The Russia House

CHAPTER 2

The whole of Whitehall was agreed that no story should ever begin that way again. Indoctrinated ministers were furious about it. They set up a frightfully secret committee of enquiry to find out what went wrong, hear witnesses, name names, spare no blushes, point fingers, close gaps, prevent a recurrence, appoint me chairman and draft a report. What conclusions our committee reached, if any, remains the loftiest secret of them all, particularly from those of us who sat on it. For the function of such committees, as we all well knew, is to talk earnestly until the dust has settled, and then ourselves return to dust. Which, like a disgruntled Cheshire cat, our committee duly did, leaving nothing behind us but our frightfully secret frown, a meaningless interim working paper, and a bunch of secret annexes in the Treasury archives.

It began, in the less sparing language of Ned and his colleagues at the Russia House, with an imperial cock-up, between the hours of five and eight-thirty on a warm Sunday evening, when one Nicholas P. Landau, travelling salesman and taxpayer in good standing,'if of Polish origin, with nothing recorded against, presented himself at the doors of no fewer than four separate Whitehall ministries to plead an urgent interview with an officer of the British Intelligence Branch, as he was pleased to call it, only to be ridiculed, fobbed off and in one instance physically manhandled. Though whether the two temporary doormen at the Defence Ministry went so far as to grab Landau by the collar and the seat of his pants, as he maintained they did, and frog-march him to the door, or whether they' merely assisted him back into the street, to use their words, is a point on which we were unable to achieve a consensus.

But why, our committee asked sternly, did the two doormen feel obliged to provide this assistance in the first place?

Mr. Landau refused to let us look inside his briefcase, sir. Yes, he offered to let us take charge of the briefcase while he waited, provided he kept charge of the key, sir. But that wasn't regulations. And yes, he shook it in our faces, patted it for us, tossed it about in his hands, apparently in order to demonstrate that there was nothing in it that any of us needed to be afraid of. But that wasn't regulations either. And when we tried with a minimum of force to relieve him of the said briefcase, this gentleman – as Landau in their testimony had belatedly become – resisted our efforts, sir, and shouted loudly in a foreign accent, causing a disturbance.

But what did he shout? we asked, distressed by the notion of anybody shouting in Whitehall on a Sunday.

Well, sir, so far as we were able to make him out, him in his emotional state, he shouted that this briefcase of his contained highly secret papers, sir. Which had been entrusted to him by a Russian, sir, in Moscow.

And him a rampageous little Pole, sir, they might have added. On a hot cricketing Sunday in London, sir, and us watching the replay of the Pakistanis against Botham in the back room.

Even at the Foreign Office, that freezing hearth of official British hospitality, where the despairing Landau presented himself as a last resort and with the greatest of reluctance, it was only by dint of high entreaty and some honest-to-God Slav tears that he fought his way to the rarefied ear of the Honourable Palmer Wellow, author of a discerning monograph on Liszt.

And if Landau had not used a new tactic, probably the Slav tears would not have helped. Because this time he placed the briefcase open on the counter so that the doorman, who was young but sceptical, could crane his pomaded head to the recently installed armoured glass and scowl down into it with his indolent eyes, and see for himself that it was only a bunch of dirty old notebooks in there and a brown envelope, not bombs.

'Come-back-Monday-ten-to-five,' the doorman said through the wonderfully-new electric speaker, as if announcing a Welsh railway station, and slumped back into the darkness of his box.

The gate stood ajar. Landau looked at the young man, and looked past him at the great portico built a hundred years earlier to daunt the unruly princes of the Raj. And the next thing anyone knew, he had picked up his briefcase and, defeating all the seemingly impenetrable defences set up to prevent exactly such an onslaught, was pelting hell-for-leather with it -'like a bloomin' Springbok, sir'- across the hallowed courtyard up the steps into the enormous hall. And he was in luck. Palmer Wellow, whatever else he was, belonged to the appeasement side of the Foreign Office. And it was Palmer's day on.

'Hullo, hullo,' Palmer murmured as he descended the great steps and beheld the disordered figure of Landau panting between two stout guards. 'Well you are in a muck. My name's Wellow. I'm a resident clerk here.' He held his left fist to his shoulder as if he hated dogs. But his right hand was extended in greeting.

'I don't want a clerk,' said Landau. 'I want a high officer or nothing.'

'Well, a clerk is fairly high,' Palmer modestly assured him. 'I expect you're put off by the language.'

It was only right to record – and our committee did – that nobody could fault Palmer Wellow's performance thus far. He was droll but he was effective. He put no polished foot wrong. He led Landau to an interviewing room -and sat him down, all attention. He ordered a cup of tea for him with sugar for his shock, and offered him a digestive biscuit. With a costly fountain pen given him by a friend, he wrote down Landau's name and address and those of the companies that hired his services. He wrote down the number of Landau's British passport and his date and place of birth, 1930'in Warsaw. He insisted with disarming truthfulness that he had no knowledge of intelligence matters, but undertook to pass on Landau's material to the ._competent people', who would no doubt give it whatever attention it deserved. And because Landau once again insisted on it, he improvised a receipt for him on a sheet of .Foreign Office blue draft, signed it and had the janitor add a date-and-time stamp. He -told him that if there was anything further the authorities wished to discuss they would very probably get in touch with him, perhaps by means of the telephone.

Only then did Landau hesitatingly pass his scruffy package across the table and watch with lingering regret as Palmer's languid hand enfolded it.

'But why don't you simply give it to Mr. Scott Blair?' Palmer asked after he had studied the name on the envelope.

'I tried, for Christ's sake!' Landau burst out in fresh exasperation. 'I told you. I rang him everywhere. I've rung him till I'm blue in the face, I tell you. He's not at his home, he's not at work, he's not at his club, he's not at anywhere,' Landau protested, his English grammar slipping in despair. 'From the airport I tried. All right, it's a Saturday.'

