The Madness of July Page 4

  With that appeal, Bendo placed a hand on Grauber’s arm. He got nothing in return. As his voice had softened, Grauber’s had taken on a sharper tone and he shook his head. ‘It’s going to be easier if we don’t play it like that when we have to sit together in some damned room, wherever it turns out to be. You didn’t drift, you changed sides, old buddy.’

  Faced with the fact, they fell silent for a moment.

  Grauber picked up first. ‘And the question why isn’t the important one for me – you know that – it’s the beginning. Who, how, when? The timeline. All the stuff that’s going to help us in other places, with other people. The ones after you who’ll come along. They always do.’ It was the first cruel jab. Bendo was no longer the guy who’d slipped through the same streets as Grauber, a secret gunner in the same army, but an emblem of betrayal. A miserable statistic, and a wraith of a spy.

  But he hadn’t yet given up asking questions. ‘You say we’ve been waiting. I guess I have. But you – how long?’

  Grauber looked him in the eye and said, ‘No dice’.

  He listened to Bendo setting off on a detour, trying to steer the conversation up a siding as neatly as he could manage. It was absurd. For a few minutes there was a pretence that their conversation hadn’t taken place. Bendo spoke of another audit of European stations going on with the Langley bean-counters in charge, and London was in a sulk. ‘Really pissed.’ Berlin might scrape through, the island in the east that was still the bulwark and therefore protected to the last. Bendo might have been bred for its charms and demands. He flitted between the soldiers and the diplomats, happy to be neither one nor the other. ‘Liaison!’ he’d sometimes cry to friends. ‘I’m the whore who visits every bedroom, the highest and the lowest. Everyone knows, and they never give it a name. Just let me work the street.’

  His ambassador in Bonn, with whom he exchanged messages from his Berlin satellite, because that was the propriety that they observed for form’s sake, was a diplomatic bird of passage who’d worked clandestinely in an earlier life, and that helped. Knew some useful levers in Washington that he could jerk, a few old debts to call in. ‘You? How’s Santa Claus?’ Grauber shook his head with a thespian’s sigh, and he spoke inconsequentially about his own ambassador for a minute.

  But the atmosphere cooled quickly; Bendo was forced back to earth.

  ‘My time’s up. OK. Still have my uses, though, even if I’m going to miss out on all the shit in Poland. That’s coming, I promise you, and soon. Got some good lines in there, believe me. Just like us, in the old days. Never again.’ Grauber listened to him doggedly treading water, and was touched by the gentle, lingering boastfulness of the boulevardier spy. ‘I’ll miss it. The city that never changes.’

  He looked up. ‘Going across?’ he asked Grauber, playing with the leafy celery stick growing out of his cocktail. ‘London?’

  ‘No plans. No reason right now.’ Grauber was hunched over the bar, dealing with a softshell crab, his voice almost a whisper. They created their own pool of silence in the crowd. Bendo and he had shared so many secrets since their paths first ran together in Saigon in the full bloom of the war nearly a decade before, and taken them from the heat to the chill of the western front. History between them, ancient and modern.

  Bendo said, ‘I’m a loyal man.’

  Grauber spoke as if he hadn’t heard, the appeal dismissed. ‘You’re ready for everything that…’ he had unwittingly picked up Bendo’s fear, and stumbled over the words ‘… has to happen, whether or not we want it? It’ll take time to tell the whole story. Long days.’

  Bendo, however, wanted to complete his thought and wouldn’t leave his script. ‘I still think you can bring good out of bad. Always believed that. Keeps me going.’

  But the answering silence obliged him to answer Grauber. He raised the glass to his lips and said, ‘You’ll get what you need. Promise.’

  Grauber replied, ‘Names, places, times. I’m trying to make this work for everyone. That’s a promise, too.’

  Bendo looked sideways with eyes that had yellowed since they’d last been together in Berlin, when they’d walked for two hours in the Tiergarten. Grauber waited for a question, maybe a plea, and put his hand on Bendo’s for encouragement, the first time he had reached across since they sat down.

  Then Bendo said, ‘Sorry, of course.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Grauber.

