'H.E. will be leaving in a minute; I should make yourself scarce if I were you,' he said with chilling ease. 'He's not awfully keen on you people.'
In most of the corridors it was daytime. Commercial Section was celebrating Scottish week. A mauve grouse moor, draped in Campbell tartan, hung beside a photograph of the Queen in highland dress. Miniatures of Scotch whisky were mounted in a collage with dancers and bagpipes, and framed in plywood battens. In the Open Plan, under radiant exhortations to buy from the North, pale-faced clerks struck doggedly at machines for adding and subtracting. Deadline Brussels! a placard warned them, but the machines seemed unimpressed. He climbed a floor and was in Whitehall with the Service Attachés, each with his tiny Ministry and his stencilled title on the door.
'What the hell are you up to?' a sergeant clerk demanded, and Turner told him to keep a civil tongue in his head. Somewhere a military voice wrestled gallantly with dictation. In the Typing Pool, the girls sat forlornly in schoolroom lines: two juniors in green overalls gently nursed a mammoth duplicator while a third laid out the coloured telegrams as if they were fine linen for going away. Raised above them all, the Head Girl, blue haired and fully sixty, sat on a separate dais checking stencils. She alone, scenting the enemy, looked up sharply, nose towards the wind. The walls behind here were lined with Christmas cards from Head Girls in other missions. Some depicted camels, others the royal crest.
'I'm going over the locks,' he muttered, and her look said, 'Go over what you like, but not my girls.'
Christ, I could do with one, I'm telling you. Surely you could spare just one for a quick drop into paradise? Harting, you thief.
It was ten o'clock. He had visited every room to which Harting had acquired access; he had gained nothing but a headache for his trouble. Whatever Harting wanted was no longer there, or else so hidden as to require weeks of searching; or so obvious as to be invisible. He felt the sickness which follows tension and his mind was racing with uncoordinated recollections. Christ: one single day. From enthusiasm to frustration in one day. From an aeroplane to the dayroom desk, all the clues and none; I've lived a whole bloody life and it's only Monday. He stared at the blank foolscap pages of the telegram form, wondering what the hell to write. Cork was asleep and the robots were silent. The keys lay in a heap before him. One by one he began threading them back on to the ring. Put together, he thought; construct. You will not go to bed until you are at least aware of the trail you must follow. The task of an intellectual, his fart-arsed tutor brayed, is to make order out of chaos. Define anarchy. It is a mind without a system. Please, teacher, what is a system without a mind? Taking a pencil he lazily drew a chart of the days of the week and divided each day into panels of one hour. He opened the blue diary. Re-form the fragments, make of all the pieces one piece. You'll find him and Shawn won't. Harting Leo, Claims and Consular, thief and hunter, will hunt you down.
'You don't know anything about shares by any chance?' Cork enquired, waking with a start.
'No, I don't.'
'My query is, you see,' he continued, rubbing his pink eyes, 'if there's a slump on Wall Street and a slump in Frankfurt and we don't make the Market on this run, how will it affect Swedish steel?'
'If I were you,' Turner said, 'I'd put the whole lot on red and forget it.'
'Only I have this firm intention,' Cork explained. 'We've got a bit of land lined up in the Caribbean-'
'Shut up.'
Construct. Put your ideas on a blackboard and then see what happens to them. Come on, Turner, you're a philosopher, tell us how the world goes round. What little absolute will we put into Harting's mouth, for instance? Facts. Construct. Did you not, after all, my dear Turner, abandon the contemplative life of the academic in favour of the junctional life of the civil servant? Construct; put your theories to work and de Lisle will call you a real person.
Mondays first. Mondays are for invitations out. Buffet parties are favoured, de Lisle had told him in an aside at luncheon; they eliminate the pains of placement. Mondays are reserved for away matches. England plays the wogs. Away to a different kind of slavery. Harting was essentially a second division man. The minor Embassies. Embassies with small drawing-rooms. The B team played away on Mondays.
'- and if it's a girl, I reckon we could get a coloured nanny, an Amah; she could do the teaching, up to O-level at least.'
'Can't you keep quiet?'
'Provided we have the funds,' Cork added. 'You can't get them for nothing, I'm sure.'
'I'm working, can't you understand?'
