A Colder War

by Charles Cumming

  Kell laughed at this, but Rachel was looking out across the water and would not meet his gaze.

  “Explain,” he said, trying to deny to himself that a woman he desired, whose good opinion he already coveted, had deliberately insulted him.

  “I think it killed something off in Pappa,” she said. “A part of him dried up inside. I began to think that he had a piece missing from his heart. Call it decency. Call it tenderness. Honesty, perhaps.”

  And Paul knew that, Kell thought, remembering the abundance of photographs of Andrew in Ankara, the comparative absence of pictures of Rachel. Wallinger knew that his bright, beautiful, perceptive daughter had seen through him. He knew that he had lost her respect.

  “I’m sorry to hear you say that,” he said. “I really am. I hope you won’t always feel that way. I don’t think it’s true of Paul. He was capable of great kindness. He was a decent man.” Kell tripped on the words as he said them, because he knew they were platitudes designed to comfort a woman who was long past any desire to be falsely reassured. He tried a different approach. “What we do—the people we are obliged to work with, the ends we are asked to justify—takes its toll. It becomes impossible to remain above the fray. Does that make sense? In other words, we are blackened by our association with politics, with the secret world.” Even as he said this, Kell could feel a contrary argument rising inside him. There had been decency in Paul Wallinger only when it was in Paul Wallinger’s interests to be decent; when it served him to be ruthless, he was ruthless. “What’s the line from Nietzsche? He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster—”

  Rachel interrupted him, tossing her cigarette out to sea. “Right,” she said impatiently, as though Kell was a freshman trying to impress her with cod philosophy. He felt embarrassed and opted for greater simplicity. “What I’m trying to tell you is that we are all the sum of our contradictions. We all make mistakes. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, but your mum and dad also do a pretty good job of fucking themselves up, too.”

  That made her grin. At last. It was lovely to see it again, the flattering radiance of Rachel Wallinger’s smile. Kell tossed his cigarette into the water, but they remained on the veranda.

  “So what mistakes have you made, Tom?” she said, and touched his arm, as though she imagined that she did not have his full attention. Had Kell possessed an ounce more self-confidence in that moment, a watertight assurance that it would not offend her, he would have reached for Rachel, looped his hand around her waist, pulled her toward him, and kissed her. But he could no more make a pass at Wallinger’s daughter than he could imagine making a pass at Amelia Levene.

  “Lots,” he replied. “And all of them bound by the Official Secrets Act. You’ll have to wait for my memoirs.”

  She smiled again and looked south at the vast suspension bridge linking European Istanbul to the Asian side. At night it was lit by a thousand blue lights, a sight Kell always enjoyed. He would have liked to take Rachel to one of the restaurants in Moda or Ortakoy, to order oysters and Chablis, to talk for hours. He hadn’t felt that way about a woman in years.

  “How well do you know Amelia?” she asked.

  Kell heard a warning in the question, perhaps the implication that Rachel knew about the affair. He smothered his concern with a joke.

  “Well enough that if she had spinach in her teeth, I would tell her.”

  Rachel did not laugh. She was still looking south, toward the bridge.

  “Mum doesn’t trust her.”

  “No?”

  “She thinks she knows more about Dad’s accident than she’s letting on.”

  That was unexpected. Nothing to do with the affair. Everything to do with the crash. Kell did his best to reassure her.

  “Please don’t worry about that,” he said. “All of us are trying to find out what happened. That’s why I’m here. That’s why they’ve gone off for a walk.”

  “You’re talking to me like I’m too young to hear the grown-ups’ secrets.”

  “You know that’s not true. Nobody thinks that, Rachel. Least of all me.”

  “We’ve only just met. You don’t know me.”

  He wanted to tell her that he had met her before; or, at least, that he had watched her and seen what she had done with the flowers at her father’s funeral. The flare of anger in her eyes, flinging the bouquet into the wall, a gesture at once violently dismissive of Cecilia Sandor and instinctively defensive of her mother. Kell remembered how Rachel had gone to Andrew afterward, almost as if she was protecting him from the consequences of their father’s deceit. She had removed the card before Andrew had had the chance to see it. Kell still did not know if Rachel had been able to understand the Hungarian text on the card or had simply recognized the handwriting.

