The hidden man am-2 Page 4

  ‘Nice fucking place,’ Graham muttered, tilting his head to one side to get a better lookat the house. ‘What does the brother do for a living? Stockbroker? Investment banker? Dot com millionaire?’

  ‘None of the above.’ Ian dialled a number in Euston Tower on his mobile phone and held it up to his ear. ‘Our Benjamin’s an artist. Farts around all day in oils and charcoal, struggling with the impossibility of the authentic artistic act.’

  ‘I thought that sort of behaviour was out of fashion?’

  The number wasn’t answering and Ian hung up.

  ‘Not so,’ he said.

  ‘What does the wife do?’ Graham was new on the Kukushkin case and still a bit sketchy on details. He looked upon Ian as a mentor, an older hand he wanted to learn from and impress.

  ‘Journalist,’ Ian said. ‘Writes about canapes and boy bands for the Evening Standard. One of your gorgeous, pouting, twenty something hackettes, arse so firm you could crack an egg on it. Drive up and we might get a lookat her.’

  Graham flicked on the headlights, moved back out into the road and tookthe cab past the house. They saw Alice open the front door and fling her arms around Mark’s neck, her smile a flash in the darkness.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell,’ Graham muttered. ‘Wouldn’t mind one of them in my Christmas stocking.’ He pulled up another fifty metres further along the street and peered back over his shoulder. ‘How long they been married?’

  ‘Couple of years; three, maybe. Daddy was decent enough to throw eighty grand at the wedding. Nice of him, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘All things considered.’ Graham couldn’t keep his eyes off her. ‘Does the gaffer have ears in there?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet. Only at Mark’s place. And the lawyer, Macklin. We don’t reckon young Benjamin’s involved.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So what time’s Michael taking over?’ Ian scratched his armpit. ‘I wanna get the Arsenal score, find a pub with ITV.’

  ‘Search me,’ Graham replied. ‘Search me. The way I heard it, I thought we was on all night.’

  8

  A man of sixty looks back on his working life and feels, what? A sense of regret at opportunities lost? Shame over badly handled investments, businesses that might have turned sour, a colleague treated with contempt by the board after forty years’ loyal service to the firm? Keen simply did not know. He had lived his life in a separate world of deliberate masquerade, a state servant with carte blanche for deceit. Waiting for Mark in his son’s favourite, if overpriced, Chinese restaurant at the south end of Queensway, Keen had the odd, even amusing sensation that most of his professional life had been comprised of social occasions: Foreign Office dinners, embassy cocktail parties, glasses of stewed tea and mugs of instant coffee shared with journalists, traitors, disgruntled civil servants, ideologues and bankrupts, the long list of contacts and informants that make up a spy’s acquaintance. Indeed it occurred to him — over his second glass of surprisingly decent Sancerre — that he was a scholar of the long, boozy lunch, of lulling strangers into mistaken beliefs, of plying dining companions with drinkand sympathy and then sucking them dry of secrets. It was his talent, after all, the knack they had spotted at Oxford, and the reason now, more than thirty years later, that Keen could charge Divisar 450 a day for his old-style flair and expertise. But to use those skills on his own son? To do that, if he looked at it for too long, would seem horrific. But Christopher Keen never looked at anything for too long.

  Mark was late by half an hour, a mirror image of Keen’s own father at thirty-five, coming into the restaurant at a brisk walk mouthing, ‘Sorry, Dad,’ from fifty feet. Keen thought he looked tired and preoccupied, but that might have been his paranoia over Taploe.

  The Service would like your assistance in clearing up Libra’s position, in revealing the exact nature of their relationship with Kukushkin. We just need you to pick your son’s brains, find out what he knows.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  He said it without anger, because Mark looked genuinely contrite.

  ‘I’m really, really sorry.’ He placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘Meetings. All morning. Fucked electrics at the club and a tabloid hack giving me gyp.’

  He was wearing a dark blue corduroy suit and, for want of something better to say, Keen remarked on it.

  ‘Bespoke?’ he asked.

