Joseph Anton: A Memoir (46 page)

Elizabeth knew she wasn’t costing the country anything and her contempt for the fabricated stories was admirable.

Most of the time the house on Hampstead Lane felt worry-free and permanent. It felt
there
. He didn’t spend half his day worrying about it being “blown” and having to make another sudden move. Even when tradesmen came to the house things were calm. The place was large enough for him to get on with his work while the gardener mowed the lawn or the plumber plumbed or some piece of kitchen equipment got repaired. The Bulsaras were relatively incurious landlords. Fitz was very convincing, and portrayed his boss as a high-flying international publisher, often away, sometimes there; in other words, not unlike the real Rea Hederman, even though the real Rea would never have rented an eight-bedroom house on Hampstead Lane. Fitz began to talk to them about the possibility of buying the house and Mrs. Bulsara proposed a ridiculous price. “I’ve tried to negotiate her down, sir,” said Fitz, “but she’s got pound signs in her eyes.”

Then a new property came on to the market, very nearby in the northern (and less pricey) reaches of Bishop’s Avenue. It needed work but the asking price was relatively reasonable. The owner wanted a quick sale. Elizabeth went to see it, accompanied by Fitz and a member of the protection team, and they all liked it. “We can definitely make it work,” Elizabeth said and the police gave it the thumbs-up too. Yes, he could have a permanent base again; it had been agreed at the highest level, they said. He drove by the house twice but there was no way for him to go inside. It stood behind a double-gated forecourt, a mansion with a high-gabled roof and a whitewashed façade, anonymous
and, yes, inviting. He took Elizabeth’s word for it and moved as fast as he could. Ten days after Elizabeth saw 9 Bishop’s Avenue for the first time they had exchanged contracts and the house was his. He couldn’t believe it. He had a home again. “You should understand,” he said to his new protection officer, a posh chap known to his colleagues as CHT (for Colin Hill-Thompson), “that once I move in there I’m never going to go on my travels again.” Colin was perhaps the most sympathetic of all the officers he’d had on the team so far. “Quite right,” he said. “Stick to your guns. They’ve approved it, and that’s that.”

The new house needed a lot of work. He called an architect friend, David Ashton Hill, and drew him into the heart of the secret. David, the next in the long sequence of Friends Without Whom Life Would Have Been Impossible, set to work at once; the construction workers were not allowed into the secret but were told “the story.” 9 Bishop’s Avenue was the intended London home base of Joseph Anton, international publisher of American origin. His English girlfriend, Elizabeth, was in charge of the works and would make all necessary decisions. The building contractor, Nick Norden, was the son of the comedy writer Denis Norden, and nobody’s fool. It was difficult to explain to Nick why a publisher like Mr. Anton required bulletproof glass in the ground-floor windows, or a safe room upstairs. It was odd that Mr. Anton was never there for meetings, not even once. Elizabeth’s good-natured Englishness was reassuring, of course, and Mr. Anton’s Americanness could be blamed for a lot of his skittishness about security—Americans, as all Englishmen knew, were scared of everything; if a car backfired in Paris, everyone in America canceled their French holidays—but the truth, Mr. Anton suspected, was that Nick Norden and his builders knew perfectly well whose house they were doing up. But they didn’t say so, preferring to act as if they had swallowed the story, and nobody ever leaked a word to the press. It took nine months to prepare the house for Mr. Anton, who lived there for the following seven years, and the secret was kept throughout that time. At the very end, one of the senior officers of “A” Squad confessed that they had expected the house to become public knowledge in a few months, and that everyone at the Yard had been amazed that
it remained “covert” for eight years and more. Once again, he had reason to be grateful to the seriousness with which people responded to his plight. Everyone understood that this was an important secret to keep; and so, quite simply, they kept it.

