‘You will obviously have to think things over. There are a lot of issues to consider when deciding to become an SIS officer. So let’s end this discussion now. I will be in touch with you by post in the next few days. We will let you know at that stage if we want to proceed with your application.’
‘And if you do?’
‘Then you will be invited back here for a second interview with one of my colleagues.’
As he stands up to leave Lucas folds the piece of paper in two and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Leaving the recruitment file on the table, he gestures with an extended right arm towards the door which has been left ajar by the secretary. I walk out ahead of him and immediately begin to feel all the stiffness of formality falling away from me. It is a relief to leave the room.
The girl in the neat red suit is standing outside waiting, somehow prettier than she was at two o’clock. She looks at me, gauges my mood, and then sends out a warm broad smile that is full of friendship and understanding. She knows what I’ve just been through. I feel like asking her out for dinner.
‘Ruth, will you show Mr Milius to the door? I have some business to attend to.’
Lucas has barely emerged from his office: he is lingering in the doorway behind me, itching to get back inside.
‘Of course,’ she says.
So our separation is abrupt. A last glance into each other’s eyes, a grappled shake of the hand, a reiteration that he will be in touch. And then Lucas vanishes back into his office, firmly closing the door.
3
Tuesday, 4 July
At dawn, five days later, my first waking thought is of Kate, as though someone trips a switch behind my closed eyes and she blinks into the morning. It has been like this, on and off now, for four months. Sometimes, still caught in a half-dream, I will reach for her as though she were actually beside me in bed. I try to smell her, try to gauge the pressure and softness of her kisses, the delicious sculpture of her spine. Then we lie together, whispering quietly, kissing. Just like old times.
Drawing the curtains I see that the sky is white, a cloudy mid-summer morning that will burn off at noon and break into a good blue day.
All that I have wanted is to tell Kate about SIS. At last something has gone right for me, something that she might be proud of. Someone has given me the chance to put my life together, to do something constructive with all these mind wanderings and ambition. Wasn’t that what she always wanted? Wasn’t she always complaining about how I wasted opportunities, how I was always waiting for something better to come along? Well this is it.
But I know that it will not be possible. I have to let her go. Finding it so difficult to let her go.
I shower, dress and take the Tube to Edgware Road, but I am not the first at work. Coming down the narrow, sheltered mews, I see Anna ahead of me, fighting vigorously with the lock on the garage door. A heavy bunch of keys drops from her right hand, jingling like sleigh-bells. She stands up to straighten her back and sees me in the distance, her expression one of unambiguous contempt. Not so much as a nod. She rests her hands on the backs of her hips and tilts backwards fractionally, flattening her breasts. I push a splay-fingered hand through my hair and say good morning.
‘Hello,’ she says archly, leaning forward again, twisting the key in the lock.
She’s growing her hair. Long brown strands flecked with old highlights and trapped light.
‘Why the fuck doesn’t Nik give me a key that fucking works?’
‘Try mine.’
I steer my key in towards the garage door, a movement which causes Anna to pull her hand out of the way like a flick knife. Her keys fall on to the grey step and she says fuck again. Simultaneously her bicycle, which has been resting on the wall beside us, topples to the ground with a metal clatter. She walks over to pick it up as I unlock the door and go inside.
The air is wooden and musty. Anna comes through the door behind me with a squeezed smile. She is wearing a summer dress of pastel blue cotton dotted with pale yellow flowers. A thin layer of sweat glows on the freckled skin above her breasts, soft as moons. With my index finger I flick the switches one by one. The strip lights in the small office strobe.
There are five desks inside, all hooked up to phones. I weave through them to the far side of the garage, turning right into the kitchen. The kettle is already full and I press it, lifting two mugs from the drying-up rack. The toilet perches in the corner of the narrow room, topped by pink rolls of Andrex. Someone has left a half-finished cigarette on the cistern which has stained the ceramic. The kettle’s scaly deposits crackle faintly as I open the door of the fridge.
