Текст книги "What a cave up!"

Автор книги: Джонатан Коу

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Nobody saw anything unusual in this: those who knew Mark were accustomed to his reserve. He was clearly not enjoying himself, but then he had probably never learned how to enjoy himself, and he certainly never allowed himself to relax. Eternal vigilance was one of the preconditions of his wealth. At ten thirty-five, purely as a matter of routine, he went upstairs to check on security. Next to the one (single) bed in the master bedroom, a panelled door gave on to a small windowless room containing a wall of television screens and a control panel. Patiently he flicked the monitors on, one at a time, and looked for irregularities. The dining hall, the kitchens, the conservatory; the pool, the bedrooms, the lifts. The study.

If Mark felt any shock or alarm at what he saw in the study, there was again no trace of it in his eyes. He watched closely, making sure that he had not misread the image. But it was plain enough. A man in a tuxedo was crouched over his desk. Somehow he had managed to pick the lock, and a set of papers had been laid out on the desk top. The man had a small camcorder and was slowly tracking along the desk, recording the contents of each document.

When the man had finished, he put the papers back in the desk and slipped the miniature camera down the leg of his trousers. He looked around furtively, and looked up, although he failed to see the camera hidden behind a wall-lamp which was following his every movement. It was at this point that Mark recognized him. It was Packard.

Mark left the monitoring room and took a lift down to the ground floor, calmly sifting this new information in his mind. He was angry, but not surprised. He’d been expecting something like this to happen: you always expected something like this to happen. And it made sense, in a way, because Mark now remembered a small detail: Packard had been carrying a video camera the very first time they met.

∗

1983–1990

Graham had left college with his ideals intact, but seven years later his student radicalism was, to all appearances, a thing of the past: he now occupied a managerial position with Midland Ironmasters, who supplied precision machine tools for the international market and were based just outside Birmingham. He had a house, a wife and a company car, spent a good part of the year travelling abroad at his employers’ expense and was on first-name terms with a handful of Britain’s most influential businessmen and entrepreneurs. His career gave every sign of being well thought out and perfectly on course; but his fellow board members would have been shocked if they had known its secret goal.

He had come to Birmingham soon after graduating, to take up a job programming films for a small arts cinema which went bankrupt within weeks of his arrival, halfway through a John Cassavetes season. Graham signed on the dole and didn’t work again for several months, when one of his new flatmates got married and asked if he would make a video of the wedding. The result was considered so professional that Graham decided to set himself up in business on one of Mrs Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance schemes, confining himself to weddings at first and then branching out into promotional videos for local businesses. It was a far cry from his own self-image as subversive visionary, but the money was good and in the meantime he salved his conscience by doing unpaid work for the Labour Party and for various co-ops, unions and women’s groups in the area. In the evenings he pored over copies of Screen, Tribune, Sight and Sound and the Morning Star, and dreamed of the documentary he would one day make: a feature-length masterpiece using all of the cinema’s most dazzling resources, which would hold the worldwide capitalist conspiracy up to merciless, irresistible scrutiny. He dreamed, in particular, of making a film about the arms market, a subject which called for the politics of a Ken Loach or a Frederick Wiseman, combined with the outrageous plot and seductive glamour of a James Bond movie.

It seemed a long way off: but Graham was to find his opening sooner than he imagined, and through an unexpected quarter. Packard Promos – as the one-man company now styled itself – was approached by Midland Ironmasters in the spring of 1986. It was the most important contract Graham had yet been offered: they wanted a thirty-minute video which would showcase every stage of their production process. The budget was comparatively big and he was shooting on to high resolution tape with stereo sound. Graham followed his brief carefully, and when he presented a rough cut of the film to the firm’s directors it was received with great excitement. There followed an animated discussion during which he was quizzed relentlessly for ideas about packaging and distributing the finished product: it quickly became obvious that he was dealing with novices, who seemed inordinately impressed by his routine proposals. The next day the managing director, a Mr Riley, invited him into his office and offered him a job as Head of Marketing. Graham had no intention of moving into this area and politely turned the offer down.

