35
Devereaux walked through the green line that had a sign reading Nothing to Declare. A customs officer stopped him anyway.
“Will you open that bag, sir?”
Devereaux opened it.
He was in London at last and he was tired. It was night already, as though daylight had been an afterthought or a momentary illusion.
The customs officer, wearing British blue and a stiff, starched collar, plumped through the clothing as though feeling his way around a woman. He ran his hands along the sidewalls of the bag with a sensual, even lascivious gesture. He smiled at Devereaux as he did this and Devereaux did not return the smile.
“Are you here on pleasure, sir?”
“My lifelong dream was to be in London in November,” Devereaux said.
The agent frowned.
“Business. I’m a stockbroker.” He took out a card and showed him. The agent read the card. He frowned again but had lost interest in the matter.
“Will you be here long, sir?”
“Three days, I think.”
“All right, sir. You can close the bag.”
Like all competent customs officials, he had managed to disarrange the contents of the bag just enough to make instant closure impossible. Devereaux struggled briefly and the customs official frowned at him for holding up the line. He finally snapped the bag shut and carried it through.
Heathrow was its throbbing, messy self, full of announcements, people of every color, and the din of travel noise that is the most tiresome thing in the world. He found a bank of public phones and went to them. He punched in numbers that connected him to a telephone in a town house in Washington.
“Yes,” Mac said.
“Me.”
“Do you want her?”
“Yes.”
“Just a moment.”
Devereaux wondered what he had just heard in Mac’s voice. Or in her’s, now that she picked up the receiver and spoke into it.
“Dev.”
“I’m in London. I think you’ll meet me here. And I don’t think there’s as much time as we thought there would be.”
She caught her breath.
“Rita?”
“I’ll come on the night plane from Dulles. British Air is seven P.M. I think.”
“All right. Check in at Connaught’s; I’ll contact you. I might not be able to wait. There’s been a change. Henry is in London if we’re close enough to getting him as I think. It complicates things. I have to set it up differently.”
“Dev.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He waited.
“I love you,” Rita said.
He waited.
“Dev?”
“What?”
“Dev. I… I can’t kill him. Not like this. Not in the way it has to be done.”
He let his breath out slowly.
“Dev?”
“I know,” he said.
“Are you going to kill him?”
“Yes.”
“For us?”
“Yes.”
“For R Section. You’re doing it because it’s a thing you’ve done before. For R Section. You couldn’t kill to protect me that once.”
He waited some more. The din of Heathrow took the heart out of him. It came on him so suddenly that he felt a pain across his chest that fell into his belly. So tired, so goddamned tired. The pains of his body fell away. It wasn’t pain but just this overwhelming fatigue. He might even let the telephone receiver drop from his hand. He might lie down and never rise. He might sleep and never awake. He was suddenly so tired of everything. The man who was tired of London and was tired of life. Was he that man?
He opened his eyes and looked around him and felt sick to his stomach in the same way he had felt sick to his stomach all the time in the hospital when the drugs took over his body and put his mind on the shelf to watch his body from afar.
He was holding a telephone. He wondered why.
“Hello,” he said.
“I thought we were disconnected.”
He blinked. He knew that voice.
“Hello?”
“Dev. Are you all right?”
“Rita?”
“Dev? Where are you?”
He looked around him. Two Indian gentlemen, their heads wrapped with scarves, passed in Western dress, carrying briefcases and followed like children by two plump Indian ladies in veils and jewels. A gaggle of Japanese businessmen, dressed in identical navy blue suits, followed their leader, who was as lost as they were. Everyone was very lost and time was not on any side but its own. It was like a bazaar of the world.
“I don’t know,” Devereaux said.
“You’re in London.”
He remembered that now.
“Dev. Come home. Come home. I need you, you need a doctor now, we’re both ill and—”
“Rita. Where are you?”
“I’m at Mac’s house. You remember that.”
Mac. He had to remember that. M. A. C. There might be questions later. Will this be on the exam? My God, an exam is nothing more than self-knowledge. God, he was tired of them and their empty minds refusing to be filled and he longed to fill himself with the honeycomb of Asian fields beneath the sweltering Asian sky that always warmed him, always filled the fields with rain in monsoon and the fine, hard rain falling warmly down his skin as he walked the muddy tracks through the jungle, endless jungle, sounds of endless gunfire and endless chops of choppers clotting the sky and chopping at nothing…
“Dev!”
Rita sounded hysterical.
“What’s wrong, Rita?”
“Dev. Dev. You blanked out on me there. You just blanked out. Are you all right? Dev, come back, it’s not worth it.”
“I’m going to kill Henry McGee. Wait for me, Rita. It’ll be just a little time and then I’ll come back and I’ll never leave you—”
“Love, you just blanked out. What if you do that when you’re against Henry? Come back to me, you promised me—”
“Just a little while, Rita. I love you. I always did,” he said.
“Dev.”
“I love you,” he whispered, to silence her.
“Dev.”
But he had to leave her now, even though he had promised never to do it.
36
“Yes, Miss Turnbull?”
“Mr. Cassidy on the telephone, sir.”
Trevor punched button five.
“Yes?”
“This is Mr. Cassidy. Regarding our previous conversation, I wonder if we could have a bit of a chin-wag, say, round about noonish.”
“Yes.” Dull voice, dull eyes. He’d have to cancel his luncheon. “Where?”
The preposterous British accent continued, “Say, my club. No. Come to think of it, they’re closed for remodeling. Say, noon at Chester’s in the City, do you know it?”
“Noon,” Trevor Armstrong said.
“Splendid. And do try to be alone, old bean. Ta-ta then.” Click.
For a long moment, Trevor sat alone in the world. Then the world intruded and Jameson said, “Something?”
“No. Cancel my luncheon with Lord Asbury; a… private matter has come up. And send in Dwyer.”
Jameson permitted himself the trace of a frown. His employer had any number of “private matters” that would occur during the day and invariably they involved discreet women who were suddenly available for a slap and tickle. Trevor would suddenly put the business on hold for a couple of hours in the Connaught or Dorset with a Miss or Mrs. or Lady and Jameson was expected to provide a suitable cover. He was a man who endured humiliations for the sake of employment, a latter-day Cratchit, but it galled him nonetheless. And sending for the toady Dwyer proved the nature of the something that had come up.
Thirty seconds later, Dwyer was alone in the big room with the boss. Dwyer was fifty, born and raised in Queens, a sharp-faced Irishman with heavy eyebrows and ruddy cheeks. He looked like he was made to wear a green suit and play the leprechaun in a New York Saint Patrick’s Day parade.