The Russia House (45 page)

For perhaps an hour he remained there at the window before returning to the bed. She was lying on her side with her eyes open and her knees drawn up. He put his arm round her and drew her into him and he felt her cold body break inside his grasp as she began sobbing with convulsive, soundless heaves, as if she was afraid even to weep within the hearing of the microphones.

He began writing to her again, in bold clear capitals: PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

The screens were rolling every few minutes. Barley has left the Mezh. More. They have arrived at the metro station. More. Have exited (
sic
) the hospital, Katya on Barley’s arm. More. Men lie but the computer is infallible. More.

‘Why on earth’s he driving?’ Ned asked sharply as he read this.

Sheriton was too absorbed to reply but Bob was standing behind him and Bob picked up the question.

‘Men like to drive women, Ned. The chauvinist age is still upon us.’

‘Thank you,’ said Ned politely.

Clive was smiling in approval.

Intermission. The screens slip out of sequence as Anastasia takes back the story. Anastasia is an angry old Latvian of sixty who has been on the Russia House books for twenty years. Anastasia alone has been allowed to cover the vestibule.

The legend speaks:

She made two passes, first to the lavatory, then back to the waiting room.

On her first pass, Barley and Katya were sitting on a bench waiting.

On her second, Barley and Katya were standing beside the telephone and appeared to be embracing. Barley had a hand to her face, Katya also had a hand up, the other hung at her side.

Had Bluebird’s call come through by then?

Anastasia didn’t know. Though she had stood in her lavatory cubicle listening as hard as she could, she hadn’t heard the phone ring. So either the call had failed to come through or it was over by the time she made her second pass.

‘Why on earth should he be embracing her?’ said Ned.

‘Maybe she had a fly in her eye,’ Sheriton said sourly, still watching the screen.

‘He drove,’ Ned insisted. ‘He’s not allowed to drive over there, but he drove. He let her drive all the way out to the country and back. She drove him to the hospital. Then all of a sudden he takes over the wheel. Why?’

Sheriton put down his pencil and ran his forefinger round the inside of his collar. ‘So what’s the betting, Ned? Did Bluebird make his call or didn’t he? Come on.’

Ned still had the decency to give the question honest thought. ‘Presumably he made it. Otherwise they would have gone on waiting.’

‘Maybe she heard something she didn’t like. Some bad news or something,’ Sheriton suggested.

The screens had gone out, leaving the room sallow.

Sheriton had a separate office done in rosewood and instant art. We decamped to it, poured ourselves coffee, stood about.

‘Hell’s he doing in her flat for so long?’ Ned asked me aside. ‘All he has to do is get the time and place of the meeting out of her. He could have done that two hours ago.’

‘Maybe they’re having a tender moment,’ I said.

‘I’d feel better if I thought they were.’

‘Maybe he’s buying another hat,’ said Johnny unpleasantly, overhearing us.

‘Geronimo,’ said Sheriton as the bell rang, and we trooped back to the situation room.

An illuminated street map of the city showed us Katya’s apartment marked by a red pinlight. The pick-up point lay three hundred metres east of it, at the south-east corner of two main streets marked green. Barley must now be heading along the south pavement, keeping close to the curb. As he reached the pick-up point, he should affect to slow down as if hunting for a car. The safe car would pull alongside him. Barley had been instructed to give the driver the name of his hotel in a loud voice and negotiate a price with his hands.

At the second roundabout the car would take a side turning and enter a building site where the safe truck was parked without lights, its driver appearing to doze in his cab. If the truck’s wing aerial was extended, the car would make a right-hand circle and return to the truck.

If not, abort.

Paddy’s report hit the screens at one a.m. London time. The tapes were available for us less than an hour later, blasted from the roof of the US Embassy. The report has since been torn to pieces in every conceivable way. For me it remains a model of factual field reporting.

Naturally the writer needs to be known, for every writer under the sun has limitations. Paddy was not a mindreader but he was a lot of other things, a former Gurkha turned special forces man turned intelligence officer, a linguist, a planner and improviser in Ned’s favourite mould.

