“So what’s in it?”
Nigel and Brotherhood exchanged glances. Fergus still had his eyes wide open.
“What’s in it?” she repeated as a different and more elusive fear began to grip her.
“Oh. Not much,” said Brotherhood. “Agents in place. All our Czechs. A few Poles. Hungarian or two. Just about everything we have that’s run from Vienna. Or used to be. Who’s Wentworth?”
“You asked. I don’t know. A place. What else is in the burnbox?”
“So it is. A place.”
She had lost him. Jack. Gone. Lost him as a lover, as a friend, as an authority. His face was her father’s face when she took him the news of Sam’s death. The love had gone out of him and the last of his faith with it.
“You knew,” he said casually. He was halfway to the door, not even looking at her. “You bloody knew, for years and years.”
We all did, she thought. But she hadn’t the heart to say it to him or, for that matter, the interest.
As if the bell had rung for the end of visiting time, Nigel also prepared to make his exit. “Now, Mary, I’m leaving you Georgie and Fergus for company. They’ll agree their cover with you and tell you how to play everything. They’ll report to me all the time. From now on, so will you. Only to me. Do you understand? If you need to leave a message or anything like that, I’m Nigel, I’m Head of Secretariat, my P.A. is called Marcia. Don’t talk to anybody else in the Firm at all. I’m afraid that’s an order. Even Jack,” he added, meaning Jack particularly.
“What else is in the burnbox?” she repeated.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Routine stores. Don’t you worry yourself.” He came to her and, emboldened by Brotherhood’s intimacy with her, placed a hand awkwardly on her shoulder. “Listen. This needn’t all be as bad as it sounds. We have to take precautions, naturally. We have to assume the worst and cover ourselves. But Jack does have a rather Gothic way of looking at things sometimes. The less dramatic explanations are often a lot closer to home. Jack’s not the only one with experience.”
CHAPTER 6
A dark sea rain had enveloped Pym’s England and he strode in it warily. It was early evening and he had been writing for longer than he had written in his whole life and now he was empty and accessible and afraid. A foghorn sounded — one short, two long — a lighthouse or a ship. Pausing under a lamp he again studied his watch. A hundred and ten minutes to go, fifty-three years gone. Bandstand empty, bowling green awash. Shop-windows still wearing their fly-blown yellow cellophane against the summer’s sun.
He was heading out of town. He had bought a plastic cape from Blandy the haberdasher. “Good evening, Mr. Canterbury, sir, what can we be doing you for?” In the rain its hood pattered round him like a tin roof. Inside its skirts he carried his shopping for Miss Dubber: the bacon from Mr. Aitken, only mind and tell him he’s to cut it on number five, give him half a chance he’ll make it thicker. And tell that Mr. Crosse three of his tomatoes were rotten last week, not just bad, rotten. If I don’t have replacements I’ll never go to him again. Pym had followed her instructions to the letter, though not with the ferocity she would have wished, for both Crosse and Aitken were recipients of his secret subventions, and for years had been sending Miss Dubber bills for only half what she had spent. From Farways the travel agent he had also obtained details of a senior citizens’ tour of Italy departing Gatwick in six days. I’ll phone her cousin Melanie in Bognor, he thought. If I offer to pay for Melanie as well, Miss Dubber won’t be able to refuse.
A hundred and six minutes. Only four gone. From countless pressing memories in his head clamouring to be acknowledged, Pym selected instead Washington and the balloon. Of all the crazy ways we ever had of talking, really that balloon took the biscuit. You wanted a chat, I wouldn’t meet you. I was running scared and had appointed you my unperson. But you wouldn’t be put down, you never would. To humour me, you launched a miniature silver-coated gas balloon over the rooftops of Washington, D.C. Half a metre diameter; sometimes Tom gets them free at the supermarkets. As we drove our separate cars on either side of town, you told me in German what a fool I was to do a Garbo on you. Over matched handsets that hopped like bedbugs between the frequencies and must have sent the listeners just as frantic.
