TWENTY-SEVEN

VENICE

MESSAGES CAME IN BY FAX AND MODEM, A FLURRY OF THEM FROM different parts of the world. One originated in Berlin; Barron had already seen the TV pictures. A second relayed news from the Czech Republic. A bomb had exploded in Prague Castle, killing President Svobodin and four of his ministers. Barron had been in the castle in the days of the old regime, before Svobodin’s reformers had come to power. He’d been given the whole tour, the picture gallery, the cathedral of St Vitus, the tomb of Wenceslas, the Bohemian Crown Jewels.

There were messages from Belfast, from Somalia, one from Kuwait, where military representatives of the royal family, struggling with the unexpected depletion of currency reserves, were seeking to renegotiate terms. Another came from Mindanao: insurgents were busily accumulating arms in the interminable fight against the government in Manila.

The last message had been sent from Lyon. It simply said: The Weed has been removed. He was more relieved to read this than he might have expected. He’d known, of course, that Streik would be eliminated sooner or later, but something of the General’s anxieties had clearly entered his system. He rose from his desk, studied the wall maps. The world, he thought, was burning like so much kindling.

He was about to leave the room when the telephone rang. This was his private line, a number known only to a very few. He picked up the receiver, spoke his name. The voice at the other end of the line echoed. Each word was repeated in a whispered way, creating a bizarre husky effect.

‘I’ve heard something that disturbs me greatly, Tobias. Frank Pagan is looking for Carlotta. You didn’t say a goddam thing about Carlotta being involved. You didn’t tell me how the business was going to be handled. I don’t understand what’s going on.’

Barron didn’t speak for a time. He had a small jarring sensation. He twisted the phone cord in his fingers. ‘How the hell did Pagan get that information?’ he asked.

‘I have no idea.’

‘Can you find out?’

‘I think I can cope with Pagan. But I’m not happy with the way this whole goddam thing has been done. You never said anything about Carlotta—’

‘Things happen.’ It was an inadequate response but the only one that came to mind. Barron put the receiver down. He left the room, locked the door, walked into the kitchen. Carlotta stood against the refrigerator, drinking a glass of the dark blood-orange juice she favoured.

Barron looked at her. He had an uneasy sense of a fuse burning in his head, a spark attached to a cylinder of gelignite, a dangerous smouldering. He sat down at the long kitchen table. He clasped his hands in front of himself. He sought some inner calm, but it wouldn’t come. He heard again the message on the phone, which seemed to repeat itself in his head.

Carlotta said, ‘Something troubling you, Barron?’

Barron stood up. How to approach this, how to raise the subject: he wasn’t sure. He was walking on broken glass. It was best to come straight out with it, and if she flew into a defensive rage he’d have to cope. He walked toward her. He placed his hands on either side of her face and looked into her eyes.

‘Tell me, Carlotta. What did you do in London?’

‘Is this weird question time or something? You know what I did. You sent me, after all.’

There was a thickness at the back of his throat. ‘What did you do in London, Carlotta?’

‘You’ve got on your serious expression, Barron. The heavy one I don’t like.’ She broke away from him, walked to the kitchen window, pulled the blind back. A gondolier with the small crabbed face of a gargoyle smoked a cigarette on the quay.

‘I just had a phone call, Carlotta. From London.’

‘How nice,’ she said.

‘No. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t even close to nice. Will I tell you what I just heard? They have your name, Carlotta.’

‘Who has my name?’

‘The cops. How did that happen? How do you suppose that happened?’ He tracked her round the kitchen table.

‘How would I know?’ she asked.

‘They’re looking for you.’ He caught her wrists.

‘Don’t touch me, Barron.’

‘Somehow you’ve fucked up,’ he said, releasing her.

She looked challengingly at him. ‘Fucked up?’

‘You must have been careless. You left something behind, didn’t you? Something, some kind of clue, a hint, Christ knows what.’

‘Don’t shout at me,’ and she covered her ears. ‘I didn’t leave anything behind in London. I did the job. In and out. Nobody saw me. You know what this is? It’s rumour, gossip, nothing.’

‘They just plucked your name from a hat? Is that what you’re telling me?’ He faced her, irritated with himself for losing control, but on a deeper level angry that he’d set her loose in London in the first place without knowing her plans. But she’d told him emphatically that if he wanted her to do the job then he’d have to entrust it to her, the method, the details, everything – and he’d gone along with that, turning a blind eye.

‘I don’t know how you come by your information, Toby,’ she said. She edged toward him, dragging one foot behind her, play-acting. He knew this performance: this was the scolded child routine, the plunge into sulking, a funk she affected when things were getting away from her.