Two days later something happened to change his mind. In preparation for the final edit he was making some establishing shots of the factory floor, when Mr Riley appeared, accompanied by a neat, ratty-looking man who seemed to be taking a guided tour of some of the latest machinery. When they spotted Graham and his camera, they approached and Mr Riley asked him if he would stop filming for a few minutes: clearly at the personal instigation of his guest. Now, at close quarters, Graham recognized him, even though it was some years since he had seen his picture, in a magazine article about illegal arms sales to South Africa.

‘No problem,’ he said, clipping the lens cap on to his camera. Then he held out his hand. ‘Graham Packard, Packard Promos.’

The stranger took his hand and shook it reluctantly. ‘Mark Winshaw. Vanguard Import and Export.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ He turned to Mr Riley. ‘A new contract in the offing?’ he asked, blandly.

Mr Riley puffed out his chest and said, with a mixture of pride and obsequiousness: ‘The start of a long and fruitful relationship, I hope.’

At that moment Graham took several decisions very quickly. If Ironmasters were doing business with Mark Winshaw this could only mean that they were going to let their machines, whether knowingly or not, be used for munitions production, probably in Iraq which was militarizing itself more rapidly than any other Middle Eastern country. From Mr Riley’s remark it sounded like a big, long-term contract. If he took a job with this company, he might be in a position to follow the progress of the deal, perhaps even to start building up contacts: in short, to worm his way inside the very network which he wanted to make the subject of his film, and which until now had seemed so hopelessly inaccessible.

And so before going home that evening he asked to see Mr Riley, and much to his surprise and delight told him that he had reconsidered his offer and wanted to accept the marketing position. And over the next two years he would prove himself such an enthusiastic member of the team that promotion and extra responsibilities came swiftly, until he had moved from Marketing into Planning, and moved from Planning into Expansion, and in 1989 (not long after his wedding) reached the apogee of his career with Ironmasters when he was invited to represent the firm at the First Baghdad International Exhibition for Military Production which opened on Saddam Hussein’s birthday in April of that year.

Meanwhile, as soon as Mr Riley and Mark Winshaw had left the shop floor, he took his camera and hurried upstairs to the boardroom, which commanded a good view of the car park and forecourt. Luckily it was empty. He knelt out of sight and, with only his lens peering over the window-sill, zoomed in on the two men, getting a good shot of them chatting and shaking hands next to Mark’s red BMW.

Work on the masterpiece had already begun.

∗

1990

‘The base at Qalat Saleh,’ said Graham, ‘contained twelve reinforced concrete underground aircraft hangars large enough to house two dozen planes, which would take off from an underground ramp, with their brakes on and afterburners lit.’

Listening to his own voice on the headphones, he found it flat and less than compelling. But this was only a test commentary, to help him synchronize the words and the images. When the film was finished, he would hire an actor, someone known for his leftwing sympathies, and whose voice would carry immediate authority. Alan Rickman, perhaps, or Antony Sher. Of course, this would only happen if he managed to get some real money put behind the project, but he was starting to feel quite optimistic on that front. Preliminary discussions with Alan Beamish, head of current affairs at one of the largest ITV companies, had been very encouraging: as long as he still had a job, Beamish had said, he would do everything in his power to see that the film was supported.

It was getting dark. Graham switched the light on and drew the curtains. The editing suite – actually the back bedroom of their house in Edgbaston – was directly above the kitchen, and he could hear Joan moving about downstairs, putting the finishing touches to dinner.

‘The 3,000 metre runways,’ said his voice on the tape, ‘were built behind mounds of desert clay, making them invisible to all but the closest observers.’

∗

April 1987

In the jeep taking them from Qalat Saleh to the test site, the Iraqi general had asked Mark for his opinion.

‘Not bad,’ said Mark. ‘Although the crew quarters seemed rather vulnerable.’

The general shrugged. ‘You can’t have everything. Men are easier to replace than machines.’

‘You think those blast doors are safe?’

‘We think so,’ said the general. He laughed and put his arm around Mark. ‘I know, you only wanted us to buy them from the British because they were more expensive.’

