The Russia House (16 page)

‘Whole thing’s a load of hocus-pocus,’ Barley pronounced raucously at the end of a wearying session on the techniques of secret writing. But he clearly enjoyed it, all the same.

And as the day of reckoning drew nearer his submissiveness became total. Even when I wheeled in the Service accountant, a dreary stick called Christopher, who had devoted five days to an awed inspection of the Abercrombie & Blair books, Barley showed none of the rebelliousness I had expected.

‘But every last swine in publishing is broke, Chris old boy!’ he protested, pacing the pretty drawing-room to the rhythms of his own humming, holding his whisky glass wide while he dipped at the knees for the long steps. ‘The big fellows like Jumbo eat the leaves and we gnaw the bark.’ A German voice: ‘You hef your methods, ve hef ours.’

But neither Ned nor I gave a cuss about every last swine. Neither did Chris. We cared about the operation and were haunted by the nightmare that Barley might go bankrupt on us in the middle of it.

‘But I don’t
want
a bloody editor!’ Barley cried, waving his long-suffering spectacles at us. ‘I can’t
pay
a bloody editor. My sainted aunts in Ely will pop their
garters
if I hire a bloody editor!’

But I had already squared the sainted aunts. Over luncheon at Rules I had wooed and won the Lady Pandora Weir-Scott, better known to Barley as the Sacred Cow on account of her High Anglican beliefs. Posing as a Foreign Office Pontiff, I had explained to her in the greatest confidence that the house of Abercrombie & Blair was about to be the recipient of an under-the-counter Rockefeller grant to promote Anglo-Soviet cultural relations. But not a word, or the money would be whisked away and given to another deserving house.

‘Well
I’m
a bloody sight more deserving than
anybody
,’ Lady Pandora averred, spreading her elbows wide to get the last scrap out of her lobster. ‘
You
try running Ammerford on thirty thousand a year.’

Mischievously, I asked her whether I could safely approach her nephew.

‘Not on your nelly. Leave him to me. He doesn’t know money from muck and he can’t lie for toffee.’

The need to provide Barley with a minder seemed suddenly more pressing. ‘You advertised for him,’ Ned explained, brandishing a small-ad from a recent edition of the cultural press in Barley’s face.
Old Established British Publisher seeks qualified Russian reader for promotion to editor, 25–45, fiction and technical, curriculum vitae.

And on the next afternoon Leonard Carl Wicklow presented himself for interview at the much-mortgaged premises of Abercrombie & Blair of Norfolk Street, Strand.

‘I have an angel for you, Mr. Barley,’ boomed Mrs. Dunbar’s gin-soaked voice over the ancient intercom. ‘Shall I ask him to fly in?’

An angel in bicycle clips, a webbing kitbag slung across his chest. A high angelic brow, not a worry on it, blond angelic curls. Angelic blue eyes that knew no evil. An angelic nose, so mysteriously knocked off course that your first instinct on meeting him was to reach out and switch it straight again. Interview him as you would anybody, Ned had told Barley. Leonard Carl Wicklow, born Brighton 1964, honours graduate, School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London.

‘Oh yes, you. Marvellous. Sit down,’ Barley grumbled. ‘Hell brings you to publishing? Lousy trade.’ He had lunched with one of his more strident lady novelists, and was still digesting the experience.

‘Well, it’s been kind of an on-going thing of mine for years, actually, sir,’ said Wicklow, with a smile of angelic enthusiasm.

‘Well, if you do come to us you certainly won’t
on-go
,’ Barley warned, bridling at this unprovoked assault on the English language. ‘You may
continue
. You may
endure
. You may even
prevail
. But you jolly well won’t
on-go
while
I’m
in the driving seat.’

‘Don’t know whether the bugger barks or purrs,’ he growled to Ned, the same evening back in Knightsbridge, as the three of us loped up the narrow stairs for our evening tryst with Walter.

‘He does both rather well, actually,’ said Ned.

