The Secret Pilgrim (38 page)

“Don't mind if I squeeze ahead of you, do you, old boy? I've been sent for urgently. Bloody man seems to expect me to work in my sleep. What's your problem?”

“Leprosy,” I said.

There is nowhere quite like the Service—except possibly Moscow—for becoming an unperson overnight. In the upheavals that had followed Barley Blair's defection, not even Burr's predecessor, the nimble Clive, had kept his foothold on the slippery Fifth Floor deck. When last heard of, he was on his way to take up the salubrious post of Head of Station, Guyana. Only our craven legal adviser, Harry Palfrey, seemed as usual to have weathered the changes, and as I entered Burr's shiny executive suite, Palfrey was slipping stealthily out of the other door—but not quite quickly enough, so he treated me to a rhapsodic smile instead. He had recently grown himself a moustache for greater integrity.

“Ned! Marvellous! We must do that lunch,” he breathed in an excited whisper, and disappeared below the waterline.

Like his office, Burr was all modern man. Where he came from was a mystery to me, but then I was no longer in the swim.
Someone had told me advertising, someone else the City, someone else the Inns of Court. One wit in the Pool mailroom said he came from nowhere at all: that he had been born as found, smelling of aftershave and power, in his two-piece executive blue suit and his patent black shoes with side buckles. He was big and floating and absurdly young. Grasping his soft hand, you at once relaxed your grip for fear of denting it. He had Frewin's file in front of him on his executive desk, with my loose minute—written late last night—pinned to the cover.

“Where does the letter come from?” he demanded in his dry North Country cadence, before I had sat down.

“I don't know. It's well informed. Whoever wrote it did his homework.”

“Probably Frewin's best friend,” said Burr, as if that was what best friends were known for.

“He's got Modrian's dates right, he's got Frewin's access right,” I said. “He knows the positive vetting routine.”

“Not a work of art, though, is it? Not if you're an insider. Most likely a colleague. Or his girl. What do you want to ask me?”

I had not expected this quickfire interrogation. After six months in the Pool, I wasn't used to being hurried.

“I suppose I need to know whether you want me to pursue the case,” I said.

“Why shouldn't I?

“It's outside the Pool's normal league. Frewin's access is formidable. His section handles some of the most delicate signals traffic in Whitehall. I assumed you'd prefer to pass it to the Security Service.”

“Why?”

“It's their bailiwick. If it's anything at all, it's a straight security enquiry.”

“It's our information, our shout, our letter,” Burr retorted with a bluntness that secretly warmed my heart. “To hell with them. When we know what we've got, we'll decide where we go with it.
All that those churchy buggers across the Park can think of is a judgeproof prosecution and a bunch of medals to hand around. I collect intelligence for the marketplace. If Frewin's bad, maybe we can keep him going and turn him round. He might even get us alongside Brother Modrian back in Moscow. Who knows? The security artists don't, that's for sure.”

“Then presumably you'd prefer to hand the case to the Russia House,” I said doggedly.

“Why should I do that?”

I had assumed I would make an unappetising figure to him, for he was still of an age to find failure immoral. Yet he seemed to be asking me to tell him why he shouldn't count on me.

“The Pool has no charter to function operationally,” I explained. “We run a front office and listen to the lonely hearts. We've no charter to conduct clandestine investigations or run agents, and no mandate to pursue suspects with Frewin's sort of access”

“You can run a phone tap, can't you?”

“If you get me a warrant I can.”

“You can brief watchers, can't you? You've done that a few times, they say.”

“Not unless you authorise it personally.”

“Suppose I do? The Pool's also empowered to make vetting enquiries. You can play Mr. Plod. You're good at it by all accounts. This is a vetting matter, right? And Frewin's due for a vetting topup, right? So vet him.”

“In positive vetting cases, the Pool is obliged to clear all enquiries with the Security Service in advance.”

“Assume it's done.”

“I can't do that unless I have it in writing.”

“Oh yes you can. You're not a Service hack. You're the great Ned. You've broken as many rules as you've stuck to, you have, I've read you up. You know Modrian, too.”

