Spy Line (19 page)

Perhaps without that bottle of Château Talbot and the double measure of malt whisky with which my meal had ended I would have had neither the rashness nor the force to do what I did next. I raised my boot and kicked the door almost off its hinges. It swung into the next room with a noise like thunder.

For a moment I thought I’d made a terrible miscalcu lation, but I hadn’t. Standing up blinking in the sudden light were two shirt-sleeved men with headphones clamped over their ears. Their faces were set in an expression of horror. Beyond them there were some TV monitoring screens shining in the gloom. The operators had jumped to their feet. One of them leapt back so that his headphones’ lead pulled a piece of equipment from the table. It fell to the floor with a crash. Then the heavy door, with a prolonged squeaking noise, twisted on its remaining hinge and sank slowly to the floor, landing finally with a resounding bang. Neither operator said anything: perhaps it happened to them frequently.

They were of course putting me on videotape. I suppose it would have been stupid of them to hear what I knew without having some sort of record of it, but that didn’t mean that I had to sit there and cheerfully confess to anything that might later be construed as making me an accessory to a murder.

‘Okay, smart ass, you’ve made your point,’ said Brody calmly. It was a different sort of voice now. I still don’t know how much of his former bad temper was feigned. And if it was feigned to what extent it was a device to intimidate me or to intimidate Posh Harry. ‘Come and sit down again. We’ll talk off the record if that’s what you want.’ To the two video operators he said, ‘Take off you guys. We’ll cut the crowd scene,’ and he smiled at his own joke.

Posh Harry hadn’t moved. He was still standing near the refrigerator sipping his soda water.

‘Could we go downstairs and talk in another room?’ I asked. ‘The kitchen for instance?’

‘With the water running and the fluorescent light on?’ offered Brody sarcastically. He went and picked up his jacket from the floor, frisking it to make sure his wallet was still in place. ‘Sure. Anything that will make you feel good, Bernard.’ His manner was warmer now, as if he preferred the idea of talking about his friend Johnson’s death to someone who could kick doors in.

We went downstairs to the tiny kitchen in the basement. It had the same well-preserved look that the rest of the house had. Here was a kitchen where no meal was ever cooked. There were wet cups and saucers in the sink and some glasses on the draining board. On the shelf above it there were packets of coffee and a huge box of tea bags and a big transparent plastic container marked sugar. A grey slatted blind obscured the window.

Joe Brody opened a refrigerator filled with canned drinks. He helped himself to a Pepsi, snapped the top open and drank it from the can. He didn’t offer anyone else one: he appeared to be lost in thought.

I sat with Harry at the circular kitchen table. Brody gripped an empty chair, rested his foot on a bar of it and said, ‘Were there two Americans, or just the one?’

‘Two,’ I said, and described Thurkettle and the way he’d come out on to the terrace and talked about sharing an office with Peter Underlet, and the way in which Johnson had approached me after the auction. I didn’t say that I’d bid in the auction and I left out any mention of my wanting the cover.

Brody sat down and said, ‘We know about the auction.’

‘Why don’t you tell me what you know, Mr Brody? I’ll try and fill in the spaces.’

‘Thurkettle, you mean?’

‘That’s what I mean,’ I said.

‘Well, now you see why I wanted to leave a few of the details out,’ said Brody. ‘We’re trying to establish that both men were there at the time of the explosion.’

‘I heard Johnson speak to Thurkettle as he went into his room. At the time I thought he was talking to himself. Afterwards…well, I don’t know.’

‘When was that?’ said Brody. He up-ended his Pepsi and drained the last of it with obvious relish. I suppose he needed the sugar.

‘Maybe half an hour before the explosion,’ I replied.

‘What did he say?’ Carelessly Brody tossed the empty can across the room. It landed with a clatter in the rubbish bin.

When Brody’s eyes came back to me I said, ‘I think he said “What about that?” It was the sort of remark a man might make to himself. But it might have been a greeting.’

‘To someone already in his room?’

