The Russia House

CHAPTER 17

The elusive truth that Ned was speaking of came out slowly and in a series of distorted perceptions, which is generally'the case in our secret overworld.

At six p.m. Barley was seen to 'exit' the VAAP offices, as our screens now insisted on advising us, and there was a flurry of apprehension that he might be drunk, for Zapadny was a drinking buddy and a farewell vodka with him was likely to be just that. He emerged, Zapadny with him. They embraced fulsomely on the doorstep, Zapadny flushed and a little excitable in his movements and Barley rather rigid, hence the watchers' worry that he was drunk, and their rather odd decision to photograph him - as if by freezing the moment they might somehow sober him up. And since this is the last photograph of him on the file, you may imagine how much attention has been paid to it. Barley has Zapadny in his arms, and there is strength to their embrace, at least on Barley's side. In my imagination, if no one else's, it is as if Barley is holding the poor fellow up in order to give him the courage to keep his half of the bargain; as if he is literally breathing courage into him. And the pink is weird. VAAP is a former school on Bolshaya Bronnaya Street in the ccntre of Moscow. It was built, I guess, at the turn of the century, with large windows and a plaster faqade. And this plaster was painted in that year a light pink, which in the photograph is transformed to a flaming orange, presumably by the last rays of a red sun. The entwined men are thus caught in an unholy scarlet halo like a red flash. One of the watchers even gained the entrance hall on the pretext of visiting the cafeteria, and tried to achieve the reverse shot. But a tall man stood in his way, watching the scene on the pavement. Nobody has identified him. At the news-stand, a second man, also tall, is drinking from a mug, but not with much conviction for his eyes too are turned to the two embracing figures outside.

The watchers took no note of the scores of people who had passed in and out of the VAAP building during the two hours Barley had been in the place, how could they? They had no idea whether the visitors had come to buy copyrights or secrcts.

Barley returned to his hotel where he had a drink in the bar with a bunch of publishing cronies, among them Henziger, who was able to confirm, to London's relief. that Barley was not drunk - to the contrary, that he was calm and in thoughtful spirits.

Barley did mention in passing that he was expecting a phone call from one of Zapadny's outriders - 'We're still trying to stitch up the Trans-Siberian thing.' And at about seven p.m. he suddenly confessed himself ravenous, so Henziger and Wicklow took him through to the Japanese restaurant, together with a couple ofjolly girls from Simon & Schuster whom Wicklow was counting on for light relief to ease Barley's passage to his evening rendezvous.

Over dinner Barley sparkled so brightly that the girls tried to persuade him to come back to the National with them, where a party was being thrown by a group of American publishers. Barley replied that he had a date but might come on afterwards if it didn't run too long.

Exactly at eight p.m. by Wicklow's watch, Barley was summoned to the telephone and took the call in the restaurant, not five yards from where the party was sitting. Wicklow and Henzigcr strained, as a matter of routine, to catch his words. Wicklow recalls hearing 'That's all that matters to me.' Henziger thinks he heard 'We've got a deal' but it might have been 'not a deal' or even 'not yet real'.

Either way, Barley was cross when he resumed his seat and complained to Henziger that the bastards were still holding out for too much money, which Henziger regarded more as a sign of his internal stress than of any great concern for the Trans-Siberian project.

Quarter of an hour later the phone rang again and Barley returned from his conversation smiling. 'We're on,' he told Henziger jubilantly. 'Scaled, signed and delivered. They never go back on a handshake.' At which Henziger and Wicklow broke out clapping and Henziger remarked that 'we could do with a few more of them in Moscow.'

It seems not to have occurred to either man that Barley had never before shown so much enthusiasm for a publishing agreement. But then what were they supposed to be looking for, except the night's great coup?

Barley's dinner conversation was later painstakingly reconstructed, without result. He was talkative but not excitable. His subject was jazz, his idol was Slim Gaillard. The great ones were always outlaws, he maintained. jazz was nothing if not protest. Even its own rules had to be broken by the real improvisers, he said.

And everyone agreed with him, yes, yes, long live dissent, long live the individual over the grey men! Except nobody saw it that way. And again, why should they?

