There are three styles in cities. There are river cities – London and Paris – and waterfront cities like Chicago, Beirut and Havana; and there are island cities. Stockholm and Venice are island cities. So are Helsinki and Leningrad, and so is Manhattan that sparkled in the dust like a wet finger dipped into the caster sugar of electricity. The plane dropped a wing towards Brooklyn and the dark water of Jamaica Bay and nosed gently down the traffic pattern of Kennedy Airport.
Kennedy Airport is the keyhole of America. You peer into it and glimpse the shiny well-oiled pieces, the bright machine-finished gleaming metal; it’s clean and safe and operates smoothly. It’s a great keyhole.
I got off the Air India jet spitting betel nut and nursing a swollen hand. The airport was crowded with hurrying people, men in stetsons or tartan jackets, men carrying suits in bright polythene bags. I found myself hurrying too, until I realized that I had no destination: I wondered how many people around me had fallen into the same trap. A woman with all her baggage and a raucous infant in a wire buggy wheeled it over my foot, and a woman in a yellow overall rushed out of a shop yelling, ‘Did you just buy a Scrabble game?’
‘No.’
‘You forgot your instructions,’ she said. ‘They didn’t enclose the instructions.’
The loudspeaker was calling, ‘Skycap to the information centre.’
The woman in the yellow overall said, ‘It’s not like you didn’t pay for it. A Scrabble game is complicated.’
‘I didn’t buy it,’ I said. A lady with a lot of packages marked ‘Shannon duty-free shop’ said, ‘I’d just love chicken-burger and French fries. I haven’t had real good French fries since I left San Francisco.’
The woman with the Scrabble game rules waved them in the air. ‘Unless you know how to use it,’ she sighed, ‘a Scrabble game is just a boxful of junk.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I turned away from her. ‘It’s not like you didn’t pay for it,’ she said again.
The lady with the duty-free packages said, ‘Not even in Paris. Not real good French fries.’
A man in an Air India uniform said, ‘Are you Mr Dempsey? Air India passenger?’ A transistor radio was playing so loud that he had to shout. I nodded. He looked at my passport, then handed over a large envelope. Inside there was three hundred dollars in bills, two dollars in small change sealed into a plastic bag labelled ‘small money’, and a thick bundle of political literature. One pamphlet said that eighty per cent of all US psychiatrists were Russian, educated in Russia and paid by the Communists to indoctrinate Americans. As a first step they tend to make sexual attacks on their female patients. Another booklet said that the mental health programme was a Communist-Jewish conspiracy to brain-wash the USA. Two booklets said that the President of the USA was a Communist and suggested that I should ‘… buy a gun now and form a secret minuteman team’. The last thing was a bright blue bumper-sticker, ‘Are you a Commie without knowing it?’ I stuffed the whole wad back into the envelope and phoned the Brain. The metallic voice said, ‘No instructions. Call tomorrow at this same time. Have you read the literature? Record your reply then ring off.’
‘I read it,’ I said. It was all very well for Dawlish to tell me to take orders from the Brain, he didn’t have to obey them.
I threw my baggage into a battered cab. ‘Washington Square,’ I said.
Tunnel or bridge?’ said the driver. ‘I always ask ’em. Tunnel or bridge?’
‘Bridge,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep the East River where we can see it.’
‘You bet,’ said the driver. ‘Six bucks.’
‘Could we find a doctor somewhere on the way in?’ I asked him. ‘I think I’ve got a broken finger.’
‘You’re British aintcha, fella, well I’ll tell ya sumpin. Just one thing dough don’t buy ya in this town, fella; total silence. Know what I mean? Total silence.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘Total silence.’
I joined the cast of the relentless 3D movie that calls itself Manhattan, where it’s always night and they keep the lights on to prove it. I prefer to arrive in New York at night, to lower myself into the city gradually, like getting into a bathful of very hot water. The rusty taxi-cab clattered down the spine of the city and the driver told me what was wrong with Cuba, and we went past the silent skyscrapers, kosher pizzerias, glass-fronted banks, bagel factories, Polish gymnasiums with belt-vibrators for rent, pharmacies selling love-potions and roach-killers, and all-night supermarkets where frail young men were buying canned rattlesnake. New York, New York; where the enterprise is free if nothing else is.