'But it's Sunday, ' Palmer objected with a forgiving smile.

'So it was a Saturday yesterday, wasn't it! I try his firm. I get an electronic howl. I look in the phone book. There's one in Hammersmith. Not his initials but Scott Blair. I get an angry lady, tells me to go to hell. There's a rep I know, Archie Parr, does the West Country for him. I ask Archie: "Archie, for Christ's sake, how do I get hold of Barley in a hurry?" "He's skedaddled, Niki. Done one of his bunks. Hasn't been seen in the shop for weeks." Enquiries, I try. London, the Home Counties. Not listed, not a Bartholomew. Well he wouldn't be, would he, not if he's a –'

'Not if he's a what?' said Palmer, intrigued.

'Look, he's vanished, right? He's vanished before. There could be reasons why he vanishes. Reasons that you don't know of because you're not meant to. Lives are at stake, could be. Not only his either. It's top urgent, she told 'me. And top secret. Now get on with it. Please.'

The same evening, there being not much doing on the world front apart from a dreary crisis in the Gulf and a squalid television scandal about soldiers and money in Washington, Palmer took himself off to a rather good party in Montpelier Square that was being thrown by a group of his year from Cambridge - bachelors like himself, but fun. An account of this occasion, too, reached our committee's ears.

'Have any of you heard of a Somebody Scott Blair, by the by?' Wellow asked them at a late hour when his memory of Landau happened to have been revived by some bars of Chopin he was playing-on the piano. 'Wasn't there a Scott Blair who was up with us or something?' he asked again when he failed to get through the noise.

'Couple of years ahead of us. Trinity,' came a fogged reply from across the room. 'Read History. jazz fiend. Wanted to blow his saxophone for a living. Old man wouldn't wear it. Barley Blair. Pissed as a rat from daybreak.'

Palmer Wellow played a thunderous chord that stunned the garrulous company to silence. 'I said, is he a poisonous spy?' he enunciated.

'The father? He's dead.'

'The son, ass. Barley.'

Like someone stepping from behind a curtain, his informant emerged from the crowd of young and less young men and stood before him, glass in hand. And Palmer to his pleasure recognised him. as a dear chum from Trinity a hundred years ago.

'I really don't know whether Barley's a poisonous spy or not, I'm afraid,' said Palmer's chum, with an asperity habitual to him, as the background babel rose to its former roar. 'He's certainly a failure, if that's a qualification.'

His curiosity whetted still further, Palmer returned to his spacious rooms at the Foreign Office and to Landau's envelope and notebooks, which he had entrusted to the janitor for safekeeping. And it is at this point that his actions, in the words of our interim working paper, took an unhelpful course. Or in the harsher words of Ned and his colleagues in the Russia House, this was where, in any civilised country, P. Wellow would have been strung by his thumbs from a high point in the city and left there in peace to reflect upon his attainments.

For what Palmer did was have a nice time with the notebooks. For two nights and one and a half days. Because he found them so amusing. He did not open the buff envelope - which was by now marked in Landau's hand writing 'Extremely Private for the attention of Mr. B. Scott Blair or a top member of the Intelligence' - because like Landau he was of a school that felt it unbecoming to read other people's mail. In any case it was glued at both ends, and Palmer was not a man to grapple with physical obstacles. But the notebook - with its crazed aphorisms and quotations, its exhaustive loathing of politicians and soldiery, its scatter-shot references to Pushkin i the pure Renaissance man and to Kleist the pure suicide - held him fascinated.

He felt little sense of urgency, none of responsibility. He was a diplomat,'not a Friend, as the spies were called. And Friends in Palmer's zoology were people without the - 45 intellectual horsepower to be what Palmer was, Indeed it was his outspoken resentment that the orthodox Foreign Office to which he belonged resembled more and more a cover organisation for the Friends' disgraceful activities. For Palmer too was a man of impressive erudition, if of a random kind. He had read Arabic and taken a First in Modem History. He had added Russian and Sanskrit in his spare time. He had everything but mathematics and common sense, which explains why he passed over the dreary Pages of algebraic formulae, equations and diagrams that made up the other two notebooks, and in contrast to the writer's philosophical ramblings had a boringly disciplined appearance. And which also explains - though the committee had difficulty accepting such an explanation - why Palmer chose to ignore the Standing Order to Resident Clerks relating to Defectors and Offers of Intelligence whether solicited or otherwise, and to do his own thing.

'He makes the most frantic connections right across the board, Tig,' he told a rather senior colleague in Research Department on the Tuesday, having decided,that it was finally time to share his acquisition. 'You simply must read him.'

'But how do we know it's a he, Palms?'

Palmer just felt it, Tig. The vibes.

Palmer's senior colleague glanced at the first notebook, then at the second, then sat down and stared at the third. Then he looked at the drawings in the second book. Then his professional self took over in the emergency.

'I think I'd get this lot across to them fairly sharpish if I were you, Palms,' he said. But on second thoughts he got it across,to them himself, very sharpish indeed, having first telephoned Ned on the green line and told him to stand by.

Upon which, two days late, hell broke loose. At four o'clock on the Wednesday morning the lights on the top floor of Ned's stubby brick out-station in Victoria known as the Russia House were still burning brightly as the first bemused meeting of what later became the Bluebird team drew to a close. Five hours after that, having sat out two more meetings in the Service's headquarters in a grand new high-rise block on the Embankment. Ned was back at his desk, the files gathering around him as giddily as if the girls in Registry had decided to erect a street barricade.

'God may move in a mysterious way,' Ned was heard to remark to his red-headed assistant Brock in a lull between deliveries, 'but it's nothing to the way He picks his joes.'

