Текст книги "A Foreign Country"

Автор книги: Charles Cumming

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

25

The first thing that François reacted to was Amelia’s beauty. He had not expected to find her so striking. Her remarkable appearance surprised him, because he had deliberately decided never to look at her photograph. Extraordinary dignity and strength of character in her face. She was elegantly dressed. The cut of her jacket brought out the fullness of her breasts and made her waist look slim and flat, as though she had never borne a child. He saw that she was wearing only basic make-up: a pale pink lipstick, light foundation, some definition around the eyes.

At first, because it was what he had decided on as the best course of action, he closed the door behind her and then reached out to shake her hand. Very quickly, however, he was drawing Amelia towards him into an embrace. She resisted this at first, and looked at him as though concerned that he might run off, like a frightened animal. He was touched by this. Her embrace, when it eventually came, was soft and hesitant, but as she reacted to the strength in his arms she squeezed much harder. She was not shaking, but he could sense that she was overwhelmed to be with him and he allowed her to rest her head briefly against his shoulder. François found that his own breathing was quick and lacked control, an irregularity that he put down to nerves.

‘Do you mind if we talk in French?’ he said, the line that he had practised and rehearsed many times.

‘Of course not!’ Amelia replied, and he heard the accuracy of her French, the flawless accent.

‘It’s just that I have never learned to speak English. I heard from the agency that you were fluent.’

‘Well, that was flattering of them. I’m a little rusty.’

He had rehearsed the next part, too. My mother is British, and the British like to drink tea. Offer to make her a cup. It will break the ice and it will give me something to do in the first awkward minutes. To François’ relief, Amelia accepted, and he led her through the small apartment to a kitchen that faced on to the street. He had already set out two cups and saucers and a bowl of brown sugar and could sense her watching him with forensic attention as he poured water into the kettle and retrieved a carton of milk from the fridge.

‘Would you like a biscuit?’

‘Thank you, no,’ she replied, a lovely open smile. She was so impressive to look at; what his grandfather would have called ‘sophistiquée’. He could see the euphoria in her eyes; she was trying hard to disguise it. He knew that she wanted to hold him again and to apologize for everything that she had done. Behind a British screen of nods and acknowledging smiles was a woman overwhelmed by the privilege of meeting him.

They spent the next four hours deep in conversation. To his surprise, Amelia told him almost immediately that she worked for SIS.

‘I can’t bear the idea of any lies coming between us,’ she explained. ‘Obviously it’s not something that I speak about very much.’

‘Of course.’ He was so surprised by her candour that he made a joke about it. ‘I guess it’s kind of cool to have a mother who’s like Jason Bourne.’

She had laughed at this, but he realized that he had acknowledged her biological role as his mother before he had meant to. It was not a mistake, but it was not how he had wanted the afternoon to proceed. He suspected that the secret Amelia had shared with him had been intended, from her point of view, as a bond between them, something that even François’ adopted parents had not known about her. And so it proved. Thereafter, he was surprised by how easy it was to talk to her. There were no awkward silences, no moments when he wished that she would leave so that he could be alone again in the apartment. They spoke about his career in I.T., they discussed the horror of the attacks in Egypt. Amelia appeared to be deeply sensitive to his loss, but she was not sentimental about it. He liked that. It showed that she had character.

In due course, he asked about Jean-Marc Daumal, but it transpired that Amelia knew very little about him. The last time I saw him, she said, was the night that I left the house. She confessed that in the face of near-constant temptation, particularly at the outset of her career, she had never run a trace on him, nor asked a colleague in Paris to peek into the French tax records.

‘They would do that?’ he asked.

‘They would do that,’ she told him.

Only once did he feel that she overstepped the mark, suggesting that their own reunion might be a precursor to François tracing his biological father, if indeed Jean-Marc was still alive.

‘More than anything,’ she said, ‘I want you to feel that you have people in your life who care very deeply for you, despite what has happened.’

He had felt that this was crass and pushy, but disguised his reaction.

‘Thank you,’ he said. They had been standing, so he had allowed her to embrace him again. He could not place her perfume; he had a vague recollection that one of the girls in his high school class had worn it to a party at which they had kissed.

‘I would very much like you to come to the funeral tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I would be honoured,’ Amelia had replied.

Later, after she had gone, despite the remarkable success of their first meeting, François’ overwhelming feeling had been one of exhaustion. This was only to be expected, he told himself. They were at the beginning of what he hoped would be a deep and rewarding relationship. In order to achieve that, he would be called upon to dig into reserves of strength and mental fortitude that were perhaps, at this stage, unknown even to him. It was part of the deal he had struck with himself. They were getting to know one another.

