Paris Spring Read online

  PARIS SPRING

  James Naughtie

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  About Paris Spring

  Paris, April 1968

  The cafes are alive with talk of revolution, but for Will Flemyng – secret servant atthe British embassy – the crisis is personal. A few words from a stranger on the metro change his life. His family is threatened with ruin and he now faces the spy’s oldestfear: exposure.

  Freddy Craven is the hero and mentor Flemyng would trust with his life, butwhen he is tempted into a dark, Cold Warlabyrinth, he chooses the dangerous pathand plays his game alone.

  Then a bizarre murder reveals a web ofsecrets, and his loyalty to family and friendsis tested as never before.

  As the streets of Paris become a smokefilledbattleground, Flemyng, like hisfriends and enemies, discovers that wheresecrets are at stake, lives are too.

  For everyone on the Today programme

  The early months of 1968 were a time of conflict and protest around the world. The Vietnam war was dividing the United States, which had half a million men under arms in south-east Asia, and it destroyed a presidency. Lyndon B. Johnson spoke from the White House on 31 March to announce that he was standing down as a candidate for re-election. Five days later, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and violent anger swept through the black ghettoes of America. In eastern Europe, challenges to Communist orthodoxy were alarming the Soviet Union. Throughout the spring, the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact threatened the reforming government in Prague, demanding loyalty to Moscow and reminding the Czechs of the military might that could crush them. West of the Iron Curtain, France was a cauldron of youthful anti-establishment unrest, for which the government of the ageing President Charles de Gaulle was quite unprepared. In the week after Easter, which fell on 14 April, Paris was a city on the brink of an eruption.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About this book

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  After the story

  Preview

  About the Author

  Also by James Naughtie

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  ONE

  ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before.’

  Will Flemyng turned his head a little to the left to look at him. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Paris may not be as big as it seems.’

  He had watched the man come into the carriage at Solférino metro station and move directly to a place beside him, taking a moment or two to settle. It was Flemyng’s usual hour, and he recognized that his companion, who hadn’t turned towards him to follow his own question, was not a regular. He could be certain, because the man was memorable. His left shoe seemed to have been built up, he wore old man’s trousers and an unlit pipe was pushed into his breast pocket, stem outwards so that it spewed unlit tobacco over his clothes. His navy blazer glistened with age, completing the picture of someone who might be expected to have a decade or two on Flemyng, and he seemed stiff with weariness. Yet his face was that of a youngish man, despite his greying hair, and a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand was incongruous, a fleck of gold in the dust. The effect was unsettling, a portrait split in two.

  It produced pleasure in Flemyng. He waited for the follow-up, which came as the train slowed down for the next station, the man having turned to face him.

  ‘It may have been at the Salle Pleyel last month. Did you attend the concert with the Gewandhaus? And perhaps the reception afterwards?’ His English was accented but accurate and flowing, the words delivered at a practised pace, and his gaze was direct. Flemyng shook his head.

  At the next stop the carriage thinned out quickly. The National Assembly was somewhere above. ‘So many civil servants,’ Flemyng said, and smiled. No reply.

  They reached Concorde, and Flemyng rose. ‘Someone else, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘But, who knows, we may see each other again on the metro. It’s like that, don’t you find?’ The man nodded as Flemyng stepped on to the platform, and he gently tipped a hand from his knee to say goodbye.

  On most mornings, Flemyng stopped for a coffee at a corner café on rue du Faubourg St-Honoré but today he walked directly to his office. The last days of April held the promise of summer and a stirring breeze with the dampness of coming rain seemed to brighten the streets. The sweepers had left pavements clean, and the trickle of water in the roadside gutters was a clear stream. Flemyng savoured the natural smells and sounds of the city. Bread from the café, the faint scent of blossom drifting from the trees over the wall, long trails of cigarette smoke from the workmen outside the apartments across the way and always the horns blaring down the street. Paris appeared content. But as the high wooden gate opened for him and he turned from the pavement into the embassy courtyard, he could see the security barricades being hauled into place at the Élysée Palace, a hundred yards away. The guard had been doubled at every entrance.

  May Day promised thunderstorms.

  Within five minutes he had reached his eyrie on the third floor, and before going to his desk he pushed open Craven’s door, giving a light knock as he stuck his head inside. ‘Freddy – can I see you, in ten minutes or so?’

  The room was filled with smoke, with yellowing curls on the ceiling, and through the fog a warm and gravelly voice welcomed him. It was quiet, and musical. ‘Be my guest, but give me a hint. A little clue, my boy?’

  Flemyng leaned forward through the doorway. ‘Well, I’ve just been picked up.’

