The Russia House (6 page)

‘I did, sir.’

‘You’re sure?’ he piped, rolling his head and peering crookedly at him from under his silken brow.

‘Totally, sir. A blue dress with a brown perhaps-bag. Most perhaps-bags are made of string. Hers was brown plastic. “Now Niki,” I said to myself, “today is not the day, but if you were ever thinking of having a tumble with this lady at a future date, which you might, you could always bring her a nice blue handbag from London to match her blue dress, couldn’t you?” That’s how I remember, you see. I have the connection in my head, sir.’

And it is always an oddity of the tapes when I replay them that Landau called Walter ‘sir’, while he never called Ned anything but Ned. But this was no great sign of respect in Landau so much as of a certain squeamishness that Walter inspired. After all, Landau was a ladies’ man and Walter was quite the opposite.

‘And the hair
black
, you say?’ Walter sang, as if black hair strained credulity.

‘Black, sir. Black and silky. Verging towards the raven. Definitely.’

‘Not dyed, you don’t think?’

‘I know the difference, sir,’ said Landau, touching his own head, for he wanted to give them everything by now, even the secret of his eternal youth.

‘You said earlier she was Leningrad. Why did you say that?’

‘The bearing, sir. I saw quality, I saw a Russian woman of Rome. That’s how I think of her. Petersburg.’

‘But you didn’t see Armenian? Or Georgian? Or Jewish, for example?’

Landau dwelt on the last suggestion but rejected it. ‘I’m Jewish myself, you see. I won’t say it takes one to know one but I’ll say I didn’t go ting-a-ling inside.’

A silence that could have been embarrassment seemed to encourage him to continue. ‘I think being Jewish is overdone, to be frank. If that’s what you want to be, good luck I say. But if you don’t need it, nobody should make you have it. Myself, I’m a Brit first, a Pole second and everything else comes afterwards. Never mind there’s a lot would have it the other way round. That’s their problem.’

‘Oh well said!’ Walter cried energetically, flapping his fingers and giggling. ‘Oh that
does
put it in a nutshell. And you say her English was really rather good?’

‘More than good, sir. Classic. A lesson to us all.’

‘Like a schoolteacher, you said.’

‘That was my impression,’ said Landau. ‘A teacher, a professor. I felt the learning. The intellect. The will.’

‘Could she not be an interpreter, you see?’

‘Good interpreters efface themselves, in my opinion, sir. This lady projected herself.’

‘Oh well I say, that’s rather a good answer,’ said Walter, shooting his pink cuffs. ‘And she was wearing a wedding ring. Well done.’

‘She certainly was, sir. A betrothal ring and a marriage ring. That’s the first thing I look at after the usual, and in Russia it’s not England, you have to look the wrong way round because the girls wear their wedding rings on the right hand. Single Russian women are a pest and divorce is off the peg. Give me a nice solid hubby and a couple of little ones for them to go home to any day. Then I might oblige.’

‘Let’s ask you about that. You think she had children as well, do you, or not?’

‘I am convinced of it, sir.’

‘Oh come, you can’t be,’ Walter said peevishly, with a sudden downturn of the mouth. ‘You’re not psychic, are you?’

‘The hips, sir. The hips, the dignity even when she was scared. She was not a Juno, she was not a sylph. She was a mother.’

‘Height?’ Walter shrieked in a descant as his hairless eyebrows bucked upwards in alarm. ‘Can you do her height for us? Think of yourself. Measure her against you. Are you looking up or down?’

‘Above the normal. I told you.’

‘Taller than you, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Five six? Five seven?’

‘More like the second,’ said Landau sullenly.

‘And her age again? You fumbled it before.’

‘If she’s over thirty-five, she doesn’t know it. A lovely skin, a fine form, a fine woman in her prime, especially the spirit, sir,’ Landau replied with a defeated grin, for while he might find Walter unsavoury, in some way he still had the Pole’s weakness for eccentrics.

‘It’s a Sunday. Imagine she’s English. Would you expect her to be going to church?’

‘She’d definitely have given the problem a good going over,’ said Landau to his great surprise before he had time to think of an answer. ‘She might have said there was
no
God. She might have said there
was
a God. But she wouldn’t have let it drift away from her like most of us. She’d have gone for it and come to a decision and done something about it if she thought she should.’

