As for me, from the moment Monsieur Denis – alias le Général, thanks to his great height and supposed resemblance to President de Gaulle – had unwound himself from his yellow van and started towards the front steps, I knew at one glance that the letter he was grasping in his spindly hand was from the Circus.
*
I wasn’t alarmed at first, just quietly amused. Some things about a British secret service never change. One of them is an obsessive anxiety about what sort of stationery to use for its overt correspondence. Not too official or formal looking: that would be bad for cover. The envelope not see-through, so preferably lined. Stark white is too visible: go for a tint, just nothing amorous. A dull blue, a hint of grey, both are acceptable. This one was pale grey.
Next question: do we type the address, do we handwrite it? For answer, consider as always the needs of the man in the field, in this case, me: Peter Guillam, ex-member, out to grass and grateful for it. Long-time resident in rural France. Attends no veterans’ reunions. No listed significant others. Draws full pension and therefore torturable. Conclusion: in a remote Breton hamlet where foreigners are a rarity, a typed, semi-formal-looking grey envelope with a British stamp could raise local eyebrows, so go for handwritten. Now for the hard bit. The Office, or whatever the Circus calls itself these days, can’t resist a security classification, even if it’s only Private. Maybe add a Personal for extra force? Private & Personal, addressee only? Too heavy. Stick to Private. Or better, as in this case, Personnel.
1 Artillery Buildings
London, SE14
My dear Guillam,
We haven’t met, but allow me to introduce myself. I am business affairs manager at your old firm, with responsibility for both current and historical cases. A matter in which you appear to have played a significant role some years back has unexpectedly raised its head, and I have no option but to ask you to make yourself available in London as soon as possible to assist us in preparing a response.
I am authorized to offer you reimbursement for your travel arrangements (economy class) and a London-weighted per diem of £130 for as long as your presence is required.
Since we appear to have no telephone number for you, kindly feel free to call Tania at the number above and reverse the charges, or if you have email, at the email address below. Without wishing to inconvenience you, I have to stress that the matter is of some urgency. Allow me in closing to draw your attention to Paragraph 14 of your termination agreement.
Yours sincerely,
A. Butterfield
(LA to CS)
P.S. Kindly remember to bring your passport with you when you present yourself at Reception. AB
For ‘LA to CS’ read Legal Adviser to Chief of Service. For ‘Paragraph 14’ read lifelong duty to attend, should Circus needs dictate. And for ‘allow me to remind you’ read just remember who pays your pension. And I don’t have email. And why doesn’t he date his letter: security?
Catherine is down in the orchard with her nine-year-old daughter Isabelle, playing with a pair of vicious young goats we recently had wished on us. She is a slight woman with a broad Breton face and slow brown eyes that measure you without expression. If she stretches out her arms, the goats leap into them and little Isabelle, who pleases herself in her own ways, puts her hands together and spins round on her heel in private delight. But Catherine, muscular though she is, must be careful to catch her goats one at a time, because if they’re allowed to jump at her together they can knock her flat. Isabelle ignores me. Eye contact bothers her.
In the field behind them, deaf Yves the occasional labourer is bent double cutting cabbages. With his right hand he slices the stems, with his left he tosses them into a cart, but the angle of his arched back never changes. He is watched by an old grey horse called Artemis, another of Catherine’s foundlings. A couple of years back we took in a stray ostrich who had broken loose from a neighbouring farm. When Catherine alerted the farmer, he said keep him, he’s too old. The ostrich expired gracefully and we gave him a state funeral.
‘You wish something, Pierre?’ Catherine demands.
‘Got to go away for a few days, I’m afraid,’ I reply.
‘To Paris?’ Catherine does not approve of me going to Paris.
‘To London,’ I reply. And because even in retirement I need a cover story: ‘Someone’s died.’
‘Someone you love?’
‘Not any more,’ I reply, with a firmness that takes me by surprise.
‘Then it is not important. You leave tonight?’
