A Spy By Nature (15 page)

I laugh at this, making a snorting noise loud enough to cause someone at a neighboring table to look up and stare at me. I bring my napkin to my face and dab away an imaginary speck. Keep going.

“The trouble is that they don’t give me any indication of how well I’m doing. There’s very little in the way of compliments or praise.”

“I think people need that, the encouragement,” Katharine says.

“That’s right,” says Fortner, his voice going deep and meaningful. “So is that usual for young guys like yourself to get hired by a company and then, you know, just see how it pans out?”

“I guess so. I have friends in a similar kind of position. And there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. It’s work, you know?”

The pair of them nod sympathetically, and, sensing that this is the best opportunity, I decide to tell them now about my interviews with SIS last year. It is a great risk, but Hawkes and I have decided that to tell the Americans about SIS may actually draw me further into their confidence. To conceal the information might arouse suspicion.

“It’s funny,” I say, taking a sip of wine. “I nearly became a spy.”

Katharine looks up first, vaguely startled.

“What?” she says.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you, Official Secrets Act and all that, but I got approached by MI6 a few months before I got the job at Abnex.”

Not missing a beat, Katharine says, “What is MI6? Like your version of the CIA?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus. That’s so…so James Bond. So…are you…I mean, are…?”

“Of course he’s not, honey. He’s not gonna be sitting here telling us all about it if he’s in MI6.”

“I’m not a spy, Katharine. I didn’t pass the exams.”

“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“Why? Why are you sorry?”

“Well, weren’t you disappointed?”

“Not at all. If they didn’t think I was good enough for the job, then fuck ’em.”

“That’s a great attitude,” Fortner exclaims. “A great attitude.”

“How else am I supposed to react? I went through three months of vetting and interviewing and IQ tests and examinations, and at the end of it all, after they’d more or less told me I was certain to get in, they turned around and shut me out. With a
phone
call. Not a letter or a meeting. A phone call. No explanation, no reason why.”

My sense of disappointment should be clear to them.

“You must have been devastated.”

But I don’t want to overplay the anger.

“At the time, I was. Now I’m not so sure. I had a pretty idealistic view of the Foreign Office, but from what I can gather it’s not like that at all. I had images of exotic travel, of dead drops and seven-course dinners in the Russian embassy. Nowadays it’s all pen pushing and equal opportunities. Right across the board, the Civil Service is being filled up with bureaucrats and suits, people who have no problem toeing the party line. Anybody with a wild streak, anyone with a flash of the unpredictable, is ruled out. There are no rough edges anymore. The oil business has more room for adventure, don’t you think?”

They both nod. It looks as though the gamble has paid off.

“Sorry. I don’t mean to rant.”

“No, no, not at all,” says Katharine, laying her hand on my sleeve. A good sign. “It’s good to hear you talk about it. And I have two things I wanna say.” She refills my glass, draining the bottle in the process. “One, I can’t believe that a guy as smart and together as you didn’t make it. And two, if your government doesn’t have sense enough to know a good thing when it sees one, well then, that’s their loss.”

And with that she raises her glass and we do a three-way clink over the table.

“Here’s to you, Alec,” says Fortner. “And screw MI6.”

While we are eating pudding something odd happens between Fortner and Katharine, something I had not expected to see.

I have been given a large bowl of tiramisu and Katharine is insisting on tasting it. Fortner tells her to leave me alone, but she ignores him, sliding her spoon into the ooze on my plate and retrieving it with her hand held underneath, catching stray droplets of cream.

“It’s good,” she says, swallowing, and turns to Fortner.

“Can I try yours, sweetie?”

He rears back, shielding his bowl with his hand.

“No way,” he says indignantly. “I don’t want your germs.”

There is a startled pause before she says, “I’m your wife, for Chrissakes.”

“Makes no difference to me. I don’t want any foreign saliva on my mint choc chip.”

Katharine is embarrassed, as am I, and she stands up just a few seconds later to go to the ladies’.

“Sorry, Milius,” Fortner grunts, now shamed into regret. “I get real touchy about that kinda thing.”

“I understand,” I tell him. “Don’t worry.”

To smooth things over, he starts telling me a story about how the two of them met, but the ease has gone out of the evening. Fortner knows that he has slipped up, that he has shown me a side of himself he had intended to remain concealed.

