For the Good of the State Page 8

  ‘Nobody—that’s the trouble, Tom.’ Audley’s frown indicated that he had already tackled the problem, but in vain. ‘I’m not into Irish matters nowadays—I’m not reliable there … And the same applies to Arab-Israeli business—no one trusts me with them either … except the Arabs and the Jews themselves, that is—and they don’t matter … ’ He bit his lip.

  ‘But you’re a Soviet specialist—aren’t you?’

  ‘Supposedly … sometimes.’ Audley bridled slightly.

  ‘Like now?’

  Audley chewed at his lip, as though he didn’t like its taste. ‘In so far as it’s any of your business—yes … But nothing contentious … Interesting, maybe—bloody fascinating, if you like—’ But then he shook his head decisively ‘—only I don’t see how it could be them—not this time … if ever.’

  Tom felt reality slipping again. ‘You’re sacrosanct, are you?’

  ‘What?’ Audley focused on him as though he hadn’t heard.

  ‘Where I come from they aren’t above hitting people, David.’

  Audley stared at him for a moment. ‘But you aren’t where you come from. And I’m not “people”, Tom.’ Now Audley was focusing exactly on him. ‘No, don’t get me wrong, my lad: no one’s sacrosanct, I agree … But at my level, over here and over there, there are a few unwritten rules, Tom.’

  ‘What rules?’

  ‘What rules?’ The brutal look returned. ‘In theory the rules exist at two levels—at least, according to Jack Butler, who’s a great man for rules—“Rules of Engagement”, as he puts it—okay?’ But then he read Tom’s face. ‘You’re used to terrorists, boy—uncontrolled ones and Soviet-controlled ones—I know! But that’s not what I’m talking about now.’

  ‘So what are you talking about?’ The fact that Audley knew the score made it more confusing. ‘What two levels?’

  ‘Okay!’ Audley nodded. ‘There’s the gentlemanly level— which Jack truly understands. Which is like Wellington at Waterloo, when this artillery officer comes up to him, and says he’s got a clear view of Napoleon and his staff, and a battery pointing in that direction, and he’s ready to fire. But the Duke says “No! no! I’ll not allow it. It is not the business of commanders to be firing on each other.” Okay?’

  Tom felt he had to argue. ‘But what about us trying to hit Rommel in North Africa—the Keyes commando raid? And the Americans killing Yamamoto with that aerial ambush, after they’d broken the Japanese naval code?’

  ‘That was different.’ Audley waved a vague hand as he peered out of one of his own windows, across the pacific sheep. ‘That was hot war, not cold war.’

  ‘Wasn’t Waterloo hot war?’ That had been the second time the man had mentioned the Battle of Waterloo, which fitted neither what Harvey had said about him nor Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society.

  The hand waved again. “That wasn’t disgusting twentieth-century war—it was gentlemanly … ‘Audley gave him a cautious sidelong look ’ … at least, it was on Wellington’s side, anyway—if you are about to throw Sous-Officier Cantillon at me, eh? But then Bonaparte was no gentleman— he was just a National Socialist born a century too late—‘ The sidelong look suddenly became sardonic’—although I suppose you, of all people, wouldn’t admit that, eh?‘

  Bloody hell! thought Tom: what was ‘You, of all people’ meant to mean? ‘Who?’ And this wasn’t either the time or the place for such games. ‘Why—who!’

  ‘Didn’t Bonaparte pretend to be nice to the Poles? Apart from fathering a child on Marie Walewska?’ Audley circled round him, to take a view of the terrace on his own account. ‘Count Walewski—Napoleon III’s ambassador in London, to Queen Victoria, wasn’t he?’ He concentrated on the terrace for an instant. ‘All clear this side.’

  The conversation was taking an unreal and tangential turn, reminding Tom of his earlier passage of words with the elfin child on the forecourt. But then the wife had warned him that they were like each other; and everything that had happened here had been unreal—even the house itself was unreal, and this sudden unseasonable outburst of sunshine and blue sky, when he’d left grey clouds and rain in the real world.

  ‘Hadn’t you better keep an eye on the front?’ Audley chided him gently. ‘The police will come up the drive, like Christians. But they’ll be scared, so I wouldn’t wish not to welcome them—you understand?’

