The Mission Song Part 2

"We've a bit of live action for you, son," Mr. Anderson announced, with great portent, as he tucked his cellphone back into his handkerchief pocket. "No more sitting in a nice comfortable cubicle and listening to the world from a safe distance, I'm afraid. You're about to meet some of those ruffians in the flesh, and do a bit of good for your country while you're about it. You're not averse to changing your ident.i.ty, I take it? Everybody wants to be somebody else at some point in their lives, they tell me."

"Not averse at all, Mr. Anderson. Not if you say it's necessary. Very willing indeed." I'd already changed it once in the last twenty-four hours, so twice wasn't going to make a lot of difference. "Who are we saving the world from this time?" I enquired, careful to conceal my excitement beneath a breezy manner. But to my surprise, Mr. Anderson took my question to heart, mulling it over before putting one of his own.

"Salvo."

"Mr. Anderson?"

"How squeamish are you about getting your hands dirty in a good cause?"

"I thought I was doing that already well, only in a way," I corrected myself hastily.

I was too late. Mr. Anderson's brow had clouded. He set great store by the moral integrity of the Chat Room, and did not care to have it impugned, least of all by me.

"Until now, Salvo, you have performed an entirely essential, but defensive role on behalf of our beleaguered nation. As of tonight, however, you will be taking the struggle to the enemy. You will cease to be defensive, and you will become' he was hunting for the mot juste 'proactive. Do I sense a reluctance on your part to go that extra mile?"

"None at all, Mr. Anderson. Not if it's a good cause, which you say it is. I'd be happy to. As long as it's just the two days," I added, mindful of my life-decision regarding Hannah, which I was anxious to implement with all speed. "Or three at the outside."

"I do, however, have to warn you that from the moment you leave this building you will be deniable as far as HMG is concerned. If for any reason you are rumbled blown, as we say you will be abandoned without scruple to your fate. Did you hoist that aboard, son? You're looking somewhat other-worldly, if I may say so."

With slender, well-groomed fingers, Bridget was coaxing my dinner jacket off me, unaware that, just a skull's width away from her, Hannah and I were nearly falling off her sofa-bed while we tore the remaining clothes off each other and made love a second time.

"Hoisted aboard and accepted, Mr. Anderson," I quipped gaily, if a little late. "What languages do they need? Are we talking a specialised vocabulary here? Maybe I should pop back to Battersea while the coast is clear and grab some works of reference."

My offer was clearly not to his liking, for he pursed his lips. "That will be a matter for your temporary employers to determine, thank you, Salvo. We are not privy to their detailed plans, neither do we wish to be."

Bridget marched me to a dingy bedroom but did not come in. Laid out on the unmade bed were two pairs of used grey flannels, three hand-me-down shirts, a selection of Prisoners' Aid underwear, socks and a leather belt with the chrome peeling off the buckle. And beneath them on the floor three pairs of shoes, part worn. A mangy sports coat dangled from a wire hanger on the door. Divesting myself of my evening wear, I was again rewarded with a waft of Hannah's body odour. Her tiny room had contained no washbasin. The bathrooms across the corridor were occupied by nurses about to go on duty.

Of the shoes, the least offensive were the worst fitting. In a mistaken victory of vanity over common sense, I nonetheless selected them. The sports jacket was of industrial-strength Harris Tweed with iron armpits: push my shoulders forwards and the collar sawed my neck. Backwards, it locked me in a citizen's arrest. An olive-green tie of knitted nylon completed the dismal ensemble.

And here, if only for a minute, my spirits plummeted, for I must own straight out to my love of sartorial finery, my relish for impact, colour and display that no doubt springs direct from my Congolese mother's genes. Peek into my briefcase any working day and what will you find tucked among the written depositions, briefings, background papers and deportation orders? Glossy give-away magazines of the world's most pricey menswear, items I could never in half a dozen lifetimes afford to buy. And now look at me.