At nine-ten p.m., with less than two hours to kill, Barley announced that he would stretch out in his room for a bit, he had letters to write and business to clear up. Both Wicklow and Henziger offered to give him a hand, for they had orders not to leave him to himself if they could avoid it. But Barley declined their offers and they could not insist.

So Henziger took up his post in the next-door room and Wicklow placed himself in the lobby while Barley stretched out, though in reality he cannot have stretched out even for a second, for what he accomplished verges on the heroic.

Five letters were traced to this short span, not to mention two telephone calls to England, one to each of his children, both monitored within the United Kingdom and bounced through to Grosvenor Square but neither of operational consequence. Barley was merely concerned to catch up with family news and enquire after his grand-daughter, aged four. He insisted she be brought to the telephone, but she was too shy or too tired to talk to him. When his daughter Anthea asked him how his love-life was, he replied 'complete', which was held to be an unusual sort of reply. but then the circumstances were not usual.

Ned alone remarked that Barley had said nothing about returning to England the next day, but Ned was by now a voice in the wilderness and Clive was seriously considering taking him off the case altogether.

Barley also wrote two shorter letters, one to Henziger, one to Wicklow. And since they were not tampered with, so far as the laboratories could afterwards determine, and since – even more remarkable – the hotel delivered them to the correct room numbers promptly at eight o'clock next morning, it was assumed that these letters were in some way part of the package that Barley had negotiated while he was inside the VAAP building.

The letters advised the two men that if they left the country quietly that day, taking Mary Lou with them, no harm would come to them. Barley had a warm word for each.

'Wickets, there's a real publisher in you. Go for it!'

And for Henziger, 'Jack, I hope this won't mean you take premature retirement in Salt Lake City. Tell them you never trusted me anyway. I didn't trust me, so why should you?'

No homilies, no apt quotations from his large, untidy store. Barley, it seemed, was coping very well without the assistance of other people's wisdom.

At ten o'clock, he left the hotel accompanied by Henziger only, and they had themselves dropped on the northern outskirts of the town where Cy and Paddy were once more waiting in the safe truck. This time Paddy was driving. Henziger sat beside him and Barley got in the back with Cy, slipped off his coat and let Cy put on the microphone harness and give him the latest operational intelligence: that Gocthe's plane from Saratov had arrived in Moscow on time; and that a figure answering Goethe's description had been observed entering Igor's apartment block forty minutes ago.

Soon afterwards, lights had come up in the windows of the target flat.

Cy then handed Barley two books, one a paperback copy of From Here to Eternity which contained the shopping list, the other a fatter volume, leather-bound, which was a concealment device containing a sound-baffler to be activated by pulling open the front cover. Barley had played with one in London and was proficient in its use. His body microphones were tuned to defeat the impulses of the device, but normal wall microphones were not. The disadvantage of the baffler was also known to him. Its presence in the room was detectable. If Igor's flat was microphoned, then the listeners would at once be aware that a baffler was being used. This risk had been passed by both London and Langley as acceptable.

The other risk had not been considered, namely that the device might fall into the hands of the opposition. It was still in the prototype stage and a small fortune and several years of research had been lavished on its development.

At ten-fifty-four p.m., just as Barley was leaving the safe truck, he handed Paddy an envelope and said, 'This is for Ned personally in case anything happens to me.' Paddy slipped the envelope in his inside jacket pocket. He noticed that it was a fat envelope and, so far as he could see in the half-light, it was not addressed.

The most lively account of Barley's walk to the foot,of the apartment block was provided not by the military reportese of Paddy, still less by the Haig-speak of Cy, but in the boisterous tones of his good friend Jack Henziger who escorted him to the entrance. Barley did not utter, he said. Neither did Jack. They'd no wish to be identified as foreigners.

'We walked alongside of each other out of step,' Henziger said. 'He has this long step, mine's short. It bothered me we couldn't keep step. The apartment house was one of these brick monsters they have out there with like a mile of concrete round them, and we kept on walking without getting anywhere. It's like one of those dreams, I thought. You keep on running but you don't make any distance. Very hot, the air. Sweaty. I'm sweating, but Barley's cool. He was collected, no question. He looked great. He looked straight into my eyes. He wished me a lot of luck. He was at peace with himself. I felt it.'

