Lost American

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘You live abroad?’ said Erickson.

  ‘Moscow.’ said Blair.

  ‘Have you had a chance to talk to Paul?’

  Blair nodded, ‘I tried, last night.’

  ‘Tried?’ picked up Kemp.

  ‘I couldn’t get through to him,’ said Blair. ‘Maybe I did, towards the end, but I’m not sure. But he wouldn’t talk to me … say anything. I asked him why he did it and he just sat there, like a dummy!’

  ‘That’s usually the way,’ said Kemp.

  Blair decided the man was definitely annoying him. ‘So you’re the experts,’ he repeated. ‘So you tell me. Why do they do it?’

  ‘I wish I knew that, too,’ said Kemp. ‘There’s never one single reason. Or a way of assembling all the factors into any understandable answer. There’s peer pressure, being shamed into it by someone they admire, a bigger guy. There’s experimentation, the way most kids have: should have. There’s boredom. There’s the availability of the stuff, all sorts of stuff: it’s easier to buy dope on a street corner than it is to buy bread. Supermarkets close: dealers are always there.’

  ‘So why aren’t they cleared off the damned streets!’

  ‘They are,’ said Erickson. ‘And the moment – literally the moment – they go there’s two more to take their places.’

  Blair felt the frustration building up inside him. ‘Let’s talk specifics,’ he tried again. ‘Let’s talk about Paul and let’s talk about me and let’s try to find something we can do. I’ll take your word about it being a modern American problem and I’ll take your word about all the reasons it can happen but I want to find a way – will find a way – to stop Paul fucking himself up.’ Blair hadn’t intended to swear but didn’t really give a damn whether they were offended or not. There wasn’t any reason why they should be.

  ‘How did you talk to him, last night?’ asked Erickson.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Calmly, trying to understand? Or did you lose your temper?’

  Blair conceded it was justified, after his outburst. ‘Calmly, as far as I was concerned,’ he said, i don’t think I shouted and I don’t think I lost my temper. But I let him know how I felt. I let him know I thought what he had done was stupid and weak and that I thought he’d let everyone down and that I wasn’t accepting the fact that my wife and I are divorced to be any excuse. That there wasn’t an excuse …’ Blair paused. Then he said, ‘And I am trying to understand. I keep asking questions but no one seems able to provide any answers.’

  Blair saw the two men exchange looks and realised they considered he’d handled it wrongly. Erickson said, ‘You were aggressive?’

  ‘No,’ refused Blair. ‘I was direct and straight, like I felt a father should be.’ Except, perhaps, that a father should be at home and not a polite visitor.

  ‘A factor I didn’t mention was that sometimes drug-taking is a rebellion against authority,’ said Kemp, in his lecturing voice.

  ‘Rebellions against authority get crushed: that’s what law and order means,’ said Blair, impatient at the meaningless cliché. ‘Growing up, becoming an adult …’ He stopped, unsure which way his argument was leading him. ‘… OK,’ he resumed. ‘Making the mistakes that growing up means, that’s all right. That happens … it happens. That I can understand. Accept even. If he got drunk I’d understand it …’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Erickson, slightly ahead of the other counsellor.

  Blair blinked at the concerted demand. ‘Kids get drunk: it happens,’ he said, badly.

  ‘Do you know what the worst drug in existence is, Mr Blair?’ said Kemp, who appeared to regard himself as the spokesman. ‘Alcohol is the worst drug. It kills more people and causes more lost work days and more lost school days and more accidents than marijuana and cocaine and heroin and pills put together.’

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ said Blair, letting the exasperation show.

  ‘Paul’s side,’ said Kemp. ‘I’m not on your side and I’m not on your wife’s side and I’m not on anybody else’s side. Just Paul’s.’

  ‘At last!’ said Blair. ‘At last someone’s said something positive.’

  ‘We always try to be positive, Mr Blair,’ said Erickson. ‘I’ve sat through a hundred meetings like the one I’m having with you now and let me tell you that your reaction is the reaction of practically everyone. You think we’re inconclusive and you think we’re weak and you get impatient but try not to show it, because you love your kid and think you might in some way affect how we’ll try to help him, if you loudmouth us. We’re not interested in making our own points, Mr Blair: in expressing our opinions and our attitudes because our opinions and attitudes are middle-aged and already formed and at the end of every frustrating day we go home to a home where there’s a six-pack in the fridge and if it’s been a bad, particularly frustrating day we might even blow the whole six pack and get drunk and when we’re drunk we might believe that things aren’t really as bad as they are. Which is what taking drugs is all about, Mr Blair. Not wanting to know how things are – not dramatic, major, world-shattering things – but the really important things, things that directly affect you and worry you and wake you up in the middle of the night … those things. Not wanting to face up to how bad – or how easily solved – those things are.’

