The Berlin Assignment (2 page)

“
Gentle
Hanbury, eh? You think with Hanbury, Godinski would have cooed?” Stepney's voice has a sudden touch of vitriol.

Heywood snorts. “Godinski as dove! I like that, Manny. That's good. Speaking factually though, we know Godinski liked being
surrounded by yes-men. Hanbury could have handled that. But not Anderson. As you'd expect, Godinski pulled rank. Anderson got sentenced to silence and meditation. What happened next? You guessed it…diplomatic drift. Hit him like a ton of bricks. For months on end, nearly a year in fact, he arrived at the embassy every day around noon with a head like a football, then knocked off in the early afternoon, heading straight back to the club. A textbook case. His zeal took him down for the count in Manila. He's still down. Turns out his mandate was nothing more than a loose remark by someone in accounting that Ambassador Godinski had double-counted the cost of a couple of lunches.”

The trade commissioner shakes his head. He doesn't show it – Manny Stepney never shows much of himself – but he enjoys Heywood's stories. Heywood has a knack for making the Service sound Gothic. And the stories are better, more detailed, now that Heywood is the Investitures priest. Heywood, Stepney knows, is incapable of forgetting an anecdote about failure. He reflects on what it must be like to fail and can't help thinking of Hanbury in Berlin.

Heywood's thoughts have been leading in that direction also.
Is now a good time to begin Berlin?
No, the Investitures priest decides, not yet. He doesn't like to start Berlin too quickly, not on lazy summer afternoons. The Berlin file is flimsy. It hasn't that much overt failure in it, not like Manila. Hanbury was on his own in Berlin, and gossip from fellow travellers, the colour commentary from the sidelines, is missing. The Berlin file, Heywood sometimes thinks, is a Teutonic file – colourless and blunt – and if deployed ineptly it would stop a conversation, not promote it. Stick to Manila for a while. Dredge up one more Godinski tale.

The Investitures priest raises his gaze towards the tree tops and says, “The question has been asked, Manny, why Godinski didn't save his new head of chancery. Why didn't he notice that Anderson was suffering from diplomatic drift?” Stepney lifts his glass of whiskey, tilts his head
back, finishes it and sits forward, leaning over the porch railing, staring into the forest in the pose of a hunting dog. Stepney smells game. “The point to make about Godinski,” says Heywood, “is that he tuned out long before Anderson arrived. The ambassador went to work all right, but mostly to do crossword puzzles. He went out for lunch early so that he could get back early to play cards with the clerks on their break. He was generally sullen, except when he played cribbage. Every point he pegged was a triumph. He'd show his old spark then. It seemed cribbage allowed him to relive the negotiations of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. That's where he made his reputation.”

“Bad for business, that treaty,” remarks the trade commissioner gravely. “Cost us reactor sales all over the world.” He continues peering dolefully into the distance.

Heywood knits his brows together, as if he's an oracle now, ready to predict chaos. “Once, a delegation of prairie school-board types was visiting Manila. Godinski loathed receptions, but since one of the visitors was a childhood chum from Wawanesa, he felt compelled to have one. The usual mix attended: expats on World Bank contracts, diplomats from second-tier countries, local heavies keen on a few free drinks. The residence was full. It was a wonderful place, you know, a sweeping driveway lined with blooming hibiscus, stately steps up to a grand entrance, marbled hallways, flowering plants everywhere, the air filled with the busy sounds of the tropics. Someone told me that arriving at that house was like entering paradise.”

Heywood leans far back. Paradise. He reflects on it. For him paradise is more than a stately mansion. For him, it's a state of mind. That's what the Service is – his paradise. Each movement of the whisky tumbler to his lips quickens a feeling of heavenly affection. Anderson, Godinski, Hanbury, all souls with blemishes. He loves them like kin. On afternoons like this, love cascades around inside Irving Heywood.
He is overwhelmed by love for Hannah too. With her help he did a decent job, he believes, spread over several continents, to raise four precocious sons.

