Saturday 16 May 2015
RUDY KRUGER
Rudy Kruger. Not a real person but real enough for me to create a blog for him. Call him my alter ego. He's been in my mind for some time now and has a real personality. Rudy had a tough life to start but has made something of himself. It is a long journey. May you love reading about his many adventures. There are several stories finished and many more in the pipeline. There is also a superb book about the Cold War. A blurb writer might call it the "backstory".
Monday 27 May 2013
COLD WAR
The small airfield was half a mile from the nearest town. The inhabitants were used to military activity and so barely lifted their heads when aircraft flew over the fields. But the noise of the Boeing 747 made Heinz look up and squint into the early morning sun. As the aeroplane came down in the field two acres away he was more than a little surprised to see the famous livery, despite someone’s attempt to obliterate the colours.
‘Someone tried to cover them up,’ he was to tell a friend that night. ‘But they didn’t do a very good job. The rain must have washed it off. Can’t make paint properly in the West.’
Heinz leant on his pitchfork in the middle of the potato field as the three figures emerged and went quickly into the massive hangar capable of holding five Jumbo Jet aircraft.
He turned back to his work happy to have something to talk about that evening. If someone had told Heinz he was witnessing history in the making he could not have been more pleased. It was enough for him to survive from day to day, with the promise of a little good conversation in the evenings. Beyond that he had no concern for the doings of the outside world.
Inside the hangar, the Soviet general, Yuri Padrovovitch, extended his fat, liver-spotted hand to his guest, former United States Army general and presently U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Anthony Marshall.
‘You are on time. You should be in the Soviet services. Such punctuality.’ Both men laughed easily as Anthony allowed Yuri to guide him to his seat beside the table in the far corner.
‘You said you have something to offer which would make this trip worthwhile,’ General Marshall commented. ‘As you know, I am taking something of a risk by being here.’
‘In a minute my friend, in a minute. First you must taste this Crimean caviar. Nothing but the best for my new friend.’
The two men and their teams sat and ate, indulging in small talk which touched on everything apart from the frosty relations between the two superpowers. Both generals were men of infinite patience. Neither was about to be pushed by the other into a sudden or ill-advised comment. They were like poker players battling to see who had the toughest resolve.
About three quarters of an hour later the Russian touched the American lightly on the arm and suggested they move off to another part of the hangar.
As they strolled over the wide concrete apron Yuri Padrovovich started to speak in a low voice with a lilting menace. ‘We should always keep something in the bank for a rainy day.’ The Soviet officer let the words gather above their heads as a storm cloud grows on a dull, overcast day.
‘So. I didn’t think you believed in capitalism,’ his American counterpart commented.
‘Wise men have open minds.’
The two men reached the far corner of the hangar and sat down at a large oak table containing a bottle of vodka and two unopened bottles of Krug champagne. Without asking whether his new friend liked vodka Padrovovich poured two glasses and handed one across the table to his enemy.
‘I have always thought vodka aptly summed up the Cold War,’ he said after taking a deep draught of the colourless liquid. ‘It is cold and threatening on the outside but once hidden inside the body it contains a fire which is hard to quench. Where would both of us be without an enemy to wage war against, eh?’
Anthony Marshall drank slowly, allowing his eyes to roam the craggy distorted face of the man on the other side of the table. He had never met the famed Soviet General before and was intrigued to see how he had changed since the date of the faded photograph he had seen in the briefing documents.
Those pictures had been taken when the man had been a rising star in the Red Army during the Second World War. He had been tall and handsome with a fresh face and clear eyes. Anthony noticed the eyes were blue. ‘Ice blue,’ he thought to himself. The years since then had taken their toll on the handsome young officer. The briefing documents had told him that the title of General meant nothing. Yuri Padrovovitch was one of the three most senior men in the KGB.
Both men buried their heads in the pile of photographs and old documents the General had produced from a tattered leather briefcase.
Outside an owl hooted in anger as the guards disturbed it from its sleep in the barn on the other side of the landing strip. The two men in the uniform of Spetznaz soldiers, the Soviets’ elite fighting force, were prodding hay and turning over compost heaps to ensure there were no mad snipers waiting to interrupt this secret meeting. Anthony heard the owl hoot. It would not be the first creature to learn that these men were capable of turning night into day.
It was growing quite dark by the time they left the hangar. Yuri vigorously shook his new friend’s hand at the foot of the aircraft steps. ‘May your God go with you,’ he told Anthony, with a wide smile revealing large, nicotine-stained teeth. He looked like a cross between a mad wizard and Santa Claus.
‘We shall meet again, Yuri. One day, on the same side.’
‘Perhaps.’
Later that night, after Heinz had long ago bored his friends in the bar with his story of the secret aircraft, he slumped against the windowsill wondering why he had allowed himself to get drunk yet again. There would be hell to pay the following morning.
Dimly, through the cacophony of the customers and the violent, gusting wind tearing into the window, shaking the glass like a child angrily shakes a toy which has ceased to work, he heard the sound of the aircraft flying overhead. Heinz Kruger remembered he had forgotten to buy his son, Rudy, a present for his thirteenth birthday.
‘Someone tried to cover them up,’ he was to tell a friend that night. ‘But they didn’t do a very good job. The rain must have washed it off. Can’t make paint properly in the West.’
Heinz leant on his pitchfork in the middle of the potato field as the three figures emerged and went quickly into the massive hangar capable of holding five Jumbo Jet aircraft.
He turned back to his work happy to have something to talk about that evening. If someone had told Heinz he was witnessing history in the making he could not have been more pleased. It was enough for him to survive from day to day, with the promise of a little good conversation in the evenings. Beyond that he had no concern for the doings of the outside world.
Inside the hangar, the Soviet general, Yuri Padrovovitch, extended his fat, liver-spotted hand to his guest, former United States Army general and presently U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Anthony Marshall.
‘You are on time. You should be in the Soviet services. Such punctuality.’ Both men laughed easily as Anthony allowed Yuri to guide him to his seat beside the table in the far corner.
‘You said you have something to offer which would make this trip worthwhile,’ General Marshall commented. ‘As you know, I am taking something of a risk by being here.’
‘In a minute my friend, in a minute. First you must taste this Crimean caviar. Nothing but the best for my new friend.’
The two men and their teams sat and ate, indulging in small talk which touched on everything apart from the frosty relations between the two superpowers. Both generals were men of infinite patience. Neither was about to be pushed by the other into a sudden or ill-advised comment. They were like poker players battling to see who had the toughest resolve.
About three quarters of an hour later the Russian touched the American lightly on the arm and suggested they move off to another part of the hangar.
As they strolled over the wide concrete apron Yuri Padrovovich started to speak in a low voice with a lilting menace. ‘We should always keep something in the bank for a rainy day.’ The Soviet officer let the words gather above their heads as a storm cloud grows on a dull, overcast day.
‘So. I didn’t think you believed in capitalism,’ his American counterpart commented.
‘Wise men have open minds.’
The two men reached the far corner of the hangar and sat down at a large oak table containing a bottle of vodka and two unopened bottles of Krug champagne. Without asking whether his new friend liked vodka Padrovovich poured two glasses and handed one across the table to his enemy.
‘I have always thought vodka aptly summed up the Cold War,’ he said after taking a deep draught of the colourless liquid. ‘It is cold and threatening on the outside but once hidden inside the body it contains a fire which is hard to quench. Where would both of us be without an enemy to wage war against, eh?’
Anthony Marshall drank slowly, allowing his eyes to roam the craggy distorted face of the man on the other side of the table. He had never met the famed Soviet General before and was intrigued to see how he had changed since the date of the faded photograph he had seen in the briefing documents.
