The Untouchable (20 page)

He leaned back on the bench seat, his face sinking into darkness.

“Boy Bannister gives us information that he gets from his father,” he said.

“Boy’s father? Boy’s father is dead.”

“His stepfather, then.”

“Retired, surely?”

“He still has contacts at the Admiralty.” He paused. “Would you,” softly, “would you do that?”

“Betray my father? I doubt if the secrets of the bishopric of Down and Dromore would be of great interest to our masters.”

“But would you?”

The upper part of his torso was swallowed in shadow, so that all I could see were his corkscrewed legs and one hand resting on his thigh with a cigarette clipped between thumb and middle fingers. He took a sip of whiskey, and the rim of the glass clinked tinnily against his teeth.

“Of course I would,” I said, “if it were necessary. Wouldn’t you?”

When we left the pub the rain had stopped. The night was blowy and bad-tempered, and the vast, wet darkness felt hollowed out by the wind. Sodden sycamore leaves lolloped about the road like injured toads. Hartmann turned up the collar of his coat and shivered. “Ach, this weather!” He was on his way back to London, to catch the sleeper to Paris. He liked trains. I imagined him on the Blue Train with a gun in his hand and a girl in his bunk. Our footsteps plashed on the pavement, and as we walked from the light of one lamp to another our shadows stood up hastily to meet us and then fell down on their backs behind us.

“Felix,” I said. “I’m not at all adventurous, you know; you mustn’t expect heroics.”

We reached the car. An overhanging tree gave itself a doggy shake and a random splatter of raindrops fell on me, rattling on the brim of my hat. I suddenly saw the Back Road in Carrick-drum, and remembered myself walking with my father one wet November night like this when I was a boy: the steamy light of the infrequent gas lamps, and the undersides of the dark trees thrashing in what seemed an anguish of their own, and the sudden, inexplicable swelling of ardour inside me that made me want to howl in ecstatic sorrow, yearning for something nameless, which must have been the future, I suppose.

“As a matter of fact, there
is
something we want you to do,” Hartmann said.

We were standing on either side of the car, facing each other across the glistening roof.

“Yes?”

“We want you to become an agent of Military Intelligence.”

Another gust of wind, another spatter of raindrops.

“Oh, Felix,” I said, “tell me that’s a joke.”

He got into the car and slammed the door. He drove for some miles in an angry silence, very fast, gouging about with the gear-stick as if he were trying to dislodge something from the innards of the car.

“All right, tell me, then,” I said at last. “How am I supposed to get into the Secret Service?”

“Talk to the people at your college. Professor Hope-White, for instance. The physicist Crowther.”

“Crowther?” I said. “Crowther is a spy master? He couldn’t be. And Hope-White? He’s a scholar of Romance languages, for God’s sake! He writes lyric verses about boys in Provencal dialect.” Hartmann shrugged, smiling now; he liked to surprise. In the glow of the dashboard lights his face had a greenish, death’s-head pallor. A fox appeared on the road in front of us and stared in venomous surprise at the headlights before putting down its tail and sliding off at a low run into the dark verge. And I remember now a rabbit hopping out of a hedge and gaping at two young men walking towards it up a hill road. “I’m sorry, Felix,” I said, looking out at the night rushing helplessly at us in the windscreen, “but I can’t see myself passing my days decoding estimates of German rolling stock in the company of former Eton prefects and retired Indian Army officers. I have better things to do. I am a scholar.”

He shrugged again.

“All right,” he said.

It was a phenomenon with which I was to become familiar, this way they had of trying out something and then dropping it when it met even the mildest resistance. I remember Oleg in a great flap rushing around to Poland Street one day during the war after he had discovered that Boy and I were sharing rooms there (“Agents cannot live together like this, it is impossible!”) and then staying to get weepily, Slavicly drunk with Boy and flopping on the couch in the living room for the night. Now Hartmann said:

“A new case officer will be arriving soon.”

I turned to him, startled.

“And what about you?”

He kept his eyes fixed on the road.

“It seems they have begun to suspect me,” he said.

“Suspect you? Of what?”

He shrugged.

“Of everything,” he said. “Of nothing. They come to suspect everyone, in the end.”

I thought for a moment.

“You know,” I said, “I wouldn’t have agreed to work for them, if they had sent a Russian.”

He nodded.

“This one will be Russian,” he said grimly.

We were silent. In the dark sky before us a low, big-bellied bank of cinder-black cloud reflected the lights of Cambridge.

“No,” I said presently, “it won’t do. You’ll have to tell them it won’t do. I’ll deal with them through you, or not at all.”

He gave a melancholy laugh.

“Tell them?” he said. “Ah, Victor, you don’t know them. Believe me, you do not know them.”

“Nevertheless, you must tell them: I will only work with you.”

