Gavin Lyall - The Crocus List

Going down in the lift, which was uncrowded because it was still early for lunch, Maxim said: "/ think he just wants to put his hand on your knee-in a purely uncle-ly fashion."

"Why, Major Maxim, I didn't know you cared. But I'm a big girl now." Her face was controlled and serious.

"How d'you think we're doing?"

"Let's walk a bit."

They walked uptown on Madison, which quickly loses its advertising-agency and legal-eagle gloss in that direction, with a chill wind in their faces. A mere two hundred miles from Washington had brought them into a different season, although it was obviously the first hint of real autumn in New York: around them, others were hurrying because they were too thinly dressed, or tugging at coats and gloves that were unfamiliar and awkward after half a year at the back of the closet. Maxim felt smug in his thick car-coat for the first time in America.

"Well, at least we established how it all started," he said. "Were you guessing at that Track Two business?"

"More or less. But Charlie's Indians"-she had avoided the British jargon with Magill, Maxim had noticed-"are a big outfit, and big outfits tend to behave in patterns. It was worth trying. Yes, we got that far, but we didn't get any names, not yet. Are you hungry?"

"So-so."

"I don't feel like anywhere too swank. Do you mind missing Delmonico's on your first visit to New York?"

They missed Delmonico's by only a few blocks geographically but far more gastronomically-or so Maxim assumed, since he also assumed that Delmonico's didn't specialise in hamburgers and tuna sandwiches for the decorators working on the shop next door. But he felt securely anonymous jammed in a corner against the steamed-up front window, and perhaps that was what Agnes wanted.

"The trouble is," she muttered through her sandwich, "that we don't really have the leverage I was trying to imply. Mo may just not care what gets said about the Company-it's all the new team now-as long as he isn't caught saying it himself. And if he gets blamed for some dirty work that got started fifteen years ago-and I doubt he was directly responsible; he was too senior, then-how much does it hurt him now? His clients must know he's ex-Company, and like it. It suggests good Washington connections, as he said, and a certain fluidity of ethics, as he didn't say. Clients do like winning."

"He must still want the whole thing stopped."

She raised her eyebrows. "I wish I agreed with you. Look at it this way: Track Two is now doing just what it was set up to do, in just the situation they foresaw: a weak British government getting too close to Moscow. If Mo liked the idea then, why shouldn't he like it now?"

Maxim chewed thoughtfully on something he had deeded to eat rather than take out and look at; he had chosen the hamburger. "Do you think the CIA could still be running it, then?"

"No, the old reasoning still holds. If Charlie had triggered it, there'd have been a big back-up of propaganda and so on. I think the British end somehow managed to start itself up-though I'm damned if I see how."

"What's the problem?"

"Because that's exactly what Charlie wouldn't want them to do: start anything without a clear directive from over here. And there's only one sure way to do that: recruit and train them individually, or in pairs, but never let any one of them see the whole list."

"So somebody must have got hold of the list."

"That could be our strongest point: that things are running out of control. But it depends on how much control the Companywants to have now…"

"Not just a list, though," Maxim went on. "They got hold of a cache of arms and other kit. That sounds like a base, somewhere. They wouldn't issue those things individually, I'd think. I mean, if one of them steps under a bus and you start valuing his estate for probate, Ullo, ullo, ullo, how much is a case of Russian grenades worth?"

Agnes grinned quickly. But Maxim was most likely right. Spreading such immediately incriminating material around was more risky than one truly safe house. "It's something we'd like to know, all right."

"You could ask."

Agnes was about to say scathingly 'Ask how?' but caught herself in time. "So now you go and tramp the streets changing your traveller's cheques into cash and then into traveller's cheques signed Winterbotham. Spread it around the banks-have you got both passports? Clever fellow. Think up a story why you've got cash and want cheques butdon't tell it until they drag it out of you. Sign of guilt. What the hell business is it of theirs? You're innocent, remember."

This time there was no waiting at the reception desk; Agnes carefully avoided the girl's eye as she was shown straight through to Magill's office.

The door to the inner room was open and Mo was standing watching a newscast on a TV set in the far corner, sipping from a cut-glass tumbler.

"Hi, sweetie, like a drink?" He mixed her a dry martini from a collection of decanters on a silver tray-nothing so arriviste as a drinks cupboard or private bar-set on a small table. The other furniture was a couple of wing chairs, a single-ended Victorian chaise-longue and a fruitwood dressing-table. The room was decorated in quiet tabby-cat colours, with style-and a purpose. She sipped her drink.

"I did some thinking," Mo said, "and I figured I didn't need to call DC after all. Maybe I should tell you about one man. D'you want to hear?"

"I'm all ears."

"Not all, sweetie, not all. " They sat in the wing chairs. "It goes back to the old OSS days and the crusade we were running against Hitler, along with your SOE and Dot Tuckey and people like that. Like Arnie Tatham. Did you ever meet with him?"

"The name sounds… Didn't he get killed by Italian terrorists?"

"Right. I first met with Arnie, it must've been '44, I didn't get to know him well then, but he came outofthatwith one hell of a name as a field man. He was a natural, you find them sometimes, if you're lucky, and from the damnedest backgrounds. Most anywhere except where you'd go looking. Like Arnie: his old man was rector of an Episcopalian church in small-town Illinois. I think his mother died when he was young and he grew up withmore books than friends, maybe more Shakespeare than Mark Twain. I guess if there hadn't been the war, Arniewould be a professor at some small college writing monographs on how many times Hamlet called Ophelia 'a dumb broad'."

"Mo…"

But Magill was already grinning to himself. "Okay -but did you ever reread Hamlet as power politics, déstabilisation, covert operations?"

"And assassination."

"Plenty of it. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would be working for The Mob, these days. And did you wonder how an Elizabethan audience would take allofthat? I'd say they loved it-and they understood it. If that was what you did to keep control, that was what was needed. "

"So Tatham became a top field man by reading Shakespeare. And was he running Track Two?"

"He set it up, I just ran interference for him, trying to keep your people looking the wrong way with talk about opening up Winter Garden again. I guess it worked, too -until you figured it out." Agnes noted the sly flattery and smiled. "But if you're going to ask me did I know who he recruited, no I didn't. I never wanted to."

Agnes absorbed that and found that she believed it: Mo had been thirty years in intelligence work, which trains up a determination not to know some things quite as strong as the desire to know others. "And Tatham got himself killed in Italy-what? four, five years ago?"

"Right. He retired over there: his marriage had gone, and so had his daughter's"-and so had Magill's first marriage, she knew: marriages in the secret world had a high casualty rate-"and she went over to keep house for him. " He took her glass and freshened their drinks. "Then some asshole of a journalist printed a story that he was still working for the Company and a couple of weeks later the Red Brigade snatched both of them. It was the usual stuff: demands for money and release of terrorist prisoners… I don't know how much pressure we put on for the police to get off their butts and do something. I wasn't with the Company any more, and Arniedidn't have much in the way of friends left in DC, so… Anyhow, they killedhim. In front of his daughter; they made her take pictures of his body… Then the cops did do something, but I don't know if it was a tip-off or dumb luck: they raided some farmhouse up in Tuscany and found her still alive. They charged some people with the murder, a year later. It was that big show trial, everybody charged with everything, the Bologna train station bombing, Moro's murder, you remember it… I don't recall if they got a conviction for Arnie. What did it matter?"