He counted the odds against him and decided that it was just about time for a big gamble. He liked gambling, liked pitting his instincts against the odds. Like that first time he had gone to see Simone. That had been a risk that paid off, until now at least. Or when he had fished Torriano out from under Melzer’s nose and brought him to San Diego. And these last weeks had added a few pretty smart heads to his list.
But this current and potentially lucrative venture wasn’t going smoothly. And he had staked a lot on it. Too much.
He gave his newspaper a violent shake, then turned to scan the market listings. Chiron was going up. That meant White Jnr had a lot of loose change in those deep pockets of his. He could afford to dangle him just a little longer before bringing him in. With a little bit of luck. And Genentech was doing pretty well. That meant the new division would be going ahead and a little more headhunting would have to be done. As for Biotech Enterprises, his eyes moved to the opposite page, well just look at that, they were branching out to the Czech Republic. If he had to stay on a few more days, he might just do a little sniffing while he was here.
Ted folded his newspaper and buried it in his coat pocket. He felt a little better now. Almost able to face the old sphinx who was bound to give him bad news. He would need his wits about him. And that poker face which usually served him so well. He didn’t want to fall into any traps or find himself dashed against a stony cliff. Maybe he had better bring her a box of chocolates or some flowers. He looked around the lobby. Nothing much here. He just about had time to find something in the Square.
As he wrapped his camel-hair coat round himself, he saw Stephen Caldwell walking in his direction. Not only Stephen, but Stephen with two extremely young and extremely attractive women. Especially the leggy blonde. Well, well, well. Fancy that. He had to give it to Caldwell. He had brains and taste. Though maybe his wits weren’t altogether what they might be.
Ted chuckled, made himself visible. But Stephen hurried right past him. Cut him.
A veritable cut, Ted reflected, his good humour vanishing more quickly than it had come.
With a shrug, he steeled himself for his meeting with Simone.
-19-
______________
The old tiled radiator gave off a sparse dry heat.
Simone placed her hands on it and gazed out the window. Snow was coming again. She could almost smell it. The clouds had the dark heaviness of a school of whales. With a sigh, she prodded a cigarette into an alabaster holder and went to sit in the delicate Louis XVI chair which graced her suite.
She needed to rehearse the speech she would make to Ted Knight. But all she could think of here in this city of memory was that fatal meeting they had had in the early seventies. The autumn of ‘71 it must have been. He was still working in the American Embassy in Paris then, posing as some minor official in the Trade Delegation. And he was strikingly handsome. That had been her weakness in those days, which she now counted as her youth. Soon after that, she had learned better.
For several months, she had bumped into Edward S. Knight here and there in embassy circles. Then, because her elder daughter was going through some love crisis, she had decided to invite him home for drinks and introduce them. But Paule had stamped out of the house before Ted’s arrival, saying she really didn’t need her mother’s help in that domain. Simone had been left alone to entertain him.
In the event, it was Ted who provided all the entertainment.
He had arrived bearing a bouquet of torch lilies and dahlias as dazzling as his smile and his suit and he had sprawled on her white settee offering compliments and gossip and bonhomie. As talented a charmer as she had ever met, with his dimple and his dramatic sweep of fair hair. He had drawn her out too, asked her about her work at the Institute, about Prague before the war. She didn’t known how he knew about that, but his manners were impeccable and she had chatted, not with any particular seriousness, but with pleasure.
And then without any change of manner or tone, though perhaps he had sat up a little straighter, he had said, ‘I know a little secret of yours. A love affair you had.’ He had laughed cheerfully, though her back had stiffened and her nerves were setting off alarm bells.
She had resorted to urbanity. ‘If it’s a secret, we had better keep it so.’ Her laugh had tinkled, alongside his.
‘Maybe. But just so long as you know that I know. And one day I may tell.’
The hint of menace was buried beneath a smile, yet she had sensed it as acutely as if a diamond studded dagger had been poised at her back.
