Vienna: May 1956
Gus Fforde was a rogue. A rogue, a wag, and an old friend. He and Troy and Charlie Leigh-Hunt had been schoolboys together. Charlie was the leader, Troy and Dickie Mullins very much the NCOs, and Gus the inspired, reckless subaltern. It was Fforde who had taught Troy how to disable a car by shoving a potato up the exhaust, how to blow out the down-pipe on a lavatory cistern with guncotton so that the next poor sod to flush the bog got a free shower, and how to catapult stink bombs in chapel. Of these, Troy had only found the first to be of any lasting value.
Fforde was also First Secretary at Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy in Vienna, capital of the newly reconstituted Austria. The Austrian democratic government was only weeks old, the Russian and American troops that had been in the country since 1945 having departed a matter of months ago.
Troy wondered, as he had so often, what outlet life as a British diplomat provided for the inherent anarchist in Gus. A world that revolved around gin and tonic, fours at bridge, and constant glad-handing could hardly satisfy the need to create chaos in a man happier knocking up home-made bombs.
“A passport, you say?”
“Yes, Gus. For my wife.”
“She’s not English, then?”
“Of course not.”
“Okey doh. And when did you get married?”
“Tomorrow. You can be a witness if you like.”
“Freddie, there wouldn’t be anything … how shall I say? … untoward about this, would there?”
“Untoward, no. Downright dodgy, yes. In need of discreet assistance from an old friend, yes.”
“Quite,” said Fforde. “What are old friends for? Now, I’ll need a name and some sort of identification.”
Troy slid Tosca’s passport across the table to him. Her real passport. One of her real passports. The real American one.
Gus read the name out softly to himself.
“Larissa Dimitrovna Tosca. Well, there’s a mixed bag of origins for you. Dostoevsky and a dash of Puccini.”
“Russian … Italian … all America’s a hybrid of some sort.”
“Quite,” said Gus. “Born April 5, 1911. New York. You and older women again, eh Freddie?”
Troy said nothing.
Gus did his bit. Witnessed a civil wedding, pronounced Tosca, even with her haggard look and pancake makeup, to be “a stunner,” discreetly intervened when the clerk raised the vexatious matter of “residency”, popped the champagne and served the Sachertorte in the lobby of the Hotel Sacher, and rushed through a British passport, asking no questions and stepping lightly over embassy staff who remarked that it was all a little irregular.
Gus did not give a damn about the irregular. Little or large.
“However, there is one thing,” he said sotto voce, towards the end of the second bottle of champagne. “The ambassador would like to meet you.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“You’re the brother of a man who’ll be Foreign Secretary after the next election. Effectively the ambassador’s boss. Isn’t that reason enough?”
“What’s his name? Do I know him?”
“Sir Francis Camiss-Low. New to the job, but then so are we all.”
“Nope. Never met the bloke and now is not the time for a doublebarrelled Englishman.”
“He’s just a diplomat trying to be diplomatic.”
“So am I.”
“Fine, Freddie. Don’t tell me.”
Troy shrugged it off and mourned the days when they had all told each other everything.
What were old friends for?