I said this, but my mind was on the subtext: the aching monot-ony and unhappy lovemaking of our honeymoon, by then in its second week, the sheer relief—to Diana too, as she later told me—of having a third person in our lives, one as wild as Larry into the bargain, even if he made fun of her conventional ways. I saw Larry in his red-white-and-blue T-shirt kneeling dramatically at Diana’s feet, one hand clutched to his heart, the other holding out his hat, the hat, his Wykehamist strat, the same miraculous survivor that he had worn for our grape harvest at Honeybrook just a year ago. Its lid taped down, varnished, and enamelled, then, as now, its basket life long over. And around its crown, tattered but victorious, our sacred House hatband. I heard his mellow voice with its bogus Italian accent ripping theatrically through the Venice sunlight as he yells his crazy salutation: It’s a-Timbo! The Boy-a Bishop himself! And you’re his a-lovely bride-a!
“We took him to restaurants, visited his awful digs—he was living with a Pomeranian countess, naturally—and one morning I woke up and had this inspiration: He’s exactly what we’re looking for, the one we’ve been talking about at the Friday seminars. We’ll sign him up and take him all the way through.”
“And it didn’t bother you that he was your friend?” she suggested.
At the word friend, a different pain swept over me. Friend? I never came near him, I thought. Familiar maybe, but friend never. He was the risk I would never take.
“It would have bothered me a lot more if he had been my enemy, Marjorie,” I heard myself replying silkily. “We’re talking the depths of the Cold War. We were fighting for our survival. We believed in what we were doing.” I could not resist the gibe: “I imagine these days that comes a little harder.”
And then, in case the New Era had blurred her memory of the old one, I explained what it meant to take someone all the way through: how the agent-running section was constantly under pressure to find a young man—in those days it had to be a man—to trail his coat at the busy-bee Russian recruiters who were working the Oxbridge circuit from the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. And how Larry fitted in almost every possible way the profile we had drawn of the man we dreamed of finding, or they did—we could even send him back to Oxford to do a third year and sit his Finals.
“Blast the fellow, he landed an outright First against my rather shaky Second,” I said with a sporting laugh, which no one shared: not Merriman, who was continuing his examination of the ceiling, or Waldon, who had set his jaw in such a grim lock that you could have wondered whether he would ever speak again.
And how we would give the Russian recruiters precisely what they were looking for and had found for themselves in the past to such effect, I went on: a classy Englishman on the slide, an intellectual explorer, a Golden Boy Going Wrong, a God-seeker sympathetic to the Party but not compromised by formally belonging to it, unanchored, immature, unstable, politically omnivorous, crafty in a vague way, and, when he needed to be, larcenous—
“So you propositioned him,” Marjorie Pew interrupted, managing to make it sound as if I had picked Larry up in a public lavatory.
I laughed. My laughter was annoying her, so I was doing quite a lot of it.
“Oh my goodness, not for months, Marjorie. We had to fight it through the system first. A lot of people on the Top Floor said he’d never accept the discipline. His school reports were awful, university reports worse. Everyone said he was brilliant, but for what? Can I make a point here?”
“Please do.”
“The recruitment of Larry was a group operation. When he agreed to take the veil, my section head decided I should have the handling of him. But only on the understanding that I report to him before and after every meeting with Larry.”
“So why did he take the veil, as you call it?” she asked.
Her question filled me with a deep tiredness. If you don’t know now, you never will, I wanted to tell her. Because he was footloose. Because he was a soldier. Because God told him to and he didn’t believe in God. Because he had a hangover. Or hadn’t. Because the dark side of him liked an airing too. Because he was Larry and I was Tim and it was there.
“He relished the challenge of it, I suppose,” I said. “To be what you are, but more so. He liked the idea of being a free servant. It answered his sense of duty.”
“A what?”
“It was a bit of German he had in his head. Frei sein ist Knecht. To be free is to be a vassal.”
“Is that all?”
“All what?”
“Is that the full range of his motivation or were there more practical considerations?”
“He was lured by the glamour. We told him there wasn’t any, but that only whetted his appetite. He saw himself as some sort of heretic Templar knight, paying his tribute to orthodoxy. He liked having two fathers, even if he never said so—the KGB and us. If you asked me to write it all down, you’d have a string of contradictions. That’s Larry. That’s joes. Motive doesn’t exist in the abstract. It’s not who people are. It’s what they do.”
