The Cryptographer Read online

  For my sister

  He broke a twig

  From a low branch of oak. The leaves

  Turned to heavy gold as he stared at them

  And his mouth went dry

  He felt his brain move strangely, like a muscle.

  Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid

  Contents

  I Winter

  II Fall

  Thanks and Acknowledgements.

  By the Same Author

  I

  Winter

  She is late and he is alone at his table. Before he looks up, in that space, she sees him as clearly as if he were a stranger. He is an old man, there are spots on his hands and neck the colour of old meat, but his eyes are still beautiful. They make him uncomfortable: he would prefer to be less handsome, and so less conspicuous. And this is his favourite table, at his favourite bar, a stranger might notice it in the way he sits. His own place, where the waitresses cajole him to eat, come on Lawrence, have something with that, and the taxis give him a discount home.

  ‘Anna’, he says, and she kisses him. Not as she always has, but as she would family.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Better for seeing you.’ There are two glasses lined up ready. Cold dry white. He doesn’t touch his until she has sat down, taken off her coat. He looks cold himself, though the room is warm. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I tried to call. I left work when I could,’ Anna says, smiling for him, but already he is waving her away, decorously, irritably, as if her excuses are as faint and distasteful as smoke from an adjoining table.

  ‘Work. And how is work, these days?’

  ‘You know, it never changes.’ She settles back in the leathered booth. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘Awful. My poor protegée,’ says Lawrence. ‘Did I tell you I still have nightmares about it?’

  ‘Don’t,’ she says, as if he is joking, and looks up to find that he is not. That he is only embarrassed, after all.

  ‘Not the work. I mean of course the work, but the place. Her Majesty’s Central Inland Revenue. They say there was once a labyrinth where the way weaved between blind walls and lost itself in a thousand treacherous paths.’

  ‘Come on. It’s not that bad.’

  ‘Only because it has you at the end of it. But you’re here now. Now you’re here we both have something to celebrate. To drink to. I should thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For your remarkable new client… Mister John Law. What else?’ He beams with pride. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Are you surprised or impressed?’

  ‘Definitely impressed.’

  ‘Liar. Well may you smile. To your client, your career, and John Law, the Cryptographer.’

  ‘The Cryptographer.’

  They touch glasses. She isn’t surprised; not as he means it. The acquisition of fact has been Lawrence’s life, after all, or its working constituent – his practised answer to the question What do you do? being a euphemistic I work in Information – so that his knowledge is not quite unexpected. She is only surprised by his happiness. He has been waiting to tell her all day. She can see it in his face.

  She watches him drink, carefully, no more than a taste. Twenty-first century Chablis. He is measuring the day and night in wine, a glass an hour from noon until midnight. Hour-glasses.

  ‘Alright, I give up. How did you know?’

  ‘I still have my sources. What do you make of him?’

  ‘Nothing, yet.’

  ‘Oh, now.’

  ‘The investigation hasn’t begun. I haven’t even met him.’

  ‘But you know everything about him, you have the information at your fingertips, don’t you? Of course you do.’

  ‘You taught me that.’

  ‘So I did.’ He sits back. ‘I might be able to help … well, I know when I’m not wanted. If you need advice, you know where to find me. I’m a little jealous, you see.’

  ‘I’ll keep you in mind,’ she says, and drinks.

  Her hair is still wet from the street, she can feel its coldness, the wine in her throat, the heat of her skin as the room warms it. It is to do with being watched, this self-consciousness. Watched and wanted, though she has known Lawrence too long to be surprised by either the sensation or the desire.

  ‘Not your everyday client, Mister Law. The extremely rich are not like the rest of us, or so we say. The rest of us, that is. Does he know yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then I feel sorry for him.’

  ‘Do you? You make it sound cruel,’ she says. Then, as she feels it, ‘You almost make me sound like that.’

