Confessor (16 page)

“Masonic? One of those odd secret societies? Funny handshakes? Rituals? What you think, Herb?”

“I don’t think funny societies. I think something different. I think a society, or even societies. But not funny in the sense you’re thinking, Tony. You know what this is?” He lifted the two pieces of wood. “You must’ve seen one. Is magic wand, Tony. Magic wand, like with the magic tricks you see in clubs, or with Paul Daniels on TV. Or David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy, all those great people.”

“Oh, you mean conjurers?” Sneer. Curve of the lip.

“I think they prefer to be called magicians. You see David Copperfield do the flying?”

“Actually, no. Don’t really go in for that kind of stuff.”

“You never seen Copperfield fly? Should be ashamed. Sits there, wide-eyed, says he’s always dreamed of flying, then he does just that. He flies. Amazing. People all round him. Flies into a glass box. They put the lid on. Still flies. No wires. No strings. Then he flies over the audience. Picks up a girl and flies with her in his arms. Last he flies up and a falcon flies out onto his wrist. Moved to tears, and unashamed. Wonderful.” After the one operation they had given him a couple of years ago, Herbie had gone on vacation to the United States. He did not like gambling, but he still went to Vegas—mainly to see Siegfried and Roy. Copperfield had been playing at Caesars Palace, so he had taken in that show as well. Big Herbie Kruger had been a magic buff from before his secret life. His father had taken him to see the Great Bagheera on his tenth birthday. He had even had a
Zauberkästen
—a magic set—on that day. There was a time when Big Herb’s great ambition was to be like the Great Bagheera and perform miracles.

“It’s all a fake.” Worboys was still sneering.

“Maybe. But me? I believe, because great magicians do impossible things. I believe, and what have we got here? We got ourselves a dead magician here, Tony, that’s what we got. The Great Gus Keene: Magic and wonders. Smoke and mirrors, that’s what we got.”

B
IG HERBIE WANTED TO
start questioning people: the widow Keene to be precise—but the powers-that-be had said no, not yet.

“For heaven’s sake, Herb, let the poor girl adjust. You’ve already had a little time with her.”

“Not enough. The first time she was coming to terms with things. The second was a quick ID of personal effects.”

“Give her a few days,” Worboys told him.

“Is correct to talk with her now, straight off.” Herb was frustrated, and feeling grim enough about the necessary inquisition. To him, this was mere procrastination.

“You don’t think she was hand in glove with the buggers who did this, Herb, so what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that you made me a bloody detective, so I got to do it correct. I got to ask her if Gus was on edge; if there were phone calls in the night; suspicious cars along the road, or footpads near the scene. We don’t even know what he was doing in Salisbury that night. Have no clue about the other guy seen with him by the roadside. Carole could shed light. Open a window. I need her now.”

“Couple of days, Herb, eh? Just a couple of days.” He was not asking, but giving an order.

Herb tried to put the bizarre scene at the cemetery from his mind and concentrate on the files and notes that Gus had left behind, but the more he tried, the more impossible it became. He had exhausted his choices regarding the files from the Registry mainframe. Even the ones into which he had peeked illegally had brought forth nothing of interest. In the end, though he did not like the idea of talking to Angus Crook, it was the only option left to him.

“Want you to do a wee favor for me, Angus,” he said on the secure line, carefully using the word “wee” instead of “little” in order to reach across the language barrier. The problem was that the “wee” came out as “vee.”

Angus grunted, so he tried a small threat, saying he could come down with the catchall piece of paper the Chief had signed.

“Private lives,” he explained. “Things that don’t get in normal jackets. Trivia hidden from all the clowns who have no need-to-know.”

“Their
Blue Jackets
,” Angus supplied.

“
Ja
. Yes, that’s the kind of thing.” Herb knew the files were called
Blue Jackets
. You had to have about twenty passwords to get at them on the computers, and what they contained was usually of no value to anybody: little sensitive secrets; skeletons in family closets; peccadilloes that had no true bearing on how people conducted their professional lives; shame and scandal in de family. They even asked for certain small nuggets to be buried in the
Blue Jackets
, and sometimes the request was turned down.

