by Brian Martin
My journalistic work had taught me to register details. I had done so with that man and something – his oddity of manner, his vague familiarity, the way he left the scene – put me on mild alert. I realised that it might be a reflection of the mood of uneasiness I was in, but I felt I should follow the prompting of my gut feeling. Before reaching my own front door, I decided to go into the pub.
One of the Aussies, a pleasant, friendly, fair-haired guy in his mid-twenties who was over in the UK just having finished university in Melbourne, was tidying and wiping part of the bar. I had spoken to him a number of times before and knew his name was Andy. We had talked and joked about the perils of owning a house alongside a pub.
‘Can I ask you something, Andy? The tall West Indian guy who just left, what was he doing? How long was he here?’
‘He was here about an hour, I reckon. I don’t know what he was doing. I suppose he was waiting for someone, but no one came. He bought a couple of rum and cokes.’
‘Has he been in here before? Strange guy: he acted as though he knew me, as though we’d met before. Did he phone anyone?’
‘Not that I noticed. He just started on the phone as he was going out.’
It was curious. That wink had not been disconcerting. It was not the sort of come-hither signal for a pick-up, a sexual invitation, the message flagging an imminent assignation. It was not like that at all. It was casual, knowing, friendly. That was it. It was a knowing wink. It suddenly struck me that there was a recognition of complicity in the gesture. Yet I could not work out that I had ever seen the man before. The chance meeting remained a mystery.
I did not like the uncertainty of it, and again it did nothing for my mood. I was already uneasy on the personal front: now there was a slight cause for concern on the professional front. Perhaps I was being watched, kept a close eye on. Perhaps I was meant to know that I was under scrutiny. It might even have been a warning. Naturally all these thoughts turned over in my mind. Again my reporting work made me aware of all possibilities. I had to consider all aspects of that strange encounter. There was no resolution to the problem. I said goodnight to Andy and left, let myself in next door, and went to bed.
7
That night I did not sleep well. I woke once or twice. The first time I went to the lavatory in the bathroom for a long pee. I had been dreaming of Roxanne. We had met at the Alfonso. For some reason I was resident there on a long-term basis. In my dream I had set up home on the top floor. When we went up to my hotel room and entered the door, it was as though we entered my house next to the pub behind Olympia. Australian Andy featured as one of the hotel porters. He had escorted us up with a bottle of champagne that he left on a bedside table. He turned the covers of the bed down and asked if there was anything else he could fetch for either of us. Roxanne had asked him if he could find us some condoms. He gave a knowing wink that I recognised originated in reality from the tall West Indian, and said that he could. He produced a packet of five from a fat money wallet stuffed with euro notes and dollar bills. Roxanne thanked him and kissed him full on the mouth, which I thought an unnecessary thing to do. I could not help noticing that he had the beginnings of an erection. As he went out through the door he winked at me again. Roxanne had started to get undressed. She had taken off her shoes and tights, unzipped her dress, stepped out of it, stood like a fashion model in her sheer white bra and pants, and beckoned me to the bed. As I walked towards her, she reached out and undid my belt, unzipped my fly and ran her fingers round the inside of my brief’s waistband. It was at that point I woke up and desperately needed to make my unsteady way to the bathroom. When I returned to bed, no matter how hard I tried, the Alfonso could not be recreated. The vision, the waking dream, had fled. The seductive Roxanne was no longer there in the forefront of my imagination, neither fully dressed nor half naked. I could not even see her features in my mind’s eye. I managed to convince myself that I would never be able to remember what she looked like. I tried all sorts of ways to recall the situation that we had reached in that all too vivid dream. I thought hard of Andy in his role as lewd pimp. Nothing would avail.
