The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (98 page)

“So what are we to do?”

“Pray. To God in Heaven and any other gods you can find in the back of your closet. Get down on your knees. Humble yourself. And beg that the Turks will be caught trying to fuck us up once more.”

***

The telephone warbled. From the rear seat of the Citroën limousine on the congested streets of Paris, the businessman stretched to answer it, listening carefully. He said nothing, his attention focused absolutely on the message and its consequences, which were clear. The quarter of a million dollars he’d already handed to—what was the name of that Turkish quisling? He’d already forgotten—had been thrown away, the gamble had been lost. And it hurt. Even in the oil business, a quarter of a million unreceipted dollars makes a heavy hole in the petty cash account. Yet that was the least of the pain, for it seemed certain that he was about to lose more, far more. Thousands of millions of dollars’ worth of lost opportunity. Oil by the seaful. It seemed he would never get to drill his wells.

He replaced the receiver without a word, hearing it latch gently into place. The darkened glass and heavy noise insulation of the limousine cocooned him from the chaos on the street beyond. This was a sheltered world, a world of privilege and security, protected from the outside. Except for the phone. And the messages it brought.

He was a controlled man, emotionally desiccated, with his appetites reserved for only one thing. Oil. The Earth’s milk. More precious to him than his own blood. With a rage as silent as the engine at idle and his fist balled like a mallet, he began pounding the leather armrest, heedless of the pain, until it broke.

***

She rolled to one side and, as the sheet slipped across the contours of her body, he felt himself shaking inside once more. Until he had met Maria he hadn’t been sure quite where his loins were, now they seemed to be everywhere, vibrating with an extraordinary energy every time he undid a button or clasp. In Maria he had found an ideal partner, a woman of natural curiosity and wit who was not afraid to acknowledge the shortcomings of her experience and was anxious to overcome them. They were explorers, trekking together through new territories and relishing the joys of discovery.

He was surprised he felt no guilt, for he knew now that his marriage was over. It was form with no substance, his wife the absentee landlord of his loyalties, his house no longer a home, and it was not enough. He had tried many things to fill the void in his life—ambition, esteem, endeavor, achievement—but nothing would work while he was alone. The presence of Maria Passolides in his world—and in his bed—had made him realize that.

As she propped herself up on the pillow, he watched transfixed as a bead of sweat trickled its way from around her neck past the creases of olive skin between her breasts. “What are you thinking, white man?” she asked, amused.

With the point of his little finger he traced the passage of the droplet, which had made a sudden rush for her navel. “I’m thinking about what I can do for you.”

Her eyes closed as his finger slid slowly past her belly button, her breath quickening. “Christ, what did you have for breakfast?” she panted. The blood was beginning to rush once more, her body desperate to make up for so much lost time.

Reluctantly his finger sidetracked, diverted to the outside of the thigh and then was gone. “Not this,” he muttered. “You came to me for help. About the graves.”

“Sure,” she said, “but why the sudden hurry?” She sought his hand but he rolled back to give them both some breathing space.

“We have little time left,” he continued. “If we don’t get an answer during the next eight weeks, before the peace agreement is signed, it will never happen. After that no one will be interested, not in this country. Something else will be in the news. They’ll say they’ve done their job, wash their hands. Cyprus will go back to being a faraway island where it might be nice one day to take a holiday in search of young wine and old ruins. Nothing more. It must be now, or we’ll never find the answer.”

“So what do we do?”

“We make a fuss. Put on some pressure. Try to stir up a few old memories.”