Shaking hands, Henziger nevertheless hdd a momentary impression that Barley was angry about something. -Perhaps angry against Henziger, for now in the half-dark he seemed determined to avoid Henziger's eye.

'Then I thought, Maybe he's mad at Bluebird for getting him into this. Then I thought, Maybe he's mad at all of us, but too polite to say it. Like he was being very British somehow, very laid back, very understated, keeping it all inside.'

Ninety seconds later as they were preparing to leave, Cy and Paddy saw a silhouette at Igor's window and took it to be Barley's. The right hand was adjusting the top of the curtain, which was the agreed signal to say 'All's well. * They drove away and left the surveillance of the apartment to the irregulars, who covered each other in shifts all night, but the light in the apartment stayed burning and Barley didn't come out.

One theory out of hundreds is that he never went up to the apartment at all, and that they took him straight through the building and out the other side, and that the figure in the window was one of their own people, for instance one of the tall men in the photograph taken in the VAAP foyer that afternoon. It never seemed to me to matter, but to the experts for some reason it did. When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.

Speculation about Barley's disappearance began slowly and built throughout the night. Optimists like Bob, and for a while Sheriton, clung on till dawn and after. Barley and Bluebird had drunk themselves under the table again, they kept insisting in order to keep each other's spirits up. It was Peredelkino all over again, a re-run, no question, they told each other.

Then for a short while they worked up a kidnap theory, until soon after five-thirty in the morning - thanks to the time difference - when Henziger and Wicklow had their letters and Wicklow without further fuss took a cab to the British Embassy, where the Soviet guards at the gate did not obstruct him. The result was a flash signal to Ned, decypher yourself, from Paddy. Meanwhile, Cy was putting through a similar message to Langley, Sheriton and anyone else who was still willing to listen to a man whose Moscow days looked like being over very soon.

Sheriton took the news with his customary phlegm. He read Cy's telegram, he looked around the room and realised that the whole team was watching him – the smart girls. the boys in ties, loyal Bob, ambitious Johnny with his gunman's eyes. And of the Brits, Ned, myself and Brock, for Clive had prudently discovered urgent business elsewhere. There was a lot of the actor in Sheriton, just as there was in Henziger, and he used it now. He stood up, he hauled at his waistband, he massaged his face like a man reckoning he needed a shave.

'Well, boys. Better put the chairs on the tables till next time.'

Then he walked over to Ned, who was still sitting at his desk studying Paddy's telegram, and he laid a hand on Ned's shoulder.

'Ned, I owe you dinner some time,' he said.

Then he walked over to the door and unhooked his new Burberry and buttoned himself into it and departed, followed after a moment by Bob and Johnny.

Others did not bow out so elegantly, least of all the barons of the twelfth floor.

Once again, a committee of enquiry was formed.

Names should be named. Nobody should be spared. Heads must roll.

The Deputy to chair it, Palfrey to be secretary.

Another purpose of such committees, I discovered, is to impart a sense of ceremony to events that have passed off without any. We were extremely solemn.

The first to be heard, as usual, were the conspiracy theorists, who were recruited in short order from the Foreign Office, the Defence Ministry and a rather unlovely body called the Informal Consultants, which consisted of industrial and academic scientists who fancied themselves as Sunday spies. These amateur espiocrats commanded huge influence around the Whitehall bazaars, and were heard at inordinate length by the committee. A professor from Edinburgh addressed us for five full pipe-loads and nearly gassed us all, but nobody had the nerve to tell him to put the damn thing out.

The first great question was, what would happen next? Would there be expulsions, a scandal? What would become of our Moscow station? Had any of the irregulars been compromised?

The audio truck, though Soviet' property, was an American problem, and its abrupt disappearance caused hushed concern among those who had favoured its use.

The question of who is expelled for what is never a plain one, for heads of station in Moscow, Washington and London are these days declared to their host countries. Nobody in Moscow Centre had any illusions about Paddy's activities, or Cy's. Their cover was not designed to protect them from the opposition, but from the gaze of the real world.

In any case, they were not expelled. Nobody was expelled. Nobody was arrested. The irregulars, who were stood down indefinitely, went peaceably about their cover jobs.

The absence of a retaliatory gesture was quickly seen by Western pundits as vastly significant.

A conciliatory move in the season of glasnost?

