Secret Kingdom (5 page)

‘In those dangerous days after the war, Peter told us what the Soviets were doing and thinking. For a time we reckoned we knew
them better than they knew themselves. Then it all went bottom up and we haven’t managed to get within a mile of the bastards since.’

At some point never clearly established, the Russians had turned Peter. For months after that they used him to feed high-level disinformation to London. Their strategy had been to deceive the West into thinking the Soviet nuclear programme was in such disarray they could safely lower their own nuclear budgets. It was a daring deception and it had nearly succeeded.

‘The Soviets did serious damage to us at that time. We damn near gave away our nuclear lead before we discovered we’d been sold a dummy. Not one of the brighter episodes in the Service’s history.’

Peter was a case study at Nursery School on which the reaction of Hart’s group had been very divided. On balance, their instructor had said, the Peter episode was to be judged a success. Hart was not alone in remaining unconvinced. Despite the early gains, his assessment was that a dangerous lack of scepticism had allowed the Soviets to push our intelligence operation close to bankruptcy, and the country to within an inch of what would have been a catastrophic reversal of policy. He wasn’t susceptible to the criticism that this was writing history backwards, imposing present-day attitudes on events that had taken place ten years before, when our understanding of the Russians was much less advanced than now. The Soviets had been seriously underestimated, he argued, which was not a fault his intake would be guilty of.

‘We lost our sense of direction cleaning up after Peter,’ Carswell was saying. ‘Our zeal to find out who was to blame for what had gone wrong came close to destroying us. We revelled in accusation and recrimination, we saw conspiracy and betrayal in every corner. We made the near-fatal mistake of spending too much time fighting each other and not enough getting after the real enemy. It was a messy business. A number of reputations took a beating. People left the Service early, some of them under a cloud. Bobby was battered and bruised but he came through it all, much to the surprise of many. To this day some of his former colleagues haven’t forgiven him for surviving when their careers ended in tatters.’

The post-Peter trauma when they had searched for a traitor within the Service had only been lightly sketched by their instructors in New Malden. Its effect had been far greater than Hart had imagined.
An obsession had raged out of control, Carswell was telling him, and there’d been casualties. No traitor had been found.

‘Martineau has enemies, is that what you’re telling me?’ Hart was curious. Were they members of the Service? If so, were they still active?

‘The Service can be unforgiving,’ Carswell replied evasively. He waited while two elderly members of the club poured themselves coffee from the tray nearby. ‘It goes with the nature of the beast. Intense, secret, introspective. Old sores fester. Scar tissue itches. In the secret mind, time can magnify the damage done. Bobby was wrongly cast as the villain of the piece and his career never recovered from the loss of Peter, and one or two other indiscretions.’

This was it, the proposition, the reason for the invitation to lunch. He was going to be told about some misdemeanour in Martineau’s past. (He was a drunkard, a homosexual, he had slept with an ambassador’s wife, embezzled embassy funds.) Carswell finished his coffee. To Hart’s surprise he was silent for a moment. Was he having second thoughts about what he had come to say?

‘I’ve a soft spot for Bobby. I wouldn’t want him to come to any harm.’

What kind of harm? Hart wanted to ask. What would I be looking out for? Men with thick accents in ill-cut suits? His spine prickled. No, he reasoned, if anything Carswell was telling him to watch out for pinstripe suits and old school ties.

‘There’ve been some rumblings from the past recently,’ Carswell added. ‘I don’t think they’re threatening but you can never be sure.’

‘Rumblings connected with Peter?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought Peter had died years ago.’

‘Reports of his death may have been premature,’ Carswell replied enigmatically.

What was he saying? Martineau had made enemies in a thirty-year career. That wasn’t surprising. He didn’t imagine you could be involved with anything as big as Peter without upsetting someone. What else? Some bruised egos from the Peter era might resurrect themselves and have a go at Martineau? It was ten years since Peter had been given a decent burial. With all that had happened since, he couldn’t imagine there was any real threat there. Was that all? On balance it didn’t seem much, not enough to earn a lunch, even an indifferent one. He wondered what Carswell was after.

‘Sometimes we have enemies closer to home than we think.’

