The Russia House Read online

  He felt little sense of urgency, none of responsibility. He was a diplomat, not a Friend, as the spies were called. And Friends in Palmer’s zoology were people without the intellectual horsepower to be what Palmer was. Indeed it was his outspoken resentment that the orthodox Foreign Office to which he belonged resembled more and more a cover organisation for the Friends’ disgraceful activities. For Palmer too was a man of impressive erudition, if of a random kind. He had read Arabic and taken a First in Modern History. He had added Russian and Sanskrit in his spare time. He had everything but mathematics and common sense, which explains why he passed over the dreary pages of algebraic formulae, equations and diagrams that made up the other two notebooks, and in contrast to the writer’s philosophical ramblings had a boringly disciplined appearance. And which also explains – though the committee had difficulty accepting such an explanation – why Palmer chose to ignore the Standing Order to Resident Clerks relating to Defectors and Offers of Intelligence whether solicited or otherwise, and to do his own thing.

  ‘He makes the most frantic connections right across the board, Tig,’ he told a rather senior colleague in Research Department on the Tuesday, having decided that it was finally time to share his acquisition. ‘You simply must read him.’

  ‘But how do we know it’s a he, Palms?’

  Palmer just felt it, Tig. The vibes.

  Palmer’s senior colleague glanced at the first notebook, then at the second, then sat down and stared at the third. Then he looked at the drawings in the second book. Then his professional self took over in the emergency.

  ‘I think I’d get this lot across to them fairly sharpish if I were you, Palms,’ he said. But on second thoughts he got it across to them himself, very sharpish indeed, having first telephoned Ned on the green line and told him to stand by.

  Upon which, two days late, hell broke loose. At four o’clock on the Wednesday morning the lights on the top floor of Ned’s stubby brick out-station in Victoria known as the Russia House were still burning brightly as the first bemused meeting of what later became the Bluebird team drew to a close. Five hours after that, having sat out two more meetings in the Service’s headquarters in a grand new high-rise block on the Embankment, Ned was back at his desk, the files gathering around him as giddily as if the girls in Registry had decided to erect a street barricade.

  ‘God may move in a mysterious way,’ Ned was heard to remark to his red-headed assistant Brock in a lull between deliveries, ‘but it’s nothing to the way He picks his joes.’

  A joe in the parlance is a live source, and a live source in sane English is a spy. Was Ned referring to Landau when he spoke of joes? To Katya? To the unchristened writer of the notebooks? Or was his mind already fixed upon the vaporous outlines of that great British gentleman spy, Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair? Brock did not know or care. He came from Glasgow but of Lithuanian parents and abstract concepts made him angry.

  As to myself, I had to wait another week before Ned decided with a proper reluctance that it was time to haul in old Palfrey. I’ve been old Palfrey since I can remember. To this day I have never understood what happened to my Christian names. ‘Where’s old Palfrey?’ they say. ‘Where’s our tame legal eagle? Get the old lawbender in! Better chuck this one at Palfrey!’

  I am quickly dealt with. You need not stumble on me long. Horatio Benedict dePalfrey are my names but you may forget the first two immediately, and somehow nobody has ever remembered the ‘de’ at all. In the Service I am Harry so, quite often, being an obedient soul, I am Harry to myself. Alone in my poky little bachelor flat of an evening, I am quite inclined to call myself Harry while I cook my chop. Legal adviser to the illegals, that’s me, and sometime junior partner to the extinct house of Mackie, Mackie & dePalfrey, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, of Chancery Lane. But that was twenty years ago. For twenty years I have been your most humble secret servant, ready at any time to rob the scales of the same blind goddess whom my young heart was brought up to revere.

  A palfrey, I am told, was neither a warhorse nor a hunter, but a saddle horse deemed suitable for ladies. Well, there’s only one little lady who ever rode this Palfrey any distance, but she rode him nearly to his grave and her name was Hannah. And it was because of Hannah that I scurried for shelter inside the secret citadel where passion has no place, where the walls are so thick I cannot hear her beating fists or tearful voice imploring me to let her in and brave the scandal that so terrified a young solicitor at the threshold of a respectable career.

  Hope in my face and nothing in my heart, she said. A wiser woman might have kept such observations to herself, it has always seemed to me. Sometimes the truth is by way of being a self-indulgence. ‘Then why do you pursue a hopeless case?’ I would protest to her. ‘If the patient is dead, why keep trying to revive him?’

  Because she was a woman, seemed to be the answer. Because she believed in the redemption of male souls. Because I had not paid enough for being inadequate.

  But I have paid now, believe me.