‘He knew Thurkettle was there the previous day.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘He talked about it. He asked me if I knew who he was.’

‘He asked you that?’

‘He said he’d met Thurkettle before but didn’t know who he worked for or what he did.’

‘Do you know who Thurkettle is? Really know?’

‘I do now,’ I said.

‘Let me ask you a speculative question,’ said Brody. ‘Why would Thurkettle go back to the hotel and go to that room? The bomb was already in the razor. Why didn’t he keep going?’

‘Ummm,’ I said.

‘Don’t umm me. You must have thought about it,’ said Brody. ‘Why didn’t he keep going?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But when I went back to warn him who Thurkettle was…’

‘Hold the phone,’ said Brody. ‘Are you expecting me to believe you were going to tip Johnson off about Thurkettle?
You? The guy who sits there stonewalling all questions about the death? No sir, I don’t buy that.’

‘I’m not sure what I was going to do. I went along to his room to find out what the hell was going on.’

‘Okay, keep talking.’

Posh Harry got up and went to the refrigerator and after looking at everything on offer, and selecting a tumbler from the cupboard, poured himself a drink of soda. Harry must have been very fond of soda. Or perhaps he was trying to sober up. Brody glared at him to show that such movement disturbed his concentration. Harry sipped his soda and didn’t look at Brody.

I said, ‘I went into his room and spoke with him just before the explosion. He said I was to come back in fifteen minutes. Right after that the damned thing exploded.’

‘Let me get this straight. You spoke with Johnson in his room a few minutes before he died?’

‘He called from the bathroom.’

Brody said, ‘The bathroom door was closed? You didn’t see him?’ He tugged his nose as if in deep thought.

‘That’s right.’ I began to understand what was going on in Brody’s mind. He waited a long time. I suppose he was deciding how much to tell me.

Eventually Brody said, ‘When that voice told you to come back in fifteen minutes there were two men in the bathroom. Johnson was probably just about to be murdered.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘I don’t think you see at all,’ said Brody.

‘Who was Thurkettle working for?’

‘He’s a renegade. He’s been a KGB hit man for two years. We’ve lost at least four men to him but this is the first time he’s come so close to home. Johnson and Thurkettle knew each other well. They’d worked together back in the old days.’

‘That’s rough,’ I said.

Brody couldn’t keep still. He suddenly stood up and
tucked his shirt back in to his trousers. ‘Damn right it is. I’ll get that bastard if it’s the last thing I do.’

‘So he didn’t die as the result of the explosion?’

‘You worked that out did you?’ said Brody sarcastically. He went over to the sink and turned to look at me, leaning his back against the draining board.

‘Thurkettle murdered Johnson and after that blew his head off with explosive. Why? To destroy evidence? Or was Johnson too smart to go for the razor bomb? Was Thurkettle caught switching razors? Did he kill Johnson then use the bomb with a timing device?’ Brody still staring at me gave a contemptuous little smile. ‘That way he wouldn’t get spattered with brains and blood.’

Posh Harry had regained his customary composure by this time. Still holding his glass of fizzy water he went over to where Joe Brody was lounging against the kitchen unit and said, ‘You’d better level with him, Joe.’

Brody looked at me but said nothing.

Harry said, ‘If you want the Brits to help they have to know the way it really happened.’

Brody, speaking very slowly and deliberately, said, ‘We think Thurkettle killed Johnson and then blew his head off to destroy evidence. But the guy who told you he was Johnson was really Thurkettle.’

‘The hell it was!’ I said softly as the implications hit me.

Brody enjoying my consternation added, ‘The dead body you saw in the bathroom was the man who spoke with you on the terrace.’

‘I see.’

‘You don’t see much, Samson old buddy,’ said Brody. I’d earned that rebuke: I should have looked more closely at the dead body on the floor.

Posh Harry said, ‘Thurkettle changed identity with his victim on a previous occasion. It had us real puzzled for ages.’

‘So what are you going to do about it, Bernard?’ said Brody.