‘The source is impeccable,’ Barron said.

He watched her as she turned her feet inward, toes touching in a childlike way, hands clasped behind her back. Even the fact that she was wearing one of his white linen shirts, which was too long for her, contributed to an effect of smallness. But he wasn’t buying into this performance. He said, ‘They’re looking for you. Understand what I’m saying?’

‘They’re not going to find me, Toby. They don’t know where I am.’ She was changing in front of his eyes. The chastised little girl had gone, replaced by someone cold and hard and contentious. She was defiant, shoving aside the world, forging her own reality.

‘Your security must be screwed up,’ she said. ‘You can’t blame me for your failings, Barron. Somewhere along the line you’ve got a leak.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No? What makes you imagine your set-up is perfect? Somebody spoke. Somebody said something in the wrong place. I won’t be blamed for that.’

Barron considered this. But it was impossible. Nobody had known of Carlotta’s involvement. Not Kinsella, not Rhodes, not the General. And Willie Caan – Caan certainly hadn’t been told in advance. Only Schialli had met the woman, but Schialli – even if he recognized her – would never have spoken. Nobody knew. Nobody had been told about Carlotta. You didn’t just bandy about your association with somebody like her. You didn’t want to hear the arguments against her – she was unstable, wayward, her mental state ballistic. You didn’t want to listen to criticism of her.

‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my security,’ he said quietly.

‘God. You sound so fucking sure of yourself, Barron. You think you’ve got the perfect cover, don’t you? You hide behind famous friends. You conceal yourself behind good deeds. You like to see your name in the gossip columns. But it doesn’t work that way. Somewhere along the way your worlds overlap. And you’re caught. You’re exposed.’

He was going to counter with something abrasive. He was about to say that she had no right to talk when it came to disguises and concealments and the alteration of identities – but he checked himself. He rarely won arguments with her in any event.

He went toward her, took her hands, held them against his chest. When he spoke he did so very quietly. ‘Carlotta. A lot of planning has gone into all this. All over Europe, in the United States, a great deal of money and time and thought has gone into this whole business. Understand me? Now the British police have your name.’

She gazed at him wide-eyed. ‘I already told you. They don’t know what I look like. They don’t know I’m in Italy. I disappeared in France. I covered myself.’

He shook his head. There was no way of getting his message across to her. There was no way of explaining the clockwork of a police inquiry, cogs turning, the availability of a large network of information. She just didn’t want to listen. She was plugged into the moon.

‘This cop Pagan,’ he said. ‘He has your name. That in itself doesn’t worry me. It’s all the rest of it that does. Sooner or later, probably sooner, wires will be buzzing across Europe, requests will go to Interpol, bulletins will be issued. It doesn’t stop there, Carlotta. The FBI will be alerted, and God knows who else. Do you see?’

He gazed at her. It was futile to berate her. Instead, he had a sudden urge to protect her, as if she were some tiny vulnerable creature he’d found in a hedgerow. He wondered at the mysteries of the heart, the excesses and the surprises.

‘Something must have happened in London,’ he said very quietly. ‘Think. Try to think. Talk to me.’

She closed her eyes. She spoke in a strange monotone. ‘I watched him for a week in the beginning,’ she said.

‘He didn’t notice you?’

‘Nobody notices me unless I want them to, Barron.’ She opened her eyes, looked at him with contempt. ‘He had a habit of varying his routine. The variations were strictly limited. Harcourt wasn’t the most imaginative human being I’ve ever had to deal with. He usually left the Embassy between five and six o’clock. Sometimes he went home by Tube. Sometimes he drove. Sometimes he caught a taxi. Once, he took a bus.’

She paused. She sipped her orange juice. Barron watched her face, the odd lack of expression.

‘He spent his evenings in the company of women usually. One night he went to a house in St John’s Wood with a woman. I was parked outside, waiting. A man is sometimes vulnerable and not too attentive when he’s just made love, Barron, as you’re probably aware. His thoughts are elsewhere, he’s just been laid and he’s feeling exuberant, maybe he’s even feeling omnipotent. When he left the house, he walked to his car. I watched him come out of the house. When he was about twenty feet from his car, I took my gun from the glove-compartment and I approached him. At the last moment he turned his face, saw me coming under a street-lamp, he smiled at me – I was a mere woman, how could I possibly be a danger to him? I shot him twice in the heart. When he fell, I shot him a third time in the skull. I walked back to my car and drove away.’

‘And that was it?’

