Here Be Monsters (19 page)

And true, he had been momentarily querulous at the sight of the little Morgan, into which he would not fit easily. But then, again, he had quickly adjusted himself to the imposition, mentally as well as physically, launching instead into a long anecdote about a hot-shot USAF pilot he’d once known, who had once owned just such a car—

‘
Flew Voodoos, out of Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire
—
photographic reconnaissance — took some very pretty snapshots for us on one occasion too, much to the annoyance of a certain ally across the Channel
…
Bought himself one of these — same colour, British Racing Green, naturally. And you know what tickled him most, Elizabeth?
’

Too relaxed, she thought. But no, she didn’t know, she had said.

‘
Bought it from the factory (he
’
d been on the waiting list for years, of course), and paid for it in cash
…
some of which we
’
d just given him, for services rendered
…
but most of which was gambling profits — he was a mean poker player
…
But, anyway, he paid in cash, and there was seventeen shillings and fourpence change to come from his money. And they only had pound notes, so they sent an apprentice lad across the road to a pub to get him his seventeen-and-four, down to the last penny. Tickled him pink, that did.
’

Much too relaxed. It hadn’t tickled her at all.

‘What was his provenance?’ Although they weren’t quite out of London proper the traffic was already thinning in the brief gap between closing time and early departure home. ‘Was he ever in the real army—Red Army?’

‘So he maintained. One of the heroes of the Patriotic War, who ran up the red flag over the Reichstag, or the Brandenburg Gate, or some such place, in ‘45. But I have my doubts, although he had his army stuff off pat, certainly. So they say.’

She was meant to pick that up. ‘You never interrogated him?’

‘No.’ He gazed ahead sightlessly. ‘He came across just about the time I came into the Service. So I was doing my homework while they were taking him apart. And I suppose you could say he was out of my league.’

Elizabeth drove in silence for a time, beckoned by the motorway signs. Paul had warned her that she would be out of her league in this affair, but that wasn’t a bad way of improving one’s game. All the same, the idea of an age of the world when David Audley had not been in the Blues’ team overawed her somewhat: it was a defect in her powers of imagination that she could not readily enough accept that those who were old had once been young—that dear old Major Birkenshawe had once been a dashing subaltern, and even Father had been a dewy-eyed little midshipman—
even Father
!

‘There were three of them, who assessed him—all Fred Clinton’s trusted cronies. One was a don from Cambridge, who’d been a Doublecross consultant; one was ex-SOE -one of the few Fred had been really thick with, and had kept an eye on; and there was a soldier, an ex-regular who’d watched Fred’s back during the war. And he was the one who didn’t reckon Gorbatov as a front line warrior: “In the army, but not of it” … meaning that he’d been NKVD from the cradle, keeping watch on the lads as they carried the red banners westwards.’

The West
, the final blue sign ahead proclaimed, echoing him and inviting her into the fast lane.

‘His version—
Gorbatov
’s version—was that he’d been talent-spotted by one of Ignatiev’s lieutenants in 1950, as a politically reliable career soldier. A very tough egg by the name of Okolovich—Anatoli Okolovich. And we knew all about
him
… In fact, he was an up-and-coming man at that time, and an invitation from him to join the happy band certainly wouldn’t have admitted refusal: it would have been either the Communist Party or the farewell party.’

That was one of Paul’s little black jokes, so maybe it had started as one of Audley’s. Elizabeth took a quick sidelong look at the big man beside her. He was so utterly unlike Paul in so many ways that the ways in which they
were
like each other—ways which were sometimes no more than similar phrases and jokes trivializing unpalatable truths—emphasized their underlying similarity. So -, allowing physically for Paul’s age and much better looks, and mentally for his admiration of Audley, was this the shape of Paul Mitchell to come?

‘So he did the sensible thing, and ended up in ‘56 as General Okolovich’s leg-man in eastern Hungary, when the balloon went up there. Except that, according to him, he’d been feeding the General with soldierly warnings about trouble in store … which Okolovich had unwisely bowdlerized before passing on to his ambassador, one Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov—you remember him, Elizabeth?’ He turned towards her. ‘What’s the matter, Elizabeth?’

