The Envoy (30 page)

Kit reached out and touched her other hand. ‘Don’t think that. You are life itself – it’s the rest of us who belong to the shadows.’

‘What did I do wrong? Did I eat the wrong food?’

‘Nothing, Jennie, nothing. Look at grandmother, she had two babies that died and five that lived. It’s nature – it’s normal.’

‘No, Kit, it isn’t normal. There’s something wrong, something on Orford Ness that Brian brings home with him – I think he’s contaminated.’

Kit could see hate, anger and madness in his cousin’s eyes. She wasn’t thinking rationally.

‘Look what’s happened in Japan – after the atom bombs, all those birth defects. They won’t tell us everything. There must be secret hospitals full of monsters – babies with two heads and no eyes, babies with flippers for arms and webbed feet. They want to throw us back in the sea.’ She suddenly looked hard at Kit. ‘You think I’m hysterical, don’t you?’

‘No, Jennifer, you’re sane. We’re the ones who are
hysterical
. We’re the ones who made those bombs at Los Alamos – and there weren’t any women politicians who decided to use them and there weren’t any women pilots who dropped them.’

‘But we would have, Kit. There are women who would have done that and more.’

‘But not you.’

‘No,’ Jennifer squeezed his hand, ‘and not you, Kit, not you.’

Kit leaned forward and kissed her brow. ‘You’re very tired, Jennie, I think you should go to bed.’

Later, Kit lay awake in the guest room and listened through the walls to hear his cousin’s breathing. It was a way of being close: different rooms, but alone under the same roof. He wished that the night would last forever.

Kit thought about the things Jennifer had said. He wondered if it was possible that Brian’s sperm had been damaged by
radiation
. Kit also thought that it was an ugly coincidence that the loss of Jennifer’s baby had occurred at the same time as the nuclear accident – ‘the bent spear’ – at Lakenheath. Of course, if the bombs had actually gone off, then Suffolk would have become the English Hiroshima. How, he thought, how do you
really
get rid of those monsters?

The first thing that Kit did when he got back to London was to check a rubbish bin in Kensington Gardens for a fresh chalk mark. There wasn’t one. Kit whispered, ‘Fuck,’ and continued walking. He came to a kiosk and bought a newspaper. He retraced his steps back to Kensington Gardens and sat on a bench near the Peter Pan statue. Kit opened his newspaper and wondered what he should do next. He felt that it was stupidly obvious that he was a spy trying to make contact with an agent. It was sort of funny: like the way a plain clothes policeman looks
more
like a cop than one in uniform. Kit looked at his watch, then began to read the paper. He’d give it ten more minutes.

On the inside pages, there was a brief reference to the accident at Lakenheath. The press office at the base had released the names of the airmen who had perished. The press attaché had certainly done a slick job. The British journalists were treating the incident as a tragic, but pretty humdrum accident. Not the least suspicion that a large chunk of England had so nearly been fried and
radiated
– Nagasakied. Kit wondered how long they could keep the story under wraps. He had since heard that a large number of American airmen had fled the airbase in a blind panic. They had commandeered cars and bicycles and tried to put as much
distance
between themselves and the smouldering atom bombs as they could. Surely, some of the Suffolk people – ‘the indigenous personnel’ – must have seen that terror-struck exodus. What did they think was going on? In any case, it wasn’t the first time American troops had cut and run. Kit had done it himself – and the early days in Korea had been a disgrace. Americans, despite the Hollywood cover-up versions, were not very good soldiers. This was why they had to have nuclear bombs. No American army would have stood at Stalingrad. The Russian Army lost nine
million
soldiers – and fourteen million civilians – fighting the Nazis. What else can you say? How can anyone look a Soviet citizen in the face and not blush with shame?

Kit turned the page and found another story based in Suffolk. It was, he thought, odd for so rural a county to be mentioned twice the same day in the national press. The story was a macabre tabloid one.

Kit folded the newspaper and thought about the Suffolk corpse. He felt sorry for the poor woman who had found it. She had probably enjoyed walking her dog along that beach for years. He doubted if she’d ever do it again. Dead bodies spoil the
countryside
. There was a beautiful Chesapeake Bay creek that everyone had shunned after the putrefied body of a tramp had been found tangled in the branches of a fallen tree – the soft tissue of his face eaten away by crabs. And, for a long while, crab cakes were off the menu too. The newsworthy thing about the Shingle Street body was the chains. Wrapping a body in chains was a method
commonly
used by gangsters and intelligence operatives to deep-six a corpse – so that it didn’t become a ‘floater’. During his OSS days Kit had helped dispose of a double agent in the South China Sea. The difficult thing was getting all that weight over the gunwales: you needed five or six gorillas. But maybe the Suffolk business wasn’t murder at all. He’d heard about people committing suicide by weighting themselves down and walking into water. That’s the way Virginia Woolf did it.

Kit leaned back and enjoyed the summer sun on his face. He wondered if Vasili had any of the chewing-gum left that Kit had given him. The fallback rendezvous signal was a piece of gum stuck on the inside windowpane of a phone kiosk on the Bayswater Road. It was, in fact, a far better way to arrange a meeting – but Vasili hated chewing gum. He said it made him feel like a Chicago gangster. Vasili simply preferred to chalk a Cyrillic ‘К’ – for Kit.

