The Russia House

CHAPTER 14

'Oh come, Ned,' said Clive airily, still elated by the wizardry of the transmission. 'The Bluebird's been ill before. Several times.'

'I know,' said Ned distractedly. 'I know.' And then. 'Maybe I don't mind him being ill. Maybe I mind him writing.'

Sheriton was listening chin in hand, as he had been listening to the tape. An affinity had grown up between Ned and Sheriton, as in an operation it must. They were handling the transfer of power as if it had happened long ago.

'But my dear man, that's what we all do when we're ill,* Clive exclaimed in a misjudged demonstration of human understanding. 'We write to the whole world!'

It had never occurred to me that Clive was capable of illness, or that he had friends to write to.

'I mind him handing chatty letters to mysterious intermediaries. And I mind him talking about trying to bring more materials for Barley,' Ned said. 'We know he never normally writes to her. We know he's security conscious to a fault. Suddenly he falls ill and writes her a gushing five-page love letter via Igor. Igor who? Igor when? How?'

'He should have photographed the letter,' said Clive. becoming disapproving of Barley. 'Or taken it off her. One or the other.'

Ned was too wrapped up in his thoughts to give this suggestion the contempt it deserved.

'How could he? She knows him as a publisher, That's all she knows him as.'

'Unless the Bluebird told her otherwise,' said Clive.

'He wouldn't,' Ned retorted, and returned to his thoughts. 'There was a car,' he said. 'A red car then a white car. You saw the watch report. The red car went in first, then the white car took over.'

'That is pure speculation. On a warm Sunday the whole ofMoscow takes to the countryside,'said Clive knowledgeably.

He waited for a reaction but in vain, so he returned to the subject of the letter. 'Katya didn't have any problems with it,' he objected. 'Katya's not crying foul. She'sjumping forjoy. If she didn't smell a rat, and Scott Blair didn't, why should we - sitting here in London, doing their worrying for them?'

'He asked for the shopping list,' said Ned, as if still hearing distant music. 'A final and exhaustive list of questions. Why did he do that?'

Sheriton had finally stirred himself. He was flagging Ned down with his big paw. 'Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned. Okay? It's Day One again, so we're jumpy. Let's get some sleep.'

He stood up. So did Clive and so did 1. But Ned stayed doggedly rooted where he was, his hands clasped before him on his desk.

Sheriton spoke down at him. With affection, but with force as well. 'Ned, just hear me, Ned, okay? Ned?'

'I'm not deaf.'

'No, but you're tired. Ned, if we bad-mouth this operation one more time, it will never come back. We are going with your man, the one you brought to us in order to persuade us. We moved hell on earth to get this far. We have the source. We have the appropriation. We have the influential audience. We are within pissing distance of filling gaps in our knowledge that no smart machines, no electronic heavy breathers, no Pentagon Jesuits can get within light years of. If we keep our nerve, and Barley does, and Bluebird does, we will have landed a bonanza beyond the dreams of the most accomplished fantasists. If we stay in there.'

But Sheriton was speaking with too much conviction, and his face, for all its pudgy inscrutability, was betraying an almost desperate need.

'Ned?'

'Hearing you, Russell. Loud and clear.'

'Ned, this is no longer a cottage industry, for Christ's sake. We played big, now we have to think big. You don't get bigger than this. Presidential findings are not an invitation to doubt our own good judgment. They are in the way of being orders. Ned, I really think you should get some sleep.'

'I don't think I'm tired,' said Ned.

'I think you are. I think everyone will say you are. I think they may even say Ned was very bullish for the Bluebird until the big bad American wolf came and took his joe away. Then all of a sudden the Bluebird was a very iffy source. I think people are going to say you are tired as hell.'

I glanced at Clive.

Clive too was looking down at Ned, but with eyes so cold they chilled my blood. Time to move you on, they were saying. Time to measure. you for the drop.

Both Henziger and Wicklow kept a close eye on Barley that day and reported on him frequently, Henziger to Cy by whatever means they used, Wicklow by way of an irregular to Paddy. Both attested to his high spirits and relaxed manner, and in differing language to his sovere,ignty. Both described how at breakfast he had enchanted – a couple of Finnish publishers who were showing interest in the Trans-Siberian Railway project.

