Comrade Charlie by Brian Freemantle

Author:Brian Freemantle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-10-15T11:34:55.632000+00:00

27

It was three days after the failed suicide attempt – almost four taking the overnight flight into account – when Emil Krogh landed in London. He still felt ghastly. And looked it, too. His face was grey and even more sagged, his eyes rheumy and with an occasional apprehensive tic pulling at the right side of his face, near his mouth, so that he seemed to be smiling, but grotesquely. There was a tremble to his hands, as well: there was an almost permanent shake and at times a more profound jump, actually lifting his hands in small convulsions. Again it was his right side.

He didn’t sleep at all during the flight and arrived gravel-eyed and sour mouthed, a throbbing ache moving beyond his head to run down the back of his neck into his shoulders. Although his eyes were open and his body moving there kept being momentary breaks in his awareness of his surroundings, so that he kept twitching back in apprehension at finding himself in a place – like the immigration check and the Customs hall and outside the terminal building, seeking a taxi – without knowing how he got there.

He sat with his head back against the seat on the drive into London, oblivious and uncaring about the route or anything on it. At the hotel he went robot-like through the registration formalities: in his suite he jerked up, like a man awakening, unable to remember getting there from the downstairs lobby. He slumped into a chair in the sitting room, not bothering to unpack, drifting in and out of positive awareness, dreaming but not dreaming and never a proper dream at all. His mind was blocked by the squalor of the Oakland motel, and that was all he kept thinking of: the smell and the filth and how he’d scrabbled around on his hands and knees the following morning, trying to clean away the mess he’d caused and then to clean himself and after that sneaking out, still early, without being seen and then driving aimlessly around, trying to recover. Incredibly Peggy seemed to accept his explanation of some gastroenteritis bug and he’d stayed away from the plant that day and played out the charade with his concerned father-in-law that evening, insisting it was only a passing, twenty-four-hour thing and that there was no reason at all for him to cancel the trip to England.

And now he was here, Krogh realized, in a sudden, coherent moment. Here, like he’d been told to be: obedient and waiting for them to snap their fingers for him to do whatever they wanted done, like a dog performing tricks. He supposed that’s what he was: their performing animal, here boy, good dog, fetch boy, fetch.

Krogh’s right hand leapt high in fright at the sound of the telephone. He sat, transfixed by the strident sound but not responding to it for several moments. When he did, finally, he just lifted it from its cradle, not able to speak to identify himself.

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