From my hotel at the foot of Fifth Avenue I made short forays into the neon between soaking my cuts, counting my abrasions and nursing anxiety to sleep. On the third night in New York I settled down to watch one of those TV programmes where relaxed, informal chatter had been perfected by hours of intensive rehearsal. Outside I could hear rain falling upon the fire-escape and bouncing back against the window. I closed the window tight and turned up the heat.
I seemed to have spent most of my life in hotel rooms where room service wanted money in advance and the roller towels were fixed with a padlock. Now I had graduated to the Birmingham-rug and Dufy-print circuit, but I wondered what I had sacrificed to do it. I had few friends. I stayed well clear of the sort of people who thought I had a dead-end job in the Civil Service, and those who knew what the job was stayed clear of me. I poured myself a drink.
On the TV a man in an open convertible was saying, ‘It’s sunny and hot here in Florida. Why not fly down tonight? You can take twenty-four months to pay.’ My broken finger hurt like hell. I soaked it in hot water and antiseptic and I drank a little more whisky. By the time the phone rang I was well beneath the label.
‘Stage Delicatessen,’ the voice on the phone said. ‘Eight three four, seventh. Immediate. Secure. Are you waiting to go in?’ I wondered what would happen if I ignored the call or pretended it wasn’t me, but I had a strong feeling that they knew it was me. I had a feeling that if I had been somewhere in the midst of a mob at Madison Square Garden they would have still got that metallic voice to talk to me. So I put my head under a cold shower and climbed into my raincoat and the doorman whistled up a cab for the Stage Delicatessen. The schlock-shops were afire with sale signs and smiling suckers, and the cops were buttoned tight and growling. A man in a blue poplin raincoat was standing outside the Delicatessen waving a bundle of show-biz newspapers. He ignored the code introduction.
‘OK slim,’ he said as I arrived. ‘Let’s go.’
I said, ‘I’m going nowhere till I’ve had a hot pastrami sandwich.’ We crowded into a mêlée like the Eton Wall Game. We both had a sandwich, the man in the blue raincoat saying ‘We’d better make it snappy’ between every bite. Waiting for us was a black Ford Falcon with a DPL (diplomats’) licence plate. We got in and the Negro driver gunned it away without a word. He passed Columbus Circle. Blue raincoat buried himself into an article headlined ‘Bliz Boffs Borscht Biz’ and chewed on a toothpick. The car radio was saying, ‘… New Jersey Turnpike traffic moderate, Lincoln Tunnel, heavy. Route twenty-two moderate, Holland Tunnel moderate. Folks this is the time of year to think about buying a new car …’ The driver tuned to another station.
‘Where are we heading?’ I asked.
The blue raincoat said, ‘You follow your orders, feller. I’ll follow mine, right?’ The driver said nothing, but we were in Broadway and the seventies and still heading north. Suddenly the driver turned left and pulled up before one of those little medieval castles on the West Side that are owned by people who like to stare tall buildings in the toenails. The car stopped. The chauffeur reached for the car phone.
‘Let’s go, bud,’ said blue raincoat. He stuffed the bundle of papers into his pocket and pulled a face, as if the toothpick was causing him some sort of pain. ‘The old man’s as touchy as sweating gelignite tonight,’ he said. The bottom half of the building was towers, balconies and metal grilles, and the top half was very Flemish merchant. He didn’t ring the bell so we just stood there looking at the massive door.
‘What are we waiting for?’ I asked. ‘Won’t they lower the drawbridge?’
The blue raincoat looked at me like he was mapping the course of my jugular vein. There was a lot of chain-rattling, then the door opened with a faint buzz. Blue raincoat pointed at the open door, then went back to the car. The driver and blue raincoat waited until I entered, then they drove away south. Maybe they were going for another pastrami sandwich.
The fittings and furnishings inside the old house were old. In America that either means you made it, or you just got off the boat. Just in case there should be any mistake about it, these old items were spot-lit by Swedish lamps.
