The Russia House (35 page)

‘West Point,’ said Quinn.

It was evening and the first delegation had just flown in. We sat in the same room with the same red floor under the same billiards light, waiting for Barley. Quinn sat at the head and Todd and Larry sat to either side of him. Todd and Larry were Quinn’s people. They were clean-limbed and pretty and, for a man of my age, ludicrously youthful.

‘Quinn’s from way up there,’ Sheriton had told us. ‘Quinn talks to Defense, he talks to the corporations, he talks to God.’

‘But who hires him?’ Ned had asked.

Sheriton seemed genuinely puzzled by the question. He smiled as if pardoning a solecism in a foreigner.

‘Well now, Ned, I guess we all do,’ he said.

Quinn was six foot one, wide-shouldered and big-eared. He wore his suit like body armour. There were no medals on it, no badges of rank. His rank was in his stubborn jaw and shaded empty eyes, and in the smile of enraged inferiority that overcame him in the presence of civilians.

Ned entered first, then came Barley. Nobody stood up. From his deliberately humble place in the centre of the American row, Sheriton meekly made the introductions.

Quinn likes them plain, he had warned us. Tell your man not to be too damn clever. Sheriton was following his own advice.

It was right that Larry should open the questioning because Larry was the outgoing one. Todd was virginal and withdrawn, but Larry wore an overlarge wedding ring and had the colourful tie and did the laughing for them both.

‘Mr. Brown, sir, we have to think this thing through from the point of view of your detractors,’ he explained with elaborate insincerity. ‘In our business, there’s unverified intelligence and there’s verified intelligence. We’d like to verify your intelligence. That’s our job and that’s what we’re paid for. Please don’t take any hint of suspicion personally, Mr. Brown. Analysis is a science apart. We have to respect its laws.’

‘We have to imagine it’s an organised put-together,’ Todd blurted belligerently from Larry’s side.
‘Smoke.’

Amusement, until Larry laughingly explained to Barley that he was not being offered a cigarette: ‘smoke’ was the trade word for deception.

‘Mr. Brown, sir, whose idea was it, please, to go out to Peredelkino that day, fall two years ago?’ asked Larry.

‘Mine, probably.’

‘Are you sure of that, sir?’

‘We were drunk when we made the plan, but I’m pretty sure it was me who proposed it.’

‘You drink quite a lot, don’t you, Mr. Brown?’ said Larry.

Quinn’s enormous hands had settled round a pencil as if they proposed to strangle it.

‘Fair amount.’

‘Does drinking make you forget things, sir?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And sometimes not. After all, we have long verbatims between you and Goethe when you were both totally inebriated. Had you ever been to Peredelkino before that day, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Often?’

‘Two or three times. Maybe four.’

‘Did you visit with friends out there?’

‘I visited friends, yes,’ said Barley, instinctively bridling at the American usage.

‘Soviet friends?’

‘Of course.’

Larry paused long enough to make Soviet friends sound like a confession.

‘Care to identify these friends, please, sir, names?’

Barley identified the friends. A writer. A woman poet. A literary bureaucrat. Larry wrote them down, moving his pencil slowly for effect. Smiling as he wrote, while Quinn’s shadowed eyes continued glowering at Barley on fixed lines down the table.

‘On the day of your trip then, Mr. Brown,’ Larry resumed, ‘on this Day One, as we may call it, did it not occur to you to press a few doorbells of your old acquaintance, see who was around, sir, say hullo?’ Larry asked.

Barley didn’t seem to know whether it had occurred to him or not. He shrugged and performed his habitual trick of pulling the back of his hand across his mouth, the perfect untruthful witness.

‘Didn’t want to saddle them with Jumbo, I suppose. Too many of us to cope with. Didn’t occur to me, really.’

‘Sure,’ said Larry.

Three excuses, I noted unhappily. Three where one would have been enough. I glanced at Ned and knew he was thinking the same. Sheriton was busy not thinking at all. Bob was busy being Sheriton’s man. Todd was murmuring in Quinn’s ear.

‘So was it also
your
idea to visit Pasternak’s tomb, Mr. Brown, sir?’ Larry enquired, as if it were an idea anyone could be proud of having had.

‘Grave,’ Barley corrected him testily. ‘Yes, it was. Shouldn’t think the others knew it was there till I told them.’

‘And Pasternak’s dacha too, I believe.’ Larry consulted his notes. ‘If “the bastards” hadn’t pulled it down.’ He made
bastards
sound particularly dirty.

