The Madness of July (41 page)

‘And now in the middle of all this.’

Paul, grey and serious, said, ‘Go on. You tell it.’

Flemyng was fluent, the story clear in his mind. ‘Here’s a speculation. After my time, our man prospered. We played him long, and it worked. No name, you and I know the rules. But year by year, he gave more. And we’ve learned from him a great deal about how another ally – the big one, our best friend across the pond – is operating on our continent, sometimes on its own and sometimes with others, and not always in our interest. That story is gold dust, for sure. Everything we’ve always wanted. He was the source we have dreamed about so often, looking east and west, laying Europe bare and preparing us for the time when we’re all in from the cold, and we’ll start all over again. When he’ll still be ours.’

Paul said, ‘What was your phrase? A surfeit of allies. How true.’

‘And you’ll understand how I made the connection,’ Flemyng said. ‘There was something particular about this asset, our man with the bag of gold dust. A promise that he made me give from the start: that he was ours and not anyone else’s. His help was for us alone. And now I hear of a request for access from Washington that has got this whole place pitching and yawing like a ship in a storm. It’s too much of a coincidence. I see all the signs – and they smell to me like a mixture of pride and something else. Guilt. I don’t think it can be anyone else.’

Paul laughed for the first time. ‘When I asked you to think for me, this wasn’t what it was about, you know. I needed help with the Manson business because I wanted to know why he was here. That was all. You’ve raced off on your own. I should have known.’

Flemyng’s voice had softened. ‘They’re inseparable, Joe Manson and Berlin. He was a danger to the whole deal. And I think I know why.’

Paul said nothing. Waited.

Flemyng picked up. ‘I decided there must be two operations at risk. One of ours, and one of theirs, coiled up in a knot. Let me try this one out on you.’

He laid Sam’s precious fragment before Paul, like the jewel that it was. ‘Assume that the Americans discovered they had an ugly problem of their own in Berlin, that normally they wouldn’t share, even with us. A leak, operations gone wrong – all the tell-tale signs that one of their own might have wandered off the reservation and gone bad. Embarrassing, but they needed help and turned to us.

‘Did you ever hear of an operation called Empres
s
?’ Paul stared at him. ‘We used an ally to do some of our own dirty business, years ago, on our own doorstep. Inside government. I’m told Operation Empress is a clue, and I think I may know why.’

It’s what allies were for in time of need, he said. ‘The Americans had heard a whisper about our prize asset so they hatched a plan. Maybe they didn’t have the name, but they knew enough. Get us to use our source to identify their leak. Plant information, send some signals and follow them, track him everywhere… that kind of thing. The same kind of help that we got in Empress
–
an ally called in to muck out the stables.’

He thought of Sam, his excitement at retelling the tale, then his admission that he’d come to a dead end. ‘I think I’ve worked out the next chapter.

‘We gave the Americans a dusty answer. We were reluctant, backed away. Unusual, to say the least. So I asked myself why. Sure, they had rumbled the existence of our super-source and we were piqued, appalled if the truth be told, but allies are supposed to help each other out.’ He paused, and Paul gestured with one hand: keep going.

‘It leaves me facing one conclusion, which may explain why Sassi and my brother and, for all I know, half a dozen other people are crawling round this town with cloaks pulled round them, looking like death.’

He stepped towards Paul as he turned from the window at last.

‘I can think of one good reason why their request should provoke so much reluctance on our part, and fear.’ They were face to face now.

‘
Their
man, their bad egg, is one of ours. Turned by my old friends, bless them, and for all I know just as useful to us as the seam of gold that we’ve been trying to protect, and keep from the Americans. And we worried that this operation would break him.’

Paul’s eyes were in shadow, the sun coming through the window behind him giving his profile a soft halo of light. ‘Go on.’

Flemyng said, ‘Our closest ally, the special one, has rumbled our game. What we’ve been doing to them in Berlin, and it hurts us both. The nightmare of nightmares.’

Paul spoke. ‘If Gwilym were here, he’d call it a bugger’s muddle.’

‘Quite,’ said Flemyng.

He said he assumed Maria Cooney had worked it out first. ‘She understood why we were stalling, why we had something to hide and what it might be. Miles ahead of the game as usual, which is why she’s still running her own show.

