A Divided Spy. Чарльз Камминг
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the two men had made a secret plan to meet. Rising to his feet, Suda laughed as his date cracked a toothy joke. If Riedle left now, he would bump into Suda within thirty seconds.
‘Would you mind if I went first?’ Kell asked and did something that he had never done in all his life as an intelligence officer. He clutched at his waist and pretended to be hit by a searing pain in his stomach.
‘But of course,’ Riedle replied, settling back into his seat. ‘Are you all right, Peter?’
Kell struggled to his feet, wincing in apparent agony. ‘Fine,’ he gasped, ‘Fine’, and ducked to avoid a low-hanging lamp. ‘Happens from time to time. Just give me five minutes will you, Bernie? I’ll be right back.’
Kell was only a few feet behind Suda as he walked into the bathroom. A man in a dark grey suit came out at the same time and held the door for him as they passed.
‘Merci,’ Kell said, going inside.
Suda was standing at a urinal, staring down into the bowl. He was alone in the room. There were two cubicles beyond him, both of which Kell checked for occupants before lighting the blue touchpaper.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Suda looked back, urinating, and swore in Polish.
‘Tom.’
‘I’m eating dinner ten feet away from your fucking table with Bernhard fucking Riedle. Why are you still in Brussels?’
The shock oozed into Suda’s face as he began to reply, his blue-black birthmark creased with fatigue. Still urinating, he was unable fully to turn around. Kell was riding the adrenaline of the previous fifteen minutes and did not hold back.
‘You realize if he sees you, I’m fucked? You realize if he so much as turns around and looks at your underage, I-still-haven’t-graduated-from-high-school girlfriend and recognizes the man sitting opposite her, that my operation – for which you were extraordinarily well paid and which has cost me outside of ten thousand pounds and almost two weeks of planning – will not only be over, but will involve you being arrested in front of a room full of people carrying iPhones – iPhones with cameras and zoom lenses and microphones – and me standing right beside Riedle as he asks me to positively identify the street criminal who tried to mug him two nights ago?’
Suda was zipping up his trousers and trying to interrupt, but Kell wasn’t done.
‘I’m not interested what excuse you have, why you felt that you had to stay in Brussels with your newly adolescent, fake eyelash, breast-enhanced babysitter, rather than go home to your wife and children in Warsaw as you promised me you would do when I hired you, but here’s what’s going to happen, Rafal. There’s a kitchen outside. You go into it. You walk very quickly and very confidently to the back of that kitchen and you leave by any exit possible. You leave the way the staff leave. If anybody tries to stop you, pay them. Do you have money?’
Suda nodded. It was like scolding a schoolboy who had been caught cheating in an exam.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I will tell a waiter that I saw you leaving, that you had to go out the back because your wife had walked into the restaurant and that you gave me money. I will pay your bill. The waiter will then explain to Kim Kardashian that you’re waiting for her outside. Maybe she’ll finish her oysters. Maybe she won’t. You can call her. Do what you want. But if you don’t get out of here and get permanently out of Riedle’s sight, I will personally see to it that no intelligence agency, no corporate espionage outfit, no police department, no bank or multinational will ever give you any business again. You won’t teach. You won’t drive cabs. You won’t change a fucking lightbulb in this shitty Belgian bathroom. All you will do is get out of this restaurant. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred pounds. Leave.’
Suda did as he was told.
Kell watched him walk briskly through the swing doors of the kitchen and waited outside to make sure that he did not double back. He then took the maître d’ to one side, explained that he had met a man in the bathroom who was at risk of being compromised by his wife while dining with his mistress, paid Suda’s bill in cash, tipped the maître d’ a further twenty euros to break the news gently and discreetly to the girlfriend, then made his way back to Riedle.
Several minutes had passed since Kell had left the table, but the German was relaxed and companionable, fussing and fretting over Kell’s condition. Have you had these incidents before? Do you require a doctor? Perhaps it was something in your food? Kell brushed aside his concerns, realizing – as their conversation continued – that Minasian would almost certainly have taken advantage of Riedle’s innate decency; there was a neediness about him, a desire to win affection through acts of kindness and generosity, which to a sadist like Minasian would have been like the scent of blood to a shark.
‘I was thinking, while you were away, that I feel rather ashamed.’
‘Ashamed, Bernie? Why?’
Kell wondered why Riedle hadn’t yet taken the opportunity to go to the bathroom. His napkin was still balled on the table.
‘It is embarrassing for a man of my age, a man almost sixty, to be at the mercy of an infatuation, don’t you think? To be so broken-hearted. So weak. I feel like a fool.’
‘Don’t,’ Kell replied firmly, and tried to comfort Riedle with a gentle smile. ‘I think it shows that you are alive. That you haven’t given up on people, become stale or jaded.’ Riedle asked him to translate the word ‘jaded’ and Kell offered ‘tired’ as a lazy synonym. ‘We all have a need for company. Most of us, anyway. What you are going through speaks to our deep need to feel connected, to share our lives with somebody who understands us, who makes us feel cherished. We want to feel free to be who we are. We want somebody who will help to open up the best side of ourselves.’
Rachel flooded Kell’s memory, her poise and her laughter, the way in which she had so quickly intuited so much about him. He felt the loss of her as a pain every bit as searing as that which he had faked only ten minutes earlier, clutching his stomach for Riedle’s benefit.
‘To care for somebody and to be cared for,’ Kell continued, now thinking of Claire and of everything that had gone missing between them. ‘To be excited about seeing them, hearing what they have to say, talking to them. Isn’t that what it’s all about? You obviously had that with Dmitri, when things were good between you. A person can be fifty-nine or nineteen and experience those things. There’s no shame in mourning them when they have been taken away from you.’
‘Then I thank you for your understanding,’ Riedle sighed with a gesture of collapsing gratitude, and finally stood up to go to the bathroom.
As he inched along the walkway, Kell looked across to the opposite balcony, where the maître d’ was only now informing Suda’s companion that her date had left for the evening via the back door. She took the news with laudable restraint, checking her face in a compact mirror before standing up, adjusting her hair and walking downstairs. As she tottered to the ground floor on four-inch heels, she took a smartphone from her purse and checked the screen for messages. At the same moment, Kell felt his own phone pulse in his trouser pocket.
It was a text from Suda.
I will tell Stephanie that it was a Polish police matter, not anything to do with my wife.
Tell her what you like, Kell muttered as a second text came in.
I will take her to Hotel Metropole. I apologize, Tom. My plane leaves for Warsaw at 8 tomorrow. In the morning.
Kell deleted the messages without replying