Fresh milk? No.
When I come out of the kitchen Anna is already on the phone, talking softly to someone in the voice that she uses for boys. Perhaps she left him slumbering in her wide, low bed, the smell of her sex on the pillow. She has opened up the wooden doors of the garage so that daylight has filled the room. I hear the kettle click. Anna catches me looking at her and swivels her chair so that she is facing out on to the mews. I light a cigarette, my last one, and wonder who he is.
‘So,’ she says to him, her voice a naughty grin. ‘What are you going to do today? Oh Bill, you’re so lazy…’
She likes his being lazy, she approves of it.
‘Yeah, OK, that sounds good. Mmmm. I’ll be finished here at six, maybe earlier if Nik lets me go.’
She turns and sees that I am still watching her.
‘Just Alec. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.’
Her voice drops as she says this. He knows all about what happened between us. She must have told him everything.
‘Well, they’ll be here in a minute. OK. See you later. Bye.’
She turns back into the room and hangs up the phone.
‘New boyfriend?’
‘Sorry?’ she says with heavy sarcasm, standing up and passing me on her way into the kitchen. I hear her opening the door of the fridge, the minute electric buzz of its bright white light, the soft plastic suck of it closing.
‘Nothing,’ I say, raising my voice so that she can hear me. ‘I just said, is that your new boyfriend?’
‘No, it was yours,’ she says, coming out again. ‘I’m going to buy some milk.’
As she leaves a telephone rings in the unhoovered office, but I let the answering machine pick it up. Anna’s footsteps clip away along the cobbles and a car starts up in the mews. I step outside.
Des, the next-door neighbour, is buckled into his magnesium E-Type Jag, revving the engine. Des always wears loose black suits and shirts with a sheen, his long silver hair tied back in a ponytail. None of us has ever been able to work out what Des does for a living: he could be an architect, a film producer, the owner of a chain of restaurants. It’s impossible to tell just by looking into the windows of his house, which reveal expensive sofas, a widescreen television, plenty of computer hardware and, right at the back in the sleek white kitchen, an industrial-size espresso machine. On the rare occasions that Des speaks to anyone in the CEBDO office, it is to complain about excessive noise or car-parking violations. Otherwise, he is an unknown quantity.
Nik shuffles his shabby walk down the mews just as Des is sliding out of it in his low-slung, antique fuck machine. I go back inside and look busy. Nik comes through the open door and glances up at me, still moving forwards. He is a small man.
‘Morning, Alec. How are we today? Ready for a hard day’s work?’
‘Morning, Nik.’
He swings his briefcase up on to his desk and wraps his old leather jacket around the back of the chair.
‘Do you have a cup of coffee for me?’
Nik is a bully and, like all bullies, sees everything in terms of power. Who is threatening me, whom can I threaten? To suffocate the constant nag of his insecurity he must make others feel uncomfortable. I say:
‘Funnily enough, I don’t. The batteries are low on my ESP this morning and I didn’t know exactly when you’d be arriving.’
/> ‘You being funny with me today, Alec? You feeling confident or something?’
He doesn’t look at me while he says this. He just shuffles things on his desk.
‘I’ll get you a coffee, Nik.’
‘Thank you.’
So I find myself back in the kitchen, re-boiling the kettle. And it is only when I am crouched on the ground, peering into the fridge, that I remember Anna has gone out to buy milk. On the middle shelf a hardened chunk of over-yellow butter wrapped in torn gold foil is slowly being scarved by mould.
‘We don’t have any milk,’ I call out. ‘Anna’s gone out to get some.’
There’s no answer, of course.
I put my head around the door of the kitchen and say to Nik:
‘I said there’s no milk. Anna’s gone -‘
‘I hear you. I hear you. Don’t be panicking about it.’