‘Tomorrow. I’ll take the early flight from Rennes.’
Time was, the Circus had only to whistle and I would race to Rennes for a plane. Not today.
*
You have to have grown to spy’s estate in the old Circus to understand the aversion that came over me as, at four o’clock the following afternoon, I paid off my cab and started up the concrete catwalk to the Service’s shockingly ostentatious new headquarters. You had to be me in the prime of my spying life, returning dog-weary from some godforsaken outpost of empire – the Soviet empire most likely, or some member of it. You’ve come straight from London airport by bus, then by tube to Cambridge Circus. The Production team is waiting to debrief you. You climb five scruffy steps to the doorway of the Victorian eyesore that we variously call HO, the Office or just the Circus. And you’re home.
Forget the fights you’ve been having with Production or Requirements or Admin. They’re just family quarrels between field and base. The janitor in his box wishes you good morning with a knowing ‘welcome back, Mr Guillam’ and asks you whether you’d like to check your suitcase. And you say thanks Mac, or Bill, or whoever’s on duty that day, and never mind showing him your pass. You’re smiling and you’re not sure why. In front of you stand the three cranky old lifts that you’ve hated since the day you joined – except that two of them are stuck upstairs, and the third is Control’s own, so don’t even think about it. And anyway you’d rather lose yourself in the labyrinth of corridors and dead ends that is the physical embodiment of the world you’ve chosen to live in, with its worm-eaten wooden staircases, chipped fire extinguishers, fish-eye mirrors and the stinks of stale fag smoke, Nescafé and deodorant.
And now this monstrosity. This Welcome to Spyland Beside the Thames.
Under the scrutiny of dour men and women in tracksuits, I present myself at the armoured-glass welcome desk and watch my British passport being snapped up by a sliding metal tray. The face behind the glass is a woman’s. The absurd emphases and electronic voice are Essex Man’s:
‘Kindly place all keys, mobile phones, cash, wrist watches, writing instruments and any other metal objects you may have about you in the box on the table to your left, retain the white tag identifying your box, then duly proceed shoes in hand through the door marked Visitors.’
My passport returns. Duly proceeding, I am frisked with a ping-pong bat by a merry girl of about fourteen, then radiated in an upended glass coffin. Having returned the shoes to my feet and tied the laces – somehow a far more humiliating procedure than taking them off – I am escorted to an unmarked lift by the merry girl, who asks me if I’ve had a nice day. I haven’t. Or a nice night either, if she wants to know, which she doesn’t. Thanks to A. Butterfield’s letter I had slept worse than I have slept in a decade, but I can’t tell her that either. I’m a field animal, or was. My natural habitat was spying’s open spaces. What I’m discovering in my so-called mature years is that a Dear John letter coming out of the blue from the Circus in its new incarnation demanding my immediate presence in London sets me off on a night-time journey of the soul.
We have reached what feels like the top floor, but nothing says so. In the world I once inhabited, its biggest secrets were always on the top floor. My youthful escort has a bunch of ribbons round her neck with electronic tabs on them. She opens an unmarked door, I enter, she closes it o
n me. I try the handle. It doesn’t budge. I’ve been locked up a few times in my life, but always by the opposition. There are no windows, just childish paintings of flowers and houses. The work of A. Butterfield’s offspring? Or the graffiti of former inmates?
And where has all the noise gone? The silence gets worse the longer I listen. No jolly chatter of typewriters, no unanswered telephones ringing off the hook, no clapped-out file trolley rattling its way like a milkman’s float over the bare-board corridors, no furious male roar of stop that bloody whistling! Somewhere along the road between Cambridge Circus and the Embankment, something has died, and it isn’t just the squeak of trolleys.
