Touchstone (11 page)

“Well, that might explain why Carstairs broke into a sweat when he saw you standing there with that hulking great weapon on your shoulder.”

After a moment, Grey made a peculiar choking noise. Stuyvesant jerked around and saw the man’s contorted face, but to his astonishment, Grey was laughing, baring his teeth to the sky while his hand slapped the rock in pleasure. “Yes, oh yes, that was worth the price of admission, wasn’t it?”

Stuyvesant gave a chuckle, but a moment later the dark shadow reached them and the day went abruptly cold. He picked up his coat and put it on, but as he’d hoped (for Stuyvesant was, in his own way, very good at interrogations) Grey couldn’t leave matters unfinished.

“If you can’t reach your man Bunsen through my sister and Laura Hurleigh, how do you propose to do so?”

“Haven’t a clue, yet. But don’t worry, I’ll manage.”

“Stuyvesant,” Grey shouted, “will you for Christ sake stop trying to manipulate me!”

Stuyvesant threw up his hands. “Jesus, you don’t make it easy on a poor Bureau agent, do you? Okay, look: Carstairs’ original idea was that we could talk you into writing your sister to say that you and I were great pals and I was interested in her work. I’d go meet her, take a look at the clinics, and eventually she’d introduce me to her friend Richard Bunsen. Like I said, I’ve done a lot of undercover work, Grey; I’m good at getting close to people. Very good. And that’s all I need to do—to get close to Bunsen and get a sense of whether he could be our man, to see, among other things, if he has an alibi for the times our agitator was in the States. Clearly, having you make an introduction through your sister would have saved me some time. But I can see why you wouldn’t want to do anything that brings you within arm’s reach of Aldous Carstairs.”

To Stuyvesant’s interest, and gratitude, Grey did not storm off as he had threatened. Then again, Stuyvesant supposed that what he had told Grey wasn’t really a lie: He might still be nurturing faint hopes that Grey would write that letter, but really, he was more or less resigned to writing this Cornish trip off as a bust.

However, Grey did not climb to his feet and accuse him of deceit, which was a good sign, and the silence that fell was more thoughtful than uncomfortable. After a while, Grey seemed to come to a decision. He said, “I actually had a letter from my sister not very long ago.”

“That’s good.” Carstairs was right: The two were still in communication.

“She happened to mention that there’s a Friday-to-Monday at Hurleigh House coming up.” Stuyvesant grunted, and forbore to comment that Fridays and Mondays tended to take place in that order everywhere. “She’ll be going, and a number of the other Hurleighs will be there. It starts the sixteenth. What’s the date today, the thirteenth?”

“Today’s Monday, so it’s the twelfth. Are you talking about a week-end party?”

“Yes. Although I shouldn’t use the word
week-end
in the Duchess’s hearing: She may be unconventional, but she’s a tyrant when it comes to language. Are you sure that today is Monday?”

“Unless Cornwall operates on a different calendar from London.”

“If you say so. I heard the church-bells two days ago, so I thought…well, it must have been a Saturday wedding. Doesn’t matter—the point is, Sarah ended her letter as she usually does, by saying that she’d love to see me, if ever I got the urge to come out of my hermitage.”

“Does this roundabout tale have anything to do with me?”

Grey’s face was transformed when he grinned, an expression that clutched Stuyvesant’s heart with its familiar mix of insouciance and dread, the devil-take-all look his kid brother Tim’s face had worn on the edge of battle. “Mr. Stuyvesant, how would you like to be my companion to a week-end with the mad Hurleighs?”

Chapter Fifteen

T
HE RAIN WAS FALLING STEADILY
as Harris Stuyvesant followed Aldous Carstairs onto the train, huffing its readiness in the Penzance station. The carriage closed in around them as the attendant led the way down the corridor, pointing out the common sitting compartment, two of its six chairs occupied by men with glasses in their hands, as he took them to their private sleeping compartments. Carstairs permitted Stuyvesant the first one, and said, “If you join me next door, we can speak in private.”

