Whispers of Betrayal. Michael Dobbs

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       ONE

      ‘Bugger London.’

      Peter Amadeus swore softly to himself as he stepped out from beneath the shelter of the theatre doorway and into the semi-darkness. Shaftesbury Avenue was under assault from the rain and was on the point of surrendering. Gutters ran with garbage and puddles like oil slicks were collecting on the cracked pavement. Even here, in the heart of the West End, it seemed that London was falling apart. Its streets echoed to the constant noise of nothing, while strangers huddled inside their cars, cutting corners so they could be the first to arrive at the next traffic jam, sounding their horns in impatience as they splashed down life’s muddy road. No one gave a damn about anyone else. That’s what life in the city was all about.

      He lit a cigarette, drawing deep on nicotine and dank night air. The evening lights reflected from the damp roadway, forming a chorus line of red-and-yellow neon that danced around the soaked shoes of two figures beside a taxi. They were coming close to blows. One door handle, two hands. Raised voices. A dispute over occupation rights. Wars had been started for less, Amadeus supposed, but only by politicians.

      Beyond the battle, on the other side of the Avenue, Amadeus searched for signs of his country, the homeland for which he had fought and on more than one occasion almost died. He found a Turkish restaurant, a Balti house, a pizzeria and three Chinese wok shops brushing up against a branch of his own bank that recently had been taken over by the French. There may be some small corner which was forever England, but it wasn’t here.

      He’d been right first time. Bugger London.

      Black fingers of rain began to burrow their way behind Amadeus’s collar. He shrugged, welcoming them like old friends, stamping impatiently as he waited for his wife. Marriage, he had long since concluded, was much like an examination of his prostate, something that left him wanting to be on his own for a while. She was still inside the foyer where he had left her, cheeks flushed, voice trilling as though in the heat of sexual excitement, launching opinions on a tide of gin-and-diet-tonic about a performance that had pitted two notorious thespian queens against each other, locked in a battle for inclusion in the Birthday Honours List. The only sort of combat they were fit for. And as close as she’d got to an orgasm in years. Unless, of course, she’d been …

      Suddenly he felt the blood drain from his cheeks, overwhelmed by one of those fleeting moments of honesty that left him feeling physically sick. Who the hell was he to sneer at others? Amadeus was nothing but a paper warrior, whose weapons were bulldog clips. Whose battlefield was a bursar’s desk at some inconsequential fee-paying school in the suburbs, whose only recent victories were against misdirected invoices, and whose Commanding Officer was a woman intent on exacting exquisite revenge for the years she’d spent following in the dust of his career. A once-and-would-be man who now smoked too much and swore too little, who over-tightened his belt and whose bed was as cold as an Arctic foxhole. Who found himself lingering outside playhouses like some cuckold in the rain.

      He needed more narcotic. He lit another cigarette. He wasn’t to know that it was a cigarette that would change the course of his life.

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