  Their eyes met, and Grauber winced a little as if he was wondering whether Bendo might cry. Then, before fear turned to self-pity, Bendo shook his glass of iced water like a bell and in an improbable riff steered things away as best he could to baseball and summer camps. Two of his brood were already upstate for the summer, having a rough time in the Adirondacks. He was a Syracuse graduate, knew the mountains, and they agreed that the families might try to get up to their cabin on Saranac Lake before the fall. Grauber went along with it, for friendship’s sake, knowing that Bendo’s reserves would soon be depleted, and admired the effort.

  Spinning a gossamer web of normality, aware of the self-deception, they went through some stories of days long gone, remembered a few dead warriors who’d been friends, joked about a promotion that had just junked an A-star under-secretary at State with a hack who was a five-star Pentagon nark to boot, and concluded that nothing changed. ‘Whatever,’ said Bendo flapping a hand in a gesture of faux-aimlessness. You toiled uphill, and hoped there was only a gentle slope on the other side. That’s how it went. They carried on, whatever, and rolled home in the end. Grauber could hardly bear it.

  ‘We keep things hanging together,’ said Bendo. ‘Always been the same. Can’t ask for more.’ He hand was shaking as he reached for his glass.

  Grauber said quietly, ‘And we look after our friends when we can.’

  Bendo accepted that he had to meet his eyes again. ‘Please,’ he said. The restaurant seemed to dance around them, the noise rising, but they were still. ‘Maria?’

  Grauber shrugged. ‘She’s sad.’

  ‘Friends,’ Bendo said, as if he hadn’t heard, and raised his glass. Grauber waited. Nothing more. Bendo was the first to turn away, and finished his drink. They tidied up, and Grauber paid. Bendo thanked him, and his eyes moistened again.

  They were in the street a minute later. ‘Ready,’ said Bendo, without turning towards Grauber, his voice rising unexpectedly. ‘That’s all. We’ll talk. They know where I am. Now they’ll be watching.’

  ‘Sure,’ said his friend, falling into step. ‘But it will be me who sits with you. That’s a promise. Hope you’re glad.’ There was no answer.

  Together they strolled up to the concourse. Bendo was at the Algonquin so they slipped through to 44th and Grauber joined him in the lobby to say hi to the cat he’d known for years. The two friends shook hands as if their last bear-hug was already behind them, and parted. ‘Soon,’ said Grauber as Bendo pulled open the door for him, giving him a bow and looking for a moment like an oversized bell-boy. They said no more and Grauber turned away to the street.

  A gentle ten-minute walk, good thinking time, found him at Third Avenue where he pulled over a cab and headed for the mid-town tunnel and La Guardia.

  Berlin was in his mind, nights with Bendo and the melancholy music of the streets, and the moment when Maria told him what she knew and what had to be done.

  The Thursday tide was starting to run through the airport, and he speeded up to beat the crowd. Fifteen minutes, but they would still let him buy a ticket at the gate. Long might it last. The clerk whizzed his roller across his credit card for an imprint. Grauber scribbled a signature on the carbon copy and the ticket was in his hand. Less than a minute later he was stowing his backpack in the rack and looking for a seat where he might sit alone. He thought there was a chance on the right side, halfway back, and settled in.

  For a few minutes, he thought he might survive. There was lawyer talk from the seats behind, a mother and child across the aisle, but still an empty seat beside him, where he’d placed a book and
a New Yorker as a discouragement. He looked away as a wide, swaying figure began to move towards him from the front of the plane, and feared that he wouldn’t find peace. The man flopped down beside him, handing him his book and his magazine, then dug around for his seatbelt.

  ‘The shuttle. That’s America. Roll up, and you’re on. No crap.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Grauber. He smiled a welcome, turned away as if to snooze, and as the plane left the gate he settled in his favourite zone, just under the surface of full consciousness, where he could think with bracing clarity and shut out the world.

