Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  Happy days. But after half an hour, Flemyng had found nothing that suggested any connection with Kristof. Not a clue. Craven gave no detail of what had been learned about the other side.

  He turned to the second, later volume, and the tone changed. It dealt with Freddy’s efforts to establish his own network in the east, and the narrative gave way to entries that were more like puzzles deliberately contrived to confuse. He used initials and numbers, and occasionally geometric drawings of which Flemyng could make nothing.

  For an hour he went back and forth through the book, and the third, in search of a pattern. A name.

  Nothing.

  He considered what Kristof had said. The secret lay in Berlin, and might be known to Craven.

  The three diaries lay in front of him, and he looked at the dates on the covers. He had missed something.

  But Kristof hadn’t mentioned dates. Why had Flemyng thought that he was most likely to find the link in the days when Craven was in charge in Berlin? Stupid. An assumption without reason. Craven had visited Berlin many times since, and was in touch with Duncan Gilfeather, now in charge of the station, who was one of his boys. Why delve into history when he could look at the here and now?

  He was convinced, and felt a prickle of excitement. It was closer than he had thought. Forget the Berlin years. Look at Paris, and work backwards from the latest volume.

  He picked up the book he had seen the week before, with pages of Craven’s abbreviations.

  Within a few minutes, he became fluent in the style that the old man had developed over the years. It had little of the narrative flow that gave the earlier diaries their flavour, and had turned into a shorthand that gave an outline of his days and little more. His style was spare, the descriptions shrinking like Craven himself. But Flemyng noticed immediately that the story was punctuated with sketchy anecdotes and fragments of gossip, and his poetic references had started to return. Craven was making sure that as he got older he wouldn’t let such scraps of information slip from his mind. The disciplines of his trade were still obvious – no codenames, nothing to give an outsider a pathway into the work of the station. But hints, and, to Flemyng, the picture was clear.

  There were initials that he could recognize, and slowly he began to piece together the account of the year that included his own arrival in Paris. ‘W piped aboard.’

  In the silence, with his mind cleared of any other thoughts, he looked at the latest entries and worked backwards, month by month.

  December, and Bridger’s arrival. A rumour, which came to nothing, that Bolder was getting a promotion in London. Craven’s travels – by boat train to London once or twice a month, three flights to Vienna – and, in the high heat of the previous July, two days in Berlin.

  He read the entries for June, pricked by a memory at the back of his mind. A dinner on the Left Bank, and an evening of recollection. The dates in his head were right. Gilfeather had visited Paris for two days. The diary made it clear that he had stayed with Craven.

  Flemyng recalled the dinner they had together at the Balzar. Gilfeather, freckled and carrot-haired, retained a boyish presence and Flemyng had always enjoyed his good humour. Although they could have been taken for contemporaries, he was Flemyng’s senior by eight years. They had overlapped twice in London, and he had taken his place in Vienna, picking up the contacts and agents that he played, as Craven put it, like an old violin.

  Gilfeather and Flemyng liked each other. Their bookishness led them on to shared territory, and Flemyng enjoyed the blend of innocence and cunning that Gilfeather had perfected. Even when he was scheming, cranking the machine in Berlin, he never lost his sense of wonder. Like Craven, he relaxed with naval history and sea stories, and half the dinner involved picking apart Villeneuve’s tactics before Trafalgar. Flemyng remembered some Berlin tale-telling, gossip about the latest shuffle of station chiefs, but no revelation. In his notes, Craven gave the date of the dinner.

  Turning the page to look at the next day, Flemyng found an entry that held his attention, because he couldn’t explain it.

  Craven had written, ‘DG’ – Gilfeather – ‘saw C lst nt.’

  ‘C’ could only refer to the chief of the service, seldom known by any other title. Flemyng was puzzled.

  He had been at the dinner with Gilfeather and Craven on that date, and they had sat down at eight. Gilfeather could not have been in London, and if C had been in Paris, Craven would have told him. The chief’s visits were never secret from his own men, and it would have been odd for him to pass through without the station being aware.

