The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

He wondered if he was about to get double-fucked. The punishment had become notorious inside the entire national bureaucracy. Civil servants in every department spoke about it: Defence, Education, you name it. That was the thing about the boss: he'd been around so long, he'd done every job. There was no one over twenty-five and under eighty with even the remotest connection to government who hadn't worked under him at least once. His dressings-down were legendary; there were schoolchildren in backwater towns who knew of them – though they surely did not speak of getting double-fucked.

No one knew when he had done it first, but there were multiple versions of the story. Some said the first victim was the luckless chump who had failed to square three crucial union bosses on the eve of a party election that the boss suddenly realized he was going to lose. ‘What kind of fuck makes a mistake like that, you fuck?’ he had asked at the meeting of his advisers that journalists later called a pre-mortem. Two fucks in one sentence: a double-fucking.

Now the aide who cursed his luck to be travelling with the boss during this crisis was ready to place a bet that he was in line for the same treatment. Never mind what the outside world saw – Mr Eloquent Orator and Man of Letters – he knew that his boss could be a crude and brutal bully. He hadn't stayed at the top for so long by being sweet.

Still, it was late afternoon and it had been a long day. And he was old. Maybe he wouldn't have the energy for such histrionics. The aide hoped.

He knocked on the door of the boss's suite and let himself in. Unsurprisingly, the old man was dressed in a suit and shirt without a crease between them, his face clean-shaven. He was sitting at a table set for afternoon tea – one of the boss's anglophile affectations – with a clear, picture window view of Manhattan easing its way towards dusk.

‘Any news?’ he said, before the aide had even crossed the room. No hello, no invitation to join him, not even a look round. These were not good signs.

‘Some news, sir.’ He cursed himself for not having rehearsed this moment; he should have sat down with a pen and paper and worked out precisely what he was going to say.

‘Umm?’

‘Good news and bad news, you might say.’

‘What's the bad news?’

Damn.

‘Well, it only really makes sense once you've heard the good news, sir,’ the aide began, incredulous that he could have walked into so obvious a cul-de-sac. ‘Which is, that Henry Goldman will be giving us no further trouble, sir. He did not manage to pass on the, er, critical information to the subj- sorry, the people we're following, sorry, I mean the people we're watching, that is to say, are interested in-’

‘You're babbling. What's happened?’

‘Goldman is dead, sir.’

‘What? How?’

‘Tonight. At his home, sir.’

The old man's face was reddening. ‘Are we responsible?’

‘Not in any way that could be proved, I don't think, sir.’

‘You don't THINK?’ The boss slammed his fist on the table, sending cutlery, plates and a milk jug leaping into the air. ‘What do you mean, you don't think? What the fuck happened there?’

Here we go, the aide thought. It's coming.

‘Was I not clear in my instructions?’ Now the voice was low, calm – which only made it more terrifying. ‘Was I in any way unclear? Or did I spell out, in words any moron could understand, that there were to be no casualties? We could persuade, even intimidate, but nothing more. Did I not make that CRYSTAL CLEAR?’

‘Our men were following those orders, sir.’

‘Don't be an idiot.’

‘The trouble is, Goldman had a weak heart. The minute he saw them, there in his house, he started shouting, then clutching his chest. They didn't touch him. It just happened.’

‘Did they try to save him?’

The aide hadn't even thought of that. ‘I don't think so, sir.’

The boss was no longer shouting. ‘I think in my day, men on such a mission would not just have left a man dying. They would have done something.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The old man was slumped in his chair; he looked somehow smaller. ‘Did they find anything?’

‘Yes.’ He was about to say that that was the good news, but thought better of it. ‘As it happens, Goldman was going through some papers when our men arrived. They haven't had time to analyse them yet but they believe they relate to our issue.’

‘What if there are other papers?’

‘He was going through a box, sir. It seemed as if everything had been kept in one place. Probably hidden.’

‘And those papers are safe now?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Any mention of,’ his voice trailed off, as if he were embarrassed, ‘by name, I mean?’

‘Don't yet know that, sir. There's some translation work to be done.’

‘What about the girl and that man?’

‘They discovered Goldman's body.’

‘Are they in trouble?’

‘Our information is that they've been taken away by police and arrested. They're in custody now.’

The old man rubbed his chin. Whether he was pleased or dismayed by this last item of news the aide could not tell. The boss was simply processing the information, calculating.

Finally, he threw down his napkin and pushed back his chair. Then, barely audibly, he muttered, speaking more to himself than to the official who was still standing by the table, like a waiter poised to clear away the plates. ‘What have we started here?’ he said. And with that, he waved the man away.

The aide receded from the room in soft steps, closing the door behind him almost noiselessly. No double-fucking then. The boss had been subdued rather than livid. And, in a curious way, that was altogether more frightening.