The Birds Fall Down (21 page)

“I asked the actress, ‘Can you give us any idea of the whereabouts of the house? Was it on the right or the left of the Avenue? Was it as far up as the Rue Dumont-d’Urville just off the Avenue des Portugais?’ But she interrupted me by saying, ‘I can do better than that. I remember the number.’ It seemed that as she turned away in disgust from the door the small enamel number-plate on the wall had caught her eye, and she had noted the figures because they were three more than the year of the century in which she had been born.

Perhaps because I was so tired by my long journey, and because I was so overcome with grief over the capture of these three young men, with whom I had been so recently, I passed at this moment into a state of light-mindedness. I didn’t listen to the number as she said it. I sat there, smiling, almost openly laughing, because it struck me as so ridiculously characteristic of an actress to remember a number because it was three more than the year in which she was born. Any of us might say, ‘Why, ’68 or ’69, or whatever it might be, that’s the year I was born,’ but to say, ‘ ’71, that’s three more than the year I was born,’ that takes the theatrical temperament, the innocent egotism of the player.

“Then I suddenly heard the young man with the straight yellow hair, of whom I’ve already spoken, exclaim, ‘Why, that’s the number of the house where the Minister of Justice who was disgraced, the Count Diakonov, has an apartment. And it explains the whole thing. For there’s a Tsarist spy working in that household.’ I asked stupidly, ‘How should you, an Englishman, know that?’ He answered, ‘What do you mean? I’m not English, I’m Russian. You should know that, aren’t we talking Russian now? Very few Englishmen know any Russian and when they speak it you’d take it for Double Dutch. I’m a student at Oxford. I’m here only because my father’s one of the secretaries at our Embassy in Paris. It’s from my father’s papers that I know there’s a Tsarist spy working in Diakonov’s household.’ I thought he was talking nonsense. A revolutionary spy, but not a Tsarist spy. What an extraordinary idea, I told myself, and wondered how the confusion could have arisen; and I said coldly, ‘What grounds can you have for saying that?’ as I have often said before, when we older ones have had occasion to keep our younger comrades from spreading false rumours.

“The young man said with what I realized afterwards was great good nature, considering my tone, ‘I go home for my holidays to stay with my father in Paris. He knows nothing of my revolutionary sympathies and I see what I can see for the good of the cause. I can tell you for certain that there is a Tsarist spy in Diakonov’s household who sends to our Embassy in Paris the fullest reports of all his doings, and who photographs all his diaries and his letters. His diaries are pitiful, and show the Tsar in the worst light, and as they are all sent back to Petersburg, the old man is in great danger. The Tsar is eagerly looking for some excuse to recall him to Russia and lay some trumped-up charge against him, and then discredit him thoroughly by never bringing him to trial and abandoning the proceedings on the pretence of showing him mercy. It’s easy to see that my father, who is an honourable though unenlightened man, hates the whole business, which is indeed repulsive. There was one letter from Baron Roller, written from Vichy, in which he refused to come and see old Diakonov, though they’d been friends since childhood, because the Tsar had forbidden it, and that disgusted my father so much that when he read it he tore the copy across, and it had to go on its way to the Tsar, with a note from the secretary saying there’d been an accident. My father’s often quite bitter these days, and I’m sure it’s about this.’

“I sat there, asking the actress questions which I knew didn’t matter, while it sank in: the knowledge that the Tsarist authorities were receiving precisely the same documents which were being regularly transmitted to us by our agent, Porfirio Ilyitch Berr. But when I tried to visualize a Tsarist spy and a revolutionary spy working side by side in your apartment I couldn’t believe it. We know, of course, how many rooms there are in your apartment and how many servants you have. You’ve greatly reduced your household. It could be said that you live more like a French or an English aristocrat than a Russian one. It seems most unlikely that in your comparatively modest household there should be two men, both having access to your papers and both taking advantage of their opportunities to remove those papers and photograph them surreptitiously, who didn’t sooner or later become aware of each other. But I knew Berr’s reports by heart, and I was sure he’d never expressed any suspicion that there was a police spy working beside him in your study. I could draw only one conclusion. There were not two spies in your household, but one. The spy who was working for us was also working for the police. It was he who had stood in the entry and looked out at Korolenko and Primar and Damatov; and if he knew enough to betray them, then he was the Judas who had long persecuted us. I remembered too the unpleasant impression Berr had made on the few people who had seen him. I said to the diplomat’s son, ‘Have you no idea who supplies your father with Diakonov’s papers?’ and he answered, ‘I don’t know the man’s name, he’s always referred to by a number, which I’ve forgotten. But he’s an agent who has worked for the police over a number of years, and again and again he has given them most valuable information.’”