A joe in the parlance is a live source, and a live source in sane English is a spy. Was Ned referring to Landau when he spoke of joes? To Katya? To the unchristened writer of the notebooks? Or was his mind already fixed upon the vaporous outlines of that great British gentleman spy, Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair? Brock did not know or care. He came from Glasgow but of Lithuanian parents and abstract concepts made him angry.

As to myself, I had to wait another week before Ned decided with a proper reluctance that it was time to haul in old Palfrey. I've been old Palfrey since I can remember. To this day I have never understood what happened to my Christian names. 'Where's old Palfrey?' they say. 'Where's our tame ' legal eagle? Get the old law bender in! Better chuck this one at Palfrey!'

I am quickly dealt with. You need not stumble on me long. Horatio Benedict dePalfrey are My names but you may forget the first two immediately, and somehow no body has ever remembered the 'dc' at all. In the Service I am Harry so, quite often, being an obedient soul, I am Harry to myself, Alone in my poky little bachelor flat of an evening, I am quite inclined to call myself ' Harry while I cook my chop. Legal adviser to the illegals, that's me, and sometime junior partner to the extinct house of Mackie, Mackie & dePalfrey, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, of Chancery Lane. But that was twenty years ago. For twenty years I have been your most humble secret servant, ready at any time to rob the scales of the same blind goddess whom my young heart was brought up to revere.

A palfrey, I am told, was neither a warhorse nor a hunter, but a saddle horse deemed suitable for ladies. Well, there's only one little lady who ever rode this Palfrey any distance, but she rode him nearly to his grave and her name was Hannah. And it was because of Hannah that I scurried for shelter inside the secret citadel where passion has no place, where the walls are so thick I cannot hear her beating fists or tearful voice imploring me to let her in and brave the scandal that so terrified a young solicitor at the threshold of a respectable career.

Hope in my face and nothing-in my heart, she said. A wiser woman might have kept such observations to herself, it has always seemed to me. Sometimes the truth is by way of being a self-indulgence. 'Then why do you pursue a hopeless case?' I would protest to her. 'If the patient is dead, why keep trying to revive him?'

Because she was a woman, seemed to be the answer. Because she believed in the redemption of male souls. Because I had not paid enough for being inadequate.

But I have paid now, believe me.

It is because of Hannah that I walk the secret corridors to this day, calling my cowardice duty and my weakness sacrifice. It is because of Hannah that I sit here late at night, in my grey box of an office with LEGAL on the door, files and tapes and films stacked around me like the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce without the pink string, while I draft our official whitewash,of the operation we called the Bluebird and of its protagonist, Bartholomew, alias Barley, Scott Blair.

It is because of Hannah also that even while he scribbles at his exculpation this old Palfrey now and then puts down his pen and lifts his head and dreams.

Niki Landau's recall to the British colours, if he had ever seriously abandoned them, took place exactly forty-eight hours after the notebooks hit Ned's desk. Ever since his miserable passage through Whitehall, Landau had been sick with anger and mortification. He hadn't gone to work, he hadn't bothered with his little flat in Golders Green which he normally buffed and pampered as if it were the lantern of his life. Not even Lydia could rouse him from his melancholy. I myself had hastily arranged the Home Office warrant to tap his phone. When she telephoned, wit listened to him putting her off. And-when she made a tragic appearance at his front door, our watchers reported that he let her stay for a cup of tea and then dismissed her.

'I don't know what I've done wrong but whatever it is, I'm sorry,' they heard her remark sadly as she left.

She was hardly in the street before Ned rang. Afterwards Landau shrewdly wondered to me whether that was a coincidence.

'Niki Landau?' Ned enquired in a voice you didn't feel like fooling with.

'I could be,' said Landau, sitting up straight.

'My name's Ned. I think we have a mutual friend. No need to mention names. You kindly dropped a letter in for him the other day. Rather against the odds, I'm afraid. A package too.'

Landau thrilled to the voice immediately. Capable and commanding. The voice of a good officer, not a cynic, Harry.

'Well, yes, I did,' he said, but Ned was already talking again.

'I don't think we need to go into a lot of details over the telephone, but I do think you and I need to have a long chat and I think we need to shake your hand. Rather soon. When can we do that?'

'Whenever you say,' said Landau. And had to stop himself from saying 'sir'.

'I always think now's a good time. How do you feel about that?'

'I feel a whole lot better, Ned,' said Landau with a grin in his, voice.

'I'm going to send a car for you. Won't be at all long, so perhaps you'd just stay where you are and wait for your front doorbell to ring. It's a green Rover, B registration. The driver's name is Sam. If you're worried, ask him to show you his card. If you're still worried, phone the number on it. Think you'll manage?'

'Our friend's all right, is he?' said Landau, unable to resist asking, but Ned had rung off.

The doorbell pealed a couple of minutes afterwards. They had the car waiting round the corner, thought Landau as he floated downstairs in a dream. This is it. I'm in the hands of the professionals. The house was in smart Belgravia, one of a terrace recently restored. Its newly painted white front glistened wholesomely at him in the evening sun. A palace of excellence, a shrine to the secret powers that rule our lives. A polished- brass sign on the pillared doorway said FOREIGN LIAISON STAFF. The door was already opening as Landau climbed the steps. And as the uniformed janitor closed it behind him Landau saw a slender, straight-built man in his early forties advance towards 'him through the sunbeams, first the trim silhouette, then the no-nonsense handsome healthy features, then the hand shake: discreet but loyal as a naval salute.

'Well done, Niki. Come on in.'