He clears his throat to shake off the emotions. “Back to Godinski. The educational administrators from Medicine Hat, Fort Qu'Appelle, Neepawa, Wawanesa – places like that – flew out of Calgary just as a blizzard was coming on. You can guess they were overwhelmed by Manila. It's a fair distance from snowdrifts up to your kitchen windows at minus forty to Godinski's palace in the tropics. The party started well enough. The Canadians liked the moist floral air. Everyone else liked Godinski's free booze. But half way through Godinski commandeers his third secretary to play cards. This goes on for an hour. The visitors from western Canada are embarrassed, the Filipinos amused. At the end, slurring, Godinski tells the third secretary to
get these damned people the hell outta here!
You can imagine the shuffling that started towards the front door. By the way, he seldom lost at cribbage. He'd just taken the poor kid for ten bucks.” The Investitures priest inhales deeply through his nostrils, though it's unclear whether he's signaling admiration or disgust.

“There's a saying,” Stepney interjects. “It takes three generations to make a gentleman. I bet Godinski's old man was an immigrant, straight from some place like Minsk.” In a fading voice he adds, “Let's hope he's got a son.” Heywood raises his ferocious eyebrows and breaks into a grating laugh, which clashes with the stillness of the forest. He appreciates how Stepney sometimes puts things. Coming out of a slouch, he takes the thermos with chilled whisky and reaches over to Stepney who, glass in hand, responds with a practised sideways swing. Heywood pours a generous amount, then treats himself. “Speaking of sons,” he says, “Lecurier holds the record in that department. I asked him about it once. We were on a jaunt through Europe to lobby for our
position on North Atlantic fish.
Paterfamilias globalis
. That's what he called himself. He always became animated when asked him about his children. He was fond of all of the ones he knew. There were plenty and their skin colour varied.”

Heywood thinks of his own children. He waited patiently in his youth for someone to come along to match his New Brunswick genes and Hannah, British-born, was the one. He met her during his first assignment, in Lagos, in the Stepney drawing room. Stepney's wife Laura sang with Hannah in a local Anglican choir. She brought Irving and Hannah together. As happens to foreigners in far-away places, a romance developed, and quickly led to marriage. Manny was Irving's best man and Laura was Hannah's maid of honour. Hannah became the type of wife who once sustained the British Empire: unfailingly cheerful, an imaginative cook, an enthusiastic gardener, lively at receptions. In short, a perfect mate for an ambitious Service man. Everyone instinctively flocked around Hannah at parties. Irving usually stood around helplessly for a while – a backwoodsman's habit he never shook – until the alcohol took hold. At a certain moment, expertly chosen by Hannah, when he was ripe, she'd throw him an opening and Irving would barrel forward with his stories. Their success on the cocktail circuits had no limits, save those posed by Heywood's liver.

Now that the reminiscing has gotten around to Lecurier and his children, Heywood's pride surges over his own offspring. He is thinking that he, also, is a
paterfamilias
. Unlike Lecurier however, his boys are legal. Apart from number three, a problem child, they take after Hannah. A curious coincidence, Heywood sometimes mused, that all but number three were fathered in his favourite conservative position. In contrast, number three was the product of a wild night on a Cuban beach. They had been on vacation. A tempest was raging and nature's violence carried him away. Perversely, he insisted on penetrating Hannah
from behind as she, legs astride and feet firmly planted, leaned forward into the tearing wind. Number three had been restless and adversarial – a stormy boy – from the moment of his birth, perhaps from the moment of conception. Heywood always kept this speculation to himself, but he did occasionally think, if indeed undiscovered forces arising from the style and energy of the reproductive act determine personality, that all the world should marvel at Lecurier's imagination, given his rambunctious brood.

Stepney, interested to hear more about Lecurier, prompts Heywood. “Sorry, Manny. My thoughts wandered. Where was I? Lecurier, right? Well, I'll say this about Jacques, he managed his assignments with biological adroitness. He had always left a place by the time the paternity accusations were ripe. You know, after the fish talks in Europe, I was put into Investitures for a spell. Lecurier had dispersed his seed pretty widely already by then and it fell to me to ask him to slow down. What happened? Naturally, he claimed we had no business digging around in his personal affairs. I couldn't reprimand him too severely, because to his credit he did his best to support the mothers.”

“I heard there was something with a princess in the Saudi royal family,” says Stepney. “That must have been a tough one to have paid for.”

