Borderless Deceit (38 page)

Let me, Anne-Marie, share with you where I am. In a hotel bar. My hotel's bar. I'm drinking beer. Alone. It won't be long before I feel the effect, so I'll be quick
.

Thank you for sending Carson this way. You were right. After the conference and, before that, the fiasco with Nikko, I needed decent company. Carson couldn't have been better. There really is a gentle man behind that smouldering exterior, but we both knew that already
.

He was polite and attentive and endlessly interested. It was refreshing to spend three days without all kinds of baggage. Carson also opened up. Who would have expected it? (I admit I did encourage him.) We talked about his
marriage – an ancient song by now – and why people shun him, issues like that. I suspect he wasn't used to it because he almost fainted. Really! An endearing moment. So stalwart a man, so surprising the vulnerability. Afterwards he was looser, spontaneous, laughing easily. It became him
.

So it was easygoing. Until I became a problem. A problem for myself, not him
.

Of all the things to happen, at the beginning, in a café where I occasionally went with Nikko, he was there. It was the last thing I expected. We didn't say anything, and Nikko quickly moved on, but the moment was weird. Carson asked who he was. I didn't want to talk about it, not then, not at the beginning of that day. I thought I could do it later, over a drink. We walked everywhere then and in the evening I invited Carson for that drink and broached the subject. I began it indirectly, talking about seeing the world, thinking an opening would present itself. But it got off track, by Carson putting me on a pedestal – me being a member of the UN jet set, that sort of thing – and I couldn't find a way to get off. The whole evening was a discussion of my professional life which he finds much more interesting than I do. The next day on a boat tour, which excited him and he enjoyed like a child, I was interested to find out more about him. That's when he almost fainted. Once over that, he was chattier than he's ever been, even making little jokes. Carson, normally like a storm brewing, was suddenly bright and sunny. Ask him to show you the photo taken of us on the boat
.

That evening I expected he would suggest the nightcap, but no. Perhaps he thought about it, because he stood there for a while. I asked if he was tired. He said, having had so much sun and wind, it had been strenuous. Which was how day two ended. I felt dissatisfied. I hoped to sit quietly with Carson and talk about what's happened the last four years. I looked forward to his take on it. It could also be that having been with him for two full days, a different Carson
was emerging, one which I must say I was beginning to like more all the time. For this and that reason, he was in my thoughts that whole evening. I also began to wonder what Carson might really think of me. A UN wunderkind? A female freak? I confess, Anne-Marie, I even thought how it would be if I were intimate with him. Yes, I desired it
.

This morning we were off again. I wasn't relaxed whereas Carson was never more accommodating. We spent the day in a lovely park. We picnicked in a pleasant spot. I wanted to talk about myself, to get off that pedestal, to be approachable. It didn't work. I got into a rut. I couldn't stop being oblique and Carson patiently put up with it. Finally he asked if I had a problem; for some reason I couldn't admit I did. In this way I became my problem
.

We think Carson is a loner and on the outside he is. But when you know him better you discover he has grace. The last three days made me think I may be his opposite
.

Tomorrow it's back to Geneva where everything will be as before. Carson has such enthusiasm for what I do. I'll miss that because I'm growing bored with it. I'm on a carousel which looks pretty and seems never to be static. But beyond that what does it actually do?

Carson will never know, but I think I'm the bigger loner, and my inner self lacks his solidness and probably his grace. He made me realise it is high time to address a few things about myself
.

Jaime listened dreamily to what happened in Berlin. The way she had settled, leaning on my knee, she seemed engrossed, as if by a retelling of a favourite story. Eventually she shifted, sliding across the floor to sit next to me. With our backs against the wall we were oblivious to time, two truants basking in defiance. How in my austere cell had it come to this, this clubby atmosphere, this crystallising familiarity? What was it about Jaime?

“Three days with Miss Dunn and you didn't make a pass? Not even a snaky one?” she asked, fingering a flashy earring. “You sure they don't put funny stuff in the Berlin water?”

“I didn't drink the water.”

