The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (99 page)

“I want my brothers.”

“Great, really great,” Franco responded, shuffling his papers in search of the next cue.

“And I want something else. The
bastardos
who murdered them.” The voice was rising through all the octaves of emotion. “This was not war but murder, of two innocent boys. Don’t you see? That is why they had to burn my brothers’ bodies. Why they could never admit it. And why this miserable British Government continues to cover it up. Wickedness! Which makes them as guilty as those men who pulled the trigger and poured the gas.”

“Yeah, sure,” Franco stumbled, scratching his stubble, unused to anything more heated than a weather report. “So I suppose we’d all better write to our MPs and give Mr. Makepeace a hand.”

“And crucify the bastards like Francis Urquhart who are betraying our island, selling us out to those Turkish
poustides
…”

The producer was second generation, not familiar with all the colloquial Greek covering the various eccentricities of human anatomy, but the intonation was enough to cause him alarm, especially with license renewal coming up. Uttering a prayer that no one from the Radio Authority was listening, he made a lunge for the fade control. And missed. The cup of stale coffee tipped everywhere, over notes, cigarettes, his new jeans. Havoc. Evanghelos Passolides, after an armistice of almost fifty years, was back at war.

Twenty-One

All opposition requires retaliation. I prefer to get my retaliation in first.

The French Ambassador had begun to feel a strong sense of kinship with General Custer. Since the elevation of Arthur Bollingbroke to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, business had degenerated into bloody war, waged by the Frenchman against insuperable odds and a foe who had dispensed with diplomatic trimming in favor of wholesale scalping. Monsieur Jean-Luc de Carmoy had no illusions about the fact that the Court of St. James’s had become distinctly hostile territory. The Ambassador preferred to pursue his campaign with strawberries and champagne rather than the .44 caliber Winchesters of the U.S. cavalry but, like the blond American general, he had made the deeply personal decision that if he were going to die he would do so surrounded by friends. They milled about him as he stood directing maneuvers from the lawn of his official residence overlooking Kensington Gardens.

“Enjoying the quiet life, Tom?”

Makepeace cast his eyes at the garden crowded with guests. “As much as you.”

“Ah, but there are differences between our lives,” de Carmoy sighed, lifting his eyes in search of the sun that shone over his beloved Loire. “I feel at times as though I have been sold into slavery, where every rebuke must be met with a smile and every insult with humility.” He paused as a butler with hands resembling black widow spiders supplied them with full glasses before taking Makepeace by the arm and leading him toward the seclusion of a nearby lime arbor. There were obviously things to discuss.

“I envy you, Tom.”

“The freedom of the wilderness. You envy that?”

“What would I not give at times to share with you the liberty to speak my mind.”

“About what in particular?”

“Your Mr. Urquhart.” His face had the expression of a leaking milk carton.

“Scarcely
my
Mr. Urquhart.”

“Then whose, pray?”

Around them the branches of the pleached limes twisted and entangled like a conspiracy. They were both aware that the Ambassador had crossed beyond the frontiers of diplomatic etiquette but, caught in the crossfire between Bollingbroke and the Quai d’Orsay, de Carmoy was in no mood for standing still.

“Tom, we’ve been friends for a long time now, ever since the day you summoned me to the Foreign Office to administer a formal mutilation”—the Frenchman brushed some invisible piece of lint from the sleeve of his jacket—“after that confidential computer tape went missing from British Aerospace.”

“Along with two French exchange technicians.”

“Ah, you remember?”

“How could I forget? My first week at the Foreign Office.”

“You were frightfully severe.”

“I still suspect the clandestine hand of some official French agency behind the whole thing, Jean-Luc.”

The shoulders of the Ambassador’s well-cut suit heaved in a shrug of mock Gallic confusion. “But when you’d finished you sat me down and plied me with drink. Sherry, you called it.”

“Standard Foreign Office issue. For use only on open wounds and Africans.”

“I think I tried to get Brussels to reclassify it as brush cleaner.”

“Didn’t stop you finishing the whole damned decanter.”

