The Other Side of Silence

TWENTY-TWO

Sir John “Sinbad” Sinclair crossed his long legs and straightened the perfect creases on the trousers of his summer-weight suit. His polished brown shoes gleamed in the lamplight, while his short, gray hair sat on top of a long head like an army beret. He looked exactly like what he was: an ex-general in the British army, one of those paternally minded and probably much-loved generals who regarded his men as his sons, and his junior officers as younger brothers. While he listened to the tape, he made notes with a fountain pen and occasionally rubbed a broken nose that was bent toward the left side of his face. He was a handsome man, about sixty years old and rather more vigorous than the other Englishman accompanying him. Patrick Reilly was younger than Sinclair by more than a decade, and while he was probably as tall as Sinbad, he was altogether less physical, with the beginnings of a double chin and a posture that belonged in a plantation chair on the veranda of some Indian bungalow. Where Sinclair’s expression was lively and adventurous, like a well-trained gun dog, Reilly’s was altogether more feline and wary, with small, searching green eyes and a mouth as tight as a Frisian miser’s purse. Neither of them had said very much, but Reilly already struck me as the more intelligent of the two. Both men regarded me with strong suspicion and were more than a little surprised—as was I—when Maugham had earlier introduced me as his “private detective.”

“Winston had one, when he came to stay here at the Villa Mauresque,” added Maugham, by way of explanation and justification. “Can’t remember the fellow’s name.”

“Walter Thompson, I think,” said Sinclair. “Like the advertising agency.”

“No, that was the previous one,” said Reilly. “Don’t you remember? Obtuse sort of chap. We had all that trouble when he wanted to publish a book about his experiences guarding Winston.”

“Oh yes.”

“Well, my detective is also called Walter,” said Maugham. “And he’s here with us tonight because he’s been helping me to deal with this blackmailer, Harold Hebel. I trust you have no objection to his being here because I’ve rather come to rely on his judgment. In any event, I prefer him to remain. Just as I’m sure you feel safer with your two chaps from Special Branch. If that’s what they are.” Maugham nodded in the direction of the French windows, where two largish Englishmen with guns were blundering around in the gardens and trying to look inconspicuous.

“I’ve no idea where they’re from.” Reilly looked at Sinclair. “Do you?”

“Not my department. I drew them both from stores. Standard issue for an excursion like this. They’re from Fort Monckton, I believe. Portsmouth muscle.”

The third visitor from London seemed to belong at the Villa Mauresque in a way Sinclair and Reilly could never have done. Obviously homosexual, Anthony Blunt was about fifty, tall, as thin as a Giacometti bronze figure, with a shock of boyishly combed gray hair and the look of a man who had just tasted a rather indifferently blended sherry. He wore an open-necked white shirt with short sleeves as, unlike the other two, he had removed his jacket since it was a very warm evening. The deep laugh lines around his slit of a mouth were in frequent use. His dry sense of humor was deployed often and he struck me as a man both charming and highly intelligent, albeit deeply untrustworthy. The idea that this man had ever been a spy in MI5 seemed preposterous, but he didn’t look like a blackmailer and I quickly discounted the idea that he might be in cahoots with Hebel to extort money from Maugham. I doubt he could have demanded his morning newspaper with any real menace. He, too, was making copious notes, and when we’d finished listening to the tape for the first time it was Blunt who spoke. His voice was probably as familiar to the English Queen as her own, and I assumed it was probably the way she herself spoke.

“I think the answer to the most obvious question right now—is this Guy Burgess speaking on the tape?—is categorically yes; in my opinion, it is. The details and dates he gives of his early life are, of course, accurate. As is the code name of the Swiss source he was running for MI5 back in nineteen forty-four: Orange. Only Guy and one or two others, including myself, would have known that name. Known, too, that poor Orange did indeed meet a sticky end with the Gestapo in Trier. That’s one thing in favor of this tape’s authenticity. And here’s another, which is paradoxically confirmation by way of a perverse delusion, it being Guy’s perverse delusion, of course.

“In spite of the weight of experience he had behind him to form a contrary opinion, I have to say it was entirely typical of Guy that he might actually believe the BBC would even be capable of broadcasting this tape recording. Guy was always extremely critical of the BBC and all its works. He believed, as I do, that the BBC is one of those institutions that trivializes the serious and it’s impossible to imagine that they would have treated this tape as he could ever have wished them to. I can only assume he must have supposed some left-leaning soul at the BBC, intent on embarrassing the government, would leak the tape to a newspaper such as the Manchester Guardian in order that they might publish an extract from the tape. But even they would have been subject to a Defense Advisory Notice forbidding publication on the grounds of national security. The idea that open criticism of the security services is now permissible in our media is laughable, to say the least. Nor is his admission of the ease with which he helped himself to sensitive files something that could ever be allowed to be heard by the great British public.”

“Yes, that’s very damaging,” admitted Sinclair. “It makes us look like incompetents.”

“The story about Guy driving down to Chartwell to interview Churchill is true,” continued Blunt. “I’d heard it before, of course, and the story is well known, I think. Guy told it often enough in the Reform Club, especially when he was drunk. What is much less well known is that Guy did indeed pursue Churchill’s niece, Clarissa—now Mrs. Anthony Eden. I was vaguely aware of it at the time and of course I was surprised, to say the least, for the obvious reason. I certainly had no idea that he’d been put up to it by his Russian controller, Arnold Deutsch, code name Otto.”

“MI6 has, to the best of my knowledge, never heard of a Russian handler called Arnold Deutsch, code name Otto,” said Sinclair.

