Wemyss said that it had seemed to him a helpful piece of information, but also a warning.
Like the other half of a cross-talk act, Bridger said, ‘A warning. Do you begin to see the light? Freddy? Will?’ He ignored Bolder, cruelly.
‘About what, exactly?’ said Craven.
Wemyss said, ‘The death of Miss Grace Quincy. There’s concern that we may be interfering, and… holding things back.’
‘Concern,’ Bridger repeated.
‘This is my office,’ said Craven, and they all sensed his anger. He stood up and stepped across the room, a plume of smoke behind him. ‘I’m sure that nobody here wants to waste time. I certainly don’t. So for God’s sake stop meandering. What are we supposed to have done?’
‘Wemyss.’ Bridger pointed to him.
‘I’m afraid they believe someone from this embassy has visited the Père Lachaise cemetery, where she died, on some sort of mission. Poking around was the phrase that was used to me.’ Wemyss was uncomfortable, but had to see it through. ‘They believe that we are having an investigation of our own, and they don’t like it. She was American. They want it stopped.’
‘But not before we tell them what we might know,’ Craven said.
‘Me too!’ Bridger slapped the desk. ‘I said I wanted co-operation with our friends and allies, not a ruddy competition. And I must know everything.’
Everything. Flemyng’s mind slipped back to Abel’s phone call. Behind their brief words lay the knowledge that their paths were crossing because of the deeds of others. They hadn’t wished their Paris rendezvous on themselves, happy though they might wish it to be. What would it be like when they met, and found themselves trading in secrets again? The thin consolation was that he was certain Abel was feeling some of the emotions that disturbed him. ‘I hope we can have some time, despite everything,’ his brother had said.
Looking at the scene in Craven’s office he wondered what he would have learned by then, and how much he would have revealed. What he would say to Kristof.
Craven had the floor. ‘First of all, there is nothing for which anyone here needs to apologize. As you are aware, Pierce, Will’s name and mine turned up in the Quincy notebook. We would have been delinquent if we didn’t try to find out why. Do you agree?’
Bridger let him continue.
‘That has meant having conversations, of the kind that we have all the time. Except that her name was involved.’
‘And the graveyard?’ said Bridger.
‘I went there,’ Flemyng said, and Bridger sighed. Flemyng watched Wemyss, who hadn’t learned to conceal embarrassment. He had known.
When Craven had taken his seat, Flemyng gave the version of his story he had devised while he had waited for Kristof the previous evening. Craven’s warning that Bridger was summoning the whole station to a meeting in the morning had given him time.
‘As Freddy says, we have tried to find out the nature of Quincy’s interest in us. I am afraid, Pierce, that we have failed. I did visit Père Lachaise, and I spoke to a superintendent there, because I wanted to know if there had been a rendezvous of any kind, or any activity before her death, that might throw light on her purpose if indeed she was planning to make contact with us.’
No dead letter box and no envelope, and Bridger didn’t ask whether or not he had been alone.
‘I had come across her on the Saturday evening before she died, as I told you the other day. A journalist called Hoffman was giving a birthday party. Our conversation was fun, but in the context of your question, Pierce, banal. We met only once more.’
But he offered no story from the lunch, and Bridger didn’t ask.
‘That is what you should tell the Americans. We made a few general inquiries, and got nowhere. If it had been otherwise, we should certainly have told them.’
Craven was smiling.
Bridger swivelled on his axis, as he’d been trained to do, and took the other tack. ‘So that’s what I’m supposed to report. Failure. My – our – fabled intelligence apparatus can’t find out anything? Embarrassing.’
‘Would you prefer it if we had a big secret, and were hiding it?’ Craven said.
‘I tell you what I would prefer, Freddy, and that is not to be in the position of having to mention this wretched business to my American friend in front of our ambassador, and all at my own table. But I shall be asked, and the answer I have been given by you will make us sound foolish.’
