PERFUME

Every now and then she sighed and deleted a whole chunk of words. It was clear she was having difficulty trying to express herself.
She wished there were windows in the newsroom. Working in the cloistered hothouse environment with its pretty pictures and towering plants was all right as long as you did not have to spend several hours at a stretch in the one room. Then you noticed the lack of natural light. She knew that was one reason why so many of the staff seemed prematurely aged, wrinkles appearing where most people had flat skin, white faces and desolate expressions. It was clear human beings needed a little light in the darkness of their day.
Working for ‘The Nation’ deprived you of all natural light on your working days, unless you were lucky enough to leave the office. Many did not and so they often represented the embodiment of Mummified corpses waiting for official recognition of their everyday condition.
‘No matter,’ she used to murmur to herself. ‘It’s their lives they are wasting. Not my concern.’
Nevertheless, despite her ambition, Alison was not a heartless person and felt sorry for the condition of these people who always struck her as rather sad and desolate.
Almost without exception they all had dreams which had failed for one reason or another. The happiest were the recent failures who were happy to joke about the enormous cock-ups in their lives and how they planned to rescue themselves from what they clearly saw as nothing more than a temporary setback.
There were others, though, who were quite different. They carried themselves as though the world’s cares were resting on their shoulders. These people walked around the newsroom with their backs bent and their clothes never quite fitting properly. When one of them would catch Alison’s eye she would think of the tailor’s dummies which had been left in a shop window overnight, naked and ill-proportioned, a dirty yellow colour with scuff marks where they had landed after being frequently dropped on the floor over many years by careless hands. She always wondered about these dead dummies. Who had decided to leave them so exposed during the long dark hours of the night? Had the new clothes not arrived or had the shop assistants simply been too tired to bother to dress the mannequins for the morning.
She recalled a shop she passed once in East Berlin. It was just off the Friedrichstrasse. She had turned left after passing through the security checks and transferring her proper Deutschemarks into the joke money which the communists had forced tourists to take with them no matter how short their journey.
About a hundred yards up the road she had decided to turn left, heading onto the Unter Den Linden, with the blocked-off Brandenburg Gate in the far distance. Crossing the road she had come across a line of shops where nothing seemed to be on display. Moving closer she realised her eyes had been fooled. There were items for sale. Items which were obviously highly praised by the shop owners and consequently of value to the many would be shoppers in this half a city. Except they had been almost impossible to see.
She recalled one perfume shop in particular. It was part of a large building with a massive front window, of the kind of size found in the prestigious shops fronting Regent Street in Central London. But there the comparison ended. This was no toy shop or sophisticated department store. This was just an exceedingly large window from another age which had been allowed to decay.
There were horrible scratches which collected dust and dirt and formed odd patterns reminding her of the paintings she had made as a child by dripping ink onto paper and then folding it in half.
Through the dark glass she could see a display which quite took away her breath. It was obviously a perfumer’s. The prize bottles of perfume were arrayed on plinths of varying sizes, arranged to show them in their best of lights. Except the bottles were no more than the cheap throwaway miniatures dumped on passengers by airlines. And the plinths they were resting on in their Romanesque glory were just cheap cardboard boxes. Their sides had shrunk and the concave pillars, with their faded colours and dust, barely visible through the dust of the window, seemed to express a forlorn sadness which was somehow ageless.
Alison had felt as she imagined she might have done in the presence of a child who had just discovered that she had been given the cheapest Christmas present in the class.
Something of that feeling struck her now as she cast her eyes around the newsroom looking at the worn figures struggling to better each other in a state of fear and desperation. None of them were the cossetted stars, the highly paid and much lauded public names who seemed to ride the surf of life without ever having to ask for anything more than the best bank in which to deposit their rapidly increasing amounts of money.
She turned back and looked at the screen. It had been taunting her with its inability to provide the correct words to describe the story. Now she had them. They rolled off her fingers and onto the keyboard and then the screen with consummate ease. Alison printed out a copy for herself and then went for a coffee. She stood in the corridor, secretly smoking a cigarette and proof reading her story, before going over to the newsdesk.
‘So this is it, then, is it,’ the chief assistant said as he scrutinized her words.
‘You better get this checked by Simon, before he unleashes the world of the secret services on his back.’
‘I’m about to fax it to his home. I thought you might like a copy first, that’s all.’
The chief had a way of getting right under Alison’s skin. Even the way he said hello in the mornings would drive her mad.
She went back to her desk to wait for the call from Simon.