I have forgotten the Russian’s name. Skryne always refused to believe this, but it is true. His code name was Iosif, which struck me as dangerously obvious (the first time we made contact I asked if I might call him Joe, but he did not think it funny). He is one of the many persons from my past upon whom I do not care to dwell overmuch; the thought of him ripples across my consciousness like a draught across the back of a fever patient. He was a nondescript but dogged little sharp-faced man, who reminded me eerily of a Latin master, harsh of tongue and a fine mimic, especially of the Northern Irish accent, who had made life hell for me in my first year at Marlborough. At Iosif’s insistence, our meetings took place in various pubs in the more respectable of London’s suburbs, a different one each time. I believe he secretly liked these ghastly establishments; I suppose he, like Felix Hartmann, saw them as typical manifestations of an idealised England, with their horse brasses and dart boards and cravatted, ruddy-hued proprietors, who all looked to me like the kind of cheery chap who would have his wife coming along
nicely in an acid bath upstairs. A belief in this mythical version of John Bull was one of the few things that the Russian and the German ruling elites and their lackeys had in common in the thirties. Iosif was proud of what he imagined was his ability to pass for a native Englander. He wore tweeds and brown brogues and sleeveless grey pullovers and smoked Capstan cigarettes. The effect was of a diligently fashioned but hopelessly inaccurate imitation of a human being, something a scouting party from another world might send ahead to mingle with Earthlings and transmit back vital data—which, when I think of it, is pretty much an accurate description of what he was. His accent was laughable, though he imagined it was flawless.

For our first meeting I was summoned one cold bright afternoon early in December to a pub beside a park in Putney. I arrived late and Iosif was furious. As soon as he had identified himself—furtive nod, strained smile, no handshake—I demanded to know why Felix Hartmann was not there.

“He has other duties now.”

“What sort of duties?”

He shrugged a bony shoulder. He was standing with me at the bar, with a glass of fizzy lemonade in his hand.

“At the embassy,” he said. “Papers. Signals.”

“He’s at the embassy now?”

“He was brought in. For his protection; the police were beginning to investigate him.”

“What became of his fur business?”

He shook his head, annoyed, pretending impatience.

“Fur business? What is this fur business? I know nothing about this.”

“Oh, never mind.”

He wanted us to go to a “quiet table in the corner”—the place was empty—but I would not budge. Although I do not care for the stuff, I ordered vodka, just to see him flinch.

“
Na zdrovye!
” I said, and knocked back the measure Russian style, remembering the brothers Heidegger. Iosif’s glittery little eyes had narrowed to slits. “I told Felix I would work only with him,” I said.

He darted a sharp glance in the direction of the barman.

“You are not in Cambridge now, John,” he said. “You cannot choose your colleagues.”

The door opened and a ragged old boy with a dog came in, preceded by a pallid splash of winter sunlight.

“What did you call me?” I said. “My name is not John.”

“For us you are. For our meetings.”

“Nonsense. I’m not going to have some ridiculous code name foisted on me. I won’t be able to remember it. You’ll telephone me and I’ll say,
There’s no John here,
and hang up. It’s impossible. John, indeed!”

He sighed. I could see I was a disappointment to him. No doubt he had been looking forward to a pleasant hour in the company of a British gentleman, a university type, diffident and courtly, who just happened to have access to the secrets of the Cavendish Laboratory and would pass them over with charming absent-mindedness, in the manner of an impromptu tutorial. I ordered another vodka and drank it off; it seemed to go straight upwards rather than down, and my head swam and I had the sensation of levitating for a second an inch above the floor. The fat old man with the dog subsided at a table in the corner and began to cough laboriously, making a noise like that of a suction pump in action; the dog meanwhile was studying Iosif and me, head to one side and an ear-flap dangling, like that terrier on the record label. Iosif hunched his back against the animal’s alert gaze and, passing a hand across the lower half of his face in what comedians call a slow burn, said something incomprehensible.

“I can’t hear you if you speak like that,” I said.

In a spasm of anger, immediately checked, he clutched my arm—a surprising and, I confess, frightening, iron grip—and put his face close beside mine, looking over my shoulder and swivelling his mouth towards my ear.

“The Syndics,” he hissed, and a prickle of spittle settled on my cheek.

“The
what?”

I laughed. I was a little tipsy already, and everything had begun to seem at once hilarious and faintly desperate. Iosif in a hot whisper explained, amid tics and twitches and whistling breaths, like a chorister telling the boy next to him a dirty joke,
that Moscow desired to procure a transcript of the deliberations of the Cambridge Syndics, under the illusion that this venerable body was some sort of clandestine union of the great and powerful of our powerful and great university, a cross between the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “they’re just a committee of the university senate!”

He waggled a portentous eyebrow.

“Exactly.”

