The Madness of July Read online

  He had his arm around her shoulders as they walked in, rediscovering the comfort of a room that he loved. There were South American rugs on the walls, half a dozen candles burning, warm wood everywhere, a welcoming round table set simply for two, and wide, inviting New England chairs arranged at angles to face a sofa with richly patterned red, green and orange cushions piled up. He sank straight into them. Maria was comfortable in this home, which she sometimes shared with an on-off lover who worked at State and whose existence was known only to a handful of friends. They guarded the fact. Grauber understood how difficult it was for both women, even with Maria’s experience of the shadows. Tonight, as so often, she was alone.

  He was pouring wine, expecting a few minutes of catch-up before business. There had been the lunch, after all. But Maria was quiet as she went to stir a pot that was filling the room with promise, checked the bread in the oven, letting loose a heady garlic cloud, brought in a platter of glistening peppers, and finally sat down in the low light with her hands resting on her knees. ‘Thanks for the Bendo news,’ she said. ‘I need a drink.’

  He said nothing, waiting for the explanation.

  ‘You’re going to London. Tonight.’

  Grauber moved to one of the wide chairs facing the window at the back of the house. Before he sat down he leaned over and reached out a hand. Maria came first. He breathed in. ‘Your message said I wasn’t. Tell me everything.’

  She said, ‘I wish. It’s not here yet, but there’s a storm coming our way, a big one, and it’s moving fast. Could blow itself out; my guess is not. A hurricane gathering speed.’ She circled a hand above her head.

  They both knew they did not have long. Grauber assumed he would be on the last red-eye from Dulles and there was time for her to tell him what he needed, and not much more. Not one of their happier evenings, but he felt a pulse of excitement. The atmosphere in the room was begging him to slow down; his mind sharpened.

  ‘Here’s a name you don’t know,’ she said. ‘Aidan McKinley.’

  He nodded, spread his arms. Maybe it was on a passport she would have ready for him, one he hadn’t used before.

  ‘Here’s a name you do know. Joseph O’Connell Manson.’ Spoken as if she were giving him a citation.

  Joe, dear Joe. Grauber thought of the first time they had played the street together. They’d concocted a New York operation of their own, targeting a Mexican at the UN who fell into their laps like a game bird brought down with a clean shot. He was a joy, and Joe had taken him with such delicacy that for the brief few weeks while they shared the intensity of the sting, Grauber had been rejuvenated by the bubble-haired, womanizing, danger-seeking bundle of fun that was Joe. A moth always drawn to the flame, he had a dash and an energy that Grauber associated with his happiest times. Such was Joe’s flair; but he recognized in him, too, a capacity for melancholy and self-destruction. Maybe that was why when they first met they had smiled instinctively like brothers, or lovers electrified by a single moment in the wildness of the dance floor.

  When the operation was over, Grauber had helped him out with a couple of contacts in London, together with his invariable warning: only if in trouble. He wondered if this was a summons to work with Joe again. ‘I adore him,’ he said.

  Maria reached for the bottle, and didn’t speak until she had topped up both their glasses, turning them ruby red.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  In silence, she raised a glass. Grauber, shaken but as quiet as Maria for a moment, did the same. Then together: ‘Joe’. They drank.

  Grauber shook his head to clear it, and put both hands to his brow. ‘When did you know?’ There had been no hint earlier in the day. ‘How?’ The tears for Joe had to wait.

  She got up and moved to the fireplace to fiddle with a candle on the mantelpiece that was reaching the end of its life. She found another one, lit it with care from the first, waited until the flame sent up a confident flicker up the wall and turned to Grauber in shadow before sitting down again. In memoriam, she repeated ‘Joseph O’Connell Manson,’ saying it with a nice flourish, her hand raised at the end.

  ‘I asked you to come here because I learned today that he’d left the reservation, gone on a private expedition,’ she said. ‘That’s all. A tricky one, about which I’m afraid I knew little. I was livid when I found out – you can imagine. Then I had a message this afternoon – did I know it was coming? – telling me this. He’s gone. You’ll remember Wherry. Well, Jackson has fetched up in the London embassy. Remembers old times. Gave me a call. Kind. He didn’t have to do it so quickly, but he wants to help.

