Proof of Life, page 21
And if he went too far? If he upset too many people and something far worse than Tegel happened to him, what then?
Well, then he would be dead, and the dead had no regrets.
42
Stroud had not been in Paris since the riots of ’68. Back then – not yet thirty years of age – the events of those weeks had been of immense significance to him. In a strange way, it was a baptism of fire, and so very different from the war zones he’d experienced. Paris was a modern, Western city. It was a city of art, of culture, of sophistication and style, and yet almost overnight it had become a battleground. Following support for the initial demonstrations at the university in Nanterre, more than twenty per cent of the population had gone on strike. Factories and universities were occupied by soixante-huitards, street battles ensued, and the response from the police – apparently incited and encouraged by the state’s own agents provocateurs – grew ever more violent and heavy-handed. Finally de Gaulle fled to a French military base in Germany. The National Assembly was dissolved and new elections were held.
Despite the black humour of the chants – ‘I’m a Marxist, of the Groucho tendency!’ and ‘I love you! Say it with paving stones!’ – there was a real fear that the ruling class would collapse and anarchy would reign. It had happened before, and a lot of heads had been lost.
Raphael and Stroud were side by side during those fraught and desperate weeks, one day amidst the crowds gathered on the Rive Gauche, the next hurtling down narrow streets in the Latin Quarter, clutching their cameras, knowing all too well that if they were cornered by the police, they would lose not only their pictures, but also their freedom. Whatever was going on, the government didn’t want it publicised to the world.
Ironically, when the fury had somehow burned itself out, the Gaullists emerged stronger than ever. The protests and demonstrations evaporated as rapidly as they’d started, and order – at least superficially – was restored.
Of course, such a tidal wave of political upheaval had sent shockwaves through French political society, and many societies beyond. If this could happen in Paris, then perhaps it would also be seen in London, in Rome, in Berlin. Effects would be felt for years, even decades. All the same, it taught Stroud a lesson that he was to see time and again in so many places around the world. Human beings, no matter what they said and did, ultimately erred in the direction of order. The wars, the civil conflicts, the riots and protests always ended, and in their place – alongside a huge sense of relief for the vast majority of ordinary people – came a renewed effort to establish a stable society. That it became unstable again was evidence of man’s ultimate dissatisfaction with inequality, injustice and the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. It was a scenario that had played itself out generation after generation, irrespective of the culture, irrespective of the country.
Nevertheless, the Paris in which he arrived – with a different name and a different purpose – was still Paris. It was a city like no other, a city that was so very easy to love.
Stroud took a taxi into the 5th arrondissement. He had no plan, no predetermined strategy, and once he’d found a hotel and taken a room, he stood at the window and took stock of what he’d done.
Once more, driven by an innate compulsion to do everything at once, he had taken steps without considering the precise destination. He couldn’t look for Vincent Raphael. He couldn’t look for Hendrik Dekker. They were dead. What name was now being used – if the man behind those names was even alive – he didn’t know, and there was no way to find out. Based on nothing more than the indefinite words of an anonymous source, he had crossed the Channel under an assumed name and was now adrift. All he had was Jean-Michel Fournier and some connection to the French security services. That was where this thing had started, and it had now come full circle.
Whether or not Fournier was back in France would only be known if Stroud went looking for him, and that – as far as he could see – was his sole course of action. Merely asking after the man seemed clumsy and ill-advised, but what other option did he have? Fournier might very well be nothing more nor less than who he professed to be – a member of the French embassy staff – but Stroud doubted that. He understood the dynamics of an embassy too well. Diplomatic immunity and privilege were a green light to many undercover operations. Individuals could be spirited in and out of cities under the aegis of ambassadorial protection. Coups had been organised, assassinations planned, military strategies devised and implemented by men whose business cards merely said Political Adviser or Assistant Administrator.
From what Stroud remembered, Fournier had very pointedly denied any knowledge of Raphael, and then the following morning, Stroud had learned with one phone call that there was no such office as assistant to the deputy ambassador. As far as he was concerned, Fournier was the agent of an interested concern, presenting himself as embassy staff, in reality an operative for Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot he could think of. If the DGSE – as Haig had said – was now under the Ministry of Defence, then the Ministry of Defence was where he had to go.
Stroud had arrived early on a Saturday afternoon. He had to assume that the wheels of government, especially within those offices and departments in which he was most interested, didn’t grind to a halt for the weekend. Spooks were not the kind of people to maintain sociable hours. However, waltzing into the Hôtel de Brienne – the headquarters of the French Ministry of Defence in the 14th – and loudly announcing his wish to have an audience with Jean-Michael Fournier was perhaps not the wisest course of action. He needed Fournier unguarded, a meeting on neutral ground, but making contact with the Ministry of Defence was going to be necessary to determine whether he was even in the country. If he had no success with that, he would have to go via the embassy. That, without doubt, would require that he prove his identity with his passport, something he very definitely wished to avoid.
