‘Also food, medicine, clothes…’
‘Uniforms.’
‘You want us to buy books?’ asked the woman.
‘I would prefer it immensely,’ said László. ‘But tell me, where would this case have to go?’
‘Can you not guess?’ asked Emil.
‘No,’ said László, ‘not at all.’
‘Where are you most qualified to go? Where would you not be a stranger? Where do you know the language…’
‘The language?’ So that was it! He had been chosen not because he was “a friend of justice”, but because he spoke an impossible language!
‘You want me to go to Hungary?’
‘To Budapest,’ said the woman.
László threw back his head and laughed: he couldn’t help it. What fun the gods were having with him now! It was strange, however, that he had not seen it coming.
‘Who,’ said Emil, leaning forward and lighting a cigarette, ‘could suspect your motives in going there? You know the city…’
‘I have not been there since ’91.’
‘How much does a city change in six years? And you have relatives there.’
‘Two rather dim cousins. A very elderly aunt. My brother…’
‘…is in America. We know all this. The point is that I would be a foreigner there. My presence would immediately be suspect. I am also well known to the Serbian informers in Paris, of whom there are many. The moment I left my apartment it would be reported.’
‘But why Budapest?’
‘That is more than you need to know,’ said the woman.
László shook his head. ‘You will have to do better than that.’
‘We go,’ said Emil, ‘wherever there are people who will provide the items that we need.’
‘I know Budapest has its share of Ukrainian mafia,’ said László. ‘Are these the people you are dealing with?’
Emil held up his hands, palms out. ‘As my colleague has said, that is more than you need to know. Or rather, more than I am at liberty to tell you. Suffice to say that when one goes shopping one does not always admire the character of the shopkeeper.’
László tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped the sweat from his eyes. ‘Supposing,’ he said, ‘that I considered doing as you ask – and for the moment I commit myself to nothing – when would I have to leave?’
‘Six, perhaps seven days’ time.’
‘And I would receive this case in Paris?’
‘We will give you the details when we have your answer. You must please inform us by fifteen hundred hours tomorrow. If we have not heard from you by then it will be assumed that you do not wish to help us. You will not be contacted again. And this meeting will not have happened.’
He passed over a slip of paper with a number on it. ‘Call from a public telephone. Do not say who you are. Simply ask “Is Françoise there?” Nothing more.’
‘Is Françoise there.’
‘We will take care of the rest.’
‘One more thing,’ said László. ‘You mentioned Kurt Engelbrecht. If I find that you have involved him in any of this I will go directly to the authorities and denounce you. Is that understood?’
‘Yes,’ said Emil. ‘Perfectly.’ He went with László as far as the head of the stairs, where the young man in the sports jacket was waiting for them.
‘You know,’ said László, ‘whatever anyone may have told you about me, the truth is I was never much of a “freedom fighter”.’
Emil smiled. ‘I did not think you were Che Guevara, monsieur.’
‘You see,’ said László, looking down into the well of the courtyard where the late afternoon sunlight was heaped up in a corner, ‘I couldn’t pull the trigger. Did you know that?’
‘We do what we can,’ said Emil. ‘Each in his way.’
‘Yes,’ said László. ‘But I did nothing.’ He turned to his guide. ‘Let’s go.’
Emil watched them from the top step. As they came to the turn in the stairs he said: ‘Sometimes we have a second chance, monsieur.’ He was not sure, however, if the playwright had heard him.
5
At 6 a.m. British Summer Time, flight BA902 from SFO floated through cloudbanks suffused with morning light, Sister Kim praying serenely, until England appeared in a rush of housing estates and tiny fields. An A-road, a motorway, an athletics ground, an industrial estate. It was a landscape without much grandeur to it, but from the air, at least, it had some quality of the homely, the delicately human, pleasing after so much time amid the towers and deserts of the American immense.
Alec was waiting for them as they came through the automatic doors at arrivals; a pale, weary-looking figure among the huddle of early greeters. He waved and smiled. Larry, carrying the big suitcases, smiled back, thinking how there was always at such moments a disconcerting adjustment to be made, as if the person who had come to meet you could never quite be the person you had expected. Even a face, a posture as familiar as his own brother’s, seemed subtly misremembered.
When he cleared the barrier he put down the cases. Alec held out his hand but Larry pulled him into a hug, immediately learning more of the true history of the last weeks than any amount of talking could have produced. Not just the fizz of tension in his brother’s body, but that smell of unhappiness, like a room in a house where children have been punished.
Ella turned up her face. Alec kissed her forehead.
‘Good flight?’
‘Crappy flight. Thanks for coming to get us.’
‘No problem.’
You’re looking good,’ said Larry.
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Alec, raising an eyebrow as though everything were irony.
As they crossed the road to the carpark, he said: ‘She’s coming back today. Una’s bringing her from the hospital around four.’
He gave this news so conversationally that Larry, the mesh of himself strung weblike between time zones, was unsure for an instant who Alec was talking about.
‘Mum?’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s fantastic! You hear that, El? Granny’s coming out of hospital!’ He was profoundly relieved. A hospital-bed reunion had been a miserable prospect, not least because hospitals had such odd associations for him. Places of entertainment. Places where he pretended to be someone else.
‘Is she better now?’ asked Ella.
‘Maybe a little better,’ said Larry, glancing at Alec. ‘But just a little.’
‘She has to take her medicine,’ said Ella, sternly.
On a steadily filling motorway they drove with the sun livid in the rear-view mirror, the Renault creaking and rattling, never quite making seventy. The brothers talked of Alice, though always with an awareness of Ella wide awake in the back seat. It did not take Larry many questions to discover that Alec had not visited her in the hospital. For this, Alec offered no explanation or defence. He didn’t say ‘I couldn’t. I tried but I couldn’t’, and Larry did not pursue it, though it angered him a little. After ten hours in the air it was difficult to have much patience with other people’s fear, their shortfalls. And Alec’s failure to do something as simple as drive to a hospital indicated that things were rather worse than he had imagined. He told himself that this was OK, that they would manage, but it gave him a sinking feeling, as if having run almost to the end of his breath he had looked up to see ahead of him vast distances still to be travelled.
They came off the motorway at Coverton – ‘Can you smell the sea, El?’ – then drove over the moor. The villages they passed were tidy and prosperous, almost suburban, the barns and old village schools converted into private houses with expensive foreign cars outside, but the hedgerows were still tall and in their way unmannerly and uproarious with June.