Gabriel's Moon, page 23
Caldwell went on to explain more fully. This was how he communicated with the Russians. As a result of the five-year relationship between him and Blanco, Caldwell was in possession of a considerable number of drawings, sketches, etchings, lithographs and so forth, that Blanco, his lover, had given him – often with fulsome declarations scribbled on them. It was very easy to add a microdot. Then the drawings were sent to a small Moscow art gallery. They were authentic Blanco artworks, after all – and there happened to be an ardent collector in the city. The KGB.
‘It was brilliantly secure. Worked like a charm. Trouble was,’ Caldwell said, ‘I ran out. I had used all my small collection up over the years. Hence the need for a new drawing.’
‘Enter Gabriel Dax, art dealer,’ Gabriel said, drily.
‘Faith Green’s idea. Then she saw its potential.’
Caldwell looked around again. Gabriel wondered if he was searching for a specific individual.
‘By the way,’ Caldwell said. ‘There are ten dentists behind that door. Working like demons.’
‘What’re you giving them in these microdots?’ Gabriel asked, sensing that Caldwell was in a confessional, indiscreet mood.
‘Well, in this one,’ Caldwell tapped his jacket pocket, ‘are all the photographs of the missing H-bomb. Remember our trip to the base?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘The Tovs’ll be agog. Dumbfounded.’
Gabriel shook his head in wonderment.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re telling me that the “Las Monteras Incident” was an elaborate set-up.’
‘Exactly. A joint operation between us and the CIA. All very convincing, though, you have to admit.’
‘What does that gain us . . .?’ Gabriel paused. ‘You giving this information, I mean. How does that help the West? The “Free” World?’
Caldwell plumed cigarette smoke up into the air. Gabriel sensed he was quite enjoying this act of enlightenment.
‘Basically all the information I give them makes the same undeniable point – our bombs and missiles work. And theirs probably don’t. Or won’t. Or at least not very well.’ He sniffed, made a sceptical face. ‘Russian technology may look impressive – when they trundle the gleaming rockets and freshly painted tanks through Red Square once a year with all those goose-stepping soldiers – but it’s very unreliable. Botched, more often than not. And I’m speaking as the proud owner of a new ZIL-111. “Russia’s Mercedes-Benz”, so-called. Hopeless vehicle – breaks down once a week. And that incapacity applies especially to their nuclear arsenal, such as it is. You see, there’s no guarantee that an inter-continental ballistic missile, launched from Russia, would ever reach its target in the USA. Or, if by some miracle it did, that it would detonate. Simple as that.’
‘It’s vast, their arsenal, isn’t it?’
‘Well, put it this way – Russia has about three thousand-plus warheads. The USA has over twenty-five thousand. Not to mention France and Britain.’ Caldwell shrugged. ‘It’s a very uneven playing field, the nuclear arms race.’ He smiled. ‘David and Goliath, you know. Goliath versus David. But Russia is a David with a malfunctioning sling, as it were. Won’t end happily for the old USSR.’
He took out a flat silver flask from his inside jacket pocket, unscrewed the top, and had a quick swig. He handed it to Gabriel. Gabriel drank.
‘Scotch whisky, wonderful! I’m awash with vodka.’
‘The senior Tovs have a special shop. Like Harrods – you can get anything.’
‘How interesting about Russia’s bombs,’ Gabriel said, handing the flask back. ‘And to think we live in quaking fear of nuclear Armageddon.’
‘It explains all the Cuba business,’ Caldwell said matter-of-factly, tucking away his flask.
‘What Cuba business?’
‘Ah, yes. Of course. Nobody knows. Yet. However, the shit is about to hit the fan, as they say. Russia is building nuclear missile bases in Cuba. A hundred miles offshore from the USA. Even they can’t miss at that range.’
Gabriel took this in, shocked.
‘Jesus! What? Missile bases in Cuba?’
‘Do keep your voice down, Gabriel, old chap.’
‘Sorry. I’m just a bit stunned.’