  There is laughter at a nearby booth. Anna looks beyond its crowded source. The bar has sixty floors of view. Outside the rain has eased. The air is clear over the twin cities of Westminster and London, their silver-greys and golds.

  ‘You know,’ Lawrence says, bringing her back, ‘in my own time I came to the conclusion that there were only two kinds of tax inspector. The failed police officer and the failed stockbroker. Both have reasons to be cruel.’

  ‘Which kind am I?’ she says, because he wants her to. And Lawrence smiles, gratefully, because he knows it, and also fondly, because he is drunk, and he is remembering the times they have been more or less than friends.

  ‘You?’ he says, his eyes quite bright. ‘My dear Anna. Sometimes you hardly seem like an inspector at all.’

  He walks to his cab one step at a time, waves as if he has just won gold, and is gone. Anna drives home with the taste of good wine in her mouth. The intoxication is subtle, she is barely conscious of it; a tremor in the bloodstream. But it is always like this. It is like a memento of him, of what it is to be him. Which is one reason she does it to herself, after all.

  It is past midnight. The streets are cleaned out with rain. The crowds are tiring but unsatisfied, congregating under neon. At night it is hard not to fall for London, Anna thinks, when the best of it is lit, and the worst is glamorised by darkness. The Capital of Money, people call it these days, as if it is not fully inhabited by those people at all, but by other things. Synthetics, metals, futures.

  Only as she reaches the suburbs does she pick up speed, edging the limit. She is wakeful in a way she knows can lapse too easily into sleep. She turns on the radio. The signal keeps her going, moving through waves and intermittent stations.

  She wishes she could have told Lawrence more, tonight. There was a time when she would have gone to him for advice gladly, when it would have been the first thing she would have done. Now she suspects, with an inspector’s instinct, that he is not a man to trust with secrets.

  Mister Law is full of secrets. The Cryptographer, people call him, or the Codemaker, and other things, expressions of distrust and ill-concealed admiration. It is the new millennium, after all, and no longer acceptable to admire the rich. But Law is both distrusted and admired more than most, more than Anna entirely understands, and that will have to change. She will need to understand her client. Rule number one: information is the inspector’s greatest weapon.

  Now she is almost home. Two blocks east, five north. She turns into her road. The trees and street lights form a procession of shadow and illumination. The car is warm and dark as a head.

  Her own job is simple in its way. Anna measures the worth of people. It is something they hide, often, and most often from themselves. It is not pleasant to be reduced to the margins of profit and loss, to see one’s life scored. More than once, over the years, Anna has interviewed clients so frightened or angry they have forgotten the facts of their lives: age or birthplace, the name of a husband, a child. She has waited while they sit staring back at her, dumbstruck at their own stupidity. It isn’t the potential for loss which do
es it, Anna thinks, so much as the imminence of measurement. The relentless picking-through of days.

  There are clients who appear guilty even when they have nothing to hide. They watch Anna as if they expect her to hold up their accounts, as a doctor will hold X-rays to the light, and find them wanting. Those are the ones who equate worth with worth, money with success, and believe they have failed. It is not what Anna believes of them herself. She has seen too much of money for that. It is not what she hopes for; she doesn’t dream of money in itself. But then, as Lawrence says, sometimes she hardly seems like an inspector at all.

  It is eleven years since she joined the Revenue. Inevitably there have been more clients than she remembers. The names tend to escape her first, followed by the faces. The lives stay with her longer. But when she works well she comes to know them all for a while: even the most difficult clients, the richest and the most impoverished. She knows who they think of, when they think of money. To understand the rich, Anna believes, you should know who they are rich for.

  Sometimes it is only themselves. More often it is the children they mean to have, or meant to. Anna has investigated clients who talk of nothing but the people who wouldn’t believe in them, the ones who said they would fail. For them wealth collects in sweet, cold drops.

  Then again it can be a stranger they imagine. A woman seen once, on a bright street, in a bright dress, smiling. Someone they want to have or to be. And it can also be the dead. The dead can be a reason. But Anna has found there is always someone.

