The Other Side of Silence

SEVEN

“Before the war I worked for the British secret service,” said Somerset Maugham. “Mostly I was based in Geneva. But some of the time I was stationed in what was then Petrograd. I shan’t bore you with the details of my mission but I had a largish team of British agents under my control. Frankly, it’s always been a business that attracted homosexuals, because queers are used to living their lives in secret—at least in England, where to be homosexual can still draw a sentence of up to two years in prison. Being silent about who and what you are is second nature to English queers. Things haven’t improved a lot since the days of Oscar Wilde. That’s why so many queers like Isherwood and Auden went to Berlin in the twenties. Because it was a poof’s paradise. And a good reason why I live here. Anyway, that’s all by the by. I still have a lot of friends in SIS. Many of them, including Sir John Sinclair, the current head of MI6, were my agents. Besides, it’s not the kind of business you ever really retire from.”

I nodded grimly. “Don’t I know it? I’ve been trying to retire from the detective business for years now, but it keeps dogging me.”

“Yes. I am sorry about that.”

“I doubt it.”

Maugham stared into space for a moment and then adjusted his monocle. “Over the years since, I’ve done small jobs here and there for SIS,” he said, continuing. “And I’ve welcomed friends and acquaintances at the Villa Mauresque. In nineteen thirty-seven, not long after I first bought this place, I had a number of friends to stay, including two boys just down from Cambridge University, who came down here in Victor Rothschild’s Bugatti: Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. Subsequently they went to work for MI5: MI5 is the UK’s domestic and counterintelligence agency. Blunt is rather less well known, at least to anyone outside of the world of fine art. But Guy Burgess is now infamous as a result of a press conference in Moscow just a few months ago when he and another man, Donald Maclean, were revealed to have been long-term spies for the Soviet Union—where they’re both now living. You may have read about it in the newspapers. Anyway, Guy is, and always was, notoriously homosexual. For that matter so is Anthony. And there’s a photograph of us and several others lying naked beside my swimming pool. This is the photograph that your friend Harold Hebel is in possession of and which he is threatening to send to the press in England. I can’t tell you the embarrassment it would cause me if it was revealed in the British newspapers that Guy and I were intimate. It’s not just a question of our homosexuality, as I’m sure you can appreciate, Herr Gunther; it’s also a matter of my loyalty to my country. I’m not a Soviet spy. Never have been. But given my service in Petrograd and my friendship with Guy, who knows the trouble the newspapers might cause for me? Certainly I had contact with people who worked for the Petrograd VRK and the Cheka—the forerunner of the KGB—when I was there. So you can see how vulnerable I am. Especially in America. Senator McCarthy hasn’t just been going after Communists but homosexuals, too. The so-called Lavender Scare, for example. So. Visas to the United States might be withdrawn. Lucrative film contracts cancelled. MGM are making a film of one of my books as we speak. And United Artists plan to film a short story of mine next year. I may be the most successful writer in the world but I am not immune to public opinion. To say nothing of the embarrassment it might cause for my poor brother, Frederic, in England, who just happens to be the former Lord Chancellor. We’ve never been close, he and I, but I would like to spare him that, if I can. He’s very old. Even older than I.”

“Where did Hebel get this photograph?”

“There are a number of possible explanations. There were several other men at that particular pool party who might have taken photographs: Dadie Rylands, Raymond Mortimer, Godfrey Winn, Paul Hyslop. But most likely it was my former friend and companion Gerald Haxton. I met Gerald during the Great War and we were together for the rest of his life. He died in nineteen forty-four. Gerald was a wonderful man and I loved him very dearly, but in spite of my generosity Gerald spent too much and was always in debt—mostly to the local casinos. In order to raise some extra cash he may have sold the photograph to a male whore called Louis Legrand with whom he was infatuated. Loulou was here a lot during the thirties, and many of the guests here at the Villa Mauresque—myself included—were his appreciative customers. He’s in the photograph, too. He went to live in Australia after that, doing what I’m not entirely sure. But he turned up here a couple of years ago demanding money for some letters written to him by me and some of my more illustrious friends.”

“And what happened then?”

“I paid him off. With a check.”

“Who handled that business for you?”

“A lawyer in Nice. A Monsieur Gris.”

“To your satisfaction?”

“Entirely. But before you ask I can’t use him again. Unfortunately he died, quite recently.”

“If Louis Legrand had been in possession of the photograph then surely he’d have used it at the time, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, that’s true. But I now suspect he might not have used it because he appears in it. Anyway, he was disappointed with his check, it has to be said, and threatened to come back with something ‘more damaging.’ My lawyer wrote him a letter informing Loulou that if he ever returned with more menacing demands for money we would certainly place the matter in the hands of the police. And since Loulou did have a conviction in France, for pimping, which is illegal in this country, he could easily have been deported.”

“So, would you say it’s possible that he decided to use the photograph at one remove and sold it to Harold Hebel?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Do you have a print you can show me?”

Maugham went to his refectory desk and pulled open a drawer. He took out a largish black-and-white photograph and handed it to me, without hesitation or embarrassment, which, for anyone but him, would probably have taken some nerve. But at eighty-two I guess he was through apologizing or feeling ashamed of what he was.

It was a nice swimming pool; at each corner there was an ornamental lead pinecone, with a diving board at one end and, at the other, a marble mask of Neptune as big as an archery target. There was water in the pool, too. Gallons of it. I tried to keep my eyes on the water, but it was difficult. Any self-respecting satrap would have been quite satisfied with the swimming pool’s obvious luxury and, quite probably, the many naked men and boys in various stages of arousal, who were grouped around the mask of Neptune and paying particular priapic attention to the god’s open mouth. As obscene photographs go, it was up there with anything drawn by Aretino at his most provocative. I’d seen worse but not since the days of the Weimar Republic, when Berlin was the world capital of pornography.

“Who’s who?” I asked. “It’s a little difficult to tell anyone apart.”

“That’s Guy there,” said Maugham. “That’s Anthony. And that’s Loulou.”

“Boys will be boys, I suppose.”

“Quite.”

“Is he offering you the negative?”

“Yes.”

“How much does he want for this?”

“Fifty thousand American dollars. In cash. For the negative and the prints.”

“That’s a lot of money for a holiday snap.”

“Which is precisely why I want someone trustworthy to handle the matter for me. Someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing. And who’s not going to get too nervous or overexcited. Someone like you. At least that’s what Hebel says. He tells me you have experience of dealing with blackmailers. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“In Berlin?”

“Yes.”

“Would you care to tell me about that, perhaps? Just out of interest, I mean. If I’m going to give you five thousand dollars’ commission I think I have a right to know what kind of service I’m buying, don’t you?”

“That’s the thing about blackmail,” I said. “You’ll soon find that you don’t have any rights at all.” I shrugged. “But sure. I’ll tell you. Not that there’s much to tell. This was quite a few years ago, mind, so unlike that photograph—unfortunately—the story’s a little grainy now. It must have been January nineteen thirty-eight. Long after I’d quit the police, and a year or two after I’d left the Adlon. When I was working as a private investigator in Berlin and before—well, that doesn’t matter. But there’s one detail you know already. The identity of the blackmailer. You see, a leopard doesn’t change its spots. The blackmailer was a man called Harold Heinz Hennig, but I fear you know him rather better as Harold Heinz Hebel.”