‘Yes, there’s going to be an almighty bloody stand-off, any day now. As you can imagine, the Yanks are hopping mad.’
‘What will happen?’
‘Third World War? Maybe. Maybe not. Or America will bomb the bases to high heaven. And perhaps invade – though that didn’t go well for them the last time they tried. Or, this is what I think, the Tovs will pack up and sheepishly go home now they’ve been caught out. They’re denying everything, of course, saying they’re air-defence bases to prevent US aggression against Castro and his regime. But the evidence is there – you know, spy planes, photographs. Russian nuclear missiles in America’s back yard. It’ll end in tears of some sort.’
Gabriel was both disturbed and nonplussed at Caldwell’s blithe display of secret information. He looked around the room. Number 17 was now chalked on the blackboard. They were sitting at the back, isolated somewhat from the body of potential dental patients. No one was paying any attention to the two Englishmen chatting quietly, smoking and drinking.
Then he saw a man in a brown suit come into the hall, who looked around and spotted Caldwell. Caldwell gave him a quick wave. He went and sat down across the room and took out a newspaper.
‘Who’s that?’ Gabriel said, alarmed.
‘KGB Tov,’ Caldwell said, calmly. ‘Just checking.’
‘Fuck!’
‘Relax, Gabriel. He knows I was meeting you. He was curious – just confirming.’
‘Confirming what?’
‘That, you know, you’re one of us. My London “contact” in MI6.’
Gabriel felt his sphincter loosen and clenched it hard. Sweat formed in his armpits.
‘What in God’s name are you talking about, Kit?’
‘Steady on, dear. They know that you were the one who warned me, the one who allowed me to “defect” days earlier. They saw you with me at the quayside in Cádiz, helping me board. I told them everything that you’d done for me.’
Gabriel took this in. Despite his shock and confusion his mind was still working.
‘So they think I’m some kind of a double agent. Like you.’
‘They think that, but of course you’re not. I have to say that it’s very useful for me that they do think that, however.’
Gabriel looked up at the ceiling. He exhaled, with a little shudder running through his body.
‘This is all Faith Green’s doing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘All part of her plan.’
‘Well, yes. I must say she’s brilliant. Incredibly impressive.’
Explanations started clicking into place like fruits in a slot-machine, lining up.
The whole art-dealer Blanco connection.
The meetings with Caldwell.
The way she’d deliberately left her scarf in the hotel, knowing he’d promptly return it.
And see Sefton there.
Yes, Sefton was part of it also, clearly.
It was Sefton who’d set him up in the first place.
‘My brother the useful-idiot courier.’
And Blanco with his so-called ‘secret’ information. His deal. Obviously fake. Blanco was part of it all from the beginning.
So then Gabriel Dax ‘discovers’ the conspiracy – and sees how he’s been used.
And in his fury, to spite them, he warns Caldwell that they’re circling close. Cut and run, Kit. Get out now.
Incredibly elaborate, he thought, so easy to go wrong, surely? But the puppet-mistress had him all figured out. She had jerked the strings and he’d moved as commanded. And here he was in Warsaw, still strung to her control bar. The perfect, model marionette.
The revelations made him feel nauseous.
‘You’ve gone a bit quiet, old fellow.’ Caldwell said. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Could I have another swig of your whisky?’
Caldwell offered him the flask. Gabriel took a large gulp and savoured the throat-burn. It helped. Some equilibrium returned.
‘What if I hadn’t warned you?’ Gabriel said, thinking the logic through. ‘What if I’d just left Cádiz? Bit of a risk, wasn’t it?’
‘Then Plan B would’ve kicked in. Faith had thought of all eventualities, of things going awry.’
‘What was Plan B, may I ask?’
‘If you hadn’t warned me, then I was going to ask for your help, directly, as a friend. Make a plea. Help me to defect.’
‘What if I’d refused?’
‘I was strangely confident you wouldn’t, funnily enough. I’d come to like you. Very much. I thought we were friends, fellow spirits.’