  Blair felt the words dump over him, like a wave at the very moment of hitting the shore, when it’s like a punch and stronger than any resistance and knocks you over and sends you sprawling on the sand, looking a fool. They’d had their shots and he’d had his and they were still at either end of a hugely wide bridge. He said, ‘You’ve seen Paul, both of you? Talked to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kemp.

  ‘So what’s his problem? What wakes him up in the middle of the night and seems insoluble?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Erickson. ‘Because he doesn’t know. That’s the problem, because it’s the problem with so many of the kids, not just Paul. Why he sat like a dummy with you last night and when you asked him why he did it said something stupid, like he didn’t know. Is that what he said, that he didn’t know?’

  ‘About that,’ agreed Blair. Wanting to air the doubt, he said, ‘Could the divorce, the fact that I’m thousands of miles away and his mother’s got to cope by herself, could that be it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Kemp unhelpfully. ‘Or maybe his problem is not being able to hack his school work or pimples or how much or how little pubic hair he has or how a girl he’d like to show that pubic hair to is more interested in someone else’s.’

  ‘I didn’t smoke dope or snort coke and hold up stores to do either because I couldn’t hack my school work or had pimples or was worried about getting laid!’ said Blair.

  ‘Because that was thirty years ago,’ said Erickson. ‘Didn’t you drink a beer, occasionally?’

  Yes, thought Blair, giddy on the carousel. Determined to achieve something, he started, ‘My problem …’ and at once stopped. ‘Paul’s problem,’ he began again, ‘is that he lives in Washington and I live in Moscow. I’m here now – will be here now – to see him through whatever needs to be done but then I’ll have to go back and I won’t be around to follow up what the court decides and whatever you guys try to do. I know I should be but I can’t be.’

  ‘What about visiting?’ asked Kemp. ‘Not just for Paul: I know there’s John, as well. What are the visitation arrangements?’

  ‘Whatever, whenever,’ said Blair. ‘My wife and I remain extremely friendly. But I’ve been in Moscow for two years and it isn’t easy, bringing kids there …’ He hesitated. ‘And if there’s one thing I’m certain about, about my kids, it’s their resentment against my second wife.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the kids for two years!’ said Erickson.

  Blair took the rebuke, knowing now – no, not now, knowing as he had for too long – that it was justified. ‘Eighteen months,’ he said, in desperate qualification, ‘I came back eighteen months ago to sort some things out.’ For two days and didn’t stay a
t the house, he remembered.

  ‘Divorce things?’ said Kemp, refusing him an escape.

  ‘Yes,’ said Blair, trapped.

  ‘Thirty years ago, when I was a kid too,’ said Kemp, ‘I think I might have taken a drink – maybe two – if I hadn’t thought I was important enough for my father to bother about, for eighteen months at a time.’

  ‘How was it?’ asked Ruth, when Blair got to Dominiques: he was late and she was already in the small side bar, nursing a whisky sour.

  Blair didn’t answer, not at once, still not through with stripping away the self-protective attitudes, a process which had started at the end of his encounter with the counsellors and continued in the cab on his way to the restaurant. ‘Good,’ he said, self-reflective. Expanding more forcefully he went on, ‘I’m not sure – because nobody’s sure about anything – but I think it was good and I think I’ve found a way to help Paul.’

  Now it was Ruth’s turn to hesitate. ‘How?’ she said at last.

  ‘I’ve been wrong, Ruth,’ said Blair, intent upon a complete catharsis. ‘I abandoned Paul. John too. I’ve got to work out some way to be their father again. Their proper father.’

  Ruth sipped the whisky, needing it and wishing it were stronger. ‘How?’ she managed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Blair, still self-enclosed and not fully aware of how intently Ruth was waiting. ‘Find some way of getting them into Moscow … of liking Ann. And if that isn’t possible, then making Ann understand there have got to be times I have to spend with my kids.’

