Fortunately, for matters culinary – and much else – Mr Bauer had Mrs Gabriel, brown-haired, pigeon-chested guardian of laundry and kitchen, keeper of the keys, and the only person in Smithson’s Chambers who actually knew where everything was, or could at least locate it while it was still needed or indeed vaguely relevant. She wore thick brown stockings and a hideous blue nylon housecoat over her street clothes, and flat shoes with soles composed of some substance which caused her to scuff up cracking little charges of static electricity, so that it was possible to hear her approaching across the Chambers’ worn carpets like a tiny electrical storm. Rudi had invested some time in wondering about her relationship to Mr Bauer. Wife? Daughter? Mistress? Nurse? And then it had all become clear; Mrs Gabriel was Mr Bauer’s housekeeper, and therefore transcended all those merely temporal descriptions. Without Mrs Gabriel, Mr Bauer would not only have been unable to function; he would have been unable to exist at all. Mrs Gabriel was a steady cook of the unadventurous English type, whose heavy food and nourishing gravies had sustained generations of public schoolboys all the way back to the days of the Great Game. It wasn’t that Rudi
disliked
her food, exactly, but when she brought her steak-and-kidney pies to the table, with their ritual accompaniment of boiled potatoes, boiled carrots and boiled peas, the Limoges gravy boat carrying its velvety cargo in their wake, he felt a dark wing of depression fold around him. He would have suggested other English dishes, perhaps á la Fergus Henderson, but he suspected the first mention of roasted marrow bones would galvanise Mrs Gabriel and her fellow housekeepers into a moonlight assault on Smithson’s Chambers with pitchforks and scythes and burning torches.
Beneath Mr Bauer’s rooms, Smithson’s Chambers went on with their everyday work, giving hope and succour to the weak, the indigent, the hopeless and the frankly criminally insane. Mr Bauer had arrived from Harvard Law almost fifty years ago, clutching his newly-minted degree, independently wealthy due to his connections with some Boston Brahmin family and determined to carry out
pro bono
work of the most hopeless kind, defending clients no barrister in the history of the Inns of Court would have been crazy enough to defend. And for quite a long time – a
very
long time, actually – he had made a success of it. He had driven England’s most eminent judges to their knees in court, over and over again, leaving them bleeding and weeping for mercy while his clients walked free. He defended peers and petty thieves, blackmailers and perjurers, murderers and – once – a Traitor of the Realm, a Foreign Office clerk who had been caught passing confidential ministerial briefing papers to a contact in the Russian Embassy. He lost that one – some said deliberately, because loyalty to one’s country was of paramount importance to Mr Bauer. But he won enough cases to blaze a trail through the British legal system. There was even an old biopic of him, made during one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-them windows when Hollywood was interested in courtroom dramas.
That he was a decayed colossus these days was fairly well accepted. But he was still a colossus. And that was why, when he did his hail-fellow-well-mets around the Inns, people replied to him, because even if he didn’t know who they were, they knew who
he
was, once upon a time.
Rudi thought he had been kidnapped and put in the hands of lunatics.
As if the thought had summoned him, Mr Self passed through the room, probably looking for Mr Bauer. Mr Self was a cadaverous young man with sharp suits and even sharper sideburns and one of the most insincere smiles Rudi had ever seen. He deployed it the moment he saw Rudi sitting in the armchair.
“Hey, Rudi,” he said, all golly-gosh bonhomie. “Got everything you need? Good. That’s the way, eh? Looking for Mr Bauer, actually. Great man passed through here recently?”
“He’d prefer it if we called him ‘Red,’ actually,” Rudi said without stirring from the chair.
“I know,” said Mr Self. “Silly old sod. Can’t do that.” His eyebrows went up. “See where he went, did you?”
Rudi pointed, and Mr Self nodded thanks and left the room.
The past seven weeks had been a genial and thoroughly civilised learning curve for Rudi. He had learned that the Temple was actually part of London’s legal heart, named after the Knights Templar, who had once had a house there. It housed two of the Capital’s Inns of Court, the professional legal associations so-named because once upon a time they really had been inns, places of residence for barristers. These days the Inns were mostly barristers’ offices, known as ‘Chambers,’ of which Smithson’s Chambers, a group of about a dozen barristers led by Mr Bauer, was one.
