Our Game (9 page)
"You refer in one of your last reports to Larry's 'remarkable affinity' with Checheyev. Would that include areas you might not know about?"
"If I didn't know about them, how can I answer your question?"
"What did it include?"
"I've told you already. Larry appointed Checheyev his university of the North Caucasus. Larry does that. He eats people whole. When Checheyev arrived here, Larry knew as little about the region as anyone else. He had a decent general knowledge of Russia, but the people of the Caucasus are a subject apart. After a few months, he could hold forth on the Chechen, the Ossetians, the Dagestanis, the Ingush, the Circassians, the Abkhazians, the you-name-them. Checheyev handled him really well. He had an instinct for him. He could crack the whip, and he could charm him out of the trees. He was droll. He had a gallows humour. And he kept Larry's conscience ticking. Larry always had to have a ticking conscience—"
Again she interrupted me. "Are you saying that your own affinity with Larry was more remarkable?"
No, Marjorie dear, I am not saying anything of the kind. I'm saying that Larry was a love thief on a seesaw, and as soon as he'd finished enchanting Checheyev he had to race back to me and make it right, because he was not only a spy but a clergyman's son with a diminished sense of responsibility who needed everybody's absolution for betraying everybody else. I'm saying that for all his breast-beating and moralizing and supposed intellectual breadth, he took to spying like an addict. I'm saying that he was also a bastard; that he was sly and vengeful and would steal your woman as soon as look at you; that he was a natural for tradecraft and the black arts and that my sin was to promote the cheat in him above the dreamer, which is why he sometimes hated me a little more than I deserved.
"Larry loves archetypes, Marjorie," I replied, adopting a weary tone. "If they don't exist, he appoints them. He's an action freak, to use the modern parlance. He likes scale. Checheyev delivered it."
"Did you?"
I gave an indulgent laugh. What on earth was she getting at—apart from me? "I was the home side, Marjorie. I was his England, warts and all. Checheyev was exotica. He was a closet Muslim the way Larry is a closet Christian. When Larry was with CC, he was on holiday. When he was with me, he was at school."
"And it lasted," she said. And left me dangling a moment. "Thanks to you." She consulted her hands again. "Long after our other Cold War agents had been laid off, Larry continued to enjoy a full operational life. Checheyev's tour in London was actually extended by Moscow so that he could go on handling Larry. Isn't that rather odd, looking back?"
"Why should it be?"
"With other Cold War agents being run down?"
"Larry's relationship with Moscow was unique. We had every reason to believe it could survive the Communist era.
So did his Russian controllers."
"That was certainly the view you encouraged."
"Of course I did!" I had forgotten the force of my convictions in those days. "All right, there was a sea change. There was no Communist experiment left for Larry to admire, but then Larry was never that kind of agent anyway, not in their eyes, not in his. He was a scourge of Western materialism, a champion of Russia good or bad. What powered him—in the fiction and the reality—was his romanticism, his love of the underdog, his gut contempt for the British Establishment and its crawling adherence to America. Larry's hatreds didn't change when Communism collapsed. Neither did his loves. His dreams of a better, fairer world didn't change—his love of the individual over the collective—his love of differentness and eccentricity. Neither did our pigskin-clover society. After the Cold War it got worse. On both sides of the Atlantic. More corrupt, inward, conformist, intolerant, isolationist, smug. Less equitable. I'm talking Larry talk, Marjorie. I’m talking the renegade humanist who wants to save the world. The Britain that Larry was sabotaging in his imagination all those years is alive and well today. The worst government, the greyest leadership, the saddest, most deceived electorate we've ever had ... Why shouldn't Larry continue to betray us?"
Descending from my soapbox, I was pleased to see her blush. I imagined uncles in the cabinet and blue-rinsed aunts who were the backbone of the Tory right. "Leave Larry out there. That was my argument. Wait and see what the new Russian intelligence service does with him. They're only the same crowd in different hats. They're not going to sit back and let one corrupt superpower run the earth. Wait for the next act, instead of ditching him and then trying to catch up when it's too late, which is what we usually do."
"However, your eloquence failed to carry the day," she pointed out while she thoughtfully fingered her fob-chain.
"Unfortunately, yes. Anyone who had an ounce of history in him should have known it would be business as usual in a year or two. But that didn't include the Top Floor. It wasn't the Russians who dumped Larry. It was us."