‘She put the squeeze on us. They knew we’d turned one of theirs, and they played hardball. Wanted double rations. All the stuff we’d got from their guy who’s been working for us – everything we’ve had from him and others of his ilk, for all I know – and on top of that, access to our prized source, inside the European government that’s going to be the most important of all some day. Our German benefactor.

‘And what if we said no?

‘The worst threat of all. My guess is that they’ve threatened to blow our asset so that we end up covered in horseshit. Humiliated with one European ally – and at the same time denied the stuff from Washington that we depend on, day by day, just to keep our peckers up. The prospect has had a lot of people in this town wetting themselves.

‘All for refusing to behave like a good ally.’ Flemyng laughed.

‘So here was the American deal. Give them access to our source, let them dig our seam of gold, and at the same time open the books on all the material we’ve had from their guy whom we turned. In return they promise to protect our Big Person, and lift their skirts for us in some difficult places here and there where we need to know things we can’t get for ourselves. Trust us, they said: a nice payback. Otherwise, no deal and a long, cold winter.’ Flemyng was aware that he was beginning to sound like Sam.

‘Then Joe Manson stepped into the middle of it all, doing his girlfriend’s business.’ Flemyng shook his head.

‘He explains the panic. He was the guy who knew too much and might talk. Three allies, at least, would be screaming at each other, and, just for once, so loudly that people out there’ – he gestured to the window – ‘might hear. The thing we dread more than anything.’

Paul sighed. ‘You’re there, more or less. We have to buy the deal, because there’s no other choice. They have us by our private parts, and they’re twisting hard. So here’s our problem.

‘How can we persuade our big source that everything from him is shared with Washington? He’s not that way inclined, as I now know you learned an age ago. Quite the reverse. And he’s in a position to know if we start to share it – believe me, he sees everything these days. Why do you think we’ve got such good stuff on the Americans from that source over the years? As well as goings-on over the wall, I may say. So we’ve had to be open with him about what the Americans want. Everyone has his pride.

‘It’s been our game for a long time and we don’t want to change the rules. We’ve had to work to persuade our brave helper, who’s been on our side through long, difficult years, that it’s better to do what Washington wants than to go down in flames. Very hard when we’re having to admit to our American friends at the same time that we’ve got one of theirs.’

No win, but no choice. Fortunes of war.

‘Sassi knows, and he’s been good – given us some time. Helped with oiling wheels. We may be able to get what Washington wants, and still keep some of our pride. There I must stop. Almost nobody knows all this. But Ruskin, and this is what’s scaring me rigid, knows more than he should and he’s worked out much of the rest for himself. Just how much, I can’t say, because I’m frightened to ask, and that’s the truth.’

Massaging his cheek with nervousness, he added, ‘You’re so similar, you know. Peas in a pod when it comes to this kind of thing.

‘If he knew nothing, it would be a crisis that was more… normal. As it is, we can’t know what he might do.’ Serious again. ‘And what else did Manson tell him?’

Flemyng thought for a moment. ‘Was Ruskin going to the Washington embassy?’

‘Might have been, God help us,’ said Paul. ‘But not for sure. He’s got his supporters.’ He looked down at Ruskin’s letter which still lay on his desk, torn apart. ‘But it could have been Forbes. Even you, although that would have been over Forbes’s dead body. Sorry, inappropriate.’

So Forbes had been poisoning the well. ‘That’s why I’m “the bastard Flemyng”,’ he said, and Paul’s eyes creased at the corners. ‘Forbes rang me on Sunday morning at home – I’d been on the hill, in the early light – and said he wanted to pass on something as a friend. Said he was worried about Ruskin’s balance; alarmed that he might get Washington. Could I help? Crap, of course. He didn’t know what we do about Jonathan. Jay playing his own game, as ever, trying to tie the rest of us in knots.’

Paul said, ‘We were going to sort it out this week, after Paris. Putting somebody big there was going to be part of the repair job after Berlin. A peace envoy. We’ll be back to square one now. My guess is that Dennis can pack his tennis racquets, but that hardly matters.’

Flemyng knew he was thinking of Joe Manson’s body in its icebox, and counting how many people knew something of the story, wondering what Ruskin might do next.

‘Think for me, Will. Keep going.’

