Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  ‘So Tommy Critchley gave me the fact of this boy as a parting present. He was off to his Dorset village to squirrel himself away for the last time. He was sure – this came from the family – that the prodigal son was still on the other side. If not, he’d have come home. Apparently, he was that kind of boy, despite everything. This is important – he was fond of the family. You told me he wears a signet ring. I’m not surprised. His father’s, I’d bet. Funny how loyalty works, isn’t it? That was his nature.

  ‘Anyway, I kept an ear to the ground. No trace. Every now and then I’d get the BRIXMIS boys in Berlin to nose around in the eastern sector, see if they’d heard talk of a young Englishman. No name, of course. I didn’t want it advertised. Very occasional questions. I didn’t know if he was in the apparatus, but I thought it likely. You’d hardly jump across at his age to work as a farmer, would you?

  ‘Time passed. Nothing. He came to mind from time to time but we had other business on hand, and it never seemed urgent. A long game at best.

  ‘Then, many moons after I’d left Berlin, Duncan Gilfeather got a sniff. A word in the ether. We had somebody who came over, across the bridge, low-level but helpful. Gilfeather was in on the questioning, and he picked up a hint. You know how sharp he is. I had told him about Critchley, and he always had an ear cocked, just in case. This defector, an old man, remembered a security building where he’d worked and an English boy who was there. Stood out, obviously. He heard people around him speaking of Paris. We wondered if he was bound for the trade mission. So we watched. The Americans keep an eye on the list here, from one of their sources, and we spotted him only a few weeks after he arrived.’

  Flemyng broke in. ‘I don’t want to interrupt, Freddy, but I think I know the date. This is a confession. It was when Gilfeather had dinner with us here.’

  Craven was enjoying himself, and lighting another cigarette. He stood up, with difficulty, and took a few steps. ’You’ve been in the diaries again. I’m glad.’

  Flemyng felt an overwhelming humility, and a rush of relief that took him back to a time before the crisis began.

  ‘Thank you. I’ve worried.’

  Craven waved him away. ‘To continue. We wanted to entice him. Gilfeather and I had a plan. We’d find a way to getting contact – something simple, trade delegation to Paris, that kind of thing – and ask for help in passing on a message. Something that might be useful to his people.

  ‘And remember this, Will. Nothing was going to alarm him. There would be no indication – none at all – that we knew of his background. He’d be just another East German, alone in the west. But we knew.

  ‘The information we passed would be harmless. Some trade nonsense. Maybe in time, a tiny piece of gossip about the tabs we’re keeping on their people in London. But not at first. I was keeping out of it. Too much risk of me being spotted around the place by some of his people – one or two of them are rather good. Gilfeather, on the other hand, is completely unknown here. So we put him up as a businessman. Ran into Kristof, accidentally on purpose as it were, and they met for a second time on the night we all had dinner together at the Balzar. Gilfeather passed him a message that might be interesting to them, to set himself up as a source. Tantalising for your friend. We waited. And, lo and behold, it got back to Berlin. So we had a conduit, and one who was ignorant of what we knew about him.’

  ‘Neat,’ said Flemyng.

  He said he remembered reading ‘message arrived home’ in the diary.

  ‘Just so,’ said Craven. ‘One of our sources let us know that our titbit had arrived safely in Berlin. Gilfeather passed one more message after a few months, then we would wait until he was needed. We were keeping him for store. Because we knew his secret, and that gave us power.’

  ‘And then?’ said Flemyng.

  ‘And then your friend Grace Quincy blundered in, and got interested in the people around Kristof. Met him. My bet is that he worried that she had worked him out and guessed his origins. I’m told she was always asking questions.’

  ‘She was,’ Flemyng said. ‘And those eyes.’

  Craven said that, like so many others, Kristof would have fallen under her spell.

  ‘And he panicked. Was she on to him? He hadn’t given up on his commitments back in the east, though they pained him. He was beginning to lose his faith. The problem for him was that she had bigger games to play, at the wrong moment. Couldn’t make up her mind if she wanted stories for the papers, or the thrill of the underworld. Decided on both, and it killed her.’