Those pictures had been taken when the man had been a rising star in the Red Army during the Second World War. He had been tall and handsome with a fresh face and clear eyes. Anthony noticed the eyes were blue. ‘Ice blue,’ he thought to himself. The years since then had taken their toll on the handsome young officer. The briefing documents had told him that the title of General meant nothing. Yuri Padrovovitch was one of the three most senior men in the KGB.
Both men buried their heads in the pile of photographs and old documents the General had produced from a tattered leather briefcase.
Outside an owl hooted in anger as the guards disturbed it from its sleep in the barn on the other side of the landing strip. The two men in the uniform of Spetznaz soldiers, the Soviets’ elite fighting force, were prodding hay and turning over compost heaps to ensure there were no mad snipers waiting to interrupt this secret meeting. Anthony heard the owl hoot. It would not be the first creature to learn that these men were capable of turning night into day.
It was growing quite dark by the time they left the hangar. Yuri vigorously shook his new friend’s hand at the foot of the aircraft steps. ‘May your God go with you,’ he told Anthony, with a wide smile revealing large, nicotine-stained teeth. He looked like a cross between a mad wizard and Santa Claus.
‘We shall meet again, Yuri. One day, on the same side.’
‘Perhaps.’
Later that night, after Heinz had long ago bored his friends in the bar with his story of the secret aircraft, he slumped against the windowsill wondering why he had allowed himself to get drunk yet again. There would be hell to pay the following morning.
Dimly, through the cacophony of the customers and the violent, gusting wind tearing into the window, shaking the glass like a child angrily shakes a toy which has ceased to work, he heard the sound of the aircraft flying overhead. Heinz Kruger remembered he had forgotten to buy his son, Rudy, a present for his thirteenth birthday.
Thursday 31 May 2007
BERLIN WALL
Rudy Kruger approached the celebrations at the Berlin Wall with a feeling of intense spite. Far too many people were having fun. Rudy hated that.
The crowds around the section of the wall which ran through Checkpoint Charlie made him particularly angry. ‘Who are these people to rejoice in their sudden freedom?’ he whispered through gritted teeth. Rudy had already made one fortune smuggling goods and people from the East to the West and was hoping to make many more. ‘Now all the little bastards have to do is walk through the holes. The wall is like a summer fog.’
He stood on the outside of the crowd spitting rage and muttering venom. Did these people not know Rudy had a penthouse flat and three extremely expensive women to pay for? A monthly mortgage on all four properties. Now his one source of income had died, all in the space of a few weeks.
He recalled the television pictures of the would-be refugees clambering onto trains, smashing the windows and clinging to the frames not caring whether they cut themselves with the broken glass. There were pictures of those who had fallen off and lost limbs as the trains had run over them. Rudy had roared with laughter. He had expected the communist guards to pump the fare-dodging passengers full of bullets when they arrived at the next station. You could not escape from the Reds. That was the great guarantee about them. Not unless you dealt in dollars and bought them the western goods they so cherished. Now the slavering lips belonged to the whole population. They would regret it. Rudy knew nothing good lasted in this world.
Suddenly his mood lightened. He saw a fat balding man in his forties jumping up and down. He was wearing a pathetically worn black leather jacket and stroking his girlfriend as though frightened she would quickly lose him in the crowd in favour of a more prepossessing specimen. Poking out of his right-hand pocket was a large expensive-looking wallet. It was bulging. Rudy sensed it was full of dollars.
With the agility of a fox tearing across a field in pursuit of a rabbit, he slipped through the crowd and lifted the wallet out of the man’s pocket. Within a matter of seconds he had removed the cash and credit cards and had managed to drop the empty wallet into a rubbish bin. Rudy had been right. It had been stuffed full of dollars. Large denomination notes as well. He felt pleased. A little of the hatred subsided from his heart.
Rudy turned around and made his way back to the Kurfurstendamm. He would celebrate his good fortune in the warmth of a good bar while leaving the fools to waste their expensive champagne at the wall.
Anthony Marshall saw the pickpocket at work through the binoculars he was training on Checkpoint Charlie from his hotel bedroom. ‘Smart guy,’ he said to himself. ‘Good operator. I could do with recruiting that man.’ He laid the binoculars on the table beside the window and turned to face his friend. Mr Marshall had been in Berlin for nearly a week on unofficial business.
Unlike many of his friends in the military he knew only too well that the advent of satellite television and videos would sound the death knell for communism. ‘People are fundamentally greedy,’ he told his subordinates. ‘They would rather die than give away their grandmother, but they would happily sell her for the right price.’ Not that these people had needed satellite television to activate their greed. All they had to do was turn on their own sets and in some cases make an adjustment to the aerial and they were able to see through the grandiose promises of seventy years of communist propaganda.
Marshall turned away from the window and towards his friend who was sitting with a face of stone watching the same scene on television.
‘It’s a bit of a surprise to the rest of the world, is it not?’
The thickset man with the heavy shoulders slumped further into the cushions on the hotel sofa.
‘A bit more of a surprise to us on the other side of the curtain.’
‘We will have to do some serious talking.’
‘This is the end of the Soviet Union you know.’
‘Probably. But not necessarily the end of communism.’
‘Fuck communism.’
‘Take heart, Yuri. We have plenty of time.’
‘The creeping tide of capitalism will wash over this little country and drench our sacred shores.’
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t drown the gold bars hidden in the cellar of your dacha.’
The man looked away and spat on the floor. ‘We should think seriously about our future. Now.’
The crowds around the section of the wall which ran through Checkpoint Charlie made him particularly angry. ‘Who are these people to rejoice in their sudden freedom?’ he whispered through gritted teeth. Rudy had already made one fortune smuggling goods and people from the East to the West and was hoping to make many more. ‘Now all the little bastards have to do is walk through the holes. The wall is like a summer fog.’
He stood on the outside of the crowd spitting rage and muttering venom. Did these people not know Rudy had a penthouse flat and three extremely expensive women to pay for? A monthly mortgage on all four properties. Now his one source of income had died, all in the space of a few weeks.
He recalled the television pictures of the would-be refugees clambering onto trains, smashing the windows and clinging to the frames not caring whether they cut themselves with the broken glass. There were pictures of those who had fallen off and lost limbs as the trains had run over them. Rudy had roared with laughter. He had expected the communist guards to pump the fare-dodging passengers full of bullets when they arrived at the next station. You could not escape from the Reds. That was the great guarantee about them. Not unless you dealt in dollars and bought them the western goods they so cherished. Now the slavering lips belonged to the whole population. They would regret it. Rudy knew nothing good lasted in this world.
Suddenly his mood lightened. He saw a fat balding man in his forties jumping up and down. He was wearing a pathetically worn black leather jacket and stroking his girlfriend as though frightened she would quickly lose him in the crowd in favour of a more prepossessing specimen. Poking out of his right-hand pocket was a large expensive-looking wallet. It was bulging. Rudy sensed it was full of dollars.
With the agility of a fox tearing across a field in pursuit of a rabbit, he slipped through the crowd and lifted the wallet out of the man’s pocket. Within a matter of seconds he had removed the cash and credit cards and had managed to drop the empty wallet into a rubbish bin. Rudy had been right. It had been stuffed full of dollars. Large denomination notes as well. He felt pleased. A little of the hatred subsided from his heart.
Rudy turned around and made his way back to the Kurfurstendamm. He would celebrate his good fortune in the warmth of a good bar while leaving the fools to waste their expensive champagne at the wall.
Anthony Marshall saw the pickpocket at work through the binoculars he was training on Checkpoint Charlie from his hotel bedroom. ‘Smart guy,’ he said to himself. ‘Good operator. I could do with recruiting that man.’ He laid the binoculars on the table beside the window and turned to face his friend. Mr Marshall had been in Berlin for nearly a week on unofficial business.