“Laura,” said Nikolai.

“Grandfather?”

“You’re biting your nails,” he said icily. “It’s an ill-bred trick. You have the good fortune to inherit the long, narrow hands of our family, do not spoil them.”

“Yes, Grandfather,” she said, tears standing in her eyes. He should not have said that in front of a stranger.

“As I’ve said,” continued Chubinov, “there was no further doubt in my mind. I was sure that at last we’d uncovered the trail of our Judas, and that we knew his name. I had to keep my thoughts to myself. There might be some traitors in that very room. I stood up and said that I could do nothing, I must return to Paris and confer with the head of the organization there, to the end of finding out what charges the police had brought against Primar and Korolenko and Damatov, and of warning our other centres that a traitor was at work. I also told them that I would try to get in touch with Gorin, and the mention of his name instantly tranquillized everybody. I bent over the actress and kissed her hand, and she looked up at me with her great eyes and told me that if Damatov were to die she would not wait a single day before following him into the Absolute. She said this with perfect sincerity, but also in perfect style, with that same utterly heart-breaking lack of resonance, and I knew that she would not fulfil this prediction, but would live to enjoy much happiness and success. There was nothing unpleasant about this realization, on the contrary, it was as agreeable as looking forward to spring in the middle of winter. I smiled down at her and kissed her hand again, and then asked the comrades who had met me in the station to take me somewhere where I could send a telegram, and said my good-byes.

“We had to walk quite a long way, and then take a bus, and then go a journey by underground railway, to the General Post Office, which was the only place from which I could send a telegram at that hour. It was dark now, and the city was fascinating and terrifying in its exoticism. The streets round the General Post Office were empty, except for a large number of cats. It all might have been a fantasy drawn by Gustave Doré. I sent a telegram to the deputy head of our Battle Organization in Paris, whom I can now dare to name to you as a man called Stankovitch, who would, I was certain, know all that was to be known about the investigation of Berr, asking him to meet me at the station when I arrived in Paris the next afternoon. Then, finding that it was not so very late, I asked my companions to take me to look at St. Paul’s Cathedral, as I remembered from a passage in the correspondence of either Herzen or Marx that it was not far away. The two Englishmen seemed surprised by the request but agreed. I stood with them in the street looking up at the dark mass of the superb building against the starlit sky, but when I turned to them to compliment them on their national possession and ask them if they didn’t consider it wonderful that Wren had never seen a dome until he built one for himself, I found they were looking not at the cathedral but at me. One of them said, ‘You know a lot about all this, don’t you?’ I said that I knew no more than he and his friends. They said, ‘Well, when we asked you if you had known that Primar and Korolenko and Damatov were coming to London, you said you hadn’t, but it seemed to us you weren’t entirely surprised to hear that they’d meant to. And why were you smiling? You smiled twice when that woman was telling her story. What’s funny about all this?’ I could not tell them that I had smiled at the actress remembering a number because it was three more than the year she was born, or because I thought she would not take poison if Damatov were to die. They were good men, but they wouldn’t have understood. They took me back to my room in Pimlico, and arrived next morning to take me to Victoria as if they were police agents seeing a criminal out of town. I found myself resenting this for reasons which made me ashamed. It is hard to overcome the disadvantages of one’s birth. I was angry because one of the men who doubted me was an old soldier from the ranks, the other a tailor.

