Vagabond (41 page)

She had said, ‘You’re a sight. What happened?’

He had said, ‘Something to do with a door.’

For a while, as they trekked, she’d left it. The wounds were clean and the cuts were already knitting but the abrasions were ugly and the bruises were colouring. His lips were puffed out of shape, and he’d looked at her through slit eyes because the lids were swollen and the bags under them grotesque. They’d crossed Resslova Street, and she’d pointed down it, indicating a tall church spire. She’d said, ‘I haven’t been there, but it’s significant in Prague history. It’s St Cyril and St Methodius. There was a shoot-out in the crypt, and some partisans were killed. It was after the assassination of a Nazi administrator and . . .’ He had shown no interest and she hadn’t bothered to go on with the story. Extraordinary, because she’d read the guidebook and wished she had time to go there, feel the place and sense the event. The hotel was huge, modern, glass and steel, without the heritage of the church behind them. She rated him a philistine, shorn of sensitivity.

She quit irony, did flippant. ‘Will you tell me why you and the door were fighting?’

‘No.’

‘Make a habit of it?’

He glanced at her. The file in the archive said he had run agents but that was a long time ago. Life had moved on. Perhaps he’d gone out for a few drinks in the old town, been jumped and mugged. Not something to boast about. So bloody patronising, and he’d been beaten up. She wondered if he’d lost his wallet. Street-thieving in central London – Romanians, Bulgarians and Albanians, the favourite villains – was a constant moan in the office, the hassle of sorting out the damage. Police she knew in the capital told her that only idiots fought to protect their property. It was best to let the scumbags have it. He wouldn’t have. It would impinge on his pride to cave. He’d been done over on a street in the Stare Mesto and his pride was injured. It was almost worth a giggle.

‘I don’t make a habit of fighting doors.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

They were close to the hotel when he slowed, then veered off to the left and the wide car park. He said, ‘Just a little query. Did you see our Joe this morning?’

‘Exton? No.’

‘Sleeping in, was he?’

‘I checked his room, but didn’t get an answer.’

‘Last night, how was he? Standing up well?’

A gulp. Perhaps her irritation showed. ‘I didn’t see him last night. I did the Irish. Didn’t you know? Followed her back. Saw her inside, then went to my room. Yes, I tried him – I opened his door and the bed hadn’t been slept in. He wasn’t there.’

‘Wasn’t there last night or this morning?’

Reluctant. ‘Something like that.’

‘Well, well . . .’

She saw the girl, Frankie.

‘I’d have thought, you having a good relationship with your Joe, that he wouldn’t go to the toilet without your say-so. Anyway, we’ll close that down.’

They were at the edge of the car park and could see the route to the hotel’s revolving doors. He didn’t rate her; she didn’t like him. Frankie had been in the black trouser suit she’d worn before and a neutral blouse. Her hair had been pinned up at the back of her head. She was new to it all, Gaby thought, naïve and stood out. She didn’t take precautions.

She didn’t need to say it, but did – as if it were important to prove her tradecraft. ‘Standing out, obvious. My mum and dad used to take me and my brother to the Northumbrian coast, and on the Farne Islands there’s a lighthouse, the Longstone. She was about as obvious as that is when it’s flashing.’

‘Do you reckon she’s crap?’ He had spoken quietly, as if her opinion was important.

‘Absolutely.’

‘You don’t think it’s intended?’

She was rocked. She felt as she had on the first day of the surveillance course when she’d spotted none of the people tracking her. She had almost failed.

She murmured, didn’t know if he heard, didn’t care, ‘Fuck you.’

He thought it a test of wills. In Danny Curnow’s mind there was a similarity between the places he knew best: there had been that trial of morale on the beach at Dunkirk, on the shingle slopes of Dieppe and on the wide sands in front of Hermanville-sur-Mer. He could have backed away or accepted the challenge. It was, of sorts, a game. At best, the reward for showing out would be the failure of the mission. At worst, if his efforts were inadequate and the tail was seen, lives would be cut short. The location for the game was the garden around the church at Vyšehrad and inside the fortress walls. He had not chosen the ground: Malachy Riordan had.

