A Little White Death (7 page)

‘No, I heard them talking about her. Indiscreet because they don’t expect foreigners to speak the language. And I don’t think we should lose her. They’ll find us petty
damn quick anyway. Far better a tail you know about than one you don’t. Or am I teaching my spymaster to suck eggs?’

‘Touché, old chap, touché.’

It was a truly dreadful place. A gin house from a Hogarth plate. A joyless hole in which to drink and smoke and smoke and drink. A place with but one purpose, to quench the
committed. A brown study of a brown room, a room of worn and peeling paintwork, of years of encrusted dirt, of woodwork shaped and worn with elbows, of floors patterned in spittle, with but a
single piece of decoration, a tiny touch of red and gold among the shades of brown – a cobwebbed, foxed portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the wall behind the bar. Heroic of posture, caught
in a media moment at the Finland Station, making his first speech in many a year on Russian soil. He had to make a speech – how else would he have passed the time in that sealed train except
by writing a speech?

‘Don’t tell me it’s a dive, Freddie,’ said Charlie, reading his mind. ‘It’s this or nothing. Or to be precise, it’s some other place exactly like this
or one of the hard-currency joints in the hotels which are strictly for the tourists. I can’t play the tourist. I’m here for life. Begin as you mean to go on, Isay.’

Dark eyes under beetle brows occasionally glanced at them as Charlie forced a way through to the bar. Miserable men, working men, heavily wrapped up against the winter cold, heavily wrapped
upagainst the working life, their heads in clouds of tobacco fug, their feet in puddles on the floor, streaming from their boots. Two toffs, two foreigners, in good clothes, but scarcely meriting
enough attention to detract from the serious business of getting seriously drunk.

Charlie got both elbows on the bar and seized the attention of the barman. He was a dead ringer for the late Maxim Gorki, a face consisting largely of open pores, a nose like a ripe strawberry
and a moustache the size of a yard brush.

‘Now we get to the heart of the matter. Four fucking days in this utter fucking igloo of a country and I still can’t muster enough of the lingo to ask this bugger for a drink. I got
you here just to order the booze. Tell him I want a whisky, and make damn sure he pours at least three fingers.’

This struck Troy as innocent, but he asked anyway.

‘Where do you think you are?’ said the barman. ‘What do you think this is? Order vodka or piss off the pair of you.’

Troy translated loosely for Charlie.

‘It’ll have to be vodka. That’s all they serve.’

‘If your English pal wants whisky he’ll have to use his privileges. In this place there are no privileges. We’re the scum of the earth. Vodka or vodka. And none of that fancy
shit with bison grass or red peppers in it. Take it or leave it.’

‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Two large ones.’

‘Not so fast,’ said Gorki, and pointed over his shoulder to a small blackboard and the chalked entries under the heading ‘menu’.

‘First you order a meal.’

The kopeck dropped for Troy. It was not a bar; there was no such place as a bar. In a nation of drunks there were only two places to get drunk outside the privacy – or not – of your
own home. In the street or in a café. An approximation of which this place seemed to be.

‘Charlie – you have a choice. Sausages, fish dumplings or soup.’

‘Sausages,’ said Charlie. ‘Anything as long as the bugger pours me a drink.

Troy ordered for them.

‘Nah,’ said Gorki. ‘Bangers is off.’

‘Dumplings then.’

‘Nah, dumplings is off too.’

Troy looked around the room at the pack of miserable boozers. Each one of them had in front of him a bowl of yellowish gruel. Not one of them seemed to have touched it.

Another kopeck dropped.

Nobody ate a damn thing in this satanic hole; the pretence of food, the utterly ‘off ’ menu, was just a front to keepa fraction the right side of the law. If a militiaman – the
Soviet version of a copper – walked in, doubtless a few elbows would ply a few spoons, but that was it. A bar by any other name in a country where there were no bars was a caff.

Just for the pleasure of the hunt, he said, ‘What’s the soup?’

‘Yeller soup,’ said Gorki.

Troy could see that.

‘Yellow what?’

‘Yeller taters and yeller cabbage, bit o’ this, bit o’ that.’

‘Sort of like saffron?’

‘If you like.’

Then a kopeck dropped for him too.

‘Bloody good idea.’ He turned to a fat man in a greasy apron lounging behind him. ‘Andrei, change the menu. From now on its
soupe au saffron
.’ He stuck two bowls
in front of them and ladled out the yellow mess.