  There was a second mystery. Nowhere else in the diary had Craven mentioned C. Flemyng checked. He remembered a visit from the chief’s predecessor to Vienna, soon after his own stabbing, and found the diary for that month. Nothing. He looked up several references to Craven’s visits to London, when he would usually have seen the chief. Again, nothing.

  For several minutes he turned pages at random, and confirmed his suspicion. C was nowhere. He didn’t exist in the diary.

  Going forward, from June to July, he followed Craven to Berlin.

  He met Gilfeather, had a night out with the station – Flemyng recognized the initials of the boys – and paid a visit to the Olympic Stadium and the Somerset Arms. The next morning, he saw the ambassador and the rest of the day seemed to have been spent with Gilfeather, in the office and on a walk in the woods. As usual with Craven, there were no details of their conversation.

  Except one, and when he saw it Flemyng knew he was on the way.

  ‘Paris message safely home.’

  And a little further down the page, ‘C is for cunning.’

  The next day, Craven had visited the American embassy, and flew out that evening.

  Back in Paris, he made the last entry of the day.

  ‘The sea is calm tonight.’

  Flemyng remembered the end of the poem, and the darkling plain where ignorant armies clashed by night. Ignorant is right, he said to himself. He put the book aside. Opening the last notebook, which he had opened the previous week, he turned the pages to find Friday, 19 April, the day it all began in a café on rue Pigalle, with Kristof.

  In his last entry for the day, Craven had written, ‘Patience its own reward.’

  In his excitement, he felt a touch of shame. Craven’s life lay open before him. But he placed his guilt against his discovery, and found a balance that calmed him. Betrayals by two friends cancelled each other out. Surely.

  He heard a clock chiming two as he locked the box containing the diaries in Craven’s drawer. He left the desk laid out precisely as he had found it, and checked that he was leaving nothing behind. He switched off the desk lamp, and opened the curtains. Looking out from the darkened room, he saw the soldiers smoking at the gatehouse. Two police cars drove slowly past the front gate to join the others parked outside the Élysée. In the distance he heard a siren, sounding lonely after the cacophony of Sunday night.

  He double-locked the security door that separated the station’s rooms from the rest of the embassy, and took the stairs slowly in the soft glow of the one bulb on the ceiling that burned all night but did little to lighten the darkness. From the window on the landing he saw the shadowy outline of the garden, the black bulk of the trees and the seat where he liked to be alone. In the thin moonlight he could see a light curtain of rain and he stopped for a minute or two to watch, and think.

  He decided to leave a message for Kristof in the morning, on the assumption that he could find Craven in Brussels and talk to him for approval.

  He tried to think of the right words for either of them, and failed.

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘A three-breakfast problem,’ Craven said in the lobby of the Amigo.

  ‘You’ve given up your pipe?’ Sam said.

  ‘Not quite.’ They laughed together, and Sam helped him to the restaurant. Craven was unsteady on his feet, a sailor who’d been too long at sea, and they did a slow waltz towards their table.
‘Forgive me,’ said the old man as they settled down in a quiet corner, with no one near. ‘Not too good, I’m afraid.’

  Sam didn’t try to laugh it off. The truth was obvious. ‘Let’s take this slowly. Am I putting you on a train later?’

  ‘Do you think we might travel back together? I’d like that.’ Sam thought that age was bringing back his West Country burr, and he felt a warmth.

  ‘Of course, Freddy. I’ll see you all the way home.’ The old man smiled.

  ‘Now,’ said Craven, underlining the feeling that time was short. ‘The news from Hinckley.’

  ‘I gather that Sandy Bolder is unlikely to be godfather to his new baby,’ Sam said.

  Craven said, ‘I imagine Jonny’s been given the third degree, poor boy. Not his fault.’

