Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  ‘He told you?’ Abel was stating a fact with his question and didn’t wait for an answer. ‘And now you can tell me how you came to visit her death place together.’ For the first time, his voice lost a little of its confidence. ‘You’ll realize this is a big surprise.’

  He rose and poured himself a glass of water, drinking it down slowly in one. ‘I’ll give you mine now. The reason I’m here is to talk about Quincy, as it happens, but I can’t start till I know the whole story of you and Will. Tell me all.’

  Taking the floor without asking another question, Maria drew a picture.

  ‘When I told you I’d met him last year I said that he’d probably marked me down. He hasn’t mentioned you: I’d have told you. We’ve walked together, had dinner. Gossiped. Things known, and never said. Then the last few weeks came along. And Quincy, too. She brought us together and pulled back the veil. One of the last things she did.’

  Abel asked what Quincy knew about her.

  ‘Guesswork. But she knew all right.’

  ‘And Will?’ he said.

  ‘He was attracted to her. I saw it immediately. They were playing a game, and he was willing to let her.’

  ‘So she knew,’ he said.

  ‘They’d hardly begun,’ Maria said, ‘but I’d say so. And Will would, too.’

  Abel said he’d interrupted her flow. She took up the story.

  ‘The night she died, we got information afterwards pointing us to the dead letter box. It came from a source of his, and I was there. This is where it gets difficult.’

  ‘Why?’ Abel said.

  ‘The source is his.’

  ‘So what? That’s how we got the list,’ said Abel.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So he’s ours, too,’ he said. ‘Who’s the source?’

  Abel was still standing, and she went to him. Holding both his shoulders, she said that she was depending on the trust between them. ‘There’s a history here that I don’t understand yet, can’t put together. Give me time. Let me come back to the source later, and put him aside for now. Please, for me.’

  He said, ‘Do it your way. Your town.’

  With Kristof off the stage and safely stowed in the wings, waiting for his cue, Maria went back to the cemetery. She described their discovery of the hiding place, the encounter with M. Lebosquet and his revelations. ‘Two facts. The missing cigarette lighter, taken from the scene, and his memory of Quincy’s previous visits.’

  ‘Helpful,’ he said.

  Days later, Maria would remember Abel’s response with crystal clarity. Quincy was in the room with them – teasing, determined and, as she had learned with her death, in thrall to a secret life.

  Maria felt pain, but understood.

  Abel, younger than Maria, was in control. The knowledge that he brought from Washington changed everything. He began with his memories.

  ‘I met her in Europe, a couple of times, and got the full treatment. I remember a party in Vienna where she came on strong. Almost ate me up.’ He smiled. Maria spoke of the folklore that was attached to Quincy and her travels, the guile and gaiety, and her capacity to appear from nowhere and seem at home. Always one of the band, longing for the road. She said she found it hard to imagine such a lonely death.

  ‘But she was lonely,’ Abel said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  At the moment of revelation, he smiled again, as if it might be a relief to Maria. ‘Because she was playing the game on both sides, where there’s no hiding place. No trust.’

  He got up. ‘I’ll go back about eighteen months, after you left for Europe. There’s a young guy who climbed on board with us around that time. Name of Zak Annan, you’ll like him, and after a bit he brought us a story. He’s been a reporter, still writes a little, and runs with the old crowd. Twice in Saigon.’

  ‘I’ve seen the byline,’ Maria said.

  ‘Well, he’s with us. Now an L Street guy to the core.’

  ‘And he knew Quincy?’

  ‘Sure. Admired her. And… who knows?’

  Maria said, ‘OK. Him and how many others?’

  ‘Here’s his story,’ said Abel. ‘He suspected that Quincy had worked him out. Knew he was in touch with us, at least. You saw her at work, the eyes that saw through any mask. But did she drop him, avoid him? No chance. She took it as an invitation, a come-on. Started to feed him useful stuff that never saw the light in a magazine. It checked out, and some of it was golden.’

  ‘She knew where it was ending up?’