A clear signal to us that the Bluebird was a gambit to obtain the American shopping list?

Or a less clear signal to us that the Bluebird material was accurate, but too embarrassing to acknowledge?

The battle-lines were set. Somewhat along the principle that Ned had already explained to me, doves and hawks on both sides of the Atlantic once more gleefully parted company.

If the Sovs are sending us a signal that the material is accurate, why then clearly the material is inaccurate, said the hawks.

And vice versa, said the doves.

And vice versa again, said the hawks.

Papers written, feuds waged. Promotions, sackings, pensions, medals, lateral postings and downgradings. But no consensus. just the usual triumph of the fattest, disguised as rational deduction.

In our committee Ned alone refused to join the dance. He seemed cheerfully determined to accept the blame. 'The Bluebird was straight and Barley was straight,' he repeated to the committee over and again, without once losing his good humour. 'There was no deception by anyone, except where we deceived ourselves. It was we who were crooked. Not the Bluebird.'

Soon after he had delivered himself of this judgment, it was agreed he was under mental stress and his attendance was required more sparingly.

Oh, and note was taken. Passively, since active verbs have an unpleasant way of betraying the actor. Very serious note. Taken all over the place.

Note was taken that Ned had failed to advise the twelfth floor of Barley's drunken breakout after his return from Leningrad.

Note was taken that Ned had requisitioned all manner of resources on that same night, for which he had never accounted, among them Ben Lugg and the services of the head listener Mary, who sufficiently overcame her loyalty to a brother officer to give the committee a lurid account of Ned's high-handedness. Demanding illegal taps! Imagine! Faulting telephones! The liberty!

Mary was pensioned off soon after this and now lives in a rage in Malta, where it is feared she is writing her memoirs.

Note was also taken, if regretfully, of the questionable conduct of our Legal Adviser dePalfrey – I even got my de back – who had failed to justify his use of the Home Secretary's delegated authority in the full knowledge that this was required of him by the secretly agreed Procedures Governing the Service's Activities as Amended by etcetera, and in accordance with paragraph something of a deniabIc Home Office protocol.

The heat of battle was however taken into account. The Legal Adviser was not pensioned off, neither did he take himself to Malta. But he was not exonerated either. A partial pardon at best. A Legal Adviser should not have been so close to an operation. An inappropriate use of the Legal Adviser's skills. The word injudicious was passed around.

It was also noted with regret that the same Legal Adviser had drafted a glowing testimonial of Barley for Clive's signature not forty-eight hours before Barley's disappearance, thus enabling Barley to take possession of the shopping list, though presumably not for long.

In my spare hours, I drew up Ned's terms of severance and thought nervously about my own. Life inside the Service might have its limitations but the thought of life outside it terrified me.

The announcement of Bluebird's passing provided a temporary setback to our committee's deliberations. but it soon recovered. The offending item was a sixline affair in Pravda, carefully pitched to be neither too much nor too little, reporting the death after illness of the distinguished physicist Professor' Yakov Savelyev of Leningrad and listing his several decorations. He had died of natural causes - the bulletin assured us - soon after delivering an important lecture to the military academy at Saratov.

Ned took the day off when this news reached him, and the day became three days, a light flu. But the conspiracy theorists had a ball.

Savelyev was not dead.

He had been dead all along, and the version we had dealt with was an impostor.

He was doing what he had always been doing, running the Scientific Disinformation Section of the KGB.

His material was vindicated, was not vindicated.

It was worthless.

It was pure gold.

It was smoke.

It was a truthful message of peace sent to us at immense risk by the moderates inside Moscow's ruling ranks in order to show us that the Soviet nuclear sword had rusted in its scabbard and the Soviet nuclear shield had more holes in it than a colander.

It was a fiendish plot to persuade the American fainthearts to take their fingers off the nuclear trigger.

In short, there was enough for everyone to get their teeth into.

And, because in the symbiotic relationship that exists between belligerent states nothing can take place in the one without setting off a mirror reaction in the other, a counterindustry grew up and the history of the American part in the Bluebird affair was hastily rewritten.

Langley knew all along that the Bluebird was bad, said the counter-industry.

Or that Barley was.

Or that both of them were.

