The Russia House (26 page)

I looked again at the new Americans, so slight, so trim, so characterless. Security, Ned had said. Yet why? And why
now
? Why did they look at everyone except Walter? Why did Walter look at everyone except them? And why did Bob sit apart from them, and Johnny go on staring at his hands? I was grateful to have my thoughts interrupted.

We heard the boom of footsteps on wood stairs. Brock had started the recorder. We heard clunks and Barley’s oath as he barked his back on the window frame. Then the shuffling of feet again as they clambered on to the rooftop.

It’s a séance, I thought, as their first words reached us. Barley and Katya are addressing us from the great beyond. The immobile strangers with their executioners’ faces were forgotten.

Ned was the only one of us with earphones. They made a difference, I later discovered when I tried them. You hear the Moscow doves shuffling on the gable and the rapid breathing inside Katya’s voice. You hear the beating of your own joe’s heart through the body mikes.

Brock played the whole rooftop scene before Ned ordered a break. Only our new Americans seemed unaffected. Their brown glances brushed each one of us but settled nowhere. Walter was blushing.

Brock played the dinner scene and still no one stirred: not a sigh or a creak or a handclap, not even when he stopped the spool and wound it back.

Ned pulled off his earphones.

‘Yakov Yefremovich, last name unknown, physicist, aged thirty in 1968, ergo born 1938,’ he announced as he grabbed a pink trace request from the pile before him and scribbled on it. ‘Walter, offers?’

Walter had to gather himself. He seemed distraught, and his voice had none of its usual flightiness. ‘Yefrem, Soviet scientist, other names unknown, father of Yakov Yefremovich q.v., shot in Vorkuta after an uprising in the spring of ’52,’ he declared without looking at his pad. ‘There can’t be
that
many scientific Yefrems who were executed for an overdose of intelligence, even in dear Stalin’s day,’ he added rather pathetically.

It was absurd, but I fancied I saw tears in his eyes. Perhaps someone really
has
died, I thought, glancing once more at our two Mormons.

‘Johnny?’ said Ned, writing.

‘Ned, we think we’ll take Boris, other names unknown, widower, Professor of Humanities, Leningrad University, late ’sixties, one daughter Yekaterina,’ said Johnny, still to his hands.

Ned seized another trace form, filled it in and tossed it into his out-tray like money he was pleased to throw away.

‘Palfrey. Want to play?’

‘Put me down for the Leningrad newspapers, will you please, Ned?’ I said as airily as I could, given that Clive’s Americans had turned their brown gaze full upon me. ‘I’d like runners, starters and winners of the Mathematics Olympiad of 1952,’ I said amid laughter. ‘And for safety’s sake perhaps you’d throw in ’51 and ’53 as well. And shall we add his academic medals, please, somewhere along the line? “He made candidate of sciences, he made doctor of sciences. He made everything,” she said. Can we have that, please? Thank you.’

When all the bids were in, Ned glared around for Emma to take the trace forms down to Registry. But that wasn’t good enough for Walter who was suddenly determined to be counted – for, leaping to his feet, he marched fussily to Ned’s desk, all five foot nothing of him, his little wrists flying out in front of him.

‘I shall do
all
the ferreting myself,’ he announced, in far too grand a tone, as he grabbed the pink bundle to his breast. ‘This war is
far
too important to be left to our blue-rinse generals of Registry, irresistible though they may be.’

And I remember noticing how our Mormons watched him all the way to the door, then watched each other as we listened to his merry little heels prinking down the corridor. And I do not think I am speaking with hindsight when I tell you that my blood ran chill for Walter, without my having the smallest idea why.

‘A breath of country air,’ Ned told me on the internal telephone an hour later when I was barely back at my desk at Head Office. ‘Tell Clive I need you.’

‘Then you’d better go, hadn’t you?’ said Clive, still closeted with his Mormons.

We had borrowed a fast Ford from the car pool. As Ned drove, he brushed aside my few attempts at conversation and handed me the file to read instead. We entered the Berkshire countryside but he still didn’t talk. And when Brock rang on the carphone to give him some elliptical confirmation he required, he merely grunted, ‘Then tell him,’ and returned to his brooding.

We were forty miles from London, on the foulest planet of man’s discovery. We were in the slums of modern science, where the grass is always nicely cut. The ancient gateposts were mastered by eroded sandstone lions. A polite man in a brown sports jacket opened Ned’s door. His colleague poked a detector underneath the chassis. Politely, they patted us both down.

‘Taking the briefcase, are we, gentlemen?’

‘Yes,’ said Ned.

‘Care to open it, sir?’

‘No.’

