The Other Side of Silence

TWENTY

“Somerset Maugham is being blackmailed,” I told Anne French over a late dinner at her house. “And not for the first time, I think. Previously it was just a few injudicious love letters. But this is much more serious. There’s an old photograph of him and various naked men, some of them now quite well known, I believe. And a tape recording. I can’t give you any details but it’s all very compromising to the old man. There’s a lot of money involved, too.”

“And what’s your role in this affair?” she said. “If you don’t mind me asking. Because, I’ll be honest, this sounds to me to be a little beyond the duties of a normal hotel concierge. Whatever they are. I’m never all that sure.”

“I’m not so sure myself. Mostly I just answer stupid questions. Steal the occasional piece of lingerie from a guest’s room. Throw away a room key now and then. Look after a gun or two. Dispose of a bloodstained dress. The usual stuff. But now and then I try to help people out.”

I’d spent the evening doing quite a bit of that already. Julia Rose’s gun and the key to Spinola’s apartment were safely in my jacket pocket, and as soon as Julia’s green dress was in the hotel incinerator, she’d be in the clear. I wasn’t even looking for a tip.

“Is that what you’d call your role here? Helping out?”

“Sure. I’m a sort of go-between. A human fender, like you see dangling off one of those nice white boats in the harbor down the hill, to stop the paintwork getting scratched against the dockside pontoon or another boat. Only I’m hanging between Maugham and the blackmailer.”

“How did you get that job?”

“I answered an ad in the Nice-Matin. Wanted: Dumb German. Look, it doesn’t matter. But years ago, in Berlin, I was a cop. So this kind of thing isn’t exactly new to me. People have been disappointing me for a long, long time.”

“You certainly give that impression.”

“It’s my face, I know. I worry I’m on my way to looking like Somerset Maugham.” I shrugged. “I don’t know why, but I feel sorry for the old man. Almost everyone around him is looking out for themselves and their bank accounts.”

“And you’re not?”

“No more than is normal for a guy like me.”

“Is he going to pay the blackmailer?”

“It looks that way. Some people are flying down tomorrow from the Foreign Office in London to help verify the tape recording.”

“The Foreign Office? Goodness. It certainly sounds serious.”

“It seems to be.”

“Not to mention dangerous. One reads about this kind of thing in the Sunday newspapers. Demanding money with menaces requires—well, menace, doesn’t it?”

“Usually. That’s certainly true in this case.”

“So please, be careful.”

“I think I’m in no danger. But I’ll let you know for sure, the day after tomorrow.”

“No, really, Walter, if I can help in any way, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Sure. But I really don’t see what you can do.”

“You don’t have to hide your hand from me. Is it that you think I can’t be trusted? We are sleeping together.”

“I know you’re itching to write this biography and I will introduce you to him when all this is over, perhaps in a couple of days. But I can’t betray his confidence. He’s not a bad fellow, I think. I mean, for an Englishman.”

“I thought the Germans were supposed to admire the English.”

“That’s just a story put around by a lot of guilty Englishmen who stay awake nights worrying about how they dropped bombs on children in Dresden and Hamburg.”

“You started it.”

“Strictly speaking, it was Neville Chamberlain who started it.”

We were seated at the table on the terrace. In the dark we could hear some wild pigs snuffling around in the trees behind a wire fence. They came down from the hills in the dark to forage. Many locals regarded them as a nuisance but Anne was fond of them. There was even a nice bronze of a wild boar on the sideboard in her drawing room. She was fond of describing me as her own pig, which suited me very well.

“Come with me, sanglier,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

We left the terrace and crossed the garden to the guesthouse. The wild pigs heard us and ran away, squealing a little. They were French, after all. Meanwhile, Anne switched on the light to reveal a large room that had been perfectly set up for a writer. There were pots full of pencils, lots of bookshelves, several filing cabinets, and, on a table, a pink Smith Corona Silent Super typewriter. Next to this was a smaller pink portable, lying on its open carry case. It looked like the sweet daughter of the larger one. Against one of the walls was another table on which stood a Hallicrafters shortwave radio. Anne was a keen listener to the BBC World Service, where she got most of her news.

“This is my office,” she explained. “Where I do my writing.” She touched the big pink Smith Corona and a ream of paper next to it fondly, almost as if she were wishing she could sit down and start work right then and there.

“Nice. Very nice. I like it a lot. Yes indeed. You know, I think I could write in here myself.”

“I’d like to read that book.”

“Not a book. Too long. Your horoscope, perhaps.”

“And what would my horoscope say?”

“That there’s going to be a handsome man in your life. You just met him. He’s a little older than you’re used to, perhaps, but you’re going to want to see a lot more of him. Hopefully naked. Just as soon as you’ve told him exactly what’s bothering you.”

“You’re good. You should write for a magazine. As a matter of fact, there is something bothering me. The fact is that I owe you an apology. I haven’t been entirely honest with you, Walter.”

“I read that in your horoscope, too.”

“No, really. I am sorry but I haven’t been honest at all.”

I felt the sincerity of what she had said, but it made me uneasy all the same, as if she’d played me like a hand of cards. Not that it mattered, particularly. I always liked my women a bit slippery. And it wasn’t as if she’d used me to get close to Somerset Maugham. When first she’d approached me I hadn’t even known the old man. All she’d wanted was some lousy bridge lessons. Besides, she didn’t know my real name, so I was hardly in a position to feel aggrieved at her lack of honesty.

