He went to the rear window and spat out into the bushes beneath, cleansing his mouth.
‘You finito up there?’
Slobodan stood below, covering three men with his gun. They leaned, faces inwards, against the farmhouse, hands above their heads, trousers round their knees. Slobodan gave the Thumbs Up sign.
Squire could not speak.
‘I’ve got Zvonko Nedec here. That’s worth something. Who’ve you got up there?’
Nedec was a well-known pro-Soviet Croat, high on the Belgrade wanted list.
Squire went into an empty corner of the room and was violently sick. Sweat poured from him. He found himself weeping. The vomit splashed his boots and slacks.
Confused, he realized after a moment that Slobodan was in the room, driving Nedec before him, the latter with hands tied and face ashen; stains down the front of his trousers showed where he had pissed himself in fright. Only Slobodan was enjoying himself. He clapped Squire on the shoulder.
‘Take it easy.’
Squire sat shaking on the rear window sill, mopping his mouth and face. Chill overcame him. He had shot a man down like a dog. Almost without comprehension, he took in the view from his vantage point.
Behind the house ran a ruinous stone wall with a steep drop on its far side. Parked under the drop were three old German army lorries with camouflage canopies lashed into place. No doubt that they contained the stolen arms from the arms train. Beyond the lorries, the broken Istran landscape fell away, giving place to a magnificent panorama of the Kvarner Bay. The sun shone dazzling on the blue water. Resting on the breast of the sea were the islands of Cres and Losinj. Squire stared at the sea with longing, until a movement nearer at hand caught his eye.
Parked under a tree at a distance from the lorries was a white Zastava. A thick-set young man in civilian clothes had broken cover and was running towards it. He climbed in and started up the engine.
At the sound, Slobodan rushed to the window. He pointed at the car.
‘Why don’t you shoot? That’s one of the rats we saw first, maybe!’
Squire shook his head. Slobodan produced his last grenade, pulled its pin, and hurled it at the car, already moving downhill. The grenade exploded behind it. The car kept on going, bumping across the field, and disappeared behind a fold of hill.
Losing interest, Slobodan gave Squire a cigarette. Both men lit up. Squire was ashamed of how much his hand shook.
‘Come and look see this. It’ll cheer you up. Here’s Milo Strugar’s killer, okay.’
Slobodan turned and set his foot against the shoulder of the man Squire had shot, so that head and narrow face rolled over in Squire’s direction. A further nudge from Slobodan’s boot brought the head into a beam of sunlight, which blazed in through a gap in the roof. The features of the dead man were unpleasantly illuminated, so that Squire’s stomach lurched again. The features were heavy and sagged in death. On the left cheek was a large mole, its long dark hairs glinting in the sun. It made the man look harmless in death.
There was no doubting his identity.
‘You killed Slatko, my clever young friend!’
Squire had studied the dead man’s photograph a number of times in Belgrade. Codename Slatko had been active ever since Stalin ceased to be Tito’s patron and master; he was the Russian colonel in charge of softening-up operations in Yugoslavia prior to a Soviet take-over. As head of Department XIII of Soviet Counter-Espionage, he was answerable only to the Soviet Central Committee. Slatko’s presence here in Istra showed how confident the Russians had become of defeating Tito. Perhaps the stolen arms were to reinforce an intended strike presided over by Slatko, and timed to take place while the West had its energies and attention involved with the Berlin air-lift. If so, Slatko had been over-optimistic.
‘You killed Slatko,’ Slobodan repeated. He embraced Squire.
‘I need a crap,’ Squire said.
The official break between Stalin and Tito, marked by Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform for hostility to the USSR, came less than two months later. From then on, the Yugoslavs went their own way, negotiating a difficult path between East and West.
By that time, Thomas Squire had returned to England. He had been too successful — the Yugoslavs feared attempts on his life. They gave him an enormous party in Belgrade and sent him home.
Squire returned to his own country in a curious mental state.
What he could confess to no one, and what most deeply disturbed him, was that he had perversely enjoyed killing. It satisfied a black greedy thing in his psyche. For months, he could not rid himself of the vision of Slatko dying, the leg kicking, the Istran sunlight blasting through the broken building.
The department de-activated him, and Squire returned to private life. Following family tradition, he went up to Cambridge, and spent three years there reading Medieval History, without great distinction. Among his friends were James Rotheray and Ronald Broadwell, later to become Squire’s publisher.
He invested the money paid by the BIA, and a legacy that accrued to him on his twenty-first birthday, in a directorship in a city insurance firm. Then he settled down to pretending that he took himself for an ordinary man. Several years passed before he could realize that he was an ordinary man.
‘By the way,’ d’Exiteuil said, turning an unfriendly face to Squire as they were leaving the conference hall. ‘You said yesterday in your opening speech that we had to forge a methodology for the future. Well, we have one, despite anything you or Fittich may say to the contrary. It’s Marxism. Academic Marxism. And it’s already started to run future culture. Popular arts, after all, can never belong to reactionaries like you. We have to shape them to the needs of society. You will be out of it from now on, as I expect you will discover after the conference.’
11. ‘The Strong Act as They Have Power to Act’
Two women stood at a window looking out, one intently, one restlessly.
The house was low-built of red brick, with seven bays and two stories. It dated from the Regency period. Even in the sunny days of this fitful Norfolk July, its rooms remained shady.
Pink flowers of tamarisk pressed against the window, growing in sandy soil. The house stood on a spit of land at one end of Blakeney quay, with long perspectives of sea and marshes to both the back and front. The rear of the house was sheltered against winter winds by trees and a high wall.
In the front of the house, the windows were square casements, low to the ground, with white-painted shutters on the inside. The two women stood together at the living-room window, Deirdre Kaye with her arms folded, Teresa Squire with binoculars to her eyes, searching the distance.
The linked circles of Teresa’s vision passed over the lively scene of the harbour, with its porcupine-quill quota of masts of dingeys, with near-naked children fishing for gillies at the harbour-edge. They lifted slightly and passed beyond the main channel to the distant sea, the glittering mud of low tide where terns fed, the bars of sand, the marshes and dykes, to a pale stretch of beach backed by the blue North Sea. On the stretch of beach four ponies moved.
Even from this distance, the glasses enabled Teresa to distinguish the copper heads of Deirdre’s two boys, Douglas and Tom, Deirdre’s husband, Marshall, and her own estranged husband, Tom, riding in a line by the water’s edge. She stared for a long while at Tom’s image, wavering in the heat rising from the land. He resembled a phantom progressing underwater. He had drowned in heat and absence.