Текст книги "A Foreign Country"

Автор книги: Charles Cumming

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

29

There was only one passenger ferry scheduled to leave for Marseille the following day. Kell went back to the Valencia, reserved an interior cabin via the SNCM website, cancelled his return flight to Nice and grabbed a few hours’ sleep before ordering breakfast to his room. Sami called at eight to say that he was en route to the Ramada to pick up both Amelia and François.

‘They want me to take Mrs Farrell to the airport. Then I drop François at the ferry terminal. They are close to each other.’

Kell assumed he was talking about the proximity of the airport to La Goulette, rather than offering an opinion on the status of Amelia’s relationship with her son. He didn’t trust Sami’s sense of humour sufficiently to make a joke about it.

‘Any idea why François isn’t flying as well?’

‘He said he likes to go by sea when he has a choice. Amy is going to Nice.’

Back to her painting course, Kell thought, and wondered if the Knights were still dutifully attending classes, day after day, in the vain hope of catching sight of their mark. Chances were she would clear out her room at the Gillespie and be back in London by Sunday night.

‘Call me when you’ve dropped François at the terminal,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave your final payment in an envelope at reception. Fifteen hundred dinars. Is that OK?’

‘This is very generous, Stephen.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

The port was a thousand concrete acres of cranes and trucks, seagulls twisting in the wind, ramps on to ferries banked with cars. Kell took a cab to the SNCM terminal and queued on an elevated walkway in the full glare of the sun behind a shuffling family of Tunisians who looked to have made their way in from the desert. A stooped old man cast Kell a slow, disdainful look before ordering a young boy – perhaps his great-grandson – to fasten a blue plastic bag stuffed with clothes and shoes that was threatening to slip free of its mooring on a rattling metal trolley. The old man’s hands were long and dark, thick-boned through decades of manual labour. Kell wondered at the family’s circumstances; were they emigrating to France? It looked as though their every possession was packed into three veteran suitcases and crammed into the soft cardboard boxes that drooped on the metal trolley like stomachs.

The queue moved quickly. Before long Kell found himself in an indoor waiting area, a high-ceilinged cube bordered on three sides by ticket desks, souvenir kiosks and a café selling pizza and pancakes. He collected his ticket from an SNCM official of Sami’s vintage who looked as smart and urbane as any London spymaster. His was the sort of job Kell had always dreaded: the confinement in one room; the day-after-day repetition of mundane tasks. He bought himself a coffee and sat at a window table overlooking the harbour, everything strangely damp to the touch, as if the morning sea had swept through the hall on a sudden, cleansing tide.

After five minutes, through the crowds of foot passengers gathered in the hall, he saw François standing at the security check fifty metres away. He was showing his ticket to a guard. Headphones were looped around his neck and he was holding a little leather clutch bag of the sort favoured by fashionable southern European men. Passport control indicated the expensive pair of designer sunglasses concealing François’ eyes and Kell saw him pull them up over his head with what looked like an almost haughty disdain; perhaps a week spent in the company of the Chief-designate of the Secret Intelligence Service had fortified him in the presence of low-level power. He then turned left, out of sight, and Kell finished his coffee with no sense of rush or panic. He had twenty-two hours on the ship ahead of him: that was plenty of time to make the acquaintance of Monsieur François Malot.

The ferry was identical to many Kell had taken as a child across the English Channel on family holidays to the Normandy coast; a roll-on, roll-off passenger ship with stacked decks, open walkways on the port and starboard sides, a sun deck beneath the funnel. He located his cabin in the bowels of the ship, a tiny room squeezed among a hundred others along identical, criss-cross corridors in which he quickly lost any sense of direction. He could hear the voice of his father – ‘No bloody cat small enough to swing’ – as he pulled the bed down from the wall of his cabin, immediately reducing the available floor space by fifty per cent. He slid his luggage underneath. There was a small moulded shelf next to the pillow, beneath a scratched mirror; to the right of the door, a bathroom only fractionally larger than a telephone box. Kell sat on the bed, put the half-finished bottle of duty-free Macallan on the shelf, removed the memory card from the camera, then took out The Scramble for Africa and headed back upstairs to look around.