‘That’s right, his dacha too.’

‘But you didn’t visit the Pasternak dacha, am I right? You didn’t even establish whether the dacha still existed. The Pasternak dacha disappeared totally from the agenda.’

‘It was raining,’ Barley said.

‘But you did have a car. And a driver, Mr. Brown. Even if he was malodorous.’

Larry smiled again and opened his mouth just wide enough to let the point of his tongue caress his upper lip. Then he closed it and allowed a further pause for uncomfortable thoughts.

‘So
you
mustered the party, Mr. Brown, and
you
identified the aims of the journey,’ Larry resumed in a tone of whimsical regret. ‘You rode point, you led the group up the hill to the tomb. Grave, forgive me. It was you personally, no one else, that Mr. Nezhdanov spoke to as you all came down the hill. He asked if you were American. You said, “
No, thank God, British
.” ’

No laughter, not even a smile from Larry himself. Quinn looked as though he were concealing an abdominal wound with difficulty.

‘It was you too, Mr. Brown, who quite by chance were able to quote the poet, speak out for the company during a discussion of his merits, and almost
by magic
to detach yourself from your companions and find yourself seated next to the man we call Goethe during lunch. “Meet our distinguished writer Goethe.” Mr. Brown, we have a field report from London regarding the girl Magda from Penguin Books. We understand it was obtained unobtrusively, in non-suspicious social circumstances, by a non-American third party. Magda had the impression you wished to handle the Nezhdanov interview on your own. Can you explain that, please?’

Barley had disappeared again. Not from the room but from my understanding. He had left suspicion to the dreamers and entered his own realms of reality. It was Ned not Barley who, unable to contain himself in the face of this admission of Agency skulduggery, produced the desired outburst.

‘Well, she’s not going to tell your informant she was panting to tuck her boyfriend into bed for the afternoon, is she?’

But again that single answer might have done the trick if Barley had not capped it with his own. ‘Maybe I
did
pack them off,’ he conceded in a remote but friendly enough voice. ‘After a week of book fair any reasonable soul has had enough of publishers to last him a lifetime.’

Larry’s smile had a doubtful slant. ‘Well hell,’ he said, and shook his pretty head before handing over his witness to Todd.

But not yet, because Quinn was speaking. Not to Barley, not to Sheriton, not even to Clive. Not really to anyone. But he was speaking all the same. The captive little mouth was writhing like a hooked eel.

‘This man been fluttered?’

‘Sir, we have protocol problems,’ Larry explained, with a glance at me.

At first I honestly did not understand. Larry had to explain.

‘What we used to call a lie detector, sir. A polygraph. Known in the business as a flutterer. I don’t think you have them over there.’

‘We do in certain cases,’ said Clive hospitably from beside me before I had a chance to answer. ‘Where you insist on it, we bend towards you and apply it. They’re coming in.’

Only then did the troubled, inward Todd take over. Todd was not prolix; he was at first bite not anything. But I had met counsel like Todd before: men who make a crusade of their charmlessness and learn to use their verbal clumsiness as a bludgeon.

‘Describe your relationship with Niki Landau, Mr. Brown.’

‘I haven’t one,’ Barley said. ‘We’ve been pronounced strangers till Doomsday. I had to sign a paper saying I’d never speak to him. Ask Harry.’

‘Prior to that arrangement, please?’

‘We had the odd jar together.’

‘The odd what?’

‘Jar. Drink. Scotch. He’s a nice chap.’

‘But not socially your class, surely? He did not go to Harrow and Cambridge, I take it?’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘Do you disapprove of the British social structure, Mr. Brown?’

‘One of the crying pities of the modern world, it always seemed to me, old boy.’

‘ “He’s a nice chap.” That means you like him?’

‘He’s an irritating little sod but I liked him, yes. Still do.’

‘You never did deals with him? Any deal?’

‘He worked for other houses. I was my own boss. What deals could we do?’

‘Ever
buy
anything from him?’

‘Why should I?’

‘I would like to know, please, what you and Niki Landau transacted together on the occasions when you were alone, often in Communist capital cities.’

‘He boasted about his conquests. He liked good music. Classical stuff.’

‘He ever discuss his
sister
with you? His
sister
still in Poland?’

‘No.’

‘He ever express his resentment to you regarding the alleged ill-treatment of his father by the British authorities?’

‘No.’

‘When was your last intimate conversation with Niki Landau, please?’

Barley finally allowed himself to betray a certain irritation. ‘You make us sound like a pair of queens,’ he complained.

