The Madness of July Read Online Free Page A

Lucy had decided she must open at last.
    She was still at the desk, fiddling with a heavy black pen but writing nothing. She didn’t know he had arrived back until the door opened and he was standing in front of her. She noticed sweat stains on his pink shirt, and a hint of wildness in his hair. But he smiled.
    ‘Where have you been?’
    ‘I went for walk. I’m allowed to, don’t you think?’ He was still smiling, hanging his jacket on the coatstand, undoing another shirt button. Looking away as he spoke, he said, ‘Anything up? An exciting telegram maybe?’ He busied himself with an open red box on the corner of the desk, and she saw the nervousness in his shuffling with the files inside. He closed it and turned the lock with the tiny brass key that went back into his pocket.
    Lucy was ready. Her tremble had gone, and she was alert to every change in his expression. He was relaxing, but she spotted the effort in masking the tiredness. Lucy said he should sit down, and even gestured to his chair as she stood up from it, in charge again.
    She took his place in the doorway, turning away to close the door quietly. Spinning round, strands of light red hair sweeping across her face, she sensed that they were both reluctant to break the deep silence. His eyes were fixed on her, and she realized that his concentration had kicked in.
    ‘You’re going to have to get to Paul’s office quickly,’ she said.
    ‘Paul? Quickly?’
    She watched him lean back and slip one hand into his shirt, touching the scar.
    ‘When you were out…’ and she added with a deliberate hint of the cruelty that intimates understand ‘… wherever you were…’
    He was utterly still.
    ‘…I heard some strange tidings from Paul. And bad, however you look at it.’
    His hands were back on the desk and she saw that he was trying to hold them still.
    ‘There’s a dead American. And he has your phone number in his pocket.’

3
    Half a world away, at the moment when Flemyng got his summons to Paul Jenner’s office, the clock on Grauber’s kitchen wall in New York was showing eight-fifteen. He set coffee on the hob and quickly took the four steps outside the house for a walk to the bakery three blocks away.
    Hannah would be up when he got back, kids too, and there would be time together before he headed uptown to the mission and his desk. He wanted to lift his mood after a broken night, and the auguries were good. A storm had powered down the Hudson Valley in the evening and was safely out to sea, leaving a layer of lightness on the city. The skyline sparkled in gratitude, the weight of the last week gone and the air on the move. The freshness encouraged Grauber to find a spring in his step, despite the day ahead.
    He was above medium height, though not tall enough to stand out, and slim. Against the fashion his hair was cut close to the skull, almost to stubble, and that often gave him a serious look whether he liked it or not. He had the advantage that when he smiled, a dimple on his chin gave him an air of cheerfulness that even suggested frivolity. His outward appearance could change in an instant. But most of the time his jet black eyes under shadowed lids, and lips that were heavier than his finely boned face might have promised, seemed to veer towards gloom. This was misleading but helped at work, where he carried serious burdens.
    The United States Mission to the United Nations, squatting on the corner of 45 th and First Avenue, was heavy duty. On his floor, never visited by outsiders, he led a working life that forced him every day to balance flurries of excitement and exhilaration against the weary conviction that conflict would never end. He worried above all about Berlin and points east, and believed he always would; moving pieces on a board which seemed to stretch to infinity. He’d come to believe that the slow-motion struggle in which his life had been subsumed would roll on beyond him and carry him off in its wake. A few cold