The Madness of July (3 page)

‘Any ideas?’

Francesca wondered aloud whether he might be present-hunting for her birthday the next month, then they shared their puzzlement in a moment of silence.

‘Probably a quick walk in the park,’ Lucy said, unconvincingly.

She could sense Francesca treading water. Her voice was deep and smooth. and Flemyng often spoke about its hypnotic effect, her style being elegant and unhurried. She was two years older than him, although she had looked the younger at their wedding the previous summer, and Lucy had concluded early in her time with him that it was from Francesca he absorbed some of the free spirit that enlivened their office. She often thought that in Flemyng’s character, gaiety and darkness were always struggling with each other. Without Francesca there might have been more frenzy.

Now Francesca said, ‘Well, he needs to be back for the opera,’ changing the tempo. In her professional role as social manager at Covent Garden – queen bee of the opera party, Flemyng called her – she had become the famed impresario of the interval encounter, and a simple supper she had planned for the private room was getting bigger by the hour. ‘The cabinet secretary’s office has been on,’ she said. ‘There are two Americans coming from somewhere, and now it’s going to be Paul Jenner himself and two other ministers on top of that. I still don’t know who. His office have put it together. All of a sudden it’s turned quite… political. They’re laying on lobster – the works. Can you warn Will?’

‘Americans?’ said Lucy.

‘Yup. But from where I don’t know, if you see what I mean. I expect you’ve noticed he’s been a bit distracted in the last week or two. I don’t know how much he’s told you.’ No response from Lucy, so Francesca plunged on. ‘There’s a thing going on in his family that seems to be awkward. News to you?’

Lucy said that organizing his life in government was difficult enough without families getting in the way, and avoided the point.

The conversation made a quiet and quick gear change, without warning, as if they had pushed open a door together. ‘Can I be frank?’ said Francesca.

‘Please.’

‘Something else has knocked him sideways, and I’m not sure what it is. You know how much Will enjoys his politics. Now it all seems to be turning sour for him, and quickly. That’s what troubles me.’

Lucy didn’t hesitate, aware that a pause would produce awkwardness. ‘I’ve noticed. Don’t know anything about family matters, of course.’ By unspoken agreement, as if the conversation needed to be wrapped up before it took on too many complications, they were quick to wind things up.

Francesca asked, ‘Anything on your desk that might have caused all this, if you’re allowed to tell me?’

‘Nothing that comes to mind. Pretty routine right now.’

Then an offer from Francesca. ‘Lunch next week, OK?’

‘Please.’

Francesca said, ‘I’m glad. I’ll fix it.’

The two women spoke of a sultry weekend, and the unreliability of men who didn’t say where they were going, and made cheerful farewells because neither wanted the conversation to drift. Lucy closed the outer door again to get some quiet, ignoring a thick file that she saw being placed on her desk. There was too much uncertainty. Americans turning up, names unknown, to sit with him and two other ministers for a whole evening, and at the bidding of the cabinet secretary. Paul should have told her. She shifted in her chair. Coincidences, Flemyng always said, were never what they seemed.

*

At the Royal Opera House, Francesca was feeling a ripple that disturbed the heaviness settling over everything with the rising heat. She didn’t believe the birthday-present story that she’d concocted for reassurance, knowing Flemyng to be a last-minute merchant, but she had needed to confide in Lucy. She leaned out of her window near the top of the building, put both elbows on the ledge, and found a faint stream of fresh air. The crowds of high summer were down below, around the old vegetable market, now empty and a place of bare stone since the last traders had been shunted south of the river to their new home. A place of memories and sweet echoes. Murmurs from the holidaymakers rose towards her. She looked over the rooftop landscape towards the river. It was just an unusual day. Her man had wanted to be out of the office, get some air, have a break. That was all.

But Lucy was off balance, which broke the pattern on which they all depended. Francesca let her eyes scan the heads of the crowd below, an anonymous throng, close and yet unaware of her gaze. A singer was practising in a dressing room one floor below, window open, and Francesca listened for a few minutes. The voice was Russian, melancholic, lonely.