I'm trying, he thought, and his mind drifted into other fields. He was with the little girl in the corridor, whose full unpainted lips faded so reluctantly into the feathery skin; he imagined that long appraising stare upon his nascent paunch and he heard her laughing as his own wife had laughed: Alan darling, you're supposed to take me, not fight me. It's rhythm, it's like dancing, can't you understand? And Tony's such a beautiful dancer, Alan darling, and I shall be a little late tonight, and I shall be away tomorrow, playing an away match with my Monday lover. Alan, stop. Stop! Alan, please don't hit me! I'll never touch him again, I swear. Until Tuesday.
Harting, you thief.
Tuesdays were for entertaining at home. Home is a Tuesday; home is having people in. He made a list of them and thought: it's worse than Blackheath. It's worse than her bloody mother fighting for her fragment of power; it's worse than Bournemouth and seed cake for the minister; it's worse than black Sundays in Yorkshire and weddings timed for six o'clock tea; it is a custom-built, unassailable preventive detention of vacuous social exchange. The Vandelungs (Dutch)... the Canards (Canadian)... the Obutus (Ghanaian)... the Cortezanis (Italian)... the Allertons, the Crabbes, and once, sure enough, the Bradfields; this happy band was mingled with no fewer than forty-eight accountable bores defined only by their quantity: the Obutus plus six... the Allertons plus two.... the Bradfields alone. You gave them your full attention, didn't you? 'I understand he maintains a certain standard there.' Champagne and two veg that night. Plover's eggs paid for by the Russian taxpayer. His wife interrupted him: darling, why don't we go out tonight? The Willoughbys won't mind, they know I loathe cooking and Tony adores Italian food. Oh sure, sure: anything to please Tony.
'- And if it's a boy,' Cork said, 'I'll take it on myself. There must be some facilities for boys, even in a place like that. I mean it's a paradise, isn't it, specially for teachers.'
Wednesday was welfare. Ping-pong night. Sing-song night. The sergeants' mess: 'Have a little something in that gin and whisky, Mr Turner, sir, just to give it bite. The boys say one thing about you, sir, and I'm sure you won't mind me repeating it, sir, seeing it's Christmas: Mr Turner, they say - they always give you the Mister, sir, it's not something they do for everyone - Mr Turner is tough; Mr Turner is firm. But Mr Turner is fair. Now, sir, about my leave...' Exiles night. A night for worming an inch or two further into the flesh of the Embassy; come back, little girl, and just slip off those jeans. A night strictly for business. He studied the engagements in detail and thought: you really did work for your secrets, I will admit. You really hawked yourself, didn't you? Scottish Dancing, Skittles Club, Exiles Motoring, Sports Committee. Sooner you than me, boy; you really believed. I'll say that for you too. You really went for goal, didn't you? You kept the ball and you went through the lot of them, you thief.
Which left - since the weekends were not marked with anything but references to gardening and a couple of trips to Hanover - which left Thursdays.
Guilty Thursdays.
Draw a box round Thursday, telephone the Adler and find out what time they lock up. They don't. Draw another box round that box, measuring one and a half inches by half an inch, and decorate the margins in between with sinuous snakes; cause their forked tongues to lick suggestively at the sweet Gothic curves of the letter T, and wait for the throbbing of a tormented head to be assumed into the waking drumbeat of the cypher machines. And the result?
Silence. Bloody silence.
The result is a Thursday shrouded in sexual mystery, tantalised by abstinence. A Thursday surrounded by meticulous entries written in a swollen, boring mayoral hand by a man with nothing to do and a lot of time to do it in. 'Remember Mary Crabbe's coffee grinder,' the worshipful mayor of Turner's home town in Yorkshire warned his fortunate biographer; remember to grind Mary Crabbe, you thief. 'Speak to Arthur about Myra's birthday,' Mr Crail the Minister, well known throughout all Yorkshire for the inanity of his sermons, whispered in a benevolent aside; 'Anglo-German Society Buffet Luncheon for Friends of the Free City of Hamburg,' 'International Ladies Subscription Luncheon, Costumes of All Nations, DM. 1500. Incl. wine,' the Master of Ceremonies proclaimed, puffing his Mess-Night capitals over the lined pages. And make a mental note to ruin Jenny Pargiter's career. And Meadowes' retirement. And Gaunt? And Bradfield? And who else along the path? Myra Meadowes? You wrecker, Harting.
'Can't you turn those bloody things off?'
