Message From Malaga (18 page)

“It has been tapped,” she said curtly. Then she was lost in her own thoughts, and they worried her. “But that’s another problem,” she said at last. “And not yours.”

“At least you’ve learned it exists,” he said consolingly.

He hadn’t been much comfort. She nodded her agreement, but she frowned down at the bag on her lap as if she were seeing it as a cluster of possibilities, and none of them pleasant. “Let’s get back to us,” she said, becoming business-like again.

“Delighted.” But not this way, Ferrier thought. Here I am with a pretty girl, a really pretty girl, face and figure perfect according to my taste, bright eyes, soft lips, and obvious intelligence. We are driving through a pleasant foreign town, heading for some beaches and the blue Mediterranean. It’s Saturday, and there’s a sunny weekend ahead, and all the traffic around us is showing it, everyone going somewhere with nothing but pleasure on his mind. And we are being businesslike.

“If you weren’t driving,” she said, “I’d ask you to write down the time you telephoned Martin. But I’ll do it for you—if you’ll lend me a pencil.”

“What’s wrong with yours?” he asked. But he fished for the silver pencil in his trouser pocket and handed it to her. “That makes me okay?”

“It’s reassuring.” She examined the pencil closely, handed it back. “Thanks.”

“What else did it tell you?” he asked. He pocketed it carefully.

“It is Reid’s. He must trust you a lot.”

Here it comes, he thought once more. The question.

But it didn’t. She said, “Martin got in touch with me this morning. He instructed me to get his reply to Reid. Will you
take it? It’s simple. Tell Reid to stop worrying. Martin has sent for reinforcements. They are on their way—arriving tonight. They will make contact with him. Definitely. So not to worry.”

“Is that all?” No questions, he thought in surprise, no probing...

“Isn’t it enough? Help is coming. And in this game, that’s all you want to hear when you are in a jam like Jeff Reid. Whoever arrives will get in touch with him and learn what all the sore trouble is about. It must be big. It must be fantastic.” She lingered over that last word, dropping her voice, her eyes widening. “Ah,” she said quickly, “there’s the bull ring! Got your bearings?”

“Yes. And no.”

“No?”

“What’s your connection with Lucas?”

“I share the same courtyard with him. I have two rooms and a small balcony opposite his studio.”

“How long have you been there?”

“Almost a year.”

“And Lucas?”

“He was well settled in three years ago.”

“How did he know about the pencil?”

“By accident. At least, I hope it was an accident. He was searching for some matches one night at a party, started looking through my bag, emptied it all out on a table with the usual masculine jokes about the things women carry around with them. The pencil was there among all the litter. He admired it. So you see why I nearly panicked today when I thought you might have believed him enough to offer him yours. It would have been an easy two and two for him to add together. He’s
no fool, even if his style is flamboyant American—the young, get-with-it, look-at-me crowd. It’s good cover.”

“Cover for what?”

She didn’t seem to hear that quiet question. “Of course, today he was trying to act Establishment. But the truth is he has no real conception of how the American Establishment behaves.”

“And how does it?” he asked jokingly. Establishment...a word imported from England along with the Beatles and miniskirts. Over there, it had validity: an army of permanent civil servants, nonpolitical, nonpartisan, outlasting all governments, a formidable block of quiet, unobtrusive, continuing power. But in the United States, where every change in administration brought new faces as assistants and advice-givers, where every cabinet member brought in his own men for guidance and counsel? Where most career civil servants were bypassed, sometimes for a four-year stretch, sometimes for even less, by the lawyers, journalists, professors, business-men, and image makers? It was a very remarkable Establishment that rose to the top levels of power so swiftly and then dropped just as speedily out of sight. “How does it behave?”

She thought about that. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “But I do know that Lucas is quite sure he has the answer; and he hasn’t, any more than those trendy movies—you know the type? Let’s pull everything to pieces, leave no beliefs intact, ignore the good, emphasise the bad, down with the system, up with us.” She shook her head sadly. “All these bright little boys and their intellectual pretensions...” She paused, tried to laugh. “I do know about that, at least. Once upon a time, I was one of the bright little girls.”