No sign of François. He went from deck to deck, from salon to salon, mapping out the territory. Two veiled women were already camped out in a reception lobby on Level 6; they had laid out sponge mats and were fast asleep on the floor. A door connected the lobby to a seating area where roughly fifty North Africans had secured rows of leather armchairs in a sunlit lounge. It was lunchtime and they were eating picnics of boiled eggs, lettuce and bread. One man was slicing a tomato with a penknife and spreading a baguette with what appeared to be homemade harissa paste. The eggs were peeled white and Kell watched as he swept the broken shells carefully into a small plastic tub on the floor. He felt a pang of hunger and went looking for something to eat. Two floors up there was a restaurant, closed, and he was told by a genial French waiter that food would be served once the ship had left dock. So Kell went out on to the port deck, braced his hands on a chipped-paint railing, and watched as the last of the cars made their way into the stern of the ferry. It was a brilliant summer day, sun-glinting and clean, the salt light blinding to the eyes. Kell breathed the air deeply to clear what felt like days of indoor living. Beside him, an Algerian man with a moustache was taking photographs of the port; another was waving at a small family group clustered in a car park. He looked close to tears.

30

The years, as they say, had been kind to Jean-Marc Daumal. From Tunis, in the first months of the new decade, he had been posted to Buenos Aires, where he had enjoyed a front-row seat at the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands and embarked on a suitably tempestuous affair with one of the girls from the secretarial pool at his office in Avenida San Juan. In due course, his infatuation with Amelia Weldon had been, if not forgotten, then replaced by something closer to resentment and shame. It irked Daumal that a young woman should have exercised such a hold over his emotions; had he met her at a particularly vulnerable moment in his life? None of the other women with whom Daumal had become involved in the remaining twenty years of his working career had meant much more to him than brief, diversionary pleasures.

Daumal had finally solved the enigma of Amelia’s disappearance some sixteen years after leaving Tunisia. At a wedding reception for a wealthy client in Atlanta, Georgia, who should Jean-Marc espy across the snow-white marquee but Joan and David Guttmann, the WASP and the Jew who had sheltered his lover on the night of her flight from La Marsa. In those first gruelling days in 1978, Jean-Marc had quickly abandoned his theory that Guttmann had stolen Amelia from under his nose, for the simple reason that he had been in Israel for six weeks either side of her disappearance. In fact, everything had later been clarified by Joan. At a lunch three days after Amelia had gone missing, she had vouchsafed to Celine that one of the English boys with whom Amelia had been spending time in the city had made her pregnant. According to Joan, she had taken the very difficult decision to fly home and to have an abortion. She hoped that the entire matter would now be forgotten and that the Daumals would find some way of forgiving their au pair for her rash and morally contemptible behaviour.

Jean-Marc had known, of course, that the baby was his, and in spite of his overwhelming feelings of love for Amelia, could not suppress a parallel sensation of intense relief that she had decided to abort the pregnancy. An illegitimate child would have steered Celine to the divorce courts, no question; the scandal would have ruined his chances of promotion to the Argentine office and had a deleterious long-term effect on the personal development of Thibaud and Lola. No, upon reflection, he was glad that Amelia had shown such maturity and good sense.

But there was a final twist. On that radiant summer afternoon in Atlanta, David Guttmann had had too much to drink. Forgetting the carefully assembled lies of 1978, he had assumed that Jean-Marc knew all about the long months that Amelia had spent in Tunis at an apartment near their house, as the baby grew inside her. Trying to disguise his astonished reaction, Jean-Marc had come to realize that Amelia had not aborted their child but instead given birth to a son. It was only when Guttmann had drunkenly registered the extent of his mistake that he grabbed a lie out of the clear Georgia air and tried to backtrack on what he had said.