Craven told Bridger that he was forgetting something. ‘They’re jumping around like grasshoppers because this thing is a public event. Her photograph is everywhere. Did you see that someone has written a song about her? Frankly they wouldn’t care about interference from us, as long as we could provide them with something new. That’s what they’re trying to get us to give them, because their cupboard is bare. And we can’t, because we don’t have anything.’
Bolder offered a thought. ‘Don’t worry about sounding foolish, Pierce’, and Flemyng thought it was certainly the worst thing he could have said.
Bridger ignored him, and said to Craven, ‘I want your assessment, Freddy. Everything. Now.’
‘Very well. Grace Quincy was celebrated in her trade, and a woman who courted danger. We know that from her travels and her writing, which is powerful. We also know that in recent months she had spent time in Prague, Berlin and Vienna for reasons that are obvious to us all. She followed her instincts in search of stories, and was drawn to the European fault line. This interest, given events in the east, makes her death suspicious. She had decided to swim in dangerous waters. It is our view that for some reason unknown to us she was probably killed by an agent of… another power. The method is one that has been used elsewhere – a poison spray, we think. We can’t say why, but I should add that we do not take seriously the theory in some of the American newspapers of a love tangle. We understand the Americans are on the same path. It is the likely explanation, but one for which we have, at the moment, no firm evidence.’
Flemyng liked the ‘firm’, delicately positioned at the end. Bridger didn’t pick Craven up on it.
‘So, Pierce, if I were you I would give that to your American counterpart. It has the advantage of being true, confirming their own thoughts, and I expect it will reassure him.’
Turning to Wemyss, he said, ‘And I think we can be confident that the murmuring will stop.’
Bridger rose. ‘Insubstantial, very insubstantial.’
Opening the door for him, Bolder said, ‘But true, Pierce, true. That’s what we’re here for.’
He left them, Wemyss a step behind.
Craven said, ‘Sandy, would you mind? A bit of business with Will.’ Bolder closed the door as he left.
‘Well?’
‘The trouble is that Bridger is right,’ said Flemyng.
‘Of course,’ Craven said. ‘We’re playing a game and no one’s told him the rules.’
But Bridger would have to be kept in the dark. They spoke about Kristof, Flemyng trying to keep from his mind their conversation in the night. Craven said it was unthinkable that his existence, let alone his identity, such as it was, should be known elsewhere. He hadn’t spent a lifetime in embassies defending the territory of his service against the Bridgers of this world – the uniformed branch, he called them – in order to give up now.
Craven turned to the cemetery. Flemyng had been preparing for the question since the previous evening. ‘You found something, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
Simply and briefly, Flemyng explained that Craven needed to know that Kristof had pointed him to Père Lachaise for a reason, and that his information had brought them some treasure. ‘I was going to take you through it this afternoon, before all this, but I have a better idea. Let’s walk to my apartment, where I can show you what I’ve got, and we can talk on the way. There’s so much to say. For a start, I’m seeing Abel tonight. He’s here, and we’re having dinner, to talk.’
For once, Craven was taken by surprise. But
he smiled.
‘Well, I shall enjoy this walk. Take it slowly, for my sake, and we can go through everything. I’ll tell Sandy we’re out of commission until well into the afternoon.’
For the first few minutes, Craven spoke about Altnabuie. ‘I felt as if I’d had a blood transfusion. Mungo showed me some of your old walks. We sat by the loch. I wish I could have fished.’
Flemyng talked for a while about the power of memory. ‘I’ve seen so little of the place in the last few years, and I’m at the point in my life where I’ve spent more time away from home than I ever had there, but the images are as strong as they’ve ever been. Stronger, perhaps. I see the folds of the hills; hear the birds wheeling over the woods. Smell the air.’
‘And watch the orrery?’ Craven said.
‘Ah.’
‘I got it going when I was there. Mungo left me to it. Will, I thought of you as a boy – fiddling with the mechanism, polishing it, watching solar eclipses. Following the moon. It put me in a mood of great calm.’
