‘Sir? My name’s Brabazon. John Brabazon. First time I’ve stayed here. Can I just say something?’
He could, and the Herr Direktor, suspecting it was bad news, braced himself to hear it.
‘This is simply one of
the
most exquisite, unspoiled art nouveau hotels – you probably don’t use the word
Edwardian
! – that I’ve come across in my travels.’
‘You are a hotelier?’
‘Afraid not. Just a lowlife journalist.
Times
newspaper, London. Travel section. Totally unannounced, I’m afraid, here on private business …’
The tour began:
‘So here is our ballroom which we are calling the Salon Royal,’ the Direktor intoned in a well-trodden monologue. ‘Here is our small banqueting room which we are calling our Salon du Palais, and here is our Salon d’Honneur where we are holding our cocktail receptions. Our chef takes very much pride in his finger foods. And here is our restaurant La Terrasse, and actually the
must
rendezvous for all fashionable Berne, but also our international guests. Many prominent persons have dined here including film stars, we can give you quite a good list, also the menu.’
‘And the kitchens?’ Luke asked, for he wished nothing to be left to chance. ‘May I just take a peep if the chefs don’t object?’
And when the Herr Direktor, somewhat exhaustively, had shown him all there was to be shown, and when Luke had duly swooned and taken copious notes, and for his own pleasure a few photographs with his mobile if the Herr Direktor didn’t mind, but of course his paper would be sending a real photographer if that was acceptable – it was – he returned to the bar, and having treated himself to an improbably exquisite club sandwich and a glass of Dôle, added a few necessary final touches of his own to his journalistic tour, which included such banal details as the lavatories, fire escapes, emergency exits, car-parking facilities and the projected rooftop gymnasium presently under construction, before retiring to his room and calling Perry to make sure all was well their end. Gail was asleep. Perry hoped to be any minute. Ringing off, Luke reflected that he had been as near to Gail in bed as he was ever likely to get. He rang Ollie.
‘Everything just lovely, thank you, Dick. And the transport’s
tickety-boo, in case you were worrying at all. What did you make of those Arab coppers, by the way?’
‘I don’t know, Harry.’
‘Me, neither. But never trust a copper, I say. All well otherwise, then?’
‘Till tomorrow.’
And finally Luke phoned Eloise.
‘Are you having a good time, Luke?’
‘Yes, I am really, thank you. Berne’s a really beautiful city. We should come here together sometime. Bring Ben.’
That’s how we always talk: for Ben’s sake. So that he has the full advantage of happy, heterosexual parents.
‘Do you want to speak to him?’ she asked.
‘Is he up? Don’t tell me he’s still doing his Spanish prep?’
‘You’re an hour ahead of us over there, Luke.’
‘Ah yes, of course. Well, yes please, then. If I may. Hello, Ben.’
‘Hello.’
‘I’m in Berne, for my sins. Berne, Switzerland. The capital. There’s a really fantastic museum here. The Einstein Museum, one of the best museums I’ve seen in my life.’
‘You went to a
museum
?’
‘Just for half an hour. Last night when I arrived. They were doing a late opening. Just across the bridge from the hotel. So I went.’
‘Why?’
‘I felt like it. The concierge recommended it, so I went.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Yes. Just like that.’
‘What else did he recommend?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Did you have a cheese fondue?’
‘Not much fun if you’re on your own. I need you and Mum. I need you both.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘And with any luck I’ll be back for the weekend. We’ll go to a movie or something.’
‘I’ve got this Spanish essay, actually, if that’s all right.’
‘Of course it’s all right. Good luck with it. What’s it about?’
‘Don’t know really. Spanish stuff. See you.’
‘See you.’
What else did the concierge recommend?
Did I hear that right? Like
is the concierge sending you up a hooker?
What’s Eloise been saying to him? And why in God’s name did I tell him that I’d been to the Einstein Museum simply because I saw the brochure lying on the concierge’s desk?
