“Okay,” O’Farrell said, not really knowing to what he was agreeing.
“You’re out of balance,” Lambert said. “For months, maybe longer, it’s been difficult morally for you to go along with what you’ve been doing, right?”
O’Farrell nodded. There was a vague feeling, too vague for relief but something like it, at the admission, at talking at last to someone who understood.
“Why not?” Lambert said, not wanting an answer. “Within the strict lines of morality, how can you justify taking another life? It’s difficult to fit, whichever way you twist it.”
“More than difficult.”
“Is it, though?” Lambert demanded at once. “I said earlier they were clichés, but wouldn’t millions of lives have been saved and the suffering of millions more been avoided if Hitler and Stalin and Amin had been removed? Isn’t there the need for that sort of justice?”
“Decided upon by whom!” O’Farrell came back. “Who are these unknown wise men with clairvoyant powers that can’t be appealed! What gives them the right to sit in judgment!”
Lambert sat nodding, as if he were agreeing, but said, “That’s a weak argument. Won’t stand examination. Have you, personally, ever been asked to move against anybody in anticipation of their evil?”
O’Farrell did not reply for several moments. “No,” he admitted begrudgingly.
“Have you, personally, ever had the slightest doubt of the guilt of the person in any mission you have been asked to undertake?”
“No,” O’Farrell conceded.
“If any of them had appeared in a court of law and the evidence against them had been presented, what would the judgment have been?”
“Guilty,” O’Farrell said. Hopefully he added, “Although it’s debatable whether the verdict would have been death.”
Lambert was ready for him. “Let’s debate it then. According to the judgment of their own country, was it more than likely that the sentence would have been death?”
“I suppose so,” O’Farrell said.
“Judged according to their own standards?”
“Yes,” O’Farrell capitulated.
“You were in Special Forces?”
“Yes.”
“Ever had any difficulty carrying out a morally objectionable order in the army?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I … it was …” O’Farrell stumbled.
“Because you had the right,” Lambert supplied. “You had a service number and a rank and usually a uniform and that gave you the right. More than that, even. If anything went wrong, as it went wrong yesterday in London, the ultimate responsibility wasn’t yours—”
“But it was yesterday,” O’Farrell broke in. “I didn’t have any right to kill Estelle Rivera.”
“So yon didn’t try to kill her!” Lambert said, equally insistent. “It was an accident.”
O’Farrell sighed, but with less exasperation than before. He definitely did feel better talking to this man, convoluted though at times he found the reasoning. He supposed that by a stretch of the imagination—a stretch he was still unprepared to make—the London incident could be considered an accident. He wasn’t prepared to dispute it anymore. “And I don’t have a rank or a serial number, either.”
“Part of the same problem,” Lambert said. “No official backing or support. Minimal, at best. Guess your great-grandfather operated that way a lot of the time, though.”
O’Farrell thought it was the first time the psychologist had strained too hard to win a point. He said, “A dogtag or a badge. I can think of them as the same.”
“So where are we?” Lambert appeared to feel the same as O’Farrell about his earlier remark.
“You tell me,” O’Farrell said, enjoying the temporary supremacy.
“Talked through for today, I guess.”
“I want to go home,” O’Farrell announced. “There’s nothing left for us to talk about.”
“Give me another day, to sort a couple of things out in my mind,” Lambert said. “Just a day or two.”
“One day just became two,” O’Farrell said.
“Evening of the second day. My word.”
“If it’s not, I’m going to test the quickness of the guys on guard,” O’Farrell said.
“Sure you are,” Lambert said, and O’Farrell regretted the bravado; he had sounded like a child protesting that he was unafraid of the dark when really he was terrified.
In addition to the genuine mourners, there was a large contingent from the Cuban security service and more from the Diplomatic Protection Squad. Rivera didn’t object, although he disliked having so many guardians constantly around him. “Highly professional and skilled” was the forensic description of the assassination; so Belac had gone to a lot of trouble, employing the best. But then, it was logical that the arms dealer would know the best. It was his business to know things like that. Beside him Rivera felt a slight movement, as Jorge clutched his leg. Rivera put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and pulled him closer. Jorge had cried a little in the church but had recovered now, in the churchyard, and Rivera was proud of him. At the touch Jorge looked up through filmy eyes and smiled slightly, and Rivera hugged him again.
Rivera kept his head bowed because it was expected but managed to look quite a way beyond the priest saying whatever he was saying over the coffin, which was resting on the lip of the grave. Rivera hadn’t expected there to be so many people. They were crowded together, solemn-faced, and the immediate grave area was a blaze of flowers; some of the wreaths were quite elaborate. He was glad he’d deputed a secretary to make a note of the names so he could write later.
The coffin was lowered. Rivera felt a nudge of encouragement from someone and took the offered trowel, casting earth into the grave, giving it in turn to Jorge. When the boy moved, there was a chatter of camera shutters. Rivera wondered if the photographs would appear in the papers belonging to Henrietta’s husband. After the bombing they had described him as a playboy diplomat, and he’d made a mock complaint to Henrietta.
Rivera thanked the priest, whose name he could not remember, and hesitated on the pathway back to the cars for people to murmur their regrets as they filed by. He murmured his thanks in return. Some of the women patted Jorge’s head as they passed. Rivera wished they hadn’t and knew Jorge would feel the same way, too.
The cortege had left from the embassy and not the Hampstead house because it still bore the burns and damage of the explosion, so it had been easy for Rivera to give the instructions to his First Secretary.
The man was beside him now Rivera said, “Well?”
“No, Excellency.”
“You sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Rivera was disappointed. He had quite expected the man to attend.
The line was almost over before the First Secretary leaned toward Rivera and said, “Here, Excellency,” and Rivera stretched out a limp hand to accept that of Albert Lopelle, Estelle’s French lover.
The formality over, Rivera hustled Jorge into the car but remained outside himself. To his First Secretary, he said, “You have to be wrong. That can’t be Albert Lopelle.”
“I assure you it is,” said the man. “I have met him several times.”
Rivera looked in disbelief after the Frenchman. He was so fat he walked with a rolling gait, and he was short, not much over five-five, and visibly balding. The handshake had been wet with perspiration, which was perhaps understandable, but Rivera guessed the man perspired a lot.
“Incredible,” Rivera said, finally entering the car. He felt offended that Estelle should have considered leaving him for such a man, empty though their marriage had been.
TWENTY-FOUR