The Russia House (42 page)

14

‘Oh come, Ned,’ said Clive airily, still elated by the wizardry of the transmission. ‘The Bluebird’s been ill before. Several times.’

‘I know,’ said Ned distractedly. ‘I know.’ And then, ‘Maybe I don’t mind him being ill. Maybe I mind him writing.’

Sheriton was listening chin in hand, as he had been listening to the tape. An affinity had grown up between Ned and Sheriton, as in an operation it must. They were handling the transfer of power as if it had happened long ago.

‘But my dear man, that’s what we all do when we’re ill,’ Clive exclaimed in a misjudged demonstration of human understanding. ‘We
write
to the whole world!’

It had never occurred to me that Clive was capable of illness, or that he had friends to write to.

‘I mind him handing chatty letters to mysterious intermediaries. And I mind him talking about trying to bring more materials for Barley,’ Ned said. ‘We know he never normally writes to her. We know he’s security conscious to a fault. Suddenly he falls ill and writes her a gushing five-page love letter via Igor. Igor who? Igor when? How?’

‘He should have photographed the letter,’ said Clive, becoming disapproving of Barley. ‘Or taken it off her. One or the other.’

Ned was too wrapped up in his thoughts to give this suggestion the contempt it deserved.

‘How could he? She knows him as a publisher. That’s all she knows him as.’

‘Unless the Bluebird told her otherwise,’ said Clive.

‘He wouldn’t,’ Ned retorted, and returned to his thoughts. ‘There was a car,’ he said. ‘A red car then a white car. You saw the watch report. The red car went in first, then the white car took over.’

‘That is pure speculation. On a warm Sunday the whole of Moscow takes to the countryside,’ said Clive knowledgeably.

He waited for a reaction but in vain, so he returned to the subject of the letter. ‘
Katya
didn’t have any problems with it,’ he objected. ‘
Katya’s
not crying foul. She’s jumping for joy. If she didn’t smell a rat, and Scott Blair didn’t, why should
we
– sitting here in London, doing their worrying for them?’

‘He asked for the shopping list,’ said Ned, as if still hearing distant music. ‘A final and exhaustive list of questions. Why did he do that?’

Sheriton had finally stirred himself. He was flagging Ned down with his big paw. ‘Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned. Okay? It’s Day One again, so we’re jumpy. Let’s get some sleep.’

He stood up. So did Clive and so did I. But Ned stayed doggedly rooted where he was, his hands clasped before him on his desk.

Sheriton spoke down at him. With affection, but with force as well. ‘Ned, just hear me, Ned, okay? Ned?’

‘I’m not deaf.’

‘No, but you’re tired. Ned, if we bad-mouth this operation one more time, it will never come back. We are going with
your
man, the one
you
brought to
us
in order to persuade
us
. We moved hell on earth to get this far. We have the source. We have the appropriation. We have the influential audience. We are within pissing distance of filling gaps in our knowledge that no smart machines, no electronic heavy breathers, no Pentagon Jesuits can get within light years of. If we keep our nerve, and Barley does, and Bluebird does, we will have landed a bonanza beyond the dreams of the most accomplished fantasists. If we stay in there.’

But Sheriton was speaking with too much conviction, and his face, for all its pudgy inscrutability, was betraying an almost desperate need.

‘Ned?’

‘Hearing you, Russell. Loud and clear.’

‘Ned, this is no longer a cottage industry, for Christ’s sake. We played big, now we have to think big. You don’t get bigger than this. Presidential findings are not an invitation to doubt our own good judgment. They are in the way of being orders. Ned, I really think you should get some sleep.’

‘I don’t think I’m tired,’ said Ned.

‘I think you are. I think everyone will say you are. I think they may even say Ned was very bullish for the Bluebird until the big bad American wolf came and took his joe away. Then all of a sudden the Bluebird was a very iffy source. I think people are going to say you are tired as hell.’

I glanced at Clive.

Clive too was looking down at Ned, but with eyes so cold they chilled my blood. Time to move you on, they were saying. Time to measure you for the drop.

Both Henziger and Wicklow kept a close eye on Barley that day and reported on him frequently, Henziger to Cy by whatever means they used, Wicklow by way of an irregular to Paddy. Both attested to his high spirits and relaxed manner, and in differing language to his sovereignty. Both described how at breakfast he had enchanted a couple of Finnish publishers who were showing interest in the Trans-Siberian Railway project.