Returning to the living room I found Bridget writing out an inventory of my possessions on a legal pad: one state-of-the-art cellphone slimline brushed steel with flip camera one bunch of house keys, one driving licence, one British pa.s.sport which for reasons of pride or insecurity I always carry on my person, and one slender wallet of genuine calf containing forty-five pounds in notes plus credit cards. Obedient to my sense of duty, I handed her the last vestiges of my former glory: my dinner jacket trousers not yet run in, my Turnbull & a.s.ser bow tie to match, my pleated dress shirt of best sea-island cotton, my onyx dress studs and cufflinks, silk socks, patent leather shoes. I was still undergoing this painful ordeal when Mr. Anderson came back to life.

"Are you familiar with one Brian Sinclair by any chance, Salvo?" he demanded accusingly. "Think hard, please. Sinclair? Brian? Yes or no?"

I a.s.sured him that, bar hearing him speak the name on his cellphone a few moments previously, I was not.

"Very well. From now on, and for the next two days and nights, Brian Sinclair is who you are. Note please the felicitous similarity of initials B.S. In matters of cover, the golden rule is to remain as close to the reality as operational requirements permit. You are no longer Bruno Salvador, you are Brian Sinclair, a freelance interpreter raised in Central Africa, the son of a mining engineer, and you are temporarily employed by an internationally based syndicate registered in the Channel Islands and dedicated to bringing the latest agricultural techniques to the Third and Fourth Worlds. Kindly advise me whether you have any problems with that, of whatever nature."

My heart didn't sink, but it didn't exactly rise either. His anxiety was getting to me. I was beginning to wonder whether I should be anxious too.

"Do I know them, Mr. Anderson?"

"Know who, son?"

"The agricultural syndicate. If I'm Sinclair, who are they? Perhaps I've worked for them before."

It was hard for me to see Mr. Anderson's expression because he had his back to the light.

"We are talking, Salvo, of an anonymous syndicate. It would be illogical indeed for such a syndicate to have a name."

"The directors have names, don't they?"

"Your temporary employer as such has no name, any more than the Syndicate does," Mr. Anderson rebuffed me. Then he appeared to relent. "You will, however and I suspect I am speaking out of turn be given into the charge of one Maxie. Please do not on any account, at any future date, indicate that you have heard that name from me."

"Mr. Maxie?" I demanded. "Maxie Someone? If I'm putting my head into a noose, Mr. Anderson '

"Maxie will be quite sufficient on its own, thank you, Salvo. In all matters of command and control you will, for the purposes of this exceptional operation, report to Maxie unless otherwise directed."

"Should I trust him, Mr. Anderson?"

His chin came up sharply and his first reaction, I am sure, was that anyone named by himself was by definition a person to be trusted. Then, seeing me, he softened.

"On the strength of such information as has reached me, you would indeed be justified in placing your confidence in Maxie. He is, I am told, a genius in his field. As you are, Salvo. As you are."

"Thank you, Mr. Anderson." But the sound-thief in me had caught the note of reservation in his voice, which was why I pressed him further. "Who does Maxie report to? For the purposes of this exceptional operation? Unless otherwise directed?" Daunted by the severity of his glare, I hastened to modify my question in a manner more acceptable to him. "I mean, we all report to someone, don't we, Mr. Anderson? Even you."

Pressed beyond bearing, Mr. Anderson has a habit of breathing in deeply and lowering his head like a large animal on the point of charging.

"I understand there is a Philip," he conceded with reluctance, 'or, I am told, when it serves him' - a sniff "Philippe, in the French manner." Despite his polyglot calling, Mr. Anderson has always considered English enough for anybody. "As you are in Maxie's hands, so Maxie is in Philip's. Does that satisfy you?"

"Does Philip have a rank, Mr. Anderson?"

Given his previous hesitation, his answer came fast and hard: "No, Philip does not. Philip is a consultant. He has no rank, he is a member of no official service. Bridget. Mr. Sinclair's visiting cards, if you please, hot off the presses."

With a facetious bob Bridget presented me with a plastic purse. Prising it open, I extracted a flimsy card introducing Brian S. Sinclair, Accredited Interpreter, resident at a post-office box in Brixton. The telephone, fax and e-mail numbers were unfamiliar to me. None of my diplomas was mentioned, none of my degrees.

"What does the S stand for?"

"Whatever you wish," Mr. Anderson replied magnanimously. "You have only to select a name and stick to it."