  Sam described picking him up at NATO. ‘I’d forgotten how big the bloody place is getting. Not for me.’ He said they got well away, beyond the city, walked in the woods for nearly an hour, and found an open glade where they had privacy but enough space to know if they were being seen or overheard. Sam said he was Craven’s emissary, to get that straight from the start, and Hinckley relaxed in the knowledge that he could give a full report without the caution that came in a cable that might find its way anywhere. He and Sam had been in Prague together, and preserved the trust of warriors in the field.

  ‘We had a long talk. Freddy, it’s bad.’

  ‘A headline, please.’

  ‘Hinckley says Bolder should stay away from this town, or he mightn’t get home alive. I don’t pretend to understand it all yet, but here’s what he said.’ They were still alone, but Sam whispered.

  ‘The trouble with Bolder isn’t that he’s wrong, but that he’s half right. Worse.’

  ‘I feel light breaking in,’ Craven said.

  Sam said that with luck they might find an empty compartment on the train and they would have three hours to talk. ‘I’ve got fragments in my head, but no picture that makes sense.’ In spite of his privileged position at the crossroads in Vienna, where he saw material that bypassed Paris, even Craven’s own desk, on this one he felt he was in the dark. ‘Can you help, Freddy? Are you in on this?’

  Craven shook his head. ‘Officially, no. But I have a history. That’s the thing about old men – memory.’

  Without uttering an operational codename, nor turning one into a joke as Bolder liked to do when he was obliged to have conversations in public places, Craven described the problem that had preoccupied him when he patrolled the eastern front and which had never gone away. In their island of quiet in the restaurant, he could speak quite plainly. ‘All the time, we worry about leaks. But sometimes there are things we need them to know. You and I know this. The problem is – how.’

  ‘Hinckley’s point exactly,’ said Sam.

  Craven picked up his frothing coffee cup with both hands and put it to his lips, drinking like a thirsty man who’d been handed a water bowl at the fountain.

  After a minute he said, ‘Sometime the most dangerous thing in an enemy is ignorance.’

  *

  Flemyng rang Pascal’s bar at ten and said he would see Mr Kristof at noon, without leaving a name. He couldn’t tell if the message got home. He would turn up, and hope.

  His second call was to Hinckley’s office. ‘Freddy’s in town, I gather.’

  ‘Malachy’s here, or was, on Freddy’s behalf. That’s the best I can do, Will. I saw him yesterday. I got the feeling that he’ll be back in Paris by tonight.’

  Flemyng rang the station to say he would be out all morning, and Bolder answered.

  ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Fifty thousand at the Arc yesterday, so they say. There isn’t an empty cell in Paris. I’m going to take a turn in the streets today. With Freddy away, I shall write it up.’

  ‘Take your tin hat, Sandy.’

  The day was fine, and Flemyng wanted to walk. Along the Boul’ St-Germain the debris of the night was smouldering. There was a leaning tower of loose cobblestones on one corner, and across the road two smashed cars pulled together to make a barricade. Two of the cafés he knew best were boarded up, and you could find your way to Odéon by following the trail of broken glass. He spoke to some students at Le Rouquet, squashed into the red leatherette banquettes and high on the prospect of battle. When he took to the street again he felt the sour aftertaste of tear gas and, as he cut away on rue Danton towards the river, he could hear the crowd that had survived the night outside the Sorbonne, where the riot police watched them across their barricades. The chanting followed him until he crossed the bridge into the deep streets of Île de la Cité and away.

  He had an hour, and wanted to let the time bring him some calm.

  Bolder was in Bridger’s office, trying to make up lost ground.

  ‘Everything takes second place now. Everything,’ he said.

  Bridger, who hadn’t yet lost the fingertip feeling for events that had served him so well, said he had spent the evening in the streets. ‘There’s wind in their sails. General strike next week, they say. In our time, Sandy, we haven’t known a city in this state – in Europe, anyway. They’ve occupied Sciences Po. I saw fires in the Luxembourg Gardens. God.’