‘I’ll stick with the soap and water shaves,’ I said. Brody scowled. I got to my feet to show them that I wanted to leave. He turned away and leaned across the sink to prise open the slatted blind and look out of the window. There was a minuscule yard and a whitewashed wall and large flower-pots in which some leafless stalks struggled for survival. From the front of the house, through the double-glazing, came the traffic noise: worse now that the end of the working day was so close.

‘Don’t forget the Kalashnikov,’ said Posh Harry.

Joe Brody was still looking at the yard. He seemed not to have heard.

I went upstairs to get my parcel. Harry came with me and added a few snippets to what I knew about Thurkettle. Other US government departments, resentful at the way the CIA had got Thurkettle released from prison and provided with false documentation, had proved singularly uncooperative now that he had in Harry’s words ‘run amok’. The CIA had sought a secret indictment from a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia and had it thrown out of court on the grounds of lack of identification. An appli c ation to the Justice Department had also failed and so had the attempt to have Thurkettle’s citizenship revoked. Harry explained that there was now a desperate need to link Thurkettle with a crime. Everyone – by which I suppose he meant Brody – had been hoping that my evidence would supply the needed link. Until it was obtained Thurkettle was thumbing his nose at them and walking free.

‘I still don’t get it,’ I said. ‘If you find out why Thurkettle blew Johnson away things might become clearer.’

‘We know why,’ said Posh Harry smoothly. ‘Johnson had the goods on him.’

‘On Thurkettle?’

‘That was Johnson’s assignment. They were buddies. Joe Brody told Johnson to find him and get pally. Last week Johnson phoned Brody and confirmed that Thurkettle was
peddling narcotics. He couldn’t say much on the phone but he said he had enough evidence to put Thurkettle in front of a grand jury.’

‘But Thurkettle was a jump ahead of all concerned.’

‘Joe Brody blames himself.’

‘Narcotics.’

‘The prevailing theory in Grosvenor Square,’ said Harry, ‘is that Thurkettle blew poor old Kleindorf away too.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I was hoping you’d tell me. We think Thurkettle is doing business with London Central.’ He laughed in a way that said it might be a joke. I decided not to get angry: I was too old to get angry twice in one day.

I nodded and thanked him for lunch and felt pleased that I hadn’t mentioned Tessa’s new friend with his rim beard and no moustache. They would have been all over George and Tessa. Anyway by now he might have shaved it off.

We talked for a few minutes more and then I said goodbye to Posh Harry, and went home. I hadn’t brought the car into town that day, I was using the train. Standing all the way in the shabby compartment I had a chance to reflect on what had happened. Had I been set up, I wondered? Brody’s fury had been all too convincing and Posh Harry’s reaction to it could not have been entirely feigned. But had the powerful Martinis, and the big lunch with lots to drink, been a way of getting me softened up for Brody’s grilling? And to what extent had Dicky guessed what I was walking into?

I’d known ‘Uncle’ Silas all my life. He’d been my father’s boss from a time before I was born. I remembered him in Berlin when I was a child. He was young Billy’s godfather and distantly related to my mother-in-law.

He had long since retired from the Department and he now lived at his farm in the Cotswold hills. He was old and becoming more exasperating every time I saw him but I knew there had been times when I’d exasperated him more than he ever had me. To look truth right in the eye I suppose I’d only kept my job this long because my father had made good friends; and Uncle Silas was one of them.

So when I had a phone call from an agitated Mrs Porter, his house-keeper, and was told that Silas Gaunt was seriously ill and asking for me, I went to him. I didn’t ask for permission, or tell Dicky I needed a day off, or even send a message to the office. I went to him.

The day began with unabating heavy rain and the wet roads persuaded me to drive cautiously. It was a long drive and so I had plenty of time to reflect upon this precipitate action during the journey. As I got to the Cotswolds the hills were lost in grey silken skeins of mist, and the trees on the estate were entangled in it. ‘Whitelands’ consisted of about six hundred acres of fine agricultural land and an incongruous clutter of small buildings. There was a magnificent tithe barn, large enough to hold the parson’s tribute of corn, and stabling
for six horses. The tan-coloured stone farmhouse itself had suffered a couple of hundred years of depredations by philistine occupiers, so that there was a neo-Gothic tower and an incongruous wing that housed the large billiards room.

