A Spy By Nature (14 page)

Fortner now turns to Saul, and Katharine takes me to one side.

“Do you have a card?” she asks, holding a slim piece of embossed white plastic in her hand. “So Fort can get in touch about the movie.”

Luck is on my side.

“Of course.”

We exchange cards. Katharine studies mine carefully.

“Milius, huh? Like the name.”

“Me too,” says Fortner, breaking in from behind and slapping me hard on the back. “So we’re set for John Wayne? Leave the womenfolk at home?”

Katharine adopts an expression of good-humored exasperation.

“Looking forward to it,” I tell him. “I’ll give you a call.”

An hour later the Hobbit weaves toward me carrying a glass of sparkling mineral water. Saul is inside the club, talking to the waitress.

“Hi, Matt.”

He looks slightly sheepish.

“How did you get on?”

“Very well. I think we’re going to see each other again. I just bumped into them as they were leaving and we chatted for another ten minutes.”

“Good,” he says, picking a piece of lemon out of his drink and dropping it to the ground.

“Manners, Matthew.”

“Nobody saw,” he says, looking quickly left and right. “Nobody saw.”

“So how did it go?”

Hawkes is leaning back in a molded plastic chair on the second floor of the Abnex building. The blinds are drawn in the small gray conference room, the door closed. His feet are up on the table, hands clasped behind his neck.

“Fine. Really well.”

He arches his eyebrows, pressing me.

“And? Anything else? What happened?”

I lean forward, putting my arms on the table.

“I met Saul at seven for a drink in the bar. You know, where they have all those bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge.”

Hawkes nods. The soles of his shoes are scuffed to the color of slate.

“Fortner was on time. Seven fifteen. We had another round of drinks, bought our tickets, and went in.”

“Who paid?”

“For the drinks or the tickets?”

“Both.”

“Everybody went dutch. Don’t worry. There was no largesse.”

Somebody walks past outside at a fast clip.

“Go on,” he says.

As it always is when we are talking business, Hawkes’s manner is abrupt to the point of being rude. Increasingly he has become a withdrawn figure, an enigma at the back of the room.

“Saul sat between us. There was no planning to it. It just worked out that way. We saw
The Searchers,
and afterward I told him we had to go to a party. Which we did.”

“Did you invite him along?”

“I thought that would be pushing things.”

“Yes,” he says after a moment’s contemplation. “But in your view Grice wasn’t offended by that?”

I light a cigarette.

“Not at all. Look, I’ve obviously been thinking about what I was going to tell you this afternoon. And it’s a measure of how well things went that I feel as if I have nothing of any significance to reveal. It was all very straightforward, very normal. It went exceptionally well. Fortner has a youthful side to his personality, like someone much younger. Just as you said he did. He fitted in, and if I’d invited him to the party, he would have fitted in there, too. He was making an effort, of course, but he’s one of those middle-aged men who are hanging on to something youthful in their nature.”

Hawkes folds his arms.

“So it wasn’t at all awkward,” I tell him. “When we were having the drink beforehand, we talked like we were old friends. It was a boys’ night out.”

“And how do you want to play it now?”

“My instinct is that they’ll call.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because he likes me. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

No reaction. Hawkes is assessing whether I have read the situation correctly.

I continue, “He left saying that Katharine wanted to have dinner sometime. He also wants to introduce Saul to a friend of his in advertising who used to be an actor. He’s interested, believe me.”

“But in Saul or in you?”

“What do you think?”

“That’s what I’m asking,” he says, not impatiently.

“Look. Saul has a lot of friends. Far more than I do. He likes Fortner, they laugh at each other’s jokes, but there’s no connection between them. Saul will fall by the wayside and resume his day-to-day life without even realizing he has brought the Americans to me. And then it’ll just be the three of us.”

Exactly two weeks later, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, J.T. walks over to my desk and presses a single sheet of Abnex-headed paper into my hand.

“You seen this?” he says.

“What is it?”

I save the file on my computer and turn to him.

“New staff memo. Unbelievable.”

