“Larry loves archetypes, Marjorie,” I replied, adopting a weary tone. “If they don’t exist, he appoints them. He’s an action freak, to use the modern parlance. He likes scale. Checheyev delivered it.”
“Did you?”
I gave an indulgent laugh. What on earth was she getting at— apart from me? “I was the home side, Marjorie. I was his England, warts and all. Checheyev was exotica. He was a closet Muslim the way Larry is a closet Christian. When Larry was with CC, he was on holiday. When he was with me, he was at school.”
“And it lasted,” she said. And left me dangling a moment. “Thanks to you.” She consulted her hands again. “Long after our other Cold War agents had been laid off, Larry continued to enjoy a full operational life. Checheyev’s tour in London was actually extended by Moscow so that he could go on handling Larry. Isn’t that rather odd, looking back?”
“Why should it be?”
“With other Cold War agents being run down?”
“Larry’s relationship with Moscow was unique. We had every reason to believe it could survive the Communist era. So did his Russian controllers.”
“That was certainly the view you encouraged.”
“Of course I did!” I had forgotten the force of my convictions in those days. “All right, there was a sea change. There was no Communist experiment left for Larry to admire, but then Larry was never that kind of agent anyway, not in their eyes, not in his. He was a scourge of Western materialism, a champion of Russia good or bad. What powered him—in the fiction and the reality—was his romanticism, his love of the underdog, his gut contempt for the British Establishment and its crawling adherence to America. Larry’s hatreds didn’t change when Communism collapsed. Neither did his loves. His dreams of a better, fairer world didn’t change—his love of the individual over the collective—his love of differentness and eccentricity. Neither did our pigs-in-clover society. After the Cold War it got worse. On both sides of the Atlantic. More corrupt, inward, conformist, intolerant, isolationist, smug. Less equitable. I’m talking Larry talk, Marjorie. I’m talking the renegade humanist who wants to save the world. The Britain that Larry was sabotaging in his imagination all those years is alive and well today. The worst government, the greyest leadership, the saddest, most deceived electorate we’ve ever had . . . Why shouldn’t Larry continue to betray us?”
Descending from my soapbox, I was pleased to see her blush. I imagined uncles in the cabinet and blue-rinsed aunts who were the backbone of the Tory right. “Leave Larry out there. That was my argument. Wait and see what the new Russian intelligence service does with him. They’re only the same crowd in different hats. They’re not going to sit back and let one corrupt superpower run the earth. Wait for the next act, instead of ditching him and then trying to catch up when it’s too late, which is what we usually do.”
“However, your eloquence failed to carry the day,” she pointed out while she thoughtfully fingered her fob-chain.
“Unfortunately, yes. Anyone who had an ounce of history in him should have known it would be business as usual in a year or two. But that didn’t include the Top Floor. It wasn’t the Russians who dumped Larry. It was us.”
Her hands let go the fob-chain, joined, and prayed beneath her chin again. There was premonition in her stillness. On the other side of the room, Barney Waldon gazed into the middle air. Then I realized they had heard something that they were attuned to and I was not—some electronic beep or buzz or tinkle from another room—and it reminded me of Emma in the orchard, hearing Larry’s car before I did, on the day he made his first appearance.
Without explanation, Marjorie Pew got up and stepped as if commanded towards one of the inner doors. Like a ghost she passed through it, leaving it as securely closed as before.
“Barney, what the bloody hell’s going on?” I whispered as soon as we were alone. We were both straining our ears, but the acoustics were immaculate, and I for one heard nothing.
“Lot of clever women in the shop these days, Tim,” he replied, still listening. I couldn’t tell whether this was a boast or a lament. “Suits them, mind, the nit-picking. Right up their alley.”
“But what does she want from me?” I pressed. “I mean, Christ, Barney, I’m in retirement. I’m a has-been. Why’s she giving me the hairy eyeball?”
Marjorie Pew returned, sparing him a reply. Her face was stony and even paler than before. She sat down and put her fingertips together. I saw that they were trembling. You’ve been getting the slow handclap, I thought. Whoever’s listening has told you to get hostile or get out. I felt a quickening of my pulses. I wished I could stand up and walk around. I’ve been too bloody glib, I thought, and now I’m going to pay for it.
