EIIR symbol, once gold, was worn, and it had been one of the games played by the B Grade clerk to imagine what secrets had been held in the briefcase… There were no damn secrets now.
He took his notes from the briefcase. He was already in the vernacular of his client. They were the notes that he had scribbled fast on the table beside the Aga of the horrid young woman, Dorrie. How the horrid young woman, Dorrie, had killed her mother's honeymoon; how she had made a quality scene when the guest for dinner had been the local Master of Foxhounds and she had poured tomato puree over the man's tuxedo jacket; how she had made a quality exhibition with the strip dance that went to full frontal at her sixteenth birthday party; how she had taken her mother's Visa, forged the signature, and bought the current 'liaison' from the council houses a 500-cc Yamaha, new; how she swore at her stepfather where the world could hear her; how she stole, screwed.,.
They had pulled clear of Ljubljana. They had lurched to an uneven stop at a halt station. There was the slamming of doors, and the scream of whistles. The train headed on in the night.. How she was gone, dead, buried. He thought that his own father would have taken a strap to the horrid young woman, and his own mother would have locked her in a bedroom to scream, starve, do what she cared. There were two photographs in the briefcase. There was the photograph of her hanging back and half hidden behind the posed pair, her mother and stepfather, with her face pinched in aggression. It was the second photograph that interested Penn more, the girl laughing, and a prettiness on her face, and three of the 'liaisons' from the council houses with their arms on her, as if they knew each corner of her. This photograph had been hidden in her room and found by her mother. Perhaps he would find which of the photographs was real, perhaps not… A man towered above him. It was as the instructor had said. A man in a uniform of cheap cloth, and with a cheap leather belt with a cheap leather holster slung from it, and a cheap cigarette in his mouth, waited over him, smelling of cheap lotion. His passport was checked, handed back to him. No record was taken of his passport number. He was into Croatia. Maybe it was important that no record had been taken, maybe not. He settled back to the photographs, and back to his notes. It certainly would have been easier for him if the client's daughter, Dorrie, had been more than just a horrid young woman. She knew the sound of the Jaguar. And she knew to take his moods from the sound of the Jaguar braking. The braking was sharp, noisy. God… she set her face, the smile of the little woman back home and waiting on an angry breadwinner returning from commercial warfare, with his damned nose tweaked or his damned ego bruised. She could usually massage his temper, turn anger to a sullen acceptance. Mary opened the front door. 'Poor dear, what's the crisis?' The door slammed behind Charles Braddock, kicked shut with his heel… Fine for him to kick the door shut with his iron-tipped shoe heel, but heaven preserve a village boy who as much as brushed a leaning elbow on the paintwork… 'The crisis is those bloody Koreans, the crisis is that they are, twenty-four hours after ink on paper, requiring re- negotiation of penalty clauses. Bloody impossible…' 'Poor dear. Gin's waiting.' Routine time. Into the small living room. Into his chair. Four cubes of ice, two fingers of gin, half-slice of lemon, to the top with tonic, and let him blather it out. Mary sat on the arm of the chair and her fingers made patterns at his neck, and the gin level lowered as if the anger was gulping down his throat. Curses, obscenities, giving way to resentment, self-pity, nothing changed. After their supper, when she was putting the dishes away, she might just push him down the garden towards his 'snug', and she might just ring next door and get Arnold to report for duty across the stile.
'I mean, how can you do business with people, agree everything, have those bloody lawyers sift through it, have them sign it, then the little buggers want to start haggling again? It is just not possible …'
Her fingers soothed him. 'Poor dear…'
Resigned. 'How's your day been?'
'He rang,' she said brightly. 'He rang from the airport…'
'I should think he bloody did, and bloody cheerful he should have been, with the bloody money we're paying him.'
'Not, actually, cheerful. Sort of distant…'
She knew she shouldn't have said it. It was like another flint in a walking shoe.
She saw the frown burrow at his forehead and tried to escape. 'I don't know… I'll get supper.'
'Hold, hold, what do you mean, distant?'
'Well, it was the airport. He was just flying out. Nobody's communicative when they ring from the airport…'
'Give it me.'
She took a breath. 'It was as though he was uninvolved, of course he's not involved. It was as though it was just another job, of course it's just another job. Why should he be involved…?'
