A spy by nature am-1, page 18
part #1 of Alec Milius Series
“Nice weather?” I ask, with a grin that he doesn’t see.
“Oh, yeah. Real nice. They sure don’t know how to dress for it, though. Girls wearing nylon tights in the sunshine, and all the guys with these thick mustaches. What is that, a macho thing?”
“What, wearing nylon tights?”
“You’re sharp tonight, Milius,” he says, putting his arm across my shoulders. He does that quite frequently nowadays. “I like it when you’re quick on your feet. Keeps us old guys on our toes.”
Fortner and I are going for a drink together. It’s something we’ve done three times before, just the two of us. Katharine cooks dinner, makes herself scarce, and leaves us to it. You go enjoy yourself, honey, she says, helping him on with his jacket. Bring him back in one piece, y’hear? And we walk the few blocks from their flat in Colville Gardens down to Ladbroke Grove, ready to drink through to last orders.
The setting is a spacious, brown, old-style pub that will be a themed bar and restaurant within twelve months, guaranteed. I hold the door open for him and we go inside, finding a pair of stools at the bar. Fortner hangs his elbow-patched tweed jacket on a nearby hook, retrieving his wallet from the inside pocket. Then he sits beside me and rests his forearms on the wooden bar, breathing out heavily in anticipation of the long night ahead. To his left there’s a vast, Sun -reading builder, all biceps and sinew, muscles packed tight into a lumberjack shirt. His neck has been shaved to stubble and dropping from a scarred right earlobe is a single silver stud that seems to contain his entire personality. The man does not look up as we sit down. He just keeps on reading his paper.
“I’ll get the first round,” I say and reach into my hip pocket for a handful of change. “You want a pint or something, Fortner?”
“A pint,” he says slowly, as if, after four years in London, he is still coming to terms with this strange Limey word. “Yes. That is a good idea, young man. A pint.”
“Guinness? I’m having one.”
The barman hears this and brings down two tall glasses, starting to pour the Guinness before I have even asked for them. He allows the pints to settle for a while, using the time to take my money and cash it in at the till.
“Nuts? Do you want any nuts?”
“Not for me,” Fortner says. “Been tryin’ to get back to my ideal weight. Two hundred fifty pounds.”
“There you go, guys,” says the barman, setting the glasses down in front of us. He has the slightly sweeter, higher semitone voice that distinguishes Kiwis from Australians.
“How was your flight?”
“From Ukraine? Lousy.”
Imperceptibly, Fortner gathers together the lies.
“There’s no chance of jet lag on account of the time difference, but they do their best to exhaust you anyway. Airplane sat on the tarmac for three straight hours. Fuckin’ stewards gave us one complimentary drink and then played cards until takeoff. Then the flight was diverted through Munich and I had to spend the night in a goddamn Holiday Inn. Took a day to get home.”
This is utterly convincing. Perhaps the Hobbit got it wrong. Fortner does look older tonight, aged by long-haul flights and the trickeries of Kiev. Here is a man propping up a bar, a man in shirtsleeves and slacks, with ovals of sweat under his arms and stubble cast across his face like a rash. There will be questions he means to ask me, but his eyes look drained of will. He has no energy.
“You look tired,” I tell him.
“Oh, I’m all right. This’ll start me up.”
He takes a long creamy swig of his Guinness and sets it back down on the bar with a thud.
“So what’d you and Kathy get up to while I was away?” he asks, licking his upper lip. We’ve already been over this at dinner, but it makes me do the talking.
“Like she told you at supper. We went walking in Battersea Park. Had dinner at your place afterward.”
“Oh, yeah. She mentioned that.”
“Why d’you ask, then?”
“I just wanted details. Kinda missed her while I was away. I like hearing stories about her, things she did and said.”
The truth here would prove interesting. Well, frankly, Fort, there’s a lot of sexual tension between your wife and me and we nearly had sex on Saturday night.
“She talked about you a lot,” I tell him.
“Is that right?”
“Then I talked about me a lot.”
“No change there, then.”
“And finally we went to bed. I slept on the sofa.”
“You stayed the night on the couch? Kathy never said.”
Interesting.
“Didn’t she?”
“No.”
An awkward pause hovers over us. The builder turns the page of his newspaper and it crackles in the silence.
“Why do we always drink here?” I ask Fortner, turning back to face him and lighting a cigarette from my pack on the counter. “Why do you like it?”
“Don’t you?”
“No, it’s great. It’s just that we haven’t varied the venue.”
“Consistency is a much undervalued asset in modern times, my friend. Best to get to know a place. And besides, there’s good-lookin’ women later on.”
The builder vibrates slightly on his stool. Something about this unnerves him.
Fortner takes another long draw of Guinness. “So how are things?” he asks. “Everything okay at Abnex?”
“Good, actually. Alan’s on holiday this week so we can get things done without him breathing down our necks.”
“That’s always good, when the big chief takes off. You gotta hope they never come back.”
“But I’m broke. I got hit for a parking ticket and a tax bill first thing on Monday morning. That really pissed me off.”
“You forget to feed the meter?”