“My friend, but I thought it was meant to be my punishment. I remember I was swaying like a wheat field in an east wind by the time I returned home. My wife consoled me, thinking you’d been so offensive I’d had to get drunk.”

Like old campaigners they smiled and raised glasses to toast past times and dig over old battlefields. The Frenchman took out a cigarette case packed with Gauloises on one side and something more anodyne on the other; with a quiet curse Makepeace took the Gauloise. He’d started smoking again, along with all the other changes in his personal habits. God, he’d left her only an hour ago and knew that in spite of the aftershave he still reeked of her. Pleasure and pain. So much was crowding in on him that at times he had trouble finding space to breathe. Slowly the trickle of humor drained from his eyes and died.

“How is Miquelon?” he asked.

“Blossoming. And yours?”

“Teaching. In America.” He gave his own impression of the Gallic shrug, but without the enthusiasm to make it convincing.

“You sound troubled. Let me ask…”

“As Ambassador? Or as an old friend?”

“About politics. I have no right to pry into personal matters.” In any event, the Ambassador didn’t have to. At the merest mention of his wife, Makepeace’s face had said it all. He’d never make a diplomat, no inscrutability, all passion and principle. “I hear many expressions that the era of Francis Urquhart is drawing to its close, that it is only a matter of time. And much discussion of who, and how. Many people tell me it should be you.”

“Which people?”

“Loyal Englishmen and women. Friends of yours. Many of the people here this afternoon.”

Makepeace glanced around. Among the throng was a goodly smattering of political correspondents and editors, politicians and other opinion-formers, few of whom were renowned as Urquhart loyalists. From a distance and from behind a tall glass, Annita Burke was staring straight at them, not attempting to hide her interest.

“You’ve been getting pressure,” de Carmoy stated, knowing it to be a fact.

“Nudges aplenty. I suppose I’m meant to be flattered by so much attention. Now’s the moment, they say, step forward. But to be honest, I don’t know whether I’m standing on the brink of history or the edge of a bloody cliff.”

“They are your friends, they respect you. Virtue may be a rare commodity in politics; it may speak quietly at times, but no less persuasively for that. It sets you apart from others.”

“Like Francis Urquhart.”

“As a diplomat I couldn’t possibly comment.”

Makepeace was in too serious a mood to catch the irony. “I’ve thought about it, Jean-Luc. Thinking about it still, to be precise. But did any of these friends of mine suggest to you how their…ambitions for me might be achieved? Or are these no more than slurpings through mouthfuls of Moët?”

“My assessment is that this is not idle talk. There’s a desperate sense of longing for a change at the top. I’ve heard that not just within your party but from across the political spectrum.”

“And from Paris, too, no doubt.”

“
Touché
. But you can’t deny there’s a great moral vacuum in British politics. You could fill it. Many people would follow.”

Makepeace began running his index finger tentatively around the rim of his crystal glass as though he were tracing the cycles of life. “For that I need a vehicle, a party. I might be able to grab at the wheel, force Urquhart off the road, but it would probably do so much damage that it’d take years to get it working again. The party’s scarcely likely to offer the keys to the man who caused the accident.”

“Then create your own vehicle. One that’s faster and better built than Urquhart’s.”

“No, that’s impossible,” Makepeace was responding, but they were interrupted by another guest, the Minister for Health who was seeking to bid farewell to his host. Felicitations and formal thanks were exchanged before the Minister turned to Makepeace.

“I’ve got only one thing to say to you, Tom.” He paused, weighing both his words and the company. “For God’s sake keep it up.” With that he was gone.

“You see, you have more friends than you realize,” the Ambassador encouraged.

“In his case not a friend, merely a rat hedging his bets.”

“Perhaps. But they are edgy, waiting to jump. The rats, too, believe the ship is sinking.”

Makepeace was back with the rim of his glass, which was vibrating vigorously. “So often we seem to go around in empty circles, Jean-Luc. What’s necessary to make it more than noise, to get the whole universe to shatter?”

“Action.”