Reluctantly, retaining his hat and coat to make it clear he wasn’t staying, Stuyvesant followed Carstairs into the second cubicle, which would have been simply snug without three men inside. Even when the attendant had left, having satisfied Carstairs’ demands for greater heat and a wooden coat-hanger for his overcoat, the space was crowded, its air oppressive after a day spent in the out of doors.

Stuyvesant slouched into the compartment’s tiny seat, hands stuffed into the pockets of his mud-smeared overcoat, for which the garage’s clothes-brush had proved inadequate. The rain that had begun shortly after he and Grey returned to the cottage was now pouring down the dark window, twisting the figures moving across the platform’s lights. As Carstairs fussed with his own coat, damp but unsullied, whistles sounded, doors slammed, and the train shuddered, reluctantly letting go of the platform and turning its face towards London. Five minutes longer over the flat tire, and they’d have been stuck here overnight.

Which, Stuyvesant reflected, wouldn’t have been altogether bad, to be parked in this quiet fishing village instead of being thrust back into the furious hive of workers and oppressors that was London. It made his teeth grind in anticipation. However, staying here would also mean prolonging his acquaintance with Carstairs, and the sooner he was rid of “the Major,” the better.

The two men had spoken little since Carstairs trudged back up the lane to Grey’s cottage, rain dripping from his hat brim, Robbie dogging his heels. Pressing time and the deteriorating weather had Carstairs hunched over the steering wheel all the way to Penzance, his attention focused on the slick road. Their only exchange, other than trading curses over the car’s inadequate tire-repair kit, had been while they were barely out of Grey’s yard: Carstairs asked whether Stuyvesant had any success, and Stuyvesant could only manage a brusque reply, that he’d been asked to accompany Grey and his sister to Hurleigh House in four days. Carstairs had grunted, then addressed himself to the treacherous lane.

The grunt had sounded more like satisfaction than surprise, Stuyvesant thought: Had he honestly not been surprised? Was it possible the man knew Grey so well he could second-guess him? Then again, if Carstairs’ people were indeed keeping an eye on Grey, as Grey claimed, they could also be opening his mail. In which case Carstairs had known of Sarah Grey’s invitation, there for the taking.

All in all, he thought it more likely that it had just been an involuntary reaction, instantly quashed, to the way Stuyvesant had managed to get Grey’s cooperation where Carstairs could not. Either way, Stuyvesant was happy enough for the ensuing silence. Now, if he could only prolong it until they reached Paddington. He let his hat come to rest against the window, narrowing his eyes, feigning the approach of sleep.

The other man took no notice. He brushed off the spotless bed, laid a newspaper down to protect it from his shoes, and perched atop the bed-clothes, easing the gloves from his hands. He took out one of the thin brown cigars he affected, and when he had found an ash-tray for the spent match, said “Tell me, what did you think of our Captain Grey?”

At the sardonic voice, coupled with the insinuations behind the “our,” a mighty urge welled up in Harris Stuyvesant, an almost overwhelming impulse to rise up and smash the man’s face in, cigarillo and all.
You don’t own me, you bastard, and I’m not going to do your shit work for you.

He stifled the impulse instantly, unclenching his fists in his pockets and wondering why the hell Carstairs got his goat like this (
…a considerable pleasure out of causing pain…
). Of course, that dirty stunt Carstairs had pulled as they were leaving Grey’s compound made it hard to look the man in the face—but wasn’t that part of the job, working with people you’d travel across town to avoid? Stuyvesant would use him, then move on. Like he did in any job, even those where he had to do things that made him feel like a scab and a toady and the lowest of the low-lifes. God knew he’d had enough experience with that, over the years.

Honestly, Bennett Grey wasn’t his problem. Was. Not. His. Problem. Grey was a step along the way—a small step, little more than the promise of an introduction, but that was better than anything he’d got in London.