'They were eating out of his hand,' said Wicklow, providing an unconsciously comic picture of breakfast, but at the Mezh anything is possible.

Both recorded with amusement Barley's determination to act as their tour-guide when they reached the permanent exhibition site, and how he obliged their taxi to drop them at the end of the grand avenue so that, as first-time pilgrims from the world of capitalism, they could make their first approach on foot.

So the two professional spies strolled contentedly through the wet autumn sunshine with their jackets over their shoulders and their joe between them while Barley favoured them with his own eccentric guided tour, extolling the 'late Essoldo period' architecture and the 'Revolutionary Rococo' gardens. He doted on the immense ornamental pool and its golden fish spewing jets of water at the rumps of fifteen naked golden nymphs, one for each of the Socialist republics. He insisted that they dawdle at the white-pillared love bowers and temples of delight - whose portals, he pointed out, were dedicated not to Venus or Bacchus but to the fallen goddesses of the Soviet economy – coal, steel and even atomic energy, Jack!

'He was witty but he wasn't high,' reported Henziger, who had already taken fondly to Barley in Leningrad. 'He was damn funny.'

And from the temples Barley marched them up the triumphal avenue itself, the Emperor's Ride, perhaps a mile of it and heaven knows how broad, celebrating the People's Achievements in the Service of Mankind. And surely no vision of popular power was ever portrayed in such despotic images! he proclaimed. Surely no revolution had so perfectly enshrined everything it had set out to raze to the ground! But by then Barley had to bellow his irreverences over the din of the loudspeakers, which all day long pour floods of self-congratulatory messages on to the -heads of the benighted crowds below.

Finally they atrived, as they had to, at the two pavilions housing the fair.

'On my right, the publishers of Peace, Progress and Goodwill,' Barley announced, playing the referee at a prize fight. 'On my left, the distributors of Fascist imperialist lies, the pornographers, the poisoners of truth. Seconds out. Time.'

They showed their passes and walked in.

The exhibition stand of the newly inaugurated and geographically confusing house of Potomac & Blair was a small but satisfactory sensation of the fair. Langley's lovingly created P. & B. symbol shone resplendent between the dowdicr displays of Astral Press and Purbeck Media. The stand's interior design, characterised by its Langley architects as tough but tasty, was a model of instant impact. The exhibits - many of them, as is customary, dummies of books still to enter the production line - were prepared with all the attention to detail that intelligence services traditionally bestow on fakes. The only good coffee at the fair was to be found bubbling on an ingenious machine in the rear cubby-hole. There was Langley's own Mary Lou to serve it. For the favoured, there was even a forbidden shot of Scotch to help them through the day – forbidden, indeed, by special edict of the organiscrs, for even literary reconstruction must be the-work of sober men.

And Mary Lou, with her homespun schoolgirl smile and billowing tweed skirt, made a natural product of the nicer side of Madison Avenue. Nobody need ever have guessed she had a little of Langley's thread woven into her as well.

Neither was Wicklow, with his polished patter, anything other than the quick-eyed, upwardly-mobile young publisher they make these days.

As to honest Jack Henziger, he was the archetype of the settled buccaneer of the modern American book trade. He made no secret of his antecedents. Pipelines in the Middle East, humanity in Afghanistan, red beans to opium-growing hill-tribes in Thailand – Henziger had sold them all, whatever he had sold for Langley on the side. But publishing was where his heart was, and he was here to prove it.

And Barley seemed to revel in the artifice. He threw himself upon it as if it were his long-lost reality, shaking hands, receiving the congratulations of his competitors and colleagues, until around eleven he professed himself restless and proposed to Wicklow that they tour the lines and take comfort to the troops.

So off they set. Barley bearing in his arms a bunch of white envelopes of which he occasionally pressed one into a chosen hand as he yelled and greeted his way along the packed alleys of visitors and exhibitors.

'Well blow me over, if it isn't Barley Bloody Blair.' a familiar voice declared from the centre of a multi-lingual display of illustrated Bibles. 'Remember me, do you? Third from the left in the mink jock-strap, back in your humble days?'

'Spikey. They let you in again,' said Barley with pleasure, and handed him his envelope.

'It's when they won't let me out I'm worried. This your dad, then?'

