Charlie M

He fastened the dress: she didn’t bulge it anywhere, he saw.

He gave every indication of loving her, she thought, patting her hair into place before the dressing table.

‘Promise me something, Charlie,’ she said, crossing the room to him and placing her hands upon his shoulders. She was very serious, he realised. Her eyes were quite wet.

‘What?’

‘You won’t leave me because of this office business, will you?’

‘You know I won’t,’ chided Charlie. ‘I’ve told you not to worry.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Edith, who ten years earlier had occupied the position that Janet now held as secretary to Sir Archibald Willoughby. Charlie had told her in detail of his treatment since Cuthbertson’s arrival.

He stood up, coming level with her.

‘I love you, Edith,’ he insisted, putting his hands round her waist. ‘I promise you that everything will work out. They’re bloody fools.’

‘They can’t be as stupid as you think.’

‘You wouldn’t believe it!’

He kissed her, very softly, and she clung to him, head deep into his shoulder.

‘I’m so worried about you, Charlie.’

He stroked her neck, lips against her hair.

‘I’m a survivor, Edith. Don’t forget that. I always have been.’

She shook her head, dismissing the assurance.

‘Not this time, Charlie.’

‘We’ll see, darling. We’ll see.’

Edith had allotted ?100 a day for their holiday and Charlie drove eastwards from Paris the following morning ? 10 under budget, which pleased her.

Financial security meant everything to Edith, he knew, as it always had to her family. She couldn’t temper her attitude, despite what had happened to her father. He had been a bank manager in Reigate, a respected Freemason, church deacon and treasurer to the local Rotary Club. And he’d embezzled ?600 to cover stupidly incurred gambling debts he was too proud to ask his rich wife to settle, shocking her and Edith by the knowledge that he feared their contempt and attitude to money more than the ignominy of a jail sentence.

Edith had never forgotten the barrier that money had created between her parents and tried desperately to avoid it arising between her and Charlie. She was terrified that she was failing.

Charlie had planned the holiday with care, determined they should enjoy themselves. In Reims, they stayed at La Paix but ate at Le Florence, on the Boulevard Foch, dining off pate de canard truffe and langoustine au ratafia, drinking the house-recommended Maureuil. The next day, Charlie drove hard, wanting to reach the German border by the evening. They stayed in Sarreguemines, where Charlie remembered the Rotisserie Ducs de Lorraine on Rue Chamborand from an operation eight years earlier.

‘The duck is as good as it ever was,’ he declared at the table that night.

‘I wish we could stay in France,’ said Edith, almost to herself.

‘I thought you were looking forward to seeing Austria and Germany in the autumn.’

‘I was,’ she agreed. ‘But not any more. Not now.’

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘You do love me, don’t you, Charlie?’

‘Yes, Edith,’ he answered, holding her eyes.

‘I know I’m inclined to keep a pretty close check on money,’ she said, looking down into her wine glass and embarking upon a familiar path. ‘But I can’t help it: it’s bred into me. But I regard it as our money, Charlie. Not just mine. Spend all of it, if you want to.’

He waited.

‘I mean, it wouldn’t matter if you were downgraded … we wouldn’t starve or anything. And it would be safer, after all.’

‘I’ll have Cuthbertson begging me for help,’ predicted Charlie. ‘And it’ll be my money that supports us.’

Why, thought the woman sadly, did he have to have that bloody grammar-school pride. Just like her damned father.

(5)

The priority coded warning had come from the C.I.A. Resident at the Moscow embassy in advance of the diplomatic bag containing the full report, so the Director was already alerted and waiting when the messenger arrived at Langley.

He spent an hour examining the messages, then analysing the station head’s assessment, reading it alongside the report that had come in two days earlier from the agency monitoring station in Vienna, which had fed his excitement the moment the initial Moscow report had been received.

Finally he stood up, gazing out over the Virginia countryside, where the leaves were already rusting into autumn.

Garson Ruttgers was a diminutive, frail man who deliberately cultivated a clerk-like appearance with half-lens spectacles that always appeared about to fall off bis nose and slightly shabby, Brooks Brothers suits, invariably worn with waistcoats, and blue, button-down-collared shirts. He smoked forty cigarettes a day against doctor’s advice, convincing himself he compensated by an almost total abstinence from liquor, and was consumed by the ambition to become to the C.I.A. what Hoover had been to the F.B.I.

In a period that included the last year of the Second World War – when he had been a major in the O.S.S. – and then in the Korean conflict, he had killed (by hand because weapons would have made a noise and attracted attention) ten men who had threatened his exposure as an agent. Never, even in moments of recollection, had he reproached himself about it, even though two of his victims had been Americans whose loyalty he only suspected but could not disprove, and so had disposed of just in case.

That more people had not been killed with the same detachment was only because he had spent nearly eighteen years in Washington and the need had not arisen. He was, Garson Ruttgers convinced himself, a complete professional. A psychiatrist, knowing of his tendency to kill without compunction, would have diagnosed him a psychopath.

Ruttgers shivered, suddenly frightened by the information that lay before him. There could only be one conclusion, he judged. And the British, whom he regarded as amateurs, were bound to screw it up.

He dispatched a ‘most urgent’ classified instruction to the embassy, ordering the Resident back to Washington on the next civilian aircraft, guaranteeing the man’s presence in the capital at dawn the following day by arranging for a military plane to be specially available at the first airfield in the west.

Building a margin for any flight problems, he arranged the meeting with the Secretary of State, Willard Keys, at noon, cautioning in their telephone conversation that Keys might want to request an immediate meeting with the President.

From the computer in the Langley headquarters Ruttgers had within two hours a complete print-out on the man named in the report lying on his desk. It was very brief, as Ruttgers had anticipated: a man like General Valery Kalenin used anonymity like a cloak, he knew. Annexed to the print-out was the brief confirmation: ‘no photograph known to exist’.

It had to be right, assessed Ruttgers, summarily cancelling all appointments and meetings during the next week.

There had never been an opportunity like this, he reflected. If they could get involved, the Agency would wipe away all the post-Watergate criticism. Internal telephone tapping, the Bay of Pigs and the Rockefeller Commission would be laughed at. And Garson Ruttgers would achieve the awe that had surrounded Hoover.

That night Ruttgers broke his habit and had two brandies after dinner; without them, he decided, he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He looked upon the second drink as a celebration in advance.