Crocodile Tears

morning and his alarm had just gone off.
    It had been a dream, of course, but a very pleasant one—and Bulman had no doubt that very soon it would become a reality.
    He was going to be famous. Newspaper editors who were usually too busy to give him the time of day would be lining up to employ him. There would be television talk shows, celebrity parties, lots of awards. It occurred to him that maybe he had been a little too generous offering Alex fifty percent of his earnings. After all, he was the one doing all the work. It was his story. Maybe forty or even thirty percent would have been closer to the mark. In fact, at the end of the day, the journalist didn’t need to pay him anything at all. It wasn’t as if Alex could do anything about it.
    It was incredible, really, that the two of them had finally met. Bulman remembered the first time he had heard the story of a teenage spy. It had been in a pub, the Crown on Fleet Street, a late-night drinking session with an old friend in the police who had been at the Science Museum when the parachutist came through the roof. He hadn’t believed it then, but something had told him to stick with it, and very soon he had found himself on what had become nothing less than a quest. He had spent months doggedly following leads that had gone nowhere, meeting contacts who had clammed up at the last moment, calling in favors, and, when necessary, making threats. Piece by piece he had put the story together. And in the end it had led him to Alex.

    Bulman slept in a circular bed with black silk sheets on the top floor of a modern block of apartments in Chalk Farm. His bedroom had views of the railway lines leading into Euston Station. The place had been built only twenty years ago but already there were cracks appearing, maybe because of the vibrations from the trains. One was passing now. When he had first moved in here, the grinding wheels used to wake him up, but he had soon grown used to it. Now he quite liked it. He wouldn’t have been able to afford the place if it had been anywhere quieter.
    It was the start of a new week. Seven days since he had been in Alex’s Chelsea flat. In the end, he had decided to give the boy time to work things out and to recognize he had no alternative but to work with him. He and that housekeeper of his would have talked things over and probably blamed each other for what had happened. Now that he thought about it, maybe that was another interesting angle. The girl—
    Jack—was quite pretty. What was she doing, living with a fourteen-year-old boy? The National Enquirer would like that! Well, this afternoon Bulman would go back. He would be there waiting with a glass of white wine and a digital recorder when Alex finished school.
    He threw back the covers and went into the kitchen, where the plates from dinner last night—and the night before—were still stacked up in the sink. Bulman enjoyed good food, but he couldn’t be bothered to cook for himself and the packaging from frozen meals was spilling out of the garbage. He found a clean mug and made himself a coffee, glancing at the newspaper articles that were pinned to a corkboard above the sink. “Secrets of Army’s Basra Breakfast.” “Intelligence Chief Appears on Face-book.” “SAS Commander Misses Flight.” He wasn’t proud of his work. Nobody took much notice of what he wrote, and the stories were always nearer the back of the paper than the front. What did it matter, anyway? They were read and then forgotten … if they were read at all.
    That would all change soon.

    Bulman opened the fridge. He took out the milk and sniffed it. It was sour. He poured it into the sink and drank his coffee black. What was he going to do until four o’clock? It was a beautiful day, a cold January sun glinting off the railway tracks. He watched a second train rumble past on its way into town, packed with commuters on their way to their boring jobs. He could almost imagine them, squashed into the newspapers they were trying to read. A month from now, those newspapers would belong to him.
    A late breakfast. Shopping. A couple of beers at the Groucho Club in Soho. He mapped out his day as he got dressed in his usual open-neck shirt, blazer, and slacks. He never wore jeans. He liked to look stylish. He fastened the shirt with brightly polished silver cuff links, each one decorated with a miniature engraving of the Fairbairn-Sykes dagger, used by the commandos since the Second World War.