  *

  Wilfred Craven ran a merry ship. Although his office reeked and the walls were drab, the one painting hanging askew, he contrived to give it spirit. A place for confessions and stories, a centre of operations that was also a hidey-hole from the world. A boys’ room. Freddy was a joker who rationed the high seriousness in his life, and made a stand against office tedium in the hope of keeping the flame of good humour burning. As an emblem of his regime he’d placed in one corner of his small room a mechanical wooden doll, half life-size – a grinning black figure with lurid painted lips, striped trousers and a patchwork jacket of many colours, who raised his bowler hat with one jerky hand when a glass was removed from the other, in Freddy’s case usually filled with Scotch and soda.

  His last ambassador, in Vienna, had ordered it out of the embassy, and for a while Craven secreted it in the garage with the rest of his fabled collection of ephemera. There were Victorian theatre bills, shiny boxing gloves from long-gone title fights, a model of HMS Victory made from matchsticks because he was a navy man, and the silk stockings of a music-hall star. Even a black ballot box he’d bought in a backstreet in Chicag
o to remind him of shenanigans, and the doll fitted in. He had brought it out of retirement for the entertainment of his boys in Paris, because they understood his need for the absurd.

  Taste didn’t come into it. Freddy Craven never wanted to forget the ludicrous things he’d known, sometimes the ones he’d done. He had spotted the doll in a small-town auction in North Carolina and knew that some day it would be a grotesque antique. So he took it home, and it still made him smile.

  Flemyng had been picked up. The young man, whom Craven had steered through his first secret forays in the streets of Vienna, had a quick eye and, precociously, the tender touch of a veteran. He would handle the contact delicately. Craven made a rough pile of the books scattered across his desk, crumpled yesterday’s newspaper into the bin and split the foil on a new packet of cigarettes. He lay back in his chair, grey waterspout hair flopping behind him and a country-check shirt tight over his belly, which was starting to shrink like the rest of him. With an effort, he put his feet on his desk and stretched out. Flemyng.

  The good-looking boy had arrived in Vienna green and eager, and with an advantage. Craven came of West Country farming stock and preferred the few youngsters who knew something of rural ways, taking them under his wing. Flemyng’s family was a little different, having an estate in Perthshire that covered forest and hill, but there was still a bond. Even as he felt the shadow of illness coming on, Craven found in Flemyng a listener and an outlet for old enthusiasms lived out on the front line, and often in the darkness beyond. They would talk for long nights, Flemyng drinking from the well of stories that Freddy wanted to pass on before they disappeared with him and became folklore. And it was on the orders of Freddy in Vienna that Flemyng had taken to the lanes behind St Stephen’s Cathedral on a November night five years before and crawled back to the embassy slashed from neck to right breast with a knife wound that nearly killed him.

  Craven was coughing when Flemyng knocked on his door a few minutes later, and took a moment to recover.

  ‘Apologies, my boy. One of my bad days, I can tell.’ He smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry, Freddy. Water?’

  He shook his head. ‘I want to hear it all.’

  Flemyng sat between him and the window. He was dark-haired and slim, dressed without ostentation and with natural style. His shoes were polished but his hair cut longer than anyone in the embassy except Craven, who was past all that. On this morning his shirt was white, and his tie was a soft green. The jacket of his grey suit hung over the chair, and he put his hands behind his head.

  ‘I was spoken to, on the metro.’

  ‘Did you get on at your usual station?’

  ‘Yes. Rue du Bac, at my regular time.’

  ‘A man?’

  Flemyng said, ‘East German, pretty sure. Not Russian anyway. We spoke in English. He mentioned the Leipzig orchestra and wondered if we’d encountered each other before, maybe at a party after a concert. I said no, which was true, and that was all.’

  But more than enough, said Craven, who promised to get an up-to-date book of photographs from the library so that they could look for a match. ‘Did you get the feeling that he wanted a meeting?’

  ‘No doubt of it,’ Flemyng said. ‘There was hardly any pretence.’

  Craven was making circles with both hands on the desk, tracing patterns on the leather. ‘Let’s consider, just for the sake of it, the possibility that it was a genuine inquiry, that came to him from a chance collision – that he did think he’d seen you somewhere before.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Flemyng. ‘He knew what he was doing, and I felt it. He was staring straight ahead when he started the conversation, and he’ll have known that I understood his purpose.’

  Freddy Craven smiled. ‘So?’

  ‘I’ll make sure I meet him again. I said we might bump into each other on the metro, and he’ll know what I meant. I wanted to put it to you so that we play by the rules without misunderstandings. Advice?’

  It took Craven some effort to stand up, and he edged round the desk, leaning on one hand for support. ‘The timing’s interesting, wouldn’t you say?’

  He looked through the window, with a hand on the back of Flemyng’s chair. ‘We know this place is heading for trouble. Wemyss was murmuring at the ambassador’s last night about revolution, although I’m not sure I believe in that any more. The Movement of 22 March – come on. Sounds like some South American fandango, and I’ve seen many a flop in my time. But you tell me the Sorbonne’s boiling. The unions can get everybody on the streets in May if they want to, as we know. They think the old man will panic.’ He waved towards the gardens of the Élysée beyond the walls, the high trees dipping in the wind. ‘I don’t, but they probably think it’s worth a try. Do you?’

