Young Philby (17 page)

“Ahhh, I’m beginning to see why you always sit facing the café window—you’re afraid of being stabbed in the back, you’re keeping track of what’s going on b-behind you without appearing to.”

I grunted in agreement. “It’s a bit of tradecraft that doesn’t cost Moscow Centre a kopek,” I said.

“I’m not quite sure I understand.”

I decided not to explain. “What route did you take getting here?” I asked.

“Train to San Sebastián, then caught a ride in a Red Cross truck to Bayonne and took that new tramway to Biarritz. I was obliged to spend a night in Bilbao on the way—the rail line after Bilbao had been cut by a mudslide. I chatted up a German military attaché in the bar of my hotel. Nice chap. Heinrich von something.” Philby rummaged in the breast pockets of his desert jacket with his fingertips but couldn’t find what he was looking for. “B-bloody hell, he gave me his calling card but I seem to have mislaid it. Heinrich was so impressed to come across someone who had spoken with Ambassador Ribbentrop, he invited me to supper in the officers’ mess at an aerodrome near the city. Whilst driving past an enormous hangar, I could see airmen assembling several fighter planes that seemed to have been shipped in large crates. The attaché told me they were Willy Messerschmitt’s latest model—Bf 109 F’s, with 1100 horsepower engines. He boasted about their being able to fly rings around the Russian fighters the Republicans managed to put into the air.”

“Did he mention the 109’s armaments?”

“No. And I didn’t ask. Should I have?”

I shook my head. “You were smart not to. You want to be careful not to appear overly curious.” I took my sweet time sipping my anisette. “In any case, with or without the new 109s, the war against Franco is lost.”

“Is that what Moscow Centre thinks?”

“That’s what the world thinks. The forces Franco gathered under the Nationalist banner—monarchists, Fascists, priests, career army officers—control the Basque country and the heavy industry in Bilbao. You yourself reported that Franco could muster five armies supported by some four hundred aircraft.”

“The Republicans still have Barcelona and its port,” Philby said. “Comrade Stalin could send in masses of armaments…”

Knowing me, I would have smiled one of my knowing smiles. I said, “Comrade Stalin will need those masses of armaments to defend Soviet Russia when war breaks out with Germany. The Republicans’ only hope is to stay put in their trenches and try to hang on until the European war erupts, at which point the weights on the scales might conceivably shift.”

I was struck by the expression on Philby’s face. He looked genuinely distressed. Clearly the moment had come to raise the delicate matter of the special assignment from Moscow Centre. “There is one other hope for our Republican friends and their Communist allies…”

“Yes?”

Philby ran a finger under his scarf, as if it were chafing his neck. I thought silk didn’t chafe but then what did I know? I only owned itchy woolen scarves. I said, “Generalissimo Franco is the Republicans’ only other hope.”

“I beg your p-pardon?”

I couldn’t contain a laugh. The special assignment Moscow had instructed me to pass along to Sonny was manifestly ridiculous. Still, I had little choice but to do what I was told. “If he were to die suddenly—”

“Why would Franco die suddenly?” I noticed the heavy lids on Philby’s eyes blinking open as he grasped where this was going. He leaned half across the table. “How would Franco die suddenly?” he whispered.

“Someone might assassinate him.”

“You’re surely not suggesting that that someone might be me?” He stared at me incredulously. “You are, aren’t you? What a pisser. You’re actually asking me to kill Franco!”

His lack of sophistication was getting on my nerves. “I’m not asking you anything. Special assignments don’t originate with controllers in the field. I’m the fucking middleman, passing along an order from Moscow Centre. Wise up, Kim. A special assignment of this nature could only come from Comrade Stalin himself.”

“Do I have this right? Joe Stalin wants Kim Philby to assassinate Francisco Franco?”

“The moment has come to educate you on how things like this work,” I said. And I did. At some length. The tale usually begins with Comrade Stalin watching late-night motion pictures with his Politburo cronies in the Near Dacha outside of Moscow. Along about the second or third reel, he might make a casual remark, which then works its way down the chain of command, gaining authority and urgency with each retelling.

Nodding as if he were punctuating my sentences, the Englishman heard me out. “How can you be sure of this?” he demanded. “Have you encountered Comrade Stalin? Do you know him personally?”

“I worked for him during our civil war in the city we now call Stalingrad. He was a tough biscuit, as the Americans say.”

