Bridger’s rise would be over.
It compounded his sadness. Their history was difficult, but shouldn’t be corrupted by this.
His mind wandered, and it fixed suddenly on the strange question Quincy had asked Maria. Could she meet Craven’s wife? He didn’t have one, Flemyng had told Maria. Never had.
She had got the wrong man, that was all. If she had lived, she would have been on Bridger’s trail. Was there a hidden reference, concealed in the notes Maria had found? Would he have to tell her?
Poor Pierce. He didn’t deserve this.
Distracted, consumed by the guilt of an old rivalry, and agonized by Craven’s decline, his mind raced until, exhausted, he slid into sleep.
He woke an hour later. O’Casey was shaking his shoulder.
‘Will, please come.’
Craven’s breathing was uneven and guttural. Flemyng came close and took his hand, leaning down to whisper, ‘Freddy, it’s me.’
His hand was squeezed. Craven said nothing.
Flemyng sat on the bed and held the hand, feeling a trembling that had almost gone. After a few minutes he brushed the hair back from where it had fallen on the old man’s forehead, and kissed him on the brow. Another squeeze on his hand, softer this time.
O’Casey stood at the side of the room. He said nothing, and made no move to interfere.
Craven’s breathing was lighter, and the roughness passed. Flemyng felt his hand losing its grip and slipping away.
Putting his head down, he heard the last breath.
Flemyng wept.
He smoothed his old friend’s hair, ran his hand with a gentle touch across his face, remembered happy times once again, and felt the beat of his own heart. He stayed for a few minutes, holding his hand as it began to get cold.
As he got up, words came back to him from childhood, lines that he knew Freddy Craven had loved:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ’grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
THIRTY-SIX
In the chill of the early morning, Flemyng felt a bleakness in Paris he had never known. A hurricane might have passed along the Left Bank, leaving lifeless streets and ruination. The excitement that had moved him in previous days had ebbed away, and when he steered round the barricades at the end of his own street and saw smoke rising from the encampments near the Sorbonne, he found himself succumbing, for the first time in a month of exhilaration, to a feeling of creeping melancholy. The thrill was gone, the city’s colours turned grey.
He was taking a walk soon after dawn, because he was crushed by the intimacy of his apartment and its memories. One of Craven’s pipes was on the kitchen table. He hoped for escape in the streets. Only a day before, the need to plunge into events, and run with the crowd, had spurred him on. But on Friday morning, even as he saw signs of the battles to come, he felt removed from it all.
Freddy Craven was gone and his life changed.
By habit, he took refuge in home thoughts. He would talk to Mungo, because he knew his brother would need comfort, and first he transported himself to the landscape where he knew every rise and fall in the land, the sound of a river and the quiet of the woods. The dogs would soon be on the hill, and in his head he could hear the water in the burn splashing over the rocks that had been his stepping stones into the trees and away. Standing near a burned-out car on the Boul’ Mich where a hundred kids had set up a pretend commune behind their barricades, he took himself to a different world, where nothing seemed to change and the seasons followed their settled patterns, predictable as the mechanism of the orrery at Altnabuie.
But as he walked, Flemyng shook himself, disturbed by his own mood.
Sadness couldn’t save him. He had to see Kristof.
Putting the danger aside, he decided to walk to Pascal’s bar. He could make use of the time. And as he walked out, eastwards along the quai, he prepared for the encounter that would decide how the crisis ended.
At the embassy, he knew, Bridger had taken charge. The mourning machinery was in motion, and, with Bolder drafting the station’s cables, that part of the world that knew Freddy Craven was informed of his death, the shock of his friends and comrades, and assured that before too long, after his private burial in the West Country in the family plot on a hillside overlooking the sea, there would be a gathering of all who had known him and who owed him their loyalty. Bridger had summoned the entire embassy to a brief memorial that afternoon in the ambassador’s residence, and there would be prayers in church on Sunday. All were expected to be there.
Flemyng wanted something else. Not far from Bastille he found a small church that was open, even as the city was still waking, because two old women were washing the steps before early mass and had pulled back the doors to get at their buckets. He didn’t want a priest, only quiet, and took a seat alone in the side chapel, relieved that he was the only occupant of the building.
He closed his eyes and thought of the old man. A prayer came into his head, but he made no formal devotions. It was a small, dark place where some incense always hung on the air because there was never a breeze to take it away, and he felt light-headed. Softly, his face lit by a rack of flickering candles, he spoke to Freddy Craven. Made promises.
After a quarter of an hour, he was outside as two priests arrived for their morning duties. He avoided them, preferring to give no explanation, and hurried on.
He was at Pascal’s bar before nine. The street was deserted, but inside a woman was wiping down the tables. He asked for Pascal, and she pointed him towards a café on the corner diagonally over the crossroads. There was little traffic so he walked straight over, and found him with a coffee and cognac beside him.
Little had to be said. Pascal recognized him, and he explained in a few words that it was an emergency.
With no sign of surprise, Kristof’s friend went to the kiosk beside the bar and dropped some coins in the box. He came back to Flemyng and pointed across the street to his own café. One hour.
