High Jinx (14 page)

The general personally examined the papers of the inquiring MI5 historian and picked up the telephone to verify from Sir Eugene Attwood himself that he was permitted to give details of this highly sensitive mission. Satisfied, he leaned his long, heavy frame back on the armchair and said, ‘What exactly did you want to know about Heath?'

‘Well,' the young historian said, ‘What did he do after he left the army?'

‘We have incomplete records on that. But we used him three times, on three important missions, all of them successful: one in Yugoslavia, one in Vietnam in cooperation with the French, another in Morocco. Always we contacted him through his box number in London. He was a brave and tough officer. Two of the operations I mention involved hand-to-hand engagements, in both of which he was wounded, his antagonists killed. His men respected him and feared him—he executed one man, on the North African mission, when he refused during a fire fight to carry out orders. We needed for Tirana someone highly intelligent, which Heath was: he studied physics at Cambridge before the war. Someone who had had parachute training: Heath taught parachute work toward the end of the war. And someone who kept his mouth shut, and there had never been any security problems there. Oh, he would go out drinking and wenching every now and then, but there was never anything more. To this day, as far as we have been able to determine, the Russians know nothing about the three missions Heath was involved with.'

The MI5 clerk wanted to know if, in the files, there was any record of any address other than the post office address?

General Islington stood and went to a six-foot-long strongbox. He opened it and pulled out a file. He returned to his chair and opened it on his lap. ‘Before that first mission—that was 1948—we had him complete a form. After the question: “Where have you lived during the past three years?” he wrote down, “Mostly in London. I stay with my fiancée in Old Windsor when she is in residence (she is an airline stewardess). I have frequented many hotels in London, and have travelled several times to the continent.”'

‘That is all that's there?'

‘Yes. Ah. There are notes in the margin, evidently by the security checker. In the margin is written, “Questioned, Captain Heath gave (reluctantly) the identity of his fiancée. She is Renira Williams, employed by BOAC. Check with Miss Williams confirms relationship with Heath.”

‘There,' said General Islington, evidently pleased with himself. ‘Not too much to go on. You will not, of course, need to know the nature of the other missions, but at least you can fill out a memorial paragraph or two, I should think?'

Tracing Renira Williams had been time-consuming, but she was found to be living in a small house in Old Windsor, near her family home, and working as the matron at a Jesuit boys' preparatory school, St. John's, affiliated with Beaumont College, the public school to which the younger boys mostly went when they reached the age of thirteen.

Father John Paine S.J., the headmaster, received the solicitor who told him he needed help in checking on the credentials of an applicant for a confidential position, and that the name of Miss Williams had been given as a reference, and might he interview her?

The short, stocky priest said of course he would have no objection to his, so long as Miss Williams had no objection.

But first, the visitor asked, a question or two about Miss Williams. His records showed that she had been an airline stewardess?

‘That is correct. But before she went with BOAC she had spent a year at a nursing school, so she is qualified to run our little infirmary. If a boy is seriously ill the doctor comes over.'

Did Miss Williams spend nights at St. John's?

‘Most of the time. Her family lives nearby and occasionally she will leave after the boys have gone to bed and will be back by breakfast time in the morning. She has, of course, a day off every week.' The priest then rose, shook hands with the solicitor, and said he would send in the matron.

A few minutes later, Renira Williams walked in.

She was a handsome woman, erect and heavyset. Dressed in a nurse's stiff white uniform, she wore a small cap on her rich brown hair. A tiny red cross was sewn above the trim little pocket above her left breast. She greeted Blackford Oakes with poise and sat down.

‘Father Paine says you have some questions you wish to put to me? What about?'

‘About Bertram Heath.'

‘Oh,' she said guardedly. ‘What about him?'

‘He has applied for a position, and a client of our firm'—Blackford extended a card identifying himself as ‘George Benton,' an associate of ‘Whitelock & Entwhistle,' solicitors of Gray's Inn Road—‘has asked us to—well, to make the normal investigation.'

