Charlie’s Apprentice (7 page)

The second was a detailed account of his initial meeting with John Gower.

The third official letter to Patricia Elder asked to be informed of any communication John Gower sent to her. It was, Charlie insisted, a particularly important request.

The official communication completed, Charlie tilted himself back in his chair, reviewing the first day in a new job he disliked intensely. He’d shown off like a bastard, he decided. But then, legally he was a bastard. It reminded him he had to visit his mother very shortly.

Seven

Natalia Fedova lived in confused guilt about Eduard. Her son had grown up – until the age of nineteen at least, the last time she had endured his being with her – to be a replica of the father who had abandoned them both when Eduard was barely three years old.

All the bad memories – memories she’d erased from her mind – had been brought back by the official notification of her husband’s death, just over a year earlier. Memories of the drunkenness and the beatings and the whoring – he’d been in bed with a prostitute the night she’d actually given birth to Eduard, prematurely – had all flooded back.

But at least, in the first year, he had carried himself with some danger-hinting charm, helped by the dash of a naval officer’s uniform. Initial charm was the saving trait that Eduard had failed to inherit. It hadn’t been so obvious when he had been at university: none of it had been obvious then. It had all emerged, once he’d joined the officer cadet school: considered himself a man, able to do anything a real man could do. A large-for-his-size, perhaps overly confident teenager had left her. The person who returned from the academy had been an army-coarsened, foul-behaved, even fouler-smelling stranger interested only in the material benefits she could provide. Like the car and the apartment at Mytninskaya which he’d literally invaded with other army cadets as ugly and as frightening as himself and who he said were his friends she had to like. Later they had invaded with their whores when she was away, doing to her carefully maintained home whatever they liked, breaking and smashing and soiling. She shuddered at the last word, insufficient to describe the blood and stains and filth she’d found in her own bed, when she’d returned.

Despite which, despite everything, he was
still
her son, a son she felt – and could never stop feeling – she had abandoned.

She had tried so very hard over the months that now stretched into more than a year, to rationalize how she felt. But never fully succeeded. It was, maybe ridiculously, not enough for her to convince herself of the true situation. That it was Eduard who’d abandoned her: never ever making contact – never a letter, never a telephone call – until he was about to arrive in Moscow. When he needed the things – showing them off to the coterie of grabbing, snickering hangers-on – that her official position could provide. Even those sickening, impossible-to-avoid visits had ceased during her last year at Mytninskaya.

And now she was no longer at Mytninskaya. One of the benefits that went with her promotion – in a country and a city where there were no longer supposed to be elitist benefits but where there always would be – was a much more opulent, better-equipped and more comfortable apartment originally designated for members of the now discredited Communist Party, on Leninskaya Prospekt.

Without needing a reminder of the time, Natalia went to the chrome-glittered kitchen to begin preparing the baby’s bottle: from the window over the disposal-equipped sink she could see the monument to Russia’s first astronaut, seemingly so long ago, in terms of history little more than yesterday.

So much of her personal history seemed just like yesterday. And not just the Mytninskaya apartment, with its kitchen fittings so very inferior to this. An apartment she no longer occupied, she remembered, forcing herself to concentrate to get some cohesion into her mind. But the only address Eduard had: the only place he knew where to reach her. Yet it was still controlled by the Russian intelligence service. So this new address would not be divulged if Eduard tried to find her from the old apartment. Would he have tried since she’d left? Inevitably if he’d wanted something. Should she order that he was to be told where she was, if he enquired? Or try to locate him herself? With the power she now had – a degree of power which, after more than a year, she was still sometimes bemused to discover – she should be very quickly able to locate him and his unit or group or whatever it was called.

If
he had a unit or a group. All the military had been withdrawn from the satellites and the no longer linked republics: the army was being decimated, destroyed more quickly and effectively than if there had ever been a war. Would Eduard still be
in
the army? He’d enlisted on a commission – not been a conscript – so there would have been some protection, but if the military reductions were anything like those already announced the cutbacks would have gone far beyond, biting deep into the structure of the regular army. Eduard would still be the most junior of officers, even if he had passed the promotion examinations. The most junior of officers would be the first to be dismissed under such reorganization.