The Ambassador reached for the finely cut crystal, taking it from his guest’s hand and holding it aloft by the stem, turning it around until it had captured the rays of the afternoon sun and melted into a thousand pools of fire. Suddenly he appeared to fumble, his fingers parted and before Makepeace could shout or move to catch it the glass had tumbled to the lawn. It bounced gracefully and lay, undamaged, on the grass.

Makepeace bent his knee to retrieve it, stretching gratefully. “That’s a stroke of…”

In alarm he snatched his fingers back as, with the heel of his elegant handmade shoe, the Frenchman crushed the glass to pieces.

***

The helicopter swept low along the black sand coastline of Khrysokhou Bay in the northwest of the island, past the tiny fishing villages they had known as boys. Those days of youth had been long, summers when the octopus had been plentiful, the girls had eager eyes and much to learn, and sailing boats had bobbed in the gentle swell beside clapboard jetties. Not so long ago the road back through the mountain had been little more than a rutted track; it had since turned into a swirling tar highway that bore on its back thousands of tourists and all their clutter. The fishing villages now throbbed to the beat of late-night discos, the price of fish had soared, so had the price of a smile. Progress. Yet the sailing boats were still moored inside ramshackle harbors, which collected more flotsam than jetfoils. Opportunities unfulfilled, yet Theophilos’s marina on the nearby cape would change all that. Once he’d got the British off his back.

The helicopter banked. “Bishop’s Palace in five minutes,” the pilot’s metallic voice informed them through the headphones. Dimitri reached for the hand grip; he hated flying, regarding it as an offense to God’s law, and would only submit to such folly so long as God’s personal messenger were by his side. Trouble was that his brother traveled everywhere by helicopter, often flying the machine himself, which served only to exaggerate Dimitri’s congenitally twitchy disposition. He’d give his life for his brother but prayed it wouldn’t be necessary at this precise moment. He sat upright in his seat, relieved that the noise of the engine precluded conversation.

Theophilos, by contrast, displayed an exceptional degree of animation. He’d been studying a newspaper, repeatedly stabbing his finger at it and thrusting it in Dimitri’s face. Dimitri was sure this was done deliberately in the knowledge that any activity other than rigid concentration on the horizon would induce in him an immediate and humiliating attack of sickness. In many ways they were still kids back on the rocks by the beach, playing, planning new and greater adventures, testing each other’s courage, bending the rules. Dimitri recalled the first day his brother had returned to the family house as a priest, clad in his robes, clutching his crucifix and bible, a dark apparition in the doorway surrounded by all the panoply of holy office. Dimitri, overawed and uncertain, had fallen immediately to his knees, head bowed in expectation of a blessing; instead Theophilos had raised a leg, placed his boot squarely upon his brother’s shoulder, and sent him spiraling backward to the ground. That night they’d got bladder-bursting drunk on homemade wine, just like old times. Nothing had changed. Theophilos was always the bright and ambitious brother, honed by a year at Harvard’s Business School, who would lead the family Firm. Dimitri was a man of linear mind, reconciled to following. Even in helicopters.

They had landed on the helipad behind the palace and Dimitri, having cheated death once more, came back to the world of the moment. His brother was still absorbed in the newspaper,
The
People’s Voice
, a leading Cypriot newspaper in London. This in itself was not unusual since the Firm had well-watered business contacts among the expatriate community and Theophilos took considerable care to ensure that his press coverage was high in both profile and praise, but this item was not about him. It appeared to be an extensive report concerning missing graves, many column inches, which the Bishop kept caressing with the tips of his fingers, yet his words were inaudible, sent spinning away in the wash from the rotors. As they clambered from the cabin instinctively they ducked low, Dimitri wanting to kiss the ground in relief while the Bishop struggled to secure the flowing
kalimachi
headpiece. He continued to cling to the newspaper.

“What? What did you say?” Dimitri roared in his brother’s ear as the noise behind them began to subside.

Theophilos stood to his full height, his holy garb adding further inches and authority. He was smiling broadly, the gold cap of his tooth much in evidence.

“I said, little brother, that you should brace yourself. We’re about to catch a bad dose of bone fever.”

Twenty-Two

Westminster is the type of place that on occasion makes Chernobyl attractive as a holiday destination.