The Ambassador (34 page)

Strether should have been concentrating. On his desk lay the tidal wave of files that had swamped it two days before as he had left for Milton Keynes. Its volume had doubled; more items carried the red ‘Urgent’ sticker. The ten-page diary required his immediate approval. A working dinner tomorrow required a seating list; the chef’s menu deadline was noon.
Now
. The afternoon was filled by a Packer Television plc seminar where he was to speak on foreign service broadcasting – tedious, but he could not wriggle out of it. And he was expected at Buckingham Palace for supper with the King, another invitation that could be neither refused nor deferred.

He rifled half-heartedly through the folders. It amazed him how, when virtually everything could be generated by electronic means, and children were taught to use the computer before they could walk, so much still ended up with archaic technology. A previous incumbent had once erased every file on the hard disk by mistake; the office now insisted on paper, which could not be made to vanish at the touch of a button. In a truly up-to-date society, Strether grumbled to himself, printers would be illegal. That view did not seem to have found favour in the Foreign Service. They were not satisfied unless they had a signature – equally old-fashioned and far easier to forge than DNA testing – on a sheet of A4.

The diary was depressing. So many dinners, with so many hideously boring guests at the embassy, the Residence and elsewhere. Mostly other diplomats, whose tinny superficialities jarred, especially after his recent terrifying adventures – which he had not yet dared share with anyone. So few hours for himself, or for the necessaries of life: riding on the Heath, a discreet dalliance at the Toy Shop, a quiet night in with one of those classic books nestling by his bed. He longed to try Salman Rushdie or the searing prose of Jackie Collins’s later works. The twentieth-century literary canon repaid the effort, though it would take his full tour of duty to plough through
Ulysses
. Or he could start on Solzhenitsyn. But not if he were out gallivanting past midnight every night; youngsters like Matt Brewer could cope, but not him.

Where was Matt? Come to that, where was everybody? His coffee had not arrived at ten as usual. Engrossed, he had barely noticed, but the phone had been silent for over half an hour. Usually his office was a buzz of activity with staff and secretaries traipsing in and out.
He pressed the bell, which sounded in the outer room, but there was no response.

Maybe they’d had trouble getting in today because of the tube strike. Some suburbs had had electricity cuts as well, so perhaps wake-up alarms had not gone off or vehicle batteries had died. Strether considered: maybe these events were not entirely coincidental. He recalled a comment of Spartacus’s. Perhaps Solidarity or some other underground movement lay behind them. The fact that virtually no information was available strengthened that possibility. A natural disaster – a tornado, or a lightning strike damaging pylons, say – would have been widely reported on TV and vidnews. Deliberate acts of sabotage, on the other hand, were bound to be downplayed.

Since that fateful visit to the tunnels the world had gone topsy-turvy for the Ambassador. Had it really been only forty-eight hours before? In every way he had lost his innocence. He no longer believed that there was much to admire in the European system. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark, and England, and France and several other regions too; and above all in the uppermost echelons, among those unelected apparatchiks who, as he had suspected and as Marius had hinted months ago in Brussels, were the driving force behind the entire operation.

But that loss was also a profound gain. He was no longer so naive. For months he had been criminally slow on the uptake. That made him ashamed. He had been dazzled. His own essentially open nature led him largely to accept what he was told, and had shielded him from the callousness and cruelty of much of what he encountered. But now, the arrogance of the leading castes towards those they ruled, and their determination to keep the rest, the lower classes, ever more firmly in their place, angered his democratic soul. To him, leadership depended on the informed support of the masses, not on their stupefaction by physical and worldly well-being. The elimination of poverty and misery had been the goal of respectable statesmen since time immemorial, but once it had been securely achieved, surely more noble aims could take their place. Instead in the Union they were being ignored entirely.

He had lost Lisa. In moments of solitude he pondered how serious he had been about her. It had not been a casual affair, not to him. She had awakened in his heart that latent regard for women and pleasure in their company that he had buried on the death of his wife. Some men, released from the anguish of that dreadful time, would have turned in relief quite speedily to other women, but not Bill Strether. After a while, as the pain of bereavement slowly diminished but nothing positive surfaced to replace it, he had believed he would never fall in love again, or feel any powerful attraction for a woman: both lust and love had seemed beyond him, at any rate emotionally.

