Wu Ming - 54

‘Don’t talk bollocks, Peppino. Get the blanket, come on now!’

They wrapped it up well and wedged it between the Lambretta and a transistor radio to avoid any damage.

Finally he was being treated in an appropriate manner. Finally someone seemed to have grasped the great value of a McGuffin Electric Deluxe, even one that had been slightly damaged, with fake walnut finish and with a seventeen-inch screen.

The door closed. The truck screeched on the porphyry, terrifying the life out of two cats, then vanished with a murmur into the Naples night.

Chapter 57

Moscow, the Lubyanka, 2 May

General Serov laid the documents out on the desk, the sheets perfectly aligned. The ‘Leach Grant’ file now consisted of a considerable number of typed pages. Zhulianov’s report was meticulous. Just like the internal communications of MI6 that had just come in from London a few moments before.

The British secret services had had their worst quarter of an hour since Hitler’s bombers had flown over Westminster. The kidnap of Cary Grant had been a failure, but they had had their result. Tito had lost face with the British; the British had lost face with Grant and the Americans. Sources revealed that the actor’s conclusive comment, once he had resumed contact with MI6, had been: ‘Gentlemen, fuck off the lot of you.’ The file also reported Dyle’s embarrassed reply: ‘I’m mortified. Is there anything we can do for you, Mr Grant?’ and the retort: ‘Certainly. Call me a taxi for the airport.’

The general chuckled to himself, imagining the scene.

MI6’s film project ended up in the dustbin of history before it even saw the light of day.

He could be satisfied with that.

Perhaps they would go on the attack once again, but if Cary Grant’s character profile was correct, he was willing to bet his colonel’s stripes that the actor would never again be flattered by these bunglers.

It would be important to watch what Grant did next. He made a note on a piece of paper and turned his concentration back to the crucial questions of the day.

The world was facing new threats. The Soviet Union would have to assume its responsibilities. And he was there to do his part.

In Indochina the Vietnamese communists had the French colonialists on the ropes. General Giap put the final squeeze on the siege of Dien Bien Phu: the days of the Foreign Legion contingent, barricaded up on the high plain, were clearly numbered. The Americans were ready to supplant those shreds of fascist arrogance. They would never let Indochina turn red.

On the other hand the Chinese were ready to play the game to become the leading communist country in Asia. They had got used to it and won their stripes in Korea, and now they wanted to have their say.

The Chinese. You had to be careful with the Chinese; he had said as much to Khrushchev as well, when he had asked him his advice about the events of the day. There were so many of them, too many, with a leader no less charismatic than Stalin. But you never knew what they were thinking. When you thought about the Chinese you had to think in a completely different way. The General wasn’t afraid of anything, not after everything he had seen in his life. The French were buffoons. They thought they still had an empire, but they borrowed money from the Americans to keep it on its feet. They reminded him of faded aristocrats in ragged trousers, braying things like, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ The British, good soldiers, certainly, but with all those stupid habits, like taking tea under bombing raids. Without the Americans and the Russians they would have been serving tea to Himmler, while that maniac Goebbels would have been raping their awful princess in the next room. How disgusting.

Then there were the Americans. The Normandy landings had been one of the most costly and absurd actions in history. All to get to Berlin before the Russians did. They had no idea of how to fight a war. Just fire-power. That was their only weapon, sounding the charge, trumpets blaring, atom bombs, helicopters, and now that new invention, napalm. If they went on like that they would end up like Custer, chopped to pieces by people with bows and arrows.

No, it was the Chinese that frightened him. Six hundred million people in the same line of fire. They had made it to the negotiating table in Geneva, to discuss the fate of Indochina. Khrushchev had called in old Molotov, dusted down his good suit and sent him to Switzerland to do his best. He wasn’t sure that the experience of that crafty and decrepit revolutionary would be enough to resolve the situation in favour of the Soviet Union. Probably not.

Meanwhile the Americans were manoeuvring in the shadows. They had made contact with Bao Dai, the emperor of Vietnam, and filled his pockets with money to persuade him to go back to his own country and act as their puppet. Hundreds of thousands of dollars from American taxpayers being handed over to a decadent Indochinese aristocrat, who threw them away at the casino in Evian. Because it was there that he had decided to wait for the outcome of the Geneva Conference. And they bankrolled him and his court of dwarfs and belly-dancers, to use him as a joker and reinstate him in Vietnam. The Americans were the least parsimonious people the world had ever seen.

The general shuddered with rage. He started jotting down some notes on a piece of paper. He would have to activate the Swiss resident, and the French one: any scraps of phrases exchanged in the corridors of Geneva would have to be on his desk within the hour. No less important: keep as close an eye as possible on Bao Dai. If the Americans planned to put that feeble alcoholic back on the throne, he would have to be informed of it in good time.

Finally he got to his feet, cracked the joints of his neck and his shoulders, and walked the ten paces that separated him from the window. The curtains had gone. He looked outside and once again he had the sensation of being part of an enormous clockwork mechanism. Part of history.

Chapter 58

In the sky over California, 2 May

As the plane came down over Los Angeles, Cary felt that energy again. It had just been a shiver behind his ears, when, in his sitting room at home, they had suggested his mission to Yugoslavia. Then it had turned into emotion, concealed with aplomb, at the moment of his meeting with Tito. It had turned into fear on the island of

Sipan, when they had shot at him and he had had to turn himself into a hundred-metre sprinter. And those two strange Italians who had helped him. He hadn’t been able to work out what they were doing down there, but they had been nice, and equipped to deal with such a weird situation.

He looked out of the window to see the hills, but he couldn’t get his bearings. They would be landing at the same military camp from which they had left. They hadn’t added anything else, perhaps because no one knew (it was still a secret operation), and certainly anyone who did know was ashamed of what had happened. They hadn’t come out of it looking all that great. And not just Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the Americans, who had supported the operation.

How had Bondurant coped in his place? When he finally got through to Betsy, on the private line put at his disposal by the military, she had given him nothing but the vaguest of hints. The business about the regimental tie was water under the bridge, he could almost laugh about it now. His good humour had really returned. His enthusiasm for things, which he thought he had lost, and which he had thought would never return, the enthusiasm that Betsy had tried without success to help him feel again as they travelled around the world, had grown back within him like a climbing plant. He couldn’t say why, but as he headed for home he felt regenerated.