Unlike many of his friends in the military he knew only too well that the advent of satellite television and videos would sound the death knell for communism. ‘People are fundamentally greedy,’ he told his subordinates. ‘They would rather die than give away their grandmother, but they would happily sell her for the right price.’ Not that these people had needed satellite television to activate their greed. All they had to do was turn on their own sets and in some cases make an adjustment to the aerial and they were able to see through the grandiose promises of seventy years of communist propaganda.
Marshall turned away from the window and towards his friend who was sitting with a face of stone watching the same scene on television.
‘It’s a bit of a surprise to the rest of the world, is it not?’
The thickset man with the heavy shoulders slumped further into the cushions on the hotel sofa.
‘A bit more of a surprise to us on the other side of the curtain.’
‘We will have to do some serious talking.’
‘This is the end of the Soviet Union you know.’
‘Probably. But not necessarily the end of communism.’
‘Fuck communism.’
‘Take heart, Yuri. We have plenty of time.’
‘The creeping tide of capitalism will wash over this little country and drench our sacred shores.’
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t drown the gold bars hidden in the cellar of your dacha.’
The man looked away and spat on the floor. ‘We should think seriously about our future. Now.’
TEATIME
The tea trolley bumped along the corridor and the huge woman pushing it winced as her ‘complaint’ hit her in the side for the fiftieth time that day. She would just have to live with it. She had no money left for visiting doctors.
It seemed to the woman that the corridors grew longer every day, just to spite her. Although some of the young men and women who worked in the Pentagon were kind there were many, many more who did not even have the time to talk to her. They would grunt unintelligible words as they thrust pies, bananas, cakes, chocolate bars in front of her and pointed a loaded finger to indicate whether they wanted tea or coffee from the clearly-marked urns. She once thought of taking off the silly labels and forcing them to speak, if only for them to avoid being given the wrong drink.
This morning was no different. She considered it a good day if ten out of a hundred people spared a quick kind word. Surely they could see she was in pain. Norah Grant never let it pass through her mind how wealthy were these serious souls in this forbidding building. As she passed their Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs, Lamborghini Diablos and even the occasional Rolls Royce on her way to the bus stop she would think of a bird she had heard singing on her way into work and wonder what kind of day it had enjoyed.
‘Too much dwelling on your own misfortunes is a recipe for the evil one to dunk another sodden biscuit of hate in your cup of tea, just out of spite,’ she was constantly telling friends of hers who seemed to do nothing but moan.
In fact, it was probably true to say that on this morning just like all the others, but particularly on this morning, Norah Grant with all her ailments, her restless family and her mean chances of a happy carefree life, was the most optimistic soul in the whole of the Pentagon complex.
All Norah had to worry about was being ill, poor and the wrong colour. All Gerald Kenworthy had to worry about was exposure in The National Enquirer, rapidly followed up by The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Herald and every other important newspaper in the land, let alone the television stations. He would be ruined. All because of a stupid childhood friendship which had gone wrong.
As National Security Advisor Gerald had an office in the Pentagon as well as one in the White House. As a forty five year old he was doing well with a home on either coast and a holiday cottage in the Florida Keys. Unlike so many others of his age group he also had a flourishing although not ecstatically happy marriage and two beautiful and intelligent children. There was little more Gerald could ask for. And it reminded him of the day eighteen years earlier when he had none of those things and had been a struggling bond salesman wondering where the next deal was coming from. As he had been worrying that his life was over before it had even really started in had walked Robert Harding the Third, brandishing the slight nick on his left cheek and calling it a scar from a bullet fired in anger in Vietnam. It was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect face and although Gerald had been told about it by mutual friends it had still aroused feelings of intense anger when he saw it for real.
Robert was everything Gerald was not. It hurt that Robert was telling the truth about his one war injury. It was exactly what you might expect from the man. The one injury everyone always asked about which caused no physical blemish nor pain but allowed the owner to recount again and again how brave he was. Right now Gerald wished he had been the soldier with the rifle aimed at Robert. He most certainly would not have missed.
At the time he had also been healthily impressed when Robert had walked through the door. The feelings of jealousy he now recalled were more like boyhood worship of a particularly brave senior boy. Gerald had taken Robert out to lunch and they had rapped over old times as though they had been the best of friends they never had been. It was only later Gerald discovered the real reason why Robert had come searching for him as though he was a long lost buddy.
Robert was floating a company and needed to raise a million dollars in capital. The company was a real one, a small engineering operation he had taken over from a dead uncle, with an annual turnover of eighty thousand dollars and about ten thousand dollars profit. Not quite in the big league. So Robert had printed some brochures, created some lies, hired a devious press officer and started a tale of total bullshit which had taken in every single person he had talked to. Now he needed a driver to take his cartload of bullshit into the heart of Wall Street and Gerald was promised enough money to keep him off work for a quarter of a century.
Gerald, who was an incompetent man, had worked unusually hard and they had floated the company at an enormous profit. Not surprisingly it had died eighteen months later and they had managed to blame everyone but themselves. Fortunately no one had discovered that the house they had built had foundations of sand, quicksand at that. At least, no one had discovered the fact until right now when Gerald was occupying the most important office of his political career.
The caller had been far too well informed for Gerald to brush him off, although he had done that with a faint hope nothing more would be heard. It seemed to Gerald that the facts had been provided by someone who had sat on them until the time had been right.
Robert, of course, was nowhere to be found. Gerald left a whole string of messages on a nationwide set up of answering machines and secretaries. He still had no reply and the caller had promised to ring again that evening. Gerald could not concentrate on anything at all. He wished Robert would call back and tell him what to do. Gerald was like a floundering schoolboy who has been pushed into the deep end of a swimming pool the moment his friends heard him tell them he could not swim. Right now Gerald wondered whether he was going to be left to drown.
It seemed to the woman that the corridors grew longer every day, just to spite her. Although some of the young men and women who worked in the Pentagon were kind there were many, many more who did not even have the time to talk to her. They would grunt unintelligible words as they thrust pies, bananas, cakes, chocolate bars in front of her and pointed a loaded finger to indicate whether they wanted tea or coffee from the clearly-marked urns. She once thought of taking off the silly labels and forcing them to speak, if only for them to avoid being given the wrong drink.
This morning was no different. She considered it a good day if ten out of a hundred people spared a quick kind word. Surely they could see she was in pain. Norah Grant never let it pass through her mind how wealthy were these serious souls in this forbidding building. As she passed their Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs, Lamborghini Diablos and even the occasional Rolls Royce on her way to the bus stop she would think of a bird she had heard singing on her way into work and wonder what kind of day it had enjoyed.
‘Too much dwelling on your own misfortunes is a recipe for the evil one to dunk another sodden biscuit of hate in your cup of tea, just out of spite,’ she was constantly telling friends of hers who seemed to do nothing but moan.
In fact, it was probably true to say that on this morning just like all the others, but particularly on this morning, Norah Grant with all her ailments, her restless family and her mean chances of a happy carefree life, was the most optimistic soul in the whole of the Pentagon complex.
All Norah had to worry about was being ill, poor and the wrong colour. All Gerald Kenworthy had to worry about was exposure in The National Enquirer, rapidly followed up by The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Herald and every other important newspaper in the land, let alone the television stations. He would be ruined. All because of a stupid childhood friendship which had gone wrong.
