THE HEART OF DANGER (11 page)

for

the spring snow to have lasted, and the steepling forests beside the

track were a mass of black, and the rivers tumbled silver in the light

thrown down from the carriages. The joy of the journey was gone with

the coming of the evening. The joy had been the afternoon crawl

through Austria, and the images stayed with him of the tall-towered

and

ruined castles that perched on crags, of the farms of toy-town

neatness

that were in the valleys below the track, and the miniature tractors

that were out in the handkerchief fields pulling the manure carts

from

the wood-built cattle barns. It was not his style to think the clever

thoughts, that he was traversing the no man's land between the

civility

of old Europe and the barbarity of new Europe. His style was to

inhale

the beauty, the majesty, of high mountains and sharp valleys and thick

forest and brutal outcrops of rock, take the beauty and majesty into

his mind and imagine the delight of walking there. He wondered if

there would be the same deer, the same foxes, the same badgers, as

there had been in the fields and woods and hills around the tied

cottage of his childhood. A place for a man to be alone. So he had taken the chance to ride the great train. He had flown in the morning

from Heathrow to Munich, crossed Munich by the airport bus, and bought

his ticket at the Hauptbahnhof, and eaten a sandwich, and climbed

onto

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the Mimara Express Salzburg, Villach, Ljubljana to Zagreb. It was

his

dream, it was a collection of postcard prints, and the dusk and then

the evening had come; and he doubted that he would tell Jane when

he

made it back to Heathrow and Raynes Park and 57B the Cedars, that

he

had taken a great train over a track that cut a route through Austria.

His briefcase was on the seat beside him. He reached for it ... It

was

the briefcase that he had purchased, second hand, from the store in

Gower Street, bought with pride thirteen years back. The briefcase

had

been black but long usage by a previous owner had frayed the flap

and

scuffed the edges and scratched the surface. The briefcase might

once

have belonged to a higher executive officer, even to a senior

executive

officer, but it had been purchased by a B Grade clerk, and it was

his

symbol that he belonged at the heart of the Security Service. The

EIIR

symbol, once gold, was worn, and it had been one of the games played

by

the B Grade clerk to imagine what secrets had been held in the

briefcase .. . There were no damn secrets now.

He took his notes from the briefcase. He was already in the

vernacular

of his client. They were the notes that he had scribbled fast on

the

table beside the Aga of the horrid young woman, Dorrie. How the

horrid

young woman, Dorrie, had killed her mother's honeymoon; how she had

made a quality scene when the guest for dinner had been the local

Master of Foxhounds and she had poured tomato puree over the man's

tuxedo jacket; how she had made a quality exhibition with the strip

dance that went to full frontal at her sixteenth birthday party; how

she had taken her mother's Visa, forged the signature, and bought

the

current 'liaison' from the council houses a 500-cc Yamaha, new; how

she

swore at her stepfather where the world could hear her; how she stole,

screwed . , .

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They had pulled clear of Ljubljana. They had lurched to an uneven

stop

at a halt station. There was the slamming of doors, and the scream

of

whistles. The train headed on in the night. . How she was gone,

dead,

buried. He thought that his own father would have taken a strap to

the

horrid young woman, and his own mother would have locked her in a

bedroom to scream, starve, do what she cared. There were two

photographs in the briefcase. There was the photograph of her

hanging

back and half hidden behind the posed pair, her mother and stepfather,

with her face pinched in aggression. It was the second photograph

that

interested Penn more, the girl laughing, and a prettiness on her face,

and three of the 'liaisons' from the council houses with their arms

on

her, as if they knew each corner of her. This photograph had been

hidden in her room and found by her mother. Perhaps he would find

which of the photographs was real, perhaps not ... A man towered above

him. It was as the instructor had said. A man in a uniform of cheap cloth, and with a cheap leather belt with a cheap leather holster

slung

from it, and a cheap cigarette in his mouth, waited over him, smelling

of cheap lotion. His passport was checked, handed back to him. No

record was taken of his passport number. He was into Croatia. Maybe

it was important that no record had been taken, maybe not. He settled

back to the photographs, and back to his notes. It certainly would

have been easier for him if the client's daughter, Dorrie, had been

more than just a horrid young woman. She knew the sound of the

Jaguar.

And she knew to take his moods from the sound of the Jaguar braking.

The braking was sharp, noisy. God .. . she set her face, the smile

of

the little woman back home and waiting on an angry breadwinner

returning from commercial warfare, with his damned nose tweaked or

his

damned ego bruised. She could usually massage his temper, turn anger

to a sullen acceptance. Mary opened the front door. "Poor dear,

what's the crisis?" The door slammed behind Charles Braddock, kicked shut with his heel .. . Fine for him to kick the door shut with his

iron-tipped shoe heel, but heaven preserve a village boy who as much

as

brushed a leaning elbow on the paintwork .. . "The crisis is those

bloody Koreans, the crisis is that they are, twenty-four hours after

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ink on paper, requiring re-negotiation of penalty clauses. Bloody

impossible .. ." "Poor dear. Gin's waiting." Routine time. Into the

small living room. Into his chair. Four cubes of ice, two fingers

of

gin, half-slice of lemon, to the top with tonic, and let him blather

it

out. Mary sat on the arm of the chair and her fingers made patterns

at

his neck, and the gin level lowered as if the anger was gulping down

his throat. Curses, obscenities, giving way to resentment,

self-pity,

nothing changed. After their supper, when she was putting the dishes

away, she might just push him down the garden towards his 'snug',

and

she might just ring next door and get Arnold to report for duty across

the stile.

