ON THE TRAIN back to Munich Mundy has offered up prayers of thanks to Zara’s beloved youngest sister, whose wedding will take place in her home village one week from today. He has also noted that tomorrow is Zara’s day off and, because it’s a Thursday, Mustafa will be home at lunchtime.
The charter flight leaves two days from now at crack of dawn. Arriving at Munich’s main station Mundy seeks out a luggage shop and buys a new suitcase—green, Zara’s favorite color—and, from a department store close by, a long gray dress and matching headscarf that according to her cousin Dina, mother to Kamal, she has long coveted. Since living with Mundy, Zara has taken to locking herself up from head to toe as a sign that she has returned to her tradition; but also she is demonstrating her pride that Mundy alone has the key to her. For Mustafa, also on Dina’s advice, he buys a flash blue jacket and white trousers like Kamal’s: the boys are the same size. Dina, he has established, will also take charge of the dog Mo for the duration.
He next calls on Zara’s kebab café. At eleven in the morning business is quiet. The manager, a tubby man in a skullcap, is at first disconcerted by the sight of Mundy bearing down on him with a green suitcase. Has Zara some complaint about her treatment? he inquires anxiously, from behind the safety of the counter. No, Mundy says, she has none. Now that you’ve learned to keep your hands off her, she’s happy in her work, he might have added, but he doesn’t. The manager insists Mundy accept a coffee on the house, and how about a slice of chocolate cake? Mundy accepts the coffee, declines the cake and proposes a deal: a month’s unpaid leave for Zara with immediate effect, and Mundy will subsidize a temporary replacement to the tune of five hundred euros. They settle for seven hundred.
From a public phone box he calls Zara’s Turkish doctor. I’m a bit worried about Mustafa, he says. Adolescence seems to be weighing him down. He’s doing all right in class, no truancy, but he’s gone solitary, he’s sleeping ten hours a day and looking very gray. “It is the dusk of puberty,” says the doctor knowingly. So what Mundy is wondering, doctor, is this. If I can rustle up the money to send Mustafa and his mother back to Turkey for a big family beanfeast, could you see your way to providing a medical certificate that will satisfy the school authorities?
The good doctor believes he can reconcile this with his conscience.
Mundy calls the Linderhof and makes yet another excuse for not coming in, but it is not well received. He feels badly, but knows no remedy. Returning home, he lets Zara sleep until Mustafa comes back from school, then leads her by the hand to the tiny living room, where he has set the stage. The softness of her palms always amazes him. He has placed her youngest sister’s photograph prominently on the sideboard, and the green suitcase on the floor below it with the new dress and scarf draped over one corner. Mustafa wears his new blue jacket. Zara’s front teeth are repaired but in her apprehension she runs her tongue across them to make sure they are there.
He has laid the tickets side by side on the table together with the written release in Turkish from the manager of the café. She sits down straight as a schoolgirl on the center chair, arms to her sides. She stares at the tickets, then at Mundy. She reads the letter from her Turkish employer, and without expression replaces it on the table. She takes up the nearer ticket, her own. She studies it with severity and only brightens when she discovers that she may return in three weeks. She seizes Mundy roughly by the waist and presses her forehead against his hip.
Mundy has one more card to play. It’s the air ticket for himself. It takes him to Turkey for the last week of their trip, and brings him back with them on the same plane. Zara’s happiness is complete. The same afternoon, they make ecstatic love and Zara weeps with shame that she ever doubted him. Mundy’s shame is of a different order, but eased by the knowledge that she and Mustafa will soon be out of harm’s way.
Driving Zara and Mustafa to Munich airport in the wee hours, he at first fears ground fog but by the time they arrive it’s lifting and there are few delays. Shuffling down the check-in line, Zara keeps her eyes down and clings so hard to Mundy that he imagines she is his daughter and he is sending her off to boarding school against her will. Mustafa holds her other arm and makes jokes to keep her spirits up.
At the counter there is business about the trolley-load of gifts that Zara has bought for her sisters, brothers and cousins out of her savings. A container is found. Some of the parcels must be repacked. The distraction is helpful. In his last sight of her, Zara is standing at the passenger departure doors as they close on her. She is bent double like Rani at the roadside, choking over her folded arms, and Mustafa is trying to console her.
Alone with his thoughts on the autobahn, heading north and isolated by a deluge of heavy rain, Mundy is brought back to time present by the trilling of his cellphone. That bloody man Rourke, he thinks, as he shoves it to his ear, and he is preparing to be short with him when to his astonishment he hears Amory, en clair, on an open line, chatting to him as if neither of them had a care in the universe.
“Edward, dear boy. Have I woken you from your slumbers?”
But he knows he hasn’t.
“Received your message, and of course I’d love to,” he is saying breezily, in the manner of an old friend passing through town. “How would today suit?”
Mundy considers asking Amory where he’s speaking from but sees no point since Amory wouldn’t tell him.
“Sounds great,” he says instead. “What sort of time d’you have in mind?”
“How about one-ish?”
“Fine. Where?”
“How about your place?”
“In Heidelberg?”
“The school. Why not?”
Because it’s bugged from ear to ear is why not. Because it’s been surveyed for a whole day by polite young men and women. Because Rourke believes it’s being prepared as a terrorist nest for Euro-anarchists who would like to split Germany from America.