‘So what is it that you know?’ She had still maintained the mask of lightness.
‘All about you and a young man by the name of Jan Martin whom we’ve been keeping our eyes on.’
She didn’t immediately question the ‘we’ though she noted it. With a wave of the arm, she made light of the whole thing, put on her superior woman of the world face and said, ‘Ah that. We’re allowed a little escapade now and again.’
‘But perhaps not with the son of a woman we’ve fed to the Stalinist hounds.’ His eyes were on her then, pinning her to the wall and she knew there was nothing to deny.
‘You have age-old sources!’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Will you reveal them to me?’
‘If it makes you more amenable.’
‘To what?’
‘A few little favours. Now and again.’
In a language whose innuendo she was well enough versed in to decipher both the level of knowledge and the level of threat, he had told her then about a certain James Redford who had worked at the Embassy in the ‘50s. He didn’t have to do more than drop the name, for she knew it well enough. Redford had been an old friend of her husband, Michel’s, and it was to him that in her cold trance of vengeful rage she had posted from Prague some of the materials she had lifted from Karolina Dostolova’s desk. She had written his name with a prominent flourish on three successive envelopes, assuming, rightly as it transpired, that they would never reach him, that the censors would hold them back and investigate the sender.
But she couldn’t be one hundred percent certain of her assumption, so on her return to Paris, she had confided in James and confessed her act. At the time, she still felt little compunction about what she had done. Nor did she have much of an inkling about the full extent of the damage it would cause. Or at least, that was what she told herself. She only wanted to give Karolina a taste of her own crippling medicine, have her suffer something of what Staszek had suffered.
Redford, good bureaucrat that he was, had obviously kept a record of their meeting. And this had fallen under Ted Knight’s perspicacious eye.
‘I see,’ Simone had murmured when this piece of history came clear. ‘And the rest. About Jan.’ At that time, their passion still felt so recent, that it was a struggle for her to speak his name aloud.
‘Ah. Jan Martin.’ Ted had picked a handful of cashews from the crystal bowl on the table and popped them into his mouth with greedy pleasure. ‘Our friends across the Channel were interested in him at the time.’
He had given her the quick assessing glance of the man who enjoys more than cashews. ‘Young Mr Martin spent an inordinate number of hours at the Hotel Europa during a certain period which just happened to coincide with your visit.’
It was then that Simone had the certain realisation that she was dealing with no run-of-the-mill member of the American trade delegation. Years ago, she had left the Congress for Cultural Freedom, when she had learned how closely its activities were aligned with those of the CIA. And now, just as the network she had slowly and assiduously begun to build up was beginning to function, here she was confronted by its insidious power once again.
She had dropped the mask of urbanity then and said in a steely voice, ‘So what is it exactly that you’re telling me?’
Ted Knight had chuckled, ever friendly. ‘I’m telling you that young Mr. Martin might find it something of a shock to learn about your relations with
his mother and father. So too might your daughters, your friends, your contacts…’
‘I see. And what precisely do you want of me?’
‘Oh, nothing much…’
He left it for her to hear the unspoken ‘yet’.
‘The occasional favour. A name. A contact. A parcel. An independent runner. Nothing much. Nothing frequent.’
‘You had better go now.’
‘Had I? But I’ll be back. You know that I’ll be back. Thank you for the drink. You serve a fine malt.’
After he had gone, she realised that she was being blackmailed with more subtlety than even she was capable of in her worse moments.
She hadn’t slept that night. She had weighed up the damage on either side - to Jan, to her family, her good name and as importantly to the network whose success depended not only on her, but on a complete lack of notoriety. On the other side, there was the inevitable if delayed damage of blackmail itself. She told herself that in the extended sphere beyond her own emotions and relations, she could not immediately see what the CIA might ask of her which would run contrary to her own network’s covert battle against the monopoly on truth which the Soviet states exercised.