  ‘Zak was in no doubt,’ Abel said. ‘We got him to take it slowly, but eventually he coached her in some methods – transmission, rules of the game – and she used them. Didn’t hesitate. Within months, we were certain. Ours.’

  Maria said, ‘You’re going to tell me that your coming to London is part of this.’

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘But only a part. She’d got dangerous, and it was worrying.’

  Abel said that Maria needed to know something of the pattern of his life in the previous year. ‘We have an operation running that’s plugged me into Brussels and Berlin. I’ve been working with people in London – that’s why I’m going back – and we were making progress. Not enough, but starting to see a picture. Then Zak Annan warned us that something was going wrong with Quincy, like an affair that was starting to be a bore. She needed more fun. He thought she was on the loose, and confessed his fears. Knew she was sleeping around Paris. She’s been writing NATO stories from the French point of view. Teased him as well about people she spoke to in Berlin, Prague. She couldn’t resist, and he sounded the alarm.

  ‘I’m posted to London to get a grip of this. And next thing I hear, she’s dead, in a cemetery where you tell me she’s been servicing a dead letter box that has nothing to do with us. You say they think she’s been poisoned, and there’s a cigarette lighter that’s been stolen from the scene.’

  He told her that the previous autumn he’d spent a month at the FBI laboratories at Quantico where they collected as much debris as they could from the other side, and from every scene of trouble, all their agents’ gadgets assembled in a ghoulish classroom display. ‘I’ve seen pens and lighters that they’ve used in Berlin, and in Turkey of all places. This will be one of them. I’ve seen pictures of the workshop in Rostock where they put them together, and I don’t believe in coincidences.

  ‘What we’ve got isn’t a whodunnit. We know the answer. It’s a whydunnit.’

  ‘Most of the time they’re the same,’ she said.

  ‘No. Assume she was killed by the other side. ‘This time, “why?” is more difficult than “how?” . And as for “who?” , if we’re right, identity may not matter. We know that whoever he was, he’ll be long gone from Paris now.

  ‘Here’s my guess. She’d got herself close to some of the people we call the enemy. But she was too good, and liked the game too much. They couldn’t trust her – just like us – and there was only one thing they could do. Put an end to her. Because, believe me, this matters.

  ‘The funny thing, Maria, is that we wouldn’t want this to come out any more than they would. But what went wrong for them is that, for some reason, when they got rid of Quincy, they left the list behind – that is, if her killer knew it was there.’

  Gesturing to him to sit across from her at her low table, she said, ‘Now me.’ He sat back, flopped out and easy, but his gaze was intense. ‘This may help you. Quincy said she was working on a story that was big, even by her lights. It was going to shake us up.’

  ‘About Paris?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Will confirmed that.’

  ‘After that last lunch?’ Abel said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  He gave her time to choose her words. Maria said it was clear to her that Flemyng was interested in Quincy, and a little dazzled. He’d confessed his hope, after it was too late, that they might have got closer. In her view, learning from her brief acquaintanceship, Quincy was able to summon up strong feelings, and excitement, apparen
tly without effort. Her fame and her personality were one; an engine that only ran at full power.

  ‘You felt this yourself,’ Abel said, without making it sound like a question.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And Will fell for her.’

  ‘You could put it like that. Not a crush. He just found her a little irresistible.’

  Abel asked if his brother had felt as if he might have been used.

  ‘Ask him, but I’d say no. We’re talking about two or three days here.’

  ‘They only had two encounters – at the party, and then the lunch?’ Abel asked.

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘But she told him something about her story that she didn’t tell you. What was it?’

  Maria said, ‘That it was about the other side. Not the Russians, but their foot soldiers in East Berlin.’

  Abel’s eyes were black and shining. ‘Did she ask him for help?’

  Maria said, ‘He didn’t say that. He was astonished.’

  ‘Why?’ Abel pulled himself up and sat forward at the table, leaning towards her.

  ‘His source is East German,’ she said. ‘The one who sent us back to the cemetery.’

  Abel said, ‘I have to meet him.’