Carswell had wanted to tell him something about Martineau, Hart was sure of that. How else could he explain an early lunch at his club? Why the elaborate strategies to avoid being overheard? Then, at the last minute, for reasons Hart couldn’t understand, Carswell’s nerve had failed him. He’d dodged the issue, said nothing at all. Hart felt an acute sense of disappointment, and hoped it wasn’t a pointer to the future.

‘Keep an eye on him for me, will you? There’s a good chap.’

She kneels on the floor and stares at the framed photograph in her hand. Two young girls, laughing, their arms around each other one summer Sunday years ago on Margit Island, one blonde, the other with short dark hair (she had cut her hair for swimming). Dora aged five stands in front of them, leaning against her mother, looking solemn, her thumb in her mouth. They are wearing each other’s dresses – she and Julia were always swapping clothes. A time without care, when they believed they could build a whole new world and thought that that was what they were doing.

It hurts to go on looking at it. Any memory of Julia is too painful to bear. Into the box.

She has got up early, the idea firmly in her head that she must systematically remove all traces of Julia from the apartment, all her photographs, letters, anything she has ever given Eva, even the books in which she had written her name. If nothing remains to remind her of Julia, perhaps she will find some release from the agony of guilt and recrimination that is tormenting her, the inescapable and distressing thought that in some way, unclear but definite, she is responsible for Julia’s death.

Another photograph. Julia at eighteen. It must have been taken just after they arrived in Moscow. How little she changed as she grew older. She was always slimmer than me, Eva remembers, with masses of curly blonde hair – how I envied that – an oval face, huge dark blue eyes, almost Scandinavian in appearance. Men were attracted by her looks. When you got down to it, she was not beautiful, but striking, attractive, animated. That was Julia’s secret. She was alive, brimming with energy, laughter, expectations, plans, ideas. She brought excitement with her. She was always so full of
life.

Into the box before her eyes fill with tears.

In the weeks after Julia’s disappearance, she floated through what remained of her life, too shocked to weep, too frightened to imagine what might have happened, too wounded to ask questions. She supported her daughter in her grief, tried and failed – how many times? – to provide Dora with some convincing explanation for what had happened, concentrated on her translation work, forcing herself to take no time off from her professional duties. Her sole purpose was to survive, and frequently she questioned the point of trying. Dora’s presence brought her back to some kind of sanity. She found an anchor in her daughter’s dependence on her.

As she recovered, a new emotion took over, a terrible rage against the injustice that an innocent woman had died for no apparent reason. How can a schoolmistress threaten anyone? How can her death contribute to the ultimate victory of anything good? With the brutal removal of so much love and laughter from her life, the blindfold of her belief is torn away. Now she sees she is surrounded by an evil authority that kills its people secretly, that is answerable not to its own people but to Moscow, able to destroy its enemies, real or imagined, with impunity and conceal its crimes from censure without fear of discovery. Such acts betray everything she has worked for since her youth. The moral emptiness of the landscape stretches to the horizon and beyond. She can see no end to it in time or space. The revelation leaves her breathless, winded. The structure of her life dissolves around her as her faith in the ideals she has never questioned before is shattered beyond repair. Julia’s murder is a crime beyond the reach of explanation or forgiveness.

She resigns from the committee of the translators’ union, though she remains a member of the union in order to get work. Within a month she has quietly cut all her formal ties with the Party, carefully avoiding any suspicion that she may be politically unreliable. She exiles herself from her past life. Secretly she sets herself the task of discovering who ordered Julia’s death. Her life is now governed by this single ambition.

Her records are strewn across the floor. She picks up
In
The
Wee
Small
Hours.
How they both loved the picture of Frank Sinatra on the cover of the album, the hat on the back of his head, the pensive, wistful expression of a lonely man searching for love but destined never to find it (or not for long), his tie loosened, his collar undone
and behind him the blue of the New York night, entrancing, beguiling, suggesting deserted streets, mysteries and dreams. They’d learned all the words to almost every song … was there a single track they didn’t love? ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’, ‘Dancing On The Ceiling’, ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’. Written across the cover in her swirling handwriting are the words: ‘To my dearest sister, with all my love, Julia.’ Of all the records she owns, this is the one she loves the most. (How on earth had Julia managed to get hold of a copy? Sinatra records were gold dust.) Can she throw this out too?

