Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  ‘Rubbish,’ Flemyng said. ‘Exposing me wouldn’t help you. It would damage me, that’s all. And my brother.’

  Kristof shook his head. ‘You don’t understand my position. There is something I need to know. It is everything to me.’

  Flemyng said, ‘And as for my brother? You say your people know him as a friend, which I don’t believe any more now than when you first said it, so what could you tell them that they don’t know?’

  ‘Who his friends are,’ Kristof said. ‘Maria for one.’

  Flemyng concealed his alarm. After a moment’s pause, having seen it laid out, he put the threat to one side and returned to Craven. He could see Kristof’s surprise. There was nothing threatening in his tone, and he displayed none of the anger that had come out when they spoke in his apartment. Instead, he was encouraging.

  ‘Why is it so important that Freddy Craven knows nothing? Perhaps he can help.’ He was watching Kristof’s eyes and saw the surprise come immediately.

  ‘No.’

  Flemyng was in command. ‘You say he has information that you need. Let me ask him.’

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘In that case, you’ll have to explain why.’ Taking the carafe, Flemyng poured the drinks. Raising his glass, he said, ‘I think that’s fair. Don’t you?’

  ‘I can’t explain. We all have secrets.’

  ‘Very weak, Kristof.’ Flemyng’s face had softened. ‘There’s a connection here that I’m missing. With Freddy.’

  ‘I am in danger,’ said the German. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Who from?’ Flemyng said.

  Kristof shook his head, and Flemyng sensed a change, as if the question unsettled him.

  ‘You say you want a deal,’ he went on. ‘I’m negotiating. Isn’t that what you want?’

  Kristof gave no indication that he was going to answer. The darkness that had clung to Flemyng when he arrived seemed to have been transferred to him. He was wearing a black shirt, buttoned up to the collar, and his face had lost its life as quickly as he had experienced his rush of excitement. His eyes were half closed, and Flemyng identified the fearfulness that he had tried to sketch after their first meeting.

  Turning the screw, he said, ‘Where were you this weekend?’

  Kristof shook his head. ‘You know how difficult it is. I am supposed to be followed if I leave Paris.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘I thought so,’ Kristof said. ‘I noticed someone near me in Brussels, on the street. Twice in one day.’

  ‘Brussels?’

  ‘I have friends there.’

  Flemyng said, ‘All of us have.’ He sipped his wine, and said, ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘I’m trying to answer your questions.’

  Flemyng pulled back, aware of his display of weakness and a nervousness that he had been able to conceal at first. He clasped his hands behind his neck, then stretched like a man who had been cooped up for too long. ‘OK. Let’s talk about other things for a little. Tell me, where do you think you belong?’

  Kristof took a moment to gather himself.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Berlin?’

  ‘Where else?’ Kristof looked away.

  Flemyng waited, and the German began to talk, because silence seemed to upset him. He spoke about the difficulties of his life – the restrictions in Paris, colleagues who watched him, the rules of his life – and said that Flemyng would be unlikely to understand that he still felt loyalty to those he served. ‘I have my apartment in Berlin that waits for me, and a few friends there. But there are troubles. They come to us all one day.’

  ‘Family?’ Flemyng asked.

  Kristof shook his head. He spoke about a life under orders, but said nothing that told of his origins, his travels, the staging posts in his life.

  Flemyng listened, and then said, ‘Why did you come for me?’

  ‘I told you. Your brother.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Flemyng said.

  There was nothing more. Kristof was sullen, drawn into himself.

  ‘What’s your mystery?’ Flemyng said, to make it worse for him.

  He shook his head.

  Flemyng said, ‘I’m familiar with your story, you know. I’ve seen it before. A loyalty that’s threatened. You know what you’re like? A believer who loses his faith, then finds that he can’t quite let go.’

  ‘How would I know?’ Kristof said.

  Flemyng waited, but there was no more.

  ‘Perhaps I can help you,’ he said.

  Kristof’s face was questioning, but filled with longing. He said nothing.