“Our chum’s in Hamburg, isn’t he?” Amory continues, when Mundy still doesn’t answer.
“Yes. He is.” If he’s still our chum, thinks Mundy.
“Until late tonight, right?”
“So he says.”
“And today’s Saturday, right?”
“So I’m told.”
“So there are no workmen tearing the place apart.”
“No.” Or putting it back together.
“So what’s wrong with meeting at the school?”
“Nothing.”
“Family get off all right?”
“Like a breeze.”
“See you around lunchtime then. Can’t wait. Masses to talk about. Tschüss.”
A salvo of torrential rain sets his car shuddering. Long bursts of summer lightning fill the sky. The Beetle needs time out, and so does Mundy. Crouched head in hand at a roadside restaurant, he picks the hidden signals out of Amory’s message or—as Dimitri would have it—the flyshit out of the pepper. In his laborious dialogue with Amory’s electronic lady Mundy had suggested they meet at a remote service station ten miles out of Heidelberg. Instead they are to stage a jolly reunion at the scene of the crime, with Rourke listening to their every word.
So what has Amory told me so far—Amory who never says anything without a purpose?
That he is speaking for the record, over an open line, with nothing up his sleeve. But whose record is he speaking for?
That he is being kept informed of my movements, and Sasha’s, and my family’s. But who by?
That he has masses to report to me, but only within the hearing of the people he got it from. Amory like Dimitri is an artist of the unobserved life. But this time he’s telling me that he’s observed.
Mundy returns his thoughts to where they were before Amory interrupted them. Where is she now? Overflying Romania, headed for the Black Sea. Thank heaven for Mustafa. He longs for Jake but can’t reach him. He never could.
Mundy is back at his place in the bay window on the first floor of the schoolhouse, staring down the brick path the way he stared down it when he was keeping an eye out for Sasha and his consignment of core library books. He has parked his Beetle outside the front gates, the time is twelve-thirty of the same Saturday and, yes, Sasha is in Hamburg: amazingly for him, he has actually called Mundy to inquire whether he is still of stout heart, or would he after all prefer Sasha to find a replacement for him, because “Look here, Teddy, we are both completely adult, I would say.” And Mundy for his part has assured Sasha that he is one hundred percent committed to the great project, he believes in it. And perhaps in a way he does, since he has no option. To walk out on Sasha is to leave him to Dimitri and Rourke, whatever that means.
While he is waiting, Mundy has also done the stupid, anxious things that joes do when they’re waiting for their case officers to show up: shaved and showered and pushed his dirty clothes behind a curtain, and prepared a sitting area in one of the classrooms, and put a hand towel and a cake of new soap beside the handbasin, and made a thermos flask of coffee in case Amory no longer drinks Scotch the way he used to. He had actually to stop himself from going into the garden and picking wild flowers to put in a jam jar.
And he is still going through these ridiculous acts of overpreparation in his mind, while at the same time picturing the arrival of Zara and Mustafa at Ankara airport and the vast reception committee of her ecstatic relations, when he realizes that a tan-colored BMW with a Frankfurt registration has parked itself behind the Beetle, and that Nick Amory, younger by far than the years between that should have aged him, is emerging from the driver’s side, locking the car, opening the gate and setting course for the front door.
Mundy gets only one quick look at him before bounding down the stairs, but it’s enough to tell him that Nick’s nearly sixty years sit well on him, that the old shagginess has acquired an unmistakable air of authority, and that the habitual smile, if that’s what it ever was—though magically resurfacing the moment Mundy opens the door to him—was not on parade when he started up the path.
The other thing Mundy has noticed, and continues to notice as they square up to greet each other, is Amory’s cap, which is a flat cap, green tweed, sporting, and certainly of a better cut than the cap favored by the Major when he was roaring at Mundy from the touchline, or Des when he was carving the beef for Sunday lunch, or Sasha when he was wearing his Tarnkappe.
But a cap for all that.
And since Mundy has never seen Amory wear a cap or any other sort of headgear, let alone one that smacks so offensively of the rural English classes who are his professed aversion—largely, Mundy suspects, because they are where he springs from—it can’t fail to excite his attention, even if he’s too polite or too Edinburgh-trained to remark on it.
Stranger still, to anybody familiar with English manners, he doesn’t take it off when he steps inside the house. He pats Mundy’s shoulder. He does a cheerful “How are you, cobber?” Australian-style, and confirms in a quick question that nobody else is in the house or expected—“And if we’re disturbed, I’m your first pupil for September,” he adds, for cover. And then, like Sasha, he sweeps past Mundy and takes up a command position directly beneath the art nouveau skylight, a yard away from the island of packing cases and dust-sheets that, like a statue waiting to be unveiled, dominates the main hall.
But the cap stays put, even while Mundy gives Amory his desired tour of the property. And that’s not because Amory has forgotten he’s wearing it. To the contrary, he gives it a tweak now and then to make sure it’s still there, in much the way Sasha used to tweak his beret; or a shove from behind as if he hasn’t got the angle quite right; then a tug at the peak to keep the sun out of his eyes, except that there isn’t any: the rain may have stopped, but the sky is black as soot.
Their tour of the property is perfunctory. Perhaps Amory feels as uneasy about his presence here as Mundy does. And as always with Amory, though you forget it betweentimes, he says nothing without purpose.
