Talking to Strange Men (2 page)

Few cars came along down here, especially after the factory workforces had left for home. But he looked to the right and left before he crossed the street just the same. As much as anything he was looking for a possible watcher. The dull bluish light made indigo shadows, broad and deep and with invisible depths. He looked up and felt rain on his face, a thin spray of drizzle only. The night was so dark so early because of cloud hanging in a bulging canopy. But down here the lights glittered, few and far between though they were, their slab-shaped bulb cases vague in the mist the rain made.

There was no soul to be seen. And because it was constant, unvarying, the roar of the traffic was itself a kind of silence. He went across and stepped on to the grass which at once spotted the toes of his shoes with water drops. Under the shelter of the steel pillars he took the piece of paper out of his pocket. It was contained in an envelope he had made out of a small plastic bag, the kind you buy on a roll at a supermarket. Also in his pocket was a spool of transparent sticky tape.

He managed to tear off a fifteen-centimetre strip, impatient because the first time it tore diagonally and stuck itself back on to the spool. Carefully, at a level some way beneath his own head height, for he was exceptionally tall, he secured the paper in its plastic envelope to the inside of one of the grooves of an upright, the right-hand one of the two central pillars, choosing the groove that was of all forty-eight the least visible from any external point. He stuck it in there
with two strips of tape, pressing the tape against the smooth cold metal with the heel of his hand.

Turning round once more to check if it was possible the drop had been observed, he thought he saw a movement on the far side of the road he had crossed to reach the green, at the opening to a narrow passage between the red-brick side of a deserted, no longer used, boarded-up church, and the stucco wall of a squat unidentifiable building with flat roof and metal-framed windows. These buildings lay in semi-darkness between two widely-spaced lamp stilts. He crossed the empty street, leaving behind and above him the steady roar, feeling the hair on the back of his neck prickle. They had been using this drop since Angus's day. In fact, Angus had begun it, instituted it, out of that curious bravado or panache that made him long to infiltrate what were Moscow Centre's preserves.

And with all the rest he had handed it on: ‘Down below Rostock, Mungo, where the flyover dips down, there are twelve steel posts on a green. The post in the centre on the right, that's the one that's sacred.'

Angus had used it a lot and Guy Parker had never known. Jealously appreciating the drop, Mungo had kept it as his private preserve, confined to himself and his best agents. Even his second-in-command was ignorant of it. As for Ivan Stern, he didn't even begin to suspect. Unless . . . Mungo, keeping in shadow, crept along the front wall of the church, past the great sandstone arch in which the double doors were battened up, past a Victorian flying buttress, its bricks chipped where a truck had hit it, flattening himself against the shadowed stone, emerging suddenly into the alley. And seeing what the movement had been, had probably been: a sheet of black plastic, originally a rubbish sack, that someone had nailed up to cover a broken pane in a window on the stucco wall, a corner of which had worked free and flapped in the wind. He was aware then of the wind that had got up, blowing the rain into his face in spurts, sending to trundle and clatter along the street with appalling noise, with a ringing hollow cacophony, an empty cuboid oilcan. Or had someone kicked it to make it clang and bounce like that?

The oilcan was stilled now, the flap of plastic hanging
immobile, everything motionless but for the pounding traffic, the roar. And even that was diminishing as the exodus of cars lessened, as the evening came on. It would seem therefore that there had been no one, that he had imagined it, imagined that he had seen not the corner of a shiny black sheet arbitrarily blown, but a man in a black oilskin jacket who for one second, one split second, had emerged from the dark of the passage to eye him and the copse of metal trees.

He must have been mistaken but for a moment he considered returning to the sacred tree and removing the message from the long fissure in its trunk. If he did that it would mean he was saying it could never be used again, its life as a drop was over. And what of Basilisk coming for it, at some danger to himself, Basilisk whom he could think of no way of warning? Mungo knew himself to be over-imaginative, he did see things that weren't there, or that other people said weren't there.

‘A visionary, that's what you are,' Ian had said, ‘or else it's schizophrenia.'