‘Dip it in the box, can we, gentlemen? We’re not talking unexposed film, I presume, sir?’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Dip it in the box.’

We watched while they lowered the briefcase into what looked like a green coal bin, and took it out again.

‘Thank you,’ I said, taking it back.

‘It’s my pleasure, sir. Not at all, I’m sure.’

The blue van said FOLLOW ME. An Alsatian dog frowned at us from its barred rear window. The gates opened electronically and beyond them lay mounds of clipped grass like mass graves grown over. Olive downs stretched towards the sunset. A mushroom-shaped cloud would have looked entirely natural. We entered parkland. A pair of buzzards wheeled in the cloudless sky. High wire fenced off the hay fields. Smokeless brick buildings nestled in artful hollows. A noticeboard urged protective clothing in Zones D to K. A skull and crossbones said ‘You Have Been Warned.’ The van ahead of us was moving at a funeral’s pace. We lumbered round a bend and saw empty tennis courts and aluminium towers. Lanes of coloured pipe jogged beside us, guiding us to a cluster of green sheds. At their centre, on a hilltop, stood the last vestige of the pre-nuclear age, a Berkshire cottage of brick and flint with ‘Administrator’ stencilled on the gate. A burly man came tripping down the crazy-paving path to greet us. He wore a blazer of British racing green and a tie with gold squash rackets on it, and a handkerchief shoved into his cuff.

‘You’re from the Firm. Well done. I’m O’Mara. Which of you is who? I’ve told him to kick his heels in the lab till we whistle for him.’

‘Good,’ said Ned.

O’Mara had grey-blond hair and an offhand regimental voice cracked by alcohol. His neck was puffy and his athlete’s fingers were stained mahogany with nicotine. ‘O’Mara keeps the long-haired scientists in line,’ Ned had told me in one of our rare exchanges during the drive. ‘He’s half personnel, half security, all shit.’

The drawing-room had the air of being tended by Napoleonic prisoners of war. Even the bricks of the fireplace had been polished and the plaster lines between them picked out in loving white. We sat in rose-patterned armchairs drinking gin and tonic, lots of ice. Horse-brasses twinkled from the glistening black beams.

‘Just come back from the States,’ O’Mara recalled, as if accounting for our recent separation. He raised his glass and ducked his mouth to it, meeting it halfway. ‘You fellows go there a lot?’

‘Occasionally,’ said Ned.

‘Now and then,’ I said. ‘When duty calls.’

‘We send quite a few of our chaps out there on loan, actually. Oklahoma. Nevada. Utah. Most of them like it pretty well. A few get the heebie-jeebies, run for home.’ He drank and took a moment to swallow. ‘Visited their weapons laboratory at Livermore, out in California. Nice enough place. Decent guest house. Money galore. Asked us to attend a seminar on death. Bloody macabre if you think about it, but the shrinks seemed to believe it would do everybody good and the wines were extraordinary. I suppose if you’re planning to consign large chunks of humanity to the flames you might as well know how it works.’ He drank again, all the time in the world. The hilltop at that hour was a very quiet place. ‘Surprising how many people hadn’t given the subject much thought. Specially the young. The older ones were a bit more squeamish. They could remember the age of innocence, if it ever existed. You’re a prompt fatality if you die straight off, and a soft one if you do it the slow way. I never realised. Gives a new meaning to the value of being at the centre of things, I suppose. Still, we’re into the fourth generation now. Dulls the pangs. You chaps golfers?’

‘No,’ said Ned.

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘I used to take lessons but they somehow never made much difference.’

‘Marvellous courses but they made us hire bloody Noddy carts. Wouldn’t be seen dead in the things over here.’ He drank again, the same slow ritual. ‘Wintle’s an oddball,’ he explained when he had swallowed. ‘They’re all oddballs but Wintle’s got odder balls than most. He’s done Socialism, he’s done Jesus. Now he’s into contemplation and Tai Chi. Married, thank God. Grammar school but talks proper. Three years to go.’

‘How much have you told him?’ Ned asked.

‘They always think they’re under suspicion. I’ve told him he isn’t, and I’ve told him to keep his stupid mouth shut when it’s over.’

‘And do you think he will?’ I asked.

O’Mara shook his head. ‘Don’t know how to, most of ’em, however hard we boot ’em.’

There was a knock at the door and Wintle came in, an eternal student of fifty-seven. He was tall but crooked, with a curly grey head that shot off at an angle, and an air of brilliance almost extinguished. He wore a sleeveless Fair Isle pullover, Oxford bags and moccasins. He sat with his knees together and held his sherry glass away from him like a chemical retort he wasn’t sure of.