She glanced at her mirror again. “There’s a police car about three hundred yards behind us. He’s waiting for me to put my foot down.’

‘Ah!’ He nodded, and then hunched himself to view her speedometer. ‘72-3? Young woman in British Racing Green sports car? Do you always play with policemen like this? It’s very naughty.’

‘I just don’t want to get stopped, that’s all.’

‘No? But you could show him your card then—and make him hate you. And then put your foot right down again, and make him hate you even more. Paul—your own Paul—does that all the time, so I’m told.’

‘I’m not Paul.’ She decided not to rise to ‘your own Paul’.

‘Is there any reason why I should be hurrying? When are we meeting Major Turnbull at this pub of yours?’

She studied her mirror again. The police car would drop her at the next junction. ‘Would that be about 5.30? You know more about opening times than I do.’

‘I suppose so.’ He looked at her innocently. ‘I take it that you’ve had lunch? You couldn’t have spent half the morning at that
salon
of yours—?’

They both knew that she had ostentatiously placed a distinctively-labelled
Rochard Freres
bag in the car, so he couldn’t deny her cover-story. ‘I snatched a sandwich.’ But, on second thoughts, that casual reference to Paul might be a hint that he guessed—or, being David, somehow
knew
—
where she’d been. ‘I hope you had something, David—I’m sorry, if I kept you hanging around, waiting for me. That was thoughtless of me.’

‘Not at all! I like your style, young woman.’ Audley chuckled. ‘Putting the Defence of the Realm second to Jimmy Rochard’s summer frocks is like old Macmillan sitting on the Front Bench when he was Prime Minister, ostentatiously reading letters from his gamekeeper before his official bumpf.’ Another chuckle. ‘Same with your Paul—or
our
Paul, if you prefer … First thing every morning, he should be reading his overnight SGs. And what does he do?’ He gave her a knowing look as though wishing to share an answer known to them both; which reminded her oddly of the object of their journey, since in Latin he could have actually worded the question to convey their shared certainty.

‘What does he do?’ She was certain that he did know about Paul and herself now, but she decided to play hard to get. ‘I’m sure I don’t know—?’

‘Why, he reads his morning post from all those 1914-18 veterans with whom he zealously corresponds, before they finally fade away.’ He cocked his head, half-smiling, half-frowning. ‘What is he into at the moment—the Battle of Loos, is it?’

Elizabeth shrugged. ‘I’ve really no idea.’ But Paul was right:
once a Sopwith Camel pilot pulls his stick, no one knows where the Camel is going
! ‘But I do remember your Mr Andropov. He wasn’t very nice to the Hungarians, was he?’

‘Correct.’ A minute, and slightly more than a mile, passed while Audley consulted his own memories. ‘So you can appreciate why General Okolovich was scared in ‘56, having given the egregious Andropov demonstrably incorrect information about the state of the Hungarian nation before the rising. Because when the dust had settled, and they’d buried the 30,000 dead—including all the good Russian soldiers who’d turned their tanks over to the Hungarians, and offered to fight for them … when
they
had been shot too, if they were lucky—Comrade Ambassador Andropov was after blood. So Okolovich was very scared indeed. And while Okolovich was scared, poor old Gorbatov was comprehensively
terrified
. Because he hadn’t got anyone worth a damn to shop. So he knew he was for Siberia, if he was very lucky—or the chop, if he wasn’t. And he knew enough to know which was more likely.’ Audley waved a huge hand across the windscreen. ‘Actually, if he had reckoned on Siberia he wouldn’t have minded, because he was born there—his parents had been shunted off there in the twenties, because his grandfather had a Tsarist commission, but hadn’t annoyed his other ranks sufficiently to be lynched out of hand when the Red Revolution reached his regiment—he
liked
Siberia, did Andrei Afanaseevich Gorbatov.’ Audley nodded at the windscreen. ‘But then he remembered this colleague of his—or nodding KGB acquaintance—who’d done a tour in Canada during the war, and gone off to the North-West Territory of Canada, to tell the Canadians what a splendid fellow Uncle Joe Stalin was. And this fellow had told him about all the endless trees and snow, just like Siberia, but with the birds and the booze, and no questions asked afterwards. And Gorbatov then conceived the idea that if he followed the yellow-brick road to the West there was a land over the rainbow—with trees and snow, and women and drink, and no questions asked, like home only better.’ He nodded again. ‘So when he came over to our side he offered all he had in exchange for the North-West Territory. He thought he might be safe there, too, as well as happy.’