I begin to read.

“Jesus,” I mutter.

“Too right. Fucking nanny state.”

“Next they’ll be telling us what to eat.”

Cohen’s desk faces mine. We work staring into each other’s eyes. He looks up from his computer terminal and says, “What is that?”

“New memo. Just came up from personnel.” J.T. looks at him. “Call it up on your e-mail. They’ve labeled it urgent. Some big-brother piece of shit instructing employees on how to conduct their private lives. Fucking disgrace.”

“Did you manage to get those figures I asked you for at lunch?” Cohen asks him, ignoring the complaint entirely. He will not tolerate any hint of dissent on the team.

“No. I can’t seem to get hold of the guy in Ankara.”

“Well, will you keep trying, please? They’ll be closing up and going home now.”

“Sure.” J.T., suitably rebuked and sheepish, slopes back to his desk and picks up the phone. He leaves the memo beside my computer and I slide it into a drawer.

All seven members of the team, including Murray and Cohen, share a secretary. Tanya is an anglophone Canadian from Montreal with strong views on Quebec separatism and a boyfriend called Dan. She is big boned, thickset, and straightforward, and has been with the company since it started. Tanya wears a lot of makeup and piles her hair up high in a thick ebony bunch, which she never lets down.

“Only Dan gets to see my hair,” she says.

No one has ever met Dan.

At half past three the telephone rings on my desk.

“Who is it, Tanya?”

“Someone from Andromeda.”

I think that it may be the Hobbit, but then she says, “Katharine Lanchester. You want me to take a message?”

Cohen looks up, just a half glance, registering the name.

“No. I’ll take it.”

I was a day away, no more, from calling them myself.

From his desk nearby, Ben mutters, “Play hard to get, Alec. Birds love that.”

“I’m putting her through.”

“Okay.”

Adrenaline now, my hand in my hair, pushing it out of my face.

“Alec Milius.”

“Alec? It’s Katharine Lanchester at Andromeda. Fortner’s wife.”

“Oh, hello. What can I do for you?”

“How are you?”

“Fine, thanks. It’s good to hear from you.”

“Well, Fort so enjoyed going to the movies with you. Said he had a great time.”

Her voice is quick and enthused.

“Yes. You missed a good film.”

“Oh, I can’t stand Westerns. Guys in leather standing in the middle of the street twirling six-shooters, seeing who blinks first. I prefer something more contemporary.”

“Sure.”

“Still, I had a nice dinner with Fortner afterward and he told me all about it. Matter of fact, that’s why I was calling. I was wondering if you and maybe Saul would like to have dinner sometime?”

“Sure, I—”

“I mean I don’t know if you’re free, but…”

“No, no, not at all, I’d like that very much. I’ll ask him and I’m sure he’d like to.”

“Good. Shall we set a date?”

“Okay.”

“When are you not taken up?”

“Uh, anytime next week except—just let me check my diary.”

I know that I’m free every night. I just don’t want it to appear that way.

“How about Wednesday?”

“Terrific. Wednesday it is. So long as Saul can make it.”

“I’m sure he’ll be able to.”

Cohen’s eyes are fixed on the far wall. He is listening in.

“How’s Fortner?” I ask.

“Oh, he’s good. He’s in Washington right now. I’m just hoping that he’ll be back in time. He’s got a lot of work to get through out there.”

“So where shall we meet?”

“Why don’t we just say the In and Out again? Just at the gate there, eight o’clock?”

She had that planned.

“Fine.”

“See you there, then.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

I hang up and there is a rush of blood in my head. “What was all that?” Cohen asks, chewing the end of a pencil. “Personal call.”

The only spy who can provide a decent case for ideology is George Blake. Young, idealistic, impressionable, he was posted by SIS to Korea and kidnapped by the Communists shortly after the 1950 invasion. Given
Das Kapital
to read in his prison cell, Blake became a disciple of Marxism, and the KGB turned him after he offered to betray SIS. “I’d come to the conclusion that I was no longer fighting on the right side,” he later explained.

