“All right.” Antonio took the two envelopes from the counter and shoved them in the pocket of his black coat. He drained the last of the beer. “Penev, I want a woman tonight. Arrange it.”
“I’m not a pimp—”
“Don’t tell me what you are.”
“You could go too far.”
“I have gone too far. Don’t warn me. Not ever. You can send one of your agents if she’s not ugly. I won’t tell her any secrets.” Antonio smiled and got up from his barstool. “I might want to hurt her a bit, but she’ll be all right.”
“What kind of a man are you?”
“I told you in Paris I wanted some cocaine. I’ve had problems getting—”
“Yes. It’s in the first envelope. I’m not a pimp—”
“I know exactly what you are; you are just like me, Penev.” Antonio slipped both hands into his pockets. “I’m tired. The train was late. I want to take a little nap now. Send up a woman, you know the room. Someone young. Not one of your old Bulgarian sows. Tell her it will be for all night, okay?”
4
Ely paused a moment before he trudged up the worn stone steps to the entrance of the Georgian graystone at the far side of the square off Pall Mall. There were just seven stone steps to the glass door but the effort to mount them always seemed to the agent to be out of proportion to the task.
He climbed the stairs heavily and rang the bell. A buzzer sounded and he pushed the locked door and was in a cold entry hall, which was covered with a soiled red carpet. At the end of the dim hall was a young man behind a standard wooden government-issue desk. He looked like every hotel clerk Ely had ever known.
He glanced up and Ely produced the required bit of plastic with his photograph embalmed on a card. Ely. How long had he been Ely? What was his name, anyway?
He smiled at the earnest young man who gave the card careful scrutiny before returning it. Ely had once been Gemstone and before that 0047 in the early days when the service decreed everyone in Auntie had a number. But it wasn’t even called Auntie then, was it? Codes on codes, names on names, and the identity of all men is buried beneath the rubble of their own histories.
“The identity of all men is buried beneath the rubble of their own histories,” Ely said to the clerk.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. Doesn’t matter.”
“You’re to get a new card at the end of the month, sir.”
“More security? Or merely to keep the printers employed?”
“I couldn’t say, sir.”
“No. I suppose you couldn’t. Perhaps none of us could.”
Silence. Ely felt saddened but he had been a part of sadness for so long that there was something familiar about it, like an old friend who drinks too much or talks too much or insists on reciting poetry at awkward moments; an old friend such as Ely would be if he could afford the trivial nature of friendships.
“I’m supposed to see Q this morning.”
“Should I ring you up?”
“I know the way.”
“You can’t take the lift, I’m afraid, it’s out of repair.”
“Of course,” Ely said gently. “Or it would be a work-to-rule job action by the lift operators. Or perhaps a new measure to cut government costs.”
The clerk nodded again absently like a hotel clerk who cannot pay attention to the foreign guest.
Ely sighed and went to the stairs. They were covered with the same hideous red carpet that covered the worn floor in the front hall. The building was very old and in need of repair; the ceiling in Files leaked, for example, something Ely had discovered on his first day in the assignment. Poor old England, he had thought then.
Poor old England, he thought now, stepping on the first step, pulling himself up to the second, to the third, to the fourth.…
Q was on the fourth floor in the second building. All the buildings on the south side of the little square off Pall Mall were attached and walls had been opened between them. So the establishment of Auntie was quite large, though it appeared deceptively small at first.
Ely paused for breath at the second landing.
He had thin hands that gripped the oak banisters with casual strength. He was nearly fifty, which was very old for an agent still in the field, very old for an agent who yearned to stay in the field. His shoulders drooped and his face had a wasted look, as though he had recently undergone surgery. His youthful vanity was maintained in the bright ginger mustache with fierce Guardsman’s curls that belied the stricken look of his face. Something mocking was always present in his blue, clear eyes. His voice was reedy and some would mistake him, in appearance and speech, for a beloved Mr. Chips of a professor.
In fact, he was called the Fixer inside the upper ranks of Auntie. He fixed things that were broken. He put the pieces back together. Should that be in the past tense? He had been a fixer. Sometimes, when he killed, the job description was strained to match the event. Ely would have said that a fixer who has to kill in the end has merely failed. Perhaps that explained it; he had merely failed.
“He’s expecting you.” The women was not yet twenty-five and Ely noticed that she had already begun to ruin her once-fair English country complexion with hideous amounts of cheap makeup in the current style. Her name was Mary and she was not terribly bright, a quality that suited Q, who did not believe in surrounding himself with bright and ambitious people. “I want people who will do as they’re told,” he once said to Ely in pointed reference. Ely knew exactly what Q would like from him.
“Thank you, Mary.” Politely, without emphasis, gently; the old, honored employee showing courtesy in the course of a day’s work.
“Good morning,” he said when he entered the room.
In fact, it was not. Blustery winter banged at the windows. There was rain in the gray, brooding clouds covering the old city. The room was chill — all the rooms inside Auntie were too cold or too hot or leaky or carried some permanent defect — and Q had a small gas fire blazing in a corner. He sat very near the fire behind a Queen Anne — period desk. There was one other chair in the bare room and it was in front of the desk and away from the fire. It was not pleasant, on a cold day, to be interviewed by Q.
“Take a pew,” Q said.
Ely sat down.
“We need a fixer,” Q said.
Ely was surprised. He had botched the matter two years before in Vienna, botched it badly. Tompkins, who was Q’s Number One, had gotten him off the hook but not without cost. Tompkins had pulled him back to headquarters and put him under Miss Marple in Record Retrieval. It was a purgatory but at least it was not expulsion. Tompkins had been his friend; Tompkins had explained that Ely had botched the matter because of bad luck. Ely knew that it was a lie, even if Tompkins did not. Ely had failed because his nerve had failed. He had dishonored himself for the first time. He had failed to act when an action would have saved the business. Not to mention the lives of six people.
He showed no emotion as he listened to Q.
“Two days ago, one of our men in Cheltenham disappeared.”
Ely did not speak. He saw the purgatory opening. He was going back. And yet he still felt the chill of his failure in Austria two years before.
“He was working on Special Section. I don’t have to go into the thing too deeply, the Section I mean. But he had made an inquiry to Seeker before he disappeared. Strange inquiry, it seems.” Q was wearing a gray cardigan sweater. He had intense blue eyes and was clean-shaven. His white hair was parted in the middle in an old-fashioned cut. His eyes were framed by rimless glasses. There was something so cold about the man that Ely felt the chill of the room was more than an accident of the season.
“I don’t know what Seeker is, sir.”