Part 22 (2/2)

”Fine,” I said.

”Cyril used to take a newspaper on the train. The Telegrapb, need you ask. Cyril doesn't hold with Labour - he says they're common. But he doesn't buy a paper any more. He sits. Sits and stares. That's all he does. Our bloke had to give him a nudge yesterday when they pulled up at Victoria. He'd gone off in a daydream. Going home last night, he tapped out the whole score of an opera on his briefcase. Nancy says it was Vivaldi. I suppose she knows. Remember Pauli Skordeno?”

I said I did. Diversions were part of Monty's way. Like, ”How's Mabel?” for instance.

”Pauli's doing seven years in Barbados for bothering a bank. What gets into them, Ned? He never put a foot wrong while he was watching. Never late, never naughty with his expenses, lovely memory, lovely eye, good nose. Burglaries galore we did. London, the Home Counties, the Midlands, the civil-rights boys, the disarmers, the Party, the naughty diplomats - we did the lot. Did Pauli ever get rumbled? Not once. The moment he goes private, he's all fingers and thumbs and boasting to the bloke next door to him in the bar. I think they want to be caught, that's my opinion. I think it's wanting recognition after all the years of being n.o.body.”

He sipped his tea. ”Cyril's other kick, apart from music, is his radio. He loves his radio. Only receiving, mind, as far as anybody knows. But he's got one of those fancy German sets with the fine tuning and big speakers for his concerts, and he didn't buy it locally because when it went on the blink the local shop had to send it off to Wiesbaden. Three months it took, and cost a fortune. He doesn't run a car, he doesn't hold with them. He shops by bus Sat.u.r.day mornings, he's a stay-at-home except for his Christmases in Austria. No pets, he doesn't mix. Entertaining, forget it. No house-guests, lodgers, receives no mail except the bills, pays everything regular, doesn't vote, doesn't go to church, doesn't have a television. His cleaning lady says he reads a lot, mainly big books. She only comes once a week, usually when he's not there, and we didn't dare get close to her. A big book for her is anything bigger than a Bible-study pamphlet. His phone bills are modest, he's got six thousand in a building society, owns his house and maintains a well-managed bank account fluctuating between six and fourteen hundred, except Christmas times when it drops to around two hundred because of his holiday.”

Monty's sense of the proprieties again required us to make a detour, this time to discuss our children. My son Adrian had just won a modern languages scholars.h.i.+p to Cambridge, I said. Monty was hugely impressed. Monty's only son had just pa.s.sed his law exam with flying colours. We agreed that kids were what made life worth living.

”Modrian,” I said when the formalities were once more over. ”Sergei.”

”I remember the gentleman well, Ned. We all do. We used to follow him round the clock some days. Except at Christmas, of course, when he took his home leave .... Hullo! Are you thinking what I'm thinking? We all take leave at Christmas?”

”It had crossed my mind,” I said. ”We didn't even bother to pretend with Modrian, not after a while, you couldn't. Oh, he was a slippery eel, though. I could have walloped him sometimes, I really could. Pauli Skordeno got so angry with him once he let his tyres down outside the Victoria and Albert while he was inside sussing out a dead-letter box. I never reported it, I didn't have the heart.”

”Am I not right in thinking Modrian was also an opera buff, Monty?”

Monty's eyes became quite round, and I had the rare pleasure of seeing him surprised.

”Oh my Lord, Ned,” he exclaimed. ”Oh dear, oh dear. You're right. Sergei was a Covent Garden subscriber - of course he was, same as Cyril. We must have taken him there and fetched him - oh, a dozen times. He could have used a cab if he'd had any mercy, but he never did. He liked wearing us out in the traffic.”

”If we could know the performances he went to, and where he sat - if you could get them - we could try and match them up with Frewin's.”

Monty had fallen into a theatrical silence. He frowned, then scratched his head. ”You don't think this is all a touch too easy for us, do you, Ned?” he asked. ”I get suspicious when everything fits in a pretty pattern, don't you?”

”I won't be part of your pattern,” Sally had said to me the night before. ”Patterns are for breaking.”

