A Delicate Truth (3 page)

Except that his name isn’t Elliot but
Illiot
, thanks to the South African accent.

Is Elliot one of Ethical Outcomes’
brand-new international team of uniquely qualified geopolitical thinkers
?
It’s possible, though not apparent. In the bare office in a poky side street off
Paddington
Street Gardens where the two men sit a mere ninety minutes
later, Elliot wears a sober Sunday suit and a striped tie with baby parachutes on it.
Cabalistic rings adorn the three fattest fingers of his manicured left hand. He has a
shiny cranium, is olive-skinned, pockmarked and disturbingly muscular. His gaze, now
quizzing his guest in flirtatious flicks, now slipping sideways at the grimy walls, is
colourless. His spoken English is so elaborate you’d think it was being marked for
accuracy and pronunciation.

Extracting a nearly new British passport
from a drawer, Elliot licks his thumb and flips officiously through its pages.

‘Manila, Singapore, Dubai: these are
but a few of the fine cities where you have attended statisticians’ conferences.
Do you understand that, Paul?’

Paul understands that.

‘Should a nosy individual sitting next
to you on the plane enquire what takes you to Gibraltar, you tell them it’s yet
another statisticians’ conference. After that you tell them to mind their fucking
business. Gibraltar does a strong line in Internet gambling, not all of it kosher. The
gambling bosses don’t like their little people talking out of turn. I must now ask
you, Paul, very frankly, please, do you have any concerns whatever regarding your
personal cover?’

‘Well, maybe just the one concern
actually, Elliot, yes, I do,’ he admits, after due consideration.

‘Name it, Paul. Feel free.’

‘It’s just that being a Brit –
and
a foreign servant who’s been around the halls a bit – entering a
prime British territory as a
different
Brit – well, it’s a bit’ –
hunting for a word – ‘a bit bloody
iffy
, frankly.’

Elliot’s small, circular eyes return
to him, staring but not blinking.

‘I mean, couldn’t I just go as
myself and take my chances? We both know I’m going to have to lie low. But
should
it happen
that,
contrary
to our best
calculations, I
do
bump into someone I know, or someone who knows me, more to
the point, then at least I can be who I am. Me, I mean. Instead of –’

‘Instead of what exactly,
Paul?’

‘Well, instead of pretending to be
some phoney statistician called Paul Anderson. I mean, who’s ever going to believe
a cock-and-bull story like that, if they know perfectly well who I am? I mean, honestly,
Elliot’ – feeling the heat coming into his face and not able to stop it –
‘Her Majesty’s Government has got a bloody great tri-Services headquarters
in Gibraltar. Not to mention a substantial Foreign Office presence and a king-sized
listening station.
And
a Special Forces training camp. It only takes one chap
we haven’t thought of to jump out of the woodwork and embrace me as a long-lost
chum and I’m – well, scuppered. And what do I know about statistics, come to that?
Bugger all. Don’t mean to question your expertise, Elliot. And of course
I’ll do whatever it takes. Just asking.’

‘Is that the complete sum of your
anxieties, Paul?’ Elliot enquires solicitously.

‘Of course. Absolutely. Just making
the point.’ And wishing he hadn’t, but how the hell d’you throw logic
out of the window?

Elliot moistens his lips, frowns, and in
carefully fractured English replies as follows:

‘It is a
fact
, Paul, that
nobody in Gibraltar will give a five-dollar fuck who you are for as long as you flash
your British passport at them and keep your head below the horizon at all times.
However: it’s your balls that will be in the direct line of fire, should we strike
worst-case scenario, which it is my bounden duty to consider. Let us take the
hypothetical case of the operation aborting in a manner not foreseen by its expert
planners of whom I pride myself as being one. Was there an
inside man?
they may ask. And who is this scholarly wanker Anderson who skulked in his hotel room
reading books all day and all night? – they will start to wonder. Where is this Anderson
to be found, in a colony no bigger than a fucking golf course? If that situation were to
arise, I suspect you’d be grateful indeed not to have been the person you are in
reality. Happy now, Paul?’

Happy as a sandboy, Elliot. Couldn’t
be happier. Totally out of my element, whole thing like a dream, but with you all the
way. But then, noticing that Elliot looks a bit put out, and fearing that the detailed
briefing he is about to receive will kick off on a bad note, he goes for a bit of
bonding:

‘So where does a highly qualified chap
like
you
fit into the scheme of things, if I may ask without being intrusive,
Elliot?’

