A Spy's Life (50 page)

‘No, I don’t.’ She searched his face.

‘Originally I thought it was you. I thought you had worked for Vigo in the eighties.’

She shook her head. ‘No, Bobby. I wish I had in many ways. It was what my heart wanted. But I couldn’t have risked Tomas and my mother so I stayed loyal.’

‘Yes, that was my reasoning. Besides, like every other intelligence organisation, the StB had firewalls between different departments. There was no way a code breaker like you would have had knowledge of how Kapek was handling me. And vice versa of course. Only a few individuals had total access and saw the whole picture. So whoever told them about the tape was either directly responsible for Kapek or was very high up. Kapek was Czech and so one presumes he reported to a senior StB man. Perhaps this individual was SIS’s informant, but my inclination is that it was someone else.’

‘But why are you interested in this now? It has nothing to do with the present.’

‘But it does. There is one person who had access to everything the StB was doing – Kochalyin. He also told you that there was a tape, repeating Kapek’s little myth. Perhaps he didn’t know that there wasn’t a tape. After all you said he had nothing to do with the operation in Rome. So maybe he just took Kapek’s word for it. The important thing was that this was never committed to Kapek’s file which means that SIS could only have got this information from Kapek or Kochalyin.’

‘You’re saying that Oleg was working for SIS? That’s too incredible.’ She paused and groped for another cigarette. ‘Aren’t you placing too much significance on the tape and the fact that it wasn’t mentioned in Kapek’s file?’

‘Yes, perhaps,’ he said. ‘But there’s something else. Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about Ana Tollund. She worked in the Secretariat of the Praesidium. She was a quiet little mouse of a person by all accounts, but she fed the West vital intelligence for twenty years after the Prague Spring. She was very good – subtle, courageous and discriminating in what she passed on to her handlers. Then in ’88 she was caught, tried and executed. I heard about her a little time before her arrest, but I knew nothing in detail about the case and I certainly didn’t say anything to Kapek about her. However, when I was questioned before Christmas, they accused me of tipping off the Czechs about Tollund. That was Kapek making it up to boost his own importance after the event. But somehow this was passed back to SIS. It could only have been Kochalyin.’

‘Why weren’t you accused then, if she was so important?’

‘Because they knew that I had no access to the information about Ana Tollund. They knew I couldn’t know but they kept what Kochalyin had told them on file nevertheless. Everything, you see, is noted down and kept.’

‘But you have no evidence that it was Oleg.’

‘No, and I never will have. On the other hand, we know that subsequent to the Velvet Revolution Kochalyin had a relationship with SIS. And we know one of his prime motivations is money. Does it not seem likely that he was on the SIS payroll
before
the revolution? He’d have been an incredibly valuable asset to them and when the collapse of the régime came they would have been very willing to extend the association. More than a few favours went his way, I bet.’

She drank some wine and absorbed this.

‘It’s true,’ she said, ‘that he always had money. Nothing would stop him selling information if he thought he could get away with it. Maybe you’re right, but you will never know. Perhaps you have become a little obsessed with this. Maybe you should stop thinking about the past, Bobby.’

‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘But it is my past. Ever since I talked to Tomas in New York I realised how damned little I knew about my own life. You said something on the train about a person’s history being hidden from them. I want to know my history.’

‘But there’s something more to this for you, isn’t there? You think that Kochalyin learned from your colleagues about your plan to buy the intelligence archives. You’re thinking that they told him you were coming?’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly what I believe. I had a theory about his interception of the coded traffic between here and the embassy, but it seems much more likely that his handlers here sounded him out about the plan. And that was all he needed. He knew exactly where to find me and he could do what he liked without anyone hearing about it in London.’

‘Do you think they guessed?’

‘That’s an interesting point. I think Vigo had his suspicions. He may even have been responsible for alerting Kochalyin in the first place, but I doubt that he intended what happened.’ He stopped. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though. Kochalyin saved my life.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Oleg Kochalyin saved my life. When the swelling in my groin didn’t go down, the doctors investigated and discovered I had cancer in one testicle. They got it just in time.’

