The Russia House

CHAPTER 12

We flew to the island in a small plane, arriving at dusk. The small plane belonged to a grand American corporation. Nobody said who owned the island. It was narrow and wooded, its middle sagged into the sea and its ends were propped up by conical peaks, so that my impression from the air was of a Bedouin tent collapsing into the Atlantic. I put it at two miles long. We saw the New England mansion and its grounds at one end, and the tiny white dock at the other, though I learned later that the mansion was called a summer house because nobody went there in winter. It had been built at the turn of the century by a rich Bostonian, in the days when such people called themselves rusticators. We felt the wings rock and smelt salt sea through the rattling cabin windows. We saw sunspots flicking over the waves like searchlights at a tattoo, and cormorants warring in the wind. We saw a light-beacon on the mainland to the west. We had been following the coast of Maine for fifty-eight minutes by my watch. The trees came up either side of us, the sky vanished, and suddenly we were bouncing and swinging along a grass avenue with Randy and his boys waiting with a jeep at the end of it. Randy was wholesome as only privileged Americans can be. He wore a windcheater and a tie. I felt I knew his mother.

'I'm your host here, gentlemen, for as long as you elect to stay, and welcome to our island.' He shook Barley's hand first. They must have shown him photographs. 'Mr. Brown, sir, this is a real honour. Ned? Harry?'

'Jolly nice of you,' said Barley.

The pine trees, as we wound down the hillside, stood black against the sea. The boys followed in a second car.

'You gentlemen fly British? Mrs. Thatcher really got a hold of that line!' said Randy.

'Time she went down with the ship,' Barley said.

Randy laughed as if laughing were something he'd learned on the course. Brown was Barley's workname for the trip. Even his passport, which Ned carried, said that he was Brown.

We bumped across a causeway to the gatehouse. The gates opened and closed behind us. We were on our own headland. At the top of it stood the mansion lit by arc-lights hidden in the bushes. Lawns and wind-burned shrubs fell away from it to either side. The posts of a broken jetty stepped precariously out to sea. Randy parked thejeep and, taking Barley's luggage, led us along an illuminated path between hydrangeas to a boat-house. On our crossing to Boston, Barley had dozed and drunk and groaned at the film. On our small plane he had frowned at the New England landscape as if its beauty troubled him. But once we landed he seemed to re-enter his own world.

'Mr. Brown, sir, my orders are to accommodate you in the bridal suite,' said Randy.

'Can't think of anywhere nicer, old boy,' said Barley politely.

'You really say that, Mr. Brown: old boy?'

Randy ushered us through a stone-flagged hall to a captain's cabin. The style was designer homestead. A reproduction brass bed stood in a corner, a reproduction scrubwood writing desk at the window. Doubtful ship's fittings hung on the walls. In the alcove where the allAmerican kitchen was, Barley identified the refrigerator, pulled it open and peered hopefully inside.

'Mr. Brown likes a bottle of Scotch in his room of an evening, Randy. If you've such a thing in your locker he'd be grateful.'

The summer house was a museum of golden childhoods. In the porch, honey-coloured croquet mallets lay propped against a dusty goat-cart laden with lobster buoys gathered from the beach. There were smells of beeswax and leather. In the hall, portraits of young men and women in broad hats hung beside primitive paintings of whalers. We followed Randy up a wide polished staircase, Barley trailing behind us. On each landing, arched windows bordered with stained glass madejewelled gateways to the sea. We entered a corridor of blue bedrooms. The largest was reserved for Clive. From our balconies we could look down the gardens to the boat-house and across the sea to the mainland. The dusk was turning to dark.

In a white-raftered dining room, a Langley vestal managed not to look at us while she served Maine lobster and white wine.

While we ate, Randy explained the rules of the house. 'No fraternising with the staff, please, gentlemen, just a good morning and hullo. Anything needs saying to them, best let me say it for you. The guards are for your convenience and safety, gentlemen, but we would like you to remain within the confines of the property. Please. Thank you.'

Dinner and speeches over, Randy took Ned to the communications room and I walked Barley back to the boathouse. A fierce wind was ripping over the gardens. As we passed in and out of the light-cones Barley seemed to be smiling into it recklessly. Boys with handsets watched us pass.

'How about chess?' I asked him as we reached his door.

I wished I could see his face more clearly but I had lost it, just as I had lost his mood. I felt a pat on the arm as he wished me goodnight. His door opened and closed again, but not before I had glimpsed the spectral figure of a sentry standing not two yards from us in the darkness.

'A wise lawyer, a fine officer,' Russell Sheriton advised me next morning in a reverential murmur, knowing I was neither, as his strong, soft palms enveloped my hand. 'One of the true greats. Harry, how are you doing?'

Little had changed in him since his tour of duty in London: the rings beneath the eyes a little doggier, a little sadder, the blue suit a size or two larger, the same whiteshirted paunch. The same mortician's aftershave, six years on, anointed the Agency's newest head of Soviet operations.

A group of his young men stood respectfully apart from him, clutching their travel bags and looking like stranded passengers at an airport. Clive and Bob were mounted either side of him like cohorts. Bob looked older by ten years. A chastened smile had replaced his old-world self- assurance. He greeted us too effusively, as if he had been warned to stay away from us.

The Island Conference, as it euphemistically became known, was about to begin.

There is an underlying pleasantness to the events of the next days, an air of good men going about their business, which I am in danger of forgetting as I recall the rest.

It is the hardest point for me to make, yet I owe it to Barley to try, for he never took against our hosts - he never blamed them for anything that happened to him, then or later. He could grumble about Americans in general, but no sooner had he met them individually than he spoke of them as decent fellows all. There was not a man among them he wouldn't have been happy to swap a drink with any evening at the local, if we'd had one. And of course Barley always saw the force of any argument that was directed against him, just as he was always vastly impressed by other people's industry.

And my goodness, were they industrious! If numbers, money and sheer endeavour alone could have produced intelligence, the Agency would have had it by the cartload - except that, alas, the human head is not a cart, and there is such a thing as unintelligence as well.

And how deeply they yearned to be loved! – and Barley warmed immediately to their need. Even as they tore into him, they needed to be loved. And by Barley, too! just as to this day they need to be loved for all their staged putsches, destabilisations and wild adventures against The Enemy Out There.

Yet it was this very mystery of good hearts turned inside out that gave our week its underlying terror.

Years ago I talked to a man who had been flogged, an English mercenary who was doing us a few favours in Africa and needed paying off. What he remembered most was not the lash but the orange juice they gave him afterwa~rds. He remembers being helped back to his hut, he remembers being laid face down on the straw. But what he really remembers is the glass of fresh orange juice that a warder set at his head, then crouched beside him, waiting patiently, till he was strong enough to drink some. Yet it was this same warder who had flogged him.

We too had our glasses of orange juice. And we had our decent warders, even if they were disguised behind headsets and a surface animosity that quickly melted before Barley's warmth. Within a day of our arrival, the same guards with whom we were forbidden to fraternise were tiptoeing at any odd moment in and out of Barley's boat-house, stealing a Coke or a Scotch from him before slipping back to their posts. They sensed he was that kind of man. And as Americans they were fascinated by his celebrity.