“Thank you.”
“Not at all.”
“And the money?
“I’m sorry?”
“The money that we paid him. The substantial tax-free income. What part did the money play in his calculations, do you suppose?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Marjorie, nobody worked for money in those days, and Larry never worked for money in his life. I told you. He called his pay Judas money. He’s money-illiterate. A financial Neanderthal.”
“Nevertheless he got through an awful lot of it.”
“He was feckless. Whatever he had he spent. He was a touch for everyone with a sob story. He had one or two expensive upper-class habits, which we encouraged because Russians are snobs, but in most ways he was totally unmaterialistic.”
“Like what?”
“Like buying his wine from Berry’s. Like having his shoes made.”
“I don’t call that unmaterialistic. I call it extravagant.”
“That’s just words,” I flung back.
For a while no one spoke, which I took as a good omen. Marjorie was making yet another tour of her unvarnished fingernails. Barney was looking as if he would prefer to be safely back among his policemen. Finally Jake Merriman, emerging from his unnatural trance, straightened himself, smoothed his hands over his waistcoat, then ran a finger round the inside of his stiff white collar to free it from the folds of flesh that threatened to engulf it.
“Your Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev has milked the Russian government of thirty-seven million quid and rising,” he said. “They’re still counting. Friday last, the Russian ambassador here sought parley with the foreign secretary and presented him with a file of evidence. Why he chose a Friday, when the secretary was just leaving for his dacha, God alone knows. But he did, and Larry’s hoofprints are all over the file. Daylight, premeditated banditry, Tim Cranmer, by your ex-agent and his former KGB controller. Odds are, Checheyev got word that the balloon was about to go up and hightailed it to Bath to advise Larry to do a runner before the ambassador made his démarche. Are you trying to say something? Don’t.”
I had shown no sign of this that I knew of, so shook my head, but he was already talking again.
“It’s a simple enough racket they were working, but don’t let’s knock it for that. Very few Russian banks are empowered to transfer money abroad. Those that are tend to have close links with the former KGB. A U.K.-based accomplice sets up a bogus U.K. company— import, export, you name it—and bangs in bogus bills to his mates in Moscow. The bills are authenticated by crooked officials, mafia linked. Then they’re paid. There’s a gloss I like particularly. It seems the Russian legal code hasn’t yet got round to addressing such modern eccentricities as bank fraud, so nobody gets hammered and everyone who might make a stink gets a cut instead. Russian banks are still in the ice age, profits are an abstraction nobody takes seriously, so in the immortal words of Noel Coward, whistle up the caviar and say, ‘Thank
God.’”
Another hiatus while Merriman raised his eyebrows at me in invitation, but I remained silent.
“Having landed the cash, Checheyev did what we’d all do. He buried it in a string of no-see-um accounts in Britain and abroad. In most of these enterprises your old friend Larry functioned as his intermediary, bagman, and red-toothed accomplice: registering the companies, opening the accounts, presenting the bills, stashing the loot. In a minute you’re going to tell me it’s all in Checheyev’s weaselly imagination; he forged Larry’s signature. You’ll be wrong. Larry’s in it up to his nasty neck, and for all we know, so are you. Are you?”
“No.”
He turned to Barney. “How far down the line are the rozzers?”
“Commander, Special Branch, is reporting to the cabinet secretary at five this evening,” Barney said, having first cleared his throat.
“Is that where Bryant and Luck come from?” I asked.
Barney Waldon was about to confirm this when Merriman cut rudely in: “That’s for us to know and him to guess, Barney.”
But I had my answer: yes.
“Rumour has it that their investigations are getting nowhere fast, but that may be bluff,” Barney went on. “The last thing I can do is show undue interest. I’ve told Special Branch it’s not our problem; I’ve put my hand on my heart to say it’s not. I’ve told the Met, I’ve told the Somerset Constabulary. I’ve sold them the Lie Direct.” It seemed to bother him.
Merriman again: “So don’t you go spoiling our game, Tim Cranmer, do you hear? If they catch Larry and he claims he worked for us, we’ll deny it and go on denying it right up to the trial and out the other end. If he says he worked for you, then Mr. Timothy Cranmer, ex-Treasury, gets dropped down a very deep hole. And in the new spirit of openness, dear boy: If you so much as open your mouth, God help you.”
“Is their ambassador presenting Checheyev as a bona fide diplomat?”