“Ho, ho. So you're a wet blanket naturally, are you? Mega-sized one too. How'd you get that way, Carson? 'Cause you were married once? Or are you in some kind of phase?”

“Neither,” I said testily. “I admire Rachel. It sufficed being with her as a friend.”

“Yeah sure. I'd bet a wad you frustrated the hell out of her three days running. You and Heywood, what geeks, ginormous ones, him singing a never-ending song to that woman's virtues, you doing the accompanying on the drums. A whole day in a forest with her? All that good moss wasted?” Her laughter seemed born of experience.

I asked myself why I was taking this. Because it was Jaime's way of
showing she thought well of me? Or because I'd been through this before? Jaime's take on Berlin wasn't unlike Anne-Marie's. They merely put it differently. I was scarcely back when Anne-Marie called to have lunch. Her first question was if I had pictures. I lifted the photo from my wallet, the one taken on the gangplank. She studied it closely. “Yes,” she said, as if it confirmed a suspicion. “I wonder,” she continued, her eyes tightening into a tease, “that day, which of you two parrots was the most eloquent?”

“You got the postcard?”

Anne-Marie laughed. “Postcard one day. Letter from Rachel the next.”

Enthusiastically I began to tell Anne-Marie how packed the time in Berlin had been, history being so pervasive there, seemingly dangling from every lamppost. Anne-Marie listened politely, but after a while she frowned and finally she interrupted. “Carson, tell me, throughout all this how did you get along with Rachel?” She wasn't greatly interested in my breathless description of the remnants of the Berlin Wall.

I said, fine, we got along fine, perfectly fine.

“I mean, did you feel something was getting going between you?” Anne-Marie was spooning her soup more slowly.

I snapped off a piece of carrot and crunched it between my teeth. Did something get going in Berlin? Being there with Rachel had been like being marooned on a glorious island and three days of that is a long time. What of it still lingered? All of it, I concluded, but especially the forest picnic. Every day I relive Rachel gazing at the form of the unclothed Apollo as she mused over enigmatic questions and voiced odd conclusions. What had been my role? Not major, I had convinced myself. If anything, I'd been there as a kind of reflector, something Rachel looked into. The way it went, I rationalised, there was no chance I could have become part of something larger. For one self-indulgent hour Rachel had used me as a mirror on the wall. What of herself had she seen? She hadn't said. She appeared troubled by something, or by the absence of something. But what? I couldn't tell. If anything got going between us during the three stolen days in Berlin it had been a hesitant trade in reflections, a tepid passing back and forth of images, I of me, she of her, all of them incomplete. I was sure Anne-Marie would mock me if I summed it up this way and I merely remarked that Rachel and I had
got to know each other better.

“I wasn't actually asking that, though I'm sure she got to know you better. Did you get to know
her
better too?”

I answered that at times I found Rachel very private.

Anne-Marie held her soup spoon still. “She can seem that way, but her privacy isn't entirely off limits. No more than yours. Three fun days and you weren't getting what Rachel was signalling? You didn't think you could go a little further? You couldn't think of some clever way to bring her out? You couldn't figure out maybe she wanted that?”

Unused to so much reproach from Anne-Marie and suddenly unsure what Rachel might have written her, I fell silent.

But at least Anne-Marie hadn't labelled me. She hadn't called me a wet blanket, or limp noodle, or jellyfish, or anything else which, with distressing imagery, goes splat. Imagery was Jaime's specialty and she wasn't shy deploying it. Confronted by her directness, I visualised once more the day spent in Frederick the Great's park – the naked gods at every turn, the paradisiacal mood, and, yes, the tranquil mossy clearings. Had an opportunity passed? More stone-faced than with Anne-Marie I pictured a possible future lost.

Jaime cut in. “Okay,” she said, ever the realist, as if she had been through all this. “Stop moping. You blew it. You misted your fragrance into the wind. Everyone makes that mistake. So let's figure out what's next. Heywood's closing in. I'd say you've got three, four days max. He's just finalising the paperwork.”

This jolted me. “What paperwork?”

