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I waited. The ‘need-to-know’ basis, upon which the department worked, meant that I’d been told only a part of it. Schlegel took his time getting his cigar well alight.
I said, ‘The story about the machineguns fits with everything I’ve been told. The whole story – the stuff about the uncut diamonds providing the money to start the mine, and then the fruit and vegetable imports – that’s all on non-classified file.’
‘Not all of it,’ said Schlegel. ‘Long after the file closes, Champion was still reporting back to this department.’
‘Was he!’
‘Long before my time, of course,’ said Schlegel, to emphasize that this was a British cock-up, less likely to happen now that we had him with us on secondment from Washington. ‘Yes,’ said Schlegel, ‘those machineguns were shipped to Accra on orders from this office. It was all part of the plan to buy Champion into control of the Tix set-up. Champion was our man.’
I remembered all those years when I’d been drinking and dining with the Champions, never suspecting that he was employed by this office.
Perhaps Schlegel mistook my silence for disbelief. ‘It was a good thing while it lasted,’ he said. ‘Champion was in and out of Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, arguing about his melons, carrots and potatoes, keeping his eyes open and dropping a few words to the right people, doing us all a power of good. And the way that Champion had scored – selling cannons to some freaky little terrorist outfit – all helped.’
‘So what was the fadeout?’
Schlegel blew a piece of tobacco off his lip, with enough force to make the bookcase rattle. ‘The feedback of information began to sag. Champion said the French were starting to lean on him, and it was getting too dangerous. It was a top-level decision to let him go. It was the right decision. You Brits are good at bowing out gracefully and you’d done all right out of Champion by that time.’
‘And now?’
‘A guy in German security trying to make a name for himself. He’s dug out some stuff about Champion’s financial affairs. They are asking questions about the guns at Accra.’
‘Bonn gets hysterical – and we have to join in the screaming?’
‘If the Champion business becomes a big scandal, they’ll say we were careless when we let him go.’
‘Perhaps it was a little careless,’ I suggested.
‘Well, maybe it was,’ said Schlegel. He picked up my report exonerating Champion. ‘But your whitewash job isn’t going to help matters.’
‘I’ll take another shot at it,’ I said.
He slid my report across the polished desk. Then from a drawer he got Perrier water and a tiny bottle of Underberg bitters. He shook the bitters into the mineral water and stirred it with a ballpoint pen to make it a delicate brown. ‘Want some?’
‘That’s just for hangovers,’ I said. ‘And even then it’s got to be a pretty damn bad hangover.’
‘I like it,’ said Schlegel, and drank it slowly, savouring each sip.
I took the report and stood up to leave. Schlegel said, ‘This is going to be a lousy rotten miserable bummer. I hate these jobs where we are shaking down our own. So you don’t have to give me a bad time, or give yourself a bad time for not covering up for him.’
‘I had that lecture at Indoctrine Four, when I went to the CIA Communications symposium in 1967,’ I said.
‘Champion saved your life,’ Schlegel reminded me. ‘If you can’t hack it, just say you want out.’
‘I know what kind of out I’d get,’ I said bitterly.
Schlegel nodded. ‘And I’d countersign it,’ he said. In a way, I preferred Schlegel’s New World directness: the others would have tried to persuade me that such a request would have had no effect on my career.
Schlegel stood up to look out of the window. It was still snowing. ‘This isn’t just some kind of fancy positive vetting job,’ he said. ‘This is a hot one.’ Schlegel scratched his behind, and reflected.
‘Someone across the street could lip-read you,’ I warned him.
He turned to look at me pityingly. It was Schlegel’s often expressed belief that we’d get more done here in London if we worried less about such details. ‘The Germans are sending one of their people down to Nice to investigate Champion,’ he said thoughtfully.
I didn’t respond.
‘Have you been taken suddenly drunk or something?’ said Schlegel.
‘I didn’t want to disturb your deductive processes,’ I said. I polished my spectacles and blinked at him.
‘Damned if I understand it,’ he said.