Good voices do not always belong to good faces, but Ned's did. As Landau followed him into the oval study, he felt he could say anything in the world to him, and Ned would still be on his side. Landau in fact saw a whole lot of things in Ned that he liked at once, which was Ned's Pied Piper gift: the careful charm, the restrained good looks, the power of ' quiet leadership and the 'Come on in.' Landau also sniffed the polyglot in him, for he was one himself. He had only to drop a Russian name or phrase for Ned to reach out for it and smile, and match it with a phrase of his own. He was one of us, Harry. If you had a secret, this was the man to tell it to, not that flunkey in the Foreign Office.

But then Landau had not realised, until he began talking, hi;w desperately he had been needing to confide. He opened his mouth, he was away. All he could do from then on was listen to himself in amazement, because he wasn't just talking about Katya and the notebooks, and why he had accepted them, and how he had hidden them, but about his whole life till now, his confusions about being a Slav, his love of Russia despite everything, and his feeling of being suspended between two cultures. Yet Ned did not lead him or check him in any way. He was a born listener. He hardly stirred except to write himself neat notes on bits of card, and if he interrupted, it was only to clear up a rare point of detail - the moment at Sheremetyevo, for example, when Landau was waved through to the departure lounge without a glance.

'Now did all your group receive that treatment or only you?'

'The lot of us. One nod, we were through.'

'You didn't feel singled out in any way?'

'What for?'

'You didn't have the impression you might be getting a different kind of treatment from other people? A better one, for instance?'

'We went through like a bunch of sheep. A flock,' Landau corrected himself. 'We handed in our visas, that was it.'

'Were other groups going through at the same rate, did you notice?'

'The Russkies didn't seem to be bothering at all. Maybe it was the summer Saturday. Maybe it was the glasnost. They pulled a few out to inspect and let the others through. I felt a fool, to be truthful. I didn't need to have taken the precautions that I did.'

'You were no sort of fool. You did marvellously,' said Ned, without a hint of patronising while he wrote again. 'And on the plane, who did you sit next to, remember?'

'Spikey Morgan.'

'Who else?'

'No one. I had the window.'

'Which seat was that?'

Landau knew the seat number off pat. It was the one he pre-booked whenever he could.

'Did you talk much on the flight?'

'Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.'

'What about?'

'Women, mainly. Spikey's moved in with a pair of freewheelers in Notting Hill.'

Ned gave a pleasant laugh. 'And did you tell Spikey about the notebooks? In your relief, Niki? It would have been perfectly natural in the circumstances. To confide.'

'I wouldn't dream of it, Ned. Not to a soul. I never did, I never will. I'm only telling you because he's vanished and you're official.'

'How about Lydia?'

The offence to Landau's dignity momentarily outweighed his admiration of Ned, and even his surprise at Ned's familiarity with his affairs.

'My ladies, Ned, they know a little about me. They may even think they know more than they do,' he replied. 'But they do not share my secrets because they are not invited to.'

Ned continued writing. And somehow the trim movement of the pen, coupled with the suggestion that he could have been indiscreet, provoked Landau into chancing his hand, because he had noticed already. that every time he started to talk about Barley, a kind of freeze settled over Ned's quietly reassuring features.

'And Barley's really all right, is he? He hasn't had an accident or anything?'

Ned seemed not to hear. He took a fresh card and resumed his writing.

'I suppose Barley would have used the Embassy, wouldn't he?' said Landau. 'Him being a professional. Barley. It's the chess that gives him away, if you want to know. He shouldn't play it, in my opinion. Not in public.'

Then and only then did Ned's head rise slowly from the page. And Landau saw a stony expression in his face that was more frightening than his words. 'We never mention names like that, Niki,' said Ned very quietly. 'Not even among ourselves. You couldn't know, so you've done nothing wrong. just please don't do it again.'

Then seeing perhaps the effect that he had had on Landau, he got up and strolled to a satinwood side table and poured two glasses of sherry from a decanter and handed one to Landau. 'And yes, he's all right,' he said.

So they drank a silent toast to Barley, whose name Landau had by then sworn to himself ten times already would never again cross his lips.

'We don't want you to go to Gdansk next week,' said Ned. 'We've arranged a medical certificate and compensation for you. You're ill. Suspected ulcer. And stay away from work in the meantime, do you mind?'

'I'll do whatever you say,' said Landau.

But before he left he signed a declaration of the Official Secrets Act while Ned benignly looked on. It's a weaselly document in legal terms, calculated to impress the signatory and no one else. But then the Act itself is scarcely a credit to its drafters either.

After that, Ned switched off the microphones and the hidden video cameras that the twelfth floor had insisted on because it was becoming that kind of operation.

And this far, Ned did everything alone, which was his good right as head of the Russia House. - Fieldmen are nothing if not loners. He didn't even call in old Palfrey to read the riot act. Not yet.

If Landau had felt neglected until that afternoon, for the rest of the week he was swamped with attention. Early the next morning, Ned telephoned asking him with his customary courtesy to present himself to an address in Pimlico. It turned out to be a 1930s block of flats, with curved steel-framed windows painted green and an entrance that should have led to a cinema. In the presence of two men whom he did not introduce, Ned took Landau crisply through his story a second time, then threw him to the wolves.

The first to speak was a distraught, floating man with baby-pink cheeks and baby-clear eyes and a flaxen jacket to match his straggling flaxen hair. His voice floated too. 'You said a blue dress, I think? My name's Walter,' he added, is if himself startled by the news.

'I did, sir.'

'You're sure?' he piped, rolling his head and peering crookedly at him from under his silken brow.

'Totally, sir. A blue dress with a brown perhaps-bag. Most perhaps-bags are made of string. Hers was brown plastic. "Now Niki," I said to myself, "today is not the day, but if you were ever thinking of having a tumble with this lady at a future date, which you might, you could always bring her a nice blue handbag from London to match her blue dress, couldn't you?" That's how I remember, you see. I have the connection in my head, sir.'

