The Mission Song (6 page)
‘Salvo,’ she said. ‘When your mother and father made you, they must have loved each other very much.’
‘All right if I open a window?’ I called out to Fred my white driver.
Snug in the rear cushions of the Mondeo as it wove expertly through the dense Friday-evening traffic, I was enjoying feelings of liberation bordering on euphoria.
‘Please yourself, mate,’ he responded lustily, but my needle-sharp ear immediately spotted beneath the colloquialisms the trace of an English public school accent. Fred was my age and drove with aplomb. I liked him already. Lowering the window, I let the warm night air wash over me.
‘Any idea where we’re heading, Fred?’
‘Bottom end of South Audley Street.’ And assuming my concern to be directed at the speed of his driving, which it wasn’t: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you there in one piece.’
I wasn’t worrying but I was taken aback. My encounters with Mr Anderson had until now occurred at his Ministry’s headquarters in Whitehall in a richly carpeted dungeon set at the end of a labyrinth of green-painted brick corridors guarded by sallow janitors with walkie-talkies. On its walls hung tinted photographs of Mr Anderson’s wife, daughters and spaniels, interspersed with gold-framed testimonials awarded to his other love, the Sevenoaks Choral Society. And it was in this dungeon, after I had been summoned by confidential letter to a series of ‘test-interviews’ conducted above ground by an enigmatic body calling itself the Linguistic Audit Committee, that he had unveiled to me the full majesty of the Official Secrets Act plus its many threatened punishments, first by reading me a homily which he must have delivered a hundred times already, then by presenting me with a printed form with my name and date and place of birth electronically pre-entered, and addressing me over his reading spectacles while I signed it.
‘Now you won’t go getting big ideas, will you, son?’ he said, in a tone which irresistibly recalled Brother Michael’s. ‘You’re a bright lad, the sharpest pencil in the box if all they tell me is true. You’ve a cluster of funny languages up your sleeve and a Grade A professional reputation that no fine Service such as this one can ignore.’
I wasn’t sure which fine Service he was alluding to but he had already informed me that he was a Senior Servant of the Crown, and this should be sufficient for me. Neither did I ask him which of my languages he considered funny, although I might have done if I hadn’t been on such a cloud, because sometimes my respect for people flies out of the window of its own accord.
‘That doesn’t make you the centre of the universe, however, so kindly don’t think it does,’ he went on, still on the subject of my qualifications. ‘You’ll be a PTA, that’s a Part-time Assistant, and you can’t get lower than that. You’re secret but you’re fringe, and fringe is what you’ll remain unless you’re offered tenure. I’m not saying some of the best shows aren’t fringe, because they are. Better plays and better actors in my wife Mary’s view. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Salvo?’
‘I think so, sir.’
I use ‘sir’ too much and am aware of it, just as I said
Mzee
too much when I was a child. But in the Sanctuary everyone who wasn’t a Brother was a sir.
‘Then repeat to me what I’ve just told you, please, so that we can both be clear in our minds,’ he suggested, availing himself of a technique later employed by Hannah to break the bad news to Jean-Pierre.
‘That I shouldn’t be carried away. I shouldn’t get too—’ I was going to say ‘excited’ but checked myself in time. ‘Enthusiastic.’
‘I’m telling you to douse that eager gleam in your eye, son. Henceforth and for evermore. Because if I see it again, I’ll worry about you. We’re believers but we’re not zealots. Your unusual talents aside, what we’re offering you here is normal meat-and-potatoes drudgery, the same as you’d be doing for any client on any wet afternoon, except you’re doing it with Queen and country in mind, which is what you and I both like.’
I assured him—while careful not to appear over-enthusiastic—that love of country ranked high on my list of personal favourites.
‘There’s a couple of other differences, I’ll grant you,’ he went on, contradicting an objection I hadn’t made. ‘One difference is, we’ll not be giving you much in the way of a background briefing before you put on your headphones. You’ll not know who’s talking to who or where, or what they’re talking about, or how we came by it. Or not if we can help it, you won’t, because that wouldn’t be secure. And if you
do
come up with any little suppositions of your own, I advise you to keep them to yourself. That’s what you’ve signed up to, Salvo, that’s what secret means, and if we catch you breaking the rules you’ll be out on your ear with a black mark. And our black marks don’t wash out like other people’s,’ he added with satisfaction, although I couldn’t help wondering whether he was making an unconscious allusion to my skin. ‘Do you want to tear up that piece of paper and forget you came here?—because this is your last chance.’
Upon which I swallowed and said, ‘No, sir. I’m
in
—really,’ with as much cool as I could muster, and he shook my hand and welcomed me to what he was pleased to call the honourable company of sound-thieves.
