Secret Kingdom (9 page)

The lightning flash was so bright that for an instant, from his vantage point on the fourth floor of his building, the city across the river became a negative, a reverse image in black and white. Then the thunder broke with a huge crash directly overhead and the apartment shuddered. He was in the eye of the storm.

Did Martineau never have doubts about the value of the tasks they had to perform? After a sweltering day filled with pettiness and frustration when he had come close to losing his temper more than
once, he put the question to Martineau. Perhaps by getting him to talk about what he believed in, he might get closer to the man, understand him better, learn how to deal with him.

‘Our role is to safeguard the society we both grew up in,’ Martineau replied. ‘If we are to do that successfully, we must be able to read the enemy’s intentions. We must know his mind, study his behaviour, note the smallest changes in his routines. That is the never-ending task we are entrusted with. What could be more important than that?’

‘How do you equate these high-sounding words with the mundane nature of what London asks us to do?’ Hart asked, putting forward an edited version of his own frustration. More tactful, he thought, to appear to blame London for his condition than anyone closer to home. Did Merton House really want to know who had arrived from Moscow? Was it worth all the risks of running agents under the nose of the AVH for the sake of trivial information like that? Who read it? Who made use of it?

‘They have analysts in London,’ Martineau replied. ‘Their job is to interpret the information we gather. Making policy depends on that. Without us, without the information we supply, nothing happens.’

He wasn’t going to dent Martineau’s armour that way. The disciple was sticking to his faith with the fervour of the true believer.

‘Be grateful,’ Martineau warned, trying to outflank Hart’s evident restlessness. ‘Thin gruel is better than no gruel. And then, in this game, you never know when your bowl will be filled to the brim.’

Give it time and the breaks will come. He’d heard that one before and it sounded no better with every day that passed. Hart bit his lip as he entered the embassy each morning and prayed his patience would resist the onslaught of condescension and irritation that assailed him. Things will change, he heard. Give it time. He struggled to put a brave face on it and concealed his growing frustration in his letters home.

He set about ‘learning the ropes’, Martineau’s other favoured expression. He made friends at the embassy; found himself an apartment, three rooms on the top floor of an ancient building under the lee of the Royal Palace; took part in the embassy tennis ladder and did rather well; explored Budapest; learned enough Hungarian to get by (‘the most impossible language in the world’); familiarized himself with the territory. But the question posed in his first week
gained in volume all the time. Surely he’d been prepared for more than this?

Deprived of the answers he wanted, he turned his attention to understanding the political situation in Hungary, the names and recent histories of the players – Rakosi, Nagy, Gero and others. He recognized the style of Martineau’s ‘Borises’ (he called his agents ‘Borises’, a practice he’d presumably adopted during his Moscow posting): ‘Vardas’, a senior civil servant in one of the ministries; ‘Pluto’, the lecturer in physics with connections in the government; ‘Martha’, a politician’s mistress who occasionally came up with gems of pillow talk. Their reports were gathered and analysed by Martineau, coded up and sent on to London with the appropriate gloss. Martineau knew his territory and his people were good. Hart’s quarrel wasn’t with Martineau himself, the man had his respect, but with his overprotective attitude. His mothering was torment.

The rain had started again, throwing itself in wild bursts against the window with the ferocity of a machine gun. Hart saw water racing through the gutters in the street below, and he wondered how long he could resist the humidity and keep the window shut.

The first signs that the tension between them might break out into a quarrel arose, unexpectedly, over a discussion about possible Soviet responses to the threat of an uprising.

‘Any popular insurrection is bound to demand the removal of Rakosi,’ Martineau was saying. ‘That’ll face the Soviets with an uncomfortable choice between letting the people dictate who governs them or putting tanks on the streets to suppress the people.’

‘I can’t see the Soviets removing their own man. They’d lose too much face.’

‘If they send in the tanks,’ Martineau argued, ‘will the West stand by and let them get away with it? Surely not?’

‘I don’t believe for a moment we’d risk any kind of confrontation that could lead to war, merely to save the lives of a few Hungarians who don’t like living with the Russians. Do you?’

Hart sounded more aggressive than he felt, but his anger was dangerously close to the surface.

‘A policy of inaction is very risky with the Soviets. It tells them that whatever they do, we don’t have the nerve to oppose them.’

‘In this case I’d prefer to call it prudence.’

Martineau wasn’t convinced. ‘What if, as a consequence of that
inaction, thousands of innocent people go to their deaths? How do you square your conscience with murder on that scale?’