Even if Grey had been Stuyvesant’s concern, didn’t it all boil down to a straightforward question? The man had a skill; his country needed it; why not allow Carstairs to haul him in by the scruff of his neck and make him help out?

And if he’d fallen into antipathy with Carstairs, it was the same in reverse with Grey. A few hours in the man’s company, and he felt more for him than he’d felt for some of the women he’d slept with over the years. The—what else to call it?—intimacy of the conversation on that rock above the sea had just turned him all to mush, affected him like all the leggy redheads and blonde kitten-women of the world rolled into one. Without the sex, he hastened to add—whatever it was he felt about Bennett Grey, it had nothing to do with sex. But the fact was, if the rain-clouds hadn’t interrupted their little tête-à-tête and sent them down to the cottage, he’d probably still be there, perched with Robbie atop the wall, mismatched gargoyles guarding the good captain from intruders.

It was enough to make you believe in chemistry. Or the stars.

But whatever the reason—chemistry, astrology, or just that Carstairs reminded him of all the parts of his job that he didn’t like—having to sit in a compartment with Major Aldous Carstairs and his
hmm
s and his impenetrable eyes and his fucking brown cigar made him want to slug the bastard unconscious.

Maybe Grey’s raw nerves were contagious.

Yeah, and maybe he ought to pull himself together and act like a professional.

Which was a laugh, considering that he didn’t know if he’d have a job when he got home. Ah, the hell with it.

“I don’t really know what to make of him,” he replied. “I’ll have to think about it. Right now, I need a drink. I’ll be in the seating compartment.” He slammed out before Carstairs could offer to join him.

Eyes half shut, legs outstretched, Aldous Carstairs mouthed the slim cigar, drawing a comforting lungful of the fragrant smoke. He opened his lips to let the smoke spill slowly out, and reached into his breast pocket for the slim leather note-book he carried always. He did not open it right away, just laid it on his knee and sat, smoking and looking in the glass at his face superimposed on the last of the town’s lights, contemplating how his will might be superimposed on the life of Captain Bennett Grey.

Rain on a dead land. The brush of an old lover’s perfume on the nostrils. The rebirth of opportunity to a man who’d all but given up.

Wheels turning.

Grey—
Grey!
—after all this time: threat in one hand, temptation in the other had done the job. And surely the weight of Grey’s presence, even if only in the back of Carstairs’ own mind, would be enough to tip the balance of coming events?

Since the previous summer, Carstairs had spent every waking moment working to convince those that mattered that a General Strike would be, not a catastrophe, but an unparalleled opportunity. At this very hour, a brief document—future generations would know it as the Carstairs Proposal, although for the present, it went nameless—was circulating among certain chosen individuals. A small document, philosophical in tone, with implications that could reach into all aspects of British life.

What its thesis boiled down to was that in the next month, Britain would have the chance to silence, once and for all, those who would turn the country on its end, those who would make the country a place where the able served the ignorant, the experienced waited upon the raw and untutored. Britain would have the opportunity, under the impetus of the Strike, to reshape itself and redefine what its very constitution intended. Nothing extreme, nothing radical, merely a shift in attitudes.

He had chosen the time to circulate the Proposal with care. During the next three weeks, Britannia would be rudely awakened to the extremity of its danger. She would feel rough hands around her throat, and would scrabble wildly for a weapon with which to defend herself.

And Aldous Carstairs would be there to provide it.

Then when the Strike was smashed and rule of law returned to the land? With the danger fresh in their minds, their hearts still pounding with how close it had been, Britain’s leaders—from Baldwin and Churchill all the way down to the most infant M.P.—would listen to reason, and consider the Proposal, and in the end, acknowledge that a law was worth nothing without the means of enforcing it.

Again, Aldous Carstairs would be there with the answer.

Not that the great British public would see his hand in the matter, not in this generation, at any rate. But the men of importance, they would know, and they would finally give Carstairs what he needed to do his job.

It might surprise some of them to find that he did not want power, certainly not beyond his own interests. Once the Proposal was implemented, he would step down, and return to his long-time pet, the Project.

