The Russia House (28 page)

‘A lonely decider,’ Walter declaimed rhapsodically. He froze a moment as he heard us, but did not turn his head. ‘A fifty-year-old achiever shaking his mid-life bars, looking at mortality and a wasted life. Well, aren’t we all?’

He stood back. Then skipped forward again and chalked in a date. Then took a swig of champagne. And I sensed something ghoulish and scaring about him, like make-up on the dying.

‘Living at their secret centre all his adult life,’ he continued gaily. ‘But keeping his mouth shut. Taking his own decisions, all by himself in the dark, bless him. Getting his own back on history if it kills him, which it probably will.’ Another date, and the word OLYMPIAD. ‘He’s the vintage year. Any younger, he’d be brainwashed. Any older, he’d be looking for an old fart’s sinecure.’

He drank, his back still turned to us. I glanced at Bob for enlightenment but he was looking studiously at the floor. I glanced at Ned. His eyes were on Walter but his face was expressionless. I glanced at Walter again and saw that his breath was coming to him in defiant gasps.

‘I invented him, I’m sure I did,’ Walter declared, seemingly oblivious to the dismay around him. ‘I’ve been predicting him for years.’ He wrote the words FATHER EXECUTED. ‘Even after they’d drafted him, the poor lamb tried so
hard
to be good. He wasn’t sneaky. He wasn’t resentful. He had his doubts but, as scientists go, he was a good soldier. Until one day –
bingo
! He wakes up and discovers it’s all a load of junk and he’s wasted his genius on a bunch of incompetent gangsters and brought the world to the edge of ruin into the bargain.’ He was writing in fierce strokes while the sweat ran down his temples: WORKING UNDER ROGOV AT 109 TESTING SITE KAZAKHSTAN. ‘He doesn’t know it but he’s joined the great Russian male menopausal revolution of the ’eighties. He’s had all the lies, he’s had Stalin, the Khrushchev chink of light and the long dark of Brezhnev. But he’s still got one last shot in him, one last menopausal chance to print himself on the world. And the new buzz-words are ringing in his ears: revolution from above, openness, peace, change, courage, reconstruction. He’s even being
encouraged
to revolt.’

He was writing faster than ever, shortwinded or not: TELEMETRY, ACCURACY. ‘Where will they land?’ he was asking rhetorically between gasps. ‘How close will how many get to how many targets when? What’s the expansion and temperature of the skin? What’s gravity up to? Crucial questions and the Bluebird knows the answers. He knows because he’s in charge of making the missiles talk while they go along – without the Americans hearing, which is his skill. Because he’s contrived the encryption systems that dodge the American super-listeners in Turkey and mainland China. He sees all the answers in clear, before Brother Rogov fudges them for his lords and masters in Moscow. Which according to the Bluebird is Rogov’s speciality. “Professor Vitaly Rogov is an arse-licking toady,” he tells us in notebook two. A fair judgment. That’s what Vitaly Rogov is. A verifiable, fully-paid-up, spineless, arse-licking toady, meeting his norms and earning his medals and his privileges. Who does that remind us of? No one. Certainly not our own dear Clive. So Bluebird blows his lid. He confesses his agony to Katya and Katya says, “Don’t just whimper, do something.” And by golly, he does it. He gives us every bloody thing he can lay his hands on. The Crown Jewels doubled and re-doubled. Encryptions decrypted. Telemetry
en clair
. Retrospective code-breaks to help us check it out. The unbuggered head-on truth, before it gets repainted for Moscow consumption. All right, he’s potty. Who isn’t, who’s any good?’ He took a last swig from his glass and I saw that the centre of his face was a crimson mass of pain and embarrassment and indignation. ‘Life’s a botch,’ he explained, as he shoved the glass into my hand.

The next I knew, he had slipped past us up the stairs and we heard the steel doors successively open and slam shut behind him till he had reached the street.

‘Walter was a liability,’ Clive explained to me tersely next morning, when I bearded him. ‘To us he was merely eccentric perhaps. But to others – ’ It was the nearest I had ever known him come to acknowledging the existence of sex. He quickly censored himself. ‘I’ve given him to Training Section,’ he continued with a return to his most frigid manner. ‘He raised too many eyebrows on the other side.’

He meant, on the other side of the Atlantic.

So Walter, wonderful Walter, disappeared and I was right, we never saw the Mormons again and Clive never once referred to them. Were they mere messengers from Langley, or had they formed their verdict and exacted their punishment? Were they from Langley at all, or from one of the mushrooming groups of initials that Ned had so objected to when he complained to Clive about the Bluebird distribution list? Or were they Ned’s greatest of all pet hates – tame psychiatrists?

