A Spy's Life (10 page)

He was so distraught when he returned to London that he took a friend into his confidence, a good sort named Jimmy Kinloch who was in his SIS intake. Jimmy told him that he was well out of it – a relationship like that could ruin a man’s career and get him into a lot more trouble besides. And so Harland had forgotten Eva, at least he had stopped tormenting himself by thinking of her, which was an altogether different thing from forgetting her. What he did was to relinquish her, although some part of her was still in him.

‘Tell me why your mother had to return to Czechoslovakia. Why couldn’t she defect? If, as you say, she was pregnant, she could have defected and had the baby in the West. She would have been looked after.’

‘It is obvious. If you’d listened to her, you would have known that she could not leave because of her mother – Hanna. Hanna was why she went back. She is still alive today. Do you know her story?’

Harland dimly recalled that Eva’s mother had been in a concentration camp. He nodded to the boy to tell the story.

‘In 1945 my grandmother, Hanna Rath, was found in Terezin. The place is called Theresienstadt in German. The Nazis made it the holding camp for the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia. She was nine years old and the last member of her family alive. All of them had been sent to Auschwitz on the transports but she managed to survive. Terezin was full of Jews helping each other. But without protection of any kind – no family, no friends – it was very hard for her. Somehow she escaped the transports. She has told me that she memorised the names of other children in the latest groups to arrive at Terezin and learned where they came from. That way she could pretend to be part of the new shipment. She also had a hiding place which she went to when the transports were being assembled for the death camps. Sometimes she stayed there for a day at a time, with just a little water. She told me that she imagined herself to be invisible and even today she says she has the power not to be noticed. She can walk down a street and not be seen. Can you believe that, Mr Harland?’

Harland nodded. He had met such people in his old trade. They were called ghosts.

‘When Terezin was liberated by the Russians in May ’45, she was found at the gates of the castle. She was the first to receive treatment from the Soviet army doctors. Later in the summer of 1945 she was taken to an orphanage near Prague. She was one of just three thousand survivors of Terezin. Ninety thousand had disappeared into the camps, but this little girl had survived. She was alive yet she was never able to reclaim her family’s property. The home and the business were gone. She could not say what her family owned and anyway she did not know where the proof of that ownership lay. She couldn’t even prove who she was because there was no one left from her town who could identify her. No one – not a teacher, a doctor, a friend or one single member of her family – was alive to say who she was. They were all gone. She was left with a name – Hanna Rath – and that was all.

‘And so she stayed in the orphanage. Then at sixteen she became pregnant – that was with my mother. There was some kind of scandal. She would not say who the father was. She had to leave. But Hanna was very smart. She got work and she raised my mother in a room in Prague with almost nothing – just the two of them together. That is the story of the woman you fell in love with in Rome. Maybe you did not know it all?’

‘You didn’t explain why your mother had to return to Prague,’ observed Harland, apparently unimpressed. Inwardly his heart churned at the thought of Eva.

‘That is simple. She could not leave my mother there. Remember what it was like at that time – the “Normalisation” after the Prague Spring. It would have been unthinkable for my mother to defect to the West and leave Hanna to face the authorities. Everything in her life depended on her keeping in favour with the authorities – her job, her home. As it was, she had very little. My mother could not do that to the woman who had made so many sacrifices for her.’ He stopped and looked at Harland intently for a moment, then turned to signal to the waitress for another beer. ‘I have told you my story. What more can I do to persuade you? I guess there is a DNA test which would prove it to you. But that would be humiliating and there is no point because – you must understand this, Mr Harland – I do not claim anything from you. I do not want anything from you.’

‘So let me ask you again, Tomas, why have you come? You could probably have traced me before now.’

‘I have known this story for only a little time. Before, I thought someone else was my father – the man she married. And I didn’t know where you lived. There are many Harlands in the London telephone directory. Besides, I have had my own concerns.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I don’t want to talk about them now,’ he replied, with an oddly grave expression. He looked away. ‘Maybe I’ll tell you some day, Mr Harland.’