  ‘Thought you might notice that.’ It was a shared passion between them, the luxury of fine clothes. Marks at down and flapped a napkin into his lap. ‘This here is a Doug Hayward original in navy corduroy, a sympathetic cloth flexible enough to accommodate today’s retro styling.’ He was beginning to relax. ‘The jacket has high lapels, as you can see, with long double vents and three buttons at the front. Furthermore, if I stood up you’d notice an immaculately tailored flat-fronted trouser with straight legs that flare just above the tongue of the shoe.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Keen said. ‘Indeed,’ and enjoyed Mark’s charm. He poured both of them a glass of Sancerre and ordered another bottle from the waiter. ‘What’s in the bag?’

  Mark said, ‘Oh yes,’ and leaned over to retrieve two bottles of vodka from a duty-free bag he had carried into the restaurant. Three litres of Youri Dolgoruki, his father’s favourite brand.

  ‘Present for you,’ he said. ‘Picked them up in Moscow three days ago. Know how you prefer the real thing.’

  ‘That was immensely kind of you.’ Keen put the bottles on the floor beside his chair and wondered if they would clinkin his briefcase. ‘You shouldn’t have bought me anything at all.’

  ‘For all the birthdays I missed,’ Mark replied lightly, as if the observation held no resonance. Then he opened his menu.

  Keen had noticed this about Mark before: the way he gave presents to people at Libra and Divisar, little surprises to lighten their day. The cynic in him had decided that this was an unconscious way of keeping colleagues onside, of buying their trust and loyalty. It was the same with his memory: months after meeting them, Mark could recall the names of personal assistants who had brought him cups of coffee during fifteen-minute meetings in downtown Moscow.

  ‘How do you do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Eh?’

  Mark was staring at him and Keen realized he had been thinking aloud.

  ‘Sorry, I was just mulling something over. Your ability to remember names. I was thinking about it while you were late.’

  Mark clumped the menu shut.

  ‘Trick I was taught by Seb,’ he said frankly, and put his jacket on the back of the chair. ‘Remember someone’s name and it makes them feel special. Tack on a fact or two about their lives and they’ll practically offer themselves up. It’s all vanity, isn’t it, Dad? We all want to feel cherished. Bloke comes to work to fix the sound system and I remember he’s got a ten-year-old kid who supports West Ham, he’s gonna be touched that I brought it up. Good business, isn’t it? How to win friends and influence people.’

  Keen nodded and could only agree. At a table near by, a decent-looking woman in a reasonable suit was eating lunch with her husband and giving him the occasional eye. Mutton dressed as lamb, Keen thought, and wished she were ten years younger.

  ‘Will you order for me?’ Mark said. ‘My brain’s gone numb.’

  Lacquer-black walls and a low oppressive ceiling patterned with dimmed halogen bulbs lent the interior of the restaurant the atmosphere of a mediocre seventies nightclub. Mark was always impressed by his father’s knowledge of the more obscure dishes on a menu — in this case, preserved pork knuckle, fragrant yam duck, a soup of mustard leaf with salted egg and sliced beef. He even ordered them in an accent that sounded authentically Chinese.

  ‘You spend time in Beijing?’ he asked. ‘In Shanghai, Hong Kong?’

  ‘Not really.’ Keen refilled Mark’s glass with the new bottle. ‘A fortnight in Taiwan in the seventies. Overnight stop in Kowloon harbour a few years ago. Rather a lovely ketch, if I recall, French owner. Otherwise just homogeneous
Chinese restaurants the world over. Anxious-looking fish in outsized tanks, ducks flying anticlockwise around the walls.’

  Mark listened intently. He was good at that. Keen wondered if he had an image, in technicolour, of his father calmly going about the Queen’s business, standing on the prow of a luxury yacht wearing a battered Panama hat.

  ‘Why does everyone insist on calling it “Beijing” nowadays?’ he asked. ‘You don’t say “Roma”, do you? You don’t talk about “Milano” or “Munchen”?’

  ‘It’s just the fashion,’ Mark replied.

  ‘Ah yes, the fashion.’ Keen sighed and let his eyes drift towards the ceiling. He enjoyed playing the fuddy-duddy with Mark, assumed that it was a part of his paternal role. ‘I sometimes think that everything these days is about fashion, about not doing or saying the wrong thing. Common sense has gone right out of the window.’

