The Madness of July (11 page)

‘Can we leave it until the morning?’ He put an arm round her. They took the stair down and found Lawrence waiting, to drive them across the river and home, an unhappy silence between them.

*

Near Hyde Park Corner, Sassi and Wherry were having a slow journey through the post-theatre traffic, Wherry to his Kensington house and his colleague to a favoured townhouse hotel near Sloane Square. In London the day was almost done. As they wheeled round and looked down Constitution Hill they could see Big Ben. The light above the clock face at the top of the tower that stayed burning when the Commons was sitting had now gone out. They turned towards Knightsbridge. A curtain of black velvet had come down over the park; the city was going to sleep. Will and Francesca were on their way back to Putney. Paul was nearly at his office, where he wanted to spend the last few minutes of the day.

Wherry said, ‘What a mess. A real beaut.’

Sassi sighed. ‘We need that eight o’clock meeting. I’ll have a plan by then.’

He looked at his watch, and the dial glowed green, the only light in the car. ‘It’s quarter of seven in DC. Not even dark yet.’

7

As the embassy car dropped Wherry at his home, Grauber was checking into a hotel a short step from Union Station on Capitol Hill. The sun was setting. He used the nondescript place quite often, because it was run-down enough not to be inhabited by any colleagues and only a six-minute walk from Maria’s house. He liked the shabby lobby and the sleepy clerks, who changed with a helpful frequency. Like the guests, they were birds who never nested. He showered in a sprinkle of water, went through a quick exercise routine in his tiny room, diverted by insect life in the carpet, and changed into jeans and a loose shirt.

He savoured the walk in the fading light across the east front of the Capitol and veered left into Independence Avenue towards Maria’s house, past a gang of staffers and interns churning the gossip mill in the Hawk ’n’ Dove. A congressman crossed the road, a boy skipping at his heels and reading loudly from a legal pad, his pace set by the rattling commentary of his master, who chopped the air as he walked. Grauber gave a couple of quarters to a guy propped up at Maria’s corner, rattling a tin cup in the old style, stopped at the liquor store for a bottle, and turned towards her house.

The door was painted a warm yellow, but everything else was scruffy. The trash can had almost tipped over and the shrubs round the steps were scrawny and dried out. There was a bike chained to the short fence, which he thought too tempting, even with a heavy lock. The upper floors were dark, but by contrast the big lower room to the left of the door sent out a welcoming glow through its window. When he rang the buzzer she was there in a flash. ‘Hey!’ They hugged, and he handed over the bottle of wine in its brown paper bag. She gave no clue as to her mood, looked along the street and closed the door behind them.

He had his arm around her shoulders as they walked in, rediscovering the comfort of a room that he loved. There were South American rugs on the walls, half a dozen candles burning, warm wood everywhere, a welcoming round table set simply for two, and wide, inviting New England chairs arranged at angles to face a sofa with richly patterned red, green and orange cushions piled up. He sank straight into them. Maria was comfortable in this home, which she sometimes shared with an on-off lover who worked at State and whose existence was known only to a handful of friends. They guarded the fact. Grauber understood how difficult it was for both women, even with Maria’s experience of the shadows. Tonight, as so often, she was alone.

He was pouring wine, expecting a few minutes of catch-up before business. There had been the lunch, after all. But Maria was quiet as she went to stir a pot that was filling the room with promise, checked the bread in the oven, letting loose a heady garlic cloud, brought in a platter of glistening peppers, and finally sat down in the low light with her hands resting on her knees. ‘Thanks for the Bendo news,’ she said. ‘I need a drink.’

He said nothing, waiting for the explanation.

‘You’re going to London. Tonight.’

Grauber moved to one of the wide chairs facing the window at the back of the house. Before he sat down he leaned over and reached out a hand. Maria came first. He breathed in. ‘Your message said I wasn’t. Tell me everything.’

She said, ‘I wish. It’s not here yet, but there’s a storm coming our way, a big one, and it’s moving fast. Could blow itself out; my guess is not. A hurricane gathering speed.’ She circled a hand above her head.

They both knew they did not have long. Grauber assumed he would be on the last red-eye from Dulles and there was time for her to tell him what he needed, and not much more. Not one of their happier evenings, but he felt a pulse of excitement. The atmosphere in the room was begging him to slow down; his mind sharpened.