“He's tarting up some kind of case. You know, about what caused the plague. He needs a sacrificial lamb. So he's going to sic the mob on you.”

“What case?” I said irritably. “What sacrifice? What mob? Damn it, Jaime. Heywood spins. You see that. He's a whirligig shifting to every wind. He can't think straight, so how could he construct a case?”

“He had some help,” Jamie said sheepishly, once more fingering an earring.

“How?” I asked, sensing betrayal.

Jamie began describing her temple offerings, the details of Zadokite Port. Deeper and deeper into that long night I listened to a tale of how
a crypto-slanderer, a gutter-dweller really, mixed facts up with fictions so as to claim that he had created some kind of new holy writ.

Of all the rituals he used in his rule of empire – as our Service Czar began to trumpet to himself – not one ever gratified him quite as much as his new daily processional into Zadokite Port. Zadokite Port, Heywood came to appreciate, was a temple to potency. Zadokite Port appraised and augured. Zadokite Port searched and found. Wandering deep into its inner spaces, Heywood sensed he was nearing holiness.

But it started slow. Outwardly, scarcely noticeable at first, the Czar attended fewer Service meetings. Meetings had always been his dominant barbiturate; a day without meetings, sitting only at his desk, was more excruciating than being pulled apart on a rack. But at Jaime's pestering he insisted that holes – black spaces – be entered into his daily planner. An hour here, another there, unstructured time which began expanding, until the subordinates who track such vagaries began whispering that the Czar was now at his computer
all the time!
The black holes in his agenda, they breathed suspiciously, had started to resemble the real interstellar thing: everything going in, nothing coming out, an infinite darkness descending. Sometimes one of them tiptoed into his office to beg attention to a signature that was urgently needed. Awesome concentration – that's what they found. Awesome silence too.
Sir, please, could you read and sign this?
would be the humble request. But all that triggered off was a thick and ghostly hand rising from the keyboard, floating backwards and with jabs of annoyance pointing at the tray where the previous day's urgencies could still be found. Not one of the underlings, nobody at all, knew what was going on in the Czar's office.

Just signing in to Zadokite Port became pleasurable for Heywood. There were complex codes to initiate secret processes and he loved punching them in. Comfortably logged on, his chair groaning with each twitch of fattened hams, the Czar's labour of love began. So many promising folders on the screen, all having contents that were often surprising. Each morning now, lips wetted by a quick tongue, the first thing Heywood did was to click his way lickety-split through everything. Now he had an overview of the day's new and tasty morsels; now he
could go back to savour. The stuff Jaime fed him! His appetite for it was insatiable; he digested even the crumbs. Ever more detail on Nikko Krause's depravity. And steady bulletins on Morsi Abou-Ghazi's flights of illicit fancy. All of it thrilled him. But Heywood hated news of Rachel. He refused to believe she was travelling regularly from Bucharest to Alexandria. As rookie ambassador she was doing fine. He just knew it. So all that extraneous stuff about her being away from her post, that, he deleted. Jaime should just leave Rachel alone. He planned to speak to her about it. Messages about Carson, on the other hand, he read with special relish. These he preserved in a special folder which adorned his screen as a red icon drawn like a devil.

The Czar first struck out on his own in applying Zadokite Port's marvels by using a little notebook in which he had scribbled entry codes to Service data dumps. As weeks went by he became proficient at mining them. The nice thing about an electronic folder, such as the devil file, Irving thought, if you compared it to the messy paper ones now fossilizing on his desk, was the complete absence of limits on what you could stick in.

Yet, the Czar did more than sit before his monitor. Every few days he made a point of getting up to exercise and so trekked down to Jaime's place. “I'm here for more instruction,” he'd growl upon entering, meaning he had a question about overcoming some new obstacle.

“Read that latest piece I sent you?” she'd ask him right away.

“Which one?” he'd grunt. “There were nine this morning.”

“The one about the anti-air missile contract Morsi's just signed with Azerbaijan. Nikko's arranging to make it look like a shipment of main frame computers from Siemens.”