Upon his release in 1953, Blake returned to England a hero. He had suffered terribly in captivity and was seen to have survived the worst that communism could throw at him. There is television footage of Blake at Heathrow Airport, modest before the world’s press, a bearded man hiding a terrible secret. For the next eight years, working as an agent of the KGB, he betrayed every secret that passed across his desk, including Anglo-American cooperation on the construction of the Berlin Tunnel. His treachery is considered to have been more damaging even than Philby’s.

Blake was caught more by a process of elimination than by distinguished detective work. SIS summoned him to Broadway Buildings, knowing that they had to extract a confession from him or he would walk free. After three days of fruitless interrogation, in which Blake denied any involvement with the Soviets, the SIS officer in charge of the case played what he knew was his final card.

“Look,” he said, “we know you’re working for the Russians, and we understand why. You were a prisoner of the Communists, they tortured you. They blackmailed you into betraying SIS. You had no choice.”

This was too much for George.

“No!” he shouted, rising from his chair. “Nobody tortured me! Nobody blackmailed me! I acted out of a belief in communism.”

There was no financial incentive, he told them, no pressure to approach the KGB.

“It was quite mechanical,” he said. “It was as if I had ceased to exist.”

The platforms and escalators of Green Park underground station are thick with trapped summer heat. The humidity follows me as I clunk through the ticket barriers and take a flight of stairs up to street level. The tightly packed crowds gradually thin out as I move downhill toward the In and Out Club.

I am casually dressed, in the American style: camel-colored chinos, a blue button-down shirt, old suede loafers. Some thought has gone into this, some notion of what Katharine would like me to be. I want to give an impression of straightforwardness. I want to remind her of home.

I see Fortner first, about fifty yards farther down the street. He is dressed in an old, baggy linen suit, wearing a white shirt, blue deck shoes, and no tie. At first I am disappointed to see him. There was a possibility that he would still be in Washington, and I had hoped that Katharine would be waiting for me alone. But it was inevitable that Fortner would make it: there’s simply too much at stake for him to stay away.

Katharine is beside him, more tanned than I remember, making gentle bobbing turns on her toes and heels, her hands gently clasped behind her back. She is wearing a plain white T-shirt with loose charcoal trousers and light canvas shoes. The pair of them look as if they have just stepped off a ketch in St. Lucia. They see me now, and Katharine waves enthusiastically, starting to walk in my direction. Fortner lumbers just behind her, his creased pale suit stirring in the breeze.

“Sorry. Am I late?”

“Not at all,” she says. “We only just got here ourselves.”

She kisses me. Moisturizer.

“Good to see ya, Milius,” says Fortner, giving me a butch, pumping handshake and a wry old smile. But he looks tired underneath the joviality, far off and jet-lagged. Perhaps he came here directly from Heathrow.

“I like your suit,” I tell him, though I don’t.

“Had it for years. Made in Hong Kong by a guy named Fat.”

We start walking toward The Ritz.

“So it was great that you could make it tonight.”

“I was glad you rang.”

“Saul not with you?”

“He couldn’t come in the end. Sends his apologies. Had to go off at the last minute to shoot an advert.”

I never asked Saul to come along. I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to.

“That’s too bad. Maybe next time.” Katharine moves some loose hairs out of her face. “Hope you won’t be bored.”

“Not at all. I’m happy it being just the three of us.”

“You gotta girlfriend, Milius?”

I don’t mind it too much that Fortner has decided to call me that. It suggests a kind of intimacy.

“Not at the moment. Too busy. I used to have one but we broke up.”

This is quietly registered by both of them, another fact about me. We continue along the street, the silence lengthening.

“So where are we heading?” I ask, trying to break it, trying to stop any sense that we might have nothing to say to one another. I must keep talking to them. I must earn their trust.

“Good question,” says Fortner, loudly clapping his hands. It is as if I have woken him up from a nap. “Kathy and I have been going to this place for years. We thought we’d show it to you. It’s a small Italian restaurant that’s been owned by the same Florentine family for decades. Maître d’ goes by the name of Tucci.”