Her hands let go the fob-chain, joined, and prayed beneath her chin again. There was premonition in her stillness. On the other side of the room, Barney Waldon gazed into the middle air. Then I realized they had heard something that they were attuned to and I was not—some electronic beep or 'Jazz or tinkle from another room—and it reminded me of Emma in the orchard, hearing Larry's car before I did, on the day he made his first appearance.
Without explanation, Marjorie Pew got up and stepped as commanded towards one of the inner doors. Like a ghost she passed through it, leaving it as securely closed as before.
Barney, what the bloody hell's going on?" I whispered as soon as we were alone. We were both straining our ears, but the acoustics were immaculate, and I for one heard nothing.
”Lot of clever women in the shop these days, Tim," he replied still listening. I couldn't tell whether this was a boast or a lament. "Suits them, mind, the nit-picking. Right up their alley."
"But what does she want from me?" I pressed. "I mean, Christ, Barney, I'm in retirement. I'm a has-been. Why's she giving me the hairy eyeball?"
Marjorie Pew returned, sparing him a reply. Her face was stony and even paler than before. She sat down and put her fingertips together. I saw that they were trembling. You've been getting the slow handclap, I thought. Whoever's listening has told you to get hostile or get out. I felt a quickening of my pulses. I wished I could stand up and walk around. I've been too bloody glib, I thought, and now I'm going to pay for it.
FOUR
"TIM."
"Marjorie."
"Am I right in suggesting that Larry was at odds with us by the time he left?" A harder, clotted voice. A faster glance. "He was always at odds with us, Marjorie."
"But by the end quite specifically, I gather."
"He thought we weren't worthy of the luck that history had dealt us."
"Luck how?"
"As the winners in the Cold War. He regretted the unreality of it all."
"Of what all?" Acidly.
"Of the Cold War. Of two discredited ideologies fighting for a peace neither wanted, with weapons that didn't work. That's another Larry quote."
"Did you agree with him?"
"To a point."
"Do you think he felt we owed him something? We the Office. Something he was entitled to help himself to, for example?"
"He wanted his life back. That was rather more than we could do for him."
"Do you think he felt the Russians owed him something?”
“Quite the reverse. He owed them. He does a pretty good line in guilt too."
She gave an impatient toss of her head, as if guilt were not her responsibility. "And you are saying that throughout the last four years of his operational life for us, Larry had no financial dealings with Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev? Or none that you reported?"
"I am saying that if he had them I wasn't aware of them and therefore I didn't report any."
"What about you?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Did you have any financial dealings with Checheyev you did not report?"
"No, Marjorie, I have not had any financial dealings with Checheyev or any other member of Russian intelligence past or present."
"Not with Volodya Zorin."
"Not with Zorin."
"And not with Pettifer either."
"Apart from keeping him out of bankruptcy, no.”
“But you do have private means, of course."
"I have been fortunate, Marjorie. My parents died when I was young, so I had money instead of love."
"Will you please give me some idea of your personal expenditure over the last twelve months?"
Did I say Merriman had joined us? Perhaps not, for I am not sure at what point he did so, though his entry must have followed quite soon upon Marjorie's return. He was a big man, a floater, very light on his feet, the way large men often are, and I suppose the door he came in by must have been ajar, left that way by Marjorie. Yet it puzzled me that I had not noticed this, for like many people in my trade, I have a thing about unclosed doors. I could only suppose that in the internal mayhem brought on by Marjorie Pew's assault, I had failed to observe the displacement of air and light as Merriman soundlessly lowered his ample rump onto the convenient arm of Bamey's sofa. I had turned in indignation to Barney, protesting the enormity of her question. Instead I found myself looking at Merriman. He was wearing a stiff white collar, a silver tie, and a red carnation. Merriman was always dressed for someone's wedding.
"Tim. How nice."
"Hullo, Jake. You're just in time. I'm being asked to say how much money I've spent this year."
"Yes, how much have you? There's the Bechstein for a start. That cost a bomb. Then there's your little pilgrimages to Mr. Appleby's nice jeweller's shop in Wells, never cheap—you've dropped thirty grand there—not to mention all the fillies and smart frocks you've bought her. Must be quite a gal. Lucky she disapproves of motorcars, or I can see a Bentley with mink-lined seats. I know you inherited early from your parents, I know your uncle Bob left you Schloss and contents, but what about the rest? Or is it all from naughty Aunt Cecily, who died so conveniently in Portugal a few years back? For a fellow who never cared about money, you certainly know how to pick a relative."