26

It was half-past eleven by the time Sami called again. Kell had eaten another club sandwich in his room and read a centimetre of Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa. There was that same cacophony of Arabic music on the line when he picked up, like a roomful of belly dancers having the time of their lives. Then Sami said:

‘I have just let them out.’ He still sounded tense, as though he had been confronted by the limits of his own decency. It was often the way with embryonic agents; the guilt and the adrenalin worked through them like poison and its antidote. ‘François took her to the Valencia to make sure she was safely home. He said he was going to have a cognac in your hotel bar. Maybe I can meet you somewhere and tell you what happened between them. His mother, she is an interesting woman.’

Kell almost asked Sami to repeat what he had said, but the logic of it was suddenly as clear to him as the trajectory of a setting sun. Malot was Amelia’s child, born to her in Tunis more than thirty years earlier. Was this possible? Kell thought back to Amelia’s file. The dates matched precisely. Malot had been born in 1979, only months after Amelia had finished working as an au pair in Tunis. How could he have missed the connection? Philippe and Jeannine must have adopted him at birth, with no trace of Amelia Weldon’s name on the adoption papers or birth certificate. He marvelled at her ability to have kept the child a secret; SIS vetting was forensic, yet somehow François had slipped through the net. But who was the father? Somebody from the ex-pat community in Tunis? There had been no record in the pre-recruitment file of a boyfriend from that period of her life. Had Amelia been raped?

Kell looked up at the bare whitewashed walls of his room, down at the worn beige carpet, and rubbed his eyes. ‘Come to my room,’ he said quietly. ‘We can talk here.’

He had not expected to feel resentment, but he was angry with Amelia because he felt that she had deceived him. Their shared childlessness, after all, had been the great private bond between them, a mutual absence that they had both quietly mourned. Yet all that time the master spy had concealed from him a simple tale of her youth. Then Kell began to feel enormous sorrow for his friend, because he could not imagine the agony of that separation, nine months of a body growing inside her body, the baby speaking to Amelia through her womb, then wrenched away to a life about which she would have known almost nothing. Kell wanted to knock on Amelia’s door and to tell her that he was a friend to whom she could turn if ever she needed to speak about what had happened.

‘You’re going soft,’ he muttered to himself, and stood up, as if he might regain a sense of professional decorum by doing so. He switched on the main overhead light in the room and poured himself the last of the glutinous red wine he had ordered from room service. Hannibal, the local poison. He retrieved his camera from the bed and began to click through the surveillance photos of the pool. In all, there were roughly fifty shots of Amelia and Malot. Looking at the images, Kell was sure that he could detect a family resemblance between the two and began to feel intrusive of Amelia’s privacy. Their holiday in Tunis would be one of only a few occasions when they managed to spend time together. He had no right to be snooping on them. Throughout his long career, Kell’s own privacy had been of the utmost importance to him; he knew that Amelia felt the same way about hers. As an intelligence officer, you had so little space in which to live a life free of scrutiny’s gaze; moments of unguarded seclusion were sacred. Amelia’s house in Wiltshire, for example, was a haven to which she would escape from the pressures of the secret world as often as she could. Kell had no comparable bolthole, and had instead shuttled between Claire and Vauxhall Cross until his personal and professional selves had seemed to bind together into a knot that would not be untied. On the one hand, a Service that had wanted his head on a plate for Afghanistan; on the other, a wife who would not release him from the cage of her resentment and frustration.

‘To you,’ Kell said aloud, raising the glass to Amelia. Then, more quietly: ‘To being a mother.’ And he drank.

27

There were only twelve mourners at the crematorium; a larger memorial service was planned for the autumn. François had insisted that Amelia sit beside him, with his mother’s sister on her other side. Afterwards, at his uncle’s apartment, François had introduced Amelia as ‘an old friend of the family from England’. He had later apologized for this, saying that he did not yet ‘possess the courage to tell everybody who you are’. Their decision to go to Tunis had been made that night. François explained that he was desperate to get out of Paris and Amelia could not bear the thought of leaving him so soon after they had met; when would there be another chance to be together? She had therefore contacted her assistant at Vauxhall Cross, announced that she needed time off in the wake of the funeral, and revealed that she would be in the South of France for a fortnight, using up the rest of her holiday allowance. As cover for the journey to Tunisia, she booked herself into a hotel in Nice, where she would be attending a painting course. There was a telephone call from Simon Haynes, who understood that she ‘probably deserved a break’ and an irritable email from George Truscott pointing out the ‘considerable inconvenience of abandoning the Office at twenty-four hours notice’. Otherwise her absence seemed to generate little in the way of comment.