‘Far from it. I’m a patriot, that’s all.’

The general laughed again, louder than ever. Over the years he had come to appreciate Mark’s sense of humour. ‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ he teased. ‘We are living in an age of internationalism. These bases are a testament to that. Swiss airlocks, German generators, Italian doors, British communication systems, French hangars. What could be more cosmopolitan?’

Mark didn’t answer. His eyes were hidden behind mirror sunglasses which reflected nothing but desert.

‘A patriot!’ said the general, still chuckling over the joke.

The test was noisy but gratifying. They watched from a bunker dug deep into the sand as the target area, set up to resemble convoys of Iranian tanks, exploded with deafening blasts of fire from the 155mm GCTs positioned more than twenty kilometres away. The guns were performing more accurately than even Mark would have thought possible, and as he saw the general’s eyes light up with excitement, he knew that he was going to make an easy sale. They were both in excellent humour as the driver took them back to Baghdad.

‘You know, it’s not that our leader doesn’t admire your country,’ said the general, returning to the subject of Mark’s patriotism. ‘It’s just that you make it difficult for him to trust you. So it’s a sort of love-hate thing with him. Our armies are still using manuals prepared by your War College. We still send our men to be trained at your air bases, and draw upon the expertise of your SAS. There is nothing better than a British military education. I should know: I was at Sandhurst myself. If only your military genius were backed up by honourable intentions in the diplomatic field.’

Before returning to central Baghdad, they detoured to the Diyala Chemical Laboratory in Salman Pak, where a plant for the manufacture of nerve gas had been established under the guise of a university research facility. It was Mark’s third or fourth visit, but as they were waved through the heavily guarded entrance gates and escorted to one of the labs, he could not help being impressed, as before, by the scale and efficiency of the operation.

‘German engineering is the best in the world, there is no doubt about it,’ said the general. ‘And you know why? Because they are not just a nation of opportunists. There are people in Germany who really believe in what we are trying to achieve in Iraq. There’s something there that the British could learn from. You and I are not old enough to remember the days before ’58, when nearly all of our equipment used to come from Great Britain, but it’s possible to be nostalgic for such an arrangement. There can be no dignity when business has to be done clandestinely, behind closed doors. We want allies, you see. We want relationships. But all you are interested in is doing deals.’

As they continued their tour, the general explained why he had brought Mark back to the laboratory. Nervous of the side-effects of the highly volatile chemicals, they wanted to find a contractor who could install a new air cleaning plant.

‘I’m pleased to hear you’re so concerned about environmental protection,’ said Mark.

His friend seemed to like this joke even more than the one about patriotism.

‘Well, we must give our technicians the best possible working conditions,’ he said. ‘After all, they are making important researches in the field of veterinary science.’

As if to illustrate his point, he took Mark past the animal house on their way back to the vehicle. For a while their conversation was drowned out by the howling of the beagles which would be used to test the effectiveness of the nerve gas agents. A nearby garbage dump was piled high with the corpses of their predecessors.

∗

May 1987

Mark did not have to look far to find his air cleaning plant. He went to a senior German industrialist who had already sent equipment over to the Salman Pak laboratory and had proved himself a reliable, prompt supplier. Mark always enjoyed visiting his country house in the Rhine valley, where the contracts would be signed in a magnificent study beneath a large, gold-framed portrait of Hitler, and tea would be served by his beautiful young daughter. And today, as a sign of special favour, he was offered some extra entertainment, when the industrialist unlocked a cabinet containing a reel-to-reel tape recorder, wired up to a speaker which had been mounted inside a radio console of 1930s vintage. When he started the tape a familiar voice could be heard, and for the next ten minutes the Führer himself, in full oratorical flight, roared out through the bay windows, across the summer lawns and down to the sparkling river’s very edge.