‘Look, forget the Mr Harland, will you? Use my first name if you must call me anything.’

‘I think I prefer Mr Harland until things change between us.’

‘As you wish.’ Harland put down his glass. He acknowledged to himself that he was affected by the directness of Tomas’s manner.

‘Do you go to London?’ asked Tomas, apparently composing himself.

‘Yes, sometimes. I have a sister who lives in London, but I haven’t spent much time there over the last ten years.’

‘Will you be visiting your sister for Christmas?’

‘Probably. I haven’t decided yet.’

‘If you go, we could see each other. My girlfriend is in London and I will leave her number with you, together with my own number. If you feel you want to see me again, you may call me.’ He paused. ‘I know you don’t believe my story now. But maybe you could after a time.’

‘Maybe, but I would like to speak to your mother.’

Tomas shook his head.

‘You do see your mother?’

He shook his head again. ‘No. I have not seen her for some time. Look, it’s difficult to explain, Mr Harland. There are many things you don’t know. And it is perhaps better that I do not tell you everything at once.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I cannot say.’

‘But you won’t mind if I take her number?’

‘No, but she will be angry that I’ve told you. She doesn’t know I have come here.’

‘Well, I’d like to speak to her about this. You can understand that.’

Tomas shrugged and for the next few minutes there was a silence between them. Harland studied him as he shifted his chair to make room for a couple of young women who had planted themselves with a great fuss at the next table and were unbundling in the warmth. There were a few sideways looks and some giggling, which Tomas returned with an offer of help to one of the girls who was coquettishly struggling to remove her jacket. He had something and it was working on these two girls, thought Harland.

Suddenly he felt incredibly tired. When he closed his eyes the golden light which he had noticed after the crash was flaring in front of him. He got up and indicated that he was going to the lavatory at the back of the restaurant.

Facing the urinal, he put his hand to the wall to steady himself, and thought about the young Eva. He tried to imagine how she would look now – dumpy and probably gone to seed, he thought. Still, he would have to call her as soon as possible because it was now imperative that he establish whether the boy was telling the truth. If this turned out to be an elaborate hoax inspired by Vigo, he would have to prepare his defence and work out what was behind it all. But it seemed unlikely because preparing Tomas’s story and the fake identity cards, complete with the actual pictures of Eva, would have taken longer than the few days since the crash.

Harland’s thoughts were disturbed by a man coming in and entering one of the cubicles behind him. He zipped himself up and turned to rinse his face in the basin. He needed to pull himself together and concentrate because there was a lot more he wanted to ask this Tomas character – a lot more.

When he returned to the bar he instantly noticed that Tomas’s chair was empty and the pile of cold-weather kit had gone. He glanced at the door and caught sight of him at the tail of a group of six or seven people who were leaving. Tomas gesticulated in a diving motion with both hands towards the two girls. Then he put his right hand to his forehead in a salute which flipped up into a wave. Harland went to the table. One of the girls looked up.

‘Hey, your son had to go. He left this for you.’

‘What do you mean, my son?’ he said, seizing the scrap of paper she held out.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the woman. ‘We just kind of assumed you were related.’ Her companion worked the gum in her mouth and nodded.

There were two numbers on the paper. One was for a cellphone; the other had a central London prefix. ‘Ask for Lars Edberg’, said the note.

Lars Edberg, thought Harland. Why was Tomas using an alias? There was no number for Eva.

‘Did he say why he had to go?’ Harland said, looking down at the two puzzled faces.

‘No,’ said the gum-chewer. ‘He was looking out onto the street and then he turned back and just kind of got up and left. He gave us the note and said you’d understand.’

Harland tossed down a twenty and worked his way through the tables towards the door. Out on the street there was no sign of Tomas. He hurried back to the intersection at the top of the hill and caught sight of a figure running down Clinton Street. Whoever it was, he was moving very fast, then he dodged to the right and disappeared from sight behind a truck. Tomas Rath had vanished.