“Has our chum still not given you any clear picture of what he got up to in the Middle East?” he demands, as he peers down at the pile of soft goods that was Sasha’s temporary bed.
“Not really. Traveling lecturer. The odd short-term contract where they needed a spare professor. Whatever came along, as far as I can see.”
“Not what we’d call a full life then, was it?”
“Plus a bit of aid work. Aid work was hard to come by because of his legs. Basically he was—well, just some kind of wandering academic bum, from the little he’s told me.”
“A wandering radical academic bum,” Amory corrects him. “With radical and not so academic chums, perhaps.”
And Mundy, instead of attempting to moderate this, says he supposes so, because by now it’s becoming clear to him that Amory, for whatever reasons, is playing to the gallery, and that Mundy’s job is to support him and not try to take over the scene. It’s the same role he used to play for Sasha when they were performing for the dread Lothar or the Professor, he thinks. Not every line has to be a masterpiece, he used to tell himself: just play it straight and the audience will come to you. He’s telling it to himself now.
“And this will be the library,” Amory comments, examining the long room with its builders’ ladders and buckets.
“It will.”
“The shrine to objective truth.”
“Yes.”
“Do you seriously believe that crap?”
Mundy has asked himself the same question a few hundred times by now, and is no nearer to a satisfactory answer.
“When I listened to Dimitri, I believed it. When I got out of the room, it began to blur,” he replies.
“And when you listen to Sasha?”
“I try.”
“And when you listen to yourself?”
“It’s a problem.”
“It is for all of us.”
They are back in the hall, contemplating the veiled statue of library books.
“Looked inside any of this stuff?” Amory asks, giving his cap another shove.
“I’ve read a couple of the inventories.”
“Got one handy?”
Mundy pulls back the dust-sheet, picks a plastic envelope from the lid of a packing case and hands it to him.
“Standard stuff then,” Amory remarks, when he has run his eye down the list. “Available in any lefty library.”
“The strength of the library will be in its concentrated message,” Mundy says, quoting Sasha and sounding hollow to himself. He is preparing to trot out more of the same when Amory thrusts the inventory back at him to say he’s seen enough.
“It stinks,” he announces to the house at large. “Specious, unreal and bloody suspicious. My only problem is, why are you working for that layabout Jay Rourke instead of a decent intelligence officer like me?”
Then he gives Mundy a fat wink, and another buffet on the shoulder, before proposing they get the hell out of here and go somewhere foully expensive for lunch.
“And we’ll take my car, if you don’t mind,” he murmurs as they set off down the path. “It’s cleaner than yours.”
Inside the BMW, Amory keeps his cap on, but the levity he displayed indoors deserts him and lunch is no longer the first thing on his mind.
“Do you know this town well, Edward?”
“I lived here for three years.”
“I’m a glutton for medieval castles. Places with very thick walls and maybe a band playing. I rather think I spotted something of the kind as I drove here. We’ll pick up a wurst as we go.”
They park in the old university square. Mysterious as ever, Amory has got himself a permit.
For half his life, Mundy has been a witness to Amory’s facial mannerisms. He has known him resolutely impassive under strain; and resolutely indifferent in success. He has watched the shutters come down when he has attempted to penetrate Amory’s private life: to this day he is not sure whether Amory is married or single, or if he has children. Once or twice, in a supposed moment of confidence, Amory has referred to an infinitely forbearing wife and two achieving children at university, but Mundy is never certain that he hasn’t lifted the scenario from the pages of John Buchan. Otherwise, he has remained what he was when he first appeared at Mundy’s bedside in the military hospital in Berlin: a dedicated professional who never crosses the white line, and doesn’t expect you to cross it either.
It is therefore disturbing to Mundy, as they tramp with the crowds up the steep cobbled lane towards the castle ruins, to see signs of indecision in his old mentor. Nothing has prepared Mundy for this loss of sureness in his last remaining adult. It is not till they reach the castle’s apothecary museum, and are standing on the wobbly redbrick floor, bowed over a glass case of materia medica, that Amory at last removes his cap and, taking a deep breath through his nose with his lips pressed together, speaks the first small part of what is on his mind.
“My instructions are unequivocal. You take Rourke’s shilling. You stay with the operation to the end and beyond. You work for Rourke exactly as you would work for us. Got it?” He has transferred his attention to a wooden effigy of the healing St. Roch, and the dog that brought him his daily bread while an angel cured him of the plague.
Mundy stoops obediently beside him. “No,” he replies, with a firmness that surprises him. “I haven’t got it at all. Not any part of it.”
“And neither have I. And so far as I can read it from what I’m not being told, neither has anyone in the Service.”
Not shop anymore. Not firm, office or outfit. Amory may be speaking softly but he is speaking in clear text.
“So who gave you your orders if the Service didn’t?” Mundy asks stupidly, as they head back into the crowded courtyard.
“Our masters, who d’you think?” Amory retorts, as if it is Mundy, not he, who is speaking out of turn. “The advisor to the advisor to the Highest in the Land gave the orders. Whoever makes his Ovaltine at night. ‘Do as you’re told and shut up and this conversation never took place.’ So I’m doing as I’m told.”
But you’re not shutting up, thinks Mundy as they follow a group of plump Frenchwomen down a steep stone staircase.