The door had been opened by some sort of electric release, but two Negro footmen in grey silk – complete with stockings – stood inside the door and said, ‘Good evening, sir,’ in unison. A tall man walked into the hall to greet me. He was dressed in a red coat, cut-away from chest to knee, with long yellow lapels that became a cape collar. His breeches were made of white shiny silk and so was his waistcoat. His hair was white and powdered and long enough to be tied in a small black silk bow. It was the uniform of an eighteenth-century soldier. I followed him along the marble hall. Through a doorway to the right I saw two more soldiers opening a crate of champagne with their bayonets. I was ushered into a high-ceilinged room dark with oak panelling. There was a long refectory table round which sat seven young men, all in the same red-coat uniform. They were drinking from pewter tankards. Their hair was uniformly white and long. A young girl in a long, low-cut dress with a sash and apron sat on a settle beyond the table. The whole scene looked like something soaked off a box of chocolates. The man who had shown me in reached a pewter tankard down from the Welsh dresser and filled it with champagne. He handed me the tankard and said, ‘I won’t be a minute.’
‘Take your time,’ I said.
The door at the far end opened and a girl in a similar serving-wench dress but of silk and with a richly embroidered apron came in carrying a small cardboard box. Mozart wafted through the door. The girl with the box said, ‘Has he broken his hand?’
The first wench said, ‘Not yet,’ and the second wench tittered.
One of the soldiers said, ‘A new boy,’ and waved a thumb at me over his shoulder.
‘He’s come to talk with the General.’ He said it like I had aisle seats for the Day of Judgement.
The wench with the box said, ‘Welcome to the Revolutionary War.’ A couple of the soldiers grinned. I swilled down the half-pint of champagne as if it was bitter lemon.
She said, ‘Where you from?’
‘I’m from Sci-Fi Anonymous,’ I said. ‘I’m selling subscriptions to the twentieth century.’
‘Sounds awful,’ she said. Then the first soldier returned and said, ‘The General will see you now,’ with awesome regard for the word ‘General’. He reached a cocked hat from the Welsh dresser and put it on carefully.
I said, ‘Do you think I should pipeclay my alligator shoes?’ but he just led the way into the hall and up the stairs. The music was louder here. It was the second movement of the Mozart A Major Concerto. The soldier walked ahead of me, holding his sword in his left hand so that it didn’t clatter against the stairs. At the top, a long red-carpeted corridor was lit by antique oil lamps. We walked past three doors, then he opened the next and showed me into the study. There was an inlaid desk upon which silver ornaments had been placed with that carefully posed look that photos in House and Garden have. On one wall there were ancient documents – some merely signatures – framed in modest elegance, but apart from that the walls were plain. If that’s what you call walls lined in silk. There was a communicating door in one corner of the room and from behind it came the third movement of the Mozart, which was working itself up to that frantic minor-key Turkish routine which I’ve never thought a good enough ending for such a great beginning; but then that complaint went for just about everything in my life.
The music ended, there was applause and then the door opened. Another one of these antique soldier boys came into the room and said, ‘General Midwinter,’ and both the red-coats went into a state of paralysed rigidity. The applause continued.
Midwinter came into the frame of the door and turned back to the room beyond to clap gently with his white-gloved hands. He was speaking to someone and beyond them I could see a brightly lit room with vast chandeliers and women in white dresses. From the dark study it was like glimpsing daylight through a manhole.
‘This way,’ the General said. He was a tiny man, dapper and neat like most small men, and he wore a gold-encrusted eighteenth-century English general’s uniform with its complex aiguillette and thigh-length boots. He pointed with his general’s baton and said, ‘This way, men,’ again. His voice was soft but with a hard mechanical edge like a speak-your-weight machine, and he said ‘men’ like his friends said ‘General’.
The General tucked the baton under his armpit and clapped his hands softly as the small orchestra walked through his study. When the last violin and cello had disappeared the General switched on the desk light and settled down behind his tidy desk. He rearranged a couple of silver paperweights and brushed his long white hair with his hand. A large emerald ring flashed a spot of light into a dark corner of the room. He motioned me to a chair and said,’ Tell me about yourself, boy.’
I said, ‘Can we cut the crowd scene?’ and he said, ‘Sure; beat it, you two.’ The two sentries saluted and left the room. General Midwinter said, ‘What’s your phone number?’