"I mean, how can you do business with people, agree everything, have those bloody lawyers sift through it, have them sign it, then the

little buggers want to start haggling again? It is just not possible

.. ."

Her fingers soothed him. "Poor dear .. ."

Resigned. "How's your day been?"

"He rang," she said brightly. "He rang from the airport .. ."

"I should think he bloody did, and bloody cheerful he should have

been,

with the bloody money we're paying him."

"Not, actually, cheerful. Sort of distant .. ."

She knew she shouldn't have said it. It was like another flint in

a

walking shoe.

She saw the frown burrow at his forehead and tried to escape. "I

don't

know .. . I'll get supper."

"Hold, hold, what do you mean, distant?"

"Well, it was the airport. He was just flying out. Nobody's

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communicative when they ring from the airport .. ."

"Give it me."

She took a breath. "It was as though he was uninvolved, of course

he's

not involved. It was as though it was just another job, of course

it's

just another job. Why should he be involved .. . ?"

And she felt the tiredness, and she didn't want to talk about it,

and

she didn't want to think about it, and she had sat all the afternoon

in

Dorrie's room. She was tired and the anger in his face lowered at

her

and his voice beat over her.

"His problem, Penn's problem, is he's second-rate. He's not what

Arnold cracked him up to be. He's offensive and second-rate. If

it

hadn't been for you, I tell you, I would not have tolerated his

rudeness to me. He caught me, and he's a bloody second-rater. He's taking me, you, us, for a bloody ride."

The snap. She was trying to call it back, the face of a small child,

happy. The weight of a footfall on a dried branch. She had the body of the child and the clothes of the child. She went for the kitchen.

The face was old, mature, not a child's, and screwed in dislike. She

was shouting back at him. Always the image was of the screwed face

of

a young woman, never of a happy child. Her voice, shrill, "He should join the club. Right? Should join the club because we're all

second-rate to you. Right? Starting with my daughter." The

lights

were dim over the platform, the electricity supply had been reduced

to

save power. Penn's carriage between Ljubljana and Zagreb had been

empty. He took his suitcase down from the rack and he checked that

his

briefcase was fastened and he went to the door. He stepped down onto

the platform, into the gloom of the place. A pair of Germans, suits,

businessmen, jostled past him, and Penn thought they might have been

cursing that they hadn't flown. Down the platform he saw two

military

policemen questioning a young man against the grimed brick wall, and

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one of them held back a Rottweiler dog on a short leash, and Penn

guessed they would be checking for army deserters. He followed the

Germans through the exit arch and down the corridors past the closed

ticket windows. There were men, women, sleeping on the hard floor

in

corners, and Penn was reminded that somewhere out in the darkness,

out

beyond the city, there was war. He hurried. He knew where he would go

because he had memorized the guidebook map. There was a mist on

Zagreb. He stumbled on the cobblestones of the street. A bell rang fiercely and he looked up, startled, as a tram loomed towards him.

He

skipped forward and tripped on a tram line. He saw the neon sign

of

the hotel. Tired staff waited on him at the reception. He walked

past

the entrance to the bar, closed. He looked into the casino, deserted

but for the croupiers. He went by the dining room, shut. A slow

lift

took him up. He gave the porter a pound sterling coin, and the porter

grimaced as if it were dirt. He wanted German marks or American

dollars, and Penn thought he could go stuff himself. There was a

siren

in the darkness. All around him, in the night, a hostility. A

foreign

place, this, not Penn's place. And just thirty-five miles down the

road was the cease-fire line and the start of the war zone, and it

was

not Penn's war. He would have said that he was good at being alone,

but in the hotel room he felt his loneliness. Not his place and not

his war ... He threw off his clothes. He washed. He unpacked his

suitcase. There would have been other men in the hotel, far from

home,

nit-picking through their lives, behind their locked doors. He

chose

to scratch unhappily at his marriage, as if with grubby fingernails.

Alone in the room he could summon the honesty to say it was not Jane's

fault, he was to blame. Five years back, making small talk at a

railway station waiting for a fog-delayed train, and going for a drink

when the train was finally cancelled, and sharing a taxi. She was

so

different to the women, the girls, in Gower Street. She was pretty,

fluffy, and her skirt was always halfway up her thighs and climbing,

and he was the quiet one with the secret of his job to hide behind.

She

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must have felt an excitement at being with a man who did secret work

for the government, something that could not be talked about, and

the

excitement had lasted through to marriage, and then gone sour. Gone

sour because she would come home from the estate agent's, and maybe

he

would be just going out for a night shift with the Transit van team

of

watchers, or maybe he had been up all night and half the day and gone

to bed and expected her to tiptoe round the maisonette as if she was

a

dormouse, and maybe he would snarl because she'd woken him with the

telly and the soaps, or maybe it had been a bad damn awful day that

couldn't be talked through because that was the lore of the Service.

Maybe it was him snapping at her friends because he couldn't answer

their so bloody simple questions about his work. Maybe it was him

refusing, point blank, to permit her to ask her father for more money