October Men

by Anthony Price

  “Then listen. You say David makes a big black mark, breaking a little rule that is no rule to him. And I say that I believe you—that David is in trouble. But not for the breaking of any kleinliche rule. He is in trouble because he is ripe for it—he has been ripe for it for months, ever since he settled the Zoshchenko affair of yours.”

  Maybe not in the business, thought Richardson, carefully concealing his surprise, but too goddamn well-informed for comfort if he had had a finger in that pie. Indeed, if the Professor had aimed to impress him he could hardly have chosen a better name to do it with: the late comrade Zoshchenko was not buried under it, and the name he had used was not buried in the Dead Files either, but even deeper in the top secret Closed Active files of the department, like a bit of lethal radioactive waste…

  He thrust the memory into the back of his mind; there were more pressing matters now.

  “Then you know what David’s up to?” he murmured. “Thank the Lord somebody does!”

  The bullethead shook in violent disagreement. “No, Mr. Richardson—I indicated that it is no surprise to me that he is causing trouble. As to what kind of trouble, there I cannot help you.”

  Richardson stared at him for a moment thoughtfully. “I think maybe you can, you know, Professor.”

  Freisler frowned, his eyes almost lost in the overhanging folds of skin; it was, thought Richardson, a face of absolutely outstanding ugliness, brutality even. And yet everything the man said, and the aura he threw off, contradicted his appearance: so might the Beast in the fairy tale have aged if no Beauty had ever arrived to turn him back into his true princely shape, lonely and gentle—and dangerous only when someone imputed his honour, as he had seemed to do now.

  “I don’t mean you’re holding out on me,” he said hurriedly. “But tell me one thing first: what makes you think David’s in trouble?”

  The frown dissolved. “Not in trouble—I did not say that—but ready for it, Mr. Richardson. You see, I know the symptoms of his condition.”

  “His condition?”

  “It is not infectious—do not fear!” There was the merest suggestion of a glint behind the glasses. “At least, not to such a person as yourself. It is the scholar’s sickness—the good teacher’s too. Are you not familiar with accidie?”

  “Ace—?” Richardson goggled. “Accidie?”

  “Accidie. It is the fourth cardinal sin.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “I never joke, Mr. Richardson,” Freisler shook his head seriously. “It is regrettable, but I have no sense of humour. So I do not joke and I am not joking now. So—you do not know of accidie?”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Again? I—Ach! Another of your little sayings! But I am being stupid. You are not an historian, as David is—or as he should have been. He knew!”

  “You told him, then?”

  “But of course! Friendship is for truth telling or it is nothing. I told him of his sin and he agreed that I was right.”

  “So—“ Richardson bottled his impatience with an effort: this was one hard lesson he had learnt these last three years, not to let the seconds stampede him when time was pressing “—just what is this sin of his?”

  Freisler beamed at him. “Sloth, Mr. Richardson. Sloth and sluggishness. It was a peculiarly monastic sin in the Middle Ages—it is I think a medieval word, accidie, and I do not know the true modern word for it in English.”

  “But David isn’t slothful, Professor. He works like a ruddy beaver with his files and his reports. He eats ‘em up by the dozen.”

  The old man’s face fell. “No, then I have missed the right word … dégoût, the French would call it, perhaps. … It is when one loses the interest in—and the desire to do—those things which one does habitually and does well. When some men do well it is for them fulfilment, but for others it is dust and ashes—and David is such a man.”

  “He’s bored with his job, you mean?”

  “So! Except that ‘bored’ is too little a word.”

  “And when did you tell him all this?”

  Freisler looked at him questioningly. “Pardon?”

  “When did you tell him he’d got this—accidie?” Richardson pushed forward gently. “Was it when you had dinner down at his place?”

  “Dinner?” For a moment Freisler seemed confused. “It was—yes —it was then… But you know about it?”

  “Not enough. Not nearly enough. And not the right things yet—I know you had roast beef and apple pie to follow.”

