you have much cause to get rid of pests?’
‘Not until recently.’
‘I recommend the old Roach Motel.’
Jarrald tittered and wiped the mayonnaise off his face with a paper napkin while Collard wondered if this was what lay at the centre of the labyrinth: a mean last supper and heavy-handed metaphor at a rich man’s table.
‘You blew up that airliner,’ Collard said.
‘That sounds like a false accusation if ever I heard one. Wouldn’t you say, Mr Remington?’
Casting pretence aside, Sheehan said, ‘Mr Collard should have been on that flight, so he takes the matter personally.’
‘And is prone to jump to the wildest conclusions.’
‘I know about Stavinsky.’
‘Is that why you are here?’ Sarcasm, previously held in check, gave Collard his first glimpse of the real man. ‘We all know about Stavinsky! He was a pest and a fantasist. He was a stalker, as I suspect you are, and we had to put a restraining order on him. The rubbish he peddled about my father! My father lived here in the United States before the war, which makes a mockery of his lunatic ravings. He was a twisted failure who hunted the more fortunate to make their lives miserable.’
Collard knew Jarrald’s family would be able to produce doctored immigration papers. It made Stavinsky’s death all the more pointless.
Jarrald turned to Sheehan. ‘What does he believe, that we orchestrated events to get rid of a man who amounted to nothing and because that other man, what was his name . . . ?’
‘Barry.’
‘That’s the problem with you people. You’re incapable of accepting the truth. You need to fantasize something bigger, something even more cold-hearted, because everything else disappoints.’
Collard pointed at Sheehan. ‘He put my boy on that plane knowing it would cra
sh.’
Jarrald said, ‘You are obviously distressed. Grief does the strangest things.’
‘My son was with his daughter.’ He pointed at Sheehan.
‘Is this true?’ Jarrald asked, surprised for the first time. ‘Your daughter, the apple of your eye? Do you owe the man an explanation?’
‘I don’t owe him anything,’ Sheehan said.
Jarrald said, ‘It sounds like you have plenty to talk about but not in my hearing. You should team up. I’m tired and it has been a long day. In the meantime, I look forward to our game of golf. Do you play to a handicap?’
Jarrald sounded almost merry as he thanked Collard for coming. He offered his hand to shake, which Collard refused. Jarrald looked more amused than insulted.
‘I forgot Brits don’t.’
He followed them out and stood watching Collard’s hire car refuse to start. Jarrald looked apologetic.
‘Everyone has the night off, otherwise I’m sure we could have fixed it.’
Collard checked the glove compartment. The gun was gone.
Jarrald and Sheehan played along with the accidental nature of events. Jarrald suggested Sheehan offer to drive Collard back to the motel.
‘Unless of course his car doesn’t start either.’ He looked on the point of giggling. ‘Unfortunately I don’t have any beds made up. Goodbye, Mr Collard.’
It was the first time Jarrald had called Collard by his real name. He stood and waved them away, watching until the car was gone before turning back into the house, permitting himself a little shuffle of triumph.
Damnation
As he started to unravel with the pressure, Angleton’s fishing trips became anything but – events that were just another metaphor. By then he was only pretending to fish. He drove drunk around Maryland and got drunker in bars, listening to music and talking to strangers, pretending he was regular by saying he worked for the post office, which was what he told his son. Whether anyone believed that was another matter. Angleton talked politics, took straw polls on what people thought and was shocked that no one gave a fuck. He was close to losing his grip. When was this? Sixty-four or sixty-five.
Angleton’s formula had proved insufficient – elegance and lucidity turned to alcoholism, cancer and madness. In his late paranoia, he wanted to relate his own deeply compromised methods to someone. He needed to unburden. What he had once believed was a fight against an evil enemy wasn’t anything of the sort. It was another form of useless control.
By the end of the 1960s, Angleton saw himself as a damned man and others saw him as mad. He was going to end up in hell next to a man who ate babies, that was how damned he was.
In the Land of the Blind
‘Mint?’ Sheehan asked, as they drove away from Brennan Jarrald, sounding like their company was the most inevitable thing in the world.
Collard refused.
‘You know, Jarrald’s right. We should team up. I change my mind every day about whether they are alive. What did you think of Jarrald?’
‘What I think doesn’t matter.’
‘He’s very integrated. Don’t be a sore loser.’ Sheehan gave a big laugh and added, ‘In your case the standard threat no longer applies, which is we take care of the family first.’
He laughed again. Collard knew he was being toyed with. The tight space of the car emphasized Sheehan’s physical presence. Sheehan was the sort of man who regarded possession as his right and had no doubt forced his bull-like way into numerous orifices on the grounds of superiority, physical and mental. Collard sensed the man sniffing at him. For someone with so little to lose, he was still afraid.
Sheehan said, ‘Be careful when you play golf with Jarrald. He’s prone to fairway tantrums.’
Collard almost believed Sheehan, saying he would play.
Collard saw the lights of the motel ahead. He supposed he would wait up and make sure Sheehan didn’t kill him in his sleep. Sheehan drove him to his door.
‘Maybe I do owe you an explanation.’
Collard wondered if Sheehan would invite himself in. Once inside, their unspoken bargain would be struck: Sheehan would reveal what he knew and Collard would never walk out alive. The question was: was his life worth the price of knowledge? He was living on borrowed time anyway.
‘One of these days, we’ll sit down and chew the fat,’ Sheehan said. ‘Goodnight now.’
