Agent in Place (33 page)

“Midnight?” Tony asked, suddenly remembering Tom Kelso. “Damnation.” He reached for the telephone, dialled from memory. No answer. “Georges, look up the local directory—under Maurice Michel. I must have got the number wrong.” But the telephone-book listed the same number he had dialled. He tried again, more slowly. And still there was no answer. He waited for the space of twenty rings before putting down the receiver. “I don’t like this,” he said.

“They’re asleep. Or perhaps they turned the ’phone off.”

“Tom said he’d be awake to take my call—whenever it came.”

“They may have gone for a late-night stroll.”

“I don’t like it,” Tony said. He held out his hand. “The car keys, Georges.” He was pulling on his jacket as he moved towards the door. “Not alone,” Georges warned him.

“How else?” Tony pointed to the electronic gear on the table. “You keep your ear on that.”

“And if questions come in?”

“We don’t budge from our requests. I’ll stay in touch with you. Have you a spare transceiver?”

Georges produced it from a drawer, along with a small automatic. “For reassurance,” he said with a grin, knowing Tony’s objections to firearms.

Tony didn’t argue. He slipped the pistol into his belt. With a parting nod, he closed the door carefully behind him.

The house lay in darkness. Tom Kelso drew up beside the deep shadow of the orange-trees, stepped out of the Fiat, and opened its trunk for Chuck’s suitcase. His earlier emotions, a paralysing mixture of grief and rage, had left him. The visit to the Casino and the brief talk with Tony Lawton had actually been good for him: pain had been cauterised, mind braced. He could look at the facts, as far as he knew them, and see the shape of things that had to be done.

Thea had carried out his final instructions almost too well. Not only had she drawn curtains and closed shutters and locked doors both front and back; she had also bolted them, so that his keys were useless. He returned to the kitchen entrance—the one they generally used, near their parking space—and knocked hard. Perhaps she was asleep upstairs, and he’d have to go round to the side of the house and throw pebbles up at the bedroom window. He knocked again, called her name, had a moment of real fear—his emotions weren’t so deadened after all, he admitted—before he heard her voice answering. Fear subsided as quickly as it had risen. As he waited for her to open the door, he looked around him at the sleeping hillside. Down by the nursery, lights glinted cheerfully from the close group of three small cottages where Auguste and his two married sons lived. Lights, too, from the houses scattered up and down the Roquebrune road. And brighter by far was the rising moon, almost full, silvering the open ground, blackening the shadows of trees and bushes. Nothing stirred. Even traffic sounds were thinned and muted. Peaceful and quiet and reassuring. The door opened, and he could take Thea in his arms and hold her.

“Gardenia,” he said, kissing her neck. “So you were having a bath. I was beginning to think I’d need a battering-ram to get in here.” He lifted Chuck’s suitcase across the threshold, closed and locked the door behind him.

Relief spread over Dorothea’s face as she heard him sound so normal. She matched her mood to his. “I heard the car, but I had to dry myself and get some clothes on—”

“And that isn’t warm enough, either,” he told her. She had only a thin wool dressing-gown, belted and neat, over silk pyjamas.

“I’ll be all right.” And her outfit was practical, chosen, in spite of haste to get downstairs, to let her cook something for Tom’s supper. Besides, with all those windows and doors closed—

“Not warm enough,” he repeated, “once you’ve cooled off from your bath.” Her face was flushed to a bright rose, her hair was pinned up with damp tendrils curling over her brow and at the nape of her neck, her smile delighted with his concern but totally disbelieving. She was fastening a checkered apron around her waist, getting eggs and parsley out of the refrigerator. “I’m really not hungry, Thea,” he said gently. “And I’ve some work to do.”

“No trouble—and no time at all.” She glanced at the suitcase in his hand. Was that the work he had mentioned? “I’ll have an omelette ready in five minutes. Why don’t you wash and have a drink?”

He nodded, dropping the suitcase on a kitchen chair before he went into the pantry and poured himself a single Scotch. That was something, he thought, a gesture of trust—the first time Thea had suggested a drink in the last five or six weeks. He went to wash in the study’s small bathroom, took off jacket and tie, replaced them with a sweater, listening to the clank of a pan on the stove and the sound of eggs being beaten. The smell of the omelette cooking in butter, and coffee beginning to percolate, spread through the house. Appetising, he had to admit as he returned to the kitchen. And a normal scene, with Thea at the stove gently shaking the heavy pan, her face intent as she judged the omelette’s consistency. Now she was snipping the parsley into its centre, working deftly. Tom put out the mats on the kitchen table, napkins and forks, resisted a quick visit to the pantry for another drink. “I’m hungrier than I thought,” he told her as she folded the omelette, prepared to slip it on to a plate. We’ve stepped back into our own lives, he thought—except for the closed doors and windows, except for the suitcase lying on the chair.

