The Spy Game (4 page)

I
have never come to Berlin before. In forty years I somehow never found the time.

I Peter came here as soon as he began to travel, a hunched student on a rail pass, and when he got home he spoke of the divided
city's scars and its lack of beauty yet he seemed to have preferred it to Paris or Amsterdam or Rome. He was drawn back repeatedly
in those years and again later, after the Wall came down. He made an effort to come and see me just after that, invited himself
for a weekend as he had not done in years and brought me what he said was a piece of the Wall as a present. (And that was
just what it was, a chunk of graffitied concrete, and I have no idea where it has got to. Perhaps my husband has thrown it
away by now. My husband is a tidy man and has no place for what has no function.)

'I don't know what you expect to find,' my husband said when I told him I was planning this trip. 'It was all a very long
time ago.'

* * *

It takes getting used to, travelling alone. Life seems at some moments blank, as there is no one to share it with, and at
others strangely vivid. Being without habit, husband, family becomes all at once like being without a skin, senses bared to
every impression, to the sunlight, the morning, the bus ride from the airport, the confusion of catching a tram, buying and
punching a ticket in a place where you do not speak the language. At least the hotel was not hard to find. I checked in and
took up my case but did not unpack it and only sat there for a while on the bed. It is a tolerable room, more spacious than
I might have expected, and it smells fresh. I have taken the bed closest to the window. The other one by the wall I will leave
untouched. If it is clear that I have not used it then perhaps they will not have the bother of changing the sheets.

I shall leave sightseeing for tomorrow. It is lucky that the route of the bus from the airport passed by so many of the famous
sites. I have at least glimpsed the new dome of the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, Alexanderplatz. I know
where these things are.

This first evening I thought I should stick to the streets by the hotel. I walked until I came to a triangular platz with
trees and cafés about it. No one was sitting at the tables outside as there was a biting wind. The cold was getting to me
even as I was walking, but with so many cafés and restaurants it was hard to choose where to stop. It was some time later
that I found this one, a place much like any other with a menu board outside on the pavement, but a couple were just leaving,
and the door they held open seemed like an invitation. The restaurant is cosy and there is white linen on the table, and lentil
soup.

I have a book to read. Isn't that what lone women are supposed to do when they travel: read books propped open with knives
at restaurant tables?
The Meaning
of
Treason
by Rebecca West, the 1965 edition updated with chapters on the spy cases of the Sixties: Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Blake,
Vassall, Profumo, the Portland Ring. I particularly mean to read the chapters about the Portland case, about Houghton and
Gee and Lonsdale and the Krogers. I shall not begin to read it with concentration until later when I am back in the hotel
room. Here in the restaurant the book is just for cover.

I
t was the story of the Krogers that people were to remember long after everything else about Portland was forgotten. Houghton
and Gee were understandable if despicable. Lonsdale was a Russian and a professional. The secrets they traded became obsolete.
The Krogers re-mained an enigma.

What was interesting about them was the completeness of the lie they lived. In person, they entirely convinced. They seemed
perfectly nice, middle class, trustworthy, classifiable, the sort of people others liked: Helen and Peter, the nice New Zealand
couple, who had seemed to fit in so easily to suburban living. British people rather expected that of New Zealanders, back
then. New Zeal-anders were provincial in that special Commonwealth way; you trusted them almost more than your own people
because places like New Zealand and Canada were thinly populated and a little behind the times, and kept to the old values
that reminded you how good it was to be British.

It was only when they were gone, when the police had taken them away, the evening of that same Saturday in January when the
other three were arrested at Waterloo, that the things they left behind revealed who they really were.

Their house was a bungalow on a suburban street in Ruislip, a house of such a common design, with its twinned bow windows
and white cement, and brick edging to the porch, that anyone who passed it might think they could reasonably guess at the
life that went on inside. It looked as predictable as a mass-produced doll's house, to which a child might add pieces bought
in little packs, all made to scale, all with the safety in them of standardised design: a sofa for the lounge, a coffee table
with a Ronson lighter on it, a Murphy radiogram, a bookcase, a bathroom suite, a kitchen cabinet with two drawers in the middle.
At six-thirty on a wintry Saturday evening the lights should be on, and figures placed upon the sofa,
Dixon of Dock Green
on television - a scene to be glimpsed perhaps through the gap in the not-quite-yet-closed curtains.

So it appeared, and yet it was not so.

The Murphy radiogram had headphones fitted and concealed in its back, and was tuned to a high frequency band for the reception
of foreign transmissions.

The Ronson table lighter had a concealed cavity in its base containing negative films with dates and signal plans for wireless
communications with call signs based on the names of Russian towns and rivers.

The Bible in the bookcase contained pieces of light-sensitised cellophane to be used for the making of micro-dots.

The tin of Three Flowers talcum powder in the bath-room sprinkled talc only from a central compartment and concealed a microdot
reader in secret compartments along-side.