He found the Hôtel de Brienne on a map. The 14th bordered the 5th. It would take no time at all to get there. And it was in that moment – as he realised the proximity of this building – that he also comprehended the foolishness of such an approach. If he needed Fournier alone, he needed to find out where Fournier was when he was alone. His home. The journey between where he lived and where he worked. The bar he frequented, the restaurant he preferred. This was where he needed to be looking. This was where he might catch the man off-guard, and thus find out why he had a picture of Raphael in his possession. And more importantly, why that picture had Dekker’s name on it.
The telephone directory gave him three J.-M. Fourniers, only one of whom had an unlisted telephone number. The address was in the 7th, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower. Stroud doubted very much that Fournier garnered a salary sufficient for such an address. It made sense that it would come with the job, state-owned and state-funded.
He left his hotel and took the Métro. What little he knew of French was sufficient to get the right station, the right ticket, the right direction. He looked at the people who alighted and departed at each station en route – young, old, elegant, awkward, each of them travelling from somewhere to somewhere else, their reasons and motivations known only to themselves. How many of them were actually who they were purporting to be? How many of them wore a face for the world that was not their own? How many of them were operating under an assumed name with fabricated identity papers? Perhaps very few, perhaps none at all, but Stroud’s experiences thus far had contributed to another shift in viewpoint.
The times he had spent with Raphael had not been spent with Raphael at all. South Africa, the Congo, Berlin, Cuba, and finally the Allenby Bridge in Jordan, where a stray hand grenade had been thrown into Raphael’s Land Rover and wiped him from the face of the earth. All of them were fabricated, both in reality and in his memory. If Raphael was not Raphael, then who was he? How much of what he had said was a reflection of himself, rather than a reflection of who he was pretending to be? And what had happened that had necessitated his disappearance? More than that, in fact – what had necessitated that his life, at least as Vincent Raphael, had to come to an abrupt and violent end?
It was interesting that those who knew him were not surprised by the nature of his death. Such an end could be the only fitting one for Raphael, they said. Stroud remembered his memorial service. He remembered the shock they’d all felt, and yet beneath it there had been a sense of karmic inevitability. This was Raphael. This was his life. This was his death. But it was all a lie. This was not Raphael, neither his life nor his death. It was theatre, an illusion, sleight of hand. Now you see me, now you don’t. And even when you see me, the person you believe me to be is not who I am at all. Shame on you, suckers.
Stroud felt anger for the first time. He felt that deep wound of personal betrayal. He had been lied to, deceived, misled. More than his parents, more than any childhood friend, more so even than Donald Montgomery’s influence over Julia, Raphael had been a constant certainty. For all his idiosyncrasies, his lunatic escapades and death-defying leaps into the unknown in search of the bigger headline and the better picture, he had been forever reliable. If nothing else, the one thing that could always have been said of Raphael was that what you saw was what you got. Except that it wasn’t, and never had been.
Stroud got off at Bir-Hakeim and started walking. He found the correct street, and the apartment building within which J.-M. Fournier lived was right there on the corner. He was listed as one of the occupants on the external intercom, and Stroud thought to buzz it and see if there was an answer. The first thing he had to establish was whether this was the same man, and whether he was even in the city.
Standing there in the doorway, he caught sight of the concierge. He got her attention. She came out to him and he asked – as best he could in his pidgin French – whether Monsieur Fournier was home.
The woman smiled. ‘It is okay,’ she said. ‘I can speak some English, yes?’
‘So, Monsieur Fournier. He is at home?’ Stroud asked.
‘I do not know, monsieur. Perhaps here. Perhaps he is away for his work. You would like for me to call his apartment?’
‘No, it’s okay,’ Stroud said. ‘But he is back in France?’
‘Oh yes. You are his friend?’
‘No, we work together. I am also at the Ministry of Defence.’
The concierge frowned. ‘You are English, no?’
‘Yes,’ Stroud replied. ‘I work for the United Nations. I am a consultant. I have been at the Hôtel de Brienne for some weeks.’
‘Ah, yes, I understand. Well, Monsieur Fournier is here and there all the time. He is not home for a week, sometimes a day, then he is here again. It is this way with the government business.’
‘Thank you,’ Stroud said. ‘You’ve been really helpful.’
‘De rien, monsieur!’ she replied, and closed the door.
Stroud headed back up the street and found a café with a clear view of the front of the apartment building.
He had succeeded in locating Fournier’s place of residence. He had succeeded in confirming that this was the right Jean-Michel Fournier. He knew the man was no longer in Istanbul. Three out of three. Maybe his luck was turning. Maybe he was getting a little closer to finding out the truth of this thing, whatever this thing was.
He knew he would wait as long as it took. He could be accused of many things, but a lack of patience was not one of them. He had come this far. There was no turning back. Such a possibility didn’t even enter his mind.