“Do you happen to know the great Dimitri’s real name by any chance?” Amory murmurs, very close to Mundy’s ear.
They have reached the cellar darkness of the Big Barrel and are surrounded by tour groups of French, Japanese and Germans, but apparently no English Spokens. Amory is talking under the cover of their polyglot chatter.
“I thought you might,” Mundy replies.
“What I know about Dimitri, or any other part of this so-called operation, would go on the back of a very small water beetle,” says Amory.
“Well, Rourke must know his name, for heaven’s sake!”
“You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?” Amory agrees, gazing up admiringly at the Big Barrel’s monstrous belly. “It would be logical, in the normal scheme of things, if one is pursuing the greatest villain of the moment, night and day, to know the fellow’s name.”
“Well, have you asked him?”
“Not allowed to. Haven’t spoken to dear old Jay—not since he paid his state visit to Bedford Square. He’s far too secret these days. All dialogue with the dear man has to go through channels.”
“Which bloody channels?” Mundy demands, surprised by Amory’s lack of reverence for the old mystique, and his own.
“Some born-again marvel in the U.S. Embassy in London who calls himself special defense liaison officer and is so grand he doesn’t bother to speak to his ambassador,” Amory replies in one long, carefully pointed expletive, as they clamber back up the steps and into the sunlight.
It has not occurred to Mundy—and why should it since it has never happened before?—that Amory’s perplexity might exceed his own. Nor that Amory’s anger might one day get the better of his discretion.
“There’s a new Grand Design about in case you haven’t noticed, Edward,” he announces, loudly enough for anyone who cares to hear him. “It’s called preemptive naïveté, and it rests on the assumption that everyone in the world would like to live in Dayton, Ohio, under one god, no prizes for guessing whose god that is.”
“Where does Dimitri get his money from?” Mundy demands, desperate for hard ground, as they start back down the path towards the town.
“Oh my dear fellow, all those bad Arabs, who d’you think? He’s doing their dirty work in Europe for them, rallying the Euro-anarchists to the flag, so he’s worth every penny,” Amory replies airily. “Red squirrels,” he goes on, pausing to peer into the branches of an oak tree. “How nice. I thought the grays had eaten them all up.”
“I don’t believe Sasha knows any part of this,” Mundy urges, forgetting in his perturbation the conventional our chum. “I don’t believe he’s the man Rourke says he is. If anything, he’s mellowed. Grown up. Rourke’s talking up a storm.”
“Oh, Jay’s talking up a storm all right. It’s whipping down the corridors of Whitehall and Capitol Hill at a splendid rate.” Amory again breaks off, this time to allow two lanky boys in lederhosen to clatter past them. “No, I don’t expect our chum—your chum—knows a damn thing about any of it, poor soul,” he resumes reflectively. “He was never much of a one to see round corners at the best of times, was he? He’s fallen for Dimitri hook, line and sinker by all accounts. Besides, he’s too busy signing up all those lefty academics and producing core libraries of counterculture. Lot of interesting books there, by the way, Edward. You should take a look at them sometime.”
Which to Mundy’s ear makes a thunderous contrast to his earlier dismissal of them. They are entering the Corn Market. At its center, a bronze Mother of Christ proudly displays her child, while her foot tramples the fallen beast of Protestantism.
“Rourke isn’t Agency anymore, by the way,” Amory is saying. “Did I happen to mention that? He signed up with a politically motivated group of corporate empire-builders four years ago. Oil chaps, most of them. Strong attachment to the arms industry. And all of them very close to God. In those days they were fringe but today they’re playing to packed houses. Good people, mind. Just like we gung-ho British imperialists used to be, and I’d rather hoped we weren’t anymore.” They are close to the town center. Amory seems to know the way. “Unfortunately, I never took much interest in politics before. Now it’s a bit late,” he remarks through his all-weather smile. “However, please don’t let that discourage you. The fact that this or that improbable rumor has come my way should not deter either of us from serving our country exactly as we are commanded”—his voice now heavy with sarcasm. “All that matters as far as our lords and masters are concerned—whether they’re sitting in Washington or Downing Street—is that this splendid operation will play a vital role in the task of bringing Europe and the United States closer together in our unipolar world. They regard your mission as absolutely —” He searches in vain for an adequate superlative.
“Alpha double plus?” Mundy suggests.
“Thank you. And if you play your part to the hilt—which I’m sure you will—there’ll be no limit to their bounty. Huge cash prizes just waiting for the lucky winner. Medals, titles, directorships. You have but to ask. As one long familiar with your mercenary streak, I feel I must make this clear to you.”
“Rourke’s offered me a pretty good package too, actually.”
“Of course he has! And so he should! What more could you ask? A double whammy. Go for it. And talking of double whammies”—Amory drops his voice. They are standing shoulder to shoulder before Ritter’s Hotel, studying its superb baroque façade. Rain is falling, and other pedestrians have taken to the doorways—“consider this possibility, Edward, while we’re about it. Suppose Brother Jay and Dimitri Who Has No Other Name, instead of being at each other’s throats, which ideologically they plainly are —” He breaks off, waits for a group of nuns to pass. “Are you hearing me?”
“Trying to.”
“Suppose Dimitri and Jay, instead of being deadly enemies, were two horses from the same stable. Would that make any sense to you?”
“No.”
