A Delicate Truth A Novel

Nazi-style doorway. By the sodium glare of Tudor lanterns, joggers in red shirts, secretaries in top-to-toe black livery, striding men with crew cuts and paper-thin black briefcases glided past each other like mummers in a macabre dance. Before every lighted tower and at every street corner, bulked-out security guards in anoraks looked him over. Selecting one at random, Toby showed him the letter heading.
    ‘Must be Canada Square, mate. Well, I think it is, I’ve only been here a year’ – to a loud peal of laughter that followed him down the street.
    He passed under a walkway and entered an all-night shopping mall offering gold watches, caviar and villas on Lake Como. At a cosmetics counter a beautiful girl with bare shoulders invited him to sniff her perfume.
    ‘You don’t by any chance know where I can find Atlantis House, do you?’
    ‘You wanna buy?’ she asked sweetly, with an uncomprehending Polish smile.
    A tower block rose before him, all its lights blazing. At its base a pillared cupola. On its floor a Masonic starburst of gold mosaic. And round its blue dome, the word Atlantis . And at the back of the cupola, a pair of glass doors with whales engraved on them that sighed and opened at his approach. From behind a counter of hewn rock, a burly white man handed him a chrome clip and plastic card with his name on it:
    ‘Centre lift and no need for you to press anything. Have a nice evening, Mr Bell.’
    ‘You too.’
    The lift rose, stopped, and opened into a starlit amphitheatre of white archways and celestial nymphs in white plaster. From the middle of the domed firmament hung a cluster of illuminatedseashells. From beneath them – or as it seemed to Toby from among them – a man was striding vigorously towards him. Backlit, he was tall, even menacing, but then as he advanced he diminished, until Giles Oakley in his new-found executive glory stood before him: the achiever’s rugged smile, the honed body of perpetual youth, the fine new head of darkened hair and perfect teeth.
    ‘Toby, dear man, what a pleasure! And at such short notice. I’m touched and honoured.’
    ‘Nice to see you, Giles.’
     
    *
     
    An air-conditioned room that was all rosewood. No windows, no fresh air, no day or night. When we buried my grandmother, this is where we sat and talked to the undertaker. A rosewood desk and throne. Below it, for lesser mortals, a rosewood coffee table and two leather chairs with rosewood arms. On the table, a rosewood tray for the very old Calvados, the bottle not quite full. Until now, they had barely looked each other in the eye. In negotiation, Giles doesn’t do that.
    ‘So, Toby. How’s love?’ he asked brightly when Toby had declined the Calvados and watched Oakley pour himself a shot.
    ‘Fair, thank you. How’s Hermione?’
    ‘And the great novel? Done and dusted?’
    ‘Why am I here, Giles?’
    ‘For the same reason that you came, surely’ – Oakley, putting on a little pout of dissatisfaction at the unseemly pace of things.
    ‘And what reason is that?’
    ‘A certain covert operation, dreamed up three years ago but mercifully – as we both know – never executed. Might that be the reason?’ Oakley enquired with false jocularity.
    But the impish light had gone out. The once-lively wrinklesround the mouth and eyes were turned downward in permanent rejection.
    ‘You mean Wildlife ,’ Toby suggested.
    ‘If you want to bandy state secrets about, yes. Wildlife .’
    ‘ Wildlife was executed all right. So were a couple of innocent people. You know that as well as I do.’
    ‘Whether I know it or you know it is neither here nor there. What is at issue is whether the world knows it, and whether it should. And the answer to those two questions, dear man – as must be evident to a blind hedgehog, let alone a trained diplomat such as yourself – is very clearly: no, thank you, never. Time does not heal in such cases. It festers. For every year of official British denial, count hundreds of decibels of popular moral outrage.’
    Pleased with this rhetorical flourish, he smiled mirthlessly, sat back and waited for the applause. And when none came, treated himself to a nip of Calvados and airily resumed:
    ‘Think on it, Toby: a rabble of American mercenaries, aided by British Special Forces in disguise and funded by the Republican evangelical right. And for good measure, the whole thing masterminded by a shady defence contractor in cahoots with a leftover group of