The Russia House (37 page)

Ned had put a hand across his forehead as if to shield his eyes from the sun. But the storm had taken hold, and outside the window both sea and sky were black.

‘Don’t know. Big place. Phone cabins under a sort of iron balcony.’

‘You called her at her office or at her home?’

‘Office. It was office hours. Her office.’

‘Why don’t we hear you do that on the body tapes?’

‘I switched them off.’

‘What was the purpose of the call?’

‘I wanted to make sure she was all right.’

‘How did you go about that?’

‘I said hullo. She said hullo. I said I was in Leningrad, I’d met my contact, business was going along fine. Anyone listening would think I was talking about Henziger. Katya would know I was talking about Goethe.’

‘Makes pretty good sense to me,’ said Brady with a forgiving smile.

‘I said, so goodbye again till the Moscow book fair and take care. She said she would. Take care, I mean. Goodbye.’

‘Anything else?’

‘I told her to destroy the Jane Austens I’d given her. I said they were the wrong edition. I’d bring her some new ones.’

‘Why’d you do that?’

‘The Jane Austens had questions for Goethe printed into the text. They were duplicates of the questions in the paperback he wouldn’t take from me. In case she got to him and I didn’t. They were a danger to her. Since he wasn’t going to answer them anyway, I didn’t want them lying around her house.’

Nothing stirred in the room. Just the sea wind making the shutters crack, and puffing in the eaves.

‘How long did your call with Katya take, Barley?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How much money did it cost you?’

‘I don’t know. I paid at the desk. Two roubles something. I talked a lot about the book fair. So did she. I wanted to listen to her.’

This time it was Brady’s turn to keep quiet.

‘I had a feeling that as long as I was talking, life was normal. She was all right.’

Brady took a while, then against all our expectation closed the show: ‘So, small talk,’ he suggested as he began to pack his wares into his grandfather’s attaché case.

‘That’s it,’ Barley agreed. ‘Small talk. Chitchat.’

‘As between acquaintances,’ Brady suggested, popping the case shut. ‘Thank you, Barley. I admire you.’

We sat in the huge drawing-room, Brady at our centre, Barley gone.

‘Drop him down a hole, Clive,’ Brady advised, in a voice still steeped in courtesy. ‘He’s flakey, he’s a liability and he thinks too damn much. Bluebird is making waves you would not believe. The fiefdoms are up in arms, the Air generals are in spasm, Defense say he’s a charter to give away the store, the Pentagon’s accusing the Agency of promoting bogus goods. Your only hope is throw this man out and put in a professional, one of ours.’

‘Bluebird won’t deal with a professional,’ said Ned, and I heard the fury simmering in his voice and knew it was about to boil over.

Skelton too had a suggestion. It was the first time I had heard him speak, and I had to crane my head to catch his cultured college voice.

‘Fuck Bluebird,’ he said. ‘Bluebird’s got no business calling the shots. He’s a traitor and a guilt-driven crazy and who knows what else he is besides? Hold his feet to the fire. Tell him if he stops producing we’ll sell him to his own people and the girl with him.’

‘If Goethe’s a good boy, he gets the jackpot, I’ll see to it,’ Brady promised. ‘A million’s no problem. Ten million’s better. If you frighten him enough and pay him enough, maybe the neanderthals will believe he’s on the level. Russell, give my love. Clive, it’s been a pleasure. Harry. Ned.’

With Skelton at his side he started to move towards the door.

But Ned wasn’t saying goodbye. He didn’t raise his voice or bang the table but neither did he hold back the dark glow in his eyes or the edge of outrage in his words.

‘Brady!’

‘Something on your mind, Ned?’

‘Bluebird won’t be bullied. Not by them, not by you. Blackmail may look nice in the planning room but it won’t play on the ground. Listen to the tapes if you don’t believe me. Bluebird’s in search of martyrdom. You don’t threaten martyrs.’

‘So what do I do with them, Ned?’

‘Did Barley lie to you?’

‘Not unduly.’

‘He’s straight. It’s a straight case. Do you remember straight? While you’re thinking round corners, Bluebird’s going straight for goal. And he’s chosen Barley as his running mate. Barley’s the only chance we have.’

‘He’s in love with the girl,’ said Brady. ‘He’s complicated. He’s a liability.’