Then he had loved Lisa, and had felt her slip from his grasp. As he had watched her with Marius he had felt helpless, and old, and envious. Of their youth and beauty –for they were, whatever might be feared for their future, a handsome and well-matched couple. He recalled an ancient Chinese explanation of true love: that on conception certain souls are twinned, so that for the remainder of its life each twin seeks the other, and can find happiness only when they are at last united. He had felt thus about his wife. It didn’t rule out another romance, but in his mature years he knew he would be expecting something altogether less dramatic. Indeed, he had this cause above all to be grateful to Lisa, despite losing her: she had made him start searching once more.

Marty was a different animal entirely. For a start, she earned her living as, bluntly, a
prostitute. Mesmerising though she was, he could hardly go parading with her in polite company. She would be a raucous and bizarre intruder at diplomatic dinners. The entertaining vision of her spectacular entrance made him chuckle, but also squirm with embarrassment. Her gorgeous flesh would excite ribald comment, though she could probably cope with that better than most – as had the original Marilyn. But to American eyes she was, as a clone and a toy, an example of everything wrong about the programme. She epitomised the
fin-de-siècle
decadence of Europe to a degree that could not be explained away.

He could well imagine that outside the artificial world of the Toy Shop she would get fed up with endless inquiries and snide remarks. He wondered what she was like beyond her own environment. At what point would she be out of her depth? The question gave him pause for thought.

For Marty, Strether felt a vivid, somewhat dazed affection mixed with straightforward lust. It had begun as a contractual arrangement; she was paid to be available, and friendly. At first he had experienced some guilt, but this had evaporated under her tender solicitude. Only faint stirrings of responsibility for her had surfaced, at any rate while Lisa dominated the frame. Indeed, Marty might resent any interference. Unlike many good-time girls she seemed comfortable with her profession and would defend it vigorously. Although she had had no choice about it, her upbringing had fitted her to take a justifiable pride in her job. Over the years the Toy Shop management must have been superb foster-parents. Marty was easily the best adjusted person he had met, with little guile but an endless ability to make a man feel special amid a solid dollop of her own self-esteem. And, increasingly, in Lisa’s wake, she was a pal.

He was daydreaming, but to what purpose he was unsure. Marty did have worries. Probably they were groundless – but, then, he’d once believed that about the whole caboodle. An appointment with Marty after the palace that evening, however, if it could be fixed, would be a delight to look forward to all day. He could marvel aloud with her about his trip down the tunnels. Her responses would be grounded in sound common sense. He consoled himself that he valued Marty’s worldly wisdom as much as her fabulous bosom. He pushed the buttons on the vidphone and waited.

Nothing. The line was dead.

Strether got up and went to the door. Nobody was about in the outer office. Bewildered and mildly alarmed, he trotted down the main stairs. Near the front entrance he heard a commotion. Several employees, girls and men, were in the hallway, with two burly police officers in blue municipal uniforms.

‘Your Excellency,’ one of the staffers said. ‘Sir. We have some bad news.’

One of the young women burst into tears. Her wailing rose to a high keening and she was comforted by an older woman, who led her gently to a nearby chair. Her sobs filled the air –’Oh dear, it’s awful. Oh! Oh!’ The others present shuffled their feet and blew their noses but were unable to meet his eyes.

The policemen looked from one to another, unsure whether to address him. Strether squared his shoulders. ‘What’s the matter?’

The senior officer stepped forward. ‘Sir? Sergeant Carter from the Met. Sorry for the intrusion but the phone lines are down round here. The engineers are working on it.’

‘I’d be grateful if you’d get on with it, Sergeant. What’s the problem?’ Strether was
aware he sounded impatient.

‘D’you have staffers by name Matthew Brewer and Dircon Cameron?’

‘Yes, indeed. Two of my best young men.’

‘Then, sir, I’m afraid we must ask if you could come down to identify them.’

‘Come down? Where? What have they done?’

The sergeant ignored the last query. ‘To the morgue, sir. I’m afraid they’re dead.’

Strether pulled the officer out of earshot of the weeping girl. ‘Dead? What on earth? Where? When?’

The sergeant glanced back. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but that’s why we need you. Their bodies were found early this morning by a refuse collector. They’d been dumped. They appear to have been murdered. I’m afraid they’ve been –’ He stopped.

‘You’d better tell me, Sergeant, before I get there,’ Strether growled.

‘The corpses have been mutilated, sir. Cut in pieces and trussed up. Have you any idea where they might have been last night?’