UNDERGROUND

There’s a whole world which lives underground in Washington. People work there as if they were coal miners, arriving before dawn and leaving after dusk, never seeing the sun.
The underground railway system which transports congressmen and senators also houses a group of shops where the good and the great can buy a vast variety of products at cheap prices. It was in one of those strange warehouses that Robert Harding the Third was buying rolls of Kodachrome 25 film. He was flirting with the young raven-haired assistant. Robert could never turn down a chance to dally with any member of the opposite sex.
He took his film and his Visa receipt and made his way to the train. Emerging twenty minutes later into the sunlight of the late winter morning he blinked and waited for his eyes to adjust to the bright light.
A tall man with a wooden stick stood near the corner of the opposite street. He carried a neat black briefcase which looked more like a woman’s handbag. The man was standing so still he resembled a lamp post or hydrant. He had arrived a quarter of an hour early. No one was paying any attention to him. That did not surprise this man. He would have been shocked had anyone come up to him and started talking. Washington was a city where people minded each other’s business. The people who walked the streets were rarely worth paying attention to.
He gave a little cough, as if to reassure himself he was still alive, then moved to the corner to meet the person who had emerged a few moments earlier.
‘Let us stroll down the street for a block or two, Ted,’ Robert Harding said, as their paths met. The two men walked in silence for a while as if they were two chickens walking down a mountainside with their eyes wide open watching not for other chickens but for the fox hiding in its bushy lair.
The tall man spoke first. ‘Anthony has been in touch with me.’
Robert did not alter his pace nor did he look at Ted Garner.
‘He was on the telephone from Moscow. Things are moving fast.’
‘What are you planning?’
‘All the evidence from our point of view is to be wiped. A special team is working on it right now.’
‘How can we trust these people you are employing?’
‘There is no problem over that. None of them have any idea of the whole story. Each is set a small task which they have to complete without doing any more than confirming they are destroying the correct files.’
Ted Garner stumbled. ‘Damn this leg.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Quite all right, thank you. Just a weakness I’ve had since a teenager. Some nervous problem.’
‘You ok to fly?’
‘Of course. As I said, it is an ever-so-slight disability I have had since I was a child. Please do not worry about me. I am more robust than many an Olympic athlete.’
Robert Harding did not laugh. His sense of humour was so well refined it only reacted to his own jokes.
‘We want you to fly to London.’
‘Don’t tell me you let any of their people know about the operation.’
‘Not exactly.’
A little girl, furiously pedalling a cheap yellow bicycle, swished by on the inside of the pavement.
‘Bloody child. Could have paralyzed me.’
‘You have health insurance Robert. You would be all right.’ Two jokes in as many minutes were more than enough for Robert Harding. The operative was getting on his nerves. It was a pity Anthony Marshall thought so highly of him. He would far rather have used one of his own men who were trusty, reliable, young and competent. People who were of the New World Order not these decrepit middle-aged old men who seemed to live on another planet.
‘The problem is not one of our making. Long before our operation came into effect some of the Brits got involved. We fear they may have kept track of us. Anthony simply wants to find out how much they know. You’re good at prising information out of pompous old men in gentlemen’s drinking clubs.’
‘What an accusation,’ Ted commented, with an infectious chuckle.
‘But most certainly true. I think they like you. They see a doddering old fogey with no physical presence and a bit of a simple mind. People are such snobs.’
‘I am ready to go. It will be good to leave this Sodomic City of Sin for the fresh carbon dioxide fumes of London.’
‘We’ve booked a flight tonight. That will be suitable?’
Ted Garner nodded his approval.
As Robert hailed the taxi he looked at with concern at his partner’s briefcase.
‘I do wish you would come with a proper briefcase. I think you do this deliberately. I feel such a fool returning with your woman’s handbag.’
Ted Garner smiled softly. He was glad he had found some way of getting under the skin of the little prick.