“You want coffee, honey?” he asks timidly when Katharine comes back. I can tell straight away that she has forgiven him, gathered herself together in the ladies’ and taken a deep breath. There is no hint of admonishment or frustration on her face.

“Yeah. That’ll be nice,” she says, grinning. She has put on a new coat of lipstick. “You boys having one?”

“We are.”

“Good. Then I’ll have an espresso.”

And the incident passes.

Half an hour later we emerge into the darkness of W1. Fortner, who has picked up the bill, puts his arm around Katharine and walks east, looking around for a cab. The weight of his arm seems to be pulling her down on one side.

“We gotta do this again sometime,” she says. “Right, honey?”

“Oh, yeah.”

High up to the left, Katharine gazes at the postcard lights of Piccadilly Circus and says how she never grows tired of looking at them. We walk down the hill toward Waterloo Place and pass the statue commemorating the Crimea.

There are no cabs in sight, but an old red Audi curb-crawls us on the corner of Pall Mall. An unlicensed taxi. Fortner looks over nervously as the driver lowers the window on the passenger side and mutters, “Cab?” under his breath. I lean down and tell him no thanks. He pulls away.

“Did you want to go with him?” I ask.

“No, we’ll get a black,” Fortner replies firmly.

And no sooner has he said this than one shows up.

“You sure you don’t want it?” Katharine says, kissing me on both cheeks.

“No,” I tell her. “I’m going to catch a train from Charing Cross.”

“Well, it was lovely seeing you.”

“Give me a ring,” I say as she climbs in behind Fortner. I can see the slim outline of her arse and a long slender thigh taut against the cloth of her charcoal trousers.

“We will,” he shouts out.

It went well.

Hawkes leaves the country for the next four and a half months, ostensibly on Abnex business, although I am increasingly of the view that he is involved in other projects with at least one other company. In his absence my encrypted reports are sent to John Lithiby, who has not contacted me directly since the beginning of the year. I have taken this as a sign of his approbation.

There is a rumor in the office—no more than that—that Hawkes has a girlfriend in Venice. When we meet in the gray conference room on the second floor for our first debriefing of the summer, he has just returned from a ten-day break “in northern Italy.”

“Nice this time of year?” I ask him.

“Crowded,” he says.

Lithiby will have informed Hawkes of the progress of my relationship with Katharine and Fortner: the Sunday lunch I cooked for them at my flat in May, with the Hobbit, his girlfriend, and Saul in attendance; the night we watched England lose on penalties to Germany in a pub on Westbourne Grove; the Saturday afternoon when Fortner got sick, and Katharine and I ended up going to the cinema together. It is the record of a gradually improving acquaintance, all of it planned and analyzed to the last detail.

“John said something about a drive you took with Fortner the week before last. Could you tell me more about that?”

I have been fiddling with my mobile phone, which I now place on the table in front of me.

“He wanted to see Brighton, said he’d never been there.”

“Where was Katharine?”

“Visiting a pregnant friend.”

“What did you talk about?”

“It’s in the report, Michael.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

I have difficulty casting my mind back to that afternoon. There is an important call coming through from an Abnex client in Russia this evening, and I am eager to get back to my desk to prepare for it.

“It was normal. I told him about my problems at Abnex.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Made-up stuff. Not getting enough money, that kind of thing.”

“Don’t overplay that,” he says, one of the few times that Hawkes has hinted at any concern over the way I am handling things.

“I won’t,” I tell him, lighting a cigarette. “Fort likes to give me advice about the business, tells me how to handle Alan and Harry. He gets a kick out of it.”

“Playing the father figure?”

I hesitate here, uncomfortable with the analogy.

“If you want to call it that, yes. He likes to think of himself as someone who helps out the younger generation. He tried to set Saul up with a contact he had in advertising.”

“Did anything come of that?”

“Don’t think so. Anyway, we chatted, drove around, had some coffee. I managed to bring up that conversation you suggested.”

“Which one?”

“You wanted me to complain to them about our government doing anything the Americans tell it to.”

“I do recall that, yes.”

“As a matter of fact, I think I used your phrase: ‘We’ve been hanging on to the shirttails of every presidential administration since Franklin Roosevelt.’”

“And how did Fortner respond?”