‘He’s in love with hundreds of girls. He proposes to every girl he meets. That’s who he is. It’s not Barley who thinks too much. It’s you people.’

Brady was interested. Not in his own conviction, if he had any, but in Ned’s.

‘I’ve done all kinds,’ Ned went on. ‘So have you. Some cases are never straight, even when they’re over. This one was straight from the first day, and if anyone is shoving it off course, we are.’

I had never heard him speak with so much fervour. Neither had Sheriton, for he was transfixed, and perhaps it was for this reason that Clive felt obliged to interpose himself with a fanfare of civil servant’s exit music. ‘Yes, well I think we have ample food for thought here, Brady. Russell, we must talk this through. Perhaps there’s a middle way. I rather think there may be. Why don’t we take soundings? Kick it around a little. Run over it one more time?’

But nobody had left. Brady, for all Clive’s ushering platitudes, had remained exactly where he was, and I observed a raw kindliness in his features that was like the real man beneath the mask.

‘Nobody hired us for our brotherly love, Ned. That’s just not what they put us spooks on earth for. We knew that when we signed up.’ He smiled. ‘Guess if plain decency was the name of the game, you’d be running the show in place of Deputy Clive here.’

Clive was not pleased by this suggestion, but it did not prevent him from escorting Brady to his jeep.

For a moment I thought I was alone with Ned and Sheriton, until I saw Randy our host framed in the doorway, wearing an expression of star-struck disbelief. ‘Was that
the
Brady?’ he asked breathlessly. ‘The Brady who did like
everything
?’

‘It was Greta Garbo,’ Sheriton said. ‘Go away, Randy. Please.’

I should play you more of that steadying music while Sheriton’s young men take Barley back again, and walk with him on the beach and joke with him and produce the street map of Leningrad for him, and painstakingly log the very shop where Miss Coad’s lynx hat was bought, and how he paid for it and where the receipt might have got to if there ever was one, and whether Barley had declared the hat to customs at Gatwick, and the very post office where he must have made his telephone call.

I should describe to you the spare hours Ned and I spent sitting around Barley’s boat-house in the evenings, hunting for ways to shake him from his introspections and finding none.

For Barley’s journey away from us – I felt it even then – had not flagged from the moment when he first agreed to be interrogated. He had become a solitary pilgrim, but where to? Where from? Who for?

Then comes the morning following – a real sparkler, as they call it there; I think it must have been the Thursday – when the little plane from Logan airport brought us Merv and Stanley in time for their favourite breakfast of pancakes and bacon and pure maple syrup.

Randy’s kitchen was well acquainted with their tastes.

They were bearish, kindly men of the soil, with pumice-stone faces and big hands, and they arrived looking like a vaudeville duo, wearing dark trilby hats and humping a salesman’s suitcase which they kept close to them while they ate and later set down gingerly on the red-painted floor of the billiards room.

Their profession had made their faces dull, but they were the type our own Service likes best – straightforward, loyal, uncomplicated foot-soldiers with a job to do and kids to feed, who loved their country without making a to-do of it.

Merv’s hair was cropped to a moleskin fuzz. Stanley had bandy legs and wore some sort of loyal badge in his lapel.

‘You can be Jesus Christ, Mr. Brown. You can be a fifteen-hundred-a-month typist,’ Sheriton had said as we stood around in Barley’s boat-house in a state of shifty supplication. ‘It’s voodoo, it’s alchemy, it’s the ouija board, it’s reading fucking tea-leaves. And if you don’t go through with it, you’re dead.’

Clive spoke next. Clive could find reasons for anything. ‘If he’s nothing to hide, why should he be bothered?’ he said. ‘It’s their version of the Official Secrets Act.’

‘What does Ned say?’ Barley asked.

Not Nedsky any more. Ned.

There was a defeat in Ned’s reply that I shall never forget, and in his eyes as well. Brady’s interrogation of Barley had shaken his faith in himself, and even in his joe.

‘It’s your choice,’ he said lamely. And as if to himself, ‘A pretty disgusting one too, if you ask me.’

Barley turned to me, exactly as he had done before, when I had first asked him whether he would submit to the American questioning.

‘Harry? What do I do?’