“Nor have I,” admitted Reilly. “He might have been one of the great illegals, I suppose. Those Trotskyist Communists not born in Russia who believed in the Comintern. But I thought I’d heard of all of them. No such man as Deutsch, Otto or Arnold, exists in our files. I’m certain of it.”

“How about you, Anthony?” asked Sinclair. “Ever heard of him?”

“No. I’ve never heard of him. Certainly there was no one I remember at Cambridge who fits that description. And none I remember who crossed Guy’s meandering, not to say erratic, path.”

“Of course,” added Reilly, “the Russians might readily own up to him now if he’s dead, murdered by Stalin back in nineteen thirty-eight—a few years after Guy says he was recruited to the NKVD—like most of the illegals. So that would make sense.”

“To me, the stuff about Hector McNeil is very damaging,” said Sinclair.

“Especially as he was a government minister at the time.”

“Certainly to the Labour Party if not to McNeil himself. He died last year.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He was only forty-eight.”

“Christ. Scots, of course. Working-class Glasgow. They never seem to live long, do they?”

“The information about Britain having a list of which Russian cities we might bomb in a preemptive strike is also damaging,” said Reilly. “The British people don’t like to think of themselves as aggressors. That could never have been broadcast. Not in a million years.”

“I would like to know who this man was that Deutsch and Guy met in Paris,” said Sinclair. “The one he says Deutsch was looking to recruit for the comrades.”

“The ones who’d just come back from China?” said Blunt. “Yes. That was rather interesting.”

“It sort of rings a bell with me somewhere,” said Sinclair. “But why?”

“He’d been working for a tobacco company, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out,” said Reilly. “But what interests me more is where the tape comes from. We need to find out from the BBC if they ever received it. And if they did receive it, who gave it to them and what happened to it. One can hardly imagine they wouldn’t have been aware of its importance.”

“On the other hand, if this chap Hebel was given the tape by someone in the KGB,” said Blunt, “the question is what the Soviets can hope to achieve by letting us have it now, five years after Burgess and Maclean went to Russia. Disinformation or disclosure? It’s rather a dilemma.”

“Quite.”

“Walter has an interesting theory about the tape,” said Maugham. “Don’t you, Walter?”

“Yes, sir.” And I quickly told them about Hebel and his history as a practiced blackmailer in Germany. “This just may be a case of blackmail, pure and simple. If so, I can’t imagine anyone better equipped than Hebel to handle it for the Russians.”

“Yes, but what could they want?” asked Reilly.

“Money,” I said. “What else? The Soviet Union is desperately short of foreign currency. And they know how sensitive Anglo-American relations are right now. How anxious you would be to prevent the Americans from having ears on the tape. There’s no telling what’s on the other tapes being offered as part of the deal.”

“They could be even more embarrassing,” said Reilly. “Yes, I do see what you mean.”

“Under the circumstances,” I said, “two hundred thousand dollars looks cheap compared with the diplomatic cost of this tape and others like it appearing in the pages of the New York Times or on some foreign news network.”

“If Walter’s right, then clearly someone in Russian intelligence has a sense of humor,” said Maugham. “The idea of the British government paying off the KGB to stop it from leaking secrets about its number one defector is nothing short of hilarious. At least, it would be if it wasn’t me who was being asked to pay up.”

“Quite,” said Sinclair.

“And Hebel is the man who was in possession of the incriminating photograph that Anthony bought from Willie’s nephew, Robin,” said Reilly. “Is that right? For a thousand pounds.”

“Yes,” said Maugham. “I’m sorry about that, Anthony. You must let me give you the thousand pounds you paid him for it.”

“Please don’t concern yourself too much, Willie,” said Blunt. “As you know, this is not so much an occupational hazard as a constitutional one. The picture and the negative were both purloined from my flat several months ago. In my work as director of the Courtauld Institute I have to entertain a great many students. Sadly, I think one of them must have stolen it and sold it to this awful man. I do have half an idea of who it might have been. An Austrian boy. Which makes it even more disappointing. He’s one of my most promising students.”

“You know this fellow reminds me of the chap in the Sherlock Holmes story,” said Sinclair. “‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.’”

Reilly smiled calmly. “Yes, of course. The king of blackmailers. Rather a good tale that one, I always thought.”

“Milverton was based on a real blackmailer, by the way,” added Blunt. “A man called Howell who was blackmailing the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Howell was found with his throat cut and half a sovereign in his mouth. Which seems fitting, somehow.”

“I wish someone would cut this man Hebel’s throat,” said Maugham. “I suggested to Walter that he should kill him, but alas he declined. Why don’t you have your two friends from Portsmouth pick him up and go to work on him with a red-hot travel iron. It seems to me that you could get all the answers you need from him that way.”

“I don’t think the French would like that very much,” said Reilly. “We’re getting on rather well with them right now, what with all this Suez business. Which makes a very pleasant change. For once we’re on the same page. They wouldn’t like it at all if we acted in such a high-handed fashion as you describe, Willie.”

“Besides,” added Sinclair, “we risk Hebel’s masters responding to that by simply sending one of the tapes to the Americans. Which would be a disaster. That’s the risk you take when you call the blackmailer’s bluff. That the whole thing goes pear-shaped.”

“If this is just an attempt to raise a bit of extra money, then it’s rather clever,” said Reilly. “Willie pays the blackmailer—and pays quickly—to avoid personal embarrassment. We pay him—though rather more slowly, as is typical of government departments—to avoid placing Willie in the invidious position of wondering how to recover his money. And Walter is right, I think. These tapes have been keenly priced. Two hundred thousand is just enough to make it worth their while but not too much to stop Willie from buying them.”