"What happens if someone tries to ring me?" I asked, as my thoughts went racing back to Hannah.

A courteous recorded announcement will advise them that you will be back at your desk in a few days. Should somebody elect to e-mail you, which we consider improbable, that message will be received and dealt with in the appropriate manner."

"But otherwise I'm the same person?"

My persistence was putting a strain on the last of Mr. Anderson's patience.

"You are the same person, Salvo, recast in circ.u.mstances parallel to your own. If you are married, remain married. If you have a dear grandmother in Bournemouth, you may retain her with our blessing. Mr. Sinclair himself will be untraceable, and when this operation is over, he will not have existed. I can't make myself plainer than that, can I?" And in a more emollient tone: "It's a very normal type of situation in the world you are about to enter, son. Your only problem is, you're new to it."

"What about my money? Why do you have to keep my money?"

"My instructions are that '

He stopped. Meeting his stare, I realised that he was surveying not Salvo the sophisticated party-goer, but a coffee-coloured Mission boy in a Salvation Army sports coat, baggy flannels and increasingly tight shoes. The sight evidently touched a chord in him.

"Salvo."

"Yes, Mr. Anderson."

"You're going to have to harden yourself up, son. You'll be living a lie out there."

"You said. I don't mind. I'm ready. You warned me. I need to ring my wife, that's all." For wife, read Hannah, but I didn't say so.

"You'll be mixing with others who are living lies. You understand that, don't you? They are not like us, these people. The truth is not an absolute to them. Not the Bible truth that you and I were brought up to, much as we might wish it was."

I had never identified, and have not to this day, Mr. Anderson's religious affiliations which I suspect were largely Masonic. But he had always made a point of reminding me that we were comrades in whatever faith we both adhered to. Having handed me my cellphone for one last call, Bridget had removed herself to the bedroom no more than six feet from where I stood. Mr. Anderson was anch.o.r.ed in the drawing room, and able to hear every word. Hunched in the little entrance hall, I underwent a crash course in the complexities of marital infidelity. My one desire was to tell Hannah of my undying love and warn her that, contrary to my a.s.surances, I wouldn't be able to talk to her for two days. But with only a spindly door separating me from my audience, I had no option but to ring my legal wife and listen to her answer phone You have reached Penelope Randall's voice mail I'm away from my desk right now. If you'd care to leave a message, do so after the tone. To talk to my a.s.sistant, ask for Emma on 9124.

I took a breath. "Hi, sweetie. It's me. Look, I'm terribly sorry, but I've been called away on yet another rather high-powered job. One of my oldest and best corporate clients. They say it's a matter of life and death. Could be two or three days. I'll try and ring you but it's going to be tricky."

Who was I sounding like? n.o.body I'd met. n.o.body I'd listened to. n.o.body I wanted to meet again. I tried harder: "Look, I'll call as soon as they give me a spot of breathing s.p.a.ce. I really am heartbroken, darling. Oh, and your party looked just great. Repeat, great. The outfit was fab. Everyone was talking about it. I'm just so sorry I had to walk out on you all. Lots to sort out when I come back, okay? See you, darling. Bye."

Bridget took back my cellphone, pa.s.sed me my night-bag and watched me while I checked its contents: socks, handkerchiefs, shirts, underpants, a sponge-bag, one grey pullover with V-neck.

"Using any medication at all, are we?" she murmured suggestively. "How about contact lenses? No lubricants, little boxes?"

I shook my head.

"Well, off you both go then," Mr. Anderson declared, and if he had raised his right hand and bestowed one of Brother Michael's floppy blessings on us, I would not have been surprised.

4.

It is frankly a conundrum to me, observing these events from where I sit today, that as I followed Bridget down the stairs and back onto the pavement of South Audley Street, attired as I was in the garb of a secondary-school master up from the country, and with nothing to attach me to the world except a bunch of bogus business cards and the a.s.surance that I was about to endure unfamiliar perils, I should have counted myself the most blessed fellow in London that night, if not the whole of England, the most intrepid patriot and secret servant, but such was indeed the case.