‘How did you get my name?'

Blackford gave the same story he had given to the headmaster. ‘Why, Mr. Heath evidently gave your name as a reference.'

‘He did not. You are lying to me.'

Blackford managed to look surprised as he reached up and pulled distractedly on his two-week-old beard. ‘Why, Miss Williams, I am most surprised at this. I have simply assumed that he gave your name, because your name appears on the list of the four or five people I have been instructed to consult. It could be, I suppose, that one of the other references gave your name; it would be in the file I have here.' Absentmindedly, he looked into the little folder.

‘Look,' Renira Williams said. ‘Let me be direct. Is your firm willing to pay for information?'

Blackford seized the moment. The tone of his voice changed. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘My firm is willing to pay for information.'

‘In that case, meet me at the Nell Gwynne Tavern in Windsor at nine-thirty.'

‘I shall be there. Thank you.'

Blackford walked out of the main door, down the steps to his car. It was very nearly dark. He opened the door, and thereby caused a bucket of water perched on the car roof and tied to the door handle to tumble, dousing him with its contents. He heard the squeals and giggles of boys from behind the brick wall running to the side of the school building. He thought briefly of giving chase, instead wiped the water from his face with the sleeve of his jacket and called out, ‘Nice aiming, boys.' He drove off.

14

Alistair Fleetwood returned to his apartments late after the dinner in honour of Albert Einstein. Fleetwood had been asked to propose the first toast, and he was pleased, when he rose to speak, by the wall-to-wall murmur of appreciation, not unmixed with awe. He had spoken of Einstein's humbling of the universe, a universe which had succeeded over so many centuries in outwitting the mind of man—until it came upon the mind of Albert Einstein.

A lot of that kind of thing, Sir Alistair chuckled internally, the sort of grandiloquent nothingness that works so well with people who are expecting profundity, and will find it, never mind the merit of the thought. (Einstein, Sir Alistair liked to think, hit on a very bright idea in his early twenties, and dithered for most of the rest of his life, but all that dither was interpreted as profundity, and Sir Alistair was willing to go along with the game, indeed thought it professionally self-enhancing to do so.) But Fleetwood had gone out of his way to indite a few sentences the meaning of which he knew would be understood by not more than a dozen of the hundred guests there: a nice, recondite cadenza on the subject of the choreography of wavelengths, which exercise would there and then reemphasise him as a part of that elect fraternity that could speak to Einstein in his own special language. After that, he turned his esoterica into a single metaphor that suggested the preeminent concern all civilised persons must have for peace, and—Sir Alistair Fleetwood smiled just a bit as he turned the key of his door—the crowd had, well, demonstrated the rare satisfaction they had taken from hearing such … poetry, from their very own Nobel laureate.

Inside, he took off his black tie and dinner jacket and laid them down on the armchair in his living room for Jackson, his manservant, to pick up in the morning, press, and hang up. He went into his large, book-lined study, in one corner of which he kept his formidable collection of radios. (He boasted to his friends that he had not paid an overseas long-distance telephone bill for years, so proficient was he in the use of ham radios. ‘If I wish to speak to Paris, God save me, I simply ask a fellow ham operator in the area kindly to “patch me in” to the desired number, to introduce the vocabulary of the fraternity!') He went to the little wire recorder he had preset to tune into Radio Moscow at nine. This was, after all, a Monday, Alice Goodyear Corbett's day of the week. He wound the wire back, flicked on the switch, and continued undressing as he listened to what had come in on the 7.150 MHz frequency. It began as always with the top of the news:

‘Soviet authorities today delivered identical notes to Great Britain, France, and the United States, proposing a Big Four summit conference to take place in August or September in order to pave the way for the European Security Meeting already suggested by Soviet authorities to the three nations on July 24.' The announcer continued for five minutes, mostly on this development as yet another indication of the dogged priority attached by the Soviet Union to a peaceful world.