She looks at the slender face on the cover. She must. She knows she must. She puts it carefully into the box.

She stares at all her treasured memories of Julia and wants to cry. How can you cleanse your heart of a life that was intimately bound up in your own without disabling yourself? What she is doing is madness, but she has gone too far to stop herself now.

Julia’s clothes. How could she have forgotten them? She gets to her feet. She must clear her wardrobe of the clothes she had borrowed and not returned at the time of Julia’s death. She goes quietly into the bedroom. Dora is still asleep. Two summer dresses, a white shirt and the black winter overcoat with the astrakhan collar that Julia had insisted on lending her to wear to a meeting with a trade delegation from London, where she was acting as interpreter for the trade minister.

‘It suits you,’ Julia had said. ‘You haven’t got a smart coat and you need one for something as important as this. Take it. I don’t need it, I’m not going anywhere special.’

Eva drops the dresses and the shirt into the box on the floor. The coat is heavy and won’t fit. She lays it over the back of the sofa. Automatically she searches the pockets for anything she may have left there. She finds a handkerchief, nothing else. Is there an inside pocket? Yes. She reaches into it. At first nothing, then a scrap of paper. She retrieves a ticket. She recognizes it at once as a Moscow metro ticket.

Moscow?

How could Julia have got the ticket when she hadn’t been back to Moscow since they left in 1946? It can’t be Julia’s. Someone else must have borrowed the coat. But who? Julia had no other friends to whom she lent her clothes. She is certain of that. How on earth
has she got a metro ticket in the pocket of her best coat? She is besieged by questions she can’t answer.

‘What are you doing, Mother?’ Dora stands in the bedroom door, her voice a mixture of indignation and disbelief. ‘You can’t take Julia’s photographs away. They belong here. They’re ours.’

She watches helplessly as her daughter takes the photographs, books and records from the box and puts them back where they have always lived. She does nothing to stop her. She knows that the exercise she was engaged in is futile. Julia is too much a part of her life to be discarded. Until a few moments ago she imagined that she knew everything there was to know about Julia. She was never closer to anyone. Now it seems as if there may be a part of her life that she knows nothing about. It is an impossible thought, but the evidence is undeniable.

Against her will, Moscow has come back into her life. How can she face it without Julia?

‘Damn.’ Under the direction of the military policeman, Martineau brought the car to a halt. The evening was hot and he wanted to open the window but they would have been drowned in thick clouds of diesel fumes.

‘We’re going to be late, Bobby.’

‘What do you suggest?’ He tried to control his irritation. Christine could be so unreasonable at times. ‘I can’t drive through this lot, can I?’

A temporary roadblock had been set up while a convoy of Soviet tank transporters lumbered past, belching clouds of dirty smoke. T44s, he noticed. A dozen or more. Going east. He could guess where.

‘We should have started out earlier.’

If you had got back on time, she was saying, if you had been ready when you said you would be instead of coming in late, shaving too quickly, spilling blood on the collar of your only dress shirt which she’d had to sponge clean, then we wouldn’t be held up now. Oh, hell. He bit his lip to prevent himself from saying something he might regret.

‘It’s the French too,’ she added. ‘You know what they’re like.’

Bugger the French. Bugger everyone. He wanted to turn the car round and go home, forget the dinner at the embassy, all the ludicrous diplomatic pretence he’d have to go through. How he hated it all.

‘Of course you’ve got to come,’ Archie Randall had said to him the previous day. ‘We’ve got to live up to the fiction that you’re one of us, Bobby, even if you aren’t. You know that as well as I do.’

‘Why on earth drive tanks through the city?’ Christine asked.

‘A show of strength. The Soviets like to remind us who’s boss.’

Vardas had warned him it was likely. There were troop movements in other parts of the country now, none of them concealed. Summer manoeuvres was the official word for it, but no one was fooled by that. Hungary was an occupied country and the occupiers were flexing their muscles.

‘We’re going to be here all night at this rate.’

‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’ Careful. Don’t get drawn in. There’s no gain in it. There never is.

Christine took her compact out of her evening bag and inspected her face. She wiped an invisible speck of powder from her cheek, re-anointed her lips with lipstick and then pressed them together. It was a gesture that always irritated him, he had no idea why. She lit a cigarette but didn’t think of offering one to him.

