by Jeremy Duns
She had changed. There was still the dark soulfulness in her eyes, the wide jaw, the wave of hair swept back. But the mouth that had been full and sensual was now thin and hard, and her skin was also somehow different: still bronzed, but now a little leathery. Perhaps Pritchard hadn’t been lying about her having lived in Tunisia. She turned to look at me then, and it was almost as if her skin tautened under my gaze, until, like the surface of a painting being scratched away, the ghost portrait that had been hiding beneath was revealed.
It was her. Nearly twenty-five years after I had last seen her, here she was again, still in a nurse’s uniform, and this time she was clutching a sniper rifle. I looked back at the duffel bag and saw the small white cap with a red cross on it peeking out of the top. It was just like the one I’d seen at the Afrospot. Or close enough: I noticed that the thread was slightly the wrong shade, and guessed she had taken the outfit from one of the Nigerian clinics and adapted it.
‘Hello, Paul,’ she said, and then she turned from me and lowered herself into position, crouching down on one knee and screwing her eye into the rifle sight.
*
I closed my eyes and swallowed the vomit that had risen in the back of my throat.
‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.
‘You were wrong.’
I laughed involuntarily, though it came out more as a whimper. ‘I was… Is that…’ My breathing failed again and my legs nearly gave out from under me. Come on, get the words out! ‘Is that the best you can come up with?’ I said. ‘I was wrong?’
‘We can discuss this later. Did you see Henry?’
I didn’t say anything, mainly because my right thigh was jerking and I was trying to keep it under control with my arms, but she misinterpreted the silence.
‘Did you see him, Paul?’
Her voice had a coldness that cut right through me. Even with everything that was happening, something told me not to let her know he was dead, and I shook my head, then answered, ‘No’ aloud when I realized that she still wasn’t looking at me, but remained fixed in her position at the window. With them that walk against me, is my sun. Only she wasn’t walking: she was staying put, waiting for the PM.
‘Don’t tell me you still intend to go through with this,’ I said. She didn’t reply, just kept on looking through the sight. I wanted to lunge across the room and rip her away from it, force her to stand and face me and answer me. But I was too weak, so instead I just stood there, clutching my leg uselessly. More seconds passed. What was going on down there? Had the car stopped?
There was too much flooding through me, and I couldn’t slow it down or order it.
‘How did you do it?’ I asked, finally. ‘Make-up and something to stop your pulse?’ I had no idea what part of my mind had come up with the question, but another part approved. Keep her talking, get some answers, distract her. Distract yourself.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Something like that. I was one of the first – they have done it many times since.’
‘Why, Anna?’ Here was the question. Here, finally, was the question I had wanted her to answer.
She didn’t say anything for a while, and I wondered if she had heard me. Then she answered. ‘Love,’ she said simply. ‘Love of my cause.’ She lifted her head a fraction and glanced across at me, and the Anna I had known all those years ago receded once again. I searched her face desperately for the glimpse I’d had just moments before, but it was no use. ‘I am sorry I hurt you,’ she said, still talking in the same calm, slow way. ‘I didn’t want to. But I knew you were one of us the first time I saw you. I could sense that you wanted to do good, that you would be a strong soldier for us. Are you still a strong soldier for us, Paul? Can you keep fighting a little longer for me?’
The anger welled in my stomach. Did she think I was a bloody child? My legs started to spasm, and I fought back the dizziness. Please don’t let me lose my hearing now! I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to find some stillness and regulate my breathing, but all I could see were dozens of tiny bursts of light, darting here and there, trying to make connections with one another. I placed a hand behind me and let myself slump slowly to the floor, leaning my head against the jamb. It was more comfortable here and, after all, it was where I belonged. How did the next line run? The wheel is turned, that was it: ‘The wheel is turn’d; I hold the lowest place’.