  ‘I guess.’

  A smooth-skinned waiter, working in tandem with a pretty Chinese girl wearing a sky-blue silk dress, ferried plates of dim sum and steamed rice to their table. They were on to their third bottle of wine — a characterless Ribera del Duero — by the time Keen got round to Taploe’s business.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said. ‘I had a call from Thomas Macklin while you were away.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Tom? What did he want?’

  ‘Just a couple of routine questions. Divisar business. Tell me about him. How do you two get on?’

  Mark was swallowing a mouthful of prawn satay and for some time was able only to nod and raise his eyebrows in response.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked eventually, wiping a napkin over his bottom lip.

  ‘He intrigued me. As you can imagine, we get a lot of lawyers coming into the firm. He’s still relatively young, highly competent, somebody whom I imagine would be an asset to Libra.’

  ‘Tom’s all right. A bit flash, bit lippy. Good lawyer, though.’

  ‘Does your work dove tail?’

  Mark could not hear the question over the noise of the restaurant and he cocked his head to one side to encourage his father to repeat it. Keen leaned in.

  ‘I said, does your work dove tail? How much of him do you see, apart from when you’re both abroad together?’

  ‘I was out with him last night, matter of fact. Tom’s a big drinker, likes to whip out the company credit card. If there’s a new secretary in the office he’s always the one who asks her out. Champagne and oysters, loves all that shit. Never has any luckwith the birds, mind, but you’ll have a good time if you tag along.’

  Whenever Mark discussed Libra business his voice unconsciously dropped into a mannered sub-Cockney that cloaked its true origins in private education. His workaccent, his music industry drawl, deliberately shaved off consonants and slackened vowels. It was an affectation that irritated Keen, though he had never mentioned it.

  ‘And what happens when you go on these trips?’ he asked, pouring himself a glass of water. The woman with whom he had briefly flirted rose from her table and managed a final seductive glance. Keen ignored her. ‘You must get sick of the sight of one another.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Mark was using a pair of chopsticks to pickup a pork dumpling. He held it in the air for some time, like a jeweller examining a gem for flaws. ‘I like the company, to be honest.’ He popped the food into his mouth and began chewing it vigorously, smiling as he ate.

  All of this was of interest to Keen. Is Viktor Kukushkin’s syndicate providing Libra with protection in Russia, or is there a larger conspiracy evolving here in London? Taploe had almost whispered his requests, eyes glued to Keen’s lapel. Mark could prove vital in giving us a clear picture of Roth’s and Macklin’s activities. We’d like to know everything you can find out. But Mark did not appear unsettled by the line of questioning: on the contrary, he seemed comfortable and relaxed, just chatting and enjoying his lunch.

  ‘Good, these, aren’t they?’ he said, and picked up another dumpling.

  ‘Yes,’ Keen nodded. ‘I must say I was impressed by all of your people. Sebastian, of course, though we met only briefly. The two marketing girls as well. And that Frenchman you brought in last time, Philippe d’Erlanger.’

  ‘Philippe, yeah. He’s Belgian, actually.’

  Keen acknowledged the mistake.

  ‘But Macklin stood out. Very bright, very capable. During our initial meetings he impressed me a great deal. I acted only as a conduit, as you know, so I have no idea how he’s behaved latterly. But he was very well informed, seemed to know his stuff. A bit pushy, clearly, not necessarily someone one would want to buy a used car from. Do you trust him?’

  ‘No,’ Mark replied, swallowing. ‘But I wouldn’t have thought he trusts me either.’

  ‘Now why do you say that?’

  ‘Best policy, isn’t it? Rule of thumb. Never trust the people at the top. Don’t put yourself in a position where you have to rely on anyone. That way you won’t be too disappointed when they fuck you over.’

  Keen’s eyes narrowed. He wondered if the sentiment had its origins in Mark’s childhood.

  ‘Do you think he’s capable of that?’

  But he had pushed too hard.