Instinctively, as she thought about his words, she pulled the sheet up to her neck. Over the last few days she’d tended to forget the reason why she had originally sought his help, distracted by the discovery of how versatile his help could be. They had made love in his kitchen chair that first time and in her exuberance she had torn off the arms. After they had finished laughing she had volunteered to take it back to Habitat, but then she changed her mind, deciding she would never be able to keep a straight face when inevitably they asked how it had happened. Somehow she felt sure everyone would guess simply by the way she smiled. So they’d pushed the pieces into the corner and tried the other kitchen chair, and the Chesterfield in his study where her damp skin stuck to the leather and made a ripping sound as it peeled off. He’d only invited her to bed—his wife’s bed—when it seemed there was something more than sweating flesh behind his willingness to see her. He’d not offered help in exchange for sex any more than she had offered sex for his help, but their separate motives were becoming more intertwined and confusing, so much so that she’d had to be reminded of her original purpose in knocking on his door. She felt a pang of guilt, but orgasms could be so distracting. And such fun.

“If only I’d met you while I was still Foreign Secretary this might have been so much easier,” he said wistfully. “I could’ve unlocked some doors from the inside rather than having to kick them down from out in the street.”

“But then you would be deceiving me officially instead of personally.”

“What do you mean deceiving you personally?” He sounded affronted.

“That cup of tea you offered me the first day we met and you invited me into your kitchen? I still haven’t had it.” She leaned over and kissed him before rolling out of bed.

“Now get up, Makepeace. There’s work to be done.”

***

Evanghelos Passolides sat alone in his darkened restaurant. The last diner had long gone and he’d made a perfunctory effort at cleaning up, but had been overcome with melancholy. He felt deserted by everything he loved. He hadn’t seen Maria for days. And his own Government in Nicosia was about to give away a large chunk of his beloved homeland to the Turk. Was this what he had fought for, what George and Eurypides had died for?

He sat among all the memorabilia, drunk, an empty bottle of Commanderia at his elbow. A glass was lying on its side, the tablecloth stained red with droplets of what many years before might have been blood. He sobbed. In one hand he held a crumpled photograph of his brothers, two tousle-haired boys, smiling. In the other he held a much burnished Webley, the pistol that had been taken from the body of a British lieutenant and with which he had always promised to exact his revenge. Before he had become a cripple.

Now it was all too late. He had failed in everything he had touched. Others were heroes while life had stripped him of honor and all self-respect. He sat alone, forgotten, an old man with tears coursing down his cheeks, remembering. Waving a pistol. And hating.

Twenty

Leadership is about change. Breaking things. Breaking people. Their hearts, their backs, and, when necessary, their lives.

A man’s place in history is no more than that—one place, a single point in an infinite universe, a jewel that no matter how brightly it may be polished will eventually be lost among a treasury of riches. A grain of sand in the hourglass.

For Urquhart, this was a hallowed scene: the shiny leather bench scuffed by the digging of anxious nails, the Dispatch Box of bronze and old buriri polished by the passing of a thousand damp palms, the embellished rafters and stanchions that, if one listened carefully and with a tuned ear, still echoed with the cries of great leaders as they were hacked and harried to eclipse. Every political career, it seemed, ended in failure; the verdict of this great Gothic court of judgment never varied. Guilty. Condemned. A place of exhortation, passing approbation, and eventual execution. Only the names changed.

In recent days, whenever he turned away from the lights, there were voices in the shadows that whispered it would one day be his turn to fall, a matter only of time. As he sat on the bench they were at it again, the whispers, growing assertive, impertinent, almost heckling him. And through them all he could hear the voice of Thomas Makepeace.

“Is my Right Honorable Friend aware”—the constitutional fiction of friendship passed through Makepeace’s lips like vinegar—“that the Greek Cypriot community in this country is deeply concerned about the existence of graves that still remain hidden from the time of the war of liberation in the nineteen fifties…?”

Old memories like embers began to revive, to flicker and burn until the crackle of flames all but obliterated the words with which Makepeace was demanding that the British Government lay open its files, reveal all unreported deaths and burial sites, so that the tragedies of many years ago could finally be laid to rest?

For a moment or two the House observed the unusual sight of the Prime Minister sitting stiffly in his seat, seeming unmoved and unmoving, lost in another world before cries of impatience caused him to stir. He rose stiffly to his feet, as though age had glued his joints.

