Absolute Friends (39 page)

"Understood."

"_With one hand only__ you take off the vest. Slowly, slowly. No fast movements or we shoot you. It's not a problem. We kill people. We don't mind. Maybe you kill people too, yes?"

Using his left hand and punching his right stiffly in the air, Mundy finds the zipper at his neck and draws it gingerly downward.

"Okay. _Now.__"

He slithers out of the vest and lets it flop to the ground.

"Put your hands back on your head. Good boy. Now you take five big paces to your left. Stop."

Mundy takes his five paces and sees out of the side of his right eye a brave young gendarme approach his vest, prod it with the barrel of his rifle, then turn it over.

"All clear, captain!" he reports.

As a supreme act of courage, the boy shoulders his rifle, picks up the vest and takes it down the hill to his leader, where he dumps it like dead game at his feet.

"Take off your shirt."

Mundy takes it off. He wears no undershirt. Zara says he's too thin. Mustafa says he's too fat.

"Take off your left shoe. _Slowly!__"

He takes off his left shoe. Slowly.

"Right shoe."

He stoops and takes off his right shoe. Equally slowly.

"Now socks. Good boy. Now take five paces to your right."

He's back where he started, standing barefoot in thistles.

"Unbuckle your belt. _Slowly.__ Put it on the ground. Strip naked--yes, your underpants too. Now put your hands back on your head. What's your name?"

"Mundy. Edward Arthur. British subject."

"Born?"

The captain is holding Mundy's passport in the hand that doesn't hold the field glasses, and he is checking Mundy's answers against it. He must have fished it out of the pocket of the vest.

"August 15, 1947."

"Where?"

"Lahore, Pakistan."

"Why do you have a British passport if you're from Pakistan?"

The question is too large for one unarmed naked man to answer. When my mother began her labor the sun was still Indian. By the time she was dead it was Pakistani, but you wouldn't understand that.

"My father was British." And my mother was Irish, he might add, but he doesn't feel the need.

An old trooper with Father Christmas eyebrows is waddling up the hill to him, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. He is accompanied by the brave young gendarme carrying a pair of crimson pajamas.

"Bend over, please, son," the old trooper says quietly. "You make any problems, they'll shoot us all, so be a good fellow."

The last time anyone did this to me was in the early days of my recruitment to the secret flag. Kate decided I had prostate cancer because I was peeing too often, but it was nerves. The old trooper has his fingers so far up Mundy's arse he wants to cough, but he doesn't find whatever he is looking for, because he shouts _"Nix"__ to the captain. The crimson shirt has no buttons so Mundy must haul it over his head. The trousers are too big for him, even after he has drawn the tapes as tight as they'll go.

Two men have grabbed his arms and are pinning them behind his back. Leg irons snap round his ankles. A gumshield forces his teeth apart. Blackened goggles descend over his eyes. He would like to shout but he can only gurgle. He would like to fall over but he can't do that either, because a dozen hands are toppling him crablike down the hill. His mouth fills with exhaust fumes as more hands shove him facedown on a throbbing steel floor between a gauntlet of toe caps. He is back in the Steel Coffin, heading for the marshaling yards, but without Sasha's monkey wrench to look forward to. The floor jerks forward and his feet crash against the rear doors. This act of indiscipline earns him what, despite the darkness, is a blinding kick over the left eye. Change of reference: he is Sasha in the dog van on his way to lunch with the Professor. Then he's Ted Mundy again, in the _grüne Minna,__ being driven to the police station to make another voluntary statement.

The van bumps to a halt. He is hopping up an iron ladder under the churning rotaries of an unseen helicopter. He is flat on the floor again, this time chained to the deck. The helicopter lifts off. He feels sick. The helicopter flies, he doesn't know for how long. It lands, he is grappled down more steps, across tarmac and through a succession of clanging doors. He is chained to a dunce's chair in a gray brick room with no windows and a steel door, but it takes him a while to realize he can see.