By Friday, Amelia Levene was in Gammarth, living under the Farrell alias and staying in a package hotel located across the road from a Ramada, where François was installed for a probably needless second layer of secrecy. François himself had not questioned this strategy nor objected to the subterfuge; if anything, he seemed to relish the sense of intrigue and even joked that it might be ‘hereditary’.

For Amelia to return to Tunisia after more than thirty years was, at first, melancholy and unsettling, but as the days went by and they visited many of her old haunts, the journey became emotionally satisfying in ways that she had not anticipated. On the surface, little had changed: she remembered the whistle of darting swifts in the evening sky, the fierce dry heat and the constant chatter of men. She recalled the garden at La Marsa, long nights in the arms of her lover, so contemptuous of Jean-Marc’s wife and children, so cruel in her desire to possess him. She took François to Le Golfe, a restaurant that his father had never dared risk for fear that they would be spotted by one of his colleagues or friends. It was in Tunisia, before the pregnancy, that Amelia had begun to study Arabic, wandering the streets of the Medina on the way to class wearing a headscarf and skirt, gawping Tunisian boys clicking their tongues as she passed. She had been convinced, as all self-possessed young people are at such an age, that Amelia Weldon was different to all the other students and backpackers passing through Tunis, Mummy’s boys travelling on Daddy’s bank account. Now, more than three decades later, she felt a great nostalgia for that time, not least because she had long since ceased to be one of the most captivating girls in the city. In the second decade of the twenty-first century Amelia Levene was just another middle-aged tourist from England, a target for stallholders selling carpets and counterfeit polo shirts. It was as though the same men she had seen in 1978 were drinking the same cup of tea at the same café; identical women scrubbing identical vegetables lurked in the same alleys and tiled doorways of the Medina. The wedding baskets, pink and cream, the piles of tea and spice, they still lay unsold in the market. Nothing had changed. Yet of course it had. The young women now wore make-up and Dolce & Gabbana jeans. There were mobile phones attached to the ears of their boyfriends, and posters of Chelsea footballers on the walls of the cafés. The children that had run amok in the dust and the diesel of 1978 were now the adults who drove Amelia’s taxi to the Boudu museum, or popped François’ napkin as he sat for lunch at Dar el-Jeld.

‘I was happy here,’ she told him in an unguarded and sentimental moment, regretting it instantly, because how could she have been happy when she was about to give up her son? ‘Before what happened,’ she added, stumbling on the phrase in French. ‘I loved the freedom of my life. I loved the sense of being away from England.’

‘And yet now you work for England,’ François replied.

‘What a way to put it,’ she said, raising a glass to toast him and staring into the refraction of the crystal. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

28

A knock at the door, a soft tap-tap from the corridor. Kell slipped the security chain and invited Sami to come inside. A strange midnight encounter between men. Kell opened the door of the balcony to allow fresh evening air to blow into the room. There was a bottle of Macallan on the floor beside his bed, imported duty free via Nice, and he poured three fingers into two glasses from the bathroom. As he did so, Kell made a point of apologizing for the ‘atmosphere of secrecy’, a phrase that he had difficulty translating into Arabic.

‘Not a problem,’ Sami replied. ‘I understand.’

A long evening at the wheel of the cab had left the Tunisian looking hunched and slightly immobile, but as he shuffled across the room, compacting himself on to a low-sprung sofa, Kell saw that his eyes were glinting with excitement.

‘So they had a nice time?’ he began, an ambiguous question that would allow Sami to fill in the blanks.

‘Yes. An incredible story.’ Sami was leaning forward in his chair, bald and squat and full of news. ‘You know about them?’

‘Tell me,’ Kell said. ‘I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.’

And so it began. Thirty years before, ‘Amy’ – that was the name Amelia was going by – had been working in Tunis when she had fallen pregnant outside of marriage. Because she was still a teenager, and the daughter of strict Catholic parents, it had been decided that she should give up her baby for adoption. That baby was François, who was subsequently taken to France and raised in Paris by Philippe and Jeannine Malot. Tragically, his adoptive parents had been murdered only weeks earlier during a holiday in Egypt. It was only while reading his father’s Will that François had been made aware, for the first time, of the circumstances of his birth. Without hesitation, he had contacted the agency in Tunis that had arranged his adoption.

Kell listened with less astonishment than might ordin-arily have been the case; he had suspected as much. The story, after all, made sense in all the right places. The sole surprise was that Amelia had only met her son for the first time in recent days. For some reason, Kell had assumed that the relationship between them had been growing for several years. Why had he made such a baseless assumption?

‘Who told you all this?’ he asked. ‘How did it come out?’

‘François. I asked him what they were doing in Tunisia, so soon after the revolution, he tells me the whole story.’