  A noise inside the house. Josephine and Amelia returning from their walk. Kell wished that he had been privy to their conversation; Amelia tiptoeing around Josephine’s resentment of the woman who had almost stolen her husband. Rachel opened the door and went back into the room. Kell caught a knowing look on Amelia’s face as she registered that the two of them had been outside together.

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke, darling,” Josephine said, smiling benignly at Kell as though he were a chauffeur who had been killing time waiting for his boss. “What time’s your thing tonight?”

  “What thing?” Amelia asked.

  “I’ve been invited to a party,” Rachel replied.

  “Some colleague of Paul’s,” Josephine added blandly, still looking at Kell. “Perhaps you know him. American diplomat. Ryan Kleckner.”

  22

  Kell reacted quickly, a rapid improvisation.

  “That’s odd. I had a meeting with someone who was going to the same party. Kleckner. He works at the consulate here, right?”

  “Right,” Rachel replied.

  “I think somebody caught someone’s eye,” Josephine added, shooting Rachel an arch look. In that moment Kell realized that Kleckner had asked Rachel as his date.

  “Mum, I met him for five minutes at the wake. He knew I was coming out to Istanbul. He just very sweetly invited me to his party.”

  “Is it a big thing? A dinner?” Kell’s voice was steady but he was aware of trying to make himself feel less physically tense. If the party was an intimate dinner for a dozen of Kleckner’s closest friends, he had no chance of crashing; if most of expat Istanbul was invited, he could tag along.

  “Some bar. Bleu. Have you heard of it?”

  Amelia obviously hadn’t, but she said: “Yes” because she knew what Kell was trying to do. He wanted to get into Kleckner’s circle, wanted to have a chance to go eye-to-eye with his target.

  “I’m not sure I want to go on my own,” she said. “I won’t know anyone.”

  Josephine began to speak. “Then just stay here with…”

  Amelia did not allow her to finish. “Take Tom,” she said, throwing out the idea as casually as Kell had tossed his cigarette into the Bosporus. “He’s always complaining that he’s too old for nightclubs but too young to stay at home.”

  Rachel seemed to enjoy that line. “Are you always complaining about that?” she asked, with a knowing tilt of the head. Kell muttered: “I’ve never said that in my life,” while all three women grinned at him. Rachel enjoyed the sight of his momentary discomfort and took up Amelia’s suggestion. “Come with me, then,” she said. “It’ll be fun. You can be my chaperone.”

  * * *

  Chaperone, Kell thought two hours later as he stared into the steamed-up mirror of his hotel bathroom, wiping away the condensation to reveal a face smothered in shaving foam, his hair wet from the shower. Chaperone. He opened the bathroom door and shaved as the steam slowly cleared. He thought of the line in Moonraker about Bond’s reluctance to shave twice in the same day and a smile curled in the mirror. Thomas Kell was not a vain man, but he was vain enough to want to look good for Rachel Wallinger. Moving closer to the glass he spotted a single
black hair protruding from his left earlobe, two more in his nostrils. He pulled them out, his eyes watering. There was a hair dryer in the wardrobe, but Kell drew the line at that, toweling himself dry and then dressing in jeans, desert boots, and a pale blue shirt that had been laundered by the hotel in Ankara.

  He had arranged to meet Rachel at the base of the Galata Tower. She was there before he was, pivoting on wedge heels in a belted black dress, a pair of Ray-Bans with powder blue frames shielding her eyes from the fading evening sun. He kissed her on both cheeks and recognized her perfume, though he could not place it. Perhaps a colleague had worn it at SIS.

  “Did you eat?” she asked.

  Kell had ordered a sandwich from room service and wolfed it after the shower, but said: “No,” because he hoped that Rachel was hungry. He wanted to sit with her for a while, to get to know her, just the two of them.

  “Shall we get something quick?”

  “Good idea.”