As National Security Advisor Gerald had an office in the Pentagon as well as one in the White House. As a forty five year old he was doing well with a home on either coast and a holiday cottage in the Florida Keys. Unlike so many others of his age group he also had a flourishing although not ecstatically happy marriage and two beautiful and intelligent children. There was little more Gerald could ask for. And it reminded him of the day eighteen years earlier when he had none of those things and had been a struggling bond salesman wondering where the next deal was coming from. As he had been worrying that his life was over before it had even really started in had walked Robert Harding the Third, brandishing the slight nick on his left cheek and calling it a scar from a bullet fired in anger in Vietnam. It was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect face and although Gerald had been told about it by mutual friends it had still aroused feelings of intense anger when he saw it for real.
Robert was everything Gerald was not. It hurt that Robert was telling the truth about his one war injury. It was exactly what you might expect from the man. The one injury everyone always asked about which caused no physical blemish nor pain but allowed the owner to recount again and again how brave he was. Right now Gerald wished he had been the soldier with the rifle aimed at Robert. He most certainly would not have missed.
At the time he had also been healthily impressed when Robert had walked through the door. The feelings of jealousy he now recalled were more like boyhood worship of a particularly brave senior boy. Gerald had taken Robert out to lunch and they had rapped over old times as though they had been the best of friends they never had been. It was only later Gerald discovered the real reason why Robert had come searching for him as though he was a long lost buddy.
Robert was floating a company and needed to raise a million dollars in capital. The company was a real one, a small engineering operation he had taken over from a dead uncle, with an annual turnover of eighty thousand dollars and about ten thousand dollars profit. Not quite in the big league. So Robert had printed some brochures, created some lies, hired a devious press officer and started a tale of total bullshit which had taken in every single person he had talked to. Now he needed a driver to take his cartload of bullshit into the heart of Wall Street and Gerald was promised enough money to keep him off work for a quarter of a century.
Gerald, who was an incompetent man, had worked unusually hard and they had floated the company at an enormous profit. Not surprisingly it had died eighteen months later and they had managed to blame everyone but themselves. Fortunately no one had discovered that the house they had built had foundations of sand, quicksand at that. At least, no one had discovered the fact until right now when Gerald was occupying the most important office of his political career.
The caller had been far too well informed for Gerald to brush him off, although he had done that with a faint hope nothing more would be heard. It seemed to Gerald that the facts had been provided by someone who had sat on them until the time had been right.
Robert, of course, was nowhere to be found. Gerald left a whole string of messages on a nationwide set up of answering machines and secretaries. He still had no reply and the caller had promised to ring again that evening. Gerald could not concentrate on anything at all. He wished Robert would call back and tell him what to do. Gerald was like a floundering schoolboy who has been pushed into the deep end of a swimming pool the moment his friends heard him tell them he could not swim. Right now Gerald wondered whether he was going to be left to drown.
Sunday 30 June 1985
GERALD'S LITTLE PROBLEM
So it was that everything Robert Harding the Third touched either melted at the caress of his fingers or turned to gold. Though it is as well to point out that thanks to the good fortune of his birth and his natural physical attributes Robert really did not have to work very hard to make anything at all happen. But that would be too cruel to this man. In truth, he worked extremely energetically to make his world come true. The bond deal had been nothing special. It was fun turning a company worth nothing into millions and then watching others get their greedy fingers burnt. Robert had never had a need for money. It had always been there. It was just that he had heard that Wall Street could be fooled and he had never liked the uncle who had left him his pathetic business. And Robert had decided that he would screw Gerald Kenworthy one day.
Gerald had been at school with him and had severely embarrassed him during auditions for the school play. Robert had been asked to play the part of someone who had just had his fingernails torn out. One thing Robert did extraordinarily well was to play a whole soap opera of parts. He was a one man repertory theatre. But he could never act to someone else’s direction. In other words, when Robert Harding wished to fake it, or to lie, he could do so with consummate ease. But when asked to pretend, he never had the desire, never had the heart to make it work.
So at the age of twelve he was up on the stage of his prep school being urged sarcastically by the lank-haired over-theatrical English teacher who doubled as the school’s Head of Drama, to act this part of a torture victim.
Another problem for Robert was that he was barely aware of what pain actually was. A doting mother, the one quite prepared to believe her son would never indulge in sex, except perhaps to procreate another child just like Robert, for her to enjoy, had always been on hand to protect him.
The size of his father’s wallet had ensured the best treatment. Doctors and dentists used to receiving Mr Robert Harding the Second’s Christmas presents of stocks and shares were not disposed to let his little son run home crying that ‘the doctor’ or ‘the dentist’ had hurt him. So the part the show off teacher was forcing him to play was an impossibility. Which was extremely unfortunate for Robert because Gerald Kenworthy sniggered. He was in the front row and Robert not only heard him snigger but saw him try to cover it up. That one snigger set off the whole class. Gerald had been severely beaten up by Robert for his mistake. But the incident had gone into Robert’s memory bank and for the rest of his life he would try to get his own back. No matter how hard he tried he would never succeed, at least not to himself.
So now Gerald was paying the price yet again. Except Gerald had no idea this was what was really happening. He thought Robert was his best friend. That was the trouble with Robert. Rather too many people thought he was their one true friend.
Robert was suffering no such worries as he climbed out of the car which had just pulled up on Rodeo Drive in one of the many suburbs of Atlanta. The automatic garage door swung down and temporarily sank Robert and his young companion into darkness. Robert flicked the switch on the remote control and the room was bathed in a bright light as the door to the utility room swung open.
‘It always frightens me, that,’ Sally said to him, touching his right arm with her left hand. ‘You should have an automatic light on in here or open up a window.’
‘I like the black and the silence. It’s also soundproof.’
‘And what, I might ask, is that in aid of?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to never bother about.’
‘Sometimes you worry me Robert, you really do.’
They went inside. Robert checked his answering machine. Very few people knew he owned the house in Atlanta. His neighbours hardly saw him. They knew him as an international pharmaceutical salesman who worked too hard to spend time at home. He was not surprised to find there were only three messages. One from Anthony Marshall asking what progress he had made on the ‘latest order’. The two others were both from Gerald Kenworthy asking for him to contact him urgently. It was week two of a constant barrage of calls from Gerald. Robert needed to have his victim shivering in fright before he could get what he wanted.
He listened to the messages again before deciding that perhaps now was the right time to put the second part of his plan into action.
He slumped in the armchair in the study after telling Sally not to bother him for an hour, and telephoned Gerald’s home knowing he would get his worried little shrew of a wife.
Twenty minutes later the call came through from Gerald, all breathless and scared.
Robert reflected on how he could make people squirm, even from a few thousand miles away at the other end of a telephone.
‘Yes Gerald. I am back in the country.’
‘I’ve been trying to contact you for days.’
Liar, Robert nearly said, feeling like adding: You’ve been trying to contact me for two weeks. But let it pass.
‘Why. What’s the problem?’
‘They’re onto us, Robert.’
‘Onto us? About what, exactly, my friend?’
‘You know very well.’
‘Gerald. I jet around the world doing deals every day. You may sit in the Pentagon taking the taxpayers’ dollars for drinking cups of coffee, making free international phone calls and putting your children through private school but I actually have to earn a living. Now, tell me what the bloody hell is bugging you.’
Robert sat back in the chair sensing the squirming lump of jelly working late in his office, knowing his wife was worried but afraid to confide in her. Gerald started to explain what had been going on. Robert closed his eyes and dreamt of Sally. They had been bloody lucky not to have been caught this afternoon, he thought. ‘Bloody lucky,’ he told himself out loud.
Gerald took his time explaining to Robert what Robert, unknown to him, had been doing to wind him up. When he had finished Robert let slip a couple of authoritative ‘I see’s’ and then paused long enough for Gerald to ask if he was still there.
‘What do you expect me to do?’
‘I don’t know, Robert. But they’re just as much a threat to you as they are to me.’