‘They were eating out of his hand,’ said Wicklow, providing an unconsciously comic picture of breakfast, but at the Mezh anything is possible.

Both recorded with amusement Barley’s determination to act as their tour-guide when they reached the permanent exhibition site, and how he obliged their taxi to drop them at the end of the grand avenue so that, as first-time pilgrims from the world of capitalism, they could make their first approach on foot.

So the two professional spies strolled contentedly through the wet autumn sunshine with their jackets over their shoulders and their joe between them while Barley favoured them with his own eccentric guided tour, extolling the ‘late Essoldo period’ architecture and the ‘Revolutionary Rococo’ gardens. He doted on the immense ornamental pool and its golden fish spewing jets of water at the rumps of fifteen naked golden nymphs, one for each of the Socialist republics. He insisted that they dawdle at the white-pillared love bowers and temples of delight – whose portals, he pointed out, were dedicated not to Venus or Bacchus but to the fallen goddesses of the Soviet economy – coal, steel and even atomic energy, Jack!

‘He was witty but he wasn’t high,’ reported Henziger, who had already taken fondly to Barley in Leningrad. ‘He was damn funny.’

And from the temples Barley marched them up the triumphal avenue itself, the Emperor’s Ride, perhaps a mile of it and heaven knows how broad, celebrating the People’s Achievements in the Service of Mankind. And surely no vision of popular power was ever portrayed in such despotic images! he proclaimed. Surely no revolution had so perfectly enshrined everything it had set out to raze to the ground! But by then Barley had to bellow his irreverences over the din of the loudspeakers, which all day long pour floods of self-congratulatory messages on to the heads of the benighted crowds below.

Finally they arrived, as they had to, at the two pavilions housing the fair.

‘On my right, the publishers of Peace, Progress and Goodwill,’ Barley announced, playing the referee at a prize fight. ‘On my left, the distributors of Fascist imperialist lies, the pornographers, the poisoners of truth. Seconds out. Time.’

They showed their passes and walked in.

The exhibition stand of the newly inaugurated and geographically confusing house of Potomac & Blair was a small but satisfactory sensation of the fair. Langley’s lovingly created P. & B. symbol shone resplendent between the dowdier displays of Astral Press and Purbeck Media. The stand’s interior design, characterised by its Langley architects as tough but tasty, was a model of instant impact. The exhibits – many of them, as is customary, dummies of books still to enter the production line – were prepared with all the attention to detail that intelligence services traditionally bestow on fakes. The only good coffee at the fair was to be found bubbling on an ingenious machine in the rear cubby-hole. There was Langley’s own Mary Lou to serve it. For the favoured, there was even a forbidden shot of Scotch to help them through the day – forbidden, indeed, by special edict of the organisers, for even literary reconstruction must be the work of sober men.

And Mary Lou, with her homespun schoolgirl smile and billowing tweed skirt, made a natural product of the nicer side of Madison Avenue. Nobody need ever have guessed she had a little of Langley’s thread woven into her as well.

Neither was Wicklow, with his polished patter, anything other than the quick-eyed, upwardly-mobile young publisher they make these days.

As to honest Jack Henziger, he was the archetype of the settled buccaneer of the modern American book trade. He made no secret of his antecedents. Pipelines in the Middle East, humanity in Afghanistan, red beans to opium-growing hill-tribes in Thailand – Henziger had sold them all, whatever he had sold for Langley on the side. But publishing was where his heart was, and he was here to prove it.

And Barley seemed to revel in the artifice. He threw himself upon it as if it were his long-lost reality, shaking hands, receiving the congratulations of his competitors and colleagues, until around eleven he professed himself restless and proposed to Wicklow that they tour the lines and take comfort to the troops.

So off they set, Barley bearing in his arms a bunch of white envelopes of which he occasionally pressed one into a chosen hand as he yelled and greeted his way along the packed alleys of visitors and exhibitors.

‘Well blow me over, if it isn’t Barley Bloody Blair,’ a familiar voice declared from the centre of a multi-lingual display of illustrated Bibles. ‘Remember me, do you? Third from the left in the mink jock-strap, back in your humble days?’