So my mind wandered back to the West Indian, and then to Mark. He occupied my consciousness. When I awoke next, I was aware that Mark had been the subject of my dreams. We had been working on some unclear mission. I remembered that we had interviewed Belmont. Belmont had been dressed as usual in his slightly down-at-heel way, shabby, but scented with an expensive aftershave. He limped. He said he had fallen at the railway station and was lucky not to have been crushed by an arriving train. We had told him he was fortunate because a man had been killed recently by falling under a slowing locomotive. Mark dismissed Belmont with the remark that he had told us enough on that occasion: we would call him up later to verify our report that had to be sent back to London. Belmont’s skin changed to resemble translucent parchment. I thought it looked like the skin of a dead man and said so to Mark. Belmont limped away. Mark told me optimistically that we had done well and that I should not be so gloomy. He said goodbye and kissed me on the cheek. I remember wondering if it was a Judas kiss. Did he mean its implied import or was he trying to make me feel secure in order to trick me into a state of disadvantage. He left and on his way out thanked and tipped a pianist who turned and smiled. The pianist was Andy. I remained worrying about Mark.
I then knew that I had to leave the hotel quickly. I looked for my document case and could not find it. I had to leave immediately otherwise whatever it was I was due to do, I should be late for. I searched, thought I saw it under a neighbouring chair at the next table; but when I picked it up it was not mine. I grew more and more agitated, convinced that at any moment someone would tell me that it was too late for whatever it was I had to do. I hurried here and there looking under chairs and tables, behind pillars and potted plants, and as I looked under the grand piano, I was suddenly aware that the tall West Indian had appeared and was saying that it was all too late. I awoke, hot, sweaty, clammy, a complete mental and physical mess, full of anxiety, totally disturbed, thoroughly distressed.
It was twenty past six. I went downstairs and made myself a mug of tea, and then went back to bed, propped myself up against some pillows and, sipping the tea, thought about matters. Roxanne and Seville were haunting me. I knew what I should do. I should finish with her altogether. There was never any prospect of a long-term relationship: she would not leave her husband. Yet no matter how much I knew that to be the truth of the situation, I managed to persuade myself that in life all things are flux, and that one day I might be lucky enough to enjoy her to myself. A fool’s paradise. I recognised it but chose to ignore it. I should have openly declared to myself that Roxanne was good for pure sexual thrill; the experience with her was entirely sensual. Nothing happened on an intellectual plane. I often wondered what she thought about in her reflective moments. I concluded that she did not think. In moments of what seemed to be reflection, she stared at a blank wall: nothing went on in her mind. If I wanted intellectual stimulation then Mark was the person to provide it. There was never a shortage of topics for conversation. His ideas prompted my ideas and vice versa.
I sat in bed and tried to relax totally. It was impossible to sleep any more. At seven I showered, dressed and, as I was eating toast, wondering why my newspaper had not arrived, the telephone rang. It was Willy, unspecific, teasingly mysterious, asking me to call in at his office on my way to the Journal. Nothing could be said on the telephone: there was no security. As I was on the move early, I said I would be there just after nine. I heard the newspaper drop through the letter box.
Naturally I did not take the paper I worked for. I subscribed to one more on the political left than my own. It was necessary to be aware of what spectrum of opinion on national and foreign affairs existed. The prime minister had been backing up the chancellor on fiscal policy. The health minister had promised more nurses for hospitals, even if they had to be brought in from other countries. On the foreign pages there was a s
tory about a Budapest-based property corporation buying disused factories in the Baltic states. There was a significant deal being struck to redevelop an old Soviet military base in Estonia, not far from Tallinn. The people involved in the work belonged to the Myrex corporation, part of the empire controlled by Roxanne’s husband. What seemed to me odd, was that I had not heard about this particular enterprise from any source. I thought I would have heard about it on the journalistic front, or from Roxanne since it must have been brewing while I was with her in Seville. More important was that, since the redevelopment concerned old ex-Soviet installations, I expected to have been briefed by my editor. He was bound to be aware of it. It was the sort of thing I knew about and it lay within the compass of my operations. My commercial and industrial connections were extensive throughout the old satellite countries and in the Baltic. Anyway, perhaps Willy’s call was to do with precisely that item of news.