  ‘Without threats,’ Flemyng said. ‘I will try to get the information, in my own way, and then I shall decide what to do with it.’ For a moment he sounded formal, a man giving orders.

  ‘Try?’ Kristof.

  ‘Certainly. But first I need something more from you. The prize. Entice me.’

  Kristof looked defeated.

  Flemyng said, ‘I need to see the colour of your money. Quincy’s, rather. That’s better for you than nothing. I’m asking you to trust me, that’s all. It’s what you said when we first met. Remember?’

  ‘I do. How soon will you want it?’

  ‘I will let you know,’ Flemyng said. Kristof said he should ring Pascal, and gave the number.

  ‘So?’

  Kristof said that he would be able to reveal Quincy to him.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Flemyng said.

  ‘Work it out for yourself.’ Against Flemyng’s expectations, the German had rallied. His voice had recovered its force and the sharpness in his face had returned.

  ‘And remember, I could bring your whole house down.’

  ‘How?’ Flemyng said.

  Kristof smiled, a man in control again.

  Flemyng reached behind and took the folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. Opening it out, he laid it on the table and pushed it towards Kristof.

  ‘With this?’ But Flemyng’s command had gone.

  Kristof shook his head and said, ‘No. That isn’t my gun, it’s my olive branch. The question is, will you be able to believe it?’

  He stood up, took his coat and left the room without another word.

  THIRTY

  Mungo Flemyng was shocked at Freddy Craven’s appearance. Since his visit to Altnabuie, less than two weeks before, the years had pulled him down. His jowls hung heavy and his grey hair had lost its spring, heavy with sweat even in the early morning. Mungo saw that he was thinner, and the tremor in his hands could no longer be concealed. An ugly blotch ran down his neck. Only his eyes were full of life.

  They met at Craven’s club, in a cavernous room where they were alone except for a grumpy waiter who was irritated at the summons to serve an early breakfast before the start of his day. They sat at the end of a long table and he took a chair in the far corner, immobile and gazing towards them while they ate their eggs, like a frozen figure from one of the portraits looking down on him. Mungo had arrived in a cab straight from King’s Cross and the night train, enjoying the gentle bustle of the waking city, and Craven showed him to the sinks downstairs where he could spruce up. When he came to the table he was smart and spry, with a fresh shirt and tie from his bag, beaming and smelling of soap. Putting a good face on it, he said, ‘It’s good to see you. Refreshing. You’re well, I hope.’

  ‘I’m not, Mungo. The old frame is shaky.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No need. Life catches up with all of us in the end. I’m seeing the doc today, as it happens, so I’ll get the latest bulletin from the front.’

  The intimacy startled Mungo, and the effect of Craven’s openness was to remove any need for preliminaries. He was able to say, without apology, that he had been alarmed by the telegram asking him to come south for Monday morning. He had been pleased at the chance to meet again, but confessed that he had passed a sleepless night on the train. ‘Happy, but rather dreading this breakfast, too,’ he said. ‘I’
ve been having some bad days.’

  ‘I understand that,’ Craven said, ‘and I’m sorry for the drama, but certain events are moving fast.’

  Craven waved to the waiter, who cleared their places and brought a fresh pot of tea. ‘You can leave us alone now, thank you. I’m most grateful.’ He closed the door heavily behind him and the room was quiet again. A faint noise of the first rush hour traffic from Pall Mall through the raised window, and nothing else.

  He told Mungo first that although he understood that there was still much he couldn’t say – names, secret histories, the very shape of his brother’s life – he had tried to give him a glimpse of the difficulties with which Flemyng lived every day. ‘You warn your students of the fog of war. Well, I know it to be real. I breathe the fumes. The complication is that we enjoy it, need it, even. I never wanted a life where I could clear my office desk at the end of each day, then start again in the morning. I want the game that doesn’t end, the riddle that can’t be solved.’

  Mungo let him talk.

