The Russia House (3 page)

The knot finally yielded. Landau coiled up the string and laid it on the bed. I have to know, you see, dear, he explained to the woman Yekaterina Borisovna in his mind. I don’t want to pry, I’m not the nosy one, but if I’ve got to con my way through Moscow customs, I’d better know what I’m conning them out of, because it helps.

Delicately so as not to tear it, using both hands, Landau parted the brown paper. He did not see himself as any sort of a hero, or not yet. What was a danger to a Moscow beauty might not be a danger to him. He had grown up hard, it was true. The East End of London had been no rest cure for a ten-year-old Polish immigrant, and Landau had taken his share of split lips, broken noses, smashed knuckles and hunger. But if you had asked him now or at any time in the last thirty years what his definition of a hero was, he would have replied without a second’s thought that a hero was the first man out of the back door when they started yelling for volunteers.

One thing he did know as he stared at the contents of that brown-paper parcel: he had the buzz on him. Why he had it was something he could sort out later when there weren’t better things to do. But if dodgy work needed to be done tonight, Niki Landau was your man. Because when Niki has the buzz, Harry, no one buzzes better, as the girls all know.

The first thing he saw was the envelope. He registered the three notebooks underneath it and saw that the envelope and notebooks were joined with a thick elastic band, the kind he always saved but never found a use for. But it was the envelope that held him because it had her writing on it – a strict copybook kind of writing that confirmed his pure image of her. One square brown envelope, glued rather messily and addressed ‘Personal for Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair, urgent’.

Slipping it free of the elastic band, Landau held it to the light but it was opaque and revealed no shadow. He explored it with his finger and thumb. One sheet of thin paper inside, two at most.
Mr. Scott Blair has undertaken to publish it with discretion
, he remembered.
Mr. Landau, if you love peace … give it immediately to Mr. Scott Blair. Only to Mr. Scott Blair … it is a gift of trust.

She trusts me too, he thought. He turned the envelope over. The back was blank.

And there being only so much that one may learn from a sealed brown envelope, and since Landau drew the line at reading Barley’s or anybody else’s personal mail, he opened his briefcase again and, peering into the stationery compartment, extracted from it a plain manila envelope of his own, with the words ‘From the desk of Mr. Nicholas P. Landau’ inscribed tastefully on the flap. Then he popped the brown envelope inside the manila one and sealed it. Then he scribbled the name ‘Barley’ on it and filed it in the compartment marked ‘Social’, which contained such oddities as visiting cards that had been pressed on him by strangers and notes of odd commissions he had undertaken to perform for people – such as the publishing lady who needed refills for her Parker pen or the Ministry of Culture official who wanted a Snoopy T-shirt for his nephew or the lady from October who simply happened to be passing while he was wrapping up his stand.

And Landau did this because with the tradecraft that was instinctive in him, if totally untaught, he knew that his first job was to keep the envelope as far away as possible from the notebooks. If the notebooks were trouble, then he wanted nothing that would link them with the letter. And vice versa. And in this he was entirely right. Our most versatile and erudite trainers, dyed in all the oceans of our Service folklore, would not have told it to him one whit differently.

Only then did he take up the three notebooks and slip off the elastic band while he kept one ear cocked for footfalls in the corridor. Three grubby Russian notebooks, he reflected, selecting the top one and turning it slowly over. Bound in crudely illustrated board, the spine in fraying cloth. Two hundred and twenty-four pages of poor-quality, feint-ruled quarto, if Landau remembered correctly from the days when he peddled stationery, Soviet price around twenty kopeks retail from any good stationer, always provided that the delivery had arrived and that you were standing in the right queue on the right day.

Finally he opened the notebook and stared at the first page.

She’s daft, he thought, fighting off his disgust.

She’s in the hands of a nutter. Poor kid.