‘I doubt that old boy. Anyway, if they publish what they know I’ll simply have to retire to the ranch. Live the rest of my life in splendid luxury, doing nothing but getting up at midday and going to the bar.’
Robert sensed rather than heard the exasperation at the other end of the telephone line. As Gerald started to explain how important it was to him to keep his job Robert’s mind wandered to the top drawer on the right-hand side of his big oak desk. Inside it were copies of Gerald’s recent bank statements including copies of loan agreements for his car and house and credit cards. Robert knew damn well how important it was to Gerald to keep his job. The statements were in a special file. Robert had a whole cellar full of such information on people throughout the world. Right now Gerald was caught in Robert’s garlic crusher and would soon come out smelling of sweet perfection, in little pieces too small for anyone to worry about.
‘I could do something for you, if you really wanted that.’
‘What?’
‘I could buy the incriminating information from whoever is selling it.’
‘Would you? It would be incredibly expensive.’
Robert clenched his left fist. ‘Gerald. Please don’t lecture me about money.’
‘I would be terribly grateful.’
‘Actually Gerald there is something you could do for me.’
‘Anything. Anything at all if you can get this sodding horror out of my life.’
‘It would involve doing some things which you would not normally be expected to do.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘You have access to the illegal immigration documents.’
‘It is one of my responsibilities, yes. What of it?’
‘I have some names I wish to have included.’
‘But you could do that yourself.’
Robert was again clenching his fist. ‘Look Gerald. Do I have to explain everything to you. If I could do something like this without asking you do you think I would be asking you? Do you? It is illegal and you must not talk about it.’
‘I don’t know, Robert. It could get me into the most dreadful trouble.’
‘Ok. Ok. Let’s leave for a while. Next time the person calls about the story just try and fob them off.’
‘No. No, wait. Maybe there is something I could do.’
‘Gerald, make up your bloody mind.’ Robert had won him over.
Half an hour later he put down the telephone on his sworn childhood enemy and dialled the number Anthony had left on his answering machine earlier in the day.
The delay in answering was not more than a couple of seconds. The conversation was short but explicit.
‘It’s done. The customer can be told all will be ready by the first of next month. The supplier can meet all our requirements.’ There was an almost imperceptible drawing in of breath at the other end of the telephone line, or it could have been an electronic whisper, Robert could not tell.
‘Thank you, Robert. You have proved your worth yet again.’
Gerald had been at school with him and had severely embarrassed him during auditions for the school play. Robert had been asked to play the part of someone who had just had his fingernails torn out. One thing Robert did extraordinarily well was to play a whole soap opera of parts. He was a one man repertory theatre. But he could never act to someone else’s direction. In other words, when Robert Harding wished to fake it, or to lie, he could do so with consummate ease. But when asked to pretend, he never had the desire, never had the heart to make it work.
So at the age of twelve he was up on the stage of his prep school being urged sarcastically by the lank-haired over-theatrical English teacher who doubled as the school’s Head of Drama, to act this part of a torture victim.
Another problem for Robert was that he was barely aware of what pain actually was. A doting mother, the one quite prepared to believe her son would never indulge in sex, except perhaps to procreate another child just like Robert, for her to enjoy, had always been on hand to protect him.
The size of his father’s wallet had ensured the best treatment. Doctors and dentists used to receiving Mr Robert Harding the Second’s Christmas presents of stocks and shares were not disposed to let his little son run home crying that ‘the doctor’ or ‘the dentist’ had hurt him. So the part the show off teacher was forcing him to play was an impossibility. Which was extremely unfortunate for Robert because Gerald Kenworthy sniggered. He was in the front row and Robert not only heard him snigger but saw him try to cover it up. That one snigger set off the whole class. Gerald had been severely beaten up by Robert for his mistake. But the incident had gone into Robert’s memory bank and for the rest of his life he would try to get his own back. No matter how hard he tried he would never succeed, at least not to himself.
So now Gerald was paying the price yet again. Except Gerald had no idea this was what was really happening. He thought Robert was his best friend. That was the trouble with Robert. Rather too many people thought he was their one true friend.
Robert was suffering no such worries as he climbed out of the car which had just pulled up on Rodeo Drive in one of the many suburbs of Atlanta. The automatic garage door swung down and temporarily sank Robert and his young companion into darkness. Robert flicked the switch on the remote control and the room was bathed in a bright light as the door to the utility room swung open.
‘It always frightens me, that,’ Sally said to him, touching his right arm with her left hand. ‘You should have an automatic light on in here or open up a window.’
‘I like the black and the silence. It’s also soundproof.’
‘And what, I might ask, is that in aid of?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to never bother about.’
‘Sometimes you worry me Robert, you really do.’
They went inside. Robert checked his answering machine. Very few people knew he owned the house in Atlanta. His neighbours hardly saw him. They knew him as an international pharmaceutical salesman who worked too hard to spend time at home. He was not surprised to find there were only three messages. One from Anthony Marshall asking what progress he had made on the ‘latest order’. The two others were both from Gerald Kenworthy asking for him to contact him urgently. It was week two of a constant barrage of calls from Gerald. Robert needed to have his victim shivering in fright before he could get what he wanted.
He listened to the messages again before deciding that perhaps now was the right time to put the second part of his plan into action.
He slumped in the armchair in the study after telling Sally not to bother him for an hour, and telephoned Gerald’s home knowing he would get his worried little shrew of a wife.
Twenty minutes later the call came through from Gerald, all breathless and scared.
Robert reflected on how he could make people squirm, even from a few thousand miles away at the other end of a telephone.
‘Yes Gerald. I am back in the country.’
‘I’ve been trying to contact you for days.’
Liar, Robert nearly said, feeling like adding: You’ve been trying to contact me for two weeks. But let it pass.
‘Why. What’s the problem?’
‘They’re onto us, Robert.’
‘Onto us? About what, exactly, my friend?’
‘You know very well.’
‘Gerald. I jet around the world doing deals every day. You may sit in the Pentagon taking the taxpayers’ dollars for drinking cups of coffee, making free international phone calls and putting your children through private school but I actually have to earn a living. Now, tell me what the bloody hell is bugging you.’
Robert sat back in the chair sensing the squirming lump of jelly working late in his office, knowing his wife was worried but afraid to confide in her. Gerald started to explain what had been going on. Robert closed his eyes and dreamt of Sally. They had been bloody lucky not to have been caught this afternoon, he thought. ‘Bloody lucky,’ he told himself out loud.
Gerald took his time explaining to Robert what Robert, unknown to him, had been doing to wind him up. When he had finished Robert let slip a couple of authoritative ‘I see’s’ and then paused long enough for Gerald to ask if he was still there.
‘What do you expect me to do?’
‘I don’t know, Robert. But they’re just as much a threat to you as they are to me.’
‘I doubt that old boy. Anyway, if they publish what they know I’ll simply have to retire to the ranch. Live the rest of my life in splendid luxury, doing nothing but getting up at midday and going to the bar.’
Robert sensed rather than heard the exasperation at the other end of the telephone line. As Gerald started to explain how important it was to him to keep his job Robert’s mind wandered to the top drawer on the right-hand side of his big oak desk. Inside it were copies of Gerald’s recent bank statements including copies of loan agreements for his car and house and credit cards. Robert knew damn well how important it was to Gerald to keep his job. The statements were in a special file. Robert had a whole cellar full of such information on people throughout the world. Right now Gerald was caught in Robert’s garlic crusher and would soon come out smelling of sweet perfection, in little pieces too small for anyone to worry about.
‘I could do something for you, if you really wanted that.’
‘What?’
‘I could buy the incriminating information from whoever is selling it.’
‘Would you? It would be incredibly expensive.’
