‘First of all,’ Harper went on, ‘Flitlianov can still get these letters over here —’
‘We’re onto him all the time. If he does, we’ll take them off him here. And go ahead with Marlow and the Cheltenham deal as planned.’
‘What is this deal? What are you after there?’
‘You don’t need to know, Harper — just that it’s the crucial data on this new electronic one-time pad they’ve developed there. And if we get it — it’s the Rosetta Stone for us.’
‘A needle in a heavily guarded haystack, Andrei.’
‘Of course. But that’s the luck of Jackson. He was going back to learn about this very process in Cheltenham.’
‘Was going back?’
‘Yes. Marlow will be taking his place.’
‘And Jackson? What’ll become of —’
‘We’ll arrange all that. Nothing for you to do there.’ Popovich looked at Harper carefully. ‘You just talk to Marlow as arranged when you see him. Then go back to London. And wait. We’re going to need you back in England when the whole thing starts moving.’ Popovich finished with his teeth, rinsed out his toothbrush and spat vigorously into the flow of water.
‘And what about Marlow?’ Harper asked. ‘How will you persuade him?’
‘I think he will be persuaded by Jackson’s fate.’
‘I see.’ And Harper did see now, and he sighed.
‘Good.’ Popovich replaced the toothbrush on the rack above the basin. ‘Good, good, good.’ Then he looked at his face studiously in the mirror, rubbing his chin gently. He turned to Harper invitingly. ‘I like that after-shave. What’s it called? I must try and get some.’
13
It all happened very quickly — that evening in the UN building a few weeks later, late summer, the sun still blazing damply everywhere outside, but cool as ever in the false weather of our huge aluminium shrine.
Helen had left several weeks previously with the children with nothing of my business with her resolved. I had seen her only once more alone after our weekend upstate, and that only for ten minutes in the Delegates’ Lounge before Guy had joined us. And though I took the address she was going to, a rented house somewhere outside Cheltenham, and said I would look them both up if and when I got back to England myself, I didn’t really expect to see her again. Graham was dead to her, and, I inferred, I would be too as far as keeping quiet about her real work was concerned. I never told her about the man I’d seen with binoculars on our ride upstate. Instead I suggested that it might be best if I simply kept out of the way. It was a low-keyed parting, but one of mutual trust at least. I was not to be involved there. Hopefully, indeed, after my talk with Harper when he’d suddenly turned up to quiz me a month before, I was to be out of the whole business by the end of August, if no one in New York contacted me, and back to London to some undecided future.
Helen Jackson was out of my life and in our last conversation I’d simply feared for her future with Guy — the long days coming to them both, full of enmity and hopeless disgust. Why didn’t they separate or divorce, I asked her again?
‘The children,’ she said, without conviction.
‘But if you go on destroying each other like this, what use will either of you be to them?’
‘Yes, I know. Maybe a month apart will help.’
She was prevaricating, postponing. She said, ‘It’s difficult — you wouldn’t know — to throw everything away of a family, a relationship, even when it’s been as bad as ours. It’s really difficult.’
And yet I knew that in the days when Graham had stood happily on her horizon she had wanted just that, was willing to lose everything in the way of family mementoes. It was simply that now she had full knowledge of her isolation, and this was why she would stay with Guy. She had no one to go to. And she was a woman, I had recognised, who moved always towards people, who fulfilled herself with them more than with ideas or things. And then, too, she was very tired at that moment of stage-managing her life and I think she felt the need for fate to take a hand in her affairs for a while.
On that last evening the offices were nearly all empty on my floor. But I’d stayed behind, having had a message left on my desk — from Guy’s secretary as I thought — saying that Guy would like to see me before he left and would come by around six o’clock.
It was Guy’s very last moment with the UN. There’d been a small drinks party for him the previous evening. And that day he’d simply come in to tidy up, get his papers, and sign off. He was flying back to London first thing next morning. The rest of his furniture and effects were coming over by ship later.
Of course, with Guy they’d chosen exactly the right moment to move, when he’d finally left his office on the floor above mine, had all his papers with him and so on. And they knew I’d be expecting to see him before he left, would find nothing strange in the message from his secretary.
But when he came into my office he was with two other men — right behind him, pushing him into the room quickly and then locking the door. They were both in smart dark suits, very properly dressed, one of them carrying a briefcase, the other with very long, sinewy arms, almost to the point of deformity, like a nineteenth-century prizefighter. Their faces were anonymous, bureaucratic, perfectly part of the building — calm and without any expression: two government servants from one of the ‘great powers’ holding their cards close to their chests before the 1014th meeting of the Decolonisation Committee. And I thought for a moment, with their locking the door, that they must be colleagues of Jackson’s from Intelligence in London come to question me again about my non-existent progress in New York.
I thought this, at least, until one of them drew a gun and pointed it at me and the other started to undress Jackson. He took his coat off first — Guy was in one of his finest pin-stripes — and the moment he laid his hands on the lapels Guy started to protest, quietly and politely at first, as though making a small but important criticism to the secretary of his London Club.
‘No. No, please!’ Now he was utterly shocked by the effrontery of this initial touch — this touching him, this intimate proximity without so much as a by-your-leave. He didn’t seem to mind the rest of the disrobing so much.
But it was quite terrible to watch, this indignity in this formal man who had so carefully dressed himself that morning, as he did every morning — terrible to see this sartorial destruction, for clothes were something which Guy had put a lot of his life into — Savile Row coat, waistcoat and trousers, the pale blue sea-island cotton shirt, the fine silk old-boys’ tie, gold cuff-links, the hand-made dimpled leather shoes: they all piled up on my desk against his intermittent, pleading voice: ‘No. No! For God’s sake, what are you doing?’ — as if he thought he was going to be raped by them. And indeed at that point I had no idea what they were up to.
Yet, in some sense I knew, seeing Guy being stripped: for I had watched the destruction of a man long before the real end, the desecration of life before life in the flesh was gone: a lifeless skeleton when he was finally nude, six feet of naked emptiness, his neatly groomed hair tossed around, the elegant face disrupted fearfully, fallen, as though bones had been broken in it, and red: the whole of his face from the neck upwards turned a bright, blushing red — all his lanky poise utterly destroyed as he looked around him with a sort of terrified prudery, as though Matron had suddenly come up on him in the shower after cricket thirty years before.
I saw all this and was so saddened by it that I hardly noticed when the other man with the awful gangly arms came over and started to undress me. But I’d had the message by then and did it for him. It never occurred to me to make any struggle. I suppose that was wrong.