  ‘My dear boy, Abel…’ his first name a sign that they were changing gear ‘… we’re in a hole. Joe, poor Joe, may have screwed everything up with his last fling.’ She sighed and almost thumped her arms on the cushions piled up around her. ‘Why? Trouble is, I know. We liked him ’cos of his weaknesses, that indifference of his, the mad passions. We loved it all, and now he’s gonna haunt us. Abel, I’m weeping for him. And for us.’

  The scene was familiar to him – the talk racing away, a story getting ahead of itself, the need for calm, which would come in time because he had never known Maria succumb to panic. He sighed to insert some heavy punctuation, watched her flop out, waited for a long minute or so, and said, ‘Explain. Take me there. Berlin. Bendo. Everything.’

  Maria gazed directly at him. ‘I have to start somewhere else, in this town, and tell you a straightforward story that most days wouldn’t lose us any sleep. Familiar… amusing, I suppose. But this has turned dangerous, unpredictable. A serpent worming its way into our business, yours and mine.

  ‘There was a time when your path and Joe’s never crossed. Different territories. Then the Mexican business, right? You remember how he was when he had his own patch. Miami, sunk in Little Cuba – that madhouse. You know Joe played both sides of the street, stirring up the exiles with their dreams and their fury and their guns? Well, he was even comfortable when he was away from them, with what we might call regular Miami. There’s a joke. But he did so well – that Spanish of his. They’d have thought him Colombian if it wasn’t for his hair. Then the Mexico swing – the drug gangs, rough stuff. Good times; you know what I mean. We all understood that he had a problem from time to time. I thought he’d got on top of it. Maybe not.’

  Abel realized that he was still in the foothills on this expedition, felt the steepness ahead.

  ‘So what happened? Why scramble to London tonight? Tonight!’ She took a chair and stretched out, long legs straight ahead of her, head back, face to the ceiling. Ready.

  ‘Patience. This goes back and involves coincidences, of course. Our business. They’ve happened, and that’s why you’re here. It’s why we exist, I suppose – to wait for a collision, which is what we’ve got.’ She turned her face towards him and gave him the old smile that they’d shared so often. He sensed behind it an anxiety that he hadn’t seen for a long time. ‘More oncoming trains,’ she said, ‘heading down the line at us.’

  Abel knew better than to try to steer the story, although he was already letting his mind think through their operation, which had preoccupied him for so much of the day, that she now thought at risk. In the stillness, he felt the room become gloomier.

  ‘You need to know more about Joe’s life before your time with him.’

  Maria took him back years, to a time when Joe was a callow conscript cutting his teeth in Washington, before her own era in the city had started to bloom. She was in Europe, laying down her tracks in Paris and in the thick of it at the Sorbonne. Threw the occasional paving stone, as she used to say. Joe was straight down from the north of Maine, sharp and lively, big on the street. The story was that he had befriended – Maria’s careful choice of word – a Spanish woman, then single and a mover and a shaker around town. In her late twenties and well-connected, she was a cut above Joe’s normal level, maybe two, but because he was getting a taste of the diplomatic life for the times that lay ahead, and was charming and
sexy in his way, they made contact. Hit it off, said Maria, which summed it up without need for extra detail. She was at her embassy, apparently in a humdrum role; he was doing whatever he was doing and pretending to be something else. Never mind. Joe’s job, in part, was to log everything he picked up – everything! – and lay down stores for the future, which he did with the aptitude that he later showed off in the fleshpots of Mexico and Miami, via some strange places in between, God remember him. He was an accumulator. But so, it turned out, was she.

  Before Maria got too distracted, she forced herself back to Joe’s time in DC, and what he’d left behind. The lady – still no name – told him a tale that was spicy enough when she first passed it on, startling and piquant, and had matured with the years. ‘It’s ripe now,’ Maria said, bulging with promise or menace, depending how you saw it.

