Comrade Charlie Page 3

  ‘I don’t need to worry,’ said Laura enigmatically.

  Richard Harkness, who’d moved into the Director General’s office on the same day that Wilson suffered his heart attack, was sitting personally immaculate behind an impeccably clean desk that unfortunately appeared too big for him. He was pink-faced, grey hair fantailed over his ears, and faultlessly tailored in a foppish kind of a way, the black suit broad chalkstriped and the pastel yellow shirt set off against a matching yellow tie and pocket handkerchief. Charlie couldn’t see because the man’s feet were hidden beneath the desk, but he guessed the socks would be some sort of coordinated yellow: Harkness tried hard to finish everything off.

  There were no chairs conveniently near to the desk, which meant Charlie had to stand: Prick, he thought, smiling towards the man. Harkness looked back blank-faced.

  ‘You’ve no outstanding assignment, have you?’ Harkness asked expectantly.

  ‘Holding myself in readiness,’ said Charlie. He believed the cocky, Jack-the-lad routine got up Harkness’ nose, which was why he did it.

  ‘There’s a request from the Other Place,’ announced Harkness, using the inter-departmental jargon for MI5, Britain’s counter-intelligence service. ‘They’ve got a bit of a staff shortage and have asked for some temporary secondment for embassy observation.’

  Which was roughly equivalent to parking meter warden or leaf sweeper in public parks, Charlie assessed: freezing your ass off in a supposed secure house overlooking communist embassies, monitoring and photographing the comings and goings of one day and comparing them to the comings and goings of the previous day. Spot-the-Spy, the latest quiz game the entire family can play, brought to you courtesy of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He said: ‘Sorry to hear that: must be a problem for them.’

  ‘I’m transferring you, until further notice,’ announced Harkness with self-satisfied contentment.

  No you’re not, asshole, thought Charlie. He said: ‘Oh dear!’

  ‘Is there a problem?’ asked Harkness, smiling at last at his own personal joke.

  ‘I hope not,’ said Charlie. ‘You can call upon other people, can’t you?’

  Cold silence came down upon the room. Harkness did not speak for several moments and Charlie was unsure whether there was a nervous tug pulling at the corner of the man’s left eye. Harkness said: ‘ Other people?’

  ‘Well, I can’t go across, can I?’ said Charlie. ‘These new Orders of Conduct you’ve issued: they specifically state that all active operatives attend assessment courses every six months. I’ve got my instructions to go at the end of the week. Sorry about that.’

  Laura Nolan looked up, smiling hopefully, when Charlie emerged. ‘What happened?’ she said.

  ‘The dick-head tripped over his own red tape,’ reported Charlie.

  The girl frowned. ‘You did show him the proper respect, didn’t you?’

  Charlie snapped his fingers, an exaggerated gesture. ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘I knew there was something!’

  4

  Emil Krogh came awake first and was glad because it gave him time to compose himself, get some life into his face and pull the lines up. Not that it was a real problem. Kept himself in shape in the exercise room at home and the lift-and-tuck job he’d had before he met Cindy had worked just fine, taken off ten years at least. Like the moderate but discreetly maintained tinting, allowing just the right amount of mature greying at the temples but literally not a hair’s breadth more; if a President could do it, why couldn’t he? No, it wasn’t the waking moment Krogh was uneasy about; it was the sleeping ones. And something Peggy, who knew about the face-lift, had said about five months earlier: Almost time for another one, honey: asleep your face drops in those old relax lines and we don’t want that, do we? Not that his wife really cared what he looked like. All she cared about was the kids and baby-minding the grandchildren, which was fine by Krogh because of the time and freedom it gave him in addition to what he manipulated for himself, which was a lot. But he was grateful for the warning. Which was why he was glad he’d awakened first. Goddamn miracle that he had, after what he and Cindy had done last night; he should feel exhausted but he didn’t. Felt fine. Another, perhaps the best, indication that he was in great shape.