There was one old hand called Edgar, an ex-Marine, who gave him quite a run for his money at chess. Barley, I learned later, got his name and address out of him, against every known canon of the trade, so that they could play a contest by post 'when all this is over'.

Not only warders either. In Sheriton's chorus of young men, as in Sheriton himself, there was a moderation that was like an even beat of sanity against the hysterical highs and lows of those whom Sheriton himself dubbed collectively the egomaniacs.

But that, I suppose, is the tragedy of great nations. So much talent bursting to be used, so much goodness longing to come out. Yet all so miserably spoken for, that sometimes we could scarcely believe it was America speaking to us at all.

But it was. The lash was real.

The interrogations took place in the billiards room. The wooden floor had been painted dark red for dancing and the billiards table replaced by a ring ofchairs. But an ivory scorer and a row of initialled cue-cases still lined the wall, and the long downlight made a pool at the centre where Barley was obliged to sit. Ned fetched him from the boat-house.

'Mr. Brown, sir, I am proud to shake your hand and I have just decided that my name for the duration of our relationship is Haggarty,' Sheriton declared. 'I took one look at you, I felt Irish. Don't ask me why.' He was leading Barley at a good pace across the room. 'Most of all, I wish to congratulate you. You have all the virtues: memory, observation, British grit, saxophone.'

This in one hypnotic flow while Barley grinned sheepishly and allowed himself to be settled in the place of honour.

But Ned already sat stiffly, arms folded across his chest, and Clive, though he was of the circle, had managed to paint himself out of the picture. He sat among Sheriton's young men and had pushed his chair back till they hid him.

Sheriton remained standing before Barley and was talking down at him, even when his words said he was addressing someone else. 'Clive, would you permit me to bombard Mr. Brown with some impertinent questions? Ned, will you tell Mr. Brown, please, that he is in the United States of America and that if he doesn't care to answer anything he needn't, because his silence will be taken as clear evidence of his guilt?'

'Mr. Brown can look after himself,' Barley said - but still grinning, still not quite believing in the tension.

'He can? That's great, Mr. Brown! Because for the next couple of days that's exactly what we hope you'll do!'

Sheriton went to the sideboard and poured himself some coffee and came back with it. His voice struck the calmer note of common sense. 'Mr. Brown, we are buying a Picasso, okay? Everybody round this room is buying the same Picasso. Blue, saignant, well-done, what the fuck? There are about three people in the world who understand it. But when you get to the bottom line there's one question counts. Did Picasso paint it, or did J. P. Shmuck Jr. of South Bend, Indiana, or Omsk, Russia, paste it together in his potato barn? Because remember this.' He was prodding his own soft chest and holding his coffee cup in his spare hand. 'No resale. This is not London. This is Washington. And for Washington, intelligence has to be useful, and that means it has to be used, not contemplated in Socratic detachment.' He lowered his voice in reverent commiseration. 'And you're the guy who's selling it to us, Mr. Brown. Like it or not, you personally are the nearest we shall get to the source until the day we persuade the man you call Goethe to change his ways and work to us direct. If we ever do. Doubtful. Very, very doubtful.'

Sheriton took a turn and moved to the edge of the ring. 'You are the linchpin, Mr. Brown. You are the man. You are it. But how much of it are you? A little of it? Some of it? Or all of it? Do you write the script, act, produce and direct? Or are you the bit part you say you are, the innocent bystander we all have yet to meet?'

Sheriton sighed, as if it were a little hard on a man of his tender sensitivities. 'Mr. Brown, do you have a regular girl these days, or are you screwing the backlist?

Ned was halfway to his feet but Barley had already answered. Yet his voice was not abrasive, even now, it was not hostile. It was as if he were unwilling to disturb the good atmosphere all of us were enjoying.

'Well now, how about you, sunshine? Does Mrs. Haggarty oblige or are we reduced to the habits of our youth?'

Sheriton was not even interested.

'Mr. Brown, we are buying your Picasso, not mine. Washington doesn't like its assets cruising the singles bars. We have to play this very frank, very honest. No English reticence, no old-school persiflage. We've fallen for that horse manure before and we will never, never fall for it again.'

This, I thought, for Bob, whose head was once again turned downward to his hands.

'Mr. Brown is not cruising the singles bars,' Ned cut in hotly. 'And it's not his material. It's Goethe's. I don't see that his private life has the least to do with it.'

Keep your thoughts to yourself, Clive had told me. His eyes repeated the message to Ned now.

'Oh Ned, come on now, come on!' Sheriton protested. 'The way Washington is these days, you have to be married and born again before you can get on a fucking bus. What takes you to Russia every five minutes, Mr. Brown? Are you buying property there?'

Barley was grinning, but no longer so pleasantly. Sheriton was getting to him, which was exactly what Sheriton intended.

'As a matter of fact, old boy, it's a rôle I rather inherited. My old father always preferred the Soviet Union to the United States, and went to a lot of trouble publishing their books. He was a Fabian. A kind of New Dealer. If he'd been one of your people he'd have been blacklisted.'

'He'd have been framed, fried and immortalised. I read his record. It's awful. Tell us more about him, Mr. Brown. What did he bequeath to you that you inherited?'

'What the devil's that to anyone?' said Ned.

He was right. The matter of Barley's eccentric father had been aired and dismissed as irrelevant by the twelfth floor long ago. But not apparently by the Agency. Or not any more.

'And in the 'thirties, as you no doubt also know, then, Barley continued in his calmer tone, 'he started up a Russian Book.Club. It didn't last long but he had a go. And in the war when he could get the paper he'd publish pro-Soviet propaganda, most of it glorifying Stalin.'

'And after the war what did he do then? Go help them build the Berlin Wall on weekends?'

'He had hopes, then he packed them in,' Barley replied after reflection.

The contemplative part of him had regained the upper hand. 'He could have forgiven the Russians most things, but not the Terror, not the camps and not the deportations. It broke his heart.'

'Would his heart have been broken if the Sovs had used less muscular methods?'

'I don't expect so. I think he'd have died a happy man.'

Sheriton wiped his palms on his handkerchief and like an overweight Oliver Twist carried his coffee cup in both hands back to the refreshments table, where he unscrewed the Thermosjug and peered mournfully inside before pouring himself a fresh cup.

'Acorns,' he complained. 'They gather acorns and press them and make coffee out of them. That's what they do out here.' There was an empty chair beside Bob. Sheriton lowered himself into it and sighed. 'Mr. Brown, will you let me spell it out for you a little? There is no longer the space in life to take each humble member of the human family on his merits, okay? So everybody who is anybody has a record. Here's yours. Your father was a Communist sympathiser, latterly disenchanted. In the eight years since he died you have made no fewer than six visits to the Soviet Union. You have sold the Sovs precisely four very lousy books from your own list and published precisely three of theirs. Two awful modem novels which didn't do a damn thing, a piece of crap about acupuncture which did eighteen copies in the trade edition. You're on the verge of bankruptcy, yet we calculate your outlay for these trips at twelve thousand pounds and your revenue at nineteen hundred. You're divorced, freestyle and British public school. You drink like you're watering the desert single-handed and you pick jazz friends with records that make Benedict Arnold look like Shirley Temple. Seen from Washington, you're rampant. Seen from here, you're very nice, but how will I explain this to the next Congressional sub-committee of Bible-belt knuckle-draggers who take it into their heads to pillory Goethe's material because it endangers Fortress America?'

