William Boyd - Restless

'It's a stroke of luck,' I said carefully.

'Can I meet your source?'

'No, I'm afraid not.'

'Because I have about a million questions, as you can imagine.' There was a strange light in his eye – the light of the scholar-hunter who has smelt fresh spoor, who knows there is an unblazed trail out there.

'What I might do,' I offered, cautiously, 'is write some of it down, in broad outline, see if it made any sense to you.'

'Great. Happy to oblige,' he said, and leant back in his seat as if, for the first time, he were just taking in the fact that I was, for example, a member of the female sex, and not simply a new mine of exclusive information.

'Fancy going to the pub for a drink?' he said.

We crossed the High and went to a small pub in a lane near Oriel and he gave me a potted synopsis of SIS and BSC and the pre-Pearl Harbor operations as far as he understood them and I began to understand something of the context for my mother's particular adventure. Thoms spoke fluently and with some passion about this covert world with its interconnecting lines of duplicity – effectively a whole British security and intelligence apparatus right in the middle of Manhattan, hundreds of agents all striving to persuade America to join the war in Europe despite the express and steadfast objections of the majority of the population of the United States.

'Astonishing, really, when you come to think of it. Unparalleled…' He stopped suddenly. 'Why are you looking at me like that?' he asked, a bit discomfited.

'Do you want an honest answer?'

'Yes, please.'

'I can't decide whether the hair doesn't go with the beard or the beard doesn't go with the hair.'

He laughed: he seemed almost pleased by my bluntness.

'I don't usually have a beard, actually. But I've grown it for a role.'

'A role?'

'In Don Carlos. I'm playing a Spanish nobleman called Rodrigo. It's an opera.'

'Yeah. That Verdi bloke, innit? You can obviously sing, then.'

'It's an amateur company,' he explained. 'We're doing three performances at the Playhouse. Want to come and see it?'

'As long as I can get a baby-sitter,' I said. That usually scared them off. Not Thoms, though, and I began to sense Thoms's interest in me might extend further than any secrets I possessed about the British Security Coordination.

'I take it you're not married,' he said.

'That's right.'

'How old's the kid?'

'Five.'

'Bring him along. You're never too young to start going to the opera.'

'Maybe I will,' I said.

We chatted a bit more and I said I'd call him when I had my summary complete – I was still waiting for more information. I left him in the pub and wandered down the High Street to where I'd parked my car. Some students, wearing gowns and carrying champagne bottles, burst out of University College, singing a song with a nonsensical refrain. They capered off down the street, whooping and laughing. Exams over, I thought, term nearly finished and a hot summer of freedom ahead. Suddenly I felt ridiculously old, remembering my own post-exam euphoria and celebrations – an aeon ago, it seemed – and the thought depressed me for the usual reasons. When I took my final exams and celebrated their conclusion my father had been alive; he died three days before I had my results – and so he never learned that his daughter had got a first. As I made for my car, I found myself thinking about him in that last month of his life, that summer – six years ago, already. He had looked well, my unchanging Dad, he wasn't unwell, he wasn't old, but in those final weeks of his life he had started behaving oddly. One afternoon he dug up a whole row of new potatoes, five yards' worth, tens and tens of pounds. Why did you do that, Sean? I remember my mother asking. I just wanted to see if they were ready, he said. Then he cut down and burned on a bonfire a ten-foot lime sapling he'd planted the year before. Why, Dad? I just couldn't bear the thought of it growing, was his simple, baffling reply. Most strange, though, was a compulsion he developed in what was to be his last week on earth, for switching out electric lights in the house. He would patrol the rooms, upstairs and down, looking for a burning light bulb and extinguish it. I'd leave the library to make a cup of tea and come back to find it in darkness. I caught him waiting to slip into rooms we were about to vacate, poised to make sure the lights went off within seconds of their being no longer required. It began to drive me and my mother mad. I remember shouting at him once: what the hell's going on? And he replied with unusual meekness – it just seems a terrible waste, Ruth, an awful waste of precious electricity.

I now think he knew that he was soon going to die but the message had somehow become scrambled or unintelligible to him. We are animals, after all, and I believe our old animal instincts lurk deep inside us. Animals seem to be able to read the signals – perhaps our big, super-intelligent brains can't bear to decipher them. I'm sure now my father's body was somehow subtly alerting him to the impending shutdown, the final systems malfunction, but he was confused. Two days after I had shouted at him about the lights he collapsed and died in the garden after lunch. He was deadheading roses – nothing strenuous – and died immediately, we were informed, a fact that consoled me, but I still hated to dwell on his few, bewildered, frightened weeks of timor mortis.

I unlocked my car and sat down behind the wheel, feeling blue, missing him badly all of a sudden, wondering what he would have made of my mother's, his wife's, astounding revelations. Of course, it would have all been different if he'd been alive – a pointless hypothesis, then – and so, to move my mind away from this depressing subject I tried to imagine Timothy Thoms without his hidalgo 's beard. 'Rodrigo' Thoms. I liked that better. Perhaps I would call him Rodrigo.

New Mexico . 1941

EVA DELECTORSKAYA STEPPED QUICKLY off the train at Albuquerque 's Santa Fe station. It was eight o'clock in the evening and she was arriving a day later than she had planned – but better to be sure and safe. She watched the passengers disembark – a dozen or so – and then waited until the train pulled out, heading for El Paso. There was no sign of the two crows she had lost in Denver. All the same, she walked a couple of blocks around the station, checking, and, being shadow-free, went into the first hotel she found – The Commercial – and paid six dollars in advance for a single room, three nights. Her room was small, could have been cleaner, had a fine view of an air shaft, but it would do. She left her suitcase there, walked back to the station and told a taxi driver to take her to the Hotel de Vargas, her original destination and where she was due to meet her first contact. The de Vargas proved to be ten minutes away in the business district but after the scare in Denver she needed a bolt-hole. One town: two hotels – standard Lyne training.

The de Vargas lived up to its pretentious name. It was over-decorated, had a hundred rooms and a cocktail lounge. She put a wedding ring on her finger before she checked in and explained to the receptionist that her luggage was lost in Chicago and the railway would be sending it on. No problem, Mrs Dalton, the receptionist said, we'll be sure to let you know the moment it arrives. Her room looked out over a small faux-Pueblo courtyard with a pattering fountain. She freshened up and went down to the cocktail lounge, dark and virtually empty, and ordered a Tom Collins from a plump waitress in a short orange dress. Eva wasn't happy, her brain was working too hard. She nibbled peanuts and drank her liquor and wondered what was the best thing to do.