A Colder War (33 page)

“You love this woman, don’t you? You love Rachel Wallinger?”

“Yes, I do.”

He took a sip of the wine, a pull on the cigarette. To Kell’s surprise, Elsa plucked the cigarette from his hand and took two quick drags of her own, tipping her head back and breathing smoke at the ceiling. Her jaw was tensed, her eyes steady, as though she was recalling every love affair, every heartbreak, every moment of passion she had ever known.

“She is—what?—twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”

“Thirty-one,” Kell replied.

She passed the cigarette back to him. For an absurd and illogical moment, Kell thought that Elsa was going to ask why Kell had not fallen in love with
her
. Instead, she said something that took him completely by surprise. “I have met her.”

Kell stared at Elsa.

“In Istanbul. With Miss Levene. With Amelia. I understand why you feel this way. She is very special. Not just beautiful. A rare person. More than
simpatica
.”

“Yes,” Kell replied, reluctant to pay Rachel any compliment or to acknowledge that he had proved incapable of securing her love. “She is very special.”

“But you feel a fool for losing yourself to her.”

Kell smiled and remembered how much he valued Elsa’s friendship, her habit always of speaking her mind.

“Yes,” he said. “You could say that.”

“Don’t feel that way.” Her reply was emphatic. “Why else are we here? To feel love is to be alive. To let your heart go out to a person you love is the most beautiful thing in the world.” Elsa must have seen something flicker across Kell’s face, because she stopped short and said: “You think I am just an Italian romantic. The stereotype.”

“No I don’t,” he told her, and touched her arm, offering her the cigarette. Elsa shook her head.

“No. No, thank you. Just to taste the tobacco was good.” She stood up and walked across to the far side of the room, staring at another row of books on Kell’s crowded shelves. Seamus Heaney. Pablo Neruda. T. S. Eliot. Auden.

“You keep all of your poetry together.”

It was an observation rather than the start of a new line in their conversation. Kell stubbed out the cigarette. He remembered how close he had come to making a pass at Elsa on a similarly intimate night in Wiltshire when they had discussed Yassin Gharani. She had cooked for him. She had listened to him. He wondered again why she had come to the flat. It would not have surprised him to learn that she was under instruction from Amelia.

“Tom?”

“Yes?”

“This has been a very bad night for you.”

“Yes.”

“I am so sorry. I cannot begin to imagine what you must be feeling. But you
are
feeling. And this is good.”

He could see that she was trying to say something beyond words meant as mere comfort. Something deeper, something about himself. She took down one of the books, as though to give herself time in which to form the correct words. It was
Jane Eyre
. Kell looked at her and, for a reason he could not properly understand, tried to will himself to find Elsa attractive. But he could not do so.

“When I first met you, I felt that you were closed.”

“Closed,” he repeated.

Smiling, Elsa put the book down on a table in the center of the living room and crouched in front of him, touching both of Kell’s knees for balance. He did not know if she was going to try to comfort him with a kiss, or if she was simply being kind and considerate toward him.

“When we began to talk in Nice, and later in Tunisia and in England, I felt there was a great sadness at the center of you. More than frustration. More than loneliness. It was as if your heart had been dead for years.”

Kell looked away toward the window. He remembered Rachel saying an almost identical thing to him in Istanbul, as they walked hand in hand to the restaurant in Ortakoy. “You’ve been lying dormant.” It had shocked him that she had intuited such a thing, but he had felt the essential truth of the remark as something close to a revelation. Rachel had brought him back to life. He knew that he had been unhappy with Claire in the same way that he knew his own capacity for vengeance.

Now Elsa sat down beside him on the sofa. She put her right arm across Kell’s back, like somebody comforting the bereaved.

“This time,” she said, “when I see you in Istanbul, and here in London, you are a different person. This girl has lifted you up out of your sadness. It must feel like a weight has been around you and lifted off by what you feel for her.”

“It did sometimes feel like that. Yes. It no longer feels like that.”

Elsa hesitated, as if her natural optimism had caught her out and caused her to be gauche. “Of course,” she replied softly. “This is a hell for you. We lose lovers. We are betrayed by them. We must imagine them moving on into new hearts. But to see this with our own eyes, to be confronted by this directly, it must be unbelievable for you. Unbearable.”