‘Isn’t that called realpolitik?’ Hart replied. Was that really what he believed? ‘The Hungarians have the bad luck to live in the Soviet sphere of influence. The world’s not going to square up to the Soviets and risk blowing itself to bits because of what might happen in the streets of Budapest, is it? Things just don’t work like that.’ Realizing that he may have gone too far, he added, ‘Just as well we aren’t faced with such a decision, isn’t it?’

The thunder had retreated. There was an occasional distant rumble from behind the hills, but that was all. The street lights had come on. An illuminated Budapest, city of blown opportunities, swam wetly before his eyes.

Somehow, he didn’t think he’d presented himself in the best possible light.

Extract from the
Daily
Express
of 12 June 1956:

The blanket smelled of stale cigarettes but it was all he’d got and it would have to do. Leman rolled it up and placed it at one end of the stained and dusty mattress to serve as a pillow. He lay down
carefully in the darkness, hands behind his head, and gazed up at the ceiling.

He wanted this to be a nightmare from which he would awaken to find himself back in Moore Street, Anna warm beside him, the morning light pouring into the bedroom, a day at the Institute in prospect; but the harshness of his circumstances did not allow him the luxury of such self-deception. His confinement was not the product of an overheated imagination. It was an undeniable fact. The key to the door was in someone else’s possession. The bars across the window were made of steel and embedded in concrete. The footsteps outside his cell were those of his captors whose task it was to see that he stayed put. He had lost control of his own life. He was trapped, the plaything of others. He had found adventure all right, pared-down, harsh, inescapable, and its brutality terrified him.

*

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

Six weeks before (only
six
weeks? It seemed like a lifetime), he had been trapped in a noisy, crowded room at the Institute, too many journalists and politicians and too many White Russians – those who worked for the Institute and endless hangers-on – who hovered around the bar cadging drinks off anyone they could and easing the canapés by the handful. Impossible to hear without shouting.

‘Stephen Sykes,’ the man repeated. ‘I publish a political weekly called
Commentary.
Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’

It was clear Sykes expected an answer in the affirmative.

‘I take it,’ Leman said lamely.
Commentary
was a left-wing journal unrelenting in the superiority of its moral and political stance and unforgiving in its hostility to the Conservative Government. Like many others, he bought a copy most weeks, but too often it resided unread in his briefcase along with other good intentions.

‘Are you part of this set-up?’ Sykes asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Where do you fit in?’

‘I analyse Soviet agricultural production.’ How he hated talking about himself. It wasn’t untrue, rather a half-truth; he did more than that, but it was enough to satisfy Sykes, he hoped. ‘Ponder comparative wheat yields, that sort of thing.’

‘I suspect you do more than you’re letting on.’ What could Sykes know? Who could he have been talking to? ‘We like to have people like you writing for us.’

‘I’m not a journalist,’ Leman replied defensively.

‘I know what you are,’ Sykes said confidently. ‘You’re an expert. Expertise is in demand these days. I like the authority experts bring to what they write. You’d find yourself in good company.’

Was it publisher’s flattery, elevating him to a rank he didn’t deserve? Or was it what Sykes genuinely believed? That was the man’s skill. There was no way of knowing. He could take the remark as he chose. He chose to be flattered, and Sykes responded to his conquest.

‘I’ve got an idea that might intrigue you. Come and have a natter. Here’s my card. Don’t leave it too long. Good ideas wither if they aren’t loved.’

*

For the first time since he had started to work at the Institute, Leman had a sense that he was drifting. He questioned the value of what work he was doing – did an analysis of the annual cereal production in Kazakhstan truly further anyone’s cause? He questioned himself for wasting his time doing it, increasingly finding he could do the work with his eyes shut, but when he tried to move away from the familiar world of Soviet economic statistics, he had no idea what he wanted and he despised himself for his ignorance. His academic success had failed to provide any instinct about where and how to take the leap into a world beyond Cambridge or the Institute, which, he saw, was really Cambridge in another form, the institution as refuge. How else was he to satisfy the longing for something more, something that tested him so that he could discover who he was?

