“The CIA owns British Intelligence—”
“There are signs of strain in their relationship of late. And with the North Sea oil business, Britain is not as weak as she looks today. In ten years, she will be a major oil-exporting country. They know that over there. And we’re just beginning to realize what that means.”
“Perhaps we don’t have time,” said Devereaux. He did not want this assignment. He wanted a winter night on the mountain in Virginia, sitting in the dark front room, the fireplace making ghosts for him to stare at for hours. He wanted warmth. “O’Neill said the Boys will act between November fifteenth and Boxing Day, December twenty-sixth. It’s the fourteenth.”
“I will have to talk to the Chief about this.”
Devereaux said, “And what if Lord Slough is shot in the meantime?”
“That would be a great loss,” Hanley said in a voice that did not express sympathy.
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
“This may take a little time. The Chief was in San Francisco this morning. He’s due back later this evening. It may not be until midnight—”
“Five A.M., here,” said Devereaux.
“Yes. Sorry. Did you have a good trip?”
“Awful.”
“Sorry.” Politely. “Well, I think we must have twelve hours at least. I’ll get through tomorrow morning. Let’s say seven A.M. here and noon there. You may sleep late.”
There was no way of not delaying, Devereaux knew. Still, he was restless and he wanted to be out of this country and this sordid business with the Boys and their fucking Lord Slough. He hated the victim in that moment. Plain Green was right. This was not his milieu, He was too far afield. Since Asia had closed down to the extent of becoming a series of China-watching or Cambodia-watching listening posts, Devereaux had felt cut adrift. Asia had been his world and he had traveled in it with the familiarity of a realtor in a small town. He knew the properties. It had been his real country, his people, his smells. He had been alive then in the red-sun mornings and the hut-level villages living precariously for a thousand years in a valley or on the side of a hill.…
Something like homesickness threatened to overwhelm him. But where was his home? Letting his face fall slack and his eyes dull, he replaced the telephone receiver. Asia faded like a watercolor painting left in the rain.
Enough.
Getting up, Devereaux stretched and walked out of the room. Plain Green had a fresh drink in his hand when Devereaux returned to the library. There were not enough books to cover the shelves. Devereaux noticed the boy’s hands were not steady. He placed that information somewhere in his memory bank.
“Well, everything all right then?”
“Yes,” said Devereaux. “I’ll be back in tomorrow. At noon. For another message. Thanks for the drink.”
“Oh, any time. You’re welcome to stay—” Devereaux’s single leather bag had been brought into the library.
“No, thanks. I’m a little restless. I prefer a hotel tonight. Thanks anyway.”
Green nodded, smiled idiotically. Who was he? Why had they chosen such an unprofessional youth to be a station keeper? And in London?
Devereaux checked in at the Inn on the Park and showered and shaved and still felt restless. Finally he went down to the lounge and permitted an underdressed waitress to offer him a vodka martini with ice. It was after eleven and the pubs were closed, but the hotel bar was still all hearty good-fellowship in the clubby, insincere — and yet warm — way of the English when they meet as strangers. Devereaux sat at a ridiculously small table and sipped a cold drink. They catered to Americans here. He looked around at the fake English-pub furnishing, designed no doubt by a California consulting firm and made in plastic Japan. Just the thing to make Yanks feel at home. After a second drink, the murmur of voices faded and allowed him a sort of reverie. He let his guard down. He began to think about Asia again—
“Mr. Devereaux? I’m sorry. But aren’t you Professor Devereaux?”
For a moment, he thought his silent travelogue had taken on a soundtrack. It could have belonged to that time when he was Professor Devereaux and Asia was a new present to him.
He had, of course, noticed her when she came into the lounge, but she had drifted out of his field of vision. Now the question, uttered softly with a shy confidence, brought her back to him. He turned off the lights of Asia and looked at her. Still, he could not remember her except from the moment before.
“Yes? I’m sorry—”
“My God,” she laughed, shaking her head and letting her brown hair beat softly around her pale, oval, open face. She laughed as though she had rehearsed it, which was all right. “I don’t expect you to remember me but it’s — it’s just such a coincidence that I had to say hello after all these years.”
He tried out a smile and decided it would not do, so he turned it up several degrees. That was better — she was responding. Her own smile did not need fine-tuning. It was just right. He encouraged her to speak with a little professorial nod of his head that he thought he had forgotten.
“You wouldn’t remember me. It was fifteen years ago at least. You were teaching a course in Chinese history at Columbia and you had just come back from the Peace Corps — Asia — and you were so… enthusiastic. And, well, I kept asking you about the experience, I was just eighteen and you were—”
She hesitated. Was what?
So she was part of the travelogue in his mind, he thought. No one had mentioned the Peace Corps to him since — since then, he supposed. That was his last full year of a kind of idealism; although, as these things happen, it did not go away all at once. Like a once-prized ceramic cup, whatever had been inside him merely got chipped a little more each year, and one day it was cracked so badly it was thrown away because no one cared anymore.
“Elizabeth?” She said her name the way a television game show contestant might offer a guess.
“Of course,” he lied. “Elizabeth. My God,”—he did not attempt to laugh but managed a smile—“fifteen years later and we’re here.”
She looked delighted and the delight seemed genuine enough to be out of place in the atmosphere of the plastic pub.
“So what did I do?” she went on. “Joined the Peace Corps and they sent me to Addis Ababa for two years — which is not Asia. Not what you said it would be.” She smiled. “You were so enthusiastic. But you know something? You were right. It was the best thing I ever did for myself.”
The Peace Corps. Those old ideals that had seemed so fresh and sophisticated to him. Before Vietnam and Watergate. He called up the Peace Corps in the theater of his mind and saw himself, the younger Devereaux, squatting in the rain, new Asia hand, extending himself for the poor and wretched in black pajamas. But the Peace Corps, unlike the rest of the travelogue, did not move him. He had edited out that segment for too long.
“What are you doing in London?” he asked politely.
“Working,” she said. She seemed to guard her answer.
“Oh,” he said.
“You?”
“Working,” he said in the same tones.
She smiled, blushed. He wondered why embarrassment was a charming trait in women and a foolish one in men.
“There’s no secret about it,” she said. “It’s just that I hate to bore anyone.” She paused, but he said nothing,
“I’m actually here for a month working with my people. You’ve heard of Free The Prisoners?”
“Is that something like Amnesty International?”
“Not the same thing,” she said. She seemed to have a private energy source barely hidden behind her blue eyes. He could feel the pleasurable tension in her. “Amnesty does marvelous work — bringing these things to the attention of the world. Free The Prisoners is more of an activist group.”