4
“Tim.”
“Marjorie.”
“Am I right in suggesting that Larry was at odds with us by the time he left?” A harder, clotted voice. A faster glance.
“He was always at odds with us, Marjorie.”
“But by the end quite specifically, I gather.”
“He thought we weren’t worthy of the luck that history had dealt us.”
“Luck how?”
“As the winners in the Cold War. He regretted the unreality of it all.”
“Of what all?” Acidly.
“Of the Cold War. Of two discredited ideologies fighting for a peace neither wanted, with weapons that didn’t work. That’s another Larry quote.”
“Did you agree with him?”
“To a point.”
“Do you think he felt we owed him something? We the Office. Something he was entitled to help himself to, for example?”
“He wanted his life back. That was rather more than we could do for him.”
“Do you think he felt the Russians owed him something?”
“Quite the reverse. He owed them. He does a pretty good line in guilt too.”
She gave an impatient toss of her head, as if guilt were not her responsibility. “And you are saying that throughout the last four years of his operational life for us, Larry had no financial dealings with Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev? Or none that you reported?”
“I am saying that if he had them I wasn’t aware of them and therefore I didn’t report any.”
“What about you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did you have any financial dealings with Checheyev you did not report?”
“No, Marjorie, I have not had any financial dealings with Checheyev or any other member of Russian intelligence past or present.”
“Not with Volodya Zorin.”
“Not with Zorin.”
“And not with Pettifer either.”
“Apart from keeping him out of bankruptcy, no.”
“But you do have private means, of course.”
“I have been fortunate, Marjorie. My parents died when I was young, so I had money instead of love.”
“Will you please give me some idea of your personal expenditure over the last twelve months?”
Did I say Merriman had joined us? Perhaps not, for I am not sure at what point he did so, though his entry must have followed quite soon upon Marjorie’s return. He was a big man, a floater, very light on his feet, the way large men often are, and I suppose the door he came in by must have been ajar, left that way by Marjorie. Yet it puzzled me that I had not noticed this, for like many people in my trade, I have a thing about unclosed doors. I could only suppose that in the internal mayhem brought on by Marjorie Pew’s assault, I had failed to observe the displacement of air and light as Merriman soundlessly lowered his ample rump onto the convenient arm of Barney’s sofa. I had turned in indignation to Barney, protesting the enormity of her question. Instead I found myself looking at Merriman. He was wearing a stiff white collar, a silver tie, and a red carnation. Merriman was always dressed for someone’s wedding.
“Tim. How nice.”
“Hullo, Jake. You’re just in time. I’m being asked to say how much money I’ve spent this year.”
/>
“Yes, how much have you? There’s the Bechstein for a start. That cost a bomb. Then there’s your little pilgrimages to Mr. Appleby’s nice jeweller’s shop in Wells, never cheap—you’ve dropped thirty grand there—not to mention all the frillies and smart frocks you’ve bought her. Must be quite a gal. Lucky she disapproves of motor-cars, or I can see a Bentley with mink-lined seats. I know you inherited early from your parents, I know your uncle Bob left you Schloss and contents, but what about the rest? Or is it all from naughty Aunt Cecily, who died so conveniently in Portugal a few years back? For a fellow who never cared about money, you certainly know how to pick a relative.”
“If you don’t believe me, check with my solicitors.”
“My dear boy, they bear you out entirely. Half a million quids’ worth of the best, added to what you’ve already got, paid in two instalments from a nice Channel Islands trust fund. The solicitors never met the aunt, mind. They were instructed by a firm in Lisbon. The firm in Lisbon never met her either. They were instructed by her business manager, a lawyer in Paris. I mean really, Tim, I’ve seen money laundered before, but never lawyers.” He turned to Marjorie Pew and spoke as if I weren’t in the room. “We’re still checking, so he needn’t think he’s in the clear. If Aunt Cecily turns up in a pauper’s grave, Cranmer’s for the high jump.”
