One day I noticed amongst the papers on Bret's marble-topped table a coloured postcard. It was van Gogh's portrait of a blue-uniformed postman, a picture of which Gloria was inordinately fond. 'Could that card be for me?' I asked him.
'No,' he said immediately and without hesitation.
'You're sure?'
'It's my private correspondence,' said Bret.
I felt like grabbing it to see but the table was big and Bret reached it before I did. He put it in a drawer. I knew it was a card from Gloria to me. I just knew it.
After that I was seldom allowed into Bret's 'office', and when I did go in there his table was always cleared. And in all that time the only correspondence that was forwarded to me was a picture of Paul Bocuse. It was postmarked Lyon and was from Tante Lisl describing the meal she'd eaten.
They put me and Fiona into a comfortable guest house set apart from the main buildings. It was complete with kitchen, dining room and a young Mexican girl to make breakfast and clean and tidy. Fiona spent four – sometimes five – hours almost every day with Bret. Neither of them emerged to eat a proper lunch. Sandwiches, fruit and coffee were sent into them and they carried right on talking. Bret had a part-time secretary but she wasn't with them during these sessions. His large and very comfortable office, with its window grilles and security locks, had maps and reference books and a computer that would feed into his screen and/or print out anything he required from all sorts of data banks. Everything Fiona said was recorded on tape and locked away in a huge safe. But there were no transcripts – all that would come later. This was the first run-through so that Bret could alert London and Washington to anything urgent.
Sometimes I went in and listened, but after a few days Fiona asked me to stay away. My presence made her too selfconscious, she said. I was hurt and offended at the time, but one-to-one was the usual form for such debriefings, and I'd never much liked having someone 'sit La' when I was doing one of these deep analysis stunts.
So I swam in the blue outdoor pool, caught up on my reading and listened to the 24 hours a day classical music on KSCA-FM or to cassettes on the big hi-fi. Most days I swam with Mrs O'Raffety, the artistic old lady who owned the place, and who had to swim on account of her bad back. And most days we took lunch together too.
I would have liked to go into Los Angeles, or, failing that, go for a beer in Santa Barbara which was much nearer. Walk along the beach, drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, do the tour of the Hearst Mansion – anything to break the monotony. But Bret was unyielding: both of us were confined inside La Buona Nova compound surrounded by the chain-link fences, the armed Mexican guards and the dogs. It was a prison, a nice comfortable prison but we were sentenced to stay there for as long as the Department decreed. I had the nasty feeling that that would turn out to be a very long term indeed. But what could I do? It was for Fiona's safety, said Bret. There was no arguing with that.
One night, soon after arriving, I'd tried to talk to Fiona about her time with Stinnes and his merry men. We were preparing for bed. She answered normally at first but then she grunted shorter replies and I could see she was getting very upset. She didn't weep or anything as traumatic as that. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if she'd done so: it might have helped her. But she didn't weep; she climbed into bed and curled up small and pulled the bedsheet over herself.
Each evening we'd eat dinner with Bret, our hostess and her son-in-law, an amiable lawyer. They were dull affairs at which the Mexican servants hovered all the time and the rest of us made small-talk. Sometimes I'd see Bret Rensselaer at the pool and exchange pleasantries with him. His only response to anything I said about Fiona seeming unwell, was bland reassurances. The doctor had given her a physical the day following her arrival and she had lots of vitamin pills and sleeping pills if she required them. And he told me that she'd been through a tough time and generally treated me like a neurotic mother worrying about a child with a grazed knee. But the changes I saw in Fiona were perhaps not evident to those who didn't know her so well. The changes were all small ones. She seemed shrunken and her face was drawn, and she didn't walk absolutely upright in the attractive way that I remembered so well. There was the soft and hesitant way she spoke and the diffidence she showed to everyone from me and Bret right through to the Mexican house servants.
One evening at dinner she spilled a couple of drips of barbecue sauce on the tablecloth – the kind of thing I do all the time – and she slumped back in her chair and closed her eyes. No one round the table gave any sign of noticing it but I knew she was close to screaming, close perhaps to breaking point. The trouble was that she'd confide nothing to me, no matter how I tried to get her to talk. Finally she accused me of harassing her, so then I stopped and left it all to Bret.
Two days later Bret asked me to sit in with them for the morning session. 'There are a few things unexplained,' said Bret.
'From where I'm sitting there are a lot of things unexplained,' I said.
Fiona sat slumped in a big armchair. Bret was behind a table – an elaborate modern design of pink marble with polished steel legs – with his back to the tinted window. The garden was packed with colour. Against the whitewashed wall of the yard there were orange and lemon trees, jasmine, roses and bougainvillaea. There was no perfume from them, for the window was tightly closed and the air-conditioning fully on. Bret looked at me for a long time and finally said, 'For instance?'
'The traces of heroin in the Ford van.' It was a bluff and it didn't work.
'Let's not get side-tracked,' Bret said. 'We're supposed to be establishing the identities of the other people there.'
'Fiona can tell you that,' I said. 'She was in the car with them.'
'Erich Stinnes,' said Fiona somewhat mechanically. 'Plus a Russian liaison man. And there was a man I had never seen before. He arrived on a motor cycle.'
'Good! Good!' murmured Bret as he laboriously wrote it down in case he forgot. He looked up. 'Three men,' he said and gave a quick nervous smile. Bret Rensselaer was one of those slim elegant Americans who, whether sick or healthy, always look well cared for: like a vintage Bugatti or a fifty-carat diamond. Sitting behind his desk, golden pen in hand, he looked like a carefully posed photo in a society magazine. He was wearing tailored white designer slacks and a white tennis shut with a red stripe at the collar. It all went well with his white hair and made his tanned face seem very brown.
I wondered if the mysterious 'extra man' was going to be identified as Thurkettle. I didn't volunteer that idea, and I noticed that Fiona said nothing of his American accent.
'Have the monitors picked up anything?' Fiona asked.
'Nothing in any of the newspapers or periodicals and certainly nothing on the radio.' He gave another of his crisp little smiles and fidgeted with his signet ring, 'It would be surprising if there was,'
'And even more surprising if you told us about it,' I said.
Bret wasted no more than a moment on that one. He grunted and turned to Fiona again. 'Why would they burn the car, Fiona?'
'Bernard says it was to destroy the evidence,' she replied.
'I was asking you, Fiona.'
'I really have no idea. It might have been an accident. There was still one man there.'