  There was only a sheet covering them and that hardly at all, and Krogh eased it further away, better to see Cindy’s nakedness. Christ, what a body! Tight and firm, not the slightest droop to those fantastic tits even lying like she was, the powder puff between her legs turned towards him, like the invitation he was definitely going to accept. Krogh wondered if he could get out of bed without disturbing her, to clean his teeth: he knew he was dragon-breathed after all that Mexican shit they’d eaten with those tequila drinks the previous night. But only clean his teeth, not shave. Cindy preferred him unshaven when he went down on her; said it was more exciting. Krogh checked his watch as he slipped off the bed. Plenty of time for that. A lot more, too. Still only eight a.m. and he’d been vague when he spoke to Peggy about what time he’d get home, just some time that evening and not to bother waiting dinner.

  Krogh scrubbed his teeth, able from the condo window to see the ocean nudging in against the beach. It was a grey, clouds-against-the-water sort of day that visitors didn’t expect at Malibu and felt cheated to find. There were the usual joggers and exercise freaks and owners walking dogs and scuffing sand over their crap instead of collecting it up, like they were supposed to. On balance Krogh decided the outlook from Barbara’s apartment in San Francisco was better, the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and the higgledy-piggledy buildings clutching to the side of Nob Hill. He rinsed his mouth and found some mouthwash in the bathroom cabinet and tried that, too, smiling to himself through tight-together lips as the thought came to him. He’d set the day aside for Cindy. But they’d already been together for two celebratory days because of the customary time allowance he’d built in to the East Coast trip and the meetings in Washington DC and at the Pentagon, signing the formal, committing contracts. So why didn’t he move on, to celebrate some more? He could fly up to San Francisco in less than an hour: meet Barbara for lunch and spend the afternoon in the sack with another equally attractive and inventive girl. He’d done it before, quite a few times, going straight from one to the other, always managing to make it happen for both of them, proving himself. He’d need to phone Barbara, of course. Let her know he was coming. But not from here, because the number would be recorded on the bill and it would be a dumb thing to do even though he looked after all the bills, the telephone and the condo payments and all the charges, just like he did for Barbara. Have to make it before ten: Barbara left for art classes promptly at ten and it was difficult to get her to a telephone if she were posing. Eight fifteen, Krogh saw: still plenty of time.

  Cindy was awake when he went back into the bedroom. She’d pushed the sheet further off herself and brought one leg up so he could see better, and had her hand there although she wasn’t doing anything.

  ‘I almost started without you,’ she said. She was blonde, naturally so and able to prove it lying like that, and brown-eyed and utterly uninhibited, enough to worry him sometimes with some of the things she wanted to do. They’d met a year before in San Diego, at a convention where she’d been one of the promotional girls for an aircraft interior accessory firm. He’d balled her that first night and set her up in the Malibu condominium a month later.

  ‘It was good of you to wait.’

  ‘I thought you’d like me to.’

  Krogh guessed she’d only just managed to hold back. Cindy devoured him, literally, not allowing him to lead in anything and he let her, doing what she guided him to do after she’d done what she wanted. He was finding it difficult to match her but she pulled away just at the right moment, cutting the lines on the little marble slab from the bedside drawer and taking two herself before offering him the chance. Krogh was frightened, although he was confident he was strong enough never to become addicted and so he’d done it with her a few times a
nd he did it now, needing the help. It was good stuff and hit immediately and all their tiredness went and they did it all again, but longer this time.

  ‘Jesus!’ gasped Krogh, when they finally parted. ‘Sweet Jesus!’

  ‘You’re guaranteed the gold when fucking becomes an Olympic event,’ said Cindy. Always tell the guy it was the best it had ever been, she thought: worked every time. Actually it had been pretty terrific.

  ‘At the moment I couldn’t get up on the rostrum to collect it,’ said Krogh.

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  It was gone ten, he saw; too late for Barbara now. He was down from the coke and felt absolutely drained, like he’d been wrung out to dry, and didn’t think he could have managed it with Barbara anyway. He said: ‘Afternoon somewhen: no particular hurry.’ The contract signing confirmed everything, which made it pretty fantastic, but his father-in-law was never at the plant in the afternoon and he was the only person it was really necessary to impress.

  ‘So we’ve got lots of time?’