I was used to arriving here to find a dozen cars scattered in the front drive and – on sunny days – parked in the shade of the three tall elms that marked the limits of the lawn. On such days the house was noisy with appreciative guests. It was not like that today. The front drive was empty except for a muddy Land-Rover from which three young men in faded denim were unloading equipment including, I noticed, three bright red hard-hats and three sets of earmuffs. The rain had stopped but the water dripped from the drenched trees and the lawn squelched underfoot.

As I stepped on the metal grating in the porch it rattled reminding me to scrape the mud from my shoes. I pushed open the front door and went in to the hallway. The house was silent, and like all such farmhouses, dark. The tiny windows, set in the thick stone walls, allowed only small rectangles of daylight to cut coloured rugs out of the oriental carpet. Suddenly from the drawing room, through several closed doors, Lohengrin began singing ‘In fernem Land’.

Mrs Porter, his ever-cheerful, ever dependable cook, house-keeper and general factotum, came from the kitchen to say hello and take my coat. Still holding it she went past me to look out of the front door. She sniffed the air with relish, as a submarine commander might savour the night after a long spell submerged. Over her shoulder I saw that one of the forestry men had donned a red helmet and ear covers and was climbing one of the trees. He was getting very wet.

She came back to me. ‘Yes, I thought I heard your car,’ she said. ‘I’m so pleased you are here, Mr Samson. I was worried…I still am. He becomes so listless when he is ill.’

‘Really?’ I said. I didn’t find it easy to visualize a listless Uncle Silas.

‘He got up and dressed when he heard that you were
coming. I phoned the doctor about it but he said it would be all right as long as he stayed indoors, rested and kept warm.’

‘That sounds like the doctor,’ I said.

She smiled uncertainly. Women like Mrs Porter become alarmed if their faith in medicine comes under attack. ‘The doctor said that Mr Gaunt could be taken from us any time,’ she said in a voice that seemed intended to remind me of the leading role Silas’ physician played in a drama where I was no more than a walk-on. I assumed a suitably sober face and she said, ‘He’s writing his memoirs. Poor soul! He seems to know his time is coming.’

His memoirs! Political careers would be ended; reputations in shreds. It was unthinkable that Silas would ever get permission to write such a book, but I didn’t contradict her.

‘He puts it away when I go in there. I’m supposed not to know about it but I guessed when he smuggled the little typewriter downstairs. Before the last bad turn I would hear him tapping away in the music room every day. That’s where he is now. Go in, I’ll bring you tea.’

The ‘music room’ was the drawing room into which Silas had installed his hi-fi and his record collection. It was where he sat each evening listening to music. He didn’t care much for television. I was reluctant to interrupt his opera but Mrs Porter came up to the door and said, ‘Do go in,’ and added with an almost soundless whisper which her exaggerated lip movement helped me understand, ‘He’s probably asleep, it’s the pills.’

At Mrs Porter’s insistence I barged into the room. I didn’t see him at first, for his back was to me as he faced the log fire. He wore a dark shirt and a plum-coloured velvet smoking jacket, complete with cream silk handkerchief flopping from the top pocket. It was the sort of outfit an Edwardian actor might have chosen to go to the Café Royal. A tartan car rug was beside him on the floor. It had fallen from his knees or perhaps he’d pushed it aside when he heard me arrive. His feet – in bright red carpet slippers – were resting amongst the
fire irons. The music was loud and there was a smell of wood smoke. As if in response to a draught from the doorway the fire burned bright so that yellow shapes ran across the low ceiling. ‘Who’s that?’ he growled. He wasn’t asleep.

