The Company of Saints (7 page)

She took the metro to the Station Malakoff and went into the public telephone. She dialled a number and tapped her foot impatiently. When it answered she said quickly, ‘This is France. I've got important news.'

Tony Walden was away when Davina got back from Washington. He had a trip booked to Australia; it would keep them apart for three weeks. She arrived on a Saturday morning, feeling mentally and physically exhausted. Consultations had gone on nonstop for the full four days of her visit. She and Johnson had been flown by helicopter from the capital to Langley. Eric Brunson, the CIA's director, was a pleasant man under normal conditions, but the pressures building up made him peremptory and suspicious.

Davina showed Tim Johnson that she could be patient and tactful, qualities he hadn't thought were in her. And he saw Brunson warm to her as to a friend. A very clever Boss Lady, Tim decided. She's mentally holding the man's hand, sympathizing with his predicament. And by the end of the visit, Davina and Brunson were committed to a joint investigation. The SIS would contribute anything that came its way through its intelligence sources and send the information direct to the States. And the CIA would share its findings with London. Between them they should circumvent the deliberate blocking tactics of the Italian government and its security service. They were more concerned with proving that the assassin had come to Italy from outside than with finding him. As Brunson said on their last evening together, ‘They don't want to find the bastard because they think he
is
Italian!'

Davina didn't disagree.

Johnson was met by his wife at the airport. Davina spoke to her briefly; she felt a sickening pang of loneliness when she saw them drive off together. She was going back to her empty flat.

It was a lovely June day; the suburban gardens were bright with flowers on the way into London. She longed to get into the country, to breathe some clean air and walk with a dog running alongside her. Marchwood. Marchwood with its famous garden a riot of colour, her mother's loving care rewarded by the splendours of that perfect English flower, the rose. She missed the house terribly; she missed the summer evenings with a drink on the warm terrace, and the scents drifting on the faintest breeze. She missed her mother, even her father's awkward welcome. For a while she had been friends with Charlie. Now that was finished. There was no welcome for her at home. They had exiled her as completely as her brother-in-law was exiled. She in her lonely London flat, he in his KGB apartment in Moscow.

She unlocked the door, left her suitcase unopened on the bed. There was a stale atmosphere in the place, although it had only been empty for a few days. Davina opened the windows; there was little traffic and the quietness grated on her nerves. When the city fell silent it was unnerving, as if everyone in the world had gone away for the weekend and only she were left behind.

She chided herself irritably. There were people she could ring up. If Tony Walden wasn't available she stayed at home, content to read or watch television, feeling relaxed after the week's work. But not this time. Not after Paris. Now that she was alone, Davina felt despair. She couldn't counter it with argument, because instinct and logic told her that their relationship could not survive. And there was no one in the world she could confide in. She remembered Sir James White's remark when she moved into his office.

‘It's a lonely spot to be in, my dear. Especially for a woman. But I think you'll come to terms with it.'

Until that night in Paris, Davina believed that she had faced the problem. Now she knew the real test was just beginning. She didn't ring Australia. She made coffee, unpacked her clothes, had a hot bath and dialled the number of James White's house in Kent.

His wife Mary answered. Yes, of course he was in – would she hold on? Davina said briefly, ‘Chief, can I drive down and see you?'

His voice was full of pleasure. Very warm. ‘My dear, of course! And stay the night – we haven't a thing to do the whole weekend. We'll expect you in time for tea.' He rang off and slowly Davina put the receiver back.

Of all the men in the world, he was the last she ever expected to go to for help. But of all the men in the world now, he was the only one she could trust.

Four thousand miles away someone else just as lonely prepared for his weekend. He had a dacha outside Moscow, nestled in the pine forests above the Moscova river. It was a luxurious house, secluded from the other dachas that gave the members of the Politburo a retreat from the city. It was smaller than the magnificent residence of the President himself. But not much smaller. The shadows moving discreetly round the grounds belonged to the KGB militia; they guarded Igor Borisov, Director of State Security, head of the largest network of intelligence in the world, with a quarter of a million men under arms at his command. The second most powerful man in Russia. Some said the first, because the President was old and ailing, kept alive by the doctors at the Ushenkaya Clinic.

