The Company of Strangers (41 page)

‘Can I have my coat please, Meredith?’

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. Course you can. Strangling the poor fellow.’

He helped her into it and at the door planted a ludicrously chaste but very wet kiss on her cheek.

‘Wonderful,’ he said, and fell back against the wall.

The next Monday morning, the second week in January, she was in Cardew’s office when Speke came to give the numbers. She witnessed the absurd sight of a grown man whispering in another’s ear behind a cupped hand. As soon
as Speke left the room Cardew wrote down the numbers on a pad.

‘Don’t know why I bother,’ he said. ‘But you know the one time I did need to go to the Hot Room and I went to ask Speke to repeat the week’s numbers, the bugger wouldn’t tell me. Worse than school here, Andrea. If anywhere could be worse than Charterhouse.’

As she stood at the end of the meeting she read the numbers off upside down. She had one week’s access. Now she had to get past Broadbent.

Broadbent worked from nine to five thirty with an hour off for lunch. Usually he cleared the archive room and locked up while he went for his sandwich and pint in the Coach and Horses in Soho. Andrea persuaded him to let her stay. He could lock her in there while he went out.

‘Just for a few days while I get on top of this,’ she said. ‘It’s getting all the background that’s so important, Mr B. Peggy White can only tell me so much.’

‘I’m surprised Mrs White can tell you anything,’ said Broadbent, swigging his hand. ‘That’s not water she’s knocking back, you know.’

He locked her in the archive room. She sat reading her files for five minutes and went to the Hot Room. She slipped in the card, punched in the numbers and the lock clicked back. She took off her shoes and put them on the table. She’d been washing herself in non-perfumed soap since this campaign began and she hadn’t washed her hair over the weekend to make sure she was odourless. She went straight to the Berlin/Soviet section and went through all the active personnel files, each one fronted with the agent’s codename. There was no Snow Leopard, but there was a file headed Cleopatra, which she opened only because of the business with Speke and the curiosity of finding a Middle East agent in the Berlin section.

According to the file Cleopatra was not working out of Tel Aviv but was in the Political Section of the Secret Intelligence Service in Berlin recruiting KGB officers for intelligence purposes. She memorized the recruited names, all Russian except one German. The back of the file opened in a gatefold and showed the monies paid to the men and the totals. None of the amounts were insignificant. She looked at the dates. She went back to the front of the file. Cleopatra had been installed on 1st August 1970. She replaced the file, looked around the room, found the London section. There was no admin section and all files were headed with codenames. There was a click, the same click as when she’d opened the Hot Room door herself, but not from her end of the room. The noise went through her like a slaughterer’s bolt.

She snatched her shoes from the table. The noise had come from beyond the stacks to the right. Another click as the door shut. Footsteps on the lino floor. She moved alongside one of the Dexian stacks with their woodchip shelves. Speke walked down the aisle on the far side, a cardboard folder under his arm. There was another door. It should have been obvious. How were the section heads expected to access files after hours? She backed behind the stack, viewed him from between the files, looked at her watch. She had twenty minutes before Broadbent was due back. The sweat seemed to pounce out of her.

Speke threw his folder down and went to a caged section beyond the Soviet/Berlin area. He took out a bunch of keys connected to his trousers by a chain and unlocked a padlock at the front, opened the barred doors. He let his fingers play along the shelves and pulled out a file. He went back to the table in the middle and put it down. He removed his jacket, hung it on the back of the door, sat down and opened the file. He went through the papers until he got to a buff envelope, put his hand in and drew
out a set of colour photographs. A small groan emanated from deep in his throat and he looked around suddenly and directly at her so that everything in her retreated to her spinal column. Speke laid the photographs on the table and leaned forward over them. In the foreground was a naked woman on all fours with a man in front and a man behind. Broadbent hadn’t been joking. This was Speke’s personal erotica section. The needle of the second hand on the wall clock behind Speke flickered as it devoured each chunk of time. Speke sat back and then jolted forward as he picked up some other unseen detail.