After that, in his later memory, it is only a matter of a few hours and several lifetimes before he is a free man again, wearing his own clothes and sitting in a flowered armchair in a pleasantly furnished office with rosewood furniture and regimental trophies and photographs of heroic pilots waving from their cockpits and an eternal gas-fired log burning cheerfully in the grate. With one hand he holds a warm poultice to his eye. In the other, a king-sized dry martini. And across the room from him sits his old friend and confidant Orville J. Rourke--call me Jay--of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia--and dammit, Ted, you don't look a day older than when you and I took those crazy walks through darkest London all those years ago.

Mundy's return to life, now that he is able to reconstruct it, came in three set pieces.

There was Mundy the Terrorist Prisoner, chained to a chair and being asked a lot of aggressive questions about his movements by two young American men and one matronly American woman. The matronly woman kept gabbling Arabic at him, presumably in the hope of catching him out.

Then there was Mundy the Object of Concern--initially to a young male doctor, also American and by his demeanor military. This doctor was accompanied by an orderly bearing Mundy's clothes on a hanger. The doctor needed to _take a look at this eye of yours, if I may, sir.__

The orderly also called Mundy sir. "Sir, there's a restroom right across the corridor here, also a razor for your convenience," he said, hanging Mundy's clothes on the handle of the open cell door.

The doctor advised Mundy that the eye was nothing to worry about. Just rest it. If it gets sore, put a patch over it. Mundy, ever the wag, said thanks, he had one over it not long ago.

And after that there was Mundy the Magnanimous, holding court in the same room where he is now sitting, being plied with hot coffee and cookies, and Camel cigarettes he didn't want, while he received the apologies of people he didn't recognize and assured them that he had no hard feelings, everything's forgiven and forgotten. And these embarrassed young men and women had names like Hank and Jeff and Nan and Art, and they wanted Mundy to know that our chief of ops was on his way from Berlin _right now,__ and meanwhile--well, jeez, sir--all we can say is, we're so sorry, we had no idea who you were and--this is Art speaking now--_I am truly proud to meet you, Mr. Mundy, sir, they taught your fine record on my training course__. By which was meant, Mundy assumed, his fine record as a Cold War spy rather than as a language tutor on the skids or a loyal servant of the late King Ludwig. Though how on earth Art was able to put Mundy's name to a standard case history taught at his CIA training school was another mystery, unless Jay Rourke in his outrage had used it to rub their noses in the mess they'd made. Because Mr. Rourke is really pissed with us, sir, and he needs Mr. Mundy to know that before he gets here.

"I guess the best we can say for those kids is, they were obeying orders." Rourke is summing up, with a doleful shake of his head, an hour later.

Mundy says he knows, he knows. Rourke hasn't changed either, he's thinking. Which is a pity. With people, you see in them what you think you already know, so Mundy sees the same droll, spare, good-looking, lazy-spoken Bostonian shit that Rourke always was, with his Dublin suit and Harvard shoes with heavy treads and easy Irish charm.

"Just too bad we never got to say a decent goodbye," Rourke recalls, as if he feels there is something else he needs to get off his chest. "Some bushfire crisis blew up so fast there wasn't time to pack my toothbrush. And dammit, for the life of me, Ted, I don't believe I remember what it was. Still, I guess hullo is always better than goodbye. Even in _these__ circumstances."

Mundy guesses it is too, and takes a pull of his martini.

"We tell Austrian liaison we're interested in a certain house--we suspect a terrorist connection and we want first look at anybody acting suspiciously around the place--well, I guess that's what we asked for and that's what we have to live with these days. Overcompliance from our friends and allies, and a disregard for innocent people's human rights."

And you're still peddling the same spurious sedition, Mundy notes.

"Enjoy the war?" Rourke asks.

"Hated it," Mundy retorts, whacking the ball back as hard as his weightless condition allows.

"Me too. Agency never gave those fucking Washington evangelists one scrap of encouragement, you have my word."

Mundy says he can well believe it.

"Ted, can we stop pissing around?"

"If that's what we're doing."

"Then why don't you just explain what you were doing up there, Ted, four in the morning for Christ's sake, taking bearings in an empty house that we have a certain very specific interest in? I mean, frankly, between you and me, getting on that plane and flying down here, I couldn't help asking myself whether we weren't right to pull you in."