  Maria had tapped him on the shoulder. He wasn’t going to be sent away, as he had been so often in the past, but his knowledge was needed. The benefit of the state he had attained on the plane – a dwam his mother would have called it, from her rattlebag of words – was that he could assemble his options before he rolled up at Maria’s. In his seven years at her side, he had done a job that was sensitive enough but which concealed more secrets underneath. Thinking about her message, he guessed that Maria was back on his special territory, maybe in the town where he had worked his own network on the embassy posting that had ended five years before. It had often been unhappy despite the benefits it bestowed on him, but had been the making of him. As he told Hannah, when she worried about the glooms that had visited him regularly in London and sometimes returned, contradictions were his business.

  He made a list in his head. Maria had discovered something that only he would understand, and it had blown up quickly. Otherwise there would have been noise: meetings, secure memos, a call for papers, a cry of ‘Heave-to’ running through the ranks. The boys would have jumped. Fat Zak Annan would have phoned in a whisper from Fort Meade, and Barney Eustace, a beanpole farm boy from Tennessee, whose joy was boozing and schmoozing on the embassy listening circuit and bringing home scuttlebutt for Maria, would have been sending messages in his own near-indecipherable code. But none of this had happened. Grauber drew two conclusions.

  First, whatever information she had received had arrived in the last day or two. It was Thursday. He’d take a punt and say that it concerned something that had occurred – or changed, or been changed – since the weekend. Then there was Joe, whose name Maria had slipped into her message.

  Joseph O’Connell Manson was up to something, had to be. They had last met a few months ago, Joe having returned to his natural territory in Miami and the sultry ganglands beyond. But they had shared London connections, and Grauber suspected he had been drawn into the ploy that had preoccupied them in recent times, maybe making a few European runs. He could see smiley Joe in his mind’s eye – gangly, blond, hopelessly attractive, wilful and vulnerable.

  By the time they were over Delaware, the ocean haze stretching to the horizon and the plane scything into its descent, Grauber knew these were the only preparatory thoughts worth assembling, fragmentary though they were. He was content that he had done all he could with what he knew. Maria would lead him on.

  She was a star. Tall, with black hair, a swan’s neck and marble-white skin, she carried herself and her secrets with gutsy élan that concealed everything. Grauber goaded her as an obvious Irishwoman – green Mafia, St Patrick’s Day madness, the Celtics – and they had a store of jokes that they would mine when they met to cheer themselves. She had a laser brain that allowed her to concentrate in a way that Grauber had seldom encountered. She was always there before you, spotting the complications that were going to multiply. He looked forward to dinner, eased himself down to the next level with the plane, changing his mood easily, almost asleep.

  His companion spoke for the first time since New York.

  ‘Work?’

  ‘Kind of. You?’

  ‘Fun in the nation’s capital.’ He paused. ‘Family wedding. I care about family. You?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Grauber. ‘That’s all that matters.’

  He turned to the window, and the skyline. They had circled southwards and were following the Potomac upstream as they dropped towards National. He watched the sun strike the dome of the Capitol and send out an ivory-white gleam, and as they touched down he saw the shimmer of heat moving across the city. He wished his companion well with his wedding, following in his wake to the arrivals door.

  Using coins instead of his credit card, he made a brief call from a phone in the arrivals lobby.

  ‘We’re nearly home. He’s coming in at last.’

  The response was just as brief. ‘Thanks, Abel.’

  4

  Will Flemyng spoke as if dealing with an arm’s-length matter of fact that would not directly touch him. ‘The real question here is whether or not I know this American person. He may know me, but so what?’

  Lucy said Paul Jenner had offered no clue, only a summons to attend.

  ‘I’ve not been expecting anyone. There’s been no message. This dead man has come from nowhere,’ Flemyng said, shifting papers around as if he had to maintain physical contact with his desk. ‘That’s the first thing to consider. A friend or someone unknown?’

  Lucy was straightening her hair in the mirror near the door, finding calm in familiar rituals. She said, ‘The old story. Strangers or brothers?’

  At this, Flemyng fell quiet for a full minute, and Lucy filled it by leaving the room with an embarrassed bustle to check her desk. ‘A straight question,’ he said when she returned, tapping his desk with two fingers. ‘D’you think I’m in trouble?’ His head was down.

  ‘I haven’t the least idea,’ she said, her voice almost as steady as his, ‘and nor do you. But we’re going to find out. Paul Jenner’s expecting us.’