‘Here’s a name you don’t know,’ she said. ‘Aidan McKinley.’

He nodded, spread his arms. Maybe it was on a passport she would have ready for him, one he hadn’t used before.

‘Here’s a name you do know. Joseph O’Connell Manson.’ Spoken as if she were giving him a citation.

Joe, dear Joe. Grauber thought of the first time they had played the street together. They’d concocted a New York operation of their own, targeting a Mexican at the UN who fell into their laps like a game bird brought down with a clean shot. He was a joy, and Joe had taken him with such delicacy that for the brief few weeks while they shared the intensity of the sting, Grauber had been rejuvenated by the bubble-haired, womanizing, danger-seeking bundle of fun that was Joe. A moth always drawn to the flame, he had a dash and an energy that Grauber associated with his happiest times. Such was Joe’s flair; but he recognized in him, too, a capacity for melancholy and self-destruction. Maybe that was why when they first met they had smiled instinctively like brothers, or lovers electrified by a single moment in the wildness of the dance floor.

When the operation was over, Grauber had helped him out with a couple of contacts in London, together with his invariable warning: only if in trouble. He wondered if this was a summons to work with Joe again. ‘I adore him,’ he said.

Maria reached for the bottle, and didn’t speak until she had topped up both their glasses, turning them ruby red.

‘He’s dead.’

In silence, she raised a glass. Grauber, shaken but as quiet as Maria for a moment, did the same. Then together: ‘Joe’. They drank.

Grauber shook his head to clear it, and put both hands to his brow. ‘When did you know?’ There had been no hint earlier in the day. ‘How?’ The tears for Joe had to wait.

She got up and moved to the fireplace to fiddle with a candle on the mantelpiece that was reaching the end of its life. She found another one, lit it with care from the first, waited until the flame sent up a confident flicker up the wall and turned to Grauber in shadow before sitting down again. In memoriam, she repeated ‘Joseph O’Connell Manson,’ saying it with a nice flourish, her hand raised at the end.

‘I asked you to come here because I learned today that he’d left the reservation, gone on a private expedition,’ she said. ‘That’s all. A tricky one, about which I’m afraid I knew little. I was livid when I found out – you can imagine. Then I had a message this afternoon – did I know it was coming? – telling me this. He’s gone. You’ll remember Wherry. Well, Jackson has fetched up in the London embassy. Remembers old times. Gave me a call. Kind. He didn’t have to do it so quickly, but he wants to help.

‘My dear boy, Abel…’ his first name a sign that they were changing gear ‘… we’re in a hole. Joe, poor Joe, may have screwed everything up with his last fling.’ She sighed and almost thumped her arms on the cushions piled up around her. ‘Why? Trouble is, I know. We liked him ’cos of his weaknesses, that indifference of his, the mad passions. We loved it all, and now he’s gonna haunt us. Abel, I’m weeping for him. And for us.’

The scene was familiar to him – the talk racing away, a story getting ahead of itself, the need for calm, which would come in time because he had never known Maria succumb to panic. He sighed to insert some heavy punctuation, watched her flop out, waited for a long minute or so, and said, ‘Explain. Take me there. Berlin. Bendo. Everything.’

Maria gazed directly at him. ‘I have to start somewhere else, in this town, and tell you a straightforward story that most days wouldn’t lose us any sleep. Familiar… amusing, I suppose. But this has turned dangerous, unpredictable. A serpent worming its way into our business, yours and mine.

‘There was a time when your path and Joe’s never crossed. Different territories. Then the Mexican business, right? You remember how he was when he had his own patch. Miami, sunk in Little Cuba – that madhouse. You know Joe played both sides of the street, stirring up the exiles with their dreams and their fury and their guns? Well, he was even comfortable when he was away from them, with what we might call regular Miami. There’s a joke. But he did so well – that Spanish of his. They’d have thought him Colombian if it wasn’t for his hair. Then the Mexico swing – the drug gangs, rough stuff. Good times; you know what I mean. We all understood that he had a problem from time to time. I thought he’d got on top of it. Maybe not.’

Abel realized that he was still in the foothills on this expedition, felt the steepness ahead.