‘The great tragedy, of course, is that the baby passed away a few weeks later.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Sure. It was just a heart-rending thing. Some kind of blood poisoning. We never really got to the bottom of it. Joan will remember, but probably best not to bring it up tonight, huh? Far as I recall, the hospital wasn’t as clean as it should have been. Some problem with septicaemia.’

By 1996, Jean-Marc Daumal was living back in Paris and flew home determined to find out what had become of his child. He found no trace of Amelia Weldon in the United Kingdom, despite employing the services of a private detective in Mayfair, at eye-watering expense. His various enquiries with adoption agencies in Tunisia drew a series of similar blanks. It was only a decade later, long since retired and living at the family home in Burgundy, that Daumal finally discovered what had become of Amelia. Daumal’s son, Thibaud, now a journalist in Paris, had brought home one of his girlfriends, who happened to work in the Ministry of the Interior. Keen to impress the man whom she hoped might one day become her father-in-law, the girlfriend, whose name was Marion, had agreed to find out what she could about Mademoiselle Amelia Weldon. Her subsequent enquiries into a known officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service had attracted the attention of France’s overseas intelligence service, which had promptly interviewed Marion in order to discover the reason behind her enquiry. She, in turn, had pointed the DGSE in the direction of Jean-Marc Daumal, who agreed to have lunch in Beaune with an officer identifying himself as ‘Benedict Voltaire’.

‘Tell me, Monsieur,’ Benedict had asked, as their waiter snapped open a couple of menus at the outset of what was to become a memorable meal. ‘What do you remember of your time in Tunis? Is there anything at all, for example, that you can tell us about a woman named Amelia Weldon?’

31

Spying is waiting.

Kell went back to his cabin, retrieved The Scramble for Africa, got lost in the switchback corridors on the sleeping level, eventually found his way to the restaurant and ate a decent lunch. The ferry, now pulling out into the open sea, appeared to be only half-full; no queue had formed outside the restaurant and there were enough spare tables to accommodate the mostly French passengers who had materialized en masse from the lower decks after parking their cars. There were no Africans in sight; the food was French, the prices in euros and the clientele exclusively white. Kell waited for François to make an appearance, lingering over his book and coffee, but by two thirty he had still not shown and Kell gave up, on the assumption that the Frenchman must have eaten in the self-service canteen. He paid his bill and walked upstairs, passing through the canteen as the low, whitewashed houses of Carthage narrowed to a chalk strip on the horizon. The entire area was deserted save for a young British couple on a damage-limitation exercise with two screaming toddlers and a new-born baby. The mother was spooning puréed food into the baby’s mouth, the toddlers bombing the linoleum with plastic toys. A section of the floor was soaked with seawater. All of them looked exhausted.

Eventually, like stumbling on the right street without the aid of a map, Kell found François standing at the stern railings on the sun deck, gazing down at the churning wake of the sea, the distant Tunisian coast now obscured by a vapour of mist. Beside him was a taller man, bearded and dressed in jeans, wearing a button-down blue shirt. The man, who had lustrous black hair, almost certainly dyed, looked about fifty-five and was smoking a filterless cigarette, which he eventually flicked out over the stern; the wind failed to catch it and it dropped on to a lower deck. The conversation between them seemed relaxed and matter-of-fact, yet something in their physical proximity spoke of an established familiarity. Perhaps they had been talking for some time; perhaps they had met before. Kell positioned himself a few metres along the railing, caught the man’s name – Luc – and heard a snatch of dialogue about ‘hotels in Marseille’. But any hopes he had of overhearing more of the conversation were snuffed out by the low, perpetual roar of the ship’s funnel.

He lit a cigarette of his own. He always carried a packet in environments that might require him to make contact with an agent or member of the public. A lighter could trigger a conversation; a cigarette was something to occupy nervous hands. Kell turned and looked at the plastic chairs on the deck, at the scattering of passengers taking siestas under the unrelenting Mediterranean sun. They were held in the suspended animation of travel, the no-man’s-land of waiting to cross from one place to another. Nothing to do but read and sleep and eat. The wind was buffeting Kell’s face and cracking a French flag at the stern of the ship. Still the two men kept talking, their voices low, their conversation a rumble of French unpunctuated by laughter. Eventually Kell took a flight of sea-greased steps to a lower deck and waited directly beneath them, hoping that the breeze might push more of their words towards him. But it was no good: the roar of the engine muffled every sound. At a loose end, he powered up his London phone, only to watch the last bar of reception flicker and vanish as the ship moved steadily north.