Why should he want more when already he had so much? Anna gave without thought, she brought her love to him and with it a home; she provided a kind of security he had never allowed himself to dream of when he was young and which many, he knew, would envy. For a time the novelty of this experience had smothered any residual longing to test himself. Anna and the life she gave him had overwhelmed his secret ambitions. Recently, and for reasons he didn’t understand, some part of his conscience had woken up and was uncomfortably reminding him of the truth of his situation.
Someone – Anna? – had duped him into assuming the identity of a man who was both settled and content. He had lowered his defences, become lazy. Had he struggled all those years at Cambridge and before simply to exchange the cobbler’s shop in Pimlico for a smart address in Kensington? Was there not more to life than creature comforts, seductive as they were? Where would he be if a rich woman had not fallen in love with him? What was he without Anna?

That had been his condition when he met Stephen Sykes.

As he lay on the ancient mattress in his cell, he asked himself how he could have fallen victim to Sykes’s insane dreams. The man’s vision was extravagant, unbalanced. He must have been mad not to reject his proposal out of hand. If he could see that all too clearly now, why not at the time? The only answer he was prepared to accept was that, for a few days, perhaps only for a few hours, those dreams had seemed to coincide with his own. He’d been gullible, beguiled (that was the least harmful interpretation he could put on his behaviour), and the price he was paying for his moment of weakness was the loss of his freedom and the sacrifice of everything he had once had. He felt sickened and ashamed. There was no one he could blame for his predicament but himself. He had been stripped naked by his own foolishness because, for a few delicious moments, he had imagined that Sykes understood his secret dreams. How gullible he’d been! He was paying the price for that now.

She leans her bicycle against the railings, opens the gate, goes down the steps and across the forecourt into the entrance hall. It is dark after the bright sunlight. She remembers the times she brought Dora here, every day for how many years? and the ritual of hanging up your coat and your lunch bag when you arrived. Around her she can hear the hum of voices, one class is rehearsing a song, a phrase repeated again and again until it is sung with the correct intonation, another is taking dictation in Russian. Sentences are read with unnatural pauses. Where is the concierge whose name she has forgotten? Her memories of the school are that she was always around, sitting in her cubby hole under the stairs or, armed with a mop, guarding the place and the Marxist ideologies taught within it as if her life depended on her vigilance which, perhaps, it did.

‘What do you want?’

She wears a faded tunic and slippers, her hair is pulled back into an untidy bun and she stands, arms crossed, in an aggressive defence of her territory. She is as ugly and ill-tempered as Eva remembers.

‘I’m Dora Balassi’s mother. You may not remember me. My daughter was at school here.’

‘I see too many parents to remember names. What do you want?’

‘I should have done this ages ago.’ Faced with this woman’s cold, unfriendly stare, she is glad she took the trouble to rehearse her lines. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t but I’ve been so busy, you know how it is, at least that’s my excuse.’ She pauses. That too had been planned. She has said enough, she hopes, to give the impression of a disorganized mother. ‘I came to collect Julia Kovacs’s things. The headmistress wrote to me ages ago. I should have come before now, shouldn’t I? Julia and I were cousins. There’s no reason why you
should know that. I’m so sorry if this is inconvenient. Perhaps I should have made an appointment.’

She smiles her carefully prepared, hopeful smile.

‘Wait there.’

Eva is left alone in the hall, looking at the children’s paintings that have been put up on the walls, bright poster colours worked on thick grey paper, celebrating the glorious victory of the proletariat: men driving tractors through endless fields of bright yellow corn, women carrying bales of hay, a battle scene full of explosions, tanks and soldiers. The bodies of the enemy are lined up in one corner, crude representations of the American flag draped around them, a portrait of a leader (Rakosi? Stalin?), his hand raised, talking to a group of children. The caption reads: “The Father of the Nation Directing the Future”. Above them, a banner in huge black and red letters: THE STRUGGLE TO BUILD THE NEW WORLD.

‘This is all I can find.’

Was that it? All that was left of Julia at the school where she had taught for years was a small bag not even full. Not even her own. The bag carries the crudely sewn initials ‘N.R.’. It must have belonged to a child who’d left it behind. Is this what our lives amount to when we die?

‘Thank you.’

That’s it. What could be easier? She has got what she wanted, no questions asked. She walks out into the sunlight. She smiles only when she is certain that the concierge can’t see.

*

She emptied the bag on to her kitchen table. A pair of shoes, one with a broken heel, some old laddered stockings, a handkerchief, a notebook, two pencils, a box of aspirin, a folded timetable of her teaching schedule, a diary, a purse, some loose coins, a note about a new time for a teachers’ meeting.

