wore white socks with black suits and spoke with mid-Western accents. The tape was easy to find. It was still on the reel-to-reel machine, obviously the only recording the FBI had done that day. It also looked certain that the recording had been done automatically and unmonitored by a human listener – good. Kit pulled on a pair of surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints and rewound the tape. He put on the headphones and then fast-forwarded to the Hoover conversation . He then cut out the incriminating section with scissors. Kit knew that the Dulleses would, to an extent, protect him, but he didn’t want a lifetime of FBI harassment just because Allen Dulles wanted to piss off Hoover. Kit finished the job by splicing in blank tape to replace the section he had removed. He then rewound to the beginning and erased the rest of the tape, making it look as if the technician had made a mistake. Kit knew that the agent concerned, unsuspecting foul play, would then send the tape to a lab in Washington that had the technology to recover the lost recording. The lab would probably think that FBI London had done the splicing themselves. When the London jerks got the tape back and discovered the empty spliced-on bit, they would think that the lab had fucked up the tape and was trying to hide the fact. Kit smiled in anticipation of the bureaucratic shit-flinging fight that would follow.
When Kit got back to his flat it was one o’clock in the morning. Unlike the other embassy staff, he lived in a working-class borough of the East End. In fact, it was ‘a manor’ controlled by a well-known family of villains. It suited him perfectly. Kit paid ‘the brothers’ a few pounds a month ‘to keep an eye on his place’ – and they did so with a vengeance. The Manor was full of eyes and ears that instantly picked up anything out of place. That brand of surveillance and assurance of safety was better than anything Scotland Yard’s Diplomatic Protection Squad could offer. But the villains and Cockney neighbours who kept an eye on Kit and his flat had no idea that he was a diplomat. As far as they were concerned he was François Laval, a Canadian shipping agent from Montreal.
The flat, in a rabbit warren of run-down streets, was a safe house that he paid for with his own money – in Canadian dollars. Kit’s ‘official address’, where everyone at the embassy supposed he lived, was on the top floor of a Georgian terrace in Pimlico. He had sublet it to a junior doctor who, because of her hospital schedule, was seldom there. The doctor knew that she was paying less than half the going rent. In exchange, she had to follow a script if anyone turned up looking for Kit or made enquiries. She had to give the impression that she was a secret girlfriend – possibly one that was cheating on her husband – and pretend to be very embarrassed and a bit angry too. Meanwhile back in the East End, anyone who snooped around looking for ‘the Canadian geezer’ was in for a nasty surprise. The Montreal shipping agent was a perfect cover – it explained his American accent and fluent French – and his irregular comings and goings. And ‘the b rothers ’, of course, assumed the shipping agent stuff was ‘pure porkie’ and that Kit was a fellow villain engaged in smuggling.
Kit loved his bolthole. As soon as the got in, he took off his tie and draped it around a plaster death mask of Baudelaire that he’d found in a junk shop on the rue Saint Jacques, not far from the Panthéon. He poured a brandy and bade a toast to the pale mask of the French poet.
The room shook as a train rumbled past. Kit’s flat backed on to a railway embankment. All the embassy staff on similar pay grades rented smart townhouses in Kensington, Chelsea or Hampstead, but Kit preferred the rough edges and accents of the East End. He liked to get away from people like himself: educated, arrogant, privileged assholes.
Most days, the couple in the downstairs flat
When Kit got back to his flat it was one o’clock in the morning. Unlike the other embassy staff, he lived in a working-class borough of the East End. In fact, it was ‘a manor’ controlled by a well-known family of villains. It suited him perfectly. Kit paid ‘the brothers’ a few pounds a month ‘to keep an eye on his place’ – and they did so with a vengeance. The Manor was full of eyes and ears that instantly picked up anything out of place. That brand of surveillance and assurance of safety was better than anything Scotland Yard’s Diplomatic Protection Squad could offer. But the villains and Cockney neighbours who kept an eye on Kit and his flat had no idea that he was a diplomat. As far as they were concerned he was François Laval, a Canadian shipping agent from Montreal.
The flat, in a rabbit warren of run-down streets, was a safe house that he paid for with his own money – in Canadian dollars. Kit’s ‘official address’, where everyone at the embassy supposed he lived, was on the top floor of a Georgian terrace in Pimlico. He had sublet it to a junior doctor who, because of her hospital schedule, was seldom there. The doctor knew that she was paying less than half the going rent. In exchange, she had to follow a script if anyone turned up looking for Kit or made enquiries. She had to give the impression that she was a secret girlfriend – possibly one that was cheating on her husband – and pretend to be very embarrassed and a bit angry too. Meanwhile back in the East End, anyone who snooped around looking for ‘the Canadian geezer’ was in for a nasty surprise. The Montreal shipping agent was a perfect cover – it explained his American accent and fluent French – and his irregular comings and goings. And ‘the b rothers ’, of course, assumed the shipping agent stuff was ‘pure porkie’ and that Kit was a fellow villain engaged in smuggling.
Kit loved his bolthole. As soon as the got in, he took off his tie and draped it around a plaster death mask of Baudelaire that he’d found in a junk shop on the rue Saint Jacques, not far from the Panthéon. He poured a brandy and bade a toast to the pale mask of the French poet.
The room shook as a train rumbled past. Kit’s flat backed on to a railway embankment. All the embassy staff on similar pay grades rented smart townhouses in Kensington, Chelsea or Hampstead, but Kit preferred the rough edges and accents of the East End. He liked to get away from people like himself: educated, arrogant, privileged assholes.
Most days, the couple in the downstairs flat
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