By five to two Andrea’s physiognomy had changed. The desire to scream that had been confined to her throat had now spread over her entire body. She couldn’t swallow, she couldn’t blink, her brain had seized, its cogs crunched together like a traumatized gearbox. The second hand flickered two hundred and thirty more times until she was sinking her teeth into pure air.

Speke suddenly looked at his watch, started, packed up the photographs, slung the file back together and threw it into the caged section. He relocked it and headed for his door so quickly that Andrea barely had time to shift around the end of the stack.

She heard the lock go, the door shut. She counted to fifteen, forced the seconds out of her. Then slammed her card into the door and tapped out the numbers. No click. The lock didn’t shoot back. She tapped the numbers again. Nothing. She knew the numbers were right. She never made a mistake with numbers and not with this number. This number was a famous number. This number was 1729. No mathematician could forget that number. It was the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. Her brain was crashing down a cresta run of pure panic, white, white, white.

She took two deep breaths. Slowed everything down.
Tried the numbers backwards, thinking Holloway, Holloway. The lock clicked back. Broadbent’s keys were rattling in the outer door. She sprinted to the desk, threw her shoes down and hit her chair so hard with her behind that she had to save herself from crashing to the floor.

‘Still here, then?’ said Broadbent.

She rattled a pencil between her teeth. Started as she noticed him.

‘What?’

‘Still here?’

‘To be honest with you, Mr B., I wasn’t.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘I went to Lisbon for lunch. Grilled lobster and white wine on the terrace.’

‘All right for some,’ he said, monotonous, morose.

Her stomach disentangled itself from her heart and lungs and headed south.

She met Gromov at night in a safe house just off Lordship Lane in Peckham or East Dulwich. A balding, grey-haired man let her into the semi-detached house halfway down Pellatt Road, behind a hedged front garden of various gnomes at work. She followed his large rubber-soled slippers into the living room where Gromov was sitting by a tiled fireplace, with a clock on the mantelpiece and a figurine of a woman in a bonnet with a trug of flowers. The Russian looked awkward with his still, grey face next to a print of two sweet little girls entitled ‘Nature’.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been to this part of London before,’ she said. ‘Brockwell Park, now Lordship Lane. I thought it was all supposed to happen on Hampstead Heath.’

‘Not at this time of year, and in the summer it’s full of civil servants with their boys in the bushes.’

‘I had no idea.’

‘Some of them are our boys,’ he said, and didn’t laugh.

‘You’re everywhere, Mr Gromov.’

‘Nearly.’

She told him that there was no record of the Snow Leopard in the active personnel files and Gromov nodded as if this was common knowledge. She said she hadn’t had time to look through the operations files because of Speke and she made it clear that she wasn’t going to try again, given the dangers.

Gromov blinked, accepted it, not upset at all. His reconciled silence needled her. She told him about the Cleopatra file and got his attention. He was pleased to see that she was operating off brief. She told him of the oddity of the file, Cardew’s insights into the Company, the atmosphere of distrust, the rift between ops and admin. She gave him details of what was in the file. Gromov still did not register surprise.

‘There were six names on the list,’ she said.

‘Six?’ he said. ‘Are you sure there were six?’

‘I was a postgrad mathematician until six weeks ago, Mr Gromov. I can count.’

‘Give me the names.’

‘Andrei Yuriev, Ivan Korenevskaya, Oleg Yakubovsky, Alexei Volkova, Anatoly Osmolovsky and one German, Lothar Stiller.’

‘This will have to be checked,’ he said brutally.

‘Checked?’

‘You have done very well.’

‘How do you
check
this, Mr Gromov?’

‘I send somebody else in…somebody with Grade 10 Red status.’

Hard silence from Andrea.

‘You have proved yourself,’ said Gromov. ‘That was what was important about this exercise.’

She was furious.

‘Do nothing until you hear from me again,’ he said and went to his coat.

He handed her an envelope.

‘What’s this?’

‘Five hundred pounds.’

‘I don’t want your money.’

‘Your mother wasn’t so proud,’ he said, and she remembered safe-deposit box number 718 sliding back into its wall.

At the weekend Louis Greig appeared outside the house. He rang on the door bell and she didn’t answer it. He stayed there, pacing up and down the pavement outside, checking the front-room window and peering through the stained-glass panels of the front door. He went away and came back after lunch and she knew she was going to have to see him or be besieged in her own home.