  The piggy eyes brightened again momentarily at the memory. So far all Richardson knew of the crucial meal was a cook’s view of it: the roast beef had been for the old German himself—a fine big sirloin, with fiery-hot home-made horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes and three vegetables, because it was heavy eating that he loved; and the apple pie with thick Devonshire cream was for Sir Laurie Deacon, because he had a famous sweet tooth and Mrs. Clark’s apple pies had taken prizes in shows from Steeple Horley to Guildford for twenty years; and the very Englishness of both dishes made them right for the oilman Ian Howard, just back from a year of tinned food and Arab delicacies in Saudi Arabia.

  But that cook’s view had not been unprofitable. For David Audley loved these apple pies as much as any man—and this one had been good enough to make Sir Laurie promise his services free to Clarkie if she ever needed them, to the subsequent utter confusion and discomfort of the authorities. Yet to Clarkie’s chagrin David had left his pie to congeal while he listened with rapt attention to what was being said—an event so unlooked-for that sharp-eared Clarkie was too disconcerted to eavesdrop into the actual conversation.

  That had been the moment, though: something had happened between the cutting of the pie and the serving of the cheese to turn David from a taciturn sorehead into the schoolboy who kissed his wife publicly and outrageously in the middle of the kitchen and pinched Clarkie’s backside as she bent over the washing-up.

  Whatever it was it had been a cure for accidie, anyway.

  And whatever it was Richardson was betting it had already brought one man to his death.

  “Not the right things?” The Professor was staring at him now, alert. “You are meaning that I know of those right things, eh?”

  “I hope so, yes.” Richardson nodded. “What did you talk about over dinner?”

  Freisler thought for a few seconds, then spread his hands. “But —so many things we talked of. … The food, the European Community—which you insist on calling the Common Market, the Industrial Relations Act—“

  “What did David have to say?”

  “He did sot say much. That is, at first he did not say much—it was for that that I finally chided him.”

  “Go on.”

  “But I have told you. I spoke of his sin and he agreed. He said he was—“ The wide brow crinkled with concentration “—confined and —‘cribbed’ I think was the word he used. It must have a meaning other than that my students attribute to it, though.”

  “It does. ‘Cabin’d, cribb’d and confin’d’-“

  “Ach! A quotation. I see.”

  “From Macbeth, Act Three,” murmured Richardson, gratified at the surprised lift of Freisler’s eyebrows, which decided him not to add that he had once been conscripted into the play at school and knew every line of that act, in which he had featured prominently in ghastly pale green make-up as Banquo’s Ghost. “I’m not just a pretty face, you know—but please go on.”

  “What more do you want?”

  Richardson considered the question. “Well, just when did David say this—during the beef or the apple pie?”

  “Is that important?” Freisler’s forehead crinkled again. “But obviously it is. … Well, I will try to recall. … It was, I think, before the pie, Mr. Richardson.”

  “Very good, Professor. Now—what happened next?”

  “Next?” Freisler paused, his face heavy with concentration. He was beginning to take the game in earnest
at last. “Next it was Mr. Howard who spoke.”

  “The oilman.”

  “He is in the oil business, yes.”

  Richardson nodded encouragingly. There was nothing odd about David entertaining oilmen; in his Middle Eastern days he had been as thick as thieves with some of them and he was not a man to jettison good contacts. In fact it was agreed in the Department that half the secret of his success lay in his ability to hold on to them.

  “What did he have to say?”

  “He disagreed with me. He said—“

  “Confined? Don’t you believe it, man—you’re just plain old-fashioned unpopular. You’ve been right too many times, and you’ve said ‘I told you so’ afterwards. People don’t love you for that, David —not in any business.”

  “Yes. And then?”

  “David just grunted. And Lady Deacon asked him how he had won his reputation for foretelling the future so accurately—a silly question, but he couldn’t very well grunt at her—“

  “All I do is extrapolate on the past and the present, Helen. It isn’t too difficult if you have enough accurate information. The trouble is we seldom have enough to do the job properly, so most of the time I’m just guessing like everyone else. Nobody sees into the future. I’m not an astrologer.”