  It is because of Hannah that I walk the secret corridors to this day, calling my cowardice duty and my weakness sacrifice.

  It is because of Hannah that I sit here late at night, in my grey box of an office with LEGAL on the door, files and tapes and films stacked around me like the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce without the pink string, while I draft our official whitewash of the operation we called the Bluebird and of its protagonist, Bartholomew, alias Barley, Scott Blair.

  It is because of Hannah also that even while he scribbles at his exculpation this old Palfrey now and then puts down his pen and lifts his head and dreams.

  Niki Landau’s recall to the British colours, if he had ever seriously abandoned them, took place exactly forty-eight hours after the notebooks hit Ned’s desk. Ever since his miserable passage through Whitehall, Landau had been sick with anger and mortification. He hadn’t gone to work, he hadn’t bothered with his little flat in Golders Green which he normally buffed and pampered as if it were the lantern of his life. Not even Lydia could rouse him from his melancholy. I myself had hastily arranged the Home Office warrant to tap his phone. When she telephoned, we listened to him putting her off. And when she made a tragic appearance at his front door, our watchers reported that he let her stay for a cup of tea and then dismissed her.

  ‘I don’t know what I’ve done wrong but whatever it is, I’m sorry,’ they heard her remark sadly as she left.

  She was hardly in the street before Ned rang. Afterwards Landau shrewdly wondered to me whether that was a coincidence.

  ‘Niki Landau?’ Ned enquired in a voice you didn’t feel like fooling with.

  ‘I could be,’ said Landau, sitting up straight.

  ‘My name’s Ned. I think we have a mutual friend. No need to mention names. You kindly dropped a letter in for him the other day. Rather against the odds, I’m afraid. A package too.’

  Landau thrilled to the voice immediately. Capable and commanding. The voice of a good officer, not a cynic, Harry.

  ‘Well, yes, I did,’ he said, but Ned was already talking again.

  ‘I don’t think we need to go into a lot of details over the telephone, but I do think you and I need to have a long chat and I think we need to shake your hand. Rather soon. When can we do that?’

  ‘Whenever you say,’ said Landau. And had to stop himself from saying ‘sir’.

  ‘I always think now’s a good time. How do you feel about that?’

  ‘I feel a whole lot better, Ned,’ said Landau with a grin in his voice.

  ‘I’m going to send a car for you. Won’t be at all long, so perhaps you’d just stay where you are and wait for your front doorbell to ring. It’s a green Rover, B registration. The driver’s name is Sam. If you’re worried, ask him to show you his card. If you’re still worried, phone the number on it. Think you’ll manage?’

  ‘Our friend’s all right, is he?’ said Landau, unable to resist asking, but Ned had rung off.

  Th
e doorbell pealed a couple of minutes afterwards. They had the car waiting round the corner, thought Landau as he floated downstairs in a dream. This is it. I’m in the hands of the professionals. The house was in smart Belgravia, one of a terrace recently restored. Its newly painted white front glistened wholesomely at him in the evening sun. A palace of excellence, a shrine to the secret powers that rule our lives. A polished-brass sign on the pillared doorway said FOREIGN LIAISON STAFF. The door was already opening as Landau climbed the steps. And as the uniformed janitor closed it behind him Landau saw a slender, straight-built man in his early forties advance towards him through the sunbeams, first the trim silhouette, then the no-nonsense handsome healthy features, then the handshake: discreet but loyal as a naval salute.

  ‘Well done, Niki. Come on in.’

  Good voices do not always belong to good faces, but Ned’s did. As Landau followed him into the oval study, he felt he could say anything in the world to him, and Ned would still be on his side. Landau in fact saw a whole lot of things in Ned that he liked at once, which was Ned’s Pied Piper gift: the careful charm, the restrained good looks, the power of quiet leadership and the ‘Come on in.’ Landau also sniffed the polyglot in him, for he was one himself. He had only to drop a Russian name or phrase for Ned to reach out for it and smile, and match it with a phrase of his own. He was one of us, Harry. If you had a secret, this was the man to tell it to, not that flunkey in the Foreign Office.

  But then Landau had not realised, until he began talking, how desperately he had been needing to confide. He opened his mouth, he was away. All he could do from then on was listen to himself in amazement, because he wasn’t just talking about Katya and the notebooks, and why he had accepted them, and how he had hidden them, but about his whole life till now, his confusions about being a Slav, his love of Russia despite everything, and his feeling of being suspended between two cultures. Yet Ned did not lead him or check him in any way. He was a born listener. He hardly stirred except to write himself neat notes on bits of card, and if he interrupted, it was only to clear up a rare point of detail – the moment at Sheremetyevo, for example, when Landau was waved through to the departure lounge without a glance.