  Ruth’s drink became really sour, curdling in her stomach and coming back into her throat, so that she had to swallow against it and she actually coughed, to clear the sensation. If it helped Paul – please God, cured Paul – then it was a special occasion, more special than any before. But not special like she’d wanted it to be.

  Natalia sat awkwardly before him, cowed but slightly bent to one side, like a beloved pet who’d always obeyed and done every trick suddenly brutally beaten for some misdemeanour it didn’t understand. ‘Why?’ The question came out as a wail.

  ‘I just don’t feel anything any more.’ Orlov was wet with perspiration, forcing himself on, feeling like a man trying to wade a swamp without knowing where the safe ground was, the mud dragging him down deeper and deeper.

  ‘But why?’ said the woman again. ‘You haven’t given a proper reason.’

  ‘Apart too long,’ said Orlov. ‘Not the same any more.’ Where were the rehearsed sentences and the balanced arguments, points carefully anticipated against points, everything arranged so there wouldn’t be a scene like this?

  ‘It can be the same,’ she pleaded desperately. ‘We can learn to love each other again. I love you!’

  ‘No!’ he said. Orlov wished the mud were real and he could be engulfed by it.

  ‘Please!’

  ‘No!’

  She fell physically sideways, against the edge of the chair, once trying to raise her head for another protest but being swept away by tears before the words formed, staying huddled there with the sobs shuddering through her. This hadn’t worked as it should have done, thought Orlov. Not at all. Would the rest?

  The dissident arrests in Moscow were reported in the Western media, as Panov predicted, and it was linked with the famine in the regions, which Panov also predicted. The practice of rushing the Western supplies in their entirety to the areas of worst unrest, which Sokol organised initially, became unworkable because it denied anything to other suffering districts and caused rioting to break out there. Whenever there was trouble, Sokol had any obvious leaders immediately arrested and jailed in penal institutions as far away from their homes and regions as possible. The internal militia worked always on orders to open fire on any mob violence. Five people were killed and twenty wounded in Rovno, in the Ukraine, and three died in Gomel. Sokol, the methodical man, evolved a regime, working from six in the morning through until mid-afternoon monitoring the shortages and guaranteeing the transportation of the relief shipments and from then working until near midnight on other material moving through the Second Chief Directorate. More alert to fresh, undermining danger than the now scarcely thought-of need for an impressive coup, he stared down at the report of Blair’s return to Washington. What, he thought worriedly, did that mean?

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was not a sudden idea. It had been with Ann for some time but she refused to acknowledge it. Then she realised how ridiculous she was being and determined there was nothing wrong with it. Jeremy Brinkman was a friend – just a friend – and she was by herself and almost climbing the wall with boredom so what was wrong with seeing a friend? She’d even discussed it with Eddie. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She’d told Eddie about the Bolshoi and that hadn’t happened yet. But there wasn’t a lot of difference. Eddie wouldn’t see anything wrong with it. How could he? There wasn’t anything wrong with it. She just wanted to talk to someone else before she started talking to herself. Nothing wrong with that at all. Nothing that any sensible adult would find. Betty Harrison would probably make it into something rivalling War and Peace but sod Betty Harrison. Gossiping old cow.

  Brinkman, who was growing increasingly frustrated because everything had gone quiet but he knew – was absolutely convinced – that Blair was involved in something big, was delighted to get Ann’s call. Despite the previous decision not to, he was approaching the point of calling her. He told her dinner sounded like a good idea and no he wasn’t doing anything and she had no reason to apologise in advance for her cooking and he’d be there at seven. Which he was, as the hour struck. With a bottle of wine – French, not Russian – and a gift-wrapped box of Floris soaps and bath preparations he’d had freighted from London in the pouch to thank her for the Bolshoi but decided to invest earlier. Hopefully.

  Ann wasn’t, in fact, a particularly good cook and she’d tried too hard, which made it worse. She hadn’t marinated the meat sufficiently and it had obviously been tough before she started and she added the cream to the stroganoff too soon and it was on the point of turning.

  ‘Fabulous!’ said Brinkman. ‘Next time show me how to do it!’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

  ‘Would I lie?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Would you?’

  He laughed. ‘If I had to. But here I don’t’

  ‘How often, elsewhere?’

  ‘All the time,’ he parried. She was in a funny mood and he wondered why. ‘How’s Eddie?’ he asked. It wasn’t too soon; it was an obvious question.