Elliot’s voice acquires the
sanctimoniousness of the pulpit:

‘I sincerely thank you for that
question, Paul. I am a man of arms; it is my life. I have fought wars large and small,
mostly on the continent of Africa. During these exploits I was fortunate enough to
encounter a man whose sources of intelligence are legendary, not to say uncanny. His
worldwide contacts speak to him as to no other in the safe knowledge that he will use
their information in the furtherance of democratic principles and liberty.
Operation
Wildlife
, the details of which I shall now unveil to you, is his personal
brainchild.’

And it is Elliot’s proud statement
that elicits the obvious, if sycophantic, question:

‘And may one ask, Elliot, whether this
great man has a name?’

‘Paul, you are now and for evermore
family. I will therefore tell you without restraint that the founder and driving force
of Ethical Outcomes is a gentleman whose name, in strictest confidence, is Mr Jay
Crispin.’

Return to Harrow by black cab.

Elliot says,
From now on, keep all
receipts
. Pay off cabbie, keep receipt.

Google Jay Crispin.

Jay is nineteen and lives in Paignton,
Devon. She is a waitress.

J. Crispin, Veneer Makers, began life in
Shoreditch in 1900.

Jay Crispin auditions for models, actors,
musicians and dancers.

But of Jay Crispin, the driving force of
Ethical Outcomes and mastermind of
Operation Wildlife
, not a glimpse.

Stuck once more at the overlarge window of
his hotel prison, the man who must call himself Paul emitted a weary string of mindless
obscenities, more in the modern way than his own.
Fuck
– then
double
fuck
. Then more
fucks
, loosed off in a bored patter of gunfire aimed
at the cellphone on the bed and ending with an appeal –
Ring, you little bugger,
ring
– only to discover that somewhere inside or outside his head the same
cellphone, no longer mute, was chirruping back at him with its infuriating
diddly-ah, diddly-ah, diddly-ah dee-dah-doh.

He remained at the window, frozen in
disbelief. It’s next-door’s fat Greek with a beard, singing in the shower.
It’s those horny lovers upstairs: he’s grunting, she’s howling,
I’m hallucinating.

Then all he wanted in the world was to go to
sleep and wake up when it was over. But by then he was at the bed, clutching the
encrypted cellphone to his ear but, out of some aberrant sense of security, not
speaking.

‘Paul? Are you there, Paul? It’s
me.
Kirsty
, remember?’

Kirsty the part-time minder he’d never
set eyes on. Her voice the only thing he knew about her: pert, imperious, and the rest
of her imagined. Sometimes he wondered whether he detected
a smothered
Australian accent – a pair to Elliot’s South African. And sometimes he wondered
what kind of body the voice might have, and at others whether it had a body at all.

Already he could catch its sharpened tone,
its air of portent:

‘You still okay up there,
Paul?’

‘Very much so, Kirsty. You, too, I
trust?’

‘Ready for some night-birding, owls a
speciality?’

It was part of Paul Anderson’s fatuous
cover that his hobby was ornithology.

‘Then here’s the update.
It’s all systems go. Tonight. The
Rosemaria
left harbour bound for Gib
five hours ago.
Aladdin
has booked his on-board guests into the Chinese on the
Queensway Marina for a big lash-up tonight. He’s going to settle his guests in,
then slide off on his own. His tryst with
Punter
confirmed for 2330.
How’s about I pick you up from your hotel at 2100 hours cold? That’s 9 p.m.
on the dot. Yes?’

‘When do I join up with
Jeb?’

‘As soon as maybe, Paul,’ she
retorted, with the extra edge in her voice for whenever the name Jeb was mentioned
between them. ‘It’s all arranged. Your friend Jeb will be waiting. You dress
for the birds. You do
not
check out. Agreed?’

It had been agreed all of two days ago.

‘You bring your passport and your
wallet. You pack up your possessions nicely, but you leave them in your room. You hand
your room key in at the desk like you’re going to be back late. Want to stand on
the hotel steps so’s you don’t have to hang around the lobby and get stared
at by the tour groups?’

‘Fine. I’ll do that. Good
idea.’

They’d agreed that, too.

