The Russia House (36 page)

‘So why stick your neck out?’ I objected. ‘If it’s not a popular ticket, why run on it?’

And suddenly I didn’t know where to put myself.

It isn’t often that old Palfrey stops a conversation, causes every head to swing round at him in amazement. And I certainly hadn’t meant to this time. Yet Ned and Bob and Clive were staring at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, and Sheriton’s young men – we had two of them, if I remember rightly – independently put down their forks and began independently wiping their fingers on their napkins.

Only Sheriton didn’t seem to have heard. He had decided that a little cheese wouldn’t hurt him after all. He had pulled the trolley to him, and was morosely examining the display. But none of us imagined that cheese was uppermost in his mind, and it was clear to me that he was buying time while he wondered whether to reply and how.

‘Harry,’ he began carefully, addressing not me but a piece of Danish blue. ‘Harry, I swear to God. You have before you a man committed to peace and brotherly love. By this I mean that my primary ambition is to knock so much shit out of the Pentagon firebreathers that they will never again tell the President of the United States that twenty rabbits make a tiger, or that every fucking sardine fisherman three miles out of port is a Soviet nuclear submarine in drag. I also wish to hear no more bullshit about digging little holes in the ground and surviving nuclear war. I am a glasnostic, Harry. I have made certain discoveries about myself. I was born a glasnostic, my parents are old glasnostics from way back. For me, glasnosticism is a way of life. I want my children to live. Quote me and enjoy me.’

‘I didn’t know you had any children,’ said Ned.

‘Figurative,’ said Sheriton.

But Sheriton, if you pulled away the wrapping, was telling us a truthful version of his new self. Ned sensed it, I sensed it. And if Clive didn’t, that was only because he had deliberately abbreviated his perceptions. It was a truth that lay not so much in his words, which as often as not were designed to obscure his feelings rather than express them, but in a new and irrepressible humility that had entered his manner since his cut-throat days in London. At the age of fifty, after quarter of a century as a Cold War brawler, Russell Sheriton, to use Walter’s expression, was shaking his mid-life bars. It had never occurred to me that I could like him, but that evening I began to.

‘Brady’s bright,’ Sheriton warned us with a yawn as we turned in. ‘Brady can hear the grass growing.’

And Brady, parse him how you would, was bright as boot-buttons.

You spotted it in his clever face and in the nerveless immobility of his courteous body. His ancient sports coat was older than he was, and as he came into the room you knew he took pleasure in being unspectacular. His young assistant wore a sports coat too and, like his master, had a classy dowdiness.

‘Looks like you’ve done a fine thing, Barley,’ Brady said cheerfully in his Southern lilt, setting his briefcase on the table. ‘Anybody say thank you along the way? I’m Brady and I’m too damned old to fool around with funny names. This is Skelton.
Thank you.
’

The billiards room again but without Quinn’s table and upright chairs. Instead, we lounged gratefully in deep cushions. A storm was brewing. Randy’s vestals had closed the shutters and put on lights. As the wind rose, the mansion began clinking like restless bottles on a shelf. Brady unpopped his briefcase, a gem from the days when they knew how to make them. Like the university professor he occasionally was, he wore a polka-dot blue tie.

‘Barley, did I read somewhere, or am I dreaming, you once played sax in the great Ray Noble’s band?’

‘Beardless boy in those days, Brady.’

‘Wasn’t Ray just the sweetest man you ever knew? Didn’t he make the best sound ever?’ Brady asked as only Southerners can.

‘Ray was a prince.’ Barley hummed a few bars from ‘Cherokee’.

‘Too bad about his politics,’ Brady said, smiling. ‘We all tried to talk him out of that nonsense, but Ray would go his way. Ever play chess with him?’

‘Yes I did, as a matter of fact.’

‘Who won?’

‘Me, I think. Not sure. Yes, me.’

Brady smiled. ‘So did I.’

Skelton smiled too.

They talked London and which part of Hampstead Barley lived in: ‘Barley, I just love that area. Hampstead is my idea of civilisation.’ They talked the bands Barley had played. ‘My God, don’t tell me
he’s
still around! At his age I wouldn’t even buy unripe bananas!’ They talked British politics and Brady just
had
to know what it was that Barley thought so wrong with Mrs. T.