  As Joe’s friend had put it to him, it concerned the ruination of her life. Not the word he would have chosen, but never mind. It was no less than that. She had lost her innocence and dignity and her position all at once, so she said. ‘We’re talking here about a high-born woman, and a Spanish Catholic. Worst of the lot. They can see off the Irish any day.’ Maria smiled.

  The woman had been raped – legalities aside, that was her word for it – by a man who had done the deed and walked away, leaving her in despair to guard her secret shame. Not American, but someone who subsequently gained prominence in public life. She’d kept his name to herself; still did.

  ‘I only know one thing about him,’ said Maria. ‘He’s a Brit.’

  The secret festered throughout the years. Maria said that Joe’s story was that the memory had been controlled, laid to rest because she had to survive the day-to-day, but it was never lost. It could erupt at any time.

  And the moment had arrived. ‘For you and me, my friend, at the very worst time. This little tale starts to become the plot of something far bigger. It’s not Joe’s fault, but mine. He knew’ – Abel noticed how the tense had changed for good – ‘too much about Berlin, did some runs for me there, and made connections. Connections I wish he’d never understood.’ Maria closed her eyes, and Abel understood the pain that came from loss of control. Joe had got a step ahead of her, and one way or another it was the end of him.

  Maria began to trace the links, to try to see a pattern. ‘Joe told me this story not long ago. He was back in touch with her. Bad news. And here’s your second curve ball of the evening. You know who she is.’ She lifted her glass towards the Capitol dome around the corner. ‘Our friends on the Senate intelligence committee? You know what they think of us. One in particular. Got it?’

  They didn’t need to use a name. The senator whose wife had been Joe’s lover flashed into Abel’s mind at Maria’s simple gesture. He felt the force that had almost flattened her.

  ‘We don’t need to ask if they resumed their relationship in every respect – I couldn’t be surer of it, incidentally – but Joe was agitated when I talked about it. I had to turn the screws on him to get him to say why. It worried me; he was obsessing, and she’s a lady we should handle like an unexploded bomb. Unstable, corroding from the inside, dangerous to everyone. Eventually Joe let it out to me. Here, on Monday.’

  Abel knew, from the way Maria now stretched out her arms with a sigh, and raised her legs as if she were going to do her exercises, that she had come to the turning point.

  ‘She’d had a child after the rape. Not known to us, and well-protected. Kept carefully out of sight, until now.

  ‘That boy has just enrolled in a masters program at Georgetown U.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s why she decided never to shout her story from the highest hill – she wanted to see him quietly through the years. A mother’s duty. He’s only just arrived in town.’

  Abel sipped his wine and asked, ‘What changed?’

  Maria smiled. ‘It would be beautiful if it was a piece of math, some kind of perfect equation. Joe’s history and our game in balance. Except it’s ugly. The Brits have nearly – nearly! – decided to help you and me. Right? And for us the prize is big. With Bendo fixed, it could be ours.’ Abel inclined his head.

  ‘They don’t know it yet, but they may have decided to do something stupid at the same time. This woman, whose influence we know, believes that her humiliation is going to be paraded before her eyes, and she can’t bear it. For the first time she’s faced with something that’s greater than the price of her own private shame, the one thing that could break her. If it comes about, she’s prepared to tell her story and bottle it up no more. No matter what.’

  Abel waited, saying nothing.

  ‘From friends of the guy, her assailant as she would have it, who’ve kept in touch with her she has learned that the demon in her life, the father of her son and the source of all her pain, may be about to become Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States of America.’

  Abel stayed quiet for a few moments, frowning. There had to be more. Ambassadors could be stopped, friendly governments warned. Happened all the time. For some reason these channels weren’t open, which was why he was here.

  Maria smiled at him. She began to walk around the room. ‘You’re right. It should be the simplest thing to fix. Overnight job.’ Not this time. His eyes were on hers and he saw in them, for the first time since he’d walked in, a wariness that he associated with their most difficult moments. There were the times when her natural lightness was a disguise, and he knew the symptoms.