She flicked through the diary, the few entries that Julia had completed now more than a year old. The start and end of terms were marked, the times and days of the teachers’ union meetings (for some reason Julia was determined to get elected to the committee of the union). The afternoons when she took her class for political instruction. Nothing personal. No birthdays, no dates for meetings with friends, no trips to the cinema. This was her school diary. She
was about to close it when she saw that Julia had drawn a line through the second week in February. Across the days she had written in capital letters the single word: Moscow.

The metro ticket and now this. Her heart was close to breaking.

She drank a glass of water and composed herself. She remembered that Julia had been away last year. There’d been a teachers’ conference in Pecs in February. Wasn’t that where she said she’d gone? Her uncertainty was the price of being disorganized – no wonder Julia criticized her for the way she managed her life. She looked through the pages of the exercise book that she kept next to the telephone. Julia had given it to her because she was always losing the scraps of paper on which she wrote her notes and messages. Lists of groceries, numbers to ring, messages for Dora. Messages for Julia too. Doodles. Reminders. Slowly she worked her way backwards. Even though no date was written down, it wasn’t difficult to identify March of the previous year. Her writing changed at that point. It was unusually careful, using the lines on the page, not scrawled in her familiar hasty fashion. Her grief had briefly reformed her untidy habits.

The exercise book confirmed nothing. But the diary entry and the metro ticket were evidence that she couldn’t ignore. Julia
had
deceived her. It was a painful conclusion, but it had to be drawn. Julia had secrets, perhaps another life that she knew nothing about. What she was discovering didn’t mean that her own memories of Julia were false. They were pages torn from a book. True in their way but not the whole story. What frightened her was that the structure of her life that she had taken for granted was suddenly shaking. Whether it would survive many more revelations was open to question. She felt shocked, angry, perplexed. The discovery that those you love have deceived you is the hardest way to lose your innocence.

She heard Dora letting herself into the apartment. She wanted her to know nothing of what Dora would call her ‘revisionism’, the steady destruction of Julia’s reputation in the light of revelations following her death. To Dora Julia remained her ‘second mother’, whose loss in her own way she mourned every day.

Hastily she swept everything back into the bag and put it on the chair in the bedroom.

‘Please sit down, Miss Livesey. What can I do for you?’

‘I’m a friend of the Leman family.’ She’d told him as much over the telephone. What she hadn’t explained was why she was so anxious to see him. Pountney listened without interruption to what she had to say, nodding over arched fingers.

‘We’re all concerned about Joe Leman’s disappearance,’ he said.

On the face of it, he seemed a diffident man, so different to Sykes. Nothing manipulative about him, nothing intimidating. Beneath the passive exterior, she sensed there was a point where he could dig his heels in and refuse to budge. One of those deceptively quiet men who could be stubborn if the mood took him. Not to be underestimated, she decided. Quite attractive, too. She liked his brown hair. But he looked tired. A man with too much on his mind.

‘I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but Joe went to Vienna to write a piece for
Commentary.
I believe the journal is owned by your brother-in-law.’

That was the bombshell, establishing the connection between Leman and Sykes. Pountney’s reaction showed he was taken aback by what she’d said. She felt pleased with herself. It was a small victory but it made up for the high-handed way his colleagues had treated Esther.

‘Are you sure of that?’ Pountney asked.

‘Joe told me before he disappeared that he was writing something for
Commentary
and when I saw him two days ago, Sykes made no secret that he’d commissioned an article from Joe. You can telephone him if you want to.’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary.’ Pountney was writing in a notebook. ‘Did Sykes tell you what Joe was doing for him? Did he mention the nature of his commission?’

‘He said he’d asked Joe to write a piece on Europeans living with the threat of communism, what it’s like for people whose countries border on the Soviet bloc. In any political crisis they’re the ones on the front line.’

Pountney looked at her enquiringly. ‘Why do I get the impression you aren’t convinced by that explanation, Miss Livesey?’

‘Joe’s an economic analyst, not a journalist. The proprietor of a
political journal like
Commentary
could find dozens of more suitable people to write a piece like that, couldn’t he? Why ask Joe?’ Pountney’s silence forced her to continue. ‘In the last few days before he disappeared, he wasn’t his usual self at all. He was miles away, distracted. His mind was where he was going even though he hadn’t got there yet. I’d have expected him to have been worrying about what he was going to write, that would have been more in character. Despite his abilities, he’s not very confident about himself.’

Pountney sucked on the end of his pencil. ‘I see.’ More comments in the notebook. ‘You’re suggesting that your analysis of Joe’s subsequent behaviour has another explanation?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘What might that be?’

