The Double Bind of Mr. Rigby (3 page)

Later that afternoon, I was in my office at the
London Journal
. I say my office, but it was everyone else’s as well. The whole of one vast floor was open plan. There must have been about forty desks spaced out on the floor. A number of us had created our own privacies. I surrounded myself with two filing cabinets on one side, bookcases on two others, and the fourth was window and wall. That was my office; and that was why I preferred to be away from it as much as possible. There was a constant ringing of telephones and a dull undertone of voices in conversation.

At around 4.30 I called Charles.

‘Charles. So, what’s the dirt on Belmont? How big is the big money you mentioned?’

‘Well, no one really knows. I told you it is rumour; but there is always something in a rumour. Apparently it has to do with the placing of funds into sources over here that are then available to political causes. The word is that there are a couple of million slushing. It’s thought Belmont was involved with the placing.’

‘What are the political causes? And why is Sevillian money, if that’s what it is, interested in what goes on here?’

‘There’s the mystery. No one knows. You’re a journalist. It’s your job to find out. Must rush. Client on the line.’

‘Thanks, Charles. Keep in touch,’ I said, conscious that the only times I sought Charles’s company was when I wanted to know something; and that I needed to remedy that if he were to continue being useful to me.

I immediately rang Mark and passed on what I had just been told. Mark was intrigued but sceptical. He said he would stay alert. If there was spare cash sluicing around the city, he would hear about it pretty swiftly. Our conversation, as always, quickly moved on. He asked me if I had seen the review in the
Evening Standard
of the latest film, just released, directed by an old friend, a contemporary of mine at university. The reviewer had given the film a rare five-star rating: it was a masterpiece,
trés noir
, highly atmospheric, stuffed with great actors, and the cinematography was stunningly arresting. My friend, the director, had his photograph on the front page: he was to be seen stepping out of a limousine in Leicester Square accompanied by his latest girlfriend, a young, sexy, elegant model. I wondered where I had gone wrong. I was sitting in that untidy, grubby area, amongst that regiment of desks, hacking out hundreds of words a day for a living. When I was not doing that I was leading a life of subterfuge and deception trying to find out things that dangerous criminals wanted kept quiet. I needed constantly to remind and convince myself that what I did was worthwhile; and, further, it was all for peanuts compared with the film director. I wondered if he ever felt that what he did was futile. Perhaps, in the end,
sub specie aeternitatis
, there was little difference between us. In the scales of eternity probably neither of us would add up to much.

I complained to Mark of how I felt. He dismissed my mood with a laugh, told me to stop brooding, to go out and buy the paper and read the review. I told him that I would do so and suggested that we might take in the movie one afternoon if things on the market and in the City were quiet. He agreed and thought that the following day might be suitable. His sources were predicting a quiet trading day, although you could never be certain. It was a bear market but at some time or other there would be surges, and eventually the beginning of a recovery. Then we should all have to be ready. Still, it was unlikely to happen tomorrow.

One of the stories I was covering was to do with corruption and fraud in one of the most significant and successful companies in the UK over the last twenty years. It was a familiar type of story. There had been false accounting and auditing procedures contrived by a national accountancy partnership in order to hide a crisis in profits. Three directors had recently sold personal holdings in the company just before a steep slide in the share price. Any financial journalist, or anyone with common sense come to that, would sniff the sweet smell of corruption. I was one of a number of journalists leading enquiries, much to the annoyance and chagrin of the company bosses and one or two politicians. There is never an important national company without its political connections. This one, because part of its concerns was with munitions and arms, was more close to the political centre than most.

At six o’clock I decided to leave the office. There was no point in holding on there. Anyone who knew anything about the City and finance had shut up shop. Since it was cocktail time and fond memories of Seville came flooding back, particularly those that had to do with Roxanne, I took my old briefcase, shoved in it a copy of a draft article, and caught the underground to Piccadilly Circus. It was time I saw the damage that the car bomb had caused.

I walked down Lower Regent Street. There at the bottom to the left, the great flag of the Institute of Directors headquarters flew and fluttered in Pall Mall. It had not been affected by the blast: it had given with the shock wave, floated, waved, as the force of the air currents, the tornado winds, had swept into it. No fragment of flying metal, no shrapnel, had torn or shredded it. In Waterloo Place itself, the tall figure of the golden Athena, goddess of wisdom, that stands guard outside the Athenaeum, was, like the statue of the Duke of York, pockmarked. Both stood wounded, but still stolidly defiant, Athena presiding over the entrance of the club, the Duke of York surveying magnificently St James’s Park from the top of his immense column.