He did not see the bearded Luc again until dinner. François’ companion was eating alone at a corner table not four feet from where Kell was seated. He had his back to the room and was hunched over a lengthy document that he read, with great concentration, between mouthfuls of rice and chicken chasseur. Kell had a glorious sunset and a copy of Time magazine for company and was beginning to wonder why he had bothered following François back to Marseille. Better, surely, to have tailed Amelia to Nice, to liaise with the Knights, send a full report to London and then invoice Truscott for his trouble.

He was mid-pudding when Luc stood up and walked towards a salad bar close to the entrance of the restaurant. He appeared to scan the selection: cucumbers in yoghurt; piles of shredded carrot; drained, tinned sweetcorn. As Luc was helping himself to a triangle of processed cheese, François walked into the restaurant, directly in his line of sight. Kell saw the two men make eye contact, plainly aware of the other’s presence, but there was no further acknowledgment between them. Luc looked down at his plate; François immediately switched his gaze to a waiter, who led him to a table on the starboard side of the restaurant. Kell wondered what he had just seen. Were they ignoring one another? Was it a case of avoiding a fellow passenger for fear that they would be obliged to sit together. Or was there more to it?

François sat down. He flapped a napkin into his lap and picked up the menu. He was seated directly opposite Kell but paid no attention to him, nor to any of the other diners in the restaurant. The light of the sunset was pouring through the windows and coating the walls of the salon in a deep orange glow. It was curious to watch him in his solitude. Much of François’ swagger and arrogance had diminished; he was somehow less striking, less self-confident than the man he had photographed at the hotels. Perhaps grief was upon him; Kell knew all too well how the loss of a parent could snatch at you for months, sometimes years afterwards. His own mother had died from breast cancer in the second year of his career at SIS, a loss with which he felt he had only recently come to terms. François had no book for company, no newspaper, and seemed content simply to eat his food, to sip his wine, and to allow his thoughts and gaze to wander. Once, sensing that Kell was staring at him, he caught his eye and nodded, in a way that reminded Kell so completely of Amelia that he was almost tempted to rise from his chair, to introduce himself as an old friend of the family and to share memories of his mother’s life and career. Luc, meanwhile, had finished his meal and was gesturing im– patiently at a waiter for the bill. Kell did the same, put the food and wine on a Uniacke debit card, and followed Luc out of the restaurant.

It was not easy to track him. One switchback, one curious turn of the head, and Luc would have seen him all too easily. The stairs were short and narrow, the corridors of the ship all but empty. Kell tried to maintain his distance, but had to be close enough to spot a sudden turn or a move to a lower deck. In due course it became apparent that Luc was heading for the sleeping cabins, descending four floors to the deck immediately below Kell’s room. He was soon into the criss-cross corridors, all sense of direction lost. Halfway along one of the narrow, yellow-lit passages, Luc came to a halt outside his room. At a distance of perhaps fifty metres, Kell observed him punching a four-digit pin into the lock. The Frenchman went inside, securing a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outer handle, then closed the door. Kell waited several seconds, walked past the cabin and made a note of the room number: 4571. He then went back to his own room and read again a Heaney poem that he had enjoyed in Tunis, in order to give François time to finish dinner. The name of the poem was ‘Postscript’, and on the inside back page of The Spirit Level Kell scribbled down a phrase – the earthed lightning of a flock of swans – that struck him as particularly beautiful. He left the book open on the bed, face down, then headed upstairs with no larger ambition than to sit among the passengers in the entertainment lounge, hoping that François would stop by for a drink. If he did so, he would make conversation; if he did not, he would try to speak to him in the morning, perhaps on deck as the ship closed in on Marseille. There was no future in tracking François from the restaurant, in trying to break the code to his room. All that he needed was the chance to talk to him and to make an assessment of his character. He wondered if Amelia had told him about her work for SIS. Though it was beyond the remit of the task Marquand had set, Kell wanted to be sure that François wasn’t going to blow her cover, either by talking to random strangers on ships, or when he reached mainland France. If he was satisfied that her son was capable of keeping a secret, he would leave both of them in peace.