“Not well.”

“How well?”

“I had dinner with him once and played squash with him once. That's hardly knowing him.”

“Squash where?”

“At the Lansdowne.”

“How did that come about?”

“Modrian was formally declared to us as the Embassy's Moscow Centre link. I was trying to put together a deal with him on Barley Blair. A swap.”

“Why didn't you succeed?”

“Barley wouldn't go along with us. He'd done his own deal already. He wanted his girl, not us.”

“What's his game like?”

“Tricky.”

“Did you beat him?”

“Yes.”

He interrupted his own flow while he looked me over. It was like being studied by a baby. “And you can handle it, can you? You're not under too much stress? You've done some good things in your time. You've a heart too, which is more than I can say for some of the capons in this outfit.”

“Why should I be under stress?”

No answer. Or not yet. He seemed to be chewing at something just behind his thick lips.

“Who believes in marriage these days, for Christ's sake?” he demanded. His regional drawl had thickened. It was as if he had abandoned restraint. “If you want to live with your girl, live with her is my advice. We've cleared her, she's nobody's worry, she's not a bomb thrower or a secret sympathiser or a druggie, what's your bother? She's a nice girl in a nice way of life, and you're a lucky fellow. Do you want the case, or do you not?”

For a moment I was robbed of an answer. There was nothing surprising in Burr knowing of my affair with Sally. In our world you put those things on record before the record put them on you, and I had already endured my obligatory confessional with Personnel.

No, it was Burr's capacity for intimacy that had silenced me, the speed with which he had got under my skin.

“If you'll cover me and give me the resources, of course I'll take it,” I said.

“So get on with it, then. Keep me informed but not to much— don't bullshit me, always give me bad news straight. He's a man without qualities, our Cyril is. You've read Robert Musil, I dare say, haven't you?”

“I'm afraid I haven't.”

He was pulling open Frewin's file. I say “pulling” because his doughy hands gave no impression of having done anything before: now we are going to see how this file opens; now we are going to address ourselves to this strange object called a pencil.

“He's got no hobbies, no stated interests beyond music, no wife, no girl, no parents, no money worries, not even any bizarre sexual appetites, poor devil,” Burr complained, flipping to a different part of the file. When on earth had he found time to read it? I asked myself. I presumed the early hours. “And how the hell a man of your experience, whose job is dealing with modern civilisation and its discontentments, can manage without the wisdom of Robert Musil is a question which at a calmer moment I shall require you to answer.” He licked his thumb and turned another page. “He's one of five,” he said.

“I thought he was an only child.”

“Not his brothers and sisters, you mug, his work. There's five clerks in his dreary cyphers office and he's one of them. They all handle the same stuff; they're all the same rank, work the same hours, think the same dirty thoughts.” He looked straight at me, a thing he had not done before. “If he did it, what's his motive? The writer doesn't say. Funny, that. They usually do. Boredom—how about that? Boredom and greed, they're the only motives left these days. Plus getting even, which is eternal.” He went back to the file. “Cyril's the only one not married, notice that? He's a poofter. So am I. I'm a poofter, you're a poofter. We're all poofters. It's just
a question which bit of yourself ends on top. He's no hair, see that?” I caught a flash of Frewin's photograph as he waved it past me and talked on. He had a daunting energy. “Still that's no crime, I dare say, baldness, any more than marriage is. I should know, I've had three and I'm still not done. That's no normal denunciation, is it? That's why you're here. That letter knows what it's talking about. You don't think Modrian wrote it, do you?”

“Why should he have done?”

“I'm asking, Ned, don't fox with me. Wicked thoughts are what keep me going. Perhaps Modrian thought he'd leave a little confusion in his wake when he went back to Moscow. He's a scheming little monkey, Modrian, when he puts his mind to it. I've been reading him too.”

When? I thought again. When on earth did you find the time?

For another twenty minutes he zigzagged back and forth tossing possibilities at me, seeing how they came back. And when I finally stepped exhausted into the anteroom, I walked straight into Peter Guillam again.