‘What’s going to happen here, Bobby? Will everything collapse?’

‘It’s possible.’ He didn’t want to be drawn on what might happen. He didn’t want to worry her.

‘The Hungarians can’t stand up to the Soviets, can they? Not on their own.’

Another transporter thundered past. He saw the red star on the Soviet tank and shuddered. How many more were out there? he wondered.

‘It’s unlikely.’

‘Will anyone help them?’

‘Ask the politicians,’ he said, going further than he had intended. ‘I’m the man on the spot. I don’t take the decisions.’

For the first time the emptiness of the possible betrayal of the Hungarians yawned open before him. Would anyone in the West
listen to their cries for help? He felt sickened and anxious. Or would these poor people be left to die on their own?

‘Bobby.’

Christine tapped his arm. The military policeman was waving them on again. He put the car into gear and moved off.

‘Should I wear a hat?’ Esther had asked and Anna had said no, she didn’t think that would be necessary, just something nice that she felt comfortable in. She should be ready by ten. Esther wore the dress she had bought for Joe’s graduation.

‘Where you going, dressed up like that?’ Manny called from the machine room. She’d told him shopping with Anna, because she didn’t want him to know what she was doing. Whether he believed her or not she wasn’t sure, but he’d gone back to his task without comment.

‘I’ve never met Sykes,’ Anna told her in the taxi on the way to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. ‘All I know about him is what Joe told me.’

‘Then you don’t know much,’ Esther replied.

Joe had never described Sykes. He couldn’t tell Anna his age or what he looked like; details like that weren’t important. Her curiosity fuelled by Joe’s incomprehension at her questions, Anna had painted her own mental portrait of the man with whom she had battled long and hard in her imagination. Early forties, smooth-skinned, a spreading waistline. If he smoked, and he was bound to, it was either small cigars or cigarettes in a silver holder. Oh, and he was rich. Peddling socialism because that was the future and where the future was, there was usually money. The creature of her prejudices.

The man who greeted her was tall, pale and gaunt (‘almost skeletal from some angles’), with deep-set eyes, only a few years older than she was and dressed in a thick, shapeless jersey, an ancient pair of corduroy trousers and battered suede boots. When he spoke it was slowly and with care, as if he was concealing the last traces of a childhood stammer. What finally destroyed the image she had conjured up was his right arm which hung useless at his side (Sykes shook their hands with his left). Joe wouldn’t have missed that – how could he? – but he hadn’t thought to mention Sykes’s disability.

‘No need to ask why you’ve come,’ Sykes said. ‘Where’s Joe?’ He lit a cigarette without offering one either to Anna or Esther. ‘That’s what we’d all like to know, isn’t it? Where’s our man buzzed off to?’

‘You’ve not heard anything?’ Anna asked.

‘Not a peep, no, and he’s missed his deadline, damn it. I’m left with pages to fill, which doesn’t make me happy.’

‘What was he writing for you?’ Anna wanted Sykes’s version.

‘Didn’t he tell you?’ Sykes sounded surprised.

‘You know what Joe was like.’ She had to remember to talk about Joe in the present, otherwise she’d start believing he had gone for ever. ‘He keeps things to himself.’

‘I’m interested in what’s happening in the countries closest to the Soviet borders, Austria and Germany particularly, what it’s like to live with the threat of a Soviet invasion every time there’s any political tension between East and West. I got the impression Joe was excited by the project. He saw writing for us as a real opportunity to spread his wings a bit, maybe as a prelude to a change in career. That’s why his disappearance is so puzzling. He had so much to gain from making a success of this commission.’

‘You don’t think he might have crossed the border into Hungary, do you?’ she asked, voicing her worst fears. ‘Unintentionally, of course.’

‘Good God, no. What makes you think that?’

‘Budapest’s not far from Vienna.’

‘He’s a bloody fool if he has,’ Sykes said sharply. He didn’t know Joe that well, he went on, but by his reckoning the man was an academic, not an adventurer. Creeping into the communist bloc by the back door wasn’t something he could see Joe doing, unless MI6 had got their claws into him, which was pretty unlikely given the political colouring of
Commentary.
‘I see no point in thinking he’s crossed any borders. It won’t get us anywhere.’