  Audley was quite matter-of-fact, but somehow that only made it worse, projecting Tom’s memory back out-of-reason into his own childhood, when Mamusia, beautiful and sweet-smelling, had read him to sleep with some silly story about the Elf-King and his daughter, who lived Under the Hill, half in their world, and half in our world, where the flowers were brighter but the dangers were more dangerous … and this was under a hill, or nearly, and there was an equivocal daughter—and an even more equivocal father, who’d known Mamusia herself, too … and where danger was undeniably more dangerous than it ought to be on a quiet afternoon in England!

  ‘Yes.’ He pretended to scan the empty forecourt again. The trick in Mamusia’s story was to hold on to something from his own world: the boy in the story had held on to his penknife: all he had to feel the shape of in his coat-pocket was the little wallet with his credit-cards in it; but then nothing could be more real world than credit-cards, after all. ‘Who the hell is—or was—“Sous-Officier … Cantillon”—?’

  ‘Cantillon?’ Audley seemed to expect him to know who the man was. ‘Why—he was the Napoleonic veteran who tried to assassinate Wellington in Paris in 1814, dear boy.’ He paused interrogatively. ‘And the unspeakable Bonaparte left the fellow 10,000 francs in his will—not the sort of thing a gentleman would do, as I said—did your dear mother never tell you that story, Tom?’

  ‘My mother?’

  Audley gazed at him for a moment, reflectively. ‘No, I can see that she didn’t—perhaps understandably, in the circumstances.’

  Tom was beginning to feel foolish. ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘What circumstances?’ Now Audley seemed surprised. ‘My dear boy, your mother—my Danny Dzieliwski—your dear mother was—and presumably still is—quite devoted to Napoleon Bonaparte. And all things French … quite uncritically, if I may say so. The dreadful Corsican was one of her great heroes—after Marshal Poniatowski, of course. “The epic of Napoleonic Poland” was one of her favourite themes … I won’t say that I learnt all my Polish history from her—rather, I learnt it so that I didn’t have to sit listening to her without being able to argue back, when she swept her generalizations halfway across Europe. In fact … ’ Audley raised a large dirty finger ‘—in fact, I became quite an authority on Casimir the Great and Jadwiga of Anjou in my own right, thanks to her. But I never really got beyond the medieval period in any detail, to be honest—modern history is mostly far too complicated for me.’

  It was happening again—

  ‘So don’t get the idea that I’m an expert on Bonaparte—’

  ‘No—’ It must be stopped, thought Tom desperately.

  ‘No, indeed! I just happen to be reading this book my wife gave me, about Colquhoun Grant, who was Wellington’s Head of Intelligence in the Peninsula—brilliant field operator, quite brilliant … And I had an ancestor who was killed there, you know—on my mother’s side—charging with Le Marchant at Salamanca in 1812. So she’s always on the look-out for books on the Peninsular War—Faith is, I mean, not my mother—’

  ‘David!’ Tom finally cracked. ‘For Christ’s sake—I don’t want to know about your mother—or my mother … Or Casimir the Great and Napoleon, for Christ’s sake!’ And what the hell had the child meant by Tripoli? ‘Somebody just took a shot at us, David—remember?’

  ‘At me, dear boy—not you. How could I forget?’ Audley screwed up his ugly features. ‘I’m only talking because I’m frightened—I told you. It’s a reflex in some people. But at least it’s preferable to other physical reflexes I’ve encountered—’ He stopped suddenly. ‘You don’t think he was shoot
ing at you, do you? But … he would have had to be a very bad shot, surely—?’ He stopped again, and frowned at Tom. ‘But then, he was a very bad shot—wasn’t he!’

  Audley had got there at last, however belatedly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes … ’ Audley’s frown deepened. ‘A sitting target—or a standing-still one, anyway … And he would have had plenty of time to sight-up, and make all the necessary allowances, too … ’ He stared clear through Tom.

  But that had been one of the problems. ‘He would?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Audley nodded through him. ‘He would have spotted me in the orchard. But I was moving around, and the trees wouldn’t have given him a clear shot.’ He drew a breath. ‘Only, after we had word of your impending arrival, and the sun came out … after that Faith got the chairs out and put them on the terrace. So then he would have known he’d get a clear shot.’ He focused on Tom again. ‘But then he missed—eh?’