“Sounds great.”

Katharine’s attention has been distracted. There are hampers, golf bags, and elegant skirts on display in the windows of Fortnum & Mason and she has stopped to look at them. I am watching her when Fortner puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “I like this part of town.” He’s decided to play the avuncular card right away. “It’s so…
anachronistic,
so Merchant Ivory, you know? Round here, an English gentleman can still get his toast done on one side, have an ivory handle attached to his favorite shooting stick, get a barber to file his nails down and rub his neck with cologne. You got your bespoke shirts, your customized suits. Look at all this stuff.”

“You like that, honey?” Katharine asks, pointing at a smart two-piece ladies’ outfit in a window.

“Not a whole lot,” Fortner replies, his mood abruptly fractious. “Why, you wanna get it?”

“No. Just askin’.”

“Well, I’m hungry,” he says. “Let’s go eat.”

The restaurant has an outside staircase flaked with dried moss leading down to a basement. Fortner, walking ahead of us, clumps down the steps and through the heavy entrance door. He doesn’t bother holding it open for Katharine. He just wants to get inside and start eating. Katharine and I are left on the threshold and I hold the door open for her, letting her glide past me with a whisper of thanks that is almost conspiratorial.

The restaurant is only half full. There’s a small clearing immediately inside the entrance, where we are met by a paunchy, hair-oiled Italian in late middle-age. Fortner already has his arm wrapped around him, with a big, fulfilled smile all over his face.

“Here they come now,” he is saying as we come through the door, his voice hearty and full of good cheer. “Tucci, let me introduce you to a young friend of ours, Mr. Alec Milius. Very smart guy in the oil business.”

“Nice to meet you, sir,” says Tucci, shaking my hand, but he hasn’t even looked at me. His eyes have been fixed on Katharine since she walked in.

“And your beautiful wife, Mrs. Grice,” he says. “How are you, my dear?”

Katharine bends to meet Tucci’s puckered kiss, offering him a smooth, pale cheek. She doesn’t bother explaining that Grice isn’t her surname.

“You look as beautiful as ever, madam.”

“Oh, you’re incorrigible, Tucci. So charming.”

The slimy old bastard leads us downstairs into a dark basement where we are shown to a small table covered in a faded red cloth and cutlery. The decor is very seventies, but it isn’t consciously retro. Cheap wood carvings line the walls and there are candles in old wicker flasks on shelves. Hardened wax clings to their sides like jewelery.

Fortner shuffles onto a sofa attached to the wall and Tucci pins the table up against his legs. I take the chair to Fortner’s right and Katharine sits opposite me. Three of us in a booth. Rather than have one of his dumb-looking Sicilian studs do it, Tucci then goes back upstairs and brings down three menus and a wine list, thereby giving himself as much time as possible with Katharine. All of his premeal small talk is addressed to her.
That’s a lovely dress, Mrs. Grice. Have you been on holiday? You look so well.
By contrast, Fortner and I are treated with something approaching contempt. Eventually, Fortner loses his cool and tells Tucci to bring us some drinks.

“Right away, Mr. Fortner. Right away. I have a nice bottle of Chianti you try. And some Pellegrino, perhaps?”

“Whatever. That’d be great.”

Fortner takes off his jacket to eat, tossing it in a crumpled heap onto the sofa beside him. Then he undoes the top three buttons of his shirt and inserts a napkin, mafia-style, below his neck. His chest hair is clearly visible, tight black curls like cigarette burns.

In the early part of the meal we do not talk about any aspect of the oil business. I am not tapped for information, for tips and gossip, nor do Katharine and Fortner discuss ongoing projects at Andromeda. I have ordered veal, but it is tough and bland. Both Americans are having the same thing—plump breasts of chicken in what appears to be a mushroom cream sauce; it looks a lot better than mine. We share out french beans and potato croquettes and get through the first bottle of red wine within half an hour.