‘I have paid a price, too,’ Anna was saying, and I woke from my dreams of poetry in a distant classroom and strained my ears to make sure I heard her right. I wanted to catch every word of this extraordinary confession, wanted very much to know how she had paid a price for betraying me. ‘I have sacrificed my career and a good part of my life to protect you,’ she said. ‘Because if anyone ever found out I was alive, that might have exposed you.’
Ah, well: that wasn’t bad. One had to admit that that wasn’t bad. So that was why she hadn’t shot me yet – because of my value as an agent?
‘But Slavin found out,’ I said.
‘Yes, that was unfortunate. Vladimir Mikhailovich had been out here too long – he was lonely. He became obsessed with me. I told him there was someone else. That was a mistake. I have spent much of my time away from Lagos in recent weeks, and on one occasion he must have broken into my quarters and found some letters I had never sent Henry. I had kept them – a weakness. I suppose he sent photographs of them to Moscow and someone in the KGB realized who I was. But he’s gone now.’ She smiled tersely. ‘Nobody knows.’
‘You’re still a believer, then?’ I said. A phrase she had often used in Germany came back to me. ‘In the brotherhood of man?’
Her mouth tightened. ‘Of course. Why not?’
I clawed my way up to a sitting position, but she heard me and lifted the rifle an inch so I stopped and she replaced it again.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, as though nothing had happened. ‘The gulags, the mock trials, the tanks in the streets? The use of assassination to sustain a civil war in Africa until you can install a puppet leader to further your own aims?’
The car must have stopped because she moved her eye away from the sight and turned to look at me. ‘Henry warned me you might have lost your nerve,’ she said. ‘I didn’t believe him. You’ve worked for us for over twenty years, Paul.’
‘Based on what, though?’ I said.
She went back to her previous position.
‘I never lied to you about the big things. And you’re hardly in a position to lecture me about sustaining a civil war. Your government—’
‘My government. Not me.’
‘So whose side are you on then?’ she said, and the false politeness vanished for a moment.
‘My own,’ I said.
‘I see. Just a neutral bystander, condemning everyone else from your position of complete superiority… and inactivity?’
‘You’re all as bad as each other,’ I said. ‘I refuse to take sides any longer.’
‘But you must, Paul! Don’t you see? You must! There’s no room for sitting on the fence in this world. One side will win, and it will change how millions of people live. You have to take sides, and act on your beliefs. And I believe we will help this country.’
There was a mad glare in her eyes. I didn’t want to hear how killing the PM was going to help – no doubt she had her answers. She’d always been good with the abstracts. ‘So that’s it?’ I said. ‘The cause above all, and screw anyone who gets in the way?’ I forced myself onto my feet and began trudging across the room towards her. She didn’t even flinch.
‘What’s to stop me from killing you?’ I asked.
She looked up, surprised, then calmly put her eye back to the sight as though I were a child.
‘Because you loved me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you still do, in some way. I am what you have believed in for most of your life, and you can’t destroy me. You will watch me finish this and then you will leave here, and we will never speak again. You will continue your work in London with Sasha.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘I won’t be—’
There was a sudden lift in the noise of the crowd outside.
‘Here’s the test, Paul,’ she said. ‘Here it is now. Which side will you take?’
I lunged forward, hitting her in the back. My pistol clattered onto the floor, out of reach, and Anna turned and lashed out at me, scratching at my face, but I managed to hook my arm around her right shoulder and brought her weight back and slipped the other arm around her neck and squeezed as hard as I could, trying to block out the pain, the sounds, everything. My hands were tingling and I looked down and saw that blood was flowing from the palms and I saw her face, her eyes fixed open, no drugs now, no clever injections, and I kept squeezing her even though I knew it was too late, because I could still hear the echo of the shot, and then I thought a flock of seagulls swept over the courtyard, but it wasn’t seagulls, of course, it was humans, screaming. What a strange sound, I thought.