For his Moscow persona, he had put on such a skin of English silliness that the uninitiated made a joke of him when they described him to each other: his long shorts in the summer when he took himself on treks through the Moscow woods; his langlaufing in the winter, when he loaded up his Volvo with ancient skis and bamboo poles and iron rations and finally his own egregious self, clad in a fur cap that looked as though it had been kept over from the Arctic convoys. But it takes a clever man to act the fool and get away with it for long, and Paddy was a clever man, however convenient it later became to take his eccentricities at face value.

Also in controlling his motley of pseudo language students, travel clerks, little traders and third-flag nationals, Paddy was first rate. Ned himself could not have bettered him. He tended them like a canny parish priest, and every one of them in his lonely way rose to him. It was not his fault if the qualities that made men come to him also made him vulnerable to deception.

So to Paddy’s report. He was struck first by the precision with which Barley gave his account, and the tape bears him out. Barley’s voice is more self-assured than in any previous recording.

Paddy was impressed by Barley’s resolve and by his devotion to his mission. He compared the Barley he saw before him in the truck with the Barley he had briefed for his Leningrad run and warmed to the improvement. He was right. Barley was an enlarged and altered man.

Barley’s account to Paddy tallied also with every checkable fact at Paddy’s disposal, from the pick-up at the metro and the drive to the hospital, to the wait on the bench and the stifled bell. Katya had been standing over the phone when it rang, Barley said. Barley himself had scarcely heard it. Then no wonder Anastasia hadn’t heard it either, Paddy reasoned. Katya must have been quick as light to grab that receiver.

The conversation between Katya and the Bluebird had been short, two minutes at most, said Barley. Another neat fit. Goethe was known to be scared of long telephone conversations.

With so much collateral available to him therefore, and with Barley navigating his way through it, how on earth can anybody afterwards maintain that Paddy should have driven Barley straight to the Embassy and shipped him back to London bound and gagged? But of course Clive maintained just that, and he was not the only one.

Thus to the three mysteries that by now were sticking in Ned’s throat – the embrace, the drive from the hospital with Barley at the wheel, the two hours they spent together in the flat. For Barley’s answers, we must see him as Paddy saw him, bowed over the low light on the table in the truck, his face glistening from the heat. There is the whirr from the bafflers in the background. Both men are wearing earphones, a closed-circuit microphone lies between them. Barley whispers his story, half to the microphone, half to his station chief. Not all Paddy’s nights of adventure on the North-West Frontier could have yielded a more dramatic atmosphere.

Cy sits in the shadows in a third pair of earphones. It is Cy’s truck but he has orders to let Paddy host the feast.

‘Then she goes and gets the wobblies,’ says Barley, with enough of the man-to-man in his voice to make Paddy smile. ‘She’d been winding herself up all week for his call and suddenly it was over and she went pop. Probably didn’t help her, me being there. Without me around, I reckon she’d have held it back till she got home.’

‘Probably would at that,’ Paddy agrees understandingly.

‘It was too much for her. Hearing his voice, hearing he’ll be in town in a couple of days, her worries about her kids – and about him, and about herself as well – it was just too much for her.’

Paddy understood perfectly. He had known emotional women in his day, and was experienced in the sorts of thing they cried over.

From there everything else flowed naturally. The deception became a symphony. Barley had done what he could to comfort her, he said, but she was in bad shape so he put his arm round her and lugged her to the car and drove her home.

In the car she did some more crying but she was on the mend by the time they got to her flat. Barley made her a cup of tea and patted her hand, until he was confident she was able to cope.

‘Well done,’ said Paddy. And if, as he says this, he sounds like a nineteenth-century Indian Army officer congratulating his men after a futile cavalry charge, that is only because he is impressed and his mouth is too near the microphone.

There is lastly Barley’s question, which is where Cy came in. With hindsight, no doubt, it sounds like a straight declaration of larcenous intent. But Cy didn’t hear it that way and neither did Paddy. Neither, in fact, did anyone in London except Ned, whose impotence was by now unnerving. Ned was becoming the pariah of the situation room.

