Authors: Charles Cumming
“What?”
Pretending not to have heard him buys me the time to think of a reason.
“I said couldn’t you have done the letters at home?”
“No. I had all my notes here.”
“I see. Bye then.”
“See you, Harry.”
He turns the corner and disappears, taking the stairs all the way to the ground floor. I continue to sit at my desk, wanting to clutch my head in my hands and sink to the floor. After all the planning and preparation, it seems extraordinary to me that something should have gone wrong so quickly.
I put the documents into my briefcase, place the letters beside the postage meter, shut off the lights in the office, and take the lift to the foyer. The blur of aftermath makes it impossible to think at all clearly. I leave the Abnex building without speaking to George and disappear out onto Broadgate. It’s five thirty.
Some things become clear as I walk around.
I may have overreacted. What did Cohen really see? He saw Milius, the new boy, doing some printing. No more, no less. He saw letters on my desk, cold cups of coffee, the outward signs of an afternoon’s work. Nothing untoward about that. Nothing to make him suspect sharp practice.
What do I know about Cohen? That he is guileful and malevolent. That he is the sort of person to sneak up on a colleague in a deserted office on a weekend afternoon and get a kick out of giving him a fright. Cohen feels simultaneously threatened by what I am capable of and contemptuous of what I represent. He’s just another Nik, snuffing out his insecurity by making others feel uneasy.
But he will be watching me that much more closely from now on. It was my first mistake, the only thing to have gone wrong so far.
Why didn’t I see him coming?
Just after six, still feeling restless and shaken, I take a slow, half-empty tube to West Kensington. I have rationalized what happened, and yet it continues to play on my nerves. There should have been a clean through-line of action in the last six hours, right up to the handover this evening, but it has been disrupted by Cohen and by my own stupidity.
Emerging from the underground station into a humid September evening, I walk slowly, clutching the briefcase tightly in my right hand. Sweat has warmed the handle, making it clammy to the touch. The contents feel almost radioactive, as if they will somehow burn through the leather case. This thought in itself strikes me as absurd, yet I cannot shake it off. I want to stop and open the briefcase to check that the documents are still inside. Dog walkers and lone queers pass me as I walk through Hammersmith Cemetery, and each one appears to steal a glance at the case, as if aware of its contents. Their faces seem full of bored, suspicious loathing, and this only deepens my sense of isolation. I was warned that the first drop would be like this, but the chaos of it has completely bewildered me.
Approaching the door of Saul’s apartment building at seven fifteen, I turn around in the street to check for evidence of a tail. There is an old lady loitering near a fenced-off expanse of grass, but otherwise the road is deserted. I look closely at the cars parked up and down the length of Queen’s Club Gardens, but all of them appear to be unoccupied. Now there is not solely the probability of American and British surveillance, which I had anticipated, but the added problem of Cohen. It is as if I am expecting him to appear around the next corner at any moment.
Saul buzzes me in without saying hello and I climb the four flights of stairs to his flat. This is a slow business. My mind has been scrambled by the afternoon’s events and my body feels tired and cumbersome. Yet the optimism contained in his smile as he opens the front door momentarily lifts me. I had forgotten just how much I rely on him for a sense of being
liked.
He plants his arm across my back and gives it a slap.
Katharine and Fortner have come up behind me on the stairs. They are so close that Saul asks if we have come together. How could I not have seen them after staring so long down Queen’s Club Gardens? They must have been parked a long way from the building, watched from a distance as I entered, and then followed me up. As soon as I see them, my stomach tightens.
“Hi, sweetie,” Katharine says, kissing me on the cheek. Her face looks puffy up close, suddenly middle-aged. “You okay?”
“Fine, thanks,” I say. “Fine.”
Both of them look unnervingly focused. Fortner’s complexion is almost gray against the faded white of his shirt, but there is a look of intense concentration in his fixed, still eyes. In his left hand he is holding a single bottle of wine wrapped in thin crepe paper, and in his right a tanned leather briefcase that I have not seen before. He will be using this to carry my documents away.
Katharine surges forward to plant a kiss on Saul’s cheek and compliments him on his clothes. He is wearing a cream shirt and a trim pair of dark moleskins with what look to be a new pair of running shoes. Saul has always had the money to buy decent clothes. He and Fortner shake hands as we shuffle around, putting our jackets and coats in the hall.