And it is always an oddity of the tapes when I replay them that Landau called Walter 'sir', while he never called Ned anything but Ned. Bug this was no great sign of respect in Landau so much as of a certain squeamishness that Walter inspired. After all, Landau was a ladies' man and Walter was quite the opposite.

'And the hair black, you say?' Walter sang, as if black hair strained credulity.

'Black, sir. Black and silky. Verging towards the raven. definitely.'

'Not dyed, you don't think?'

'I know the difference, sir,' said Landau, touching his own head, for he wanted to give them everything by now, even the secret of his eternal youth.

'You said earlier she was Leningrad. Why did you say that?'

'The bearing, sir. I saw quality, I saw a Russian woman of Rome. That's how I think of her. Petersburg.'

'But you didn't see Armenian? Or Georgian? Or Jewish, for example?'

Landau dwelt on the last suggestion but rejected it. 'I'm Jewish myself, you see. I won't say it takes one to know one but I'll say I didn't go ting-a-ling inside.'

A silence that could have been embarrassment seemed to encourage him to continue. 1 think being Jewish is overdone, to be frank. If that's what you want to be, good luck I say. But if you don't need it,_ nobody should make you have it. Myself, I'm a Brit first, a Pole second and everything else comes afterwards. Never mind there's a lot would have it the other way round. That's their problem.'

'Oh well said!' Walter cried energetically, flapping his fingers and giggling. 'Oh that does put it in . a nutshell. And you say her English was really rather good?'

'More than good, sir. Classic. A lesson to us all.'

'Like a schoolteacher, you said.'

'That was my impression,' said Landau. 'A teacher, a professor. I felt the learning. The intellect. The will.'

'Could she not be an interpreter, you see?'

'Good interpreters efface themselves, in my opinion, sit. This lady projected herself.'

'Oh well I say, that's rather a good answer,' said Walter, shooting his pink cuffs. 'And she was wearing a wedding ring. Well done.'

'She certainly was, sir. A betrothal ring and a marriage ring. That's the first thing I look at after the usual, and in Russia it's not England, you have to look the wrong way round because the girls wear their wedding rings on the right hand. Single Russian women are a pest and divorce is off the peg. Give me a nice solid hubby and a couple of little ones for them to go home to any day. Then I might oblige.'

'Let's ask you about that. You think she had children as well, do you, or not?'

'I am convinced of it, sir.'

'Oh come, you can't be,' Walter said peevishly, with a sudden downturn of the mouth. 'You're not psychic, are you?'

'The hips, sir. The hips, the dignity even when she was scared. She was not a Juno, she was not a sylph. She was a mother.'

'Height?' Walter shrieked in a descant as his hairless eyebrows bucked upwards in alarm. 'Can you do her height f6r us? Think of yourself. Measure her against you. Are you looking up or down?'

'Above the normal. I told you.'

'Taller than you, then?'

'Yes.'

'Five six? Five seven?'

'More like the second,' said Landau sullenly.

'And her age again? You fumbled it before.'

'If she's over thirty-five, she doesn't know it. A lovely skin, a fine form, a fine woman in her prime, especially the spirit, sit,' Landau replied with a defeated grin, for while he might find Walter unsavoury, in some way he still had the Pole's weakness for eccentrics.

'It's a Sunday. Imagine she's English. Would you expect her to be going to church?'

'She'd definitely have given the problem a good going over,' said Landau to his great surprise before he had time to think of an answer. 'She might have said - there was no God. She might have said there was a God. But she wouldn't have let it drift away from her like most of us. She'd have gone for it and come to a decision and done something about it if she thought she should.'

Suddenly all Walter's quaint ways had resolved themselves into a long rubbery smile. 'Oh you are good,' he declared enviously. 'Now do you know any science?', he continued as his voice again soared into the clouds.

'A bit. Kitchen science, really. What I pick up.'

'Physics?'

'O-level, not more, sir. I used to sell the course books. I'm not sure I'd scrape through the exam, mind, even now. But they did enable me to improve . myself, put it that way.'

'What does telemetry mean?'

'Never heard of it.'

'Not in English, not in Russian?'

'Not in any language, sir, I'm afraid. Telemetry has passed me by.'

'How about CEP?'

'The what, sir?'

'Circular-error-probable. My goodness, he wrote enough about it, didn't he, in those funny notebooks that you brought us? Don't tell me CEP hasn't stuck in your mind.'

'I didn't notice it. I skipped. That's all I did.'

'Until you came to his point about the Soviet knight dying inside his armour. Where you stopped skipping. Why?'

'I didn't come to it. I happened to come to it.'

'All right you happened to come to it. And you formed a view. Is that right? Of what the writer was telling us. What view?'

'Incompetence, I suppose. They're no good at it. The Russkies. They're duff.'

'Duff at what?'

'The rockets. They make errors.'

'What sort of errors?'

'All sorts. Magnetic errors. Bias errors, whatever those are. I don't know. That's your job, isn't it?'

But Landau's defensive surliness only emphasised his virtue as a witness.

For where he wished to shine and could not, his failure reassured them, as Walter's airy gesture of relief now testified.

'Well I think he's done terribly well,' he declared as if Landau were nowhere within earshot, flinging up his hands again, this time in a theatrical gesture of conclusion. 'He tells us what he remembers. He doesn't make things up to spin a better tale. You won't do that, will you, Niki?' he added anxiously, uncrossing his legs as if his crotch were nipping him.

'No, sir, you may rest assured.'

'And you haven't? I Mean, because sooner or later we'd find out. Then everything you've given us would lose its lustre.'

'No, sir. It's the way I told it. No more, no less.'