Quinn’s face did not flicker. Perhaps he had made that deduction already.

‘The question was
when
, Mr. Brown,’ said Todd, in a tone suggesting that his patience was being stretched.

‘Frankfurt, I suppose. Last year. Couple of belts in the Hessischer Hof.’

‘That the Frankfurt book fair?’

‘One doesn’t go to Frankfurt for fun, old boy.’

‘No dialogue with Landau since?’

‘Don’t recall one.’

‘Nothing at the London book fair this spring?’

Barley appeared to rack his brains. ‘Oh my hat. Stella. You’re right.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Niki had spotted a girl who used to work for me. Stella. Decided he fancied her. He fancied everybody really. By way of being a stoat. Wanted me to introduce them.’

‘And you did?’

‘Tried to.’

‘You pimped for him. That the term?’

‘That’s right, old boy.’

‘What transpired, please?’

‘I asked her for a drink at the Roebuck round the corner, six o’clock. Niki turned up, she didn’t.’

‘So you were left alone with Landau? One on one?’

‘That’s right. One to one.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Stella, I suppose. The weather. Might have been anything.’

‘Mr. Brown, do you have anything very much to do with past or former Soviet citizens in the United Kingdom?’

‘Cultural Attaché, now and then. When he can be bothered to answer, which isn’t often. If a Sov writer comes over and the Embassy gives a binge for him, I’ll probably go along.’

‘We understand you like to play chess at a certain café in the area of Camden Town, London.’

‘So?’

‘Is this not a café frequented by Russian exiles, Mr. Brown?’

Barley raised his voice but otherwise held steady. ‘So I know Leo. Leo likes to lead from weakness. I know Josef. Josef charges at anything that moves. I don’t go to bed with them and I don’t trade secrets with them.’

‘You do have a very selective memory, though, don’t you, Mr. Brown? Considering the extraordinarily detailed accounts you give of other episodes and persons?’

Still Barley did not flare, which made his reply all the more devastating. For a moment, indeed, it seemed he would not even answer; the tolerance that was now so deeply seated in him seemed to tell him not to bother.

‘I remember what’s important to me, old boy. If I haven’t got a dirty enough mind to match yours, that’s your bloody business.’

Todd coloured. And went on colouring. Larry’s smile widened till it nearly split his face. Quinn had put on a sentry’s scowl. Clive had not heard a thing.

But Ned was pink with pleasure and even Russell Sheriton, sunk in a crocodile’s sleep, seemed to be remembering, among so many disappointments, something vaguely beautiful.

The same evening as I was taking a walk along the beach, I came on Barley and two of his guards, out of sight of the mansion, skimming flat stones to see who could get the most bounces.

‘Got you! Got you!’ he was shouting, leaning back and flinging his arms at the clouds.

‘The mullahs are smelling heresy,’ Sheriton declared over dinner, regaling us with the latest state of play. Barley had pleaded a headache and asked for an omelette in the boat-house. ‘Most of these guys came to town on a Margin of Safety ticket. That means raise military spending and develop any new system however crazy that will bring peace and prosperity to the arms industry for the next fifty years. If they’re not sleeping with the manufacturers, they’re sure as hell eating with them. The Bluebird is telling them a very bad story.’

‘And if it’s the truth?’ I asked.

Sheriton sadly helped himself to another piece of pecan pie. ‘The truth? The Sovs can’t play? They’re cost-cutting at every corner and the buffoons in Moscow don’t know one half of the bad news because the buffoons in the field cheat on them so they can earn their gold watches and free caviar? You think
that’s
the truth?’ He took a huge mouthful but it didn’t alter the shape of his face. ‘You think that certain unpleasant
comparisons
aren’t made?’ He poured himself some coffee. ‘You know what’s the worst thing for our democratically-elected neanderthals? The total worst? It’s the implications against
us
. Moribund on the Sov side means moribund
our
side. The mullahs hate that. So do the manufacturers.’ He shook his head in disapproval. ‘To hear the Sovs can’t do solid fuel from shit, their rocket motors suck instead of blow? Their early-warning errors worse than ours? Their heavies can’t even get out of the kennel? That our intelligence estimates are ludicrously exaggerated? The mullahs get terrible vibes from these things.’ He reflected on the inconstancy of mullahs. ‘How do you peddle the arms race when the only asshole you have to race against is yourself? Bluebird is life-threatening intelligence. A lot of highly-paid favourite sons are in serious danger of having their ricebowls broken, all on account of Bluebird. You want truth, that’s it.’