I said, ‘I’m at One Fifth Avenue, that’s Spring 7–7000.’
‘Five million, nine hundred and twenty-nine thousand,’ said Midwinter. ‘That’s the square of it. The square root of it is two hundred and seventy-seven point four nine. I can do that with any number you name,’ he said. ‘So could my father; it’s a knack, I guess.’
‘Is that why they made you a general?’ I asked.
‘They made me a general ’cause I’m old. Old age is an incurable disease, see. People think they ought to do something for you. Me they made a general. OK?’ He winked at me and then scowled as though he had thought better of it.
‘It’s OK with me.’
‘Good.’ The word carried a certain amount of menace. Midwinter leaned forward and the harsh cross-lighting emphasized his age. His flesh was soft; a badly-fitting mask that around the eyes showed a moist pink edge. The yellow skin freckled brown shone like the well-fingered ivories of a bar-room piano.
His white-gloved hands played possum on the desk-top until one of them walked across to the baton, picked it up and hit the desk-top a sharp blow.
‘They told me you were belligerent,’ said Midwinter. ‘I said I didn’t mind ’cause I’m a little belligerent myself.’
‘Looks like neither of us is going to grow out of it.’
‘In your case, I’m not so sure.’ He tapped the baton on the desk and dropped it with a loud clatter. ‘When you see the set-up we have – not only here but throughout the world – you will join us all right.’ The soft white animal-like hand picked up the baton again.
‘You are a probationer. This is a symbol of the faith we have in you.’ He picked up one of those brown shiny golf-balls that I had seen at Pike’s and rolled it across the desk to me. I picked it up and looked at it. ‘Inside that sphere is a sample of American soil – the soil of freedom. I hope you will treasure that piece of soil, remain true to it; a symbol of the simple faith of a free people rooted in a free soil.’ He tapped the desk as though it was all there in a diagram that I should have already looked at.
‘When you come back from training, then we will have tested you, then we will be trusting you.’
‘Suppose you decide that you won’t be trusting me?’
‘Then you won’t be coming back,’ Midwinter wheezed.
‘Then perhaps it’s me that should be mistrusting you,’ I said.
‘No, no, no,’ said Midwinter in a fatherly voice. ‘I like you. You will find that I am the one person you can always trust. Come to me, confide in me. I am the one person you can trust around here. Always trust a financier because he is investing the stuff that counts. If you pay money to an artist how can you tell if he’s going to be famous a couple of years from now? You submit yourself to a doctor; well, who knows how many guys he’s slaughtered? It’s strictly between him and the AMA. An architect: maybe he had a smart assistant last year; you may end up with the dumbest heap of concrete you ever saw. But a financier: when he lays it on the line it’s going to be portraits of presidents cashable in solid US any place on the globe. So don’t ever say a financier doesn’t measure up; he’s the only one who does.’ One of the soft white animals had gone to sleep and the other went across the desk to sniff at it. ‘Get me?’ said Midwinter.
‘Got you,’ I said. Midwinter nodded and wheezed a wheezy laugh.
‘Let me tell you something, son,’ he said. ‘Making a lot of money is no fun. When you get rich you find that the rich are soft and stupid and want to talk about parties for their daughters. Your old friends – your real friends – don’t want to see you any more. Poor people don’t want a millionaire among them reminding them of some way in which they failed to make it. So it’s lonely being a rich old man. Lonely.’ The animal with an emerald on its leg tugged at Midwinter’s sleevelace and picked up the baton again and staggered about with it.
I said, ‘Poor old rich men are something of a cliché, aren’t they?’
Midwinter said, ‘I got nothing against clichés, son. It’s the quickest method of communication yet invented, but I get you. You think I’m a lonely old man looking for a tomb in a history book. I love. It’s as easy as that. I love, I love my country. Get me?’ The animal with the baton smacked the sleeping animal in time to Midwinter’s staccato pronouncements. From the next room I heard a riff of a clarinet and toot of a trombone. ‘Get me?’ Midwinter said again.
‘Yes.’ I said quietly.