‘You’re in Europe now, Colonel,’ I said. ‘This German scandal has come just when the Bonn government are warming up for an election. When their security people discovered that Champion had once been a British agent it was the answer to all their problems. They wrote “Passed to British security” in the margin and fired it across here. Now the German Defence Minister can refuse to answer any questions about the scandal on the grounds that it would prejudice the security of their British ally. It will give them all they need to stall until the election is over. When they are elected again it will be “Minister requested” and that’s the last we’ll see of it. I’ve been through all this before, Colonel.’
‘Well, you know more about all this European Mickey Mouse than I’ll ever understand,’ said Schlegel. It was a double-edged compliment and he bared his teeth to let me know it. ‘We’ll hold it for the three-month cycle,’ he offered, as if trying to come to terms with me.
‘Don’t do me any favours,’ I told him. ‘I don’t give a good goddamn if you publish it as a whole-page ad in Variety. I’ve done what I was asked. But if the department expected me to return with the synopsis for World War Three, I’m sorry to disappoint. If you want to send me back to spend the rest of the year drinking with Champion at the department’s expense, I’ll be very happy to do so. But Champion is no dope. He’ll tumble what’s going on.’
‘Maybe he already did,’ Schlegel said slyly. ‘Maybe that’s why you got nothing out of him.’
‘You know what to do, then,’ I told him.
‘I already did it,’ he said. ‘A short dark kid. Looks ten years younger than she really is: Melodie Page. Been with the department nearly eight years!’
3
‘William, come to Mother, darling, and let me give you a kiss.’ Champion’s failed marriage was all there in that imperious command. An elegant French wife who persisted in calling their small son Billy ‘William’, and who gave him kisses, instead of asking for them.
She gave Billy the promised kiss, pulled a dead leaf off the front of his sweater and then waited until he’d left the room. She turned to me. ‘All I ask is that you don’t remind me how keen I was to marry him.’ She poured fresh hot water into the teapot, and then put the copper kettle back on the hob. It hummed gently with the heat from the blazing logs. There was a stainless-steel kitchen only a few steps along the carpeted corridor, but she had made the tea and toasted the bread on the open fire in the lounge. From here we could look out of the window and watch the wind ruffling the river and whipping the bare trees into a mad dance. The black Welsh hills wore a halo of gold that promised respite from the dark daylight.
‘I didn’t come down here to talk about Steve, or about the divorce,’ I protested.
She poured tea for me and gave me the last slice of toast. She spiked a fresh piece of bread on to the toasting fork. ‘Then it’s surprising how many times we seem to find ourselves talking about it.’ She turned to the hearth and busied herself with finding a hot place in the fire. ‘Steve has this wonderful knack,’ she continued bitterly, ‘this wonderful knack of falling on his feet … like a kitten.’
It was an affectionate analogy. The rejection had hurt, I could see that. I buttered my toast and put some of Caterina’s homemade jam on it. It was delicious and I ate it without speaking.
‘This damned house,’ she continued. ‘My sister wrote to tell me how much it would be worth if it was in France. But it’s not in France, it’s in Wales! And it costs a fortune to keep the slates on, and mend the boiler, and cut the lawn … and heating oil has nearly doubled in price just since the last delivery.’ The bread started to smoke. She cursed softly, broke the scorched piece off and threw it away into the flames before toasting the other side. Caterina could cope with things. That was her misfortune in a way. She wanted to be cosseted and looked after but she was ten times more efficient than any of the men who wanted to do it. ‘So Steve gets rid of the house, burdens me with all its problems and expenses, and everyone tells me to be grateful.’
‘You’re not exactly poor, Caty,’ I said.
She looked at me for a moment, deciding if I knew her well enough to make such a personal remark. But I did know her well enough.
‘You know what the arrangement was … If he’s going down to the river, I’ll kill the little devil.’
I followed her gaze to where her small son was dragging a toy cart across the lawn. As if sensing that he was being watched, he changed direction and started back up towards the smart new sauna again. Caterina went back to her tea and toast. ‘He’s changed a lot, you know … I swore to my father that Steve had come through the war unmarred, but it took ten years to take effect. And then the last few years have been hell … hell for both of us, and little William, too!’
‘He had a lousy war, Caty,’ I said.
‘So did a lot of other people.’