”He sings, Ned,” Mary La.s.selles murmured while she arranged my white tulips in a pickle jar. ”He sings all the time. Night and day, it doesn't matter. I think he missed his vocation.”

Mary was as pale as a nightnurse and as dedicated. A luminous virtue lit her unpowdered face and shone from her clear eyes. A shock of white, like the mark of early widowhood, capped her bobbed hair.

Of the many callings that comprise the over-world of intelligence, none requires as much devotion as that of the sisterhood of listeners. Men are no good at it. Only women are capable of such pa.s.sionate espousal of the destiny of others. Condemned to windowless cellars, engulfed by tracks of grey-clad cable and banks of Russian-style tape recorders, they occupy a nether region populated by absent lives which they know more intimately than those of their closest friends or relations. They never see their quarries, never meet them, never touch them or sleep with them. Yet the whole force of their personalities is beamed upon these secret loves. On microphones and telephones they hear them blandish, weep, smoke, eat, argue and couple. They hear them cook, belch, snore and worry. They endure their children, in-laws and babysitters without complaint, as well as their tastes in television. These days, they even ride with them in cars, take them shopping, sit with them in cafes and bingo halls. They are the secret sharers of the trade.

Pa.s.sing me a pair of earphones, Mary put on her own and, folding her hands beneath her chin, closed her eyes for better listening. So I heard Cyril Frewin's voice for the first time, singing himself a pa.s.sage from Turandot while Mary La.s.selles with her eyes shut smiled in her enchantment. His voice was mellow and, to my untutored ear, as pleasing as it clearly was to Mary.

I sat up straight. The singing had stopped. I heard a woman's voice in the background, then a man's, and they were speaking Russian.

”Mary, who the h.e.l.l's that?”

”His teachers, darling. Radio Moscow's Olga and Boris, five days a week, 6 a.m. sharp. This is yesterday morning.”

”You mean he's teaching himself Russian?”

”Well, he listens to it, darling. How much of it is going into his little head is anybody's guess. Every morning, sharp at six, Cyril does his Olga and Boris. They're visiting the Kremlin today. Yesterday they were shopping at Gum.”

I heard Frewin mutter unintelligibly in the bath, I heard him call out ”Mother” in the night, while he tossed restlessly in bed. FREWIN Ella, I remembered, deceased, mother to FREWIN Cyril Arthur, q.v. I have never understood why Registry insists on opening personal files for the dead relatives of suspected spies.

I listened to him arguing with the British Telecom engineers' department after he had waited the statutory twenty minutes to be connected with them. His voice was edgy, full of unexpected emphases.

”Well, next time you elect to identify a fault on my line, I would be highly grateful if you would kindly inform me as the subscriber prior to barging into my house when my cleaning woman happens to be in, and leaving particles of wire on the carpet and bootmarks on the kitchen floor . . .”

I listened to him phone the Covent Garden opera house to say he would not be taking up his subscription ticket this Friday. This time his tone was self-pitying. He explained that he was ill. The kind lady the other end said there was a lot of it about.

I listened to him talking to the butcher in antic.i.p.ation of my visit, which Foreign Office Personnel had set for tomorrow morning at his house.

”Mr. Steele, this is Mr. Cyril Frewin. Good morning. I shall not be able to come in to you on Sat.u.r.day, owing to the fact that I have a conference at my house. I would therefore be grateful if you would kindly deliver four good lamb chops for me on the Friday evening as you pa.s.s by on your way home. Will that be convenient, Mr. Steele? Also a jar of your pre-mixed mint sauce. No, I have red currant jelly already, thank you. Will you attach your bill, please?”

To my over-acute ear, he sounded like a man preparing to abandon s.h.i.+p.

”I'll take the engineers again, please, Mary,” I said. Having twice more listened to Frewin's dogmatic tones of complaint to British Telecom, I gave her a distracted kiss and stepped into the evening air. Sally had said, ”Come round,” but I was in no mood to spend an evening professing love to her and listening to music I secretly detested.

