THIRTY-THREE

VENICE

THE MORNING WEATHER IN VENICE WAS UNEXPECTEDLY SUNNY, ALMOST springlike, if you chose to ignore the fact that the temperature was only four degrees above zero. The rain had gone, the sky was clear. The pastel shades of the city had been refreshed overnight. Shadows formed in the squares. At least for the moment the dead city of winter had passed; hardy tourists hired gondolas, crowds strolled on the Rialto or gathered in the Piazza di San Marco, where they stood around in awe, and when awe subsided they fed the pigeons with breadcrumbs purchased at extortionate prices from vendors.

Barron stepped out on to the balcony of his apartment. Leaning against the handrail, he looked down into the canal below. He wondered where the currents had taken the General’s body. Out to sea, Carlotta had said. Out to sea and long gone. But Barron was beset by the strange notion that the corpse would eventually somehow drift just under his window, that he’d look down and see the General’s sea-bleached face staring up at him. All night long he’d imagined the body rolling with tides, water billowing in the General’s clothing.

He went back indoors. Carlotta was coming down the staircase from the bedroom. She wore a navy-blue business suit, the skirt knee-length, dark shoes brightly polished. She had very little make-up on her face. She’d tinted her hair and now it was black and severely parted.

‘How do I look?’ she asked.

‘Businesslike,’ Barron answered.

‘Perfect.’ She came to the bottom of the staircase. ‘You had a restless night. You didn’t sleep well.’

‘I drifted in and out.’

‘Nervous?’

Nervous didn’t quite describe it, Barron thought. He watched Carlotta cross the floor toward him. It was strange how she adapted the movements of her body to the kinds of clothing she wore. In loose-fitting garments, she seemed angelically at ease, flowing. In tight skirts she walked provocatively, her hips thrust forward at an aggressive angle. In her present attire she appeared to have developed a rapid walk with shorter steps than usual: you almost expected her to advise you on investment matters. Angel, slut, businesswoman, mass murderer: there were no limits to Carlotta, and because there were no limits there was no core of personality, nothing you could ever pin down and say: Here, this is the real Carlotta. This is who she really is.

‘Well, Barron,’ she said. She tapped a cigarette on the surface of a silver cigarette case. ‘This is the day. And the sun is shining. How appropriate.’ She looked from the window, lit her cigarette. She stuck the case back inside the small bag she carried, which matched her suit. She turned, faced him, smiled. There wasn’t a trace of uneasiness about her. She was calm, deliberate. This is Carlotta in her element, he thought. This is how she comes to life – by being somebody else, in this case a Russian security operative named Alyssia Baranova.

She stepped towards him, put her arms round his shoulders, blew smoke directly past his face. Every gesture, every move – total confidence.

‘Well? Nothing to say?’ she asked.

‘You know what you have to do,’ he answered. ‘There’s nothing you’ve forgotten?’

‘We’ve gone over everything.’ She laid the palm of a hand tenderly against the side of his face. ‘It’s going to be very simple, Barron. There’s nothing in the world to worry about. Anyhow, frowning ages you. And you don’t want to look your age, do you?’

He smelled scent on her fingertips.

‘Think of it as just another day,’ she said. She pinched his cheek lightly between thumb and forefinger. The gesture, seemingly so innocuous, made him feel like a patronized child. His relationship with this woman had more complex passageways than an anthill. You went one way, found yourself in a chamber you’d never seen before. You went another, came to a dead end, backtracked, passed through rooms only vaguely familiar to you, and yet all the while you could detect the spoor of the woman, the scent that compelled you to keep searching for her. But you never found her because she wasn’t there.

‘Just another day,’ he said.

‘Exactly.’ She moved away from him. Looked at her watch. Took from her bag a compact, flipped it open, regarded her face a moment in the mirror. Suddenly stern, eyebrows drawn together, she surveyed Barron over the rim of the mirror. ‘Alyssia Baranova. I was probably raised in Smolensk. My father was, let’s say, an engineer. A Stalinist. Definitely a Stalinist. Loyal Party member who couldn’t stomach the new regime. My mother taught in a nursery school. She was more liberal than my father. When I was ten, she sent me to ballet classes, but I didn’t have the talent for that. What then? Well, I went to university, studied languages, became fluent in French and German. And then I was recruited by Intelligence. The bare bones of a life.’

She smiled, seemingly pleased with her invented history. She might never have been Carlotta. She put the compact back inside the bag, then she removed a small black cylindrical object. Barron remembered the cheerfully innocuous paper in which the General had wrapped the thing. But he didn’t want to think about the General now.

‘Simple little device,’ she said. ‘Amazing. So much destruction from such a tiny source.’ She replaced the object, closed the bag. ‘And when I’m no longer Alyssia Baranova? What happens next?’

‘We go away on an extended vacation. Tonight.’

‘We leave all this,’ and she gestured round the room.

‘For a time,’ Barron replied.

‘And then. Do we live happily ever after, Barron?’

‘We try.’

Barron watched her go toward the door. He had an urge to detain her, to keep her from going out of the apartment, as if some part of him, a relic of conscience, wanted to bring everything to a dead stop. But he didn’t speak. It was too late to change anything now. He’d played his part. He had nothing more to do with events.

‘Later,’ she said. And she went out, leaving her casual word of departure hanging in the air. Later. He walked up and down the room, stopped at the mantelpiece, remembered all the photographs he’d broken. Earlier, he’d watched Schialli silently sweep away shattered glass, and he’d felt nothing, no regret, no touch of sadness. He had a sense of having outlived the usefulness of his souvenirs.

He went back on the balcony, back out into the sun whose cold harshness burned upon the decaying buildings of the city. He felt a peculiar menace in the brightness.

He looked at his watch. He thought of the girl calling from Lyon to say that the business with Pagan was finished with, and he wondered why she wanted to see him. She was always a delight, of course, she always had been – and he permitted himself a moment of nostalgia, remembering her father Harry Cairney, the business he and the old man had done together, Harry raising money for his beloved Ireland, Barron supplying weapons. Life had seemed altogether simpler in those days. And then he thought of the son, Patrick, but that memory was thin.

He looked down into the waters of the canal and pondered Rhodes and Kinsella in their hotel suites, anxiously awaiting news of Helix.