‘I think Joe was on to something and whatever it was, Sykes had put him up to it. Which is why he disappeared. The commission was a cover story, nothing more. There was never any intention to write an article.’

She was implicating Sykes now. She wondered what Pountney would make of that. Could he be even-handed?

‘If we assume that what you’re saying is true, then the consequence is that Sykes must be lying. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it?’

‘I’d prefer to say he’s knows more than he’s letting on, that he’s deliberately hiding something. I think he has a pretty good idea where Joe is because he sent him there.

But I suspect he’s as mystified as we are about his disappearance. I don’t think that was ever part of his plan.’

‘But you’ve no evidence for such an allegation?’

‘Nothing more than I’ve told you, no.’ She felt tears pricking at her eyes. ‘I can’t imagine another reason for Joe disappearing into thin air.’

‘People don’t disappear into thin air, Miss Livesey. They vanish because they want to or because someone makes them do so, usually against their will.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I am grateful to you for coming. I hope this hasn’t been too much of an ordeal. We will follow up what you’ve told us, you can count on that. I’ll arrange to have a word with my brother-in-law and when I’ve done so, I’ll come back to you.’

When Sykes telephoned a week later to suggest they meet for a drink after work, Leman’s first instinct had been to refuse. He’d had a trying day at the Institute working on Soviet policy issues with an argumentative White Russian whose ferocious halitosis was ‘a deadly weapon at anything less than three feet’. Sykes clearly had other ideas. Leman gave way to a barrage of insistence, learning quickly that if you said no to Sykes he behaved like a spoiled child until you changed your mind, which he clearly expected you to do.

The office was in a row of Regency houses on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Leman was ushered into a high-ceilinged, book-lined room on the first floor overlooking the square. Sykes, he discovered, had no small talk. He said what was on his mind without preamble.

He was picking up signals, he told Leman as he poured him a drink, that suggested the communist alliance was nowhere near as secure as the Kremlin wanted the West to believe. Was that Leman’s impression too?

‘What kind of signals?’ Leman asked.

‘A growing restlessness in Poland, East Germany, Hungary. Incidents of dissent, individuals refusing to accept what the Soviets impose, like the enforced teaching of Russian in schools. Nothing major, no public demonstrations, no violence. Trouble simmering just below the surface. Small-scale but significant.’

‘We get occasional reports of anti-Soviet activities in the satellite states,’ Leman replied, ‘but we don’t think they count for much. The locals may loathe the regime they’re living under but there’s precious little they can do about it. We’re not going to see Poland or any of the other countries suddenly float free of Soviet control. That’s wishful thinking.’

What intrigued him, Sykes said, was the Soviet response to the prospect of such a threat. If you added up the comings and goings of Soviet political and military officials to Budapest in the last few weeks you’d see they were far beyond the normal. Unusual activity was usually a sign of Soviet anxiety.

‘Anxiety about what?’ Leman asked, wondering how on earth Sykes knew anything about the visits of Soviet officials to Budapest.

‘They’re afraid the Hungarians will try to assert their independence.’

‘Is that likely?’ Leman asked. He could make no judgement on whether or not the Hungarians would rise up against the Soviets – he knew little about the circumstances – but he doubted a popular uprising would cause more than a bit of local trouble for a day or two. He certainly couldn’t imagine the prospect was keeping the Kremlin awake at night. The successful secession of a satellite state from the Soviet empire was unthinkable. The Soviet army was far too powerful. The Hungarians were realists. They’d hardly take a risk like that with the odds so heavily against them.

‘If the Soviets are as invincible as you say,’ Sykes replied, ‘why are they showing such anxiety? Surely there’s a contradiction there?’

How easily he rode opposition, Leman noticed, swaying with your argument but never allowing you to get through his defences to knock him off balance. He’d make a formidable opponent if you were unlucky enough to come up against him.

‘Show me the evidence of anxiety and I might agree.’

‘Do these satisfy you?’ Sykes pushed a large brown envelope across the table. It was a theatrical gesture but Leman had to admit its impact. Sykes had prepared himself carefully for this meeting and no doubt had a further trick or two up his sleeve. But why? What did he want? Men like Sykes did nothing without a purpose.

‘What are they?’

‘Classified reports from the SIS man in Budapest.’

Leman removed the documents from the envelope to examine them.

‘Are they genuine?’ he asked.

Sykes laughed. ‘If you want, I can put you in touch with someone who will vouch for them.’