'I'm sure it is,' said Walter to his colleagues in a tone of simple trust as he again sat back. 'The hardest thing in our trade or anybody else's is to say "I believe." Niki's a natural source and rare as hen's teeth. If there were more of him, nobody would need us.'

'This is Johnny,' Ned explained, playing the aide-de-camp.

Johnny had wavy greying hair and a broad jaw and a file full of official-looking telegrams. With his gold watch chain and tailored charcoal suit, he might have been a foreign barmaid's- vision of an Englishman but he certainly wasn't Landau's.

'Niki, first we have to thank you, pal,' Johnny said, in lazy East Coast American. We the larger beneficiaries, his munificent tone suggested. We the majority shareholders. I'm afraid Johnny is like that. A good officer, but unable to keep his American supremacy inside its box. I sometimes -think that is the difference between American spies and our own. Americans, with their frank enjoyment of power and money, flaunt their luck. They lack the instinct to dissemble that comes so naturally to us British.

Anyway, Landau's hackles went up in a flash.

'Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?'Johnny said.

'If it's all right by Ned,' said Landau.

'Of course it is,' said Ned.

'So we're at the audio fair that night. Okay, pal?'

'Well, evening really, Johnny.'

'You escort the woman Yekaterina Orlova across the room to the top of the staircase. Where the guards are. You slay goodbye to, her.'

'She's holding my arm.'

'She's holding your arm, great. In front of the guards. You watch her down the stairs. Do you also watch her into the street, pal?'

I had not heard Johnny use 'pal' before, so I took it that he was trying to needle Landau somehow, a thing that Agency people learn from their in-house psychologists.

'Correct,' Landau snapped.

'Right into the street? Pause and think,' he suggested, with the attorney's false expansiveness.

'Into the street and out of my life.'

Johnny waited till he was sure everyone was aware that he was waiting, and Landau more aware than anybody. 'Niki, pal, we've had people stand at the top of that staircase in the last twenty-four hours. No one sees the street from the top of that staircase.'

Landau's face darkened. Not in embarrassment. In anger. 'I saw her walk down the stairs. I saw her cross the lobby to where the street is. She did not return. So unless somebody has moved the street in the last twenty-four hours, which I grant you under Stalin was always possible.

'Let's go on, shall we?' said Ned.

'See anyone walk out after her?' Johnny asked, riding Landau a little harder.

'Down the stairs or into the street?'

'Both, pal. Both.'

'No, I didn't. I didn't see her go into the street, did I, because you just told me I didn't. So why don't you answer the questions and I'll ask them?'

While Johnny sat idly back, Ned intervened. 'Niki, some things have to be very carefully examined. There's a lot at stake and Johnny has his orders.'

'I'm at stake too,' said Landau. 'My word's on the line and I don't like having it made a fool of by an American who's not even British.'

Johnny had returned to the file. 'Niki, will you please describe the security arrangements for the fair, as you yourself observed them?'

Landau took a tense breath. 'Well then,' he said, and started again. 'We had these two young uniformed policemen hanging about the hotel lobby. Those are the boys who keep the lists of all the Russians who come and go, which is normal. Then upstairs inside the hall we had the nasties. Those are the plainclothes boys. The dawdlers, they call them, the toptuny,' he added for Johnny's enlightenment. 'After a couple of days you know the toptuny by heart. They don't buy, they don't steal the exhibits or ask for freebies and there's always one of them with the butter-blond hair, don't ask me why. We had three boys and they didn't change all week. They were the ones who watched her go down the stairs.'

'That everyone, pal?'

'As far as I know it is everyone but I'm waiting to be told I'm wrong.'

'Were you not also aware of two ladies of indeterminate age, grey-haired persons who were also present every day of the fair, came early, left late, who also didn't buy, didn't enter negotiations with any of the stand holders or exhibitors, or appear to have any legitimate purpose for attending the fair?'

'You're talking about Gert and Daisy, I suppose.'

'Excuse me?'

'There was two old biddies from the Council of Libraries. They came for the beer. Their main pleasure was whipping brochures off the stands and cadging free handouts. We christened them Pert and Daisy after a certain British radio show popular in the war years and after.'

'It did not occur to you that these ladies might also be performing a surveillance function?'

Ned's powerful hand was already out to restrain Landau but he was too late.

'Johnny,' said Landau, boiling over. 'This is Moscow, right? Moscow, Russia, pal. If I stopped to consider who had a surveillance function and who didn't, I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning and I wouldn't get into it at night. The birds in the trees are wired for all I know.'

Yet again Johnny was at his telegrams. 'You say that Yekaterina Borisovna Orlova referred to the adjoining stand of Abercrombie & Blair as having been empty on the previous day, correct?'

'I do say so, yes.'

'But you didn't see her the day before? Is that also correct?'

'It is.'

'You also say that you have an eye for a pretty lady.'

'I do, thank you, and may it long remain vigilant.'

'Don't you think you should have noticed her then?'

'I do sometimes miss one,' Landau confessed, colouring again. 'If my back is turned, if I am bent over a desk or relieving myself in the toilet, it is possible my attention may flag for a moment.'

But Johnny's nervelessness was acquiring its own authority. 'You have relatives in Poland, do you not, Mr. Landau?' The 'pal' had evidently done its work, for listening 'to the tape I noticed he had dropped it.

'I do.'

'Do you not have an elder sister highly placed in the Polish administration?'

'My sister works in the Polish Health Ministry as a hospital inspector. She is not highly placed and she is past retiring age.'

'Have you at any time directly or indirectly been the witting target of pressure or blackmail by Communist bloc agencies or third parties acting in their behalf?

Landau turned to Ned. 'A what target? My English isn't very good, I'm afraid.'