'Why does it do that?' said Barley.

I think we were all surprised by his calm. Sheriton certainly was. He was looking at Barley over his shoulder until then, affecting a slightly pitiful stance as he explained his dilemma. Now he straightened up, and faced Barley full on with an alert and quizzical directness.

'Pardon me, Mr. Brown?'

'Why does Goethe's material scare them? If the Russians can't shoot straight, Fortress America should be jumping for joy.'

'Oh we are, Mr. Brown, we are. We're ecstatic. Never mind that the entire American military might is invested in the belief that the Soviet hardware is accurate as hefl. Never mind that a perception of Soviet accuracy is all in this game. That with accuracy, you can sneak up on your enemy while he's out playing golf, take out his ICBM's unawares and leave him unable to respond in kind. Whereas without accuracy, you'd damn well better not try it, because that's when your enemy turns right around and takes out your twenty favourite towns. Never mind that zillions of taxpayers' dollars and wholejunk-yards of political rhetoric have been lavished on the fond nightmare of a Soviet first strike and the American window of vulnerability. Never mind that even today the idea of Soviet supremacy is the main argument in favour of Star Wars, and the principal strategic fun-game at Washington cocktail parties.' To my astonishment, Sheriton abruptly changed voices and broke into the accents of a Deep South hillbilly. 'Time we blew those mothers apart before they do the same to us, Mr. Brown. This li'l ole planet just ain't big enough for two superpowers, Mr. Brown. Which one do you favour, Mr. Brown, when poo-ush comes to sheu-uve?'

Then he waited, while his pouchy face resumed its contemplation of life's many injustices.

'And I believe in Goethe,' he went on in a startled voice. 'I am on record as buying Goethe outright from the day he stepped out of the closet. Retail. Goethe for my money is a source whose time has come. And do you know what that tells me? It tells me that I also have to believe in Mr. Brown here and that Mr. Brown needs to be very candid with me or I'm dead.' He cupped a paw reverently over his left breast. 'I believe in Mr. Brown, I believe in Goethe, I believe in the material. And I'm scared shitless.'

Some people change their minds, I was thinking. Some people have a change of heart. But it takes Russell Sheriton to announce that he has seen the light on the road to Damascus. Ned was staring at him in disbelief. Clive had chosen to admire the cue-cases. But Sheriton remained pouting at his coffee, reflecting on his bad luck. Of his young men, one had his chin in his hand while he studied the toe-cap of his Harvard shoe. Another was peering at the sea through; the window as if the truth might rather lie out there.

But nobody was looking at Barley, nobody seemed to have the nerve. He was sitting still and looking young. We had told him a little, but nothing like this. Least of all had we told him that the Bluebird material had set the industrial-military factions at one another's throats and raised roars of outrage from some of Washington's most sleazy lobbies.

Old Palfrey spoke for the first time. As I did so, I had a sense of performing in the theatre of the absurd. It was as if the real world were slipping out from under our feet.

'What Haggarty is asking you is this,' I said. 'Will you voluntarily submit to questioning by the Americans so that they can take a view of the source once and for all? You can say no. It's your choice. Is that right, Clive?'

Clive didn't like me for that but he gave his reluctant assent before once more ducking below the horizon.

The faces round the ring had turned to Barley like flowers in the sun.

'What do you say?' I asked him.

For a while he said nothing. He stretched, he drew the back of his wrist across his mouth, he looked vaguely embarrassed. He shrugged. He looked towards Ned but could not find his eye, so he looked back at me, rather foolishly. What was he thinking, if anything? That to say 'no' would be to cut him off from Goethe for good? From Katya? Had he even got that far in his mind? To this day I have no idea. He grinned, apparently in embarrassment.

'What do you think Harry? In for a penny? What does my mouthpiece say?'

'It's more a question of what the client says,' I answered glossily, smiling back at him.

'We'll never know if we don't give it a try, will we?'

'I suppose we never will,' I said.

Which seems to be the nearest he ever came to saying, 'I'll do it.'

'Yale has these secret societies, you see, Harry,' Bob was explaining to me. 'Why, the place is shot through with them. If you've heard of Scull and Bones, Scroll and Key, you've still only heard the tip of the iceberg. And these societies, they emphasise the team. Harvard now – why, Harvard goes all the other way and puts its money on individual brilliance. So the Agency, when it's fishing for recruits in those waters, has a way of picking its team players from Yale and its high flyers from Harvard. I won't go so far as to say that every Harvard man is a prima donna or every Yale man gives blind obedience to the cause. But that's the broad tradition. Are you a Yale man, Mr. Quinn?'

'West Point,' said Quinn.

It was evening and the first delegation had just flown in. We sat in the same room with the same red floor under the same billiards light, waiting for Barley. Quinn sat at the head and Todd and Larry sat to either side of him. Todd and Larry were Quinn's people. They were clean-limbed and pretty and, for a man of my age, ludicrously youthful.

'Quinn's from way up there,' Sheriton had told us. 'Quinn talks to Defense, he talks to the corporations, he talks to God.'

'But who hires him?' Ned had asked.

Sheriton seemed genuinely puzzled by the question. He smiled as if pardoning a solecism in a foreigner.

'Well now, Ned, I guess we all do, he said.

Quinn was six foot one, wide-shouldcred and big-eared. He wore his suit like body armour. There were no medals on it, no badges of rank. His rank was in his stubborn jaw and shaded empty eyes, and in the smile of enraged inferiority that overcame him in the presence of civilians.

Ned entered first, then came Barley. Nobody stood up. From his deliberately humble place in the centre of the American row, Sheriton meekly made the introductions.

Quinn likes them plain, he had warned us. Tell your man not to be too damn clever. Sheriton was following his own advice.

It was right that Larry should open the questioning because Larry was the outgoing one. Todd was virginal and withdrawn, but Larry wore an overlarge wedding ring and had the colourfal tie and did the laughing for them both.

'Mr. Brown, sir, we have to think this thing through from the point of view of your detractors,' he explained with elaborate insincerity. 'In our business, there's unvcrified intelligence and there's verified intelligence. We'd like to verify your intelligence. That's our job and that's what we're paid for. Please don't take any hint of suspicion personally, Mr. Brown. Analysis is a science apart. We have to respect its laws.'

'We have to imagine it's an organised put-together,' Todd blurted belligerently from Larry's side. 'Smoke.'

Amusement, until Larry laughingly explained to Barley that he was not being offered a cigarette: 'smoke' was the trade word for deception.

