The Russia House Read online

  ‘Got it with you then, have you, dear?’ he asked, peering down at the perhaps-bag and smiling like a friend.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In there, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then give me the whole bag normally,’ Landau said, talking her through her act. ‘That’s the way. Now give me a friendly Russian kiss. The formal sort. Nice. You’ve brought me an official farewell gift on the last evening of the fair, you see. Something that will cement Anglo-Soviet relations and make me overweight on the flight home unless I dump it in the dustbin at the airport. Very normal transaction. I must have received half a dozen such gifts today already.’

  Part of this was spoken while he crouched with his back to her. For, reaching into the bag, he had already slipped out the brown-paper parcel that was inside it and was dropping it deftly into his briefcase, which was of the home-filing variety, very compendious, with compartments that opened in a fan.

  ‘Married, are we, Katya?’

  No answer. Maybe she hadn’t heard. Or she was too busy watching him.

  ‘Is it your husband who’s written the novel, then?’ said Landau, undeterred by her silence.

  ‘It is dangerous for you,’ she whispered. ‘You must believe in what you are doing. Then everything is clear.’

  As if he had not heard this warning at all, Landau selected, from a pile of samples that he had kept to give away tonight, a four-pack of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s specially commissioned reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he placed ostentatiously on the table and signed for her on the plastic casing with a felt-tip pen: ‘From Niki to Katya, Peace’, and the date. Then he put the four-pack ceremoniously into the perhaps-bag for her, and gathered the handles of the bag together and pressed them into her hand, because she was becoming lifeless and he was worried she might break down or cease to function. Only then did he give her the reassurance that she seemed to be asking for, while he continued to hold her hand, which was cold, he told me, but nice.

  ‘All of us have got to do something risky now and then, haven’t we, dear?’ Landau said lightly. ‘Going to adorn the party, are we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Like a nice dinner out somewhere?’

  ‘It is not convenient.’

  ‘You want me to take you to the door?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I think we’ve got to smile, dear,’ he said, still in English as he walked her across the room, chatting to her like the good salesman he had once again become.

  Reaching the great landing, he shook her hand. ‘See you at the book fair, then? September. And thanks for warning me, okay? I’ll bear it in mind. Still, the main thing is, we’ve got a deal. Which is always nice. Right?’

  She took his hand and seemed to draw courage from it, for she smiled again and her smile was dazed but grateful, and almost irresistibly warm.

  ‘My friend has made a great gesture,’ she explained as she pushed back an unruly lock of hair. ‘Please be sure that Mr. Barley is aware of this.’

  ‘I’ll tell him. Don’t you worry,’ said Landau jauntily.

  He would have liked another smile just for himself, but she had lost interest in him. She was delving in her bag for her card, which he knew she had forgotten till this moment. ‘ORLOVA, Yekaterina Borisovna,’ it read, in Cyrillic one side and Roman the other, again with the name October in both renderings. She gave it to him, then walked stiffly down the pompous staircase, head up and one hand on the broad marble balustrade, the other hand trailing the perhaps-bag. The boys in leather jackets watched her all the way down to the hall. And Landau, while he popped the card into his top pocket with the half-dozen others he’d collected in the last two hours, saw them watch her and gave the boys a wink. And the boys after due reflection winked back at him, because this was the new season of openness when a pair of good Russian hips could be acknowledged for what they were, even to a foreigner.

  For the fifty minutes of revelry that remained, Niki Landau threw his heart into the party. Sang and danced for a grim-faced Scottish librarian in pearls. Recited a witty political anecdote about Mrs. Thatcher for a pair of pale listeners from the State Copyright Agency, VAAP, till they suddenly emitted wild laughter. Buttered up three ladies from Progress Publishers and, in a series of nimble journeys to his briefcase, presented each with a memento of his stay, for Landau was a natural giver and remembered names and promises, just as he remembered so many other things, with the directness of an unencumbered mind. But all the while he kept the briefcase unobtrusively in view, and even before the guests had left, he was holding it in his spare hand while he made his farewells. And when he boarded the private bus that was waiting to take the reps back to their hotel, he sat with it on his knees while he joined in a tuneful unison of rugby songs, led as usual by Spikey Morgan.

