TWO THINGS HAPPENED in the following seven days that changed the bright colours of our briefly carefree existence to black. The first event altered the psychological landscape for the whole world but the second was more personal, it attacked our world directly–Finn’s anyway, and therefore mine.
One late afternoon as the first cool September breeze blew in from the sea, Willy came running over to the shack where Finn and I were working on my first report to submit to the Forest. I had never seen Willy look agitated, let alone excited. He wore his past lightly and he took bad news in the same way he took good news, with tolerant equanimity.
‘Quick, come quick,’ he said.
Finn and I looked at each other, fearing that our hideaway had been discovered or worse, and immediately left what we were doing and followed Willy to the restaurant. He had an old radio that was screwed to the bar. It was a thing of great value to him, and reminded him of his youth when tuning into the BBC’s World Service up in a friend’s attic in Budapest could have had him imprisoned. He still treated a radio with reverence fifty years later.
One or two of the less stoned inhabitants of Willy’s little enclave on the beach were gathered around the radio and their normal expressions of varying degrees of blankness were relatively animated. He pushed them out of the way so that he and Finn and I could lean in closer.
‘A plane has hit a building in New York,’ Willy said.
We listened to the commentary as the second plane hit and stories flew around the airwaves of other planes in America that were evidently aimed at American targets. I don’t know how long we listened, but Finn and Willy must have drunk half a case of beer. It was an hour or more before we knew we wouldn’t know anything more that day and Willy switched off the radio, as if it were a precious finite resource that needed to be rested. Then we sat down for an early supper.
‘It’s not events that change history, but the way people react to them,’ I remember Finn saying, and Willy nodding with his mouth full of freshly caught red snapper, perhaps remembering Hungary again, back in 1956.
‘Whoever did this did it in the cause of chaos,’ Willy said eventually. ‘The devil loves chaos.’
Finn said prophetically, if strangely in the circumstances, ‘This will be good for Russia, for Putin.’
‘Surely you’re not going to blame it on Russia!’ I said, and felt the gap yawn between defending my country as a place, as a people, and defending the clique who ruled it.
‘No, no,’ he said and gently held my arm. ‘I don’t think that. But it will open a window of opportunity for Putin.’
He was right. The benefits, from a Russian point of view, of the thousands dead in New York, and the subsequent chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan, was that the CIA and MI6 would cut their Russian operations still further. By the end of 2006 the British would devote only five per cent of their intelligence budget to Russia, instead of forty per cent at the end of the Cold War.
In America, George W. Bush said, in a bid to muster worldwide support for his military plans, that he ‘had looked into President Putin’s soul and liked what he saw’. Putin strongly supported Bush’s second presidential campaign against Kerry who might have restrained the American invasion of Iraq. In Russia, and increasingly beyond our borders, we were free to join the amorphous war on terror created by Bush.
But it was the second event in those seven days that hit Finn far harder, being almost a fatal blow to his personal mission. Again Willy came hurrying over. We were putting the finishing touches to my report by this time. Willy was carrying a satellite phone. There was no mobile connection.
‘Finn,’ he said. ‘You must call Frank…’ He checked his watch. ‘Call in about eight minutes.’
Finn took the phone and walked up the beach. He didn’t come back for over an hour and when he did he was white in the face.
‘The boy’s dead,’ he said inexplicably and sat hunched in the sand in front of the crates Willy and I were sitting on, and hugged his knees, rocking gently. ‘They killed him.’
‘What boy, Finn? Who?’
He looked me in the eyes and I saw how angry he was.
‘There’s a boy I spoke to…’ he said. ‘I put the squeeze on this boy in Luxembourg. About Exodi.’
‘What do you mean, he’s dead?’ Willy said quietly. ‘How is he dead? Killed, you mean?’
Finn picked up a handful of sand and let it slide through his fingers.
‘Frank says he was found in a rental car in a lock-up in Metz across the border. Engine running. He was suffocated by the fumes. The boy couldn’t have afforded to rent a car, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Did Frank say that?’ Willy asked.
‘No, he didn’t.’ Finn paused. ‘He gave me the benefit of the doubt,’ he added bitterly.
‘You didn’t kill him, Finn,’ I said.
‘This is what they do,’ Willy said. ‘You know that. That’s why we fight these people. To prevent them from doing things like this.’
‘A war of prevention,’ Finn said mockingly.
‘Back in the seventies,’ Willy said, ‘when I used to go over the Wall, something that concerned the British was Hungary’s development of nuclear power. The Soviets used Hungarian nuclear facilities to provide Moscow with plutonium. One of my contacts in Budapest, a scientist, didn’t like this arrangement. He gave me much information that filled in the picture for your people in London. The scientist was found in a vat of molten aluminium. It’s a war, Finn.’
‘Your scientist knew what he was doing and took the risk. This boy had no choice.’
‘You say Frank gave you the benefit of the doubt,’ Willy said. ‘There’s no evidence of anyone else being involved. The boy may have killed himself. We don’t know.’
‘They don’t leave evidence,’ Finn snapped.
Willy went to get a bottle of Scotch and we tried to talk to Finn but he was adamant. What Willy and I were both thinking, however, was that the boy’s death confirmed the value of what he’d told Finn.
‘We don’t know what happened,’ I said. I put my arms around Finn and held him close. ‘You have a choice, Finn. You can choose to believe he was killed and you can equally choose to believe he took his own life.’
Finn had a child’s attitude to his work, he’d always told me he had. Maybe we all do in this business. Finn once told me that he enjoyed putting himself in dangerous situations so that he could get out of them. He said that, for him, this was what made life worth living. But he also said it was the attitude of youth. It was the attitude of youthful pursuits, like mountaineering or any extreme sport, which normal people eventually grow out of.
The two of us walked up the beach as the sun sank and merged with the orange sea on the horizon. We didn’t talk for a long time.
The following day, we packed my things–Finn was travelling light–and Willy drove us to Aix-en-Provence in his car. Our farewell to Willy was sombre. Finn made no attempt to be cheerful, or even grateful, in the knowledge, I suppose, that we would be meeting again before long and that a new beginning was never far away. We caught a train and began a series of changes that slowly took us to the West, to Brittany, where Bride of the Wind lay on a mooring in a quiet estuary.
Finn could never be cheerless for long and rebounded from his grief with almost inappropriate speed. But somewhere, deep inside him, I knew that the boy’s death had been filed away, fuel for future action and, perhaps, guilt.
It was a beautiful clear night when we sailed for England, but the cold of autumn was coming in off the Atlantic. I had never been on a boat before and Finn showed me what to do if he should fall off. We sat on deck for most of the night. Finn explained what he had to do from now on, and how he needed my help. It had taken him more than a year to get this far and he knew he was only at the beginning of a long journey.
As dawn broke on the English side of the channel, Finn said, ‘What they’ll do at the Forest in the coming months, years perhaps, is to try to drive a wedge between us. That’s what we have to be most careful of.’