'Mr. Brown, sir, whose idea was it, please, to go out to Peredelkino that day, fall two years ago?' asked Larry.

'Mine, probably.'

'Are you sure of that, sir?'

'We were drunk when we made the plan, but I'm pretty sure it was me who proposed it.'

'You drink quite a lot, don't you, Mr. Brown?' said Larry.

Quinn's enormous hands had settled round a pencil as if they proposed to strangle it.

'Fair amount.'

'Does drinking make you forget things, sir?'

'Sometimes.'

'And sometimes not. After all, we have long verb2tiMS between you and Goethe when you were both totally inebriated. Had you ever been to Peredelkino before that day, sir?'

'Yes.'

'Often?'

'Two or three times. Maybe four.'

'Did you visit with friends out there?'

'I visited friends, yes,' said Barley, instinctively bridling at the American usage.

'Soviet friends?'

'Of course.'

Larry paused long enough to make Soviet friends sound like a confession.

'Care to identify these friends, please, sir, names?'

Barley identified the friends. A writer. A woman poet. A literary bureaucrat. Larry wrote them down, moving his pencil slowly for effect. Smiling as he wrote, while Quinn's shadowed eyes continued glowering at Barley on fixed lines down the table.

'On the day of your trip then, Mr. Brown,' Larry resumed, 'on this Day One, as we may call it, did it not occur to you to press a few doorbells of your old acquaintance, see who was around, sir, say hullo?' Larry asked.

Barley didn't seem to know whether it had occurred to him or not. He shrugged and performed his habitual trick of pulling the back of his hand across his mouth, the perfect untruthful witness.

'Didn't want to saddle them withjumbo, I suppose. Too many of us to cope with. Didn't occur to me, really.'

'Sure,' said Larry.

Three excuses, I noted unhappily. Three where one would have been enough. I glanced at Ned and knew he was thinking the same. Sheriton was busy not thinking at all. Bob was busy being Sheriton's man. Todd was murmuring in Quinn's ear.

'So was it also your idea to visit Pasternak's tomb, Mr. Brown, sir?' Larry enquired, as if it were an idea anyone could be proud of having had.

'Grave,' Barley corrected him testily. 'Yes, it was. Shouldn't think the others knew it was there till I told them.'

'And Pasternak's dacha too, I believe.' Larry consulted his notes. 'if "the bastards" hadn't pulled it down.' He made bastards sound particularly dirty.

'That's right, his dacha too.'

'But you didn't visit the Pasternak dacha, am I right? You didn't even establish whether the dacha still existed. The Pasternak dacha disappeared totally from the agenda.'

'It was raining,' Barley said.

'But you did have a car. And a driver, Mr. Brown. Even if he was malodorous.'

Larry smiled again and opened his mouth just wide enough to let the point of his tongue caress his upper lip. Then he closed it and allowed a further pause for uncomfortable thoughts.

'So you mustered the party, Mr. Brown, and you identified the aims of the journey,' Larry resumed in a tone of whimsical regret. 'You rode point, you led the group up the hill to the tomb. Grave, forgive me. It was you personally, no one else, that Mr. Nezhdanov spoke to as you all came down the hill. He asked if you were American. You said, "No, thank God, British."'

No laughter, not even a smile from Larry himself. Quinn looked as though he were concealing an abdominal wound with difficulty.

'It was you too, Mr. Brown, who quite by chance were able to quote the poet, speak out for the company during a discussion of his merits, and almost by magic to detach yourself from your companions and find yourself seated next to the man we call Goethe during lunch. "Meet our distinguished writer Goethe." Mr. Brown, we have a field report from London regarding the girl Magda from Penguin Books. We understand it was obtained unobtrusively, in non-suspicious social circumstances, by a non American third party. Magda had the impression you wished to handle the Nezhdanov interview on your own. Can you explain that, please?'

Barley had disappeared again. Not from the room but from my understanding. He had left suspicion to the dreamers and entered his own realms of reality. It was Ned not Barley who, unable to contain himself in the face of this admission of Agency skulduggery, produced the desired outburst.

'Well, she's not going to tell your informant she was panting to tuck her boyfriend into bed for the afternoon, is she?'

But again that single answer might have done the trick if Barley had not capped it with his own. 'Maybe I did pack them off, he conceded in a remote but friendly enough voice. 'After a week of book fair any reasonable soul has had enough of publishers to last him a lifetime.'

Larry's smile had a doubtful slant. 'Well hell,' he said, and shook his pretty head before handing over his witness to Todd.

But not yet, because Quinn was speaking. Not to Barley, not to Sheriton, not even to Clive. Not really to anyone. But he was speaking all the same. The captive little mouth was writhing like a hooked eel.

'This man been fluttered?'

'Sir, we have protocol problems,' Larry explained, with a glance at me.

At first I honestly did not understand. Larry had to explain.

'What we used to call a lie detector, sir. A polygraph. Known in the business as a flutterer. I don't think you have them over there.'

'We do in certain cases,'said Clive hospitably from beside me before I had a chance to answer. 'Where you insist on it, we bend towards you and apply it. They're coming in.'

Only then did the troubled, inward Todd take over. Todd was not prolix; he was at first bite not anything. But I had met counsel like Todd before: men who make a crusade of their charmlessness and learn to use their verbal clumsiness as a bludgeon.

'Describe your relationship with Niki Landau, Mr. Brown.'

'I haven't one,' Barley said. 'We've been pronounced strangers till Doomsday. I had to sign a paper saying I'd never speak to him. Ask Harry.'

'Prior to that arrangement, please?'

'We had the odd jar together.'

'The odd what?'

'Jar. Drink. Scotch. He's a nice chap.'

'But not socially your class, surely? He did not go to Harrow and Cambridge, I take it?'

'What difference does that make?'

'Do you disapprove of the British social structure, Mr. Brown?'

'One of the crying pities of the modern world, it always seemed to me, old boy.'

'"He's a nice chap." That means you like him?'

'He's an irritating little sod but I liked him, yes. Still do.'

'You never did deals with him? Any deal?'

'He worked for other houses. I was my own boss. What deals could we do?'

'Ever buy anything from him?'

'Why should I?'

'I would like to know, please, what you and Niki Landau transacted together on the occasions when you were alone, often in Communist capital cities.'

'He boasted about his conquests. He liked good music. Classical stuff.'

'He ever discuss his sister with you? His sister still in Poland?'

'No.'

'He ever express his resentment to you regarding the alleged ill-treatment of his father by the British authorities?'

'No.'

'When was your last intimate conversation with Niki Landau, please?'

Barley finally allowed himself to betray a certain irntation, 'You make us sound like a pair of queens.' he complained.

Quinn's face did not flicker. Perhaps he had made that deduction already.

'The question was when, Mr. Brown,' said Todd, in a tone suggesting that his patience was being stretched.

'Frankfurt, I suppose. Last year. Couple of belts in the Hessischer Hof.

'That the Frankfurt book fair?'

'One doesn't go to Frankfurt for fun, old boy.'

'No dialogue with Landau since?'

'Don't recall one.'