‘Look out for a blue Toyota
four-by-four, shiny, new. Red sign on the passenger-side windscreen saying
CONFERENCE
.’

For the third time since he had arrived, she
insisted they compare watches, which he considered a needless excursion in these
days of quartz, until he realized he’d been doing the same thing
with the bedside clock. One hour and fifty-two minutes to go.

She had rung off. He was back in solitary.
Is it really me? Yes, it is. It’s me the safe pair of hands, and they’re
sweating.

He peered round him with a prisoner’s
perplexity, taking stock of the cell that had become his home: the books he had brought
with him and hadn’t been able to read a line of. Simon Schama on the French
Revolution. Montefiore’s biography of Jerusalem: by now, in better circumstances,
he’d have devoured them both. The handbook of Mediterranean birds they’d
forced on him. His eye drifted to his arch-enemy: The Chair That Smelt Of Piss.
He’d sat half of last night in it after the bed had ejected him. Sit in it one
more time? Treat himself to another watch of
The Dam Busters
? Or might Laurence
Olivier’s
Henry V
do a better job of persuading the God of Battles to
steel his soldier’s heart? Or how about another spot of Vatican-censored soft porn
to get the old juices flowing?

Yanking open the rickety wardrobe, he fished
out Paul Anderson’s green wheelie-bag plastered with travel labels and set to work
packing into it the junk that made up an itinerant birdwatching statistician’s
fictional identity. Then he sat on the bed watching the encrypted phone recharge,
because he had an unappeasable fear it would run out on him at the crucial moment.

In the lift a middle-aged couple in green
blazers asked him if he came from Liverpool. Alas, he didn’t. Then was he one of
the group? Afraid not: what group would that be? But by then his posh voice and
eccentric outdoor gear were enough for them and they left him to himself.

Arriving at the ground floor, he stepped
into a seething, howling hubbub of humanity. Amid festoons of green ribbon
and balloons, a flashing sign proclaimed St Patrick’s Day. An
accordion was screeching out Irish folk music. Burly men and women in green Guinness
bonnets were dancing. A drunken woman with her bonnet askew seized his head, kissed him
on the lips and told him he was her lovely boy.

Jostling and apologizing, he fought his way
to the hotel steps, where a cluster of guests stood waiting for their cars. He took a
deep breath and caught the scents of bay and honey mingled with the oil fumes. Above
him, the shrouded stars of a Mediterranean night. He was dressed as he’d been told
to dress: stout boots, and don’t forget your anorak, Paul, the Med at night gets
nippy. And zipped over his heart in the anorak’s inside pocket, his
super-encrypted cellphone. He could feel its weight on his left nipple – which
didn’t prevent his fingers from making their own furtive exploration.

A shiny Toyota four-by-four had joined the
queue of arriving cars, and yes it was blue and yes there was a red sign saying
CONFERENCE
on the passenger side of the windscreen. Two white faces
up front, the driver male, bespectacled and young. The girl compact and efficient,
leaping out like a yachtswoman, hauling back the side door.

‘You’re Arthur, right?’
she yelled in best Australian.

‘No, I’m Paul,
actually.’

‘Oh right, you’re Paul! Sorry
about that. Arthur’s next stop. I’m Kirsty. Great to meet you, Paul. Hop
right in!’

Agreed safety formula. Typical
over-production, but never mind. He hopped, and was alone on the rear seat. The side
door slammed shut and the four-by-four nosed its way between the white gateposts, on to
the cobbled road.

‘And this here’s Hansi,’
Kirsty said over the back of her seat. ‘Hansi’s part of the team.
“Ever watchful” – right, Hansi? That’s his motto. Want to say hullo to
the gentleman, Hansi?’

‘Welcome aboard, Paul,’ said
Ever-Watchful Hansi, without
turning his head. Could be an American
voice, could be German. War’s gone corporate.

They were driving between high stone walls
and he was drinking in every sight and sound at once: the blare of jazz from a passing
bar, the obese English couples quaffing tax-free booze at their outdoor tables, the
tattoo parlour with its embroidered torso in low-slung jeans, the barber’s shop
with sixties hairstyles, the bowed old man in a yarmulke wheeling a baby’s pram,
and the curio shop selling statuettes of greyhounds, flamenco dancers, and Jesus and his
disciples.