The phone on her desk was just behind her, and its ringing shook her out of her mood. A secretary from Paul Jenner’s office.

‘I have the names. They’re all looking forward to it. We’re so glad Will can make it, and we’re sorry to be in such a rush. You know how it goes.’

‘That’s just how we like it,’ Francesca said. ‘It’s opening-night panic here.’

In Whitehall, the pavements were thick with gangs of visitors, the curious and the lost. Crackling commentaries spilled from the open-topped tour buses and a few words floated through the window in Flemyng’s inner office that Lucy had decided she must open at last.

She was still at the desk, fiddling with a heavy black pen but writing nothing. She didn’t know he had arrived back until the door opened and he was standing in front of her. She noticed sweat stains on his pink shirt, and a hint of wildness in his hair. But he smiled.

‘Where have you been?’

‘I went for walk. I’m allowed to, don’t you think?’ He was still smiling, hanging his jacket on the coatstand, undoing another shirt button. Looking away as he spoke, he said, ‘Anything up? An exciting telegram maybe?’ He busied himself with an open red box on the corner of the desk, and she saw the nervousness in his shuffling with the files inside. He closed it and turned the lock with the tiny brass key that went back into his pocket.

Lucy was ready. Her tremble had gone, and she was alert to every change in his expression. He was relaxing, but she spotted the effort in masking the tiredness. Lucy said he should sit down, and even gestured to his chair as she stood up from it, in charge again.

She took his place in the doorway, turning away to close the door quietly. Spinning round, strands of light red hair sweeping across her face, she sensed that they were both reluctant to break the deep silence. His eyes were fixed on her, and she realized that his concentration had kicked in.

‘You’re going to have to get to Paul’s office quickly,’ she said.

‘Paul? Quickly?’

She watched him lean back and slip one hand into his shirt, touching the scar.

‘When you were out…’ and she added with a deliberate hint of the cruelty that intimates understand ‘… wherever you were…’

He was utterly still.

‘…I heard some strange tidings from Paul. And bad, however you look at it.’

His hands were back on the desk and she saw that he was trying to hold them still.

‘There’s a dead American. And he has your phone number in his pocket.’

3

Half a world away, at the moment when Flemyng got his summons to Paul Jenner’s office, the clock on Grauber’s kitchen wall in New York was showing eight-fifteen. He set coffee on the hob and quickly took the four steps outside the house for a walk to the bakery three blocks away.

Hannah would be up when he got back, kids too, and there would be time together before he headed uptown to the mission and his desk. He wanted to lift his mood after a broken night, and the auguries were good. A storm had powered down the Hudson Valley in the evening and was safely out to sea, leaving a layer of lightness on the city. The skyline sparkled in gratitude, the weight of the last week gone and the air on the move. The freshness encouraged Grauber to find a spring in his step, despite the day ahead.

He was above medium height, though not tall enough to stand out, and slim. Against the fashion his hair was cut close to the skull, almost to stubble, and that often gave him a serious look whether he liked it or not. He had the advantage that when he smiled, a dimple on his chin gave him an air of cheerfulness that even suggested frivolity. His outward appearance could change in an instant. But most of the time his jet black eyes under shadowed lids, and lips that were heavier than his finely boned face might have promised, seemed to veer towards gloom. This was misleading but helped at work, where he carried serious burdens.

The United States Mission to the United Nations, squatting on the corner of 45
^th
and First Avenue, was heavy duty. On his floor, never visited by outsiders, he led a working life that forced him every day to balance flurries of excitement and exhilaration against the weary conviction that conflict would never end. He worried above all about Berlin and points east, and believed he always would; moving pieces on a board which seemed to stretch to infinity. He’d come to believe that the slow-motion struggle in which his life had been subsumed would roll on beyond him and carry him off in its wake. A few cold warriors on the other side would doff their fur hats to him as he disappeared, as he might do for them; that was how it went. There was little he could reveal of such thoughts to anyone except the few who passed through the third-floor doors with him each morning, and from time to time to Hannah, who had been introduced to some, but only some, of the intimacies of his trade. Yet against the grain of his time Grauber seemed to his friends an optimistic man, with a priestly air of calm. He knew that it was misleading, because his hopes were laced with melancholy more often than he would have wished.