*
He went to bed, turned on the BBC World News and switched it off again. Half-truths. Quarter-truths. What the world really knows about itself, it doesn’t dare say. Since Bogotá, he had discovered, he no longer always had the courage to deal with his solitude. Maybe he had been holding too many bits of himself together for too long, and they were starting to fall apart. He went to the minibar, poured himself a Scotch and soda, and put it beside his bed. Just the one and that’s it. He missed Gail, and then Yvonne. Was Yvonne burning the midnight oil over Dima’s trade samples, or lying in the arms of her perfect husband? – if she had one, which he sometimes doubted. Maybe she’d invented him to fend Luke off. His thoughts went back to Gail. Was Perry perfect too? Probably was. Everyone except Eloise has a perfect husband. He thought of Hector, father to Adrian. Hector visiting his son in prison every Wednesday and Saturday, six months to go with luck. Hector the secret Savonarola, as somebody clever had called him, fanatical about reforming the Service he loved, knowing he will lose the battle even if he wins it.
He’d heard that the Empowerment Committee had its own war room these days. It seemed appropriate: somewhere ultra, ultra secret, suspended from wires or buried a hundred feet underground. Well, he’d been in rooms like that: in Miami and Washington when he was trading Intelligence with his
chers collègues
in the CIA or the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Alcohol, Firearms & Tobacco
Agency and God knew what all the other agencies had been. And his measured opinion was that they were places that guaranteed collective insanity. He’d watched how the body language changed as the Indoctrinated Ones abandoned themselves and their common sense to the embrace of their virtual world.
He thought of Matlock, who took his holidays in Madeira and didn’t know what a black hotel was. Matlock cornered by Hector, pulling Adrian’s name out of his pocket and firing it at point-blank range. Matlock sitting at his picture window overlooking Father Thames and droning out his elephantine subtleties, first the stick, then the carrot, then both together.
Well, Luke hadn’t bitten and he hadn’t bowed either. Not that he had much guile, as he was the first to admit:
insufficiently manipulative
one of his annual confidential reports had run, and he was secretly rather pleased with it. He did not regard himself as a manipulator. Obstinacy was more his thing. Holding out. Clinging to the one note through thick and thin:
no
– whether you’re chained up in a stockade or sitting in the other armchair of Matlock’s comfortable office at
la Lubianka-sur-Tamise
, drinking his whisky and parrying his questions. A man could drift off into his own thoughts, just listening to them:
‘A three-to-five contract down at training school, Luke, nice housing thrown in for your wife, which will help things along after the troubles I needn’t refer to, a relocation allowance, nice sea air, good schools in the neighbourhood … You wouldn’t have to
sell
your London house if you didn’t want to, not while prices are down … Rent it out is
my
advice, enjoy the income. Have a little chat with Accounts on the ground floor, say I told you to drop by … Not that we’re in
Hector’s
league for property, few are.’ A pause for decent anxiety. ‘Hector’s not dragging you in out of your depth, I trust, Luke, you being somewhat promiscuous in your loyalties, if I may say so? … They do tell me Ollie Devereux’s fallen under his spell, incidentally, which I wouldn’t have thought prudent of him. Full time, would you say Ollie was? Or more in the line of casual labour … ?’
Then repeating it all for Hector’s benefit an hour later.
‘Is Billy Boy for us or against us by now?’ Luke had asked Hector over the same farewell drink at Charles de Gaulle Airport, when they had moved gratefully to less personal topics.
‘Billy Boy will go wherever he thinks his knighthood is. If he’s got to choose between the gamekeepers and the poachers, he’ll choose Matlock. However, a man who hates Aubrey Longrigg as much as he does can’t be all bad,’ Hector added as an afterthought.
In other circumstances Luke might have questioned this happy assertion but not now, not on the eve of Hector’s decisive battle with the forces of darkness.
*
Somehow Wednesday morning had arrived. Somehow Gail and Perry had slept a little, and risen bright and ready for breakfast with Ollie, who had then gone off in search of their royal coach, as he called it, while they made a list and went shopping for the children in the local supermarket. Unsurprisingly, they were reminded of a similar expedition they had made to St John’s on the afternoon Ambrose set them on the overgrown wood path to Three Chimneys, but their selections this time were more prosaic: water, still and fizzy, soft drinks – and oh, all right, let them have Coca-Cola (Perry) – picnic foods – kids in general prefer savoury to sweet even if they don’t know it (Gail) – small backpacks for everybody, never mind they’re not Fair Trade; a couple of rubber balls and a baseball bat which was the nearest they could hope to get to cricket but, if needs must, we’ll teach them rounders – or more likely, since the boys are baseball players, they’ll teach us.