‘I know,’ Flemyng said.
‘You’re lucky with your brothers, despite everything. The Kristof business and so forth. We’ll talk about that later. I should tell you that with Mungo I found myself being frank. Freddy, I said to myself, you’re being seduced by this place. Watch it. But I came away happy. I haven’t slept better on the Golden Arrow for years.’
‘Did you have my room at the house?’
‘Yes. Mungo was kind. You don’t mind?’
‘Course not,’ Flemyng said. ‘When I realized you were there – you surprised me – that’s what I assumed. Hoped, really. Our closeness is precious. I find I have little enough of it elsewhere.’
It brought them to Abel, as they reached the Left Bank and saw the wide bulk of Les Invalides in front of them, the gold on the dome catching the sun.
‘How frank do you think you can be?’ Craven asked him.
‘I can’t decide.’
‘If I were you, I’d take my time. Although that will be hard, I can see. Find out why he’s here, talk about his London posting.’
He was walking a little too fast for his friend, and felt a hand on his arm. ‘Slow down. You forget that I’m not at my best. We’re not by the lochside now.’
‘Sorry, Freddy.’ He took his arm.
From behind them they heard sirens on the bridge, and they stepped back as a string of police vans, with outriders, sped past them. ‘Fun and games today, I expect,’ Craven said. They said little more until they reached Flemyng’s apartment, a few minutes later.
When they were inside, Flemyng showed his anxiety. He made some coffee quickly, clattering with cups in the pantry, poured a whisky for Craven though not for himself, and went to his bedroom to fetch a small wooden box, with a Celtic knot in delicate inlay on the lid, in which he kept a few precious things.
Without any preliminary explanation, he took a sheet of paper from inside and smoothed it out. Craven read the list of names without touching the paper.
His breathing was heavy and his movements slow. He took time to study the list. ‘I feel foreboding,’ he said.
‘I’ll tell you where it came from,’ Flemyng said. ‘But I want your reaction first.’
‘Bad news,’ said Craven. He was wheezing softly.
Flemyng said, ‘I’m going to ask if any of the names means anything to you.’
‘Of course. I understand that.’
‘And do they?’ Flemyng waited.
Craven sighed heavily, as if in irritation. Flemyng thought he might have lost his train of thought.
‘One, and only one, rings a bell from far away,’ he said.
TWENTY-SIX
In their preparations for the evening of 3 May, the day Paris caught fire, Flemyng and Maria took different paths, private to each of them.
He walked alone. She crossed the city to meet Kristof, congratulating herself as she went.
When they had met on the night of Quincy’s death, and waited together for Flemyng at his apartment, the surprise lifted her and she settled quickly on one objective. A means of contact. She was confident when she showed the pale-faced German upstairs after his unexpected appearance, introducing herself as a friend of Flemyng’s, that he would assume that she was in his business. So she played the brazen reporter in the sure knowledge that he knew her real game. His face brightened at her suggestion that they might be able to talk privately to give her a better impression of how his government was reading the West’s intentions, and showed no embarrassment in proposing a clandestine arrangement. ‘My people are rather obsessed by rules and regulations, as you will know. Private must mean private,’ he said, smiling all the while. Quickly and clearly he described a café where they could meet safely at only two or three hours’ notice, if a message were telephoned to Pascal behind the bar. He gave her the number.
‘Reporters are used to this kind of thing,’ she told him, and they both laughed. Done, and all before Flemyng had returned from the embassy and they talked into the night.
Now it was time to test their system. When she telephoned, a grunting Pascal said nothing except to repeat her message, word for word. She would meet their mutual friend at five.