Robert clenched his left fist. ‘Gerald. Please don’t lecture me about money.’
‘I would be terribly grateful.’
‘Actually Gerald there is something you could do for me.’
‘Anything. Anything at all if you can get this sodding horror out of my life.’
‘It would involve doing some things which you would not normally be expected to do.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘You have access to the illegal immigration documents.’
‘It is one of my responsibilities, yes. What of it?’
‘I have some names I wish to have included.’
‘But you could do that yourself.’
Robert was again clenching his fist. ‘Look Gerald. Do I have to explain everything to you. If I could do something like this without asking you do you think I would be asking you? Do you? It is illegal and you must not talk about it.’
‘I don’t know, Robert. It could get me into the most dreadful trouble.’
‘Ok. Ok. Let’s leave for a while. Next time the person calls about the story just try and fob them off.’
‘No. No, wait. Maybe there is something I could do.’
‘Gerald, make up your bloody mind.’ Robert had won him over.
Half an hour later he put down the telephone on his sworn childhood enemy and dialled the number Anthony had left on his answering machine earlier in the day.
The delay in answering was not more than a couple of seconds. The conversation was short but explicit.
‘It’s done. The customer can be told all will be ready by the first of next month. The supplier can meet all our requirements.’ There was an almost imperceptible drawing in of breath at the other end of the telephone line, or it could have been an electronic whisper, Robert could not tell.
‘Thank you, Robert. You have proved your worth yet again.’
Friday 1 June 1984
FILTH
Rudy Kruger gazed with horror at the ceiling as he awoke. The filthy encrusted dirt hung down in strips appearing to cling with glee to the paint, which in turn was struggling to maintain its tender grip on the plaster. The state of the ceiling mocked his lowly role in this post-communist revolutionary state. He had hated Russia ever since he had arrived here from Stuttgart Prison.
The experience of being in jail had provided the kick up the backside Rudy had needed to start him on a course towards earning real money. His fellow Germans had not minded him managing a strip joint which covered for an empire of prostitutes catering for goggle-eyed businessmen arriving from Britain and the United States. The suckers had smooched into the afternoon darkness and paid ten times the bar rate for their weak beers and then, if they considered themselves, lucky had paid much, much more for the pleasure of sex with one of the dancers. It had all seemed so easy Rudy wondered why ordinary people got up so early in order in order to return so late from their mind numbing jobs. He overheard one conversation in the stalls between two men who had been discussing the respective values of their pensions. He had felt sick. Rudy was often feeling sick. Humanity made him sick. But he was cursed to live among human beings who made him feel ill by forcing him to observe their strange and stupid behaviour.
The strip club had provided a decent income but already Rudy’s eyes were set upon possessions which even the club’s easy income would not provide. Rudy had always wanted a Ferrari Testarossa but short of getting a rare hit as a rock and roll star he could not see it happening. It certainly was not going to happen through anything connected with the club. So he had decided to move on.
It had not been the sale of heroin and cocaine which had been his downfall but the casual way Rudy had tried to bribe his way past honest police officers.
During his time inside Rudy had often wondered about the incorruptibility of man. He really failed to understand that some people could not be bought. He thought they had refused his money out of spite, maybe they did not like the fact that he was barely in his twenties and worth more than they would be in their whole lives. In which case, he thought, they should have taken some of the money he was offering and made things easier for themselves.
Sitting on his Moscow bed, he wondered for the thousandth time at the cold. Even walking up to Frederick the Great’s castle at the height of winter he had not been as cold as this. And yet these people lived in these sub zero temperatures for all their lives. ‘And this is their capital city,’ he muttered to himself. ‘No bloody wonder the country’s in such a fuckin’ mess.’ Rudy saw Moscow as a sad city at the heart of a sad country, which delighted in celebrating its novelists and composers while hurling all its modern day geniuses into death camps. ‘Fuckin’ weird, man,’ he told anyone who would listen.
His view of the Russians was formed by their treatment of him. He saw them as a vicious set of bastards with a very good idea of the market value of the goods they were selling. Only a few weeks ago he had all but sealed a deal on some icons. But the Russian dealers had tried to charge him virtually the prices he expected to get in New York or Berlin. In the end he had to pull out of the deal because the profit would have been virtually nil.
He was angry with their treatment of him. Rudy Kruger saw himself, a proud and educated German, doing these peasants a favour. ‘Who do they think they are?’ he asked to the walls of his flat. ‘They’ve spent seventy years fucking up their country and now they try and behave like smart Swiss who take all the dosh and never let an invader cross their borders.’
He got out of bed and looked around for his leathers. He had slung them over a chair before scrambling into bed totally drunk the night before and now he could not find the chair. The room seemed filled with chairs. There were chairs which were functional, there were chairs which were stylish, there were chairs which were made out of very odd metal indeed along with more ordinary chairs made out of straightforward pine. There were many chairs which no one in their right mind would ever have sat upon. Rudy had got the lot for a hundred dollars. He could see each chair making at least that in a London or Hamburg auction. But right now he did not give a damn how much they were worth. He just wanted to find the one on which his leather jeans would be dangling.
Eventually, his eyes focused on them. They were lying on the floor, having slipped off one of the old metal chairs. He walked over and picked up the worn leather trousers. His nose crinkled as he smelt the dry sick which had been the result of too many cheap vodkas two nights earlier. But he had no time to change them. The washing facilities in this rough temporary home of his were non existent. So he broke into one of the bottles of perfume he had been keeping behind the sink and sprinkled the stuff liberally over the inside of the leathers, where it stuck to the silk lining. He sneezed involuntarily with the sudden intake of powerful fumes.
Before leaving his one-room home Rudy looked out of the uncurtained dirty windows. He opened one of them in order to get a clear view of the street. He saw a small square in which people were bustling about selling long-hoarded goods. Rudy noticed they never sold food but always trinkets, photograph albums, little gifts of no value in a world where a pound of sausages would purchase the services of a brain surgeon for a month. Rudy shook his head in amazement.
Rudy slammed the door of the flat in frustrated protest at his appalling living conditions. He had to take out his anger on someone and the occupants of the block would serve him well this morning. ‘Anyway, they should be off their backsides and bloody well out earning a living,’ he told himself as he scuffed his shoes against the side of the pavement. He looked around to see if there was a car he could try and hitch a lift from. There was none. So he strolled on down the deserted pavement staring at the dawn light creeping over the tops of the ancient tiled roofs.
Rudy was furious with the world. He was supposed to be making real money and yet he had achieved nothing more during the past six months than tick over. ‘Two steps forward and two steps back. What an existence.’ True, he had done enough deals to put fifty thousand dollars in his Swiss account. But that was hardly going to buy him a Ferrari. It was just about the right amount for a down payment on a small house. Rudy had no intention of getting a mortgage. ‘If you can’t pay cash upfront then fuck it. You’re nobody,’ he always told his friends. ‘Just remember, when your pension comes in I’ll be three lives on from you, and still having more fun in a day than you get in a year.’ Except life was not working out quite like that for Rudy.
Lately, he had fallen into a habit of turning his past life over and over in his mind. It had not been his fault to have been born to parents who had taken no interest in him. He had done well to have made a living, and a good one at that, although his family, his foul sanctimonious family, hated his work with the strip clubs and the cocaine cafes. But that was their problem. What had they ever done to offer him a decent life outside of that world? He was good enough to survive amongst the gangsters and the dirty little hookers and their tough boxer pimps who ran from a gun like the cowards he knew them to be.
Rudy had done well and had been stamped on because of it.
But his family had no right to sit in their two bedroom flat whingeing about their baby son going to the devil. What had they done as fervent Christians during the Nazi era? Why, join the party and serve the Fuhrer of course, just like so many other good Germans. Rudy had no need to feel ashamed.