  Flemyng said that he felt as if he were high on the hills at home, lifted by the air that comes after a storm. He was tingling. ‘I’m so sorry, Freddy, for the stupidities in this business. My worries about Abel, my dissembling. The diaries, for God’s sake.’

  Craven said that helped him to make his own apology. ‘When he picked you up, I was excited, you know. We looked at those pictures in the archive. I’ve always made sure he’s not in that file. There was no one you recognized, so I was convinced it was him. He’d come back to life, as I knew he would some day. And with you of all people. I wondered if the doubts were kicking in at last. Do you understand?

  ‘I trusted you, of course, and it was better to let you go in blind, and play it your way. When you told me about Abel, I worried. But the game was on, and I let it run. I think, funnily enough, that it’s turned out for the best. We’ve learned something about Kristof, have we not? That he’s a little more important than any of us imagined. From what you say, by your reasoning he had enough clout to order – or at least advise – that Quincy should be killed.’

  ‘I know that now,’ Flemyng said.

  ‘I see myself in you,’ Craven went on. ‘Forgive this comparison, under the circumstances – but we’re brothers.’

  He spoke about Sandy Bolder. ‘Loyal as they come, of course, but you can’t depend on him. All that smartness, the perfect look, is rubbish. He’s wild. I got him to admit that he’d got the first hint of the famous list from Edward Abbott. Just a whiff, but enough. A journalist peddling the rumour of the moment. And, even worse, he’d got it from Max Anderson at lunch, whose rather large nose was out of joint because Quincy had fetched up here. He’d got it from New York that she had some agents’ names, so he spread the tale. Best way for a rival to draw her sting. And Sandy, hearing it second-hand from Abbott, got himself into a state of excitement and started to dig.’

  ‘Except,’ said Flemyng, ‘that he was right, more or less.’

  Craven gave a laugh.

  ‘Well, if he was right about a network in NATO and elsewhere – London, who can say? – it’s something that we would never want to see the light of day. How strange it is, Will, that the more tense things get across the great divide, the more important it is not to try to embarrass them. The more danger there is, the kinder we are to each other. We’re funny people, aren’t we?’

  It took a little time for Craven to build up his strength again. He was still smoking, and asked Flemyng to pour him a drink.

  ‘Your brother understood that. I learned from Sam, and indirectly from Mungo, what he was doing. The old game that I’d started in Berlin. Helping to manage the knowledge of the other side, shall we say. The nightmare was that Quincy would upset everything with a spy story.’ He took a drink. ‘Never mind dear Declan. He knows.’

  Holding his glass in both hands like a little trophy, he said, ‘Will, let me put it as simply as I can. She was promising a scandal. Penetration. Military secrets leaking. The worst stuff. Look at Europe. Neither side would want such a thing.’ After a pause for a drink, he said, ‘Odd, isn’t it? Not the way things are supposed to be.’

  Flemyng was quiet for a while. Then he said, ‘There’s still a risk from Kristof. I saw him yesterday. There a wildness loose inside him. He could do anything – try to blow Abel and me sky high.’

  Craven sat down, because the talking had taken its toll. He was breathing heavily and he fumbled when he tried to get at another cigarett
e. Flemyng lit it for him.

  ‘I have an idea,’ Craven said.

  ‘Tell me,’ Flemyng said. ‘We need something clever.’

  ‘Do you doubt me?’

  ‘Never,’ said Flemyng.

  ‘The talented Mr Abbott is still in Paris, I take it.’

  ‘I’ve seen him this very afternoon,’ Flemyng said.

  ‘Well,’ said Craven, ‘Edward has the same drive as the late Miss Quincy, although I think that, all round, he is not prone to her love of expeditions into the dark.’

  Flemyng said he was sure that was true.

  Craven was ready. ‘Abbott, as you can tell, went to a good school. By chance, the same one as Mr Kristof. They’re of an age. So our Edward has an inkling of the story. Heard it years ago from a younger brother, behind the bike sheds you might say. And, you may not be surprised to know, I have made it my business to make sure that he has a little more. Only a little. Not enough to write a story, mind, but enough to keep him on the trail. He has no idea that Kristof is in Paris. If he had… well I think he would put two and two together and his newspaper would think it one of the stories of the year. Even in this year. Don’t you? A big splash. And Kristof would be finished, before he had time to flee for the hills. Kaput.’ He managed to snap his fingers. ‘We have an opportunity.’

