The Russia House (36 page)

‘Cultural Attaché, now and then. When he can be bothered to answer, which isn’t often. If a Sov writer comes over and the Embassy gives a binge for him, I’ll probably go along.’

‘We understand you like to play chess at a certain café in the area of Camden Town, London.’

‘So?’

‘Is this not a café frequented by Russian exiles, Mr. Brown?’

Barley raised his voice but otherwise held steady. ‘So I know Leo. Leo likes to lead from weakness. I know Josef. Josef charges at anything that moves. I don’t go to bed with them and I don’t trade secrets with them.’

‘You do have a very selective memory, though, don’t you, Mr. Brown? Considering the extraordinarily detailed accounts you give of other episodes and persons?’

Still Barley did not flare, which made his reply all the more devastating. For a moment, indeed, it seemed he would not even answer; the tolerance that was now so deeply seated in him seemed to tell him not to bother.

‘I remember what’s important to me, old boy. If I haven’t got a dirty enough mind to match yours, that’s your bloody business.’

Todd coloured. And went on colouring. Larry’s smile widened till it nearly split his face. Quinn had put on a sentry’s scowl. Clive had not heard a thing.

But Ned was pink with pleasure and even Russell Sheriton, sunk in a crocodile’s sleep, seemed to be remembering, among so many disappointments, something vaguely beautiful.

The same evening as I was taking a walk along the beach, I came on Barley and two of his guards, out of sight of the mansion, skimming flat stones to see who could get the most bounces.

‘Got you! Got you!’ he was shouting, leaning back and flinging his arms at the clouds.

‘The mullahs are smelling heresy,’ Sheriton declared over dinner, regaling us with the latest state of play. Barley had pleaded a headache and asked for an omelette in the boat-house. ‘Most of these guys came to town on a Margin of Safety ticket. That means raise military spending and develop any new system however crazy that will bring peace and prosperity to the arms industry for the next fifty years. If they’re not sleeping with the manufacturers, they’re sure as hell eating with them. The Bluebird is telling them a very bad story.’

‘And if it’s the truth?’ I asked.

Sheriton sadly helped himself to another piece of pecan pie. ‘The truth? The Sovs can’t play? They’re cost-cutting at every corner and the buffoons in Moscow don’t know one half of the bad news because the buffoons in the field cheat on them so they can earn their gold watches and free caviar? You think
that’s
the truth?’ He took a huge mouthful but it didn’t alter the shape of his face. ‘You think that certain unpleasant
comparisons
aren’t made?’ He poured himself some coffee. ‘You know what’s the worst thing for our democratically-elected neanderthals? The total worst? It’s the implications against
us
. Moribund on the Sov side means moribund
our
side. The mullahs hate that. So do the manufacturers.’ He shook his head in disapproval. ‘To hear the Sovs can’t do solid fuel from shit, their rocket motors suck instead of blow? Their early-warning errors worse than ours? Their heavies can’t even get out of the kennel? That our intelligence estimates are ludicrously exaggerated? The mullahs get terrible vibes from these things.’ He reflected on the inconstancy of mullahs. ‘How do you peddle the arms race when the only asshole you have to race against is yourself? Bluebird is life-threatening intelligence. A lot of highly-paid favourite sons are in serious danger of having their ricebowls broken, all on account of Bluebird. You want truth, that’s it.’

‘So why stick your neck out?’ I objected. ‘If it’s not a popular ticket, why run on it?’

And suddenly I didn’t know where to put myself.

It isn’t often that old Palfrey stops a conversation, causes every head to swing round at him in amazement. And I certainly hadn’t meant to this time. Yet Ned and Bob and Clive were staring at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, and Sheriton’s young men – we had two of them, if I remember rightly – independently put down their forks and began independently wiping their fingers on their napkins.

Only Sheriton didn’t seem to have heard. He had decided that a little cheese wouldn’t hurt him after all. He had pulled the trolley to him, and was morosely examining the display. But none of us imagined that cheese was uppermost in his mind, and it was clear to me that he was buying time while he wondered whether to reply and how.