"If you don't believe me, check with my solicitors."
"My dear boy, they bear you out entirely. Half a million quids' worth of the best, added to what you've already got, paid in two instalments from a nice Channel Islands trust fund. The solicitors never met the aunt, mind. They were instructed by a firm in Lisbon. The firm in Lisbon never met her either. They were instructed by her business manager, a lawyer in Paris. I mean really, Tim, I've seen money laundered before, but never lawyers." He turned to Marjorie Pew and spoke as if I weren't in the room. "We're still checking, so he needn't think he's in the clear. If Aunt Cecily turns up in a pauper's grave, Cranmer's for the high jump."
It was Marjorie again. She would like to go back to the logic of my behaviour last night, she said. She wondered whether she might run it by me one more time to make sure she had it straight, Tim.
"Be my guest," I said, using a phrase I had never used in my life.
"Tim, why did you telephone us from your house? You said it was in your mind that the police might have been running illegal taps and that they'd made up the story about Larry's vigilant Scottish landlady as cover. Mightn't they have been tapping your phone too? I'd have thought that with your training and experience, you'd have driven to the village and used the public box."
"I used the established procedure."
"I'm not certain you did. Rule One is to make sure it's safe."
I glanced at Merriman, but he had adopted the posture of a hostile audience, eyeing me as he might a prisoner in the dock.
"The police could have put a tap on the village box as well," I said. "Not that they'd have got much joy of it. It's usually bust."
"I see," she said, implying once again that she didn't.
"It would have looked pretty damned odd, at eleven at night, if I had driven a mile into the village to make a call. Particularly if the police were watching my house."
She looked at the tips of her groomed fingers, then at me again, as she began counting off the points that were troubling her. Merriman had decided he preferred the ceiling. Waldon the floor.
"You cut yourself off from Pettifer. You think his disappearance may be perfectly normal. But it worries you so much you can't wait to tell us about it. You know Checheyev has retired. You know Pettifer has. But you suspect they're up to something, though you don't know what or why. You think the police may be tapping your phone. But you use it to ring us. You spend twenty minutes staring at this building before you pluck up the courage to enter it. One could therefore be forgiven for assuming that ever since the police called on you last night, you have been in a state of stress quite disproportionate to Pettifer's disappearance. One might even suppose that you had something very weighty on your mind. So weighty that even a person as overcontrolled as yourself makes a string of tradecraft errors at odds with his training."
My apprehensions had given way to outright rejoicing. I forgave her everything: her courtroom pomposity, her shrouded savagery, her description of me as overcontrolled. Angel choirs were singing in my ears, and as far as I was concerned, Marjorie Pew as in church was one of the angels. I had told her nothing. Never mind that she couldn't or wouldn't tell me the date of Checheyev's last visit. She had told me something even more important: They didn't know about Emma and Larry.
They knew about Emma and me, because under Office rules I had been obliged to tell them. But they hadn't drawn the third line of the triangle. And that, as we used to say, was three-star intelligence: worth the whole journey.
I selected a sentimental, wounded tone. "Larry was more than my agent, Marjorie," I said. "He was my friend for quarter of a century. On top of that, he was the best live source we had. He was one of those joes who make their own luck. In the beginning, the KGB recruited him on spec. He wasn't big enough to be an agent of influence; he didn't have access worth a hoot. They gave him a small salary and let him loose on the international conference circuit, armed with a bunch of briefs written by Moscow Centre, and they hoped that in time he would amount to somebody. He did. He became their man, talent-spotting left-wing students, earmarking tomorrow's friendlies for the Kremlin, and flying kites at world conferences. After a few years, thanks to Larry, this office had put together its own cast of tame Communist agents, some Brit, some foreign, but all wholly owned by this service, who between them fed Moscow some of the most sophisticated disinformation of the Cold War, and the KGB never rumbled it. He attracted subverts like flypaper. He worked the Third World fence-sitters till he had blisters on his backside. He had a memory that most of us would kill for. He knew every bought MP in Westminster, every suborned British journalist, lobbyist, and agent of influence on Moscow Centre's London payroll. There were people in the KGB and people in the Office who owed him their living and their promotion. I was one of them. So yes, I was concerned. I still am."