All of this information was doled out in a laconic drawl by Mr Self, who was notionally Mr Bauer’s clerk but who seemed to have a busy and full life all of his own, to judge by the little time he actually spent in the Chambers.
Rudi was mostly left to his own devices, which gave him many diverting hours in which to think back over the events of the past couple of months.
Firstly, it was all bullshit. The whole thing. The jump from Palmse, as much as he remembered it, seemed relatively professional. Indeed, it had happened more or less the way he would have done it, using the cover of the riot. It reminded him of the abortive jump in the Zone. In fact it reminded him
too much
of the abortive jump in the Zone, and for that reason he found it suspicious. Gibbon seemed to have known about the recent problems with German counterintelligence, therefore Rudi had to assume Gibbon also knew something of his operational history, and if Rudi were going to jump another Coureur and wanted to gain their confidence, he might very well use a scam which had worked for the Coureur before, appeal to their professional vanity. It was too obvious.
So that was that. Then there was Gibbon’s little speech at the Embassy. Rudi couldn’t guess which spy novels these people had been reading, but it was clearly not the better ones. No intelligence officer with any self-worth at all would have told him all those things, even if they were lies. Life was not like fiction. In real life, aged British espiocrats did not just suddenly emerge from the woodwork and tie up plot points for everyone.
And he had no evidence that he had actually
been
at the British Embassy. He’d been unconscious when he arrived, and he had never left his suite until the final morning. The drive to the airport had been disorienting enough to confuse him. The only thing he was actually certain of was that he had been in Helsinki. Unless whoever was behind all this had gone to the trouble of mocking up an entire airport for his benefit.
Secondly, when he finally arrived at his destination, no one showed the least professional interest in him. Not once in seven weeks had anyone tried to debrief, interrogate or even ask him an intelligent question. Mr Self appeared to be his liaison with whomever, but all Mr Self was interested in was whether Rudi found his lodgings to his satisfaction. No one seemed particularly bothered when Rudi went for walks in the Temple and sat for hours in the gardens, looking out at the Thames and the wall of buildings on the South Bank. No one seemed to care at all.
There was still no indication of why his hosts should think that Central would want him dead, nor indeed how they had come across this information. The subject was never mentioned. His Coureur life was never mentioned. It was as if he was a favourite nephew, come over from Europe to visit his Uncle Red for a couple of months. Mr Bauer was the very image of the amiable, absentminded and indulgent uncle. Mrs Gabriel was the very image – the very archetype – of an English housekeeper. So much so she might have clambered down off the pages of a Conan Doyle novel.
That, in the end, was what decided Rudi. These people all came from Central Casting, and in his experience there was no such thing as an archetype.
After about a month observing the comings and goings at Smithson’s Chambers and the other chambers on King’s Bench Walk, Rudi began to see a discrepancy. You had to look carefully for it, and even then you might still reasonably convince yourself that you were imagining things, but Rudi had a Coureur’s eye for surveillance, and he knew. Smithson’s Chambers was a shopfront. Fewer clients were passing through its doors, fewer barristers worked there, than at the other chambers. Taken with other observations, the logical inference was that Mr Bauer was a sockpuppet. If he extended that inference, Mr Self was a troll representing, however tenuously and deniably, the people who had set up the shopfront.
Quite what the shopfront was for was another matter entirely. Just a safe house for babysitting people of... unusual provenance? Or something more? It was impossible to say with any certainty.
It was all very odd. Struck by the lack of instructions to keep his head down, Rudi decided to push the envelope one day, informing Mrs Gabriel at breakfast that he intended to do some sightseeing.
“I’ll see if we can find you some maps somewhere,” she replied, standing by the table with a tray of cleared-away breakfast things in her hands. “Mr Bauer collects maps like other people collect stamps or train numbers.”
Sitting there, looking at his half-eaten breakfast, Rudi almost weakened and told her not to bother, but instead he said, “Thank you, Mrs Gabriel, that would be very kind of you.” The very act of speaking English in London seemed to bring out an exaggerated politeness.