Her mouth opened in surprise. ‘Are you serious?’

‘No doubt about it. I didn’t suspect anything was wrong. If Kochalyin hadn’t done me the favour of whacking me in the balls on the first occasion that we met, I’d probably be dead now.’

She winced. ‘Are you all right now?’

‘Not a sign since. They did a good job. Everything is okay in that department.’

A silence ensued, both of them lost in their own thoughts. Harland got up and walked to the window again. It was odd that he should end up in Century House with Eva and the ghosts of old suspicions.

‘You gave me a look when we were with Teckman and Vigo,’ he said from the window. ‘You were saying something to me. What was that about?’

She smiled. ‘You’ll see. You have a very clever son, Bobby. He’s like you. He thinks everything through until he finds the solution.’ She looked up at the ceiling then quite suddenly her composure collapsed. Her head sank to her chest and her shoulders convulsed with a sob. She began to run her hands distractedly through her hair as her shoulders continued to heave. ‘I cannot believe what has happened to my beautiful son. It’s my fault.’

Harland moved to her side, put his hands on her shoulders and held her. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he whispered. ‘You must understand that.’

She tried to speak but couldn’t get the words out. He drew her to him and stroked her head with his right hand.

‘He’s going to die,’ she said. ‘I know he’s going to die. He told me he wanted to die. Bobby, I don’t know how I’ll live without him being alive. It mattered when I didn’t see him for all that time, but at least I knew he was alive.’

‘Have you thought that he might have left you because he knew he was going to do something dangerous and he didn’t want to get you involved?’ he asked quietly.

‘That’s kind of you. But, no, he left because he couldn’t tolerate me seeing Oleg. If only I’d told him what I was doing.’

‘But you have now,’ said Harland, knowing she must have shed the whole story during the long hours by his bed.

‘Yes. Oh, Bobby, I can’t bear what has happened to him. I cannot live with the thought of him like that. I know it’s better for him to die, but …’ She sank into herself, falling forward on to her thighs. Harland stroked her back, feeling inadequate to the task of comforting her. The intimacy of shared grief, he now discovered, was as difficult as the intimacy of love. He sat looking ahead at the empty, darkened suite of offices which lay beyond the living quarters, wondering why he’d never recovered that part of himself.

At length Eva sat up a little and dried her eyes. She had the glazed look of someone whose mind is utterly elsewhere. For a time she looked out of the window, her head nodding gently as her thoughts raced. Then she stretched for the bottle of wine on the other side of the table. Harland leaned forward, retrieved it for her and filled her glass. She thanked him and stretched again, this time going for the packet of cigarettes. As she did so her hair fell from the back of her neck and he caught sight of the oval of dark skin just beneath the hairline, the birthmark he’d kissed a hundred times during the long night in Orvieto. It seemed then to be the essence of her – the mark of her uniqueness. He leaned forward and kissed her neck as she came back to the sitting position. It was an impulse. He didn’t think before doing it and for a fraction of a second afterwards he expected her to whip round in horror. She said something which he didn’t hear and turned to face him, smiling weakly.

‘I remember you doing that before.’

‘In Orvieto,’ he said.

‘Orvieto.’

He bent down to rest his face at the back of her head and kissed the birthmark many times again. And he murmured the thing that had been formed in complete sentences somewhere in his mind, waited to be voiced for over a quarter of a century.

‘I love you, Eva. I’ve always loved you. I never stopped loving. I cannot stop.’

She turned her face again to him. ‘It’s strange of you to go on calling me Eva. I like it.’

‘
Eva
,’ he insisted. ‘I love you,
Eva
.’ He was surprised. He wasn’t watching himself. He had dropped his guard.

She held his face between her fingers as if trying to steady it and looked at him. Her eyes were desperate.

‘You have to …’ she stammered. ‘You must …’

‘Help you?’ he asked. ‘Of course I’ll help you. You know I will.’

‘He’s going to die very soon,’ she said, quietly and matter-of-factly.