'Nothing at the London book fair this spring?'

Barley appeared to rack his brains. 'Oh my hat. Stella. You're right.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Niki had spotted a girl who used to work for me. Stella. Decided he fancied her. He fancied everybody really. By way of being a stoat. Wanted me to introduce them.'

'And you did?'

'Tried to.'

'You pimpcd for him. That the term?'

'That's right, old boy.'

'What transpired, please?'

'I asked her for a drink at the Roebuck round the corner, six o'clock: Niki turned up, she didn't.'

'So you were left alone with Landau? One on one?'

'That's right. One to one.'

'What did you talk about?'

'Stella, I suppose. The weather. Might have been anything.'

'Mr. Brown, do you have anything very much to do with past or former Soviet citizens in the United Kingdom?'

'Cultural Attaché, now and then. When he can be bothered to answer, which isn't often. If a Sov writer comes over and the Embassy gives a binge for him, I'll probably go along.'

'We understand you like to play chess at a certain caf6 in the area of Camden Town, London.'

'So?'

'Is this not a café frequented by Russian exiles, Mr. Brown?'

Barley raised his voice but otherwise held steady. 'So I know Leo. Leo likes to lead from weakness. I know Josef. Josef charges at anything that moves. I don't go to bed with them and I don't trade secrets with them.'

'You do have a very selective memory, though, don't you, Mr. Brown? Considering the extraordinarily detailed accounts you give of other episodes and persons?'

Still Barley did not flare, which made his reply all the more devastating. For a moment, indeed, it seemed he would not even answer; the tolerance that was now so deeply seated in him seemed to tell him not to bother.

'I remember what's important to me, old boy. If I haven't got a dirty enough mind to match yours, that's your bloody business.'

Todd coloured. And went on colouring. Larry's smile widened till it nearly split his face. Quinn had put on a sentry's scowl. Clive had not heard a thing.

But Ned was pink with pleasure and even Russell Sheriton, sunk in a crocodile's sleep, seemed to be remembering, among so many disappointments, something vaguely beautiful.

The same evening as I was taking a walk along the beach, I came on Barley and two of his guards, out of sight of the mansion, skimming flat stones to see who could get the most bounces.

'Got you! Got you!' he was shouting, leaning back and flinging his arms at the clouds.

'The mullahs are smelling heresy,' Sheriton declared over dinner, regaling us with the latest state of play. Barley had pleaded a headache and asked for an omelette in the boat-house. 'Most of these guys came to town on a Margin of Safety ticket. That means raise military spending and develop any new system however crazy that will bring peace and prosperity to the arms industry for the next fifty years. If they're not sleeping with the manufacturers, they're sure as hell eating with them. The Bluebird is telling them a very bad story.'

'And if it's the truth?' I asked.

Sheriton sadly helped himself to another piece of pecan pie. 'The truth? The Sovs can't play? They're cost-cutting at every corner and the buffoons in Moscow don't know one half of the bad news because the buffoons in the field cheat on them so they can earn their gold watches and free caviar? You think that's the truth?' He took a huge mouthful but it didn't alter the shape of his face. 'You think that certain unpleasant comparisons aren't made?'He poured himself some coffee. 'You know what's the worst thing for our democratically-elected neanderthals? The total worst? It's the implications against us. Moribund on the Sov side means moribund our side. The mullahs hate that. So do the manufacturers.' He shook his head in disapproval. 'To hear the Sovs can't do solid fuel from shit, their rocket motors suck instead of blow? Their early-warning errors worse than ours? Their heavies can't even get out of the kennel? That our intelligence estimates are ludicrously exaggerated? The mullahs get terrible vibes from these things.' He reflected on the inconstancy of mullahs. 'How do you peddle the arms race when the only asshole you have to race against is yourse]P Bluebird is life-threatening intelligence. A lot of highly-paid favourite sons are in serious danger of having their ricebowls broken, all on account of Bluebird. You want truth, that's it.'

'So why stick your neck out?' I objected. 'If it's not a popular ticket, why run on it?'

And suddenly I didn't know where to put myself.

It isn't often that old Palfrey stops a conversation, causes every head to swing round at him in amazement. And I certainly hadn't meant to this time. Yet Ned and Bob and Clive were staring at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, and Sheriton's young men - we had two of them, if I remember rightly - independently put down their forks and began independently wiping their fingers on their napkins.

Only Sheriton didn't seem to have heard. He had decided that a little cheese wouldn't hurt him after all. He had pulled the trolley to him, and was morosely examining fhe display. But none of us imagined that cheese was uppermost in his mind, and it was clear to me that he was buying time while he wondered whether to reply and how.

'Harry,'he began carefully, addressing not me but a piece of Danish blue.

'Harry, I swear to God. You have before you a man committed to peace and brotherly love. By this I mean that my primary ambition is to knock so much shit out of the Pentagon firebreathers that they will never again tell the President of the United States that twenty rabbits make 2 tiger, or that every fucking sardine fisherman three miles out of port is a Soviet nuclear submarine in drag. I also wish to hear no more bullshit about digging little holes in the ground and surviving nuclear war. I am a glasnostic, Harry. I have made certain discoveries about myself. I was bom a glasnostic, my parents are old glasnostics; from way back. For me, glasnosticism is a way of life. I want my children to live. Quote me and enjoy me.'

'I didn't know you had any children,' said Ned.

'Figurative,' said Sheritbn.

But Sheriton, if you pulled away the wrapping, was telling us a truthful version of his new self. Ned sensed it, I sensed it. And if Clive didn't, that was only because he had deliberately abbreviated his perceptions. It was a truth that lay not so much in his words, which as often as not were designed to obscure his feelings rather than express them, but in a new and irrepressible humility that had entered his manner since his cut-throat days in London. At the age of fifty, after quarter of a century as a Cold War brawler, Russell Sheriton, to use Walter's expression, was shaking his mid-life bars. It had never occurred to me that I could like him, but that evening I began to.

'Brady's bright,' Sheriton warned us with a yawn as we turned in. 'Brady can hear the grass growing.'

And Brady, parse him how you would, was bright as boot-buttons.

You spotted it in his clever face and in the nerveless immobility of his courteous body. His ancient sports coat was older than he was, and as he came into the room you knew he took pleasure in being unspectacular. His young assistant wore a sports coat too and, like his master, had a classy dowdiness.

'Looks like you've done a fine thing, Barley,' Brady said cheerfully in his Southern lilt, setting his briefcase on the table. 'Anybody say thank you along the way? I'm Brady and I'm too damned old to fool around with funny names. This is Skelton. Thank you.'

The billiards room again but without Quinn's table and upright chairs. Instead, we lounged gratefully in deep cushions. A storm was brewing. Randy's vestals had closed the shutters and put on lights. As the wind rose, the mansion began clinking like restless bottles on a shelf. Brady unpopped his briefcase, a gem from the days when they knew how to make them. Like the university professor he occasionally was, he wore a polka-dot blue tie.

'Barley, did I read somewhere, or am I dreaming, you once played sax in the great Ray Noble's band?'

