Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

Fleming suddenly felt as if the Magician was peering into his own soul, that he saw how disappointed he felt in life. All of its empty pleasures and futile plans of action had left him cold. He might be flippant and withdraw into a pose of detached superiority but he was endlessly taunted by the noonday demon, a sinful weariness of the heart. It was this that forced him to seek refuge in a solitary world where he plotted out his secret stories. That other life of obscure substance: the autobiography of his daydreams.

As he began to outline Crowley’s designated role in Operation Mistletoe, he found himself becoming far more expansive in his briefing than was usual. He had hitherto developed a method in the handling of agents where they would be carefully kept in the dark as to the overall nature of their assignment and fed information only when it was strictly required. But with the Magician he felt that he could tell him everything. All the details of this fantastical project that had been conjured out of unofficial and increasingly bewildering interdepartmental strategies of disinformation, counter-intelligence and black propaganda. It struck him that this supremely arcane intellect alone could truly comprehend the complex absurdity of such a scheme. And no one would believe him if he ever told the tale. Crowley was himself a cypher, a hidden stone, a key to all the foolish mysteries and rumours in the world.

As Fleming spoke he watched Crowley closely, instinctively gathering intelligence for his own internal memorandum. Another brief appraisal: a version of the man’s character that he could use. Crowley no longer wanted to be cast as the villain in real life, but in fiction, yes, he would make the perfect malefactor. An extravagant counterpoint to the empty hero of Fleming’s private narrative.

‘My dear boy,’ the Magician announced when the briefing had finished. ‘This is marvellous stuff! Preposterous!’ He broke into a laugh that soon turned into a gasping huff. He took another double hit of his inhaler and caught his breath. ‘It’s…’ he panted. ‘It’s completely implausible. That’s the genius of it.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Fleming, knowing then that he was right to tell Crowley all of it. ‘But you will be able to make contact with certain elements within enemy territory? Your, um, Order, it began as a German mystical society, didn’t it?’

‘The Ordo Templi Orientis, yes, a banned organisation in the Reich, I’m afraid. As you might know, the Nazis have been clumsily imposing their own monopoly on the dark arts. But I still have something of a network out there. Heh heh, my own Secret Service if you like.’

‘And might you be able to get a man close to our subject?’

‘A man, yes.’ Crowley pondered. ‘Or maybe a woman.’

‘A woman?’

‘Yes.’ Crowley looked up wistfully. ‘Astrid. It’s been a long time but she might be just the person for this job.’

‘One of your many protégées?’ asked Fleming.

‘Oh no,’ Crowley replied with a smile. ‘ She initiated me .’

The downstairs Grill Room at the Dorchester was already crowded when Joan Miller arrived. Cabinet ministers escorting nervously respectable wives or casually disreputable mistresses, steel-grey brigadiers with hatchet-jawed adjutants, off-duty airmen and on-duty tarts, cinema producers and motor-car salesmen, American war correspondents, playboys, actresses, writers: all the high and the low who could afford it seemed to have found sanctuary from the Blitz in the supposed safety of the hotel’s modernist steel and reinforced-concrete womb.

Miller struggled to assume a calm air, to attune herself to the forced gaiety that surrounded her. She had come straight from her flat to this fashionable ‘bombproof’ hotel with a sickening sense of anxiety and fear. Someone must have recognised her at the meeting and had marked her out as a target. An intangible danger waited for her in the blackout beyond and she was no longer quite sure whom she could trust. She spotted Fleming in conversation with Cyril Connolly and an elderly colonel, and staggered over to join them.

‘Now look,’ Fleming was declaiming loudly at the old soldier while gesticulating dismissively towards the short and tubby Connolly. ‘This is Connolly, who publishes a perfectly ghastly magazine full of subversive nonsense by a lot of long-haired drivelling conchies who will all be put away for their own good for seven years under Section 18b. So perhaps you’d better subscribe to the thing, now you’ve got the chance, just to see what sort of outrageous stuff they can get away with in a country like this during wartime.’

‘I see.’ The colonel nodded with a vacant sagacity. ‘Very interesting.’

‘Got you another subscription there, Connolly,’ Fleming whispered, patting the stout man on the back.

‘Don’t take any notice of Fleming, Colonel,’ Connolly countered. ‘He’s become all high and mighty since he’s been at the Admiralty but you know what they call him there? The Chocolate Sailor.’

Miller noticed Fleming wince slightly at this sting, then steel himself with a very deliberate grin.

‘ Touché , Cyril,’ he muttered, then looked up and saw Joan. ‘Must go. Oh, by the way, you don’t happen to know a writer by the name of Murray Constantine, do you?’

‘Constantine? Hmm, doesn’t ring a bell. What’s he written?’

‘A queer novel called Swastika Night . Published by the Left Book Club.’

‘Hardly your sort of thing, Ian.’

‘I know, but I want to meet the author.’

‘Well, I could have a word with Victor Gollancz if you like.’

‘Could you?’

Connolly nodded and began to scuttle away. Fleming turned to face Joan.

‘Ah, Miller,’ he said. ‘Glad you could make it.’

‘Fleming, I need to talk to you,’ she blurted out.

‘Of course.’ He frowned at her. ‘But we’d better find Trevelyan.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she rejoined breathlessly.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘Where’s Trevelyan?’

Fleming turned and craned his neck, his jagged profile scanning the room like some massive wading bird.

‘There.’ He cocked his head, his broken nose pointing obliquely. ‘He’s with Teddy Thursby. Tory Member for Hartwell-juxta-Mare. Was a junior minister in the Department of Health until he had to resign. A Select Committee is investigating some matter of undisclosed Czech assets. He’s not a very happy man. Trevelyan thinks he might have his uses.’

Miller followed Fleming’s gaze to the bar where she saw Marius Trevelyan listening intently to a middle-aged man in a bow tie and double-breasted suit, with a drink-maddened face. As they shuffled their way through the throng, Fleming touched her gently on the arm and stooped slightly to whisper in her ear.

‘You said you needed to talk.’

‘Yes.’

‘To me? Or to me and Trevelyan?’

‘Well, if we could have a word in private later.’

‘Certainly.’

As they came close to Trevelyan and Thursby, it seemed clear to Miller that the younger man was drawing out his drinking companion in some way. There was an unctuous passivity in the way that he indulged Thursby’s hurt indignation, quietly urging him on in his anger. They caught the end of the politician’s tirade.

‘Winston’s been a complete shit over the whole wretched business!’

‘Steady on, Teddy!’ Fleming announced his presence.

‘Ah, Fleming.’ Thursby looked up with a slightly chided expression. ‘Well, I was just explaining to this young man here, you know, loyalty, it goes both ways. I stuck by the old bastard for all those years, and now?’