  She undresses in the dark of her room. Her clothes smell of the sour damp of the city. There is a little light from the lamps in the street. In the mirror she catches glimpses of herself. The curve of her hips, flesh, the shadow of her hair.

  Her name is Anna Moore. She is thirty-six years old, born in the last millennium. She is an Inspector A2 Grade. Which means she is good at what she does, one of the best, or so people say, so they tell her.

  People like to think that money and love are opposites. Anna has come to be less sure. After all, both love and money tend towards others. And money arises out of greed and generosity. And greed and generosity are evidence of love.

  This is the night’s secret. Not only what she knows, but what she would like to know. Because even the Cryptographer must dream of someone. Anna would like to know who John Law thinks of, when he thinks of money.

  It is the end of October, the last days of autumn. In the morning she opens the door and her car has turned white with frost. Doggedly she guns the engine. She has never much liked machines. She talks to them like stubborn children, pleads with them like small, recalcitrant gods. The radio comes to life and dies in a single galvanic burst of music.

  The overground is ten minutes walk through the gloom. Anna finds a seat in the third carriage she tries. She takes a tablet computer from her briefcase and works with it resting on her knees, mailing the Revenue autopool, the Revenue-authorised garage, leaving her name and numbers and an imprecise list of mechanical symptoms. The screen illuminates her palms and face.

  People always say she looks proud. She doesn’t feel that way. It is only skin-deep. Not everyone has the face they deserve. Often, what people take to be pride is only her reticence. Her shyness, which is a form of gentleness.

  Her hair is long, black, with the density of mercury. Her mother has always claimed oriental blood. In another time and place she might have sold it, Anna thinks, and this is an image of herself she likes, it is something she imagines of herself, a private fiction. Her clothes are handsome, more expensive than she can afford. She would say she is no longer young. She would also say that she is no longer beautiful, though people can be wrong about themselves, they can be their own worst judges, even those who calculate the taxes of the Inland Revenue.

  Just before dawn the train stops between stations. The engine winds down in the twilight. Carriage by carriage the lights go out, like pearls spilled from a curved rope.

  There is a murmur of disquiet, but at this hour no one really complains. Given the choice of silence or the office, they are content with silence. Across from Anna, a man with the face of a lawyer sleeps beside a woman with the arms of a dancer.

  The engine thrums, accumulating power. Anna leans her face against the window. The glass is cold against her cheek. Outside is a landscape defined by trees. Each minute is lighter than the last.

  Few people use their mobiles. Those that do talk softly, as if they are afraid to wake someone. A pale black man asks for Miriam. The girl with dancer’s arms talks to John. Anna listens to them with her eyes open. She is always listening to others. Overhearing: she thinks it is an inspector’s habit. The man and woman say the same thing, everything and nothing. We’re on the train. Just waiting. We’ll see you soon. We love you, love you. Love you.

  Her colleagues have arrived before her. Carl and Janet and Mister Hermanubis, all on one park bench in Limeburner Square, like three birds on a wire, like the jury of three monkeys, two out of three watching the crowd with mistrust.

  Along with good clothes (that are nevertheless a little austere, a little old-fashioned, like the suits of undertakers) mistrust is something they have in common. They are Her Majesty’s Inspectors, after all. They are in possession of the facts. They have seen the most unexpected clients lie, so that they have come to expect the worst of people, even of one another; and this not always without reason, since they know about wealth without possessing it, and know a few things about deception. They are not inclined to trust.

  There are two kinds of tax inspector, Lawrence says, though depending on what he is drinking Anna has heard him say there are three kinds, or four. If there are three, it is those who find counting the wealth of others a torture, a temptation, or a trial. If there is a fourth, it is those who take pleasure in their investigations. Anna likes to think her colleagues are all the fourth kind. It’s only that the pleasures they take are different. One vindictive, one perverse, one vicarious.