“I believe the expression is tough
cookie
.”

“Biscuit. Cookie. He is as tough as the stunted trees in the arctic steppe. In Stalingrad several of us pooled our resources and bought him a beautiful 9 millimeter Beretta to mark a particular occasion, the details of which I won’t go into. Comrade Stalin was extremely proud of his Italian pistol—he showed the bare-breasted goddess engraved on its barrel to everyone. In Stalingrad he carried the pistol wedged into the wide belt of his tunic. I remember him once saying he slept with it on the table next to his bed.”

“The only thing I’m armed with,” Philby told me, “is humor and trepidation. I don’t even own a handgun. I wouldn’t know how to use one if I did.”

“You point it and pull the trigger.”

“If I ever pointed a handgun at another human, even someone as god-evil as Franco, I’d shut my eyes so as not to see blood spilled. If I shut my eyes I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, forget about the chest of a man.” He shrugged the way English people shrug, which is to say he lazily raised a shoulder as if he were dispensing energy frugally. “I saw my father bleeding from a cut on his hand once when I was a child. We were exploring the souk in Damascus. Know what I did? I p-puked over a p-posh
djellabah
at a tailor’s stall. The only way my sainted father could quiet the bugger was to buy it. For years he would tease me about his having wasted good Syrian
piastres
on an article of clothing that was far too big for me. I suspect my chronic indigestion, perhaps even my stammer, date back to Damascus. I took the story about the
djellabah
being too big as metaphor.”

“You didn’t fit the image your father had of what a son should be.”

“Something along those lines.”

I remember thinking, I need to soothe the Englishman’s ruffled feathers. I remember saying, “You don’t have to actually kill Franco, Kim. You only have to appear to go through the motions of organizing an assassination. Send me reports on his security precautions as if you are taking the special assignment seriously. By the time Moscow figures out you’re not going to assassinate Franco, the Republican armies will have collapsed, putting an end to the civil war. Franco, Spain’s dictator in residence, will be beyond reach in a palace in Madrid and Moscow will turn its attention to the threat closer to home: Adolf Hitler.”

Philby sat there shaking his head in bewilderment. My words obviously hadn’t registered. “I haven’t the foggiest idea how one goes about killing someone, Alexander. Otto never educated me along these lines in London. I did simple codes, I did secret writing, I learned how to spot when someone was following you, I was quite good at getting lost in a crowd even in the absence of a crowd. Nothing about assassinations. How do they expect me to do it? With a knife? A p-pistol perhaps? Ahhh, p-poison. Surely p-poison. Spies are supposed to be skilled at p-poisoning p-people. Or perhaps they would like me to strangle him. He is quite short, you know, though come to think of it quite brawny. Don’t know if I could pull it off. Assuming I was up to it, what am I supposed to do—strangle the bloke with one of my shoelaces, which is about the only p-personal item the bloody bodyguards left me when I’ve been in the same room with Franco?”

I reached across the table to grasp his wrist. “Get ahold of yourself, Kim.”

Two particularly attractive girls, French judging by their mouthwateringly bare shoulders, were strolling past the fountain at the center of the square, their arms linked, their laughter drifting across the cobblestones. With the sun’s rays slanting in between the wind-bitten sandstone apostles atop the church cornice, their long dresses had turned transparent. Philby noticed me staring at something in the café window and followed my gaze. He snickered admiringly. I heard him say, “I suppose you’ve killed people in your day.”

I wasn’t sure if it was intended as a statement or a question. Thinking an episode that might have come from one of those twenty-franc pocket detective novels, but didn’t, would distract him, I said, “I was in a cheap hotel in Nice a month ago when two French detectives burst into my room.”

“What did you do?”

“I was sleeping in my underwear when the overhead bulb snapped on. I sat up, blinking hard to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t dreaming. They were both standing at the foot of the bed, their feet planted wide apart in the orthodox firing position, pointing pistols at my solar plexus. I recognized their pistols—each had his fist around a 6.35 millimeter blowback, what the fucking French call
Le Français.
I held up my hands, palms out, and looked over at my own pistol—a lovely little P8 Luger Parabellum—in the holster hanging on the back of a chair out of arm’s reach. They followed my eyes. That was their fatal blunder. I slept with a double-barreled American Mossberg under the blanket. I had sawed off the barrels myself so the shot pattern would spread and it would be hard to miss at close range. I shot them dead, one barrel each.” I threaded my fingers through my hair, which I kept cropped in the style popular with Red Army noncommissioned officers. “It wasn’t a pretty sight, I will be the first to concede. There was a fair amount of blood spattered over the wallpaper depicting sheep grazing in a meadow. For sure, you would have thrown up. I dressed and climbed out the window and made my way to the street on one of those newfangled steel fire escapes they install on public buildings nowadays.”