13

MUNDY HAS BEEN GIVING a lot of thought to how he will answer Rourke's questions, and has come to the reluctant conclusion that he must tell him the truth. He has examined the problem from Sasha's point of view, and from his own. He has carefully considered Sasha's exhortation to confidentiality and Richard's thousand-dollar contract, but he has decided that in the circumstances neither is binding. It's only on the matter of Dimitri's grand design, and his declared war on the corrupting power of corporate America, that he feels any compunction to sweeten his story. For the rest, he is happy to fall back on his old confessive ways.

After all, what's a bit of burning joss between old pals?

And Rourke, exactly as in their Eaton Place days, hears him out with just that blend of broad tolerance and disrespect for authority that made frank talking with him such a pleasure. And when Mundy has finished his narrative, Rourke remains motionless and chin in hand for quite some while, staring ahead of him and allowing himself only the odd little nod now and then and a grim pursing of the lips, before he rises from his chair and, headmaster-like, patrols the room with his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his gabardine trousers.

"Ted, do you have any _idea__ what Sasha got up to in the last ten years?" he asks, placing so much emphasis on the word _idea__ that Mundy can only have the worst expectations. "The people he rode with, the bad places he was in?"

"Not a lot."

"Sasha didn't tell you where he'd _been?__ Who he'd _played__ with?"

"We haven't talked that much. He wrote to me a bit while he was in the wilderness. Nothing very revealing."

"Wilderness? He used that word?"

"No, I did."

"Up there in the safe flat at the lakeside--he told you Dimitri was this great, good man?"

"He's pretty smitten with him."

"And you find no _change__ in him, after all these years of separation--no quantum change, no feeling he's moved on, moved _away__ from you, in some intangible sense?"

"Same weird little bugger he always was, far as I can see," says Mundy awkwardly, beginning not to like the trend of this conversation.

"Has Sasha given you any indication at _all__ of how he feels about 9/11, for instance?"

"He thought it was a foul act."

"Not even 'They had it coming to them' kind of thing?"

"Not a murmur of it, rather surprisingly."

"Surprisingly?"

"Well, given the stuff he used to chuck at America, and the stuff he's seen while he's been out on the stomp, it wouldn't exactly have surprised me if he'd said, 'Serves the bastards right.'"

"But he didn't?"

"Quite the reverse."

"And this was in a letter?"

"Sure."

"A solus letter--dedicated to the subject?"

"One of a long line."

"Written when?"

"A couple of days after the event. Maybe one day. Don't think I noticed."

"From where?"

"Sri Lanka, probably. He had some kind of lectureship in Kandy."

"And you found the letter totally convincing? You didn't feel it was--like--"

"Like what?"

Rourke gives one of his sophisticated shrugs. "That it was written for the record, maybe. In case his pal Teddy was thinking of passing it to any of his connections in British Intelligence."

"No, I didn't," Mundy says hotly to Rourke's back, and waits for him to turn round, but he doesn't.

"Ted, when you were in Berlin with Sasha all those years ago, did he have explicit views on _direct action?__"

"He was dead against it. All the way."

"Did he have a reason?"

"Sure he did. Violence plays into the hands of the reactionaries. It's self-defeating. He said it over and over again. Dozen different ways."

"So he was practical. Violence doesn't work, so let's go for something that does. If it had worked he'd have gone for it."

"You can call it practical. You can call it moral. It was an article of faith for him. If he'd believed in bombs, he'd have thrown bombs. That's who he is. He didn't believe in them, so the bomb-throwers hijacked the protest movement and he made the mistake of a lifetime and jumped over the Wall the wrong way."

Mundy is protesting too much and knows it, but Rourke's insinuations are setting off alarm bells in him that need shouting down.

"So if I told you he'd jumped over _another__ wall, would you really be so surprised?" Rourke asks languidly.

"Depends which one you're talking about."

"No, it doesn't. You know damn well, Ted Mundy"--more languidly still. "We're talking about going the black road. We're talking about a crippled obsessive who must either play in the Super Bowl or he's a nobody." Rourke opens his hands and appeals to the eternal gas-fired log. "_I'm Sasha, fundamentalist. Fly me! I divert rivers and move mountains. I sit at the feet of great philosophers and turn their words into deeds.__ Know who Dimitri is, when he's not being Dimitri?"