He asked Fitz to prolong the rental period at Hampstead Lane. Fitz took it upon himself to negotiate the rent down—“They’ve been robbing you blind, sir”—and he succeeded, even though Mrs. Bulsara implored him, “Please, Mr. Fitz, you must persuade Mr. Hederman to pay more.” He pointed out the problems with the property—there were two ovens in the kitchen, both out of order—and she said, as if it were a full and sufficient explanation, “But we are Indian, we cook on gas rings.” Mrs. Bulsara bemoaned the loss of the sale, but continued to have an absurd idea of the value of the property. However, she agreed to lower the rent. Then out of the blue there were bailiffs at the door: High Court bailiffs, arriving to “seize the Bulsaras’ assets.”

The protection team, when faced with the unexpected, sometimes developed headless-chicken behavioral traits. Um, Joe, what’s the story we’re telling again? In whose name is the house rented? Joseph Anton, right? Oh,
not
Joseph Anton? Oh, that’s right. Rea who? How do you spell that? Who are we saying he is? Oh, he actually
is
a publisher? Oh, okay. And, Joe, what is Fitz’s full name? Okay, somebody had better answer the door. He said, “You guys have to get better at this.” Later that day he wrote out the narrative and pinned it to their sitting-room door.

The bailiffs had showed up because the Bulsaras had defaulted on a monthly payment of just £500. Fitz took charge, calling the Bulsaras’s lawyer, who faxed a letter to the bailiffs saying the check was in the mail. So in theory the bailiffs could show up every month? And they could be back tomorrow if the check turned out not to be in the mail? What was wrong with the Bulsaras’ finances? This was awful; his solid-seeming house could melt away because of the landlord’s money troubles, and in the months that would be needed to get the new place ready he would be homeless yet again. Fitz was unfazed. “I’ll speak to them,” he said. The bailiffs never returned.

There was the question of health and the related question of fear. He went to the doctor—a Dr. Bevan of St. John’s Wood, known to the Special Branch, who had treated people receiving protection before—and his heart, blood pressure and other vital signs were all in excellent shape, surprising even the physician. His physiology had apparently not noticed that he was living in stressful circumstances. It was doing just fine, and the usual guardian angels of the stress sufferer, Ambien, Valium, Zoloft and Xanax—were not called upon. He had no explanation for his good health (and he was sleeping well, too) except that the soft machine of his body had somehow come to terms with what had happened. He had begun to write
The Moor’s Last Sigh
, whose central character was a man aging at twice the normal speed. “Moor” Zogoiby’s life was going by too fast and so death was approaching more swiftly than it should. The character’s life relationship with fear was also his author’s.
I’ll tell you a secret about fear
, said the Moor.
It’s an absolutist. With fear, it’s all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot’s fall, has more or less nothing to do with “courage.” It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. I stopped being afraid because, if my time on earth was limited, I didn’t have seconds to spare for funk
.

He didn’t have time to sit in a corner and quake. Of course there was much to be afraid of, and he could feel the gremlin of fear stalking him, the bat-winged fear monster sitting on his shoulder nibbling eagerly at his neck, but he had understood that if he was to function he had to find a way of shaking the beasties off. He imagined himself trapping the gremlins in a small box and putting the locked box in a corner of the room. Once that was done, and sometimes it had to be done more than once a day, it was possible to proceed.

Elizabeth dealt with fear more simply. As long as the Special Branch teams were with them, she told herself, they would be safe. She never gave any sign of being afraid until the very end of the protection. It was freedom that made her fearful. Inside the bubble of the protection, she felt, for the most part, fine.

He was offered the chance to buy a newer, more comfortable car than the aging Jaguars and Range Rovers in the police fleet. It was an armored BMW sedan whose previous owner was the rag-trade millionaire Sir Ralph Halpern, the founder of Topshop, but better known as “five-times-a-night Ralph,” after a young lover sold her story to the tabloids. “Who knows what happened in that backseat,” mused Dennis the Horse. “But it’s quite a catch, Sir Ralph’s bimbomobile.” It was worth £140,000 but was being offered for £35,000, “a steal,” Dennis the Horse declared. It might even be permissible, the police hinted, if they were out of London and driving down country roads, for him to be allowed to drive the car himself. And the bulletproof windows could open, unlike the windows in the police Jaguars. Fresh air could, when it was deemed safe, be breathed.