‘I can still remember where I was when I heard that speech,’ said the industrialist, when the tape was over. ‘Sitting in my mother’s kitchen. The windows open. The play of light on the table. The air filled with hope and energy. A fabulous time. Well – why shouldn’t an old man be allowed to get a little wistful about his youth now and again? Some people do it with a trite, romantic poem or sentimental song. For me it will always be that wonderful voice.’ He closed the cabinet door and locked it carefully. ‘Saddam Hussein is a good man,’ he said. ‘He makes me feel young again. It’s an honour to help him. But I don’t suppose you’d understand that: you were born into an age when principles have ceased to mean anything.’

‘If that concludes our business, Herr —’

‘You’re a puzzle to me, Mr Winshaw. To me, and to many others who are old enough to have served the Reich, and who were well acquainted with your family name long before you appeared on our doorsteps.’

Mark rose to his feet and picked up his briefcase. He appeared not to be interested.

‘I know exactly what Saddam Hussein is making at his so-called research facility. I also know that Israel will be his first target. This is why I support him, of course. He will resume a process of cleansing which we were never allowed to complete. Do you take my meaning, Mr Winshaw?’

‘I make a habit,’ said Mark, ‘of not inquiring into the uses – ’

‘Come now, there’s no need to be modest. You’re a qualified engineer: a chemical engineer. I’m well aware that you’ve been instrumental in helping one of our largest firms to supply Iraq with quantities of Zyklon B, for instance. The cleansing process of which I spoke depends upon the free circulation of such commodities, and yet our own laws, placed under absurd international constraints, prohibit us from exporting them. And so, ironically, it’s left to men like you – bounty hunters – to keep our ideals alive.’ He watched for Mark’s response, but saw none. ‘You do know where Zyklon B is manufactured, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said Mark, who had visited the plant many times.

‘I wonder if you are familiar with the history of that factory. It narrowly escaped being destroyed by allied bombers in 1942. A British plane was sent out on a secret mission to reconnoitre the area, but the Luftwaffe were alerted and the unfortunate pilot and his crew were shot down. Does any of this mean anything to you?’

‘I’m afraid not. You forget that it happened a long time ago. Before I was even born.’

The old man held his gaze for a moment and then pulled on the bell-rope beside the door.

‘Quite true, Mr Winshaw. But as I say, you remain a puzzle.’ As Mark left, he added: ‘My daughter, if you wish to see her, is in the library.’

∗

December 1961

To his mother, Mark had long ago become a puzzle which there was nothing to be gained from solving, and so she had offered no protest when he told her – several weeks after the event – that he had decided to give up his law degree and enrol as a student of chemical engineering. The letter in which he communicated this news was one of the last he ever sent her. It had become pointless to maintain the pretence that mother and son still had anything to say to each other: and in another couple of years there would be physical distance between them to compound the gulf of incomprehension and indifference.

Her invitation to Mortimer’s fiftieth birthday party had provided Mildred with a rare glimpse into the Winshaws’ prosperous lives. For most of her long years of widowhood the family seemed to have forgotten her, and offered little in the way of financial help beyond the paying of Mark’s school and university fees. As she neared the age of fifty, she was still struggling to subsist on her modest income as secretary to an American wine merchant based in London. One day he announced his intention of winding up the business and moving back to Florida, and she was about to resign herself to the prospect of several gloomy weeks haunting the employment agencies, when he astonished her by asking if she would come to America with him, in the capacity not of his secretary, but his wife. It took her three days to recover from the shock; at which point she accepted.

They lived comfortably in a beach house outside Sarasota until their peaceful deaths, within two months of one another, in the winter of 1986. Mildred never spoke to her son again after leaving England. Their last conversation was over lunch one afternoon in Oxford, and they had both found it difficult to remain civil even then. She had ended up accusing Mark of despising her.

‘ “Despise” is putting it rather strongly,’ he said. ‘I just can’t really see the point of the sort of life you’re leading.’

It was a remark which came back to her every so often: perhaps as she sat with her husband on the verandah after dinner, looking out over the ocean and trying hard to think of any place she would rather be.