Thea had guessed something of his thoughts. “Must we keep everything locked up tight?” she asked as she joined him at the table, with a triumphant omelette, oval and golden, green-flecked with parsley, firm on the outside—slightly
bavant
within.

“It’s cosier,” he said, evading the true explanation. “Come on, darling, share it with me. You must be hungry too.”

“Tony’s idea, I suppose,” she said, discarding the apron, still thinking of closed windows and locked doors. “But isn’t he being over-anxious? Poor Tony... I suppose that’s his way of life—an obsession with danger.” She shook her head in amused disagreement, a lock of hair escaping further over her brow. “We had a telephone call from New York—Brad Gillon—he had just heard.” And as Tom dropped his fork and was about to rise, she added quickly, “Brad will call again as soon as he gets home from the office. That should be around eleven o’clock our time. I told him you’d surely be back from Menton by then. It’s only half-past nine now. So we can eat in peace. What about a mild Camembert to follow—and some Châteauneuf du Pape? Then fruit and coffee, and you can tell me what happened down in Menton.”

“Feed the brute?” Tom asked, but he was actually smiling. He felt better, much better. Nerve-ends were being smoothed down. “I’ll start telling you right now.” So he began a full account of his visit to the town.

Dorothea listened in silence. As she rose to clear the table, she said, “You must look through Chuck’s suitcase tonight? Oh, really—” she frowned angrily as she stacked dishes into the washer—“Tony is impossible.” Hadn’t he any imagination, any sensitivity? “Why all this rush? Couldn’t he have left us alone—”

“I’d like to know myself, just why Rick Nealey wanted to get hold of that suitcase,” Tom reminded her. “I must search through it. No way to avoid it, Thea.”

“Then let me help,” she suggested, glancing worriedly at Tom. He sounded fully in control, but—even with food and wine relaxing him—his face was haggard and drawn as he lifted the suitcase and heaved it on to the table. He opened it, looked down at the neatly-packed contents, and hesitated. Slowly, he picked out a small book and two manila envelopes.

“I’ll look through the clothes, if you like. The diary—”

“It isn’t a diary. Just addresses and engagements.” But there were some pages at the back that were headed
Memoranda
, partly filled by very small writing, close-packed, words abbreviated. “Expenses,” was Tom’s first judgment. “Chuck always kept a close account of what he spent in restaurants and theatres and—” He stopped short. There were other items, too, and a few notes. “I’ll need some time to decipher all this. Let’s move into the living-room.”

“Decipher? Is it in code?” Dorothea asked as she turned off the kitchen lights, checked the door’s lock and bolt. Tom was already carrying the suitcase through the pantry. He had it open again, placed on one of the couches to let her more easily examine the clothes, before she reached him.

“No,” he answered, as he took the address-book and envelopes over to the writing-table in the corner of the room. “Not code. Just abbreviations—an old habit of Chuck’s. He used to put as much news on a postcard as most people could get into a couple of pages.” He sat down, turned on the small light at his elbow, and began reading.

Dorothea looked down at the opened suitcase. She shivered, and then forced herself to start unpacking the dead man’s clothes. Unfold, shake, search every pocket, she told herself. It would be a heart-wrenching job. Chuck had crowded a lot into his suitcase, ready for his winter vacation: ski pants and jacket, turtleneck wool sweaters. The only touch of formality was a navy blue blazer, grey flannels, dress loafers, and a white shirt and three ties—for special evenings, presumably. Or perhaps as a concession to Menton, if his stay had lasted a full week-end.

The police, she thought as she unfolded the blazer, had been as expert in packing as Chuck. Everything looked as though it hadn’t been touched since he had filled his suitcase to the brim back in New York. Perhaps the police had only made a cursory examination of the clothes, like a Customs officer when nothing roused his suspicions. Why should they bother with clothes, anyway? They were what they seemed: the usual belongings of a young man who had been planning a holiday and not a suicide.