  ‘Why are you so interested in Tom?’ Mark asked. ‘Have Divisar had trouble with him? Has he not been paying our bills?’

  ‘No, no. I’m just fascinated by the way your partnership works. He obviously has the ear of Roth, so where does that leave you?’

  ‘Well, I’m not a lawyer, am I? That’s not my area of expertise. So the relationship he has with Seb is different from the one he has with me. More personal, if you like. Those two share a lot of secrets which nobody else is privy to.’

  Perhaps there was something here for Taploe.

  ‘What kind of secrets?’ Keen asked.

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t be secrets if I knew, would they? Financial stuff, I guess; plans for the future. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I see.’ Mark looked vaguely bored, but Keen was anxious to probe further. ‘Just while we’re on the subject,’ he said, ‘were there any developments on your trip that I should know about? The position on the roof, for example?’

  ‘No. Tom’s handling it. He deals with those boys.’

  ‘So you’ve had no contact with the gangs?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say no contact.’ The waitress picked up two plates from the table, smiled at Mark and walked off. ‘They’re everywhere out there. Hotel foyers, restaurants, sitting in their shiny four-by-fours on Novy Arbat. You can hardly move without bumping into some wanker in a cheap leather jacket who thinks he’s Chechnya’s answer to Al Pacino. Mack’s all for it, of course, loves hanging out with them. Acts like he’s landed a walk-on part in The Sopranos. But they’re not for me. Far as I’m concerned, the mafia makes a living out of other people’s misery and that’s not a good reason to go drinking with them.’

  Keen registered this last remark: at SIS he had been trained to be wary of the man who declares his innocence unprompted. It was usually the case that those who made a frequent expression of their moral outrage were most often the ones who turned out to be unscrupulous.

  ‘Surely Macklin’s just doing his job, just trying to get the best deal for Libra?’ he suggested. ‘I would have thought it was important to keep them onside.’

  Mark smirked.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘He keeps them onside, all right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Whenever we’re in Moscow, Tom makes sure to get a hooker up to his suite. Her twin sister as well, if he’s feeling perky. He’d like to call that “keeping them onside”. That way he could run it through expenses.’

  Keen frowned.

  ‘He’s got sucked into that, has he?’

  ‘Well, let’s face it, no one else is going to sleep with him.’

  Keen duly grinned but the conversation appeared to have exhausted itself. As he had both hoped and expected, there had been nothing of any content to unsettle him, n
othing he would feel obliged to reveal to Taploe. He felt an odd, protective urge to tell Mark that his flat was most probably wired, that the grass skirts had eyes and ears in the homes of every one of the senior employees at Libra. Yet he was bound by an older loyalty, barred even from advising caution. He placed his chopsticks to one side, put his napkin on the table, and was quiet.

  ‘You look worried about something.’

  Mark had also finished eating.

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Keen frowned and said, ‘No, I’m fine. Just digesting.’

  ‘Is it Ben?’

  The question took him by surprise, if only because, for once in Mark’s company, Keen had not been thinking about Ben. It was a rare occasion on which the two failed to discuss the possibility of reconciliation. Their last two meetings, for example, had descended into an awkward row about Ben’s stubborn refusal to put the past behind him. Mark had been sympathetic to his father’s position, but his first loyalty was to his brother.

  ‘Have you thought any more about that?’ If this was an opportunity to reopen the subject, then Keen would grasp it.

  ‘Not much,’ Mark said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But you’re still eager to make amends, to tell him how sorry you are?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Keen wondered if Mark had a plan, but his manner seemed dismissive and offhand. ‘Have you seen him lately?’

  ‘Matter of fact, I have.’ Mark finished off the last of the wine. ‘Had dinner with him the night I got back. Brother cooked up a green curry and spent most of the evening arguing with Alice.’

  ‘That seems to happen a lot.’

  ‘All the time lately.’

  ‘Are they unhappy?’

  Mark breathed in deeply and puffed out his cheeks.

  ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Sometimes I wonder what he sees in her, beyond the looks, the lifestyle.’

  ‘Yes, you’ve said that before. But Alice was very helpful to Ben when your mother died, wasn’t she? Isn’t that the case?’