“When I arrived at the Gare du Nord, Stankovitch was waiting for me. We went to a bar, and ordered a meal, and I left him in order to telephone to Gorin at the
pension
near Montreux. But he wasn’t there. The proprietress answered me and told me that he’d gone to Paris to see his doctor. This disquieted me and I asked anxiously about his health, but she answered with such indifference that, remembering she was a sympathizer, I concluded that she was probably repeating an untruth which Gorin had told her to give strangers. I rang off and tried to find him at the hotel he always stayed at in Paris, the Hôtel de Guipuzcoa et de Racine, it’s a little place between the Hôtel de Ville and the Tour Saint-Jacques. But he wasn’t there either. My heart sank. I then went back to Stankovitch and the meal we had ordered, and while we ate I spoke of the disappearance of the three young men and found that he knew all about that and the dispatch of Nadya Sarin to London, so I went on to question him about Berr. He answered reticently. Gorin, he said, had always impressed on him that Berr was to be handled with kid gloves, he might at any moment throw up his job as an informer. ‘Is he really so disagreeable?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know that first-hand, I’ve never spoken to him, but Gorin’s had him thoroughly investigated, and all the reports say so. Apparently he strides along with the most arrogant expression on his face, and he’s unkind to his wife, leaves her trotting after him, hardly able to catch up, and never seems to speak to her. But it’s not merely a question of his disposition. What’s to be feared is that he may get into difficulties with his niece’s husband, who’s a reactionary and who, if he found any of us hanging about, might denounce him and us.’ I found myself wondering if Gorin had not, since his illness, lost something of his genius. Surely this tale that no revolutionary must speak to an informer on account of his family was the very yarn which would be spun by a police spy who didn’t want his master to know that he was doing business with both sides.

“‘So you’re quite satisfied,’ I asked, ‘that Berr is loyal to us?’ ‘Yes, quite satisfied,’ he said. ‘He’s a very isolated man. He makes no contacts at all except with the Diakonov household, and nobody goes there now except the blind and the halt and the lame who are pensioners of the Countess’s charity. There’s nobody else at all,’ he said, ‘except a man named Kamensky, who worked for Diakonov when he was Minister of Justice and is of no importance at all. Gorin was interested in him at first, and three times set a comrade outside the Diakonov apartment to see if perhaps he was someone we’d known in Russia under a different name, and twice he didn’t turn up, but the third time he did. I forget who saw him, but anyway he was nobody; and Gorin put me to search Kamensky’s room at his hotel, the San Marino, near the Hôtel de Ville, and that told us everything we needed to learn. It’s a funny thing, he’s an engineer, and apparently quite a good one, and one would expect him to be enlightened, but he ought to have been a monk. There were several icons and shelves of religious books and a very full diary, full of pious vapourings. He’s evidently a thorough nincompoop and he spends much of his time toadying to the Countess Diakonova, who is a bigoted and reactionary woman.’ I must beg your pardon for that, Nikolai Nikolaievitch. ‘Anyway,’ Stankovitch went on, ‘Berr keeps us fully posted about all Kamensky’s doings, and they add up to exactly nothing. But don’t worry about Berr. He’s completely reliable. We’ve tested him again and again.’

“It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him what I had heard from the diplomat’s son in London. But then it suddenly struck me that if Stankovitch spoke so well of Berr he was probably a traitor himself. It struck me that my world was terribly uncertain. I had been seen off from Victoria by men who thought I was a traitor, though I was loyal, and here I had landed at the Gare du Nord to be met by a man whom I had thought was loyal but who was probably a traitor. And I could not get in touch with Gorin. ‘Where does Berr live?’ I asked, quite without subtlety. I try to follow technique but I am apt to get flustered. That is one of the reasons why I admire Gorin, who is never at fault. ‘There’s no harm in my telling you that,’ said Stankovitch, ‘for strangely enough he’s in the telephone book. He lives in a block of flats in one of the newer working-class suburbs to the north-east of Paris, one of those places built on the English model, with gardens round them. He really must be a very disagreeable man. Apparently his wife runs about like mad all day, working for him, but Gorin says that in fine weather he’s apt to spend the whole day idling in a queer sort of hut, a summer-house affair, in a patch of his own he has in the vegetable patches which are part of the estate. I’ll tell you something. I think Gorin has kept a pretty close watch on this man Berr, in case we have to take disciplinary action against him some day.’