32

François Malot finished his dinner, paid the bill in cash and made his way to the entertainment lounge on the upper level of the ship. He wanted to meet a woman and yet he did not want to meet a woman. It was a strange split in his mood, a confusion of desires. He felt a need to be outside himself, to engage with a stranger, yet he did not want to become involved in the tiring and complicated rituals of seduction. In any event, what were the chances of meeting a girl on a ship like this? A ferry halfway across the Mediterranean was not the same as a nightclub in Paris or Reims. He would be better off waiting until Marseille and buying a girl, if he could get away with it. He couldn’t have risked a prostitute in Tunisia, not with the laws as strict as they were, but a couple of times at the Ramada he had been so starved of sexual contact that he had booked himself in for a massage in the therapy centre, just to feel a woman’s hands on his skin. It wasn’t the same when Amelia did it, rubbing suntan lotion on to his back beside the pool. That wasn’t what François had wanted. That sort of behaviour confused him.

He had been seated at the bar in the lounge for about ten minutes when he became aware of a man standing beside him, trying to attract the attention of the barmaid. François recognized him as the passenger he had seen in the restaurant reading a copy of Time magazine. They had nodded at one another and François had felt his gaze once or twice as he ate his pasta. He assumed, by the man’s pale complexion and slightly unkempt appearance, that he was British. The collars of his shirt had lost their stiffness, he was sporting at least a day of stubble and his shoes were brown and scuffed. Before he knew it, he had caught the man’s eye again and they were making conversation.

‘Impossible to get a drink round here.’

François shrugged. Though he understood English, he was in no mood to stagger through a stilted conversation with a stranger. Besides, he loathed the British assumption that all foreigners could be spoken to in English. The stranger seemed to detect his reluctance and said: ‘Vous êtes français?’

‘Oui,’ François replied. ‘Vous le parlez?’

It transpired that the man’s name was Stephen Uniacke and that he spoke excellent French. At first, François was slightly worried that he might be gay, but early in the conversation Stephen vouchsafed that he was ‘happily married’ and was making his way back from Tunisia after spending a week at a hotel in Hammamet.

‘How did you find it down there?’

‘Package tourism distilled to its essence,’ Stephen replied. ‘Kids on inflatable sausage rides, fish-and-chip shops, sunburned Anglo-Saxons everywhere you look. I might as well have stayed in Reading.’

The barmaid eventually came over. François had reached the bottom of a gin and tonic. He wasn’t surprised when Stephen offered to buy him another one and felt that he could not refuse.

‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’

‘My pleasure. Are you travelling on your own?’

Perhaps he was gay. Perhaps Stephen Uniacke took holidays in Hammamet because he liked picking up boys on the beach.

‘I am,’ François replied, wondering whether he would be obliged to tell Amelia’s story all over again. He was bored even of thinking about it.

‘And you live in Marseille?’

‘Paris.’

The deliberate brevity of his answer seemed to convince the Englishman that he should change the subject. He had settled at a stool alongside and now cast his eyes around the room, perhaps while thinking of something to say.

‘This place looks like it was decorated by Grace Jones with a hangover.’

It was a very good description, very apt. François laughed and looked across the lounge. A man of about fifty was squeezed into a disc jockey booth with a pair of headphones clamped to his scalp. He was trying to entice a group of over-excited Marseillaise housewives on to the dance floor, but so far only a young boy of about ten seemed interested. One of the housewives had looked at François once or twice, but she was fat and lower class and he had paid her no attention. The lighting design was retro-purple, a disco ball spinning blurred stars around the lounge. The DJ started playing ‘Let Me Entertain You’ and Stephen mock-coughed into his drink.