  He looked at Maria with an expression of such sudden intensity that for a moment it was difficult for her to know whether he was going to cry, or laugh at the absurdity of it all.

  ‘And my brother mustn’t know.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sam had a treasure chest of street stories. He carried them everywhere as a protection against loneliness, and Flemyng knew it.

  When they were together in the gardens near Flemyng’s apartment, having said goodbye to Maria in the late morning, they spoke first of all about times they had shared, because that was how they always began. Sam called it tuning up. He remembered nights with Freddy Craven in Berlin, they laughed about the time when Bolder was found without a passport at a border crossing where he was supposed to be the link in a secret chain, and they brought old friends to mind. Some of the dead danced for them, and the voices came floating back.

  Sam sparkled. For a while they kept Maria out of the conversation and let their memories transport them, a conscious effort to recover their old closeness by stepping away from the here and now. Sam, whose latest marriage had collapsed the previous year, found reassurance and strength in the telling of tales, and by the time they reached the river he was ready for action, as surely as if he had been a runner made eager by a sweaty warm-up. ‘I assume you need my help,’ he said, as they turned into a narrow street to the restaurant Flemyng had chosen for lunch. ‘I’m game.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Flemyng said. ‘Far be it from me to get you drinking again…’

  ‘Perish the thought,’ said Sam.

  ‘… but I want you to spend time with some of the boys in London. Vienna, too, when you get back. Let’s go in.’

  He pushed at the door, and the bell behind the flowered curtain jangled to announce their arrival.

  *

  Nearly two hours later, they parted in the street. ‘I’ll be here for the weekend,’ Sam said, ‘and I’ll start the talking around before I get back to my bloody language course. There are some people I can see here, and I’ll talk to Vienna.’

  He disappeared round the corner, and Flemyng turned towards home. Without knowing it, he passed within a few yards of the alleyway that led to rue de Nevers, where Maria and his brother would meet to plan their own moves. But Flemyng knew nothing of the apartment she kept there, and gave neither of them a thought. Sam was in his mind, and the tasks he had given him were a neat list in his head.

  At home, he picked up Abel’s telegram, which had arrived at breakfast time. He remembered each word but read it again.

  Heading your way. Will ring Thursday late.

  Flemyng would expect nothing before midnight, so he would have time to prepare.

  He spent two hours quietly, making only one phone call. Ringing the embassy, he heard from Janet that Craven was out for the afternoon, and turned to a book for a while. But he was thinking of the street, and decided quickly on an expedition into the Latin Quarter. The radio was broadcasting the news that the authorities had shut down the Nanterre faculty, and he knew that the streets around the Sorbonne would be a gathering place in the evening. Along rue St-Benoî t there were already hundreds of students, swarming around Les Deux Magots and crammed in the streets around the church across the way. Afterwards, because it stuck in his mind as the start of everything, he could recall the scene in all its detail – the huddles on every corner, the chants coming from the main gates of the university not far away, the slow burn in the crowd. Then, the deliberate procession of three police vans along the boulevard, each carrying a riot squad and all of them slowing down to watch the crowd through the black windows. As the first one passed, he heard the men inside drumming with their batons on the floor.

  The beginning.

  Disorder all around. And in the muddle of uncertainties and alarms, there was private anguish for him. Abel’s telegram and Freddy’s game. His own uncertainties. On the streets, the promise of trouble. He needed a stroke of luck.

  It came in Café Tournon.

  When he took to the street, he knew it would be a place where he could smell the atmosphere. The crowd made the room uncomfortable, but he wanted to stay. Pressed into a tight corner where it was hard to stand easy, it took him a few minutes to escape for air, squeezing through the throng with a glass of wine held high like a signal of distress.

  Then, beside him, he found Edward Abbott. They were both joining the line at a door that opened to reveal a single hole in the floor, with a chipped ceramic rim, that had to serve all the men and women in the establishment. Flemyng made the point that the wall paintings and the café’s self-regard for its in-house philosophers made a fine contrast with its plumbing, and Abbott laughed. ‘That’s why we’re enjoying ourselves. The best queue in Paris.’ Flemyng, introducing himself, suggested they had a drink together if they could find a space.