Heywood answers smoothly. “I discount that story, Manny. It arose out of the sheer momentum of his reputation. Lecurier developed a pattern of holding back in high-cost countries. It's true there was a princess of sorts in Jeddah, but she was English. She did a veil dance in a secret basement suite in the residence of the Ambassador of Argentina, who would invite his friends to watch. Lecurier didn't stay there long. Not Jeddah, Manny. Kuala Lumpur, Nairobi, Bogota, Peking, those were Lecurier's hallmarks. The last one was the diciest. He took up with the great-granddaughter of a member of the Central Committee.
Somehow he got around Chinese security. It proved his most remarkable characteristic. He could go local, like a chameleon. Disappear. Needless to say, when this happened in China, the complainant was apoplectic.”

“Did he have some trick to turn himself into a slant-eye?” asks the wily trade commissioner, “or did he pose as a missionary?”

Heywood doesn't bite. “He just knew how to go local,” he insists. “And he did brilliant reporting. It makes you wonder whether paternity and political insight are opposite sides of the same coin. Lecurier had a special knack for getting through to the bare bones of a culture and an uncanny ability to predict political decisions.”

Talk of Lecurier pushes Hanbury once more into Heywood's thoughts. Hanbury also had chameleon qualities. He disappeared into Berlin the way Lecurier vanished in Peking. Like Lecurier, Hanbury wrote some acceptable reports. Heywood remembers the Berlin reports. They caused a stir. But similarities ended there. Lecurier and Hanbury diverged, as Heywood often pointed out, when it came to flair. Hanbury plodded, whereas a worldliness propelled Lecurier. Yet despite Hanbury's lack of flair, Heywood always liked him, as he did Lecurier – perhaps even more.

Shifting his great frame, Heywood slaps at a mosquito on his thigh and wipes his forehead on a shoulder. He's been sweating profusely. A pungent odour is developing. “Ever read one of Lecurier's reports?” he asks, knowing Stepney hasn't. “They were special, they really were. He created an extra dimension, a sense of history in the making. He started off in Athens when the Colonels ran the place, then he was in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, but he really came into his own in Indochina. His work on Cambodia was gripping. It even circulated in Washington. His style was to take a few telling facts, then draw a big picture. His syntheses had energy and ease. I suppose that characterized his night work too, I mean, when he lay down with local
ladies. He lived in an enviable world, always injecting order into what seemed all screwed up and crazy. From Cambodia he was sent to South Africa. The issues there were immediate. The business community was squealing about our apartheid sanctions. The Government needed someone who could charm the captains of industry, yet convince them the sanctions would never come off. There were fewer questions in the Commons once he stared down the bankers.”

“We were much too holier-than-thou with those damn sanctions,” says an annoyed Stepney, beginning to drum his glass. “The Brits and Krauts left themselves more manoeuvring room.”

“They had more historical investment,” Heywood replies dispassionately.

“We have a habit of misunderstanding investment generally,” counters Stepney, “so no wonder we never get around to having any that you could call historical.”

Heywood is not inclined to be drawn in, not on investment and especially not on sanctions and apartheid. He fills his lungs for a dramatic finale. “Lecurier's end was tragic. His vehicle was rammed by a rhinoceros while on safari and he sustained mortal injuries. That was the official line. Actually, early one morning he was stabbed in a lung as he left a public house in one of the townships, whereupon he drowned in his own blood. We were concerned, of course, that the embassy would be wobbly at a crucial time. Hanbury turned out to be a passably good chargé. After Berlin, who would have expected it?”

The truth about Lecurier stuns Stepney. “Holy shit,” he swears softly. “So it wasn't a rhino?”

“No,” Heywood confirms harshly. For a moment he thinks he may have gone too far. The real version of Lecurier's death was always closely held. The trade commissioner is melancholy for a minute, then says, “I've heard Hanbury was a tower of strength managing the funeral
arrangements. Sounds almost unbelievable.”

“We've all heard that, Manny. There could be some exaggeration.”

“I guess so. Did you know, I worked with him once. We were on a task force investigating the impact of high sugar prices on the economy.” This link, though decades old and tenuous, allows the trade commissioner a judgement. “When I knew him he gave an impression of treading water. He worked, but he never progressed.” The Investitures priest approves of the analogy. In the Priory, Hanbury routinely had a look about him that suggested he was about to sink, and Heywood often had a paternal urge to throw his deputy a lifeline.