He waited, but there was to be no further explanation, seemingly. He said, “So Lucas has been seeing too many trendy movies?”

“He doesn’t need to. He was writing that kind of stuff when he was a sophomore. And now he really believes his own propaganda. He cooked up plenty of it in his underground newspaper. That was in Berkeley, 1964. I was there, too.”

“You knew him even then?”

“Radicals together. He scarcely knew me. He was deep in the action. I was a very minor revolutionary. Then we went off—in different directions.”

“And how did that happen?”

“Oh, with a small incident, which he played up big. He burned his draft card, although he wasn’t in any danger of being drafted—he was a graduate student by that time. A public ceremony with TV cameras notified in advance; after which he disappeared. Driven into hiding, fear of persecution, America in the hands of Nazis, the whole bit.”

“And you?”

She looked at him with large and thoughtful eyes. “Are you just curious, or really interested?”

“Interested.”

“I had a severe case of disillusionment. You see, at first I had really believed that Lucas’ protest was honest. Then I found proof—I didn’t want to believe it, but there it was, proof—that the whole thing had been staged. On orders. It was a performance. So all our protests on his behalf became performances; we didn’t know it, but all our reactions were according to plan. That was the first shock. The second was when I learned that his disappearance was on order, too. The
third was when a girl we all liked and trusted—a true liberal, an honest radical, a free and soaring spirit—was elected president of a really important student society and then announced to the newspapers that she always had been a communist. I suppose the idea was to make us think that if someone like her was a communist, then communists must be delightful people. But she had got most of the votes because she had always maintained she wasn’t a communist. When I challenged her about lying, she told me she hadn’t lied; she had only been following orders. And what benefited the cause was never a lie; couldn’t be, by definition. Because truth was whatever was good for communism. Whatever hurt it was a lie.” Amanda shook her head, sighed. “And so—I faced a big moment of real truth, my own, and nothing to do with Moscow’s definition. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience—who likes to admit he has been manipulated? I had been used: that was true truth. Three shocks like that, close together, made a bolt and a jolt. And then there was a fourth shock, much worse. One of my professors had spoken out frankly against the violence that was developing on the campus. So his office was invaded, his files were looted, and the manuscript of a book he was writing—ten years of work—was burned.”

“And that was the end of the dream?”

“For me? Yes. It was no longer a dream, but a nightmare. And I woke up in stages. First, there were several weeks of honest reassessment. Painful. Especially when I heard two of Lucas’ friends persuading many of us that the professor had got what he deserved; he was against progress, a reactionary professor who should be driven out of the university. But he wasn’t reactionary; he was a liberal in the old-fashioned style.
And the truth was that he had seen more clearly than most that the universities were being destroyed and reshaped as centres of political action. Bases for revolution, in other words.”

“And after the weeks of reassessment?”

“Two months of misery while I got rid of my prejudices and collected some facts. Real facts. Not half-truths, not assumptions. A lonely, lonely time.”

“There was no one you could talk with?”

“The old friends had dropped away. I was deep in the jungle of the New Left. I had to find my own way out.”

“What about parents, family?”

She looked at him, asked sadly, “My sweet, progressive parents who never said ‘No’ to me and wouldn’t face a value judgment in case it labelled them as illiberal? How could they tell me what was right and what was wrong? They never did, you know—perhaps because they had never really faced the truth themselves. They just won’t believe there is any threat against our country except from the right wing. They don’t see there is danger from the left, too. Although, in a way, that is making a value judgment—but they’d be hurt if I even suggested that to them. I don’t want to hurt them. They fed me, nursed me when I was sick as a child, clothed me, supplied me with money, affection. And so I try to forget that every book and magazine and discussion in our house steered me in their direction—to the political left. And now that I’ve fought my way back to the centre, they don’t even listen when I try to explain what happened to me at Berkeley. They just look bewildered, and retreat. They tell their friends that Amanda has become apathetic. Apathetic!” Her voice was strained. Close to tears. “Crazy, mixed-up parents,” she said softly, unhappily. “I worry about them.”

If only to distract her from this attack of gloom, he went back to Lucas. “And no one in Lucas’ group tried to stop you? Or gave you an argument?”

