The Midnight Swimmer (34 page)

‘It’s not a matter of liking it.
It’s a matter of having to do it.’

‘I hope,’ said Alekseev with a sparkle in his eye, ‘that you enjoyed your leave.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t on leave.
I was called back to London for
consultations.
’ Honesty was just as much a tactic as lying.
‘And I believe that you were in Moscow at the same time.’

The Russian smiled and raised his glass.

‘Shall we drink a toast?’
said Catesby.

‘Of course.’

Catesby speared a piece of pickled herring and raised it high.
‘You must understand, Yevgeny Ivanovich, that I’m from a fishing port called Lowestoft.
To the herring!’

The drinking and toasting continued for the next two hours.
The Italian journalist was lying on his back with his panama hat over his face.
The Russian and Cuban soldiers were singing each other’s songs after having finished off the food.
And Sophie was sitting in a canvas chair next to Che and looking cross.
Catesby could see it was time to go.

‘The Frenchwoman doesn’t look very happy,’ said Alekseev.

‘That’s because …’ Catesby was aware that his voice was slurred,
so he began again.
‘That’s because you haven’t shown her your R-12 nuclear missiles.’
Catesby meant it as a joke, but as soon as he saw Alekseev’s face he realised he had made a mistake.

‘She thinks we have brought nuclear weapons to Cuba.’
Alekseev sounded completely sober.
‘Did she tell you that?’

‘No, it was just a joke.’

‘What sort of joke.’

‘You realise,’ Catesby was surprised by how sober his own voice now sounded, ‘that the R-12 story is a rumour that the Americans are passing around.
I meant it as a joke.’

The Russian looked at Catesby with eyes that were more sad than surprised or angry.
‘She shouldn’t say things like that.’

‘I told you, she didn’t say it.
I made the story up.’
Catesby realised that, no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Everyone was quiet and subdued during the drive back to Havana.
The Italian was dropped off first at his hotel in Miramar Playa.
‘I am sure,’ whispered Catesby now alone in the back with Sophie, ‘that I saw you in Washington.’

‘You might have.’
She spoke with the icy politeness of a tired
official
.
‘I was stationed there for a time.’

‘Did you ever go to a jazz club called the Blue Door on U Street?’

The lines around her mouth, the ones Catesby didn’t like,
tightened
like steel hawsers.
She didn’t like being caught out in a lie.
She finally answered in a voice full of affected boredom.
‘Yes, I might have been there once or twice.’

‘Your boss in Washington gets on much better with the Americans than our guy.’

‘Our Ambassador there is a very charming man.’

‘I didn’t mean the Ambassador.’
Catesby looked at the back of Alekseev’s head.
He wondered if the Russian understood French and if he was eavesdropping.
Che did understand French and spoke it very well, but he seemed to have fallen asleep.
Not surprising since he often worked thirty-six hours or more without a break.

They were now near the British Embassy.
The day had turned into a balmy humid evening.
The rich scent of jasmine, the Cuban national flower, drifted in through the open car windows.
The Cubans called it
la mariposa blanca
, the white butterfly.
During the
guerrilla war the flower became a secret code that symbolised a pure but rebellious nature that longed for independence.
Catesby looked at Sophie and realised that she was not wild jasmine, but a cultivated and stylised lily.
She belonged to the enigmatic eighteenth-century corridors and formal gardens of Robbe-Grillet’s
L’année dernière à Marienbad
.
And like the woman at Château Marienbad, she insists that they have never met.

As Alekseev turned the GAZ 21 into Calle 34, Catesby reached into his pocket for a card with his contact details and scribbled a note on it.
He tried to press the card into Sophie’s hands, but she pushed him away as if repelling an unwanted advance.
Catesby then dropped the card on to her lap.
She looked at it as if it were a
scorpion
that had fallen from the roof.
Catesby whispered the words he had written on the card since she seemed in no mood to read them: ‘Get in contact with me as soon as possible.
It’s professional, not personal – and absolutely vital.’

The car had now pulled up outside the British Embassy gates.
Catesby got out on the driver’s side.
He closed the door and stepped back into the centre of the empty road.
He looked at the dark
silhouette
of Alekseev behind the wheel – at least this coach driver wasn’t a headless one.
He then looked at Sophie alone in the back – and for the first time longed for her.
He understood what Alekseev had meant by vulnerable.

The script unrolled with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy – except some of the characters had swapped parts.
Neville’s man at José Marti Airport had reported that Alekseev had left the country again.
Presumably for emergency consultations in the Kremlin.
Catesby welcomed the news for completely selfish reasons.
Alekseev’s
absence would make it easier for him to see Katya.
And the more he saw her, the more he wanted to see her.
Catesby knew it was a weakness, perhaps even a pathetic weakness.
He had always had contempt for intelligence officers who were compromised by honey trap entanglements.
Of course Katya wasn’t a honey trap.
If anything he was using her more than she was using him.
The thought cheered Catesby up – a bit.
Spying was a lonely profession even when you were surrounded by other people.
The loneliness was from having continually to wear a false face.
Katya was an escape not just into passion, but into true emotions.