“Well, think about it, Edward. Exert your underused gray cells. Your guess is quite as good as mine, probably better. Lying for one’s country is a noble profession as long as one knows what the truth is, but alas I don’t anymore. So let us echo our masters and agree that this conversation never took place. And let us both blindly serve our Queen and country, notwithstanding the fact that both are wholly owned subsidiaries of the one great Hyperpower in the Sky. Agreed?”
Mundy neither agrees nor disagrees. They are approaching the Universitätsplatz, where Amory parked his BMW.
“However,” Amory resumes, “just in case you should decide to get as far away from here as you can in the shortest possible time, I’ve brought you a couple of fake passports. One is for you and one is for our chum, in recognition of services rendered by the little bastard. I’m sorry I couldn’t do Zara as well, but at least she’s out of the way. You’ll find them in the door pocket of the BMW on the passenger side, wrapped in a copy of the Süddeutsche. There’s a bit of money, not a great deal. I had to steal it from the reptile fund.” Amory’s face falls and becomes its age. “I’m very, very sorry,” he says simply. “For myself as well as you. Divided loyalty was never my thing. Don’t tell our chum where you got them from, will you? You never know who he may fall for next.”
As they reach the BMW the rain stops, so Amory puts on his cap.
He has walked and drunk a bit, not a lot, just taken the edge off his nerves. He has tried to connect himself with the man he used to be, looked up a couple of old haunts but the faces have changed and so have the haunts. From a park bench in the Old City he has tried to phone Zara in Ankara and got no reply. But then he doesn’t really expect one, does he? They’re having a welcome-back knees-up at one of the other farms, of course they are! They’ll be getting her to dance, not that she’ll need any encouragement. Makes you wonder, when a girl who can dance like that falls for a giraffe like me.
All the same, from the same park bench, he has rung the airline and established that their plane landed safely at its destination three hours late.
Just odd her cellphone doesn’t work. But then didn’t I read somewhere that the Americans have depleted the satellites—something to do with Saddam’s world-menacing strike power that mysteriously didn’t show up on the day?
He walks again. Anywhere but across the bridge and up the hill and back to the school. With a child’s wonder, he examines the eternal spire of the Church of the Holy Ghost carved against the evening sky. What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? Like Zara. Like Mustafa. Like Jay Rourke’s chums. To know, really and absolutely know, that there’s a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today’s Grand Design?
He is climbing the hill after all. No excuses: there was nowhere else to go. If he knew how Sasha was getting back from Hamburg, that would be another matter. He might try to head him off, go to the airport, the railway station, the terminal and say: Sasha, sport, we’ve got to elope. But Sasha doesn’t need to know. He just needs to do what he’s told.
Elope, Teddy? I think you are being a little bit ridiculous, actually. We have a great mission to fulfill. Are you losing heart again already? Maybe I should find you a replacement.
He goes on climbing. Perhaps the Lord will provide after all. Or Rourke will. Or Dimitri will, now that we suspect they come from the same stable. In the meantime my job is to get back to the school and wait till Sasha shows up. Then we’ll discuss who elopes when and who with and why. The Süddeutsche is folded lengthwise inside his jacket. One corner prods his neck. It’s been a bloody long day, Edward, dear boy. What time did you get up? I didn’t. In the small hours I was driving Zara and Mustafa to Munich airport and I haven’t put my head down since. Then maybe you’re too tired to face the microphones tonight, Edward. Maybe give yourself a break, dear boy, and pin a note on the school door: “Gone to the Blue Boar for the night. Join me there. Tschüss, Teddy.”
The false passports inside the Süddeutsche are really weighing him down. So is that little extra bit of money stolen from the reptile fund—except that if Mundy knows anything about Amory, he stole it from himself and not the reptiles. The Amorys of this world don’t steal. They serve their country right or wrong. Or they do until the day when they come face to face with real life and their warped rectitude deserts them and their faces unlock and become real, puzzled faces like everybody else’s. So there’s another god for you that’s passed its sell-by date: enlightened patriotism, until this afternoon Nick Amory’s religion.
No lights are burning in the windows, but that’s not surprising since Mundy didn’t leave any burning. On the other hand, those young surveyors might have decided to drop by and do some more surveying. But they’ve got flashlights. The gates squeak. Must oil. Tell old Stefan. In the darkness, the brick path weaves around and his big feet keep wandering off it into the long grass. I shouldn’t have had that last one. Mistake. Very quiet up here. Always was, come to think of it. But not as quiet as this, surely. Not on a Saturday night. Must be a big soccer match on television, except that I can’t hear anybody’s television set playing, or see any blue lights flickering in windows.
He finds the lock first time and stands in the darkness of the hall trying to fathom where the electricians put the new switches. Worse than Trotsky, I am with my geography, ask Sasha. Under the glow from the skylight, the shrouded pile of books looms over him like a spectral Grand Inquisitor at the center of the hall. Lot of interesting books there, by the way, Edward. You should take a look at them sometime. Good idea, Nick. Come to think of it, I’ve got a lot of reading to catch up with. He pats the walls, finds the switches but they’re not switches, they’re dials. Nothing’s simple anymore. The new lights dazzle him. He sits down on the stair, tries calling Zara again. Still no answer. Pouring himself a Scotch and water he moves to an old leather sofa in a corner of the hall and scrolls through his cellphone in search of her uncle’s farm, but fails to find it. Neither for the life of him can he remember the old boy’s name, nor the name of his farm. Too many c-cedillas and unintelligible spellings.