  ‘He called me today,’ she said, immediately brightening. ‘But it wasn’t a good line. He seems OK.’

  ‘How long’s he going to be away?’ That was another obvious question.

  ‘He’s not sure,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

  Big, thought Brinkman. Eddie Blair was on to something big. ‘Wouldn’t have thought he’d stay away for too long,’ coaxed Brinkman.

  ‘The embassy have been very good,’ she said. ‘I think he can have as long as he likes.’

  What the hell did that mean? She’d have been given a cover story, of course. He’d already decided that. ‘Why didn’t you go with him?’ he tried.

  Ann smiled at him, sadly. She was using him, she decided: so he deserved some sort of explanation. ‘I don’t think it would have been a very good idea for the wife of the second marriage to go back and get involved with the wife of the first, do you?’

  Brinkman knew about the divorce, of course. They’d made no secret of it, during the increasing friendship, and he’d guessed it anyway because of the obvious age differences. It would have made an easy cover for Blair to get back to Langley. He said, ‘Battlefield, eh?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Ann. ‘Ruth’s super.’

  Brinkman thought that if the circles got much tighter he’d disappear up his own ass. ‘So why didn’t you go back with him?’ he persisted. In an effort to make it seem a casual remark he picked up the bottle, adding to he
r wine.

  ‘It just wouldn’t have been a good idea,’ she said positively.

  Time to lean forward and time to lean back, he thought. So now it was time to lean back. Instead he said, ‘Even if Ruth’s super, it can’t have been easy.’

  Important things – like wars and history changing events and the revelation of secrets that shouldn’t be revealed – never have important beginnings. When they are looked at and examined impartially, later, the trigger is invariably inconsequential, so inconsequential it’s difficult – sometimes impossible – to believe something so insignificant could cause such a reaction. Brinkman had been pressing, certainly, but it wasn’t a considered question; he was filling in, actually, keeping the talk on the same track while he tried to determine upon another route to take him to the destination he sought.

  ‘Christ, it hasn’t been bloody easy!’ erupted Ann and with the floodgates abruptly opened everything poured out. She told him about her first meeting with Blair in London, when he was attached to the Grosvenor Square embassy and she had been a junior research assistant at the Foreign Office, just six months down from Cambridge. How she’d liked Ruth and initially actually been amused at Blair’s Texas mannerisms – ‘all John Wayne and howdy’ – and how he’d been the only friendly face she’d known at another reception, British this time and without Ruth, within a month. How it had been a boring event she intended to leave early and when he said he was going, too, it had seemed a good idea to have another drink at a bar he knew just off Sloane Street, which was on her way home anyway. How that’s all it had been, a friendly drink but how he’d called her, to suggest lunch, and she’d agreed, curious and flattered – but positively not interested – even though she found him worldly and comfortable to be with. Funny, too. He’d always been very funny, in those days. The realisation came as she talked, more an internal reverie than a conversation: he wasn’t funny any more, not like he had been then, not like the time when he’d been telling stories so interesting and so amusing that she’d driven herself up rather than go to the bathroom when she should have done and he’d suddenly made her laugh so much that she couldn’t stop it happening and peed her pants. Brinkman sat unspeaking and receptive, like a fisherman who’d put himself in precisely the right spot on the running tide that would bring the fish in, trawling with a net so fine that not even a minnow would get through. He topped her glass again and Ann talked on. About the guilt of the affair and the decision to be honest and how Ruth had behaved –’super’ was a frequent word – and how guilt wasn’t easy to get used to, ever. Any more than Moscow was easy to get used to, ever. Brinkman had known about her irritations, because she’d hinted at them before and they were the sort of irritations that a lot of Western embassy staff had and he hadn’t considered them any more important than that, frustrated anecdotes of frustrated problems of frustrated people, the normal cocktail party conversation. At cocktail parties there was always exaggeration, no one willing to concede their disappointment was less than anyone else’s but as he listened Brinkman became aware that what Ann was saying wasn’t cocktail party – or dinner party – Smalltalk but something causing her genuine unhappiness. He let her purge herself, trying to see the catch as it went into the net, not sure he wasn’t wasting his time but conceding that fishing was a time-wasting exercise anyway. He tried throwing in a lure occasionally, but she didn’t bite.