Catesby’s flat was on the top floor of a neo-colonial house called
La Mansión Blanca
.
The rest of the house was occupied by other embassy staff, including the military attaché and his family.
Even though the place was crumbling and breeding lizards, it was the most opulent accommodation Catesby had ever enjoyed on a foreign posting.
There was a balcony and a large garden with palm trees – and the susurrus of the sea in the near distance.
There was no security other than a locked door on the ground floor entrance.

Catesby woke up when he realised that someone was trying to contact him with an ST One.
It was the first and most
reliable
means of covert communication that Catesby had learned in SIS basic training.
The ST One never let you down.
The first stone rattled the wooden shutter of Catesby’s bedroom window.
The second pinged against the iron railing of the balcony.
Catesby turned on the bedside light to let the person in the garden know that he was awake.
He then turned off the light so that he wouldn’t be silhouetted.
Catesby put on his dressing gown and grabbed a gun from his bedside table.
He opened the shutter and peered into the night without exposing himself.
He flicked open the chamber of the revolver to make sure it was loaded.
It was.
He waited in the shadows listening to the sonar shrieks of diving bats.
He could wait all night.

Finally, there was a voice.
It was Katya
speaking
Russian.
‘William, is that you?’

Catesby walked on to the balcony with the revolver in his hand.
He didn’t put it in his pocket because he didn’t want to stain the dressing gown with gun oil.
It was a silk gown that his sailor father had brought back from China in 1910.
His only heirloom.

‘I need to see you.’
But Catesby couldn’t see her.
Katya was
speaking
from somewhere in the dark under the palm trees.

‘I’ll come down to let you in.’

Catesby went back into the house, the gun still heavy in his hand.
He was about to put it back in its drawer.
But he decided to take it with him in case Katya had been forced into luring him into a trap.
The Havana air had been buzzing with intrigue for weeks.

He went down the stairs without turning on a light and opened the heavy oak door.
Katya was standing there alone, her face hidden behind a black mantilla as if she had just come from a funeral.
Catesby quickly let her in and closed the door behind them.
When
Katya reached out to embrace him, she found the barrel of the gun protruding into the palm of her left hand.

‘Is this for me?’
she said.
Her hand groped along the barrel as if she wanted to take the pistol.

‘Be careful.’
Catesby pulled the gun out of her reach.

‘How did you know I needed a gun?
Who told you?’

Her words confused Catesby.
It was as if he were in a play and someone had given him a script with lines missing.
‘Why,’ he said improvising, ‘do you need a gun?’

‘I need to kill her.’

‘Who?’

‘Sophie Devereux.’

‘Come upstairs.’

‘I want to, but I haven’t time.’

‘But I need to get dressed.’

Katya followed him upstairs and then sat on the side of the bed as Catesby took off his dressing gown.
He had started to stir and she noticed it.
She leaned her head against his thigh as she caressed him.
‘I love you,’ she said.

Catesby bent down to kiss her.
She had never said that before.
‘Can you stay?’
he said.

She embraced him tightly.
‘No, but you don’t have to come with me.’

Catesby began to dress.
He didn’t know what he was doing – or why he was doing it.
He felt lost in an out-of-focus rosy dream where there were thorns and steep cliffs.
He wondered if he would let her have his pistol, a British-manufactured Webley revolver.
Any bullets recovered in an autopsy would point straight to the UK.
On the other hand, everybody sanitised their wet-job guns by using foreign weapons – so a British bullet wouldn’t prove a thing.
Maybe the opposite.
Bluff and double bluff.
In any case, Catesby didn’t want to help kill Sophie.
He wanted to save her.
But maybe there was a good reason why the Frenchwoman should be dead.

‘How,’ he said, ‘do you know Sophie?’

‘I met her at the Ministry of Culture where we attended courses on Latin American culture and language.
We became friends and often had tea together.
Zhenka suggested – the way he does – that I should get to know Sophie better.
I told him that I wasn’t going to spy on my friends for him.
Then he told me why it was important
that I did so.
I was a little shocked.
I could never do the things that she did.
It made me see her differently.’

‘And now you want to kill her?’

‘I don’t want to kill her, I have to kill her.’

‘But why does it have to be you?’

‘I want to save Zhenka.
He was ordered to have her killed, but he wouldn’t do it.
He told me he couldn’t bear to do it.
That’s why he was called back to Moscow.’
Katya looked at Catesby.
Her eyes were dark bottomless pools of pain.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s something to do with what happened to him at the end of the war in Berlin.’
Katya paused.
‘My husband, my darling husband, said that it is wrong for any man to kill a woman because it was a woman who gave him birth.
But he said it was even more obscene for a eunuch, who could not cast his seed into a woman, to take a woman’s life.
He shouted, “It’s a sin against nature.”
Then poor Zhenka began to weep the most bitter tears I have ever seen.
I put my arms around my sweet husband, but I could not comfort him.’