Meaningless scribblings, done by a lunatic with a mapping pen, in Indian ink at breakneck speed and furious angles. In the margins, sideways, longways. Diagonally across itself like a doctor’s writing on the blink. Peppered with stupid exclamation marks and underlinings. Some of it Cyrillic, some English. ‘The Creator creates creators,’ he read in English. ‘To be. Not to be. To counter-be.’ Followed by a burst of stupid French about the warfare of folly and the folly of warfare, followed by a barbed-wire entanglement. Thank you very much, he thought, and flipped to another page, then another, both so dense with crazy writing you could hardly see the paper. ‘Having spent seventy years destroying the popular will, we cannot expect it suddenly to rise up and save us,’ he read. A quote? A night thought? There was no way to tell. References to writers, Russian, Latin and European. Talk of Nietzsche, Kafka and people he’d never heard of, let alone read. More talk of war, this time in English: ‘The old declare it, the young fight it, but today the babies and old people fight it too.’ He turned another page and came on nothing but a round brown stain. He lifted the notebook to his nose and sniffed. Booze, he thought with contempt. Stinks like a brewery. No wonder he’s a mate of Barley Blair’s. A double page devoted to a series of hysterical proclamations.

– OUR GREATEST PROGRESS IS IN THE FIELD OF BACKWARDNESS!

– SOVIET PARALYSIS IS THE MOST PROGRESSIVE IN THE WORLD!

– OUR BACKWARDNESS IS OUR GREATEST MILITARY SECRET!

– IF WE DON’T KNOW OUR OWN INTENTIONS AND OUR OWN CAPACITIES, HOW CAN WE KNOW YOURS?

– THE TRUE ENEMY IS OUR OWN INCOMPETENCE!

And on the next page, a poem, painstakingly copied from Lord knew where:

He wires in and wires out.
And leaves the people still in doubt
Whether the snake that made the track,
Was going south or coming back.

Scrambling to his feet, Landau strode angrily to the window which gave on to a glum courtyard full of uncollected rubbish.

‘A blooming word-artist, Harry. That’s what I thought he was. Some long-haired, drug-ridden, self-indulgent genius, and she’s gone and thrown herself away on him same as they all do.’

She was lucky there was no Moscow telephone directory or he’d have rung her up and told her what she’d got.

To stoke his anger, he took up the second book, licked his fingertip and whisked contemptuously through it page by page, which was how he came upon the drawings. Then everything went blank for him for a moment, like a flash of empty screen in the middle of a film, while he cursed himself for being an impetuous little Slav instead of a cool calm Englishman. Then he sat down on the bed again, but gently, as if there were someone resting in it, someone he had hurt with his premature condemnations.

For if Landau despised what too often passed for literature, his pleasure in technical matters was unconfined. Even when he didn’t follow what he was looking at, he could relish a good page of mathematics all day long. And he knew at one glance, as he had known of the woman Katya, that what he was looking at here was quality. Not your ruled drawing, it was true. Light sketches but all the better for it. Drawn freehand without instruments by somebody who could think with a pencil. Tangents, parabolas, cones. And in between the drawings, businesslike descriptions that architects and engineers use, words like ‘aimpoint’ and ‘captive carry’ and ‘bias’ and gravity and trajectory – ‘some in your English, Harry, and some in your Russian.’

Though Harry is not my real name.

Yet when he began to compare the lettering of these beautifully-written words in the second book with the rambling jungle in the first, he discovered to his astonishment certain unmistakable similarities. So that he had the sensation of looking at a kind of schizophrenic’s diary with Dr. Jekyll writing one volume and Mr. Hyde the other.

He looked in the third notebook, which was as orderly and purposeful as the second but arranged like a kind of mathematical log with dates and numbers and formulae and the word ‘error’ repeating itself frequently, often underlined or lifted with an exclamation mark. Then suddenly Landau stared, and continued staring, and could not remove his eyes from what he was reading. The cosy obscurity of the writer’s technical jargon had ended with a bang. So had his philosophical ramblings and classy annotated drawings. The words came off the page with a blazoned clarity.

‘The American strategists can sleep in peace. Their nightmares cannot be realised. The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour. He is a secondary power like you British. He can start a war but cannot continue one and cannot win one. Believe me.’

Landau looked no further. A sense of respect, mingled with a strong instinct for self-preservation, advised him that he had disturbed the tomb enough. Taking up the elastic band he put the three notebooks together and snapped it back over them. That’s it, he thought. From here on I mind my business and do my duty. Which is to take the manuscript to my adopted England and give it immediately to Mr. Bartholomew
alias
Barley Scott Blair.

