Here Comes Charlie M

‘And it’s necessary for us to be personally involved, potentially dangerous as it is?’

He seemed to be seeking reassurances, thought Wilberforce.

‘There’s no one else we could trust with it.’

Onslow Smith nodded, slowly.

‘You’re right, of course,’ he accepted.

He smiled uncertainly.

‘I bet the President never had this in mind when he promised to correct mistakes with the utmost vigour,’ mused the American.

‘But that’s exactly what we’re doing,’ encouraged Wilberforce. ‘But neither he nor the Prime Minister will ever appreciate it.’

‘If they did know,’ said Smith, ‘they’d be damned scared. Tell me, George, are you frightened?’

‘Properly apprehensive,’ answered Wilberforce evasively. Somehow, he had decided, the British Premier would learn what had been done for him. When it was all safely concluded, of course.

The C.I.A. Director smiled across the table.

‘I’m scared,’ he admitted. ‘I’m damned scared.’

SEVEN

He wasn’t asleep, Edith knew. Any more than he had been the previous night at this time, just before dawn. Or the night before that. Any night, in fact, since the cemetery incident.

She breathed deeply, hoping Charlie wouldn’t realise she was awake and start talking. If they talked, they’d row. It was too late for rows. And anyway, Charlie’s response would be to fight back. Survival, he called it. She sighed, maintaining the pretence of sleep. The need to survive: Charlie’s panacea for anything unpalatable.

She became annoyed with herself, recognising the criticism. She had no right to think like that, she thought. No right at all. They had decided that Charlie was a disposable embarrassment, someone who could be dumped because he didn’t have the right accent or public school tie and was a remnant from another, discredited era. So he had had every justification for what he had done. Justification on the filthy terms within which they operated, anyway.

If only Charlie hadn’t stopped believing that. Poor Charlie. No matter what explanation or reasoning he advanced, he could never lose the feeling of remorse that had grown during the last year. Misplaced remorse, she thought. Because Charlie Muffin wasn’t a traitor. An opportunist, she accepted. Amoral, too. Worryingly so. But no traitor. He couldn’t dislodge the doubt, though. Perhaps he never would. And from that uncertainty, all the others had grown. And the drinking. Perhaps the drinking most of all. The churchyard mistake had certainly been through booze.

And all the others, before. At least that had stopped, after the latest scare. Odd how real fear made him abandon alcohol. Survival again, she supposed.

‘How long have you been awake?

She turned at his question, discarding the charade of sleep.

‘Quite a while. You?’

‘Quite a while.’

‘I still wish you wouldn’t go.’

‘I’ve got to.’

‘They couldn’t find us now.’

He didn’t reply and she demanded urgently, ‘Could they?’

‘If I don’t meet Rupert Willoughby, he might contact the department,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget how closely his father involved him … he wouldn’t have the hesitation of anyone else. And if he were to telephone them, he’d give them the lead they need.’

‘You said it was safe here,’ she accused him. ‘We moved back the same day, for heaven’s sake.’

‘I overlooked it,’ he admitted. Like so many other things, he thought.

‘You could be exposing yourself completely,’ she warned, frowning at the repetition of a previous argument.

‘I’ll be careful,’ he said. ‘Very careful.’

‘Will you bother about the money?’

‘I don’t know.’

So he did think he had been identified. If she hadn’t kept on about quitting England completely, they wouldn’t have gone back for the confounded money, she thought bitterly. The fact that she was a rich woman had always been a barrier between them.

Frightened that he might detect her tears in the growing half-light, Edith turned towards the window. Lake Zurich was already visible, dull and flat like a thrown-away silver dish.

‘What happens if he has contacted them?’ she asked, bringing the fear into the open. ‘It would be a trap.’

Again there was a pause. Then he said: ‘I won’t know. Not until I get there.’

They’d move on, she knew. Again. Away from the hide-out where she felt most safe, just five minutes’ walk from the Swiss Bank Corporation building in the Paradeplatz where her money was held in its numbered account, together with the false passports and forged documents, another identity to be donned, like new clothes, if that under which they had existed for the past two years were discovered because of that bloody graveyard idiocy.

Move on to where? At least not back to the small, greasy apartment in the Pigalle area of Paris, she thought gratefully; smelly and anonymous rooms among the no-questions-asked hotels in which the transient workers from North Africa and Turkey lived out their frightened existence, without the proper entry or work permits. So where? God knows.

‘I wish you hadn’t done it, Charlie.’

‘I’ve apologised, haven’t I? Don’t you think I regret it, every bit as much as you?’

She held back the response, recognising the defiance in his voice. She wouldn’t argue, she determined. There was no purpose in holding an inquest. She gnawed at the inside of her cheek, caught by the word. Inquests were for people who had died. Usually violently.

‘I’ll go by myself, of course,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ she agreed. Quickly, the feeling clogging her voice, Edith added: ‘Be careful.’

He laughed.

‘I’m a survivor, remember?’

‘I’m very frightened, Charlie. It’s different now. You’re completely on your own. And everything seems to be going wrong.’

‘That’s how I’ve always been, on my own.’

She moved her head, a rustling gesture of rejection against the pillow.

‘I love you, Charlie,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear to live without you.’

‘You won’t have to.’

‘I wish I could believe that.’

She waited for the reassurance to be repeated, but Charlie said nothing. The tears she had so far managed to hold back began feeling their way across her face and she turned farther towards the window, away from him.

‘You haven’t said you loved me for a long time,’ he remarked and she started crying even more.

In Moscow, the British ambassador, Sir Robert Black, accepted the sheaf of papers from the Soviet Minister of Culture and affixed his signature. The signing of the outline agreement completed, both men rose from the table. Immediately the waiters approached with the trays of drinks for the regulation toasts. Despite the regeneration of the British economy, it was sherry, not champagne. The Russian, Boris Navetsky, hesitated, looking disdainfully at the amber liquid. Bloody mean, he thought.

‘My country is eagerly looking forward to the exhibition,’ said the ambassador.

Navetsky nodded.

‘A pity, perhaps,’ ventured the Briton, ‘that it was not possible for the actual Romanov jewellery to be