The red book was his indispensable aid to creative report-writing. In its hugely secret pages, areas of Head Office’s outstanding ignorance, known otherwise as the analysts’ Black Holes, were obligingly listed for the convenience of intelligence gatherers. And what analysts didn’t know, in Osnard’s simple logic, analysts couldn’t check. And what they couldn’t check they couldn’t bloody well carp about. Osnard, like many new writers, had discovered he was unexpectedly sensitive to criticism. For two hours without a break Osnard reshaped, polished, honed and rewrote until BUCHAN’s latest intelligence material fitted like perfectly-turned pegs into the analysts’ Black Holes. A lapidary tone, an ever-watchful scepticism, an extra doubt raised here and there added to the air of authenticity. Till at last, confident of his handiwork, he telephoned his cypher clerk Shepherd, summoned him to the Embassy immediately and, on the principle that messages dispatched at unsociable hours are more impressive than their daytime fellows, presented him with a hand-coded TOPSECRET & BUCHAN telegram for immediate transmission.
‘Only wish I could share it with you, Shep,’ said Osnard in his We-Dive-At-Dawn voice, observing how Shepherd gazed wistfully at the unintelligible groups of numbers.
‘Me too, Andy, but when it’s need-to-know, it’s need-to-know, isn’t it?’
‘Suppose it is,’ Osnard conceded.
We’ll send out old Shep, Personnel had said. Keep young Osnard on the straight and narrow.
Osnard drove but not to his apartment. He drove with purpose but the purpose lay out ahead of him, undefined. A fat wad of dollar bills was nudging against his left nipple. What will I have? Darting lights, colour photographs of naked black girls in illuminated frames, multi-lingual signs proclaiming live erotic sex. Respect it but not my mood tonight. He kept driving. Pimps, pushers, cops, bunch o’ nancy boys, all looking for a buck. Uniformed GIs in threes. He passed the Costa Brava Club, young Chinese whores a speciality. Thanks, darlings, prefer ’em older and more grateful. Still he kept driving, his senses leading, which was what he liked his senses to do. The old Adam stirring. Taste everything, only way. Hell can you know whether you want a thing till you’ve bought it? His mind flitted back to Luxmore. The greatest opinion-maker in the world believes in it… Must be Ben Hatry. Luxmore had dropped his name a couple o’ times in London. Punned with it. Our Benefit Fund, ha ha. The Benison of a certain patriotic media baron. You didn’t hear that, young Mr Osnard. The name of Hatry will never cross my lips. Suck o’ the teeth. What an arsehole.
Osnard swung his car across the road, hit the kerb, mounted it and parked on the pavement. I’m a diplomat so screw the lot o’ you. Casino and Club, said the sign, and on the door all handguns to be checked. Two nine-foot bouncers in capes and peaked hats guarded the entrance. Girls in mini-skirts and net stockings undulated at the foot of a red staircase. Looks my kind o’ place.
It was six in the morning.
‘Damn you, Andy Osnard, you had me scared,’ Fran confessed with feeling as he climbed into bed beside her. ‘What the hell happened to you?’
‘She wore me out,’ he said.
But his revival was already apparent.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The rage that had swept over Pendel with his departure from the pushbutton house of love did not subside as he climbed into the four-track or drove home badly through red mist or lay with a thumping heart on his side of the bed in Bethania, or woke next morning or the morning after. ‘I’ll need some days,’ he had mumbled to Osnard. But it was not the days he was counting. It was the years. It was every wrong turning he had taken to oblige. It was every insult he had swallowed for the sake of the greater good, preferring to drucken himself rather than cause what Benny called a gewalt. It was every scream that had stopped in his throat before it reached the open air. It was a lifetime’s worth of frustrated fury arriving uninvited among the host of characters who, for want of closer definition, traded under the name of Harry Pendel.
And it woke him like a bugle call, reviving and reproaching him in one huge blast, rallying his other emotions to its flag. Love, fear, outrage and revenge were among the first volunteers. It swept away the puny wall that had separated fact from fiction in Pendel’s soul. It said ‘Enough!’ and ‘Attack!’ and tolerated no deserters. But attack what? And what with?