Walking eastwards from Bastille she wandered into a craftsmen’s quarter, where the shopfronts were hung with golden picture frames and plaster mouldings, and every corner was a collecting point for half-upholstered chairs and wardrobe doors. The street smelt of paint and wood shavings. Then she passed from the bustle of the cafés where workmen were on the pavements, drinking into the late afternoon, into territory where the colour of the city seemed to have drained away. The street life quietened and the traffic was thin. There were shuttered shops, and apartment windows painted black. But she found that the front of Kristof’s café, at the confluence of three streets, was newly decorated in red, white and blue to make a show of gaiety, and had a shop next door in the same colours with one window revealing a mountain of cheese, against a wall of wine bottles, and another filled with hung meat, pâtés and a pyramid of pigs’ trotters. A handwritten notice told her that everything inside came from the Auvergne, ‘notre terroir’, and above it the sign read Chez Pascal. She had arrived.
He was behind the semi-circular zinc bar, a bear of a man with short grey hair and a Roman nose. When she opened the swing door he jerked his head towards the back room without saying a word, nor interrupting his card game with two old men at the bar. She guessed that few women came in. Pulling the curtain aside and entering a gloomy space that smelt of sausage and garlic, she found Kristof reading alone in a corner.
He stood quite formally and put out his hand.
‘Thank you,’ he said, although it was she who had suggested the meeting.
She looked around as if to make the point that their rendezvous could hardly have been more crudely arranged, the stuff of a spy comedy, but only said, ‘Kristof.’
‘No one comes here,’ he said. ‘We’re alone. My people are elsewhere in the city. And yours? I don’t think we’ll be troubled by Americans here.’ That at least was true. There was little sign at the meeting of streets outside that they were still in the city: no taxi stand to be seen, the traffic thin and a different pace on the pavements. ‘Many Algerians live around here,’ he said. ‘They are poor, like me. Pascal lets me read and write here, and meet some friends. He is quite content, and not at all curious.’
Maria, who believed hardly a word of it, said how much she had appreciated the conversation at Flemyng’s apartment. ‘You helped us a good deal with our friend Quincy.’
‘So you visited the cemetery.’ His smile was warm.
‘Of course.’
‘And?’
‘I think you’ll understand if I leave it there for now.’
‘In that case, how can I help?’ he said, and added with emphasis, ‘Help you even more, I mean.’
Maria said she had a simple request. She had taken the trouble to leave a message with Pascal and arrange the meeting because
he, Kristof, was the only person who could take her on the next stage of her journey. ‘When we talked, you spoke of a friend who had been visited by the police because his name – maybe his address or phone number – was found in her notebook, or anyway among her possessions. You told us – Will Flemyng and me – that he was terrified by the knock on his door.’
‘It was true.’
‘I’m sure it was,’ she said. ‘I want to know if he is still in Paris.’
Kristof had closed his book when she came in, taking care to keep a bookmark sticking out, and he slid it to one side before leaning closer. ‘I can help you. He is away. The police visited my trade mission the day before yesterday to ask after him, for the second time. We told them the truth, once again. That we think he is home in Dresden. We don’t know more, except that he left the morning after we spoke and we have heard nothing of him. You will understand if I put it like this – he has officially gone.’
‘Within twenty-four hours of Quincy’s death.’
‘Indeed,’ said Kristof.
‘And what conclusion do we draw from that?’ Maria asked.
‘I’m not sure about conclusions. But we can surmise, can we not?’
She answered with a question. ‘How long have you known Will Flemyng?’
And he parried. ‘Does he know you are here?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Then why should I tell you?’ She had no doubt that he was enjoying himself, his pasty face showing more signs of colour and his eyes on the move. She realized, as Flemyng had on their first meeting, that he was much younger than he first appeared.
‘Let’s go back to the beginning,’ she said. ‘You came to his apartment because you knew Quincy was dead.’
‘Correct.’
‘And it was your friend – the one who was terrified and has gone – who told you, after the police visited him.’
‘It was.’
Maria said he would realize that the next question was inevitable, like an expected chess move being played without a pause to take the players to the next stage and a new problem. ‘Why should you connect Quincy and Flemyng in the first place?’
Paris Spring Page 23