It was the loneliest goodnight Collard had ever heard.
He remained up with the television on. The phone in the room had stopped working. He left the door unlocked. He saw no point in trying to barricade the room. Sheehan would only pick the lock or kick the door down.
The door handle started to turn. He heard Sheehan’s soft sigh at finding it open. Sheehan’s silhouette filled the doorway. Canned laughter washed round the room. Sheehan grunted. His face was blue in the light of the screen.
Sheehan went into a martial-arts crouch, taunting Collard to come for him. He snaked out a playful arm a couple of times then grabbed so fast Collard didn’t see the move. His hand was pinned back and Sheehan was close enough to smell his breath. Sheehan applied pressure to the wrist and forced Collard to his knees. He succumbed in ambiguity and shame. Sheehan’s life could be measured by physical confrontation and his could not. Sheehan’s lack of preamble and the way he had come at him without explanation left Collard feeling cheated.
He saw Sheehan’s punch too late. The arm he raised to defend himself was swiped aside.
He came to on the bed, unable to breathe. Sheehan’s weight pressed down on him. Collard was dimly aware of TV laughter and Sheehan’s low grunts of satisfaction. Pressure eased then tightened on his throat, cutting off his air, as Sheehan continued to play with him. Sheehan’s face filled the room.
Collard had tried to anticipate Sheehan’s moves and got them wrong, except for ending up on the bed because he had guessed there would be an animal quality to his violence.
His arms were pinned by Sheehan’s knees. As the pressure eased again, he tried to buck him off. Sheehan laughed at his pathetic effort.
The distraction was enough. Collard shook his right arm free and reached between the mattress and the base. The fork was his only weapon. He swung his arm and stabbed hard at Sheehan’s eye, to the accompaniment of tinny laughter and applause from the TV. He felt the jelly resist then the fork slipped under the eyeball, through the socket into Sheehan’s head.
Sheehan gave a silent howl and clamped his hand to his damaged eye. He fell back off the bed and crashed to the floor, the eye spraying blood, fork protruding between bloody fingers. Collard registered the rage in the undamaged eye as Sheehan realized he wouldn’t be walking out of the room hefting his balls with the satisfaction of another job done. He kicked Sheehan hard in the head. The throat rattle sounded like someone having the plug pulled on him. Instead of witnessing the man’s final moments, Collard walked out, leaving Sheehan to die alone.
The Natty Dreamer
Angleton saw himself once more the natty dreamer (1943–1947), that formal dandy wreathed in cigarette smoke, soft Midwestern inflections, schooled in the confinement of a British boarding school in the defensive art of irony, an honorary Brit, always a little in thrall to the offhand mannerisms of the upper classes and their tyranny of charm, that peculiar form of double offensive: a languid attack, particularly with regard to women, and often a prelude to rudeness. He had shared their smut and secrecy, the giggles and filthy jokes, and those initiations of which upper-class Yanks managed only pale imitations. He enjoyed British clubbability.
The closer Collard got to his goal, the less Angleton wanted to know, dreading the worst (being told something he didn’t know). He was fearful of Collard’s cold rage. In Angleton’s estimation, rage was the significant emotion of an historical span that began in the 1970s. The most extreme form of that rage was found in terrorism: how to convey outrage at that terror while at the same time understanding it? It was why Angleton never slept: because of the terror he found lurking the
re, the night-sweats, his dreams, and what of Philby’s and Greene’s? Three men who didn’t sleep easy.
The fact was, if you wanted to go into the subversion business, collect intelligence and move arms, you dealt with drug-movers.
He was back in Rome. The new boy in town. His operation was small and under-funded. It was sound counter-intelligence to expose sloppy security and he made a splash. Bright boy. Like the detective who knows who the murderer is because he had arranged for the murder in the first place. He knew he was good at conveying the impression of deep thinking: plucking the answer out of thin air. There was nothing to work out when you were running the agent selling secrets to US intelligence, which was naive and leaky. Scattolini worked for a Vatican newspaper as a movie critic but lost his job when they found out he had once written dirty books. Scattolini, resentful, specialized in selling Vatican secrets, all made up. The Israelis picked up the same trick from Angleton after the war. He ran the CIA Israeli desk for years (and the Vatican), along with counter-intelligence, which annoyed a lot of people because a man whose job was internal security shouldn’t be running ops too. But the Israelis made it clear they would work with no one else. One of the old Agency faces who drank a lot of Scotch and rated Angleton a snob accused him to his face of being Mossad’s man. What no one knew was Angleton had been forced to repeat the Scattolini trick to get in with the Israelis or they were going to blow what they knew about the Ratline: conspiracy, treason, consorting with gangsters. Angleton had copied Scattolini’s (and Garbo’s) method of embroidering information taken from newspaper articles to cobble together a Middle East spy ring that he sold to his superiors as the real thing. An operating budget was approved before Angleton revealed he had made the whole thing up ‘as a joke’, resulting in the removal of a rival superior from nervous collapse and the consolidation of Angleton’s position as the acknowledged expert on Middle East affairs.
Now the span of the Cold War was pretty much over. The lateral question was, did it represent the end of something or the start of a whole new perspective. That was his method, to look for clues from the past to explain the present as once he had pored endlessly over pre-war Soviet operations to discern later patterns. It was too much like hard work. One of his favourite records was ‘Cut-across Shorty’.