Barley appeared to have to think about that, and at first came up with no suggestions. Perhaps he had caught Ned’s warning eye.

‘Hell, Barley, it’s not
her
fault she hasn’t any worthwhile opponents, is it?’

‘Woman’s a bloody Red,’ Barley growled, to the secret alarm of the British side.

Brady didn’t laugh, just raised his eyebrows and waited, as we all did.

‘Elective dictatorship,’ Barley continued, quietly gathering steam. ‘A thousand legs good, two legs lousy. God bless the corporation and bugger the individual.’

He seemed to be about to enlarge on this thesis, then changed his mind, and to our relief, let it rest.

Nevertheless it was a light enough beginning, and after ten minutes of it Barley must have been feeling pretty much at ease. Until in his languid way Brady came to ‘this present thing you’ve gotten yourself into, Barley,’ and proposed that Barley should go over the turf again in his own words, ‘but homing in on that historic eye-to-eye you two fellows had in Leningrad.’

Barley did as Brady wanted, and though I like to think I listened quite as sharply as Brady, I heard nothing in Barley’s narrative that seemed to me contradictory or particularly revealing beyond what was already on the record.

And at first blush Brady didn’t seem to hear anything surprising either, for when Barley had finished, Brady gave him a reassuring smile and said, ‘Well now, thank you, Barley,’ in a voice of apparent approval. His slender fingers poked among his papers. ‘Worst thing about spying, I always say, is the hanging around. Must be like being a fighter pilot,’ he said, selecting a page and peering at it. ‘One minute sitting home eating your chicken dinner, next minute frightening the hell out of yourself at eight hundred miles an hour. Then it’s back home in time to wash the dishes.’ He had apparently found what he was looking for. ‘Is that how it felt to you, Barley, stuck out there in Muscovy without a prayer?’

‘A bit.’

‘Hanging around waiting for Katya? Hanging around waiting for Goethe? You seemed to do quite some hanging around after you and Goethe had finished your little pow-wow, didn’t you?’

Perching his spectacles on the tip of his nose, Brady was studying the paper before passing it to Skelton. I knew the pause was contrived but it scared me all the same, and I think it scared Ned for he glanced at Sheriton, then anxiously back to Barley. ‘According to our field reports, you and Goethe broke up around fourteen thirty-three Leningrad time. Seen the picture? Show it to him, Skelton.’

All of us had seen it. All but Barley. It portrayed the two men in the gardens of the Smolny after they had said goodbye. Goethe had turned away. Barley’s hands were still held out to him from their farewell embrace. The electronic timeprint in the top left corner said fourteen thirty-three and twenty seconds.

‘Remember your last words to him?’ Brady asked, with an air of sweet reminiscence.

‘I said I’d publish him.’

‘Remember
his
last words to
you
?’

‘He wanted to know whether he should look for another decent human being.’

‘One hell of a goodbye,’ Brady remarked comfortably, while Barley continued to look at the photograph, and Brady and Skelton looked at Barley. ‘What did you do then, Barley?’

‘Went back to the Europe. Handed over his stuff.’

‘What route did you take? Remember?’

‘Same way I got there. Trolleybus into town, then walked a bit.’

‘Have to wait long for the trolleybus?’ Brady asked, while his Southern accent became, to my ear at least, more of a mocking-bird than a regional digression.

‘Not that I remember.’

‘How long?’

‘Five minutes. Maybe longer.’

I could not remember one occasion until now when Barley had pleaded an imperfect memory.

‘Many people in line?’

‘Not many. A few. I didn’t count.’

‘The trolleybus runs every ten minutes. The ride into town takes another ten. The walk to the Europe, at your pace, ten. Our people have timed it all ways up. Ten’s the outside. But according to Mr. and Mrs. Henziger, you didn’t show up in their hotel room till fifteen fifty-five. That leaves us with quite a tidy hole, Barley. Like a hole in time. Mind telling me how we’re going to fill it? I don’t expect you went on a drinking spree, did you? You were carrying some pretty valuable merchandise. I’d have thought you wanted to unload it pretty quick.’

Barley was becoming wary and Brady must have seen that he was, for his hospitable Southern smile was offering a new kind of encouragement, the kind that said ‘come clean’.

As to Ned, he was sitting stock still with both feet flat on the ground, and his straight gaze was fixed on Barley’s troubled face.