‘Oh yes – that’s it – what about the shopping list?’ says Barley as he prepares to leave. The question emerges as one of several small administrative worries, not a solo. ‘When do you get to press the shopping list into my hot little hand?’ he asks repetitiously.

‘Why?’ says Cy from the shadows.

‘Well
I
don’t know. Shouldn’t I bone up on it a bit or something?’

‘There’s nothing to bone up,’ says Cy. ‘It’s written questions, yes-or-no answers, and it is positively important that you do not know any part of it, thank you.’

‘So when do I get it?’

‘The shopping list we do as late as possible,’ says Cy.

Of Cy’s own opinion of Barley’s state of mind, one nugget is recorded. ‘With the Brits,’ he is reported to have said, ‘you never know what the hell they’re thinking anyway.’

That night at least, Cy had a certain justice on his side.

‘There was no bad news,’ Ned insisted while Brock played the truck tapes for the third or thirtieth time.

We were back in our own Russia House. We had taken refuge there. It was like the early days all over again. It was dawn, but we were too wakeful to remember sleep.

‘There was no
bad
news,’ Ned repeated. ‘It was all
good
news. “I’m well. I’m safe. I gave a great lecture. I’m catching the plane. See you on Friday. I love you.” So she weeps.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, talking against my own mood. ‘Haven’t
you
ever cried when
you
were happy?’

‘She weeps so much he has to cart her down the hospital corridor. She weeps so much she can’t drive. When they get to her apartment she runs ahead of him to the door as if Barley doesn’t exist, because she’s so
happy
that the Bluebird’s flying in on time. And he comforts her. For all the good news she’s had.’ Barley’s recorded voice had come on again. ‘And he’s calm. Totally calm. Not a worry in the world. “We’re bang on target, Paddy. Everything’s fine. That’s why she’s weeping.” Of course it is.’

He sat back and closed his eyes while Barley’s trustworthy voice continued to talk to him from the recorder.

‘He doesn’t belong to us any more,’ said Ned. ‘He’s gone away.’

As also, in a different sense, had Ned. He had launched a great operation. Now all he could do by his own reckoning was watch it hurtle out of control. In my whole life I never saw a man so isolated, with the possible exception of myself.

Spying is waiting.

Spying is worrying.

Spying is being yourself but more so.

The nostrums of the extinct Walter and the living Ned rang in Barley’s ears. The apprentice had become heir to the spells of his masters but his magic was more potent than theirs had ever been.

He was on a plateau none of them had ascended. He had the goal, he had the means to reach it and he had what Clive would have called the motivation, which in better mouths was purpose. Everything they had taught him was paying off as he rode calmly into battle to deceive them. But he was not their trickster.

Their flags were nothing to him. They could wave in any wind. But he was not their traitor. He was not his own cause. He knew the battle he had to win and whom he had to win it for. He knew the sacrifice he was prepared to make. He was not their traitor. He was complete.

He did not need their scared labels and their weakling systems. He was one man alone but he was greater than the sum of those who had presumed to take control of him. He knew them as the worst of all bad weapons, because their existence justified their targets.

In a gentle way that was not even all that gentle, he had discovered anger. He could smell its first kindling and hear the crackle of its brushwood.

There was only now. Goethe was right. There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere and Goethe, even nowhere, was still right. We must cut down the grey men inside ourselves, we must burn our grey suits and set our good hearts free, which is the dream of every decent soul, and even – believe it or not – of certain grey men too. But how, with what?

Goethe was right, and it was not his fault or Barley’s that each by accident had set the other in motion. With the radiance of spirit that was rising in him, Barley’s sense of kinship with his unlikely friend was overwhelming. He brimmed with allegiance to Goethe’s frantic dream of unleashing the forces of sanity and opening the doors on dirty rooms.

But Barley did not dwell long on Goethe’s agony. Goethe was in hell and very likely Barley would soon be following him. I’ll mourn him when I have the time, he thought. Until then his business was with the living whom Goethe had put so shamefully at risk, and in a brave last gesture had attempted to preserve.