“No. Parked it on a double yellow near Hammersmith. Got towed.”
“Shit. They swoop those guys, like a fucking SWAT team. You gotta be careful.”
“The tax is worse. I live in a shithole but I’m paying a fortune to the local council.”
“You let it pile up?”
“Yeah, it’s been building for the last year. I couldn’t afford to pay so I just let it drift.”
“Foolish, my friend. Foolish. You should have come to me. I’d have helped you out.”
Fortner gives me a paternal pat on the back and I thank him, saying in the nicest possible way that I have no intention of borrowing money off him. Then he drains his pint with a long, satisfied gulp and says it’s his round. Mine is still only half empty. It takes him some time to get the attention of the barmaid, a local girl who has served us before.
“How are you, gents?” she asks. She has a crisp East End accent. “Same again, is it?”
“That’s right,” says Fortner, taking a twenty-pound note from his wallet and snapping it between his fingers. He’s started to pick up in the last few minutes. One more drink and things will be rolling.
“You mind if I make a slight criticism of you, Milius?” he says, still looking at the girl. “Would that be okay?”
It is as if the fact that he is buying me a drink has suddenly given him the confidence to ask a serious question.
“Sure.”
“It’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while now and I thought tonight would give us a good opportunity.”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s just that in the time that we’ve known each other-what is it, about six or seven months-you’ve shown a lot of hostility to the way things work over here. Does that sound unfair? I mean, stop me if I’m outta line.”
He wants to sound me out.
“No, that’s okay.”
“So you know what I’m talkin’ about?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Encouraged by this, Fortner expands on his theme.
“There’s just certain things you say, certain observations you make. For a guy your age you have a very jaded perspective on things. Maybe it’s normal for your generation. I hope you don’t mind me sayin’ this.”
I don’t mind at all. The barmaid puts two more pints down in front of us and gives Fortner his change.
“Example. Do you really think that the concept of Queen and Country is just a lot of shit?”
“Why did you use that phrase? Queen and Country?”
“Because you did. With Kathy on Saturday night. She told me you’d said you didn’t want to go into the Foreign Service for patriotic reasons because you thought that kind of stuff was a waste of time. Why d’you feel that way?”
“Maybe it’s difficult for an American to understand,” I say, trying to find a way of balancing expediency with opinions that I genuinely hold. “Although your country is divided in a lot of ways-down racial lines, in the gap between the very rich and the very poor-you’re still bound together by flag-waving patriotism. It’s drummed into you from childhood. God bless America and put a star-spangled banner outside every home. You’re taught to love your country. We don’t have that here. We don’t do things the same way. Loving the country is something blue-rinse Tories do at the party conference in Blackpool. It’s seen as naive, lacking the requisite degree of cynicism. We’re a divided nation, like yours, but we seem to relish that divisiveness. We have no reason historically to love our country.”
“That’s a crock. Look at the camaraderie you generated during World War Two.”
“Right. And we’ve been living off that for fifty years. Let me tell you something. Four in ten people in England celebrate St. Patrick’s Day every year. How many do you think do something to celebrate St. George’s Day?”
“No idea.”
“Four in every hundred. English pubs can get a special late license to serve on St. Patrick’s Day. They can’t if they want to do that on St. George’s.”
“That’s pretty sad.”
“Too right it’s pretty sad. It’s pretty fucking embarrassing, too. But that isn’t the reason why I’m jaded, necessarily.”
“Why, then?”
The builder suddenly scrapes back his stool, bundles up his copy of The Sun, and leaves. He’s heard enough of this.
“I think we’re living in an age of social disintegration,” I tell Fortner, trying not to sound too apocalyptic.
“You do?” He looks nonplussed, as if everyone he has had a conversation with in the last few days has said exactly the same thing.
“Absolutely. Health and education in this country, the two bedrocks of any civilized society, are a disgrace.”
I almost used the word time bomb there, but I can hear Hawkes’s voice in my head: You’re not trying to defect, Alec. Then his brisk, cackled laugh.
I continue, “For nearly twenty years the government has been more interested in installing pen-pushing bureaucrats into hospitals than it has been in making sure there are enough beds to tend for the sick. And why? Because in these days of enlightened capitalism and free markets, a hospital, just like everything else, has to turn a profit.”
“Come on, Milius. You believe in free markets just as much as the next guy.”
True. But I don’t admit this.
“Just a second. So in order to make their money, they’ve created a culture of fear overseen by big-brother management consultants-no offense to you and Kathy-whose only concern is to get their annual bonus. The last thing it has anything to do with is curing people.”
Fortner makes to interrupt me again, but I keep on going.
“Education is worse. Nobody wants to become a teacher anymore, because in the mind of the public, being a teacher is just a notch above cleaning toilets for a living. Just like doctors, they’ve been treated with utter contempt, subjected to endless form-filling, changes in the curriculum, low salaries, you name it. And all because the Tories don’t have the guts to say that the real problem isn’t the teachers, it’s bad parenting. And you know why they don’t say that? Because parents vote.”
“You think that’ll change if Labour wins?”
I give a spluttering laugh, more contemptuous than I had intended.
