#silverview

~

Trent’s childhood dream was to own a bookshop. He thought of bookshops as places where you could read all day and avoid people, which seemed like paradise. However, his family being who they were, his skills being what they were, the job market for English degree-holders being what it was – he spent a year at odd ends, haphazardly weighing the pursuit of postgraduate studies against attempting to break into the publishing industry, until finally he gave up and took the path he knew had always been there, lying in wait for him. He became a spy.

It was another fifteen years before he revisited the idea of the bookshop, in the wake of his abrupt and unceremonious retirement from the Circus. Cleis was one and a half years old by then, and he knew he must find something, for her sake – he had promised, he had promised –  even though he could not stomach the thought of going out in the cold again. He was mulling over his various options – heaven forbid he wind up in something horrible, like insurance – when his mother dropped by for tea and said peremptorily: “Mae is retiring, don’t you know?”

Mae – the only name anyone ever knew her by – was a veritable battleaxe who ran the Crown and Anchor, a pub that doubled up as the London station for agents of every stripe working in or passing through the city. The stations, by the unspoken rules that governed their universe, were neutral ground; they served every agency and freelancer without question and in turn brooked no conflict within their confines. To move against a station was to move against the combined powers of the rest of the agencies. Nobody had tried it in Trent’s lifetime.

“Oh?” said Trent. He was only partially listening to his mother; most of his attention was focused on trying to get Cleis to keep her yoghurt in her mouth. “Who’s taking over, then?”

His mother fixed him with the glare she had honed on some of the finest intelligencers this side of the Atlantic, as well as his teenage self. “I rather thought you might throw your hat in the ring, dear.”

Cleis mawed at her in surprise and dribbled watery yoghurt down her bib. Trent sighed. “I’ll talk to Mae.”

Mae thought it was a ridiculous notion to run a station as a bookshop. “You wouldn’t catch half that lot dead in a bookshop,” was her take on it. “Who has time for reading these days? And you’ll have to get in books! Actual books!”

“That’s rather the idea, yes,” said Trent. “It can’t be harder than maintaining a liquor licence.”

“Well, it’s not like I was going to hand the tender over to anyone else,” admits Mae. “What will you call it, love?”

Trent considered. “The Independent. Because that’s what it is.”

Even Mae had to admit, a few years in, that it was working out quite well. He’d even managed to sell some books.

~

“How’s the le Carré?” Miss Bowen asks, amid her reshelving. “Are we in trouble?”

“I don’t think so.” Trent is perusing Silverview at the counter, book in one hand, the other on the rifle. “The bookshop’s in East Anglia, and the protagonist hasn’t the first idea how to run it.”

“Oh, well then,” says Miss Bowen. “It will put nobody in mind of us at all. Is it any good? I’m always wary of these late discovery manuscripts. I don’t think I ever got over the disappointment of Go Set A Watchman.”

“It’s unevenly weighted. Makes you miss him at his best.” Trent turns a page. “Still, I’m glad he didn’t go gentle into that good night.”

He tenses as the shop bell rings, then sees that it is Keeley Jones, resplendent in a fluffy yellow coat. “What can we do for you, Miss Jones?”

“Trading in,” sings Keeley. “On Jamie’s behalf.”

Trent takes off his glasses and gives her a forbidding look. “What, has he gone and lost the lot again?”

Keeley winces. “Only some of it.”

Trent sighs. “Let’s get it processed in the back.”

Jamie Tartt is one of the stars of the agency known as the Dogtrack. He’s also aggravatingly cocky and spectacularly laissez-faire with his equipment; Keeley’s always in here, making apologies for him having thrown his Glock into a volcano, or something. Trent has no patience for the likes of Jamie Tartt. One already has so many people trying to kill one in this line of work, but there he is, giving even more people reasons to want him dead.

The back room is behind a reinforced steel door that can only be opened using either Trent’s or Miss Bowen’s fingerprints and a passcode that changes every day. The passcode is in fact a rolling alphanumerical series that progresses through the entirety of Hamlet, and if anyone ever cracks it, Trent will be very impressed by their grasp of Shakespeare. In the back room, Trent lays out the remnants of Jamie Tartt’s mission kit and purses his lips.

