The House of Rumour (28 page)

Back on earth the struggle continues. Batista’s regime is collapsing. Castro now controls almost all the countryside in Oriente. Cienfuegos and Guevara are advancing rapidly westwards through Las Villas. The people of Havana are ready to rise up and take control of the city. The future holds many risks and uncertainties in this glorious venture. This has always been the biggest gamble in history. That great spin of the wheel that we call the Revolution.

Hasta la victoria, siempre
(a Rebel Army slogan),

And affectionate regards,

Nemo

11

lust

He closes his eyes on a true darkness, submits his will to nothingness. The void. The empty, parallel world where he is zero. Everything descending into blackness: matter, energy, information.

Now.

He is on his knees, face at her feet in calm supplication. Nose up against toes that flex and creak in polished hide. He tries to kiss the glossy leather but she shifts her weight to stoop down over him. With gloved hands she loops the collar around his neck, buckles it, clips the dog leash on. She straightens up.

‘Hup!’ she commands with a swift tug of the lead.

His head jerks back. He feels a jolt of power run through him. That almost forgotten impulse of desire. Good Lord, he thinks with a wistful smile, there’s life in the old dog yet.

‘Open your eyes,’ she tells him.

He looks up. Booted and stockinged legs bestride his face. He sets his gaze on her pelvis thrusting forward, girdled in black lace. She grabs a meagre fistful of his wispy grey hair. Pins and needles tingle his scalp.

‘Naughty boy.’ She holds his head an inch or two from her crotch. ‘You want this, don’t you?’

‘Please,’ he whimpers.

‘But do you know what I’ve got for you there?’

He thinks for a moment. She glares down at his wrinkled, frowning face.

‘Whatever you care to give me, Mistress.’

‘Yes,’ she whispers. ‘Good boy.’

Marius Trevelyan had first spotted her on his way to Curzon Street on the morning he was recalled by the Service. She was tip-toeing up Shepherd Market on high heels. A short black bob, a fur-trimmed jacket, buttocks twitching in a tight skirt with that absurd erotic waddle. It was just before 9 a.m. but she wasn’t on her way to work, he decided. Oh no, on her way back, more like. He picked up his stride and followed at a discreet distance. All his years in retirement hadn’t blunted his appetite to pursue and observe. He felt a twinge of lust and an odd sense of recognition. She had finished for the night. She was coming off the game.

Coming off the game. Just as he had so many times. Only to be pulled back by the Service to consult on some little project or other. They never quite let you go, just kept you dangling. Trevelyan noted the hint of a swagger in this tart’s gait. A little too much emphasis in the upper body, he thought. Yes, that was interesting. Maybe this one really was in the same trade as he was.

The Curzon Street offices were not as changed as he had feared. He had imagined banks of computers replacing the musty confusion of Archive and Registry, the gloom of partitioned offices torn down and replaced in a bright and unforgiving open-plan. But as he made his way along the corridor, it seemed still the same dank labyrinth he had known from his days at Information Research.

The director of his old department was a woman. That was the shock he could not quite adjust to. Oh, he knew he had to. After all, there had been eight years of a female prime minister. They were everywhere in power these days. He remembered this one from when she was an assistant desk officer fresh from the Colonial Service. She’d had long hair then, and a habit of wearing exotic Indian silks. Now she had a cropped fringe and a skirt suit with shoulder pads. He noted the flat shoes when she stood up to greet him. Sensible shoes, isn’t that what they called them? She had beady, intelligent eyes.

‘Thank you so much for coming in, Sir Marius,’ she said, shaking his hand.

‘Not much choice,’ he retorted a little too sharply, baring his teeth in a grin. ‘You know, one is never completely retired. Just in suspended animation.’

She offered him a drink. Not a real one of course. That was another thing of the past.

‘There’s not a problem with this recall, is there?’ she asked him.

‘No, no.’ He shrugged.

‘You’ll be reporting directly to me, but if there is any, well, difficulty, we now have a staff counsellor.’

‘A what?’

‘It’s a new post. An independent officer that any member of the Service can consult with, concerning any problem that they might not feel able to discuss with their line management.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘We set it up after that officer from Counter-Subversion went to the press about being asked to carry out inappropriate investigations.’

‘I hope you don’t think that I’m going to go public about anything.’

‘Not at all, Sir Marius. I just feel obliged to let you know about new conditions of work within the Service.’

‘Since this
Spycatcher
business, Head Office really is worried about people blabbing, isn’t it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Even got an injunction on Joan Miller’s memoirs. Ridiculous.’

‘Joan Miller?’

‘Worked for Maxwell Knight during the war in Counter-Espionage. All the stuff in her book is about that time. Nothing that could threaten national security. Though some of her work was tangential to Operation Mistletoe and the Service is still very cagey about that. Especially now, I suppose. I mean, that’s why I’ve been called back, isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Prisoner Number Seven. Hess.’

‘Oh. Yes.’

‘Hanged himself in the summerhouse in the Spandau garden. Not easy if you’re over ninety.’

‘Quite. We’ve always known his death would be a political event so we’ve had a procedure laid down and ready for this, agreed to by all the Four Powers. The autopsy and investigation have been our responsibility.’

‘He was always our prisoner. First and foremost.’

‘Yes. And that is why we’ve called you in, Sir Marius. You’re the only one left who has known the case from the beginning.’