I ache to tell him about SIS, to see the look on his cheap Polish face. Hey, Nik, you’re twice my age and this is all you’ve been able to come up with: a low-rent, dry-rot garage in Paddington, flogging lies and phoney advertising space to your own countrymen. That’s the extent of your life’s work. This is what you have to show for yourself: a few phones, a fax machine, and three second-hand computers running on outdated software. That’s all you are. I’m twenty-four and I’m being recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service.
It is five o’clock in the afternoon in Brno, one hour ahead of London. I am talking to a Mr Klemke, the managing director of a firm of building contractors with ambitions to move into western Europe.
‘Particularly France,’ he says.
‘Well, then I think our publication would be perfect for you, sir.’
‘Publicsation? I’m sorry. This word.’
‘Our publication, our magazine. The Central European Business Review. It’s published every three months and has a circulation of four hundred thousand copies worldwide.’
‘Yes, yes. And this is new magazine, printed in London?’
Anna, back from a long lunch, sticks a Post-It note on the desk in front of me. Scrawled in girly swirls she has written: ‘Saul rang. Coming here later.’
‘That’s correct,’ I tell Klemke. ‘Printed here in London and distributed worldwide. Four hundred thousand copies.’
Nik is looking at me.
‘And Mr Mills, who is the publisher of this magazine? Is it yourself?’
‘No, sir. I am one of our advertising executives.’
‘I see.’
I envisage him as large and rotund, a benign Robert Maxwell. I envisage them all as benign Robert Maxwells.
‘And you want me to advertise, is that what you are asking?’
‘I think it would be in your interest, particularly if you are looking to expand into western Europe.’
‘Yes, particularly France.’
‘Yes. France.’
‘And you have still not told me who is publishing this magazine in London. The name of person who is editor.’
Nik has started reading the sports pages of Henry’s Independent.
‘It’s a Mr Jarolmek.’
He folds one side of the newspaper down with a sudden crisp rattle, alarmed.
Silence in Brno.
‘Can you say this name again, please?’
‘Jarolmek.’
I look directly at Nik, eyebrows raised, and spell out ‘J-A-R-O-L-M-E-K’ with great slowness and clarity down the phone. Klemke may yet bite.
‘I know this man.’
‘Oh, you do?’
Trouble.
‘Yes. My brother, of my wife, he is a businessman also. In the past he has published with this Mr Jarolmek.’
‘In the Central European Business Review?’
‘If this is what you are calling this now.’
‘No, it’s always been called that.’
Nik puts the paper down, pushes his chair out behind him and stands up. He walks over to my desk and perches on it. Watching me. And there, on the other side of the mews, is Saul, leaning coolly against the wall smoking a cigarette like a private investigator. I have no idea how long he has been standing there. Something heavy falls over in Klemke’s office.
‘Well, it’s a small world,’ I say, gesturing to Saul to come in. Anna is grinning as she dials a number on her telephone. Long brown slender arms.
‘It is my belief that Jarolmek is a robber and a conman.’
‘I’m sorry, uh, I’m sorry, why… why do you feel that?’
A quizzical look from Nik, perched there. Saul now coming in through the door.
‘My brother paid a large sum of money to your organization two separate times…’
Don’t let him finish.
‘… and he didn’t receive a copy of the magazine? Or experience any feedback from his advertisement?’
‘Mr Mills, do not interrupt me. I have something I want to say to you and I do not wish to be interrupted.’
‘I’m sorry. Do go on.’
‘Yes, I will go on. I will go on. My brother then met with a British diplomat in Prague at a function dinner who had not heard of your publication.’
‘Really?’
‘And when he goes to look it up, it is not listed in any of our documentation here in Czech Republic. How do you explain this?’
‘There must be some misunderstanding.’
Nik stands up and spits, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ in an audible whisper. He presses the loudspeaker button on my telephone and Klemke’s riled gravelly voice echoes out into the room.
‘Misunderstanding? No I don’t believe it is. You are a fraud. My brother of my wife has made enquiries into your circulation and it appears that you do not sell as widely as you say. You are lying to people in Europe and making promises. My brother was going to report you. And now I will do the same.’