I looked down. I could see everything perfectly – the black car surrounded by a swarm of people, their shadows making everything seem to lean to one side: the black man in the peaked cap kneeling beside the body of the white man in the summer suit whose head didn’t seem to be there any more. I let go of Anna, and she slumped to the floor. Releasing her seemed to do something to my breathing, because I started heaving uncontrollably.
There was a scraping noise and I looked up to see a small crowd of people tumbling into the room. I registered Smale first, then David the doctor behind him, and finally Manning, lobster-red in his tropical suit, his handkerchief the size of a windsail fluttering above the scene. Smale slapped me and screamed something I couldn’t understand, and when I didn’t answer he started shaking me. I wanted to tell him it was useless, he was wasting his time, I didn’t have long to go. ‘Murder!’ he was shouting, and I realized it was directed at me. ‘I am arresting you for murder!’ It seemed like the wrong thing to say and I started counting aloud, for some reason. There was a lot of movement, a lot of panic, but I was perfectly conscious of it all, right until the last moment, the last breath. I was watching it all, right up until I died.
XXV
Nobody tells you you’re dead – you have to figure it out yourself. It took me rather a long time. In fact, it was the presence of time that held me back. At the start, the idea didn’t even occur to me. I seemed to be surrounded by an endless grey landscape, but that didn’t mean death, surely: I was simply unconscious.
Only I wasn’t. I could vividly remember everything, right up until when Smale had shaken me and I had stopped breathing. But still, the fact that I was thinking meant I was alive: probably in a hospital somewhere, recovering.
I clung on to that idea for a very long time. I thought it must have been at least a few months since I’d ‘gone’ and ended up… wherever I was. That was when it occurred to me that perhaps death wasn’t what I had always thought it would be, but that it was a limbo state in which you had all eternity to reflect on the life you’d had, without being able to return to it.
My considerations of death were briefly interrupted by a series of extremely vivid hallucinations. One of these involved a tie I’d owned when I was a boy, a dark green silk tie with tiny red spots my father had bought me from Gieves when I’d turned sixteen, my last birthday in London before the war. The silk had been so thick and smooth it was like a river, and now it became just that and I dove deep into its comfort, luxuriating in its coolness and wishing I could stay there for ever, breathing bubbles up to the green, red-spotted surface. And then others started diving in after me, like the bodies in the ceremony I’d been at in Biafra, spirit bodies that cut through me and around me and seemed to keep diving further and further but never got any smaller or changed shape. And I wanted to climb up to the surface but I couldn’t, because it was blocked by loose threads of silk, white and sticky, and I couldn’t struggle past them and again I felt the weight on my chest and the trouble breathing, until I opened my eyes and saw a pair of disembodied eyes staring down at me from deep within a ball of white silk…
*
The lamps, though dimmed, had an unpleasant glare to them, and the walls a greenish tinge. I was in a hospital somewhere, but it was almost as bad as whatever I’d woken from. My food and drink were passed to me through a network of tubes, and I sat there, alone, imagining the fluid pumping into me and thinking back to what had happened, and what might happen next. I was in England, I knew, because the place smelled unmistakably of Dettol and every so often there was a hollow clanging, which I eventually realized was a radiator that was out of my line of sight.
I still couldn’t move. There was a window, but like everything else it only changed from white to grey to black and back again. But I was in a hospital in England, recovering. Of that I was sure.
*
The disembodied eyes returned one day: now I saw they were attached to a man in a white coat, white gauze mask, white hood, white gloves. I couldn’t speak to him, and he didn’t say anything to me – just checked my tubes and wrote things down on a white pad. I thought that my hearing must have gone again at some point, because every sound was amplified. When he moved his foot on the linoleum, it was like a coin dropping in a well.
I no longer felt pain – physical pain, that is. I thought about Anna every day, every hour. And grieved for myself, and the life I’d wasted.
*
Another man came to see me after that, wearing the same garb. It was Smale.
‘You survived,’ he said. ‘They didn’t think you would.’
I watched his eyes. Narrow and slanted, they seemed to me to be the kind of eyes that would belong to a small, ugly, grey fish. I tried to imagine the face of such a fish, and fitted it behind his mask.
