The Clown Service (2 page)

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ he replied, ‘just tired.’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’

She did so, attending to the rest of her passengers. The man didn’t speak to her again, just fell asleep, jolting awake only once the wheels hit the tarmac at Heathrow.

Analiese did her best to persuade herself that she had been mistaken. The passenger
must
have been there when they had taken off – it had simply slipped her mind. Yet she remained unconvinced.

‘You let him go?’

‘Not by choice, but you know his skills.’

The man in authority gave a slight nod, rubbing his weary eyes with the tips of his fingers. It had been two days since the death of Bortnik and he had been struggling to sleep ever since.

‘And now he is out of our control,’ the other man ventured, hoping to prompt his superior into either letting him go or issuing new orders.

‘Not quite,’ came the reply. ‘I took the precaution of having our man whisper in a few ears over there. The British are expecting him.’

‘They can’t know what he’s capable of, surely?’

The other man stared at his subordinate who wilted slightly, aware that he had spoken out of turn.

‘Naturally not. But they will be watching him; we can only hope that will be enough.’

His subordinate couldn’t help but feel that it wouldn’t be, but knew better than to question a second time. Besides, did it matter? Krishnin was nothing less than a weapon, one capable of the
most terrible destruction. The British would know him for what he was soon enough; by which time it would be far too late to do anything about it.

The difference in the light unsettled Toby Greene during those first few days back home. In the Middle East the air was clear, everything had hard edges – looked almost sharp enough to cut. Here the landscape, beneath thin cloud, was insipid, pale and blurred. As if someone had poured skimmed milk over the city.

The concussion wasn’t helping. Toby was dizzy and nauseous. The world was a place he could imagine slipping from, falling through the thick, imaginary surface into something even worse. The sombre face of his Section Chief’s secretary seemed to suggest that was indeed about to happen. Perhaps he had started falling the minute Yoosuf had hit him. Perhaps he was finally going to hit the ground.

Toby looked at his reflection in the glass partition that separated them from the shop floor of open-plan desks and bored data analysts. He saw a man of compromise: not fat but fatter than he would like; not ugly but not attractive either; not stupid but sat waiting to be labelled as such. The bandage made his
light-brown hair stick up, an extra piece of absurdity. He stared at his face and had an almost uncontrollable urge to punch it.
We all aspire
, he thought,
we all dream. Why can I not be even half the man I want to be?

‘You can go in now,’ said the secretary.

His Section Chief didn’t stand as Toby entered, just watched him as if casually interested in the progress of a limping dog.

There was a moment of silence. His superior scratched at his grey beard. Toby found himself transfixed by the way the action made the older man’s jowls quiver. The fat beneath the skin had stretched his features out, turning his whole face into a mask. He couldn’t bear to think what might be underneath.

‘You’re a headache, Greene,’ his superior said eventually.

Toby thought for a moment, wondering if the man had asked him whether his head ached. It did. But he hadn’t.

‘I despair,’ his Chief said, plainly feeling it was necessary to make his displeasure clearer.

‘Oh,’ said Toby.

‘If you worked somewhere like McDonalds,’ his Chief leaned back in his chair, ‘and let me be clear that I am using that as an example not only because it popped readily to mind but also because I think it represents a level of employment that would suit one of your intellect –’ he stared at Toby, as if quite baffled by him ‘–
if
you worked there, you would simply be fired.’

‘Sir?’

‘For showing such consistent and inarguable ineptitude for the position in which you are employed.’

‘Oh.’

‘Fired.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you don’t work at McDonalds, do you Greene?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Or indeed any brand of fast food restaurant.’

‘No, sir.’

‘You work in intelligence – a fact so weighted in irony that I would be tempted to laugh, were it not for the bubbling disgust I feel for you robbing me of my mirth.’

Toby opened his mouth to argue. After all, he could only take so much of a beating, as Yoosuf had recently proved.

