Lech still at the Park then, and Bachelor a milkman, whose round covered the old, the infirm, the clapped-out; those who’d once fought the Cold War and now were just fighting the cold. Bachelor made sure their heating bills were paid, that there was food in their fridges, all the while growing steadily worse at managing any such thing for himself, his misfortunes reading like instructions for a midlife crisis: divorce; his working hours cut; his savings lost to bad investments. So, Lech said, he’d been adrift for a couple of years, subletting rooms when he could, sleeping in his car when he had to, sofa-surfing until he ran out of friends; all the while hanging onto his job by cracked and bleeding fingernails. . . The point where this was going to be more boring than the job in front of her was approaching fast. “And what’s he done?” she said.
“He saw someone he recognised.”
Louisa said, “I really hope there’s more to this story than that. Because, you know, I could be reading lists of names.”
“Before Bachelor was a milkman,” Lech said, “long before, he worked on the London desk, and carried bags for David Cartwright. Once, he carried them all the way to Bonn.”
“Bit of a stretch from London.”
“Are you telling this or am I?”
“Sorry.”
What had happened was, someone at the British consulate in Leningrad had been caught shoplifting, or buying drugs, or something, anyway, which the KGB liked catching you doing when you were working at a British consulate, especially if you were really working for the Service. And what David Cartwright went to Bonn to do was sort out a deal which would allow the poor sod in question to come home without both countries having to resort to the usual tit-for-tat fandango, firing diplomats, rolling up local networks, and generally making a musical out of one tired old song. The sort of thing the David Cartwrights of the Service were born to do, though this particular David Cartwright, Louisa knew, had been River Cartwright’s grandfather. River probably hadn’t even been born then, but let’s not think about River right now.
The reason Bonn had been chosen was that it was neutral territory and had good hotels, Bachelor had explained. Every meeting was conducted in at least three languages, because of course the Russians weren’t going to field someone who’d admit to speaking English, and Cartwright preferred not to demonstrate how fluent he was in Russian, and as for the Germans, well, they were supplying the coffee and cakes, so why the hell shouldn’t they speak their own language? Bachelor had little Russian, less German, and the whole thing would have been boring to the point of coma if it hadn’t been for the woman taking notes on the other side of the table.
Louisa rolled her eyes. “So JB had the hots for the stenographer. That must have helped while away the hours.”
“Yeah, except old man Cartwright put him right on that.”
“She wasn’t a stenographer.”
“No, she was a full-fledged KGB colonel.”
“Who was?”
They looked round.
Shirley Dander was in the doorway, holding an iron.
Louisa said, “Uh, private conversation?”
“Yeah, I could tell. What’s it about?”
“Nothing. What’s the iron for?”
“Duh, ironing? Who was the KGB chick?”
“I think Lamb was looking for you,” said Lech.
“What did he want?”
“Something about a performance appraisal?”
“. . . Don’t believe you.”
Lech and Louisa both shrugged in such perfect unison, they might have spent the morning practising.
“I fucking hate both of you,” Shirley said, and went back downstairs, the iron leaking a spatter trail behind her.
“So what happened?” Louisa said.
“In Bonn? The usual stuff. A deal got made, there’ll be a record somewhere. Probably in Molly Doran’s archive. Bachelor was a bit hazy about it, what with everything being translated three times—”
“I really hope this is going somewhere.”
“He saw her the other day.”
“The KGB colonel?”
“Here, in London.”
“. . . Okay.”
“And that’s not even the odd thing. John says he’s looking at her, and she hasn’t aged a day, he’s seeing exactly the person he remembers from Bonn. Still in her early thirties, thereabouts. Same hair, same skin. He says.”
“So he thinks he’s discovered Wonder Woman?”
“I’m not sure that’s in his frame of reference, but you get the picture.”
“Seriously? You’ve got a drunk telling you he’s seen someone who looks like someone from his old days. I’m still waiting for a punchline.”
“He sat on the opposite side of a table from her for four straight days, closer than we are now. He says he’d recognise her anywhere. And no, he’s not a complete idiot, he knows it can’t be the same woman. Shall I tell you what he thinks?”
“You might as well.”
“He thinks it’s her daughter.”
“. . . Okay.”
“You don’t think that’s strange?”
“I’m still not convinced it actually happened. But even if it did, so what? KGB colonels have daughters? I’m not sure that’ll light them up on the hub. It’s biology, not tradecraft.”
