Comrade Charlie Read Free

inside led up to a first-floor, low-lighted drawing room. When he entered Laura was standing stonefaced but flushed by a telephone answering machine at the far side, beside the drinks tray.
    â€˜I don’t believe it!’ she said. ‘I just don’t bloody well believe it!’
    â€˜Believe what?’ asked Charlie, bewildered.
    Laura gestured towards the machine which Charlie realized was on rewind, after relaying its messages. ‘Paul’s on his way in from the airport. He wasn’t due home for three or four days yet.’
    â€˜Paul?’
    Laura made another impatient hand movement, this time towards a studied portrait photograph of a pleasant-faced, kindly looking man. ‘My husband. He’s in Venezuela… was in Venezuela. Shit! ’
    Charlie thought again of the T-shirt slogan and decided that sometimes, very rarely, life wasn’t a bitch after all. Pitching the false regret perfectly in his voice, he said: ‘I see. That’s… I’m sorry about that.’
    Laura held out her hands to him and said: ‘Darling, I’m sorry. I really am sorry .’
    â€˜So am I,’ said Charlie, soft-voiced now. Careful, smart-ass, he thought: you’re working towards an escape, not an Oscar nomination. ‘If he’s on his way in from the airport I’d better be going, hadn’t I?’
    â€˜You’d better,’ she agreed.
    Laura came close, expecting to be kissed: she smelled very nice, perfumed and clean. Charlie kissed her, lightly, feeling backwards with a painful foot for the beginning of the stairway down into the mews.
    â€˜Charlie?’ she said.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜I didn’t get what I wanted,’ said the woman. ‘You got what you wanted, though, didn’t you?’
    Charlie laughed, glad that Laura did too. He said: ‘You’ve made me feel a lot better.’
    â€˜I’ve still got to wait for the same feeling,’ she said.
    The mews was sealed off at one end but at the other still had the canopied brick entrance from when it had all been stables and artisans’ cottages, although the original huge gate had long since been removed. As Charlie emerged he saw someone paying off a taxi and hurried to get it before it drove off. When he reached it he recognized the passenger as the man in Laura’s photograph.
    â€˜Night!’ said Charlie brightly.
    The man was momentarily surprised at such friendliness from a stranger in the middle of London. ‘Goodnight,’ he said.
    Charlie got to the Pheasant with twenty minutes to spare before closing time. He downed the first Islay malt in one because that wasn’t a drink at all: that was medicinal, to gaff the fish that still felt as if it were swimming upstream. He took most of the second the same way. He began to relax on the third, deciding that as evenings go the encounter with Laura had gone very successfully indeed. If she tittle-tattled back to Harkness the enigmatic remarks about the man looking in the wrong place for embarrassments it might be perfect. He might even be able to stuff the red tape right back down the man’s throat.
    The barman approached, mopping the counter, looking inquiringly at Charlie’s glass. ‘It’s been the quietest night for a long time,’ he said. ‘Quiet all day.’
    â€˜They’re the best sort though, sometimes,’ insisted Charlie. ‘Days when nothing at all happens.’
    It was, however, far from being a day when nothing happened. It was the day when the US Defense Committee met at the Pentagon and approved the construction of the missile intended to form the nucleus of America’s Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly known as its Star Wars programme.
    The approval session – and the identity of those Defense-approved contractors to whom development of the prototype missile was to be awarded – carried the highest security classification. But