“Coolly, I would say. That’s the word I used in my report. I told him I felt Britain had become the fifty-first American state. Ask nicely, and we’ll bomb Baghdad. Just say the word and you can use our runways. You know the kind of argument. Cut us a deal and you can borrow our aircraft carriers, our military installations. Even our soldiers, for Christ’s sake.”

“You’re not trying to defect, Alec,” he says suddenly, cackling at his own joke. “I trust you didn’t go too far?”

“Relax,” I tell him. “Fortner agreed with everything I said.”

“And Katharine. How is she?”

“Very flirtatious. That’s still the predominant tactic. Little arguments every now and again with Fortner, then a little glance at me for sympathy. She’s very touchy-feely. But that may be just a Yank thing.”

Hawkes straightens up in his chair.

“Keep using the sexual element,” he says, with the detachment of a doctor discussing a prescription. “Don’t go too far, but don’t shut her out.”

“I won’t.”

“When are you next seeing them?”

“This weekend. Fortner’s gone to Kiev for the pipeline conference. Katharine called me almost as soon as he left for the airport.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. Asked if I wanted to spend Saturday with her. Go for a walk in Battersea Park.”

“Let me know how it goes,” he says.

Feeling oddly confident, I decide to press him on something.

“Any news on the job? Has Lithiby said anything about taking me on full-time?”

Hawkes withdraws slightly, as if offended by the question. As far as he is concerned, this matter has already been dealt with.

“Things remain as they were,” he says. “If the operation is a success, the Security Service will consolidate its relationship with you. Your position will become permanent.”

“That was always the precondition,” I say, speaking for him. And in a tired echo, Hawkes says, “Yes. That was always the precondition.”

Standing easy against the fridge in the kitchen at Colville Gardens, Katharine sweeps hair out of her face and says, “Alec, I’m gonna take a shower, is that all right? I’m kinda hot after our walk. If the phone rings, the machine’ll pick it up. You be okay for a bit; watch TV or something?”

“Sure.”

Her cheeks have rouged to a healthy flush after being outside in the fresh air of Battersea Park.

“Why don’t you fix us a drink while I’m gone?”

I know what she likes: a fifty-fifty vodka tonic in a tall glass with a lot of ice and lemon.

“You want a vodka and tonic?”

She smiles, pleased by this. “That’d be great. I’ve got olives in the refrigerator.”

“Not for me.”

“Okay. Leave ’em. They’re really for Fort. He eats them like candy.”

The kitchen is open plan, chrome, gadget filled. Their entire apartment is expensively decked out, but clearly rented, with no evidence of personal taste. Just a few photographs, some CDs, and an old clock on the wall.

“You like a lot of lemon, don’t you?” I ask as Katharine crosses to a cupboard above the sink. She takes down two highball glasses and a bottle of Smirnoff Blue and sets them on the counter. She is tall enough to reach up without standing on tiptoe.

“Yeah. A lot of lemon. Squeeze it in.”

I move toward the fridge and open the freezer door.

“That’ll be the best ice you ever had,” she says from behind me.

“The best
ice
? How come?”

“Fort’s started putting Volvic in the tray. Says he read somewhere it’s the only way to avoid getting too much lead or something.”

I half laugh and retrieve the tray. By the time I turn round, Katharine has left the room. I break out two cubes and throw them gently into a glass. Then I pour myself a double vodka and sink it in a single gulp.

Gladiators
is on ITV.

I look around the other three channels, but there’s nothing on, so I mute the sound and flick through a copy of
Time Out.
There’s a swamp of plays and films on in London that I will never get to see because of work. All that entertainment, all those ideas and stories just passing me by.

After about ten minutes, I hear a rustle at the sitting-room door and look up to see Katharine coming in. She is wearing a dark blue dressing gown over white silk pajamas, her hair still wet from the shower, combed back in long, straight even strands. She looks up at me and smiles with softened wide eyes.

“Good shower?” I ask, just to disguise my surprise.

“Great, thanks. Oh, are you watchin’
Gladiators
?” She sounds excited, picking up the remote control and putting the sound back on. The thin silk of her dressing gown flutters as she sits beside me, releasing an exquisite mist of warm lathered soap. “The British version of this show is much better than ours.”

“You actually watch this?”

