The reply came more quickly than she had expected; within a minute or so, text began to roll across the screen. She read it, and on two occasions felt it necessary to raise an eyebrow, which was about as close as she got these days, after six children, two dead husbands and the loss of four fortunes, to expressing surprise.
2.
MADAME LEBEC’S LOVER arrived shortly before Christmas.
He was a short, handsome gentleman in his middle years, very well-dressed, and his spoken French was excellent, although those who spoke to him believed they could detect a faint English accent.
This dapper little man could be seen most often in the mornings, when he left Madame’s house and went down the street, immaculately turned-out, for his daily constitutional. He left at the same time every day, and returned an hour later, usually with Madame’s string shopping bag bulging with groceries.
Those few neighbours who were on speaking terms with the legendarily foul-tempered Ysabelle reported that the gentleman had turned up on the doorstep at a little after eleven o’clock one night, after Madame had instructed the maid to lock and bolt the door, and that Madame had greeted him with a hesitant but forceful hug – and Madame had never been observed to hug anyone, not even the occasional member of her family who visited – as if he was a long-lost but fondly-remembered amour.
Most of the neighbours just shrugged. If the old lady, in her autumn years, chose to take herself a lover, then good luck to her. Others were a little more nosy.
Dubois the barber, for instance, had the gentleman in his chair not two days after he arrived, for the full treatment. Haircut, shave and a trim of that already-neat goatee. Dubois was able to report – having caught a glimpse of the label while removing the napkin from around the gentleman’s neck – that he wore shirts from Jermyn Street in London, and left a healthy tip.
The girl on the checkout at the supermarket told her sister that the gentleman bought instant coffee, while Madame had previously only countenanced ground. He also bought wholegrain bread, which Madame had never done – in fact, the girl told her sister, she remembered Ysabelle once telling her that Madame wouldn’t have wholegrain in the house because the grains somehow always worked their way under the top plate of her false teeth. Last, but not least, the gentleman’s arrival coincided with a change in the dietary requirements at chez Lebec from butter to salt-free margarine.
Gossip had still not subsided over the gentleman when the gentleman’s nephew turned up – although the neighbourhood cynics refused to believe he was a nephew because there was no family resemblance at all. Where the gentleman was short and dark and dapper, the nephew was tall and fair and untidy. He didn’t go out much, but those who saw him said he always looked tired and hunted, so he was dubbed ‘the Fugitive’ in neighbourhood parlance.
The Fugitive could be seen, ever so occasionally, wandering cautiously down the street, as if he wanted to keep running into doorways to hide. He came back with piles of newspapers and magazine printouts under his arm. Ysabelle confided to the girl from the supermarket that almost all these publications were German, most of them from Berlin news services.
ONE MORNING, BRADLEY knocked on the door of Rudi’s room and called, “A minute of your time, old son?”
By the time Rudi was dressed, Bradley was down in the drawing room raiding Madame’s brandy. Bradley seemed to drink almost continually without ever becoming drunk, but Rudi had never seen him eat.
“Come in, come in,” Bradley said, recapping the decanter and turning from the side-table. “How are we feeling?”
“I’m fine,” Rudi said from the door. “How are you?”
Bradley flashed his brief little grin. Bradley was one of the most charming people Rudi had ever met, but he could never recall having seen the man actually smile. Just quick grins here and there, and body language absolutely loaded with bonhomie.
“Shut the door and sit down, old chap. Got something to tell you.”
Rudi closed the door and turned the key in the lock and trusted to Madame to keep the poisonous old shrew of a maid from listening outside. The maid bothered him. She ate with them in the dining room and sat there looking at him all the way through the meals. He sat in one of the overstuffed fabric-covered armchairs by the window. Bradley sipped his brandy.
“How are you feeling?” Bradley asked again. “Really. No need to cover up for me. Think of me as a doctor. Or a priest, if that suits. You can tell me anything. I won’t pass it on.”
Rudi sighed. The days of his debriefing, closeted with Bradley for eight hours at a time, had passed very slowly. He had gone over and over the details of the fiasco in Potsdam. He had told Bradley about finding the head in the locker at Zoo Station. He had not glossed over the fact that he had lost his mind for a while after that, before he had recovered his senses enough to call in a priority signal. He had gone over every minute of his weeks-long dustoff from Berlin, via Hamburg, Gothenburg, Helsinki and St Petersburg, looking over his shoulder every few steps. He had been as honest as he could possibly manage with the little man from Central, and Bradley had never once come close to telling him what the fucking hell was going on.
“I’m quite sick of you asking me how I’m feeling, actually,” he said. They were speaking English, almost certainly Bradley’s mother-tongue, though with some people it was impossible to tell.
Bradley glanced into his glass and went to sit in the other armchair. “Coureur Leo,” he said nostalgically. “Dear old Leo. He was in it almost from the beginning, you know. Not quite a Founding Father, but not too far removed either.”
He was talking about the head in the locker, the Coureur who had been assigned as Rudi’s partner in the crash Situation. Rudi didn’t want to think about Dear Old Leo, about his family or his real-life job or his real-life home.
“As I mentioned before, we were fortunate that you had the presence of mind to close the locker before you left,” Bradley said. “When we received your message we were able to get a team of cleaners in.”
“I wondered why there was nothing about it in the papers.”
Bradley inclined his head, as if the praise was entirely due to him. “We’ve covered your dustoff from Berlin.” He looked into his drink again, as if deciding whether or not to take another sip. He decided not to. “Textbook stuff. Very good. Can’t fault it.”
Rudi realised that his fingertips were digging into the arms of his chair.
“You’ll appreciate,” Bradley went on, “that Leo was a statistical spike. This kind of thing almost never happens.”
Rudi stared at the Englishman. His gradual ascent in the Coureur hierarchy had brought with it a gradual increase in the risk associated with each Situation. In Rudi’s mind it had also become associated with the contacts he had with Central. Dariusz, who had once seemed mysterious and a little scary, now seemed to have been little more than a stringer, a local talent-spotter. Bradley, in comparison, was the real thing, a direct line to Central, a case officer. It was the first time Rudi had had this sort of contact with his employers, which only seemed to underline just how catastrophic the Potsdam and Berlin Situations had been.
“Most Coureurs spend their entire careers delivering the post,” Bradley went on. He weakened and moistened his lips with brandy. “Just moving packages from Here to There. No danger. No illegality, really. Not even any discomfort, much of the time.”