She wanted to confine him to the doorstep but he stepped straight past her into the hall. He looked hunted. His customary neatness had gone. His hair stood up so that he appeared frayed. His eyes were dark with sleeplessness.

‘I’ve been trying to find you,’ he said.

‘I was staying with a friend until…’

‘Yes, the Americans, your tenants, told me.’

‘I’ve only just moved back in,’ she said, keeping it banal.

‘Martha and I were in the States.’

‘So you went in the end.’

‘She went and I followed on later,’ he said. ‘I was going crazy in Cambridge.’

There was a very long silence in which the stink of his desperation became unbearable. She couldn’t think of anything to alleviate it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his lips thinning to white lines as he pressed them together, trying to keep the extent of his
wretchedness to himself. It made her feel cruel. ‘I just…I can’t…I’m completely desperate, Andrea.’

‘There’s nowhere for this to go, Louis. It’s finished.’

‘Couldn’t we…?’

‘What?’

‘Talk?’

‘We have. You’re forgiven. Now go.’

‘It’s just that I can’t…I have to be with you. I can’t stop thinking about you.’

‘How do you think about me, Louis?’ she asked, turning vicious. ‘On the park bench, in the back seat of the car, on your brass bed…in the potting shed?’

He grew more agitated.

‘Martha’s left me,’ he said. ‘We…we could be together…properly.’

‘No.’

He brushed back his flyaway hair, again and again, touched his anxious face.

‘Couldn’t we…?’

‘No.’

He closed his eyes, bringing himself to the marks. The real reason he was here.

‘Just one more time,’ he said. ‘Please, Andrea. Just one last time.’

She was revolted by him and opened the door.

‘Just touch me how you used to touch me,’ he said. ‘Don’t you remember…out on the common…the way you, the way I taught you to.’

‘Get out, Louis.’

He swallowed.

‘Just one touch and I’ll go.’

She got behind him and shoved him out. There was surprisingly little resistance. He’d gone kittenish. She slammed the door on him. He put his face up to the glass panels.

‘Don’t you remember how it was, Andrea? Don’t you remember?’

At work on Monday morning the atmosphere had changed. There was palpable tension like she’d only ever felt at school when something had gone drastically wrong. Peggy White was already halfway down her first glass of watery gin and it wasn’t even five past nine.

‘They want to see you,’ she said.

‘They?’

‘All the section heads. They’re in Speke’s office.’

Andrea was panting. Her heart beat in tight spurts and tapped like a knuckle against a high rib. She’d left the card with Gromov. She’d been careful all the way. It had taken her for ever to get to Pellatt Road making sure she wasn’t tailed. She covered her nose and mouth with her praying hands, closed her eyes, said a few words to a God she’d forgotten and knocked on Speke’s door. Cardew opened it. Speke was at his window in his cardigan. Wallis leaned against a wall in the corner. She was asked to take a seat in a chair in the middle of the room. Speke moved back to his desk. Cardew loomed to her left.

‘This is intimidating,’ she said. ‘I hope I haven’t been too hard on your agents’ expenses.’

‘It’s not meant to be,’ said Speke. ‘It’s just serious, that’s all.’

‘I haven’t even been here long enough to make a quarterly statement,’ she said. ‘I don’t see how I…’

‘This is something different, Andrea,’ said Wallis, sitting on the bars of the radiator in front of the window.

Her fingernails were blue with cold.

‘Wallis has been running a double agent in East Berlin for the last six years,’ said Speke. ‘None of us here knows anything about him, no name, nothing. All we know from the quality of his intelligence is that he has contacts in
both the KGB and the Stasi. Apart from his intelligence, which has always been perfect, he has facilitated a number of defections. He has managed to retain complete anonymity by being self-financed and not demanding any payment. We have no idea how he finances himself but he has always been able to meet the not inconsiderable expenses that his work demands. However…now there is a problem.’

‘Well, there’s plenty of money in both Emergency and Contingency,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ said Speke.

‘This isn’t a banking matter,’ said Wallis.