Take another pull of Scotch. Reflect. Ten thirty-five by the Major’s tin wristwatch. In Ankara it’s one hour later. Mustafa will be having the time of his life in that flash blue jacket. Wonder what old Jake’s up to. Bringing the rafters down at Bristol University Union. Last heard of, he was running for treasurer. Kate said she’d send me his cellphone number. Didn’t. Must have got stuck in the ministry’s mail room. Maybe if she’d marked it secret they’d have sent it quicker. Cheers.
“And cheers to all our listeners tonight,” he adds aloud, and raises his glass in tribute to the walls. “Marvelous chaps,” he adds. “And chapesses, naturally. Bless you all.”
This room would make a pretty decent mosque, he decides, remembering his instruction at the hands of Mustafa. It’s entry free, it has a wall that faces east. So it qualifies. Put a little basin over there in the corner for our ritual cleansing, your mihrab where the fireplace is, make sure it points to Mecca, portico there, pulpit here, get some tiles with geometric designs and beautiful calligraphy and a carpet with prayer mats drawn on it, put some kids’ rucksacks along the wall and we’re home free—how am I doing, Mustafa?
Never took him swimming. Damn. Promised we’d go before they left, and we both forgot. Note to self: swim the moment we get back.
He scrolls up Dina’s number in Munich and calls her. How’s old Mo doing, Dina? Pining, Ted. And no, Dina hasn’t heard from Zara either. But then she wouldn’t expect to, not unless something had gone wrong. They’re probably having a big party over at the farm, she says. Probably they are, he agrees, and transfers his thoughts to Sasha. So where the hell are you, you shit-faced poison dwarf? Late, Teddy. I shall be late. I have many fine academics to interview.
Well, what sort of late, for Christ’s sake? Late like midnight? Late like three in the morning? Why should Sasha care? How’s he supposed to know I’m sitting here like an anxious mother waiting for her fifteen-year-old daughter to come back from her first date? Hurry, you little bastard. I’ve got the passports. Hurry.
He gets up and glass in hand climbs the two flights to the attic just in case, by some miracle, Sasha has come back early after all and gone to sleep on his pile of improvised bedding, but no Sasha is secreted among the cushions.
He descends the curved staircase, very sober now, one hand for his whiskey, one for the boat. The shrouded heap of boxes observes his cautious descent. You should take a look at them sometime. Reaching ground level he continues to the library. Amid ladders, dust-sheets and paint pots, he locates a carpenter’s box. No padlock. A trusting fellow carpenter. Good chap. He selects a hammer and what Des called his Winston Churchill: a wrench with two fingers in a V. He returns to the hall and sets his whiskey on the floor beside the leather sofa. He removes his jacket but is careful to lay it sideways on the sofa so that the Süddeutsche doesn’t undress itself by mistake in front of the cameras.
Purposefully, almost vengefully, he drags the dust-sheets from the shrouded pyramid, rolls them up and slings them into a corner of the room. Take that. With the hammer in one hand and the Winston Churchill in the other, he selects a crate and begins prizing apart the battens. As he does so, it is his fantasy that he hears a gasp of alarm from his unseen audience. Or perhaps it’s a kiddies’ matinee he’s imagining, and they’re all yelling, “Don’t do it!” or “Look behind you!”
And he does indeed look behind him—but only at the window, in case Sasha’s taxi has pulled up. No such luck.
He has ripped apart the battens on two sides. Des would suggest a bit more science, please, Ted, but Mundy isn’t interested in science. Next comes a skin of thick brown paper joined with masking tape. The snarl it makes when he tears it off takes him by surprise. Inside it twelve cardboard boxes are stacked like bricks. Each crate has twelve boxes, each box has twelve books, he thinks facetiously: so how many boxes are going to St. Ives?
Consult the inventory, Sasha advised. Box One, Network Society, Manuel Castells. Box Two, the same in German. Box Three, the same in French. He labors through each box. He labors through all the boxes. He selects another crate, smashes it apart. And a third. Our front-runner tonight is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in nine languages, so let’s give a big hand to our Brother Frantz, who’s come all the way from Berlin to be with us here tonight.
He takes another look at the Major’s watch. Midnight. The soccer match must be running into a lot of extra time, because in three years of living in this place Mundy has never known a silence like it.
But perhaps that’s just fantasy too: When all your nerves are jangling, when one part of you is dog tired and the other part is witless with worry, when you’re sitting in a bugged house with a pair of fake passports and waiting for your infuriating friend to show up so that you can get him as far away as possible in the shortest possible time, it is only natural that noises—or more accurately the strident absence of them—should take on a supernatural quality.
At first he assumes it’s just a book packer’s stupid mistake.
He’s come across a few of those by now: a couple of Adam Smiths that found their way into the wrong box, a half-set of Thoreau squeezed in with Thorwald, and Doris Lessing mixed up with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
Then his head goes a bit furry and he thinks he must be dealing with some sort of throwback of Sasha’s, even a joke of some sort, because he’s remembering how, long ago, when Sasha liberated his subminiature camera from the Stasi operational stores, he also helped himself to an urban guerrilla’s handbook that told him to put his exposed film in a condom and store it in ice cream.