“Tim?”
It was Marjorie again. She would like to go back to the logic of my behaviour last night, she said. She wondered whether she might run it by me one more time to make sure she had it straight, Tim.
“Be my guest,” I said, using a phrase I had never used in my life.
“Tim, why did you telephone us from your house? You said it was in your mind that the police might have been running illegal taps and that they’d made up the story about Larry’s vigilant Scottish landlady as cover. Mightn’t they have been tapping your phone too? I’d have thought that with your training and experience, you’d have driven to the village and used the public box.”
“I used the established procedure.”
“I’m not certain you did. Rule One is to make sure it’s safe.”
I glanced at Merriman, but he had adopted the posture of a hostile audience, eyeing me as he might a prisoner in the dock.
“The police could have put a tap on the village box as well,” I said. “Not that they’d have got much joy of it. It’s usually bust.”
“I see,” she said, implying once again that she didn’t.
“It would have looked pretty damned odd, at eleven at night, if I had driven a mile into the village to make a call. Particularly if the police were watching my house.”
She looked at the tips of her groomed fingers, then at me again, as she began counting off the points that were troubling her. Merriman had decided he preferred the ceiling. Waldon the floor.
“You cut yourself off from Pettifer. You think his disappearance may be perfectly normal. But it worries you so much you can’t wait to tell us about it. You know Checheyev has retired. You know Pettifer has. But you suspect they’re up to something, though you don’t know what or why. You think the police may be tapping your phone. But you use it to ring us. You spend twenty minutes staring at this building before you pluck up the courage to enter it. One could therefore be forgiven for assuming that ever since the police called on you last night, you have been in a state of stress quite disproportionate to Pettifer’s disappearance. One might even suppose that you had something very weighty on your mind. So weighty that even a person as overcontrolled as yourself makes a string of tradecraft errors at odds with his training.”
My apprehensions had given way to outright rejoicing. I forgave her everything: her courtroom pomposity, her shrouded savagery, her description of me as overcontrolled. Angel choirs were singing in my ears, and as far as I was concerned, Marjorie Pew as in church was one of the angels. I had told her nothing. Never mind that she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me the date of Checheyev’s last visit. She had told me something even more important: They didn’t know about Emma and Larry.
They knew about Emma and me, because under Office rules I had been obliged to tell them. But they hadn’t drawn the third line of the triangle. And that, as we used to say, was three-star intelligence: worth the whole journey.
I selected a sentimental, wounded tone. “Larry was more than my agent, Marjorie,” I said. “He was my friend for quarter of a century. On top of that, he was the best live source we had. He was one of those joes who make their own luck. In the beginning, the KGB recruited him on spec. He wasn’t big enough to be an agent of influence; he didn’t have access worth a hoot. They gave him a small salary and let him loose on the international conference circuit, armed with a bunch of briefs written by Moscow Centre, and they hoped that in time he would amount to somebody. He did. He became their man, talent-spotting left-wing students, earmarking tomorrow’s friendlies for the Kremlin, and flying kites at world conferences. After a few years, thanks to Larry, this office had put together its own cast of tame Communist agents, some Brit, some foreign, but all wholly owned by this service, who between them fed Moscow some of the most sophisticated disinformation of the Cold War, and the KGB never rumbled it. He attracted subverts like flypaper. He worked the Third World fence-sitters till he had blisters on his backside. He had a memory that most of us would kill for. He knew every bought MP in Westminster, every suborned British journalist, lobbyist, and agent of influence on Moscow Centre’s London payroll. There were people in the KGB and people in the Office who owed him their living and their promotion. I was one of them. So yes, I was concerned. I still am.”