I remembered the day in 1944 when I went into Nice prison just a few hours after the Gestapo had moved out. I was with the forward elements of the American Army. There was another Englishman with me. We asked each other no personal questions. He was wearing Intelligence Corps badges, but he knew Steve Champion all right, and he was probably sent directly from London, as I had been. The Germans had destroyed all the documents. I suppose London were sure they would have done, or they would have sent someone more important than me to chase it.
‘Look at that,’ said this other officer, when we were kicking the cupboards of the interrogation room apart. It was a shabby room, with a smell of ether and carbolic, a framed engraving of Salzburg and some broken wine bottles in the fireplace. He pointed to a bottle on the shelf. ‘Steve Champion’s fingertips,’ said my companion. He took the bottle and swirled the brine around so that through the mottled glass I saw four shrunken pieces of dark brown organic matter that jostled together as they were pushed to the centre of the whirling fluid. I looked again and found that they were four olives, just as the label said, but for a moment I had shivered. And each time I remembered it I shivered again. ‘You’re right, Caty,’ I said. ‘A lot of people had it much worse.’
Overhead the clouds were low and puffy, like a dirty quilt pulled over the face of the countryside.
‘There was all that “we Celts” nonsense. I began to believe that Wales was little different from Brittany. Little did I know … My God!’ said Caterina. She was still watching Billy in the garden. ‘The banks of the river are so muddy this last week … the rain … one of the village boys was drowned there this time last year.’ She looked up at the carved wooden crucifix on the wall above the TV set.
‘He’ll be all right.’ I said it to calm her.
‘He never dares to go down as far as the paddock when Steve visits. But he just defies me!’
‘Do you want me to get him?’
She gave a despairing smile. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She tugged at her hair. I was a ‘friend of Steve’s’: she didn’t want me to get any kind of response from Billy that she had failed to get. ‘We’ll watch from here,’ she said.
‘That’s probably best,’ I agreed.
‘You English!’ she said. I got the full blast of her anxiety. ‘You’re probably a fully paid-up subscriber to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.’
‘That wouldn’t necessarily make me a child-beater,’ I said. ‘And it’s the Royal Society.’
‘No one can live with a man who is racked with guilt. And Steve is racked with guilt.’
‘You’re not talking about the war?’ I asked.
‘I’m talking about the marriage,’ she said.
‘Because Steve has no need to feel guilty about the war,’ I told her.
‘My mother told me about Englishmen,’ said Caterina. She raised her hand in a gesture more appropriate to an Italian market than to an English drawing-room. And now her voice, too, carried an inflection of her birth ties. ‘You don’t have to have something to feel guilty about!’ Her voice was high and almost shrill. ‘Don’t you understand that? Guilt is like pain – it hurts just the same whether it’s real or imagined!’
‘I’ll have to think about that,’ I said defensively.
‘You think about it, then. I’ll go and fetch William.’ She pushed the silk cosy down over the teapot to keep the tea warm while she was gone. But she did not go. She kept her hands round it and stared into the distance. Or perhaps she was staring at the silver-framed photo of her brother Marius, the young priest who’d died in that carbolic-smelling basement. Suddenly the sun stabbed into the room. It wasn’t real sun, there was no warmth in it, and precious little colour. It spilled over the embroidered traycloth like weak lemon tea, and made a rim round Caty’s hair.
They were both like their mother, these Baroni girls. Even as children they’d looked more like visiting townspeople than like village kids. Tall and slim, Caty had that sort of ease and confidence that belied the indecision she expressed.
‘I won’t stay here,’ she said, as if her thoughts had raced on far beyond our conversation. ‘My sister wants me to help with her boutique in Nice. With the money I get from the house, we could start another shop, perhaps.’
The sun’s cross-light scrawled a thousand wrinkles upon her face, and I was forced to see her as she was, instead of through the flattering haze of my memories. Perhaps she read my thoughts. ‘I’m getting old,’ she said. ‘Steve’s getting old, too, and so are you.’ She smoothed her hair, and touched the gold cross that she wore.
