“She left no note, no word to anyone,” Nigel continued. “She’d been preoccupied during the day but that was natural. We checked the airlines and found she was booked to London on tomorrow morning’s British Airways flight club class. She gave her address as the Imperial Hotel, Vienna.”
“This morning’s,” somebody corrected, and Brotherhood saw Nigel’s gold watch tilt sharply towards him.
“This morning’s flight then,” Nigel agreed testily. “When we checked the Imperial she wasn’t in her room and when we tried the airport a second time we established she’d taken a standby seat on the last flight of the day, Lufthansa to Frankfurt. Unfortunately we did not come by this information until after the Frankfurt flight had landed at its destination.”
She diddled you, thought Brotherhood with a satisfaction bordering on pride. She’s a good girl and knows the game.
“Isn’t it rather a pity you couldn’t have found out about Frankfurt the first time you went to the airport?” said an unbeliever boldly from the end of the table.
“Of course it’s a pity,” Nigel snapped. “But if you had been listening a little more closely, I think you would have heard me say that she took a standby seat. The official flight list bearing her name was therefore not complete until literally the moment when the plane took off.”
“Sounds a bit of a muddle all the same,” said Mountjoy. “What about the unofficial flight list?”
No, thought Brotherhood. It is not a muddle. To make a muddle you must first have order. This is inertia, this is normality. What was once a great service has become an immovable hybrid — half bureaucrat, half freebooter, and using the arguments of the one to negate the other.
“So where is she?” somebody asked.
“We don’t know,” said Nigel with satisfaction. “And short of asking the Germans — and incidentally of course the Americans — to search every hotel in Frankfurt, which seems a long shot to say the least, I fail to see what more we can do. Or could have done. Frankly.”
“Jack?” said Brammel.
Brotherhood heard an older version of his own voice ebb into the darkness. “God knows,” he said. “Probably sitting on her backside in Prague by now.”
Nigel again. “She’s done nothing wrong as far as anyone knows. We can’t keep her prisoner against her will, you know. She’s a free citizen. If her son wants to join her there next week there’s not much we can do about that either.”
Mountjoy voiced a previous worry. “I do think the telephone intercept from the American Embassy is fairly extraordinary. This woman Lederer, sitting in Vienna, screaming to her husband in London about two people exchanging messages in church. That was our church she was talking about. Mary was there. Couldn’t we have made a few deductions from that?”
Nigel had his answer pat: “Only long after the event, I’m afraid. Perfectly understandably, the transcribers saw nothing dramatic in the intercept and passed it to us twenty-four hours after the phone call had taken place. The information that would have put us on the alert — namely that Mary had been seen possibly emerging from a Czech safe flat where this man Petz and so forth had previously been housed — therefore reached us before the intercept. You can hardly blame us because we didn’t put the cart before the horse, can you?”
Nobody seemed to know whether they could or couldn’t.
Mountjoy said it was time to take a view. Dorney said they really must decide whether to call in the police and circulate Pym’s photograph, and be damned. At this Brammel came sharply to life.
“If we do that, we may as well put up the shutters,” he said. “We’re so nearly there. We’re so warm, aren’t we, Jack?”
“I’m afraid we’re not,” said Brotherhood.
“But of course we are!”
“It’s guesswork. Still. We need the furniture van. That won’t be a simple job either. He’ll have used cut-outs, halfway houses. The police know how to do those things. We don’t have a chance. He’s using the name of Canterbury. Or we think he is. That’s because in the past all his worknames have been places — he’s got a tic about that. Colonel Manchester, Mr. Hull, Mr. Gulworth. On the other hand they just may have taken the cabinet to Canterbury and Canterbury is where he is. Or they’ve taken it to Canterbury and Canterbury is where he isn’t. We need a square beside the sea and a house with a woman in it whom he apparently loves. She’s not in Scotland or Wales because that’s where he says she is. We are not in a position to comb every seaside town in the United Kingdom. The police are.”
“He’s mad,” said a ghost.
“Yes, he’s mad. He’s been betraying us for more than thirty years and so far we have failed to certify him. Our error. So we may as well agree that he makes a pretty decent show of being sane when he needs to, and that his tradecraft is damn good. Is anybody nearer to him than I am?”
The door opened and closed. Kate was standing before them with an armful of red striped folders. She was pale and very steady, like a sleepwalker. She laid one folder before each guest.
“These have just come up from Sig. Int.,” she said, to Bo only. “They ran the Simplicissimus bookcode across the Czech transmissions. The results are positive.”
* * *
At seven in the morning the London streets were empty but Brotherhood marched in them as if they were full, keeping a straight back among the falterers and weaklings, a man of bearing in a crowd. A solitary policeman wished him good morning. Brotherhood was the kind of man policemen greeted. Thank you, Officer, he thought, striding yet more purposefully. You have just smiled on the man who befriended tomorrow’s newest traitor — the man who fought off criticism of him until the case became unanswerable, then fought off his apologists when it became unfaceable. Why do I begin to understand him? he wondered, marvelling at his own tolerance. Why is it that in my heart if not my intellect I sense a stirring of sympathy for the man who all his life has made a failure of my successes? What I made him do, he made me pay for.
You brought it on yourself, Belinda had said. Then why was it that, as with his dangling arm at the moment it was shot to pieces, he had yet to feel the pain?
He’s in Prague, he thought. The chase game of the last few days was a Czech fan dance to keep us looking the wrong way while they smuggled him to safety. Mary would never have gone there unless Magnus was ahead of her. Mary would never have gone there, period.
Would she? Wouldn’t she? He didn’t know and he wouldn’t have trusted anybody who said they did. To leave Plush and all her Englishness behind? For Magnus now?
She’d never do it.
She’d do it for Magnus.
Tom will come first for her.
She’ll stay.
She’ll take Tom with her.
I need a woman.
An all-night coffee shop stood at the corner of Half Moon Street and on other early mornings Brotherhood might have stopped there and let the tired whores make a fuss of his dog, and Brotherhood in return would have made a fuss of the whores, bought them a coffee and chatted them up, because he liked their tradecraft and their guts and their mixture of human canniness and stupidity. But his dog was dead and so for the time being was his sense of fun. He unlocked his door and headed for the sideboard where the vodka was. He poured himself a warm half tumbler and drank it down. He ran a bath, switched on his transistor radio and took it to the bathroom. The news reported disasters everywhere but no British diplomatic couple surfacing in Prague. If the Czechs want to blow the whistle they’ll do it at midday in order to catch the evening television and tomorrow’s papers, he thought. He began shaving. The phone was ringing. It’s Nigel saying we’ve found him, he was at his club all the time. It’s the duty officer reporting that the Prague Foreign Ministry has put out a midday press call for foreign correspondents. It’s Steggie, saying he likes strong men.