“They were too busy planning revolts to notice mine. I just eased my way out.”

“You told them you were tired of running the Mimeograph machine and washing coffee cups?”

“Close enough,” she admitted ruefully. “But at least I didn’t graduate to a bomb factory. I saved myself from that.”

“Who is Lucas working for? Peking or Moscow?”

“You really ask the hundred-dollar questions, don’t you?”

“It’s one way of learning the hundred-dollar answers. Or is he a free-lance?”

“No, no. Totally committed. Like me.”

“That must be some courtyard you share.”

“It has its difficult moments.” She dropped her voice. “When he disappeared in 1965, he went to the Soviet Union by way of Tokyo. He completed his training there. He is now working for the KGB.”

He looked at her.

“You don’t believe me?”

He hedged. “I think he’s pretty inept for a trained agent.”

“Really?” she asked coldly. “Yet you almost accepted him as an American agent, didn’t you?”

He was annoyed. But it was true. “Perhaps I’m the one who has been seeing too many of these trendy movies.” By God, he thought, that was doubly true.

“How was he inept?” she challenged him. “If I hadn’t been around with my little pencil, you might have produced yours.”

“Lay off,” he said. “I’m stupid. Didn’t you know?”

“Not stupid. Just unaccustomed. How was he inept?”

“He arrived almost too late. Another five minutes and he would never have met me.”

“Wouldn’t he? He had that painting he splatched up this morning after an early visit from his laundress. She is his message-delivery service, actually. He would have left it with your housekeeper, used it as an excuse to call on you this evening. Inept?”

She really loved that word, Ferrier thought. “I take that back.”

But she was off and running. “Not Lucas. Do you know why he has a boat, and weekly picnics? When his guests are all prostrate with sun and food and that lazy Mediterranean feeling, he leaves them dozing on deck to the sound of his favourite records and slips down to his pint-sized but tight-shut cabin. He has a transmitter. It doesn’t receive, but it sends. It isn’t one of those big powerful jobs—that would draw too much attention—but he can easily reach the north coast of Africa. And he only needs to be a couple of miles off shore and he’s safe from the Málaga police. There are hundreds of boats, all shapes and sizes, in these waters on Saturday afternoons. His messages are short, concentrated. Within ten minutes he can be back on deck, sprawling with the rest of us.”

“And what do you do?” he teased her. “Signal your friends in one of those boats that it is time to start monitoring Lucas?” His guess must have been close enough, for she looked a little startled, and hesitated over her answer.

She never gave it. Instead, she exclaimed and pointed. “Here! Turn right!”

He had to make much too wide a turn, evade a trolley car
and a psychedelic Volkswagen, with his mind still working over Lucas and his transmitter. We must have a listening post, he was thinking, but it would have an impossible task picking up all the garble of messages, some pure chat, some real traffic, that was being sent over and around these waters. The sure way of catching Lucas’ reports would be to sail, discreetly, some distance away, and watch through powerful binoculars for Amanda’s signal: a girl in a dazzling red swimsuit standing beside the mast, or a bright-yellow towel being draped over her shoulders as she rose to look over the side of the boat. “Is Lucas as important as all this?” he asked as he swung the car back into his own lane of traffic.

Again she didn’t answer. “Neat,” she said of his driving. “But we might have been arrested. Sorry. It was my fault. I was too busy talking.” She was having an attack of worry now. “I talked too much. I should only have given you Martin’s message, and dropped into chitchat about weather. But at least I’ve made sure you don’t miscalculate on Lucas. Be careful, won’t you? There really must be something fantastic at stake.”

He liked her concern, even if it wasn’t so much for him as it was for the job on hand. “Take care, yourself.” He was driving slowly now, because of the increasing crowds, with many on foot. He could study her face for a moment. Incredible, he thought, that a girl like this could handle an assignment like Lucas. She was well qualified, that was true: her experience in Berkeley, with that small group of the radical left, made her a natural for this job. And yet... He frowned at a clutter of cars just ahead of him, slowed down more. There was something he had wanted to warn her about, something he could have told her right at the start of their talk but had postponed until he felt
more sure of her. What the flaming hell had it been? he asked himself angrily.