  ‘There’s stirring,’ Flemyng said. ‘They think that if students can do it in Poland, they can do it here. Warsaw, Prague, why not Paris? They’re terribly serious, and I think there’s something else. The London demonstration. They think they’re more anti-war than we are, and it embarrassed them. They hadn’t thought they’d see police horses charging in London. They think they can do better.’

  ‘Maybe they will, maybe they will,’ Freddy Craven said.

  He put a hand on Flemyng’s shoulder and spoke quietly. ‘So why is now a good moment to make a play at you?’

  Flemyng said, ‘It depends on whether or not I’m a target. Is he a buyer or a seller?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Craven. ‘And there’s only one way to find out.’

  Flemyng said he still lived by one of Freddy’s first pieces of advice in Vienna – ‘never rush, unless you’re on the run’.

  So he would do nothing on the next day, and come to work by a different route. The following day, a repeat performance by another way. But on the third day, he’d catch the metro at his usual time at rue du Bac and sit in the same carriage, as near as possible to the seat he’d occupied that morning. ‘And we’ll let things take their course.’

  Craven said he’d have the photographs called down from the attic archive for the afternoon, so they should rendezvous for tea. ‘I have a little lunch lined up in the 7th and I’ll take a stroll through the Sorbonne afterwards.’

  Flemyng watched him struggle to the desk, putting all his weight on one hand as he swivelled round, and a gust of sadness swept over him. Freddy should have been in retirement by now, and the Paris posting was an indulgence all round. A long-service medal, with wine list attached. He was loved, could still run a sure-footed operation from his desk, and represented a story that Flemyng’s masters wanted to keep alive, against the odds. Because Craven was dying, and everyone knew it. He concealed as many of the signs as he could, but the decline had been obvious since illness had taken hold in Vienna. First his complexion had darkened to a deeper red, sounding the first alarm bell, and then, in the course of a few months, he’d whitened and started to wither. He still mounted displays of his old, irreverent style – he’d worn sandals at a reception for a parliamentary delegation the previous week, and been the happy talk of the embassy for three days – but these moments were throwbacks, no longer the real thing. His days were on the wane.

  ‘I can see the old reaper getting his hood on,’ he’d told Flemyng the previous week. ‘He’s wondering when to come for me.’ Like so many of his jokes, it was half true.

  But when they sat together that afternoon to look at the picture books, Craven was sparkling. There was a game on. ‘Let’s forget the Soviets. You say he was German, so I’ve got them here. Lined up in all their grey glory.’

  It took Flemyng only five minutes to trawl through the gallery of faces, some from the mugshots squirrelled out of the East German trade mission in a shared operation with the Americans the year before, and others snatched by Craven’s own favourite photographer at public events and gatherings of the diplomatic corps where the expressions were more cheerful, thanks to drink. But none of them reminded Flemyng in any way of the strange young man on the train, his youthful face im
prisoned in the body and the garb of a much older man. ‘He’s not here.’

  They looked at the pages of Czechs and Poles, and Craven insisted they checked the Russians. A run through the West Germans in case Flemyng had misunderstood. Nothing.

  ‘He’s new,’ said Craven. ‘Which gives us another interesting question. Has he been sent here with you in mind?’

  They couldn’t know, he said, and it would be a waste of time to theorize. So why didn’t they have a drink? They did, Craven playing his trick with the dumb waiter and Flemyng reminding himself that there was no chance of the bowler-hatted doll surviving Freddy, because no one else would take it on. Might he need to save the thing, and have it for his own? He could hide it at home in Scotland, and no one would know. The thought had a hallucinatory effect. Flemyng found himself drifting away.

  ‘I’ll be here all day on Friday.’ Craven was talking. ‘I’ll wait as long as it takes, but come to me as soon as you can.’ He was smiling, a glass in his hand and the light back in his eyes. ‘My last game, Will, who knows?’

  When Flemyng had left the room, and he was alone, the old man slapped his desk with delight.

  *

  On the platform for Line 12 at rue du Bac, Flemyng recognized a number of regulars who took the metro just before nine o’clock each day, and stood in his usual place. He took a seat in the third carriage from the front, as he had three days earlier. When the train slowed down for Solférino, Flemyng became aware of his nerves for the first time. He felt his stomach muscles twitch and he was surprised at the way his grip tightened on the briefcase on his lap, which he had emptied for the journey to work. Inside himself he was aware of a hollowness like the rush of vertigo in his legs on the edge of a drop.

  The train stopped, and the fourth man to enter the train was the German.

  He took a seat next to a window, diagonally across from Flemyng in a set of four, and their knees touched for a moment as he eased into his place and put his black felt hat on his lap. The carriage was full, and smoky. Flemyng smiled, aware that the other man’s nerves were likely to be in the same state as his own. He lived for such moments, and knew the tension they brought with them.