Free Confessor by John Gardner

interrogator still inhabited the place. The aroma of his pipe had impregnated the curtains and his books, so that Herbie felt he was surrounded by the essence of Gus Keene, bringing him back to mind with frightening clarity.
    Herbie walked around the room trying to rediscover his old friend. This, he soon realized, was a disturbing experience. As he wrote in his diary, it was disconcerting, for he heard the sound of the interrogator’s footsteps, imagined the door opening—it still had a slight squeak of the hinge, which, he assumed, had not been oiled for a purpose. The way Gus had his worktable set up, he was forced to sit with his back to the door. Gus never liked sitting with his back to doors, so some kind of warning was necessary, hence the squealing door, which Kruger recalled in dreams of the time he had faced Gus Keene in this very place.
    On the first night, the three of them—Bitsy, Ginger and Herbie—drove into Salisbury for an Indian: Ginger driving and not drinking, which allowed Herb and Bitsy to knock off an entire bottle of unconscionably ragged red with no pedigree. They also shared a chicken vindaloo, and Bitsy became almost girlish about the heat generated by the curry. In fact, they got quite chummy and exchanged the names of mutual friends, both in and out of the Office.
    “Herb, you’ve lost a lot of weight, you know,” Bitsy told him. “You’re not ill, are you?”
    “Lost my appetite for a while, Bitsy. Getting it back now.” He placed a spoon heavily loaded with chicken and mango chutney into his mouth and chewed. To himself he admitted he was getting an appetite again. If truth be told, Bitsy could tell that Herb found her attractive, after a physical and lustful manner. As for Herbie, he allowed himself to flirt outrageously with Ms. Williams. Later, he chided himself. The thought of light, or even heavy, relief with Bitsy was not unpleasant, but he had vowed not to go through all that again.
    Life, he had long decided, had a tendency to screw you. Under his breath he had muttered, “The screwing you are getting ain’t worth the screwing you get.” This was an adage—slightly fractured by Herb’s English—passed on to him many years ago by Tony Worboys, when the world, and Worboys, really were young.
    Bitsy was attractive in a manner difficult to describe. The hair was not brilliant; dark, though not the jet of a nightshade witch. Her face was slightly irregular, the nose just a trifle too big, though the eyes, large and brown, would widen, becoming disconcertingly innocent; while her mouth was molded after the manner of Carly Simon—something that lit up Herb’s libido like a marker beacon.
    The interest did not go unnoticed, for she kissed him lightly on the cheek before retiring, and the faithful Ginger remarked that he should “take heed of the lady.” A strangely Shakespearean comment, which Kruger put down to the fact that Ginger had done a lot of work with members of an old Office family—just as Kruger had—and to be with any of them meant Shakespeare was an obligatory second language.
    Books surrounded him in Gus’s old study, and he browsed quietly, noting titles. There was, of course, some fiction. Crime and Punishment nestled close to Anna Karenina and a Folio Society Collected Plays of Chekhov . Modern authors were also there: the more humorless espionage authors. Only the very good ones. No dross. Not a hint of the Bond-wagon.
    Inevitably, there were the famed books on torture—Parry, The History of Torture in England ; Andrews, Bygone Punishments ; Haggard, The Lame, the Halt and the Blind ; Jardine, The Use of Torture ; Duff, A Handbook on Hanging, The Methods of the Inquisition , Edited by A. C. Keene. So, Gus had even added to the literature.
    The bulk of the volumes, though, were required trade reading. Histories of the Office—as they called the SIS—both whimsically bad and inaccurate, as well as scholarly and near-perfect. Nigel West rubbed shoulders