Whatever they were, the effect of them was felt all through the Russia House, and Walter’s absence yawned at us like a shell-hole made by our best ally’s guns. Bob felt it and was ashamed. Even hard-faced Johnny remained ill at ease.

‘I’ll want you nearer to the operation,’ Ned told me.

It seemed a wretched consolation for Walter’s disappearance.

‘You’re on edge again,’ said Hannah as we walked.

It was lunchtime. Her office was close to Regent’s Park. Sometimes on warm days we would share a sandwich together. Sometimes we even did a bit of zoo. Sometimes she gave the Cancer Institute a rest and we ended up in bed.

I asked after her husband, Derek. He was one of the few subjects we had in common. Had Derek lost his temper again? Had he beaten her up? Sometimes, in the days when we had been full-time lovers, I used to think it was Derek who held us together. But today she didn’t want to talk about Derek. She wanted to know why I was on edge.

‘They sacked a man I rather liked,’ I said. ‘Well, not sacked, but threw him on the rubbish heap.’

‘What did he do wrong?’

‘Nothing at all. They just decided to see him in a different light.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it suited them. They withdrew their tolerance of him in order to satisfy certain requirements.’

She thought about this. ‘You mean that convention got the better of them,’ she suggested. Like you, she was saying. Like us.

Why do I keep coming back to her, I wondered. To visit the scene of the crime? To seek, for the thousandth time, her absolution? Or do I visit her as we visit our old schools, trying to understand what happened to our youth?

Hannah is still a beautiful woman, which is a consolation. The greying and the broadening have yet to come. When I catch her face backlit, and glimpse her valiant, vulnerable smile, I see her as I saw her twenty years ago, and tell myself I have not ruined her after all. ‘She’s all right. Look at her. She’s smiling and undamaged. It’s Derek, not you, who kicks her around.’

But I am never sure. Never sure at all.

The Union Jack that had so enraged the dictator Stalin when he observed it from the battlements of the Kremlin dangled dispiritedly from its mast in the British Embassy forecourt. The cream-coloured palace behind it resembled an old wedding cake waiting to be cut, the river lay docile as the morning downpour flailed its oily back. At the iron gates two Russian policemen studied Barley’s passport while the rain smeared the ink. The younger copied out his name. The elder dubiously compared his harrowed features with his photograph. Barley was wearing a drenched brown mackintosh. His hair was plastered to his scalp. He looked a little shorter than his usual height.

‘Well,
honestly
, what a day!’ cried the well-bred girl in a pleated tartan skirt, waiting in the lobby. ‘Hullo, I’m Felicity. You
are
who I think you are, aren’t you? A jolly wet Scott Blair? The Economic Counsellor
is
expecting you.’

‘I thought the Economic people were in the other building.’

‘Oh, that’s Commercial. They’re
quite
different.’

Barley followed her swinging tail up the ancestral staircase. As always when he entered a British mission, a sense of dislocation overtook him, but this morning it was absolute. The tuneless whistling came from his local paper boy in Hampstead. The huffing and bumping of the floor polisher was the Co-op milk van. It was eight in the morning, and official Britain was not yet officially awake. The Economic Counsellor was a stubby Scotsman with silver hair. His name was Craig.

‘Mr. Blair, sir! How do you do? Sit you down! Do you take the tea or the coffee? They both taste the same, I’m afraid, but we’re working on it. Gradually, but we’ll get there.’

Seizing Barley’s mackintosh, he impaled it on a Ministry of Works coat-tree. Above the desk a framed photograph showed the Queen in riding habit. A notice beside her warned that speech in this room was not secure. Felicity brought tea and Garibaldi biscuits. Craig talked vigorously, as if he couldn’t wait to get rid of his news. His red face was shiny from shaving.

‘Oh and I hear you’ve been having the most
fantastic
runaround from those brigands in VAAP! Have they been making any sense at all? Are you getting anywhere, or are they just giving you the usual Moscow flannel? It’s all
makework
here, you see. Seldom but seldom is anything actually transacted. The profit motive, somewhat like diligence, is unknown to them. It’s all Brownie points and scratching one another’s you-know-whats. The impossible combination, I always say, of incurable idleness harnessed to unattainable visions. The Ambassador used my very phrase in a despatch recently. No credit given, none asked. How do they ever come to grips, I ask you, with an economy built upon sloth, tribalism and hidden unemployment? Answer, they don’t! When will they ever break free? What will happen if they do? Answer, God alone knows. I’m seeing the book-world here as a microcosm for their entire dilemma, follow me?’

