Charles Cumming - The Trinity Six

‘All right.’

They were turning down a narrow street, heavy brown-stone buildings weighing down on all sides. Gaddis was amazed to see a small branch of Tesco on one corner.

‘You order cheeseburger, you say “Shiteburger”.’ Miklos was laughing. It occurred to Gaddis that he must have used the same line on every foreigner who crossed his path. ‘Is funny, no?’

‘It’s funny.’

‘And the nipple we call the “mellbimbo”. Male bimbo. Crazy language, Hungarian. You like it? Crazy.’

Soon they had parked on a wide avenue beside a pile of neatly chopped wood, around which had been thrown a makeshift fence of orange plastic. Miklos retrieved Gaddis’s bag from the boot and led him down a passageway which ran between an electrical shop and a small restaurant. They emerged into the large internal courtyard of a nineteenth-century apartment building. A creaking lift carried them to the third floor.

‘I live just down here,’ Miklos said, steering Gaddis down a corridor which was open to the courtyard on the eastern side. He took out a set of keys and opened the door of his flat.

Inside, there was a large, modern kitchen with a staircase at one end, unprotected by banisters. A woman was standing at the stove, chopping mushrooms.

‘Let me introduce you to my wife,’ said Miklos.

‘Viki.’ Viki was an attractive woman, at least fifteen years younger than her husband, with long, dark hair and a slim figure partly concealed by a navy-blue apron. Gaddis raised a hand in greeting but did not approach her; she had indicated that her hands were dirty from cooking and it did not seem appropriate to kiss her on the cheek. He felt as though he had popped round to a neighbour’s house for lunch; there was no sense of anxiety in the room, no undercurrent of alarm. Was Viki in on the situation? Was she another Hungarian on the MI6 payroll? Miklos spoke to her briefly in their native tongue then offered Gaddis a stool at a breakfast bar in the centre of the room.

‘You have a beautiful place,’ he said, setting his bag on the floor.

‘Thank you. The building is very typical, but we make some adjustments. You will take a coffee? A shower?’

‘At the same time?’

Viki laughed, turning to catch her husband’s eye. There were expensive pots and pans on butcher’s hooks above the stove, black-and-white prints in frames, an iPod hooked up to some Bose speakers on a shelf adorned with paperback novels. A dog wandered into the kitchen, glided past Viki’s legs and settled beneath a deep ceramic sink.

‘Bazarov,’ said Miklos. ‘Our best friend.’

‘After Turgenev?’

His face lit up. ‘You know Fathers and Sons? You are an educated man, Mr Sam.’

Gaddis explained that he was a lecturer in Russian History and, before long, he had a cup of coffee in front of him and was knee-deep in a conversation about nineteenth-century Russian literature. Viki produced some bread and a bowl of soup and they sat together, at the breakfast bar, pinging opinions about Tolstoy back and forth while Gaddis wondered why he felt so relaxed.

An hour after he had first sat down, he was offered ‘a good hot shower and a nice change of clothes’. He duly went upstairs, armed with a white towel which smelled of chemical pine, and stood under the torrent of a steaming shower, cleaning away all the sweat and the worry and the rage of his long night in Vienna. Miklos had laid out a shirt and a jumper in a small bedroom nearby, as well as a pair of blue jeans which appeared never to have been worn. All three items fitted him perfectly; it occurred to Gaddis that MI6 even knew his sizes. He shaved and changed in front of a faded poster of Steven Gerrard brandishing the European Cup. The bedroom presumably belonged to Miklos and Viki’s son.

By half-past twelve Gaddis had made his way downstairs. Viki complimented him on his appearance and helped to pack his dirty clothes in the bag given to him by Eva. Miklos advised him to change his jacket — ‘in case a witness from the Kleines Cafe has described it to the police’ — and in its place provided a long black overcoat which was slightly tight at the shoulders. Gaddis found a tweed cap in the pocket, but did not want to put it on, arguing that it would draw unnecessary attention to him at the airport.

‘You are probably correct,’ Miklos replied, rolling the first jacket into a ball and stuffing it into the bag. ‘You look good anyway, Mr Sam. You look normal.’

They went into a sitting room cluttered with books and lamps. Viki did not follow them. There was a chess board on a low coffee table in the centre of the room, the black king toppled over. Beside the board, resting on a copy of the Economist, was a battered British passport and 40,000 Hungarian florints, the equivalent of about?200. Miklos handed them to Gaddis.

The passport seemed a perfect fake. There were stamps from Hong Kong, a stamp from JFK, even an exact copy of the photograph which appeared in Gaddis’s regular passport, taken eight years earlier. How had Tanya acted so quickly? Where the hell had the passport been printed? The British Embassy in Budapest must have been involved. He flicked through the watermarked pages and looked up at Miklos.

‘Astonishing,’ he said.

‘I have seen better.’

The Hungarian now produced a mobile phone from his pocket and handed it across the chess board. A number by which he could reach Miklos was listed under the name ‘Mike’. Gaddis knew now that the hard part was to come. The long journey home was ahead of him.

‘So.’ Miklos had also sensed the change in mood. ‘You now have what you need. I suggest we make our way downstairs to the car.’ Viki appeared in the doorway of the sitting room and came towards Gaddis, kissing him on both cheeks. He assumed that she had been listening all the time.

‘Good luck,’ she whispered, the smell of her skin like a strange memory of Holly. ‘Miklos will take good care of you.’

‘Thank you for all your kindness,’ he told her, and they stepped outside into the corridor.

Miklos’s car was still parked outside the entrance to the apartment building, close to the pile of wood. A tram chimed past, almost knocking over a stooped, elderly lady pulling a shopping basket across the street. Gaddis tried to catch Miklos’s eye but saw that his attitude was now altogether more serious. They placed his bag in the boot, stepped into the car and fastened the seatbelts.

It was a measure of the extent to which Gaddis trusted the Hungarian that he had not checked the contents of his bag before zipping it up. Had he done so, he would have discovered that Viki had placed a small package inside it, wedged between his jacket and dirty clothes.

It had been decided that Dr Sam Gaddis was going to act as a courier.

‘Listen carefully.’ Miklos had started the engine and was pulling out into traffic. ‘We drive to the airport. You are booked on the 15.30 easyJet to London Gatwick. According to the computer in my house, the plane is on time. We can check this for certain when we arrive at Ferihegy. If there is a problem, we just sit together in a cafe and make a conversation. OK? You have your passport in the coat?’

Gaddis reached into the inside pocket of the overcoat. He found the passport and held it out.

‘As you can see from the back page, your name is not Samuel Gaddis today. For the purpose of this journey, you are Samuel Tait. You have the same forenames, you have the same birthday. You can see that, for the purposes of realism, we have also given a name and address for persons to contact in the case of emergency.’ Gaddis looked at the inside back page. Somebody had written an address and telephone number for ‘Josephine Warner’ in blue biro. ‘If you need to contact Tanya in London, use the number for “Jo” in the mobile. It will go through a switchboard.’