‘So what happened? Why scramble to London tonight? Tonight!’ She took a chair and stretched out, long legs straight ahead of her, head back, face to the ceiling. Ready.

‘Patience. This goes back and involves coincidences, of course. Our business. They’ve happened, and that’s why you’re here. It’s why we exist, I suppose – to wait for a collision, which is what we’ve got.’ She turned her face towards him and gave him the old smile that they’d shared so often. He sensed behind it an anxiety that he hadn’t seen for a long time. ‘More oncoming trains,’ she said, ‘heading down the line at us.’

Abel knew better than to try to steer the story, although he was already letting his mind think through their operation, which had preoccupied him for so much of the day, that she now thought at risk. In the stillness, he felt the room become gloomier.

‘You need to know more about Joe’s life before your time with him.’

Maria took him back years, to a time when Joe was a callow conscript cutting his teeth in Washington, before her own era in the city had started to bloom. She was in Europe, laying down her tracks in Paris and in the thick of it at the Sorbonne. Threw the occasional paving stone, as she used to say. Joe was straight down from the north of Maine, sharp and lively, big on the street. The story was that he had befriended – Maria’s careful choice of word – a Spanish woman, then single and a mover and a shaker around town. In her late twenties and well-connected, she was a cut above Joe’s normal level, maybe two, but because he was getting a taste of the diplomatic life for the times that lay ahead, and was charming and sexy in his way, they made contact. Hit it off, said Maria, which summed it up without need for extra detail. She was at her embassy, apparently in a humdrum role; he was doing whatever he was doing and pretending to be something else. Never mind. Joe’s job, in part, was to log everything he picked up – everything! – and lay down stores for the future, which he did with the aptitude that he later showed off in the fleshpots of Mexico and Miami, via some strange places in between, God remember him. He was an accumulator. But so, it turned out, was she.

Before Maria got too distracted, she forced herself back to Joe’s time in DC, and what he’d left behind. The lady – still no name – told him a tale that was spicy enough when she first passed it on, startling and piquant, and had matured with the years. ‘It’s ripe now,’ Maria said, bulging with promise or menace, depending how you saw it.

As Joe’s friend had put it to him, it concerned the ruination of her life. Not the word he would have chosen, but never mind. It was no less than that. She had lost her innocence and dignity and her position all at once, so she said. ‘We’re talking here about a high-born woman, and a Spanish Catholic. Worst of the lot. They can see off the Irish any day.’ Maria smiled.

The woman had been raped – legalities aside, that was her word for it – by a man who had done the deed and walked away, leaving her in despair to guard her secret shame. Not American, but someone who subsequently gained prominence in public life. She’d kept his name to herself; still did.

‘I only know one thing about him,’ said Maria. ‘He’s a Brit.’

The secret festered throughout the years. Maria said that Joe’s story was that the memory had been controlled, laid to rest because she had to survive the day-to-day, but it was never lost. It could erupt at any time.

And the moment had arrived. ‘For you and me, my friend, at the very worst time. This little tale starts to become the plot of something far bigger. It’s not Joe’s fault, but mine. He knew’ – Abel noticed how the tense had changed for good – ‘too much about Berlin, did some runs for me there, and made connections. Connections I wish he’d never understood.’ Maria closed her eyes, and Abel understood the pain that came from loss of control. Joe had got a step ahead of her, and one way or another it was the end of him.

Maria began to trace the links, to try to see a pattern. ‘Joe told me this story not long ago. He was back in touch with her. Bad news. And here’s your second curve ball of the evening. You know who she is.’ She lifted her glass towards the Capitol dome around the corner. ‘Our friends on the Senate intelligence committee? You know what they think of us. One in particular. Got it?’

They didn’t need to use a name. The senator whose wife had been Joe’s lover flashed into Abel’s mind at Maria’s simple gesture. He felt the force that had almost flattened her.

‘We don’t need to ask if they resumed their relationship in every respect – I couldn’t be surer of it, incidentally – but Joe was agitated when I talked about it. I had to turn the screws on him to get him to say why. It worried me; he was obsessing, and she’s a lady we should handle like an unexploded bomb. Unstable, corroding from the inside, dangerous to everyone. Eventually Joe let it out to me. Here, on Monday.’