‘Harry,’ he began carefully, addressing not me but a piece of Danish blue. ‘Harry, I swear to God. You have before you a man committed to peace and brotherly love. By this I mean that my primary ambition is to knock so much shit out of the Pentagon firebreathers that they will never again tell the President of the United States that twenty rabbits make a tiger, or that every fucking sardine fisherman three miles out of port is a Soviet nuclear submarine in drag. I also wish to hear no more bullshit about digging little holes in the ground and surviving nuclear war. I am a glasnostic, Harry. I have made certain discoveries about myself. I was born a glasnostic, my parents are old glasnostics from way back. For me, glasnosticism is a way of life. I want my children to live. Quote me and enjoy me.’

‘I didn’t know you had any children,’ said Ned.

‘Figurative,’ said Sheriton.

But Sheriton, if you pulled away the wrapping, was telling us a truthful version of his new self. Ned sensed it, I sensed it. And if Clive didn’t, that was only because he had deliberately abbreviated his perceptions. It was a truth that lay not so much in his words, which as often as not were designed to obscure his feelings rather than express them, but in a new and irrepressible humility that had entered his manner since his cut-throat days in London. At the age of fifty, after quarter of a century as a Cold War brawler, Russell Sheriton, to use Walter’s expression, was shaking his mid-life bars. It had never occurred to me that I could like him, but that evening I began to.

‘Brady’s bright,’ Sheriton warned us with a yawn as we turned in. ‘Brady can hear the grass growing.’

And Brady, parse him how you would, was bright as boot-buttons.

You spotted it in his clever face and in the nerveless immobility of his courteous body. His ancient sports coat was older than he was, and as he came into the room you knew he took pleasure in being unspectacular. His young assistant wore a sports coat too and, like his master, had a classy dowdiness.

‘Looks like you’ve done a fine thing, Barley,’ Brady said cheerfully in his Southern lilt, setting his briefcase on the table. ‘Anybody say thank you along the way? I’m Brady and I’m too damned old to fool around with funny names. This is Skelton.
Thank you.
’

The billiards room again but without Quinn’s table and upright chairs. Instead, we lounged gratefully in deep cushions. A storm was brewing. Randy’s vestals had closed the shutters and put on lights. As the wind rose, the mansion began clinking like restless bottles on a shelf. Brady unpopped his briefcase, a gem from the days when they knew how to make them. Like the university professor he occasionally was, he wore a polka-dot blue tie.

‘Barley, did I read somewhere, or am I dreaming, you once played sax in the great Ray Noble’s band?’

‘Beardless boy in those days, Brady.’

‘Wasn’t Ray just the sweetest man you ever knew? Didn’t he make the best sound ever?’ Brady asked as only Southerners can.

‘Ray was a prince.’ Barley hummed a few bars from ‘Cherokee’.

‘Too bad about his politics,’ Brady said, smiling. ‘We all tried to talk him out of that nonsense, but Ray would go his way. Ever play chess with him?’

‘Yes I did, as a matter of fact.’

‘Who won?’

‘Me, I think. Not sure. Yes, me.’

Brady smiled. ‘So did I.’

Skelton smiled too.

They talked London and which part of Hampstead Barley lived in: ‘Barley, I just love that area. Hampstead is my idea of civilisation.’ They talked the bands Barley had played. ‘My God, don’t tell me
he’s
still around! At his age I wouldn’t even buy unripe bananas!’ They talked British politics and Brady just
had
to know what it was that Barley thought so wrong with Mrs. T.

Barley appeared to have to think about that, and at first came up with no suggestions. Perhaps he had caught Ned’s warning eye.

‘Hell, Barley, it’s not
her
fault she hasn’t any worthwhile opponents, is it?’

‘Woman’s a bloody Red,’ Barley growled, to the secret alarm of the British side.

Brady didn’t laugh, just raised his eyebrows and waited, as we all did.

‘Elective dictatorship,’ Barley continued, quietly gathering steam. ‘A thousand legs good, two legs lousy. God bless the corporation and bugger the individual.’

He seemed to be about to enlarge on this thesis, then changed his mind, and to our relief, let it rest.

Nevertheless it was a light enough beginning, and after ten minutes of it Barley must have been feeling pretty much at ease. Until in his languid way Brady came to ‘this present thing you’ve gotten yourself into, Barley,’ and proposed that Barley should go over the turf again in his own words, ‘but homing in on that historic eye-to-eye you two fellows had in Leningrad.’

Barley did as Brady wanted, and though I like to think I listened quite as sharply as Brady, I heard nothing in Barley’s narrative that seemed to me contradictory or particularly revealing beyond what was already on the record.