‘Amy didn’t say anything? She left it to him?’

Kell wanted to know why Amelia was allowing François to be so indiscreet; perhaps her guard was down and she had seen no reason to distrust Sami.

The driver nodded. ‘The lady, she is much quieter. He does most of the talking.’

‘But she seemed happy? They were content together.’

‘Oh yes,’ Sami replied. He had seen off the three fingers of whisky and proffered his glass for more. ‘So, can I ask you a personal question?’

Kell picked up the bottle from the carpet and obliged him. ‘Sure.’

‘Why did you want me to follow them around?’

Sami was a straightforward man, palpably kind and biddable, with a strain of romanticism in his nature that had evidently responded to the pathos of François’ story.

‘Someone is paying me,’ Kell replied. In the next room, a man began to cough. He tried to move off the subject. ‘You must be tired.’

Sami shrugged. In operations of yesteryear, even with Elsa in Nice, Kell had often tried to imagine the private circumstances of his contacts. It was one of the diversions of the trade, a way of passing time during the long periods of waiting. Elsa, he presumed, was into rock music and would take grateful, long-haired men with abundant tattoos to bed. But what about Sami? Who was he? An observant Muslim? Most probably not, judging by his thirst for whisky. A sports fan? A lover of women and food? Certainly his girth and bonhomie, the speed with which he had sunk his drink, spoke of a man with large appetites.

Kell returned to the conversation.

‘Did François say why they were staying in separate hotels?’

‘Yes.’ The reply was quick and almost startled, as though Sami suspected Kell of intuiting something from his private thoughts. ‘The Ramada was full, so she took a room here.’ He nodded in the general direction of the lobby. ‘She leaves tomorrow. I’m taking her to the airport.’

‘And they told you all this in the course of one cab journey?’

Was Amelia playing him? Did she know that Kell was in Tunis and had recruited Sami?

‘Two,’ he replied, making a stubby Churchillian ‘V’ with his fingers. ‘People always tell me things. I like to ask questions. Tourists come to Tunisia, they tell you their secrets because they think they are never going to see you again.’

Kell’s smile disguised his private doubt. ‘And so now you’re taking Amy to the airport?’

Sami suddenly looked embarrassed, as if he had spoken out of turn.

‘Is that OK, Stephen?’

‘Of course. It’s fine.’ He waved Sami’s concerns away and thought about Marquand. What was he going to tell London in the morning? How was he going to finesse Amelia’s secret? ‘Just be careful not to slip up about our arrangement. We’ve never met, OK? You’ve never seen or talked to me. I’ve never given you money. The people who are paying my bills would be very angry if Amy found out that I was following her.’

‘Of course.’ Sami put his empty glass on a table beside the sofa and looked offended at being castigated for a sin he had yet to commit. ‘Perhaps it’s time I went home and got some sleep.’

‘Perhaps.’

Moments later, Kell was ushering the Tunisian to the door, telling him to relax until it was time to take Amy to the airport. He watched as he shuffled down the corridor, wondering what he would say to François if they bumped into one another in the lobby, wondering if it would even matter if they did. The mystery, after all, had been solved. Kell’s work was done.

He switched off the overhead light and lay on the bed, listening to the rasping coughs of his neighbour, to the fragmentary and indecipherable conversation of a man and a woman talking beneath his window. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. Unable to relax, he put on a jacket and walked down to the lobby, half-imagining that he would encounter Amelia in the bar. But, save for a young man at reception, the hotel was deserted and the bar already closed. On a whim, Kell went outside to the taxi rank. A driver asked if he wanted to be taken to La Marsa and Kell, surprising himself, agreed, because he needed to be away from the hotel, away from the claustrophobia of concealment and strategy. Besides, it was time to celebrate. His driver, who did not utter a word during the ten-minute journey along the coast, dropped him at Plaza Corniche, a fashionable bar in the centre of La Marsa where the waiters dressed like pilots on a layover and caramel-tanned Italians made eyes at gangs of beautiful Tunisian girls. Kell had forgotten how much he disliked going out alone: he was too old for nightclubs, too wired to go to bed. Half an hour later, having drunk a single bottle of imported German beer, he went back outside to find his taxi driver waiting for him on the opposite corner of the street. As they were pulling away from the kerb, Sami called his mobile. The music, the belly dancers. Then:

‘Mr Stephen?’

‘Sami?’ Kell looked at his watch. ‘What’s up?’

‘I am sorry to ring so late. It’s just that I forgot to tell you something important.’

‘Go on.’

‘Tomorrow. The ship. François is booked on the ferry from La Goulette. He is leaving, travelling overnight to Marseille.’