‘No,’ said Midwinter. His voice was loud but without animosity. He leaned across the desk and looked at his hands and the baton and at me, and then he winked. When he spoke again it was a low persuasive tone. ‘You don’t understand the kind of love I have for this great country we live in. Love’s not built that way – my way – any more. These days love is marriage and its compensation is alimony or success. Love these days is bravery under fire and the compensation is medals and fame. Love is public duty or a political donation and the compensation is a pension or maybe an embassy. Love is some dame you left back in St Louis or a fast haul in the back seat of an automobile.’ One of the white animals tapped his waistcoat. ‘My love is nothing like that. My love is this great company of brave young men who are proud to make their country strong. I love my country and my token is to make the thing I love strong. Get me, boy? Get me?’ He was agitated.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said very loud. The baton waved in the air.
‘Strong,’ said Midwinter, and the animal with the baton smashed the sleeping animal in the belly and there was a terrible noise of splintering wood. One leg kicked convulsively and the sleeping animal died with its feet in the air. ‘I knew you’d get me,’ Midwinter said. ‘I knew,’ and he picked up his poor dead broken hand and removed the white glove. The wooden fingers of his false left hand were bent and damaged and he turned it slowly under the light. My own swollen hand seemed to hurt even more as I watched him.
The door opened after a brief tap and the wench with the cardboard box came in. The dance band began to play ‘Smoke gets in your eyes.’ Midwinter was still looking at the revolting hand. She bent over and kissed Midwinter on the cheek. ‘You promised,’ she said reproachfully. From somewhere across the city came the lonely scream of a police car. ‘They don’t make them strong enough,’ said Midwinter. He had lost the intensity that his love had generated and was in a post-coital triste. She kissed him again and said, ‘You mustn’t get overexcited.’ She turned to me. ‘He gets over-excited,’ she explained. She rolled back the sleeve to reveal the place where the false hand fitted to the arm. Midwinter waved his baton at me. ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘Go and have a swell time at our fancy-dress party. We’ll talk some more tomorrow. We can fix you a costume if you feel conspicuous in your street clothes.’ He winked again as if it was his way of dismissing visitors.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘Uniforms bring me out in a rash.’ That house was one of the few places where I preferred to be different from the others.
I moved out among the Nell Gwynnes with cast-iron facials and the Redcoats who rode a Jaguar unafraid. The chips were down, the levels were split and the Scotch trickled over the rocks. Harvey was there in a red-coat uniform, smiling and doing his neat little dances and pretending to drop plates and saving them at the last minute, and the girls were saying ‘Ooo’ and slyly studying each other’s hairdos and shoes. I stood watching Harvey, trying to get beyond his moods to the man underneath. His timing was exact: even when he moved in a clumsy way he never knocked anything over. He was the sort of fielder who never runs but is always there when the ball lands. His eyes were clear but his white wig was askew. I felt sure that he was more than a little drunk, but his voice never slurred or changed from that flat resonance that makes so many Americans sound as though they are speaking over a loud-hailer.
Harvey spotted me on the rim of his audience. ‘You old son of a bitch,’ he said in a relaxed idle way, and he leaned forward and grabbed my arm to be sure I wasn’t an hallucination. ’Bout time you smiled, you miserable old swine. You look drunk,’ he said. He flagged a waiter down and grabbed two drinks from the silver tray. The waiter began to move away. ‘Stay right there,’ Harvey said. ‘Stand there stood, like a real waiter should.’ Harvey insisted that I drink three gigantic martinis before he released the waiter. Harvey watched me down the drinks and he downed three just to keep me company. ‘Now let’s go,’ he said, dragging me towards the door. ‘The only thing worth having at these crazy pantomimes is the booze.’