  Craven spoke of the atmosphere in Paris, the eruptions of the weekend and the panic in high places. The Americans were caught in the coils of their own despair – ‘I’ve never known them so full of doubt’ – and with the world watching Prague, there was panic in Moscow. They were turning in on themselves as they always did, and when they peered out, over the battlements, they were scared. ‘When an elephantine regime starts heaving, everyone runs for cover.’ At every point of the compass there was distrust and misunderstanding, he said. It was why disparate events, springing from different sources and with no obvious connection, had woven themselves into a web that trapped them all. In his experience, Craven said, these were the circumstances in which mistakes were made. A time when secret servants, charged with guarding the settled order, found that all their careful schemes could unravel. Instead of holding in place the weird balance across the divide that consumed their lives and both sides understood, they became the cause of its destruction.

  ‘Sorry to sound apocalyptic,’ he said.

  Mungo poured tea and let him continue, without a word.

  ‘We’ve had a glimpse in Paris, in my embassy, of how this might happen. I’m afraid I may be talking obscurely for a few minutes, but think of the death of the American journalist – Quincy – the events in the streets, which a country made by revolution well understands as you know, and the nervousness in the citadels of the great powers. Your brothers – both of them, I should say – are caught up in this. I can’t explain how, but they are threatened, just as I feared. I’m sure of that. In danger, I’m afraid. Mungo, I’m sorry. I am trying to work out why, and to stop it. I am also aware that the consequence of all this could be devastating for some of those whom Will serves, and who walk with him.

  ‘I have spent my life believing that with a mixture of cunning and bravery we can hold the line, keep the balance. For some reasons that I know, and some that I don’t, I have been losing that faith in recent weeks. That’s why I need you.’

  Mungo was serious. ‘What can I do? I’m disturbed about the boys. I understand the picture you’re painting, I think, but I know almost nothing. Freddy, I don’t even have an idea what Will does all day.’

  ‘Nor should you,’ Craven said, and smiled. ‘And you never will.’

  It was the historian’s insight he wanted, and the feelings of a man who felt close to both his brothers. He asked if Mungo had reread the boys’ letters, as he’d asked him to, and whether anything had helped him to explain Will’s alarm over the phone call from Abel the previous month, the little episode that had caused disproportionate disturbance.

  ‘I had that in mind as I looked through the letters, of course. Carefully. They’re in date order, as I told you, so they tell a story, month by month. But I’m afraid the answer is no.’

  Craven said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, that there was something else. ‘You mentioned an observation of Abel’s when we were walking at Altnabuie. I thought about it afterwards. He said something about secrets, and why we want them.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Mungo said, because it was clear in his mind. ‘He remembered what I’d once written about a Roman battle, the strategic deceptions and so on, in the days when that was my preferred territory. I said history taught us that everyone needed secrets. We have to believe in them, perhaps even when they don’t exist, because they are necessary to us. We need the reassurance of having illicit knowledge.’

  ‘How did he put it?’ Craven said. ‘Can you remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He said he was amused that people would believe something just because they thought it was secret, and would be much more suspicious if it weren’t. He thought that was proof of the power of the unknown. He also said it was useful.’

  Craven was smiling. ‘I understand. After all, secrets are my currency – I trade in them, and they make my world go round. I got the feeling from you that he said this in a letter.’

  ‘Exactly, and I read it again – on your instruction – the other day.’

  ‘Being the historian,’ Craven said, ‘you’ll remember the date.’

  ‘I do. Almost exactly two years ago.’ He gave the month.

  ‘When Will was in Vienna with me,’ Craven said.

  Mungo said nothing, because the door at the end of the room opened and the waiter’s head appeared round it like a puppet’s. He retreated without speaking, leaving them alone.

  Craven spoke quietly, making it sound like a polite afterthought. ‘Where did that letter come from?’

  ‘Berlin. That wasn’t a surprise. He’s a traveller, as you know. Hotel notepaper. He said he was there for a spell.’

  ‘And did it mention Will?’

