Gabriel Murray Read online

  Now sometimes business takes me back. Rarely, also, holidays: yes, I get holidays from Elaine. I spend them in London and Bristol and Birmingham; I meet contacts, sometimes boys and men. Which is to say that casual sex is a useful pretext to establish as a spy—but also, it’s casual sex. Sometimes it’s a fling for a week or so. I don’t mind. If I want to sleep with someone at all I probably want to sleep with him for a week.

  Thus with someone we’ll call Denys: I had a holiday, so this was my own mask I had on, the one called Leslie Kincaid, and I told him how I worked for the BBC and sometimes contracted with the Times. “What great fun,” he said, sly; he was one of those pretty blue-bloods, the ones to whom absolutely nothing’s sexier than some notion of class mobility. Talk contemptuous posh to me, they always seem to be hinting, and put your electrician’s hands all over me. Denys had an earl somewhere on his mother’s side—good God, can I ever resist these? I’ve never fixed a damned radiator. “Why not the Daily Mail? They’ve got a market for pictures. Think of what you’d get to photograph.”

  “Darling,” I flicked ash off my cigarette, all affectations, “I did not embed myself in France during the war to go on to work for the Daily Mail. I would like my biography to show an upward trend.”

  We sat on the steps of a university library, too grown-up and dissolute to be taken for students. Sometimes it’s refreshing to be stared at here and there. He smoked with louche confidence, with sort of an insolent Francophilic attitude. “Well, that’s only if you do something interesting here too, isn’t it?”

  “Goodness, am I still in the audition phase with you?”

  Denys smiled like an imp. His eyes took a merry crease—remembering my roughness with a thrill, I supposed, the urgency I summoned or manufactured for him. You have to understand, I do feel urgency. I feel desire. It’s not the same to me with all people, and it’s certainly not the same to me between men and women. It’s just that almost no one sees it uncovered anymore; with people like Denys I find myself obliging, with the roaring engine banging on the inside of me to get out.

  “Snap one of me,” he said.

  I leaned back, sort of a dignified topple onto the steps. “What, are you commissioning me?”

  “Don’t give me that. Take a picture. I want to see what your work can do for me as a subject.”

  “This is architecturally dull.” I indicated the library. “There’s nothing good in you that university design would bring out.”

  He prodded me with his shoe. “Then pick a place. I didn’t manage to be a barrister—I’d like to be your muse, at least.”

  I don’t know how much I cared for him or didn’t. I only knew him for one holiday. It was my hotel I took him to downtown, and first I set him up in the half-empty lounge in the lobby; “Why don’t you take me to Coombe Abbey or something?” he said, laughing.

  “I’m not photographing Coombe Abbey,” I said. “I’m photographing you.”

  That startled him—I don’t know what was in me, or how I looked. I can only look out. He looked startled, looking up from the lobby sofa, and that I captured.

  There’s my Birmingham shot for you, May. You always said that I should do a portrait series; I maintain it’s a conflict of interest, getting to know subjects and depicting them—so have the one. His name was—not—Denys, and his uncle had an earldom; you can see here the fineness of his carpals and his ulna as he reaches up in that awkward manner to deflect his surprise, next to his face—those beetle brows, so indelicate, his luminous dark eyes. The sofa cushions must have had a bright gold color you can’t see here, but it’s no matter; it was so washed out, and look how insubstantial behind him. His shirt really was that white.

  Of course I photographed him again later, lying on his stomach on the bed with his feet kicked up. You could see the laughter stirring—I nearly sent it to him, actually, two weeks later after I developed it; but those were two cool weeks, I’m no fool. I did destroy that one. Some traces are bloodier, brighter red.

  We conversed on that topic, actually. Here I’ll depart from my posture—

  I was examining my own shoulder, where he’d left a very red mark. He made fun of my squeamishness at first; then he glimpsed the mark, and how red it actually was, and became very shamefaced—“Don’t,” I waved him off (though I was considering how to get rid of it). “I always like to be marked up at the end of things. Think of it as rubedo.”

  “Leslie, let’s dispense with the fiction that I know remotely as many things as you do,” he said. “What in the name of God is ‘rubedo?’”