Flemyng said, ‘I will. I’m going to talk to Abel in a minute. He’ll be telling Maria everything, and I’ll get his version of events. We’ve had a few good days together. Maria knows me, too: there were a couple of ploys, way back when. Today should see it done. Let’s regroup later. And, Paul, I have more.

‘There’s another door to unlock, and I may have the key.’

Paul walked towards him, said nothing, neither smiled nor frowned. His face seemed empty. ‘More?’

‘I’m having dinner with Abel and Mungo tonight,’ said Flemyng. ‘The three of us, at the club, a kind of celebration. In the midst of this, we’ve had a real coming together. Join us at about nine if you can. I’ll have a good idea how the land lies by then. It would be good if you could be there.’

‘I shall be,’ said Paul. ‘But tell me more about the call from Forbes. I need to know.’

Flemyng smiled. ‘Apart from what he said about Ruskin? Said he wanted to help me if I wanted the embassy. Could put a word in where it might help. I asked him why it was so bloody sensitive.’

Paul asked how Forbes had responded.

‘That he had no idea. Relations better than ever, he said. Nothing on the horizon. Which, I guess, is about as far from the truth as you can get. As he well knows, because he’s in the middle of it. Don’t you love our game?’

Paul raised his hands. ‘I’m not really in it.’ He shook his head. ‘You do the politics. We carry on.’

But Flemyng had more. ‘Let me ask you straight. Did you know that our super-source was once mine?’

Paul shook his head. ‘No. But when Osterly gave me that line from Manson’s notebook –
Friend Flemyng knows
– I wondered why he was treating you separately from the others. You were on a different page. I decided that what you knew was something different from the others. Yours alone.’

Flemyng turned away before he spoke. ‘You were right, and you weren’t the only one to work it out. It wasn’t the rape I might know about, but something else.’

Paul said that he felt sympathy for the source, a friend who’d helped London through difficult times and who’d remembered the guarantee that Flemyng had been the first to give him, when they were youthful recruits on the battlefield. ‘This could break him,’ said Paul.

‘I know,’ said Flemyng. ‘I spoke to him last night.’

27

Flemyng hailed a cab in Whitehall. ‘When were you last there?’ Abel asked him as they climbed in.

‘Ages ago,’ he said.

When Abel had suggested after their breakfast together the visit they were about to make it had startled Flemyng because it was unexpected, but then struck him as obvious. He thought of the small, light dining room where he’d passed happy times with friends, the bar where he’d told his share of tales, the photographs that lined the walls and stairwell like the filmstar trophies of a proud maître d’. But these were faces that would mean nothing to outsiders, their fame a matter of private pride. Members knew the building simply as Our Place because it was where they could mingle with their own kind, and let the rest of the world pass by.

They were not far from the Lorimer, in a crescent of mansion flats, and stopped the cab so that they could walk the last two hundred yards. There was no brass plate at the door, only a bell. But the door opened as they came up the steps and a dapper, grey-haired figure, ramrod-straight and without a crease on his suit or his military tie, beckoned them in. ‘The club is delighted to welcome you both. Let me take you to the secretary’s office.’

Flemyng was greeted quietly by two men climbing the stairs together, on their way to lunch, and an elderly woman in a high-backed chair in the corner of the lobby gave him a warm smile. She’d been a fixture in the office library where he used to retreat for solace and thinking time, and he got a little wave from her. But it was the habit in the club not to interrupt conversations, and she let the brothers pass without a word. They heard laughter from the bar. When the secretary closed the door of his office behind them, he welcomed them both and addressed Abel.

‘We’re delighted to help, Mr Grauber, and I’ve looked out one or two things for you. I’ll leave you for a few minutes. I know you’re both busy and can’t spend much time here today, but perhaps we may dine one evening. I should be able to help you further.’ With a brisk nod of his head, he left them alone.

On the table were two brown leather folders, recovered from the informal club archive in the basement. Abel opened the first, and they looked together at an album of photographs. They both thought of the picture Mungo had produced at Altnabuie, of the Bletchley hut on a sunny day. These showed the house at the centre of the park, three different huts, a group of departing passengers at the local station – arrayed like the survivors of an arduous school trip – and a selection of individual shots. One had been removed from its cellophane folder. It showed their mother sitting at a desk, a sheaf of papers in front of her and, on her dress, a brooch which they knew well. It was still in a drawer in the sitting room at home, and it always brought her to mind.