She was still attractive. Whatever kind of post-natal exercises she’d done after Billy’s birth had restored her figure to that of the trim young woman Steve had married. She used just sufficient make-up to compensate for the pale English winters she’d endured for so long. Her nails were manicured, and long enough to convince me that she didn’t spend much time at the sink, and her hair was styled in the fashion that requires frequent visits to the hairdresser.
She smoothed the striped silk pants across her knee. They were stylish and tailored. She looked like an illustration that American Vogue might run if they ever did an article about English crumpet. I wondered if she spent many elegant afternoons sitting by the log fire in her fine clothes, pouring herself lemon tea from a silver teapot.
‘Do you know what I think?’ she said.
I waited a long time and then I said, ‘What do you think, Caty?’
‘I don’t believe you just bumped into Steve. I think you were sent after him. I think you are still working for the Secret Service or something – just like in the war. I think you are after Steve.’
‘Why would anyone be after him, Caty?’
‘He’s changed,’ she said. ‘You must have noticed that yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised what he was mixed up in. He has this sort of schizophrenia and an obsession with secrecy. I don’t know if you get like that in the Secret Service, or whether the Secret Service choose that sort of man. But it’s hell to live with, I’ll tell you that.’
‘I think you still love him,’ I said.
‘You’ve always hero-worshipped him,’ she said. ‘He was your big brother, wasn’t he? You just can’t imagine that some boring little housewife like me would have the effrontery to be glad to get rid of your wonderful Steve Champion. Well, I am glad. I just hope like hell that I never see him again, ever.’
I don’t know how she expected me to react, but whatever she expected, I failed her. I saw a look of exasperation. She said, ‘I tried, believe me, I tried very hard. I even bought new things and wore false eyelashes.’
I nodded.
‘I thought Steve had sent you … to get William.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘He’ll stop at nothing to get him. He told me that. But I’ll fight him, Charles. You tell Steve that. He’ll never get William from me.’
She picked up Billy’s favourite toy rabbit and went to the door. She looked back at me as if I was a Solomon who would decide Billy’s future. ‘If I thought he would be happy with Steve, I wouldn’t mind so much. But William is not like his father – he’s a gentle child and easily hurt.’
‘I know he is, Caty.’
She stood there for a moment, thinking of things to say, and not saying them. Then she went out of the room.
I saw her as she passed the window. She was wearing a riding mac and a scarf over her head. She had Billy’s rabbit under her arm.
4
That Champion’s Master File had been brought from Central Registry was, in itself, a sign of the flap that was in progress. It was seldom that we handled anything other than the Action Abstracts and they were a three-hour task. This Master would have stacked up to a five-feet-tall pile of paperwork, had the Biog, Associative, Report, Vettings and year by year Summaries been put one upon the other.
The papers had yellowed with age, the photos were brittle and dog-eared. The yellow vetting sheets were now buff-coloured, and the bright-red Report dossier had faded to a brownish-pink.
There was little hope of discovering anything startling here. The continuing triple-A clearance, right up to the time that Champion stopped reporting to the department, was in itself a sign that men more jaundiced than I could ever be had given Champion a clean bill of health. Since then the department had shown little interest in him.
I looked at his Biographical entries. Champion’s father, a Welsh Catholic, had been a senior lecturer at the Abbasiyah Military Academy, Cairo. Young Champion came back to England to attend public school. From there he won a place at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. For a boy who grew up to table-talk of tactics, battles and ballistics, Sandhurst was a doddle. Champion became an under-officer, and a well-remembered one. And his scholarship matched his military expertise: modern history, four languages and a mathematics prize.
It was Champion’s French-language skills that earned for him a secondment to the French Army. He went the usual round of military colleges, the Paris Embassy, Maginot Line fortresses and Grand General HQ, with occasional glimpses of the legendary General Gamelin.
Champion had only been back with his regiment for a matter of weeks when a War Office directive automatically shortlisted him for a Secret Intelligence Service interview. He was selected, trained and back in France by 1939. He was just in time to watch General Gamelin’s defence system surrender to the Nazis. Champion fled south and became ‘net-officer’ for what was no more than a collection of odds and sods in the unoccupied zone. His orders were to stay clear of the enthusiastic amateurs that London called their Special Operations Executive, but inevitably the two networks became entangled.