“I find it intriguingly barbaric. She’s pretty, huh, the blond one?”

The dour Scots referee says, “Monica, you will go on my first whistle. Clare, you will go on my second whistle,” and before long two tracksuited PE teachers are chasing each other around the Birmingham NEC.

“So, you hungry?” Katharine asks, turning away from the screen to face me. “I’m gonna make us some supper.”

“That’d be great.”

I am still getting over the pajamas.

“You wanna stay here or help me out?”

“I’ll come with you.”

In the kitchen, Katharine goes to the fridge and takes out a tray of freshly made ravioli, which I make all the right noises about.
Did you make them yourself? That’s amazing. So much better than the packaged stuff.
The delicate shells are coated in a thin dusting of flour, and she sets them down beside the fridge. I help by putting a large pan of salted water on the stove, placing a lid on top, and turning the gas up high. The speed of the ignition makes me jerk my head back and Katharine asks if I’m okay. Oh, yes, I say, as the blue flames glow and roar. Then I sit on a tall wooden stool on the far side of the kitchen counter and watch as she prepares a salad.

“I’ll teach you a trick,” she says, crunching down on a stick of celery, like a toothpaste ad. “If you’ve got yourself a tired lettuce like this one, just stick it in a bowl of cold water for a while and it’ll freshen right up.”

“Handy.”

I can think of nothing worthwhile to say.

“You never had your drink,” I tell her, looking over at the sink, where the ice in her vodka tonic has melted into a tiny ball.

“Oh that’s
right,
” she exclaims. “I knew there was something missing. Will you fix me a fresh one?”

“Of course.”

The bottle of Smirnoff is still sitting out and I mix two fresh vodka and tonics as she washes a colander at the sink. This will be my third drink of the evening.

“There you go,” I say, handing it to her. Our fingers do not touch. She takes a sip and lets out a deep sigh.

“God, you make these so good. How’d you know how to do that?”

“My father taught me.”

She sets the glass on the counter and starts slicing up some tomatoes, a cucumber, and the sticks of celery on a wooden chopping board, throwing them gently into a large teak bowl. Steam has started to rise in thick clouds from the pan on the stove, rattling the lid, but rather than do anything about it, I say, “Water’s boiling, Kathy.”

“You wanna get it, honey? I’m kinda busy.”

“Sure.”

I remove the lid, twist the dial to low, and watch the water subside into little ripples.

Honey. She called me honey.

Katharine stops chopping and comes to stand beside me. She has a wooden spoon in her hand and says, “Let’s put the pasta on, shall we?”

And now very carefully, one by one, she lowers the ravioli pillows into the water on the wooden spoon, intoning, “This is the tricky bit, this is the tricky bit,” in a low voice that is almost a whisper. I am beside her, watching, doing nothing, my shoulder inches from hers. When she is done I walk away from the stove and sit back down on the stool. Katharine brings out a large white plate, a flagon of olive oil, some balsamic vinegar, and a basket of sliced ciabatta. These she places on the counter in front of me. Still clutching the basket, she turns around to face the stove and the silk of her dressing gown rides up to the elbow. Her bared arm is slender and brown, the long fingers of her flushed pink hands crowned by filed white nails.

“The trick is not to let the water boil too fast,” she says, talking to the opposite wall. “That way the ravioli doesn’t break up.”

She turns back to face me and the sleeve of her gown slips back down her arm. Even with all the flavors and steam around us, the smell of her is lifting from her hair and shower-warmed skin.

“You’ll love this,” she says, looking down at the counter. She picks up the flagon of oil and pours it onto the plate in a thin, controlled line that creates a perfect olive circle. Then she allows tiny droplets of balsamic vinegar to fall into the green center of the plate, forming neat black orbs that float loose in the viscous liquid.

“Dip the bread in,” she says, showing me how with a crusty slice of her own. “It tastes so good.”

I take a smaller chunk of bread from the basket and run it through the oil.

“Try to get a little more of the oil than the vinegar,” she says.

I swirl the bread around and leave cloudy crumbs amid the black and green spirals.

“Sorry. Messy.”

“Don’t worry,” she says, licking her lips. I take my first mouthful, sweet and rich. “Tastes good, huh?”