From is the name of the boat designed by the famous Norwegian explorer Nansen, a top member of Brother Michael's pantheon of men of action. From in the Norwegian language means onwards, and From was what inspired my dear late father to ride his heretic's bicycle across the Pyrenees. And From w.i.l.l.y-nilly had been my mood ever since I had received what Brother Michael in a different context had dubbed the Great Call. Onwards while I gathered my fort.i.tude for the decision that lay ahead of me, Onwards while I earned my wings in my country's silent war versus ruffians in the flesh, Onwards, and away from Penelope who had long been a stranger to me, Onwards while I mapped out my shining white path back to life with Hannah. Onwards, finally, to my mysterious new master, Maxie, and the even more mysterious consultant, Philip.

Given the extreme urgency of the operation and its importance, I expected to find Fred our white driver keenly revving his Mondeo at the kerb side but what with a police cordon at Marble Arch and the traffic jams, Bridget a.s.sured me it was quicker to walk.

"You don't mind, do you, Salv?" she asked, taking a firm grip on my arm, either because she was thinking I might make a run for it, which could not have been further from my mind, or because she was one of the touchy-feely brigade who pat your cheek and roll the palm of their hand around your back and you never know, or I don't, whether they're distributing the milk of human kindness or inviting you to bed.

"Mind?" I echoed. "It's a glorious evening! I couldn't borrow your phone a moment, could I? Penelope may not be picking up her messages."

"Sorry, darling. Against the regs, I'm afraid."

Did I know where we were headed? Did I ask? I did not. The life of a secret agent is nothing if not a journey into the unknown, the life of a secret lover no less so. Off we strode with Bridget setting the pace and me with my second-hand shoes hacking at my ankle bones. In the evening sunlight my spirits rose further, a.s.sisted perhaps unconsciously by Bridget, who had hoisted my right forearm so high against her that it was nestling under her left breast, which by the feel of its under-curve was self-supporting. When Hannah has lit your lamp for you, it's natural to see other women in its rays.

"You really love her, don't you?" she marvelled as she steered me through a bunch of Friday-night merrymakers. "So many married couples I know, they just b.i.t.c.h at each other. It p.i.s.ses me off. But you and Penelope aren't like that, are you? It must be great."

Her ear was six inches from my mouth and she was wearing a scent called Je Reviens, which is the weapon of choice of Penelope's younger sister Gail. Gail, apple of her father's eye, had married a car-park owner from the lower branches of the aristocracy. Penelope, by way of retaliation, had married me. Yet even today it would take a board of top Jesuits to explain what I did next.

For why does a newly anointed adulterer, who hours earlier has abandoned himself body, soul and origins to another woman for the first time in his five-year marriage, feel an irresistible urge to put his deceived wife on a pedestal? Is he trying to re-create the image of her that he has defiled? Is he re-creating the image of himself before he fell? Was my ever-present Catholic guilt catching up with me in the midst of my euphoria? Was praising Penelope to the skies the nearest I could get to praising Hannah without blowing my cover?

It had been my firm intention to draw Bridget out regarding my new employers, and by means of artful questions learn more about the composition of the anonymous Syndicate and its relationship with the many secret organs of the British State that toil night and day for our protection, far removed from the sight of your average punter's eye. Yet as we threaded our way through near-stationary traffic I embarked upon a full-throated aria to my wife Penelope that proclaimed her the most attractive, exciting, sophisticated and faithful partner a top interpreter and secret soldier of the Crown could have, plus a brilliant journalist combining hard-nosed with compa.s.sionate, and this fantastic cook which anyone would know verged upon the fanciful, seeing who did the cooking. Not everything that I said was totally positive, it couldn't be. If you're talking in the rush-hour to another woman about your wife, you can't help opening up a bit about her negative aspects or you wouldn't have an audience.

"But how the h.e.l.l did Mr. and Mrs. Right ever find each other in the first place? That's what I want to know," Bridget protested, in the aggrieved tones of one who has followed the instructions on the packet without success.

"Bridget," an alien voice inside me answered, 'here is how."

