The Hidden Man. Charles Cumming

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      8

      A man of sixty looks back on his working life and feels, what? A sense of regret at opportunities lost? Shame over badly handled investments, businesses that might have turned sour, a colleague treated with contempt by the board after forty years’ loyal service to the firm? Keen simply did not know. He had lived his life in a separate world of deliberate masquerade, a state servant with carte blanche for deceit. Waiting for Mark in his son’s favourite, if overpriced, Chinese restaurant at the south end of Queensway, Keen had the odd, even amusing sensation that most of his professional life had been comprised of social occasions: Foreign Office dinners, embassy cocktail parties, glasses of stewed tea and mugs of instant coffee shared with journalists, traitors, disgruntled civil servants, ideologues and bankrupts, the long list of contacts and informants that make up a spy’s acquaintance. Indeed it occurred to him – over his second glass of surprisingly decent Sancerre – that he was a scholar of the long, boozy lunch, of lulling strangers into mistaken beliefs, of plying dining companions with drink and sympathy and then sucking them dry of secrets. It was his talent, after all, the knack they had spotted at Oxford, and the reason now, more than thirty years later, that Keen could charge Divisar £450 a day for his old-style flair and expertise. But to use those skills on his own son? To do that, if he looked at it for too long, would seem horrific. But Christopher Keen never looked at anything for too long.

      Mark was late by half an hour, a mirror image of Keen’s own father at thirty-five, coming into the restaurant at a brisk walk mouthing, ‘Sorry, Dad,’ from fifty feet. Keen thought he looked tired and preoccupied, but that might have been his paranoia over Taploe.

       The Service would like your assistance in clearing up Libra’s position, in revealing the exact nature of their relationship with Kukushkin. We just need you to pick your son’s brains, find out what he knows.

      ‘Where the hell have you been?’

      He said it without anger, because Mark looked genuinely contrite.

      ‘I’m really, really sorry.’ He placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘Meetings. All morning. Fucked electrics at the club and a tabloid hack giving me gyp.’

      He was wearing a dark blue corduroy suit and, for want of something better to say, Keen remarked on it.

      ‘Bespoke?’ he asked.

      ‘Thought you might notice that.’ It was a shared passion between them, the luxury of fine clothes. Mark sat down and flapped a napkin into his lap. ‘This here is a Doug Hayward original in navy corduroy, a sympathetic cloth flexible enough to accommodate today’s retro styling.’ He was beginning to relax. ‘The jacket has high lapels, as you can see, with long double vents and three buttons at the front. Furthermore, if I stood up you’d notice an immaculately tailored flat-fronted trouser with straight legs that flare just above the tongue of the shoe.’

      ‘Indeed,’ Keen said. ‘Indeed,’ and enjoyed Mark’s charm. He poured both of them a glass of Sancerre and ordered another bottle from the waiter. ‘What’s in the bag?’

      Mark said, ‘Oh yes,’ and leaned over to retrieve two bottles of vodka from a duty-free bag he had carried into the restaurant. Three litres of Youri Dolgoruki, his father’s favourite brand.

      ‘Present for you,’ he said. ‘Picked them up in Moscow three days ago. Know how you prefer the real thing.’

      ‘That was immensely kind of you.’ Keen put the bottles on the floor beside his chair and wondered if they would clink in his briefcase. ‘You shouldn’t have bought me anything at all.’

      ‘For all the birthdays I missed,’ Mark replied lightly, as if the observation held no resonance. Then he opened his menu.

      Keen had noticed this about Mark before: the way he gave presents to people at Libra and Divisar, little surprises to lighten their day. The cynic in him had decided that this was an unconscious way of keeping colleagues onside, of buying their trust and loyalty. It was the same with his memory: months after meeting them, Mark could recall the names of personal assistants who had brought him cups of coffee during fifteen-minute meetings in downtown Moscow.

      ‘How do you do that?’ he asked.

      ‘Eh?’

      Mark СКАЧАТЬ