  ‘Two things. One – we don’t know who the guy is. Two – we don’t know who the Brits want to send to Massachusetts Avenue. Are they one and the same, or not?’

  Abel leaned back and put his hands behind his head. ‘And Joe is dead.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  They were two players in a long, smooth rally. Abel picked it up. ‘Joe knew too much, but we don’t know exactly what.’

  ‘Or who he told.’

  ‘About Berlin?’

  ‘And Bill Bendo.’

  ‘Or how he died?’

  ‘That too,’ she sighed. ‘That too.’

  ‘And if there was a reason behind it…’

  Maria mimed a scream, then laughed. ‘It’s our fault. Like always. We’re supposed to know these things before they happen, and we never do. We’re stuck with our reputation. Right now we have one piece of information… a precious advantage and a curse. We use it or do nothing. Our choice, and either way there’s trouble.’

  He saw the fork in the road as clearly as she did, but she wanted to spell it out, as if to help herself decide.

  ‘If we find out that her guy is going to be sent here, and we have to warn people that she’ll call him a criminal – suggesting, obviously, that we believe her – then you can take it that two things would happen. The Brits would take fright, and our deal, yours and mine – the biggest of them all – would be over. After all we’ve done to pull it round, out of the fire. Dealing with Bendo. The works.’ She looked straight at him and he was completely still. ‘Second, we’d be over too. The fall guys. Swept away to save embarrassment.’

  Maria drank some wine. ‘The killer is that we don’t know if she’s even telling the truth. You know her reputation, and she might have been spinning Joe a line for purposes that we can’t begin to guess. So think of this. We say he’s a rapist – privately, to the folks that matter, which would be like sticking it on a billboard in Lafayette Square, signed by the fucking State Department – and it turns out that he can prove he isn’t.

  ‘White House and everyone else in total meltdown. Shit everywhere. Everywhere. The works. Me and you and the rest of the boys cast into outer darkness. For good.’

  She asked the last question herself to get it over. ‘And the other option – doing nothing and letting it happen?’

  The painful answer. ‘We don’t say he’s a rapist, and it turns out that he is… and we knew all the time.’

  She painted the scene. ‘He comes here. She goes nuts in the pap
ers, spews it all out, he hasn’t a defence, the kid shouts “Dad” on the news, ambassador resigns, horror story. Our deal’s off – things are blown that would finish you and me for good – relationships screwed on all fronts. For all I know the government falls in London. I’m told, incidentally, that that’s exactly what would happen, ’cos if this door opens there’s gonna be a pile of horeshit that flows out, and she’ll be spreading it all around this town. Joe isn’t there to stop her. And, as we know, her loyal husband would throw himself into the task, with his committee piling in behind with their shovels.’

  Maria was on her feet now. ‘I say again’ – the formal touch seemed right for the moment – ‘who did Joe tell about Berlin? And what? The guy himself, whoever the hell he is? God save us.’

  Abel got up and they paced the room together, had to move. ‘It’s unfair, old friend – it’s always unfair – but we’re piggy in the middle here. No win. Go one way we’re screwed, other way we’re fucked. Crude, but that’s how it is. Joe got us into it; he can’t get us out.’

  Abel said, ‘Sassi. Still in London town?’

  ‘I’ve sent him a message,’ said Maria. ‘Knows there’s trouble. Got most of the loose ends tied up, too. He’ll try to keep them sweet. Guy’s a charmer’s charmer. If anybody can see us home, it’s him.’

  Abel was conscious that there was another chapter to come. He asked the question that he knew would open it up. ‘What might Joe have done?’

  Maria sat down across from him, and put a hand out to take his. ‘The thing we’ve been managing all this time… I used Joe, more than you knew, to help with messenger jobs. He spent enough time over there to learn… too much. He could blow the whole thing wide open. And, sad to say, he was in a frame of mind where he might have done just that.’