  ‘I only know you second-hand, I’m afraid,’ Abbott said with a smile when they did sit down. ‘We didn’t meet in Vienna – I’m right, aren’t I? – but we have mutual friends, here and there.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Flemyng. ‘And I saw you at the American party the other night.’

  Quietly and quickly they made their connection.

  Flemyng recalled some of Abbott’s columns with an admirer’s warmth, and within a few minutes they were like a pair of students, arm in arm on a hike into Middle Europe, talking of bicycles and river barges, fortresses and monasteries on the cliffs, lost days in the antique byways of half a dozen cities along the Danube, and cherishing in their tale-telling the gift they shared, a devotion to curiosity and a nose for trouble.

  Abbott was soft-spoken, and his spare frame less alarming at the table than it often seemed when he leaned into a conversation. He seldom raised his voice and his gestures were conservative, so that he didn’t show agitation, although he had the appearance of a man who might dominate. His hair was cut short without style, and his complexion sallow, always with the rough shadow of a beard that never seemed to grow. Friends said of him that he was as gentle on the inside as he was fierce outside.

  Flemyng didn’t mention the embassy, but chose history. That suited them both. For half an hour they swung back and forth between France and the places they knew half a continent away, and Abbott revealed something of his story of the spring. He’d spent most of March in Prague but was drawn back to Paris by two students, both Germans, he’d met in a bare café behind Wenceslas Square. They’d travelled by slow train through Leipzig, where Abbott said you could feel winds that came from somewhere new. ‘They’re rounding people up. Everyone’s nervous. Even I have friends in prison.’ He gave a thin smile.

  In Paris, he’d watched the eruptions at Nanterre from the inside, bedding down with new friends. Flemyng recognized a couple of
names. Abbott was embarrassed, he said, to have been persuaded to address a meeting there, invited to explain the power of protest. ‘They call me the Englishman, because I’m the only one around,’ he said. ‘It’s funny but they rather like someone who looks old-fashioned. The man in the drip-dry shirt. A lot of them are conventional, more than they know.’

  Flemyng said he’d like to hear about the speech – ‘No, really, I mean it. What did you speak about?’

  ‘Hope, I suppose.’ Abbott drank up. ‘I wouldn’t describe it as a speech. I just joined in, that’s all.’

  They were both smiling, bright-eyed now, and Abbott entered into the spirit with a few sentences about the excitements of the street, the energy from the angst of war, the giddiness. ‘It seems a little overblown,’ he said, because he was someone who always drew back from the edge, ‘but there’s a good deal in it. They’ve no idea what they’re doing, most of them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t serious.’

  ‘I know,’ Flemyng said. ‘Is there a photograph of your oration? I’d promise not to pass it around.’ He laughed.

  Abbott said he hoped not, then stopped when he saw that Flemyng’s expression had changed. Startled, he held up a hand to stop the conversation, turning to look towards a figure framed in the door and trapped by the crowd.

  Freddy Craven looked stricken.

  The old man had stopped to balance himself on his walking stick, and gazed at the crowd around him with all geniality gone. It was cool outside, but he seemed to have come from the tropics. His face was blotched, wilful spikes of hair sticking from under his tweed hat, and his naval tie badly askew. He was staring across the room with a perplexed expression in which Flemyng, against all his instincts, saw panic. He stood and waved, his own face showing nothing but happiness as he cried out.

  ‘Freddy!’

  Craven stood still and looked towards them, as if adjusting his focus before he could identify Flemyng. When he stepped forward, he moved slowly, aware of the dangerous swirl of the crowd around him. They could hear singing from outside. Both Flemyng and Abbott rose as if they wanted to help, but neither wanted to seem alarmed. They let Craven approach them at his own pace. He straightened his tie with one hand, put the other through his hair, and managed a smile for Flemyng. ‘I’m sorry, I got a little swept up on the pavement. The tide is running strong tonight.’