Borisov had sent his wife on a Crimean cruise. She didn't want to go. There had been the usual scene when he suggested it. In the end he had simply told her she was going. He needed the dacha to himself and she couldn't stay in Moscow.

He retreated from his offices in Dzerzhinsky Square to the peace of the woods and the empty house. He had wanted to get a divorce for a long time. It wasn't easy because the President was a family man, married to the same woman for forty years. He wouldn't like his protégé to cast off his wife, like an old shoe that pinched. But how she pinched, Borisov complained; how she bored him and nagged him and froze him into impotence whenever they shared a bed. But he would have to wait. It couldn't be too long. The old man's heart was labouring; the slightest chill turned to a lung infection. While he walked along the river bank, or sat in the sunshine on his porch, Borisov made plans. They had occupied his mind from the time the snows of winter melted, when the life of his friend and mentor, President Zerkhov, entered its final term. The old man knew that he wouldn't see another winter, but he faced the future with typical stony courage and set himself the task of finding someone suitable to care for Russia. He had the mentality of a tsar and the jealousy of a hereditary ruler for his heirs. No old men, he declared to his wife while she sat by his bedside. No bald heads living in the past. Russia needed a man of vision, a man who was young enough to lead her into the next century. Igor Borisov was his choice. That choice could be Borisov's guarantee of supreme power or cause his humiliation and ultimate fall. He had more enemies than friends. And he would need friends. Friends inside the all-powerful Politburo and the support of the Army. The Army and the KGB were natural rivals. No former Director of State Security had been liked by the generals. The troops with the red shield badge had provided the firing squads too often for the regular armed services to trust them. Borisov was determined to change that attitude. He agreed with Zerkhov: Russia needed a diplomat to guide her into the future, not a hard-liner living on the dictums of the past. Borisov had disposed of the worst specimen not long ago. A very convenient stroke had carried him away, with the assistance of a certain drug.

The prize was enormous. The power staggered the imagination. He had no precedent behind him to give encouragement. No man of his age had ever been elected. No holder of his unpopular office had ever stepped up to the throne. But there was a first time for all things. Sooner or later change overtook the most entrenched institutions, even in Russia. Borisov ran his own personal empire of repression and subversion with his habitual skill and dedication, but the grander scheme preoccupied him more and more.

He hadn't really concentrated on the situation outside Russia until after the assassination of Henry Franklyn in Venice. And it was high time that he did.

Venice had soon returned to normal. The tourists flocked like the famous pigeons; the shops selling leather and cheap jewellery did a handsome trade; the hotels were full; and the summer season looked like booming. The antique trade was better than the previous year, but the recession still hit the market hard. Work on the lower floor of the shop in the Piazza San Raphael had been completed, the owner installed the two renaissance pieces he had bought in Rome and hung a little primitive gem of the Crucifixion in his house in the Street of the Assassins. He had come home to find his daughter in a foul mood. She was surly enough anyway. Her mother tried to make excuses, but Valdorini had begun to dread his daughter's presence in the home. She was spoilt, he insisted, spoilt and typical of her generation, which had no respect and no aim in life. Her studies were a joke: her exam results were consistently poor, and it seemed to him that she was merely wasting time and money staying on at university.

The perpetual student was becoming an Italian phenomenon. There were greybeards of thirty still lounging around on government grants and their families' allowances, achieving nothing. And, of course, her aggressive left-wing politics drove him mad. According to his daughter, everything was wrong, he declared one evening when they had friends to dinner and the girl was out. The world was being destroyed by industry which was turning the good earth into an ecological desert; the Third World starved while the affluent threw food into their dustbins and the threat of nuclear war hung over humanity, denying the children the right to grow up. She had an answer for everything, Valdorini complained, but it was always the same answer. Everybody else was wrong and only she and her friends were responsible and caring.

His child had become a hostile stranger. He had drunk a lot of wine and he became maudlin, blinking back tears. No son, only this angry girl who looked at her parents as if she hated them; while they were away in Rome she'd had someone staying in the house and never said a word.