‘Don’t say anything, Greene,’ his superior replied. ‘It would be safer. Because if you said something I might accidentally lose my professional grip and stave in your soft skull with this decorative monstrosity.’ He pointed at a silver horse that leaped perpetually skyward from the corner of his desk. ‘A present from my wife, and nothing would please me more than to break it on your idiotic head.’ He reached out and twisted the ornament slightly, as if judging the best edge to lead with when using it in an assault. ‘I could kill you with impunity. To hell with British law. We get rid of dead bodies every day.’

Toby felt the pain in his head intensifying.

‘It would be easy,’ his superior continued, ‘but I will resist. I will resist because I do not like to waste the taxpayer’s money. Your career thus far represents an investment of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Hundreds of thousands of pounds spent trying to beat the knowledge of spycraft into that thick, curdled brain of yours.’

‘He got the jump on me,’ Toby managed to blurt out. ‘It could have happened to anyone.’

The Section Chief reached towards the horse ornament again. ‘Don’t make me do it,’ he said. ‘One solid blow, that’s all it will
take. Your medical report assures me that Yoosuf has weakened your cranium considerably.’

Toby sighed and lowered his head. A beaten dog accepting the flexed belt of his master.

‘It was a simple assignment, Greene,’ his Chief continued, ‘pathetically so. You just had to babysit him. A man whose hobbies include collecting sheet music and playing the bassoon. A man I would have previously considered one of the most delicate in espionage. Before he brained you, that is. At which point you became the most fragile flower on the books. A fragile flower that I now have to replant.’

His chief sat back in his chair and looked out of the window. ‘Somewhere shady, I think. Somewhere the bad weeds won’t immediately throttle you.’

The ensuing silence seemed to swell like a tick feeding on awkwardness. Toby wondered if it might eventually crush them both beneath its terrible weight.

‘Of course,’ said his Chief finally, ‘there was that fuss in Basra wasn’t there?’ He clicked away at his computer, making a show of searching for information that Toby knew well enough he already had. ‘A possible PTSD diagnosis?’

Toby didn’t know if he was really expected to answer. He chose to assume not.

‘A diagnosis you fiercely denied at the time. Is that the root of the problem?’ his superior continued. ‘Was that the chink of vulnerability that brought the whole lot crumbling down?’

He looked at Toby. ‘Was that when I should have realised you weren’t cut out for our line of work? That you didn’t have the …’ he looked up at the office roof, as if hoping to find the word he was thinking of scribbled on one of the ceiling tiles, ‘fortitude?’

He brought his gaze back down to the computer. ‘I always said there was a problem with sending non-military personnel into hot zones. I should have seen that you weren’t ready for it.’

Toby thought back to those few months, and one night in particular, when the sky had filled with harsh light and noise and the whole city had trembled. Who could have been ready?

‘In the old days it was so much easier,’ his Section Chief mused, ‘you threw a man into hell and he managed. These days I’m surrounded by analysts and doctors telling me to mind my poor, genteel boys.’ The man gazed into space, remembering the glory days when he hadn’t been expected to mind his operatives’ feelings.

‘The problem,’ he said, ‘has always been that you’re a dreamer. You joined up wanting to be James Bond, grown fat on a diet of TV shows and spy novels.’

Toby remained silent.

‘You expected to be working for George Smiley, no doubt,’ his chief continued, ‘a genteel old chap with a penchant for cardigans held together with pipe smoke. Instead you got me.’

He sighed and swiped his mouse on the surface of the desk. ‘Well, if this is the Circus,’ he said, referencing the slang term for the Secret Service, ‘then Section 37 is where we keep the clowns. And frankly, they’re welcome to you.’

He scribbled on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk. ‘Report there on Monday and never trouble me again.’

Toby stared at the piece of paper and opened his mouth to speak.

The Section Chief snarled, grabbed the horse statuette off his desk and threw it at him.

Toby uncoiled the bandage from his head, then leaned back with a handheld vanity mirror so that he could see his wound in the reflection. A crop circle with puckered flesh at the centre of it. He wondered if combing carefully might cover it up. A couple of minutes’ effort resulted only in an even sorer head and a piling of hair whose position was obviously contrived. Blatant as dust swept into the corner of an ugly room.

Throwing the comb at the sink, Toby went into the kitchen to find something to drink.