After all the fuss in what had once been the DDR, across the Berlin Wall when it was still standing, Herbie had asked for his major indiscretion to be buried in a
Blue Jacket
and they had said no way.

“Whose
Blue Jackets
would ye be thinking of?” Angus asked with suspicion lacing his words.

“Former Deputy CSIS Maitland-Wood, and the old Chief.”

At the distant end Angus sucked in breath through his teeth as though he were about to say that to do this was more than his job was worth.

“And Gus,” Herb added.

“Can’t promise anything, ye ken.” Angus was back in his Rob Roy role.

“You ken that if you ain’t doing it I shall come and thump you on your Scottish melon.” Herb hung up and waited, getting on with his reading.

Gus’s manuscript was smooth and efficient, dealing with family, childhood and education in a matter of three pages, which spread into the mind through the eyes at witty breakneck speed. Before you knew it, Gus was in the military and taking a course on interrogation with Army Intelligence, giving the reader just enough to whet the appetite but not enough to reveal the true secrets of the Confessor’s art.

There followed the story of his first interrogation, which, if you had known Gus, was relatively amusing. Some well-liked corporal working in immediate postwar Berlin—in a Quartermaster’s Office—had gone on leave, and then gone AWOL. He had been missing for a week when they discovered that about two hundred ration stamps—worth around five hundred sterling on the open market—had gone AWOL with the nice corporal.

The Military Police had picked him up in some den of iniquity deep in the heart of London’s Soho. The corporal, impossibly named Tweets, who had always been thought of as a docile, rather shy man, had fought like a tiger and denied everything to the military cops. Gus was sent from his unit in Berlin to Aldershot, where they were holding Corporal Tweets, ready to do the inquisition. Armed with all the best psychological ploys, plus considerable evidence, he prepared to face his victim as a monk would prepare for his final vows.

“Well, Corporal Tweets,” he began. “You know they’re going to charge you with theft, being absent without leave, selling government property and resisting arrest.” He thought it better to lay the case out straightaway, and now prepared to break the man down into small pieces of gibbering jelly.

“Oh, yes, sir. I know, and that’s fair enough. I’m guilty on all counts. Don’t know what got into me. Never been to a court-martial before. Should be quite interesting.”

Herbie chuckled over this, then his mind wandered again. Perhaps he should go through everything and check all files concerning Gus’s various brushes with the Provisional IRA and the newer FFIRA, for they still seemed the most likely perpetrators.

He searched, flicking through the written pages, then Gus’s notes. Eventually, he came to a folder the first page of which said “Ireland.” There it all was, and it made quite a horror story. Over one decade alone, Gus had traveled to Northern Ireland no fewer than a hundred times—and these were not mere day trips. The jobs were all detailed: names, reasons for interrogations, results. This was enough to make the man a legitimate target, but there was more: meetings with the Security Forces in London, interrogations all over the place. Some of the stuff was cross-referenced, and to go through it would take a long time. In fact, the main cross-reference was to another file headed “Terrorism.” This contained a whole mass of material which showed that Gus had either carried out or assisted at the interrogations of almost one hundred known, or detained, terrorists. He had obviously had a great deal of knowledge regarding the entire spectrum of both overt and covert organizations: PLO, Red Brigade, various splinter groups, Black September, the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Gus had even assisted the Germans in their interrogations of those charming people.

In all, Gus must have been a marked man the world over, and on the hit list of a dozen organizations. There was a huge pile of information, and two draft chapters covering the anti-terrorist work, but Herb’s mind, still jumping like a grasshopper, was not ready for that particular journey.

He returned to Gus’s narrative. Back in Berlin he was sent to one of the outlying units dealing with the denazification process. Herb was just about to read this long and interesting section when the telephone rang.

It was Angus.

“What’re ye actually looking for here, Herbie?”

“What you got? Multiple choices?”

“I can give ye a bit of sex scandal on Maitland-Wood.”

“You can?” Surprise, then he recalled the young Memsahib, formerly Emma Paisley of Accounts. “Bit of the lad was he, Angus? Bit of a career lecher on the side?”