Harvey grabbed two more drinks for good measure, then did a little dance. The band saw him and picked up the rhythm. It was all that – or more than – Harvey needed. The dancers cleared a path as he did a Gene Kelly, relaxed and skilful right there in the middle of the dance floor. As he drank from the two glasses so he was able to strut wider and leap higher, until with the glasses empty he was spinning and soft-shoe shuffling, and the dancers had stopped dancing and were finger-clicking and hand-clapping and the atmosphere built like a house of cards, thin and precarious but high and beautiful. The enthusiasm spread to the band, the drummer steadied him and the trumpet urged him to attempt and complete stances beyond his normal skills. The ESP boys would say that it was the telepathic radiations of the audience that enabled Harvey to do that dance. Certainly they were all rooting for him and just as certainly Harvey responded, and he did things that night that would have attracted a talent scout from the Bolshoi. When the band sensed that Harvey was growing tired they moved him towards a finale and spread a musical carpet and drew a musical curtain and the trumpet milked the applause. Harvey stood there grinning and flushed and the waiter stepped forward with another great silver tray with just two drinks on it, and some wag took down a piece of greenery and formed it into a crown and the soldiers drew their swords and provided an arch under which Harvey walked. He went out on to the balcony and the applause was still echoing around the ballroom.
Harvey said, ‘Hey, they like us. You’re not bad,’ which was nonsense because all I had done was follow Harvey’s steps and fake pauses when they became too difficult to follow.
Harvey grinned and said, ‘I knew three of those big martinis would do it. I know you only too well.’
The rain had stopped. The balcony was cool and the night was dark as far as Broadway, where a slab of writhing electricity changed the colour of all the window panes on the other side of the street. Harvey produced a couple of cigars and we looked at the glow above the dark city and smoked, and Harvey said, ‘It’s a millionaire’s toy,’ and I said, ‘Yes, with eight million working parts.’
‘Working parts,’ said Harvey. ‘Yes.’ The street below was empty except for a girl walking along sobbing quietly and a boy behind her trying to explain. ‘They wouldn’t have killed you,’ Harvey said. ‘Rough you up a little, yes; but they would never have killed you. It was Stok that made it dangerous by sending that cavalry patrol to pick them up.’
‘Better a devil you know than a devil you don’t,’ I said.
Below on the street the sobbing girl let the boy comfort her, then behind us there was a click from the balcony door. The serving wench who had been carrying the General’s spare hand in a cardboard box stepped out on to the balcony to join us. ‘Harvey darling,’ she said in that same reproachful tone she had used on General Midwinter.
‘What’s wrong, honey?’ Harvey said. ‘Won’t the General lend you his plane?’
‘You know,’ said the girl. ‘I came out of the study with the General and there you are cutting up, Harvey. Don’t you understand how terrible it makes me feel?’
‘No,’ said Harvey.
‘It makes me feel terrible. Embarrassed, Harvey: that’s how it makes me feel.’
Harvey screwed up his eyes and stared at her. ‘You know something, honey?’ he said. ‘Drinking makes you very beautiful.’
‘I haven’t been drinking, Harvey,’ she said patiently, as if this was a dialogue they had been through many times before.
‘No,’ said Harvey triumphantly. ‘But I have.’
‘If your marriage means nothing to you, Harvey,’ she said, ‘then your self-respect should. I’ll be ready to go home in fifteen minutes.’ Then she swept away, skilfully rustling her long dress for maximum effect.
‘My wife,’ said Harvey in explanation.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘One of these days I’ll wire up her electric toothbrush …’ He stopped. It was a joke, I suppose, but he didn’t grin.
‘She spies on me. Do you know that? My own wife spies on me. To hear her talk you’d think I was the hired help. To hear her talk you’d think that guy Midwinter was the right hand of God.’
‘That’s what you’d think if you hear anyone around here talk about Midwinter.’
‘Right. These punks think he’s MacArthur, George Washington, Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie all rolled into one.’
‘But you don’t?’
‘I didn’t say that. I think he’s a great man. Seriously. A really great man and a powerful man. Midwinter will never be the President of the United States but he will be close to the President. When the forces of conservatism take control of this country then Midwinter will be the power behind the throne … and man I do mean the throne.’ Harvey smiled. ‘But he doesn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t trust anyone.’
‘That’s a common failing among people in our business.’
‘Aw, but this guy taps phones, intercepts mail, checks up on friends and relatives. He even puts agents in to spy on his own staff. That’s pretty crummy, wouldn’t you say?’
‘All I’d say is, why are you so sure that this balcony isn’t bugged?’
‘I’m not sure, but I’m too drunk to give a good goddamn is all.’ Harvey suddenly thought of something else. ‘Tell me something, you bastard,’ he said. ‘Why did you change over the eggs in that package?’