And she felt the tiredness, and she didn't want to talk about it, and she didn't want to think about it, and she had sat all the afternoon in Dorrie's room. She was tired and the anger in his face lowered at her and his voice beat over her.
'His problem, Penn's problem, is he's second-rate. He's not what Arnold cracked him up to be. He's offensive and second-rate. If it hadn't been for you, I tell you, I would not have tolerated his rudeness to me. He caught me, and he's a bloody second-rater. He's taking me, you, us, for a bloody ride.'
The snap. She was trying to call it back, the face of a small child, happy. The weight of a footfall on a dried branch. She had the body of the child and the clothes of the child. She went for the kitchen. The face was old, mature, not a child's, and screwed in dislike. She was shouting back at him. Always the image was of the screwed face of a young woman, never of a happy child. Her voice, shrill, 'He should join the club. Right? Should join the club because we're all second-rate to you. Right? Starting with my daughter.' The lights were dim over the platform, the electricity supply had been reduced to save power. Penn's carriage between Ljubljana and Zagreb had been empty. He took his suitcase down from the rack and he checked that his briefcase was fastened and he went to the door. He stepped down onto the platform, into the gloom of the place. A pair of Germans, suits, businessmen, jostled past him, and Penn thought they might have been cursing that they hadn't flown. Down the platform he saw two military policemen questioning a young man against the grimed brick wall, and one of them held back a Rottweiler dog on a short leash, and Penn guessed they would be checking for army deserters. He followed the Germans through the exit arch and down the corridors past the closed ticket windows. There were men, women, sleeping on the hard floor in corners, and Penn was reminded that somewhere out in the darkness, out beyond the city, there was war. He hurried. He knew where he would go because he had memorized the guidebook map. There was a mist on Zagreb. He stumbled on the cobblestones of the street. A bell rang fiercely and he looked up, startled, as a tram loomed towards him. He skipped forward and tripped on a tram line. He saw the neon sign of the hotel. Tired staff waited on him at the reception. He walked past the entrance to the bar, closed. He looked into the casino, deserted but for the croupiers. He went by the dining room, shut. A slow lift took him up. He gave the porter a pound sterling coin, and the porter grimaced as if it were dirt. He wanted German marks or American dollars, and Penn thought he could go stuff himself. There was a siren in the darkness. All around him, in the night, a hostility. A foreign place, this, not Penn's place. And just thirty-five miles down the road was the cease-fire line and the start of the war zone, and it was not Penn's war. He would have said that he was good at being alone, but in the hotel room he felt his loneliness. Not his place and not his war… He threw off his clothes. He washed. He unpacked his suitcase. There would have been other men in the hotel, far from home, nit-picking through their lives, behind their locked doors. He chose to scratch unhappily at his marriage, as if with grubby fingernails. Alone in the room he could summon the honesty to say it was not Jane's fault, he was to blame. Five years back, making small talk at a railway station waiting for a fog-delayed train, and going for a drink when the train was finally cancelled, and sharing a taxi. She was so different to the women, the girls, in Gower Street. She was pretty, fluffy, and her skirt was always halfway up her thighs and climbing, and he was the quiet one with the secret of his job to hide behind. She must have felt an excitement at being with a man who did secret work for the government, something that could not be talked about, and the excitement had lasted through to marriage, and then gone sour. Gone sour because she would come home from the estate agent's, and maybe he would be just going out for a night shift with the Transit van team of watchers, or maybe he had been up all night and half the day and gone to bed and expected her to tiptoe round the maisonette as if she was a dormouse, and maybe he would snarl because she'd woken him with the telly and the soaps, or maybe it had been a bad damn awful day that couldn't be talked through because that was the lore of the Service. Maybe it was him snapping at her friends because he couldn't answer their so bloody simple questions about his work. Maybe it was him refusing, point blank, to permit her to ask her father for more money for another house deposit, digging in his heels, bloody-minded. Maybe it was him, suggesting, almost shyly that the way forward was for him to take three years out and go to college and get a bloody degree. And maybe she was right to jeer back that no way was she going to live for three years carrying him, paying all the bills, and she hadn't passed an exam since school and Wayne who managed the estate agent's drove a fifth-hand