And as he stepped along East 20
^th
Street his upbeat morning mood was tested. Not particularly by the shadow of a National Day celebration in the East 80s in the evening at which he was to be the senior American alongside his ambassador, although that would be a trial, but by the planned meeting with an old comrade-in-arms for lunch in one of the faded city watering holes that he treasured: the Oyster Bar in the depths of Grand Central Station. In the night he had spent two silent hours at his study desk worrying over the encounter while Hannah slept upstairs, the dog bundled at his feet and a friendly glass of whisky in hand, from a bottle he seldom opened, playing war games with the conversation they might have. The drink was almost untouched when he slipped into bed.

Now as he crossed Irving Place, the memory of the previous night’s ball game took hold. The Yankees had been obliterated in a double-header at Cleveland. He knew what awaited him, and he loved the tangy flavour of old New York that it represented, always taking trouble to let the city play to its strengths. There were surprises and turnabouts enough at work; he wanted this place to stay as he loved it, although he would remain an interloper. He got to Lehman’s corner, and the guy who always sat at the top of the subway steps caught his eye. ‘Go Mets!’ Grauber acknowledged the taunt with a grin.

Entering Lehman’s shop, bakery on one side and the small deli on the other, connected by a swinging glass door that allowed husband and wife to rule their own domains, Lehman was more sympathetic because he shared Grauber’s commitment. ‘Mr Grauber,’ he said, the formality an endearment, ‘that pitcher!’

An unknown voice came through the half-open door to the deli. ‘He pitched like my granddad… dead five years.’ A rumpled grey head followed the voice. ‘World Series, my ass! For-ged-about-it. Excuse me, Mrs Lehman.’

No one disagreed and Grauber took the chance to ask for his bread. A round rye as usual, and a long sourdough, which would see them through the next day or two. Then through the door to the deli, where the pickles glistened in their jars and the air was sharp with sauerkraut. Husband and wife swapped places each day, Monday to Saturday, bakery one day and deli the next, which gave their lives a nice symmetry, and pleased their customers who liked the atmosphere of a shop where something was always happening. He asked Mrs Lehman for a particular salami, tied up in its red string bag, which they’d work through in the course of a week.

‘Things good?’ said Mr Lehman as he passed back through the bakery.

Grauber raised a friendly fist. ‘Can’t complain. Better times coming. Seattle here Friday. Whole new ball game.’ The baker inclined his head, and smiled after him when Grauber stepped into the street.

He was back on 20
^th
in a few moments, thinking of the box of work he’d locked in his office safe the night before. Nothing too troublesome, although there was a rumour which might be productive about a Czech, new-blown into town, and the mission was alarmed about a secretariat appointment in the wind: the Australian was a disaster, too prone to vodka parties with the wrong gang, and had to be stopped. It was in hand, and a French friend might help. But that could wait, and in the office it would be an easy, catch-up day. Lunch was everything.

As he turned the last corner, he almost collided with a neighbour whom he knew by sight. He seemed to be Spanish, though whitewashed by the pallor brought on by a high life that was nearly over. He was accompanied by a tiny dog, decorated with a jewelled collar and trotting fast behind him. The matchstick piston legs reminded Grauber of happy days in Paris when just such a precious animal, the only love of the ambassador’s wife, was suffocated on a sofa at the end of a memorable embassy party with one heave of the mighty buttocks of the Norwegian chargé d’affaires, who was never told what she had done. The beast was buried the next day under the magnolia tree in the residence garden, after a night of tears. Grauber smiled. Old times.

But Bill Bendo was in town, and Grauber couldn’t escape the consequences. By the time he’d crossed the street towards the front door, his brown bakery bag in one hand and the salami swinging from the other, his smile had gone.

In a minute he was in the hall of their narrow townhouse. ‘Maria called,’ said Hannah from the kitchen.

Washington.