Barley presented the distinguished editor Wicklow, and Spikey Morgan bestowed a priestly blessing on him with his nicotine-stained fingers.

They pressed on, only to stumble into Dan Zeppelin a few yards later. Dan did not talk. Dan conspired in a gravedigger's murmur, leaning across his counter at you over folded arms.

'So I mean tell me something, Barley. Okay? Are we pioneers or are we the fucking Mitford sisters? So a few unbooks are books this year. So a few unwriters have been sprung from jail. Big deal. I walk into my own stand this morning, there's some asshole pulling the books out of my shelves. "May I ask you a personal question?" I says. "What the fuck are you doing with my books?" "Orders," he says. Six books, he confiscated. Mary G. Ambleside on fucking Black Consciousness in Song and Word. Orders! I mean who are we, Barley? Who are they? What do they think they're restructuring when there was never a structure in the first place? How do you restructure a corpse?'

At Lupus Books they were directed to the coffee room, where our Chairman Himself, the ncwly-knightcd Sir Peter Oliphant, had upstaged even the Russians by reserving a table. A handwritten notice in both languages confirmed his triumph. The flags of Britain and the Soviet Union warned off doubters. Flanked by interpreters and high officials, Sir Peter was dilating on the many advantages to the Soviet Union of subsidising his generous purchases from them.

'It's the Earl!' cried Barley, handing him an envelope. 'Where's the coronet?'

With scarcely a flicker of his dusty eyelids, the great man continued his dissertation.

At the Israeli stand an armed peace reigned. The dark queue was orderly but mute. Boys in jeans and sneakers lounged against the walls. Lev Abramovitz was whitehaired and overpoweringly tall. He had served in the Irish Guards.

'Lev. How's Zion?'

'Maybe we're winning, maybe the happy ending's at the beginning,' Lev said, pockcting Barlcy's envelope.

And from Israel, with Barley leading at a canter, they pounded across the concourse to the Pavilion of Peace, Progress and Goodwill, where there could no longer be any doubt of the massive historical upheaval taking place, or of who was doing the heaving.

Every banner and spare bit of wall screamed the new Gospel. In every stand of every republic, the thoughts and writings of the no-longer-new prophet, with his birthmark turned away and his jaw raised, were blazoned alongside those of his colourless master, Lenin. At the VAAP stand. where Barley and Wicklow shook a few hands and Barley shed a batch of envelopes, the Leader's speeches, wrapped in shiny covers and rendered into English, French, Spanish and German, made a totally resistible appeal.

'How much more of this shit do we have to take, Barley?' a blond-faced Moscow publisher demanded sotto voce as they went by. 'When will they start repressing us again to make us comfortable? If our past's a lie, who's to say our future isn't a lie as well?'

They continued along the stands, Barley leading, Barley greeting, Wicklow following.

'Joseph! Great to see you! Envelope for you. Don't eat it all at once.'

'Barley! My friend! Didn't they give you my message? Maybe I didn't leave one.'

'Yuri. Great to see you! Envelope for you.'

'Come and drink tonight, Barley! Sasha is coming, so is Rosa. Rudi's giving a concert tomorrow so he wants to stay sober. You heard about the writers they let out? Listen. it's Potemkin village stuff. They let them out, they give them a few meals, show them off and throw them back inside till next year. Come over here, I got to sell you a couple qf books to annoy Zapadny.'

At first Wicklow didn't even realise they had arrived at their destination. He saw a Roman standard hung with faded flags and some gold lettering stitched on red bunting. He heard Barley's yell of 'Katya, where are you?' But nothing said who owned the stand and probably that was a part of the display that hadn't arrived. He saw the usual unreadable books on agricultural development in the Ukraine and the traditional dances of Georgia expiring on their shelves under the strain of previous exhibitions. He saw the usual half-dozen broad-hipped women standing around as if they were waiting for a train, and a small unshaven fellow clutching his cigarette in front of him like a conjuror's wand, scowling at Barley's namctag.

Nasayan, Wicklow read in return. Grigory Tigranovich. Senior Editor, October Publishing.

'You are looking for Miss Katya Orlova, I think,' Nasayan told Barley in English, holding his cigarette still higher as if to get a clearer look at his visitor.