I made my way into the West End and walked down into St James’s Square. So far as Willy’s security work was concerned, he worked out of a suite of rooms and offices in a house close to the square. When I say, ‘worked out of’, that is it. He had no permanent place there himself, no individual office, no desk to call his own. When he needed space he went in and was assigned a desk, or he borrowed one from some civil servant there. That was where his controller lodged. The road ran down from Jermyn Street. It was discreetly convenient because it was close to my club.
The information I received from Willy was what I supposed it might be. Intelligence had known about Myrex’s interest in Estonia. Someone in Tallinn had kept them informed about Soviet-built computer factories and software labs. After the gradual release of that throttling Soviet grip, the workshops, labs, factories had been left by the Russians to decay. Many clever young Estonians became unemployed as a result. Brilliant technical and scientific brains were idle. Then along came a host of foreign entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, seed investors, people who had the vision to realise that there was talent to be put to work and exploited in one way or another. Myrex were not slow to take the advice of one of their merchant banks and look into what could be done there.
Tallinn was increasingly important. It was an essential gateway into Russia. It was a port open all year round: its waters did not freeze over. So far as business went, the hotels were filled with a medley of nationalities – Americans, British, Italians, Germans, Swiss, Japanese. Wherever the prospect of money to be made was, there were the financial jackals. I remembered the newspaper article that I had read: even the British royal family was supporting the commercial effort and doing the PR round of the Baltic states on behalf not only of British culture but also of British business.
The last time I had been in Tallinn was a few months previously. My paper wanted me to report on the way that Estonia was developing its political system and economy, and how close it was to approaching full membership of the European Community. It was a fill-in for me between one story I had finished and another one engaging the editor’s interest.
What I knew about the burgeoning prospects of the Estonian economy managed to persuade Mark to accompany me. He was always on the lookout for new investment schemes that might produce a significant profit. I mentioned our trip to Willy the day before we set off. He was cautious about our visit and not overjoyed by the news. He immediately saw inherent dangers. Any intelligence organisation worth its name would be alerted to something afoot if an investigative journalist and someone like Mark appeared somewhere together; and there was no possibility that those interested would be ignorant of our movements once we were booked to fly.
We took the Estonian Air flight from Gatwick on a Saturday morning. There were a few empty seats. From what we could hear of voices and languages there were mainly Brits, Americans, Estonians, Finns, a couple of Italians aboard, and a security marshal. The latter, dressed in a light grey suit, medium build, fit-looking, with that slight, characteristically telltale bulge under his left armpit, obviously knew the cabin crew, and stood chatting with them as we entered the aircraft. During the flight he sauntered once or twice up and down the plane and sat in a gangway seat just in front of a bulkhead. His presence was slightly chilling but at the same time reassuring. It occurred to me that some of these security guards are called air marshals so enabling fairly run-of-the-mill officials to designate themselves as the highest-ranking officer in the British Royal Air Force. In this way bank managers are impressed for house mortgage loans.
On one side of me in the aircraft sat a black rapper, a DJ who was engaged for an evening at a club in the modern part of Tallinn. He spent most of the time sleeping having explained that he had been up most of the night before and would be working most of the night to come. He would fly back the next day. It was noticeable that in Estonia we saw only two coloured people, one was my seat companion, and the other was a twenty-something girl who emerged as part of the congregation from the Russian Orthodox cathedral which crowns the Toompea, the small hill which is part of, and looks down on, the old town. She must have been from one of the southern republics of the old Soviet Union: she spoke fluent Russian but somehow looked out of place in this Baltic state with its pale people, blanched by snow, spectral as ice, purified and cleansed by saunas. Most houses, most flats, and many hotel rooms, had their individual saunas.