Kit left the park and walked the short distance to the kiosk. It was occupied by a young woman who seemed content to talk away the afternoon. Kit crossed the road and entered an off-licence. The stock was limited to ale, whisky and gin. If you wanted wine, you had to bring your own bottle and they filled it from a cask of sweet sherry. The shop assistant was bent over a crossword and didn’t even look up. But Kit had the odd queasy feeling that someone else was looking at him. He went back into the street, almost running, and saw that the phone kiosk was free. He crossed the road, dodging big London buses and black taxis that seemed to be aiming at him like hired assassins. Kit felt the paranoia rushing back. He opened the kiosk door and pretended to make a call while searching for the chewing-gum. There wasn’t any gum, or a chalk mark, but there was a card stuck to the panel next to the phone. Was it Vasili’s idea of a joke? The card said
EMBASSY MASSAGE
– and had Kit’s own phone number. Kit was angry. It wasn’t just a lousy joke, it was a dangerous joke. He unstuck the card and turned it over. There was another message. Kit read the words and broke into a cold sweat:
Under the
spreading
chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me
. The frightening thing was the realisation that it wasn’t a joke and that the card had not been left by Vasili. Someone else knew about his meetings with the Russian. And how much did they know?

Kit started to walk back to the embassy as rivulets of cold sweat dripped down his spine and funnelled into his butt cleavage. He felt a mess. Kit knew that, with a gun in his hand, he could put on a convincing tough guy pose, but he also knew that he went wobbly when his own life was in danger. He felt waves of nausea sweep up from his intestines and shake the rest of his body. He wanted to lie down in a safe dark place away from the eyes that seemed to be tracking him.

The rivulets of sweat had turned into a flood and Kit’s shirt was soaked with sweat. A half-remembered address began to appear on the edge of his mind and then vanished again. He needed a new shirt. Kit turned into Bond Street. At the first shop he was greeted by a tailor with a measuring tape around his neck who asked if he had ‘an appointment’? Kit smiled wanly and left. The next shop didn’t require an appointment, but only made shirts to measure and they wouldn’t be ready for a week. After being turned down by two more ‘bespoke shirt-makers’, Kit began to panic as waves of paranoia made him hyperventilate. He felt so dizzy he had to lean against a wall. Kit watched the people
passing
by. He envied them. They somehow belonged to the city and to England. He tried to explain in a faint pleading voice, ‘They won’t even let me buy a fucking shirt.’

A woman, wearing a floral dress and a broad hat, gave Kit a cutting look and said, ‘Drunk in public. Disgraceful.’

Kit looked up and was about to say ‘I’m sorry, I’m not very well’ when he realised he had seen the woman before. Hadn’t she been in the phone kiosk before him? But no, this one was older and wearing a hat. Kit wiped the sweat from his eyes, but when he opened them again the woman was gone.

The address started teasing Kit’s mind again. It was somewhere near. Who had told him about it? A name began to form; then it was gone again. One half of Kit’s brain was still normal and was watching the other half screaming out of control down a steep mountain gorge. He wanted to grab the steering wheel, but the mad half was strong as hell and kept giving him a sharp elbow in the face. It was like watching the blood drain out of your body. You know you have to tourniquet the wound, but your arms won’t move. Kit closed his eyes and breathed deep. ‘I don’t care what they do. They’re not going to have my mind.’

Kit felt a hand on his elbow. He opened his eyes. A man of middle-eastern appearance was smiling at him ‘Are you looking for a shirt-maker?’

Kit nodded.

‘My name is Youssef. I’ve been expecting you. My shop is just around the corner.’

Kit liked the shirts. They were well cut with the sort of long
luxurious
tails that hang down well below crotch and genitals.
Shirttails
like that stay tucked in and make you feel safe. They weren’t Irish linen, but rich Egyptian cotton. The tailor was proud of his material and said that Egyptian was the best cotton in the world. ‘But,’ he said, raising his hands in a gesture of world-weary
sadness
, ‘I don’t know how much longer …’ His voice trailed away. Kit sensed that the tailor, like himself, felt a stranger in a hostile land and didn’t want to give too much away.

‘Suez.’ Kit whispered the word as if it were a secret code.

The tailor smiled and nodded.

‘In that case, I’d better have two of them – no, make it three, it’s best to stock up.’ Kit felt dizzy again and smiled inanely. He sat down on a stiff-backed chair while the tailor carefully folded his purchases and wrapped them in brown paper.

Despite the origins of his cotton cloth, Youssef wasn’t Egyptian; he was Syrian. When Kit tried to pay, Youssef motioned him to stay seated and to wait. The tailor pushed aside a brocade door curtain and said something in Arabic. A minute later, a tray arrived with an elaborate silver urn, plain glasses and a plate of  Turkish Delight. As Youssef poured the mint tea, he said that he had been born in Aleppo. Kit tried to follow the conversation, but there was a buzzing in his ears. As Youssef recited a litany of place names – from Thessaloniki to Marrakech – Kit began to forget where he was. The street sounds of London seemed to
vanish
. There had also been a Syrian tailor in Saigon, but his name had been Sharif. The OSS officers had used him to alter their field uniforms into a smarter cut: appearances mattered. Kit looked out the shop window and half expected to see trishaws
pedalling
past instead of black taxis. He wanted to be back in Vietnam, in the opium den in Cholon with Sophie,
la métisse
, making his pipe. Sophie used to sing to him in a voice so soft that you could barely hear the words.