His doctor had been unequivocal with regards to mixing alcohol with his medication. It was something that Should Not Be Done. Finding he couldn’t care less, he opened a bottle of wine.

After draining half a glass while standing at the worktop, he refilled it and tried to decide what to do next. Naturally, given his self-destructive streak, he called his father.

‘Who is it?’

‘Toby.’

There was a lengthy pause at the end of the line. Then, ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘No, just calling to see how you are.’

‘Oh.’ There was another pause; his father couldn’t have made his disinterest clearer had he hung up.

‘So, how are you?’

‘Fine. Busy.’

‘Busy doing what? You haven’t broken a sweat in four years.’ Toby had meant the comment to sound light-hearted. It was out of his mouth before it occurred to him that it might come across as a criticism. His father certainly took it as such.

‘Retired doesn’t mean lazy,’ he said. ‘I can still be busy.’

‘I know. I was joking.’

Toby’s father made a noise that could have been dismissal or phlegm. Then was silent again.

‘I’ll ring back another time, shall I?’

‘No,’ his father replied, ‘chat away.’

‘Right, well it was more to find out how you were really.’

‘Busy, like I said.’

‘Yes.’ There was a pause, then Toby added, ‘With what?’

‘Stuff, you know, just … stuff.’ His father seemed to suddenly remember how conversations worked. ‘You?’

‘Oh, some fuss at work, nothing major. I could do without it, though.’

‘I bet. You’re lucky to have a job in this recession. So, what have you done now?’

‘Done?’

‘You say there’s been trouble. What have you done?’

The fact that his father was right hardly helped Toby forgive him the assumption. ‘Why would I have done anything?’ he countered. ‘All I said was that there was trouble at work. Why do you automatically think that means I’ve fucked up somehow?’

‘Experience,’ his father laughed. Toby was familiar with that laugh. It was a common shield, his jolly weapon to be re-employed should Toby argue over the comment. ‘Don’t be so sensitive,’ his father would say. ‘Couldn’t you tell I was joking?’

Toby refused to give his father any satisfaction. He took another mouthful of wine. ‘I’m being transferred, actually – moved to a better department.’

‘Better, eh? Says who?’

‘Says me. But I would rather have had a bit more notice; it leaves a lot of unfinished business on my desk.’

‘You always flitted about, never could settle.’

‘Not my choice,’ Toby replied, feeling his anger build, a roaring tension that made him stiffen from neck to toe, becoming one clenched muscle. ‘They need me elsewhere.’

‘God help them!’ – that laugh again. Toby felt the stem of his wine glass snap in his hand and the bowl tumbled to the floor to spill wine across the carpet. ‘What’s wrong now?’ his father asked, responding to Toby’s short, startled cry.

‘Nothing,’ Toby insisted, refusing to admit anything that might be seen as idiocy in the eyes of his father. God, how tiring it was trying to be perfect. He threw the stem onto the sofa and squatted down to pick up the bowl of the glass.

‘You made a noise,’ his father said, utterly attentive for the first time in the phone call.

Toby went to the kitchen, meaning to tug some kitchen roll off the holder but it was empty. He always forgot to replace the roll. Stupid.

‘No,’ he said into the phone as he rummaged in the cupboard under the sink, turfing out a mess of carrier bags and the sort of kitchen junk that was never used but never thrown away. ‘Must have been the line.’

He found a kitchen roll and tried to tug it free from the shrink-wrapped plastic packaging. It fought him and, as the anger continued to build, he wished he could tear it to fucking shreds.

‘Anyway,’ Toby declared, determined to keep his voice even despite his jaw beginning to tighten as much as the rest of him, ‘I start next Monday – so at least I can have a few days to chill out
a bit. The doctor says I should avoid doing much. Concussion can sneak up on you, apparently.’

‘Only you could manage to brain yourself working in HR,’ his father said. ‘Who knew filing cabinets had such fight in them?’

Of course he had had to lie about the cause of his accident, his father not having been cleared to know the nature of his son’s job. But it irritated Toby. It was bad enough that his father always seemed to consider him a failure without him having to bolster that opinion.