‘Spikey. They let you in again,’ said Barley with pleasure, and handed him his envelope.

‘It’s when they won’t let me
out
I’m worried. This your dad, then?’

Barley presented the distinguished editor Wicklow, and Spikey Morgan bestowed a priestly blessing on him with his nicotine-stained fingers.

They pressed on, only to stumble into Dan Zeppelin a few yards later. Dan did not talk. Dan conspired in a gravedigger’s murmur, leaning across his counter at you over folded arms.

‘So I mean tell me something, Barley. Okay? Are we pioneers or are we the fucking Mitford sisters? So a few unbooks are books this year. So a few unwriters have been sprung from jail. Big deal. I walk into my own stand this morning, there’s some asshole pulling the books out of my shelves. “May I ask you a personal question?” I says. “What the fuck are you doing with my books?” “Orders,” he says. Six books, he confiscated. Mary G. Ambleside on fucking
Black Consciousness in Song and Word
. Orders! I mean who are we, Barley? Who are they? What do they think they’re restructuring when there was never a structure in the first place? How do you restructure a corpse?’

At Lupus Books they were directed to the coffee room, where our Chairman Himself, the newly-knighted Sir Peter Oliphant, had upstaged even the Russians by reserving a table. A handwritten notice in both languages confirmed his triumph. The flags of Britain and the Soviet Union warned off doubters. Flanked by interpreters and high officials, Sir Peter was dilating on the many advantages to the Soviet Union of subsidising his generous purchases from them.

‘It’s the Earl!’ cried Barley, handing him an envelope. ‘Where’s the coronet?’

With scarcely a flicker of his dusty eyelids, the great man continued his dissertation.

At the Israeli stand an armed peace reigned. The dark queue was orderly but mute. Boys in jeans and sneakers lounged against the walls. Lev Abramovitz was white-haired and overpoweringly tall. He had served in the Irish Guards.

‘Lev. How’s Zion?’

‘Maybe we’re winning, maybe the happy ending’s at the beginning,’ Lev said, pocketing Barley’s envelope.

And from Israel, with Barley leading at a canter, they pounded across the concourse to the Pavilion of Peace, Progress and Goodwill, where there could no longer be any doubt of the massive historical upheaval taking place, or of who was doing the heaving.

Every banner and spare bit of wall screamed the new Gospel. In every stand of every republic, the thoughts and writings of the no-longer-new prophet, with his birthmark turned away and his jaw raised, were blazoned alongside those of his colourless master, Lenin. At the VAAP stand, where Barley and Wicklow shook a few hands and Barley shed a batch of envelopes, the Leader’s speeches, wrapped in shiny covers and rendered into English, French, Spanish and German, made a totally resistible appeal.

‘How much more of this shit do we have to take, Barley?’ a blond-faced Moscow publisher demanded
sotto voce
as they went by. ‘When will they start repressing us again to make us comfortable? If our past’s a lie, who’s to say our future isn’t a lie as well?’

They continued along the stands, Barley leading, Barley greeting, Wicklow following.

‘Joseph! Great to see you! Envelope for you. Don’t eat it all at once.’

‘Barley! My friend! Didn’t they give you my message? Maybe I didn’t leave one.’

‘Yuri. Great to see you! Envelope for you.’

‘Come and drink tonight, Barley! Sasha is coming, so is Rosa. Rudi’s giving a concert tomorrow so he wants to stay sober. You heard about the writers they let out? Listen, it’s Potemkin village stuff. They let them out, they give them a few meals, show them off and throw them back inside till next year. Come over here, I got to sell you a couple of books to annoy Zapadny.’

At first Wicklow didn’t even realise they had arrived at their destination. He saw a Roman standard hung with faded flags and some gold lettering stitched on red bunting. He heard Barley’s yell of ‘Katya, where are you?’ But nothing said who owned the stand and probably that was a part of the display that hadn’t arrived. He saw the usual unreadable books on agricultural development in the Ukraine and the traditional dances of Georgia expiring on their shelves under the strain of previous exhibitions. He saw the usual half-dozen broad-hipped women standing around as if they were waiting for a train, and a small unshaven fellow clutching his cigarette in front of him like a conjuror’s wand, scowling at Barley’s nametag.

Nasayan
, Wicklow read in return.
Grigory Tigranovich. Senior Editor, October Publishing.