“They conduct the business of the university. Butchers’ bills. The wine cellar. That’s all they do.”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, pursing his lips and letting his eyelids slowly drop. He knew what he knew. Oxbridge was running the country, and the Syndics were running half of Oxbridge: how could an account of their doings be anything less than fascinating to our masters in Moscow? I sighed. This was not an auspicious beginning to my career as a secret agent. There is a study to be written of the effect on the history of Europe in our century of the inability of England’s enemies to understand this perverse, stubborn, sly and absurd nation. Much of my time and energy over the next decade and a half would be spent trying to teach Moscow, and the likes of Iosif, to distinguish between form and content in English life (trust an Irishman to know the difference). Their misconceptions were shamingly ludicrous. When Moscow Centre heard I was a regular visitor at Windsor, that I was friendly with HM, and was often bade stay on in the evenings to play at after-dinner games with his wife—who was also related to me, however distantly—they were beside themselves, believing that one of their men had penetrated to the very seat of power in the country. Accustomed to tsardom, old style and new, they could not understand that our sceptred ruler does not rule, but is only a sort of surrogate parent of the nation, and not for a moment to be taken seriously. At the end of the war, when Labour got in, I suspect Moscow believed it would be only a matter of time before the royal family, little princesses and all, would be taken to the Palace basement and put up against the wall. Attlee, of course, they could not fathom, and their bafflement only increased when
I pointed out to them that he took his politics less from Marx than from Morris and Mill (Oleg wanted to know if these were people in the government). When the Conservatives got back they assumed the election had been rigged, unable to believe that the working class, after all they had learned in the war, would freely vote for the return of a right-wing government (“My dear Oleg, there is no stouter Tory than the English working man”). Boy was infuriated and depressed by these failures of comprehension; I, however, had sympathy for the Comrades. Like them, I too came of an extreme and instinctual race. No doubt this is why Leo Rothenstein and I got on better with them than genuine Englishmen like Boy and Alastair: we shared the innate, bleak romanticism of our two very different races, the legacy of dispossession, and, especially, the lively anticipation of eventual revenge, which, when it came to politics, could be made to pass for optimism.

Meanwhile Iosif is still standing before me, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, with his too-long cuffs and his facial muscles that seem worked by wires, attentive and hopeful as that old man’s dog, and since I am tired of him, and depressed, and sorry I ever allowed Hartmann to persuade me to throw in my lot with the likes of this absurd, this impossible person, I tell him that, yes, I will get hold of a copy of the minutes of the next Syndics meeting, if that is what he really wants, and he gives a serious, swift little nod, the kind of nod I would become familiar with later on, from self-important chumps in war rooms and secret briefing centres when I came over from the Department to deliver some perfectly useless piece of classified information. All the commentators nowadays, all the wiseacres in books and in the newspapers, underestimate the adventure-story element in the world of espionage. Because real secrets are betrayed, because torturers exist, because men die—Iosif was to end up, like so many other minor servants of the system, with an NKVD bullet in the back of his head—they imagine that spies are somehow both irresponsible and inhumanly malign, like the lesser devils who carry out great Satan’s commands, when really what we most resembled were those brave but playful, always resourceful chaps in school stories, the Bobs and Dicks and Jims
who are good at cricket and get up to harmless but ingenious pranks and in the end unmask the Headmaster as an international criminal, while at the same time managing to get enough clandestine swotting done to come first in their exams and win the scholarships and so save their nice, penurious parents the burden of paying to send them to one of Our Great Universities. That, anyway, is how we saw ourselves, though of course we would not have put it in those terms. We considered ourselves to be
good,
that is the point. It is hard to recapture now the heady flavour of those pre-war days when the world was going to hell with bells banging and whistles madly shrilling and we alone among our fellows knew exactly what our task was. Oh, I am well aware that young men were going off to Spain to fight, and forming trades unions, and getting up petitions, and so on, but that kind of thing, though necessary, was stop-gap action; secretly, we regarded these poor eager fellows as little more than cannon-fodder, or interfering do-gooders. What we had, and they lacked, was the necessary historical perspective; while the Spanish Brigaders shouted about the need to stop Franco, we were already planning for the transition period after the defeat of Hitler, when with a gentle shove from Moscow, and from us, the war-damaged regimes of Western Europe would fall down domino-fashion—yes, we were early proponents of that now discredited theory—and the Revolution would spread like a bloodstain from the Balkans to the coast of Connemara. And yet, at the same time, how detached we were. Somehow, despite all our talk and even some action, the great events of the time trundled past us, vivid, gaudily coloured, too real to be real, like the props of a travelling theatre being carted away on the back of a lorry, off to some other town. I was working in my rooms at Trinity when I heard the announcement of the fall of Barcelona on the wireless that was playing loudly in the room of my next-door neighbour—Welshman, some sort of physicist, liked dance-band music, told me all about the latest wizardry being worked at the Cavendish—and I continued calmly studying through my magnifying glass a reproduction of the curious pair of severed heads lying on a cloth in the foreground of Poussin’s
The Capture of Jerusalem by Titus,
as if the two events, the real and the
depicted, were equally far off from me in antiquity, the one as fixed and finished as the other, all frozen cry and rampant steed and stylised, gorgeous cruelty. You see …?