The Madness of July (12 page)

Abel knew, from the way Maria now stretched out her arms with a sigh, and raised her legs as if she were going to do her exercises, that she had come to the turning point.

‘She’d had a child after the rape. Not known to us, and well-protected. Kept carefully out of sight, until now.

‘That boy has just enrolled in a masters program at Georgetown U.’

‘Ah.’

‘Exactly. That’s why she decided never to shout her story from the highest hill – she wanted to see him quietly through the years. A mother’s duty. He’s only just arrived in town.’

Abel sipped his wine and asked, ‘What changed?’

Maria smiled. ‘It would be beautiful if it was a piece of math, some kind of perfect equation. Joe’s history and our game in balance. Except it’s ugly. The Brits have nearly – nearly! – decided to help you and me. Right? And for us the prize is big. With Bendo fixed, it could be ours.’ Abel inclined his head.

‘They don’t know it yet, but they may have decided to do something stupid at the same time. This woman, whose influence we know, believes that her humiliation is going to be paraded before her eyes, and she can’t bear it. For the first time she’s faced with something that’s greater than the price of her own private shame, the one thing that could break her. If it comes about, she’s prepared to tell her story and bottle it up no more. No matter what.’

Abel waited, saying nothing.

‘From friends of the guy, her assailant as she would have it, who’ve kept in touch with her she has learned that the demon in her life, the father of her son and the source of all her pain, may be about to become Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States of America.’

Abel stayed quiet for a few moments, frowning. There had to be more. Ambassadors could be stopped, friendly governments warned. Happened all the time. For some reason these channels weren’t open, which was why he was here.

Maria smiled at him. She began to walk around the room. ‘You’re right. It should be the simplest thing to fix. Overnight job.’ Not this time. His eyes were on hers and he saw in them, for the first time since he’d walked in, a wariness that he associated with their most difficult moments. There were the times when her natural lightness was a disguise, and he knew the symptoms.

‘Two things. One – we don’t know who the guy is. Two – we don’t know who the Brits want to send to Massachusetts Avenue. Are they one and the same, or not?’

Abel leaned back and put his hands behind his head. ‘And Joe is dead.’

‘Precisely.’

They were two players in a long, smooth rally. Abel picked it up. ‘Joe knew too much, but we don’t know exactly what.’

‘Or who he told.’

‘About Berlin?’

‘And Bill Bendo.’

‘Or how he died?’

‘That too,’ she sighed. ‘That too.’

‘And if there was a reason behind it…’

Maria mimed a scream, then laughed. ‘It’s our fault. Like always. We’re supposed to know these things before they happen, and we never do. We’re stuck with our reputation. Right now we have one piece of information… a precious advantage and a curse. We use it or do nothing. Our choice, and either way there’s trouble.’

He saw the fork in the road as clearly as she did, but she wanted to spell it out, as if to help herself decide.

‘If we find out that her guy is going to be sent here, and we have to warn people that she’ll call him a criminal – suggesting, obviously, that we believe her – then you can take it that two things would happen. The Brits would take fright, and our deal, yours and mine – the biggest of them all – would be over. After all we’ve done to pull it round, out of the fire. Dealing with Bendo. The works.’ She looked straight at him and he was completely still. ‘Second, we’d be over too. The fall guys. Swept away to save embarrassment.’

Maria drank some wine. ‘The killer is that we don’t know if she’s even telling the truth. You know her reputation, and she might have been spinning Joe a line for purposes that we can’t begin to guess. So think of this. We say he’s a rapist – privately, to the folks that matter, which would be like sticking it on a billboard in Lafayette Square, signed by the fucking State Department – and it turns out that he can prove he isn’t.

‘White House and everyone else in total meltdown. Shit everywhere.
Everywhere
. The works. Me and you and the rest of the boys cast into outer darkness. For good.’

She asked the last question herself to get it over. ‘And the other option – doing nothing and letting it happen?’

The painful answer. ‘We don’t say he’s a rapist, and it turns out that he is… and we knew all the time.’