Sheriton and Brady were playing double-double games, said the counter-industry. Their one aim was to plant the smoke convincingly and steal another march on the Russians in the endless struggle for the Margin of Safety.

Sheriton was a genius.

Brady was a genius.

They were all, all geniuses!

Sheriton had scored a brilliant coup. Brady had.

The Agency was staffed by nothing but brilliant strategists who were quite unlike their dismal counterparts in the overt world. God preserve the Agency. Where would we be without it?

As if all this were not enough, new tiers of possibility were added to the old. For example, that Sheriton had been the unwitting instrument of the Pentagon and Defense. It was they who had prepared the phoney shopping list and they who had known all along that the Bluebird was a plant.

And each fresh rumour had to be taken seriously in its turn, even if the only real mystery was who had fabricated it or why. The answer, in many cases, appeared to be Russell Shcriton, who was fighting for his hide.

As to the Bluebird, if he had not died of natural causes. he was certainly doing so now.

Ned alone, returned from his self-imposed vigil, was once more so crass as to speak the likely truth. 'The Bluebird was straight and we killed him,' he said roundly, at the first meeting he attended. He was not invited to the next one.

And all this while our search for Barley did not let up, even if there were those of us who were glad not to find him. We edged towards him, round him and, too often, away from him. But we were honourable men. We never let up.

But what had Barley traded – and for what?

What were the Russians prepared to buy from him – from Barley, who till now had only needed an expensive lunch, paid for most likely out of his own pocket, to talk himself into an irreversible loss?

He was blown, after all! To smithereens! Already by the time he went to them! And knew it!

What had he got to offer them that they couldn't help themselves to? We are talking after all of torture, of the foulest methods, and registers of agony from which even the return is unimaginable hell. The Russians might be improving their image, but nobody seriously supposed that they were going to abandon overnight methods that had stood them in good stead for thousands of years.

The first and most obvious answer was the shopping list. Barley could tell the Russians baldly he would not obtain it from his masters until he had the necessary assurances. And that he would sooner boil in oil for the rest of his life than fetch the shopping list for free.

And they believed him. They saw that they would have to go without the shopping list if they didn't play his game. And because the grey men of either side are as scared of self-sacrifice as they are of love, the tender sages of the KGB evidently preferred to deal with the part of him they understood, rather than meddle with the part they didn't.

They knew he had the power to refuse them, to say, 'No, I will not fetch the shopping list. No, I will not walk into Igor's apartment until you have given me your more than solemn word.'

They knew, when they had listened to him, that he had the strength. And, like us, they were a little embarrassed by it.

And Barley – as he had told Henziger and Wicklow at dinner – had never met a Russian yet who could give his solemn word and walk away from it. He was not talking of politics, of course -just business.

And in return? What did Barley buy with what he sold?

Katya.

Matvey.

The twins.

Not a bad deal. Real people in exchange for unreal arguments.

For himself? Nothing. Nothing that could conceivably modify the strength of his demand on account of those whom he had taken into his protection.

And little by little it became clear that Barley for once in his life had hammered out a first-rate contract. If the Bluebird was a lost cause, Katya and her children showed every sign of being a saved one. She remained at October, she was sighted at the occasional reception, she answered her telephone at home and at her office. The twins still went to school and sang the same daft songs. Matvey wandered his amiable ways.

Soon, therefore, another great theory added itself to the rest. 'The Sovs are engaging in an internal cover-up,' it ran. 'They do not wish to give currency to Bluebird's revelations of incompetence.'

So the needle swung the other way for a while and Bluebird's material was deemed genuine. But not for long.

'This is what they want us to believe,' a man of power cried.

So the needle swung hastily back to where it was before, because nobody wants to be made a fool of.

But Barley's deal held. Katya did not lose her privileges, her red cardi her apartment, herjob or even, as the months went by, her looks. At first, it was true, the reports spoke of the pallor of widowhood, of an unkempt appearance and long absences from work. And clearly nobody had promised Barley that she would not be invited to make a voluntary statement about her relationship with the late Bluebird.

But gradually, after a becoming period of withdrawal, her ebullience reasserted itself and she was seen about.

And of Barley himself?

The trail went hot, then cold, then very cold indeed.

