Brian Freemantle: Comrade Charlie

There was a week of practical fieldwork, mostly around London. The second surveillance exercise was much cleverer and more difficult for him to isolate, although he did. And his target failed to pick Charlie up at all when the situations were turned around and he became the Watcher. He got four Dead Letter boxes, which was the maximum, observing genuine message caches used by the Czechoslovak and Cuban consulates and broke a sample code for which he was allowed two hours in just under one hour. Marksmanship was a real pain, in every meaning of the word. Charlie didn’t like or trust guns because they went off with a hell of a noise and attracted too much attention in a genuine situation, they made his wrist hurt and his ears ache, despite the protectors, and he could never stop his eyes from blinking at the moment of pressing the trigger, when they should have been open. He made a real effort and got five points above the pass level, which with anything else would have worried him but didn’t here. The department had a section composed of men who were experts with guns: funny blokes who didn’t smile much and who always looked behind doors and wore jackets with lots of room in the shoulders. Charlie had his own method of responding to armed confrontation: turn the other way and run like buggery, even with feet as difficult as his.

The second week was spent in Herefordshire, on a totally secure army base where Charlie lived in barracks and didn’t have a single drink and was disappointed that he didn’t feel any better than he normally did when he woke up in the mornings. Charlie was confident about the language examinations, both written and oral, and felt he’d done well in the three papers of political analysis he was set. He didn’t enjoy the medicals. He had to pee in a lot of bottles and had fingers jabbed up his bum and panted on treadmills and had enough blood drawn for a vampires’ Christmas party. His eyes and ears and nose and throat were peered and poked into and he was attached to machines that blipped and told doctors things from their jumping wavy lines. There were also psychiatric and psychological tests where in the past Charlie had mucked about, quite sure the examiners were dafter than he’d ever be, but now he remained serious and didn’t try to make jokes to risk offending them.

Charlie felt quite sad in the middle of the third week when the assessment drew to a close and he realized that even being away from the same surroundings as Harkness was practically a holiday. It was an unsettling, sobering reflection because Charlie, who was always scrupulously honest with himself if rarely with anyone else, recognized at once that really was how he felt. Which meant Harkness was getting to him far more insidiously than he’d realized. And that had to stop, right away. He was buggered if he’d let the prick make his life that much of a misery.

The final session was with someone with whom he’d concluded such visits before, a balding, heavily moustached man named Shearer. He was the Director of the spy school and Charlie was always curious why the man wore a white coat, as if he were a member of the medical section. The time before last they’d played a few games of chess together when all the tests of the day were over, and the man had even kept it on then. Perhaps Shearer didn’t like his role and felt the protective clothing prevented his becoming contaminated.

‘Quite a turn-up for the books in every subject this time,’ announced Shearer. ‘You’ve excelled yourself.’ He’d cut himself that morning shaving and it had stained the collar of his check shirt.

Although he was sure he’d done well it was still good to hear it for a fact. Charlie said: ‘You know me: always try my best.’

‘I do know you, so cut the bullshit,’ stopped Shearer. ‘You usually treat all this as a great big joke. Why the sudden seriousness?’

‘I’ve always passed,’ insisted Charlie.

‘Because you don’t find it as difficult as most because you’re a born cheat and a liar and that’s what good intelligence officers mostly are, born cheats and liars,’ said the Director. ‘And that’s not an answer to my question. I asked why the sudden seriousness?’

‘No reason,’ avoided Charlie. Was he a cheat and a liar? Only when he had to be: circumstances forced it on him, more often than not.

‘Worried about lasting to collect your pension,’ demanded Shearer with unknowing prescience.

Not the pension, conceded Charlie, honest again with himself. It was the other bit: the staying on. It was, he supposed, all part of the loneliness. He filled his spare time well enough, at the Festival Hall and the Old Vic and the Barbican. And he went to movies and he read books. But filled was the operative word. There was almost a conscious anxiety completely to occupy one off-duty period until he could go the next morning to Westminster Bridge Road. Charlie thought he was like a pit pony that had spent all its life down an old-fashioned coal mine until it went blind and couldn’t find its way around in any other environment: all he’d ever known, all his working life, was espionage. He wouldn’t know what to do without it. Stirring himself to reply, Charlie said: ‘Never thought of what I do as a pensionable occupation.’

Shearer moved through the papers assembled on the desk before him and Charlie wondered if he were genuinely reading them or doing it for effect. The Director looked up abruptly and said: ‘One of the blood tests is good for measuring residual alcohol content. You know that?’

‘No,’ admitted Charlie uncomfortably.

‘You’re a good friend to the whisky distillers.’

‘I take a drink or two sometimes,’ said Charlie.

‘You take more than a drink or two a lot of the time,’ disputed the man responsible for presenting the final report upon him. ‘You think it’s a problem for you?’

‘Definitely not,’ said Charlie, as forcefully as possible. Harkness was a teetotaller: it was the sort of thing he would seize upon. Medical progress was a bloody nuisance.

‘Why so sure?’

‘Drunks get swept up. Caught. I haven’t been swept up. I won’t be.’

‘It’s only got to happen once.’

‘It won’t,’ insisted Charlie.

‘Liver shows no fatty tissue, which it would if the body regarded the intake as excessive,’ mused Shearer. ‘In fact, considering how you abuse yourself, you’re remarkably fit.’

Something else that was good to know: when he was a kid the teachers said abusing yourself when they meant masturbation. Charlie decided against trying to make a joke of it. ‘I feel fine,’ he said.

Shearer half raised himself from his chair, so he could look unnecessarily over his desk, then sat down again. ‘Still scuffing about in those preposterous shoes?’

Charlie gazed down at the Hush Puppies that had expanded and shaped themselves to his feet over months of wear. He wished he hadn’t had to thread new laces: it made them look odd. He guessed it wouldn’t take long for them to age in. He said: ‘Got bad feet.’

‘You’ve got flat feet, with a slight bone deformity in the left one, so slight it required an X-ray to show it up,’ corrected Shearer. ‘What you need are the opposite to what you’re wearing. You need proper leather, built up to create a support.’

‘Tried it,’ said Charlie, ‘didn’t work.’

‘Surveillance people commented about them,’ disclosed Shearer. ‘About the ramshackle way you dressed: said rather than making you fade into the background it marked you out.’

Charlie became immediately attentive. ‘If that’s so, if I make it so easy, how come they lost me as completely as they did?’ he demanded. He wasn’t having the disgruntled bastards score off him like that.