'Beardless boy in those days, Brady.'

'Wasn't Ray just the sweetest man you ever knew? Didn't he make the best sound ever?' Brady asked as only Southerners can.

'Ray was a prince.' Barley hummed a few bars from 'Cherokee'.

'Too bad about his politics,' Brady said, smiling. 'We all tried to talk him out of that nonsense, but Ray would go his way. Ever play chess with him?'

'Yes I did, as a matter of fact.'

'Who won?'

'Me, I think. Not sure. Yes, me.'

Brady smiled. 'So did I'.

Skelton smiled too.

They talked London and which part of Hampstead Barley lived in: 'Barley, I just love that area. Hampstead is my idea of civilisation.' They talked the bands Barley had played. 'My God, don't tell me he's still around! At his age I wouldn't even buy unripe bananas!' They talked British politics and Brady just had to know what it was that Barley thought so wrong with Mrs. T.

Barley appeared to have to think about that, and at first came up with no suggestions. Perhaps he had caught Ned's warning eye.

'Hell, Barley, it's not her fault she hasn't any worthwhile opponents, is it?'

'Woman's a bloody Red,' Barley growled, to the secret alarm of the British side.

Brady didn't laugh, just raised his eyebrows and waited, as we all did.

'Elective dictatorship,' Barley continued, quietly gathering steam. 'A thousand legs good, two legs lousy. God bless the corporation and bugger the individual.'

He seemed to be about to enlarge on this thesis, then changed his mind, and to our relief, let it rest.

Nevertheless it was a light enough beginning, and after ten minutes of it Barley must have been feeling pretty much at ease. Until in his languid way Brady came to 'this present thing you've gotten yourself into, Barley,' and proposed that Barley should go over the turf again in his own words, 'but homing in on that historic eye-to-cye you two fcllows had in Leningrad.'

Barley did as Brady wanted, and though I like to think I listened quite as sharply as Brady, I heard nothing in Barley's narrative that seemed to me contradictory or particularly revealing beyond what was already on the record.

And at first blush Brady didn't seem to hear anything surprising either, for when Barley had finished, Brady gave him a reassuring smile and said, 'Well now, thank you, Barley,' in a voice of apparent approval. His slender fingers poked among his papers. 'Worst thing about spying, I always say, is the hanging around. Must be like being a fighter pilot,' he said, selecting a page and peering at it. 'One minute sitting home eating your chicken dinner, next minute frightening the hell out of yourself at eight hundred miles an hour. Then it's back home in time to wash the dishes.' He had apparently found what he was looking for. 'Is that how it felt to you, Barley, stuck out there in Muscovy without a prayer?'

'A bit.'

'Hanging around waiting for Katya? Hanging around waiting for Goethe? You seemed to do quite some hanging around after you and Goethe had finished your little powwow, didn't you?'

Perching his spectacles on the tip of his nose, Brady was studying the paper before passing it to Skelton. I knew the pause was contrived but it scared me all the same, and I think it scared Ned for he glanced at Sheriton, then anxiously back to Barley. 'According to our field reports, you and Goethe broke up around fourteen thirty-three Leningrad time. Seen the picture? Show it to him, Skelton.'

All of us had seen it. All but Barley. It portrayed the two men in the gardens of the Smolny after they had said goodbye. Goethe had turned away. Barley's hands were still held out to him from their farewell embrace. The electronic timeprint in the top left corner said fourteen thirty-three and twenty seconds.

'Remember your last words to him?' Brady asked, with an air of sweet reminiscence.

'I said I'd publish him.'

'Remember his last words to you?'

'He wanted to know whether he should look for another decent human being.'

'One hell of a goodbye,' Brady remarked comfortably, while Barley continued to look at the photograph, and Brady and Skelton looked at Barley. 'What did you do then, Barley?'

'Went back to the Europe. Handed over his stuff.'

'What route did you take? Remember?'

'Same way I got there. Trolleybus into town, then walked a bit.'

'Have to wait long for the trollcybus?' Brady asked, while his Southern accent became, to my ear at least, more of a mocking-bird than a regional digression.

'Not that I remember.'

'How long?'

'Five minutes. Maybe longer.'

I could not remember one occasion until now when Barley had pleaded an imperfect memory.

'Many people in line?'

'Not many. A few. I didn't count.'

'The trolleybus runs every ten minutes. The ride into town takes another ten. The walk to the Europe, at your pace, ten. Our people have timed it all ways up. Ten's the outside. But according to Mr. and Mrs. Henziger, you didn't show up in their hotel room till fifteen fifty-five. That leaves us with quite a tidy hole, Barley. Like a hole in time. Mind telling me how we're going to fill it? I don't expect you went on a drinking spree, did you? You were carrying some pretty valuable merchandise. I'd have thought you wanted to unload it pretty quick.'

Barley was becoming wary and Brady_must have seen that he was, for his hospitable Southern smile was offering a new kind of encouragement, the kind that said 'come clean'.

As to Ned, he was sitting stock still with both feet flat on the ground, and his straight gaze was fixed on Barley's troubled face.

Only Clive and Sheriton seemed to have pledged themselves to display no emotions at all.

'What were you doing, Barley?' Brady said.

'I mooched,' said Barley, not lying at all well.

'Carrying Goethe's notebook? The notebook he had entrusted to you with his life? Mooched? You picked a damned odd afternoon to mooch for fifty minutes, Barley. Where d'you go?'

'I wandered back along the river. Where we'd been. Paddy had told me to take my time. Not to rush back to the hotel but to go at a leisurely speed.'

'That's true,' Ned murmured. 'Those were my instructions via Moscow station.'

'For fifty minutes?' Brady persisted, ignoring Ned's intervention.

'I don't know how long it was. I wasn't looking at my watch. If you take time, you take time.'

'And it didn't cross your mind that with a tape and a power-pack in your-pants, and a notebook full of potentially priceless intelligence material in your carrier bag, the shortest distance between two points might just be a straight line?'

Barley was getting dangerously angry but the danger was to himself as Ned's expression, and I fear my own, could have warned him.

'Look, you're not listening, are you?' he said rudely. 'I told you. Paddy told me to take time. They trained me that way in London, on our stupid little runs. Take time. Never hurry if you're carrying something. Better to make the conscious effort to go slowly.'

Yet again, brave Ned did his best. 'That's what he was taught,' he said.

But he was watching Barley as he spoke.

Brady was also watching Barley. 'So you mooched away from the trolleybus stop, towards the Communist Party Headquarters in the Smolny Institute – not to mention the Komsomol and a couple of other Party shrines – carrying Goethe's notebook in your bag? Why did you do that. Barley? Fellows in the field do some damned strange things, you don't have to tell me that, but this strikes me as plain suicidal.'

'I was obeying orders, blast you, Brady! I was taking my time! How often do I have to tell you?'

But even as he flared it occurred to me that Barley was caught not so much in a lie as in a dilemma. There was too much honesty in his appeal. too much loneliness in his assailed eyes. And Brady to his credit seemed to understand this too, for he showed no sign of triumph at Barley's distress, preferring to befriend him rather than to goad.