She painted the scene. ‘He comes here. She goes nuts in the papers, spews it all out, he hasn’t a defence, the kid shouts “Dad” on the news, ambassador resigns, horror story. Our deal’s off – things are blown that would finish you and me for good – relationships screwed on all fronts. For all I know the government falls in London. I’m told, incidentally, that that’s exactly what would happen, ’cos if this door opens there’s gonna be a pile of horeshit that flows out, and she’ll be spreading it all around this town. Joe isn’t there to stop her. And, as we know, her loyal husband would throw himself into the task, with his committee piling in behind with their shovels.’

Maria was on her feet now. ‘I say again’ – the formal touch seemed right for the moment – ‘who did Joe tell about Berlin? And what? The guy himself, whoever the hell he is? God save us.’

Abel got up and they paced the room together, had to move. ‘It’s unfair, old friend – it’s always unfair – but we’re piggy in the middle here. No win. Go one way we’re screwed, other way we’re fucked. Crude, but that’s how it is. Joe got us into it; he can’t get us out.’

Abel said, ‘Sassi. Still in London town?’

‘I’ve sent him a message,’ said Maria. ‘Knows there’s trouble. Got most of the loose ends tied up, too. He’ll try to keep them sweet. Guy’s a charmer’s charmer. If anybody can see us home, it’s him.’

Abel was conscious that there was another chapter to come. He asked the question that he knew would open it up. ‘What might Joe have done?’

Maria sat down across from him, and put a hand out to take his. ‘The thing we’ve been managing all this time… I used Joe, more than you knew, to help with messenger jobs. He spent enough time over there to learn… too much. He could blow the whole thing wide open. And, sad to say, he was in a frame of mind where he might have done just that.’

And Abel knew why he was there.

‘You know what we need from London. If Joe’s tongue has been too loose, just because he went mad about this woman – for the second time, God save us – the game could be over. There are things London must never know.’

Abel got up and walked to the table, as if looking for a place to think. His head was down. ‘All that work, digging our gold seam. And it’s dust.’

Maria sighed. ‘Yeah. The Brits will retreat, which is what some of them are inclined to do anyway, as we know. And then we’re screwed. And let’s be clear about what we both know. I don’t mean the American national interest, I mean us.

‘You and me. Our people. Nobody out there’ – she flung a hand towards the window – ‘has an idea that any of this is happening, or not happening. We don’t exist. But Joe and a stupid ambassador threatens everything. Ambassadors! Who needs them?’ Abel, if our deal goes down, we’ll be absorbed, reorganized, reconfigured. Fucked.

‘The bureaucracy’s human sacrifice. Roasted alive.’

His thoughts were turning, as Maria would know they must, to his own story, and the decision that had taken him to America. His calling, his family, and the secret that he’d kept down the years. Maria shared it and no one else around him knew it, not even Hannah. Not his brothers. He had long since decided that it was no deceit, but a necessity. All the years on the road, times of darkness and days of fun with Joe and Bendo and all the others, sprang to his mind. His life. ‘Unthinkable,’ he said.

‘You know what everything here – us – means to me, and why. It’s family. My inheritance. Well, one of them…’

‘Believe me.’ Maria spoke quietly, aware of the pain. ‘We’re all at risk.’

‘I’ve been away from home for ever, but I still worry about Will. Brother Mungo’s on the trail of the family story. He’s got on his historian’s hat, and he’s fascinated. We’re going to have to talk about it. Now this, just when we don’t need it.’ He shook his head.

‘Is Will OK?’ she asked.

‘When you knew him in Paris he was happy-go-lucky. Loved it all. Same in politics for a while, but he’s got a dark side. I sometimes speak to Francesca – his wife, you won’t have met – and she’s worried. He doesn’t know we’re in touch. He’s troubled by the game he’s in now – more than he ever seemed to be in the old one, which is strange in its way. He won’t get killed in this one, but he might be destroyed. So I guess he feels as vulnerable as he’s ever done.

‘Meanwhile, Joe’s dead in London. Meanwhile! How can I even say that?’

Maria stayed with Will. ‘He was the life and soul in Paris. Style. Everybody loved him. I’m sorry things have changed for him, but it’s what he always wanted. The political life.’

She left Abel alone then, going through the archway into the kitchen, whose aromas had now infected the whole house. He lay back on the cushions, watched the candles burn. The last of the light was fading from the windows, and the evening breeze filtering through the bug screen in front of him was a relief at the close of a long hot day. He was looking west and caught the livid stripes of the sunset through thin broken clouds. He thought for a little, while Maria sang softly in the kitchen as a counterpoint to the alarms of the last few minutes. He heard the pasta bubble and she clattered plates and salad servers, shouting to him to get water on the table, and more wine.