It is eight in the evening in Salvo's dingy bachelor bed sit in Ealing, I tell her as we wait arm-in-arm for the pedestrian lights to change. Mr. Amadeus Osman of the World Wide and Legal Translation Agency is calling me from his malodorous office in the Tottenham Court Road. I am to go directly to Canary Wharf where a Great National Newspaper is offering mega bucks for my services. These are still my days of struggle, and Mr. Osman owns half of me.

In an hour I am seated in the newspaper's luxurious offices with its editor one side of me and its shapely ace reporter guess who? the other. Before us squats her super gra.s.s a bearded Afro-Arab merchant seaman who for the price of what I'm earning in a year will dish the dirt on a ring of corrupt customs officers and policemen operating in Liverpool's dock land He speaks only meagre English, his mother tongue being a cla.s.sical Tanzanian-flavoured Swahili. Our ace crime reporter and her editor are caught in the muckraker's proverbial cleft stick: check out your source with the authorities and compromise the scoop; accept your source on trust and let the libel lawyers take you to the cleaners.

With Penelope's consent I a.s.sume command of the interrogation. As the questioning flies back and forth, our super gra.s.s alters and refines his story, adds new elements, retracts old ones. I make the rascal repeat himself. I point out his many discrepancies until, under my persistent cross-examination, he admits all. He is a con-artist, a fabricator. For fifty quid he will go away. The editor is jubilant in his grat.i.tude. In one stroke, he says, I have spared their blushes and their bank account.

Penelope, having overcome her humiliation, declares that she owes me a very large drink.

"People expect their interpreters to be small, studious and bespectacled," I explained to Bridget modestly, laughing away Penelope's rapt and, in retrospect, somewhat blatant interest in me from the start. "I suppose I just failed to come up to expectation."

"Or she just totally freaked out," Bridget suggested, tightening her grip on my hand.

Did I bubble out the rest to Bridget too? Appoint her my subst.i.tute confessor in Hannah's absence? Unveil to her how, until I met Penelope, I was a twenty-three-year-old closet virgin, a dandy in my personal appearance but, underneath my carefully constructed facade, saddled with enough hang-ups to fill a walk-in cupboard? that Brother Michael's attentions and Pere Andre's before him had left me in a s.e.xual twilight from which I feared to emerge? that my dear late father's guilt regarding his explosion of the senses had transferred itself wholesale and without deductions to his son? and how as our taxi sped towards Penelope's flat I had dreaded the moment when she would literally uncover my inadequacy, such was my timidity regarding the female s.e.x? and that thanks to her knowhow and micro-management all ended well? extremely well more well than she could ever have imagined, she a.s.sured me, Salvo being her dream mustang the best in her stable, she might have added her starred Alpha Male Plus? Or, as she later put it to her friend Paula when they thought I wasn't listening, her chocolate soldier always standing to attention? And that one calendar week later, so blown away was he in all respects by his newfound and unquenchable prowess in the bedroom, so overwhelmed with grat.i.tude and ready to confuse s.e.xual accomplishment with great love, that Salvo with his customary impulsiveness and naivety proposed marriage to Penelope, only to be accepted on the spot? No. By a mercy, in that regard at least I managed to restrain myself. Neither did I get round to telling Bridget the price I had since paid, year by year, for this much needed therapy, but only because we had by then pa.s.sed the Connaught Hotel and turned into the top end of Berkeley Square.

In my expansiveness of heart I was a.s.suming, for no reason beyond the expectations we have of natural gravity, that our path would then take us down towards Piccadilly. But suddenly Bridget's grip on my arm tightened and she wheeled me left up some steps to a grand front door that I failed to get the number of. The door closed behind us and there we were, standing in a velvet-curtained lobby occupied by two identical blond boys in blazers. I don't remember her ringing a bell or knocking, so they must have been watching out for us on their closed-circuit screen. I remember they both wore grey flannels like mine, and their blazers had all three b.u.t.tons fastened. And I remember wondering whether, in the world that they inhabited, this was regulation and I ought to be doing up the b.u.t.tons of my Harris Tweed.

"Skipper's been delayed," the seated boy told Bridget without lifting his eyes from the black-and-white image of the door we had just pa.s.sed through. "He's on his sweet way, right? Ten to fifteen. Want to leave him here with us or wait it out?"

