Free A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming Page A

all restaurants in the south of France were run by the same middle-aged proprietor on his thirty-fourth wife with the same paunch, the same tan and the same bombshell waitress whom he was inevitably trying to fuck. This one kept scratching an itch in the crack of his bum, like Rafael Nadal preparing to serve. When it was time to settle the bill, Kell decided to have some fun with him.
    ‘The steak was tough,’ he said in English.
    ‘
Comment
?’
    The proprietor was looking past his shoulder, as though it was beneath his dignity to make eye contact with a Brit. ‘I said the steak was tough.’ Kell gestured towards the kitchen. ‘The food in this place is only marginally better than the stuff they served up in
Papillon
.’
    ‘
Quoi
?’
    ‘You think it’s OK to charge tourists eighteen euros for medium-rare chewing gum?’
    ‘
Il y a un problème, monsieur
?’
    Kell turned around. ‘Never mind,’ he said. It had been enough to see Hallyday stirred from his complacency. The waitress appeared to have overheard their conversation and honoured Kell with a flirtatious smile. He left fifty euros of Truscott’s money for her on the table and walked out into the afternoon sunshine.
    A wise man once said that spying is waiting. Waiting for a joe. Waiting for a break. Kell killed time by wandering the streets of Vieux Nice and the Yves Klein galleries at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. On a steel bench in the mezzanine he checked the messages on his London phone. Claire had left a series of increasingly irate texts from the waiting room of their marriage guidance counsellor. He had completely forgotten the appointment.
    Thanks a lot. Total fucking waste of my fucking time.
    He did not want to explain himself, to confess that Marquand had brought him in from the cold. Instead, texting quickly, he wrote:
    Sorry. Totally forgot. Crazy 24 hrs. I am Nice.
    It was only when she responded with a string of three bewildered question marks that he checked the outgoing message and saw his mistake. He called Claire to explain, but the line went direct to voicemail.
    Sorry. I realize that I am not particularly nice. I meant to say that I am
in
Nice. As in France. Had to come here on business at the last minute. I completely forgot about the appointment. Will you apologize to …
    But Kell could not remember the name of the marriage guidance counsellor; he could only picture her hair, a bob, her biscuits, the clock that ticked on the mantelpiece. He fudged it:
    … the good doctor. Just say that I’m too busy. Call me back if you get the chance. I’m hanging around waiting for a meeting.
    He knew that Claire would join the dots. She was too well versed in the euphemisms of the secret world not to read between the lines: ‘last-minute business’; ‘waiting for a meeting’; ‘had to go to France’. Thomas Kell was a disgraced spook; he no longer had any business; he didn’t
need
to go to any meetings. What possible reason would he have for flying to Nice at the last minute if not to run some errand for SIS? One of the features of his long career had been the necessity to lie to Claire about the nature of his work. Kell had enjoyed the brief respite from such fabrications, but was now back in the same cycle of concealment that he had spun for twenty years; back in the habit, so natural to him and so easily acquired, of keeping anybody who came close to him at arm’s length. In this context, he wondered why Claire was keen on seeing a shrink. There was no ‘structural flaw’ in their marriage – a phrase the counsellor had used, time and again, with apparent relish. Neither was there any ‘hard-wired animosity’ between them. On the rare occasions that they met to discuss their future, Mr and Mrs Thomas Kell inevitably ended up in bed together, waking in the morning to wonder why on earth they were living apart. But the reason for that was clear. The reason for that was unequivocal. Without children, they were