He spent it preparing himself for a conversation that had taken shape in his mind through the long night. Taking coffee at a table near the window, he refused the offer of a newspaper and took no part in the conversations that filled the café as the morning regulars came and went. The high emotions that kept him awake through the early hours had subsided, and sitting still and quiet at his table, scarcely changing position until he rose to leave, he was a man bent on business. No one disturbed him.
In Pascal’s bar, their positions were reversed. It was Flemyng who sat inside and Kristof who had to pull aside the curtain to see the man who waited for him. He was dressed as Flemyng had first seen him, but with a fresh white shirt and his hair neatly combed, having clearly taken trouble to prepare after the summons. When he sat down, Flemyng noticed that the quick, darting eyes of the day before were focused again. He was under control.
‘Why?’ Kristof said, without any greeting.
‘I can answer the question you asked me,’ said Flemyng. ‘I’ve read the diary – the diary of a dead man.’
If Kristof was shaken, he gave no sign.
‘Craven?’
‘Yes. Last night.’
‘How?’
‘Exactly what I expected you to ask,’ Flemyng said. He paused. ‘His heart.’
‘You must be very sad. You have my sympathy.’
‘Thank you,’ Flemyng said. ‘I believe you.’
‘Men like him inspire great loyalty. I wish I had met him.’
They faced each other across the table, both sitting upright. Neither smiled, and each seemed to take strength from the other. There would be no more tears.
‘I can help you,’ said Flemyng. ‘I’ll tell you what I know.’
Kristof spoke calmly. ‘About me?’
‘Of course. Are you surprised?’
Kristof’s expression didn’t change. He was at rest.
‘I know your history,’ said Flemyng, ‘and if you’ll allow me I want to give you my account of what happened. I think you were scared, because of Quincy’s intimacy with you and others in her visits here over many months. You thought she had worked out your secret, too, and that drove you to despair. Probably for the first time, you wondered if Craven knew, and others like me. You had to find out, and that’s why you used my brother as a lever to force yourself into my life. Our families make us vulnerable as well as strong, don’t they?
‘Well, I can tell you that Freddy did know. And one other, too, whom you met here in Paris. What name he used when you met him as a businessman I don’t know, but he is a friend of mine in Berlin.’ He thought of patient Duncan Gilfeather, lifting his skirts for Kristof on Freddy Craven’s orders. ‘They were both aware of your story, as I am now. But I think it very unlikely that anyone else does. You’re safe.’
Kristof had lowered his head. The morning sun was coming through the window, and where Flemyng had expected shock, perhaps the reappearance of fear, there was calm.
‘They knew all along?’
‘Yes.’
Flemyng, aware of his own effort in preparing for their conversation and the struggle with his emotions, wondered how much Kristof’s control was costing him.
‘Perhaps you are relieved,’ he said.
There was no reply. Kristof’s face gave no sign of his feelings. His eyes were still. Without a word, he waited for Flemyng to continue.
‘I can’t know how and when you decided to tell us about the hiding place in the cemetery, but here’s what I think,’ he said. ‘You knew that Maria Cooney and I would find a list of names in the dead letter box, put there by Quincy, probably on the day she was killed, although it could have been earlier. Whoever killed her left the envelope untouched because he was ordered to. That instruction came, I think, from you. You arranged Quincy’s death – or, at the very least, encouraged it – and at the same time you wanted us to see the names. That was puzzling to me, and still is. Whose side are you on?’
He paused. ‘Christopher.’
Kristof’s face seemed to have lost all its weariness. His defences fell away, and he looked at Flemyng with an innocence that moved him.
The question was repeated. ‘Why did you want us to get that list?’
Kristof began quietly, his voice calm.
‘I had learned enough about Quincy to know that she couldn’t keep a secret for long, and she’d boasted to me about everyone she knew. She had helped my people – we knew she had been doing the same for the Americans – and so she learned things. That was her way. In time, she had worked out what our organization was putting in place in the west, our grand scheme, and she had worked out some names. It was typical of her to want to pass on the list – and to see my reaction. For her, there were no rules. I should tell you that I saw the names, in their hiding place, before I decided to leave them for you.’
Flemyng’s response was a statement, not a question. ‘Very soon after she died.’
‘Yes, very soon.’
Flemyng didn’t question him, and Kristof resumed. ‘I was sure that some names would soon be doing the rounds, because she was trying to identify characters who would make her story come to life. She didn’t mind that her researches would become the talk of the town in certain secret places, because her story would be all the bigger when it broke. The tension would rise among those in the know, she would time her revelation skilfully and the truth of it would be known by people like you. Her sensation would be all the greater. She told me, you know, that your Sandy Bolder had picked up the scent and was beginning to spin his own tales as a result.
‘That terrified me, but it excited her.’
‘And her excitement was a death sentence,’ Flemyng said.
Kristof’s expression didn’t change. ‘I realized the secret wasn’t going to be a secret for long. So I pointed you towards it because I wanted to help you, Will. You.’
Aware of the power they had both employed to control their feelings, Flemyng replied with only one word. ‘Why?’
