Free Hidden Man by Charles Cumming Page B

I need to have a chat with you about something. Something important.’
    Ben was smoking and pointed to the fourth finger of Mark’s right hand with his cigarette.
    ‘Is it about that?’ he asked.
    Mark looked down.
    ‘What? The ring?’
    ‘The ring.’
    A bad start.
    ‘Not exactly, no.’
    ‘Something else, then?’ Ben said, and sat down at a free table.
    Mark was slow to follow, as if assembling his thoughts. He was always apprehensive when it came to talking to Ben. Coupled with a desire to protect and assist his younger brother existed an older insecurity, rooted in childhood squabbles and fights, a feeling that Ben could outsmart him. At Libra Mark was super-efficient, the man Roth relied on to charm and cajole, an executive ten years in the business and never a foot put wrong. But when it came to Ben those talents were compromised by sheer familiarity. He hooked his suit jacket on the back of a beer-stained tartan chair and wondered how he was ever going to bring him round.
    ‘You OK?’ Ben asked.
    ‘Oh, sure.’
    Mark must have looked tired and distracted, some sort of apology already evident in his eyes, because right away Ben said, ‘It’s about Christopher, isn’t it?’
    And Mark nodded, hunching forward with an awkward smile.
    ”Fraid so,’ he said. ”Fraid so. Had lunch with him last week, before I went back to Moscow. That was when he gave me the signet ring. It belonged to…’
    Ben immediately raised his hand and a column of ash fell free of the cigarette, drifting in scatters towards the carpet.
    ‘Forget it,’ he said. His attitude was not aggressive or unfeeling, merely a relaxed, clear assessment of his position. ‘I don’t care where it came from, why hegave it to you or which one of the Keen great-great-grandfathers wore it during the Crimean War. That stuff is between you and him. I don’t want any part of it.’
    At the bar a soft drinks gun coughed.
    ‘Fair do’s,’ Mark muttered. ‘Fair do’s. I just wanted to let you know, so there was no big mystery or anything.’
    ‘Well, I appreciate it.’
    There was hefty silence. Mark instinctively felt that the timing was all wrong; both of them a little drunk, Alice only ten feet away and their father on the other side of London. Why had he agreed to do Keen’s dirty work? What was in it for him ?
    ‘But it’s connected to what I wanted to talkabout,’ he said.
    ‘What’s connected to what you wanted to talk about?’
    ‘The ring. The dinner,’ Mark replied.
    ‘Oh. Right.’
    Ben actually looked quite bored.
    ‘The other night, when I came round for dinner and you and Alice were going at it…’
    This seemed to galvanize Ben briefly. He looked up and gave a quick response.
    ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Alice has been a bit stressed lately. Both of us, in fact. Workstuff, marriage. We haven’t been getting on and it’s just been one argument after another…’
    ‘No, that’s not what I mean.’
    Ben cocked his head to one side. They were talking at cross-purposes.
    ‘What then?’
    ‘Look, why don’t I just spell it out?’ Mark moved uneasily in his chair. It was like breaking bad news, waiting for the right moment. ‘I think things have changed between me and you, brother. Not as easy as they were. You follow?’
    Ben shook his head. On the way to the pub Mark had sketched out the basics of a speech in his mind, but he was moving on to it too quickly.
    ‘It’s like this. The last six months, however long it’s been since Dad and I started meeting up, it’s as if you’ve gone into yourself, moved away.’
    To illustrate his point, Mark spread his arms outwards like a cross and nearly knocked half a pint of cider out of the hand of a passing customer. Across the pub a man was slamming his fist against the hard plastic casing of a fruit machine, spitting the single word ‘Fuck’.
    ‘It’s just that we’ve never really chatted about any of it.’ Mark was rubbing his jaw, words coming out before he