Ollie’s royal coach was an old twenty-foot green horsebox with wooden sides, a canvas roof and spaces for two horses in the back with a partition between them, and cushions and blankets on the floor for human beings. Gail sat herself down cautiously on the cushions. Perry, pleased at the prospect of riding rough, sprang in after her. Ollie put up the ramp and bolted it into place. The purpose of his wide-brimmed black hat became clear: he was Ollie the merry Roma, off to the horse show.
They drove for fifteen minutes by Perry’s watch, and stopped with a jolt on soft ground. No hanky-panky and no peeking, Ollie had warned them. A hot wind was blowing and the canvas roof above them billowed like a spinnaker. By Ollie’s calculation they were ten minutes from target.
*
Luke Alone
, his teachers had called him at his preparatory school, after the derring-do hero of some long-forgotten adventure novel. It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
But Luke Alone he had remained, and Luke Alone he was now, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and a red-hot Russian tie, tapping away at a silver laptop as he sat under the splendidly illuminated glass canopy of the great lobby of the Bellevue Palace Hotel, with a blue raincoat slung conspicuously over the arm of a leather chair pitched midway between the glass entrance doors and the pillared Salon d’Honneur, the scene of a midday
apéro
presently being hosted by the Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate, see the handsome bronze signpost pointing guests the way. It was Luke Alone, keeping an eye on arrivals by way of the many elegant door mirrors, and waiting to exfiltrate single-handed a red-hot Russian defector.
For the last ten minutes, he had looked on in a kind of passive awe as first Emilio dell Oro and the two Swiss bankers, immortalized by Gail as Peter and the Wolf, made their deliberately inconspicuous entrances, followed by a clutch of grey suits, then two young Saudis, by the look of them, then a Chinese woman and a swarthy man with broad shoulders whom Luke had arbitrarily appointed Greek.
Then in a single bored flock the Armani kids, the Seven Clean Envoys, unprotected save by Bunny Popham with a carnation in his buttonhole, and the languidly charming Giles de Salis with a silver-handled walking stick to go with his offensively perfect suit.
Aubrey Longrigg, where are you now they need you? Luke wanted to ask him. Keeping your head down? Wise fellow. A safe seat in Parliament and a free ticket to the French Open is one thing,
so is a multi-million offshore kickback and a few more diamonds for your witless wife, not to speak of a non-executive directorship in a fine new City bank with billions of freshly laundered money to play with. But a full-dress, front-line signing in a Swiss bank with the spotlights on you is a bit too rich for your blood: or so Luke was thinking as the lank, bald-headed, ill-tempered figure of Aubrey Longrigg, Member of Parliament, came stalking up the steps – the man himself, no longer a picture – with Dima, the world’s number-one money-launderer at his side.
As Luke buried himself a little deeper in his leather chair, and raised the lid of his silver laptop a little higher, he knew that if there had ever been such a thing as a Eureka moment in his life, it was here and now, and there would never be another like it, while once more thanking the gods he didn’t believe in that in all his years in the Service he had never once set eyes on Aubrey Longrigg, and nor had Longrigg, so far as he knew, on him.
Even so, it was not until the two men were safely past him on their way to the Salon d’Honneur – Dima had almost brushed against him – that Luke dared raise his head and take a quick reading of the mirrors and establish the following nuggets of operational Intelligence:
Nugget One
: that Dima and Longrigg weren’t talking to each other. And probably they hadn’t even been talking as they arrived. They had simply happened to be close to each other as they came up the steps. Two other men were following – sound, middle-aged Swiss-accountant types – and it was more likely, in Luke’s view, that Longrigg had been talking to one or both of them, rather than to Dima. And although the point was tenuous – they
could
have been talking to one another earlier – Luke was cautiously consoled, because it’s never comfortable to discover, just as your operation is reaching fruition, that your joe has a personal relationship with a main player that you didn’t know about. Otherwise, on the subject of Longrigg, he had no further thoughts above the exultant, blindingly obvious:
he’s here! I saw him! I am the witness!