With Saul’s back turned, I set my briefcase down next to an old umbrella stand and look to Fortner for approval. He nods quickly, letting me know that he has registered where it is. I look back at Saul to check that he has not seen this exchange, but he is speaking to Katharine, unaware. It occurs to me that I have still not properly considered the implications of allowing a handover to take place here. Should Saul ever find out, the consequences would be enough to end our friendship, yet I barely feel a jolt of betrayal. I have to concentrate so hard nowadays on every aspect of my relationship with Andromeda that there’s no time to consider anything as mundane as friendship.
“Everything all right?” Fortner says to me, not bothering to lower his voice.
“Absolutely.”
“Did you find that stuff we needed?”
Across the hall, Saul is still talking to Katharine, though she must have one ear listening in on what we are saying.
“Yeah. I got it. It’s there.”
I nod in the direction of the briefcase. Fortner sets his own down beside it.
“Nice goin’.”
“Come through and I’ll introduce you,” Saul is saying, and he guides the three of us into the sitting room.
I just float through the next half hour, oblivious of the others, unable to concentrate on anything beyond the possibility of discovery. We are introduced to Dave, Saul’s friend from Spain, and Susannah, his girlfriend. They are the only other guests, which concerns me. Fortner’s absence, when it comes, would not be so noticeable in a larger crowd of people.
Dave is a squat thirtysomething, bald before his time, with a generous smile stitched below weak eyes. Susannah is also short, but pale and thin, with vanished tits and charity shop wardrobe. I distrust her immediately and think of him as ineffectual. He has a slightly desperate way of looking at me, a craving to be friendly and affable. Saul pours us all a drink and a conversation develops among the five of them to which I make no contribution. The utter pointlessness of getting to know new people, given my present situation, is palpable. Smells of garlic and wine drift in from the kitchen, where Saul goes from time to time to check on the food.
Toward eight o’clock, as we are standing up to go to the table for dinner, Dave asks me how I know Saul.
“Old school friends,” I tell him. “From way back.”
“Listen to him,” Saul interjects loudly from across the room. “From way back. You never used to say that, Alec.” He looks over at Katharine. “You two are turning him into an American. The other day on the phone he told me to have a nice day.”
“Oh bullshit,” I say, but the way this comes out it sounds angry and petulant. There’s a sudden embarrassed silence among us, and Saul grimaces, a joke gone wrong.
“All right, all right,” he says, and his face fills with disappointment. He has been growing more impatient with me in the last few months, knowing that something in our friendship has changed, but without any real knowledge as to why. I don’t telephone Saul as much as I used to and don’t have the time to send him jokes via e-mail. We haven’t been out for a drink, just the two of us, since Christmas of last year, and I have entirely lost track of his career, his girlfriends, his worries and concerns. This is how I imagined things would pan out, but now that something has gone wrong, the burden of secrecy feels suddenly overwhelming. With Kate gone, Saul is the one person I might trust to talk to about what happened this afternoon. I want to tell him the truth, I want to tell him exactly what is going on. This constant entanglement with bluff, double-bluff, second-guess, and guile is wearing. Any notion of trust or honor that I ever had has vanished. My life has become a wall of lies shored up against the possibility of capture. I cannot recall what it felt like just to sit around this flat in the old days, watching videos with Saul and pissing away our teens and twenties.
“Telecommunications,” Dave is saying, to no one but me. We are sitting beside each other at the dining-room table, Katharine and Fortner at either end, with Saul and Susannah opposite us.
“What about them specifically?”
“You know how they’re paying for the Internet and all the fiber optic networks?”
Has he been talking to me about this before now? Have I missed something? Have I just been nodding and mumbling at him, my mind drifted off elsewhere?
“No. How?”
“Answering machines.”
“What do you mean, ‘answering machines’?”
Dave leans forward, plucks a napkin from his side plate, and places it on his lap.
“Before answer phones came along, you just dialed a number and let it ring out, right? If somebody wasn’t in, you hung up and there was no charge for making the call. But all that’s changed now that everybody has an answering machine. Whenever you make a call, it kicks in after two or three rings. So a connection’s been made, right? And if a connection’s been made, then you’ve added to your phone bill. They have a minimum charge of four pence, so it adds up. How many answering machines do you think there are in the UK?”
“I have no idea.”
“Maybe fifteen million, conservative estimate. So every time somebody rings those machines, British Telecom is making sixty million pence, which is…which is…”
The night is still while Dave makes his calculation. I do it for him.
“Six hundred thousand pounds.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Thank you.”
Susannah is reacting to something Saul has said. She has a laugh like a broken fan belt. There’s some kind of mousse appetizer in front of me and I am already halfway through it.