  Krogh looked nervously across the bed. ‘What for?’

  She giggled. ‘Shopping. Just shopping. Well… looking, too.’

  ‘I thought we’d shopped already,’ said Krogh. That’s all they had done, apart from screw, ever since he’d arrived in Los Angeles: he reckoned he’d parted with enough to pay the taxes on Rodeo Drive and Wiltshire Boulevard for a year.

  ‘Honey!’ she said, in the pouting, little-girl voice she had for asking special favours.

  ‘I didn’t say we couldn’t,’ assured Krogh quickly. He liked being the big spender, the whatever-you-want-you-get man. He could afford it, after all.

  She came closer to him, nuzzling against him. ‘Now?’

  ‘Sure. Now, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘You’re very good to me. And I love you for it. I still like the car, of course. Love it like I did when you bought it for me.’

  The sudden jump confused him. ‘What?’

  ‘My car. I still like it.’

  ‘Good.’ It was red, the colour she’d wanted: a Honda sports. Krogh liked to treat them both the same so he’d bought one for Barbara, as well. Barbara had chosen blue.

  ‘It’s just that I’ve seen this convertible: a Volkswagen GTI, all white. White upholstery, white top, white wheel trim,’ recited Cindy, as if she were reading from the sales brochure. ‘It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life and I love it to death and want to show it to you. Not to buy. Just to show you, so you can look. That OK?’

  ‘Sure that’s OK,’ said Krogh. The price of a new car would be swallowed without a ripple in the profits coming to him from the Pentagon deal. He wished he’d thought of it as a gift instead of her having to ask. He could still make it a surprise for Barbara.

  ‘I really do love you,’ repeated the girl. ‘Don’t you ever leave me, will you?’

  ‘You’re the one who’ll want it all to end one day,’ said Krogh realistically.

  ‘I won’t!’ insisted Cindy. ‘I won’t ever want that!’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it.’

  ‘I said noon. It’s a quarter off eleven already.’

  Again Krogh was confused. ‘Noon?’

  ‘To meet the salesman who’d got the dinkie little VW. I knew you’d say yes because you’re so wonderful so I made an appointment to see him. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No,’ sighed Krogh. ‘We’d better get cleaned up.’

  The salesroom was on Sunset, just short of where it ceases being smart movie-magazine Hollywood and gives way to the tacky I-could-have-been-a-star cocktail places. The car was on the front, glistening from a polish job, the Sold sticker already on the windscreen. Cindy said the man must have misunderstood. They went through the hood-lifting, ass-in-the-seat-for-comfort routine and the salesman said he’d take the Honda sports off their hands at a price they would not get anywhere else. Krogh bought it on the spot, which he’d known in bed that morning that he would and Cindy had known in bed that morning that he would. Krogh insisted on all the paperwork being in his name – in owning the car, in fact – just like he owned the condo on Malibu and the apartment and the car in San Francisco. Krogh knew exactly what he was doing and with whom he was doing it and when the girls moved on or he moved on he didn’t intend losing out on real estate that was appreciating in value all the time or on automobiles that still had some equity in them. As they parted with handshakes the salesman said: ‘Your daughter’s never going to want another car after this one, Mr Krogh. I hope she knows what a truly lucky girl she is.’

  ‘Asshole!’ said Cindy as they went back towards the ocean.

  ‘If he’s an asshole why’d you take the card he slipped you?’

  ‘He didn’t slip me anything!’ said the girl indignantly. ‘He gave me his card in case anything came up with the car I wanted to talk to him about.’

  Krogh hoped to Christ she was careful: he had a very real fear of catching something from either Cindy or Barbara. They went to eat at Gladstones, on the beach. There were a lot of halter tops and cut-off jeans and bare flesh and yells and shouts of young recognition and Krogh felt very old. Krogh didn’t finish his steak and their waiter, who wore a ponytail tied with a spotted ribbon and knew Cindy by her christian name, fashioned a take-home tinfoil doggy bag in the shape of a long-necked swan.

  ‘You coming back so I can thank you properly for my car?’

