The Crocus List

26

She was meeting Maxim at Pennsylvania Station, to take the Amtrak Metroliner back to Washington. For no special reason except that it was something new to show him, and it avoided the long grind out to the airport, the brief shuttle flight, and another cab queue. Airlines were brisk morning things; in the afternoon, you drifted home by train.

She bought first-class tickets and still had half an hour to spare. She found a phone booth in the shapeless concourse and called Magil J's office.

"Sweetie, what can I do for you that I didn't already? If there's anything I forgot, put it down to old age and I'll try and remember next time." If there was any post-coitaltristesseabout Mighty Mo Magill, his lifetime in covert operations hid it well.

"Couple of small things. How secure is this line?"

A momentary pause, then: "Hold on," and humming silence. He could have been warning his receptionist off the line or switching off- or on-a recording device. She didn't care either way.

"All secure. Shoot."

"I've been thinking, Mo. I'd still like the name of the front for the Crocus List."

"Long gone, I told you."

"I'd still like it. If you can't remember it, look it up and give me a call in Washington this evening. You've got my number?"

' "You sound kind of imperative, sweetie. Could there be any reason for this?" The old crocodile was smelling hook, not bait.

"We were peeped, Mo."

"No. No way at all."

"Mo, I'll tell you something, now. Your Company -my Service, too-got itself into video and pin lenses andultra-violet light, all wires and electricity. I never could understand electricity: it bites you. So I just staggered along with good old photography. I found this sweet little man who fixed up a non-reflex 35 for me, slowed down the motor wind so it wouldn't make a sound, fixed in a timer to take a shot every thirty seconds. Oh yes, and a filter to make it like the cap of my handcream tube looking out of my handbag and on the dressing-table. It's a lovely dressing-table, that, Mo. I want you to know how much I appreciate your dressing-table."

She turned to smile benevolently at the scurrying passengers behind her. There was a rare pleasure in blackmailing somebody, privately, from so public a place.

"You're in those pictures, too."

"That's right, Mo. They wouldn't do me any good with my Service, I grant you that."

"Attempt to blackmail an ex-Company man."

"You're so right. The whole thing could catch fire, all over the front pages, Crocus List and all. But I'm on a crusade-" As professionals, they were cutting a lot of corners. He hadn't suggested the film might not come out, although she couldn't have had time to develop it yet, and she wasn't working through a 'friend' sent round to sympathise with him, deplore the whole thing and assure him it could be stopped if he'd only tell that terrible woman one little thing…"-And since I'm not married or anything, I thought I'd stick to the personal angle. I assume even your second wife would be used to this sort of thing by now, but I looked you up: you've got a boy and a girl, both around college age, and-"

"You lousy little whore!" Then she knew she'd won.

When he'd calmed down, she said: "If whores don't get no respect, they should at least get paid the rate for the job."

"Jesus. Okay, then, call me in-make it fifteen minutes."

But it was a long and lonely quarter of an hour. Was there any way he could have traced her call, or picked up background noise and was now rushing downtown in a wild attempt to snatch the film from her? She stayed at the back of a shop until it was time to come out cautiously and find an unoccupied phone again.

Magill was still at his desk. "A limited liability company called Anglam Gateway."

"Registered office?"

"Taplin, Green and Keeley, solicitors at Lincoln's Inn."

"Did they provide the directors?"

"A Mr Wainwright and a Mr Nightingale."

"Great. Thank you, Mo. And the other thing-now I think about it, don't call Clare Hall in Matson. In fact, don't call anybody, don't do anything. Just work on Mrs Wertenheimer's problems with her landlord."

"Am I going to get that film, undeveloped?"

"Mo, you're too respectable to look at such things. As long as nothing happens, nothing will happen-okay? The good old British way. Be seeing you. Or not."

It was too late to ring Defence-early evening in London by now-but Maxim had given her the number of one of George's military clubs and she left the name of Anglam Gateway and its solicitors with the secretary there. There was a certain reassurance in hearing the calm voice three thousand miles away scrawl the message down and ask politely: "May I say who -? Miss Algar. A-L-G-A-R. Thank you, Madam, I'll make sure he is informed…"

Then she rang Information, asking for the number of Clare Hall in Matson, Illinois, just to establish that it was real. After that, she practised her cheery-little-girl act to allay any of Maxim's suspicions, which of coutse he wouldn't have anyway. When he arrived, he was doing much the same thing, since he wasn't asnaïveabout the values of the secret world as she assumed: assuring himself there was nothing to suspect and being careful not to find any signs of it. Anyway, there was soon the train to look at.

He liked trains. An airliner is an airliner, anywhere in the world, but a train is part of the landscape. Sadly, the Metroliner had lost confidence in being a train and wanted to be an airliner instead: the coaches were rounded like a fuselage, there were airliner seats with fold-down tables from theseatback infront, even a company magazine at each place. Maxim found himself reaching for the nonexistent seatbelt.