“But of course the really smart thing about answering machines is that you have to call back if someone leaves you a message. So that’s another guaranteed call for BT, another four pence minimum. It’s no wonder they make the profits they do. What is it? About seven hundred and fifty pounds a minute?”
“Is that how much they make?” Katharine asks. Suddenly the entire table is listening to Dave’s monologue.
“Apparently. And it doesn’t just stop with answering machines. There’s call waiting now, too. That’s the most craven one of all. You ring up a friend, and even if he’s on the line talking to someone else you’re made to wait. Beep. Beep.
Please hold the line while we try to connect you. The other person knows you are waiting.
And it goes on and on. Fucking woman sounds like Margaret Thatcher. So you’re there, you’re holding the line, but they’re not trying to connect you. Like fuck they are. They’re just happy to let you run up your bill.”
“That’s right,” says Fortner. “They are.”
He looks relaxed and composed, a drink inside him, safe in the knowledge that the Abnex documents are in the next room.
“And let’s say they do.” Dave is speaking faster and faster, gesturing wildly, cutlery in hand. I look across at Susannah, but she has nothing but pride in her eyes as Dave swallows a mouthful of mousse and continues with his discourse. “Then the first person they were talking to has to run up
their
phone bill waiting for the other person to talk to the person who’s waiting. That can go on for hours. And even then, one of them will have to call the other back, which is another guaranteed call for BT. And then—and
then
—there are itemized phone bills. If you’re sharing a flat with somebody and he denies making that five-pound call to the number listed on the bill, you then have to ring that number up and embarrass yourself by asking who the fuck they are, just so that you can work out if it’s your bill or his. You ever done that, Alec?”
“I live alone.”
Again, silence settles around the table in the wake of my speaking. Saul frowns and then turns his head to face Katharine, his lips drawn together in a tight, disappointed line. Dave, looking pale and embarrassed, finishes eating, and for a while the only noise in the room is the tinkling of his fork against his china plate, the quick munch of his jaw as he chews and swallows. Saul is already up and collecting the plates before Dave has finished, stacking them noisily and making for the kitchen.
“Can I give you a hand?” I ask, and, without looking at me, he says, “Sure.”
“I’ll come too,” Katharine offers, but Saul gestures at her to sit down.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I only need Alec.”
Once we are in the kitchen, he turns on me.
“What’s the matter with you these days?”
What surprises me about my reaction to this is that I am grateful to him for asking. For a brief moment I consider not bothering to deny any unhappiness. I want the opportunity to unburden myself, but it’s untenable. I have to keep up the masquerade.
“I’m fine. Fine,” I tell him, managing a smile, but there can be nothing in either my voice or my attitude to convince him of this.
“You’re not fine, Alec,” he says, the weight of his body shifting forward, coming at me. “You’re hardly here. Most of the time I don’t even recognize you anymore.”
He is keeping his voice low, tinkering with a pan on the stove that has pasta boiling hard inside it. I am worried that Fortner, who is only across the corridor in the chair nearest the kitchen, will hear us, so I move away from the sink and close the door until it is ajar.
“Come on, Saul. Who has the will to listen to a guy they’ve never met before doing his party piece about answering machines and phone bills? I have a lot on my mind.”
“We all work hard, for fuck’s sake,” he says, but before I have time to reply he has carried a bowl of salad into the dining room and left me alone in the kitchen. I turn to the sink and begin rinsing the plates in a coughing stream of lukewarm water. One by one, I slot them into the dishwasher.
“Is the pasta ready?” he says, coming back in.
“I don’t know. Listen, why don’t I stay tonight? We can talk then, have a smoke, watch some TV.”
“Okay,” he says, forking a strand of tagliatelle out of the water. Then, more quietly: “Whatever.”
At half past ten, with the main course out of the way, Fortner makes his move.
Saul, Dave, and Susannah are having a conversation about the latest cinema releases, which to me is always the sign of a bad dinner party. Fortner interjects to ask if anyone has seen
Mission Impossible,
and Susannah says yes she has and tells a boring story that reveals only that she has misunderstood the plot. More summer blockbusters are discussed—
Independence Day, Die Hard with a Vengeance,
one with Schwarzenegger I haven’t heard of called
Eraser
—and everybody gets to share his views about whether Arnie is past his prime. Dave plays the art-house card by revealing that he has seen “the new Bertolucci.” As far as I can tell, it’s just a story about a bunch of seedy British ex-pats sleeping around in Tuscany. In the middle of all this, Katharine says simply, “Honey, have you taken your medication?”