‘Oh Christ.’

‘What is it?’

‘On behalf of my countrymen, can I just apologize for Robbie Williams?’

François laughed again. It felt good to be engaged in a normal conversation with somebody who was bright and funny. Amelia was all those things, but their time together had been different, more like a series of interviews or business meetings in which they were working one another out. One evening in Tunis, when Amelia had gone to bed, François had felt like going out and had taken a taxi to a club in La Marsa. But the local nightlife had not been to his satisfaction. He had sat alone at the edge of a dance floor watching Tunis’s smug, idle young rich trying to seduce Muslim girls who would surely never sleep with them. Sex in Islam was the ultimate sin for a woman before marriage. The boys wore big watches and preened their hair with vats of gel. One of the girls, wearing too much eyeliner, had flirted with François, and he had thought about approaching her for a dance. But you never knew who might be watching; he never knew what he could or could not risk. The Tunisian men all looked slightly overweight and sported sinister moustaches. One of them might have been her boyfriend or brother. He had felt sorry for the girl and wondered what would become of her.

‘How did you find the food in Tunisia?’ Stephen was asking.

He could tell that the Englishman was struggling for conversation, but this was a subject about which François was enthused. He replied that he had enjoyed an evening with his mother at an open-air fish restaurant in La Goulette, but that they had both been disappointed by the couscous at an undeservedly famous Tunisian restaurant in Sidi Bou-Said.

‘I had a disastrous time with the food,’ Stephen revealed. ‘Ordered “merguez” in one place thinking it was fish, but ended up with a sausage. Tried to play it safe the next night by ordering “tajine”, but that turned out to be some kind of omelette. Hadn’t been within a thousand miles of Morocco. You said your mother lives in Tunis?’

Now François was trapped. He would have to say something about Amelia or it would seem rude.

‘It’s a long story.’

Stephen looked at his drink, looked at the disco ball, looked at François. ‘I’ve got all night.’

So he told him. The whole thing. The murder in Egypt. Trying to contact Amelia through the adoption agency. Their reunion in Paris. Then he described the week they had spent together in Gammarth. It was like telling a favourite anecdote; he embellished certain elements, skipped over the parts that no longer interested him, tried to depict Amelia in the best possible light. Stephen, as François had anticipated, was by turns appalled at the tragedy in Sharm-el-Sheikh and delighted that mother and son had been brought together so quickly in its aftermath. Yet François soon began to tire of his sympathy and questions. By eleven o’clock he had reached the bottom of a second drink, the one he had been obliged to buy for Stephen in thanks for the first, and wanted desperately to be free of him so that he could return to his cabin. It was just a question of finding a way to escape. Thankfully, a woman on the opposite side of the bar had been staring at them for some time. At first, François could not tell with whom she was flirting. She was an attractive, if severe woman in her late thirties; he had seen her on the ship in the afternoon, reading a newspaper in the lobby. Usually, he would have assumed that any available woman on board would have preferred his company to that of the Englishman, yet increasingly she seemed to be directing her attention towards Stephen.

‘Looks like someone likes you,’ he said, flicking his eyes in her direction.

‘Who?’ It appeared that Stephen had not even noticed the woman.

‘Across the bar. The lady with the dyed blonde hair. You want me to invite her over?’

Stephen looked across, startled. François noted a flush of embarrassment in his cheeks as he caught her eye. She looked away.

‘I think she’ll almost certainly be more interested in you,’ Stephen replied.

It was a flattering observation but it was also the opportunity François had been waiting for. His glass was empty. There was a long day ahead. He had every excuse to leave.

‘No,’ he said, rising from his stool. ‘I will leave you to her.’ He shook the Englishman’s hand. ‘It was interesting to meet you. I enjoyed our conversation very much. Perhaps we will see one another again in the morning.’

‘I hope so,’ Stephen replied, and with that the two men parted.