There’s nothing here, she decided, finding only a folded handkerchief in one of the blazer’s outside pockets. Inside, there was a slit pocket without one bulge showing in the silk lining. Nothing, she thought again, but dutifully searched inside the slit. Her fingers touched something light and thin, and drew out a folded sheet of airmail paper.

She opened it, and found a half page of typing: a letter, dated the twenty-sixth of February, to Paul Krantz, Shandon House, Appleton, NJ. Across its top left-hand corner were the words
Copy to Tom
. And at the bottom of the page, a hurried postscript, in pencil, with today’s date—the twenty-eighth of February: “Tom—I’ll hand this to you as I leave this evening. Didn’t want to discuss it directly until you had time to read, digest, and think it over. The original letter is signed, sealed, ready to mail—if Nealey doesn’t accept my first alternative. He began by denying everything this morning, then ended—after we had a bitter argument which I won—by a tentative admission of guilt, saying he needed time to consider, etc., etc. I have given him twenty-four hours to resign from Shandon Villa. If he does, then I needn’t send the letter to Krantz, and you can destroy your copy. If he doesn’t, I’ll see you before I leave for Gstaad. Any improvements to suggest on what I’ve written? As ever, Chuck.”

“Tom!” Dorothea called across the room. “I’ve found something. In the blazer pocket. A letter to Shandon House, telling them about the NATO—”

“Mentioning Rick Nealey?” Tom had risen, the address-book and a newspaper clipping in his hand. Quickly he reached her, seized the typed sheet, and scanned it. Yes, there it was, brief and neat in two decisive sentences: Heinrich Nealey was the only person who knew about Chuck’s possession of the entire NATO Memorandum; Heinrich Nealey was the only person who had access to the second and third sections of the memorandum, on the night of the twenty-third of November 1974.

As for the rest of the letter, equally concise, it began with Chuck’s admission of responsibility for the removal of the memorandum from Shandon House. It ended with Chuck’s resignation from the Institute, together with the statement that he had acted out of conscience and with the belief—which he still held—that the American public had the right to know the full contents of the first part of the NATO Memorandum.

Tom read the postscript again. And again. At last he said, “Chuck never had a chance, had he? He didn’t even realise that Nealey was a trained foreign agent—probably thought of him as an American who had been sidetracked into treason. Why else—” Tom looked challengingly at Thea—“did Chuck give him twenty-four hours, why delay in sending the letter when he wrote it on Wednesday?”

Because, she thought unhappily, Chuck was hoping he could avoid mailing the letter. “Perhaps,” she said, “he still couldn’t believe Rick Nealey had—” quickly she cancelled the word
duped
and found a kinder substitute—“betrayed him. Not until he met Nealey face to face.”

“But Chuck
knew
, before he met Nealey, that he had been tricked.” Tom gave her the small newspaper clipping. “I found this tucked between two of the memo pages. It’s from the
Washington Post
, published last Tuesday. One of those ‘now it can be revealed’ items.”

It was a brief report by one of the more sensational, but accurate, columnists, that the NATO Memorandum, part of which had been published by a prominent newspaper as a public service on the third of December 1974, had been delivered in its entirety to Soviet authorities. A reliable source at the Pentagon admitted that damage to Allied Intelligence agencies had been severe, and “in several cases, disastrous to agents in the field.”

“Yes,” Tom repeated, “he knew he had been tricked. Brad Gillon had told him, and he didn’t want to believe it. And then this appeared on Tuesday.” Tom put the newspaper clipping back inside Chuck’s address-book. “By Wednesday Chuck was ready to admit he had been duped. Duped. No other word for it. So he wrote the letter to Paul Krantz, changed his travel plans, came to Menton to confront Nealey—” Tom shook his head. “Good God, what a mess poor old Chuck made of everything! And always so sure he was right. Always so confident he could handle—” He broke off, turned away, said, “Chuck was out of his league.”

Dorothea began packing the last clothes back into place. “First alternative,” she said reflectively. “What did he mean by that? It was in the postscript, remember?”

As if I’ll ever forget that postscript, Tom thought. Chuck, still vacillating, trying to show he could be tough. And would he have handed me that letter to Krantz if Nealey had come to him this afternoon, accepted his terms? No, possibly not. Chuck would have taken the letter out of the blazer pocket, destroyed it, persuaded himself there was no longer any need to disturb me about it. And our talk together would have been nothing but evasions and reassurances.