“To lose one dart gun, Miss Jones, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.”

“Oh, you needn’t have a go at me, I’m proper mad at him myself. You know what he did last week? Tried to murder Roy Kent. Roy Kent!”

“What, for work?”

“Not even that! Some kind of fucking…pissing contest.” Keeley makes a noise of exasperation. “Some days it’s like we gave a bunch of five-year-olds guns and let them loose on a jungle gym. You know what I mean?”

“I’ll just put it on his tab,” says Trent. “Which is astronomical, by the way.”

“I’ll chivvy the folks at the Dogtrack to send you a cover. Only they’re rushed off their feet this week – you must have heard.”

Trent has heard, but it always serves one in intelligence gathering to pretend to know less than one really does. “What’s happening over there?”

“The Mannions are going to war,” says Keeley, her voice lush with the juice of gossip - another reason why Trent likes having her in the shop. “The whole Dogtrack’s splitting up. Christ, but it’s a mess down there.”

“Who’s Jamie backing?”

“Hasn’t decided. Rupert’s putting it about that the whole agency’s going with him, but word on the street is that Rebecca Welton’s brought in someone from abroad to take him out. They’re saying it’s an American.” She sucks in an excited breath.

“Why would you bring in an American for that?” demands Trent.

“Beats me. It’s going to keep us all on our toes for a bit, to be sure. I reckon it’s some Tom Cruise type, all Mission Impossible Jack Reacher like. But nobody knows for certain.”

“Surely not,” says Trent. “You at least must have some idea, Miss Jones.”

Keeley flutters her eyelashes at him. “Who, me? I’m just a humble secretary.”

“Of course you are,” says Trent. “And I’m just a poor bookseller.”

Keeley slants a sly look at him. “You haven’t seen any Americans around, have you?”

“We get Americans in the store all the time. Just this morning we had a Mrs Glenda Johnson from South Carolina complaining that we don’t have a café in the store.”

“Yeah,” says Keeley, “fairly sure it’s not Mrs Glenda Johnson. Isn’t there a Costa two doors down?”

“Precisely,” says Trent. “Americans.”

They return to the front of the store, the afternoon light streaming across the polished wood floors and touching the book covers. “It really is awful pretty, when the light’s good,” says Keeley, running a hand across a row of Sally Rooneys. “You know what you ought to do? You should do #BookTok.”

“That,” says Trent, “is the single worst suggestion I’ve ever heard.”

Keeley laughs. “Give me a pot of money and some Madeline Miller and I’ll do it for you. I’ll make you so famous, you’ll be beating influencers off with a stick.”

“Just tell the Dogtrack to pay for your boyfriend’s damage.”

Keeley sticks her tongue out as she swings out of the shop. “If you see the American, you’ll tell me first. Won’t you?”

~

“Tell me a story,” says Cleis. They’re curled up in her bed, her tiny frame pillowed against his side.

“You’ve had two already.”

“But I want another.” Cleis looks up at him, her eyes clear and green as the sea. “Tell me about Maman.”

Trent stares up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that speckle her bedroom ceiling. Tell me about a complicated woman, he hears Coralie say in his head. She sounds slightly amused. This is an anachronism, of course. Coralie never lived to see the Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey. She would have loved it.

“Where do I start with your mother?”

“Was she very beautiful?”

“Yes. She knew exactly how beautiful she was and what to do with it.”

“Do I look like her?”

“The spitting image.” Even at four, Cleis looks so much like her mother that Trent will sometimes look over at her, in the middle of something mundane like making dinner or brushing her hair, and the resemblance will strike him like a punch to the gut.

Cleis is pleased by this. “What else?”

“Well. She loved old poems, and she was a lot stronger than she looked, and she wasn’t scared of a thing. Never listened to anyone either.”

“Not even you?”

“I like to think she listened to me a bit more than most other people,” allows Trent, “but even that wasn’t very much.”

Cleis kneads her quilt between her small hands. “Why didn’t she come back?”

Trent swallows. “She couldn’t. She had to save everyone.” Including me, he doesn’t add. Instead he says: “She loved you more than anything in the world.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me so. It was the last thing she said, before – ” Trent stops. Cleis is silent.

“Go to sleep now, chouette.”