'I'll say I am!' Barley replied with enthusiasm, and a couple of the women smiled.

A grin of frightful courtesy had spread over Nasayan's face. With a flourish of his cigarette he stepped aside and Wicklow recognised Katya's back as she talked with two very small Asians whom he took to be Burmese. Then an instinct made her turn and she caught sight of Barley first, then Wicklow, then Barley again, while a splendid smile lit her face.

'Katya. Fantastic,' said Barley shyly. 'How are the kids? Did they survive?'

'Oh thank you, they are very well!'

Watched by Nasayan and his ladies, as well as by Wicklow, Barley handed her an invitation to the great glasnost launch party of Potomac & Blair.

'Oh by the way, I may skip some of the gay whirl tonight,' Barley remarked as they made their way back to the Western pavilion. 'You and Jack and Mary Lou will have to manage on your own. I'm dining with a beautiful lady.'

'Anyone we know?' Wicklow asked. They both laughed. It was a sunny day.

She's fine, Barley was thinking contentedly. If something is happening, it hasn't happened to her yet.

How much did we know or guess, any of us, of Barley's feelings towards Katya? In a case so scrupulously monitored and controlled, the question of love received diffident handling.

Wicklow, diligently promiscuous in his own life, was puritanical about Barley's. Perhaps as a young man he still could not take seriously the notion of an older passion. For Wicklow, Barley was merely infatuated, which he usually was anyway. People of Barley's age were not in love.

Henziger, who was Barley's rough contemporary, regarded sex as an unsung perquisite of the secret life, and took it for granted that a square-shooter like Barley would put his body where his duty lay. Like Wicklow, but for different reasons, he found nothing exceptional in Barley's tender feelings towards Katya and operationally much to recommend them.

And in London? There was no sharply defined view. On the island Brady had said a mouthful, but Brady's assault had been repelled and his advice with it.

And Ned? Ned had a wife as soldierly as himself, and as unawakened. Name me a joe in a bad country, Ned liked to say with a rueful smile, who doesn't fall for a pretty face if she's on his side against the world.

And Bob, Sheriton andjohnny seem all to have assumed in different ways that Barley's private life and his appetites generally were of such a seedy complexity that they were best left out of the equation.

And Palfrey: what was old Palfrey thinking - hurrying up to Grosvenor Square in any spare hour and, if he couldn't make it, phoning Ned to ask, 'How's the boy?'

Palfrey was thinking about Hannah. The Hannah he had loved and loves still, as only cowards may. The Hannah whose smile was once as warm and deep as Katya's. 'You're a good man, Palfrey,' she will say with terrible control on the days when she is trying to understand me. 'You'll find a way. Maybe not now, but one day.' And oh, Palfrey found a way all right! He pleaded the code - that convenient code that rules that a young solicitor caught in adultery is ipsoyacto excluded from doing anything about it. He pleaded children, hers and his - so many people involved, dear. He pleaded marriage, curse him - how will they cope without us, dear, Derek can't even boil an egg? He pleaded the partnership and, when it was dissolved, he bunicd his stupid head in the sands of the secret desert where no Harfnah would ever be able to see him again. And he had the nerve to plead duty - the Service would never forgive me a mucky divorce, dear - not its legal adviser, it couldn't.

I was thinking about the island too. About the evening Barley and I had stood on the shingle beach watching the fog-bank roll at us across the grey Atlantic.

'They'd never get her out, would they?' Barley said. 'Not if things went wrong.'

I didn't answer and I don't think he expected me to, but he was right. She was a thoroughbred Soviet national and she had committed a thoroughbred Soviet crime. She was nowhere near the swappable class.

'Anyway, she'd never leave her children,' he said, confirming his own doubts.

We watched the sea for a while, his eyes on Katya and mine on Hannah, who would never leave her children either, but wanted to bring them with her, and make an honest man out of a career-obsessed Chancery Lane hack who was sleeping with his senior partner's wife.

'Raymond Chandler!' Uncle Matvey yelled from his chair, over the clamour of neighbours' television sets.

'Terrific,' Barley said.

'Agatha Christie!'

'Ah well, now, Agatha.'

'Dashiel Hammett! Dorothy Sayers. Josephine Tey.'