Then came the gravelly voice of the woman with the personal announcements, mostly devoted to an account of awards given to workers who had distinguished themselves in one way or another. ‘Nikita Kholkov' had received an award: which meant that at eight the following morning Fleetwood must tune in on MHz 3.008. He yawned, but had no need to set his alarm. He always woke early, and tomorrow morning he would need to begin to work on the Rede lectures he was to deliver in October.

The following morning, across an unusual amount of static, he tuned in on the humdrum voice giving the humdrum messages. He singled out the one intended for him, along with the code number. It was ‘eleven.' That meant: go to Stockholm. The number was repeated three times: ‘Kholkov eleven eleven eleven.'

The repetition—eleven, three times—meant that the need was very pressing.

He turned to his desk and looked at his calendar. It was relatively uncrowded for the three weeks remaining in August, before the beginning of the next term—it would be easy enough to put off the two or three casual engagements he had for lunch and dinner. And going off to Stockholm never presented any ambient curiosity. His academic contacts were kept lively. There was always work to do in Stockholm.

But mostly he had to look forward, in Stockholm, to Alice Goodyear Corbett. To think of it! Almost twenty years since, as an eighteen-year-old, he had met her. And, even now, when he was with her he felt biologically eighteen years old, and otherwise something like a god, which is how Alice treated him, assuming there were any such things as gods. It was as basic as that she truly worshipped him, and in her hands he found his own natural self-esteem wonderfully warmed. No one could speak quite as Alice spoke of Alistair's singularity. Of his towering intellect. Of his contributions to human knowledge and to the advancement of social idealism. And—of his personal irresistibility. His manly body, his extraordinary eyes, his … He forced himself to stop, else he'd have needed to reenter the shower.

By ten his travel arrangements were made. He used his ham radio to telephone a colleague in Stockholm who passed along the word to the right quarter about his impending arrival.

Alistair Fleetwood spent the afternoon of the following day in the laboratory of the University of Stockholm, where he was a frequent visitor. He surveyed the logs kept by two graduate students studying the metamorphosis of radio wave patterns in space, made a few comments in a notebook, spoke over the telephone with a fellow astrophysicist. Two of his colleagues invited him to dine, but Fleetwood pleaded fatigue, told them that night he would eat in his room, retire early, and be the life of the party with them the following night.

He reached his room at six, called room service, and ordered smoked salmon, roast beef (Alice loved roast beef, which was hard to get in Moscow), a bottle of red and a bottle of white wine, coffee ice cream, and acquavit—for two. ‘Serve me at eight,' he added. ‘At eight exactly.' He put down the telephone and went into the bathroom to shower.

He did this, and then brought from his travel bag the cologne, picked up his dressing gown and looked at himself in the mirror, both with his dressing gown on and with it off. He was pleased by both sights, even acknowledging that he was tucking in his stomach just a very little bit. But he weighed only 180 pounds, which was not heavy for someone nearly six feet tall, and he wondered whether anywhere in the world a Nobel laureate looked quite as—well, noble was not such a bad word for it, though Alistair Fleetwood hated puns. He felt mounting anxiety in his loins, and for a fleeting instant, but not for more than an instant, he wondered whether Alice would let him down. Surely she had got word of the time of his arrival? And she always took such pride in the promptness of her own coordinated arrivals when he answered her frequent biddings to come to Stockholm. He took the bottle of sherry he had bought at the airport, opened it, and at that moment heard the knock.

She came dressed in a white blouse and flared orange skirt, her dark hair in braids around the back of her head, her ample bosom alight with excitement reflected in her eyes and with a smile on glistening lips. They kissed passionately. ‘Oh my darling Alistair, my handsome, brainy Alistair, the little boy I took all over the Soviet Union … Just think that only a very few years ago you were a student, and now—well, now you are quite simply the most exciting, and the most handsome, young physicist in the world. Everybody knows that. What they don't know is that you are also the greatest lover in—in—'

‘The spy world?' Alistair Fleetwood proffered, laughing. And then, ‘Hurry, hurry, dear Alice, don't keep me waiting now. It has been two months.'