‘Good bloody grief,’ said Charlie. ‘
Crambe repetita
. School dinners.’

‘You don’t have to eat it,’ said Troy. ‘No one else is.’

‘Water?’ Gorki was asking. ‘You want water?’

‘Water,’ said Charlie through Troy’s interpretation. ‘We don’t want fucking water.’

‘Yes you do,’ Gorki said. And he winked hammily at Troy.

‘Yes,’ Troy replied. ‘Two large waters will be fine. Doubles.’

Gorki set two far from spotless tumblers on the bar, splashed vodka generously, but without any sense of measure, into them and shoved them over. He did not ask for money. It looked to be the
kind of place that did most of its business on the slate, and Gorki looked to be the kind of man who would never forget your face or what you owed him down to the last kopeck.

Charlie was staring at the disparity in their glasses. Troy swapped his huge one for Charlie’s lesser and they touched glass together.

‘About bloody time,’ said Charlie. ‘Cheers.’

He knocked back half the glass in a single swallow. Troy sipped at his.

‘Jesus, that’s strong. Bloody hell, they certainly mean you to get pissed, don’t they?’

‘Sole purpose of visit,’ said Troy. ‘It’s probably about 120 degrees proof. You could run a car on the stuff.’

‘Good,’ said Charlie. ‘I can die happy.’

Troy doubted this very much. All the same, he wondered at the shred of truth buried in the statement. That death was the only thing left to look forward to. It did not need to be said that
Charlie had no idea what he was getting into, little idea of what kind of a country he had come to. But he felt sure it would be said, and equally sure of its finality. Charlie might live ten or
twenty or thirty years, but Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, would be home for the rest of his days. And die happy he would not.

Charlie dragged him to a newly vacated table by the window. They sat with two bowls of gruel and two large ‘waters’ between them. Condensation ran down the glass and the walls to
mingle with the sawdust on the floor. He could see nothing out, only the muddied reflection of the room within. As they crossed the room he picked up snatches of the dozen or more conversations
taking place within the hubbub.

‘So I says to him, I says, you want it doing you can bloody well do it . . .’

‘Meat and potater pie? Meat and potater fuckin’ pie? I said to ’er. Where’s the fuckin’ meat? I spend all day in a fuckin’ foundry and you serve me meat
an’ potater fuckin’ pie with no fuckin’ meat? I clouted the silly mare, didn’t I?’

‘. . . Commissar or no bloody commissar. If he comes that one with me again I’ll do the sod. I don’t care if I spend the rest of me life in a fuckin’ gulag. It’d be
worth it.’

‘. . . Women? Women? They’re just cunts, aren’t they? I never met a one that was anything more than a cunt and that includes the bitch I married.’

A place to drink and a place to curse. It struck Troy that there was not a woman in the room, and that there could not be a conversation taking place – ‘the fuckin’ wife, the
fuckin’ boss’ – that, with slight variation, could not be heard in the pubs of Liverpool or Newcastle or Glasgow. He hoped Charlie did not mean to stay long, but knew that if he
once got a taste for vodka he might stay for ever.

‘Where have they put you?’ he asked.

‘In the Moskva Hotel. The same one Burgess was in. Poor bugger. Nothing permanent. They’re being completely coy about that. Not even guaranteeing that I get to serve out my days in
Moscow. Bastards. They’ve had me in a couple of times for debriefing. I think they’re as surprised by the speed of all this as I am.’

‘Not as surprised as I was.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry about that. You slogged it all the way to Beirut for nothing. When I wired you I knew things were getting pretty final. Mr Smith did not usually turn upin January. He
came for a summer outing. The linen suit, the panama hat and the chance of getting his knees brown. I sort of had the feeling they were going to pull something out of the hat. When I saw who Mr
Smith was, I knew they were going to pull everything.’

‘Who?’ said Troy. ‘Who did they send?’

