The Other Side of Silence

FOURTEEN

Up at the Villa Mauresque they were finishing dinner; at least they were until I showed up with the money and the photograph. For a while I let them all think I’d done a great job of getting back the prints and the neg and somehow the fifty thousand dollars as well. I couldn’t have felt more popular there if I’d been Noël Coward wearing just a pair of sandals. I hadn’t the heart to tell any of them that the whole thing had been merely the first act in an opera that threatened to be longer than Tristan und Isolde. So we sat on the terrace under the starry sky, watched by a Pekingese dog and a couple of blackamoor wooden bishops, and I ate some corned-beef hash and drank amarone and even permitted Somerset Maugham to put my hand to his pink, rictus mouth and say that whatever they were paying me at the Grand Hôtel, he would double it if I came to work for him at the Villa Mauresque.

“Doing what, exactly?” I asked.

The alligator eyes narrowed in their folds of brown skin as he considered the proposition. “I’m a r-rich man,” he said, “and it strikes me that I need protection of some kind. Especially at my time of life. I might be kidnapped. Or blackmailed again. And there are always unwanted visitors at the front gates wanting a book signed. You have no idea. But if you became my security adviser, Herr Wolf, then I’d feel a lot safer. And not just me. My guests, too. Some very famous people come and stay here from time to time. Very famous and just as often even richer than I am. Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Zipkin, the Queen of Spain. And then there’s my art collection. As you will doubtless have observed, I have paintings by Gauguin, Matisse, Renoir, Pissarro, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Monet, Utrillo. A man with a gun is just what the place needs most, I think.”

“Who painted that one?” I said.

But Robin Maugham agreed enthusiastically. “This is a brilliant idea, Uncle,” he said. “Your very own Simon Templar.”

“You don’t know the first thing about me,” I said, with no idea of who Simon Templar was. “I am not a good man.”

“Look around,” said Searle. “There are no honors and decorations coming the way of anyone in this house.”

“No, indeed,” said Robin.

“I know that you returned with fifty thousand dollars I thought I’d never see again,” said Maugham. “I think that b-bespeaks a certain devotion to principle.”

“Then try this, sir. I’m not sure I could handle the predominantly male atmosphere up here at the villa. Pool parties and rent boys.”

“We’re much too old for all those shenanigans now,” said Maugham. “Aren’t we, Alan?”

“Speak for yourself,” said Searle.

“What about you, Mr. Wolf? Is there anyone in your life? A woman, perhaps.”

“You managed to make that sound queer,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “To us.”

“I’m not interested in anything like that anymore.”

“You sound exactly like a man with a broken heart,” he said. “You fascinate me, Mr. Wolf. Who was the woman who made you so bitter?”

I laughed. “It took more than just one.”

“Love is just a dirty trick that’s played on us to achieve a continuation of the species,” said Maugham. “That’s what I think.”

I shook my head. “It isn’t like that at all, Mr. Maugham. It isn’t something simply mechanistic, as you put it. Love and hate, human feelings and emotion, they’re all the same God-given illusion. It’s what convinces us that we’re here and that we count for something in this universe. When we don’t. Not for a second. Everything we feel and that we think—it’s all the same cosmic joke. You should know that more than most people, Mr. Maugham. You’ve been playing God and inflicting cosmic jokes on your characters for sixty years.”

“I’d no idea you were a philosopher, Mr. Wolf.”

“I’m a German, Mr. Maugham. For us, philosophy is a way of life.”

I’d finished my dinner and now I asked him to show me the garden, and he took his pipe and I my cigarettes down to the grotto by the swimming pool, where there was a large Chinese bronze gong that sounded once a day to announce the cocktail hour. I’d missed that, of course, but Maugham had thoughtfully asked Ernest to prepare me a jug of cold gimlets and while we sat there, we talked and I drank myself into a slightly better mood. Or so I thought.

“One of the disadvantages to playing G-God,” said Maugham, “is that I notice much more than most people. God is merely all-seeing. But I have other senses, too, and while my hearing may not be as good as it was, I can still detect a certain weltschmerz in your voice and manner that was not there before. Which is saying something, I can tell you. At the best of times you’re just bone dry. But tonight you make Heinrich Heine sound positively full of the joys of spring. So then. It’s not over, is it? With this man Hebel, I mean. It was kind of you to pretend it was, but there’s something else he’s got for sale. Something bigger than that photograph, I can tell.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you for sparing the boys,” he said. “That was decent of you. They do worry so. But I think you’d better tell me now, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” I lit another cigarette. “It has to do with your friend Guy Burgess, again.”

“He’s not my friend, let’s make that quite clear now, shall we? The man is an absolute scoundrel.”

“Clear. Well, it seems that after he and his fellow spy, Donald Maclean, escaped from England in nineteen fifty-one, they traveled by boat to Saint-Malo, where they were met by KGB officers and then driven south to Bordeaux. There they boarded a Soviet freighter bound for Leningrad. According to Hebel, that’s a voyage of several days, during which time they were debriefed, at length and separately, by KGB case officers as there was still some suspicion that the British had been complicit in the escape of these two traitors. Anyway, that debriefing was recorded on tape and it’s one of these tapes that Hebel’s now offering for sale. The unexpurgated confessions of Guy Burgess, is how Hebel described it to me. This is just one tape, but there are others being offered as part of the deal.”