One day he would own a company and it would make honest money and he would be an honest citizen. But he was not fool enough to hang around waiting for some other person to recognize his talent. Rudy did not believe in dreams. Rudy was not a harsh man, he just did not care what others thought about him. He had even helped people who had been down on their luck. He saw himself as being rather a caring kind of person.
This morning he was angry with himself. He had lost rather too much money at the poker game he had attended purely to ingratiate himself with a man he had been erroneously led to believe was a Moscow Godfather. Rudy had watched the man and listened to his stupid utterances and his need for pure vodka every third or fourth minute. He had watched until the moment when it had dawned on him that this man was no more than a simple tramp who had struck lucky with a good line of patter. Rudy had cursed himself for being led down a wrong path and had drunk even more beer to calm his temper. Despite having seen through the man he knew it would not have been a wise move to have antagonized his guests by turning on their friend. Nor would it do have done him any good to leave the game before the appointed time. So he just had to sit there seething while the wasted hours dripped on by. Rudy had felt really angry with himself.
Then, he had slumped on the dirty scuffed sofa and drifted off to sleep, knocking over his half-drunk cup of foul coffee. The constant hard rapping on the door had awoken him in a temper more foul than the one in which he had gone to sleep.
The visitor had scared him shitless. Rudy had met men like that before, but only rarely. He saw them as dark avenging angels who crawled across the surface of the planet looking for people to abuse. Rudy could not work out whether the visitor had a connection with the drunken chancer. In the end, he assumed the visit was a result of his night with the ‘Godfather’ figure. But he could not work out why or how. And he was far too scared to ask. It would not have been at all appropriate.
The man had told him he needed to join a ‘group of friends’ in order to continue working in Moscow. The visitor said there would be a subscription. When Rudy asked what would happen if he did not pay his ‘subscription’ the man had drawn a finger slowly across his neck. Rudy had got the message.
‘I have no money. How can I pay protection?’
‘This is not protection. Have I used the word protection? This is a subscription enabling you to join a select society of like-minded individuals. You should be grateful. Look out of your window. Most of the population does not have this privilege brought to their doorstep. Think of it as a tax on your earnings. We operate just like a proper government. We are even democratic, in our way.’
When Rudy asked what earnings he was likely to make in the future the visitor had written down an address and told him to be there at six the following morning.
‘Don’t be late. Our friends...’ he continued as though Rudy had now signed a contract in blood. ‘Our friends don’t like to be kept waiting. They are busy men.’ And with that he had left, leaving Rudy puzzled and more than a little worried about the following day.
The morning had come too soon for Rudy’s liking. He had a hardy constitution. So a few coffees and a five minute burst of Moscow ice under the cold shower had been enough to kick start him back into action.
He thought of waving down the passing Lada but it skidded and turned the corner before he had decided that would have been a bad idea. He wondered whether it was a KGB patrol. Rudy laughed at the incongruity of secret policemen driving around in Noddy mobiles. Although he did not fancy being taken off to the Lubyanka especially if it was a Lada which would take him there.
As he reached the corner he saw the car in the far distance. He decided on a whim to take a diversion down the side alley. ‘You can never be too careful with these Moscow policemen,’ he told himself.
The warehouse was twenty floors high. Even in a neighbourhood dominated by tall buildings it stood out from the others, an aristocrat of a building surrounding by artisan terraces. The side door was eight feet high and four feet wide and made of solid oak, although it was well worn. The lock had long since broken. Rudy leant hard on the door with his shoulder and pushed his way through to reveal the rickety wooden stairs. He was surprised that they started a couple of feet from the entrance.
Five floors up he walked over a hole in the wooden floor, where a couple of planks had finally succumbed to dry rot and just faded away, crumbling onto the floors below.
His visitor had not given him explicit instructions, just to get to the building and walk up the stairs. ‘You will be met.’ Rudy wondered when he would be met. The warehouse stank of centuries of damp. There must have been wet and dry rot in every inch of the wood. The bricks were turning to dust and crumbling onto the floor, now a hundred feet below him. The warehouse filled him with foreboding, as if it was a place of horror he had been warned about in a long forgotten dream. Now the dream, or rather the nightmare, was returning to him bit by bit, but only after he had lived the part of the earlier experience which was lodged in his subconscious.
Just as Rudy thought the stairs were going to go on for ever a figure appeared on the landing immediately above him. Rudy thought he must be a bodyguard. His clothes were shabby Moscow Godfather-minder style. That is to say they were quite dirty, with the ends of the trousers frayed and dangling around the old brown leather boots. His style of jacket would have been trendy in the fifties, in a spit and sawdust pub in some English backstreet pub.
The experience of being in jail had provided the kick up the backside Rudy had needed to start him on a course towards earning real money. His fellow Germans had not minded him managing a strip joint which covered for an empire of prostitutes catering for goggle-eyed businessmen arriving from Britain and the United States. The suckers had smooched into the afternoon darkness and paid ten times the bar rate for their weak beers and then, if they considered themselves, lucky had paid much, much more for the pleasure of sex with one of the dancers. It had all seemed so easy Rudy wondered why ordinary people got up so early in order in order to return so late from their mind numbing jobs. He overheard one conversation in the stalls between two men who had been discussing the respective values of their pensions. He had felt sick. Rudy was often feeling sick. Humanity made him sick. But he was cursed to live among human beings who made him feel ill by forcing him to observe their strange and stupid behaviour.
The strip club had provided a decent income but already Rudy’s eyes were set upon possessions which even the club’s easy income would not provide. Rudy had always wanted a Ferrari Testarossa but short of getting a rare hit as a rock and roll star he could not see it happening. It certainly was not going to happen through anything connected with the club. So he had decided to move on.
It had not been the sale of heroin and cocaine which had been his downfall but the casual way Rudy had tried to bribe his way past honest police officers.
During his time inside Rudy had often wondered about the incorruptibility of man. He really failed to understand that some people could not be bought. He thought they had refused his money out of spite, maybe they did not like the fact that he was barely in his twenties and worth more than they would be in their whole lives. In which case, he thought, they should have taken some of the money he was offering and made things easier for themselves.
Sitting on his Moscow bed, he wondered for the thousandth time at the cold. Even walking up to Frederick the Great’s castle at the height of winter he had not been as cold as this. And yet these people lived in these sub zero temperatures for all their lives. ‘And this is their capital city,’ he muttered to himself. ‘No bloody wonder the country’s in such a fuckin’ mess.’ Rudy saw Moscow as a sad city at the heart of a sad country, which delighted in celebrating its novelists and composers while hurling all its modern day geniuses into death camps. ‘Fuckin’ weird, man,’ he told anyone who would listen.
His view of the Russians was formed by their treatment of him. He saw them as a vicious set of bastards with a very good idea of the market value of the goods they were selling. Only a few weeks ago he had all but sealed a deal on some icons. But the Russian dealers had tried to charge him virtually the prices he expected to get in New York or Berlin. In the end he had to pull out of the deal because the profit would have been virtually nil.
He was angry with their treatment of him. Rudy Kruger saw himself, a proud and educated German, doing these peasants a favour. ‘Who do they think they are?’ he asked to the walls of his flat. ‘They’ve spent seventy years fucking up their country and now they try and behave like smart Swiss who take all the dosh and never let an invader cross their borders.’