Hidden in the bedroom were a box holding a micro-scope and glass slides, a magazine of 35mm film concealed beneath a chest
of drawers, an extraordinary length of electric flex, thousands of US dollars. Elsewhere were cameras, tape recorders, photographic
developing materials, black-out screens for the conversion of bathroom into darkroom.

Beneath a trap door under the kitchen fridge was a makeshift cache containing more dollars, more lenses and cameras, including
reducing lenses for making microdots, and a transmitter with a foreign plug.

And in the attic space among Helen's carefully stored overwintering apples - stored on slats so they could breathe, no one
of them touching another, the smell of them sweet and domestic beneath the roof - was a radio aerial seventy-four foot nine
inches long.

Tools, gadgets, evidence. That is what fascinated people so. There was the ordinariness of the people and then there was the
evidence of the house, like an extraordinary game of Cluedo.

That nice friendly middle-class woman Helen, who always has a smile for her neighbours, a bone for the dog or a present for
the children, who will do errands for you or bring you fresh eggs from the local farm, connects the aerial in the roof to
the transmitter beneath the kitchen floor, using the flex that was found in the bedroom, puts to her head the earphones that
were concealed in the back of the radiogram, tunes in, calls Volga ya Axov, or
Lena
ya
Amur,
transmits to Moscow.

Their names are Morris and Lona or Leontina Cohen. They are Americans, not New Zealanders, Communists and associates of the
Rosenbergs. In 1950 when the Rosenbergs were arrested the Cohens had dropped out of sight, and somehow, somewhere, in some
Soviet country, in the time between then and the time when they arrived in England in 1955, they had acquired the skills to
run their own spy cell, learnt radio operation and the making of microdots, learnt to set up a convincing cover as antiquarian
booksellers, learnt to be the Krogers.

How did it feel to do that? Perhaps it was easier than it seemed. Perhaps you simply took up the role and smiled in it. You
walked out and went to the shops in it, and gradually you became it or it became you.

Or you wake in a hotel room in a distant city and shake off the sleep and remember, this is who you will be, and dress and
go down the stairs and make yourself whoever it is as you eat your foreign breakfast.

Perhaps it began to happen with the first response from the outside, the trust of a stranger, the first making of a friend.
And what then? After a day, a week, a year, a life set up as someone else? Who were you then? Who were the Cohens, or Krogers,
when they were alone? Who were they to each other? Was Peter Kroger the same man all through as Morris Cohen, the Bronx boy
who won a sports scholarship to the University of Mississippi? He had kept Cohen's fitness and physique, an enthusiasm for
sport that had transmuted into a love of cricket, and presumably Cohen had shared the same easy charm, though his hair had
not been such a distinguished grey. And Helen? When the case was over it was known that Helen was Lona but that was even harder
for those who had thought them-selves their friends to accept, for Helen had seemed so convincingly and warmly herself. Perhaps
the different passports stood for nothing and she was one person after all, and a friend of Leontina Petka as she had been,
the daughter of Polish immigrants to America, would be equally a friend of Helen the New Zealand housewife?

I put down room key and guidebook on a table and go and dither before the hotel buffet. Other guests nod to me as I pass.
Perhaps they guess that I am English. I can be whatever woman they see. I nod back, knowing they know nothing of who I am
inside.

There was a suggestion that the deception was hard for Helen. It came out in the course of the trial that people remembered
her from the time when the Krogers had lived in Catford, before they moved to the bungalow at Ruislip. Women neighbours saw
that she used to cry a lot. She would cry alone in the house and when she came out her eyes would show it. They assumed, knowing
(as they thought) the sort of person she was, that the sadness in her life was that the couple had no children. It was a flaw
in the Helen Kroger story, the thing that neighbours noted, and talked about, and pitied her for: the lack of the thing that
rooted a woman, gave her purpose in that suburban daytime world.

Yet why did she have no children? Was that too a part of the job?

The woman who spoke in court never once appeared to diverge from character. She may have converted the bathroom in the Ruislip
bungalow into a temporary dark-room for the developing of photographs and the making of microdots, but when she spoke she
spoke as a housewife, so normal, so true to type, that other women who heard her could not help feeling that she was one of
them. She liked the man Lonsdale, she said, Lonsdale who was arrested two hours before her at Waterloo, because he was helpful
in the house. He brought in coal and helped her with the washing up, and sometimes he helped her with her hobby of photography.
It rang true. Peter Kroger, by the sound of him, probably spent his Sundays doing the crossword or watching the cricket or
deep in his books. Who wouldn't have appreciated a charming younger man like that as a weekend guest? It made spying such
a homely sort of a thing.

Then there was the moment of her arrest, when Helen had asked one favour before leaving the house: 'As I am going out for
some time may I go and stoke the boiler in the kitchen?' She spoke in character, even then, and the only oddity of it was
that she picked up her handbag to take with her - and whenever did a woman take her handbag when she went to stoke the boiler?
When Superintendent Smith took it from her he found in it an envelope full of codes and rendezvous points and microdots.