He bought the car.

The first time he was driven anywhere in it was when he was taken to Spy Central. The headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), familiar to fans of James Bond movies, sat across the Thames looking toward Random House as if it were an author in need of a good publisher. John le Carré in his Smiley books called SIS “the Circus” because its offices were supposedly at Cambridge Circus, which meant the spooks would have being looking out at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Palace Theatre. In parts of the Civil Service the SIS was called “Box 850,” a PO box address once used by MI6. At the heart of Spyland sat the person who was not, in real life, called M. The head of MI6—this was no longer a secret—was called C. On those rare occasions when Mr. Anton of Hampstead Lane and later of 9 Bishop’s Avenue was allowed to pass through those heavily guarded doors he never made it to the spider’s lair, never met C. He was dealt with by officers from elsewhere in the alphabet, lowercase officers, one might say; though he did just once address a gathering of many of the service’s capital letters. And he did, twice, meet the heads of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller and Stephen Lander.

On this first occasion, he was taken into a room that might have been a conference room in any London hotel to be given good news. The “specific threat” against him had been “downgraded.” So the
deadline for the assassination no longer stood? It did not. The operation, he was told, had been “frustrated.” That was an odd and interesting word. He wanted to ask about this “frustration.” Then he thought,
Don’t ask
. Then he asked anyway. “Since this is my life we’re talking about,” he said, “I think you should tell me a bit more about why things are better now.” The young executive across the shiny wooden table leaned forward with a friendly expression. “No,” he said. That was the end of the discussion. Well,
no
was a clear answer, at least, he thought, unexpectedly amused. Source protection was an absolute priority in the SIS. He would be told only what his case officer believed necessary. Beyond that lay the Land of No.

The “frustration” of his enemies made him, for a moment, light-headed with delight, but back at Hampstead Lane, Mr. Greenup brought him down to earth. The threat level was still high. Certain restrictions would continue. He would not, for example,
allow
Zafar to be brought to the house.

He received an invitation to speak at an event at Columbia University, in the Low Memorial Library, to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights. He had to start accepting such invitations, he thought; he had to emerge from invisibility and reclaim his voice. He talked to Frances D’Souza about trying to get Václav Havel to invite him to Prague so that the meeting the British had made impossible in London could take place on Havel’s own turf. If Her Majesty’s Government was giving up on the case they would have to internationalize the defense campaign and embarrass Thatcher and Hurd into making an effort. He would use any platforms that were offered to point out that his case was by no means unique, that writers and intellectuals across the Islamic world were being accused of exactly the same thought crimes as himself, blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, insult and offense, which meant that either the best and most independent creative minds in the Muslim world were degenerates, or else that the accusations masked the accusers’ real project: the stifling of heterodoxy and dissent. To say this was not, as some people hinted, special pleading to attract more sympathy to his own case, or to justify his “outrages.” It was just the truth. To make this argument effectively, he told Frances,
he would also have to un-say what he had said, to un-make his Great Mistake, and he needed to un-say it loudly on the most visible platforms, at the best-reported events. Frances had strong protective feelings for him and worried that to do that might be to worsen his situation. No, he said, it would be worse to remain in the false situation he had created for himself. He was learning the hard way that the world was not a compassionate place, but there was no reason to expect it to be otherwise. Life was ungenerous to most people and second chances were hard to find. The comedian Peter Cook in the classic sixties revue
Beyond the Fringe
had advised people that the best thing to do in the event of a nuclear attack “was to be out of the area where the attack is about to occur. Keep right out of that area,” he warned, “because that’s the danger area, where the bombs are dropping.” The way to avoid the world’s lack of compassion for one’s errors was to avoid making the errors in the first place. But he had made his error. He would do whatever it took to make that right.