‘As a rule it would be some anonymous bugger from the Secret Service. I think they got to think of it as an office freebie – “Who’ll be lucky this year and get a long
weekend in sunny Beirut giving old Charlie the once over?” Just reviewing my case, they’d call it. Making me sweat a bit, letting me know I wasn’t off the hook yet. Different
bloke every time. For all I knew they really could have been called Smith. They were none of them very important, because they were none of them very good at it. I think the point should have been
to screw more out of me, at which, to a man, they were useless. This time. This time, they rolled out the big gun. Tim Woodbridge MP, Minister of State. Number two at the Foreign Office. As soon as
I saw him I knew I was a busted flush. Good old Tim. Lied through his teeth for me and the honour of the Service in ’57. Cleared me in the House when everybody knew I was guilty as sin. Made
the
London Globe
print an apology. God, it was rich. I was grinning from ear to ear even as they booted me out. Lies, lies and more lies. But here’s the rub – prove it or not,
old Timbo knew everything. For them to send him instead of one of the spooks meant trouble. I thought he was going to sit me down and tell me they’d finally got all the evidence they needed.
I thought I’d find my life and treasonable times laid out neatly in one of those colour-coded foolscap folders they have depending on the nature and degree of one’s treachery –
yours was buff as I recall, which means they’re pissing in the wind. I should think mine was dick-end purple by now. Not so, not so. Tim and I have a fairly decent lunch for two laid out on
one of the upper floors of the embassy, away from prying eyes. No folder, just a fairly simple statement. “Something new has come to light,” he says. “What?” I say, and
I’d genuinely no idea what he’d come upwith. “A body,” he says, “we have found a body.” At first he was tacking so slowly I thought he was using a metaphor
– you know, along the lines of “know where the body’s hidden”. That sort of thing. But he wasn’t. “Whose body?” I said. And then you could have knocked me
over with a fan dancer’s fanny feather. “Norman Cobb,” he says. “We have found the body of Inspector Cobb. We know you killed him.”

Troy looked at the two inches of vodka in the bottom of his glass, and took a sip. Bought himself a quick moment of silence and then looked at Charlie.

‘Where did you dumpthe body?’

‘Thames marshes, way out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Out past Purfleet. God knows, I couldn’t find the place again if they gave me a map. Jacob’s Reach, Esau’s
Point. Something biblical. I weighted the bugger and watched him sink. And if it took seven years for the fat fool to surface, then I can’t have done too bad a job of it. I admired the bluff.
They have nothing but circumstantial evidence to show I killed Cobb. Of course, I denied it. And Tim duly called me a liar, and said they knew I’d killed him, and it was the last straw.
Something had to be done. I did see that, didn’t I? I had to see how far beyond the pale this was. “You can’t blow away coppers on the streets of London and expect to get way with
it.” Then I laughed till I damn near bust. He took humpat that. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

Troy did not find it funny, but he could see the irony. The last straw. Something must be done. Of all the sins of Charles Leigh-Hunt, and they were many, this was the worst. But he was
innocent; he had not killed Norman Cobb. Troy had killed Norman Cobb. Of course, Cobb had been trying to kill him at the time. And had Troy been a slower or a poorer shot, Cobb most certainly would
have killed him, and it would now be Troy’s bones, picked clean by lugworm, rising upin the Thames marshes. He had not reported the incident. He had given Charlie his chance and with that
chance the corpse of Norman Cobb. He had never asked what he had done with the body. He had never even thought about it until now.

‘“It’s time,” said Woodbridge. “You should go now. There are people back in England who would like to see you charged with Cobb’s murder.” Then he
paused, and I think he smiled, and he said, “We can’t have that.” And then he set out the deal. I was to clear off. He didn’t use the word “defect” at any point
– odd that, I thought. I’d be exposed back home, spy, traitor, another Cambridge Commie, but the Cobb thing would be kept quiet. In return I was not to give any of those Burgess and
Maclean-style press conferences. Once in Russia I was to shut up, be a good boy and keep my nose clean. If I didn’t, there’d be recriminations. I could not believe it, Freddie, I tell
you, I was gobsmacked.’

Charlie seemed to have reached a natural lull. He shook his head from side to side, looked into his empty glass and seemed to be giggling to himself. Troy pushed his almost untouched vodka
across the table to him, and fought his way back to the bar.

‘Same again,’ he said.

Gorki rubbed finger and thumb together.

‘Twenty-five kopecks for the
soupe au saffron
, two roubles fifty for the water.’

It dawned on Troy that he had no Russian currency. He dug into his coat pocket and came up with a one pound note.

‘Wossat?’ Gorki asked.

‘A British pound,’ said Troy. ‘Sterling.’