He got out of bed and looked around for his leathers. He had slung them over a chair before scrambling into bed totally drunk the night before and now he could not find the chair. The room seemed filled with chairs. There were chairs which were functional, there were chairs which were stylish, there were chairs which were made out of very odd metal indeed along with more ordinary chairs made out of straightforward pine. There were many chairs which no one in their right mind would ever have sat upon. Rudy had got the lot for a hundred dollars. He could see each chair making at least that in a London or Hamburg auction. But right now he did not give a damn how much they were worth. He just wanted to find the one on which his leather jeans would be dangling.
Eventually, his eyes focused on them. They were lying on the floor, having slipped off one of the old metal chairs. He walked over and picked up the worn leather trousers. His nose crinkled as he smelt the dry sick which had been the result of too many cheap vodkas two nights earlier. But he had no time to change them. The washing facilities in this rough temporary home of his were non existent. So he broke into one of the bottles of perfume he had been keeping behind the sink and sprinkled the stuff liberally over the inside of the leathers, where it stuck to the silk lining. He sneezed involuntarily with the sudden intake of powerful fumes.
Before leaving his one-room home Rudy looked out of the uncurtained dirty windows. He opened one of them in order to get a clear view of the street. He saw a small square in which people were bustling about selling long-hoarded goods. Rudy noticed they never sold food but always trinkets, photograph albums, little gifts of no value in a world where a pound of sausages would purchase the services of a brain surgeon for a month. Rudy shook his head in amazement.
Rudy slammed the door of the flat in frustrated protest at his appalling living conditions. He had to take out his anger on someone and the occupants of the block would serve him well this morning. ‘Anyway, they should be off their backsides and bloody well out earning a living,’ he told himself as he scuffed his shoes against the side of the pavement. He looked around to see if there was a car he could try and hitch a lift from. There was none. So he strolled on down the deserted pavement staring at the dawn light creeping over the tops of the ancient tiled roofs.
Rudy was furious with the world. He was supposed to be making real money and yet he had achieved nothing more during the past six months than tick over. ‘Two steps forward and two steps back. What an existence.’ True, he had done enough deals to put fifty thousand dollars in his Swiss account. But that was hardly going to buy him a Ferrari. It was just about the right amount for a down payment on a small house. Rudy had no intention of getting a mortgage. ‘If you can’t pay cash upfront then fuck it. You’re nobody,’ he always told his friends. ‘Just remember, when your pension comes in I’ll be three lives on from you, and still having more fun in a day than you get in a year.’ Except life was not working out quite like that for Rudy.
Lately, he had fallen into a habit of turning his past life over and over in his mind. It had not been his fault to have been born to parents who had taken no interest in him. He had done well to have made a living, and a good one at that, although his family, his foul sanctimonious family, hated his work with the strip clubs and the cocaine cafes. But that was their problem. What had they ever done to offer him a decent life outside of that world? He was good enough to survive amongst the gangsters and the dirty little hookers and their tough boxer pimps who ran from a gun like the cowards he knew them to be.
Rudy had done well and had been stamped on because of it.
But his family had no right to sit in their two bedroom flat whingeing about their baby son going to the devil. What had they done as fervent Christians during the Nazi era? Why, join the party and serve the Fuhrer of course, just like so many other good Germans. Rudy had no need to feel ashamed.
One day he would own a company and it would make honest money and he would be an honest citizen. But he was not fool enough to hang around waiting for some other person to recognize his talent. Rudy did not believe in dreams. Rudy was not a harsh man, he just did not care what others thought about him. He had even helped people who had been down on their luck. He saw himself as being rather a caring kind of person.
This morning he was angry with himself. He had lost rather too much money at the poker game he had attended purely to ingratiate himself with a man he had been erroneously led to believe was a Moscow Godfather. Rudy had watched the man and listened to his stupid utterances and his need for pure vodka every third or fourth minute. He had watched until the moment when it had dawned on him that this man was no more than a simple tramp who had struck lucky with a good line of patter. Rudy had cursed himself for being led down a wrong path and had drunk even more beer to calm his temper. Despite having seen through the man he knew it would not have been a wise move to have antagonized his guests by turning on their friend. Nor would it do have done him any good to leave the game before the appointed time. So he just had to sit there seething while the wasted hours dripped on by. Rudy had felt really angry with himself.
Then, he had slumped on the dirty scuffed sofa and drifted off to sleep, knocking over his half-drunk cup of foul coffee. The constant hard rapping on the door had awoken him in a temper more foul than the one in which he had gone to sleep.
The visitor had scared him shitless. Rudy had met men like that before, but only rarely. He saw them as dark avenging angels who crawled across the surface of the planet looking for people to abuse. Rudy could not work out whether the visitor had a connection with the drunken chancer. In the end, he assumed the visit was a result of his night with the ‘Godfather’ figure. But he could not work out why or how. And he was far too scared to ask. It would not have been at all appropriate.
The man had told him he needed to join a ‘group of friends’ in order to continue working in Moscow. The visitor said there would be a subscription. When Rudy asked what would happen if he did not pay his ‘subscription’ the man had drawn a finger slowly across his neck. Rudy had got the message.
‘I have no money. How can I pay protection?’
‘This is not protection. Have I used the word protection? This is a subscription enabling you to join a select society of like-minded individuals. You should be grateful. Look out of your window. Most of the population does not have this privilege brought to their doorstep. Think of it as a tax on your earnings. We operate just like a proper government. We are even democratic, in our way.’
When Rudy asked what earnings he was likely to make in the future the visitor had written down an address and told him to be there at six the following morning.
‘Don’t be late. Our friends...’ he continued as though Rudy had now signed a contract in blood. ‘Our friends don’t like to be kept waiting. They are busy men.’ And with that he had left, leaving Rudy puzzled and more than a little worried about the following day.
The morning had come too soon for Rudy’s liking. He had a hardy constitution. So a few coffees and a five minute burst of Moscow ice under the cold shower had been enough to kick start him back into action.
He thought of waving down the passing Lada but it skidded and turned the corner before he had decided that would have been a bad idea. He wondered whether it was a KGB patrol. Rudy laughed at the incongruity of secret policemen driving around in Noddy mobiles. Although he did not fancy being taken off to the Lubyanka especially if it was a Lada which would take him there.
As he reached the corner he saw the car in the far distance. He decided on a whim to take a diversion down the side alley. ‘You can never be too careful with these Moscow policemen,’ he told himself.
The warehouse was twenty floors high. Even in a neighbourhood dominated by tall buildings it stood out from the others, an aristocrat of a building surrounding by artisan terraces. The side door was eight feet high and four feet wide and made of solid oak, although it was well worn. The lock had long since broken. Rudy leant hard on the door with his shoulder and pushed his way through to reveal the rickety wooden stairs. He was surprised that they started a couple of feet from the entrance.
Five floors up he walked over a hole in the wooden floor, where a couple of planks had finally succumbed to dry rot and just faded away, crumbling onto the floors below.
His visitor had not given him explicit instructions, just to get to the building and walk up the stairs. ‘You will be met.’ Rudy wondered when he would be met. The warehouse stank of centuries of damp. There must have been wet and dry rot in every inch of the wood. The bricks were turning to dust and crumbling onto the floor, now a hundred feet below him. The warehouse filled him with foreboding, as if it was a place of horror he had been warned about in a long forgotten dream. Now the dream, or rather the nightmare, was returning to him bit by bit, but only after he had lived the part of the earlier experience which was lodged in his subconscious.
Just as Rudy thought the stairs were going to go on for ever a figure appeared on the landing immediately above him. Rudy thought he must be a bodyguard. His clothes were shabby Moscow Godfather-minder style. That is to say they were quite dirty, with the ends of the trousers frayed and dangling around the old brown leather boots. His style of jacket would have been trendy in the fifties, in a spit and sawdust pub in some English backstreet pub.
Thursday 2 June 1983
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.
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.
Saturday 5 June 1982
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.
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.
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