  They make room for her. She has a coffee from the station and it wakes her fast, like their chat. Mister Hermanubis gets up and mutters goodbyes like bad news. The crowd goes on past the Old Bailey, dealers and brokers in their own drab, mineral colours. They look camouflaged, Anna thinks absently. As if they could step back into the shadows of limestone around them, and disappear.

  ‘Look at them,’ Carl says. ‘Suit boys.’

  ‘And women too.’ Janet Sullivan, her voice milder with lack of interest.

  ‘Not from where I’m sitting.’ Carl puts his tea down on the bench between them. Hefts his briefcase, clicks it open, takes out four immaculately wrapped sandwiches. ‘From where I’m sitting they’re all just offshore bank accounts.’

  He offers the sandwiches around. They eat gratefully, clumsily, in more or less easy silence. Sullivan is a tall woman with small eyes, a quick temper, and – entirely unconcealed by these things – a mind like a steel trap. Carl has close-curled hair, like astrakhan, and a face that keeps tight to its bones. To Anna his features seem Semitic, Arabic or Jewish, though she has never asked. They are too close, professionally, to be close friends. Their relationship lacks the trust for that, and also the promise. She knows that by the time they are inside the Revenue both inspectors will see her as the competition. Carl has said as much, more than once. Until then, this and every morning, they are each other’s company.

  The workers pass close by them. They are young, for the most part: their seniors, the successful ones, will arrive later, by car, in subterranean bays. And they look as if they are thinking of nothing, which is to say they are thinking of money. Anna recognises it in them. The way it fills their vacancies. The addictive mix of it. Two parts anxiety, one part joy.

  They are thinking of security and independence, pleasure and power. They are thinking of the smell of new cars and the fame of personalised parking spaces. The feel of skin, footprints in sand, the gardens in emeralds, a passage of music, rain on glass, the taste of a mouth, the taste of wine
. They are thinking of someone. Their faces as set as the stone of the banks and courts around them.

  ‘The drive for five,’ says Sullivan, ‘the yen for ten, the gleam for fifteen.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asks Anna, and beside her Carl readies the phlegm in his throat, a rattling laughter.

  ‘The dealers say it. Five million buys you your basic wish fulfilment. Two houses, clean children and walk-in wardrobes. It’s all worked out. It’s what they aim for.’ Sullivan smooths her skirt critically. ‘You should know that by now.’

  ‘What happens when they reach ten?’

  ‘They get a free hula skirt and a week in Hawaii. How would I know? Right, I’m off. Places to go, people to scare. Fear and loathing to inspire.’

  ‘Early bird, eh?’ Carl squints up at her.

  ‘That’s right. I’m manoeuvring to shit on you from a great height, Carl. I’ll see you then.’

  ‘Not if I see you first.’ They watch her cross towards the Revenue steps. Anna finishes her coffee. The morning is turning out fair. From the trees a drift of small red leaves has collected at the feet of the bench, like confetti. An airship passes overhead, rolling in the breeze off the river, its slogans high as houses.

  GURU RICE – THE WISE CHOICE.

  SOFTMARK: THE NEW MILLENNIUM IS NOW AVAILABLE.

  ‘So,’ says Carl, and Anna glances back at him. Now they are alone there is a change in his voice. He is trying to sound solicitous. She knows him well enough to know when he wants something.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, just so. Just making conversation.’ He has the decency to look pained. Anna waits for him to go on. He is not a patient man, it doesn’t take long. ‘So, people are saying you’ve landed a big client. You must be pleased. Nice bit of luck, a client like that. Lots of potential. A good person to know. When do you see him?’

  She downs the last bite of immaculate sandwich. Unaccountably she thinks of Lawrence, although as far as she knows he and Carl never got on, have not been in touch since the older man’s redundancy. Nor is there any great shortage of people at the Revenue willing to discuss business behind backs.