  ‘You mean…?’ Flemyng said. He thought of Craven’s cleverness, and his own devotion to the man.

  ‘I do.’

  He drew on his cigarette and smiled through the clouds.

  ‘The blackmail of a blackmailer is good for the soul.’

  *

  In the afternoon, Flemyng found that he responded with vigour to the excitement of the streets. He wandered. Au Petit Suisse had employed extra staff to control the crowd at the doors, and the place was alive with talk of the march on the Sorbonne planned for the next day. There were broadsheets proclaiming revolution on sale at the door, factions with their own slogans, and he noticed English accents in the crowd. One student told him of a drama in the street earlier, when there appeared at the door one of the academic attendants from the Sorbonne – men in formal dress with chains round their necks who still announced the arrival of a professor for a lecture, like red-coated servants at the Élysée. This one had wandered unawares into the lions’ den. There was a moment of alarm, but the crowd took pity on him. He was carted off to Le Basile on rue de Grenelle and stripped of his uniform, then plied with his favourite pastis. The uniform was burned on a pyre outside, and by the time he left in jeans and an old T-shirt he was making promises of fealty to the revolution. Flemyng was smiling more than he had for days, tieless with his shirt open, and drinking in the mad spirit of the day. It wouldn’t last. Like the crowd, he didn’t care.

  At four, he rang Maria.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  She told him, for the first time, about the flat on rue de Nevers, a gift that he knew was a reward. They met there an hour later. Briefly, without a hint of deception, he told her Craven’s story. ‘He meant it for us all. We’re together in this.’

  ‘It makes sense of something I saw,’ she told him. ‘I wondered about it. When I met Kristof at the bar, he went to the men’s room and left his book of poems on the table. A schoolbook. He’d been reading Paradise Lost, of all things. I opened it.’

  ‘Of course.’ Flemyng said.

  ‘Naturally. I turned to the title page. I should have realized sooner what it meant.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘The book was inscribed to “Christopher” . He’d scored that out and written “Kristof” .’

  Flemyng thought of Craven’s diary and ‘C’. The jigsaw was almost complete. He realized why Kristof wanted sight of Craven’s diary. Not because of danger from his own side, but because he feared – Quincy’s questioning must have scared him – that his name might be known at the embassy, and in London, which might be a prelude to disaster for him. If Craven had spread the word, he was on borrowed time.

  And all the while, as they’d agreed the previous night, he was willing for them to see Quincy’s list. A man sunk in confusion, and fear.

  Flemyng had mistaken the source of the threat to Kristof. It wasn’t from some grey figure in Berlin, but from the very thought of exposure.

  ‘I’m going to see him,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave a message for a meeting tomorrow morning. I’ll make it clear – he gets out of Paris, or Edward Abbott gets his story. All of it. Freddy says Kristof’s loyal to his family. He wouldn’t be able to take it, and he knows that his people wouldn’t forgive him. A lamb for the slaughter.

  ‘And I’m afraid I’ll tell him that if he tries to undermine any of us in the future, the same rule applies. Abbott will get his story.’

  ‘And then you’ll give him a hug?’ Maria said.

  ‘Maybe.’

  He left in the same high spirits. With Craven away, he should go to the embassy, where Sandy would be complaining. He didn’t mind.

  Bolder was predictably agitated, although he wanted Flemyng to read the telegram he’d composed the previous evening with an account of the battle in the streets and his predictions for the coming weekend. He also showed him the message of congratulations he’d received from London in response, of which he was even prouder.

  ‘Quite a stirring moment,’ he said.

  Flemyng took himself to his own room, and Janet delivered some telegrams for him to read.

  He was lost to the world for a while.

  At half past six – he noted the time precisely – Janet returned. Unhappy.

  ‘I apologize, Will, that I have to disturb you with very bad news. I have had Dr O’Casey on the telephone. Freddy has been taken ill, I’m very sorry to say. He wants you to go immediately. I’ll clear up for you.’