He was climbing the cliff path, past lighted bungalows cut from the gardens of a great house. I’ll phone that doctor of hers and get him to persuade her that a break is what she needs. Or the vicar, she’d listen to him. Below him the fairy lights of the Amusement Palace glowed like fat berries in the mist. Alongside them he could make out the blue-white neons of the Softa Ice Parlour. Penny, he thought. You’ll never see me again unless it’s my face in the newspaper. Penny belonged to his secret army of lovers, so secret she didn’t know she was a member. Five years ago she was selling fish and chips from a Portacabin on the promenade and was in love with a leather-boy called Bill who beat her up, until Pym ran the licence number of Bill’s motorbike across the Firm computer and established he was married and had kids in Taunton. In a disguised hand he sent the details to the local vicar and a year later Penny was married to a jolly Italian ice-cream seller called Eugenio. But not tonight she wasn’t. Tonight, as Pym had approached her café for his regular two scoops of Cornish, she was head to head with a burly man in a trilby whom Pym hadn’t liked the look of one bit. It was just an ordinary traveller, he told himself as a gust of wind filled his cape. A food salesman, a taxman. Who hunts alone these days apart from Jack? And Jack it isn’t, not by thirty years. It was the car, he thought. Those clean wings, the smart aerial. The pitch of his head as he listened.
“Any callers, Miss D?” said Pym, setting out his packages on the sideboard.
Miss Dubber was sitting in the kitchen watching American soap-opera and having her one of the day. Toby sat in her lap.
“They’re so wicked, Mr. Canterbury,” she said. “There’s not one among them we’d have here even for a night, would we, Toby? What’s that tea you bought? I said Assam, you silly man, take it back.”
“It is Assam,” Pym said gently, stooping to show her. “They’ve put it in a new packing and given you three pence off. Any callers while I was out?”
“Only the gasman for the meter.”
“That usual? Or someone new?”
“New, dear. They’re all new these days.” Lightly kissing her cheek he straightened her new shawl over her shoulders. “Give yourself a nice stiff vodka, darling,” she said.
But Pym declined, saying he must work.
Regaining his room he checked the papers on his desk. Stapler to handle of teacup. Book matches to pencil. Burnbox aligned to desk leg, ignore. Miss Dubber is no Mary. Shaving, he caught himself thinking of Rick. I saw your ghost, he thought. Not here but in Vienna. Just as I used to see you in the flesh in Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington. I saw your ghost in every shop-window and autumn doorway while I tried to clear my itchy back. You were wearing your camel-hair coat and smoking the cigar you never drew on without frowning. Following me, you were, and your blue eyes shadowed like a drowned man’s, the pupils stuck against the upper lids to scare me. “Where are you off to, old son, where are those fine legs of yours taking you so late at night? Got a nice lady, have you? Someone who thinks the world of you? Come on, old son. You can tell your old man. Give us a hug.” In London you were lying on your deathbed but I wouldn’t go to you, I wouldn’t know about you or talk about you, it was my way of mourning you. “No, I will not. No, I will not,” I used to say each time my heel hit the cobble. So you came to me instead. To Vienna and did a Wentworth on me. Every corner I turned you were there. Until I felt your loving stare like a heat on the back I could never clear. Get off me, damn you, I whispered. What death was I wishing you? All of them by turns. Die, I told you. Do it on the pavement where everyone can see. Stop adoring me. Stop believing in me. Did you want money? Not any more. You had waived your claim to it in favour of the greatest claim of all. You wanted Magnus. You wanted my living spirit to enter your dying body and give you back the life I owed you. “Having a bit of fun, are we, son? Old Poppy’s crackerjack, I can see that for openers. What are you two hatching up together there? Come on, you can tell your old pal! Got some piece of business, have you? Putting a few bob in your pockets, are you, the way your old man taught you?”