We get along fine, better even than I had expected. Everything is easy and enjoyable. The generation gap between us, as was proved by the trip to the NFT, is no hindrance at all. Although Fortner’s age is in some ways accentuated by the vigor of his younger bride, he has that certain playfulness about him that largely offsets his age.

Still, I cannot work out why Katharine would ever have chosen to marry him. Fortner is handsome, yes, with a certain gruff charm and a full head of hair, but close up, sitting near her in the dim light of the restaurant, the virility dissipates: he suffers by comparison, looking blotchy and liquor-sick, just another man on the wrong side of fifty. With a few drinks inside him, Fortner has a nice, sly sarcastic manner that he can get away with on account of his age—in a younger man, it would look like arrogance—yet there is a quality of solipsism about him that overshadows any occasional glints of mischief. As I felt when I first met him, though Fortner looks to have experienced a great deal, he appears to have learned very little from those experiences. There is even an element of stupidity in him. He can at times appear almost a fool.

Yet his attitude toward Katharine is not one of deference and admiration. He is often short with her, critical and dismissive. At one point, just as I am finishing off my veal, she embarks on a story about her college days at Amherst. Before she has really begun, Fortner is interrupting her, telling her not to bore Alec with stories from her youth. Then he simply takes the conversation off on a separate tangent with which he is more at ease. This is done consciously, as a premeditated recrimination, but Katharine barely seems to mind. It is as if she has accepted the subjugatory role of pupil, like a student who has moved in with her tutor and finds herself living in his shadow. This is not how things should be. Katharine is smarter, quicker-witted, and more subtle, in her views and manner, than Fortner. He is gauche by comparison.

Just once or twice her face registers impatience when Fortner goes too far, though I sense that this may be largely for my benefit, another tactic she employs in flirtation. Nevertheless, it is all the more pointed for being concealed from him. By the time the pudding menus arrive I am convinced that she is starved of simple affections and would cherish a little attention.

Tucci recommends the tiramisu and flatters Katharine by telling her that she is the last person on earth who should worry about putting on weight. She will not be persuaded and orders fruit instead. Fortner asks if the restaurant still serves ice cream, and Tucci gives him a slightly withering look before saying yes. Fortner then orders a large bowl of mint choc chip. I ask for the tiramisu, and Tucci disappears upstairs with our order.

This is when they finally ask me a question about Abnex.

“How long have you been there?” Katharine inquires, rearranging her napkin so that it forms a neat square on her lap.

“About nine months.”

“You like it?”

She has asked me this before. At the party.

“Yes. I find the work interesting. I’m underpaid and the hours are antisocial, but I have prospects.”

“Boy, you really know how to sell it,” Fortner mutters.

“You’ve just got me on a bad day. I had an argument with my boss earlier. He comes down hard when things don’t go his way.”

“What did you do wrong?” Katharine asks.

“That’s just it. I didn’t.”

“Okay then,” she says patiently. “What does he think you did wrong?” I get all the components of the story straight in my mind, then kick off. “He told me to set up a meeting with an associate of his, who I think is unreliable. Name of Warner. This guy is an old friend of Alan’s, so he feels a residual loyalty toward him. In other words, he’s prepared to overlook the fact that Warner’s a loser. Alan knows I think this, and it’s almost as if he enjoys giving me as much contact with him as possible.”

Fortner’s head drops slightly, his eyes moving slowly across the table.

“Anyway, Warner didn’t return any of my calls for a week. I must have been ringing him five times a day. I needed some figures. Eventually I gave up and just got them from someone else. Alan went spastic, said I’d gone over his head and questioned his authority. And I’m at Abnex on a trial basis, so it doesn’t bode well.”

“A trial basis?” says Fortner, looking up immediately. He hadn’t stopped listening to me. “You mean you’re not a full-time employee?”

“I’m halfway through a trial period. I have to attain a consistently high standard of work or they’ll kick me out.”

“Jesus,” says Katharine, swallowing a mouthful of Chianti. “That’s a lot of pressure to work under.”

“Yeah,” adds Fortner. “You’re a human being, not a Cadillac.”