EPILOGUE

IT RAINED FOR DAYS, AN ENDLESS DRUMMING THAT MADE DRAINPIPES roar and gutters flood. Even so, Pagan sensed that it was the last outrage of winter, a dying squall; in the air was a hint of spring, a freshness on the night wind. After his meeting with Androtti, the details of which aroused the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency, MI6, Special Branch, and investigators representing the security interests of various foreign governments, he’d left Venice and skipped from place to place, from city to city, staying one step ahead of those who chased him with questions.

Pagan took the view that anything they wanted could be found inside Barron’s computer system, or in Streik’s papers, which he’d left with Androtti, and that he was entitled to his privacy; besides, he had no great fondness for seeing his name in print, nor did he enjoy the prospect of interrogations, the wholesale intrusion and ransacking of his life – which had suddenly become public property. Gurenko wanted to see him. The Italian Government had undying gratitude to express because he’d saved priceless works of art in the Scuola, to say nothing of the reputation of the country’s security forces. He was in the papers constantly, and longed for anonymity.

He followed the news, the unfolding story of Barron’s life and times, the scary designs of the man, the pyramid of terror he’d created. The Press, indulging its propensity to pop psychology, spoke of a man who represented the black and white aspects of the human soul – the former epitomized by the chaos he’d created and the weaponry he’d sold, the latter by his valuable acts of charity. Did he not represent the dichotomy in every man’s heart? one hack asked rather grandly.

Bullshit, Pagan thought. Barron hadn’t done any good deeds except in places where he could also do bad ones. The perfect balance. He knew the economics of what he was doing. He sold to anyone wanting to buy. Where business was poor, he had his friends pump in money to make sure it picked up again. It was deadly simple. It was predatory, and cunning.

From one rainy city to the next, slogging journeys by train, by bus, Pagan travelled in an aimless manner into obscure corners of Europe where he’d install himself in small hotels under assumed names, pretending he spoke no English. He was just a stranger who came and went. He stopped shaving. Some days he lay in bed and listened to the rain, and when it was time to move on he sneaked off under cover of darkness, even though he knew his anonymity was not everlasting. Sooner or later he’d have to surface. But only when he was ready.

In Saint-Etienne he read that William J. Caan had been taken into custody, although no reason was given. In Clermont-Ferrand he read that a number of agents of the US Defense Intelligence Agency had been suspended from duty, a small item on an inside page. By the time he reached Limoges, scandals were dominating the headlines of the world’s Press – prominent businessmen arrested in America and the UK, law-enforcement officers jailed in Germany, politicians under house-arrest in Russia; Fidel Castro had denounced the ease with which American weapons found their way into the hands of Cuban guerrillas, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family had committed suicide – the old poisoned chalice routine, Pagan noticed. A couple of four-star generals had taken early retirement from the Pentagon – for ‘budgetary reasons’ it was reported. And in London a man called Montgomery Rhodes, described as ‘an American security expert’, had been found in a sleazy bed-and-breakfast joint near Euston, wrists slashed, an incomprehensible suicide note discreetly placed under an HP sauce bottle.

It was never made plain that these events were linked to Tobias Barron directly, but his name occurred in several of the reports, usually in a vague aside or the kind of innuendo that fooled nobody. Sometimes Carlotta’s name appeared; she’d been seen in Mexico City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and once by a mushroom-eating commune leader in Montana. And some hayseed loony, driven to madness by the tedious flatlands of Kansas, had spotted her being beamed up by a UFO. A wisp, an enigma, her profiles in the Press were invariably melodramatic; she was linked with whacko satanic cults, volatile charismatic movements, and every conspiracy going. Old lovers emerged from the dry rot of her past to sell revelatory first-person accounts of their sexual experiences with her. One was an impecunious marquis, another a fashion designer, another a former runway model from Pakistan. By general consent, Carlotta was found to be more than a little weird in bed.

Pagan kept moving. He had come to favour the bus as the best means, because the trips were longer. You could draw a rug over your lap, and ride through hours of lonely darkness surrounded by sleeping passengers.

From Rouen, Pagan placed a phone call to Foxworth at his home number in London.

‘Where the devil are you, Frank?’ Foxie asked.

‘Somewhere in France.’

‘And that’s all you’re saying?’

‘That’s all.’

‘Everybody and his uncle is looking for you.’

‘Let them look. Are you recovered?’

‘Sick leave. I’m reading Anselm. Then it’s on to Thomas Merton. I’m considering a career in mysticism. Are you coming back to London?’

‘Soon,’ Pagan answered.

‘Nimmo’s going around like he’s about to get a bloody knighthood or something, Frank. His halo is gleaming. It dazzles all who come in sight of it. He’s the man whose stroke of genius brought Frank Pagan back into the fold, after all. And just look how well it turned out. God’s truth. Sir George Nimmo. He was on the telly the other day saying more or less that he knew your present whereabouts but he understood your need for privacy.’

‘Good luck to him,’ Pagan said. Nimmo: the name was a small dull echo in his head.

‘I’ve had reporters phoning me to ask about you, Frank. What was he like to work with? What kind of man is he? What can you tell us? Any little thing of human interest. You’re famous.’

‘Fame lasts about ten minutes,’ Pagan remarked.

‘Of course, I tell them rotten things, your dictatorial attitude, your despotic ways, your notorious rudeness.’ Foxie laughed quietly. ‘You’re missing some of the fun, though. The CIA has practically seized the US Embassy, causing all manner of uproar. Nobody can get near the place. Apparently they’ve uncovered documentation that is utterly damning to Caan. The President has ordered the House of Representatives to conduct an extensive inquiry, the Home Secretary has lodged a complaint about abuse of diplomatic privilege and the way Caan used the Embassy as his personal conduit for cash, and the whole thing’s a bloody circus. I lie awake at nights and I can hear the whisper of the axe, I swear it.’

Pagan moved on again. Sometimes, in a remote way, he contemplated the future, but that was an unreadable map. When he reached Paris he booked into an hotel on the Rue Mazarine; from his window he could see the corner of the Boulevard St Germain. He thought about Katherine Cairney. He’d promised her Paris: a lifetime ago. Now and then she entered his thoughts, and sometimes he found himself brooding over her, wondering where she might be and if she was thinking about him in much the same way – but he disliked the romantic impulse behind these indulgences. She was gone. History. A memory. Nothing could come of all that now.

Even so, when he left his hotel on the Rue Mazarine and strolled along St Germain to St Michel, he could feel a shadow of her. He wandered down in the direction of the Seine, crossed over into the narrow streets of the Ile de la Cité, and there he was particularly struck by her absence.

He went inside a small café and drank coffee and thought it ironic, if you were in the mood for such interpretations, that he was back where he’d been before she entered his life: on his own. Whether it was Paris in the rain, a riverbank in Cork, a street in Dublin, or watching a full moon rise over Alba – he was alone, and loneliness was an abscess.

He wondered if this was his destiny, to go through life unattached. He finished his coffee and set the cup down and stared through the rainy window at the street. He found himself entertaining the idea that the girl, like a heroine in a romance, would materialize in the rain and come running towards him over glistening cobbles, losing a shoe and laughing about it and not giving a damn—

Nothing in life happened that way.

He played with the edge of his cup, opened a pack of cigarettes, tore off the cellophane. He struck a match, watched it go out, dropped it in the ashtray. Absorbed in his thoughts, he didn’t notice the woman passing outside, a slender figure dressed in a man’s black pin-stripe suit, hat drawn down over her forehead, her hands hidden in black silk gloves.

She glanced at him through the window, and then moved on through the rain. By the time Pagan left the café, the street was empty.