'You see, Barley, a lot of people around here would attach a heap of suspicion to a gap like that,' Brady said. 'They would have- a picture,of you sitting in somebody's office or car while that somebody photographed Goethe's -notebook or gave you orders. Did you do any of that? I guess now's the time to say so if you did. There's never going to be a good time, but this is about as good as we're likely to get.'

'No.'

'No, you won't tell?'

'That's not what happened.'

'Well, something happened. Do you remember what was in your mind while you mooched?'

'Goethe. Publishing him. Bringing down the temple if he had to.'

'What temple's that, exactly? Can we get away from the metaphysical a little?'

'Katya. The children. Taking them with him if he gets caught. I don't know who has the right to do that. I can't work it out.'

'So you mooched and tried to work it out.'

Maybe Barley did mooch, maybe he didn't. He had clammed up.

'Wouldn't it have been more normal to hand over the notebook first and try to work out the ethics afterwards? I'm surprised you were able to think clearly with that damn thing burning a hole in your carrier bag. I'm not suggesting we're any of us very logical in these situations, but even by the laws of unlogic, I would feel you had put yourself in a damned uncomfortable situation. I think you did something. I think you think so too.'

'I bought a hat.'

'What kind of hat?'

'A fur hat. A woman's hat.'

'Who for?'

'Miss Coad.'

'That a girlfriend?'

'She's the housekeeper at the safe house in Knightsbridge,' Ned cut in before Barley could reply.

'Where'd you buy it?'

'On the way between the tram stop and the hotel. I don't know where. A shop.'

'That all?'

'Just a hat. One hat.'

'How long did that take you?'

'I had to queue.'

'How long did it take?'

'I don't know.'

'What else did you do?'

'Nothing. I bought a hat.'

'You're lying, Barley. Not gravely, but you are undoubtedly lying. What else did you do?'

'I phoned her.'

'Miss Coad?'

'Katya.'

'Where from?'

'A post office.'

'Which one?'

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 waves.

'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 makingwaves 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 tirne?'

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 pumicestone 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 Secret's Act.'

'Vhat 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 stare - s through the wiridow 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 relationshipwith 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 al lowed to know the questions the faceless desk inquisitors in Langley had selected. No casual tampering by Barley's terrestrial co-habitants 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.'

'No.'

'My motive is to promote peace between nations. Yes or no?'

'No.'

'I am operating in collusion with Soviet Intelligence.'

'No.'

'I am proud of my mission on behalf of world Communism.'

'No.'

'I am operating in collusion with Niki Landau.'

'No.'

'Niki Landau is my lover.'

'No.'

'Was my lover.'

'No.'

'I am homosexual.'

'No.'

A break while Stanley once more eased the pressure. 'How's it feeling, Mr. Brown? Not too much pain?'

'Never enough, old boy. I thrive on it.'

But we didn't look at him in these breaks, I noticed. We looked at the floor or at our hands, or at the beckoning wind-bent trees outside the window. It was Stanley's turn. A cosier tone, but the same mechanical flatness.

'I am operating in collusion with the woman Katya Orlova and her lover.'

'No.'

'The man I call Goethe is known to me as a plant of Soviet Intelligence.'

'No.'

'The material he has passed to me has been prepared by Soviet Intelligence.'

'No.'

'I am the victim of sexual entrapment.'

'No.'

'I am being blackmailed.'

'No.'

'I am being coerced.'

'Yes.'

'By the Soviets?'

'No.'

'I am being threatened with financial ruin if I do not collaborate with the Soviets.'

'No.'

Another break. Round Three. Merv's turn.

'I lied when I said I had telephoned Katya Orlova from Leningrad.'

'No.'

'From Leningrad I called my Soviet Control and told him of my discussion with Goethe.'

'No.'

'I am the lover of Katya Orlova.'

'No.'

'I have been the lover of Katya Orlova at some time.'

'No.'

'I am being blackmailed regarding my relationship with Katya Orlova.'

'No.'

'I have told the truth so far throughout this interview.'

'Yes.'

'I am an enemy of the United States of America.'

'No.'

'My aim is to undermine the military preparedness of the United States of America.'

'Do you mind running that one by me again, old boy?'

'Hold it,' said Merv, and at the suitcase Stanley held it, while Merv made a pencilled annotation on the graph paper. 'Don't break the rhythm, please, Mr. Brown. We have people do that on purpose when they want to shake off a bad question.'

Round Four and Stanley's turn again. The questions droned on and it was clear they would not stop until they had reached the nadir of their vulgarity. Barley's 'no's had acquired a deadened rhythm and a mocking passivity. He remained sitting exactly as they had placed him. I had never seen him so still for so long.

They broke again but Barley no longer relaxed between rounds. His stillness was becoming unbearable. His chin was lifted, his eyes were closed and he appeared to be smiling, God alone knew what about. Sometimes his 'no' fell before the end of a scntenc~. Sometimes he waited so long that the two men paused and looked up, the one from his dials and the other from, his papers, and they seemed to me to have the torturer's anxiety that they might have taxed their man too hard. Till the 'no' finally fell again, neither louder nor quieter, a letter delayed in the mail.

Where does he get his stoicism from? No, no, to everything. Why does he sit there like a man preparing himself for the indignities of age, meekly mouthing 'no'? What does this meekness mean, no, yes, no, no, till lunchtime, when they take him off the machine?

But in another part of my head, I think I knew the answer, even if I could not yet put it into words: his reality had moved elsewhere.

Spying is waiting.

We waited three days, and you may still count the hours in my grey hairs.

We had split on lines of seniority: Sheriton to go with Bob and Clive to Langley; Ned to stay on the island with hisjoe, Palfrey to remain with them on standby, though what I was standing by for was a mystery to me. I hated the island by then and I suspected that Ned and Barley did too, though I could get no nearer to Ned than I could to Barley. He had become remote and for the time being humourless. Something had happened to his pride.

So we waited. And played distracted chess, seldom finishing a game. And listened to Randy talk about his yacht. And listened for the telephone. And to the screaming of the birds and the pulse of the sea.

It was a mad time, and the vagaries of the. isolated place with its fuming skies and storms and patches of idyllic beauty made it madder. A 'dungeon fog', as Randy called it, enveloped us and with it a mindless fear that we wctuld never leave the island. The fog cleared but,we were still there. The shared intimacy should have drawn us closer, but both men had withdrawn to their kingdoms, Ned to his room and Barley to the outdoor. With the rain whipping over the island like grapeshot I would peer through the streaming window and glimpse Barley pounding over the cliff in his oilskins, picking up his knees as if wrestling with uncomfortable shoes - or once, playing solitary cricket on the beach with Edgar the guard, a piece of drift ' wood and a tennis ball. In sunny spells he sported an old blue sailing cap which he had unearthed from a sea-chest in his room. He wore it with a grim face, eyes upon unconquered colonies. One day Edgar appeared with an old yellow dog he had unearthed from somewhere and they made it run back and forth between them. On another day there was a regatta off the mainland and a shoal of white yachts clus tered in a ring like tiny teeth. Barley stood watching them interminably, seemingly delighted by the carnival, while Edgar stood off watching Barley.