Suddenly all Walter’s quaint ways had resolved themselves into a long rubbery smile. ‘Oh you
are
good,’ he declared enviously. ‘Now do you know any science?’ he continued as his voice again soared into the clouds.

‘A bit. Kitchen science, really. What I pick up.’

‘Physics?’

‘O-level, not more, sir. I used to sell the course books. I’m not sure I’d scrape through the exam, mind, even now. But they did enable me to improve myself, put it that way.’

‘What does telemetry mean?’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Not in English, not in Russian?’

‘Not in any language, sir, I’m afraid. Telemetry has passed me by.’

‘How about CEP?’

‘The what, sir?’

‘Circular-error-probable. My goodness, he wrote enough about it, didn’t he, in those funny notebooks that you brought us? Don’t tell me CEP hasn’t stuck in your mind.’

‘I didn’t notice it. I skipped. That’s all I did.’

‘Until you came to his point about the Soviet knight dying inside his armour. Where you stopped skipping. Why?’

‘I didn’t come to it. I
happened
to come to it.’

‘All right you happened to come to it. And you formed a view. Is that right? Of what the writer was telling us. What view?’

‘Incompetence, I suppose. They’re no good at it. The Russkies. They’re duff.’

‘Duff at what?’

‘The rockets. They make errors.’

‘What sort of errors?’

‘All sorts.
Magnetic
errors.
Bias
errors, whatever those are. I don’t know. That’s your job, isn’t it?’

But Landau’s defensive surliness only emphasised his virtue as a witness. For where he wished to shine and could not, his failure reassured them, as Walter’s airy gesture of relief now testified.

‘Well I think he’s done terribly well,’ he declared as if Landau were nowhere within earshot, flinging up his hands again, this time in a theatrical gesture of conclusion. ‘He tells us what he remembers. He doesn’t make things up to spin a better tale. You won’t do that, will you, Niki?’ he added anxiously, uncrossing his legs as if his crotch were nipping him.

‘No, sir, you may rest assured.’

‘And you haven’t? I mean, because sooner or later we’d find out. Then everything you’ve given us would lose its lustre.’

‘No, sir. It’s the way I told it. No more, no less.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Walter to his colleagues in a tone of simple trust as he again sat back. ‘The hardest thing in our trade or anybody else’s is to say “I believe.” Niki’s a natural source and rare as hen’s teeth. If there were more of
him
, nobody would need
us
.’

‘This is Johnny,’ Ned explained, playing the aide-de-camp.

Johnny had wavy greying hair and a broad jaw and a file full of official-looking telegrams. With his gold watch-chain and tailored charcoal suit, he might have been a foreign barmaid’s vision of an Englishman but he certainly wasn’t Landau’s.

‘Niki, first we have to thank you, pal,’ Johnny said, in lazy East Coast American. We the larger beneficiaries, his munificent tone suggested. We the majority shareholders. I’m afraid Johnny is like that. A good officer, but unable to keep his American supremacy inside its box. I sometimes think that is the difference between American spies and our own. Americans, with their frank enjoyment of power and money, flaunt their luck. They lack the instinct to dissemble that comes so naturally to us British.

Anyway, Landau’s hackles went up in a flash.

‘Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?’ Johnny said.

‘If it’s all right by Ned,’ said Landau.

‘Of course it is,’ said Ned.

‘So we’re at the audio fair that night. Okay, pal?’

‘Well, evening really, Johnny.’

‘You escort the woman Yekaterina Orlova across the room to the top of the staircase. Where the guards are. You say goodbye to her.’

‘She’s holding my arm.’

‘She’s holding your arm, great. In front of the guards. You watch her down the stairs. Do you also watch her into the street, pal?’

I had not heard Johnny use ‘pal’ before, so I took it that he was trying to needle Landau somehow, a thing that Agency people learn from their in-house psychologists.

‘Correct,’ Landau snapped.

‘Right into the street? Pause and think,’ he suggested, with the attorney’s false expansiveness.

‘Into the street and out of my life.’

Johnny waited till he was sure everyone was aware that he was waiting, and Landau more aware than anybody. ‘Niki, pal, we’ve had people stand at the top of that staircase in the last twenty-four hours. No one sees the street from the top of that staircase.’