Natalia completed the bottle preparation, leaving it to cool until Alexandra awoke. To what would Eduard be dismissed, she asked herself, brutally. Nothing, she knew. No home, no job, no monetary support. Nothing. So he could be one of the destitutes on the streets of Moscow, one of those shuffling, head-bent, sunken-cheeked men whom she drove by each day but never properly saw, or bothered to see, not thinking of them as individual people at all.

Should she agonize about someone who had treated her as badly as Eduard had done: and who would doubtless treat her as badly in the future if they restored contact? It was difficult for her not to. But she didn’t
want
Eduard intruding into her life any more. Biologically he was her son, maybe. But nothing more. Therefore hardly enough. She had her own territory: her own peace. She was finally settled. She was in charge of an entire Directorate – perhaps the most
important
Directorate – of the reformed Russian security agency. Untouchable. Secure. There was a quick qualification: untouchable and secure providing she did not give Fyodor Tudin any opportunities. Which she had no intention of doing. And most of all she had Alexandra – always shortened, of course, to Sasha.

A peaceful, settled existence, she determined, letting the reflection run on in a familiar direction. What she
didn’t
have, she
couldn’t
have: absolutely impossible. And because it was impossible it was easier to live with than her dilemma over Eduard. Not true, she denied herself once more. Not easier to
live
with: easier to confront because there was no possibility of her ever seeing Charlie again. The baby murmured and Natalia got the cooled bottle before picking her from the cot to feed.

‘Wonder what Daddy’s doing, Sasha? He’d love you very much, if he knew. Be very proud. I know he’d be proud. He told me once he had always been frightened of having a baby but I don’t think he would be frightened if he knew about you. No one could be frightened of you.’

Natalia looked up from the contented baby, out into the darkening night enveloping Moscow. How
would
Charlie feel, knowing he had a baby daughter?

John Gower picked up the telephone expectantly on the second ring, smiling in anticipation.

Marcia didn’t make any greeting. She just said: ‘I’m missing you.’

‘I’m missing you, too.’

‘Enough to set up house, so we don’t have to be apart at all when I’m in London?’

Gower hesitated. ‘You win.’

‘It isn’t a game. Or a battle.’

‘I can always kick you out, if we don’t get on.’

‘Who said we’ve decided on your place?’

‘You can always kick me out,’ he said. He had to learn how to be permanently with someone, just as he had to adjust to everything else.

‘How’s the course?’ asked Marcia.

‘OK.’ His pause was longer than before.

‘What sort of course
is
it?’

Another hesitation. ‘Difficult to define, really. I suppose it’s to see how well I’ve learned everything else.’ Gower wasn’t at all sure that was correct, but it was the best he could offer.

‘What are the people like?’

It was obvious she would expect there to be a classroom group. ‘Odd,’ he said, honestly, giving his personal judgement on his instructor with shuffling shoes.

‘Like them?’

‘Too soon to say.’ He’d done what had occurred to him at the first meeting and was apprehensive now at the outcome. Whatever, he knew he’d made the right decision. ‘How’s it going in Manchester?’

‘I’ve had two invitations to dinner tonight. One guy has a gold tooth and claims he owns a Rolls Royce.’

‘Accepted either?’

‘Do you want me to?’

‘If I said no it would mean I didn’t trust you. As I do trust you, I don’t think it’s my decision.’

‘But do you want me to?’ she persisted.

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think you would. That’s why I refused both.’

It had taken Charlie days of trying to catch the same downward elevator as Julia Robb. She showed no sign of recognition.

‘I’ve been meaning to thank you for the other day.’

For what?’

‘Miller keeps his intercom live, so he can hear what happens in the outside office, doesn’t he? Could have been embarrassing for me. So thanks.’