People who knew Silas Gaunt well, amongst whom my father was certainly numbered, spoke of his exquisite courtesy, old-world manners and compelling charm. My mother had once described him as a boulevardier: it was the first time I’d ever heard the word used. To hear them speak of Gaunt you would have expected to meet one of those English eccentrics in the mould of Henry Fielding’s Squire Allworthy. But the Silas Gaunt I knew was a devious old devil who paradoxically demonstrated the skin of a rhino and the sensitivity of a butterfly, according to his long-term plans.

‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ I said very quietly.

‘I’m listening to
Lohengrin
, damn it!’ he said. I was somewhat relieved to find, whatever his corporeal condition, that his bellicose spirit was alive and well. Then as he turned his head to see me, and the fire flickered brighter, he said, ‘Oh, it’s you, Bernard. I thought it was Mrs Porter again She keeps pestering me.’

During my childhood Silas had always shown affection for me, but now he was old and he’d withdrawn into his own concerns with ageing, sickness and death. There was less affection in him now. ‘She’s concerned about you, Silas,’ I said.

‘She’s in league with that damned pill-pusher,’ he said. He switched off the record-player in a way that simply lifted the stylus. The record under the transparent lid kept turning.

I found a place to sit. He’d lost a lot of weight. His clothes were loose so that his wrinkled neck craned from his oversized shirt collar. The shadowy room was cluttered with his bric-à-brac, antiquarian curios and mementoes from far places: scarabs, an African carving, a battered toy locomotive, a banderilla, an alpenstock carved with the names of formidable climbs, a tiny ivory Buddha and a broken crucifix. Once Silas
had told me that he didn’t want to be buried in the earth. He didn’t want to be in a tomb or consecrated ground. He’d like to be put in a museum surrounded by his possessions, just as so many of Egypt’s kings were now to be found.

‘We’re all concerned about you,’ I said. It was a somewhat feeble response and he just glared at me.

‘That damned doctor wants my grandfather clock,’ said Silas.

‘Does he?’

‘That’s all he comes here for. Never takes his eyes off it when he’s here. The other day I told him to go and put his bloody stethoscope on its movement since he was so interested in asking me if it kept good time.’

‘Perhaps he just wanted to make polite conversation.’

‘That marquetry work is what attracts him but he’s got central heating. It would dry out and crack in six months in his place.’

‘It’s a lovely clock, Silas.’

‘Eighteenth-century. It was my father’s. The front panel has warped a fraction. Some of the inlay work projects just a shade. It has to be polished very carefully by someone who understands. Mrs Porter doesn’t let anyone else touch it. She winds it too.’

‘You’re fortunate to have her looking after you, Silas.’

‘That damned quack wants to have it before I die. I know what he’s after: a written statement about the clock’s condition and history. That sort of provenance affects the price in auction. He told me that.’

‘I’m pleased to see you looking so well,’ I said.

‘His house is filled with clocks. Skeleton clocks, carriage clocks, balloon clocks, clocks riding on elephants, clocks in eagle’s bellies. I don’t want my lovely clock added to a collection like that. It would be like sending a child to an orphanage, or Mrs Porter to the workhouse. He’s a clock maniac. He should go and see a psychologist, there’s something wrong with a man who wants to live in a house filled with clocks.
I couldn’t hear myself speak for all the ding-donging and carry-on.’

There came a light tap at the door. Silas said, ‘Come in!’ in the jovial booming tone he used for Mrs Porter. But it proved to be one of the young men. ‘All ready to go, Mr Gaunt,’ he said, his voice enriched with the local accent.

‘Very well,’ said Silas without turning to see him.

The man looked at him as if expecting some more earnest response. ‘We’ll go ahead then.’

‘I said yes,’ said Silas irritably.

The man looked at the back of Silas’ head, looked at me, rolled his eyes and then withdrew. I waited to see if Silas would account for the interruption but he just said, ‘I’ve rediscovered Wagner in my old age.’

‘That’s gratifying.’

After a long pause he said, ‘I’m losing the elms. They’ve got that damned disease.’

‘All of them?’