‘The whole story, Barron.’

‘And nobody saw you.’

‘Give me some goddam credit,’ she said.

‘Are you absolutely sure Harcourt was dead?’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said.

Barron strolled the room, thinking that something in the woman’s story didn’t add up for him, an element was missing, out of place. He stopped moving, turned, faced her. It came to him suddenly: why hadn’t he heard the news of Bryce Harcourt’s murder from one or other sources of his information? Why hadn’t there been a message, a report, even an item in a newspaper? Why hadn’t Harcourt’s name been mentioned in anything that came across the wires? It was a mystifying blank, which could only be explained if the woman’s story were a lie – but why would she lie? Why would she fabricate a tale of murder?

Before he could say anything, he heard a sound from beyond the kitchen door. He raised a finger to his lips for silence, moved to the door, pulled it open.

The General stood there, dapper in his vicuña coat, his face red from the afternoon air.

‘Your manservant let me in,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry if I’m intruding.’ He looked at Carlotta and inclined his head very slightly in a gesture of greeting. But his expression was a cold one and the light in his eye hard as iron.

There was a moment of sheer awkwardness, fragility. Barron didn’t move; he smiled in a flustered way. He wondered how long the General had been on the other side of the door, how much he’d heard.

‘Have I come at a bad time?’ the General asked.

‘Of course not, Erich.’ Barron stirred into action, stepped out of the kitchen, put a hand on the General’s elbow and steered him across the sitting-room. He hoped Carlotta would stay behind in the kitchen, but she had other ideas; in a contrary way she followed him, tracking him as he escorted the General to the sofa.

‘No introductions, Tobias?’ she asked.

‘Introductions, of course, sure.’ Barron nodded at the old man. ‘Carla. Meet General Schwarzenbach.’

‘Carla?’ the General asked.

‘Sometimes,’ Carlotta said.

The General looked puzzled. ‘Only sometimes?’

‘What she means,’ Barron began to say.

‘What I mean is that I change my name when it suits me,’ she said and sat alongside the General, touched the back of his hand flirtatiously. Barron was tense, coiled.

‘A chameleon of sorts,’ the General said.

‘You got it at the first try.’

‘How convenient to change one’s name when one has the urge. But many people use different names for a variety of reasons, I’m sure. If they wish to disappear, if they have good reason to run from the law.’ The General looked at Barron. ‘Wouldn’t you say so, Barron?’

Barron nodded. He needed to step in here, to stop the process of decay; he was convinced the old man had been lingering outside the door for many minutes. He must have heard it all, the argument, the mention of the London police, the talk about a leak in security. He wasn’t a stupid man. If he’d been listening all along, he would have heard the name Carlotta. And, given the old man’s attentiveness, he’d make assumptions, draw conclusions.

‘A drink, General?’ Barron asked.

‘I think not.’

‘You don’t imbibe?’ Carlotta asked.

‘I have my moments. This is not one of them.’ The General focused on her, narrowing his eyes. He smiled insincerely. ‘You know, you seem familiar to me. Have we perhaps met someplace before now?’

‘Maybe. I meet a lot of people,’ Carlotta said. ‘But I’d remember you, General.’ She nudged the old man with her elbow. ‘If you’re a General, where’s your army?’

‘Gone, alas.’

‘AWOL?’

‘AWOL. I don’t understand.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said.

‘No. Tell me. I am anxious to improve my English.’

Carlotta got up from the sofa, stared at Barron, then drifted to the window. ‘Absent without leave, General.’

‘Ah.’ The General appeared to absorb this term before he looked at Barron. ‘We must talk, Barron. We must talk privately.’

Carlotta turned from the window. ‘Why? Tobias wouldn’t send me out of the room. Would you, Tobias? You wouldn’t eject your poor little Carla, would you?’

She was playing a game, enjoying herself. She came close to Barron, placed a hand on his thigh. ‘Don’t send me away,’ she said. ‘You aren’t some kind of male chauvinist beast, are you, Tobias? You don’t subscribe to the notion that the place of women is in the kitchen, do you?’ She kissed his cheek with an exaggerated smacking sound.

Barron said nothing. He heard an alarm in his head. What had caused some vague sense of familiarity in the General? Was it possible that somewhere in the past Carlotta’s path had crossed his?

The General was rising from the sofa. ‘Is there a place we can talk alone?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

Carlotta stepped in front of the General. She seemed flushed, excited. Barron knew this mood of animated mischief; it was a kind of high for her. When she was determined to provoke reactions, when she was flying wilfully into a scenario of her own design, he had no way of dealing with her. The General appeared bewildered and irritated.