Landau’s face darkened. Not in embarrassment. In anger. ‘I saw her walk down the stairs. I saw her cross the lobby to where the street is. She did not return. So unless somebody has moved the street in the last twenty-four hours, which I grant you under Stalin was always possible –’

‘Let’s go on, shall we?’ said Ned.

‘See anyone walk out after her?’ Johnny asked, riding Landau a little harder.

‘Down the stairs or into the street?’

‘Both, pal. Both.’

‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t see her go into the street, did I, because you just told me I didn’t. So why don’t you answer the questions and I’ll ask them?’

While Johnny sat idly back, Ned intervened. ‘Niki, some things have to be very carefully examined. There’s a lot at stake and Johnny has his orders.’

‘I’m at stake too,’ said Landau. ‘My word’s on the line and I don’t like having it made a fool of by an American who’s not even British.’

Johnny had returned to the file. ‘Niki, will you please describe the security arrangements for the fair, as you yourself observed them?’

Landau took a tense breath. ‘Well then,’ he said, and started again. ‘We had these two young uniformed policemen hanging about the hotel lobby. Those are the boys who keep the lists of all the Russians who come and go, which is normal. Then upstairs inside the hall we had the nasties. Those are the plainclothes boys. The dawdlers, they call them, the
toptuny
,’ he added for Johnny’s enlightenment. ‘After a couple of days you know the
toptuny
by heart. They don’t buy, they don’t steal the exhibits or ask for freebies and there’s always one of them with the butter-blond hair, don’t ask me why. We had three boys and they didn’t change all week. They were the ones who watched her go down the stairs.’

‘That everyone, pal?’

‘As far as I know it is everyone but I’m waiting to be told I’m wrong.’

‘Were you not also aware of two ladies of indeterminate age, grey-haired persons who were also present every day of the fair, came early, left late, who also didn’t buy, didn’t enter negotiations with any of the standholders or exhibitors, or appear to have any legitimate purpose for attending the fair?’

‘You’re talking about Gert and Daisy, I suppose.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘There was two old biddies from the Council of Libraries. They came for the beer. Their main pleasure was whipping brochures off the stands and cadging free handouts. We christened them Gert and Daisy after a certain British radio show popular in the war years and after.’

‘It did not occur to you that these ladies might also be performing a surveillance function?’

Ned’s powerful hand was already out to restrain Landau but he was too late.

‘Johnny,’ said Landau, boiling over. ‘This is Moscow, right? Moscow, Russia,
pal
. If I stopped to consider who had a surveillance function and who didn’t, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning and I wouldn’t get into it at night. The birds in the trees are wired for all I know.’

Yet again Johnny was at his telegrams. ‘You say that Yekaterina Borisovna Orlova referred to the adjoining stand of Abercrombie & Blair as having been empty on the previous day, correct?’

‘I do say so, yes.’

‘But you didn’t see her the day before? Is that also correct?’

‘It is.’

‘You also say that you have an eye for a pretty lady.’

‘I do, thank you, and may it long remain vigilant.’

‘Don’t you think you should have noticed her then?’

‘I do sometimes miss one,’ Landau confessed, colouring again. ‘If my back is turned, if I am bent over a desk or relieving myself in the toilet, it is possible my attention may flag for a moment.’

But Johnny’s nervelessness was acquiring its own authority. ‘You have relatives in Poland, do you not, Mr. Landau?’ The ‘pal’ had evidently done its work, for listening to the tape I noticed he had dropped it.

‘I do.’

‘Do you not have an elder sister highly placed in the Polish administration?’

‘My sister works in the Polish Health Ministry as a hospital inspector. She is not highly placed and she is past retiring age.’

‘Have you at any time directly or indirectly been the witting target of pressure or blackmail by Communist bloc agencies or third parties acting in their behalf?’

Landau turned to Ned. ‘A what target? My English isn’t very good, I’m afraid.’

‘Conscious,’ said Ned with a warning smile. ‘Aware. Knowing.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Landau.

‘In your travels to Eastern bloc countries, have you been intimate with women of those countries?’

‘I’ve been to bed with some. I haven’t been intimate.’

Like a naughty schoolboy Walter let out a squeak of choked laughter, lifting his shoulders to his neck and cupping his hand over his dreadful teeth. But Johnny soldiered doggedly on: ‘Mr. Landau, have you ever prior to this time had contacts with any intelligence agency of any hostile or friendly country anywhere?’