  ‘Yes.’ That was one problem solved—which only left another in its place. ‘Yes?’

  ‘So it can’t have been the Other Side?’ Audley cocked his head. ‘But … they have been known to miss, Tom.’

  ‘Not often.’ It was time to push the old man. ‘And not when someone of Panin’s seniority is involved, David. He wouldn’t have used Sous-Officier Cantillon for the job.’

  ‘No … no, that’s true.’ Audley drew another breath. ‘But this isn’t Nikolai Panin anyway.’ He shook his head. ‘No.’

  They were back to Jack Butler’s ‘Rules of Engagement’. But, whatever Jack Butler and the Duke of Wellington might believe, there were no rules that couldn’t be stretched and broken outside the playing fields of Eton—the small print of military and political necessity legitimized every successful action retrospectively — that was why the Belgrano was at the bottom of the South Atlantic.

  ‘He’s a gentleman, is he?’ But Audley had referred to two levels, he remembered. ‘Or is it that you’re old friends, and he’s sentimental?’

  ‘Huh!’ Audley didn’t mind being needled, Tom realized in that instant; or being Danny Dzieliwski’s boy maybe did confer an advantage, as Jaggard had calculated? ‘Old Nikolai’s no gentleman, that’s for sure! He’s a true-red child of the Revolution—homo Sovieticus Stalinus—he may have been an old-time cool-head, hot-heart patriotic Russian during the war—the “Great Patriotic War”—and afterwards, for a time … But surviving the last thirty-five years has surely corrupted him into a cold-hearted bastard who knows exactly which side his fresh white bread is buttered, by God!’ He shook his head at Tom, almost sadly. ‘That’s the bugger of their system, young Tom—it corrupts ordinary decent men more efficiently and comprehensively and quickly than ours does … apart from bringing the absolute shits to the top even more quickly than we can manage—eh?’

  Interesting, Tom began to think, when a slight sound from outside broke the thought suddenly. ‘So Panin was an ordinary decent man once upon a time—?’ He turned towards the window casually. ‘Was he?’

  ‘I think he might have been. He was certainly a damn good archaeologist once upon a time, by all accounts. And he’s undoubtedly one of their best disinformation men.’

  ‘And you know him from way back?’ He was torn down the middle between what Audley was saying and what had just come into sight, down the track from the road.

  ‘Not from way back. I first met him fifteen years ago.’

  Tom held his face rigid. The measure of Audley’s intelligence memory was that fifteen years wasn’t way back to him. And the measure of the difference between Nikolai Panin’s world and their own was what he was watching now, outside.

  ‘I did him a good turn … after a fashion—’ Audley was slightly thrown by his failure to turn back from the window this time. But, for the life of him, he couldn’t tear himself away from what he was seeing ‘—and he returned the compliment, a few years later … after a fashion.’

  ‘Yes?’ What that meant was that self-interest and cooperation had briefly coincided for David Audley and Nikolai Panin, no more. But also that those two occasions had been the beginning of some sort of relationship between them over fifteen years, nevertheless. If But he couldn’t go on watching. ‘Yes? What was his fashion, then?’

  ‘None of your business—’ Audley read his face. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Now he wants to meet you again, is what’s the matter, David.’

  ‘And now I want to see him.’ Audley frowned, dissatisfied with that explanation. ‘What were you looking at, Tom?’

  ‘The police have arrived, David,’ he admitted.

  The old man relaxed slightly. ‘They have?’

  ‘Not “They”, David—it’s just one policeman.’ Tom turned back to the window, inclining suddenly towards cruelty. ‘He’s just taking his bicycle clips off his ankles now. And he doesn’t seem very scared, either—he’s just parking his bicycle alongside my car … and he’s looking around as though he owns the place—six-foot-plus, slim build … about forty, forty-five … fair complexion—red weather-beaten, or a winter holiday on the Costa del Sol, or regular visits to your local pub—I don’t know which at this distance.’

  ‘Yes.’ Audley took one step, but then stopped. ‘That’ll be Alan—Constable Grant … Does he have a carrier on the back of his cycle?’

  ‘Yes—’ Tom stared at the bicycle ‘—he’s got some vegetables in it—or something green—?’

