‘All right. Let’s take him.’ McCoy pruned the syllables viciously into sharp points. ‘Take him, Croxley.’ And now his words were harshly anguished like the pleas of Trojan women. ‘Take him — and let’s be done with this tomfoolery. Stop this nonsense, almighty God….’
McCoy had risen in anger, the fats about his body expanding like a cake. He looked up at the sooty portico of his church and at last cared nothing more for blasphemy. He swore then that he would fall upon this man with venom, forget a lifetime’s careful doubt. Within the hour, he would make him pay for all the bright glitter, the sins and gifts of others.
‘Bring them in, Summers. Call them in,’ Croxley said gently, as if his men were children who had strayed over the hill. ‘You know the routine. Back and front of the building. Keep the cars at a distance. When you’re ready, give us the word.’ He turned to McCoy. ‘It should go like clockwork. We planned it all before, you see.’
3
The man studied the group of Canalettos in the ante-room to the left of the hall. He had thought at first of leaving them to the end of his tour, but they had tempted him strongly, bright visions in the distance, and he was glad he’d given in. On closer inspection, he wondered if they might be deteriorating. There were cracks, minute hair-line fractures, running like waves about the placid blue arcs of sky over the canals. He felt a quick sadness, a disappointment. These perfect memorials were ephemeral as the perfect originals. Even art was not long. He stepped back for a larger view.
Then he heard the voices and had to force himself not to turn about and run.
Two voices, a man and a woman, talking in an unfamiliar Russian dialect. Estonia, Latvia, the Ukraine? He wasn’t sure — except that it was Soviet. Then he recognised a sentence — they were speaking of Canaletto and the Doge’s Palace. He relaxed and turned his head a fraction. One of the gallery attendants, a stocky fellow in his fifties with a face like a rock, was explaining Venice to a younger woman, toughly built like him, almost a gypsy woman, in her rough, unfinished bearing, her fair hair streaked with carrot. And the man was able to place them immediately — these displaced people. There had been hundreds of thousands of them just after the war, POWs for the most part, Russians who had been in prison and then refugee camps all over Germany for years after 1945; nationalist minorities who had never gone home to Mother Russia but had chosen to settle anywhere else, in countries the world over, without ever forgetting their homeland, their language or their loss.
It ruined his afternoon. For months now, prior to his transfer he had lived clear of all control and contact. He had been sleeping, without a trail, twenty-four hours a day, for many days. He had been nothing but George Graham, Senior Reports Officer at the COI in Westminster. There had been no other life but that of his cover and he had inhabited it guilelessly and completely so that he had come to forget, as was his purpose, that he was an officer with the KGB. Had he been interrogated, even tortured, during that time it is likely that he would have given nothing away. For he had, quite literally, put a curtain about his real past and future. He had been well trained in the craft — like Pelmanism or some other mnemonic game — completely to separate the real man from the false; to bury the first while the other slept.
Yet some hazard or commonplace, like words in an empty gallery, could resurrect and re-unite these halves long before their time and trigger the whole man into dangerous action. There had been no threat in the words of the old Russian exile, boring his daughter or his cousin, yet they had broken straight through into his secrets like the verbal shafts of a skilled prosecutor.
And now he saw nothing but the politics and dangers of his real commitment, his proper concern divested of all its pleasurable cover. He no longer saw the pictures, the Bouchers or Fragonards, or the green glaze, fathoms deep, on the Urbino porcelain, or the mineral wonders of the Louis Quinze mantel clocks. He looked on these marvellous gilded and enamelled artefacts but saw nothing, they meant nothing. His critical perspective disappeared; his knack of enjoyment died. All the casual pleasures that he had taken in the past weeks were soured, faded into some dull place in his mind where they lay like old and unrewarding duties. His links with the world, which had been so firm in that April of easy strolling through the fortunate weather, had been cut off suddenly; a fault had come in the middle of a precious message down the wire. Now, in the silence, the other man reared in him, whose only business was guile, alert and smelling the wind, while the happy man cursed the hour.
So it was that he was not altogether surprised when he turned in the armoury room at the end of the building and saw them. The innocuous words of the old man ten minutes before had led them to him as surely as a cord through a labyrinth: the disinherited man and the carroty woman had somehow advertised him as clearly as a shout all over the streets of Marylebone.
The two men stood in the doorway, in sensible coats and hats, behind the great medieval horseman, sword flourishing in the air above his tortuous Gothic armour. He had come into this room on a wrong turning, looking for the exit, straight into a cage of antique weaponry. An orchestra of gleaming metal lay everywhere about him. Blades from Damascus and Toledo; Italian pikes and tufted halberds, taut Bavarian crossbows and small infernal devices from France — enough to nourish a new crusade.
He put a hand out, touching the thick glass on a case of pearl-handled Arab daggers, then gently ran his fingers down the slope in the off hand gesture of some proud and fastidious collector. It is here, he seemed to say, all in one place. After a lifetime pursuit I have gathered all this violence safely up, calmed this bloody provocation, resting quietly under my fingertips. It is here, I have tamed it all and have no need of it now.
The men walked towards him, past a silver inlaid Spanish cannon that said ‘Do not Touch’ and they took him quietly by a case of arquebuses and hatchets.
His pipe fell as they frisked him and the burnt grains of tobacco skidded over the shiny floor. Croxley bent down to pick it up and thought of the blackened grain in the gut of a dead bird, shot violently out of a big sky. Summers went through his other pockets, but the man had no weapons.
‘Nothing, sir. Except this bag of olives.’
4
McCoy went round to see Croxley in his office by the Thames later next morning. He was impatient.
‘He’s in the basement. We’re starting, but it will take some time. Do you want to go down?’
‘How long?’
‘They disorientate him first.’
‘A week?’
‘Depends. It’s an army speciality. We have one of their men on it now. Depends on how long the sounds take to sink in. And the darkness, as well as the other physical — awkwardness. It’s cumulative, you know, forty-eight hours perhaps — at best.’
Croxley was embarrassed even in hinting at this psychological violence, so that he turned away from McCoy and looked over the river as a precaution. He had realised long ago the disadvantages, among outsiders, of his sympathetic approach to security interrogations. They took it for weakness. Only other professionals recognised the skill that lay behind his gentle attitudes; the tools that Croxley masked with his diffidence were those of a great interrogator. And when the army had finished, the man downstairs would recognise this too, without knowing it, and be moved by Croxley’s sympathy to outrageous confidences, as many other men had been.
McCoy came down again three days later, sooner than expected, for Croxley had a preliminary report ready for him.