A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [2]
‘Mr Milius?’
A young woman has appeared on the staircase wearing a neat red suit. She is unflustered, professional, demure. As I stand up, Fat Man eyes me with wounded suspicion, like someone on their lunch break queue-barged at the bank.
‘If you’d like to come with me. Mr Lucas will see you now.’
This is where it begins. Following three steps behind her, garbling platitudes, adrenalin surging, her smooth calves lead me up out of the hall. More oil paintings line the ornate staircase.
Running a bit late today. Oh, that’s OK. Did you find us all right? Yes.
‘Mr Lucas is just in here.’
Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
A firm handshake. Late thirties. I had expected someone older. Christ, his eyes are blue: I’ve never seen a blue like that. Lucas is dense-boned and tanned, absurdly handsome in an old-fashioned way. He is in the process of growing a moustache which undercuts the residual menace in his face. There are wispy black puppy-fluff tufts sprouting on his upper lip, cut-price Errol Flynn.
He offers me a drink, an invitation seconded by the woman in red who, when I refuse, seems almost offended.
‘Are you sure?’ she says, as if I have broken with sacred tradition. Never accept tea or coffee at an interview. They’ll see your hand shaking when you drink it.
‘Absolutely, yes.’
She withdraws and Lucas and I go into a large, sparsely furnished room near by. He has not yet stopped looking at me, not out of laziness or rudeness, but purely because he is a man entirely at ease when it comes to staring at people. He’s very good at it.
He says:
‘Thank you for coming today.’
And I say:
‘It’s a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. It’s a great privilege to be here.’
There are two armchairs in the room, upholstered in the same burgundy leather as the sofas downstairs. A large bay window looks out over the tree-lined Mall, feeding weak, broken sunlight into the room. Lucas has a broad oak desk covered in neat piles of paper and a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman whom I take to be his wife.
‘Have a seat.’
I drop down low into the leather, my back to the window. There is a coffee table in front of me, an ashtray and a closed red file. Lucas occupies the chair opposite mine. As he sits down he reaches into the pocket of his jacket for a pen, retrieving a blue Mont Blanc. I watch him, freeing the trapped flaps of my jacket and bringing them back across my chest. The little physical tics that precede an interview.
‘Milius. It’s an unusual name.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your father, he was from the Eastern Bloc?’
‘His father. Not mine. Came over from Lithuania in 1938. My family have lived in Britain ever since.’
Lucas writes something down on a brown clipboard braced between his thighs.
‘I see. Why don’t we begin by talking about your present job. The CEBDO. That’s not something I’ve heard much about.’
*
All job interviews are lies. They begin with the CV, a sheet of word-processed fictions. About halfway down mine, just below the name and address, Philip Lucas has read the following sentence:
I have been employed as a Marketing Consultant at the Central European Business Development Organization (CEBDO) for the past eleven months.
Elsewhere, lower down, are myriad falsehoods: periods of work experience on national newspapers (‘Could you do some photocopying please?’); a season as a waiter at a leading Genevan hotel; eight weeks at a London law firm; the inevitable charity work.
The truth is that CEBDO is run out of a small, cramped garage in a mews off the Edgware Road. The kitchen doubles for a toilet; if somebody has a crap, no one can make a cup of tea for ten minutes. There are five of us: Nik (the boss), Henry, Russell, myself and Anna. It’s very simple. We sit on the phone all day talking to businessmen in central - and now eastern - Europe. I try to convince them to part with large sums of money, in return for which we promise