“Who the hell is Leonard Burr?” I asked him, still dazed. Peter was astonished that I didn't know. “Burr? My dear chap. Leonard was Smiley's Crown Prince for years. George rescued him from a fate worse than death at All Souls.”

Of Sally, my reigning extramarital girlfriend, what should I tell you? She was free, and spoke to the captive in me. Monica had been within my walls. Monica was a woman of the Service, bound and not bound to me by the same set of rules. But to Sally I was just a middle-aged civil servant who had forgotten to have any fun. She was a designer and sometime dancer whose passion was theatre, and she thought the rest of life unreal. She was tall and she was fair and rather wise, and sometimes I think she must have reminded me of Stefanie.

“Meet you, skipper?” Gorst cried over the telephone. “Top up our Cyril? It'll be my pleasure, sir!”

We met the next day in a Foreign Office interviewing room. I was Captain York, another dreary vetting officer doing his rounds. Gorst was head of Frewin's Cypher Section, which was better known as the Tank: a lecher in a beadle's suit, waddling, smirking man with prising elbows and a tiny mouth that wriggled like a worm. When he sat, he scooped up the skirts of his jacket as if he were exposing himself from behind. Then he kicked out a plump leg like a chorus girl, before laying it suggestively over the thigh of the other.

“Saint Cyril, that's what we call Mr. Frewin,” he announced blithely. “Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't swear, certified virgin. End of vetting interview.” Extracting a cigarette from a packet of ten, he tapped the tip of it on his thumbnail, then moistened it with his busy tongue. “Music's his only weakness. Loves the
operah.
Goes to the
operah
regular as clockwork. Never cared for it myself. Can't make out whether it's actors singing or singers acting.” He lit his cigarette. I could smell the lunchtime beer on his breath. “I'm not too fond of fat women, either, to be frank. Specially when they scream at me.” He tipped his head back and blew out smoke rings, savouring them as if they were emblems of his authority.

“May I ask how Frewin gets on with the rest of the staff these days?” I said, playing the honest journeyman as I turned a page of my notebook.

“Swimmingly, your grace. Par-fectly”

“The archivists, registrars, secretaries—no trouble on that front?”

“Not a finger. Not a mini-digit.”

“You all sit together?”

“In a big room and I'm the titular head of it. Very
tit
-ular indeed.”

“And I've had it said to me he's something of a misogynist,” I said, fishing.

Gorst gave a shrill laugh “Cyril? A
misogynist
? Bollocks. He just hates the girls. Won't speak to them, not apart from good morning. Won't come to the pre-Christmas party if he can help it,
in case he has to kiss them under the mistletoe.” He recrossed his legs, indicating that he had decided to make a statement. “Cyril Arthur Frewin—Saint Cyril—is a highly reliable, eminently conscientious, totally bald, incredibly boring clerk of the old school. Saint Cyril, though punctilious to a fault, has in my view reached his natural promotion ceiling in his line of country or profession. Saint Cyril is set in his ways. Saint Cyril does what he does, one hundred percent. Amen.”

“Politics?”

“Not in my house, thank you.”

“And he's not workshy?”

“Did I say he was, squire?”

“No, to the contrary, I was quoting from the file. If there's extra work to be done, Cyril will always roll his sleeves up, stay on the lunch hour, the evenings and so forth. That's still the case, is it? No slackening off of his enthusiasm?”

“Our Cyril is ready to oblige at all hours, to the pleasure of those who have families, wives or a nice piece of Significant Other to return to. He'll do the early mornings, he'll do lunch hours, he'll do evening watch, except for
operah
nights, of course. Cyril never counts the cost. Latterly, I will admit, he has been slightly less inclined to martyr himself, but that is no doubt a purely temporary suspension of service. Our Cyril does have his little moods. Who does not, your eminence?”

“So recently a slackening off, you would say?”

“Not of his work, never. Cyril is your total workslave, always has been. Merely of his willingness to be put upon by his more human colleagues. Come five-thirty these days, Saint Cyril packs up his desk and goes home with the rest of us. He does not, for instance, offer to replace the late shift and remain solo incommunicado till nine o'clock and lock up, which was what he used to do.”