And Walter’s seminars held Barley in their thrall, a sell-out every time. Barley loved anyone whose hold on life was tenuous, and Walter looked as if he were in danger of falling off the edge of the world each time he left his chair. They would talk tradecraft, they would talk nuclear theology, they would talk the horror story of Soviet science that the Bluebird, whoever he might be, was inescapably heir to. Walter was too good a tutor to reveal what his subject was, and Barley was too interested to enquire.

‘
Control
?’ Walter the ultimate hawk shouted at him indignantly. ‘Can you honestly not distinguish between
control
and
disarmament
, you ninny? Defuse world crisis, did I hear? What
Guardian
bilge is that? Our leaders
adore
crisis. Our leaders
feast
on crisis. Our leaders spend their lives quartering the globe in search of crisis to revive their flagging libidos!’

And Barley, far from taking offence, would crane forward in his chair, groan and clap and bay for more. He would challenge Walter, leap to his feet and pound the room shouting ‘
But
– hang on, damn you –
but
!’ He had the memory, he had the aptitude, as Walter had predicted. And his scientific virginity yielded at the first assault, when Walter delivered his introductory lecture on the balance of terror, which he had contrived to turn into an inventory of all the follies of mankind.

‘There’s no way out,’ he announced with satisfaction, ‘and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won’t go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there’s no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we’re human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never.’

‘So who’ll save us, Walt?’ Barley asked. ‘You and Nedsky?’

‘Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt,’ Walter retorted. ‘No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God.’

‘Otherwise no hope?’

‘Not for man alone,’ said Walter contentedly, who more than once had seriously considered taking Holy Orders rather than the Service’s.

‘So what’s Goethe trying to achieve?’ Barley asked another time, with a hint of exasperation.

‘Oh, save the world, I’m sure. We’d all like to do
that
.’

‘
How
save it? What’s his message?’

‘That’s for you to find out, isn’t it?’

‘What’s he told us so far? Why can’t I know?’

‘My dear boy, don’t be so childish,’ Walter exclaimed petulantly, but Ned stepped quickly in.

‘You know all you need to know,’ he said with a calming authority. ‘You’re the messenger. It’s what you’re equipped to be, it’s what he wants you to be. He’s told us that a lot of things on the Soviet side don’t work. He’s painted a picture of failure at every level – inaccuracy, incompetence, mismanagement and, on top of that, falsified test results sent to Moscow. Perhaps it’s true, perhaps he’s made it up. Perhaps somebody made it up for him. It’s a beguiling enough story as it stands.’

‘Do
we
think it’s true?’ Barley persisted stubbornly.

‘You can’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because under interrogation everybody talks. There are no heroes any more. You talk, I talk, Walter talks, Goethe talks, she talks. So if we tell you what we know about them, we risk compromising our capacity to spy on them. Do we know a particular secret about them? If the answer is no, then they know we lack the software, or the device, or the formula, or the super-secret ground station to find it out. But if the answer is yes, they’ll take evasive action to make sure we can’t go on watching and hearing them by that method.’

Barley and I played chess.

‘Do you reckon marriage only works from a distance then?’ he asked me, resuming our earlier conversation as if we had never abandoned it.

‘I’m quite sure love does,’ I replied with an exaggerated shudder, and quickly moved the subject to less intimate paths.

For his last evening, Miss Coad prepared a salmon trout and polished the silver plate. Bob was commanded, and produced a rare malt whisky and two bottles of Sancerre. But our festivities caught Barley in the same introspective mood, until Walter’s spirited Final Sermon rescued him from the doldrums.