It was clear that the immediate mess had been conjured away. The superficial damage remained. There were a couple of wide depressions, one in the pavement, another in the road. They should have been filled in with red concrete and become the London roses. In Sarajevo, the central streets and marketplace are filled with Sarajevo roses. Shell holes, mortar-bomb craters, and grenade depressions, all of which show the fanning marks of explosion, have been filled with red. They look like beautiful flowers and have been appropriately christened. Now in Sarajevo you walk, as it were, on rose petals.

Glaziers had already been at work on the windows of the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace and of the Athenaeum. Some of the tall windows on the upper floors of the club were still being replaced. A few of the parking places where the car had exploded were taped off. No debris or body parts remained.

The politicians had obviously ordered an immediate clear-up. Get things back to normal as soon as possible. There must be no disruption. The inconvenience is but as the sting of a gnat, the bite of a flea. The giant of the state must brush away his minor annoyance and take his coat to be invisibly mended. It was all no more than a pinprick. It all struck me as being singularly impressive, an exercise in effortless superiority.

I went up the steps into the club, under the portico that supported a statue of the goddess of wisdom, and pushed through the swing door into the vestibule and entrance hall. The evening porter, a green liveried middle-aged woman with glasses, a pleasant and reliably cheerful soul, greeted me.

‘Good evening, Mr Rigby. Nice to see you. Will you be staying for dinner?’

‘I don’t think so, Maggie. I’ll decide while I’m having a drink and let you know if I want a table. Thanks anyway.’

The grand staircase ascended to the next floor and divided as it turned halfway up. The benign countenance of Frederick of Prussia by Johan Francke of Potsdam looked mischievously down from a portrait painting. The landing presented to the visitor at the first-floor drawing room a volume of photographs or drawings of the club’s Nobel prize-winners.

For the moment I avoided the stairs, turned right into the bar, and ordered my usual whisky and soda. Seated in a corner was Willy. In another was a purple-breasted clergyman, some bishop or other I did not recognise. Their presence summed up the club. Its membership was largely made up of members of the established church and various spooks, although latterly the medical profession had gained a secure foothold. In addition there was a scattering of civil servants, MPs, lawyers and writers, one or two actors, and one famous counter-tenor; but most members were either guardians of our temporal affairs or of our souls.

I took my whisky, spiked a couple of black olives on a pick, and went over to Willy.

‘Have you got room for a poor waif here?’ I asked him.

He looked up, smiled and said, ‘Good to se you, Pelham. Come and sit down.’

‘I’ve just been looking at the damage outside, Willy. It’s been sorted out pretty quickly.’

‘Yes, well, we don’t want to give comfort to our enemies. Tidy up and get on as though nothing had happened. That’s the policy; and quite right, too.’

‘Whose was it? What’s the mutter in the marketplace?’

‘We’re not quite sure. Al-Qaeda perhaps? It could be the IRA, but some of their hallmarks are missing. Mind you, they could have been doing the job with someone else. We’re not sure. The device was different from their usual type. And why here, in Waterloo Place? That’s a mystery. Outside a gentlemen’s club. Were they trying to get at us?’

Willy took a sip of what I thought was his gin and tonic. It turned out to be just tonic water. He held his glass up and said, ‘I have to keep a clear head for later this evening. I’ve a debriefing meeting at ten o’clock. Someone’s flying in from the old Soviet empire, from the Baltic states.’

‘Anyone I know, or shouldn’t I ask? What’s that all about?’

Willy looked round. There was only the purple-breasted bishop present in the room, perched now on the arm of a chair, and he was deep in the
Spectator
.

‘I’m not sure you do know him,’ Willy said. ‘It’s something to do with a destabilisation plot here. Erode the fabric of state. Collapse institutions. Make people jumpy about their own security. You know the sort of thing; but it doesn’t usually happen here. Anyway, this chap’s got wind of something. Who knows? Perhaps this bomb outside is part of it. It wasn’t just the usual Provo stuff, that’s for certain.’