∗

1976

Although Mark never spoke to his mother after she had left for America, he did see her once. This was during the early days of his dealings with Iraq, when he was first introduced to a curt, bearlike man called Hussein who represented the ‘Ministry of Industry’ and seemed in a hurry to procure specialized equipment for the building of a large pesticides factory. Mark discussed his requirements and recognized at once that several of the compounds he intended to manufacture – including Demeton, Paraoxon and Parathion – could easily be transformed into nerve gas. None the less he saw no reason why the project shouldn’t be represented to potential clients as part of an agricultural programme, and he promised to put Hussein in touch with an American firm which would be able to supply him with the huge corrosion-resistant vats necessary for the mixing of the chemicals.

Representatives of the company were flown to Baghdad and fed a convincing story about the plight of Iraqi farmers who could not protect their crops from desert locusts. They returned to Miami and set about preparing blueprints for a pilot plant which would enable the local workforce – which had no experience of work in this dangerous field – to be trained in the handling of toxic chemicals. But before they had time to complete the designs they were informed, via Mark, that Hussein had no interest in building a pilot plant. He wished to embark upon full-scale production immediately. This was not acceptable to the safety-conscious Americans, and Mark, who expected to make some six million dollars in commission on the deal, was forced to intervene and set up a meeting between the two sides in a conference room at the Miami Hilton.

It was not a success. Mark stood at a window overlooking the beach and listened in silence as the negotiations broke down amid accusations of hidden agendas on the one hand and over-regulation on the other. Never once taking his eyes from the strip of silver sand, he heard the Americans snap their cases shut and walk out. He heard Hussein grunt and complain that ‘Those guys need their brains examining. They just threw away the chance to become rich.’ Mark didn’t answer. He was the only person in the room not to have lost his temper. The money would have been useful, but he would make it up. He’d try the Germans next.

The day before, he had driven out through the Everglades to the Gulf Coast. A morning’s drive took him to Naples, along the Tamiami Trail with its Indian villages reconstituted as tourist attractions, its airboat rides and roadside cafés offering frogs’ legs and gator-burgers. From there he took the freeway north through Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, and arrived outside Sarasota late in the afternoon. His mother’s address, although he had never used it on any letter, was committed to memory. But Mark did not want to speak to her even now. He didn’t even ask himself why he had come. Once he had found the house, he drove another half a mile down the ocean road and turned off down a dirt track which led to the beach. When he parked at the end of this track, he had a good view of the house.

Her husband was shopping in town that afternoon, but as chance would have it Mildred herself was in the garden. She’d meant just to sit out and read a magazine, maybe start a letter to her stepdaughter in Vancouver, but she could see that the gardener had made a poor job of weeding the lawn, as usual, and was soon down on her knees pulling the more obstinate specimens up by the root. Almost at once she noticed the man leaning against the bonnet of his car and staring at her. She stood up and looked at him, shielding her eyes against the sun. She recognized him now, but didn’t move, didn’t wave, didn’t call out his name; just returned his impassive gaze. There were hollow spaces where his eyes should have been. At closer quarters, she would have realized that he was wearing mirror sunglasses which reflected nothing but the sky’s deep blue. But Mildred stayed where she was, and after a minute or two she knelt down again and resumed her weeding. The next time she looked up, the man was gone.

∗

September 1988

As Graham’s researches progressed, he began to feel that it would be useful to know something about Mark’s family background, and he remembered that there was someone who could probably help him. Michael Owen’s name had disappeared from the arts pages of the newspapers over the last few years, his novels were no longer to be found anywhere in the shops, and his book about the Winshaws was yet to be published. Perhaps the whole project had never come to anything; but it was just possible, Graham reasoned, that he would still be working on it, and if this was the case, he might have gained access to any amount of valuable inside information (not that he would know what to do with it, since the depth of his political naívety had been made fairly clear even from their few conversations). It was, at the very least, worth making a few phone calls.

The first of these calls was to Joan. It was two or three years since they had been in touch, and he wasn’t even sure that she would still be living in Sheffield, but she answered on the third ring and there was no mistaking the delight in her voice. Yes, she was still in the same job. No, she didn’t let out rooms to students any more. No, she hadn’t got married or started a family or anything like that. Yes, she could certainly try to contact Michael for him, although she didn’t have a current address. Funnily enough she’d been thinking of phoning Graham in the next couple of weeks, because there was a conference in Birmingham at the end of the month, and she’d wondered if he might be interested in meeting up for a drink or something. For old times’ sake. Graham said yes, of course, why not. For old times’ sake.

