Confessional. Part 22

They sat on a bench in the Tuileries Gardens and Devlin took out his old silver case and offered her a cigarette. 'Do you use these things?'

'No.'

'Good for you, they'd stunt your growth and you with your green years ahead of you.'

Somewhere, he'd said those self-same words before, a long, long time ago. Another girl very much like this one. Not beautiful, not in any conventional sense, and yet always there would be the compulsion to turn and take a second look. There was pain in the memory that even time had not managed to erase.

'You're a strange man,' she said, 'for a secret agent. That's what you are, I presume?'

He laughed out loud, the sound so clear that Tony Hunter, seated on a bench on the other side of the Henry Moore exhibit reading a newspaper, glanced up sharply.

'G.o.d save the day.' Devlin took out his wallet and extracted a sc.r.a.p of pasteboard. 'My card. Strictly for formal occasions I a.s.sure you.'

She read it out loud. 'Professor Liam Devlin, Trinity College, Dublin.' She looked up. 'Professor of what?'

'English literature. I use the term loosely, as academics do, so it would include Oscar Wilde, Shaw, O'Casey, Brendan Behan, James Joyce, Yeats. A mixed bag there. Catholics and Prods, but all Irish. Could I have the card back, by the way? I'm running short...'

He replaced it in his wallet. She said, 'But how would a professor of an ancient and famous university come to be involved in an affair like this?'

'You've heard of the Irish Republican Army?*

'Of course.'

'I've been a member of that organization since I was sixteen years of age. No longer active, as we call it. I've some heavy reservations about the way the Provisionals have been handling some aspects of the present campaign.'

'Don't tell me, let me guess.' She smiled. 'You are a romantic at heart, I think, Professor Devlin?'

'Is that a fact?'

'Only a romantic could wear anything so absurdly wonderful as that black felt hat. But there is more, of course. No bombs in restaurants to blow up women and children. You would shoot a man without hesitation. Welcome the hopeless odds of meeting highly trained soldiers face-to-face.'

Devlin was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. 'Do you tell me?'

'Oh, I do, Professor Devlin. You see, I think I recognize you now. The true revolutionary, the failed romantic who didn't really want it to stop.'

'And what wouldit be, exactly?'

'Why, the game, Professor. The mad, dangerous, wonderful game that alone makes life worth living for a man like you. Oh, you may like the cloistered life of the lecture room or tell yourself that you do, but at the first chance to sniff powder...'

'Can I take time to catch my breath?' Devlin asked.

'And worst of all,' she carried on relentlessly, 'is your need to have it both ways. To have all the fun, but also to have a nice clean revolution where no innocent bystanders get hurt.'

She sat there, arms folded in front of her in an inimitable gesture as if she would hold herself in, and Devlin said, 'Have you missed anything out, would you say?'

She smiled tightly. 'Sometimes I get very wound up like a clock spring and I hold it until the spring goes.'

'And it all bursts out and you're into your imitation of Freud,' he told her. 'I bet that goes down big over the vodka and strawberries after dinner at old Maslovsky's summerdasha.'

Her face tightened. 'You will not make jokes about him.

He has been very good to me. The only father I have known.' 'Perhaps,' Devlin said. 'But it wasn't always so.' She gazed at him angrily. 'All right, Professor Devlin, we

have fenced enough. Perhaps it is time you told me why you

are here.'

He omitted nothing, starting with Viktor Levin and Tony Villiers in the Yemen and ending with the murder of Billy White and Levin outside Kilrea. When he was finished, she sat there for a long moment without saying anything.

'Levin said you remembered Drumore and the events surrounding your father's death,' Devlin said gently.

'Like a nightmare, it drifts to the surface of consciousness now and then. Strange, but it is as if it's happening to someone else and I'm looking down at the little girl on her knees in the rain beside her father's body.'

'And Mikhail Kelly or Cuchulain as they call him? You remember him?'

'Till my dying day,' she said flatly. 'It was such a strange face, the face of a ravaged young saint and he was so kind to me, so gentle, that was the strangest thing of all.'

Devlin took her arm. 'Let's walk for a while.' They started along the path and he asked, 'Has Maslovsky ever discussed those events with you?'

'No.'

Her arm under his hand was going rigid. 'Easy, girl dear,' he said softly. 'And tell me the most important thing of all. Have you ever tried to discuss it with him?'

'No, d.a.m.n you!' She pulled away, turning, her face full of pa.s.sion.

'But then, you wouldn't want to do that, would you?' he said. 'That would be opening a can of worms with a vengeance.'

She stood there looking at him, holding herself in again. 'What do you want of me, Professor Devlin? You want me to defect like Viktor? Wade through all those thousands of photos in the hope that I might recognize him?'

'That's a reasonable facsimile of the original mad idea. The IRA people in Dublin would never let the material they're holding out of their own hands, you see.'

'Why should I?' She sat on a nearby bench and pulled him down. 'Let me tell you something. You make a big mistake, you people in the West, when you a.s.sume that all Russians are straining at the leash, anxious only for a chance to get out. I love my country. I like it there. It suits me. I'm a respected artist. I can travel wherever I like, even in Paris. No KGB - no men in black overcoats watching my every move. I go where I please.'

'With a foster-father, a lieutenant-general in the KGB in command of Department V amongst other things, I'd be surprised if you didn't. It used to be called Department 13, by the way. Distinctly unlucky for some, and then Maslovsky reorganized it in nineteen sixty-eight. It could best be described as an a.s.sa.s.sination bureau, but then, no well-run organization should be without one.'

'Just like your IRA?' She leaned forward. 'How many men have you killed for a cause you believed in, Professor?'

He smiled gently and touched her cheek in a strangely intimate gesture. 'Point taken, but I can see I'm wasting your time. You might as well have this, though.'

He took a largish buff envelope from his pocket, the one that had been delivered by Ferguson's bagman that morning and placed it in her lap.

'What is it?' she demanded.

'The people in London, being ever hopeful, have made you a present of a British pa.s.sport with a brand new ident.i.ty. Your photo looks smas.h.i.+ng. There's cash in there - French francs - and details of alternative ways of getting to London.'

'I don't need it.'

'Well, you've got it now. And this.' He took his card from his wallet and gave it to her. Til fly back to Dublin this afternoon. No point in hanging around.'