  “How unromantic!”

  “There was a little silence then—what you call an awkward silence, I think. So I took the liberty of pointing out that Adolf Hitler had his astrologer who had not done him very much good. But then Sir Laurie Deacon reminded us that the astrologer Theogenes foretold that young Octavius would succeed Julius Caesar—Octavius went to see him incognito and Theogenes threw himself at his feet—and what had David and I to say to that?”

  “And what did you reply to that?”

  “I said that Theogenes was no fool and that he would have made it his business to know who Caesar’s heir was. And David said—“

  “I agree with Theodore—there’s always an unromantic reason somewhere. I remember how the news of the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun back in ‘46 came in to London two hours before it happened. One of the big agencies got a flash, and then an hour later it was cancelled. And then an hour later the place was blown apart. But it wasn’t a case of second sight. It was simply that the agency’s man was an undercover agent for the Irgun and he knew what was going to happen. Only his friends postponed the job and they forgot to tell him. And the moral of that is that we very seldom know what’s actually going on under our noses in the present, never mind the future.”

  “Jolly good, Professor. And what happened next?”

  “Ach! Next… Is it you are wanting what we ate now, or what we were saying?”

  “Both, for choice.”

  “So! Well—we ate and we talked … after David tells his story of the King David Hotel—yes—comes the housekeeper from the kitchen—“

  “Mrs. Clark.”

  “Mrs. Clark, that is right. She comes with the pudding in a deep dish and the thick cream, and as David’s wife serves it she says to Sir Laurie Deacon, ‘This is specially for you, Laurie, although it is David’s favourite too.’ It is made with apples—“ Freisler wrinkled his nose in disgust “—and cloves, which spoil the apples for me … and then the oilman Howard says—“

  “I know a character who’s got his own private line into the future.”

  David said: “I take it you mean your boss, Narva.”

  “Oh—you can laugh, David. But Eugenio Narva is one hell of a smooth operator. And then some.”

  “I never doubted it. He has remarkable flair for doing the right thing—and not doing the wrong one.”

  Deacon said: “You mean, like pulling out of Libya when he did? That certainly was nicely judged—remarkable is the right word for it. I wish we had done the same.”

  Faith Audley said: “He got out just before Colonel Gaddafi’s coup?”

  “Not just before, my dear. Well before would be more accurate, eh Howard?”

  “He pulled out sure enough. But that isn’t what I meant by the future—I think Gaddafi was as much of a surprise to him as it was to everyone else—“

  David Audley said: “Not to me it wasn’t.”

  “Okay—not to you, David. But he didn’t have you on his payroll. What I mean is that he got out of Libya because he wanted his ready money for something else.”

  “The North Sea.”

  “Right—you’re on the button, David. The North Sea … which is a long, long way from the sands of the desert, I can tell you.”

  Faith Audley said: “I didn’t know there were any Italian companies drilling in the North Sea.”

  “There aren’t. Narva didn’t go into the exploitation business, he went into the equipment side. He pulled me out of the desert because I cut my teeth on offshore work, I suppose, and I knew roughly what he wanted.”

  “And what did he want?”

  “A middle-man’s finger in all the pies that were going—rigs—he ordered two of them straight off—and all the paraphernalia that went with ‘em. And manpower too—he put all the best men he could lay his hands on under the longest contracts they’d put their crosses on. Technical whizz kids, divers, the lot. What he could get he got. I know, because I spent his money like water.”

  “And there’s profit in this?”

  “Faith honey, that’s where the money is at the moment. Or where it’s going, anyway. You only have to compare the development and production costs. … I guess it takes a production investment of $100 per barrel a day in the Middle East. But in the North Sea it’s going to work out at anything from twenty to seventy times as much —it takes a million pounds just for one exploration well, and that’s if the weather’s nice and kind. Which it darn well isn’t most of the times I’ve seen it.”

