Wu Ming - 54

Certainly, what he had read about him in the MI6 dossier had not made him warm to him particularly. Only a major idiot could manage a career like that without going under. But other factors had intervened, clothes first and foremost, then the affected upper-class accent, the chicken’s-arse mouth and the over-active Adam’s-apple.

On the other hand the major wasn’t entirely to blame if Cary was in such a twitch during those April days. He had set off in the hope that Archibald Leach and Frances Farmer would leave him in peace for a while.

There were other bores, too, plotting in the shadows.

On the journey from Trieste to the border alone, the AMG car had had a flat tyre, nearly knocked over a cyclist and had only avoided a head-on collision with a truck by a miracle. On the pitted Italian roads, Cary had had discovered, at the age of fifty, that reading in a car made him sick. He had thrown his guts up in a stinking ditch, not even managing to save his shoes from mud and vomit.

It was at that very moment that his nerves had started to go into a tailspin.

He had begun reading the Dyle dossier the day before, in the hospitable calm of a Trieste café, over a steaming cup of black tea. He had persuaded his escort to leave him alone for a few hours, long enough to take a walk, to have a bit of peace. He was in such a dishevelled state that no one would recognise him. They had agreed on discreet and remote surveillance. Remote, but not too much so. The delicate pier-glass reflected a clear image of the two Englishmen whose task was to follow him everywhere, busy downing a beer at three in the afternoon.

In 1947, during a communist uprising in Greece, Major Alexander Dyle had asked Marshal Tito to close the Macedonian border. No communist was to escape the repression. Slaughter, mass executions on Churchill’s orders. The kind of solution that Cary found revolting. You didn’t have to be a communist to see it as carnage. When you’ve won, you’ve won, you don’t have to be merciless. What was the Latin quote? Est modus in rebus , or something of the kind.

He had sipped his blended Assam tea, resolving to deliver that opinion to the major in person when he met him face to face. That happened the following day, on the border between zones A and B of the Free Territory of Trieste. Major Dyle, a British official on Yugoslavian soil, had come to take delivery of Cary, to bring him to Dubrovnik.

He was wearing an old and uncomfortable-looking deerstalker hat in mouse-grey tweed.

He had a ludicrous moustache.

He was pompously smoking a pipe curved like a saxophone.

He didn’t stop talking for ten minutes at a stretch, and, with minimal pauses, for the remaining three hours.

Cary was not well versed in the study of physiognomy. To claim that the facial features revealed anything about a person’s character struck him as an exaggerated hypothesis, supported by large numbers of idiots with idiotic faces and refuted by too many criminals who looked like gentlemen. Anyway, he had a technique for recognising imbeciles. More than a technique, a sixth sense. Infallible. Based on a simply elaborated concept of ‘external appearance’, which was not limited to the face, but encompassed the manner of speaking, the choice of clothing, the gait. Out of a sense of indulgence towards his fellow-man, he hesitated to attribute 100 per cent certainty to his diagnoses.

With Dyle, he restricted himself to a probability of 70 per cent.

The information in the file added another 20 percentage points.

Some 150 kilometres, 180 minutes and thousands of words were more than enough to supply the remaining 10.

The umpteenth confirmation. A moron.

Fortunately, thanks to this talent, Cary immediately sensed what a terrible blunder he had committed in bringing the discussion round to Greek communists, Tito and the style of the victors.

After travelling 160 kilometres, just past Jablanac, Cary pretended to go to sleep, but this childish ploy was not enough to silence the major. He merely redirected the flow of his logorrhoea towards the driver, the innocent victim of bombastic pronouncements on international politics.

The big dipper started getting faster, his nerves were whirling now.

Cary regretted the meditation courses recommended by Betsy; he had never gone beyond the introductory lesson. If he couldn’t actually have slept, he would at least have closed his eyes, breathed deeply, relaxed his limbs. And fixing his mind’s eye on a point above his lip where the breath brushes the skin as it leaves the nostrils, he would have avoided drowning in the muddy torrent of crap issuing from the major’s mouth.

That area of the body, just above the lip, a meeting point, etc., was currently covered by annoying bristles. Raymond had dared to suggest a false beard: ‘Mr Raymond, I gave up being a circus performer thirty years ago, and I have no intention of starting again now.’

He would have given all the banknotes in his wallet to be able to concentrate amidst all that confusion.

As a conditioned reflex, Cary stretched out a somnambulant hand along his duffel-coat to find the pocket in which.

Empty. No comforting bulge.

His hand darted towards the other pocket and rummaged around in it. His fingers gripped a piece of paper.

Cary opened his eyes wide with a start and unfolded the sheet in front of his nose.

Major Dyle fell silent.

Cary turned the paper around to read it. An incomprehensible language. Italian. A large title in the middle, in block letters. Then, one line under the other, something that looked like the lines of a poem, some scribbles, words crossed out with a stroke of the pen.

‘What is it, Mr Kaplan? You seem concerned.’

‘I am, Major. It would seem that this is not my duffel-coat.’

‘It’s not yours?’ exclaimed Dyle in an over-the-top performance of astonished stupidity. ‘Whose is it, then?’

‘I couldn’t begin to guess. Does this scrap of paper give you any clues?’

The major put on a pince-nez and concentrated on the ornate handwriting. He was the kind of person who overemphasises his every attitude, like B-movie character actors. If the situation called for astonishment, Dyle was the most astonished man in the world; if he was expected to concentrate, his forehead immediately developed five or six profound wrinkles; if his role required him to demonstrate affability, the only way to switch off his natural charm was to knock his teeth down his throat.

‘It looks like Italian,’ he said after a great deal of effort. ‘The headline says Povera Patria , “Poor Fatherland”. Does that suggest anything to you?’

‘It suggests that someone must have swapped my duffel-coat for his, and it must have happened in Trieste, in that café in the centre, what was it called?’

Cary clearly remembered going into the establishment, ordering his tea and paying straight away, yes, and the waiter had asked for his duffel-coat, which was slung over the back of the chair, to take it to the cloakroom. And then? Then nothing, he hadn’t used his wallet again: he hadn’t had to pay for anything else, and they had been waved through customs because their car belonged to the corps diplomatique .

‘Stop in the first village, Howard,’ ordered Major Dyle, ‘and find a telephone.’

Then he turned back to Cary, still calling him Kaplan for the sake of the driver. ‘Could you give me a description of your duffel-coat, Mr Kaplan?’

Cary pursed his lips, the big dipper accelerated: ‘My duffel-coat is identical to this one, Major, the swap was caused precisely by their similarity to one another. Doesn’t that seem likely to you?’

‘Oh certainly, Mr Kaplan, that’s elementary.’ Sherlock Holmes grumbled to himself, then continued: ‘And your wallet? Could you describe it to me? Do you remember what was in it?’