  ‘I heard something interesting,’ Bolder said. ‘Digging up the first cobblestone is difficult, but when it’s out, the rest are easy.’ He spoke as if he had been taking lessons.

  They made their plans for the day. Bridger wanted a council of war at five, with Craven in his place, and Flemyng if he could be found. ‘We have had a rocky fortnight, I don’t need to tell you. If we acquit ourselves well in the days ahead, it may revive the fortunes of this embassy.’

  At that moment, Flemyng was troubled.

  Far from calming him, the walk which had already taken him east of Bastille had given him time to think, and he was unable to come to a decision about how much to tell Kristof.

  In his mind, he replayed the images from the pages of Craven’s diary.

  Gilfeather had visited Paris, and had made contact with ‘C’. Three weeks later Craven was in Berlin celebrating the arrival of a message that had come the other way, from Paris. On his return he confided to his diary that he was playing a waiting game.

  If it was the message that Kristof had wanted him to find – and nothing else in the diary seemed to fit – he could see no explanation for how it might help him. Therefore, why should he confide details of Freddy’s notes to a man full of threats and whose emotions, he well knew, were veering from exuberance to despair and back again without warning. Yet he couldn’t get to the next stage – come closer to the heart of the puzzle – without giving Kristof something. He was hungry and must be fed.

  As he came close to Pascal’s bar, he was nervous and gloomy. He felt only the faintest tremor of the excitement that usually welled up at such moments. An agent, a meeting, a game. This time there was little but apprehension.

  His watch said it was nearly noon.

  Pushing open the door, he saw Pascal alone behind the bar. To Flemyng’s surprise he laughed, and flapped a long napkin towards the back room like a flag.

  Flemyng muttered a thank you and stepped through the curtained doorway.

  Kristof was at his table.

  Maria and Abel were facing him.

  *

  Before they went to the south station in Brussels, Sam took Craven to his hotel so that he could bathe and change his clothes.

  Leaving him in his room, he took the opportunity to ring London from the lobby. A few minutes later the phone in the wooden kiosk in the corner rang, and Sam was waiting.

  ‘Dr O’Casey – Declan. This is kind of you. I’m worried about Freddy. Alarmed. I know you’ve seen him.’

  He listened. ‘Thank you,’ Sam said. ‘I do think you’re right.’

  Craven came down a few minutes later, and Sam paid the bill. They took a taxi to the station and set off on a long hike to the end of the platform in search of privacy. Sam found a first-class compartment and spread a few scraps of
clothing on the seats, positioning himself at the door to repel intruders. When the train moved away they were alone, and Sam pulled down the blinds so that they couldn’t be seen from the corridor.

  Craven said they might as well be lovers, lost in each other.

  They rolled south, and Sam produced some ham and cheese from his bag. He broke a long baguette in two, and Craven watched him dig around to find the bottle of red wine he had stowed away. ‘Picnic time. Splendid.’

  Craven said he would help Sam to make sense of the fragments of the story. ‘You’ll realize that it’s for my benefit, too. This business is in need of order.’ Watching him eat, and pour some wine into the water glasses they took from their metal rings at the window, Sam realized how his tempo had slowed. Freddy Craven the quick fox was no more. He was a man weighed down by time.

  ‘What Hinckley said was true. When Bolder rang you, then scampered off to London with his tales about leaks, he had half a story. But only half. Let’s go through it.

  ‘We know they have some sources, but we think they’re low-level. Bolder’s convinced there’s a network, but he doesn’t have the slightest evidence. He’s picked it up somewhere and can’t give it provenance. We assume they know quite a bit – all about you and me, let’s say, and I dare say they talk about the pecking order in London as much as we do, probably with the same amusement – but on the military side, things have been secure, so I’m told. Targeting, dispositions, the plans that would kick in at a time of emergency. What we’d do if they rolled across the plain. However, it’s not as simple as that.