‘Boys will be boys,’ Carlotta said. ‘I’ll make myself scarce. What do you want me to do, Tobias? Rustle up some chicken soup? Make tea? Do tell.’

‘Carla,’ he said.

‘I do a wonderful gateau, General. You should taste it. Want me to whip one up, Tobias?’

‘Carla, please.’ She was heading toward the outrageous and he wasn’t sure how to stop her.

‘Please? I take it that’s an acceptance? Let me go find my apron. I can’t bake a cake dressed in one of your good shirts, Tobias. Can I? Not one of your best linen numbers. I’m so messy in the kitchen, General.’ Her voice was high, her sentences quick.

Barron looked at the General, who was shaking his head.

‘This is not a good time for us, Barron.’

‘Whaddya mean, General? It’s a great time.’ Carlotta danced in front of him, poked him in the chest. ‘You were listening at the door, weren’t you? You naughty old General. Tsk-tsk. Bad boy.’

‘I’m sure the General is too good-mannered to listen in on other people’s conversations, Carla.’ Why didn’t she leave? Why did she continue to play-act?

‘Yeah? You too good mannered, General? He doesn’t look it to me, Tobias. I think he’s an old rascal.’ She prodded him again, laughed in a theatrical way. The General stood very still, glaring at Barron, holding him responsible for this woman’s unacceptable behaviour. But there was more in the General’s expression, a certain guarded slyness Barron didn’t like.

‘I’ll make coffee,’ Carlotta said. ‘Don’t you run away, General, you hear?’ She was drawling her words in a Southern fashion now. She walked into the kitchen, closing the door behind her.

Barron stood against the spinet. ‘She’s an old friend,’ he said, thinking up lame excuses. ‘She’s been through some bad times recently. Divorce, you understand. She’s visiting me from America, a short vacation, a couple of days. I apologize for her behaviour.’ He wanted to steer the subject away from Carlotta. ‘I have news of Streik.’

The General said, ‘Streik. Yes. It was Streik I came to ask about—’

‘We found him. It’s taken care of. You have nothing to worry about now.’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ the General remarked.

‘Streik’s out of the way. He’s gone. He needn’t concern us.’

The General made a gesture of finality, as if Streik were consigned to history, an unimportant matter. ‘The world is too small these days. People come and go. They meet, they part, they live their separate lives.’

Barron wondered what the old boy was talking about.

‘And sometimes we forget the people we’ve met. The places we’ve seen. I had a position of great authority at one time in life—’

‘I know, I know—’

‘Let me finish. My work involved a great number of acquaintances, assistants, associates, informers. Their names were kept on record, their photographs filed. I sat on top of a vast mountain of information. Another man might have found it too much to digest. But I was blessed, you see, with an astonishing memory. And it served me well. It served me very well.’ The General nodded in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Your strange friend, Barron. Divorced, you say. Just arrived from America to forget her marital distress, is that it?’

‘Yes.’

The General smiled and tapped the side of his skull in a knowing way. ‘I think not.’

‘I don’t follow you, General.’

‘Barron, Barron. Do you take me for a fool?’

‘Never,’ said Barron.

The General took a step toward Barron. He was still tapping his head. ‘In here, Barron. All locked away in here. All very easy to open, if you have a key.’

The kitchen door opened. Carlotta came out carrying a tray. Barron sensed immediately a change in her mood, a lowering of the temperature in the room.

‘Instant coffee,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t find the tea.’

She laid the tray on a coffee table, smiled at the General. This is wrong, Barron thought. On two small counts. Two small domestic counts.

There is no instant coffee in the kitchen. And she knows where the tea is kept.

She knows this place, this apartment.

It is going wrong.

‘I brought biscuits. You like biscuits, General?’ she asked. ‘Chocolate chip cookies. Tobias has a weakness for them, don’t you, Tobias?’

The General stared at the tray. Carlotta moved quietly behind him. Barron’s point of view was obscured by the old man’s bulk for a moment. He didn’t see Carlotta move, he was conscious only of the way the General gasped suddenly for breath, how his expression changed from one of keen attention to pained astonishment, how he swung around, turning toward Carlotta, a hand raised in the air, the gesture of a man clutching for support where no support is to be found.

‘Dear God,’ the General said. ‘Dear God.’

He went down on his knees, gripped the edge of the coffee table, toppled the tray, biscuits fell around him, little brown discs in disarray. He tilted his head toward Barron, his eyes large with horrified surprise. Barron watched the knife go in a second time, then a third, heard flesh tear, saw the General slump to his hands and knees and try to crawl out of Carlotta’s range, saw blood spurt and drip across the carpet.