He's thinking of his Hannah, I thought. He's waiting for life to provide him with the moment of choice. It did not occur to me till much later that some people do not take their decisions in quite that way.

My last image of the island has the convenient distortions of a. dream. I had spoken to Clive only twice on the telephone, which for him was virtually a blackout. Once he wished to know 'how your friends are bearing up' and I gathered from Ned that he had already asked him the same question. And once he needed to hear about the arrangements I had made for Barley's compensation, including the subsidies to his company, and whether the monies would come from bur own funds or in the form of a supplementary estimate. I had a few notes with me and was able to enlighten him.

It is midday and The New York Times and Washington Post have just arrived on the table in the sunroom. I am stooped over them when I hear Randy yelling at the guards to get Ned to the telephone. As I turn, I see Ned himself entering from the garden side and striding across the hall to the communications room. I glance beyond him, up to the first-floor landing, and I see Barley, a motionless silhouette. There are some old bookcases up there, and that morning he has persuaded Randy to unlock them so that he can browse. It is the landing with the semi-circular window, the one that looks over the hydrangeas to the sea.

He is standing with hii back turned and a book hanging from one long hand, and he is staring at the Atlantic. His feet are apart, his spare hand is raised, as it often is, to somewhere near his head, as if to fend off a blow. He must have heard everything that is going on - Randy's yell, then Ned's hasty footsteps across the hall, followed by the slam of the communications room door. The landing floor is tiled and footsteps come chiming up that stairwell like squeaky church bells. I can hear them now as Ned emerges from the communications room, goes a few steps and halts.

'Harry! Where's Barley?'

'Up here,' says Barley quietly over the banister.

'They've given you the thumbs-up!' Ned shouts, jubilant as a schoolboy. 'They apologise. I spoke to Bob, I spoke to Clive, I spoke to Haggarty. Goethe's is the most important stuff they've handled for years. Official. They'll go for him a hundred per cent. There'll be no turning back any more. You've beaten their whole apparatus.'

Ned was used to Barley's distracted ways by then, so he should not have been surprised when Barley gave no sign of having heard him. His gaze was still fixed on the Atlantic. Did he think he saw a small boat founder? Everybody does. Watch the Maine seas for long enough and you see them everywhere, a sail, a hull, now the speck of a survivor's head or hand, ducking under the sea's swell never to resurface. You must go on watching for a long time to know you are looking at ospreys and cor morants going about their hunting.

But Ned in his excitement manages to be wounded. It is one of those rare moments in him when the professional drops his guard and reveals the unfinished man inside.

'You're going back to Moscow, Barley! That's what you wanted, isn't it? To see it through?'

And Barley at last, concerned that he has hurt Ned's feelings. Barley half-turning so that Ned can see his smile. 'Yes, old boy. Of course it is just what I wanted.'

Meanwhile it is my turn in the communications room. Randy is beckoning me in.

'Is that you, Palfrey?'

It is I.

'Langley are taking over the case,' says Clive, as if this were the other part of the great news. 'They're giving it a full-facility grading, Palfrey. That's the highest they go,' he adds quellingly.

'Oh well. Congratulations.' I say and, taking the telephone from my ear, stare at it in disbelief while Clive's drawl continues to ooze out of it like a tap nothing can turn off. 'I want you to draw up a document of understanding immediately, Palfrey, and prepare a full-length agreement to cover the usual contingencies. We've got them eating out of our hand, so I expect you to be firm. Firm but fair. We're dealing with very realistic people, Palfrey. Hardnosed.'

More. Still more. And more yet. Langley to take over Barley's pension and resettlement as earnest of their total operational control. Langley to share equally in the running of the source, but to have a casting vote in the event of disagreement.

'They're preparing a full-scale shopping list, Palfrey, a grand slam. They're taking it to State, Defensej the Pentagon and the scientific bodies. All the biggest questions of the day will be canvassed and set down for the Bluebird to respond to. They know the risks but that isn't deterring them. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, they reason. That takes courage.'

It is his Despatch Box voice. Clive has India at last. 'In the great offence-defence stand-off, Palfrey, nothing exists in a vacuum,' he explains loftily, quoting, I had no doubt, what somebody had said to him an hour before. 'It's a matter of the finest tuning. Every question is as important as every answer.They know that. They see it clearly. They can pay the source no higher compliment than to prepare a no-holds-barred questionnaire for him. It's a thing they haven't done for many, many years. It breaks precedent. Recent precedent anyway.'

'Does Ned know?' I ask, when I can get a word in.

'He can't. None of us can. We're talking the highest strategic classifications.'

'I meant, does he know you've made them a present of his joe?'

'I want you to come down to Langley immediately and thrash out terms with your opposite numbers here. Randy will arrange transport. Palfrey?'

'Does he know?' I repeat.

Clive makes one olf his telephone silences, in which you are'supposed to work out all the ways in which you are at fault.

'Ned will be brought up to date when he gets back to London, thank you. That will be quite soon enough. Until then I shall expect you to say nothing. The r6le of the Russia House will be respected. Sheriton values the link. It will even be enlarged in certain ways, perhaps permanently. Ned should be grateful.'

The news was nowhere morejoyfully received than in the British trade press. Marriage with a Future, trumpeted Booknews a few weeks later in its trailer for the Moscow book fair. The long-rumoured engagement between Abercrombie & Blair of Norfolk Street, Strand, and Potomac Traders, Inc. of Boston, Mass., is ON! Seventeen-stone entrepreneur Jack Henziger has finally weighed in beside Barley Scott Blair of A. & B. with a new joint company titled Potomac & Blair, which plans an aggressive campaign in the fast-opening East Bloc markets. 'This is a shop window on tomorrow,' declares confident Henziger.

Moscow Book Fair, here they come!

The newsflash was accompanied by a warming photograph of Barley and Jack Henziger shaking hands across a bowl of flowers. The photograph was taken by the Service photographer in the safe house in Knightsbridge. Flowers by Miss Coad.

I met Hannah the day following my return from the island and I assumed we would make love. She looked tall and golden, which is the way she always looks when I have not seen her for a while. A Thursday, so she was taking her fourteen-year-old son Giles to some spurious consultant behind Harley Street. I have never cared for Giles, probably because I know that he was conceived on the rebound, too soon after I had sent her back to Derek. We sat in our usual evil caf6 drinking rancid tea,. while she waited for him to come out, and smoked, a thing I hate. But I wanted her, and she knew it.

'Whereabouts in America?' she said, as if it mattered.

'I don't know. Some island full of ospreys and bad weather.'

'I bet they weren't real ospreys.'

'They were, actually. They're common there.'

And I saw by the strain in her eyes that she wanted me too.

'Anyway, I've got to take Giles home,' she said, when we had sufficiently read each other's thoughts.

'Put him in a cab,' I suggested.

But by then we were opposed to each other once more, and the moment was dead.