Ned had turned professional. His tantrums were set aside. ‘We’re in the business of tracking Soviet scientists,’ he said, managing to make himself sound dull. ‘Watching the snakes and ladders of their defence establishment. Nothing very sexy, I’m afraid.’

‘So you’re Intelligence,’ said Wintle. ‘I thought as much, though I didn’t say anything.’

It occurred to me that he was a very lonely man.

‘Mind your own fucking business what they are,’ O’Mara advised him perfectly pleasantly. ‘They’re English and they’ve got a job to do, same as you.’

Ned fished a couple of typed sheets from a folder and handed them to Wintle, who put down his glass to take them. His hands had a way of finishing knuckles down and fingers curled, like a man begging to be freed.

‘We’re trying to maximalise some of our neglected old material,’ Ned said, falling into a jargon he would otherwise have eschewed. ‘This is an account of your debriefing when you returned from a visit to Akademgorodok in August, 1963. Do you remember a Major Vauxhall? It’s not exactly a literary masterpiece but you mention the names of two or three Soviet scientists we’d be grateful to catch up with, if they’re still around and you remember them.’

As if to protect himself from a gas attack, Wintle pulled on a pair of extraordinarily ugly steel-framed spectacles.

‘As
I
recall that debriefing,
Major
Vauxhall gave me his
word
of honour that everything I said was
entirely
voluntary and confidential,’ he declared with a didactic jerkiness. ‘I am therefore
very
surprised to see my name
and
my words lying about in open Ministerial archives a full twenty-five
years
after the event.’

‘Well it’s the nearest you’ll ever get to immortality, sport, so I should shut up and enjoy it,’ O’Mara advised.

I interposed myself like somebody separating belligerents in a family row. If Wintle could just expand a little on the interviewer’s rather bald account, I suggested. Maybe flesh out one or two of the Soviet scientists whose names are listed on the final page, and perhaps throw in some account of the Cambridge team while he was about it? If he wouldn’t mind answering just one or two questions which might tilt the scales?

‘ “Team” is
not
a word I would use in this context, thank you,’ Wintle retorted, pouncing on the word like some bony predator. ‘Not on the British side anyway.
Team
suggests common purpose. We were a Cambridge
group
, yes. A
team
, no. Some went for the ride, some went for the self-aggrandisement. I refer particularly to Professor Callow who had a
highly
exaggerated opinion of his work on accelerators, since refuted.’ His Birmingham accent had escaped from its confinement. ‘A very small minority
indeed
had ideological motives. They happened to believe in science without borders. A free exchange of knowledge for the common benefit of mankind.’

‘Wankers,’ O’Mara explained to us helpfully.

‘We’d the French there, Americans galore, the Swedes, Dutch, even one or two Germans,’ Wintle continued, oblivious to O’Mara’s jibe. ‘All of them had hope, in my opinion, and the Russians had it in bucketfuls. It was us British who were dragging our feet. We still are.’

O’Mara groaned and took a restorative pull of gin. But Ned’s good smile, even if a little battered, encouraged Wintle to run on.

‘It was the height of the Khrushchev era, as you will doubtless recall. Kennedy this side, Khrushchev that side. A golden age was beckoning, said some. People in those days talked about Khrushchev very much as they talk of Gorbachev now, I’m sure. Though I do have to say that, in my opinion, our enthusiasm
then
was more genuine and spontaneous than the so-called enthusiasm
now
.’

O’Mara yawned and fixed his pouchy gaze disconcertingly upon myself.

‘
We
told them whatever
we
knew.
They
did the same,’ Wintle was saying as his voice gathered assurance. ‘
We
read
our
papers.
They
read
theirs
. Callow didn’t cut any ice, I’m bound to say. They rumbled
him
in no time. But we’d Panson on cybernetics and
he
flew the flag all right, and we had me.
My
modest lecture was quite a success, though I do say it myself. I haven’t heard applause like it since, to be frank. I wouldn’t be surprised if they still talk about it over there. The barricades came down so fast you could
literally
hear them crashing in the lecture hall. “Flow, not demarcation.” That was our slogan. “Flow” wasn’t the word for it either, not if you saw the vodka that was drunk at the late-night parties.
Or
the girls there.
Or
heard the chat. The KGB was listening, of course. We knew
all
about that. We’d had the pep talk before we left, though several objected to it. Not me, I’m a patriot. But there wasn’t a blind thing that any of them could do, not
their
KGB and not
ours
.’ He had evidently hit a favourite theme for he straightened himself to deliver a prepared speech. ‘I’d like to add here that
their
KGB is greatly misjudged, in my opinion. I have it on
good
authority that the Soviet KGB has very
frequently
sheltered some of the most tolerant elements of the Soviet intelligentsia.’