I will say at once that Mr Anderson’s efforts to dampen my ardour were futile. Crouching in a soundproof cubicle, one of forty, in a secure underground bunker known as the Chat Room—with suave Barney our floor manager in his coloured waistcoats watching over us from his cantilevered balcony—and he calls it meat and potatoes? Girls in jeans to fetch and carry our tapes and transcriptions and, contrary to the known rules of political correctness in the workplace, our cups of tea as well, while one minute I’m listening to a top-ranking Acholi-speaking member of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda plotting by satellite phone to set up a base across the border in East Congo, and the next sweating it out in Dar-es-Salaam docks with the clatter of shipping in the background, and the cries of hawkers, and the in-out hum of a wonky table-fan that’s keeping away the flies, as a murderous bunch of Islamist sympathisers conspire to import an arsenal of anti-aircraft missiles in the guise of heavy machinery? And the very same afternoon being sole ear-witness to a trio of corrupt Rwandan army officers haggling with a Chinese delegation over the sale of plundered Congolese minerals? Or bumping through the honking traffic of Nairobi in the chauffeured limousine of a Kenyan political mogul as he wangles himself a massive bribe for allowing an Indian building contractor to cover five hundred miles of new road with a single paper-thin surface of tarmac guaranteed to last at least two rainy seasons? This isn’t meat and potatoes, Mr Anderson. This is the Holy of Holies!
But I didn’t let the gleam show, not even to Penelope. If only you knew! I would think to myself, whenever she slapped me down in front of her bosom friend Paula, or went off for one of her weekend conferences that nobody else seemed to attend except her, and came back very quiet and content from all the conferring she’d done. If only you knew that your stuck-in-the-rut, toy-boy husband was on the payroll of British Intelligence!
But I never weakened. Forget instant gratification. I was doing my duty for England.
Our Ford Mondeo had skirted Berkeley Square and entered Curzon Street. Passing the cinema, Fred pulled up at the kerbside and leaned over the back of his seat to address me, spy to spy.
‘It’s down there, mate,’ he murmured, tipping his head but not pointing in case we were observed. ‘Number 22B, green door hundred yards up on the left. The top bell is marked
HARLOW
like the town. When they answer, say you’ve got a parcel for Harry.’
‘Will Barney be there?’ I asked, momentarily nervous at the prospect of confronting Mr Anderson alone in an unfamiliar environment.
‘Barney? Who’s Barney?’
Chiding myself for asking unnecessary questions, I stepped onto the pavement. A wave of heat rose at me. A swerving cyclist nearly knocked me over and cursed. Fred drove off, leaving me feeling I could have done with more of him. I crossed the road and entered South Audley Street. Number 22B was one of a row of red-brick mansions with steep steps leading up to their front doors. There were six bell buttons, dimly lit. The top one read
HARLOW
like the town in faded ink. About to press it I was assailed by two conflicting images. One was of Penelope’s head six inches from Thorne the Horn’s fly as she gazed dotingly up at him with her breasts peeping out of her new designer suit. The other was of Hannah’s wide eyes not daring to blink, and her open mouth silently singing her joy as she squeezed the last drops of life out of me on the sofa-bed in her nun’s cell.
‘Parcel for Harry,’ I intoned, and watched the magic door open.
I haven’t described Mr Anderson’s appearance beyond remarking on his similarity to Brother Michael. Like Michael he is a man complete, at once tall and bearish, the features as permanent as lava stone, every movement an event. Like Michael, he is a father to his men. He is somewhere in his late fifties, you assume, yet you have no sense that he was yesterday a dashing lad, or tomorrow will be on the shelf. He is rectitude personified, he is constabular, he is the oak of England. Just crossing a room he takes the moral justification for his actions with him. You can wait an eternity for his smile, but when it comes you’re closer to God.
Yet for me the real man, as ever, is the voice: the singer’s considered tempo, the timed pauses always for effect, the fireside north country cadences. In Sevenoaks, he has told me more than once, he is the leading baritone. In his younger years he sang tenor-contralto and had been tempted to go professional, but loved his Service more. And it was Mr Anderson’s voice again that dominated all other impressions at the instant of my venturing through the doorway. I was aware, dimly, of other sounds and other bodies on the premises. I saw an open sash window and billowing net curtains, so evidently there was a breeze blowing up here which hadn’t been the case at street level. But the focus of my interest was the upright silhouette of Mr Anderson against the window and his homey northern tones as he went on speaking on his cellphone.
‘He’ll be here any minute, Jack, thank you,’ I heard him say, apparently oblivious that I was standing six feet from him. ‘We’ll turn him round just as fast as we can, Jack—no faster.’ Pause. ‘You are correct.
Sinclair
.’ But Sinclair wasn’t the name of whoever he was talking to. He was confirming that Sinclair was the man. ‘He’s fully aware of that, Jack. And I shall make him even more aware when he arrives’—by now looking straight at me yet still not admitting to my presence—‘no, he’s not a new boy. He’s done a bit of this and that for us, and you can take it from me he’s the man for the job. All the languages you can eat, capable in the extreme, loyal to a fault.’
Could it really be
me
he was referring to—
capable in the extreme—loyal to a fault
? But I contained myself. I doused the eager gleam in my eye.
‘And his insurance goes on your tab, not ours, you’ll remember, Jack. All risks, please, plus sickness in the field and repatriation by fastest available. Nothing ends on this doorstep. We’re here if you need us, Jack. Just remember, every time you call up, you slow the process. I do believe he’s coming up the stairs now. Aren’t you, Salvo?’ He had rung off. ‘Now pay close attention to me, son. We’ve a lot of growing up to do in a short space of time. Young Bridget here will provide you with your change of clothing. That’s a fine dinner jacket you’re wearing, it’s a pity you’ve to take it off. They’ve come a long way, have dinner jackets, since my day. It was black or black at the Annual Songsters’ Ball. Dark red like yours was bandleaders. So you told your wife all about it, did you? A top-secret assignment of national importance which has blown up overnight, I expect?’