7

THE PULSE

Next day, as Harland moved from a rotten night’s sleep to a blank New York Sunday, he recognised that part of him wanted to accept the boy’s story. But he consciously decided to suspend judgement and concentrate on the immediate mystery of what Griswald had been carrying with him.

Three hours later he stepped down from a train bound for Canada on to the platform of a small station some fifty miles north of New York. He waited there, looking across the sweep of the Hudson River towards the Catskills, and thought about Griswald. This part of the Hudson valley, Griswald once told him, had been settled by Germans, some of them Griswald’s ancestors. It reminded them of the Rhine and their homeland which accounted for the names of the local towns – Rhinebeck, Rhinecliff, Staatsburg.

Sally Griswald’s old station-wagon swept into the car park. She got out, looking much as he remembered her a dozen years before, and gave him a bereft, wordless hug. Then, taking his hands, she drew back and looked at him with a staunch smile. At length she said, ‘If there was one man that Al would have wanted to survive while he was taken, it would have been you, Bob. Believe me, it is a consolation at this time to know that. There were very few people that Al admired and liked as much as you.’

Harland felt her loss with a sudden, useless clarity.

They drove to a large white clapboard house, set behind some conifers in two or three acres of frost-scorched lawn. Griswald’s boys, Eric and Sam, were waiting to greet them. They stood in the hallway, pretending to remember Harland from the past, sheepishly concealing their grief. They were unmistakably Griswald’s progeny – big and friendly with Al’s shrewdness lurking in their expressions.

She led him through to the kitchen where a pot of coffee was already laid out with some cups, and food was in the oven. They all sat down. The boys looked at him expectantly as if he was about to produce some news or insight.

‘So it was you who answered the phone out there,’ said Sally, shaking her head. ‘How terrible for you to deal with that. I want you to know I totally understand why – you know – why you hung up. I’m glad you did … in a way. It gave me quite a chill to learn that you were out there with Al and that I was speaking to you at that awful moment.’

‘Your call saved my life, Sally,’ said Harland. ‘They didn’t know we were out there. I’m sure I wouldn’t have lived if you hadn’t rung at that moment.’

‘It was lucky Dad kept the phone on,’ said Eric, the elder boy. ‘He should have had it switched off.’

‘True,’ said Harland.

‘But if you hadn’t been going to help him, you’d never have heard it,’ chimed in Sam.

Over lunch they talked of old times in Europe, stories which fleetingly brought Alan Griswald to life in the minds around the table. Sally had to explain the circumstances of each of the stories to the boys – who the characters were and the politics of the embassy at the time. Harland filled in a few details, which briefly made her face light up. He let the conversation take its own course and only at the end of lunch did he begin to ask how Griswald had come to work at the War Crimes Tribunal.

She told him that he had left the CIA in 1994 and gone as an observer to the Balkans for the War Studies Forum in Washington which put out reports on Western policy. He hadn’t much liked the writing aspect of the job but he had become fascinated by the civil war in Bosnia and convinced that the West’s policy hovered disastrously between inadequate help and criminal hindrance. They had been worried about money and she had found it a struggle for most of the nineties when Al had been travelling for the Forum. But she understood that he was obsessed with the failure of the West to capture the people responsible for the crimes that he knew about in Bosnia. For him there was a lot of unfinished business in the Balkans and she supported his determination to see some kind of justice done. Eventually he was suggested to the War Crimes Tribunal and created a job for himself, applying the skills he’d learned in the CIA to hunting war criminals – all the espionage stuff that she didn’t have to explain to Harland.

In the early nineties she moved into the house that Griswald had been left, partly to save money, but more to give the boys a base in the States. Al continued to commute to Europe. He kept his work out of the home but sometimes she asked him things and he answered her straight. About a month before, on his last visit home, they had been out to dinner in Rhinebeck and he had talked about the cases he was working on. He had told her about five or six men who had been responsible for the massacres in Bosnia at the end of the war. She couldn’t remember the details but he did say that there was another case which he had just begun which might prove to be very important. He hoped to be able to complete the investigation and then he would think about finding a job which would allow him to stay in the States.