  I—don’t know why I do these things.

  “Part of the old fancy superstitions,” I said to him, or the ceiling; “I mean before Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn, even. The medieval-Renaissance things: transmuting lead to gold, but it was more than that to them. They called it the Great Work—nigredo to albedo. Albedo to citrinitas. Citrinitas—to rubedo. Black to white to yellow to red. What this really meant was darkness to light, light to dawn.”

  The way he looked at me was wider than in the photograph, maybe because of the dark. No light yet to ruin things. No dawn. I could tell that what he was going to say was, maybe, are you all right?

  He was a city person, that one, fonder of the smog and the choke and the side street where people like he and I thrive; I am too. So are you. So is Elaine. So are all those Kincaids I don’t ring at Christmas—my brother who’s remodeled the shop (good for him!), my mother. From the air you would all be little lights in Birmingham and London and Bristol, pinpointed together in that bustling yellow glow. There’s citrinitas if you’re looking for it; you only see it at nighttime, up in an airplane or higher.

  I’m sorry.

  * * *

  That was stupid, and I was thirty-six. It’s been ten years, however; I seem to have weathered a fair bit of my own stupidity.

  I don’t take so many lovers in these years. I just don’t have the time. I’m busy—fewer of everything, outside of work, outside of you, outside of Elaine, outside of my magnum opus. Fewer things, so theoretically I should be getting less attached. I kid. You know me, I drain the blood out of every little thing.

  Well, no, you don’t. You don’t.

  The best friend I had in school was Sufian—you know him, or knew. We gallery-goers are a small world. He’s gone now: bled dry by madness and misery and the places we live, in and out of hospital. It was always in him; I would have taken it out if I had only known where it lived. No, May, we didn’t fuck, you vulture; it was a beautiful boy with a heart from greener country that he wanted, and I’m hardly that. I hear your imprint is doing another run of his work. The best of us never make it out, do we? Soldiers, spies, civilians. All luminous things are recorded by their hangers-on.

  I’m afraid no one is hanging on to me, though. Not even you—you’re just a woman weary of her job and circles and always getting up and falling back in—no, I’m really hanging on to you. I know I think of you about a hundred times as often as you think of me. That is really the quality for which the Secret Intelligence Service selects.

  * * *

  Whiten, therefore, the red, and redden the white.

  I’m going to talk about a woman whose name you might, or mightn’t, remember. Please say that you do. I know that it’s a fragile illusion—the notion that while we forget strangers’ sorrow every minute, the things that happen to us make a mark—but humor me, if you will, and connect the name Sylvia Leigh Nancarrow to a headline in 1949.

  I am going to include an image here from the holiday I took to Campania with Sylvia Leigh Nancarrow. The image is not of her. I never took a picture of Sylvia Leigh. Not much of anyone did. The surviving photographs of Sylvia Leigh are juvenile, up to a point, and then they’re blurry: a face in group posters, with a hat, with sunglasses, smiling, moving at the wrong moment, frustratingly imprecise. She’s difficult to pin down, like me.

  1948, Vienna. 1949, Campania—I’m just putting things in order, I’m just putting t
hings together.

  You probably remember Sylvia Leigh Nancarrow for a headline that crossed your desk at one point, or a series of. I remember Sylvia Leigh because she had the most wonderful fake bad Italian of anyone I’ve known.

  She modeled it for me on the deck of our boat from Greece. “Mi dispiace, ma non parlo bene l’italiano,” rolled off her tongue with the sly false humility of a fluent speaker—then, with a wink and a reversal, “Mee disspiacchi—” like an American trying to order at a posh restaurant.

  I leaped like she’d trod on my tail. “Fuck! I mean, cor blimey, that’s awful,” I said in the insincerest acknowledgement of the family sitting nearish. (The mum glared.) “My absolute stars and garters. How do you do it?”

  “It’s an important trick,” said Sylvia Leigh with that cigarette holder of hers. “Certainly more so than sarcastic surprise.”

  “My word, you couldn’t be implying that I am anything less than charming at all times.”