In the respectful silence that followed this peroration, I realised that I knew what H/IS stood for. If Jake Merriman was Head of Personnel and Barney Waldon was Office liaison at Scotland Yard, Marjorie Pew was that hated jackal of the Service, formerly known to the lower orders as the Polit-Commissar and now dignified by the title Head of Internal Security. Her job involved everything from unemptied wastepaper baskets to thinking dirty about the love lives of past and present employees and reporting her suspicions to Jake Merriman. Why else would Merriman and Waldon defer to her like this? Why else would she now be asking me to describe—in my own words, as if I were about to use someone else’s—how I had succeeded in acquiring Larry for the Office in the first place? Marjorie Pew wanted to test some cockeyed conspiracy theory that Larry and I had been in cahoots from the beginning; that I had not recruited Larry but Larry had recruited himself; or, better, that Larry and Checheyev between them had recruited me in some crooked and self-serving enterprise.
I trod cautiously all the same. In our trade, theories like hers had wrecked good men’s lives on both sides of the Atlantic before being laid sheepishly to rest. I answered her with care and accuracy, even if, to demonstrate my ease of mind, I allowed myself occasional flights of flippancy.
“When I first met him he was a total gypsy,” I said.
“That was at Oxford?”
“No, at Winchester. Larry was a new boy the same term I became a prefect. He was an exhibitioner of some sort. The school paid half his fees, the Church of England provided him with a bursary for being impoverished and picked up the rest. The school was still in the dark ages. Fagging, flogging, bullying galore, the whole Arnoldian package. Larry didn’t fit, and he didn’t want to. He was sloppy and clever, he refused to learn his Notions but couldn’t keep his mouth shut, which made him unpopular in some quarters and a bit of a hero in others. He got beaten blue. I tried to protect him.”
She smiled tolerantly, acknowledging the homosexual undertone but too shrewd to articulate it. “Protect him how, exactly, Tim?”
“Help him curb his tongue. Stop him making himself so damned unpopular. It worked for a few halves, then he got caught smoking, then he got caught drinking. Then he got caught at St. Swithin’s girls’ school doing the other thing, which excited the envy of less brave souls—”
“Such as yourself?”
“—and cut him
off from the homosexual mainstream,” I went on, with a nice smile for Merriman. “When flogging didn’t have the desired effect, the school expelled him. His father, who was canon of some big cathedral, washed his hands of him; his mother was dead. A distant relative stumped up the money to send him to school in Switzerland, but after one term the Swiss said no thanks and sent him back to England. How he got his scholarship to Oxford is a mystery, but he did, and Oxford duly fell in love with him. He was very good-looking; the girls rolled over for him in droves. He was a beautiful, lawless”—I felt suddenly embarrassed—“extrovert,” I said, using a word I thought would please her.
Jake Merriman chimed in. “And he was a Marxist, bless him.”
“And a Trotskyist and an atheist and a pacifist and an anarchist and anything else so long as it scared the rich,” I retorted. “For a while he favoured a conjunction of Marx and Christ, but it fell apart for him when he decided he couldn’t believe in Christ. And he was a voluptuary.” I threw this out carelessly and was pleased to observe a tautening of Marjorie Pew’s undecorated lips. “By the end of his second year the university had to decide whether to send him down or give him a fellowship to All Souls. They sent him down.”
“For what, precisely?” Pew said, in an effort to limit my effusion.
“Being too much. Too much drink, too much politics, too little work, too many women. He was too free. He was excessive. He must go. The next time I saw him was in Venice.”
“By which time you were married, of course,” she said, contriving to insinuate that my marriage was somehow a betrayal of my friendship with Larry. And I saw Merriman’s head go back once more and his eyes resume their watch on the ceiling.
“Yes, and in the Office,” I agreed. “Diana was in the Office too. We were on our honeymoon. And suddenly there Larry was, in St. Mark’s Square, dressed in a Union Jack and holding up his Winchester straw hat on the point of a rolled umbrella.” No smiles anywhere, except from me. “He was playing tour guide to a group of American matrons, and as usual every one of them in love with him. And so they should have been. He knew everything there was to know about Venice, he was inexhaustibly enthusiastic, he had good Italian and talked English like a lord, and he couldn’t make up his mind whether to convert to Catholicism or light a bomb under the Vatican. I yelled, ‘Larry!’ He saw me, flung his hat and brolly in the air, and embraced me. Then I introduced him to Diana.”