“I am not aware,” he began with an uncharacteristic lack of assertiveness, “of there being any suggestion that graves were hidden by the British…”

Makepeace was protesting, waving a sheet of paper, shouting that it had come from the Public Record Office.

Other voices joined in. Inside his head he heard contradiction and confusion, talk of graves, of secrets that would inevitably be disinterred with the bones, of things that must remain forever buried.

Then a new voice, more familiar. “Fight!” it commanded. “Don’t let them see you vulnerable. Lie, shout, wriggle, abuse, rabbit punch on the blind side, do anything—so long as you fight!” And pray, the voice might have added. Francis Urquhart didn’t know how to pray, but like hell he knew how to fight.

“I believe there are great dangers in opening too many old cupboards, sniffing air that has grown foul and unhealthy,” he began. “Surely we should look to the future, with its high hopes, not dwell upon the distant past. Whatever happened during that ancient and tragic war, let it remain buried, and with it any evils that were done, perhaps on all sides. Leave us with the unsullied friendship that has been built since.”

Makepeace was trying to regain his feet, protesting once more, the single sheet of paper in his hand. Urquhart silenced him with the most remorseless of smiles.

“Of course, if the Right Honorable Gentleman has anything specific in mind rather than suggesting some stampede through old archives, I shall look into the matter for him. All he has to do is write with the details.”

Makepeace subsided and with considerable gratitude Urquhart heard the Speaker call for the next business. His head rang with the chaos of voices, shouts, explosions, the ricochet of bullets; he could see nothing, blinded by the memory of the Mediterranean sun reflecting off ancient rock as his nostrils flared and filled with the sweet tang of burning flesh.

Francis Urquhart felt suddenly very old. The hourglass of history had turned.

***

“Go for it, Franco,” the producer encouraged. He sat up in his chair and dunked his cigarette in the stale coffee. This could be fun.

Behind a redundant church that had found a new lease of life as a carpet warehouse in a monotonous suburb of north London lies the headquarters of London Radio for Cyprus, “the voice of Cypriots in the city,” as it liked to sign itself, ignoring the fact that the four miles separating it from the City of London stretched like desert before the oasis. Describing the basement of Number 18 Bush Way as a headquarters was scarcely more enlightening—LRC shared a peeling Edwardian terrace house with a legitimate travel agency and dubious accounting practice. It also shared initials with a company manufacturing condoms and an FM wavelength with a Rasta rock station that fractured ears and heads until well after midnight. Such are the circumstances of community radio, not usually the cradle for budding radio magnates and media inquisitors. LRC’s producers and interviewers struggled hard to convey to their small but loyal audience an air of enthusiasm even while they did daily battle with second- and thirdhand equipment, drank old coffee, and tried hard to remember to turn on the answering machine when they left.

Yet this item had legs. The girl was good, somewhere behind those lips and ivories was a brain, and the old man was a fragment of radiophonic magic, his voice ascending scales of emotion like an opera singer practicing arias. Passion gave him an eloquence that more than made up for the thick accent; what was more, in its own way the story was an exclusive.

“Remember, you’re hearing this first on LRC. Proof that there are graves left over from the EOKA war, which are buried deep within the bowels of British bureaucracy…”

The producer winced. Franco was an arsehole from which a stream of incontinence poured forth every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, but he was cheap and his uncle, a wine importer, was one of the station’s most substantial sponsors.

“So what do you want?” Franco asked the pair.

“We want as many people as possible to write in support of Thomas Makepeace and his campaign to have the full facts made public. We can prove the existence of two graves, those of my uncles. We want to know if there are any more.”

“And you, Mr. Passolides?”

There was a pause, not empty and mindless but a silence of grief, long enough to capture the hearts of listeners as they imagined an old man rendered speechless by great personal tragedy. Even Maria reached over to touch his hand; he’d been behaving so oddly in recent days, morose, unshaven, digging away within himself, changes that were ever more apparent since she’d been spending more time away from him. When finally his voice emerged the words cracked like a hammer on ice.