‘I told you, Harvey, the package of eggs was stolen from my baggage on the way to London Airport.’
‘Tell me about that again.’
‘I already told you. It was the same man who followed me from the doctor’s surgery. Full face. Black hornrimmed spectacles. Medium height.’
Harvey said, ‘You said projecting ears, bad teeth, long hair, sounded like an Englishman who wanted to be taken for a Yank, bad breath. You gave me a long description.’
‘That’s right, the horn-rimmed spectacles were adapted to make his ears project. He was an American who put flat Cockney vowel-sounds into his American accent to sound like an Englishman assuming an American accent. He used a hair-piece to cover a bald patch on top of his head. (It didn’t come near the hair line so if he hadn’t kept tapping it no one would have noticed it.) He blacked out a couple of his front teeth with stage cosmetics and made his breath smell with chemical – oldest trick in the business to prevent people looking you in the face close to. He stole the baggage after it had been through customs.’ I paused.
Harvey was grinning. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was me.’
I went on. ‘I’d say he was a transit airline passenger on a refuelling stop who got off his aeroplane, changed into a pair of overalls in the toilet, drove off with a van-load of baggage, took what he wanted and was back on his plane well within the time his flight was called, to continue his journey without even going through customs. Not bad for someone who had just barn-stormed around after leaving college.’
Harvey laughed and said, ‘Elevator shoes, contact lenses to change the eye colour, dirtied fingernails and a trace of colouring on the lips to make the face seem pale. You forgot all those.’
Harvey stared down at his toes and watched them while they did a little dance.
‘You think you are a pretty smart bastard, don’t you?’ Harvey said. He was still looking down and still doing a little dance. I didn’t answer. ‘A pretty smart bastard.’ Harvey split the words into syllables and made each syllable a step in his dance, then he changed the accents round and danced the same remark again. He zinged an end to his dance with one foot high in the air. He turned his face to me. ‘You made sure your prediction about Pike came out OK, didn’t you? You’re like these dames who see two knives crossed on the table, then start a row to prove it’s a bad sign. Pike gets burned. You have a nice chat with Stok?’
I think Harvey wanted me to hit him. Whether he wanted to be hurt and suffer, or an excuse to hit me back, I don’t know, but I’m sure he wanted me to hit him.
Harvey said, ‘You were having a nice chat about Turgenev. You knew that Stok wouldn’t harm you. As far as he’s concerned you are a representative of the UK Government. If he cracks down on you, London would crack down on all the fringe people who go in and out of the Soviet network there. No; providing you are reasonably discreet you are safe anywhere in Russia. That’s what makes me sick: you laughing and chatting with Stok while our boy was sitting there petrified.’
I said, ‘Stok’s OK compared with some of the people I work with, let alone compared with the people I work against. Stok knows which side he’s on. So do I. That’s why we can talk.’
‘Stok is a bloodthirsty ruthless bastard.’
‘So are we all,’ I said. ‘Ruthless and doomed.’
‘Maybe you should have walked over to Pike and told him that. Half of us are ruthless and the other half are doomed. You should have told Pike which half he belonged to.’
‘We are all half ruthless and all half doomed.’
‘You’re drunk,’ said Harvey, ‘or you wouldn’t be so corny.’
The balcony door was open. I looked through it to see why the music had stopped. General Midwinter was in front of the band smiling benignly at the closely packed guests and holding his gloved hand high as if he was auctioning it. The guests were silenced.
‘We interrupt your pleasure for a brief prayer,’ said Midwinter; he bowed his head and so did everyone.
‘Dear Heavenly Father,’ Midwinter intoned. ‘Help us to awaken our beloved country to its great danger. Help us to cleanse it and hold it safe from the Godless forces of Communism that surround it and threaten it from within. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.’ The guests said ‘Amen’.
I looked at Harvey, but he was staring at his feet which twitched for another little dance. I eased my way through the crowds that were watching Midwinter climb down from the platform. Mercy Newbegin pushed past me.
‘How does Harvey know what I said to General Midwinter?’ she asked me as she passed.
I shrugged. How the hell did he know what I’d said to Colonel Stok?