Free The Envoy by Edward Wilson

were the only sane people he ever met. The husband was a reserve centre forward for a first division football club. He had to supplement his football wages by working as a draughtsman and a signwriter. He also played the clarinet and went to Labour Party meetings – mostly to complain about Gaitskell wanting ‘to sell out the workers’. His wife, an immensely strong and shrewd woman, had become a seamstress in a fashion house after leaving school at fourteen. The proprietors noticed that she had an eye for colours and began to trust her with commissioning designs. Kit found the wife reserved and a little suspicious, but the man was always friendly and open. He called Kit ‘old china’. What’s that mean? China plate? Must be slang for mate. Kit smiled: ‘We’re mates.’ They had two kids under five – and the wife was pregnant again.
    Kit lit the gas fire and settled in an armchair with his brandy. He liked the neighbourhood; he even liked the brothers. Sometimes he met them for a drink at the Blind Beggar – they never let him buy a round. Maybe they were cultivating him as a future gang member. The thought was flattering. The brothers were bad guys, very bad, but certainly weren’t the worst. A new gang was surfacing in Stratford who, it seemed to Kit, were truly evil. The brothers, of course, were evil too, but they compensated with a certain sleek beauty and style. The new gang had no beauty, no style: nothing but raw psychopathic cruelty. Their idea of a ‘don’t try that again warning’ was to nail their victims to the floor with six-inch nails and cut off their toes with bolt cutters. In any case, their protection rackets were nudging too close to theManor – and there were dark rumours down at the Blind Beggar.
    There was something about dangerous men that was queerly thrilling. Kit found this thrill in the presence of the two younger brothers, both of whom were boxers of almost professional standard . When you looked into their eyes there was nothing there; nothing but black bottomless wells of emptiness. Not the faintest glint of fear, humour or doubt. If they decided they had to kill you, they were going to kill you. Asking for mercy or forgiveness was as pointless as feeding a dead cat. Kit was beginning to understand that the Brits were a hard people – capable of violence as well as endurance. But they were quiet about it. North and South Americans were violent too, but in a more affable way. Once, when he was a boy, a drunk had stumbled from a bar in Managua and embraced him hard. The drunk breathed rum fumes into his face and spoke Spanish with a strong Nica accent. He whispered into Kit’s ear: ‘What’s the difference, chico , between cutting up a gringo and cutting up an onion?’
    Kit was frightened. He looked around for his parents, but they were buying something from a flower stall a hundred yards away. He was so terrified that he feared wetting himself. He tried not to tremble and to be polite. ‘I don’t know, señor , what is the difference?’
    ‘When you cut up a gringo, you don’t cry.’ The drunk then threw his head back and roared with laughter before disappearing back into the bar.
    It was a turning point. Ever since that day, Kit had felt deep shame. He had nearly peed himself: he was a coward. When he went back to boarding school, he gave up cross-country running for American football and learned to box. He had to prove that he wasn’t a coward after all. And volunteering for the OSS had been part of the same pattern. Kit knew deep down that it wasn’t just the Kennedy confrontation that had caused him to volunteer for the Agency – he had been heading that way in any case.
    The induction course for new agents was just as much about forming the minds of the recruits as it was about imparting spycraft . You were first told that the United States government will never ‘order or authorise assassination in a clandestine operation ’. Kit remembered the intense look on