‘Who was to be given the flag draped over the coffin? No family members present, she had cousins, second-cousins, but if you’re Southern Presbyterians of any standing you don’t want to draw attention to yourself by being seen by the coffin of a woman who never wanted a husband, it was to Max that the honour went, Lena had organised the whole thing.
‘The guard of honour presented the flag to your friend Max, who’d stopped believing in anything a long time ago, and especially in the American flag, he’d lost his faith the day he’d lost his boater, at the start of the century, he held up firm when they put the flag in his hands, dry-eyed, like everyone there, Lena didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body, Max saying as he got to the cemetery, “I have a feeling that there’s something intelligent inside me that stops me crying”, and Max found himself shedding tears when Leone Trice started to sing, everyone had been ready for Schumann, something robust, or even a Schubert melody, they’d been expecting the tears to well up but to be able to hold them back, a moment without ostentation, an ochre-coloured moment, the sort she liked.
‘And then Leone Trice started singing “Voi che sapete”, people were seated, and the aria, instead of rising through the air, spoke directly to them, “you who know”, Max in tears, half a century crowding back on him with those tears, and he stroked the flag on his knees, Arlington was because of what Lena had done during both wars, a military cemetery, didn’t Max tell you the full story? So what did you two talk about? On a cushion there were medals, Max said to me in his inimitable way “a few bloody medals, they’d make any storybook hero turn pale at the sight”.
‘Maisie wants to know everything about how to make Linzer, we shall do what she says, Misha, she’s one of Walker’s deputies, the CIA big man, a decorated veteran of the Korean War and the Cold War, he wants to be appointed an adviser to the White House, Maisie does whatever Walker advises her to do, she follows his lead, a good little black Republican girl, she’s the one we’ll have to deal with, she wants to know all there is to know about Lena, Lena who held Walker in her arms when he was a baby.
‘Maisie ate her profiteroles after finishing the cassoulet, she would have liked Lena to tell her what happened during the war, not just the Arlington connection, Maisie is curious, she wants to get her hands on the real file.
‘The one that doesn’t yet exist, Lena in 1943, the strained relations with her controllers, the trips to Spain or Portugal, neutral countries, Lena must have met a whole gang of people there, old contacts, she returned to Washington, set off again for Lisbon by way of Ireland, she was one of the few civilians entitled to travel by air, PanAm’s great transatlantic seaplanes, the same ones that she’d travelled in before the war, luxury birds converted for carrying generals and ministers, anyway, tense relations with her controllers, Lisbon, really means nothing to you? Not got a record of anything to do with it? We can picture the scene, dinner in a restaurant for lovers overlooking the port, “dear Lena, I’m so happy to have found you again, it’s hell and yet here you are”, the half-lit restaurant, with Portuguese watchers sitting just a few tables away.
‘The man strokes her leg, she kisses his ear, an old friend, he pets her leg under the tablecloth with his right hand, the left he’d lost along with the rest of his arm, was it at Stalingrad? Is he a soldier? Or an intelligence agent? What the hell is he doing there? Lena cuts his meat for him, she laughs, she makes him laugh, she holds out a forkful to him and laughs, the man’s right hand can stay under the table, Lena doesn’t try to stop him, two Lenas, one, high-end, eats, holds out a fork, prattles, the other, low rent, lets a man stroke her leg, is the man a hero of the Wehrmacht! Or a civilian? An aristocrat sickened by the regime? A huge problem, she has the beginnings of an explanation, no doubt when that hand finds its way into her knickers, not too much, I mean don’t let out too much of a sigh, just enough to show the man that she feels something.
‘In any case, the watchers have already taken note, you never saw a record of any of this, Misha? You are listening, aren’t you? I think you’re paying more attention now, the lady allowed the man named Berg to stroke her leg in the most outrageous way, she smiled, placed her lips on the man’s ear, at one point he said to her you aren’t just beautiful, you’re worse, the man’s hand sometimes moved out on to the table again, the lady kissed his hand, the hand went down again, the lady became hysterical, she laughed as she stroked the cheeks of the man named Berg, lots of detail of that kind in the watchers’ notes, a crippled German who was now out of control, a hysterical singer, it’s pretty clear to the watchers that this pair wouldn’t take much longer now, the restaurant is dark, many foreign lovers, but that’s no reason, the details are obscene, the watchers are careful about what they say in their report.
‘The man named Berg was recalled, never seen again, yes he was, once, remember? As to the hysterical American woman who was sleeping with a German in the middle of a war, she didn’t stay long in Lisbon, in America they must have reopened her file.
‘Always the same story, she’d been friendly with the Krauts since 1915, no one ever clarified exactly what role she’d played after 1933, maybe she was just a hysterical case, the people employed by the Portuguese secret police to spy on her submitted their report, and their superiors cheerfully circulated it widely via every one of their administrative channels, and lurking somewhere in those channels there was someone to pass the report on to the German Embassy, and someone else to do likewise for the Americans, a high price to pay for an evening of short-lived excitement, Lena was supposed to be gathering information about the state of mind of the German army, and Berg had presumably been given the job of sounding out this American woman about the possibility of an armistice, you can imagine that dear Lena would have given the Germans information about the state of mind of Roosevelt and his advisers, we had to walk on eggshells, because she was closely linked to the older Kennedy, the Germanophile.
‘Mustn’t get uptight, Misha, I’m not trying to make out that your Lena was a Nazi, that’s not what the file’s about, that’s all hearsay, but if I know all about it it’s because like you I know the rest, which Maisie would love to know, because she gets some very feminine intuitions, does our Maisie.
‘And also because she’s a musician capable of taking an interest in something that nobody spotted at the time of the funeral at Arlington, a sharp eye, on the list of all the wreaths was one which had been sent on behalf of “the Friends of the Winter Journey”, she’s certain you have things to tell her about that, she also found a note from your colleagues in Bonn, the ones who’d like to see you behind bars, there’s an issue concerning a former civil servant in your Ministry, I mean the real Ministry, a woman, an ex-civil servant in your Aufklärung who allegedly talked to them, story is they gave her a mission in 1956, no big deal, escort a woman on a trip by car from Budapest to the Austrian frontier, a strong-arm expulsion, end of August ’56, no need to get uptight, Misha.
‘I realise everyone knows the story, it’s been told often enough, but there’s one small para, “I was instructed to tell the American woman ‘it’s going to turn very cold’, just those six words”, that’s what interests Maisie, what your ex-civil servant said, just those few words, “it’s going to turn very cold”, apparently Lena never said anything about that, she told her debriefing in ’56 that she was one hundred per cent sure that the Soviets were about to attack, she told about how she’d been lifted, a very precise operation, but she never quoted those six little words “it’s going to turn very cold” nor said what they might have meant to her.