  ‘Now did all your group receive that treatment or only you?’

  ‘The lot of us. One nod, we were through.’

  ‘You didn’t feel singled out in any way?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You didn’t have the impression you might be getting a different kind of treatment from other people? A better one, for instance?’

  ‘We went through like a bunch of sheep. A flock,’ Landau corrected himself. ‘We handed in our visas, that was it.’

  ‘Were other groups going through at the same rate, did you notice?’

  ‘The Russkies didn’t seem to be bothering at all. Maybe it was the summer Saturday. Maybe it was the glasnost. They pulled a few out to inspect and let the others through. I felt a fool, to be truthful. I didn’t need to have taken the precautions that I did.’

  ‘You were no sort of fool. You did marvellously,’ said Ned, without a hint of patronising while he wrote again. ‘And on the plane, who did you sit next to, remember?’

  ‘Spikey Morgan.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘No one. I had the window.’

  ‘Which seat was that?’

  Landau knew the seat number off pat. It was the one he pre-booked whenever he could.

  ‘Did you talk much on the flight?’

  ‘Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Women, mainly. Spikey’s moved in with a pair of freewheelers in Notting Hill.’

  Ned gave a pleasant laugh. ‘And did you tell Spikey about the notebooks? In your relief, Niki? It would have been perfectly natural in the circumstances. To confide.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Ned. Not to a soul. I never did, I never will. I’m only telling you because he’s vanished and you’re official.’

  ‘How about Lydia?’

  The offence to Landau’s dignity momentarily outweighed his admiration of Ned, and even his surprise at Ned’s familiarity with his affairs.

  ‘My ladies, Ned, they know a little about me. They may even think they know more than they do,’ he replied. ‘But they do not share my secrets because they are not invited to.’

  Ned continued writing. And somehow the trim movement of the pen, coupled with the suggestion that he could have been indiscreet, provoked Landau into chancing his hand, because he had noticed already that every time he started to talk about Barley, a kind of freeze settled over Ned’s quietly reassuring features.

  ‘And Barley’s really all right, is he? He hasn’t had an accident or anything?’

  Ned seemed not to hear. He took a fresh card and resumed his writing.

  ‘I suppose Barley would have used the Embassy, wouldn’t he?’ said Landau. ‘Him being a professional. Barley. It’s the chess that gives him away, if you want to know. He shouldn’t play it, in my opinion. Not in public.’

  Then and only then did Ned’s head rise slowly from the page. And Landau saw a stony expression in his face that was more frightening than his words. ‘We never mention names like that, Niki,’ said Ned very quietly. ‘Not even among ourselves. You couldn’t know, so you’ve done nothing wrong. Just please don’t do it again.’

  Then seeing perhaps the effect that he had had on Landau, he got up and strolled to a satinwood sidetable and poured two glasses of sherry from a decanter and handed one to Landau. ‘And yes, he’s all right,’ he said.

  So they drank a silent toast to Barley, whose name Landau had by then sworn to himself ten times already would never again cross his lips.

  ‘We don’t want you to go to Gdansk next week,’ said Ned. ‘We’ve arranged a medical certificate and compensation for you. You’re ill. Suspected ulcer. And stay away from work in the meantime, do you mind?’

  ‘I’ll do whatever you say,’ said Landau.

  But before he left he signed a declaration of the Official Secrets Act while Ned benignly looked on. It’s a weaselly document in legal terms, calculated to impress the signatory and no one else. But then the Act itself is scarcely a credit to its drafters either.

  After that, Ned switched off the microphones and the hidden video cameras that the twelfth floor had insisted on because it was becoming that kind of operation.

  And this far, Ned did everything alone, which was his good right as head of the Russia House. Fieldmen are nothing if not loners. He didn’t even call in old Palfrey to read the riot act. Not yet.

  If Landau had felt neglected until that afternoon, for the rest of the week he was swamped with attention. Early the next morning, Ned telephoned asking him with his customary courtesy to present himself to an address in Pimlico. It turned out to be a 1930s block of flats, with curved steel-framed windows painted green and an entrance that should have led to a cinema. In the presence of two men whom he did not introduce, Ned took Landau crisply through his story a second time, then threw him to the wolves.

  The first to speak was a distraught, floating man with baby-pink cheeks and baby-clear eyes and a flaxen jacket to match his straggling flaxen hair. His voice floated too. ‘You said a blue dress, I think? My name’s Walter,’ he added, as if himself startled by the news.

  ‘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 n
ever 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.’