“Good God,” said Maugham. “Dynamite, in other words. Absolute dynamite. The man was a Russian spy at the heart of MI5 for two decades. There’s no telling what he knows.”

“I think that’s the point of the tape. He is telling. All of it. I haven’t heard the tape but I’m to bring a copy here to you tomorrow, after it comes into my possession. He’s even lending you the tape recorder to play it on.”

“But what’s this tape got to do with me, Walter? I haven’t seen Guy Burgess in almost twenty years.”

“Look, this is as much as I know about it, sir. Apparently, Guy Burgess is a drunk and his conversation on the tape—which was described to me as uncensored and wide ranging—includes the allegations that the British suspected he was a spy for years but let him go in order not to compromise relations with the Americans; that he was here for an orgy at the Villa Mauresque, in nineteen thirty-seven. And that immediately following this, Burgess joined the BBC and then MI6. It seems as if the photograph was just the lure to get you to bite. As a way of involving you.”

“If any of this is true, how on earth did Hebel come to be in possession of this tape? And what the fuck does he want me to do about it? I’m not in the service anymore.”

“Look, without hearing the tape, my opinion is this: The whole thing has been cooked up by the Russians to blackmail the British secret service using Burgess and you as cutouts. You’re the back door to MI6 and MI5.”

“Story of my life,” muttered Maugham.

“Harold Heinz Hebel is possibly working for Soviet intelligence. The GRU. The KGB. Who knows which service? But it has to be a strong possibility that he came by this tape because the Russians gave it to him. He tells me he wants money for the tape or else he’ll send it to the New York Times.”

“How much money does he want?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I expect Hebel thinks you are best placed to pay the blackmail money yourself and then persuade—not to say blackmail—the British to pay you that money back. There’s Hebel’s security to think about, too. It’s one thing blackmailing the British down here on the French Riviera. It would be something else to try it in London.”

“Could the Russians really be in it for the money? Nothing else?”

“I don’t know. Look, this isn’t supposed to be a joke, but the opportunities for the USSR to trade with capitalist countries for some much needed foreign currency are limited. It just might be that extortion is their best export right now.”

“And who better to extort money from than the British security services?” said Maugham. “It’s like something out of a novel by John Buchan. Yes. I may not be in the security service loop anymore, but undeniably the last few years have been an intelligence disaster for my country. Richard Hannay may save the day for queen and country, but there are plenty of others who have managed to comprehensively fuck it up: Alan May, Burgess and Maclean, and the fellow now serving fourteen years in prison for handing all our atomic secrets over to the Russians—Klaus Fuchs. By all accounts, the American FBI thinks the British security services are a contradiction in terms, a laughingstock, and they’re probably not wrong. A lot has changed since my own service in nineteen seventeen. We were good then. Formidable. Back then boys went up to Cambridge from their public schools to learn how to be lawyers and civil servants, not Russian spies. Undoubtedly the British government would indeed prefer to keep all of this very quiet. Especially now there’s a possibility of our two countries renewing their cooperation on atomic research. And while there’s no danger of any of the British newspapers being permitted to publish any of these revelations, American papers are a lot harder to control. Two hundred thousand is probably cheap next to the price of what it’s costing Britain to develop an atomic bomb on its own account. Having said that, two hundred thousand is a lot of money for me. A hell of a lot.” He sighed. “Suppose I stump up the cash and the British refuse to reimburse me? What then? Some of these Whitehall people are very tight with money, you know. I mean, really stingy.”

“Then you send it to the New York Times yourself.”

“Would that make me a traitor? I don’t know.”

“I’d say a good lawyer might convincingly argue that you bought the tape to protect the interests of your country. But that your country let you down.”

“Yes, there is that argument, I suppose.”

I shrugged. “Wait and hear the tape. Who knows? Maybe you’ll think it’s someone else’s problem after you’ve listened to it.”

“Tell me about this man, Harold Heinz Hebel. What else do you know about him?”

“He’s a rat who’s giving rats a bad name.”

“You already told me how he blackmailed that poor German captain, von Frisch, in nineteen thirty-eight. But you also said that you met him again, during the war.”

“That’s right. It was East Prussia. The winter of nineteen forty-four to forty-five. And that was the last time I spoke to him until this morning at the Grand Hôtel.”

“I think that before we go any further you’re going to have to tell me about that. In fact, you need to tell me all you know about our friend Harold Hebel. If I’m going to contact my friends in MI6 to ask for their help here, they will certainly need to know everything you know about this awful man.”

“He’s an opportunistic survivor who lives near humans and needs to be exterminated because he carries disease. He’s a rat. A rat that deserves to be drowned in a bucket. Now, let me explain why. Let me tell you about what happened in Königsberg.”