  “You ought to make your Italian a little less than perfect,” she said, unflapped; “in that way people always think they’re getting one over on you. Surely you were always doing that in France.”

  Being partnered with Sylvia Leigh was like studying with a star classmate; she had the most obnoxious standards, and the worst part was that she absolutely met all of them. “Naturally,” I said. “Well, bully for me, then—as a matter of fact, my Italian is imperfect.”

  “No, that’s just not being very good with Italian.” Sylvia Leigh had the right of it, of course. “You need to drop it a notch by design. Let’s try this.”

  She could do this with any language she spoke, which amounted to English, Italian, French, and German. Neither of us spoke Russian; we had a joke between us that we had been demoted to the non-Russian-speaking division, which was not all joke, considering the business of our trade. Our real shining stars, whoever they were, were off infiltrating the USSR and passing themselves off as comrades to comrades.

  In communiqué, I was Bullfinch; she was Jocasta. (I always thought these would have been more secure if they’d given us misleading sexes—not that a bullfinch is a specific sex, I suppose. But to think. I could have been Jocasta! I could have been Medea.)

  We were playing casual lovers; we were playing ourselves, our journalistic selves, on sort of a busman’s holiday to Naples where she was going to write about a local fertility festival, one of those pagan holdouts, and I was theoretically going to photograph it, but really we were going to eat and drink and cavort in the Italian spring like God and Stravinsky intended. But really, we were supposed to intercept and hold a crooked American arms dealer long enough for some friends in the carabinieri to transport him. Simple and crude—no miracle tranquilizer darts, we were just going to get him drunk.

  By crooked I mean in bed with the Russians, here. Otherwise no one would have any quarrel with what he was doing.

  He wasn’t due for a day or two, though, and we did eat and cavort, sort of. We ate, anyway, and drank a little: we established our cover, dancing, kissing, me boorishly fumbling at her skirt in the hotel bar until she raced away to see the bazaar with a gay spirit.

  She was impressed with Naples. The chemistry with me was all that she had to feign. I don’t think she understood me very well there. Sylvia Leigh was one of those who thought restrictions in lovers were sort of a petit bourgeois affectation: she took men and women for recreation, if they were any fun, and was a little annoyed that she had to pretend to stick with me here.

  We put on an Ellington record, danced and laughed, rolled around in the sheets and took off our clothes in case housekeeping came in; it was like that, with her putting her bare legs up on the headboard like she was sitting, dimensionally, on the wall, that she said: “Is it a problem for you? Being with women? Because you have to do it, too, don’t you? I mean, really, not just this.”

  It was a brazen question. I didn’t really mind; “Not exactly. This would be an unwise use of my time if I couldn’t abide sex with people I don’t like.”

  “How is it different?”

  Sex is more or less the same with all people if it goes decently, I was about to formulate, but if you’re not interested in women, then it just doesn’t make you happy, there isn’t a connection. But I couldn’t go further—I would hang myself with my own standard, if put that way.

  I’d leaned on my remembered self, of course. I still do. But he never says anything back to me.

  “It’s more difficult to choke on a woman.”

  “Leslie!” She laughed, the first full-throated snort I got out of her. “I thought you were meant to be dashing.”

  The next day we went to see the festival, as Mr. Piers Wegmann of San Diego, California presumably motored into town on a boat a few miles away. It was all evil-eye charms and maypoles and shadows of Priapus, which was very thematic, really—I had to squire Sylvia Leigh about to fend off the ruder young men with my tan forearms, or possibly wallet. There was a point at which she unlinked arms with me, though, to go and converse with a group of maypole girls with ribbons in their hair and all over their arms; I’ve a suspicion she wanted a ribbon for herself. I would’ve. Anyway, I supposed she knew whether she could take care of herself, and when she was out of sight I fiddled with my camera and I took a shot: a different maypole, in the first stages of being taken down, ribbons torn away. Girls chatting amongst themselves, with their friends and boyfriends. No Sylvia Leigh in sight, no Sylvia Leigh anywhere. Gone, and no one looking at her in-frame either—like a pond when the ripples ceased.