G
odfrey Lacey swore when he saw the arrest of the Portland spies announced on the News that Monday. I noticed it because usually
Mr Lacey was not a vehement man. He had the erectness to him of a former soldier but not the authority; his words hesitant,
his eyes never quite direct, his moustache the most emphatic point on his face. But at this moment the anger in him was visible.
He swore again, never mind that Susan and I were in the room nor that his wife was trying to get his attention. He took up
his gin and swallowed, and I saw the chill disgust those of his generation felt for spies and traitors.

Just as he spoke the second time, Daphne called again from the hall. Though she had a voice that could be piercing, he did
not seem to hear it. She held her hand over the receiver and called him, then when he did not come she returned to the conversation
she was having. She was standing at the table in the hall where the telephone was kept. The telephone was for information
still in those days, not a social instrument, and was kept in the hall without even a chair beside it.

I remember the simultaneous occurrences: Godfrey swearing, the television, the gin glass taken up from the Burmese side table,
Daphne on the telephone, Susan and myself playing cards. It was as if some some electrical event had occurred, a charged moment,
and each random piece of it was crystallised. Yet the meaning of each piece was not initially clear, or if any one were dependent
upon the others. At first the Portland case, and Godfrey's anger, seemed to be no more than a part of the adult background,
something to be absorbed vaguely like other news stories, like the Congo, like Algeria, like Macmillan or de Gaulle, so many
names and places that my father and the Laceys and their friends and my friends' parents turned about.

It was Peter who made the connection. Peter's fault then. Peter who was so clever but did not know where you divided stories
from reality.

A year on. Again, summer. Loose days. Open doors and windows.

Peter's school broke up before mine did. He was at home for a week, more, on his own. I do not know what he got up to. I suppose
that he stayed in his room, brooded, read, made models, watched the cricket, went next door for lunch, did what he always
did at home, and that it did not make much difference to him if anyone else was there or not.

There was a Test match. When the Test match was on the curtains in the sitting room were drawn when I came home from school
and there were men in white on the screen and a lull of voices and he sat rapt and might as well have not been there at all.
Then it was over, or rained off, and he read a book about spies. He had progressed from war to spies.

'Look at these dates, Anna, in my book.'

It was a book that he had been given, a big book with a glossy cover and black-and-white photographs in it like those in the
newspapers.

'That's just after my birthday.'

'Not only that.' Peter was so insistent, always getting cross. 'Not just the day, silly. The year as well.'

'Of course, I know. I knew that all along. It's just before Mummy died, isn't it?' The words were big, when I spoke them.
I think I may not ever have spoken them before.

'That's it, exactly, that's the point.'

I did not see why he was so excited. A day in January, two days before that day, some people arrested, men and women. Snapshots
of them smiling, looking like anyone else. Like people we might know, not criminals.

'So what?'

'Don't you see? The arrests were made on Saturday evening. It wasn't in the news until Monday. She would have found out, seen
the headlines when she got to Oxford or heard it somewhere on the way. Maybe she heard it on the radio.'

'What's it got to do with her anyway?'

He looked at me as if I was a fool, not seeing that events must have a cause. In Peter's world a thing did not just come out
of nowhere. There must be before and after, reasons why.

'Did she crash on the way there or on the way back? Did they tell you?'

'I don't know.'

I had always thought it happened in the morning. It happened in the fog, on the way. The car went off with its red lights
fading into the fog and it happened on an empty hill somewhere, just the car and the fog, and black ice. I had not thought
that it could be anything but that. Now I saw that it might have happened anywhere - on the main road, in the traffic, in
the afternoon.

'Think. We should know. It might be important.'

'Well, we just don't.'

Daphne Lacey is calling from the phone.

'Darling!'

Godfrey is not listening to her. His eyes are still on the screen.

'Come here a minute. There's something I have to say to you.'

We are playing beggar-my-neighbour. Susan turns up a king, wins three; a jack, wins one, and with it the pack.

'Buggers!' says Godfrey Lacey, and it is not clear now whether this relates to the news story or the fact that his wife is
calling him. The man on the television is saying that five persons have been charged under Section One of the Official Secrets
Act and are being held at Bow Street Police Station.

'Buggers,' he says again.

The television moves on to the weather, unwatched, as Godfrey Lacey crosses the hall and goes into the kitchen and closes
the door. A band of high pressure reaching the west by morning. The fog clearing overnight. Frost and a clear day to follow.

'I don't know, Peter. I don't know anything!'

I screamed at him. I didn't even know that I was about to scream. I screamed so loud that if someone else, some adult, had
been in the house they would have come running as to danger, then when they saw that there was no physical danger things might
have been said, an explanation given, and just possibly it might all have stopped there, right then at the beginning. But
there was no one save our two selves to hear.

'I don't know anything and anyway it doesn't matter. None of it matters. None of this means anything. It wasn't as if she
knew those people or anything.'

Whatever else Peter knew about it either he was pretending or he wasn't going to tell. He was fixed back in his book.

'How can you be so sure?'