  Deacon said: “What you’re saying, Howard, is that at the moment more money is going into the North Sea than is coming out of it. But that’s common knowledge—everyone knew it was going to be a devil to develop. If it wasn’t for the political stability of the area compared with the Middle East there’d be a good deal less enthusiasm than there is now, I tell you.”

  “Sure—everyone knew it was going to be tough. What they didn’t know was whether it’ud be profitable.”

  “Oil exploration’s always a gamble. But ever since the Groningen strike—“

  “That’s just it: Groningen was a gas field, apart from being safe on land. That’s where most of the hopes were—in the gas.”

  “But they knew oil could be there.”

  “Hell, of course they did. The gas comes from the carboniferous layers under the sandstone in the Permian rock—sorry, Faith, I’m going technological now, damn it, aren’t I!”

  “Geological, anyway. But do carry on, Ian. We’re all fascinated.”

  “So says every good hostess! But I will go on all the same. You see, you do get oil in the older carboniferous layers onshore, but precious little of it, and drilling in the southern sector early on seemed to bear that out—in the end there was plenty of gas, but precious little oil.”

  “But they went on looking for it all the same.”

  “That’s because they’re oilmen. A good oilman’s rather like a gold miner—the next hole’s bound to be the end of the rainbow, he always thinks. And yet look at the timing: Groningen was in ‘58. It wasn’t until ‘65 that Phillips and Shell-Esso and one or two others got the courage to take out licences in Scottish waters.

  “Then Phillips found the Cod condensate field in the Norwegian sector in ‘68. But even that only proved there were hydrocarbon reservoirs—it didn’t ring the till commercially. There were some damn cold feet about before that, I can tell you. It was only when Phillips brought in Ekofisk and Xenophon found the Freya field, that the balloon went up. And then it really went up. But that was only a year or so ago, remember.”

  Audley said: “But just what has this to do with Eugenio Narva’s being able to see into the future?”

  “T
iming, David—it’s all in the timing. Groningen in ‘58, just a smell of it in ‘68 at Cod and bingo at Ekofisk and Freya in ‘70. But I was buying for Narva in a big way before Cod.”

  “So he made a good guess. He’s a shrewd fellow.”

  “David, it wasn’t a guess. He knew.”

  Deacon said: “But on your own evidence he couldn’t have known. He could only have gambled.”

  “I tell you—he knew. He was making a bomb in Libya and he pulled out and made another bomb in the North Sea.”

  Deacon said: “Let’s get this straight, Ian—stop being oracular for a moment. You know he wasn’t gambling because you asked him and he told you.”

  “Naturally. He’s a straight shooter and I’ve put in a lot of sweat for him over the years, and what I was doing was giving me the shivers—I knew what the finance boys in the big companies were saying about the North Sea at the time. They said it was only good for the fish.”

  “So you asked him what he was up to.”

  “Right. I flew all the way from Oslo to Naples—to his place near Positano—just to ask him whether he’d flipped his lid. And he hadn’t.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said we were on a sure thing.”

  Lady Deacon said: “And did he have his astrologer with him, Mr. Howard?”

  “Not with him, ma’am. His astrologer was in Moscow.”

  “Moscow?” exclaimed Richardson.”

  “That is what he said, Mr. Richardson.”

  “Those were his exact words?”

  “Exact words?” Freisler nodded at him knowingly. “Now that is precisely what David wished to be told. Only it was the words of this Signor Narva he desired—“

  “Why surely—he said a little bird whispered in his ear. A little bird from East Berlin who had it on the highest authority in Moscow.”

  Deacon said: “Well … that’s uncommonly interesting. But it’s just as David says—there’s always an unromantic reason somewhere.”

  Lady Deacon said: “What do you mean, dear?”

  Deacon said: “The Russians simply had one or two of their own men on the Phillips and the Xenophon rigs, that’s all. It’s not in the least surprising. Three-quarters of the men they have over here are more concerned with industrial espionage than political and military spying … and North Sea oil would overlap both of those spheres anyway. But full marks to Narva for listening in on them—that was rather bright of him.”