Only Clive and Sheriton seemed to have pledged themselves to display no emotions at all.

‘What were you doing, Barley?’ Brady said.

‘I mooched,’ said Barley, not lying at all well.

‘Carrying Goethe’s notebook? The notebook he had
entrusted
to you with his life? Mooched? You picked a damned odd afternoon to mooch for fifty minutes, Barley. Where d’you go?’

‘I wandered back along the river. Where we’d been. Paddy had told me to take my time. Not to rush back to the hotel but to go at a leisurely speed.’

‘That’s true,’ Ned murmured. ‘Those were my instructions via Moscow station.’

‘For fifty minutes?’ Brady persisted, ignoring Ned’s intervention.

‘I don’t know how long it was. I wasn’t looking at my watch. If you take time, you take time.’

‘And it didn’t cross your mind that with a tape and a power-pack in your pants, and a notebook full of potentially priceless intelligence material in your carrier bag, the shortest distance between two points might
just
be a straight line?’

Barley was getting dangerously angry but the danger was to himself as Ned’s expression, and I fear my own, could have warned him.

‘Look, you’re not listening, are you?’ he said rudely. ‘I told you. Paddy told me to take time. They trained me that way in London, on our stupid little runs. Take time. Never hurry if you’re carrying something. Better to make the conscious effort to go slowly.’

Yet again, brave Ned did his best. ‘That’s what he was taught,’ he said.

But he was watching Barley as he spoke.

Brady was also watching Barley. ‘So you mooched
away
from the trolleybus stop,
towards
the Communist Party Headquarters in the Smolny Institute – not to mention the Komsomol and a couple of other Party shrines –
carrying
Goethe’s notebook – in your bag? Why did you do that, Barley? Fellows in the field do some damned strange things, you don’t have to tell
me
that, but this strikes me as plain suicidal.’

‘I was obeying orders, blast you, Brady! I was taking my time! How often do I have to tell you?’

But even as he flared it occurred to me that Barley was caught not so much in a lie as in a dilemma. There was too much honesty in his appeal, too much loneliness in his assailed eyes. And Brady to his credit seemed to understand this too, for he showed no sign of triumph at Barley’s distress, preferring to befriend him rather than to goad.

‘You see, Barley, a lot of people around here would attach a heap of suspicion to a gap like that,’ Brady said. ‘They would have a picture of you sitting in somebody’s office or car while that somebody photographed Goethe’s notebook or gave you orders. Did you do any of that? I guess now’s the time to say so if you did. There’s never going to be a good time, but this is about as good as we’re likely to get.’

‘No.’

‘No, you won’t tell?’

‘That’s not what happened.’

‘Well, something happened. Do you remember what was in your mind while you mooched?’

‘Goethe. Publishing him. Bringing down the temple if he had to.’

‘What temple’s that, exactly? Can we get away from the metaphysical a little?’

‘Katya. The children. Taking them with him if he gets caught. I don’t know who has the right to do that. I can’t work it out.’

‘So you mooched and tried to work it out.’

Maybe Barley did mooch, maybe he didn’t. He had clammed up.

‘Wouldn’t it have been more normal to hand over the notebook first and try to work out the ethics afterwards? I’m surprised you were able to think clearly with that damn thing burning a hole in your carrier bag. I’m not suggesting we’re any of us very logical in these situations, but even by the laws of
un
logic, I would feel you had put yourself in a damned uncomfortable situation. I think you did something. I think you think so too.’

‘I bought a hat.’

‘What kind of hat?’

‘A fur hat. A woman’s hat.’

‘Who for?’

‘Miss Coad.’

‘That a girlfriend?’

‘She’s the housekeeper at the safe house in Knightsbridge,’ Ned cut in before Barley could reply.

‘Where’d you buy it?’

‘On the way between the tram stop and the hotel. I don’t know where. A shop.’

‘That all?’

‘Just a hat. One hat.’

‘How long did that take you?’

‘I had to queue.’

‘How long did it take?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What else did you do?’

‘Nothing. I bought a hat.’

‘You’re lying, Barley. Not gravely, but you are undoubtedly lying. What else did you do?’

‘I phoned her.’

‘Miss Coad?’

‘Katya.’

‘Where from?’

‘A post office.’

‘Which one?’