They made a good-looking couple. They seemed to chat and joke together. He led through a narrow entrance under a low arch and the defensive walls were high on either side. Gaby Davies followed him. He wasn’t proud of the way he had treated her but had thought it necessary. If they showed out, everything that had been done was of no value. Why was he doing it?

He could have seen Malachy Riordan approach the hotel, swing away to the right, head along a residential street above the river and follow the signs to the castle. He could then have backed off. Dusty would have understood, Matthew Bentinick too. It was about superiority, claiming the bragging rights. He was doing it for himself.

A challenge issued and accepted.

There was a café to the right. Malachy Riordan took a seat and the girl, Frankie, went to a hatch and ordered coffee. He led Gaby Davies into the souvenir shop on the opposite side of the cobbles where she bought the necessary guidebook. He stuck himself at the postcard carousel, where he could see them. He and Gaby lingered, were fussy about which map they needed. When he saw, across the road into the gardens, that they had finished their coffee, he told Gaby to pay quickly. Then they went down towards a small church that was only a circular tower – she told him it was St Martin’s Rotunda, a millennium old. Malachy and Frankie passed them – so close that he could see the stress lines at the girl’s mouth. Had she joined up for this? Had she anticipated what participation in guerrilla warfare was about? Did she know what a prison cell looked like, how the food tasted? Had she imagined what it was like to be shot, wounded, down in the gutter with the blood seeping? He doubted it. They went on.

He told Gaby that they would leapfrog, and keep eyeball. Danny Curnow could not have backed off.

Bloody men, and their ego. To Gaby Davies there was a world of madness around her. She read it.

Malachy Riordan would walk with Frankie McKinney through the gardens of Vyšehrad and would use all the skills he possessed in anti-surveillance tactics, as practised and perfected by the experience of forty years’ sporadic conflict on Altmore mountain. He’d look to see whether Ralph Exton had brought baggage with him and whether Frankie McKinney had a tail. She and Curnow did not have to be there – the madness merged to insanity. He had no reason to prove his skill other than feeding arrogance.

Or something else.

Fear?

Interesting. She was beside him. She had the guidebook. She had to talk for the sake of authenticity. ‘It’s about a woman who married down. She was Princess Libuše and this was her dad’s castle site, more than a thousand years ago. He was Vratislav the Second. She insisted on marrying a peasant, Pr
e
˘
msyl – might have been a ploughman. Their dynasty founded Prague. Fascinating. You riveted? Of course you are. Anyway, the main defences were put up in the late seventeenth century. Did you ever get married, Curnow? Don’t answer. I didn’t either. Do I have to keep going? Over there, that’s the church of Sts Peter and Paul. Across the square – show some bloody interest – the statues are of Libuše and Pr
e
˘
msyl. How are we doing?’

They were bronzes, more than life-size. He wore a close-fitting helmet, had a shield on his arm and held her close. Gaby could turn with her map, orient herself, and was well placed to see the two targets going towards the church.

‘There’s a cemetery for national heroes. Want me to book you in?’

He didn’t rise, seemed calm enough, and other visitors drifted by them. A couple of kids had a football. She sensed a trap was baited but didn’t know where or when. She could imagine how it would be if the teeth snapped shut on her ankle. She would go back to Thames House on a crutch, take a lift up and go past Jocelyn’s cubicle. She’d see the expressionless face, feel the condemnation, and make her way to Bentinick’s lair for the dressing-down. Unthinkable. How had it happened? The instructor who had done the early courses with her intake had told a story of a Soviet trade attaché who had been regarded as a top-priority surveillance subject and was supposedly in blissful ignorance of the fifteen men and women from A Branch who traipsed after him, buses, trains, taxis and on foot. There might have been micro-dots at dead letterboxes or brush contacts. Even had a big chief out of the office doing it. An edict: no showing out. It had ended in red-faced embarrassment one sunny spring afternoon by the Serpentine. The Soviet had turned, without warning, had walked briskly back. He had gone up to the ‘big chief’, identity a matter of national-security secrecy, and had told him that the techniques and procedures of his people were exceptionally poor, that the Syrians, even the Egyptians, would make a better fist of it. He had handed over his card and offered to arrange for surveillance training courses, then buggered off. She thought Curnow needed the adrenalin surge pound, that the game mattered more than the result.