‘It’s gonna be a long weekend, one of the longest. I don’t think we have more time than that.’

He felt the night drawing in quickly, darkness only a few minutes away. The high spirits of his arrival had slipped away; there were no smiles as they sat down at the table. Maria, whom he knew to have the ability to stay cheerful at the height of a crisis, was serious, eyes cast down. They both thought of Joe.

‘First of all, I need to know where and how,’ said Abel.

‘He was found in his hotel room. Place called the Lorimer. Maybe known to you. Curled up, lots of stuff around. A mixture of substances, they say. A syringe, used – remember that. Passport in the name of McKinley – only one – stupid when he was told to ditch it after that shit hit the Colombian fan. This from our people. Wherry says the red light went crazy at Heathrow when he came in. Don’t know what they did about it.’

‘Followed him?’ said Abel.

Maria tilted her head to one side. ‘Would you? They’re strapped, like us. They’d need a good reason.’ Suddenly she smiled. ‘And we’re friends, aren’t we?’

There would be an autopsy, but the local police who were called to the hotel – Wherry knew they weren’t aware who Joe was, and only had the McKinley passport – took the straightforward view. He’d overdosed. Died in the morning sometime, maybe topped up from the night before. That’s how it looked. Maria said there would be another examination of Joe by embassy people, but they wouldn’t get the body for days and days, at best. Coroner’s call.

‘That’s it. All yours, Abel.’ Their old intimacy had kicked in easily. A team of two. She went to her desk, and took out the passport which was ready inside. ‘You’ve never had this one, Zak Annan tells me. Plane ticket’s there. Credit card in the same name. We’re getting faster at this. Lehman.’ Abel laughed for the first time since he’d arrived. ‘One
n
or two
?’
He scanned the documents. The photo was fine.

Maria said, ‘I’ll call a cab.’ He’d pick up his bag on the way to Dulles.

He called information on the other line from the phone on the kitchen wall, and after a wait for the number rang the Lorimer, Hans Crescent, London. ‘A room from tomorrow, please… Four days, probably. Is that possible? I’d like to check in around noon, if that suits you… Mr Lehman. One
n
.’ They didn’t ask for an address, only his first name. ‘Peter.’ A pause.

‘Thanks for your help… Hot? Glad to hear it. Until tomorrow then.’

They said little for the next four or five minutes, exchanging murmurs of reassurance that didn’t take them far. Abel was anxious for movement. The air was stifling, and for the first time since he’d got off the plane there was, just under the surface, a fearful pulse. The thrill of the chase was overtaken by the feeling that he and Maria were gripping each other tight, rolling headlong into a dark tunnel.

‘All these complications,’ she said, a finger raised like a teacher’s signal. ‘But so simple. What did Joe know, and who did he tell?’

Maria was smiling now. ‘It was like this with him,’ gesturing to the table, ‘on Monday night.’ Joe was heading home to Miami, and no talk of London. ‘But he left me with the story I’ve told you. He stepped out there to the Diamond cab. Last I saw was his head catching the street light at the corner. A wave, and he was gone. But he’d decided to take himself over there. Didn’t give me a hint. I think he went a little mad, and that’s why I’m scared. I’ll miss him.’

Abel shook himself and stood up. ‘Come on. This is what we’re for. It’s us. We’ll do it.’ The truth was that Maria’s mood had shaken him. She was the leader, the playmaker, source of all fun. Now she stood by the fireplace – tall, white, but half lost in shadow and darkened by a distant thought or a memory. He managed to grin. ‘Let’s go.’

As if he’d given an order, they heard the cab draw up. At the door, Maria put a hand on Abel’s back. A police car, siren blaring, rolled past quite fast; from a neighbouring street came the sound of another, an echo of the first. The noise hung in the thickness of the night and died away. The cicadas chirruped in chorus, and a little gang of kids shouted their way past on the far sidewalk. Maria leaned towards him to say goodbye, and they embraced.

He whispered, ‘Like I said from the airport, Bendo’s ready.’

She pushed him away slightly to hold him at arm’s-length, as if she wanted to examine him from top to toe. ‘And you?’