Nik stabs the button again and pulls the receiver out of my hand.
‘Hello. Yes. This is Nikolas Jarolmek. Can I help you with something?’
Saul looks at me quizzically, nodding his head at Nik, fishing lazily about in the debris on my desk. He has had his hair cut very short, almost shaved to the skull.
Suddenly Nik is shouting, a clatter of a language I barely understand. Cursing, sweating, chopping the air with his small stubby hands. He spits insults into the phone, parries Klemke’s threats with raging animosities, hangs up with a bang.
‘YOU STUPID FUCKING ARSEHOLE!’
He turns on me, shouting, his arms spread like press-ups on the desk.
‘WHAT WERE YOU DOING KEEPING THAT FUCKER ON THE PHONE? YOU COULD GET ME IN JAIL. YOU STUPID FUCKING… CUNT!’
‘Cunt’ sounds like a word he has just learned in the playground.
‘What, for fuck’s sake? What the fuck was I supposed to do?’
‘What were you… you stupid. Fucking hell, I should pay my dog to sit there. My fucking dog would do a better job than you.’
I am too ashamed to look at Saul.
‘Nik, I’m sorry, but -‘
‘Sorry? Oh, well then, that’s all right…’
‘No, sorry, but -‘
‘I don’t care if you’re sorry.’
‘Look!’
This from Saul. He is on his feet. He’s going to say something. Oh, Jesus.
‘He’s not saying he’s sorry. If you’d just listen, he’s not saying he’s sorry. It’s not his fault if some wanker in Warsaw catches on to what you’re up to and starts giving him an earful! Why don’t you calm down, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Who the fuck are you?’ says Nik. He really likes this guy.
‘I’m a friend of Alec’s. Take it easy.’
‘And he can’t take care of himself? Can’t you take care of yourself now, Alec, eh?’
‘Of course he can take care of himself…’
‘Nik, I can take care of myself. Saul, it’s all right. We’ll go and get a coffee. I’ll just get out of here for a while.’
‘For more than a while,’ says Nik. ‘Don’
t come back. I don’t want to see you. You come back tomorrow. It’s enough for one day.’
‘Jesus, what a cunt.’
Now Saul is someone who really knows the time and place for effective use of the word ‘cunt’. I feel like asking him to say it again.
‘I can’t believe you work for that guy.’
We are standing on either side of a table football game in a cafe on the Edgware Road. I take a worn white ball from the trough below my waist and feed it through the hole on to the table. Saul traps the ball with the still black feet of his plastic man before gunning it down the table into my goal.
‘The object of the game is to stop that kind of thing from happening.’
‘It’s my goalkeeper.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He has personal problems.’
Saul gives a wheezy laugh, lifts his cigarette from a Coca-Cola ashtray and takes a drag.
‘What language was it that Nik was speaking?’
‘Czech. Slovak. One of the two.’
‘Play, play.’
The ball thunders and slaps on the rocking table.
‘Better than Nintendo, eh?’
‘Yes Grandpa,’ says Saul, scoring.
‘Fuck.’
He slides another red counter along the abacus. Five-nil.
‘Don’t be afraid to compete, Alec. Carpe diem.’
I attempt a deft sideways shunt of the ball in midfield, but it skewers away at an angle. Coming back down the table, Saul saying, ‘Now that is skill’, it rolls loose in front of my centre half. I grip the clammy handle with rigid fingers and whip it so that the neat row of figures rotate in a propeller blur. Saul’s hand flies to the right and his goalkeeper saves the incoming ball.
‘That’s illegal,’ he says. The shorter haircut suits him.
‘I’m competing.’
‘Oh, right.’
Six-nil.
‘How did that happen?’
‘Because you’re very bad at this game. Listen, I’m sorry if I interfered back there…’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘It’s OK.’
‘No, I mean it. I’m sorry.’
‘I know you are.’
‘I probably shouldn’t have stuck my foot in.’
A Spy by Nature (2001) Page 3