  Flemyng stood up and put on a tie, checking the knot in the mirror. Turning round, he asked if she felt any excitement, and she responded without hesitating. ‘I’m afraid I do, a little. This is the kind of thing I think I may have been waiting for. A change in the pattern. Is that embarrassing?’

  Flemyng shook his head.

  ‘I understand, you know. I really do,’ Lucy ploughed on. ‘Thank God, for conferences and treaties. Ivan the Terrible.’ The signing in Paris, five days away, would account for the topmost layer of government, and there were preliminary visits that had cleared the field of their masters, overseas trips planned on the assumption of summer calm and torpor. The great illusion.

  Walking to the window, he turned his back on her again and drew the flimsy white curtains back, forcing a change in the atmosphere. He was pulling himself down. ‘How would you describe it?’

  ‘A nightmare, wherever it leads us.’

  He was staring towards a blazing sun as she said it. Lucy was arranging the same papers on the desk that he had shifted around more than once, but her voice had recovered a businesslike tone. He turned his head as she spoke again. ‘A mysterious man’ – he noted the extra information – ‘has been found dead, cause unknown, and the whole hen coop has gone mad. That’s all.

  ‘He’s turned up in a strange place, apparently. Paul wants to tell you himself. Bells have been ringing from here to Kingdom Come.’ Then she put both hands on the desk and leaned forward in the pose that he knew so well, her hair hanging forward so that her face was half masked. She tossed it back and made a characteristic modification of a statement that she considered too loose. ‘Well, not quite. Nobody out there – even along this corridor of ours – has a clue that it is happening. No press, nobody. Believe me. Paul said only two things, apart from requesting us to get you to him soonest.

  ‘One, your phone number has turned up on a death scene, and two’ – here she paused for a moment, fixing Flemyng’s eye – ‘the Americans haven’t been told. Don’t ask me why, or why he should say that to me.’

  Flemyng left the window and went to sit in a corner of the room, as if to postpone their departure. The reading chair was an introduction of his own, a gesture of independence against the government-issue stage set, and stuffing poked out from under the seat. His blue linen trousers were rumpled and his shirt well-worn. One hand massaged a cheek o
n which stubble still showed – it had been a dash from home that morning – and the other kept up a regular beat on the arm of the chair. ‘Who is he?’ he said, without expectation of an answer. Then, with the ease that Lucy loved, he said, ‘It might be nothing. Nothing at all.’ His head was still and he looked straight ahead.

  She brushed herself down. ‘Let’s go.’

  Flemyng said, ‘Has anyone been in touch in the last hour or so?’

  ‘Jonathan Ruskin’s office wants you. Personal. That’s it.’ She pointed to his phone and went to the door. ‘Two minutes. Then it’s Paul. Are you going to ring Ruskin?’

  Flemyng moved to his desk. ‘Not now. One family thing. I’ll be quick.’

  Soon, they were walking together down the stairs and across the courtyard into Whitehall. Within four minutes they arrived at Paul Jenner’s door, having passed from the street without being stopped, only giving a nod towards the glass box at the end of the corridor. A sleepy guard behind a whirring fan waved them through.

  Inside the cabinet secretary’s lair, high summer seemed to be at bay. The heavy curtains on the wide windows that opened towards the park were half closed, and someone had switched on a tall lamp that cast a pool of light in the corner under the Disraeli portrait. Paul’s desk, set at an angle so that visitors coming through the door didn’t meet him face-on, was an elegant defence against chaos. Flemyng could see three files of different colours lying closed, side by side, and not much more: a metronome that seemed marooned there, a few pens in a fish-shaped glass dish and a small bronze figurine keeping watch over the three phones, her arms meeting over the head. Paul was a balletomane. Otherwise, the desk was clear. Behind it was a bookcase that reached to the ceiling, each shelf neatly packed.

  Paul himself was standing in the corner away from the window, and as he approached them he unfolded his arms as if he’d been practising a formal pose before they arrived. ‘So.’ He said nothing more as he helped to pull two chairs into position in front of his desk. ‘Let’s try to straighten this out.’