Formal letters of resignation, postmark Lisbon, were received by his aunts within a few days of the book fair and bore the marks of Barley's earlier style – a general weariness of publishing, the industry has outgrown itself, time to turn his hand to other things while he still has a few good years ahead of him.

As to his immediate plans, he proposed 'to lose himself for a while' and explore unusual places. So it Was clear that he was not in Russia any more.

Seemingly clear, that is.

And after all, he said so himself. So did the pretty girl in the Barry Martin Travel Agency, which has its offices in the Mezhdunarodnaya. Mr. Scott Blair had decided he would fly to Lisbon instead of back to London, she said. A courier from VAAP brought his ticket. She rewrote it and booked him on the Aeroflot direct flight, leaving on the Monday at 1120 hours, arriving Lisbon 1530, stopping Prague.

And somebody used that ticket. A tall man,.spokc to nobody, a Barley to the life, or nearly. Tall like the man in the VAAP lobby perhaps, but we checked him anyway. We checked him all along the line and the line only stopped when it reached Tina, Barley's Lisbon housekeeper. Yes. yes! Tina had heard from him, she told Merridew - a nice postcard from Moscow saying he'd met a lady-friend and they were going to take a holiday!

Merridew was profoundly relieved to learn that Barley had not, after all, returned to his patch.

Then over the next months a picture of Barley's after-life began to form before it disappeared again.

A West German drug-smuggler while in detention heard that a man of Barley's description was under interrogation in a prison near Kiev. A cheerful fcllow, said the German. Popular with the inmates. Free. Even the guards gave him the odd grudging smile.

An adventurous French motoring couple returning home had been assisted by a 'tall friendly Englishman' who spoke some French to them when they were involved in a traffic pile-up with a Soviet limousine near Smolensk. Nobody was hurt. Six foot, brown floppy hair, polite, with a big laugh, and tended by these burly Russians.

And one day near Christmas, not long after Ned had f6rmally handed over the Russia House, a signal came in 6orn Havana reporting a Cuban source to the effect that an Englishman was under special detention at a political gaol near Minsk, and that he sang a lot.

Sang? went the outraged signal back. Sang about what?

Sang Satchmo, came Havana's reply. Source was a jazz fiend, like the Englishman.

And the text of Barley's letter to Ned?

It remains a small mystery of the affair that it never reached the file, and there is no record of it in the official history of the Bluebird case. I think Ned hung on to it as something he cared about too much to file.

So that should be the end of the ' Story, or rather the story should have no end. Barley in thejudgment of the knowing was all set to take his place among the other shadows that haunt the darker byways of Moscow society – the trodden-out defectors and spies, the traded ones and the untrusted ones with their pathetic wives and pallid minders, sharing out their dwindling rations of Western treats and Western memories.

He should have been spotted after a few years, accidentally but on purpose, at a party where 2 lucky British journalist was mysteriously present. And perhaps, if times remained the same, he would be fitted out with some taunting piece of disinformation, or invited to throw a little pepper into the eyes of his former masters.

And indeed that was the very ritual that seemed to be unfolding when a flash telegram from Paddy's successor reported that a tall sandy Englishman had been sighted -not only sighted, heard - playing tenor saxophone at 2 newly-opened club in the old town, one year to the day after his disappearance.

Clive was hauled from his bed, signals flew between London and Langley, the Foreign Office was asked to take a view. They did and it was unequivocal for once - not our problem and not yours. They seemed to feel the ' Russians were better equipped to muzzle Barley than we were. After all, the Russians had obliged before.

Next day a second telegram arrived, this time. from fat Merridew in Lisbon. Barley's housekeeper Tina, with whom Merridew had reluctantly maintained relations, had been instructed to prepare the flat for the arrival of her master.

But how instructed? asked Merridew.

By telephone, she replied, Senhor Barley had telephoned her.

Telephoned you where from, you stupid woman?

Tina hadn't asked and Barley hadn't said. Why should she ask where he was, if he was coming to Lisbon any day?

Merridew was appalled. He was not the only one. We advised the Americans, but Langley had suffered a collective loss of memory. They near as nothing asked us, Barley who? There is a public notion that services such as ours take violent retribution against those who have betrayed their secrets. Well, and sometimes it is true, they do – though seldom against people of Barley's class. But in this case it was immediately clear that nobody, and least of all Langley, had any wish to make a shining beacon out of omebody they would greatly prefer to forget. Better to quare him, they agreed - and keep the Americans out of it.