Barley sat on the sofa where Katya had settled him. The living room was tiny. The span of his arms could have bridged the width of it. A glass-fronted corner cupboard contained the family treasures. Katya had already given him the tour of them. The pottery mugs, made by a friend for her wedding, their medallions portraying the bride and groom. The Leningrad coffee set, no longer complete, that had belonged to the lady in the wood frame on the top shelf. The old sepia photograph of a Tolstoyan couple, the Man bearded and resolute in his stiff white collar, the girl in her bonnet and fur muff.

'Matvey is passionate for English detective fiction,'Katya called from the kitchen, where she had last things to do.

'Me too,' said Barley untruthfully.

'He is telling you it was not permitted under the Czars. They would never have tolerated such an intrusion into their police system. Do you have vodka? No more for Matvey, please. You must take some food. We are not alcoholics like you Westerners. We do not drink without food.'

Under the pretext of examining her books, Barley stepped into the tiny passage from where he could see her. Jack London, Hemingway and Joyce, Dreiser and John Fowles. Heine, Remarque and Rilke. The twins were in the bathroom chattering. He gazed at her through the open kitchen door. Her gestures had an air of timeless and deliberate delay. She's become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she's grateful. When it doesn't work, it's life. From the living room Matvey was still talking gaily.

'What's he saying now?' Barley asked.

'He is talking about the siege.'

'I love you.'

'The Leningraders refused to accept that they were beaten.' She was preparing cakes of liver on rice. Her hands kept still a moment, then went on-with their work. 'Shostakovich still composed even if the ink froze in his inkwell. The novelists went on writing, you could hear a chapter of a new novel any week if you knew the right cellars to go to.'

'I love you,' he repeated. 'All my failures were preparations for meeting you. Fact.'

She breathed out sharply and they both fell silent, for a moment deaf to Matvcy'sjolly monologue from the sitting room, and to the sounds of splashing from the bathroom.

'What else does he say?' Barley asked.

'Barley – ' she protested.

'Please. Tell me what he's saying.'

'The Germans were four kilometres from the city on the south side. They covered the outskirts with machinc~gun fire and shelled the centre with artillery.' She handed him mats and knives and forks and followed him to the living room. 'Two hundred and fifty grams of bread for a labourer, others a hundred and twenty-five. Arc you really so fascinated by Matvcy, or are you pretending to be polite, as usual?'

'It's a mature, unselfish, absolute, thrilling love. I've never known anything approaching it. I thought you oug4t to be the first to know.'

Matvey was beaming at Barley in unalloyed adoration. His new English pipe gleamed from his top pocket. Katya held Barley's stare, started to laugh, shook her head, not in negation but in daze. The twins rushed in wearing their dressing-gowns and swung on Barley's hands. Katya ettled them to the table and put Matvey at the head. Barley at beside her while she poured the cabbage soup. With a prodigious show of power Sergey drew the cork from a wine bottle, but KatY2 would take no more than a half-glass and Matvey was permitted only vodka. Anna broke ranks to fetch a drawing she had made after a visit to the Timiryasev Academy: horses, a real wheatfield, plants that could survive the snow. M2tVCy was telling the story of the old man in the machine shop across the road, and once more Barley insisted on hearing every word.

'There was an old man Matvey knew, a friend of my father's,' Katya said. 'He had a machine shop. When he was too weak from starving, he strapped himself to the machinery so that he would not collapse. That was how Matvey and my father found him when he died. Strapped to the machinery. Frozen. Matvey also wishes you to know that he personally wore a luminous badge on his coat' – Matvey was proudly indicating the very spot on his pullover – 'so that he didn't knock into his friends in the dark when they took their buckets to fetch water from the Neva. So. That is enough of Leningrad,' she said firmly. 'You have been very generous, Barley, as usual. I hope you are sincere.'

'I have never been so sincere in my life.'

Barley was in the middle of toasting Matvey's health when. the telephone started ringing beside the sofa. Katya sprang up but Sergey was ahead of her. He put the receiver to his ear and listened, then replaced it on the cradle with a shake of his head.

'So many misconnections,'Katya said, and handed round Plates for the liver cakes.

There was only her room. There was only her bed.