‘But for the sake of argument, what if Plan B hadn’t worked?’
‘Then, Plan C. I would have confessed the whole thing. The triple bluff. Cards on the table.’
‘I see. She’d thought of everything.’
‘Exactly. In the event, it wasn’t necessary.’
‘Yes. She’d read me very well.’
Gabriel went silent again, thinking about the process. One way or another he’d still have been implicated in Caldwell’s ‘defection’. He would still have come to Warsaw. In the eyes of the KGB he was Caldwell’s vital London connection now, come what may.
He handed back the flask, still somewhat shocked by this conclusion, this revelation. Caldwell pocketed the flask and gave him a book of matches in return. Inside the flap there was a row of what looked like telephone numbers.
‘Would you give that to Faith Green when you get back?’ Caldwell said. ‘Very important.’
‘May I ask what’s its significance? Don’t tell me if it’s top secret.’
‘Let’s just say that one of my other tasks while I’m here is to find out what termites might be lurking in our own security services: MI6, MI5. The Tovs are very open with me because of everything I’ve done for them on the nuclear bomb front. They tell me things. I don’t even need to ask.’ Caldwell gave an amused chuckle.
‘Have you found a termite?’ Gabriel slipped the match-book into an inside pocket of his jacket.
‘Think so. Faith will know what to do.’
‘The termite-hunter par excellence.’
‘Indeed.’
Gabriel was still thinking hard – thinking about Faith’s elaborate machinations. He had the bigger picture now, he realized. Everything that had happened that he’d experienced – everything – had been about finding a way to place Caldwell in Moscow. Caldwell trusted, Caldwell secure, feted, honoured – but on our side. Everything from the very outset, from the day Faith Green asked him to go to Cádiz to buy the drawing off Blanco, had been conceived and constructed to bring about this state of affairs. No, he thought – his brain now fully engaged in the swarming complexities of the way the Institute worked – perhaps even earlier. Perhaps from the very day they had both been on the same flight from Léopoldville and she was reading his book . . .
‘I’d better go,’ he said, feeling a little sick at how revelation was piling on revelation.
‘We’ll meet again, no doubt,’ Caldwell smiled.
‘Will we?’
‘I’m pretty sure we will. One way or another.’
‘Of course. I’m your London “contact”.’
‘It’s all very, very cleverly set up,’ Caldwell said. He seemed pleased. ‘I’m very glad we’re working together, Gabriel. Helps me sleep at night.’
‘Yet I feel I’ve been manipulated from the very beginning. Day one.’
‘Look. We’re all being manipulated in this business,’ Caldwell said, with an indifferent shrug. ‘We just don’t know it half the time.’
Gabriel stood up and pulled on his heavy coat. Caldwell eased himself off the wooden form with an exaggerated groan and they shook hands.
‘Good luck,’ Gabriel said.
‘You’re my good luck, Gabriel, old bean. You don’t know how important you are.’
‘Some consolation for being led up the garden path, I suppose.’
‘In a good cause. Remember that.’
Gabriel headed for the door and lingered there a moment to scan the room – to lock it away in his memory. He saw Caldwell approach the man in the brown suit. They both turned to look back at Gabriel. He raised his hand in a brief salute – yes, it’s me, I’m the one – and then left.
The next day Gabriel sat through The Caucasian Chalk Circle in something of a daze, still wondering about everything he’d learnt from Caldwell, trying to piece events together, to realize their true weight and significance. He compiled a chronology of the situations and encounters he’d experienced and saw – now – how they fitted into Faith Green’s elaborate plan. Or almost fitted, he said to himself. What was the connection with Patrice Lumumba and his brutal assassination? What did that have to do with Kit Caldwell’s magnificent act of deception? He couldn’t work it out so gave up trying.