“I’ll be fine,” Kell replied and suddenly wanted her to leave.

“Of course you do not know if what you saw was the truth.”

It was not in Elsa’s nature to offer glib consolations with no basis in fact. Kell did not understand precisely why she had said such a thing.

“We all saw the same thing. You perhaps saw more than I did.”

Elsa suddenly stood up, seized the packet of cigarettes from the table beside him. She began to move around the room, smoking, as though pacing out a private thought, a theory, coming to terms with its consequences.

“When I met Rachel, she seemed to be friendly with Amelia.”

Kell looked up. “She’s Paul’s daughter. Amelia was very close to Paul. She probably cares about her.”

“I am sure that she does. That she cares about her. Forget it. Forget what I said.”

“You haven’t said anything,” Kell replied, aware that Elsa seemed slightly agitated.

“That’s true!” she said, forcing a laugh. She was flustered, out of her depth. Elsa leaned across to the ashtray beside Kell and stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. “I do not know what I am saying.”

“I don’t know either. Did Amelia ask you to do anything for her that was related to Rachel?”

“No.”

Kell realized that Elsa was lying to him. It was as though she knew something that might put him out of his misery, but was prevented from saying it by official secrecy—by a promise, a commitment to Amelia.

“You have to tell me, Elsa.”

“Tell you what?”

Kell looked at her. Whatever glimpse of whatever truth she had uttered had vanished. In a swift moment Elsa became no more and no less than his friend again, consoling him in a moment of loss.

“You should sleep and come back in the morning,” she said. “Will you do that? I think you need to rest tonight.”

“Yes, nurse,” he replied, adding: “Would you like to stay here?” Kell saw a flicker of disgust flash across Elsa’s face. “There’s a spare room,” he said quickly. “I meant in the spare room.”

“No, I will leave you,” she replied calmly. “Are you sure you will be okay?”

“I’ll be fine. I’m a big boy. I’ve known worse.”

“Then you must have known bad things,” she said.

48

Kell slept until ten the next morning. He took a shower, walked to a branch of Carluccio’s on Westbourne Grove for eggs and bacon and orange juice, then showed his face at Redan Place shortly before midday.

“Any news?”

Harold was reading the
Daily Mail
on the sofa. As Kell walked in, he looked up and produced an uncharacteristically forced smile. Danny Aldrich was in the surveillance room, looking at the feeds from the Rembrandt. There was no sign of Elsa.

“ABACUS still asleep,” Aldrich announced.

Kell walked into the cubicle and forced himself to look at the monitors. En route to the office he had stopped in a pub and sunk a double shot of Smirnoff to ease his nerves. He was going to see Rachel wrapped in Kleckner’s arms. He had prepared himself for this.

“Still asleep,” Kell repeated and stood over Aldrich’s shoulder.

To his surprise he saw that Kleckner was alone in bed. There was nobody else in the room, no movement on the bathroom monitor. No sign of Rachel anywhere.

“Where’s the girl?” he said.

“Left ages ago.”

Walk of shame
. Hours of bliss and fucking and then she caught an early Tube home to Bethnal Green.

“What time did she go?”

“Didn’t stay long actually.”

Aldrich’s voice was level, matter-of-fact. If he knew of the link between Kell and Rachel he was doing a masterful job of disguising it.

“Why? They had a fight?”

Aldrich spun around in his seat and looked up at Kell. Kell moved away, leaning against the wall, putting distance between them.

“I got no idea what happened. I went to bed. Harold was keeping an eye on things. How you feeling by the way? Elsa said you ate a bad kebab or something?”

“I’m fine, completely fine.” Kell smiled at Elsa’s cover story and looked again at the monitor. The American was waking up. He had pushed the sheets down and twisted onto his side. He was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of underpants. It was a strange consolation to Kell that Kleckner was not naked. “Where’s the team?” he asked.

“Usual positions. Carol and Nina back on today. Jez as well. Theo’s got an old woman”—Aldrich looked down at a printed list of names—“Penny, who’s going to role-play his wife. Geriatric couple. Always makes good cover.”

“Yes,” Kell muttered, hardly listening. He was watching Kleckner. Something was happening in the room. “Here we go.”