‘The issue is
why
,’ Walter trilled suddenly, his cranky voice flying all over the room, while he helped himself to my glass of Sancerre. ‘That’s what we’re after. Not the substance, but the motive.
Why
? If we trust the motive, we trust the man. Then we trust his material. In the beginning was not the word, not the deed, not the silly serpent. In the beginning was
why
? Why did she pluck the apple? Was she bored? Was she inquisitive? Was she paid? Did Adam put her up to it? If not, who did? The Devil is every girl’s cover story. Ignore him. Was she fronting for somebody? It’s not enough to say, “Because the apple is there.” That may do for Everest. It may even do for Paradise. But it won’t do for Goethe and it won’t do for us and it
certainly
won’t do for our gallant American allies, will it, Bobby?’

And when we all burst out laughing he squeezed his eyes shut and raised his voice still higher.

‘Or take the ravishing Katya! Why does Goethe pick on
her
? Why does he put
her
life at risk? And why does she let him? We don’t know. But we must. We must know everything we can about her because in our profession the couriers are the message. If Goethe is genuine, the girl’s head is on the block. That’s a given. If he’s not, what does that make her? Did she invent the stuff herself? Is she really in touch with him? Is she in touch with someone different and if so who?’ He thrust a strengthless forefinger at Barley’s face. ‘Then there’s
you
, sir. Does Goethe think you’re a spy or doesn’t he? Did other people
tell
him you were a spy? Be a hamster. Store every nugget you can get. God bless you and all who sail in you.’

I discreetly filled another glass and we drank. And I remember how in the deep quiet we distinctly heard the chimes of Big Ben floating up the river from Westminster.

It was not till early next morning when Barley’s departure was only hours off that we granted him a limited sight of the documents he had so stridently demanded in Lisbon – Goethe’s notebooks, re-created in facsimile by Langley under draconian conditions of secrecy, down to the thick Russian board backs and line-block drawings of jolly Soviet schoolkids on the covers.

Silently accepting them in both hands, Barley became pure publisher while the rest of us watched the transformation. He opened the first notebook, peered at the gutter, felt the weight and flipped to the back, seeming to work out how long it would take him to read it. He reached for the second, sliced it open at a random page, and seeing tightly-written lines pulled a face that as good as complained that the script was single-spaced and handwritten.

Then he ranged across all three notebooks at once, puzzling his way from illustration to text and text to literary effusion, while he kept his head stiffly backwards and to one side, as if determined to reserve his judgment.

But I noticed how, when he raised his eyes, they had lost their sense of place, and appeared to be fixed on some far mountain of his own.

A routine search of Barley’s Hampstead flat conducted by Ned and Brock after his departure revealed no hard clues to his state of mind. An old notebook in which he was accustomed to make his jottings was found in the litter of his desk. The last entries looked recent, the most apt was probably a couplet he had culled from the later work of Stevie Smith.

‘I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know.’

Ned conscientiously entered it on the file but refused to make anything of it. Name him a joe who didn’t get butterflies in his stomach on the eve of his first run.

And on the back of an old bill tossed into the wastepaper basket Brock came on a quotation which he eventually traced to Roethke, and which for his own dark reasons he only mentioned weeks later.

‘I learn by going where I have to go.’

6

Katya woke sharply and, as she afterwards persuaded herself, with an immediate awareness that today was the day. She was an emancipated Soviet woman but superstition died hard in her.

‘It was meant,’ she told herself later.

Through the threadbare curtains a white sun was appearing over the cement parade grounds of her north Moscow suburb. All round her the brick apartment blocks, decked with washing, rose like tattered pink giants into an empty sky.

It’s Monday, she thought. I’m in my own bed. I’m free of the street after all. She was thinking of her dream.

Having woken she lay still a moment, patrolling her secret world and trying to shake her mind free of its bad thoughts. And when this didn’t work she sprang from her bed and impulsively, as she did most things, ducked with practised deftness between the hanging clothes and crumbling bathroom fittings and showered herself.

She was a beautiful woman as Landau had observed. Her tall body was full but not plump, with a fine neat waist and strong legs. Her black hair was luxuriant and, when she was in a mood to neglect it, rampant. Her face was puckish but intelligent and seemed to animate everything around her. Whether clothed or naked she could make no gesture that did not have its grace.