And at first blush Brady didn’t seem to hear anything surprising either, for when Barley had finished, Brady gave him a reassuring smile and said, ‘Well now, thank you, Barley,’ in a voice of apparent approval. His slender fingers poked among his papers. ‘Worst thing about spying, I always say, is the hanging around. Must be like being a fighter pilot,’ he said, selecting a page and peering at it. ‘One minute sitting home eating your chicken dinner, next minute frightening the hell out of yourself at eight hundred miles an hour. Then it’s back home in time to wash the dishes.’ He had apparently found what he was looking for. ‘Is that how it felt to you, Barley, stuck out there in Muscovy without a prayer?’

‘A bit.’

‘Hanging around waiting for Katya? Hanging around waiting for Goethe? You seemed to do quite some hanging around after you and Goethe had finished your little pow-wow, didn’t you?’

Perching his spectacles on the tip of his nose, Brady was studying the paper before passing it to Skelton. I knew the pause was contrived but it scared me all the same, and I think it scared Ned for he glanced at Sheriton, then anxiously back to Barley. ‘According to our field reports, you and Goethe broke up around fourteen thirty-three Leningrad time. Seen the picture? Show it to him, Skelton.’

All of us had seen it. All but Barley. It portrayed the two men in the gardens of the Smolny after they had said goodbye. Goethe had turned away. Barley’s hands were still held out to him from their farewell embrace. The electronic timeprint in the top left corner said fourteen thirty-three and twenty seconds.

‘Remember your last words to him?’ Brady asked, with an air of sweet reminiscence.

‘I said I’d publish him.’

‘Remember
his
last words to
you
?’

‘He wanted to know whether he should look for another decent human being.’

‘One hell of a goodbye,’ Brady remarked comfortably, while Barley continued to look at the photograph, and Brady and Skelton looked at Barley. ‘What did you do then, Barley?’

‘Went back to the Europe. Handed over his stuff.’

‘What route did you take? Remember?’

‘Same way I got there. Trolleybus into town, then walked a bit.’

‘Have to wait long for the trolleybus?’ Brady asked, while his Southern accent became, to my ear at least, more of a mocking-bird than a regional digression.

‘Not that I remember.’

‘How long?’

‘Five minutes. Maybe longer.’

I could not remember one occasion until now when Barley had pleaded an imperfect memory.

‘Many people in line?’

‘Not many. A few. I didn’t count.’

‘The trolleybus runs every ten minutes. The ride into town takes another ten. The walk to the Europe, at your pace, ten. Our people have timed it all ways up. Ten’s the outside. But according to Mr. and Mrs. Henziger, you didn’t show up in their hotel room till fifteen fifty-five. That leaves us with quite a tidy hole, Barley. Like a hole in time. Mind telling me how we’re going to fill it? I don’t expect you went on a drinking spree, did you? You were carrying some pretty valuable merchandise. I’d have thought you wanted to unload it pretty quick.’

Barley was becoming wary and Brady must have seen that he was, for his hospitable Southern smile was offering a new kind of encouragement, the kind that said ‘come clean’.

As to Ned, he was sitting stock still with both feet flat on the ground, and his straight gaze was fixed on Barley’s troubled face.

Only Clive and Sheriton seemed to have pledged themselves to display no emotions at all.

‘What were you doing, Barley?’ Brady said.

‘I mooched,’ said Barley, not lying at all well.

‘Carrying Goethe’s notebook? The notebook he had
entrusted
to you with his life? Mooched? You picked a damned odd afternoon to mooch for fifty minutes, Barley. Where d’you go?’

‘I wandered back along the river. Where we’d been. Paddy had told me to take my time. Not to rush back to the hotel but to go at a leisurely speed.’

‘That’s true,’ Ned murmured. ‘Those were my instructions via Moscow station.’

‘For fifty minutes?’ Brady persisted, ignoring Ned’s intervention.

‘I don’t know how long it was. I wasn’t looking at my watch. If you take time, you take time.’

‘And it didn’t cross your mind that with a tape and a power-pack in your pants, and a notebook full of potentially priceless intelligence material in your carrier bag, the shortest distance between two points might
just
be a straight line?’

Barley was getting dangerously angry but the danger was to himself as Ned’s expression, and I fear my own, could have warned him.