But McCoy didn’t believe this. Retribution was his guiding star. So when Croxley had come to him and told him of the chase, he had put on his riding boots and grabbed a whip, like the old-stager he was, full of anger and discredit. McCoy thought he saw a chance of saving everything, never admitting that the battle had been well lost long ago far from any fields which he, in his small way, patrolled. Now he believed, with a flush of acid hope, that he could save the day by catching more than just this single traitor: through him he would feel his way along a chain, find the initial contact and take the rest one by one — deep-cover ‘illegals’ he hoped, as this man was, operating quite outside the Embassy or trade missions, few of whom had ever been caught in Britain. That would be the saving grace. McCoy saw at last a golden page for himself in the unwritten history of the service.
So it was that the man’s innocent behaviour upset him intensely; his infuriating independence came to plague all his hopes. The man had said goodbye to everyone a week before but hadn’t left and had done nothing since. Yet he must have stayed on for some clearly sinister reason, for what sane man — a Londoner from birth — could take pleasure from a constant wandering about a place he must know so well? — through streets that had been always his, among parks and buildings and trees that had stood up on his horizon for half a lifetime. And the man had looked at all these familiar shapes, and all the objects of the city, with such intensity and contentment, as a stranger might, come to a dying Venice for the first time.
McCoy couldn’t understand, but it hadn’t taken Croxley long. For Croxley knew what could come over someone before they left their country — the moods of an industrious nostalgia, the need to imprint all the last reminders, fix the solutions of a city: because you might not come back, or would be prevented, or because everything was at risk in any case: the buildings would be torn down, and the parks and trees tidied up and put away. So you banked as much pleasure as you could before you left and might take a week off, alone, to do it. But McCoy couldn’t accept such wilful licence in a man. His character, as much as his profession, condemned him to ulterior motives, while he had long ago been taught that pleasure was a permit, not a liberty.
‘I only hope you’re right,’ he said to Croxley. ‘That he’s just been looking at the city.’
‘He’s taken a week off, grubbing around. Why not?’
‘As if he knew it was his last chance.’
‘He doesn’t. He just likes to do that sort of thing. He’d do it anyway. Besides, it’s always a last chance, when you think of the buses. Or a slate from a roof. There was a job I was on once, waiting outside a pub in a bit of a wind, and this sign fell on me, bloody thing — “The George and Dragon”, inches —’
‘Yes, but why doesn’t he see anyone, though? None of his friends. Just picture galleries and matinées. And eating. You’d think he was working his way through the Good Food Guide.’
‘He’s resting.’ Croxley looked at McCoy’s puzzled face. It was his turn to explain. ‘As actors say. Pity to take him, somehow.’
‘You’ve too much feeling for him, Croxley. Too much altogether.’
‘If I didn’t feel for him, sir,’ Croxley put in with real and quiet concern, ‘if I didn’t get into his skin with feeling, we’d never get him. It’s the feeling that gets results you know. That’s how Philby and the others survived so long, playing double. They had the feeling. We kept our heads in the sand.’
McCoy looked displeased, as if the sediment had, after all, been lurking all the while in his ale, and had just then risen, souring his mouth. The big crevices in his face narrowed and his lips puckered.
‘You still think he may make some contact?’ Croxley asked with care but in an easy tone. ‘It’s two months now. There’s been nothing.’
‘One more afternoon. One never knows — some last-minute instructions, a change of plan.’ McCoy was angered by the inevitable apology in his voice.
‘I doubt it. As I’ve said before — they let a man sleep completely before a transfer. Give him an absolutely blank trail. It was only sheer luck we got onto him in the first place with that phone call. He had his last instructions six months ago and more, I shouldn’t be surprised. When he was accepted for this UN post. They’ve been preparing this move for years. With a deep-cover chap like this they take the long view, you know.’
‘All right. We’ll just see where he goes after lunch. A last shot. Then you can take him.’
‘The Wallace Collection.’
‘That’s near here, isn’t it?’
‘Round the corner.’
‘He must have been to it before then.’
‘Usually not.’ Croxley was like a doctor with sad news. ‘One never seems to get round to the sights on your doorstep. Look at me — been living next to Clapham Junction for over thirty years — and never taken a train from there.’
‘Yes — but why the Wallace?’
‘He usually does a gallery after lunch.’
‘And he’s done all the others?’ McCoy was as weary of the man’s aesthetic proclivities as he was of Croxley’s ability to forecast them. The two men seemed as master and student in a university where he had no arts.
‘Most of them.’ Croxley took out a notebook and murmured the names quickly: ‘BM, National, National Portrait, Tate, V and A, Horniman, Sir John Soane; then the private galleries: the Bond Street ones, most of them — and even the ones in the suburbs. Wimbledon — he was there yesterday. I don’t expect he’d leave the Wallace out of that collection, do you? Stands to reason, sir, not feeling.’
‘A pound to a penny, Croxley.’
‘A pound to a penny it is, sir.’
The two men looked at each other, their eyes meeting in grim measure for a second. Then they left the pub and walked down towards Hinde Street past the Greek restaurant.
2
They could see him now inside, sitting with his back towards them in the window seat. Nearly every day he had taken lunch there, before setting out on his odysseys, and each day there had been one or two of Croxley’s men with him, at some other table, but he’d always been alone and had never spoken to any other guest. McCoy had gone there himself for lunch a few days before, just to be sure, sitting in a corner as far out of the way as possible.
It was an unpretentious Cypriot place, not a kebab shop. There was linen on the tables and Mediterranean fare of some variety, even originality. If McCoy had not appreciated this, sticking rigidly to the ‘English’ side of the menu, he had been horrified at the man’s demeanour: he had used the place like a Continental, as a regular and concerned patron, knowing the waiters, speaking some of their language, savouring a decent if in no way elaborate meal — houmous, sometimes a rice soup, warm pancakes of hollow bread, followed by a pork or lamb kebab spiced with an interesting chopped garnish — always a freshly dressed salad and a half bottle of some Attic burgundy, ending with a gritty Turkish coffee. And olives: big, puffed-up black olives, glistening in their own clear oil. He never missed these, keeping a bowl of them by his plate throughout the meal, picking them out at odd moments, punctuating the other foods with relish, biting the flesh decisively from between thumb and forefinger and letting the pips drop neatly in a line along another plate.
At the end of the meal he would smoke a pipe of some mildly aromatic tobacco, Dutch perhaps, certainly not English. And the day McCoy had been there he had taken a glass of Metaxas brandy with it, though this was not a regular feature of his lunch. He left his serious drinking and eating for the evenings — nothing stupendous apparently, Croxley’s men had reported: a succession of carefully chosen menus in small restaurants of repute about the city. And his other pleasures had been carefully listed too: Monday. Furneaux Gallery, Wimbledon: Watercolours by John Bratby. Tuesday. Hayward Gallery: Art in Revolution — Soviet Art and Design after 1917. Wednesday. Marlborough: Sidney Nolan — Recent Graphics. Thursday. Mayfair Gallery: Andy Warhol — Graphics and Paintings. Friday. British Museum: Treasures from Romania: 4000 years of Art and Silver. His interest in the theatre and the movies was fully represented as well — almost every decent thing that had been on in London that month.