He roared on until he seemed to decide that Barley and the microphones had had their fill. ‘Well, I’ve surely relished our little conversation here this morning. You’ve given me much food for thought, I don’t mind telling you. There’s a great danger in our business of getting cut off from the source here. Will you allow me to pass you around a little now? Our Chancery people will never forgive me if I don’t.’

With a nod of command, he led the way along a passage to a metal door with an evil eyehole in it. The door opened as they reached it and closed as Barley stepped inside.

Craig is your link, Ned had said. He’s hell on earth but he’ll take you to your leader.

Barley’s first impression was that he was in a darkened ward, his next that the ward was a sauna, for the only light came from a corner of the floor and there was a smell of resin. Then he decided that the sauna was suspended for he detected a rocking underfoot.

Seating himself gingerly on a bridge chair, he discerned two figures behind a table. Above the first hung a curling poster of a Beefeater defending London Bridge. Above the second, Lake Windermere languished under a British Rail sunset.

‘Bravo, Barley,’ exclaimed a sturdy English voice, not unlike Ned’s, from below the Beefeater. ‘My name’s Paddy, short for Patrick, and this gent is Cy. He’s American.’

‘Hi, Barley,’ said Cy.

‘We’re just the local messenger boys here,’ Paddy explained. ‘We’re rather limited in what we can do, naturally. Our main job is to supply the camels and hot meals. Ned sends his very special greetings. So does Clive. If they weren’t so sullied they’d have come over and done their nail-biting with us. Hazard of the profession. Comes to us all, I’m afraid.’

As he spoke, the poor light released him. He was shaggy but lithe, with the craggy brows and faraway eyes of an explorer. Cy was sleek and urban and younger by a dozen years. Their four hands lay on a street map of Leningrad. Paddy’s shirtcuffs were frayed. Cy’s were drip dry.

‘I’m to ask you whether you want to go on, by the by,’ Paddy said, as if that were a rather good joke. ‘If you want to bail out that’s your good right and no hard feelings. Want to bail out? What do you say?’

‘Zapadny will kill me,’ Barley muttered.

‘Why’s that?’

‘I’m his guest. He’s footing my bill, fixing my programme.’ Lifting his hand to his forehead, he scrubbed at it as a way of reviving communication with his brain. ‘What do I tell him? I can’t just up-sticks, bye-bye, I’m off to Leningrad. He’d think I was loony.’

‘But you
are
saying Leningrad, not London?’ Paddy persisted kindly enough.

‘I haven’t got a visa. I’ve got Moscow. I haven’t got Leningrad.’

‘But assuming.’

Another lengthy delay.

‘I need to talk to him,’ Barley said, as if that were an explanation.

‘To Zapadny?’

‘Goethe. Got to talk to him.’

Dragging the back of his right wrist across his mouth in one of his habitual gestures, Barley looked at it as if expecting blood. ‘I won’t lie to him,’ he muttered.

‘There’s no question of your lying to him. Ned wants a partnership, not a deception.’

‘That goes for us too,’ said Cy.

‘I won’t be sly with him. I’ll talk to him straight or not at all.’

‘Ned wouldn’t wish it any other way,’ said Paddy. ‘We want to give him everything he needs.’

‘Us too,’ said Cy.

‘Potomac Boston, Incorporated, Barley, your new American trading partner,’ Paddy proposed in a fresh voice, glancing at a paper before him. ‘The head of their publishing operation is a Mr. Henziger, is that right?’

‘J. P.,’ Barley said.

‘Ever met him?’

Barley shook his head and winced. ‘Name on the contract,’ he said.

‘That the nearest you’ve got to him?’

‘We’ve spoken on the phone a couple of times. Ned thought we ought to be heard on the transatlantic line. Cover.’

‘But you’ve no mental portrait of him otherwise?’ Paddy persisted, in the way he had of forcing clear replies even if it made a pedant of him. ‘He’s not a drawn character for you in some way?’

‘He’s a name with money and offices in Boston and he’s a voice on the phone. That’s all he’s ever been.’

‘And in your conversations with local third parties – with Zapadny, say – J. P. Henziger has not featured as some kind of horror figure? You haven’t given him a false beard or a wooden leg or a lurid sexlife? Nothing one might have to take into account if one were making him flesh, as it were?’