“Ye might say that. Comes as a wee surprise. I knew him, ye ken, and he always seemed ta be a pompous little fat fart to me.”

“To everybody, Angus. You are not alone in your amazement. Does not really interest me …”

“Aye, two long-standing affairs with girls from Registry. Much younger than himself. Nights in iffy motels; weekends in Brighton and Eastbourne. Ye ken about the marriage when he retired?”

“Yes, I ken, Angus. Some women like older men.”

“Aye, it’s a funny old world right enough. The man had been tupping Emma for two years before he handed in his papers, so he must have had something the girls liked.”

“Probably a gleaming and beautiful soul, Angus. What else?”

“Only one wee funny thing.”

“Which is?”

“In civilian life he was allowed to use the letters AIMC after his name.”

“So what’s AIMC?”

“Associate of the Inner Magic Circle. Ye have to take exams to get that, and there’s only one higher order, which is by appointment only. He was a conjurer on the side. Nobody knew that. Quite a high-up conjurer as well. Your Magic Circle doesna’ take any riffraff. They’re guy strict.”

“What about the old Chief?”

“Shared the same secrets as his Deputy, except he was a humble MMC—Member of the Magic Circle. Never saw either of them do any tricks except in the line of duty.”

“Gus?”

“Nay a whisper. Nothing—unless you count the lang affair he had with Carole before his divorce.”

Herbie thanked him and said he might need more. Gus not on the Magic Circle list? That was odd, if only because of the pair of monklike men doing the ritual over the grave. Perhaps Gus kept
his
secrets out of his
Blue Jacket
. He leaned back in his chair and smiled at the thought of Willis doing conjuring tricks. His eyes roved around the room, and his mind went back to the days when he had spent hours here with Gus, his friendly Confessor, always reassuring him that he was on his side, yet asking the really difficult questions when you least expected them. Gus was great on the throwaway lines, like “You ever mention our American cousins to them, Herb?” Or, “What about the
Hallet
business?” Worst of all, “How much you tell ’em about
Birdseed
, Herb?”

Herbie had nearly gone crazy about the one black mark in his otherwise distinguished record. Against all instructions he had crossed into what was then East Berlin—a very big no-no—and, after several horrors, the East German security people had got him banged up and at their mercy. Then the real authorities arrived, so that during the time he had been away Herb had been put to the question by the KGB. He had done as well as could have been expected, for everyone breaks at some point. He knew what he had given to them. At the time he had been proud. It was only later that it was revealed to him—by Gus and Tubby Fincher—that two matters were still sensitive. Not just sensitive, but things that put a deep-seated penetration in the Kremlin in a very difficult position. He remembered this room with some horror, for it was here that he found out he had just about blown someone’s cover with the
Hallet
and
Birdseed
material.

The agent concerned had been cryptoed
Stentor
and was the source of all good things from well inside what the Sovs used to call the State Organs. Kruger had truly compromised
Stentor
.

Now, as he leaned back in his chair and thought about Gus and his own old problems, he recalled something else. The room had changed a great deal, like the rest of the house. When he had been here before, with Gus being as subtle as a snake, there were two big mirrors, one on either side of the fireplace. Intuition had told him then that the mirrors shielded space; that the mirrors were not normal; that behind the mirrors technicians were monitoring his sessions with Gus. Audio on one side, together with someone taking notes, and video on the other. All those years ago he knew that behind the mirrors there were small rooms. Now the mirrors had been replaced by bookcases stocked with leather spines.

He rose and went over to the books. They were real enough, but somehow he had the feeling that they had been bought by the yard as cover. There were titles here to which neither Gus nor Carole would have paid much heed.

Leather-bound copies of Jane Austen, the Brontës and even Hardy were not Gus’s thing at all. Gus was a biography and military history buff, not to mention arcane psychological journals. The books, Herb decided, were set dressing, which meant that behind the bookcases the rooms were still in place.

He began to move the books, one by one, in the hope that some title activated a hidden catch. Then he realized that this method was pure Hollywood, and not the way old Gus would have camouflaged a lock. He examined the molding around the shelves. Nothing. So Herb returned to the desk and began to examine the drawers, knowing this was something he should have done on the first day.