I mounted the staircase apprehensively. I had declined the protective services of Brock, and Merridew's half-hearted offer of support. The stairwell was dark and steep and inhospitable and unpleasantly silent. It was early evening but we knew he was at home. I pressed the bell but did not hear it ring, so I rapped the door with my knuckles. It was a stubby little door, thickly panelled. It reminded me of the boat-housc on the island. I heard a step inside and at once stood back, I still don't know quite why, but I suppose it was a kind of fear of animals. Would he be fierce, would he be angry or over-effuslvc, would he throw me down the stairs or fling his arms round me? I was carrying a briefcase and I remember transferring it to my left hand as if to be ready to protect myself. Though, God knows, I am not a fighting man. I smelt fresh paint. There was no eyehole in the door, and it was flush against its iron lintel. He had no way of knowing who was there before he opened to me. I heard a latch slip. The door swung inward.

'Hullo, Harry,' he said.

So I said, 'Hullo, Barley.' I was wearing a lightweight dark suit, blue in preference to grey. I said, 'Hullo, Barley,' and waited for him to smile.

He was thinner, he was harder and he was straighter, with the result that he had become very tall indeed, taller than me by a head. You're a nerveless traveller, I remember thinking as I waited. It was what Hannah in her early days used to say we should both of us learn to become. The old untidy gestures had left him. The discipline of small spaces had done its work. He was trim. He was wearingjeans and an old cricket shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He had splashes of white paint on his forearms and a smear of it across his forehead. I saw a step-ladder behind him and a half-whited wall, and at the centrc of the room heaps of books and gramophone reco.rds partly protected with a dustsheet.

'Come for a game of chess, Harry?' he asked, still not smiling.

'If I could just talk to you,' I said, as I might have said to Hannah, or anybody else to whom I was proposing a half-measure.

'Officially?'

'Well.'

He studied me as if he hadn't heard me, frankly and in his own time, of which he seemed to have a lot - much, I suppose, as on ' e studies cellmates or interrogators in a world where the common courtesies tend to be dispensed with.

But his gaze had nothing downward or shameful in it, nothing of arrogance or shiftiness. It seemed to the contrary even clearer than I remembered it, as if it had settled itself permanently in the far regions to which it used occasionally to drift.

'I've got some cold plonk, if that'll do you, he said, and stood back to let me pass him while he watched me, before he closed the door and dropped the latch.

But he still didn't smile. His mood was a mystery to me. I felt I could understand nothing of him unless he chose to tell it me. Put another way, I understood everything about him that was within my grasp to understand. The rest, infinity.

There were dustsheets on the chairs as well but he pulled them off and folded them as if they were his bedding. Prison people, I have noticed over the years, take a long time to shake off their pride.

'What do you want?' he asked, pouring us each a glass from a flagon.

'They've asked me to tidy things up,' I said. 'Get some answers out of you. Assurances. Give you some in return.' I had lost my way. 'Whether we can help,' I said. 'Whether you need things. What we can agree on for the future and so on.

'I've got all the assurances I need, thanks,' he said politely, lighting on the one word that seemed to catch his interest. 'They'll move at their own pace. I've promised to keep my mouth shut.' He smiled at last. 'I've followed your advice, Harry. I've become a long-distance lover, like you.'

'I was in Moscow,' I said, fighting hard to find the flow to our conversation. 'I went to the places. Saw the people. Used my own name.'

'What is it?' he asked with the same courtliness. 'Your name. What is it?'

'Palfrey,' I said, leaving out the de.

He smiled as if in sympathy, or recognition.

'The Service sent me over there to look for you. Unofficially but. officially, as it were. Ask the Russians about you. Tidy things up. We thought it was time we found out what had happened to you. See if we could help.'

And make sure they were observing the rules, I might have added. That nobody in Moscow was going to rock the boat. No silly leaks or publicity stunts.

'I told you what happened to me,' he said.

'You mean in your letters to Wicklow and Henziger and people?'

'Yes.'

'Well, naturally we knew the letters had been written under duress, if you wrote them at all. Look at poor Goethe's letter.'