But this isn’t the same handbook.
And it’s not just one random copy either.
Books that we anticipate will be heavily in demand are supplied in multiples, he hears Sasha intoning in his Party voice.
Well, this is sixty copies if it’s a day. And they’re not talking about ice cream either—not even about photography, miniature or subminiature. Their preferred subjects are how to make bombs out of weed killer and how to kill your best friend with a knitting needle, or booby-trap his car or lavatory, or garotte him in his bed, or drown him in his bath, or smash the horns of his larynx, or send a fireball up the elevator shaft at his workplace.
Selecting his next box comes really hard to Mundy. He has a feeling that he mustn’t get it wrong in front of his many fans; of being a contender in a high-profile quiz program: screw this one up and you’re out of the running.
But when he looks more closely at himself he realizes he’s already doing the wise thing and ripping open the boxes one after another without being concerned whether they contain core works of counterculture or handbooks for aspiring terrorists or snug rows of gray-green hand grenades the size of elongated cricket balls, with puckered casings so that you can grip them in sweaty conditions, or what he assumes are timers for homemade bombs, because that’s what the enclosed instructions say they are.
So it’s not all that long before he’s sitting alone on the floor of the hall with every crate and box opened if not unpacked, and wrapping paper and straw all around him, and Mundy himself looking as bereft as any child on his birthday when there are no more presents to open.
And all he can hear in the unearthly silence is the sound of his own heart going whack, thump, whack, and Sasha’s absent voice pontificating at him through the throbbing of his eardrums. They are trying to put us into one bed. Liberals, socialists, Trotskyists, Communists, anarchists, antiglobalists, peace protesters: we are all Sympis, all pinkos. We all hate Jews and America and we are the secret admirers of Osama.
And after Sasha’s done lecturing him, he gets Rourke extolling the beauties of Heidelberg. If you want to blow America and Germany apart, Heidelberg’s not a bad place to make your point.
But then it’s Sasha’s turn to come back with an even better point:
The liberal left will be exposed as the closet fascist bastards they’ve always been, and the petit bourgeoisie of Europe will go crawling to its American Big Brother, begging it to come to its protection.
But the final word and the most authoritative must come from the savagely indignant Nick Amory this very afternoon. And when all these sibyls have said their lines and faded backstage, that’s Sasha’s cue to make one of his own inimitable appearances.
It can never be certain what prompted Mundy to go charging up the stairs to the attic again. After all, he’d been up there only an hour ago. Was it the rattle of automatic gunfire in the street? Or the mayhem inside the house that immediately followed it: the stun grenades, the smoke and smashing glass as a dozen men at least stormed through every door and window screaming at him in American, German and Arabic, ordering him to freeze, lie down, back up against the wall, show us your fucking hands and all the rest of it?
It’s generally accepted that people under this sort of attack go upstairs rather than down, so perhaps Mundy was simply behaving according to the standard pattern. Or was it some sort of homing instinct that caused him to rush up there—his memories of the Berlin squat, and the random impulse to return to it—perhaps in the confused expectation that Sasha will be there ahead of him, or at least know where to find him when he comes back from visiting his latest guru in Frankfurt or wherever, only this time it’s Hamburg?
Or was it merely to get a glimpse of what was going on outside?
Nor could Mundy be sure how long he’d been sitting on the floor surrounded by his toys before the shooting sounded and he started his ascent. It could have been minutes, could have been a couple of hours. Time, when you’re stringing together the net that has snared you, doesn’t count for much. Thinking is far more important. Comfortable ignorance, as Dr. Mandelbaum liked to say, is no longer the acceptable solution, however hard it is to face reality.
He hears the shooting, he sits up in slow motion and he says to himself, drowsily almost: Sasha, you’re out there and it’s dangerous. But when he thinks more about it, he decides that the car was starting to pull up before the shooting began. It was more like this: car, shooting, screech of tires. On the other hand, it could have been: shooting, car pulls up, screech of tires. Either way, he must obviously take a look.
The inside of the house is by now a deafening inferno of smoke and flashes and explosions and abusive screaming. Mundy’s own name, coupled with Sasha’s, is on the lips of every intruder. And what is remarkable to Mundy’s ears, and worth a moment’s thought outside the conventional borders of time, is that he’s heard a couple of these voices before, when not very friendly hands were loading him blindfolded into the van, and reloading him into the helicopter, and slamming him facedown onto the iron deck, before they took on human form and appeared tenderly before him bringing cups of hot coffee and Camel cigarettes and cookies and abject apologies, and calling themselves Hank, Jeff, Art and the like.
And is Mundy totally insane, or does he hear Jay Rourke’s voice screaming above the rest? It’s hard to tell because Mundy has never heard Jay scream before, but he’d lay good money that inside that space-invader costume of his, it’s the selfsame Jay Rourke whose dear father’s birthplace was just sixteen miles from my mother’s as the crow flies, if Irish crows fly straight, which Jay begs serious leave to doubt.
And on the subject of voices in the storm that all drowning sailors are supposed to hear as they go down, Mundy hears another familiar voice from his recent past that to begin with, for the life of him, he just can’t place at all, until after a mental stretch he gets it: Richard. Blond Richard, with the blue blazer and airline steward’s tie. Dimitri’s Richard, who gives a thousand dollars in cash as an appearance fee to all potential employees, whether or not the interview has a successful outcome. Who wonders aloud what money is beside a great ideal.