It was Champion who greeted me in person that night when I landed from the submarine at Villefranche. I was assigned to SOE but Champion kidnapped me and got it made official afterwards. If I’d gone up to Nîmes as ordered, my war service would have ended two or three months later in Buchenwald.
But Champion used me to sort out his own network and I stayed with him right up to the time the network crumbled and Champion was taken prisoner. Eventually he escaped and was flown back to London. He got a DSO and a new job. Even before D-Day, Champion was assigned to peacetime network planning. He demanded choice of personnel, and got it. His first request was to have me as his senior assistant. It wasn’t easy for me now to look at Champion’s file with an objective eye.
When you read old files, you realize how the paperwork itself decides the progress of an inquiry. Schlegel gave Bonn’s report a twelve-week life cycle, so the coordinator decided not to give it a file number. He attached it as an appendix to Champion’s abstract. Then I had to do a written report, to glue it all together. With everyone satisfied, the file would have gone over to Current Storage and then gone sliding down the priorities until it ended in a tin archive box in Hendon.
But it didn’t.
It was activated by an alert slip that came from the officer who was ‘running’ Melodie Page. She failed to report for two cycles. This would normally have meant the opening of an orange Caution File with its own file number. But with Champion’s abstract signed out to me, it caused the girl’s alert slip to be pinned on to my desk diary.
Suddenly the Champion file was wearing red stickers in its hair, and everyone concerned was trying to think of a ‘Latest action’ to pin to it, in case the Minister wanted to read it himself.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Schlegel.
‘Perhaps she’s fallen for Champion,’ I said.
He looked at me to see whether I meant it. ‘That’s all I need,’ said Schlegel. ‘You coming in here inventing new things for me to worry about.’
‘And you want me to go to this flat that Champion is supposed to have kept as some kind of bolt-hole?’
‘It’s a ten-minute job. Special Branch will send Blantyre and one of the Special Branch break-in specialists. Just take a look round, and file a short report tomorrow. No sweat – it’s only to show we’re on our toes.’
‘Are you sure I’m experienced enough to handle something like this?’
‘Don’t go touchy on me, bubblebrain. I want a piece of paper: something recent, with a senior operative’s signature, to put in the file before it leaves here.’
‘You’re right,’ I said.
‘Goddamn! Of course I’m right,’ he said in exasperation. ‘And Mr Dawlish will be looking in there on his way back from his meeting in Chiswick.’
The top brass! They really expected questions in the House, if Dawlish was going to do an I-was-there piece for them.
Steve Champion’s hideaway, in Barons Court. Well, I don’t have to tell you what kind of house it was: Gothic horror comes to town! Depressing place, with no sign of any tenants, and a dented metal grille that asks you who you are, and buzzes when it opens the lock.
That bugger Blantyre was already there, chatting away merrily with his ‘break-in specialist’ who’d already splintered the paintwork on the outer door and left a wet footprint in the hall, and who, on closer inspection, turned out to be Blantyre’s old buddy Detective-Inspector Seymour.
There they were, striding all over the clues and pouring each other double portions of Champion’s booze.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ said Blantyre.
‘So I see.’
Blantyre held up his glass and looked at it, like one of those white-coated actors in TV commercials about indigestion. He said, ‘We were wondering whether to send samples to the lab.’
‘Send a whole bottle,’ I said. ‘Order a case from Harrods, and give them his Diner’s Card number.’
Blantyre’s face reddened, but whether in shame or anger I could not be sure. I said, ‘Good. Well, if I’m not disturbing you two, I’ll take a look round while there’s still some evidence left.’
Blantyre gave me both barrels of a sawn-off twelve-bore, sighed and left the room wearing a sardonic smile. His drinking companion followed him.
I’d hardly started having a look round when Dawlish arrived. If Schlegel was hoping to keep our break-in inconspicuous, I’d say that Dawlish screwed up any last chance, what with his official car and uniformed driver, and the bowler hat and Melton overcoat. To say nothing of the tightly rolled umbrella that Dawlish was waving. Plastic raincoats are de rigueur for the rainy season in Barons Court.
‘Not exactly a playboy pad,’ said Dawlish, demonstrating his mastery of the vernacular.