'Balls,' he said. 'I wrote them of my own free will.'

I edged a little nearer to my message. And to the briefcase at my side.

'As far as we're concerned, you acted very honourably,' I said, drawing out a file and opening it on my lap. 'Everybody talks under duress and you were no exception. We're grateful for what you did for us and aware of the cost to you. Professionally and personally. We're concerned that you should have your full measure of compensation. On terms, naturally. The sum could be large.'

Where had he learned to watch me like that? To withhold himself so steadily? To impart tension to others, when he seemed impervious to it himself?

I read him the terms, which were somewhat like Landau's in reverse. To stay out of the United Kingdom and only to enter*with our prior consent. Full and final settlement of all claims, his silence in perpetuity expressed ex abundanti cautela in half a dozen different ways. And a lot of money to sign here, provided – always and only provided – he kept his mouth shut.

He didn't sign, though. He was already bored. He waved my important pen away.

'What did you do with Walt, by the way? I brought a hat for him. Kind of tea-cosy in tiger stripes. Can't find the damn thing.'

'If you send it to me, I'll see he gets it,' I said.

He caught my tone and smiled at me sadly. 'Poor old Walt. They've given him the push, ch?'

'We peak early in our trade,' I said, but I couldn't look him in the eye so I changed the subject. 'I suppose you heard that your aunts have sold out to Lupus Books.'

He laughed – not his old wild laughter, it was true, but a free man's laugh, all the same. 'Jumbo! The old devil! Conned the Sacred Cow! Trust him!'

But he was at ease with the idea. He seemed to take genuine pleasure in the rightness of it. I am scared, as we all are in my trade, of people of good instinct. But I was able to share vicariously in his repose. He seemed to have developed universal tolerance.

She'll come,,he told me as he gazed out at the harbour. They promised that one day she would come.

Not at once, and in their time, not in Barley's. But she would come, he had no doubt. Maybe this year, maybe next, he said. But something inside the mountainous bureaucratic Russian belly would heave and give birth to a mouse of compassion. He had no doubt of it. It would be gradual but it would happen. They had promised him.

'They don't break their promises,' he assured me, and in the face of such trust it would have been churlish in me to contradict him. But something else was preventing me from voicing my customary scepticism. It was Hannah again. I felt she was begging me to let him live with his humanity, even if I had destroyed hers. 'You think people never change because you don't,' she had once said to me. 'You only feel safe when you're disenchanted.'

I suggested I take him out for food but he seemed not to hear. He was standing at the long window, staring at the harbour lights while I stared at his back. The same pose that he struck when we had first interviewed him here in Lisbon. The same arm holding out his glass. The same pose as on the island when Ned told him he had won. But straighter, Was he talking to me again? I realised he was. He was watching their ship arrive from Leningrad, he said. He was watching her hurry down the gangway to him with her children at her side. He was sitting with Uncle Matvey under the shade tree in the park below his window. where he had sat with Ned and Walter in the days before his manhood. He was listening to Katya's rendering of Matvey's heroic tales of endurance. He was believing in all the hopes that I had buried with me when I chose the safe bastion of infinite distrust in preference to the dangerous path of love.

I succeeded in persuading him to come to dinner, and as a kindness he let me pay. But I could buy nothing else from him, he signed nothing, he accepted nothing, he wanted nothing, he conceded nothing, he owed nothing and he wished the living lot of us, without anger, to the Devil.

But he had a splendid quiet. He wasn't strident. He was considerate of my feelings, even if he was too courteous to enquire what they were. I had never told him about Hannah, and I knew I never could, because the new Barley would have no patience with my unaltered state.

For the rest, he seemed concerned to make me a gift of his story, so that I would have something to take home to my masters. He brought me back to his flat and insisted I have a nightcap, and that nothing was my fault.

And he talked. For me. For him. Talked and talked. He told me the story as I have tried to tell it to you here, from his side as well as ours. He went on talking till it was light, and when I left at five in the morning, he was wondering whether he might as well finish that bit of wall before turning in. There was a lot to get ready, he explained. Carpets. Curtains. Bookshelves.

'It's going to be all right, Harry,' he assured me as he showed me off the premises. 'Tell them that.'

Spying is waiting.