I perch my backside on a steel and leather chair. I thumb a grimy copy of Private Eye and wonder which of us has lost our sense of humour. I get up, try the door again and sit down on a different chair. By now I have decided that A. Butterfield is making an in-depth study of my body language. Well, if he is, good luck to him, because by the time the door flies open and a short-haired, agile woman of forty-odd wearing a business suit sweeps in and says in a class-free sanitized accent, ‘Oh. Hi, Peter, great. I’m Laura, want to come in now?’ I must have relived in quick order every misfire and disaster I’d been involved in over a lifetime of licensed skulduggery.
We troop across an empty corridor and enter a white, hygienic office with sealed windows. A fresh-faced, bespectacled, English public schoolboy of indefinable age in shirt and braces bounces out from behind a table and seizes my hand.
‘Peter! Gosh! You look positively jaunty! And half your age! You travelled well? Coffee? Tea? Honestly not? Really, really good of you to come. A huge help. You’ve met Laura? Of course you have. So sorry to have kept you waiting in there. A call from on high. All well now. Have a pew.’
All this to confiding squeezes of the eyes for extra intimacy as he guides me to an upright naughty chair with arms for a long stay. Then sits himself back the other side of the table, which is stacked with old-looking Circus files flagged in the colours of all nations. Then sets his shirt-sleeved elbows between them where I can’t see, and links his hands in a cat’s cradle under his chin.
‘I’m Bunny, by the by,’ he announces. ‘Bloody silly name, but it’s followed me around since infancy and I can’t get rid of it. Probably the reason I ended up in this place, come to think of it. You can’t very well strut your stuff in the High Court of Justice with everyone running after you yelling “Bunny, Bunny”, can you?’
Is this his usual patter? Is this how your average middle-aged Secret Service lawyer speaks these days? Now racy, now one foot in the past? My ear for contemporary English is shaky, but judging by Laura’s expression as she takes her place next to him, yes, it is. Seated, she is feral, ready to pounce. Signet ring on middle finger of right hand. Her daddy’s? Or a coded signal about sexual preference? I’d been out of England too long.
Meaningless small talk, led by Bunny. His children adore Brittany, both are girls. Laura has been to Normandy, but not Brittany. She doesn’t say who with.
‘But you’re Brittany born, Peter!’ Bunny protests suddenly, out of nowhere. ‘We should be calling you Pierre!’
Peter’s fine, I say.
‘So what we have, Peter, bluntly, is a bit of a serious legal porridge to sort out,’ Bunny resumes at a slower, louder pace, having spotted my new hearing aids peeking out of my white locks. ‘Not a crisis yet, but active, and I’m afraid rather volatile. And we very much need your help.’
To which I reply that I’m only too happy to oblige in any way I can, Bunny, and it’s nice to think one can still be of use after all these years.
‘Obviously I’m here to protect the Service. That’s my job,’ Bunny goes on, as if I haven’t spoken. ‘And you’re here as a private individual, an ex-member admittedly, long and happily retired, I am sure, but what I can’t guarantee is that your interests and our interests are going to coincide at every turn.’ Eyes to slits. Rictal grin. ‘So what I’m saying to you is, Peter: for all that we respect you enormously for all the splendid things you have done for the Office in days of yore, this is the Office. And you are you, and I am a lethal lawyer. How’s Catherine?’
‘Fine, thank you. Why do you ask?’
Because I haven’t listed her. To put the wind up me. To tell me the gloves are off. And what big eyes the Service has.
‘We wondered whether she should be added to the rather long list of your significant others,’ Bunny explains. ‘Service regulations and so forth.’
‘Catherine is my tenant. She’s the daughter and granddaughter of previous tenants. I choose to live on the premises, and insofar as it’s your business, I’ve never slept with her and I don’t intend to. Does that cover it?’
‘Admirably, thank you.’
My first lie, ably told. Now go for the swift deflection: ‘Sounds to me as if I need a lawyer of my own,’ I suggest.
‘Premature, and you can’t afford one. Not at today’s prices. We have you down as married, then unmarried. Are both correct?’
‘They are.’
‘All within the one calendar year. I’m impressed.’
‘Thank you.’
Are we joking? Or provoking? I’m suspecting the second.
