A Foreign Country

70

My name is Gerard Taine. I am no longer François Malot. I work for the Ministry of Defence. I live in a small village outside Nantes. My wife is a schoolteacher. We have three children, twin girls of two and a son who is five years old. I am no longer François Malot.

Vincent remembered the mantra of his emergency cover but did not know Taine in the way that he had known François. He knew nothing of his interests, nothing of his proclivities; he could not imagine the grammar, the architecture of his soul. He had given no thought to him in the way that he had thought about François, day and night, for months. Taine was just a fallback; Malot had been his life.

Vincent sat on the bed in the Hotel Lutetia, unsure if the British had followed him, unsure if Luc or Valerie would ever come. He felt as though he would never leave this place. He felt as though he was a shell, a failure, a man who was being made to pay the heaviest price for a sin he had never committed. It was like that time at high school when he was fourteen and his whole class, every friend he had ever made, every girl he had ever liked, turned on him because he had reported a case of bullying to a teacher. Vincent had been trying to do the right thing. He had been trying to save his closest friend from the turmoil of the older children’s attacks, but was betrayed by the very teacher in whom he had confided. As a result, they had all rounded on him — even the friend whose neck Vincent had tried to save — and for many months afterwards had humiliated him in the classroom, caking his clothes in food and shit as he walked home, screaming ‘Bitch!’ and ‘Rat!’ whenever he passed. Vincent’s whole sense of justice, of right and wrong, had been inverted by that experience. He had learned that there was no truth, there was no kindness. Even his own father had disowned him. You never betray your comrades, he had said. You never betray your friends, as though Vincent was one of the soldiers he had fought alongside in Algeria. But he was just a fourteen-year-old schoolboy with no mother, no sister, no brother to love or understand him. They were hurting my friend, Papa, he said, but the old man hadn’t listened and now he was long dead and Vincent wished that he was in the hotel room so that he could tell him what had happened in England, what had happened to François, and maybe try to explain all over again that all he had ever wanted to do was protect his friend and to make his father proud.

He stood up and went to the window, looking down on to Boulevard Raspail. The curtains were open, the window ajar. He poured himself a whisky from the mini-bar, opened the carton of cigarettes he had purchased at Heathrow and raised a silent toast to François Malot, blowing smoke out into the damp Paris night. It was the wrong thing to think — he knew that — but he missed Amelia, he missed their talks and the meals they had enjoyed together, the time they had spent at the pool and the beach. He no longer wanted her; she had betrayed him and had ceased to exist as a woman. But he missed her as François might have missed her, because she was his mother, because she had cared for him and would have gone to the ends of the earth to protect her son. A woman that powerful, a woman that strong. Imagine possessing a mother like that. François was so lucky to have her.

Vincent drained the whisky, poured another from the mini-bar, even though Luc and Valerie might arrive at any moment and smell the alcohol on his breath. He began to dread what they were going to do. It was the sense of isolation he couldn’t stand; everything he had known about himself, everything he had trusted and believed, had been stripped away from him in just a few hours. Like the bullying at school: one minute he had been one person, the next he was somebody else. A rat. A traitor. Their bitch. He had been right never to trust anybody after that. It was what he had thought going into the first interviews with the Directorate, what they must have seen in him, what they must have liked.

My solitude is my talent, he thought. My self-sufficiency is my strength.

There was a knock at the door.