On the other hand, he couldn't ever remember seeing visions in this sort of situation before. But he would leave it. He would trust to common sense and experience, not to visions. One last look down the passage and then back past Ahman–Suleiman. The cat had gone, leaving grains from a bird's crop and bones spread about the pavement. It was growing cold and the wind gusted round corners. Mungo knew he was not followed, he was positive there was no one to follow him, but he pursued a tortuous route homewards just the same, plunging into a network of little streets that gradually became residential, rows and rows of pre-First World War houses, corner shops, pollarded trees with swollen bulging amputations, cars parked nose to tail along the gutters.

If there had been anyone he had shaken him off. Mungo was adept at losing a tail. Time was, soon after he became Director General, that Moscow Centre had put a tail on him steadily for weeks, months maybe. But he had always known, had known from the beginning. Others had had the luck to be trained by Angus but none, naturally, had been as close to this particular teacher as he. Mungo had gained much
pleasure from eluding tails, had even, on one triumphant day, managed to lead Michael Stern – for Guy Parker's successor had set his own brother on to him – into a disused warehouse where he succeeded in locking him in.

He turned down a street that would bring him out at the Shot Tower. Before he reached the end of it he could see the thick-set concrete shape of Alexandra, the bridge lying low on the water (for no vessels of any size came up higher than Rostock), the incised lines and parabolas on its sides painted in a red and green which the lights bleached of colour. If someone were following him – and it would have to be a very clever, almost invisible, someone – this person would hardly dare cross the bridge. He would know where Mungo was bound for.

In the middle of the bridge he was very vulnerable, very alone. There were cars but only one other pedestrian, someone he didn't recognize but young and of the male sex. This person was walking towards him on the pavement, on the parapet side. He wasn't wearing black oilskin and he was coming from the wrong direction anyway. Even one of Stern's Stars – a Moscow Centre pun from the Utting German Department – couldn't be in two places at once.

They passed one another with studied indifference. At least, Mungo's was studied. He lifted his eyes from an apparent scrutiny of the river's rippling surface and looked across to the western bank and the tower on the CitWest insurance building. Green digits on its crest told him the time was six-fifty-nine, the temperature six degrees Celsius. And then the cathedral clock, the clock that from here was invisible, hidden on the north face of the apse, began striking the hour. It was always fractionally fast. The mist which the rain had become gave to the grave and majestic cathedral an other-worldly look as if it floated the way a palace might do in a dream, its twin spires and saint-laden east front no longer anchored to the earth but soaring to heaven.

The road came off the bridge under the cathedral wall. Mungo felt the vibration from the clock's notes thrill through his whole body. Up above him gargoyle faces in decaying stone grinned or grimaced or made rictus mouths of agony. They seemed to emerge from the mist, these faces, as if
attached to bodies, as if belonging to medieval people who moved to peer at passers-by over a high stone wall. Mungo shook himself. Stop seeing visions, he said, there's nothing there, there never was anything, and coming out into the square with its trees, thought, I'll run the last bit, I could do with a good run.

THE SUDDEN COLD
caused John Creevey to pull up the zip on his jacket. It was not of black plastic, this jacket, but very dark blue leather, and a light skin of rain made it glisten. It had belonged to his wife and would once have been too small for John, but lately he had lost a lot of weight and his shoulders were in any case narrow. He wore the jacket because she had worn it, because it was one of the few really personal things of hers he still had.

Without thinking, he had come out of the passage into that exposed place, into the light. It had not occurred to him there might be someone on the green under the pillars. His mind had been occupied with the green and the messages, wondering why for instance there had been nothing there for a month, but actually to catch sight of someone in the act of depositing one, that had hardly crossed his mind as a possibility. Immediately, of course, he retreated. He did not think he had been seen by the very tall, very thin, man on the green, whom he had himself seen only briefly.