‘A youthful folly?’ Bunny suggests, in the same courteous tone of enquiry.
‘A misunderstanding,’ I reply. ‘Any more questions?’
But Bunny does not give way easily, and wishes me to know it. ‘I mean, so who by – the child? Whose was it? The father?’ – still in the same glossy voice.
I affect to ponder. ‘Do you know, I don’t think I ever thought to ask her,’ I reply. And while he’s still meditating on this: ‘Since we’re talking about who does what to whom, maybe you’ll tell me what Laura’s doing here,’ I suggest.
‘Laura is History,’ Bunny replies sonorously.
History as an expressionless woman with short hair, brown eyes and no make-up. And nobody smiling any more, except me.
‘So what’s on the charge sheet, Bunny?’ I ask cheerfully, now that we’re getting to close quarters. ‘Setting fire to the Queen’s dockyards?’
‘Oh come, charge sheet is going it a bit, Peter!’ Bunny protests, just as cheerfully. ‘Things to resolve, that’s all. Let me ask you just one question ahead of the rest of the field. May I?’ – squeeze of the eyes. ‘Operation Windfall. How was it mounted, who drove it, where did it go so wrong, and what was your part in it?’
Does an easing of the soul take place when you realize your worst expectations have been fulfilled? Not in my case.
‘Windfall, Bunny, did you say?’
‘Windfall’ – louder, in case he hasn’t reached my deaf aids.
Keep it slow. Remember you’re of an age. Memory not your strong point these days. Take your time.
‘Now Windfall was what exactly, Bunny? Give me a pointer. What sort of date are we looking at?’
‘Early sixties, broadly. Today.’
‘An operation, you say?’
‘Covert. Called Windfall.’
‘Against what target?’
Laura, coming in from the blind side: ‘Soviet & Satellite. Directed against East German Intelligence. Otherwise known as the Stasi’ – bellowing for my benefit.
Stasi? Stasi? Give me a moment. Ah yes, the Stasi.
‘With what aim, Laura?’ I ask, having got it all together.
‘Mount a deception, mislead the enemy, protect a vital source. Penetrate Moscow Centre with the purpose of identifying the perceived traitor or traitors inside Circus ranks.’ And changing gear to downright plaintive: ‘Only we have absolutely zilch files on it any more. Just a bunch of cross-references to files that have vanished into thin air. Like missing, believed stolen.’
‘Windfall, Windfall,’ I repeat, shaking my head and smiling the way old men do, even if they’re not quite as old as other peop
le may think they are. ‘Sorry, Laura. Just doesn’t ring a bell, I’m afraid.’
‘Not even a distant chime?’ – Bunny.
‘Not a one, alas. Total blank’ – fighting off images of my youthful self in the garb of a pizza-delivery boy, bent over the handlebars of my learner’s motorbike as I rush a special order of late-night files from Circus headquarters to Somewhere in London.
‘And just in case I didn’t mention it, or you didn’t hear it,’ Bunny is saying, in his blandest voice. ‘It’s our understanding that Operation Windfall involved your friend and colleague Alec Leamas, who you may just remember got himself shot dead at the Berlin Wall while hastening to the assistance of his girlfriend Elizabeth Gold, who’d been shot dead at the Berlin Wall already. But perhaps you’ve forgotten that too?’
‘Of course I bloody haven’t,’ I snap. And only then, by way of explanation: ‘You were asking me about Windfall, not about Alec. And the answer’s no. I don’t remember it. Never heard of it. Sorry.’
*
In any interrogation, denial is the tipping point. Never mind the courtesies that went before. From the moment of denial, things are never going to be the same. At the secret-policeman level, denial is likely to provoke instant reprisal, not least because the average secret policeman is more stupid than his subject. The sophisticated interrogator, on the other hand, finding the door slammed in his face, does not immediately try to kick it in. He prefers to regroup and advance on his target from a different angle. And to judge by Bunny’s contented smile, that’s what he is sizing up to do now.