We eat the ravioli sitting at the kitchen table, and consume the better part of a bottle of Chablis by quarter past nine. As Katharine is taking the plates to the sink, the telephone rings and she goes next door to answer it, padding there softly in bare feet. From the tone of the conversation, I presume that it’s Fortner. There’s no forced politeness in Katharine’s voice, just the easy familiarity of long-term couples. At no point does she mention that I am in the next room, though there’s a section of the conversation that I can’t hear owing to a car alarm triggering in Colville Gardens. When it is finally shut off, I overhear Katharine say, “You could say that, yes,” and, “Absolutely,” with a guardedness that leads me to assume they are talking about me. It will be past midnight in Kiev.

“That was Fort,” she says, breezing back into the kitchen a few moments later. “He says hi. Jesus, those fucking vehicle alarms.”

She wouldn’t ordinarily say “fucking” unless she’d had a few drinks.

“I know, I heard it.”

“What’s the point of them, anyway? Nobody pays any attention when they go off. They don’t prevent car crime. Everybody just ignores them. You wanna coffee or something? I’m making myself one.”

“Instant?”

“’Fraid so.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re such a snob about coffee, Alec.”

“Nescafé is just an interestingly flavored milk drink. You shouldn’t tolerate it. I’m going for a pee, okay?”

“You do what you have to, sweetie.”

The bathroom is at the far end of the apartment, through the sitting room and down a long corridor that passes the entrance to the flat. The bathroom door is made of light wood with an unoiled hinge that squeaks like a laughing clown when I open it. I walk in and slide the lock. There is a mirror hung above the sink and I check my reflection, seeing tiny pimples dotted along my forehead, which can’t look good in the stark white light of the kitchen. The rest of my face is blanched and I push out my lips and cheeks to bring some color back into them. Once a little red flush has appeared, I go back outside.

Walking toward the sitting room, I steal a look through the door of their bedroom, which Katharine has left open after her shower. This is the most basic sort of invasion, but it is something I have to do. There are clothes, shoes, and several issues of
The New Yorker
strewn on the floor. I walk farther inside, my eyes shuttling around the room, taking in every detail. There is a fine charcoal sketch of a naked dancer on the wall above the bed, and a discarded bottle of mineral water by the window.

I go back out into the corridor and hear the distant running of water at the kitchen sink. Katharine is washing up. There is another bedroom farther down on the right side of the passage, again with its door open. Again I look through it as I am passing, prying behind her back. An unmade bed is clearly visible on the far side, with one of Fortner’s trademark blue shirts lying crumpled on the sheets. An American paperback edition of
Presumed Innocent
has been balanced on the windowsill, and there are bottles of cologne on a dresser near the door. Is it possible that they no longer share a room? There are too many of Fortner’s possessions in here for him simply to have taken an afternoon nap.

I walk quietly back to the first bedroom. This time I notice that the bed has been slept in only on one side. Katharine’s creams and lotions are all here, with skirts and suits on hangers by the door. But there are no male belongings, no ties or shoes. A photograph in a gilt frame by the window shows a middle-aged man on a beach with a face like an old sweater. But there are no pictures of Fortner, no snaps of him arm in arm with his wife. Not even a picture from their wedding.

No noise in the corridor. On a side table I spot a heavy, leather-bound address book and pick it up. The alphabetized guides are curled and darkened with use, each letter covered in a thin film of dirt. I check the
A
s, scanning the names quickly.

No Allardyce. That’s a good sign.

To
B,
on to the
C
s, then a flick through to
R.
Sure enough, at the bottom of the third page:

His full address and telephone number are there as well. I have to get back to the kitchen. But there is just time for
M.

Suddenly I hear footsteps nearby, growing louder. I shut the book and place it back on the table. I am turning to leave when Katharine comes in behind me. We almost collide, and her face sparks into rage.

“What are you doin’ in here, Alec?”

“I was just…”

“What? What are you doing?”

I can think of nothing to say and wait for the wave of anger in her eyes to break over me. In the space of a few seconds, the evening has been ruined.

But something happens now, something entirely artificial and against the apparent nature of Katharine’s mood. It is as if she applies brakes to herself. Had I been anyone else, there would have been an argument, a venting of spleen, but the fury in her quickly subsides.

“You get lost?” she asks, though she knows that this is unrealistic. I have been to the bathroom in their flat countless times.