I had an American contact in Tallinn, Uri Rovde, who worked for the Washington Post, and who I assumed worked for the CIA. I had met him once before in Washington, at dinner in the Cosmos Club with a group of diplomats and international relations experts from the School of Advanced International Studies on Massachusetts Avenue. We were to meet up in the rooms of the English Café on the main square. The interior decor was an Estonian attempt to reproduce what they thought the Piccadilly Ritz looks like. So there were small tables and cane chairs, no ferns or aspidistras, no Palm Court orchestra, but delicately cut sandwiches and selections of cakes. A gourmand’s additions were substantial wedges of gateaux that could be ordered and all were served with thick cream. Different flavours of Lipton’s or Twinings tea were offered. The main room on the first floor was spacious, the tables set well apart, and it overlooked the square. The grand, imposing, steep-roofed, mediaeval town hall, with a giant thermometer mounted at the end of one of its sidewalls, presided over the cobbled square. The temperature shown by the thermometer hovered around freezing point.
As I was about to enter the café, a car drove up and parked at an angle outside the entrance and an elegant, fair-haired woman got out. I recognised her immediately. I had met her many times before in European cities, but mainly in London. Her name was Monica Lightborn. She loathed both her names and insisted that everyone simply called her Mo. She was a writer on Baltic affairs and was a stringer for a British newspaper, not my own, and for a New York journal. I gave her a wave and waited for her. It seemed strange to me that there were no other vehicles parked in the square. Mo did not seem to notice. She greeted me with a wave of her gloved hand while she pocketed the ignition keys with the other. Her slightly stooping figure turned as she half pirouetted towards me. It was a peculiar way she had when meeting people – a device, a mannerism, which disguised a certain awkwardness in her approach. She was wearing, as she usually did, trousers, a long elegant coat bought in Bond Street or somewhere just off Sloane Square, and one of those Nordic hats, knitted from greasy wool with a pointed top and ear-flaps. The hat was not the height of fashion but did its job defending its wearer from temperatures which fluctuated between zero degrees and minus twelve at that time of the year. From a distance, it made her look like a rather tall goblin.
We entered the café together. A large, stocky man in a well-padded parka and a Russian fur hat pushed brusquely past us on his way out. Meanwhile, a woman from the shop next door had hurried in to catch us up and said to Mo in faultless American-accented English that no cars were allowed in the square between one and eight p.m. Mo again pirouetted and moved with embarrassment to shift the car, telling me that she
would join me in a minute or two.
At a table by a window was Rovde. He grinned cheerfully as I approached and stood up. He hugged me and welcomed me to Tallinn. He had that expansive air of hospitality and generosity that many Americans have, not cultivated but quite natural.
He accompanied me to the counter where I chose a slice of cherry gateau: I took it with cream. He ordered some strong Twinings Assam tea for me. As we went back to the table, Mo reappeared. I went over to her and took her coat, and at the same time introduced her to Rovde. I suggested that she gave us quarter of an hour together to discuss business and our future arrangements, and then that she should join us. She sat at a separate table and contemplated the square. Rovde and I quickly caught up, so far as it was possible, on what we had been doing. He explained that he had been keeping an eye on Western business interests in the old bits of Soviet leftovers in Estonia. He explained the plight of Russians who had been left behind. The Estonians hated them. They were the relics of the old colonial power, not to be trusted, certainly to be shunned. They lived together in enclaves, kept to themselves, spoke only Russian, and were generally unhappy with their lot. Estonians refused to speak the colonial language, Russian, to them. When it was necessary to communicate, everyone spoke in either English or German. He told me about Paldiski. During the years when it did not even feature on maps because it was so secret, it was a thriving community. It had been built by the Russians as a complex military and naval base. It stretched for a couple of miles along the coast, dockyards, dry docks, huge hangars, industrial workshops, laboratories. Away from the shoreline were administrative blocks, offices, and then behind them, residential buildings, tower blocks of flats, all built in the boring, monumental, wedding-cake style of Stalinist architecture.