So there we have it, Mundy tells himself, falling back on Amory’s cumbersome dictum of this afternoon: two horses from the same stable, except that now they’re beating down the door. However, he has not been idle while he is having these thoughts. Somehow or other the erstwhile second-row forward with long legs is making his way up the wide oak staircase that he always loved, paddling himself Sasha-like in unequal bounds because one of the legs is acting up and he’s got a ton weight on his left shoulder where the ceiling hit it, but perhaps it was a flying object or one of those bullets they told him about in Edinburgh that are recommended for use on airplanes and in similarly delicate situations. They knock the daylights out of you and spread a pancake of molten lead on you, but they hardly penetrate the skin of a grape.
He makes it up the first flight and through the door to the old servants’ staircase leading to the attic. A shower of bullets and plaster and smoke and invective comes up after him, but he has his wits about him, he is climbing, and when he gets to the attic and discovers he is on his knees mosque-style with his arse in the air and his face in his blood-caked hands, he can still crawl to the dormer window and crank himself up high enough to see over the sill.
And what he sees is truly amazing, the sort of son et lumière show you’d travel miles for. He remembers very well taking Jake to one in Caernarvon—or was it Carlisle? They had cannon and pikemen and halberdiers and siege towers and chaps pouring very lifelike boiling oil from the battlements, and Jake had a whale of a time: a divorced father’s half-term to remember, for once.
But in its own way, this show is just as impressive: spotlights and floodlights and arc lights and searchlights, lights stuck up on cherry pickers and flashing lights on the police vans and grüne Minnas and ambulances drawn up at each entrance to the little grass square below the front gate: lights everywhere except in the blackened windows of the surrounding houses, because marksmen like their privacy.
And costumes? Well, if you don’t mind mixing ancient with modern, unsurpassed: frogmen rubbing shoulders with King Richard Crusaders in balaclava helmets, blackamoors with battle-axes, maces and witches’ boxes lashed to their belts, West Berlin police in Prussian-style helmets, firemen dressed like Nazi storm troopers, paramedics in tin hats and laundered white coats with red crosses on, and any number of mischievous black elves and hobgoblins flitting from doorway to doorway looking to stir up trouble.
And for your sound effects, instead of the usual tattoo music and spotty rumble of cannon fire, we have the sergeant major from the parade ground at Murree, no less, barking unintelligible orders in English, German or, for all Mundy can hear, Punjabi. And at one side of the little square where the road goes by stands a brilliantly lit white taxi with all five doors open, and the driver kneeling next to it with two fellows in gas masks pointing guns at him—the driver being the same Herr Knau who delivered Sasha to the school a couple of days ago. Mundy remembered him as thin. Tied up he looks much fatter.
But the unquestioned star of the show, the man everybody has come from miles around to see, is Sasha without his Tarnkappe but carrying his Party briefcase, skipping down the cobbled road with one sneaker missing and waving his free hand in the air saying, “No, no,” the way a film star tells the paparazzi, please boys, not today, I haven’t got my makeup on.
The loss of one shoe, paradoxically, has evened him out. You’d hardly know he had a limp from the way he skips from side to side like a Kreuzberg kid in the last throes of a game of hopscotch. Are the cobbles red-hot? It’s probably part of the game to pretend they are. Then suddenly he’s outrun himself or he’s missed his footing, because the champion’s down, and rolling like a rag doll with no Mundy around to pick him up, and his arms and legs are rolling with him but it’s probably the bullets that are keeping him going rather than his own efforts, because the bullets are tearing round him as well as into him, they’re mauling him and disfiguring him, and even when he’s well and truly dead, they seem unwilling to believe him, but give him one last all-together-now-boys salvo, just for safety’s sake.
Mundy meanwhile is clinging to the windowsill with both bloody hands, but unfortunately he hasn’t got the attic to himself anymore. There are two frogmen standing behind him, loosing off burst after burst of submachine gun fire through the open window at the blacked-out neighboring houses, just as coolly as if they were on the range at Edinburgh. And though they are patently oversupplied with weapons, they seem keen to use them all, no sooner firing one gun than dropping it, picking up another and firing with that.
And there’s a third, tall fellow joined the party who, for all the tack he’s wearing, can’t disguise his lazy Bostonian walk. He’s backing away from Mundy as if he’s scared of him, and he’s putting his pistol back in his belt. But make no mistake: this is not the gesture of someone preparing to talk sweet reason with a wounded man lying on the ground. What this masked, languid antiterrorist needs is something heavier to shoot with, which turns out to be some sort of sophisticated rifle with sights so big that an uninformed and recumbent person at the receiving end—such as Mundy—might not know which hole to watch when he is being shot. But this is not something that bothers the shooter, clearly, because when he’s got himself as far away from Mundy as the room allows—until he’s right up against the wall, in fact—he puts this same rifle to his shoulder and, with studied deliberation, fires three high-velocity sniper bullets into Mundy, one straight through the center of his brow and two more at leisure into the upper body, one to the abdomen and the other to the heart, though neither can have been strictly necessary.
But not before Mundy has filled his lungs for one last intended yell of Hang on, it’s all right, I’m coming, to his dead friend lying in the square.