  ‘Ladies present now, boys,’ Landau warned and, standing up, commanded silence at the passages that he considered too broad. But even when he was playing the great conductor he contrived to keep a firm grip on the briefcase.

  At the hotel entrance the usual gaggle of pimps, drug-pushers and currency dealers hung around and, together with their KGB minders, watched the group enter. But Landau saw nothing in their behaviour to concern him, whether over-watchful or over-casual. The crippled old warrior who guarded the passageway to the lifts demanded as usual to see his hotel pass, but when Landau, who had already presented him with a hundred Marlboros, asked him accusingly in Russian why he wasn’t out flirting with his girlfriend tonight, he gave a rasping laugh and punched him on the shoulder in goodfellowship.

  ‘If they’re trying to frame me, I thought, they’d better be quick about it or the trail will be cold, Harry,’ he told me, taking the part of the opposition rather than his own. ‘When you frame, Harry, you’ve got to move in fast while the evidence is still planted on the victim,’ he explained, as if he had been framing people all his life.

  ‘Bar of the National, nine o’clock then,’ Spikey Morgan said to him wearily when they had fought their way out at the fourth floor.

  ‘Could be, could be not, Spikey,’ Landau replied. ‘I’m not quite myself, to be honest.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Spikey through a yawn, and plodded off into his own dark corridor watched by the evil-eyed floor concierge in her horsebox.

  Reaching his bedroom door Landau braced himself before putting the key into the lock. They’d do it now, he thought. Here and now would be the best time to snatch me and the manuscript.

  But when he stepped inside, the room was empty and undisturbed and he felt foolish for having suspected it of being any different. Still alive, he thought, and set the briefcase on the bed.

  Then he pulled the handkerchief-sized curtains as close as they would go, which was halfway, and hung the useless ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the door, which he then locked. He emptied the pockets of his suit, including the pocket where he stored incoming business cards, pulled off his jacket and tie, his metal armbands, finally his shirt. From the fridge he poured himself half an inch of lemon vodka and took a sip. Landau was not a drinker really, he explained to me, but when in Moscow he did like a nice lemon vodka to end his day. Taking his glass to the bathroom, he stood before the mirror and for a good ten minutes anxiously examined the roots of his hair for signs of white, touching out offending spots with the aid of a new formula that was working wonders. Having completed this labour to his satisfaction, he bound his skull with an elaborate rubber turban like a bathing cap and showered, while he sang ‘I am the very model of a modern major-general’ rather well. Then he towelled himself, vigorously for the sake of his muscle-tone, slipped into a bold flowered bathrobe and marched back to the bedroom still singing.

  And he did these things partly because he always did them and needed the steadying familiarity of his own routines, but partly also because he was proud of having thrown caution to the winds for once and not found twenty-five sound reasons for doing nothing, which these days
he might have done.

  She was a lady, she was afraid, she needed help, Harry. When did Niki Landau ever refuse a lady? And if he was wrong about her, well then she’d made a crying fool of him and he might as well pack up his toothbrush and report himself at the front door of the Lubyanka for five years’ study of their excellent graffiti without the option. Because he’d rather be made a fool of twenty times over than turn away that woman without a reason. And so saying, if only in his mind, for he was always alert to the possibility of microphones, Landau drew her parcel from the briefcase and with a certain shyness set to work untying the string but not cutting it, just the way he had been taught by his sainted mother, whose photograph at this moment nestled faithfully in his wallet. They’ve got the same glow, he thought in pleasant recognition as he worried patiently at the knot. It’s the Slav skin. It’s the Slav eyes, the smile. Two nice Slav girls together. The only difference was that Katya hadn’t finished up in Treblinka.

  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 to
o 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.