  He raced to the corner for a taxi, and banged a shopfront in frustration at the empty rank. It was five minutes before he saw a green light moving down the hill, and he had the door open before the car had properly stopped. When he got to Craven’s apartment, there was another resident of the building unlocking the front door and he pushed past and jumped to the lift.

  O’Casey came to Craven’s door, opening it quietly.

  ‘This is bad, Will. I’m afraid he won’t last. There has been a big episode. He’s forbidden me to get him to hospital, or even to tell the ambassador. He knows that even if he gets through this one, it won’t be long, and he’s reconciled. That happens. He asked for you. I’ll leave you alone. Call me if you’re concerned. I’ll wait outside the door.’

  The bedroom wasn’t dark. Craven wanted the lights on, and the curtains open to catch the evening sun. The window was raised a little, and they heard the sounds of sirens outside. Craven was in his red striped pyjamas, his hair combed back as if he was going out, and, although he didn’t raise a hand when Flemyng came in, his face broke into a smile.

  ‘I’m glad. You know something’s happened.’

  ‘Freddy. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. You’ll be sad, of course, but don’t feel bad for me. I’ve had my time and it’s been good, from start to finish. I have loved my boys, you most of all. You do know that?’

  ‘I do.’

  The old man sighed. He closed his eyes. ‘I’m glad I had the chance to tell you about our German friend who isn’t,’ he said, still smiling. ‘And it seems that in a cack-handed way – typical when a man starts to doubt himself – he wanted to find you. Help him, Will. There’s something else that you need to know – only you – about that list of names. You know I said that one of them rang a bell?’

  ‘I do.’

  Craven said, ‘We’re supposed to believe these are the names of sleepers, the traitors in the nest, waiting for their moment. Germans who we think are ours, but are really theirs. Correct? An East German operation that’s rather cleverer than we’ve expected from them. You’ll have realized the difficulty, however.’

  ‘It could be the greatest deception of them all,’ Flemyng said, ‘that turn
s us inside out, looking for spies who aren’t there.’

  ‘A nightmare we’ve seen before,’ said Craven, who bore the scars. ‘That will be for others to judge, over time, but I have a particular problem for you. One name.’

  Flemyng knew, before Craven said anything more, that the moment was a prelude. His life would be shaped, in some way he couldn’t tell, by what Craven said next.

  ‘The name,’ Craven said quietly, ‘is one that no one here will recognize, except me. Almost no one, I should say. The reason I remember her is that she was investigated before, very thoroughly and distressingly, under another name, because there was a whisper and nobody could be sure of the background in Germany. But she came out as clean as a whistle. That’s important for you to know.’

  He looked at Flemyng in silence. ‘You’ll have to decide whether this list means the whole thing will have to be done again. It will be painful.’

  Flemyng, his heartbeat quickening, asked why.

  ‘I’m afraid you know her as Grizelda Bridger.’

  Flemyng stared. He thought of his friend and rival, Bridger’s pride, and everything he attached to his career. His love for Grizelda. Another vetting, more questions? The black spot.

  Craven raised a hand. ‘I can imagine how you feel.’

  Flemyng, by habit, concealed most of his emotion, and said, ‘I’ll decide what to do, for the best.’

  ‘I know.’

  Flemyng felt Craven’s eyes on him, even as his power ebbed away.

  He had slipped down the pile of pillows, and Flemyng tucked them in to let him lie more naturally, helping to ease him on to his side.

  ‘Dear boy. Do stay near.’

  The effort had been too much. His eyes closed and Craven slept.

  Flemyng sat still beside the bed for nearly an hour. O’Casey didn’t disturb them. The clock in the next room struck nine. Flemyng went to the door, and spoke to the doctor. ‘He’s drifted away. I’m not going to leave. Can you sit with him for a while?’

  ‘Surely. I’ll come right out if you’re needed.’

  Flemyng took Craven’s chair in the sitting room, for the first time. He was engulfed by sadness. Would he speak to the old man again? His near-euphoria from the afternoon had passed. Grizelda. He knew that if there had been any shadow, Bridger would not be in Paris. But even if she were cleared again, the fact would be known.