In his former life – five minutes before – Harland would have sought to reassure her by saying that there was a chance that Tomas might recover some of his movement – it was after all a gunshot wound, not a stroke. He would have talked about Tomas building his strength and finding ways of living with his condition. But now Harland had bridged the void that existed between them, or, more accurately, between himself and the rest of humanity, he didn’t say any of this. Instead he said exactly what was in his mind.

‘When he dies, I will help you in every way I can. I will never leave you. I am here. Nothing else matters to me.’

She kissed him, first with gratitude and relief, then with passion. Her hands fell from his cheeks to the base of his neck and she pulled herself to him, lifting her legs to the sofa and moving against him. He held her close, feeling the softness of her breasts against his chest and the firmness of her arms and shoulders in his hands. Her lightness surprised him, as it had done when they were young. He marvelled at her and fell to her neck, then kissed her on her mouth, on her eyes, on her cheeks.

The scent of her awoke memories in Harland which were not exclusively erotic. He could hear the tolling of the clock tower near the hotel in Orvieto and smell the wood smoke that filled the town on winter evenings. There were inexplicable noises in the hotel. The wooden ceilings shifted and groaned in disapproval. Corridors creaked outside their door and the shutters on the windows juddered in the wind. He remembered her lying on the coarse linen sheets, twisted to an incredible degree at the abdomen so that her legs turned away from him but her torso remained flat on the plane of the bed. He remembered the miraculous curve of her hips – good child-bearing hips, he had said in a silly way, running his hand up the rise of her pelvis and down the slope of her leg and then back again, feeling the resistance of minute hairs on his fingertips.

At some stage in the long night of their weekend together, he had broken free of her and thrown open the windows and shutters and gazed down on the huge deserted square in front of the cathedral. The sight of this silenced operatic set – the illuminated façade of the mediaeval church, a cat slipping into the shadows at a low furtive run, the eddies of a few leaves in the recesses of the buildings around the square – had stayed with him in a clear, dream-like still, as if this moment had been the only time that he had seen the physical world as it really was. There was a ghostliness in the square and it prompted in him an equal joy and fear that they were the only people left alive in the town.

He had returned shivering to her warmth and laid his head on her stomach. She turned her legs and pushed herself up from the bed to watch him as his mouth drifted towards the line of her hair and down between her legs where he parted her flesh with his tongue. From the corner of his eye he could see her gazing at him with an intensely serious expression. Her hand suddenly reached down to press his lips closer to her and she came with a shudder, her head falling silently backwards so that he could only see the alabaster shaft of her throat. Quite some time afterwards she produced a gasp and her head dropped forwards on to him and she smothered him in kisses and brushed her hair across his body. In the early stages of their affair, during the collisions in the hotels of Rome, Harland, who was used to the milk-and-water sex of the English, had been taken aback by the ferocity of her attention. Eva gave, but also took with equal passion, and when at last she had exacted what she needed she lay back on the bed with utter lack of modesty. He was amazed at the whiteness of her body and its strength.

The sequence in Orvieto – moving from the window to taste her body and watching her strain backwards – he had played over and over in his head, partly because it brought her to life like no other memory, but also because it was the only order of events he could remember from the entire weekend. By that stage they must have told each other everything. He often thought of the taverna where they had sat and she had taken hold of one hand and sternly made him listen. But there was no real order in his mind to the three days because apart from that couple of hours in the restaurant they’d ruthlessly shut out the world and greedily merged into each other.

Then as now. They stayed in the half-light feeling as young and awed by their delight as they had twenty-eight years before. Their joy was limitless and engrossing. But there were few words between them. He mostly kept his eyes shut to sense her the better, and in the rare moments he opened them he saw hers were closed too.

Some time in the middle of the night they made their way into her bedroom and sprawled on the bed where he struggled with her remaining clothes. Her head flopped lazily from one side to the other as he removed her bra and drew the white shirt from her arms. He stopped for a moment and absorbed her beauty, feeling less self-conscious than he could ever remember being. She looked drugged with expectation.