Why did he insist on my opinion? It was unfair. I expect I looked as uncomfortable as Ned. I certainly felt so, though I managed a light-hearted shrug. ‘Either humour them and go along with it or tell them to go to hell. It’s up to you,’ I replied, much as I had on the first occasion.

Thus the eternal lawyer.

Barley’s stillness again. His indecision slowly giving way to resignation. His separation from us as he stares through the window at the sea. ‘Well, let’s hope they don’t catch me telling the truth,’ he says.

He stands up and flips his wrists around, loosening his shoulders, while the rest of us like so many butlers confirm among ourselves by furtive looks and nods that our master has said yes.

At their work Merv and Stanley had the respectful nimbleness of executioners. Either they had brought the chair with them or the island kept one for them as a permanency, an upright wooden throne with a scalloped arm-rest on the left side. Merv set it handy for the electric socket while Stanley spoke to Barley like a grandfather.

‘Mr Brown, sir, this is not a situation where you should expect hostility. It is our wish you should not be troubled by a relationship with your examiners. The examiner is not adversarial, he is an impartial functionary, it’s the machine that does the work. Kindly remove your jacket, no need to roll back your sleeves, sir, or unbutton your shirt, thank you. Very easy now, please, nice and relaxed.’

Meanwhile with the greatest delicacy Merv slipped a doctor’s blood-pressure cuff over Barley’s left bicep until it was flush with the artery inside his elbow. Then he inflated the cuff until the dial said fifty millimetres while Stanley, with the devotion of a boxing second, fitted a one-inch diameter rubberised tube round Barley’s chest, careful to avoid the nipples so that it didn’t chafe. Then Stanley fitted a second tube across Barley’s abdomen while Merv slipped a double finger stall over the two central fingers of Barley’s left hand, with an electrode inside it to pick up the sweat glands and the galvanised skin response and the changes of skin temperature over which the subject, provided he has a conscience, has no control – or so preach the converted, for I had had it all explained to me by Stanley beforehand, much as a concerned relative will inform himself in advance about the details of a loved one’s surgical operation. Some polygraphers, Harry, they liked an extra band around the head like an encephalograph. Not Stanley. Some polygraphers, they liked to shout and rage at the subject. Not Stanley. Stanley reckoned that a lot of people got disturbed by an accusatory question, whether or not they were guilty.

‘Mr. Brown, sir, we ask you to make no movement, fast or slow,’ Merv was saying. ‘If you do make such a movement we are liable to get a violent disturbance in the pattern which will necessitate further testing and a repetition of the questions. Thank you. First we like to establish a norm. By norm we mean a level of voice, a level of physical response, imagine a seismograph, you are the earth, you provide the disturbance. Thank you, sir. Answer to be “yes” or “no” only, please, always answer truthfully. We break off after every eight questions, that will be to loosen the pressure cuff in order to prevent discomfort. While the cuff is loosened we shall engage in normal conversation, but no humour, please, no undue excitation of any kind. Is your name Brown?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have a different name from the one you are using?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you British born, Mr. Brown?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you fly here, Mr. Brown?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you come here by boat, Mr. Brown?’

‘No.’

‘Have you truthfully answered my questions so far, Mr. Brown?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you intend to answer my questions truthfully throughout the remainder of this test, Mr. Brown?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you,’ said Merv, with a gentle smile while Stanley released the air from the cuff. ‘Those are what we call the non-relevant questions. Married?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘Kids?’

‘Two, actually.’

‘Boys or girls?’

‘One of each.’

‘Wise man. Alrighty?’ He began pumping up the cuff again. ‘Now we go relevant. Easy now. That’s nice. That’s very nice.’

In the open suitcase the four spectral wire claws described their four mauve skylines across the graph paper, while the four black needles nodded inside their dials. Merv had taken up a sheaf of questions and settled himself at a small table at Barley’s side. Not even Russell Sheriton had been allowed to know the questions the faceless desk inquisitors in Langley had selected. No casual tampering by Barley’s terrestrial cohabitants was to be allowed to breathe upon the mystic powers of the box.

Merv spoke tonelessly. Merv, I was sure, prided himself upon the impartiality of his voice. He was the March of Time. He was Houston Control.

‘I am knowingly engaged in a conspiracy to supply untrue information to the intelligence services of Britain and the United States of America. Yes, I am so engaged. No, I am not so engaged.’