“I was sober when he died. When you killed him.”
“I’m talking about the year before.”
And now she opened her eyes.
She was on her sofa, facing a bookshelf obscured by bottles; a view so distantly familiar it was a postcard from her past, when she had no control over the direction her evenings would take. When she might find herself trapped by a drunken bore; so boring, she’d find him a fascination; so drunk herself, she’d sleep with him.
“I was running joes of my own by then. The Wall was down and all kinds of nasties came crawling out. It was a full-time job keeping up with the acronyms. And there were the retirees, the assets, those we’d recruited from the other side, so they could risk their lives and betray their country. Starting to see a theme here?”
She didn’t want to be involved. Didn’t want to hear this; wasn’t going to participate.
“There was one we called Bogart. Middle-ranking Stasi officer who’d come to us long before cracks started appearing. This wasn’t someone looking to save their skin. Or get rich. Remember that. It’s important later.” He picked up his phone, which was still resting on the arm of the chair, and stuffed it into his coat pocket. When his hand came free again it was holding a cigarette.
She said nothing.
“You’re not gunna tell me I can’t?”
“You foul my living space just by being here. Cigarette smoke’s not going to make a difference.”
He thought about that for a moment, then shrugged and tucked the cigarette behind his ear.
She wondered if he’d just wanted to make her speak.
“When the Wall fell, Bogart was offered the passport package. New life, new house, new car, the usual shit. Turned it down. Said the time for betrayal was over. From now on it was about rebuilding the country, and that meant cutting the cord. No more dead-letter drops, no more cut-outs, no further contact. And we all lived happily everfuckingafter. Gives you a nice warm feeling inside, doesn’t it?”
River had told her about the evenings he’d spent with his grandfather, David Cartwright—the O.B.—back when the old man was still in the light, and she had a vivid picture of the pair, sharing a history only one of them had lived through. This was a grotesque parody of that. And the strangest detail, the ungraspable fact, was that Lamb wasn’t drinking. Wasn’t smoking.
“Except the Cold War didn’t really end. It just hid behind closed doors, like Trump in a tantrum. So when Partner decided his own passport package wasn’t good enough, and a Civil Service pension wouldn’t keep him in the luxury he had in mind, well, it wasn’t hard to find buyers for old news. Such as who’d been chipping away at the brickwork when they should have been shoring it up.”
He fell silent. Maybe he was imagining a fire he could stare into. The best on offer was the winelight glimmer of the bottles.
“So Partner betrayed Bogart,” she said, when the silence became too much.
She might not have spoken. “There were quarterly sit-downs back then,” he said. “I’d come back to the Park and spend days with Cartwright, going through the diary, what happened when, who did what. Before he went picking daisies, that man had a mania for detail. Study the small cogs, and you’ll see which way the big wheels turn. Shame he couldn’t see what was happening under his fucking nose.”
“Nor did you.”
Lamb put his unlit cigarette in his mouth.
He spoke around it. “Dates and places, but never names. Wall or no wall, Berlin was a zoo, so we still played Berlin Rules. Even First Desk didn’t get to know a source’s identity, because that was the law. So in retirement Bogart remained Bogart, and only I knew who Bogart was, and Cartwright was fine with that, as he should have been.”
There came a noise from the corridor; someone leaving the lift. Footsteps down the hallway, a door opening, closing. It was unremarkable enough that it might have gone unheard, but Berlin Rules were now in play. Off-stage noise was enemy action. Any footfall might be the last thing you heard.
When all was quiet, he continued.
“Ever go drinking with your old boss? Might have been a contest. He could put it away. Thirst like a fucking camel. Unless he was pouring it under the table.”
She’d thought many things about Jackson Lamb, most of them bad. But it had never occurred to her he’d been a teenage girl. “So that’s it?” she said. “Charles Partner got you drunk, and you told him who Bogart was?”
The look he gave would have turned a younger woman to stone.
“Or enough,” she said, “that he could work it out and sell the name?”
“He didn’t have to.” Lamb’s words were hard as bullets. “He only had to sell a single syllable.”
That made no sense, until it did. What single syllable could make a difference? Only one Catherine could think of.
She.
Lamb wasn’t looking at her now, or at anything else. He might have been the genie hiding in the lamp, contemplating all the wishes he’d heard down the years.
“I didn’t think he’d noticed. End of the week, I went back to Berlin. Nothing happened until the following month.”
He inhaled dirty air through an unlit tube. His lungs must be dishrags, thought Catherine. Like something you’d pull from a blocked kitchen sink.
“There were only three female Stasi officers of that rank in that department at the time Bogart was operating,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been difficult to identify her. Bit of due diligence. A few weeks at most.”
He looked at the cigarette in his hand, rolled it between his fingers.
“But they weren’t fucking perfectionists, were they? So they did all three. No possibility of error, no overtime involved. Hard not to admire the practical approach.”
And then the cigarette disappeared. Up his sleeve, she wondered? Or had he just made it vanish; cast it back into the past he was staring into?
“Ever seen someone hanged with piano wire? For extra points, you tie something heavy to the victim’s feet. An iron is good. Leave the body long enough, the head comes clean off.”
“You saw them?”
“No. But I got to hear about it.”
“What did you do?”
“I heaved my fucking guts out.”
“Afterwards.”
“What do you think? I reported back to Cartwright. Because he was the brains of the Service.”
“You told him you’d leaked Bogart’s gender, and now Bogart was dead. You joined the dots. You pointed him at Partner.”
And then you shot Partner in his bathtub, she thought. Where I found him.
The memory of it tasted fresh, and probably always would.
Lamb lifted the bottle from between his thighs, and re-examined its label. For a moment she thought he was about to draw its cork with his teeth, but instead he leaned over and replaced it next to its neighbours. And Catherine had to fight a sudden urge to grab it and crack its seal herself. Isn’t that what she’d been working up to? She’d been teetering on the edge so long that not to fall would disappoint. Not to drink, not to succumb: that would be an act of betrayal.
But she wasn’t going to do so with Lamb as a witness.
And then something he’d said struck her.
“This happened the previous year, you said. The year before you killed him.”
He looked at her, his skin mottled in the hazy light.
“So why did you wait so long? Friend or not, mentor or not, he was a traitor. He had your asset murdered. For money. So why’d you wait, Jackson? Were you hoping you were wrong?”
The cigarette was back, dancing between the fingers of his hand like a miniature baton he’d failed to pass on. Always, he’d be left holding it.