The strange thing was, as they both reflected afterwards, that in all of the ‘old times’ for the sake of which they had agreed to meet up, they could not remember a single evening which had ended with them leaning across the table to kiss each other, or lying down on the sofa with their arms around each other and their tongues in each other’s mouths, or falling into bed together and making love as if their lives depended on it. And yet all of these things happened, in sequence, when Joan came down for her visit to Birmingham. And once they had happened, she found herself curiously reluctant to leave and return to her house, and her job, and her solitary life back in Sheffield. And although she did return, after taking a few days’ unpaid leave (quite a bit of it being spent in bed with Graham), one of the first things she did was to put the house up for sale. At the same time she started looking for jobs in the Midlands. It took a while, because jobs were not easy to come by, not even for someone as experienced and well-qualified as Joan, but in the new year she managed to get a position running a women’s refuge in Harborne, and she moved in with Graham, and one day in February they both took time off to visit the local register office, and then suddenly they were married: he who had always believed that he wasn’t the marrying type, and she who had begun to think she had left it too late to find anyone to marry her.

And so Graham’s initial phone call had by no means been wasted, even though he never did manage to get in contact with Michael. He seemed to have gone away for a long holiday: or perhaps he just wasn’t answering the telephone any more.

∗

1981

The wedding of Mark Winshaw to Lady Frances Carfax in the chapel of St John’s College, Oxford, had been an altogether grander affair. Britain may have been in the grip of recession, but it seemed to have had little impact on those select members of the aristocracy and business community who attended the ceremony and afterwards convened at the country seat of the Carfax family for a lavish party which was still going strong (according to at least one of the newspaper reports) at four o’clock the next afternoon.

The party, in fact, lasted longer than the marriage.

Mark and Lady Frances had departed the revels early in the evening and joined a flight to Nice: from there, a taxi took them to Mark’s villa on the Riviera, where they were to begin their honeymoon. They arrived shortly after midnight, and slept in until lunchtime the next day, when Lady Frances borrowed one of Mark’s cars to drive into the nearest village and buy some cigarettes. She had only driven a few hundred yards when there was a huge explosion and the car burst into flames, careering off the road and into the stony mountainside. She was killed instantly.

Mark was devastated by the loss. The car was a 1962 Morgan Plus 8 Drop Head Coupé in midnight blue, one of about three or four left in the world, and it would be impossible to replace. He contacted his cousin Henry, who instructed the intelligence services to find out who was responsible, but didn’t have to wait for the results of their inquiry. Three weeks later an Iraqi diplomat contacted him and arranged a rendezvous in Cavendish Square. From there they drove to a secluded house in the Kent countryside. A pristine, off-white 1938 La Salle convertible sedan was parked in the forecourt.

‘It’s yours,’ said the diplomat.

He explained that a comical misunderstanding had arisen. They were well aware, of course, that Mark did business with the Iranians as well as with themselves: they would have expected nothing less from any serious entrepreneur. However, it had been wrongly suggested by an informer that Mark had also been using his position to trade military secrets. Saddam had been most upset to hear this, and had ordered swift retribution. Now the information was found to have been false: the real culprit had been identified and promptly disposed of. They could only be grateful, he said, that chance had intervened to save the life of an innocent man and a most valued friend of the Iraqi people. They were acutely conscious of the damage done to his property, and hoped that he would accept the gift of this car as a token of their continued affection and esteem.

Mark’s formal expressions of gratitude concealed his genuine annoyance at this incident. Marriage to Lady Frances would have been useful. He had been rather looking forward to the sexual aspect – although, to be honest, in terms of imagination and athleticism she could not really compare with the prostitutes whose services he was usually offered on his trips to Baghdad – but, more importantly, her father had a number of influential contacts in the South American market, which he was anxious to infiltrate. In all probability he would still be able to use them, but it would have been easier if his young and glamorous wife had been there to help.