‘Because I think you are vulnerable in the same way as I am. You’re supposed to be hard, trained to be tough, but your emotions run strong, and never far under the surface. They lead you on. I knew it from the first time we met, and it moves me.’
There was silence for a while. Kristof’s hands were clasped, and his eyes were fixed on Flemyng. He was a man at peace, his energy spent.
Flemyng would always remember the moment of peacefulness they shared.
But he had to finish. It was a difficult day for him, he said. Freddy Craven wasn’t yet in his grave. ‘After everything you’ve said, what I’m going to say now may seem unkind, even cruel. But I think you will understand why it’s necessary for us both.
‘You will leave Paris, Kristof. How you do that is a matter for you, but you will forget your threats to my brother and me and leave this town. If you don’t, I promise that your own story will be told to the world. It will be as good as if Grace Quincy had written it herself.’
The expression on Kristof’s white face didn’t change. He fingered his signet ring.
‘I do feel for you,’ Flemyng said. ‘Believe me. But this isn’t a moral question, and I’m not taking sides. It is simply practical. This chapter of our story is over.’
Kristof bowed his head to make his request. ‘I will need time.’
‘Yes, you can have some time,’ Flemyng said. ‘A little. But we will be watching you. When you leave, you will be safe. I promise.’
He added a question, feeling its cruelty as he did so. ‘Tell me, are you happy?’
For the first time, Kristof managed a weak smile. ‘What do you think?’
He asked if they could walk outside.
Flemyng rose without speaking, and they went through the curtain together, waving to Pascal at the bar as they pulled the door open and went into the street.
‘I need some air,’ Kristof said.
Flemyng said he understood. He had been walking all morning, and felt the better for it. ‘My head is clear. You’ll be fine.’
Kristof said they should walk together.
‘Quincy did scare me,’ he said quietly. ‘She seemed to know everything. Whether or not she did, we’ll never be sure. But I thought she might have my own story. And there were the names. I know some of them were correct. About others, I don’t know. I am a small cog in a heavy machine. But you are right. This chapter is over.’
‘And a new one opens,’ Flemyng said.
He looked straight ahead as he spoke. ‘You and I have reached a balance in the last half-hour, haven’t we? You can continue with your chosen life, somewhere else. My brother and I with ours. We’ll work on those names, of course. But none of us will be destroyed by this and our wounds will heal. Freddy would say that was a kind of victory. What good is blood?’
Kristof asked if he could be sure that his story would never be known.
‘It’s impossible to be sure, but I think so.’ Flemyng let a few beats pass before he went on. ‘And there is something I can do for you.’
Kristof stopped in the street and turned to him. He was ready.
Speaking quietly and quite slowly, Flemyng said. ‘I can destroy Freddy’s diary.’
‘Will you?’
‘Difficult, but I can. I think Freddy would approve, under certain circumstances.’
Turning away, Kristof began to walk again and Flemyng strode out to catch up.
‘You know what those circumstances are, don’t you?’ he said from behind, unable to see Kristof’s face.
‘Yes.’
‘That we meet again,’ Flemyng said as he came alongside. ‘On my terms.’
And it was done.
*
When they sat down to lun
ch together at Benoit, Maria told Abel and Flemyng of her dinner there with Quincy. ‘It was happy. Can you believe that now? She was high. Had no idea of the danger she’d stoked up.’
They began with a toast to Freddy Craven, and Flemyng told them of the night when the old man washed his wound in Vienna. ‘I thought I was dead. It was Freddy’s operation that had gone wrong, so he tended me as if I were his son.’
‘A dark day, but a time for thanks,’ Maria said, and she spoke of Quincy and her own infatuation. Abel watched Flemyng. Had his brother known? Yes.
That wasn’t a mistake, Flemyng told her, only a hazard of their lives. They were humans, still.
‘Which means there’s always going to be pain,’ Abel said, ‘even when things turn out right.’
They turned to Abel’s London posting, and Flemyng said they should plan a visit home. They needed time in the hills. ‘Mungo doesn’t know about Freddy yet. I’ll ring today. I think they became close in this business, and they were both grateful for that.’
‘Imagine home this weekend,’ Abel said. ‘I want to walk in the woods, get to the high tops. Take the dogs on the long loop round the loch. I can see it in my mind. You?’
‘I felt this morning, even here, that I could feel the air. Sometimes I think you can smell the water,’ Flemyng said.
‘You brothers are lucky,’ said Maria.
‘In some ways,’ Flemyng said, and Abel laughed at him.
‘The noncommittal Mr Flemyng.’
Abel went on, ‘We’ll work on this. The names and everything. We’ve been thrown together and we’ll see it through. A long road. We know that. But we’ve begun.’
‘It’s weird that we have Quincy to thank for it,’ Maria said.
‘We lead the strangest lives,’ said Abel.
After an hour, they parted. Flemyng put an arm round each of them, and promised that they would talk over the weekend. Abel would leave for London on Monday, and the following week Flemyng would take a break in Scotland where the three brothers could be together and follow each other on their favourite walks. ‘After Freddy’s funeral,’ Flemyng said.
Paris Spring Page 33
