The Berlin Assignment Read Free

Irving’s best man and Laura was Hannah’s maid of honour. Hannah became the type of wife who once sustained the British Empire: unfailingly cheerful, an imaginative cook, an enthusiastic gardener, lively at receptions. In short, a perfect mate for an ambitious Service man. Everyone instinctively flocked around Hannah at parties. Irving usually stood around helplessly for a while – a backwoodsman’s habit he never shook – until the alcohol took hold. At a certain moment, expertly chosen by Hannah, when he was ripe, she’d throw him an opening and Irving would barrel forward with his stories. Their success on the cocktail circuits had no limits, save those posed by Heywood’s liver.
    Now that the reminiscing has gotten around to Lecurier and his children, Heywood’s pride surges over his own offspring. He is thinking that he, also, is a
paterfamilias
. Unlike Lecurier however, his boys are legal. Apart from number three, a problem child, they take after Hannah. A curious coincidence, Heywood sometimes mused, that all but number three were fathered in his favourite conservative position. In contrast, number three was the product of a wild night on a Cuban beach. They had been on vacation. A tempest was raging and nature’s violence carried him away. Perversely, he insisted on penetrating Hannahfrom behind as she, legs astride and feet firmly planted, leaned forward into the tearing wind. Number three had been restless and adversarial – a stormy boy – from the moment of his birth, perhaps from the moment of conception. Heywood always kept this speculation to himself, but he did occasionally think, if indeed undiscovered forces arising from the style and energy of the reproductive act determine personality, that all the world should marvel at Lecurier’s imagination, given his rambunctious brood.
    Stepney, interested to hear more about Lecurier, prompts Heywood. “Sorry, Manny. My thoughts wandered. Where was I? Lecurier, right? Well, I’ll say this about Jacques, he managed his assignments with biological adroitness. He had always left a place by the time the paternity accusations were ripe. You know, after the fish talks in Europe, I was put into Investitures for a spell. Lecurier had dispersed his seed pretty widely already by then and it fell to me to ask him to slow down. What happened? Naturally, he claimed we had no business digging around in his personal affairs. I couldn’t reprimand him too severely, because to his credit he did his best to support the mothers.”
    â€œI heard there was something with a princess in the Saudi royal family,” says Stepney. “That must have been a tough one to have paid for.”
    Heywood answers smoothly. “I discount that story, Manny. It arose out of the sheer momentum of his reputation. Lecurier developed a pattern of holding back in high-cost countries. It’s true there was a princess of sorts in Jeddah, but she was English. She did a veil dance in a secret basement suite in the residence of the Ambassador of Argentina, who would invite his friends to watch. Lecurier didn’t stay there long. Not Jeddah, Manny. Kuala Lumpur, Nairobi, Bogota, Peking, those were Lecurier’s hallmarks. The last one was the diciest. He took up with the great-granddaughter of a member of the Central Committee.Somehow he got around Chinese security. It proved his most remarkable characteristic. He could go local, like a chameleon. Disappear. Needless to say, when this happened in China, the complainant was apoplectic.”
    â€œDid he have some trick to turn himself into a slant-eye?” asks the wily trade commissioner, “or did he pose as a missionary?”
    Heywood doesn’t bite. “He just knew how to go local,” he insists. “And he did brilliant reporting. It makes you wonder whether paternity and political insight are opposite sides of the same coin. Lecurier had a special knack for