The children had gone to their bed and Barley could hear them snuffling in their- sleep. Matvey lay on his ~rmy bedroll in the living room, already dreaming of Leningrad. Katya sat upright and Barley sat beside her, holding her hand while he watched her face against the.uncurtained window.

I love Matvcy too,' he said.

She nodded and gave a short laugh. He- put his knuckles against her check and discovered that she was weeping.

'Just not in the same way I love you,' he explained. 'I love children, uncles, dogs, cats and musicians. The entire Ark is, my personal responsibility. But I love you so profoundly that I am ashamed to be articulate. I Would be very grateful if we could find a way to silence me. I look at you, and I am absolutely sick of the sound of my own voice. Do you want that in writing?'

Then with both hands he turned her face to him and kissed her. Then he guided her towards the top of the bed and laid her head on the pillow and kissed her again, first her lips and then her closed wet eyelashes while her arms gathered round his back and drew him down on her. Then she pushed him away from her and sprang up and went to look at the twins before returning. Then she slid the bolt inside her bedroom door.

'If the children come, you must dress and we must be very serious,' she warned, kissing him.

'Can I tell them I love you?'

'If you do I shall not interpret.'

'Can I tell you?'

'If you are very quiet.'

'Will you interpret?'

She was no longer weeping. She was no longer smiling. Black, logical eyes, searching like his own. An embrace without reservation, no hidden codicils, no small print to the agreement.

I had never known Ned in such a mood. He had become the Jonah of his own operation and his rugged stoicism only made his forebodings harder to take. In the situation room he sat at his desk as if he were presiding at a court martial, while Sheriton lolled beside him like an intelligent Teddy bear. And when as a reckless throw I walked him down the road to the Connaught where I occasionally took Hannah and, to ease the waiting, fed him a magical dinner in the Grill, I still could not penetrate the mask of his forbearance.

For the troth was, his pessimism was seriously affecting my own spirits. I was on a see-saw. Clive-and Sheriton were up one end, Ned was the dead weight at the other. And since I am no great decision-taker, it was all the more disturbing to watch a man normally so incisive resign himself to ostracism.

'You're seeing ghosts, Ned,' I told him with little of Sheriton's conviction. 'You've gone far beyond whatever anybody else is thinking. All right, it's not your case any more. That doesn't mean it's a shipwreck. And your credibility is, well, ebbing.'

'A final and exhaustive list,' Ned said again, as if the phrase had been dinned into him by a hypnotist. 'Why final? Why exhaustive? Answer me that. When Barley saw him in Leningrad, he wouldn't even accept our preliminary questionnaire. He threw it back in Barley's face. Now he's asking for the whole shopping list in one go. Asking for it. The final list. The Grand Slam. We're to get it all together for the weekend. After that the Bluebird will answer no more questions from the grey men. "This is your last chance," he's saying. Why?'

'Look at it the other way round a minute,' I urged him in a desperate murmur, when the wine waiter had brought us a second decanter of priceless claret. 'All right. The Bluebird has been turned by the Sovs. He's bad. The Sovs are running him. So why do they close it down? Why not sit back and play us along? You wouldn't close it down if you were in their shoes. You wouldn't hand us an ultimatum, create deadlines. Would you?'

His reply put paid- to the best and most expensive meal I had ever given a fellow officer in my life.

'I might have to,' he said. 'If I were Russian.'

'Why?'

His words were the more chilling for being spoken with a leaden dispassion.

'Because he might not be presentable any more. He might not be able to speak. Or pick up his knife and fork. Or pour salt on his grouse. He might have made a couple of voluntary statements about his charming mistress in Moscow who had no idea, but really no idea, what she was doing. He might have – '

We walked back to Grosvenor Square. Barley had left Katya's apartment at midnight Moscow time and returned to the Mezh, where Henziger had sat up for him in the lobby, ostensibly reading a manuscript.

Barley was in high spirits but had nothing new to report, just a family evening, he had told Henziger, but good fun all the same. And the hospital visit still on, he added.

The whole of the next day nothing. A space. Spying is waiting. Spying is worrying yourself sick while you watch Ned sink into a decline. Spying is taking Hannah to y6ur flat in Pimlico between the hours of four and six when she is supposed to be having a German lesson, God knows why. Spying is imitating love, and making sure she's home in time to give dear Derek his dinner.