She gave no confirmation but she did smile, very briefly.

‘I think I owe you a drink,’ pressed Charlie.

‘I thought we’d covered all this already?’

‘For the benefit of the open intercom.’

Julia smiled more broadly. ‘Just for a drink?’

Charlie looked open-faced at the joint personal assistant for both the Director-General and his deputy. ‘What else?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Sometimes the old tricks were the best, reflected Charlie.

Eight

For long periods – as long as a total of six months on one occasion – Charlie’s mother had retreated from any reality, unreachable in total catatonia. It had all changed with the development of new drugs. Now she was invariably brightly alert, chattering constantly, although the senility was still well advanced. The largely one-sided conversations were confused and disjointed, the names of the men of whom she boasted so proudly more imagined than properly remembered any more. That afternoon she’d identified Charlie’s father by two different names, neither of whom he believed responsible for his conception and twice called him William instead of Charlie. He remained at the nursing home for an hour, leaving with the usual assurance to come again soon, which he repeated at the matron’s office on the way out, without stipulating a positive date: it was automatic for him to avoid creating the most innocent of patterns, even in something as mundane as visiting a bedridden mother suffering Alzheimer’s Disease. It was automatic to check the car park for occupied, waiting vehicles when he left. Abruptly he stopped, just as he immediately afterwards consciously avoided the instinctive pursuit check on the twisted and curved road leading from the home.

He didn’t have to bother any more. He was no longer active: no longer an operational officer who had always to be alert to everything around him, never able properly to relax. Charlie accepted he was effectively retired: like those sad, mentally eroding people he’d just left, sitting motionless in chairs, living in yesterday.

Charlie took the hire car out on to the main road, coming to the big decision of the day, where to have lunch. There was the Stockbridge hotel which didn’t let rooms to the general public ahead of one of Britain’s most exclusive fishing clubs. Or a country pub further on. Or wait until he got to London. A country inn, he decided. He still hadn’t found anywhere he really liked around the new flat in Primrose Hill: all wine bars and mobile phones that never rang. Charlie had been much more at home south of the Thames: like an animal, knowing its own warren. Denied him now though, even for a casual return visit to the Pheasant with the best pork pies in London, beer from the wood and Islay malt whisky always available.

Was
it still denied him? Hadn’t he already decided he didn’t have to bother, no longer being operational? Yes. No. Confused self-pity, Charlie decided, annoyed. Of course he had to stay away, even for a casual pub visit. There was no doubt – there was proof!. – the Russians had located the Vauxhall flat, in the targeting operation that had included Natalia and which he still didn’t understand: whatever their failed objective and the now much changed circumstances of Moscow, he couldn’t go back.

The inn was alongside the river on which the exclusive club had its rods and which still had some of the best fishing in England, despite – ironically – the pollution of the bankside fish farms breeding trout the size of small whales. The menu insisted the salmon was locally caught so Charlie took a chance. The beer was good – not as good as the Pheasant, but good enough – and he got a seat at an outside table, overlooking the hurrying, insect-swarmed river.

The self-annoyance at thinking as he had about his old apartment at Vauxhall stayed with Charlie, becoming more specifically focused. What the fuck was this self-pity all about? OK, so his pride was hurt. But it
was
an assignment. He was – for the moment or maybe forever – a schoolmaster. Which on the surface he hated. He’d never liked schoolmasters who’d always, in his experience, been bullying bastards. But hadn’t he been a bullying bastard in the first encounter with John Gower? Why didn’t he properly fulfil, to the absolute best of a personally never doubted ability, the job he’d been given? Which would be to instil the attitude and aptitude always for self-preservation,
by
John Gower,
of
John Gower. To make John Gower as good as he’d been himself, in the past.

Deep within the bar the number of his food order was distantly called, breaking Charlie’s reflection while he collected and carried it back to his waterside place: the salmon was properly sized, not a fish farm freak, and tasted earthily fresh. He was outwardly content.