‘So the Service wants my post-mortem?’

‘Yes. And your take in terms of information strategy, naturally.’

‘Don’t expect much clarity.’

‘Nuance, that’s what we’re after.’

‘Because this one was dark right from the start. A perfect example of the craft. Nobody knew the whole story and nobody ever will. So it can be told again and again. Controlled confusion, that’s the key to negritude.’

‘Negritude?’

‘Sorry, an old section nickname. You know, the Black Game. Black propaganda. What the Americans insist on calling psychological warfare. As if there was anything scientific about it. The Yanks, well, they were always a bit heavy-handed. Never learnt how to play it as a game.’

‘And the Soviets?’

‘Brutal but playful. Like a cat with a mouse. Old liars, like us. And, like us, probably better at import than export. What are they up to with this one?’

‘It’s rather strange. They appear to have shifted their attitude just months before Hess hanged himself. In April,
Der Spiegel
ran a story that Gorbachev was considering agreeing to Hess being released. In June, a similar statement was issued to the German-language service of Radio Moscow.’

‘That’s odd.’

‘Yes.’

‘They’ve always exercised their veto before. If it hadn’t been for the Russians the old Nazi would have been out years ago.’

‘The obvious analysis is that this is all part of the
glasnost
policy.’

‘
Glasnost
,’ he sneered. ‘If you ask me
glasnost
is the slyest form of disinformation we’ve ever seen. Oh yes. What we said in the past is a lie but this,
this
is the truth. It has this confessional, redemptive trick to it. What about our side? What have we been up to?’

‘There we might have a little problem.’

‘Really?’

‘Just a matter of detail.’

‘The autopsy?’

‘No, not that. The son has commissioned another post-mortem but I don’t think that should cause us any problems. No, there was a note.’

‘He left a note?’

‘Yes.’

‘A nearly blind ninety-three-year-old left a suicide note?’

‘Yes.’

‘Christ.’

‘We’re sure it can be verified.’

‘Sounds as if someone’s been a little over-zealous. What does it look like?’

‘It’s with our senior document examiner. We’ll get it to you as soon as possible.’

‘Good. And I’d like to run it past one of my old team, if that’s permitted.’

‘Eric Judd?’

Sir Marius Trevelyan nodded.

‘Yes. He should give it the old once-over.’

He spent the afternoon back in Archive, once more trying to make some sense out of the affair. Over the years it had continued to confuse him, even as he had been part of the confusion himself. Now the old bugger was dead. Prisoner Number Seven had a long history of attempted suicide. In June 1941, soon after his capture, he had thrown himself down the stairs of the country house where he was being held for interrogation. The banisters had broken his fall and he had merely fractured a femur. In February 1945, he had stabbed himself in the chest with a stolen bread-knife and later gone on hunger strike. In 1959, in Spandau prison, he had used the jagged edge of the broken lens of his spectacles to open a vein in his wrist; in 1977, he had severed an artery with a knife. But on none of these occasions had he ever left any sort of note.

And the contents of the missive were perplexing. Addressed to ‘all my loved ones’, most of the thing was taken up with an apology to his former secretary for having to act as if he didn’t know her. During his examination by psychiatrists at Nuremberg, he had been confronted with Hildegard Fath, who had worked for many years as his personal assistant, and he had claimed that he had never seen her before. She had been reduced to tears, but this was back in 1945, over forty years ago.

The note brought everything back to the question of the man’s sanity. Marius Trevelyan once more attempted to thread his way through the maze of delirium and forgetfulness. The Soviet doctors had always maintained that Hess had been faking his loss of memory. The British had been more ambivalent, concluding that he had ‘suggested an amnesia for so long he partly believes in it’. Hess protested that he had been subjected to hypnosis and psychoactive drugs. American Intelligence had been intrigued by the possibilities in the case for advancements in mind-control. A psychiatrist on their panel later developed brainwashing techniques for the CIA.

Trevelyan began to make notes on a series of index cards, a one-line subject heading on one side, details on the other. After some time he shuffled through this small pack of cards and turned up a blank one marked ‘American’. He buzzed for a desk officer and called up all the files pertaining to US Intelligence regarding Prisoner Number Seven. He had remembered that there had been an American commandant at Spandau in the 1970s who had got into trouble when it was discovered that he had been working on a book with Hess. He made a request for this file also, along with any relevant documentation.

By the end of the day they had got the suicide note to him. It had been written on the reverse side of a letter Hess had received from his daughter-in-law, dated a month before his death. A nice touch, thought Trevelyan, if it indeed was what Eric Judd would call a ‘moody one’. Yes, Eric might be able to spot something, he concluded, as he carefully replaced it in the evidence bag.

‘But what do you think is in there?’ she asks, a gloved hand still holding him by the hair.

‘Mistress?’

He feels the pressure sores as his bony knees dig into the floor and a tremor of arthritis in his right hip. His old and withered flesh is cramped and weary, trembling. She places her other hand between her thighs, lets out a little burlesque purr.

‘People often wonder what I’ve got down here,’ she says. ‘There’s uncertainty. You like that, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes, Mistress.’

She was right. That was what he liked. Subterfuge.

‘Yes. Well, it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other, does it?’

‘No, no it doesn’t, Mistress.’

‘It could be both.’

‘Yes.’

‘In fact it is both, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Until you look at it, it’s both, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t, um. I don’t understand.’