'I wish I could,' said Cork. 'Something's up, don't ask me what. Personal for Bradfield decypher yourself. Following for Bradfield by hand of officer... it must be his bloody birthday.'
'Funeral more likely,' Turner growled and returned to the diary.
But on Thursdays Harting did have something to do, something real; and not yet realised. Something he kept quiet about. Very. Something urgent and constructive; something secret. Something that made all the other days worthwhile, something to believe in. On Thursdays, Leo Harting touched the hem; and kept his mouth shut. Not even the weekly lie was recorded. Only last Thursday carried any entry at all, and that read: 'Maternus. One o'clock. P.' The rest were as blank, as innocent and as unrevealing as the little virgins in the ground floor corridor.
Or as guilty.
All Harting's life took place that day. He had lived from Thursday to Thursday as others live from year to year. What kind of meeting did they have, Harting and his master? What kind of relationship after all these years of collaboration? Where did they meet? Where did he unpack those files and letters and breathlessly recite his intelligence? In the tower room of a slate-roofed villa? In a soft, linen bed with a soft silk girl and the jeans hanging on the bedpost? Under the bridge where the train went over? Or in the crumbling Embassy with a dusty chandelier, and old father Meadowes holding his little hand on the gilded sofa? In a pretty baroque bedroom of a Godesberg hotel? In a grey block on the new housing estate? In a coy bungalow with a wrought-iron name and stained glass let into the door? He tried to imagine them, Harting and his master, furtive yet assured, the whispered jokes and the whispered laughter. Here: this is a good one, the porno seller whispers; I hardly like to part with this myself. You do like it straight, don't you? 'Well, it's nice to be fancied,' Allerton lisped. Did they sit over a bottle as they casually planned their next assault upon the citadel, while in the background the camera clicked and the assistant gently shuffled the papers? Give it me once more, darling, but gently, like Tony. You're not confident, dear, you haven't read the manuals and learned the parts of the rifle.
Or was it a hasty pick-up? A back-street encounter, a frantic exchange as they drove through the small alleys and prayed to God they had no accident? Or on a hilltop? By a football field, where Harting wore the Balkan hat and the grey uniform of the Movement?
Cork was on the telephone to Miss Peate, and a note of awe had entered his voice:
'Stand by for seven hundred groups from Washington. London please pass and decypher yourself. You'd better warn him now: he's going to be in all night. Look, dear, I don't care whether he's conferring with the Queen of England. This one's top priority, and it's my job to let him know so if you won't I will. Ooh, she is a bitch.'
'I'm glad you think that,' Turner said with one of his rare grills.
'I reckon she captains the team.'
'England versus the Rest of the World,' Turner agreed and they both laughed.
Was it with Praschko, then, that he had lunched at the Maternus? If so, Praschko could hardly be his regular contact, for he would not add the tell-tale P, that Harting, who covered his tracks so well; and would not lunch with Praschko in public either, after the trouble he had taken to sever his relationship. Was there, in that case, a middle-man, a cut-out, between Praschko and Harting? Or was this the day the system failed? Hold the line Turner, hold on to reason, for unreason will be your downfall. Make order out of chaos. Was this P the sign that Praschko proposed to see him in person, to warn him perhaps that Siebkron was on his trail? To order him here was a chance - to order him at any risk and at all costs to steal the Green File before he ran?
Thursday.
He lifted the keys and swung them gently from his finger. Thursday was the day for meeting... pressure day... the day he was warned... the day before he left... the day of the weekly briefing and de-briefing... the day he borrowed the keys from Pargiter.
Christ: had he really slept with Pargiter? There are certain sacrifices, General Shlobodovitch, which not even Leo Harting will make in the service of Mother Russia.
The useless keys. What did he suppose he would get from them? Entry to the coveted despatch box? Balls. He would have observed the procedure; Meadowes had even instructed him in it. He would know very well there were no spare keys to the despatch box in the Duty Officer's bunch. Entry to Registry itself then? Balls again. He would know at a glance that Registry was protected with better locks than these.
So what key did he want ?
What key did he want so desperately that he imperilled his whole career as a spy in order to get a copy of it? What key did he want, that he made up to Jenny Pargiter and risked the disapproval of the Embassy - incurred it, indeed, if Meadowes and Gaunt were anything to go by. What key? The key to the lift, so that he could smuggle out his files, dump them in some hideaway on an upper floor and remove them singly and at leisure in his briefcase? Was that what the missing trolley meant?