I returned to the Pool. The Service laboratories had completed their examination of the anonymous letter. A Markus electronic, model number so-and-so, probably Belgian manufacture, new or little used, was the best they could suggest. They believed they would be able to identify another doc.u.ment issuing from the same machine. Could I get one? End of report. The laboratories were still wrestling with the characteristics of the new generation of machines.

I rang Monty at his lair in Baron's Court. Frewin's complaint to, the engineers was still ringing in my memory: his pauses, like unnatural commas, his use of the word highly, his habit of punching the unlikely word to achieve vindictive emphasis.

”Did your fellows notice a typewriter in Cyril's house, Monty, by any chance, while they were kindly mending his telephone?” I asked.

”No, Ned. There was no typewriter, Ned-not one they saw, put it that way.”

”Could they have missed it?”

”Easily, Ned. It was soft-pedalling only. No opening desks or cupboards, no photographing, not too much familiarity with his cleaning lady either, or she'll worry afterwards. It was 'See what you can, get out fast, and be sure you leave a mess or he'll smell a rat.'

”I thought of phoning Burr, but I didn't. My case officer's possessiveness was taking over, and I was d.a.m.ned if I was going to share Frewin with anyone, not even the man who had entrusted him to me. A hundred twisted threads were running through my head, from Modrian to Gorst to Boris and Olga to Christmas to Salzburg to Sally. In the end, I wrote Burr a minute setting out most of what I had discovered and confirming that I would ”make a first reconnaissance” of Frewin tomorrow morning when I interviewed him for his routine vetting clearance.

To go home? To go to Sally? Home was a hateful little service flat in St. James's, where I was supposed to be sorting myself out though that's the last thing any man does when he sits alone with a bottle of Scotch and a reproduction painting of ”The Laughing Cavalier,” dithering between his dreams of freedom and his addiction to what holds him prisoner. Sally was my Alternative Life, but I knew already I was too set to jump the wall and reach it.

Preferring to remain at my desk, therefore, I fetched myself a whisky from the safe and browsed through Modrian's file. It told me nothing I didn't already know, but I wanted him at the front of my head. Sergei Modrian, tried and tested Moscow Centre professional. A charmer, a bit of a dancer, a befriender, a smiling Armenian with a mercury tongue. I had liked him. He had liked me. In our profession, since we may like no one beyond a point, we can forgive a lot for charm.

My direct line was ringing. I thought for a moment it would be Sally, for contrary to regulations I had given her the number. It was Toby and he sounded pleased with himself. He usually did. He didn't mention Frewin by name. He didn't mention Salzburg. I guessed he was ringing from his flat, and I'd a shrewd notion he was in bed and not alone.

”Ned? Your man's a joke. Books himself a single room for two weeks, checks in, pays his two weeks in advance, gives the staff their Christmas box, pats the kids, makes nice to everybody. Next morning he disappears, does it every year. Ned, can you hear me? Listen, the guy's crazy. No phone calls out, one meal, two Apfelsaft, no explanations, taxi to the station. Keep my room, don't let it, maybe I'll be back tomorrow, maybe in a few days, I don't know. After twelve days, back he comes, no explanations, tips the staff some more, everybody happy like a heathen. They call him 'the ghost.'

Ned, you got to talk nice to Burr for me. You owe me now. Toby works his fingers to the bone, tell him. Old star like you, a young fellow like Burr, he'll listen to you, costs you nothing. I need another man out here, maybe two. Tell him, Ned, hear me? Cheers.”

I stared at the wall, the one I couldn't scale; I stared at Modrian's file, I remembered Monty's dictum about too easy. I suddenly wanted Sally terribly, and had some cloudy notion that by solving the mystery of Frewin I would convert my recurring spurts for freedom into one bold leap. But as I reached for the phone to talk to her, it started to ring again.

”They fit,” said Monty in a flat voice. He had managed to check Frewin's opera attendance. ”It's Sergei and Cyril every time. When he goes, so does be. When he doesn't, neither does he. Maybe that's why he doesn't go any more. Got it?”

”And the seats?” I asked.

”Side by side, darling. What do you expect? Front to back?”

”Thanks, Monty,” I said.

<script>