  ‘Not directly,’ Mungo said. ‘The boys always allude to each other in their letters, as I told you, but seldom by name. It’s our way. Of course, I’d never pass on Abel’s whereabouts to anyone, even Will, and vice versa. An unwritten rule. But Abel did say in this one that he wanted to confide in me alone. Underlined the point. Reading it again the other day, I was moved by its tone. Almost passionate. With my historian’s hat, I’d have singled it out from a pile of correspondence. It was written in the usual easy way – obviously, they never use words like “security” and don’t give any hint about what they are… up to. Never. I understand the walls around you all, so I got the message and waited for a telephone call when he got home. It never came.’

  Craven said, ‘Naturally, you’d be concerned. Thank you. You have been of assistance, as I knew you would.’

  The morning sun was streaming in, and they spent the next quarter of an hour talking about Altnabuie, and a paper Mungo was writing on one of his new enthusiasms, General Wade and his roads across the Highlands. Then, for a few minutes, they returned to Paris. Craven spoke about the streets, the unknown, and they wondered whether some of old France might have passed away after the battles subsided. Mungo said he wanted to visit his brother and him, when the trouble had gone.

  Looking at his watch, Craven suggested a walk in the park, and as they passed the porter’s lodge, the waiter, who was doubling up at the front door until the club came properly to life, handed them The Times. It told the story of street fighting around the Sorbonne, hundreds of arrests, a hailstorm of cobblestones, and tear gas. ‘What will the French do?’ Mungo said.

  ‘They haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Craven as they passed into the street.

  Half an hour later, they had circumnavigated the lake and were having a smoke on a bench under the trees, watching a nest of moorhens near the willows that touched the water and, moving in the breeze, sent ripples across the surface.

  ‘I hesitate,’ Mungo said, ‘but this must have been important to you. Have I really helped?’

  ‘You have, my friend. I noticed at Altnabuie that you do the crossword.’

  ‘A day late,’ Mungo said. ‘The Times doesn’t reach us until the late afternoon.’

  ‘Well, I spend my life telling myse
lf that you have to let your mind take you in different directions. Seeing things from odd angles to find the answer. You know what I mean – waiting for a shaft of light that makes everything look different, and then, for a brief moment, you can see clearly.’

  ‘I know,’ Mungo said.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Craven said, ‘I don’t solve the clues, I write them. Even more fun.’

  Mungo pulled on his pipe, and waited for Craven.

  ‘I’m afraid that you will never know how you have helped me,’ he said. ‘You can’t. Does that distress you?’

  ‘A little,’ Mungo said. ‘But it’s the price of keeping my brothers happy.’

  ‘And safe,’ Craven said.

  They stood, and prepared to part. ‘May I ask you, Freddy, do you believe they’ll come through this?’

  Craven was taking his time in straightening up, leaning on the stick he’d taken from the lobby in the club, and he pulled his coat around him as if it was colder than it was. ‘I hope so, Mungo. That’s all I can say. I’m sorry.’

  They walked together towards a gate on the west side of the park, and Craven continued. ‘Anyone who loves history is attracted by uncertainty. You and I love the knowledge that we can never understand it all. It may be painful in life, but, as Abel said to you, we need to feel the touch of the unknown to excite us. That’s why we press on.’

  They shook hands, old friends from only a few encounters, and Mungo wished him good health. ‘Please take some rest,’ he said. ‘Come to me any time. There will always be a room for you.’

  Craven thanked him, and took his hand.

  ‘I shall,’ he said as he turned away with a wave and set off across the park, slowly, to another gate.

  *

  In Paris, Maria and Abel were together in the rue de Nevers with Quincy’s papers in front of them.

  ‘Will’s a target,’ Abel said.

  Maria said, ‘So it seems.’

  He shuffled the papers again, reading a few of them once more. ‘What we’ve got here is her storeroom, her travelling attic. Everything gets here in the end. Fragments from a lunch, little portraits of contacts, a couple of conversations that are like transcripts. Random names. What do we learn? That she’s got sources that are better than mine, and in more than one country. It will take some deciphering.’