Alek Popov - Mission London

“I hope you have some good news for me!” sang a capricious female voice in the earpiece.

“Especially good,” he agreed. “I was just telling myself that I should phone you. The invitation has been accepted.”

“Then the Queen will come!” she shouted ecstatically.

“But we have to be very discreet,” he hurried to calm her. “Those are the conditions. The information must not be let out beforehand; otherwise the whole deal is off.”

“But I’ve already said that she’ll be there,” a note of worry crept into her voice. “Not officially, but, you know, amongst other things…”

“You shouldn’t have! Afterwards yes, beforehand no.”

“I don’t understand, why all the secrecy?” she asked crossly.

“It’s an informal engagement.”

“What is informal supposed to mean?” a suspicious tremor entered her voice. “It doesn’t sound very serious.”

“I meant to say personal,” he corrected himself quickly, and added in a Zieblingesque tone, “Personal engagements are more important than formal ones.”

“Really?!”

“Oh yes, far more important.”

“We’ll have to explain that to the journalists somehow…” she said worriedly.

“Let’s not put the cart before the horse!”

“Everything was okay wasn’t it?” Then she remembered and added, “Then again let’s not count our chickens…”

“I said let’s not put the cart…”

“Look,” she interrupted. “I’m fed up! I’m coming in two weeks time and if everything isn’t perfect, you’ll be sorry.”

“Of course everything will be perfect,” he assured her.

The line buzzed in his ear for a minute. Then the internal phone rang. It was the radioman.

A coded announcement had arrived from Sofia.

Cryptograms were not allowed outside the Secret Sector, and he had to go up there to read them. These moments particularly annoyed him because every time he went there he saw the hidden triumph of the radioman — that was his moment of power.

Varadin went up to the top floor, entered the code into the electronic lock, waited for it to click and pushed open the metal door. He was struck by the sharp antiseptic smell. Secrecy went with hygiene.

The radioman met him in the corridor and handed him the decoded cryptogram, printed unevenly and in block capitals. Varadin went into a small cubicle set aside specifically for reading and writing confidential information. In this innermost region of the Sector there were no windows and the laboratory smell of antiseptics was even stronger. The long fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling hummed monotonously, like a big overfed bee. In the cubicle a powerful hundred-watt bulb shone, heating it like an incubator. He began to read:

TOP SECRET!!!

WITH REGARD TO THE FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION ‘HYGIENE IN BULGARIAN LANDS’ WE INFORM YOU THAT IT HAS BEEN APPROVED NEITHER BY THE CULTURAL DEPARTMENT OF OUR BRANCH NOR BY THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE. IT HAS BEEN CREATED AT THE INITIATIVE OF THE LOCAL COUNCIL OF THE TOWN OF PROVADIA. THE OFFICIAL EUROPEAN STANCE AS REGARDS THIS QUESTION IS STATED IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA, WHERE IT IS WRITTEN THAT THE FIRST WATER CLOSET WAS INVENTED IN 1596, BY SIR JOHN HARRINGTON DURING THE REIGN OF QUEEN ELIZABETH I. A SURVEY OF ATTITUDES IN DIPLOMATIC CIRCLES, CONDUCTED RECENTLY, INDICATED THAT THE DISCOVERY IN QUESTION IS REGARDED AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF BRITISH CULTURAL IDENTITY, AND (IN A WIDER SENSE) OF EUROPEAN CULTURAL IDENTITY ALSO. THE QUESTIONING OF SUCH A KEYSTONE OF CIVILISATION, FIRMLY ROOTED IN THE SUBCONSCIOUS OF GENERATIONS OF EUROPEANS, WILL NOT CONTRIBUTE POSITIVELY TO OUR COUNTRY’S INTEGRATION PROGRESS WITH EUROPE, AND MOST LIKELY WILL ATTRACT A STRONG NEGATIVE RESPONSE. WE RECOMMEND THAT THE EMBASSY DISTANCE ITSELF AS FAR AS POSSIBLE FROM THE EVENT AND KEEP ALL CONTACT AT AN INFORMAL LEVEL.

MISTER G DIREKOV

HEAD OF MANAGEMENT COORDINATION AND ANALYSIS.

He rubbed his neck thoughtfully. So there were still brains at work in the Ministry who kept their National Interest in mind. Here was some crafty and cunning clerk, scrabbling to get out. That sensation was well known to him. He himself had scrabbled like mad to get out of his disconsolate office in the Ministry and knew that the result was worth the effort, and the very last drop of humiliation. He had known that sweet stupor of victory, when the posting sleeps snugly in a pocket next to the passport and plane ticket. Then you stop caring all of a sudden, you relax and only move things from one side to another for an entire three years. You earned it, for fuck’s sake! Until you land back in your dusty office in Sofia, stuck with your miserable salary again. The holiday is over! And it all starts again: you switch on again, you mobilise all the energy you stored up during your posting and start to run between floors once more; you revive your old connections, you look for new and more powerful patrons, you hang around in front of their offices for hours, you weep, you crawl, you listen constantly, with only one purpose — so they get so fed up of you that they kick you overseas again. The further the better!

After reading the cryptogram at least three times, out of habit, so as to grasp every nuance, Varadin adjoined a short resolution to its upper corner: to be circulated to all diplomatic staff! He signed it and left.

Almost immediately thereafter Mr Kishev ran upstairs: he took in the secret information in one fell swoop and quickly composed a cryptogram of his own. After the fiasco with the Queen he was in a hurry to prove his usefulness, sending secret information to Sofia as much as humanly possible. Usually these missives consisted of things he had read in the local press and presented as priceless gems that he had gleaned from conversations with bureaucratic Mandarins. Sofia, however, was not asleep either; the clerk in charge of information on Great Britain, a sneaky brown-nosed bureaucrat, who dreamed of taking Kishev’s place once his posting was over, quickly secreted these missives and sent them back reworked as ‘Analyses’. This unusual task fell on the shoulders of the radioman. In revenge, he often removed Kishev’s name from his telegrams, prepared with such effort, and sent them with the impersonal: Embassy, London. However, he was actually doing him a priceless favour, because in rare moments of lucidity Sofia would ask itself: which idiot had doubled the Press Review all over again?

***

Katya was in a hurry. She was hoping not to be seen in the office. Working with the new hoover gave her an almost physical pleasure. The clean vibrations from the powerful motor and the hot air flow smelling of engine oil charged the atmosphere with euphoria. ‘Red Devil’ was written in fiery letters on its shiny bullet-shaped carapace. And it really sucked like a devil! The other students were equally ecstatic about the unexpected acquisition, and no one doubted that it was all thanks to Katya. What had she done to him?! They asked each other slyly.

What could she say? She did not know why the Ambassador had (with no small pleasure!) liquidated the funds that the staff had been gathering for the children’s New Year’s Party.

The noise of the new machine sounded far more lively than had the roar of the old beast, though no less loud. Which was why Katya did not hear the door open and then discreetly close. Varadin leaned against the wall, staring at the girl’s healthy calves. All other thoughts left his mind, as though she had hoovered them up to the last speck of dust. His trousers started to bulge alarmingly; his member was outlined beneath the fine material, thin and pointy like a hound’s.

She turned to unplug the hoover. His smile struck her like a lost boomerang.