'Conscious,' said Ned with a warning smile. 'Aware. Knowing.'

'No, I haven't,' said Landau.

'In your travels to Eastern bloc countries, have you been intimate with women of those countries?'

'I've been to bed with some. I haven't been intimate.'

Like a naughty schoolboy Walter let out a squeak of choked laughter, lifting his shoulders to his neck and cupping his hand over his dreadful teeth. But Johnny soldiered doggedly on: 'Mr. Landau, have you.ever prior to this time had contacts with any intelligence agency of any hostile or friendly country anywhere?'

'Negative.'

'Have you ever sold information to any person of whatever status or profession - newspaper, enquiry agency, police, military - for any purpose, however innocuous?'

'Negative.'

'And you are not and never have been a member of a Communist party or any peace organisation or group sympathetic to its aims?'

'I'm a British subject,' Landau retorted, thrusting out his little Polish jaw.

'And you have no idea, however vague, however mistily formed, of the overall message contained in the material you handled?'

'I didn't handle it. I passed it on.'

'But you read it along the way.'

'What I could, I read. Some. Then I gave up. As I told you.'

'Why?'

'From a sense of decency, if you want to know. Something which I begin to suspect you,are not troubled by.'

But Johnny, far from blushing, was digging patiently in his file. He drew out an envelope and from the envelope a pack of postcard-size photographs which he dealt on to the table like playing-cards. Some were fuzzy, all were grainy. A few had foreground obstructions. They showed women coming down the steps of a bleak office building, some in groups, some singly. Some carried perhaps-bags, some had their heads down and carried nothing. And Landau remembered hearing that it was Moscow practice for ladies slipping out for lunchtime shopping to stuff whatever they needed into their pockets and leave their handbags lying on their desks in order to show the world they had only gone down the corridor.

'This one,' said Landau suddenly, pointing with his forefinger.

Johnny played another of his courtroom tricks. He was really too intelligent for ' all this nonsense but that didn't stop him. He looked disappointed and mighty unbelieving. He looked as if he had caught Landau in a lie. The video film shows him overacting quite outrageously. 'How can you be so damn sure, for God's sake? You never even saw her in an overcoat.'

Landau is undismayed. 'That's the lady. Katya,' he says firmly. 'I'd recognise her anywhere. Katya. She's done her hair up, but it's her. Katya. That's her bag too, plastic.' He continues staring at the photograph. 'And her wedding ring.' For a moment he seems to forget he is not alone. 'I'd do the same for her tomorrow,'he says. 'And the day after.'

Which marked the satisfactory end to Johnny's hostile examination of the witness.

As the days progressed and one enigmatic interview fol lowed another, never the same place twice, never the same people except for Ned, Landau had increasingly the feeling that things were advancing to a climax. In a sound laboratory behind Portland Place, they played him women's voices, Russians speaking Russian and Russians speaking English. But he didn't recognise Katya's. Another day, to his alarm, was devoted to money. Not theirs but Landau's. His bank statements - where the hell did they get them from? His tax returns, salary slips, savings, mortgage, endowment policy, worse than the Inland Revenue.

'Trust us, Niki,' said Ned - but with such an honest, reassuring smile that Landau had the feeling that Ned had been out there fighting for him somehow, and that things were on the verge of coming right.

They're going to offer me a job, he thought on the Monday. They're going to turn me into a spy like Barley.

They're trying to put it right about my father twenty years after his death, he thought on the Tuesday.

Then on the Wednesday morning, Sam the driver pressed his doorbell for the last time and everything came clear.

'Where is it today then, Sam?' Landau asked him cheerfully. 'The Bloody Tower?'

'Sing Sing,' said Sam, and they had a good laugh.

But Sam delivered him not to the Tower and not to Sing Sing either, but to the side- entrance of one of the very Whitehall ministries that Landau only eleven days earlier had attempted unsuccessfully to storm. The grey-eyed Brock guided him up a back staircase and disappeared. Landau entered a great room that looked on to the Thames. A row of men sat at a table facing him. To the left sat Walter with his tie set straight and his hair slicked down. To the right sat Ned. Both looked solemn. And between them, with his cuffed hands resting flat on the table and lines of refusal round his neat jaw, sat a younger, 'sharp-suited man whom Landau rightly assumed to be senior in rank to both of them, and who, as Landau later put it, looked as though he had stepped out of a different movie. He was sleek and tight-hipped and groomed for television. He was rich in more than money. He was forty and rising, but the worst thing about him was his innocence. He looked too young to be charged with adult crimes.

'My name's Clive,' he said in an underpowered voice. 'Come in, Landau. We've got a problem about what to do with you.'

And beyond Clive – beyond all of them, in fact – Niki Landau as an afterthought saw,me. Old Palfrey. And Ned saw him see me and Ned smiled and made a pleasant show of introducing us.

'Ah now, Niki, this is Harry,' he said untruthfully.

Nobody else had earned a trade description till then but Ned provided one for me: 'Harry's our in-house umpire, Niki. He makes sure everyone gets a fair deal.'

'Nice,' said Landau.

Which is where, in the history of the affair, I made my own modest entrance, as legal errand boy, as fixer and bit player, and pleaser, and finally as chronicler; now Rosencrantz, 'now Guildenstern, and just occasionally Palfrey.

And to take even more care of Landau there was Reg, who was big and ginger and reassuring. Reg led Landau to a dunce's chair at the centre of the room, then sat beside him on another. And Landau took to Reg at once, which was usual, for Reg was by trade a welfarer and his clients included defectors, grounded fieldmen and blown agents, and other men and women whose bonds to England might have worn a little thin if old Reg Wattle and his cosy wife Berenice had not been there to hold their hands.