“That’s not exactly an exclusive club, Anne. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

“When I told you I had an offer of fifty thousand dollars from Victor Weybright to write Maugham’s biography, I didn’t mention that I’d already signed the contract.”

“Congratulations.”

“The fact is, I’ve been working on the old man’s biography for several months. I’m sorry, Walter, but I probably know more about Somerset Maugham than you do. Than you’ll ever know.”

While she spoke Anne pulled out one of the drawers in the cabinet, removed one of the red envelope files, and handed it to me. There was a printed title in the corner that read “MAUGHAM, SYRIE née Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo.”

“These are my research files. For example. This is all about his wife, Syrie.”

“I thought he was— I mean, I didn’t even know he’d been married.”

“When they met, she was Mrs. Wellcome, the wife of a wealthy American pharmaceutical manufacturer. They married in 1914. It was probably Syrie that put him off women for life. They divorced in nineteen twenty-eight. But she never married again so he was obliged by the terms of his settlement to support her financially. She died last year. And not a moment too soon as far as Maugham was concerned. By all accounts he hated her. I think he felt she’d trapped him into marriage. That she’d used him as a way of getting rid of Henry Wellcome.”

Anne showed me another file. It was titled HAXTON, GERALD FREDERICK.

“This name I recognize,” I said. “He was friend and companion number one, I think. Another homosexual Englishman. It’s something to do with the weather they have in England, I expect. They can hide a lot in that fog. Anyway, he sounds like a piece of work.”

“He was. Only he wasn’t English, he was American. From San Francisco. Maugham met him during the first war when Gerald was with the American Red Cross. He visited England only once, for less than a week, in February nineteen nineteen. He went to London, hoping to see Maugham, but was picked up and deported. Never went back.”

“That explains a lot, I guess. I mean, why Maugham has stayed down here for so long.”

“What I want to say to you now, Walter, is this. I really can help. If there’s anything you need to know that you think you can’t ask him, then ask me. The chances are I will know something about it. Like you, I’m an admirer of his. Albeit for different reasons. You just like the man for himself, perhaps. I happen to believe he’s one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. I know I haven’t been very honest with you about all this but for what it’s worth now, I give you my word that anything you tell me will be in confidence until after he’s dead. Or at the very least until you give me permission to use it. Is that fair?”

“I suppose so,” I murmured uncertainly. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll pay you for your help, of course.” She paused. “To cover your expenses.”

“All of a sudden there are so many people trying to pump money into me. I feel like a cigarette machine. And all of them English, too. The odd thing—to me at least—is how little I want it. Look, I’m not doing any of this for money, Anne. Not really. The old man is paying me a basic fee to help him out of a tight spot, and that’s it. And between us, well, what I’m saying is that I’d prefer there was no money at all. If I help you—and I haven’t said I will, yet—it will be because I like you and only because I like you. Nothing else. Money complicates everything. Especially between lovers.”

“Of course. I get that.”

“Do you? I wonder.”

“Look, the files are there if you need to use them. All you have to do is ask.”

“There is something I’d like to know about,” I said.

“Name it.”

“His service with SIS in nineteen seventeen. What can you tell me about that?”

“Actually it was through Syrie that the intelligence connection came about. One of her girlfriends was the mistress of a man in the secret service by the name of Major John Wallinger. It was Wallinger who offered Maugham a job and sent him to Switzerland, in nineteen fifteen. By nineteen sixteen, Maugham was an invaluable field agent working for Sir Mansfield Cumming, who was head of the foreign section of the British secret service and for whom Maugham was running a whole network of spies in southern Germany from the Hotel d’Angleterre in Geneva. Not everyone can do something like that. By nineteen seventeen, after the February Revolution in Russia, he was working out of the British embassy in Petrograd, where he met Alexander Kerensky several times. Kerensky was the leader of the Mensheviks. By now Maugham had several hundred secret agents under his sole control. He left Petrograd two days before the October Revolution, which brought the Bolsheviks to power and which ought to tell you something: that Maugham’s intelligence antennae were very good. Not everyone managed to get out safely. Since then it’s anyone’s guess how much work he’s done for the British, but there’s no doubt that being an internationally famous author is always good cover for a lot of spying. China, Central America, even the United States—Maugham has always maintained a strong connection with his old pals in the British secret service. In many ways he was the ideal agent: He’s an extraordinarily perceptive man, not to mention naturally secretive. He even wrote a novel about spying called Ashenden. I’ll lend it to you if you like.”

“Yes, I’d like to read that.”

She went to the shelves and quickly found me a copy.

Feeling the heat, I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of the door to one of the bathrooms. “I’m impressed,” I said. “At how much you know about him.”

“That’s my job. Tell me, these people from the Foreign Office. Did he say who they are?”

“He mentioned two names. Someone called Sir John Sinclair.”

“Never heard of him.”

“And a man named Blunt. Anthony Blunt.”

“Now, him I’ve heard of. He works for the Queen.”

“Yes, but which one? There are so many queens in this story. I get confused which one’s which.”

She smiled and put her arms around my neck. In the lamplight her brown hair wreathed her face like a lion’s mane. I pushed some of it aside as if it had been a curtain, kissed her tenderly, and pushed my hand between her legs. Gentlemen prefer blondes, alleged a recent movie I’d seen; it was just as well I was no gentleman. She gasped a little and pressed down on my hand. Outside the wild pigs had come back. I could hear them snorting in the trees as they snouted around blindly in the dirt. At least I thought they were the wild pigs; in retrospect they must have been my brain cells.