“How does it feel? To shoot someone to death?”

“It feels a damn sight better than
being
shot to death.”

Philby polished off the last of his American coffee, which must have been cold by now, though that didn’t seem to faze him. He reached for my copy of
Newsweek
. “I take it this is for me.”

“You’ll find a new code sheet stuck in the pages, along with what hard cash I could squeeze out of the pricks on the fifth floor. Keep addressing your picture postcards to Mademoiselle Dupont at 79 Rue de Grenelle in Paris.”

Philby gestured with his jaw toward the thin cardboard box on the chair next to me. It was tied with rose-colored ribbon. “Is that for me, too?”

“No, no. That’s a robe for my wife. The British designer Captain Molyneux has a shop in Biarritz. Want to hear something funny? I recognized one of the customers when I bought this—it was Théodore Alexandrovitch, the grand duke who fled Petrograd after the Bolsheviks came to power and washed up in a palatial seaside villa not far from Biarritz. The voluptuous young beauty being fitted for the robe the grand duke eventually bought was definitely not his wife.”

I didn’t tell the Englishman how I knew this. I didn’t want to bore him with the story of the prostitutes in my employ at a local
maison close
and my running fight with the kopek-pinching pricks in Moscow who decided the wages I paid the girls came under the heading of personal, not professional, expenses.

Philby grinned. “Perhaps you could blackmail the grand duke.”

I grinned back. “You may have a future in espionage after all.”

8: GIBRALTAR, JULY 1938

Where Mr. Philby of
The Times
Regrets Not Being a Vegetarian

The London
Rezident
had sent me out in the belief that nothing would be more inconspicuous than old Cambridge mates getting together for what Kim referred to as a snakebite, and the Rock Hotel, partway up the slope in Gibraltar with its amusing view of the harbor below and the Straits beyond, was a more or less convenient venue for the both of us. I’d discovered a telegram waiting for me at the reception desk. “Would you be Mr. Guy Burgess, then?” the concierge inquired. “I would be if I could be,” I shot back. He looked confused. “Is that a
yes
?” “Yes, it’s a yes.” He handed me a Western Union form with the message pasted in strips across it: Kim, it seemed, was running two days behind schedule, something to do with a village halfway between Valencia and Barcelona named Vinaroz falling into Franco’s hot hands, cutting the Republic in two.
The Times
, deciding this strategic victory merited a dispatch, ordered its special correspondent to the scene. I wasn’t about to hang around the Rock Hotel with the dowager matron saints who, at any given hour, could be found on the terrace strapped into their rigid corsets staring out at Africa hoping it might go away if they looked at it long enough. If I’d hung around, what with my being a Foreign Office minion on a secret mission (which I had declined to deny when the concierge supposed this to be the case), one of them might actually have engaged me in conversation. No, no, a preemptive strike was clearly called for. And Algeciras, across the bay, was the logical target. Been there before, couldn’t wait to rejuvenate my memories. There was a section of town the locals called The Hill, and a cabaret nicknamed Anal Canal run by two Scottish faggots. The unpaved street was teeming with bastard urchins retrieving discarded cigarette ends and if they were still alight, smoking them down to their filthy fingernails. The waiters were all beautiful Portuguese Nancy boys dressed in tight French sailor suits—striped shirts, tight-assed bell bottoms, a blue cap with a red pompadour—and reeking of delectably cheap perfume. You could have any one of them plus a bottle of watered champagne for the asking plus five pounds sterling. Two stark-naked lesbians, their lips and labia painted crimson red, were wrestling on a mat set out on the small proscenium. The general idea appeared to be to reduce your adversary to semiconsciousness and then bring her back to life with a revolting demonstration of mouth-to-labium resuscitation. I will be the first to concede I was worn to semiconsciousness when the taxi deposited me at the foot of the Rock Hotel two days later.