He took a window seat, ordered coffee, and sat with his cigarettes and his thoughts.
43
It was a Saturday. Somewhere outside Hereford, an old timber-raftered pub called the Dog & Duck was the rendezvous for a ragtag collection of the weary and the frayed.
Stroud was subdued, propping up the bar and on his third Guinness, keeping himself to himself.
‘You know where he would be right now?’
He turned at the sound of a familiar voice. He hadn’t seen him since Biafra in June of the previous year.
‘Marcus. Jesus. Hello. How are you?’
‘As good as can be expected, considering the circumstances.’ He looked around at the collection of journalists and cameramen who had congregated for Raphael’s memorial.
‘So, where would he be?’ Stroud asked.
‘You heard what happened on the twelfth. The planes the Palestinians blew up in the desert?’
‘Yes, I heard about it.’
‘Hostages, eight of them British, hijacked planes, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The only other thing you’d need to throw into the mix would be several bottles of something at forty per cent proof and a couple of air hostesses. That would be Raphael’s idea of heaven.’
‘I don’t doubt a word of it,’ Stroud said. His attention went to an outburst of laughter from a group of strangers at the other end of the bar.
‘Who’s that lot?’ he asked Haig.
‘A few from Reuters, AP, Magnum. The agencies, you know? But mostly SAS.’
‘SAS?’
‘Hereford is SAS country.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ Stroud said, ‘but how come Raphael knew them?’
‘Christ only knows. Another question we’ll probably never find out the answer to.’
Stroud watched them for a few moments. They possessed the blunt-instrument look of seasoned military veterans. They were used to being thrown at something unforgiving with the expectation that it would be swiftly overcome. It took a very particular type of human being to live that life. Stroud had seen so many of them come and go. There were some who were too brutal for the army. Discharged, they would go into gun-for-hire mercenary work. The Dutch seemed to have a penchant for such a life. South Africans, too. And the British. Ex-paras, ex-commandos, ex-SAS. It didn’t matter who you spoke to – Mossad, Sayeret Matkal, even SEALs – the SAS was still ranked as the most formidable special forces unit in the world. When such a man was taken out of that elite cadre, where everything done had been done with contemporaries ahead, behind and on each side, something came unhinged. A human being built by war could only survive in war, and he would go on surviving until war killed him.
Stroud didn’t spend a great deal of time considering this until later, but then – alone, the memorial finished, the pub emptied out – he understood that there must have been so very much about Vincent Raphael that he didn’t know.
Haig stayed behind with him. They talked, shared anecdotes, drank far too much to drive anywhere and ended up staying the night at a local B&B. In the morning, each of them staring helplessly at a full English, they agreed to stay in touch, to get together occasionally.
‘I’m looking at staying here,’ Haig had said. ‘You know I got married?’
‘Yes, I heard. I was away at the time.’
‘Hell, Stroud, you’re always away. You and Raphael were born from the same egg.’
Stroud frowned and shook his head. ‘I’m not so sure about that.’
‘What d’you mean? You were always together, weren’t you?’
‘On assignment, yes,’ Stroud said, ‘but not when I was back home. Julia didn’t like him…’ He checked himself. ‘Actually, that’s not completely fair. She didn’t know him enough to dislike him. He unsettled her.’
‘Stroud, he unsettled everyone. I bet he even unsettled some of those SAS bruisers we saw last night.’
Stroud was quiet for a moment, looking away towards the window.
‘What did you make of him?’ he asked Haig.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your honest opinion, Marcus. What did you really think of him?’
Haig was pensive for some time. He smiled, shook his head, looked down, looked away. Finally he turned to Stroud and said, ‘You know, I don’t really know.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘What I say. I don’t really know. I knew him for what? Ten years. I say knew him, but that’s in the very loosest sense of the word. I mean, what can you actually say about Vincent Raphael? The Transvaal. Sharpeville, right? That was the first time all three of us were together, wasn’t it?’
‘The three of us, yes.’
‘So when did you first meet him?’
‘London, ’59. I was delivering something to The Times and he sort of flew in and flew out. Indirectly, the fact that he happened to show up while I was there was how I ended up with a job. I took some of Raphael’s pictures up to Barry Hunter—’
‘Christ, yes. Barry bloody Hunter. I’d forgotten about him.’
‘That was the first time I met him. The first time we worked together was when Khrushchev went to DC.’
‘Right, right, of course.’
‘So in truth, I really didn’t know him any longer than you.’
‘But you worked with him a great deal more. I did maybe five or six trips with the two of you. You must’ve done a countless number.’
‘Sure, yes, but you know how it is. You’re always moving, following units, getting stranded somewhere. The only time you ever really get a chance to talk is when you’re in the airport waiting to come home. And by then you’re too shell-shocked and worn out to say anything.’
