conspiring to deprive him of his European birthright. Solitary as he might be in other ways, on Europe he showed no compunction in declaring that he spoke for his generation or in pointing the finger at mine.
There was an occasion when we were seated, temporarily exhausted, in the Athleticus changing room after our usual hard-fought game. Diving into his locker to retrieve his smartphone, he insisted on showing me video footage of Trump’s inner cabinet gathered round a table as each in turn protests his undying loyalty to his dear leader.
‘They’re taking the bloody Führer’s oath,’ he confides to me in a breathless voice. ‘It’s a replay, Nat. Watch.’
I dutifully watched. And yes, it was emetic.
I never asked him, but I think it was Germany’s atonement for its past sins that spoke most forcefully to his secularized Methodist soul: the thought that a great nation that had run amok should repent its crimes to the world. What other country had ever done such a thing? he demanded to know. Had Turkey apologized for slaughtering the Armenians and Kurds? Had America apologized to the Vietnamese people? Had the Brits atoned for colonizing three-quarters of the globe and enslaving numberless of its citizens?
The up-and-down handshake? He never told me, but my guess was he’d picked it up while he was lodged in Berlin with the girl’s Prussian family, and out of some weird sense of loyalty had stuck to the habit.
7
It’s ten o’clock on a sun-drenched Friday morning in spring and the birds all know it, as Florence and I, having met for an early coffee, I from Battersea and she, I assume, from Pimlico, step out along the Thames Embankment towards Head Office. In the past, returning from distant outstations for Office parleys or home leave, I have occasionally felt daunted by our over-conspicuous, many-towered Camelot with its whispering lifts, hospital-bright corridors and tourists gawping from the bridge.
Not today.
In half an hour’s time Florence will be presenting London General’s first full-blown special operation in three years and it will bear the Haven’s imprimatur. She sports a smart trouser suit and just a hint of make-up. If she has stage fright she betrays no sign of it. For the last three weeks we have been night owls together, sitting head to head into the small hours at the rickety trestle table in the Haven’s windowless Operations room, poring over street maps, surveillance reports, phone and email intercepts, and the latest word from Orson’s disenchanted mistress, Astra.
It was Astra who first reported that Orson was about to use his Park Lane duplex to impress a duo of Cyprus-based, Moscow-friendly money-launderers of Slovakian descent with a private bank in Nicosia and an affiliate in the City of London. Both are fully identified members of a Kremlin-approved crime syndicate operating out of Odessa. On receiving word of their arrival, Orson ordered an electronic sweep of his duplex. No devices were discovered. It was now up to Percy Price’s intrusion team to remedy that omission.
With the consent of its absent director, Bryn Jordan, Russia department has also taken a couple of its own steps into the water. One of its officers has posed as Florence’s Daily Mail news editor and clinched the deal with the night porter. The gas company supplying energy to Orson’s duplex has been prevailed on to report a leak. A three-man team of burglars under the pompous Eric has reconnoitred the duplex in the guise of the company’s engineers and photographed the locks on the reinforced steel door leading to the computer room. The British lockmakers have provided duplicate keys and guidance on the unscrambling of the combination.
Now all that remains is for Rosebud to be officially green-lit by a plenum of Head Office’s big beasts, known collectively as Operations Directorate.
*
If the relationship between Florence and myself is emphatically non-tactile, with each of us going to elaborate lengths not to brush hands or otherwise make physical contact, it is nonetheless close. It turns out that our lives overlap in more ways than we might have expected, given the difference in our ages. Her father the ex-diplomat had done two successive stints at the British Embassy in Moscow, taking with him his wife and three children of whom Florence was the eldest. Prue and I had missed them by six months.
While attending International School in Moscow she had embraced the Russian muse with all the zeal of youth. She even had a Madame Galina in her life: the widow of an ‘approved’ poet