‘You were extremely lucky,’ said the fish. ‘You were in a medical facility when it happened. You were out for a minute and a half – your heart even stopped beating. The wog doctor you came with declared you dead. But then you came to – almost as if you had heard us and weren’t willing to go.’
The fish paused. ‘Of course, a lot of people have been hoping you wouldn’t make it.’ He looked away contemplatively. ‘Not me, though. We’d lose so much valuable information.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Let’s get your clothes sent up, shall we? We’ve an important meeting to get to.’
*
London looked exactly the same: office workers jumped around puddles and struggled with umbrellas. We sploshed through the streets in the black Bentley. I sat in the back in my old suit, my hands cuffed to two soldiers sitting on either side of me. Smale was up in front. Near Piccadilly Circus Underground, we stopped at some lights and I glimpsed the headlines at a newspaper kiosk. ‘THE PRIME MINISTER AND MOSCOW: LATEST REVELATIONS!’ blared the poster for The Times, while The Telegraph had the more subdued: ‘MOUNTBATTEN SUSPENDS ARMS TO NIGERIA’.
‘Mountbatten?’
Smale turned back to look at me, his eyes dead. ‘He formed a government a couple of weeks ago.’
I couldn’t think what to say. ‘Wilson wasn’t KGB’ was what eventually came out.
‘Really?’ Smale replied, with a smile soaked in aspic. ‘Did you believe everything your handler told you?’ Then he turned away again and told the driver to take a right at the next junction.
*
They blindfolded me soon after that, and about twenty minutes later I was bundled out of the car and marched down a steep stairway. The room was cold and there was a slightly dank smell. Pipes gurgled in the background. Someone took the blindfold off. The two soldiers turned on their heels and took up station outside the door; Smale pushed me inside.
It was a familiar scene, right down to the naked bulb hanging from a coat-hanger. Beneath it, three men were seated behind a large desk that looked as though it were made from a solid block of steel. Two of the men were no surprise: Farraday and Osborne. The man sitting between them gave me more food for thought: Sandy Montcrieff, the Mirror reporter I’d met at the Lagos Yacht Club, and whom I’d
later seen with Smale at the clinic in Udi.
We were in the ‘rubber room’, a space reserved for the interrogation of suspected double agents and other such undesirables; I’d sat in on a couple of sessions here before, during the renewed round of vettings after Philby had made a run for it. This gave me an advantage, of course. The bulb was burning through my eyes, but I knew it was a trick: it had been especially made by a company in Vauxhall to burn that bright, and the things were a devil to get replaced. Apart from the lamp, desk, chairs and a plastic bucket filled with dirty-looking water on the floor, the room was unfurnished, so as to enhance the subject’s isolation and disorientation – but I knew that we were in the soundproofed basement of one of the smarter hotels in West Kensington.
Despite all of this, I was much more afraid than the poor souls I’d seen interviewed here before. Because I was guilty.
Osborne asked me to take a seat, which I did. The chair was cold and too low. I mentally stripped the three of them, visualizing Montcrieff’s pale and bony legs, Osborne with his gut hanging over his belt and Farraday with unsightly moles across his back. It didn’t help much.
‘What’s this about?’ I said, selecting a tone somewhere between irritation and puzzlement. Might as well kick off proceedings. ‘Are you holding me responsible for Wilson’s death? I did everything I—’
‘I’m sure you did,’ said Montcrieff. ‘Thankfully, it wasn’t enough. But that’s just between ourselves. If you don’t tell us what we want to know, we’ll announce that you were the assassin.’
The other two didn’t flinch.
Montcrieff adjusted his cuffs and smiled innocently. ‘What we want to know,’ he went on, ‘is how long you thought you could get away with playing us all for fools.’
‘“Us”?’ I said. ‘Sorry, who the fuck are you again?’ I turned to Osborne: ‘William, I thought this was Service business.’