'You've done a good job but we can't tell you why it's good, because that would be insecure,' Clive continued in his and voice when Landau was comfortably settled. 'Even the little you know is too much. And we can't let you wander round Eastern Europe with our secrets in your head. It's too dangerous. For you and the people involved. So while you've performed a valuable service for us, you've also become a -serious worry. If this were wartime, we could lock you up or shoot you or something. But it isn't, not officially.'

Somewhere on his prudent little journey to power, Clive had taught himself to smile. It was an unfair weapon to use on friendly people, rather like silence on the telephone. But Clive knew nothing of unfairness because he knew nothing of its opposite. As to passion, it was what you used when you needed to persuade people.

'After all, you could point the finger at some very important people, couldn't you?' he continued so quietly that everyone kept still to hear him. 'I know you wouldn't do that deliberately but when one's handcuffed to a radiator one doesn't have much choice. Not in the end.'

And when Clive thought he had scared Landau just enough he glanced to me, and nodded to me, and watched me while I opened up the pompous leather folder I had brought with me and handed Landau the long document I had prepared, of which the purport was that Landau renounce in perpetuity all travel behind the Iron Curtain, that he never leave the country without first advising Reg so many days in advance, the details to be arranged between the two of them, and that Reg should look after Landau's passport in order to prevent mishaps. And that he accept irrevocably into his life the rôle of Reg or whomever the authorities should appoint in Reg's place as confidant, philosopher and discreet arbiter of his affairs of every kind – including the ticklish problem of how to handle the taxation on the cashier's cheque attached, drawn on the Fulham branch of a very boring British bank, in the sum of a hundred thousand pounds.

And that, in order that he be regularly scared by Authority, he should present himself every six months to the Service's Legal Adviser, Harry, for a top-up on the subject of Secrecy – to old Palfrey, Hannah's sometime lover, a man so bowed by life that he can be safely charged with keeping others upright. And that further to the above and pursuant to it and consequent upon it, the whole matter relating to a certain Russian woman and to her friend's literary manuscript, and to th e' contents of said manuscript – however much or little he may have understood their import – and to the part played by a certain British publisher, be as of this moment solemnly declared void, dead, inoperative and expunged, henceforth and for all time. Amen.

There was one copy and it would live in my safe till it was shredded or fell apart of old age. Landau read it twice while Reg read it over his shoulder. Then Landau disappeared into his own thoughts for a while without much regard for who was watching him or who was willing him to sign and cease to be a problem. Because Landau knew that in, this instance he was the buyer, not the seller.

He saw himself standing at the window of his Moscow hotel room. He remembered how he had wished he could hang up his traveller's boots and settle to a less arduous life. And. the amusing notion came to him that his Maker must have taken him at his word and fixed things accordingly, Which to everyone's unease caused him to break out in a little burst of laughter.

'Well I hope old Johnny the Yank is footing the bill for this, Harry,' he said.

But the joke did not receive the applause it deserved, since it happened to be true. So Landau took Reg's pen and signed, and handed me the document and watched me add my own signature as a witness, Horatio B. dePalfrey, which after twenty years has such a practised illegibility that if I had signed it Heinz's Tomato Soup- neither Landau nor anybody else could have told the difference, and put it back inside its leather coffin and patted down the lid. There was handshaking, mutual assurances were exchanged, and Clive murmured, 'We're grateful to you, Niki,'just like in the movie that Landau periodically convinced himself he was part of.

Then everybody shook Landau's hand yet again and, having watched him ride nobly into tile sunset or more accurately walk jauntily off down the corridor chatting away at Reg Wattle, who was twice his size, they waited fretfully for the 'take' on the intercepts for which I had already obtained the warrants under the infallible plea of intense American interest.

They tapped his office and home telephones, read his mail and fitted an electronic limpet to the rear axle of his beloved drop-head Triumph.

They followed him in his leisure hours and recruited a typist in his office to keep an eye on him as a 'suspect foreigner' while he served out the last weeks of his notice.

They put potential lady-friends alongside him in the bars where he liked to do his hunting. Yet despite these cumbersome and needless precautions, dictated by that same intense American interest, they drew a blank. No hint of bragging or indiscretion reached their ears. Landau never complained, never boasted, never attempted to go public. He became, in fact, one of the few finished and perfectly happy short stories of the trade.

He was the perfect prologue. He never came back.

He never attempted to get in touch with Barley Scott Blair, the great British spy. He lived in awe of him for ever. Even for the grand opening of the video shop, when he would have loved more than anything in the world to bask in the presence of this real-life secret British hero, he never tried to stretch the rules. Perhaps it was satisfaction enough for him to know that one night in Moscow, when the old country had called on him, he too had behaved like the English gentleman he sometimes longed to be. Or perhaps the Pole in him was content to have cocked a snook at the Russian bear next door. Or perhaps it was the memory of Katya that kept him faithful, Katya the strong, the virtuous, Katya the brave and beautiful, who even in her own fear had taken care to warn him of the dangers to himself. 'You must believe in what you are doing.'

And Landau had believed. And Landau was proud as Punch that he had, as any of us should be.

Even his video shop flourished. It was a sensation. A little rich for some people's blood now and then, including that of the Golders Green police, with whom I had to have a friendly word. But for others pure balm.

Above all, we were able to love him, because he saw us as we wished to be seen, as the omniscient, capable and heroic custodians of our great nation's inner health. It was a view of us that Barley never quite seemed able to share -any more, I have to say, than Hannah could, though she only ever knew it from outside, as the place to which she could not follow me, as the shrine-of ultimate compromise and therefore, in her unrelenting view, despair.

'They are definitely not the cure, Palfrey,' she had told me only a few weeks before, when for some reason I was trying to extol the Service. 'And they sound to me more likely to be the disease.'