First class meant Amclub: everything on Amtrak was Am: Amcoach, Amcafé, aneffect slightly undermined if you recalled Batman and his Batmobile, Batcopterand even Batrope. Maxim wondered if they would serve Amsandwiches.

The air-conditioning roared softly and they got their first drinks as they came out of the tunnel and on to the New Jersey marshes, where gulls circled the refuse dumps among a forest of concrete stilts carrying the highways south. Any big city has a dirty hem to its outskirts.

Agnes told him what she had learnt. Condensed, it sounded very little for an afternoon's talking, but simultaneously it was a surprising amount from a man who had started the day denying everything. Both ways sounded bad to Agnes herself.

"D'you think this is the real info?" Maxim asked.

"1 don't think he's trying to kid us," Agnes said, rather more grimly than she had intended. "I think he feels guilty about his old buddy Tatham and doesn't want to interrupt his posthumous triumph, the Crocus List. At the same time, he knows a lot of this is going to get known by the people who matter and he doesn't want to be the man who hindered the investigation. He wants us to get there, but too late. A lawyer's solution."

"Crocus List." Maxim tasted the phrase. It was good to put a name-totally meaningless though it was-to two faces he had seen so briefly. "Ten, you said."

"Less, by now, I should think. After fifteen years, some may have emigrated, died… would all of them spring to the colours when called?"

Maxim brooded for a time. "We should have the CCOAC list tomorrow."

"Yes… but don't expect too much from that. Tatham wouldn't have recruited the whole Crocus List from that. One or two, maybe, and I'm damned if I see how we'll identify them in a hurry, but…"

"I'll cable it straight to George and see what he can make of it. If we can just identify Person Y… I'd rather like to get home and talk to him myself."

"Harry, sticking a bucket over some citizen's head and beating it with a broomstick is not going to advance your career."

"Seeing imaginary policemen at moments of stress isn't doing it much good, either."

Agnes pondered for a while. "Matson can't be too far from St Louis. Illinois is just across the river and turn left…"

"I could stay overnight and drop in on her." They had planned his St Louis trip as a one-day event.

"I wish I could go myself, but if she complains and London hears about it, they'll put a stop on me doing anything. She may not say a word, but-it's another base to be touched."

"AUright."

"If you're away for a night… I'd better start building you an alibi around Washington. Would you mind if it leaked out that we were having an affair?"

After a moment, Maxim said: "No, not at all."

"Just ateensy bit quicker next time, Harry. A certain enthusiasm lends conviction in these matters." But her own light-heartedness made her feel tawdry. She badly needed another drink, but Maxim hadn't finished his first, yet. She lit a cigarette instead. "I could check us into a motel out of town, you give the number to the Liaison Office, I'll give it to my office, and hope their nasty little minds think that's all that's going on."

They were both quiet for a long time, both thinking much the same thing: was such a pretence a way of beginning, or would it destroy the might-have-been? And both concluded, with an inner shrug, that it was the right thing for the job in hand; anything else could wait.

The train ambled out of the flat New Jersey landscape where the towns had a shapeless, unrooted look like a child's model village that must be cleared away by supper-time. Beyond Philadelphia, the farmland became vaguely English in the fading light, with neat fields and little clumps of trees at the corners. A claret-jacketed waiter served them a warmed-up airline meal with little bottles of wine.

"One thing you won't have out there," Agnes said, "is a credit card for Winterbotham. That makes you a very third-rate citizen indeed, but that's how they think of Canadians anyway. The snag is, it means you can't rent acar: they insist on a credit card for that nowadays, so you're going to see America by bus."

A man in a dark suit across the aisle had been working on business papers since New York. At Philadelphia he had been joined by two others in what was obviously a preplanned meeting, since the moment dinner was cleared away and a new round of gin and diet tonics ordered, they began a miniature board meeting. Apart from learning something about front-end loaded deals and arbitrageurs, Maxim found it restored his faith in American trains. They might try to look like aeroplanes, but at least there were still smart waiters serving drinks to tycoons as they shuffled papers where the noughts ran off the edge of the page, building a case to be argued to some Washington agency the next day.

He murmured some of this to Agnes.

"Poor security," she said unromantically. "The government could save itself billions by hiring a few wide-eared gents to ride these trains and find out what newrip-ofísare being planned. Probably a violation of umpteen civil rights, but…

"Actually," she went on quietly, "there's a point in there. People let their guard slip when they're travelling; they'll tell you things they wouldn't say to a neighbour they've known for years. Probably something to do with it being a finite relationship, but… Sorry, you probably learnt all that on the Ashford course. "

"It was a long time ago."

"Just whatdid they teach you there?"

"Oh, techniques of surveillance, when you're sitting alone in a car you move into the passenger seat, make it look as if you're waiting for the driver to come back… the trouble is, I never got a posting where I had to use it."

"If you're going on to Matson, you might find a bit of it useful. One person alone can't do much, but perhaps… Would you like an hour or so's refresher course when we get back to town?"

"Fine."

"All right. I'd better go to the embassy to check if anything's actually happened today. There's a bar on the north side of MStreet, just before…"