  ‘I should get back,’ said Krogh. He would go into the plant. His father-in-law would hear about it even if the man weren’t there: things like that – his dedication to work – were important. He was as safe as hell and up to his ass in stock options but his father-in-law retained the title of President and controlled the stockholders’ votes. Krogh enjoyed impressing the old man, like he enjoyed facing down the critics who’d sneered at the shopfloor draughtsman who’d gone for the main chance and married the boss’s daughter. It was going to be difficult to criticize now, after the Star Wars deal.

  Cindy ran him to the airport and Krogh promised to call. There were no delays on the flight nor hindrance on the road after landing in San Francisco and Krogh was at the plant by four, making sure he was seen going through the office level to the executive suites. He tried Barbara’s number, just to talk, but got the answering machine and rang off without leaving any message. Peggy picked up the call at home and when he told her he was at the plant said: ‘You work too hard. You don’t allow any time for yourself.’

  ‘I will,’ said Krogh easily.

  ‘Busy trip?’

  ‘I’m worn out.’

  It was the sort of club that could exist only in Los Angeles or New York, a flowered place for the butterfly people to flutter and briefly settle before moving on. Cindy’s sort of place.

  She cruised the jostled bar and the fast and slow disco, sure of herself and in no hurry to prove anything. She refused two quick approaches, hello goodbye, hello goodbye, already aware of the man at the bar, like he was aware of her: a hunk and knowing it, very dark-haired, chisel-faced, smiling at her but not doing anything else. In the end Cindy made the move, detouring on her way back from the powder room. When she got to him she said: ‘I just checked for my second head: I couldn’t find it.’

  ‘The one you’ve got is fine.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. At last.’

  He bought her kir royale, champagne and cassis, without asking what she wanted, and stayed with vodka, neat, for himself, and danced like a dream. When he suggested dinner at Spago she said he’d never get a table and he did, without her seeing any money change hands, and they both knew he was coming back to Malibu without their even talking about it.

  ‘I like the car,’ he said, outside the restaurant.

  ‘My daddy bought it for me,’ said Cindy.

  ‘You must have a very generous daddy,’ said Alexandr Petrin.

  5

  There had been occasions, quite a few in fact, when Charlie had regarded the assessments sessions to be a holiday: sit
ting in the sun, hat-over-the-eyes stuff. But not this time. He derided Harkness for behaving like a prissy schoolmaster – perhaps school mistress was more accurate – but that was exactly what this was going to be, just like being at school with all the report marked up in credit and debit columns. And Charlie was bloody sure – absolutely convinced – that if he didn’t get well over passmark in every course Harkness would have him. All the reasons could be manufactured, to bury him in some clerical division: failure to reach minimal but required standards, lack of concentration, inability to cope with the demands of the job, etcetera, etcetera.

  So Charlie tried. He couldn’t recall trying so hard in a practice environment because before he’d always considered war-games to be just that, kids’ games, bang, bang, you’re dead. Now it was different. Now it wasn’t playing pretend. It was him against Harkness, although it wasn’t quite a physical contest. Near enough, though. Important for him to win: always for him to win.

  There was a week of practical fieldwork, mostly around London. The second surveillance exercise was much cleverer and more difficult for him to isolate, although he did. And his target failed to pick Charlie up at all when the situations were turned around and he became the Watcher. He got four Dead Letter boxes, which was the maximum, observing genuine message caches used by the Czechoslovak and Cuban consulates and broke a sample code for which he was allowed two hours in just under one hour. Marksmanship was a real pain, in every meaning of the word. Charlie didn’t like or trust guns because they went off with a hell of a noise and attracted too much attention in a genuine situation, they made his wrist hurt and his ears ache, despite the protectors, and he could never stop his eyes from blinking at the moment of pressing the trigger, when they should have been open. He made a real effort and got five points above the pass level, which with anything else would have worried him but didn’t here. The department had a section composed of men who were experts with guns: funny blokes who didn’t smile much and who always looked behind doors and wore jackets with lots of room in the shoulders. Charlie had his own method of responding to armed confrontation: turn the other way and run like buggery, even with feet as difficult as his.