She did nothing. She waited. The tension the waiting produced was detrimental both to work and to family life. She found herself relieved when Ted Knight turned up at her door a month later, again bearing the bouquet which gave his arrival all the outward flavour of a social visit.
‘It’s time for that little favour,’ he drawled after a few minutes of chit chat about a current ballet.
Simone turned her back on him, fiddled with drinks at the corner cabinet.
‘Nothing much. We need a tame academic. In Baku. Someone who’s familiar with the oil sector. Got a lead for us?’
Simone had hesitated, then mumbled, ‘I might.’
‘Good. Phone me.’ He had jotted down a number on a slip of paper, given her his genial smile. ‘Three days. No more.’
She had done as he asked. It had seemed so little.
And so it had gone on, for four years, five. A favour here and there, sometimes simple, sometimes more difficult. And she had bent, not liking it, but finding it easier to bear than the alternative prospect.
Then, sometime in the mid seventies Ted Knight had vanished. She didn’t know where. She suspected Latin America. She hoped, Mars. No other operative turned up in his place. She began to breathe more easily.
Towards the end of 1981 - she remembered quite precisely for it was soon after Stephen had told her of his encounter with Jan Martin - suddenly, without warning, Ted Knight was back. Fit and bronzed and beaming geniality, he stood at her door as if only a week had passed. In his hands was a resplendent bouquet, odd that she should still remember that, of long-stemmed roses of the palest yellow. She wanted to tell her housekeeper to slam the door in his face, but it was already too late. He was bending to kiss her cheek, embracing her like an old friend, pouring them both drinks.
Lounging on her sofa as if it were a familiar haunt, he told her how he was now based in California, had a wife, children. Told her of a small company he was running which had interests here, there, and everywhere, talked a great deal of expert gibberish about pharmaceuticals, and confided in her in a low, excited voice, that he was now a head-hunter.
‘Couldn’t be more appropriate,’ Simone had commented drily. She didn’t ask him whether this was a new front or whether he had severed all his CIA links. She knew too well that they could never be severed absolutely. All she wanted was to hustle him out of the house as quickly as possible.
But he took his time. And though she waited, he didn’t mention anything of their previous business. Only at the door, when he had already donned his coat, did that sabre-sharp glint come into his eyes, that hard little twist of the mouth. ‘I hope… I trust, Simone, that I can still call on you for the occasional favour. No, no, don’t look like that. It’s not what you think. But when I’m passing through, you never know, it might be nice, it might be useful for me to meet some people, some friends. Get your vote of confidence. You always have the whole world at your fingertips.’ He had laughed.
And he had come back.
Sometimes she had the feeling that he was the truly contemporary man, spending his life in airplanes, charging back and forth, bounding in and out so quickly that he was never grounded long enough to learn the difference between good and bad. The seductive smile on his face was almost always in place, except when something he wanted was refused. Like some hyper-active toddler.
What he wanted from her now were mostly introductions and invitations. When she refused them or tried to keep him away from closer friends, he would remind her ingeniously or with overt menace, not only of her increasingly distant crimes, but of the more recent one which he himself had induced - her association with the CIA.
With her légion d’honneur, her eminent standing, it would be a terrible scandal, wouldn’t it, to expose that long-standing link? To mire her life’s work, the entire edifice of her operation - which based itself on openness of information and a lack of affiliation - by pointing to its close relation to its less salubrious but more powerful neighbour.
So more often than not, she had done as he asked. Ted Knight, she had told herself, was the cross she had to bear for her revenge on Karolina. The vindictive pendulum of vengeance. Its razor sharp edges cut and scarred, back and forth, back and forth. Until someone, somehow, demolished the mechanism.
And now, now it was enough. She had confronted Jan. As for the more public exposure, she could no longer bring herself to care.
Then, too, she was tempted to give Ted Knight a small deserved taste of his own medicine.