  They found a small contemporary place hidden in the warren of bars and restaurants north of the tower and sat at an angle to each other, eating meze and drinking a bottle of chilled Turkish red. Rachel did not ask any questions about the crash, nor did she seem interested in probing Kell for further information about her father’s career. Instead, they talked about their respective lives in London, Rachel explaining that she was about to start a new job in publishing after working for several years as a teacher. Kell made no mention of his suspension from the Service, but sketched out the basic facts of his divorce and his current life in London.

  “Do you get on well with your wife?” she asked.

  “Broadly speaking.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that we’re still friends, even though both of us feel betrayed by the other.”

  “Then you can’t be friends.”

  “I disagree. It just takes time.” Rachel produced a knowing smile. “What about you?” he asked. “Ever been married?”

  Rachel arched her eyebrows, as though Kell was being old-fashioned. “Never,” she said. “Don’t imagine I ever will be.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I’ll tell you another time. Right now I’m happier grilling you.” She looked quickly to one side of the table. “Do you miss your wife?”

  Kell drew her eyes back to his. “I miss her company, of course. She’s a fantastic person. We spent most of our adult lives together.” He placed a packet of Karelia filters on the table, like an opening bid in a game of poker. “You could say that there are times when I miss the structure of what we had, the ease of two people who knew each other very well and were comfortable in each other’s company. But I don’t miss the other stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  Kell avoided talk of adultery and rows and opted instead for a subject that he hoped would draw Rachel away from the forensic dissection of his marriage.

  “I wanted to have children. I still want to have children. We weren’t able to do that.”

  She looked at him as though he had betrayed Claire. “Is that why you left her?”

  “No,” Kell replied instantly. “It was more complicated than that.”

  Rachel chose that moment to stand up and go to the bathroom, leaving Kell alone at the table, half listening to the conversations of his fellow diners. He had been on only two dates since Claire’s departure for the more fertile slopes of Primrose Hill, on both of which he had gleaned an astonishing amount of personal information from his respective companions, never to see them again. It was one of the anomalies of life on the divorce circuit: everybody had a story to tell, everybody had baggage they were eager to unload. There was precious little privacy, but a refreshing lack of obfuscation. The time for concealment, for presenting a false self, seemed to pass as people crossed the Rubicon of forty. What you saw was, at long last, what you got.

  It was the same talking to Rachel, whom Kell might have expected to be more circumspect. Sitting with her was like sitting with the promise of better times ahead. It was an odd thing to articulate to himself, but he felt something of his old strength returning, as though he was being shown the best of a world of which he had grown tired. Rachel was provocative and honest, she was beautiful to look at, she made him feel alive and enthused. It was an effort, in fact, to conceal from her the extent to which he was already bewitched.

  * * *

  Bar Bleu was a five-minute walk downhill along a street that smelled of sewage, where cats nipped in and out of rusted scaffolding pipes and a moped screamed in high gear, struggling with the slope. At one point, walking along cobbles ruptured by years of Istanbul traffic, Rachel stumbled under the weak streetlights and Kell reached quickly across to prevent her tripping. The moment passed in an instant, but it was like an old-fashioned test of chivalry that he had passed with ease.

  “Quick reactions,” she said, briefly touching the top of his hand as Kell released her arm. The tips of her fingers were soft and cold in the night. He felt the scratch of one of her rings against his wrist.

  “The training kicked in,” he joked. “My world is a jungle of threats.”

  Rachel laughed and they smoked a cigarette on the final stages of the walk, arriving at the entrance of Bar Bleu at the same time as a pimped four-by-four with tinted windows and an inevitably personalized license plate. The doors opened and two expensively maintained, stilettoed Turkish girls emerged from the back, followed by gelled boyfriends in designer shirts. A valet attendant slipped into the driver’s seat and the traffic that had bunched up behind it on the narrow street was allowed to pass.

  “Brave new world,” Kell muttered.

  A black-jacketed bouncer gave Kell the up-and-down and nodded him toward a clipboard-wielding hostess. Under the heading “Ryan K Birthday,” Kell could see the words “Rachel Wallinger + 1.” An overweight Indian man with a shaved head and a ten-thousand-dollar wristwatch was jammed in against a wall.

