He shoved his hands into his mac pockets. He drew his cheeks in and then opened his lips with a popping sound. ‘Not a good place for a young man,’ he said. ‘Not good at all.’
There was another long silence. I waited.
‘You got there early. Very early. Unfortunate. Might have missed the whole thing if you’d arrived there on time. Eleven o’clock you were told. Might have missed the whole thing if you’d gone at eleven. On the other hand, you might not. Lot of shooting. Lot of bullets.’ He pulled a crumpled white paper bag from his pocket and proffered it to me: it contained monkey nuts. I declined. He took one, and started shelling it, slowly. ‘Lot of shooting. Must have handled yourself very well. Very well.’ He paused to munch his nuts. ‘They can’t all have been rotten shots.’ He started to attack another shell. ‘You’re in big trouble, I’m afraid. Don’t need me to tell you. Interpol’s been after this lot for a long time. Long time. Big ring. Big trouble. Heroin. Gun-running. Other things too. Not much in your defence. Judges could be lenient. Twenty years for the lot. That’d be light. You’d be lucky for that.’
‘What’s the way out? Or did you just come to tell me the bad news?’
‘Expensive. Very expensive.’
‘I don’t have a lot of money.’
He broke another shell in half, and shook his head. ‘Money’s no good. Don’t want that. No. Don’t want that at all.’
‘What do you want?’
There was another interminable pause. Wetherby sat back in his chair with a whole handful of nuts to shell. He worked on them one by one. When he had finished he stared me straight in the face. ‘You,’ he said.
‘Pardon?’
Suddenly Wetherby ceased to be an overweight peanut-guzzling slob; his face sprang alive; it was intelligent and tough as iron. ‘We want you to come and join the British civil service.’
‘The civil service? Are you joking?’
‘No, Mr Flynn, I am not joking.’
‘You want me to come and push a pen in Whitehall?’ I was stunned.
‘Not exactly, old boy.’
‘But what do you mean. For how long?’
‘No idea, old boy. But it’ll be better than this. And damn well paid.’
‘What do I get: local planning or child welfare?’
‘Neither, old boy. The Home Office; in the department which deals with security — and I don’t mean locks or pensions — The British Security Service, originally Department 5 of Military Intelligence and better known by its abbreviation: MI5. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure?’
I nodded weakly.
‘We think you’d be a good chap to have on board; need young fellows with drive, initiative. Of course, there’s no obligation on you.’ He reached for another shell. ‘No obligation at all. But I personally think you’ll find it worth a try.’
‘I don’t seem to have much choice.’
‘Well. We’ll see. Put you through the training. If you make the grade, good.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘France has no statute of limitation for murder, old boy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In some countries if a crime is committed and the police don’t prosecute within a certain period of time — maybe five years, ten, fifteen — then the criminal goes scot free. In France they don’t have that. They can go for you tomorrow, or in six months… or in forty years’ time.’
I stared at Wetherby a long, long time. His face had slackened again and his interest was once more turned to his nuts. If this was a standard procedure the British Secret Service had a pretty damn strange method of recruiting.
9
I awoke to the strange heavy-breathing sound of the wall-to-wall underfloor heating ducts pumping in a dosage of hot air to keep the temperature up at its present level. Whoever had set it must have suffered from low blood pressure. It was boiling.
I didn’t stir for several moments as I didn’t want to wake Sumpy, then I heard the sharp flick of the page of a paperback book and realised she was already awake and reading, filling her mind at this early hour of the day with the drivelling dialogue of yet another modern romantic noveclass="underline" ‘Oh Rodney, darling, why don’t you tell Mary about us today?’ ‘I can’t, my angel, it’s the kids’ first day home for the summer vacation.’
For a bright girl, she really read rubbish. Maybe she found it therapeutic, an escape from the pressure of her work. She was an authority on Impressionist painting: a consultant to Sotheby Parke Bernet, on retainer, but she worked mainly freelance, valuing pictures for prospective purchasers. It had its own strains and stresses. Nobody would be too thrilled with her if they forked out a couple of hundred thousand dollars on a painting of a bowl of apples only to later discover it had been done by an unknown child of 4.
‘Morning!’ I said, turning and looking up at her; she really did look terrific in the morning — a great virtue in my book.
She tore herself away from the page to give me a quick peck on the cheek. ‘How about some coffee?’ she said.
‘Sure; and some eggs, bacon, tomato, sausage, fried bread, beans, mushrooms, toast, marmalade and cornflakes to go with it.’ I slid out of the bed and waded through the warm shag broadloom over to the window. I drew back the curtains and stared through the treble-glazing onto a mid-December New York morning. The sky was a stark red; some sleet was falling and there was a thick white frost on the grass below and on the windows of the parked cars. Out over on the Van Wyck Expressway a solid queue of cars crept along towards Manhattan, narrowing to a sausage to squeeze past some obstruction — an accident, probably — that was marked by the twin, intermittent, flashing red lights on the roof of a patrol car.
I got back into bed, lay against the pillows, and started to gather my wits and my thoughts; the more I gathered them, the more I wished I hadn’t woken up at all. They say that problems look different after a good night’s sleep, and they’re right; mine certainly did — they looked one whole lot worse.
Sumpy got out of bed to go to the washroom. As soon as the door had closed behind her I leaned over for her handbag. I poured out the contents then pulled up the bottom liner, which I’d carefully glued down the night before last, and removed an envelope from under it, then replaced the liner and the contents and put the bag back on the floor.
The envelope wasn’t addressed to me but to my boss, Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope, better known to all by his code name, Fifeshire. I was sure he would not mind my opening it, since he was currently out of any active service.
I held the envelope out in front of me, thankful that nothing had happened to it. It was a soft pink colour, and round the middle of it was a bright blue ribbon, neatly tied into a bow.
Fifeshire was the Director-General of MI5, and was directly answerable to the Home Secretary, currently Anthony Lines. I first met him six years ago shortly after my press-ganging by Wetherby, as he insisted on meeting all new recruits personally and expounding to them his view of the role of MI5, his role, and how the recruit’s role was to fit into the overall scheme of things.
For reasons that one cannot define — some call it chemistry, some vibrations — we hit it off immediately and he took me under his direct wing. I was lucky. Most of his agents had a thankless task. They had rotten jobs — rotten, stinking lousy jobs. They had to grub around the surface of the earth, furrowing and burrowing like maggots and weevils and moles and voles; they froze and hurt and hid, pretended and lied and twisted and turned; they inhabited cheap hotel rooms and expensive hotel rooms; they never had friends and never had wives and children, and were frequently dead within ten years.