I glanced over at the smiling bishop. Was he an ardent follower of the rich little Greek boy, Taki, or was he enjoying the bluff good humour of the editor? I envied his episcopal ease and contentment. At the same time I was thinking how much I should have liked to sit in on Willy’s debriefing session, but that was not my privilege in the newspaper world. I worked on my own in the field. The official debriefings, the sorting and analysis of intelligence was in the hands of people like Willy. On a few very rare occasions someone like Mark or myself would be called in to such important meetings, and then it was just because our particular expertise was required. Mark, with his financial knowledge, his familiarity with the institutions of the City and the trading world, was required more often than me. When I say often, he had been called in twice in the last three years, whereas I had been summoned once. In my case, they had trawled in a stringer for the
Guardian
who had passed on some information about an East African regime that, on the face of it, sounded dubious. I had to assess the guy’s credibility and judge his sources. I listened to the questions and his answers. I was allowed to ask a few of my own questions for a couple of minutes, and that was it. I had a short verbal meeting with the lead interrogator afterwards and then had to write a report to be handed in within the hour. It had all been unsatisfactorily bureaucratic.

‘If there’s anything you can let me know about it after you’ve done with him, give me a ring tomorrow morning and I’ll call in to see you. Money and the state of the state are what I’m interested in at the moment, as you know.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll let you know if anything’s relevant. By the way, how was Seville and Roxanne? A beautiful girl. How can you bear to turn up there, see her again, no doubt take up from where you left off, and then leave her?’

‘We’re both resigned to the nature of our situation. The flame burns bright and briefly, dies down, then is lit again. We are old friends, lovers. We have no illusions.’

I did not want to talk about Roxanne, and certainly not to Willy. I might have known him for many years but he was not my confidant in the affairs of love.

We finished our drinks and I decided to make my way back to what passed for a home. I had invested a year or two before in a small house behind Olympia going a little way north towards Shepherd’s Bush. It was convenient and small. It was next door to a pub run by a group of young Australians who had leased out food arrangements to some very hard-working Thais. The cooking was excellent and compensated for the noise on a Saturday night when a couple of DJs played until two in the morning. Most of the houses in the area are suburban
chic
, lived in by the fashionable professional class. Mine was pokier than most but just managed to elbow its way into the list of acceptable, desirable residences even though it possessed virtually no garden. The pub had crowded in over the years and appropriated most of my space. Anyway, it served; and most Saturday nights, I either put up with the noise or contrived to be away. There were two bedrooms that were big enough and a much smaller one that doubled for my study. Off the landing was a modern, functional bathroom. On the ground floor was a kitchen and a large living room made out of two rooms knocked into one. A dining table stood at the kitchen end, and three armchairs and a low table at the other. I was happy with that situation: it was close to a Central Line station, and it was on the way out westwards of London. Heathrow was thirty minutes away on a good day.

I said goodbye to Willy, who was staying at the club for dinner, then going back to work, and made for Piccadilly Circus. The journey was quick and easy. I thought about Roxanne and regretted that she was not in London. She had told me that her husband would be coming to London later that month and that she would undoubtedly accompany him. I looked forward to that. An involuntary thrill went through my body. It was a definite physical response to the thought of Roxanne and what she promised. As I sat on the underground train I imagined the contours of her face but, as so often with those you love, I could no longer summon up a clear picture of her. I could not catch the exact details of her looks. She had become elusive in more senses than one. After a while I gave up trying and turned my attention to the evening newspaper. I noticed and read with interest an article on the government of Estonia. Its seventy-three-year-old president had just entertained to dinner in Tallinn a prince of the British royal family who was on a goodwill tour of the three Baltic States. The writer explained that the president was virtually an unreformed old-guard communist. He spoke no English whereas most Estonians spoke fluent English. It was yet another of those old Soviet bloc countries where every school child had been taught Russian and English. As adults, everyone refused to speak any Russian but all perfected their spoken and written English. The old president was a stooge, a puppet. He had been put in place by progressive, pro-European politicians, and everything happened around him. More than half the time he did not understand what was going on because everyone spoke in English. If you were to believe the report, his interpreter edited both what he was told and what he said. The arrangement suited both parties. He was happy with his lifestyle. The politicians were able to get on with the purpose of their work unhindered by an obstructive president. I wondered if Willy’s Baltic source would corroborate this story. It struck me as entirely credible of the new wave of young politicians in places like Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria. There were many young thrusters with MBAs from Harvard or Stockholm, economics doctorates from the LSE, or MAs from the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. These young political intellectuals ran rings round the old monolithic Stalinists. They were the new internationalists and their
lingua franca
was, and is, English.