‘The ones at the front.’ He bit his lip. ‘They’ve always been here: my father loved them. I suppose I shouldn’t let myself become upset about those stupid trees but…’

‘You can put in others,’ I said.

‘Yes, I’m going to put in six oaks.’ He smiled. It was understandable that he identified so closely with the trees that had always framed the house from the drive. There would be more trees, and more people too, but Silas Gaunt would have been felled, fired and forgotten by the time they matured. He brought out a bright red cotton handkerchief, dabbed his eyes and blew his nose. ‘Is it too smoky for you? Open the window if it is.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Fledermaus went well? You saw Fiona?’ Outside there came the sound of the chainsaw being started up. His face stiffened but he pretended not to hear it.

‘I saw her,’ I said.

‘It’s clear to you now?’

It was still far from clear but there was little or nothing
to be gained from saying so. ‘So we’re pulling her out?’ I said, wanting him to confirm it.

‘In due time.’

‘It’s a miracle she’s lasted so long.’

‘She’s a damned good girl,’ said Silas. ‘A wonderful woman.’

‘And Erich Stinnes is coming too?’

Silas looked at me blankly. He must have been moment arily diverted by the racket of the chainsaw. The sound of it came in longer and longer bursts as they severed larger and larger branches prior to the felling. A tree is like a network of course, and that’s how the old wartime training manuals always depicted it. And like a tree, a network is destroyed beginning with a twig. Then a small branch, until it’s uprooted and eradicated. ‘Stinnes…’ said Silas. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Does Stinnes matter?’

‘Matter?’ I said. I was as puzzled as he seemed to be.

‘Enrolling Stinnes…getting him to go back there and work for us was brilliant. It was the master touch,’ said Silas. His eyes were bright and alert now. ‘If Stinnes eventually comes back intact the Department will break every rule in the book to get a K for Bret Rensselaer.’

I looked at him carefully. So Stinnes
was
working for us. But surely what he really meant was if
Fiona
eventually comes back intact, but he didn’t want to be that candid with me. ‘Was that Bret’s doing?’

‘No. But sending Stinnes back was originally Bret’s idea. Bret pushed and pushed for it.’

‘It was madness,’ I said. ‘Maybe Stinnes pulled it off; maybe they are playing with him. Who can be sure? Either way sending him back was reckless. It endangered Fiona.’

‘Can’t you see it, even now?’ said Silas. He shook his head at my slowness. ‘We didn’t care a jot what happened to Erich Stinnes, and we still don’t. Stinnes was sent back there for one reason, and for one reason only: to reinforce the story that Fiona was a genuine defector.’

‘Not to work alongside Fiona?’

‘No, no, no. That was the beauty of it. No one revealed to Stinnes that Fiona went back to work for us; because virtually no one there knows. Every one of our people believes that Fiona’s defection was the worst blow the Department ever suffered, and whatever suspicions passed through his mind Stinnes went back believing that too.’

I said, ‘Do you mean Stinnes was told to report and defuse what Fiona was supposedly doing to us?’ It was beautiful. It had the symmetry that distinguishes art from nature.

Silas smiled contentedly as he watched me thinking about it. ‘Yes, “Operation Damage Control”, that’s what Bret told Stinnes he was. Stinnes was just a means to an end.’

‘And so was I,’ I said bitterly. ‘I’ve been made a fool of, right from the start.’ The revelation that my wife was a heroine, rather than a traitor, should have made me rejoice. In some ways it did, but on a personal level I felt bitter at the way I’d been used. My anger extended to everyone who knew about Fiona’s long-term commitment, and had kept it from me. Everyone included Fiona. From outside, the sound of the chainsaw was now continuous. They must have been cutting through the trunk.

‘You mustn’t look at it like that,’ said Silas. He sighed. It wasn’t one of the histrionic sighs he’d used in the old days. It was the sigh of a sick old man who finds the effort of living too much for him. ‘You played a vital role in what happened. What sense was there in having you worry about the operational side?’