The police car had fallen away, out of sight if not quite out of mind, baulked of its prey. But she wasn’t sure, now that there was nothing behind her, whether they hadn’t passed the word on. So she would just have to keep her eye on the rear-view mirror.

‘So our people said “Maybe”. Only at first they were disappointed, because he gave them the usual chicken-feed about Hungary. Which they knew already, because of all the Hungarians who had come over—not just the ex-Communist patriots, but the AVRM secret police types, who were afraid of both sides … But then he gave them Debrecen, and that was something new.’

Elizabeth steadied her foot on 70. It was a curious international idiosyncrasy that the Americans, who worshipped the individual, supplied cars which were equipped to adhere to speed limits, while the regimented Europeans let their drivers take their choice, and pay accordingly.

‘Something new.’ Audley agreed with himself. ‘That’s what concentrated their minds: they’d never had a smell of it before—and, according to Gorbatov, it had been functioning for at least three years, before he nerved himself to run. Which was when Okolovich took possession of his records, so the warnings he’d sent could be doctored out—then he knew he was being measured for a necktie.’

Elizabeth nodded at the road ahead. That was a fairly ordinary scenario for defection, anyway. In the West it was often much more complicated, because life itself was more complex, with all its secret guilts and its multiple moral choices. But KGB colonels were not the type to experience sudden blinding lights accompanied by divine voices telling them to change course: with them it was usually naked self-preservation which dictated action.

‘He was quite frank about it. Although our Wise Men didn’t altogether believe him. They were inclined to think that he wasn’t so clever as he pretended to be—that he might well have given Okolovich dud information, and was about to get his just deserts.
And
he had a fairly sizeable drink problem, which he said had been caused by worry … But they reckoned it might have been the chicken which laid his egg for him—the drink problem. And what also made ‘em think he wasn’t too bright was that he didn’t rate what he had about Debrecen as being the jewel in his crown. Because he hadn’t had anything directly to do with it, it was way above his clearance as well as being outside his jurisdiction. It just happened to be something he knew the bare minimum about in general, but two specific things about by pure accident. He actually thought we knew about it already—took it for granted, even. Huh!’

Now, at last, they were getting to the lean meat of the official record, which had dismissed Colonel Andrei Afanaseevich Gorbatov in one short paragraph. ‘What did he say about it … Debrecen?’

‘In general? Huh!’ Audley sniffed. ‘”That place where they process the foreigners—you know.” Which they didn’t. So they left it for a few days, and then worked back to it one evening when his vodka gauge was into the red. Only to discover that that was all he
did
know—not his directorate, big-time stuff for First Fifteen players while he had to scrum-down with the Hungarians.’ Audley paused. ‘But there were these
two
times when someone was off sick, and he had to sub for them. It was just on the transport arrangements—picking people up from an airfield, who’d come in by light plane cleared from somewhere in the west, or south-west—picking ‘em up and delivering ‘em, secret VIP treatment, semi-disguised subjects—hats, dark glasses, raincoats. All he knew was that they were Anglo-Saxon—or, Anglo-American—mostly youngish, or even young. And he knew the dates, near enough, over these two three-week periods in the summer. That was
all
.’ He nodded to emphasize the last word. ‘In the end they took him apart—leaned hard on him. But that was all he had.’

But that wasn’t all that was in the record, thought Elizabeth. ‘All?’

‘They didn’t like it, of course.’ Audley breathed in deeply, and expelled a sigh of remembrance. ‘Most particularly, they didn’t like the bit about the semi-disguised VIPs being
youngish
or
young
. Because that smelt too much like laying down new claret, for drinking in the seventies. Like the Cambridge thirties vintages were laid down.’ Audley spoke off-handedly now, reminding Elizabeth that if there was one thing he hated, and invariably referred to in his most casual voice, it was the infamous Cambridge gang. For he was a Cambridge man himself, and desperately proud of it.