Aldrich turned and looked at the monitor. Kleckner had reached for the hotel landline beside his bed. In a swift, practiced movement, Aldrich flicked three switches, grabbed two pairs of headphones, passed one of them to Kell, and placed the other over his head.

“We can listen. Probably housekeeping wondering when they can get into his room.”

But it was not housekeeping. As Kell put on the headphones and crouched in front of the monitor, he heard Rachel’s voice in his head, the agony of her tenderness, the same lilt and flow and mischief that he had foolishly thought she reserved solely for him.

“Morning, sleepyhead.”

“Rachel?”

“Yes of course Rachel! Who were you expecting?” Laughter in her voice. “Did you only just wake up? You said you’d call me.”

“What time is it?”

“Midday. Half past. I’m so hungover.”

“Me too. What happened?”

Kell could see Kleckner sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes, like a bad actor trying to convey a sense of disorientation.

“Well, you sort of fell asleep. At about two. Two thirty, maybe? I had to get home and change and come to work so I thought I’d leave you to it.”

“I don’t remember that. I don’t remember much actually.”

“Oh, thanks!” More laughter, more mischief. Kell willed himself to keep listening, to keep watching Kleckner. “You remember
nothing
?” Rachel said.

The American switched hands on the phone and reached for a bottle of water. “No, sure,” he said, scrambling for tact. “Like I remember coming home. I remember how great it was being with you. I remember that stuff. I just feel like you can’t have had such a great time.”

Rachel paused, perhaps for effect, perhaps to tread carefully around what sounded like Kleckner’s vanity and self-doubt. “Maybe that’s because of the three vodka martinis, the two bottles of red, and the mojitos we drank at Boujis. We were shitfaced!”

“I pass out? That never happens to me.”

“You passed out. We both passed out.”

“Jesus.”

There was a lengthy silence. Kell caught Aldrich’s eye but there was nothing to read in his expression. He turned back to the monitor. Kleckner reached into his pants and scratched his balls.

“So what are you doing today?” Rachel asked. “What are you doing now?” It sounded as though she wanted to get together. The second act.

“Today?” Kleckner looked across the hotel room, in the direction of the television. “I gotta bunch of stuff to do. Shit, I had no idea how late it was.” There was a crackle of static on the audio feed, enough to make Aldrich flinch and make an adjustment to his headphones. “I need a Tylenol. I got this dinner tonight. The college reunion thing I told you about.”

“Oh, yeah, at Galvin.”

“Yup. Baker Street, you said?”

“There’s two of them.” It was just like Rachel to know something like that. All the best restaurants. All the best places to go. “There’s a Galvin in Shoreditch, one in Baker Street. You should check.”

“And what are you doing after?”

Kleckner had stood up. His brain was starting to kick into gear. There was a seductive edge to the question.

“Tonight?” Rachel said. “You mean after your dinner?”

“Yeah, sure. You busy?”

Kell willed Rachel to turn him down.

“I can’t, Ryan. Not tonight. Then I’ve got to go back to Istanbul.”

He was stunned. Rachel hadn’t mentioned anything about going to Turkey. The area around his neck and chest was tight and hot.

“So that trip’s going ahead?” Kleckner asked.

“Yeah. Some final stuff Mum needs me to do at the house. But you’ll be back by the weekend, yeah?”

“Sure. That’s my plan. I’m busy tomorrow, then I could catch a late flight I guess.”

“Okay. So let’s have dinner in Istanbul. Saturday night. I love saying that. It sounds so romantic and international!”

“It sounds great is what it sounds. I wanna be with you, Rachel. I wanna see you.”

Kell closed his eyes.

“Well that’s good. Because you’re
going
to be with me. You’re
going
to see me. And I’m glad about last night.”

“What do you mean?”

Kell wanted to tear off the headphones.

“Just that we’re taking things slowly. I’m glad.”

“Oh, okay.” The American sounded resistant to the idea, as though he was not used to being finessed by a woman. “Me too,” he added unconvincingly.

“So I’ll see you in Istanbul. You can show me your favorite places. We should go back to Bar Bleu.”

“Sure. You at work now?”

“I am,” Rachel replied. “And I should stop talking to you and get off the phone or I’ll get in trouble. Bye-bye, gorgeous.”