  ‘Bedding plants, most likely,’ agreed Audley. ‘Alan knows just where to go in the village, to fill his garden in the spring. That’ll be him, right enough. So … Faith will have to give him some of her plants, from the greenhouse—’

  ‘David—for Christ’s sake!’

  Audley stood where he was. ‘It’s all right. She planted far more than we need for bedding-out … And no bugger’s going to shoot a village policeman, Tom—not at 600 yards, in default of me—or you.’ He shook his head. ‘Not even Bonaparte would pay him 10,000 francs for that.’

  Harvey had said that Audley wasn’t popular in certain quarters, and Tom could see why that might be true. ‘So you’re not scared any more?’

  Audley swayed, and then steadied himself. ‘Oh … I’m still scared—’

  A heavy front-door-knocker banging echoed in the distance, from somewhere in the depths of the house.

  ‘That’s Alan.’ Audley nodded. ‘There’s an electric bell, and a bell on a chain, out there. But Alan always uses the door-knocker. He doesn’t believe in gadgets.’

  The echoes died away, but now there was another sound—of tyres scattering gravel, and then of a car coming up the drive from the road.

  ‘I’m about as scared as Nikolai Panin should be,’ said Audley. ‘Because Fred Clinton laid down a sanction—oh, about twenty years ago, after some rogue East German tried to do for him what Sous-Officier Cantillon tried to do for Wellington, without KGB clearance … And Fred wasn’t going to have that game played with impunity by all and sundry, with apologies afterwards.’ He gave Tom one of his brutal expressions. ‘Fred was no more a gentleman than Bonaparte was—or Nikolai Panin is, you see, Tom.’

  Tom heard the police car scatter gravel again, as it reached the forecourt. But that was no longer important.

  ‘So he invented MAD—or his version of it—long before the Pentagon did … “Mutual Assured Destruction”, eh?’ Another nod. ‘Only his version wasn’t a general holocaust—it was much more precise … But not exactly precise, in case one particular KGB boss wanted us to take out one of his rivals—you understand, Tom?’

  He had heard of this, although almost as a legend rather than the truth: the life-for-a-life consensus in the intelligence community, which constrained and inhibited them from killing each other at the higher levels.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about?’ Audley had heard the doors of the police car slam, but he ignored the sounds.

  ‘Yes.’ The revenge-names were pricked at the highest level, the word was. And Research and Development was the highest level. />
  This time the electric bell pealed out, from down below and up above simultaneously, halfway to the sound of the burglar alarm.

  ‘So if I’m taken out, then Panin can’t expect to celebrate this Christmas either. Because he’s my exact opposite.’ The bell rang again, and Audley waited for the echoes to die away. ‘So the sooner we meet now, the better for both of us.’

  4

  TO AUDLEY’S scrambled phone Tom said: ‘Would you hold for a moment, sir’, as the door of the study opened; and then, to the Special Branch man, ‘What is it?’, holding his temper in check as he heard the sound of Audley’s voice approaching, through the open door; and then Faith Audley’s voice too, raised in protest—so she had been retrieved at last, from her bolt-hole, wherever it was—

  ‘Sir—’ The Special Branch man also heard the approaching voices, and paused understandably — but then jinked strangely, as though something unexpected had touched him from behind, lifting his left arm and looking down into the gap at the same time.

  ‘Sorry!’ Cathy Audley’s little face, eyes magnified behind their spectacles, and teeth metal-braced, appeared alongside him. ‘Hullo, Sir Thomas!’

  ‘What’s happening?’ said Jaggard in Tom’s ear. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I know what a baronet is,’ said the child earnestly. ‘Father said to look it up. So I did—in my Everyman’s Encyclopaedia … That’s what he always says: “Look it up”, he says. So I took BAR to CAM into the hole. And-’

  ‘Cathy!’ Faith Audley bulldozed the Special Branch man out of her way. ‘That’s enough!’

  ‘Are you there?’ repeated Jaggard.

  ‘But I didn’t tell him where the hole was, Mummy,’ the child protested. ‘I was just talking about baronets—’

  ‘Be quiet!’ Mrs Audley concentrated on Tom, ignoring her daughter. ‘Sir Thomas, will you please tell me what’s going on in my house?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom into the receiver. Come back Beirut, come back Tripoli! ‘Would you hold for a moment, sir.’ He frowned at the child as she squeezed past the Special Branch man: Tripoli?