“No. No way. Maybe they’ll try and make the difference in schools, but until the accumulation of knowledge stops being unfashionable, until kids are encouraged to stay at school past sixteen, and until they find parents who actually take responsibility for their kids when they go home in the evening, nothing will change. Nothing.”
“It’s no different in the States,” Fortner says, curling his mouth downward and shaking his head. “In some cities we have kids checking in assault rifles before assembly. You go to a high school in Watts, it’s like passing through security at Tel Aviv airport.”
“Sure. But your system isn’t a toss-up between private and public education. Only a very few people actually pay to go to high school in the States, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s not the case in this country. Here, you can buy your way out of the mess. And the worst of it is that the more state education goes into decline, the more parents are going to send their children to fee-paying schools, and the more teachers are going to want jobs outside the state sector because they don’t need the grief of working in an inner-city comprehensive. So the gap between rich and poor will widen. It’s exactly the same pattern with medical care. The only way not to have to wait three years for an operation is to pay for it. But you want to know what really sickens me?”
“I feel sure you’re gonna tell me.”
“Our fee-paying schools. They have unbelievable facilities, superb teaching resources, and they cost a fortune. But they’re wasted on the people who can afford to go there.”
“Why d’you say that?”
“Look at what the students do after ten years of being privately educated. Most of them go and work in the City with the sole objective of making money. Nobody ever puts anything back in. Nobody is taught to feel a responsibility toward their society. It’s women and children first with those guys, but only if Tarquin isn’t worried about losing the twelve percent bonus on his offshore-investment portfolio. That’s the extent of his imagination.”
“But these are bright guys, Milius. And maybe after working in the City they go into the law or politics, or they start their own small business and create jobs for other people.”
“Bullshit. Excuse me, Fort, but that’s bullshit. They’ll just make sure they have enough money to send their son to Winchester, and then the whole cycle will begin all over again. Another generation of inbred fuckwits who are spoon-fed just enough of the right information by gifted teachers that they can scrape through their A levels, go to university, and waste some more of the taxpayer’s money. You know what? We should have to pay to go to university like you do in the States. At least then we’d appreciate it more.”
Fortner smirks and mutters, “Yeah,” under his breath. A vapor of sweat has appeared on his forehead and he has a thin line of Guinness threaded across his upper lip.
I try a different tack: “Reminds me of a story my father told once.”
“Your late father?”
“Yes.”
Why did he need to stress that? Late father. Does it make him feel somehow closer to me?
“He said that whenever a Cadillac goes by in America, the man on the street will say, ‘When I make my fortune, I’m gonna buy one of those.’ But when a Rolls-Royce drives past in England, people look at it and say, ‘Check out the wanker driving the Rolls. How come he’s got one and I haven’t?’”
This is actually a story Hawkes told me, which I thought would go down well with Fortner.
“That’s what we’re faced with here,” I tell him. “A profound suspicion of anything that smacks of success. It’s got so bad now in public life that I wouldn’t be surprised if no one in my generation wants to go into politics. Who needs the grief?”
“There’ll always be folks lookin’ for power, Milius, whatever the cost to their personal lives. Those guys know how high the stakes are: that’s why they get involved in the first place. Anyway, a minute ago you were attacking politicians. Now you feel sorry for them?”
I have to be careful not to build in too many contradictions, not to sound too rash. The trick, Hawkes told me, is not to play your hand too early. Sound them out, try to discover what it is that they want to hear, and then deliver it. You must become practiced at the art of the second guess. I cannot afford to overemphasize like this. Rest assured, he said, that everything you tell them will be infinitely examined for flaws.
Fortner leans toward me.
“I’ll tell you, I think some of the worst offenders in this are CNN. That station has done more to decimate the art of television news than any other organization on the planet. For a start, it’s just a mouthpiece for whoever happens to be in the White House. It’s an instrument of American imperialism. And secondly, because of the pressure to do reports on the hour, every hour, the reporters never actually go anywhere. They sit in their hotels in Sarajevo or Mogadishu doing their hair and makeup, waiting for a live satellite linkup with the Atlanta studio based on information they gleaned from the guy who brought them room service.”
It’s surprising to hear these kinds of arguments from Fortner. They are the first anti-American sentiments he has ever revealed.
“Yes,” I tell him. “But at least you have CNN. At least you had the vision and the balls to set the thing up. Why couldn’t the BBC do that? They have the resources, the staff, the years of experience. And they would have done it a lot better than Ted Turner. Why did it take an American company to create a global news network? I’ll tell you. Because you have the vision and we don’t. It’s just too daunting for us.”
“You got a point,” he says, tapping his glass. “You got a point.”
My round again.
It’s past nine thirty and this is as crowded as the pub usually gets. Every so often, Fortner and I are jostled by customers hollering orders from behind our stools. Standing between us, a twig-thin trust-fund hippy waits for the barman to finish pouring the last of the half-dozen pints he paid for with a Coutts Co. check. His jacket smells, and he has no qualms about pushing his thigh up tight against mine. I move to the right to make more room, but he just keeps coming at me, getting closer to the bar, squeezing me up.