There were two other dealers round the table and a member of the City Trade Council. He was a Venetian whose ancestors had elected the Doge in centuries past. He loved his great city and took his responsibilities very seriously. He had been summoned to a meeting with Signor Modena, the head of Security, and members of the city's public bodies, and its most influential citizens. The problems arising from the assassination' of the American and his daughter had been put to them and their help solicited. The killer must be found. If the Red Brigades were mounting a new terrorist offensive, no one in public life would be safe. If, as Modena confided, they faced a new menace, then the prospects were horrifying. He wasn't asking anyone to inform, or to do anything that placed themselves at risk. But just to listen and use their judgement. Venice had harboured the assassin. Somewhere, he or she had left a trace behind.

That meeting had taken place before the body of the dead man was washed up on the public beach at the Lido. The fish had eaten through the anchor rope, releasing the bloated corpse. But the remains of that rope were still knotted round his waist and the postmortem showed that he had died from a broken neck and not from drowning. Identification had done the rest. Modena had a related clue which tied in with the other crime. The boatman had disappeared on the same morning. He was last seen at the public mooring by the Rialto Bridge. But nobody remembered who had hired him. There it rested, until the evening when Valdorini had too much wine and had started talking about his daughter.

3

‘I must say, I'm surprised,' James White remarked. He gave Davina a kindly look. She recognized it meant as little as his smile. ‘I never thought you'd turn to me for help, my dear.'

‘I never thought so either,' she said. ‘But needs must, Chief, when the devil drives.'

‘And are you quite sure who this devil really is?'

They were alone in his study; Mary White had slipped away so they could talk in private. Davina's head came up. He in turn recognized her mannerism.

She was about to challenge him. ‘What do you mean, the real devil?'

‘Well,' he leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs and dwelt on the word, ‘let's go over the facts. You are having an affair with a man. You know his background, you had him thoroughly vetted as soon as you took over at Anne's Yard. He's clean. Or two years ago he
was
clean.… Mother and married sister living in Poland, but no problems there. No affiliations with anything suspicious since he set himself up in England. He did bring one or two refugees out of Eastern Europe, but they were personal friends and he did it by using his money and bribing the necessary officials. In this role he came to Humphrey's notice and Humphrey introduced him to you – when you were both playing spies behind my back,' he added. ‘I must say now that I don't like your friend Walden.'

‘You don't have to tell me that,' Davina interrupted. ‘You proved it once.'

‘If you say so,' he murmured. ‘I don't like the type. It's not a good situation for someone in your position, but you've taken all possible precautions and you can't see that your private life can impinge on your job. But out of the blue, in the middle of a holiday, Walden tells you it's all over. He makes a heroic renunciation for your sake and then allows you to persuade him to go back on it. Am I being accurate, Davina?'

‘You're being a bastard,' she answered quietly. ‘But I expected that. Go on.'

‘He's a very sophisticated man who's made a lot of money out of manipulating people. Playing on their credulity. Wouldn't you agree that defines top-level advertising? He's been your lover for two years or so. He knows you very well by now. He sets the scene and writes the lines. He knows perfectly well that you're not the type to accept his noble gesture without wanting to know how and why. Very few women would, I imagine. Certainly not you. So he gives in and tells you that he's being blackmailed. And what a story! His brother-in-law was arrested as a Solidarity sympathizer. He's in the Ministry of the Interior, didn't you say? He's been interned ever since martial law. He doesn't say whether his brother-in-law is innocent or guilty. I find in my experience that civil servants have little sympathy with workers' movements like Solidarity, but that's beside the point. The point is, his sister is pregnant, living with her mother. That paints a picture of two frightened women, one old and feeble, the other having a child. Helpless and under siege by a ruthless military regime. By now, you're probably running ahead of him, Davina, filling in the gaps. It's the penalty of a quick mind. The blackmail is his brother-in-law's release? But no. It's crueller than that. The brother-in-law isn't interned as his family thinks. He's been taken to Russia because the KGB knows about Walden's relationship with you. They believe they hold a hand of trumps. Walden is to pass on anything you tell him and to pump you for secret information – in exchange for his brother-in-law's life. If he refuses, the poor chap either gets a bullet, or a ticket to the Gulag camps. Now, is that accurate?'