"Wait," said Bridget.

The boy stretched out his hand for my bag. On Bridget's nod I pa.s.sed it to him.

The grand hall that we entered had a painted dome for a ceiling, with white nymphs, and white babies blowing trumpets, and a regal staircase that halfway up itself divided into two more staircases curving to a balcony with a row of doors, all closed. And at the foot of the staircase, on either side, two more doors, grand ones, capped by golden eagles with their wings spread. The right-hand door was closed off by a red silk rope with bra.s.s fittings. I never saw anyone go in or out of it. On the left-hand door a lighted red sign said silence conference in progress without any punctuation, because I always notice punctuation. So if you wanted to be pedantic, you could interpret it as meaning that people were having a conference about silence: which only shows you how my personal state of mind was alternating between post-coital, skittish, out of it, and totally hyper. I've never done drugs, but if I had, this is how I imagine I would have been, which is why I needed to pin down everything around me before it transmogrified itself into something else.

Guarding the grand door stood a grey-headed bouncer who could have been Arab and must have been older than the two blond boys put together but was still very much a member of the pugilistic cla.s.ses, having a flattened nose and dropped shoulders and hands cupped over his b.a.l.l.s. I don't remember climbing the regal staircase. If Bridget had been ahead of me in her skin-tight jeans I would have remembered, so we must have climbed side by side. And Bridget had been in this house before. She knew the geography and she knew the boys. She knew the Arab bouncer too, because she smiled at him and he smiled back at her in a soft, adoring manner before resuming his pugilistic glower. She knew without being told where you waited, which was halfway up the staircase before it divided, something you could never have guessed from below.

There were two easy chairs, a leather sofa with no arms, and glossy magazines offering private islands in the Caribbean and charter yachts complete with crew and helicopter, price on application. Picking one up, Bridget leafed through it, inviting me to do the same. Yet even while fantasising about which From Hannah and I would sail away on, I was tuning my mind's ear to the boo my voices coming out of the conference room, because I'm a listener by nature and trained to it, not just by the Chat Room. No matter how confused I am, I listen and remember, it's my job. Plus the fact that secret children in far-flung Mission houses learn to keep their ears pinned back if they want to know what's likely to hit them next.

And as I listened I began to pick up the see-saw whine of fax machines working overtime in the rooms above us and the chirp of telephones too quickly smothered, and the fraught silences when nothing happened but the whole house held its breath. Each couple of minutes or less, a young female a.s.sistant came scuttling past us down our staircase to deliver a message to the bouncer, who opened his door six inches and slipped the message to someone inside before shutting it and putting his hands back over his b.a.l.l.s.

Meanwhile the voices were still coming out of the conference room. They were male voices and each was important in the sense that this was a meeting of men who punched at their own weight, as opposed to one supremo talking to his underlings. I also noted that, although the sound of the words was English, the voices speaking them were of varying nationalities and cadences, now from the Indian subcontinent, now Euro-American or white African colonial, much in the manner of high-level conferences I am occasionally privileged to attend where platform speeches are delivered in English, but your offstage discussions are conducted in the tongues of individual delegates, with the interpreters acting as the essential bridges between G.o.d's striving souls.

There was one voice, however, that seemed to be addressing me personally. It was native English, upper-cla.s.s, and compelling in its tonal rise and fall. So finely were my antennae tuned that after a couple of minutes of what I call my third ear I had convinced myself it was the voice of a gentleman I was familiar with and respected, even if I hadn't caught a single word of what it was saying. And I was still hunting in my memory for its owner when my attention was diverted by a thunderclap below me as the door to the lobby flew open to admit the cadaverous, breathless figure of Mr. Julius Bogarde, alias Bogey, my late mathematics teacher and chief luminary of the Sanctuary's ill-fated Outward Bound Club. The fact that Bogey had perished ten years ago while leading a party of terrified schoolchildren up the wrong side of a mountain in the Cairngorms only compounded my surprise at his reincarnation.

"Maxie," I heard Bridget breathe in reproachful awe as she sprang to her feet. "You mad sod. Who's the lucky girl this time?"

And all right, he wasn't Bogey.