The knock on the door had already sounded three times, when Simone stubbed out her cigarette and moved to answer. Her awaited visitor had arrived, his cheeks fresh, his eyes clear and unfathomable beneath the broad brim of his hat.
‘Simone. How nice of you not to keep me waiting too long.’
‘Was it not quite long enough? Perhaps you’d like to return when you’ve prepared yourself a little better, Edward.’
She would insist on calling him Edward, Ted thought. No one had called him Edward except his mother and his school teachers. And that was aeons ago. He grinned nonetheless.
‘Now, now Simone. No need for the acid. I’ve brought you a second breakfast. To sweeten our encounter.’ He thrust a cardboard box in her hand. ‘I was not altogether polite with you on our last meeting.’
‘I wonder that you can still gauge such things,’ she muttered and put the box down on the table unopened. ‘So.’ She turned back to him, watched him take off his coat, drape it neatly over a chair, make himself comfortable on another. ‘We meet on the site of one of my several crimes. Appropriate, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I sure could use some coffee, Simone. It’s as cold as a Siberian camp out there.’
‘If you want coffee, you shall have to fetch it. Room service is unreliable. And I assumed privacy would be best.’
‘Of course.’
‘You know why I have initiated this meeting?’
‘To lecture me about our dear friend Ariane. As I lectured you, somewhat abrasively, if I remember.’ He chuckled, smoothed the leg of his trousers. ‘I don’t get enough exercise in Paris. So the old temper flares.’
‘Not about Ariane. You misunderstand me.’
‘Oh?’
He gave her that look of blue-eyed innocence which made her want to rail.
‘What then?’
‘I have spoken with Jan. I have told him everything.’
‘Oh that.’ He made a disparaging gesture, but she caught the slight clenching of his left fist. ‘I’d almost forgotten all that.’
‘How convenient. Nonetheless, there are now no longer any demons you can pursue me with.’
‘None at all?’
‘None at all. I no longer care about the rest. You are free to do your worse.’
‘Simone, really!’
/>
He rose, pretending an offended air as if she had just insulted a long-standing friend, then strode round the room, examining the furniture, the silk of the upholstery, the elaborate tiles.
Simone feigned calm, relaxed in her chair, watched only the pattern in the carpet. She tested herself for that hoped-for burst of relief. It hadn’t come yet.
He turned back to her with the sudden stealth of a panther. ‘You really like this Stephen Caldwell, don’t you?’
‘There are a great many people I like,’ she said warily. ‘You know that very well.’
‘Very well.’ He laughed.
‘Do you like his wife, too? I hope so. In these last weeks, she has become, shall we be tasteful and say, my companion.’
Simone stopped herself from flinching. ‘Your loves are hardly of my concern, Edward.’
‘No, of course not. Though in the interest of friendship, ours, yours, I am quite prepared to keep this companionship quiet. Even if things so turn out that she is carrying my child.’
Simone watched him preening himself. She stood up with a sudden spurt of impatience. ‘I have had enough of your blackmail, Edward. You may leave now.’
She waited until he had donned his coat and hat, then plumped the box of pastries in his hand.
As he reached the door, she called him back. ‘Edward, as for the small matter of Ariane, you will understand my meaning when I say she is safely in my protection. There is nothing more to expect from her. Except perhaps a visit from the police. The time for these old games is up, Edward. For me too. I have recognized it. And you, you are distinctly out of date.’
It was her parting shot and she was happy to see his face fall, less happy to see how quickly it reassumed its customary beam. ‘I don’t think so, Simone. No, no. Not that. Ariane has, in any case, always been altogether peripheral.’ He bowed slightly, then was out the door.
Simone turned the key in the lock and with a sense of exhaustion went to sit by the window. She had a sudden longing to see the blue of the Mediterranean, to stretch out on a deck chair and watch the sun setting pink over the sea until the lap and thunder of the waves drowned out all other sound, all other voices, her own ghosts as well as the frantic cries of the papers, the countless screams of injustice.
The Things We Do For Love Page 32
