She started one of her long smiles, a rising beam of fun coming over her face, like sunlight emerging, drifting slowly into a blaze from behind a dark cloud. She was one of those women who, in an instant, can fill themselves with happiness — as if she had a tap in her soul, a confident fountain of truth and trust which bubbled immediately for everyone at her request.
‘I’d like to hear more about it. The novel …’
‘Why don’t you tell me first?’ she leant back, withdrawing her favours for a moment, bargaining gently. ‘You’re going to have to trust me, aren’t you? I know too much already. Or are you thinking of knocking me off? That’s how it works, isn’t it, in the stories. Hitchcock and James Bond. I have to be “liquidated”.’
More laughter, more happiness. It was as though I were the feed in a comic act she had hired me for. ‘Anyway, why the novel, why the past? Why not things now? About you. About me. Isn’t there always time later for the past?’
She seemed to be propositioning me.
‘I’m fascinated,’ she said, suddenly, sharply, apropos of nothing, like one of her characters in White Savages.
‘About?’
‘Having coffee with a spy.’ She said in a deep, funny voice, ‘Do you carry a revolver?’
‘No, as a matter of fact. No guns, no golden Dunhills, no dark glasses.’
‘No vodka martinis either — very dry, stirred and not shaken. Or is it the other way round?’
I felt the skin on my face move awkwardly, creases rising inexplicably over my cheeks. Then I realised I was smiling.
‘Yes, I drink. Sometimes. Bottles of light ale, though. I’m a spy from one of those seedier thrillers, I’m afraid.’
‘Let’s have a drink then.’
‘Here?’
‘God no. Upstairs.’
I looked at her blankly.
‘Women are out too, are they? Not even “sometimes”? What a very dull book you are.’
‘I disappoint you.’
‘Not yet.’
She stood up and tightened her belt a notch. She was already pretty thin.
Her apartment was on the 10th floor, with almost the same view of the East River as my office had, except that we were further upstream now, and closer to the ground: she saw less of the huge northern horizon than I did but she was closer to the boats. A big silver motor cruiser, rigged out for deep-sea fishing, moved down the current in the last of the sunlight, a burly figure with a beard and a baseball cap at the helm.
It was one of those very modern, expensively decorated New York Design Centre apartments made for money to live in, not people.
She fiddled with a bottle of Fleischmann’s gin, vermouth, lemon and a bowl of ice which she’d brought in from the kitchen, handling the component parts smartly, like a nurse with a hypodermic tray in her long, clever fingers.
‘Well, what about the book then. What do you want to know?’
‘I was interested in the woman he was with.’
‘Miss Jackson?’
‘Mrs.’
She came over with the drink and sat down on the floor opposite me. But this wasn’t comfortable, so she sat bolt upright instead, like an idol, cross-legged, her narrow back arched forwards, as thin as the stem of the martini glass.
‘Yes, she wasn’t just his secretary. I knew that. Well, what about her — you’ve finished the book?’
‘No. What happens?’
She leant towards me, arching her back between her legs as though starting something in yoga, putting her glass on the floor between us.
‘Why you? Who are you?’
I had postponed the decision. But now I made it willingly: I would tell her the truth, or some of it anyway. I felt perfectly confident of her discretion; talking with her I had sensed almost immediately a quality that I had missed with everyone else since I’d left prison — with the Jacksons, with Wheel and all the men in London: the sense of rational life in a real world. With this woman there were no flaws — no lost affairs, no unsatisfied obsessions, no old wounds, no guilt that would warp the future. I could see now how, by comparison with those others, she was quite free of that air of impending calamity which marked them and which I had not recognised before.
She had come out of Africa and into the white man’s world and had gone beyond the diseases of both: she had left the savagery and the cleverness equally — a person, one felt, who had thrown doubt and enmity and jealousy right away. She was dark from the Dark Continent but her vision was completely bright, an astonishingly clear heart in the darkness. It was a simple thing to tell the truth with her.
So I said, ‘I was never a spy. But now I’m involved in that stupid game, for boys with guns, and I don’t play it well. British Security are using me as a stalking-horse. George Graham, the real one, has been working for the Russians for years. They caught him in London a few weeks ago and replaced him with me — we share a similar sort of background — and I’ve been sent over here to wait for some of his Russian colleagues in a KGB network to contact me, and then hand over their names. There’s more to it. But that’s the essence — and I’m liable to get my head knocked off if the KGB or anyone else finds out.’ I looked at her seriously.
She laughed. ‘That’s the corniest story.’ But she believed me. ‘My God!’ She paused, considering, I suppose, the guns and golden Dunhills and all the rest of the childish impedimenta which my words must have conjured up for her — a world as unreal to her, I was sure, as it was to me. ‘Why risk telling me?’ she said.
‘You asked. And I need to know. I need to know as much as possible about Graham and his past — which is partly this woman.’
‘Your “life depends on it”.’
‘Perhaps. Insofar as my successful impersonation depends on it.’
‘Why? You’re not likely to run into this woman in New York are you?’
It was my turn to laugh. ‘She would have said just the same of you — if she’d known. I “ran into” Mrs Jackson on my first day here, just as I did with you that evening a few weeks ago.’
‘What a lot of accidents.’ She turned her glass slowly between her fingers, elbows leaning on either knee. Then she went on, even more precise in her words than before. ‘Yes, I know about them. Apart from what I saw of them myself when we were filming in Ethiopia, what’s in my book. My brother was the “detective” you spoke of — or one of them, they used several. That’s how I filled in a lot of my story.’
‘But — how? He can’t have been much more than a child at the time.’
‘So much the better. He may have looked that way — but he wasn’t. The whole thing appealed to him. Childish I suppose. I never followed the reason behind it all. Now I see it — it wasn’t a private inquiry this, but a government one.’
‘Apparently not. It was entirely private. Her husband had an obsession about her being with other men — and knowing all about it.’
‘An expensive sort of pornography. But the material we gathered wasn’t like that at all — not much sex: it was political.’