He thought about that for a moment, then shrugged and tucked the cigarette behind his ear.
She wondered if he’d just wanted to make her speak.
“When the Wall fell, Bogart was offered the passport package. New life, new house, new car, the usual shit. Turned it down. Said the time for betrayal was over. From now on it was about rebuilding the country, and that meant cutting the cord. No more dead-letter drops, no more cut-outs, no further contact. And we all lived happily everfuckingafter. Gives you a nice warm feeling inside, doesn’t it?”
River had told her about the evenings he’d spent with his grandfather, David Cartwright—the O.B.—back when the old man was still in the light, and she had a vivid picture of the pair, sharing a history only one of them had lived through. This was a grotesque parody of that. And the strangest detail, the ungraspable fact, was that Lamb wasn’t drinking. Wasn’t smoking.
“Except the Cold War didn’t really end. It just hid behind closed doors, like Trump in a tantrum. So when Partner decided his own passport package wasn’t good enough, and a Civil Service pension wouldn’t keep him in the luxury he had in mind, well, it wasn’t hard to find buyers for old news. Such as who’d been chipping away at the brickwork when they should have been shoring it up.”
He fell silent. Maybe he was imagining a fire he could stare into. The best on offer was the winelight glimmer of the bottles.
“So Partner betrayed Bogart,” she said, when the silence became too much.
She might not have spoken. “There were quarterly sit-downs back then,” he said. “I’d come back to the Park and spend days with Cartwright, going through the diary, what happened when, who did what. Before he went picking daisies, that man had a mania for detail. Study the small cogs, and you’ll see which way the big wheels turn. Shame he couldn’t see what was happening under his fucking nose.”
“Nor did you.”
Lamb put his unlit cigarette in his mouth.
He spoke around it. “Dates and places, but never names. Wall or no wall, Berlin was a zoo, so we still played Berlin Rules. Even First Desk didn’t get to know a source’s identity, because that was the law. So in retirement Bogart remained Bogart, and only I knew who Bogart was, and Cartwright was fine with that, as he should have been.”
There came a noise from the corridor; someone leaving the lift. Footsteps down the hallway, a door opening, closing. It was unremarkable enough that it might have gone unheard, but Berlin Rules were now in play. Off-stage noise was enemy action. Any footfall might be the last thing you heard.
When all was quiet, he continued.
“Ever go drinking with your old boss? Might have been a contest. He could put it away. Thirst like a fucking camel. Unless he was pouring it under the table.”
She’d thought many things about Jackson Lamb, most of them bad. But it had never occurred to her he’d been a teenage girl. “So that’s it?” she said. “Charles Partner got you drunk, and you told him who Bogart was?”
The look he gave would have turned a younger woman to stone.
“Or enough,” she said, “that he could work it out and sell the name?”
“He didn’t have to.” Lamb’s words were hard as bullets. “He only had to sell a single syllable.”
That made no sense, until it did. What single syllable could make a difference? Only one Catherine could think of.
Lamb wasn’t looking at her now, or at anything else. He might have been the genie hiding in the lamp, contemplating all the wishes he’d heard down the years.
“I didn’t think he’d noticed. End of the week, I went back to Berlin. Nothing happened until the following month.”
He inhaled dirty air through an unlit tube. His lungs must be dishrags, thought Catherine. Like something you’d pull from a blocked kitchen sink.
“There were only three female Stasi officers of that rank in that department at the time Bogart was operating,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been difficult to identify her. Bit of due diligence. A few weeks at most.”
He looked at the cigarette in his hand, rolled it between his fingers.
“But they weren’t fucking perfectionists, were they? So they did all three. No possibility of error, no overtime involved. Hard not to admire the practical approach.”
And then the cigarette disappeared. Up his sleeve, she wondered? Or had he just made it vanish; cast it back into the past he was staring into?
“Ever seen someone hanged with piano wire? For extra points, you tie something heavy to the victim’s feet. An iron is good. Leave the body long enough, the head comes clean off.”
“You saw them?”
“No. But I got to hear about it.”
“What did you do?”
“I heaved my fucking guts out.”
“Afterwards.”
“What do you think? I reported back to Cartwright. Because he was the brains of the Service.”
“You told him you’d leaked Bogart’s gender, and now Bogart was dead. You joined the dots. You pointed him at Partner.”
And then you shot Partner in his bathtub, she thought. Where I found him.
The memory of it tasted fresh, and probably always would.