The targets were sitting on a bench, facing a low privet hedge. Beyond it the fortifications cascaded down to the river. There were no seats, with a line of sight to them, where she and Curnow could park. He kept her on the move and they drifted towards the church. She did her map routine again, the excuse to turn through the full circle. The bench was empty. She had no eyeball.

‘Bugger. I don’t have them.’

‘What can you see?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You look hard?’

‘Of course – what for, Malachy?’

They were away from the bench and the views up-river, where rowers and scullers did their time trials, and down-river, towards the castle and Charles Bridge. They had tracked along a line of trimmed conifers that gave them cover and had gone into the cemetery. There was a covered walk on two sides of it. Heavy shadow there, and he kept back from the light. Near to them there was an exit towards the main body of the church.

‘In London, from what I hear, it would be anything. Old and young, black women as likely as men in suits. Here, it would be the Czech police. They’d be given descriptions of us. There would be, perhaps, a Five man with them, but it would be done by Czechs, and it would be men.’

He had her hold up the mirror from her makeup pouch at an angle that suited him. He could see across to the cemetery’s entrance. It was crowded with headstones, mostly marble. Angels pranced above the dead, and fresh-cut flowers brightened some plots.

‘Are we clean?’

‘I think so.’

She thought he said it grudgingly. ‘Can we go?’

‘Soon.’

‘When is “soon”?’

‘When I say it is.’

‘Can I tell you—’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Are you always nervous – frightened? You’re screwed up. How would I know? It’s an infection and you’ve given it to me. That’s how.’

She didn’t know by how far, if at all, she had overstepped the mark. She felt for the muscles at the back of his neck and let her fingers work on them. The boy at Queen’s, the one who had done sport, had calmed when she’d done that.

‘Those who aren’t nervous, or “frightened”, which is what I call “aware”, you want to know where to find them? They’re in the graveyard, like the stiffs here, except they went too young. You know what else? Most of their names are forgotten, except by their mothers.’

She kept going at the knots in his shoulder muscles, but failed to untangle them. She thought he lived with death. She didn’t know if she could. This was different from anything before: it was real, not a training run.

It was a slight. Kevin’s mother had heard that the priest had been to the other house first, then come to hers. She had no husband with her – he was away in the south, avoiding the police, the courts and, perhaps, her. She and the other children had been in the house, dead of night, when the priest had come. A cold fish. No warmth to him.

She had taken the children to school. Where else? She had work to busy herself. Straight after she was back from the school gate the police were parking outside her home. Weasel words about ‘tragedy’ and more about ‘There, ma’am, is an object lesson in what happens when wee kids are led astray’, and talk from a sergeant – with a sneer at his mouth – about what should not happen at a funeral. The sergeant had told her that the police would not tolerate shots being fired over a coffin, and advised against any ‘paramilitary trappings’. What in Heaven’s name did he mean? A bigger sneer: there should be no black gloves on the coffin and no beret. ‘If you don’t want trouble, ma’am, it would be best to steer away from anything other than an ordinary decent funeral.’ Talk, then, about when the body might be released. The undertakers would call by. She had not cried in the night but had lain in her bed, without her husband’s warmth. She had fussed at the children over their breakfast, but had told them. They had been white with shock when she had nudged them into the car and driven to the school. No one spoke to her, all the mothers frightened and holding back. At home, she had seen his boots at the back door, his coat on the hook, the school photo on the dresser, the plate in the sink that she had not yet washed and had found flowers at the gate. Then she had cried, and no one had been there to hold her. She had closed the door after her, not bothered to lock it.