For tourists, Londoners still produced paper maps, and Mrs Gabriel brought a sheaf of them to Rudi a minute or so later – surely not long enough for her to consult her superiors and get their consent, certainly not long enough for them to organise a tail. Although London was by some distance the most surveilled city on the face of the Earth, and anyone who knew what they were doing would have had a tail waiting outside, twenty-four hours a day, for just this eventuality.
The maps were tattered and frayed from constant refolding, and useless in any operational sense. The street maps showed tiny cartoon representations of notable buildings and big advertisements from corporate sponsors. The Underground map simply looked
unlikely
, a multicoloured circuit diagram inviting travellers to have a go if they felt lucky.
Outside, on King’s Bench Walk, he fought down an urge to stand and look at every passing clerk and barrister and tourist. Movement was the important thing.
Up through the archway and onto Fleet Street, and he stood for a few moments trying to get a sense of the place.
This was not, he felt right away, a European city. You could visit Paris or Brussels or Madrid, even St Petersburg, and know you were in Europe. London was different. London was... he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Even standing there watching the everyday workers and tourists go by, he heard snatches of conversation in half a dozen languages. London was certainly cosmopolitan. More than that, it was an immigrant city. First, waves of conquerors. The Romans. The Normans. Then waves of migrants from... well, from
everywhere
. Jews, Huguenots, Somalis, Bangladeshis, West Indians... the list went on and on. Rudi had even found, in one of Mr Bauer’s books, a mad story about a group of exiles from fallen Troy who were supposed to have sailed up the Thames at some point in the far and misty past to found the city.
His phone, of course, had never been returned to him, and a replacement had not been provided. And Jan’s watch had vanished somewhere along the way, which bothered him obscurely. But he judged that he had been standing there long enough for a tail to be organised by any half-competent security service, so he turned right and set off down the slope of Fleet Street towards St Paul’s.
Within the first fifteen or twenty minutes he decided that, if anyone was following him, they were fantastically good at their job. He prided himself on being fairly sharp at spotting a tail, and he couldn’t see anyone even vaguely suspicious. He tried four or five fairly lazy evasion routines, on the grounds that it might lead the people behind Smithson’s Chambers to underestimate him, which was never a bad thing, and when he’d completed the routines there was no sign of anyone picking him up again. Fine. Fuck it.
So he just forgot about surveillance and walked, map in hand, for hours. He did a long, leisurely tour of the City, the square mile that enclosed the oldest part of London and housed some of the city’s financial institutions. He walked out of the City and into the West End and theatre-spotted. Did a tour of the awesomely primal kitsch being sold on stalls in Covent Garden. Stood in Trafalgar Square and stared at Nelson’s Column.
The map he was using was about six years old, pre-dating the massive terrorist truck bomb which had blown a six-metre-deep crater in Whitehall and led to the gating off of the entire street. He stood at the gates for a little while, looking down towards Westminster, then he turned away and walked down to the Embankment, crossed the road, and sat for almost an hour on a bench watching the Thames and the various working and tourist boats passing by up and down the river. London, he had decided, was a mad place, very much of itself, entirely unique. He thought he liked it. He wondered if he would be able to make a run for the Estonian Embassy, and whether they would take him in if he got there.
Finally, hunger got the better of him and he walked back along the Embankment to Temple Station, through the side gate into the Temple, and back to Smithson’s Chambers, where Mrs Gabriel had prepared some doorstep sandwiches – what was it with these people and colossal hunks of white bread? – of boiled chicken and a big pot of Yorkshire Tea.
A
ND SO IT
went on, day after day, week after week. He dutifully ate Mrs Gabriel’s meals, worked his way steadily through Mr Bauer’s library, went for walks. He had no money with which to access public communications; he walked in and out of internet cafés hoping to catch an unattended terminal with some credit still on it, but without success. He thought he detected a boundary when he asked for some money to buy a pass and explore the Underground network and it was refused, but nobody made a big thing about it. It wasn’t even a refusal, properly speaking. He raised the subject with Mr Self one morning, just in passing, and Mr Self said he’d see about it, and it was never mentioned again. He considered repeating the request, but he’d got the point.