Back down the passage he went, not running, but walking fast, and concealed himself in a doorway just round the end of it. Here he would make himself stand for a full ten minutes, he thought, until he could be sure the bearer of the message would be gone. After all, he had all the time in the world, he had the whole empty evening before him, and his sole purpose in using this route had been to keep that pillar under observation, to feed his curiosity, to try and find some
clue as to what it was all about. Three months it had been going on now, he calculated. Well, it had probably been going on longer than that but it was in December that he had first seen one of their messages. Before that he had had no occasion to come down here, to this desolate place that had its utility by day but died at night.

The hands of his watch crawled. At exactly seven he left the shelter of the doorway and made his way back along the passage. For one moment he had a nasty feeling that he would be punished for his nosiness if the tall thin man were to be waiting round the corner for him. With a cosh perhaps – or a gun. But he made himself go on, cautious, prepared. And there was no one.

The stream of metal flowed on over the flyover. The pillars that supported it seemed faintly to vibrate. Where the roadway dipped right down and the pair of pillars were shorter than a man, a cat crouched in the scrubby grass. John could see its bright, piercingly green, eyes. He was allergic to cats, their fur gave him a sort of asthma, but it was usually all right out of doors, they didn't bother him so much there. He went across the street and on to the grass and up to the pillar where the message must be. It was funny what a thrill of excitement he felt each time he saw one of those little packages up there. He reached up and took down the plastic envelope, not tearing it but unpeeling the scotch tape with care. An interesting thing was that this time it was up above his head, which meant perhaps that this was the first time for a long while that the tall man had deposited the message.

As he had known it would be, the message was in code. But had they changed the code? Suppose it was a different code from last time? That didn't really help him, nor did knowing if they had changed it, for he had so far deciphered none of the messages he had seen. As had become his habit, he wrote the words down in a small notebook he had bought for the purpose, going back across the street and standing under a light to do this. Then he folded up the paper again, replaced it in its envelope and returning to the green, taped it back inside the groove of the pillar once more, reaching up to find the spot where the tall man had put it.

Should he have followed the tall man? John confessed to himself that he hadn't the nerve for that. Not yet. Not unless he prepared himself, anyway. And there was another consideration, an absurd one perhaps, though it wasn't a matter of vanity. He didn't want to get the jacket wetter than was absolutely necessary. As it was, he would have to dry it with care. Did this sort of leather soil in the rain?

When she bought it they were on their honeymoon at a place on Lake Garda. He had thought it rather masculine for Jennifer but she had loved it, the unusual colour, the softness of the calfskin. Only Italian leather was like that, she had said, and she had planned to buy herself something to wear in leather as soon as they decided on Italy. It smelt of her, offered the occasional fleeting illusion that she was pressed close against him. This was the first time John had worn it to go out in. He put it on because he had made up his mind it wouldn't rain today. The weather forecaster on television had said rain was unlikely in the west.

The first time he had come here – or rather had passed here on his way back from Nunhouse – he had been more sensibly dressed in his raincoat and had had an umbrella with him. He had needed the umbrella because he had stood for quite a long time opposite the cottage in Fen Street which Jennifer lived in, just watching the place, watching the windows and the front door. That time – it was just before Christmas – there had been no one at home. But he had returned, in spite of himself, a few days afterwards and was rewarded by the sight of her, or the shape of her rather, a dim figure moving behind the clouded glass of the living-room window. Going home by bus, looking out of the bus window in a kind of stunned misery, he had caught sight of something stuck inside one of the flyover uprights. But he had been too wretched then to think much of it, still less follow it up.

Going to Nunhouse was unwise. It was worse than that, humiliating and somehow perverted, voyeur's behaviour, Peeping Tom's. But he couldn't help himself. He went back, and waiting on the opposite side of the road at last caught a glimpse of her at an upstairs window. There he had stood, watching her hungrily until she revealed more of herself,
lifting up the curtain and smiling, then waving. Unable to believe his eyes, trembling with relief, he had been on the point of stepping out from under the hawthorn tree, crossing the road. But then he saw who was coming from the other direction, who it was she was smiling and waving at, who she had been waiting for, and he turned and walked quickly away.