Charlie M by Brian Freemantle Read Free Book Online

apprehensive now than he had ever been then, he decided. The Berenkov affair could topple him, Kalenin realised. It wasn’t the purge and disgrace that frightened him. It was being physically removed from the office in the Lubyanka buildings in Dzerzhinsky Square. Without a job, he would have nothing, he thought. He’d commit suicide, he decided, quite rationally. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought of such a thing and there was no fear in the consideration. A revolver, he determined. Very quick. And befitting an officer.
    He sighed, hearing midnight strike. Slowly he packed the papers into his personal safe, trying to arouse some anticipation for the war game he had prepared when he got to his apartment.
    Tonight he was going to start the Battle of Kursk, the greatest tank engagement in history. But his mind wouldn’t be on it, he knew.

(4)
    Charlie had seen advertised in the New Yorker the orange Gucci lounging pyjamas, with the matching rhinestoneencrusted sandals in which Janet greeted him.
    She smelt fresh and expensive and when he kissed her, just inside the doorway of the Cadogan Square flat, he could feel she was still warm from her bath. It was nice of her to go to all the trouble, thought Charlie.
    â€˜I’ve bought some wine,’ he announced.
    She accepted the bag from him and extracted the bottle.
    â€˜Lovely,’ she said. ‘Spanish burgundy.’
    â€˜They didn’t have Aloxe Corton,’ he said. They had, but it had been priced at £4.
    â€˜What?’ she said, moving further into the flat.
    It wasn’t important, decided Charlie. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
    Janet was using him, he decided, as he entered the antique-adorned living-room behind her, watching her body beneath the silk. She had a lovely ass.
    Had she been born in a council house instead of on a country estate and attended a state school instead of Roedean, Janet would have been a slag, Charlie decided. She had an amorality sometimes found in the rich that made her sexually promiscuous, experimental and constantly avaricious. Rich enough – first from an aunt’s, then a cousin’s inheritance – to do nothing, Janet worked for £4,000 a year as Cuthbertson’s private secretary and never had any money. To get it, she had even whored, in a dilettante, friends-only way – ‘making a hobby pay for itself’ – and enjoyed boasting about it, imagining Charlie would be impressed or excited by it. Charlie felt she was exactly his sort of woman. And in addition, very useful. And she really was very good at her hobby between those silk sheets that always slipped off the bed, so that his bum got cold.
    Quite unoffended, Charlie knew he was another experiment, like working for Sir Henry Cuthbertson, who was her godfather, and drinking warm bitter, which she had done for the first time on their initial date in the dive bar of the Red Lion, near Old Scotland Yard, and declared it, politely, to be lovely. Charlie was ‘other people’, a person to be studied like she had examined dissected frogs at her Zurich finishing school after leaving Sussex.
    â€˜Like the duchess screwing the dustman,’ he reflected, aloud, stretching his feet towards the electric fire. They were still damp, he saw, watching the steam rise.
    She reappeared from the kitchen, corkscrew in hand. She was a tall girl, hair looped long to her shoulders, bordering a face that needed only a little accent around the deep brown, languorous eyes and an outline for the lips that were inclined to pout.
    â€˜What about a duchess?’ she queried.
    â€˜You look like one,’ said Charlie, easily.
    Who was using whom? he wondered, smiling up at her. Poor Janet.
    He pulled the wine, filling the glasses she offered.
    â€˜Love or what you will,’ he toasted.
    She drank, swallowing heavily.
    â€˜Very nice,’ she said bravely.
    They had bred good manners in Switzerland, thought