  She came back. We got some ice cream and went down again. We split up and I, independently, confirmed Mr. Wegmann’s check-in at our hotel with a few duplicitous conversations—then we reconvened, in our room, as she shook down her hair and put on her evening dress: purple, almost Tyrian purple, with a plunging back. I told her half of what I’d learned and said I would confirm his identity; that she should come to the hotel bar in one hour and I would let her know what I knew.

  And then I went out and met Piers Wegmann, passing myself off as a Russian contact. No, I don’t speak the language. But neither did Mr. Wegmann, and I’d learned from Sylvia Leigh about bad accents.

  I had to kill him very quietly, in the Neapolitan dry-docks. Quiet killing is very brutal, more so if it’s bare-handed: Mr. Wegmann was not small, but I was much stronger and I crushed his windpipe before I snapped his neck, and put his body in with Asia-bound freight. Then I went home and met Sylvia Leigh in her Tyrian purple dress and told her I’d identified him—and the following morning, I left her at a restaurant and went, American, to meet his Russian contacts as Mr. Piers Wegmann, whom they’d never met.

  We formed a cordial relationship. I had an additional piece for barter—a British agent, Sylvia Leigh Nancarrow, working with the Americans. “I’m sure she would have a great deal to say,” I said, twisting the corner of a napkin between my fingers; “given the opportunity to defect.”

  I think she did “defect,” Sylvia Leigh—that is, I think they let her resettle in Moscow. I do not really know. My government does not look kindly upon her. But the headline I suggested, WRITER SYLVIA LEIGH NANCARROW MISSING AFTER NEAPOLITAN HOLIDAY, is more gentle.

  It wasn’t the Tyrian purple she was wearing the last time I saw her, it was something else. After it was done I went on down to the waterfront—not the docks where I murdered Wegmann, but a seawall where I could see the shore. Do you know that I’d expected an angel to swoop down with a ram, at any moment?

  It doesn’t matter. I laid my soul bare and open in Naples, May, in 1949. First I was called, and I answered; then I was tested, and I endured. That I don’t regret. I’m not sorry to Sylvia Leigh—the business I am in was always called sacrifice.

  Now I feel the warmth of a promise and I understand what I could not understand before. I have seen what I never thought I’d see; I have seen certainty.

  But I would like you to include the shot of the festival. The revels are coming to a close.
To this day I don’t know what Sylvia Leigh was doing then, in those minutes to herself. I’ve no way of finding out. I like to imagine the girls have forgotten: they’d be women now, and perhaps one of them has finally thrown out her ribbons.

  * * *

  I said earlier that what unites us in the service is the desire to confess. I still stand by that. I’ll add, though, that what we have even more vastly in common—man-to-man and woman-to-woman—is the compulsion to lie.

  It makes sense. You can’t really have the first without the second.

  I was making it sound like the SIS and the CIA and the KGB are all three-letter factories for memoirs, which I really do think they would have ended up being someday—embellished memoirs, first, and then eventually embarrassing exposés once no one cares for their honor anymore. I think that’s how national legends die. First in glory, then in tell-all bloody truth, then in far more banal and stupid truth. It’s certainly happening to our imperial project. Maybe someday if we’d let history run some version of its course, all the cabinets would open and all the idiotic, incompetent secrets of our leaders would come tumbling out into the light—Nelson with his pants down next to Churchill and Pitt the Younger, and all the rest of us bloody well free.

  You may see, though, that in fact I am the only person committed to time’s course.

  In any case—do you know what the Secret Intelligence Service is, however? It’s a goddamned double agent factory. You’ve probably surmised that I am one, so you would think I’m in no position to criticize; but May, darling, you know I am always in a position to criticize, so let me say that the agents of Her Majesty the Queen are always defecting for the stupidest and pettiest reasons. Sometimes it is because they have become Communists, which is stupid, but not petty; sometimes it is because they believe they have a better offer from the KGB, which is both stupid and petty and requires believing the KGB has anything to offer in the way of quality of life, or that there is even a better life on offer which doesn’t require asking the Almighty to amend history so that you never got involved with spying in the first place. There are no good lives here, May, no up-trading whatsoever, which is why I believe most of these nincompoops do it because they’re bored.