It had rained hard in the morning and, as a precaution, the Brecht play had been transferred to the Hall of Culture in the model housing development. The play was a minimalist production and in Polish so Gabriel’s bafflement was almost total, and anyway he couldn’t concentrate. Bafflement was currently his normal state of mind, he told himself, so this was symbolically apt. There were musicians and a singer who seemed to be providing some kind of over-arching narrative that he couldn’t discern. And there was a figure who appeared to be a judge. And a young washerwoman and someone who was nearly hanged by the neck but then reprieved. Perhaps. A bit of dancing at the end. It seemed interminable.
After the play was over, he was surprisingly pleased that the journalists were gathered together for a final, farewell buffet supper back at the Metropol, everyone returning to their various countries the next day. He was hungry and ate some kind of chicken vol-au-vent with rice to soak up his many shots of vodka. He was drinking so eagerly because he couldn’t analyse his constantly shifting moods after his meeting with Caldwell: anger – yes, definitely – some shame, also, at how easily duped and malleable he had been. Helplessness too. Worry – that as well. What had he inadvertently become now? In what unknown jeopardy had Faith Green placed him as she tugged on his puppet strings?
He saw the Seabird approaching and braced himself, offering up a wide smile.
‘Hi, Celia, how’s it going?’
‘Always the same man propping up the bar. Are you sure you’re not some kind of alcoholic, Gabriel?’
That aggression, unbelievable, it just bubbled up – she couldn’t help it. He must have some toxic effect on her, he realized; he must be a constant provocation, an itch, a stone in her shoe.
‘No,’ he said, calmly. ‘I’m not an alcoholic – just sad this is our last night together. Drowning my sorrows.’
‘Oh, yeah, sure. Where were you yesterday? We had a great day at the factory. Fascinating. A belter. And a really smashing football match. Bet you don’t like football, do you, Gabriel?’
She picked a full shot-glass off the bar and sipped at it.
‘You lose the bet,’ he said. ‘Chelsea supporter.’
‘So where were you?’
‘I had terrible toothache, had to find a dentist urgently.’
‘How’d you manage that?’
‘I asked at reception.’
She looked at him, full of suspicion, and finished her vodka.
‘What did you really do? Go on, you can tell me.’
‘I went to a dentist. Big filling. Just decay.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
That was bold, he thought, almost a declaration of war.
‘You know, I really don’t care whether you believe me or not, Celia. I would have thought that was obvious by now.’
That threw her a bit: his usual politesse having disappeared for a moment.
‘I saw your notebook, looked over your shoulder. You were just doodling, not writing.’
‘I have my own personal shorthand.’
‘What’re you really doing here in Warsaw, Gabriel?’
‘Same as you.’
‘Liar.’
She was definitely drunk, he thought. That was brazen.
She stared at him, blinking, full of a kind of hate, he thought. Then she walked away, a little unsteadily.
Gabriel turned and picked up another vodka. Better eat something more, he thought, and wandered over to the buffet. There was cod’s roe on blinis with sour cream, some very pale, dubious-looking small sausages, and the usual dry bun with tasteless cheese. He opted for the cheese bun. He found he was dreading the flight back to London: the stopover at Stockholm – possible delays – hours in the Seabird’s company . . . But then the idea came to him with beautiful clarity. There was another way out.
He went in search of Ryszard and spotted him at the far side of the conference room in earnest conversation with Celia Bird. He had a powerful conviction that she was talking about him. To hell with it, he thought, and strode across the room towards them. As soon as Celia saw him coming, she whispered something to Ryszard and hurried off. Yes, he acknowledged, she had indeed been talking about him.
But Ryszard was his usual benign self, as if Celia’s poisonous words had gone in one ear and out the other. He asked how Gabriel’s toothache was. Problem solved, Gabriel said. Then he asked Ryszard if he could stay on a few extra days at the Metropol, if his flight could be changed.
‘This should not be difficult,’ Ryszard said.
Gabriel told him about his book, Rivers, and how he wanted to write a chapter about the Vistula river and Warsaw.
‘This would be amazing, Mr Dax.’
‘I’ll gladly pay for the extra days.’
‘Unfortunately, that would be necessary. Let me make the arrangements with the hotel. I will change your flight to . . .’
