Brian Freemantle: Here Comes Charlie M

The third turning would mean he would be going back the way he had come. He took it as a test and when they kept in step Charlie Muffin knew they were following.

The fear belched up, sour in the back of his throat, like the brandy sickness every morning.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, desperately.

So it was to be disguised as a backstreet brawl. Scuffling, grunting men, fighting expertly. Back against a slimy wall. No escape. Clawing for the knife-hand, stomach bunched and tight against the first searing burst of pain. No sound. Not words, anyway. Only in the end, perhaps. Before they fled. Traitor, they’d say. So he would know they’d got him. At last.

The road was narrow, hardly more than an alley, leading back towards the Sacre C?ur he could see outlined blackly on top of the Montmartre hill. High, anonymous buildings either side. No people. And dark. Jesus, it was dark.

He’d actually made it easy for them. Careless again. Like Edith kept saying.

Behind, the footsteps quickened, as they recognised the opportunity.

He tried to move faster, too, but it was difficult. The road had begun to steepen, with the final gradient before the steps up to the massive Paris landmark; hand-rails were set into the walls for support. He snatched out, hauling himself along. Shoulders heaving, he stopped, winded and panting, looking back. About fifty yards, he guessed. Surprised they were so far away. Moving steadily, though. Sure of themselves. No hurry now. After all these months, they’d found him.

The break in the wall actually alarmed him, so that he pulled away from it, whimpering. If it led into an enclosed courtyard, he would be trapped. Charlie could hear them now, much closer. More noise than he would have expected.

He pushed into the opening, the relief moaning from him when he saw the narrow rectangle of light at the far end from a parallel road. It was one that the tourists climbed to the cathedral, lined with bars and souvenir shops. And with people.

At last the neglected training, so deeply instilled it was almost instinct, began to take over from the initial terror. So he didn’t run.

Why the fifty-yard gap? And the unnecessary noise? And this, a passageway to safety?

It meant they weren’t professionals. And that he’d panicked. So he wasn’t professional. Not any more.

At the entry to the broader street he paused, letting himself be silhouetted, then went right, at the sound of their suddenly scurrying footsteps. He was already inside the bar when they thrust out, looking wildly in both directions. Itinerant North Africans, he identified immediately. Knitted headpieces, pulled down over their ears, second-hand westernised clothes, threadbare and greasy. Muggers, he guessed. Frightened, nervous illiterates trying to catch an unsuspecting tourist in a back alley and grab enough money for a cockroach-infested blanket or maybe a roll of kif.

And Charlie Muffin, who had fought and defeated the intelligence systems of England and America, had collapsed. No, he certainly wasn’t professional any more.

Angrily he swilled the rest of the cognac into his mouth, gagging slightly as it caught at the back of his throat. He could still taste the sourness of his fear.

Outside, the two men shrugged, looked around uncertainly and finally moved into an opposite bar.

Charlie gestured and when the waiter came, asked for a jeton for the telephone. He waited until his glass was refilled and then moved to the corner booth, jiggling the coin between his fingers.

He’d already started on his third drink by the time the police responded to his anonymous call and swept into the cafe’ opposite. He’d reported the men as drug pedlars, guessing one of them would be carrying kif. If not, then it was a reasonable bet their papers wouldn’t be in order. Either way, it didn’t matter. By the time they were released, they would have been as frightened as he had been an hour earlier.

He snorted at his own reflection in the mirror behind the zinc-topped bar. Some victory. But it had been even more instinctive than the training. Anyone who attacked Charlie Muffin had to be attacked in response. And hurt more.

It was time to move on, he decided abruptly. Edith wouldn’t mind leaving Paris. Welcome it, in fact. She had always preferred Zurich.

‘Another cognac?’ enquired the barman.

‘Why not?’ said Charlie.

Because he got drunk and made mistakes, he answered himself. It didn’t seem to matter. Whatever he did, it wouldn’t be as disastrous as the mistake he’d already made. And from which he could never recover.

It was a rotten existence, thought Charlie.

Alexei Berenkov preferred the dacha in the autumn evenings, about an hour before it got truly dark. Then he could look down from the Moscow hills and see the Soviet capital swaddled in its smoky, protective mist, like a Matisse painting. He wondered what had happened to the one he had had in the lounge of the Belgravia house. Sold, probably. The British government would have made money, he knew. It had been a bargain when he bought it. The furniture would have gone up in value, too. Certainly the French Empire.

He heard movement and turned expectantly, smiling at Valentina. His wife was a plump, comfortable woman, warm to be next to on a winter’s night. Wouldn’t have been quite the same near the Mediterranean. Or in Africa, perhaps. But then, he thought, he wasn’t near the Mediterranean. Or Africa. Nor would he be, ever again.

‘Happy?’ she asked.

‘Completely.’

‘I never thought it would end like this. So perfectly, I mean.’

Berenkov didn’t reply immediately.

‘Were you very frightened?’ he asked.

‘Always,’ she replied. ‘I expected it to get better, when you’d established yourself with a good cover. But it didn’t. It got worse. When I heard you’d been arrested, it was almost a relief … the news I’d expected for so long.’

He nodded.

‘I was getting very nervous, too, towards the end,’ he admitted.

‘Was prison very bad?’

He nodded again.

‘I knew I’d never serve the full sentence, of course,’ he said. ‘I thought, in the beginning, that I would be able to withstand it easily enough, waiting for the exchange that we always arrange … but it had a strange, destructive effect …’

Valentina looked at the man she had seen so rarely in the past twenty years. The furtive, cowed look had gone at last, she realised. Now the only legacy was the hair, completely white. Once it had been so black, she remembered nostalgically. My Georgian bear, she had called him. She reached out, feeling for his arm, looking down with him over the faraway city.

‘What was Charlie Muffin like?’ she asked unexpectedly.

He considered her question.

‘A very unusual man,’ he said firmly. ‘Very unusual indeed.’

‘I owe him so much,’ said the woman. ‘And I’ll never be able to thank him.’