The General slithered toward him as Carlotta struck again and again. Blood covered the General’s face, ran over his scarf, spilled from the side of his face. He crawled as far as the place where Barron stood and he clutched the cuffs of Barron’s trousers, smearing them. Carlotta brought the knife down directly into the back of the General’s neck and the old man moaned, dropped his hands from Barron, turned over on his side, said something inaudible in German, and then lay still. But he was breathing, if you could call it that, his chest heaving, mouth open, throat rattling thickly. Carlotta shoved the knife between the old man’s ribs and drew it downward in a ragged line, an autopsy performed by a psychotic.

She stood over the body. Her white shirt was streaked with the General’s blood; her legs were daubed with red. It was in her hair, her face, as if she’d been targeted by spray paint. Immobilized, Barron watched her go down on her knees alongside the General.

‘I met him once,’ she said. She might have been speaking to herself. ‘The only time I was ever in Berlin. He had a job he wanted me to do. It didn’t work out. It didn’t suit me. And I didn’t like those STASI types. I could never have worked with them. He knew me as soon as he saw me, Barron. What else could I do?’ She raised her face, looked at him. ‘You wouldn’t want me to be revealed, after all. You wouldn’t want to put your precious plans in jeopardy, would you?’

Barron stepped back, appalled, stricken by a sense of having stepped inside a viciously bad dream. None of this was real, none of this had happened. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the lurid sight of the dead man, the red-stained carpet, the blemishes in the General’s clothing. He was transfixed, paralysed, trapped in a vision of red, red everywhere. The whole room might have been leaking blood. It was changed in his perception now, altered by murder, the echo of violence.

‘Forgive me. I forgot,’ she said. ‘You have no taste for this kind of thing.’

He couldn’t speak. He closed his eyes. He had an after-image of blood. He saw it all over again, the General crawling across the carpet, Carlotta following him, the knife rising and falling, the cutting sound of steel on flesh, the ripping of cloth. He couldn’t breathe. He had a barbed feeling around his heart. The air in the room seemed to reek of blood. The stench of the abattoir, the stuff of death.

Carlotta stood up. She let the knife fall from her fingers. It dropped against the side of the General’s face where it reflected red light drably. Barron opened his eyes, turned his face away.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What was I supposed to do? Let him walk? He couldn’t be trusted, Barron. Maybe he wouldn’t blow the whistle immediately. He’d wait until Helix was accomplished. I know only one thing – one day he’d talk, he’d say I was associated with you, he’d know about my role in this. Don’t you see? He would have had a lock on us for as long as he lived. I did this for you as much as for me.’

Was she trying to say that this act of murder was a means of protecting him? He couldn’t accept this. With trembling fingers he poured himself a large shot of cognac, which he tossed back rapidly; the fierce heat of the brandy made him feel sick and unsteady. His arms and legs tingled. He set his empty glass down, ran his hands across his face.

‘Queasy?’ she asked. ‘Are we upset, Tobias?’

He looked inside his glass, seeing tiny amber slicks adhere to the sides. They trapped light, inverted it; the world was upside-down. He glanced at the knife that lay propped against the General’s cheek. Then he looked at Carlotta, whose face was expressionless. She came across the floor and pressed her bloodstained body against him, her arms circling him, her damp red hands touching his skin.

‘Now you know,’ she said.

What did he know? he wondered.

‘It’s no abstraction, Barron. It isn’t fax messages and phone calls from distant places. It isn’t men droning around a table and weapons being fired in faraway countries. It’s here and now. It’s reality. And you don’t like it, do you? Just what the hell did you think, Barron? Did you just imagine you were immune, you had some kind of protection, you could pass on instructions and sleep easy and make-believe you didn’t have any direct responsibility? Sweet Christ.’

I did this for you as much as for me. Carlotta’s words rang in his head, and he wondered in horror if the act of murder were an expression of love, the only vocabulary of emotion she knew.

‘Look at him, Barron. Look at him.’ Her tone was strident.

Barron had a bizarre feeling of dislocation, as if his skull were not attached to his body, as if his body were elsewhere, a disconnected conglomeration of reflexes, none of which constituted a human being.

She pressed her hands on either side of his face and turned his head so that he couldn’t avoid looking at the body of the General who, in death, appeared to have deflated, cast off a dimension.

‘Welcome to the world,’ Carlotta said. ‘I think you’re ready now to hear the real truth about the death of Bryce Harcourt.’