Five years ago, Carstairs had been shocked to find that he simply lacked the authority to demand the continuance of the Project. Five years ago, truth to tell, he’d had to play every card in his hand just to keep it from being shut down entirely—a hard lesson,
Intra le alter cagioni che ti areca de male, lo essere disarmato ti fa contennendo:
Among the other evils which being disarmed brings is that you are despised. Since then, he had kept his head down, made a policy out of being useful to each generation of officials, and kept the Project alive by hiding it beneath larger concerns.

But now he had Grey.

He corrected himself: He did not have the man yet. But he would.

The authority he needed had not yet solidified. But it would.

He blew smoke at the window, watching how it rolled along the cold glass without seeming to touch it. That was where Aldous Carstairs lay, he thought: as the invisible barrier between two forces.

He had no wish to be noticed by the masses. Niccolò Machiavelli—a cliché to those who had never read the man’s work—was a brilliant analyst whose primary mistake had been to accept visible authority, which both compromised his decisions and gave his enemies a target. Carstairs preferred the shadows, not because they were safe, but because it meant others were overly exposed by comparison.

It made them nervous.

It made them afraid.

His work often involved making people afraid of him, and he was good at it because it didn’t bother him. If ever he made a family crest, its motto would be
È molto più sicuro essere temuto che amato:
It is safer to be feared than to be loved. In fact, sometimes fear in the eyes of others brought him not just the satisfaction of a job well done, but a truer, more visceral gratification. Something near to happiness.

Such as today. He really shouldn’t tease the boy so, but a cat is designed to toy with its mouse, and Aldous Carstairs was designed to play with the likes of Bennett Grey: earnest, upstanding, passionate, readily wounded. It was a serious game—a bit like chess, in its way—but it was also an amusement.

Every so often, a move in one of these chess-like games took him by surprise. Five years ago, he had been in a state of distraction, caught up in the last paroxysm of the Miners’ Union, and hadn’t anticipated Grey’s sudden and violent rebellion. Grey had squirted from his grasp like a wet melon seed, triggering calamity in all directions. Not only had it brought Carstairs’ professional life to the edge of an abyss, but half an inch farther and that drinking glass would have sliced his artery. At the memory, his bare fingers caressed the ridge along his jaw and neck, and he shivered at the sensation: Thought of the blood and the choking, the shouting and pain, still had the power to make him queasy.

Yes, the lesson concerning the dangers of over-eagerness had been hard won. He had made a firm policy out of double-checking himself at every turn, at pausing before decisions, at analyzing all possible effects of a move. And it had paid off.

Harder to learn had been the lesson of when to suspend careful thought.

Take this afternoon’s action. Carstairs’ act as they were leaving could be interpreted as the petulant impulse of a hard-pressed man, petty revenge for having been forced to wander around in the rain, ruining a pair of shoes he’d rather liked, and taking refuge in the reeking kitchen of some nearby peasants: a statement amounting to, You piss on me, I’ll piss back at you. Certainly the outraged American took it that way.

On the other hand, if one began with the assumption that Aldous Carstairs was never impetuous, that he took no unconsidered action, then his act became, not personal spitefulness, but the smooth, seemingly automatic move of a highly experienced operative. He had appeared to submit instantly to Grey’s commands at every turn, acquiescing to the man’s every whim; but just as Grey was thinking he’d got away with it, by his act, Carstairs had shown him who was actually in control.

Yes, he thought with satisfaction; it had, in fact, been the act of a born interrogator. Never let them settle; never let them know what you were really after.

And never, never let them go, even when they thought you had done so.

Especially
when they thought you had done so.

Slow; inexorable: That was the way to win.

He opened his small note-book then, settling the cigar in the inadequate ash container while he recorded his thoughts concerning the day’s events: He could still feel the wheels turning, and was beginning to catch a glimpse of how. As always, the dangerous act of committing his ideas to paper helped make them clear.