  “Who were you meant to come with?” Kell shouted as they pushed through the crush of drinkers at the front of the bar. The temperature had gone up by ten degrees.

  “You,” she replied. “I texted Ryan to tell him I was bringing someone. He said he’d heard of you.”

  Kell had worked with countless CIA officers over a period of twenty years. Jim Chater was the ranking American spy in the region. The name Thomas Kell was probably as well known at Langley as it was at Vauxhall Cross. He concluded that there was no darker implication to Kleckner’s remark.

  “What does he look like?” he asked Rachel as a waitress angled past, carrying a tray of cocktails above her head. Kell leaned back in a rope-a-dope, allowing the tray to pass close to his head.

  “Can’t really remember,” Rachel replied, shouting now because the music in the bar—Kell knew it was Beyoncé, but couldn’t name the track—was apocalyptically loud.

  “Rachel!”

  And there he was. Ryan Kleckner. A worked-out, tanned, good-looking American with teeth that glowed slightly blue under the bright lights of the bar. Kleckner was wearing jeans and a crisp white shirt, unbuttoned sufficiently to reveal a loose nest of chest hair, and appeared to be the lodestone around which dozens of party girls and Eurotrash lotharios were orbiting in a frenzy of coke and tequila. Rachel was in his arms as Kleckner kissed both her cheeks. He locked on to Kleckner’s eyes and smiled broadly as Rachel introduced them.

  “Tom! Wow, hi, thanks for coming.” He was nodding, smiling, enveloping Kell in goodwill. “Honored that you’re here. Know a lot about you.”

  This almost an aside, a remark to exclude Rachel, as though Kleckner was paying private tribute, spy to spy. Rachel, meanwhile, was shuffling around in her handbag, saying: “I bought you something, a present” as another waiter twisted past with a tray of cocktails.

  “What is it?” Kleckner asked, taking what looked like a paperback book that Rachel had wrapped in red paper. There was a birthday card stuck to the top of the package.

  “Open it,” she said,
shouting over the music. Kell was hot. He wanted a drink. He craved another cigarette but it was a three-day voyage back to the entrance through the drinkers and partygoers standing four deep at the bar.

  Kleckner opened the card first. From what Kell could ascertain, it was a Larson cartoon. The American took a moment to stare at it, then burst into laughter. Kell didn’t ask to take a look. The paperback was a copy of Hitch-22, the memoirs of the late British journalist Christopher Hitchens. Kleckner appeared to swallow some measure of disappointment. A flicker of irritation passed across his face, like a software glitch, before he found the words to thank Rachel.

  “This is the God Delusion guy, right?” Kleckner glanced again at the cover. Kell reckoned it was ten to one the American was a practicing believer. “Journalist who backed the U.S. on Saddam?”

  “That’s right!” Rachel was shouting. “But not The God Delusion. God Is Not Great. Sort of the same thing.”

  Kleckner did not respond. He looked as though he wanted to set the present to one side, as an error of judgment by the pretty British girl, and to continue enjoying his evening. Rachel appeared to sense this and, as a tall, redheaded woman tapped Kleckner on the shoulder, shared a look with Kell, relaxing her mouth into a mock frown.

  “Clearly not a fan of the Hitch,” she said.

  “Clearly,” Kell replied. “I’ll get us a drink.”

  That turned out to be a promise that was hard to keep. For all of twenty minutes, Kell queued at the bar, jostled and squeezed on all sides by a dozen men trying to catch the eye of the bartenders, all of them soaked in sweat and aftershave. When, finally, he had paid for two caipirinhas and ferried them back, Kell found Rachel tucked in a corner sofa talking to Kleckner and a second, unidentified man who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a silver chain necklace. There was a large ice bucket on a table in front of them, two Laurent-Perriers and a bottle of designer vodka nestled among the glittering cubes.

  “You should have had a glass of champagne,” Kleckner shouted, placing a sturdy and welcoming hand on Kell’s shoulder as he stooped to sit with them. The second man, bald and squat as Bob Hoskins, introduced himself as “Taylor, colleague of Ryan’s.” Kell filed the name away for his ten o’clock. Taylor said: “We were just talking about Erdogan.”