Charlie’s Apprentice

securing an escape route. Never trust anybody. Not me, not this department, not even Marcia. Just trust yourself

‘That sounds bloody cynical! How can I not trust people I work for here? Marcia! We’ll probably get married, for Christ’s sake!’

‘You find your own definition,’ said Charlie. ‘The other rule is don’t ever follow rule or regulation. Not what you were told before we met, or what you’ll find in all the manuals, and not even what you think you’ve learned from me. And I’m not talking insubordination. It’s mixed up with not trusting. Adapt any instruction: go very slightly off course, so that you can’t be anticipated.’

The two men sat without speaking for several moments, neither sure how to end the encounter. Eventually Gower said: ‘I have learned.’ He hesitated, then blurted: ‘I’ve told Marcia about you. She wants you to come to dinner. I do, too. I reckon I owe you dinner, for these last few weeks.’

How pleasant that would be, thought Charlie: a civilized dinner with civilized people. ‘No,’ he said, bluntly.

‘Oh.’ Gower looked nonplussed.

‘And it is personal,’ said Charlie. ‘I have refused to let myself think of you in any terms of liking or disliking. Of forming any personal opinion, apart from a strictly professional one. I don’t want to become your friend. To meet and like Marcia …’

Gower’s face creased in confusion. ‘… What the hell …?’

‘… This way there will only ever be the minimal professional regret if I hear, later, that something’s gone wrong,’ finished Charlie, even more bluntly.

‘Jesus!’ protested Gower.

‘Didn’t I also tell you once this wasn’t a game?’

‘Not as clearly as you just have.’

‘So it’s a third thing always to remember.’

There was a further silence. Gower stood awkwardly, not appearing to know what to do. Then he thrust his hand forward. Charlie scuffed to his stockinged feet to respond.

‘I’m still nervous,’ said Gower.

‘Don’t ever be otherwise,’ advised Charlie.

‘We could have made it to fit in any time with his schedule,’ Marcia pointed out.

‘He said he was sorry,’ repeated Gower. ‘His diary was tight as hell, for weeks. And there was some course or other he was committed to attend.’

‘I wanted to compare,’ she disclosed.

‘Compare?’

‘How close you’d come to making yourself like him: all those outward changes.’

Gower moved to make the denial but didn’t. ‘I don’t think I’m even close,’ he admitted.

*

Liu Yin was acknowledged in the West to be one of the strongest critics of the Beijing government, one of the protesters in Tiananmen Square who survived the massacre and who ever since had lived underground, refusing to leave China. Her escape into Hong Kong therefore received widespread publicity. She had had to flee, she insisted, at an arrival press conference. The Public Security Bureau was moving throughout the country, making widespread but totally unpublicized arrests of people they regarded as dissidents. According to her understanding, at least fifty were already under detention. She believed there might even be show trials, sometime in the future.

Snow heard scraps of the conference on the BBC World Service, recognizing the name and the person. She had been a friend of Zhang Su Lin. It had never been admitted openly, but Snow had guessed the couple lived together during the time Zhang had been his student.

Fourteen

Natalia had never drawn Charlie Muffin’s complete target file from the KGB archives.

Immediately after her return from London, the Directorate had been undergoing external transfer changes because of the political upheaval. Internally it was in turmoil from what Alexei Berenkov had attempted for absurdly private reasons. At that time it seemed more likely that she would be purged, along with Berenkov, not promoted as she eventually was. So to have provably called for the records of the man who had been at the centre of the entire fiasco would have been personally and dangerously impolitic.

After her complete exoneration and quick all-powerful promotion she could, of course, have demanded the file whenever she’d wanted, without any question or challenge. But by then her feelings about Charlie had gone through several phases, becoming confused and intermingled. Natalia Nikandrova Fedova, someone always able without any prevarication instantly to make a professional decision, in this, the most private part of her private life, found herself helplessly lost, unable to decide how she felt.

In the initial weeks and months of her promotion Natalia had hated Charlie. Or believed she had. There had been times when she’d physically wept, with aching frustration, at what she’d lost forever by his not keeping the meeting at which she had finally been prepared to turn her back forever upon the Soviet Union and the KGB – and Eduard – just to be with him. Mentally she had raged against him, thinking of him as a coward, not allowing herself to find any excuse for him.

Realizing she was pregnant could have hardened the contempt, but ironically it lessened the feeling: not, in the beginning, into complete forgiveness but tempered at least with some understanding of why Charlie had held back – professional judgement always having to be more important than personal emotions – and certainly no longer thinking him a coward.

In a country where termination is quite casually used as a method of birth-control, it would have been extremely easy for Natalia to have had an abortion. She had scarcely considered it. It was just as easy, at the echelon she now occupied, to have and to keep a baby: not that there would have been any stigma attached – and with so few friends, even acquaintances, that hardly mattered anyway – but she had still been officially a married woman within a satisfactory time-frame of the birth, with no cause to justify or explain.

It was during her confinement, with the opportunity to think of little else, that she confronted the impossibility of hating Charlie: of ever hating him. Alone in the privileged private ward of the privileged security agency hospital, the perfectly born, beautifully formed Alexandra beside her, Natalia finally tried to come to terms with how she truly felt. Huge sadness, the most obvious. Bitter disappointment that would always be there. But most of all, above all, the love: a love that overwhelmed everything, consumed everything.

Which gave her the strongest reason possible for not going to the archives. Having acknowledged her true feelings, Natalia equally recognized that she had to find some way of compartmenting the emotion, locking it securely inside her, like a miser hoarding the most precious treasure. Because unlike a gloating miser, she could never retrieve that lost treasure: never again know the pleasure or the beauty. It was difficult, but Natalia grew to think she could make the sadness and the disappointment bearable, as the weeks went into months and Alexandra became the focus of her entire existence: someone upon whom Natalia could lavish the love she could give to no one else, someone who would always be her unbreakable link to the man she would never see again.

In the final analysis there was no useful, sensible reason to recover Charlie’s private records, to disturb from the securely locked emotional compartments all the heartache Natalia hoped she now had under unshakeable control.

Or was there?

The reflective question – after the other reflective question when she’d failed to discover the whereabouts of Eduard – did not come simply or without contradiction, because nothing came simply or without contradiction when she thought about Charlie Muffin. But Natalia knew she did now have her feelings locked, bolted and barred forever.

It wouldn’t be trying to find him, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. That would have been preposterous. It would be finding out as much as she could about the father of her child. One day, inevitably, Alexandra would want to know. Natalia was not sure, at this stage, how or whether she would be able to tell their daughter the truth. Almost certainly not. But at least she owed it to the child to be able