Barley Blair, he thought in amazement as he opened his wardrobe and hauled out the large aluminium hand-case where he kept his samples. Well, well. We often wondered whether we were nurturing a spy in our midst and now we know.

Landau’s calm was absolute, he assured me. The Englishman had once more taken command of the Pole. ‘If Barley could do it, I could, Harry, that’s what I said to myself.’ And it was what he said to me too, when for a short spell he appointed me his confessor. People do that to me sometimes. They sense the unrealised part of me and talk to it as if it were the reality.

Lifting the case on to the bed he snapped the locks and drew out two audio-visual kits that the Soviet officials had ordered him to remove from his display – one pictorial history of the twentieth century with spoken commentary which they had arbitrarily ruled to be anti-Soviet, one handbook of the human body with action photographs and a keep-fit exercise cassette, which, after gazing longingly at the pliant young goddess in the leotard, the officials had decided was pornographic.

The history kit was a glossy affair, built as a coffee-table book and containing a quantity of interior pockets for cassettes, parallel texts, progressive vocabulary cards and students’ notes. Having emptied the pockets of their contents, Landau offered the notebooks to each in turn but found none large enough. He decided to convert two pockets into one. He fetched a pair of nail scissors from his sponge bag and set to work with steady hands, easing the steel staples out of the centre divide.

Barley Blair, he thought again as he inserted the point of the nail scissors. I should have guessed, if only because you were the one it couldn’t possibly be. Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair, surviving scion of Abercrombie & Blair – spy. The first staple had come loose. He gingerly extracted it. Barley Blair, who couldn’t sell hay to a rich horse to save his dying mother on her birthday, we used to say: spy. He began prising the second staple. Whose principal claim to fame was that two years ago at the Belgrade book fair he had drunk Spikey Morgan under the table on straight vodkas, then played tenor sax with the band so beautifully that even the police were clapping. Spy. Gentleman spy. Well, here’s a letter from your lady, as they say in the nursery rhyme.

Landau picked up the notebooks and offered them to the space he had prepared but it was still not big enough. He would have to make one pocket out of three.

Playing the drunk, thought Landau, his mind still on Barley. Playing the fool and fooling us. Burning up the last of your family money, running the old firm deeper into the ground. Oh yes. Except that somehow or another you always managed to find one of those smart City banking houses to bail you out in the nick of time, didn’t you? And what about your chess-playing then?
That
should have been a clue, if Landau had only had eyes for it! How does a man who’s drunk himself silly beat all comers at chess then, Harry – straight games – if he isn’t a trained spy?

The three pockets had become one pocket, the notebooks fitted more or less inside, the printed indication above them still read ‘Student Notes’.

‘Notes,’ Landau explained in his mind to the inquisitive young customs officer at Sheremetyevo airport. ‘Notes, you see, son, like it says. Student’s notes. That’s why there’s a pocket here for notes. And these notes that you are holding in your hand are the work of an actual student following the course. That’s why they’re here, son, do you see? They are
demonstration notes
. And the drawings here, they’re to do with the –’

With socio-economic patterns, son. With demographic population shifts. With vital statistics that you Russkies can never get enough of, can you? Here, seen one of these? It’s called a body book.

Which might or might not save Landau’s hide, depending on how smart the boy was, and how much they knew, and how they felt about their wives that day.

But for the long night ahead of him, and for the dawn raid when they kicked the door down and burst in on him with drawn pistols and shouted, ‘All right, Landau, give us the notebooks!’ – for that happy moment, the kit wouldn’t do at all. ‘Notebooks, Officer? Notebooks? Oh, you mean that bunch of junk some loony Russian beauty pressed on me at the fair tonight. I think you’ll probably find them in the rubbish basket, Officer, if the maid hasn’t emptied it for once in her life.’

For this contingency also, Landau now meticulously set the scene. Removing the notebooks from the pocket of the history kit, he placed them artistically in the wastepaper basket exactly as if he had flung them there in the rage he had felt when he had taken his first look. To keep them company, he tossed in his surplus trade literature and brochures, as well as a couple of useless farewell gifts he had received: the thin volume of yet another Russian poet, a tin-backed blotter. As a final touch, he added a pair of undarned socks that only your rich Westerner throws away.