“Ex-diplomat. Yes, he is. And since we never raised a finger of complaint against Checheyev in the four years he was in London, for the obvious reason that we wanted to keep the intelligence flowing, we’re taking the same position. If anyone breathes the word spook, the Foreign Office will have the vapours.”
“What about Checheyev’s relationship with Larry?”
“What about it? It was legit. Checheyev was a cultural attaché, active, popular, and effective. Larry was a pinko intellectual has-been who accepted regular freebies to Mother Russia, Cuba, and other unsavoury corners of the globe. Now he’s a quietly flowing don in Bath. Their relationship was natural and proper, and if it wasn’t, no one’s saying so.” Merriman had not taken his eyes off me. “If the Russians ever get the idea that Larry Pettifer worked for this service— had been, for the last twenty and more years, as you have repeatedly reminded us, our most obedient servant—there will be an earth-quake, do you follow me? They’ve already given your nice friend Zorin the summary heave-ho—alcoholism, passive conspiracy, having his head up his arse—he’s under house arrest and by all accounts stands a good chance of being shot at dawn. It’s extremely nice of us not to have done the same to you. If they ever take it into their tiny minds—the police, the Russians, either or both: it’s the same thing in this situation, since the police are flying blind and we propose to keep them that way—that this service, in cahoots with one or other of the Russian mafias, elected at a time when the Russian economy is dying of the common cold to con it out of thirty-seven million quids’ worth of the best . . .” He gave up. “You can finish the sentence for yourself. Yes, what is it?”
It was the eternal refrain in me. Even in my turmoil, I could not hold it back: “When was Larry last seen?” I said.
“Ask the police, except don’t.”
“When did Checheyev last visit Britain?”
“No Checheyev entered Britain in the last six months. But since it was received wisdom that Checheyev was never his name in the first place, it would be fairly surprising if he came back as somebody he’d never been.”
“Have you tried his aliases?”
“May I remind you that you’re retired?” He had had enough of small talk. “You’re to do nothing, young Tim Cranmer, d’you hear? You’re to sit in your castle, perform your good works, churn out your vintage pipi, act natural, and look innocent. You’re not to leave the country without Mummy’s permission, and we’ve got your passport, though these days that’s not the guarantee it used to be, alas. You’re not to make the smallest move towards Larry by word, deed, gesture, or telephone. Not you, not your agents or instruments, not your delicious Emma. You’re not to discuss Larry or his disappearance or any part of this conversation with anyone at all, and that includes colleagues and connections. Does Larry still flirt with Diana?”
“He never did. He just kept up with her to annoy me. And because they decided they hated the Office.”
“Absolutely nothing has happened. Nobody is missing. You’re an ex–Treasury boffin who lives with a neurotic child composer, or whatever she is, and grows bloody awful wine. Over and out. If you call us, make it a full-blown clandestine call from a safe phone. The number we’re giving you has a rotating final digit for each day. Sunday’s one, Monday’s two. Do you think you can handle that?”
“Seeing that I invented the system, yes.”
Marjorie Pew handed me a slip of paper with an 071 number typed on it. Merriman kept talking.
“If the rozzers want to talk to you again, you’re to continue lying in your teeth. They’re trying to find out what research you were doing at the Treasury, but Treasury is being as anally retentive as Treasury usually is, and the rozzers will get nowhere. As far as we’re concerned, you don’t exist. You were never here. Cranmer? Cranmer? Never heard of him.”
We were alone, Merriman and Cranmer, blood brothers as always. Merriman had taken my arm. He always took your arm to say goodbye.
“After all we’ve done for him,” he said. “A pension, a fresh start, a good job after practically every university in England had turned him down, status. Now this.”
“It’s too bad,” I agreed. There seemed nothing else worth saying.
Merriman smiled roguishly. “You haven’t executive-actioned him, have you, Tim?”
“Why should I have done?”
For the first time that day, I came within an ace of losing the last of what Marjorie Pew had called my overcontrol.
“But why shouldn’t you have done?” Merriman countered archly. “Isn’t that rather what crooks do to each other, in preference to dividing up the loot?” A mirthless giggle. “And is it simply marvellous with Emma? Are you deliriously in love?”
“Yes, but she’s away at the moment.”
“I can’t bear it. Where?”
“Attending a couple of performances of her stuff in the Midlands.”
“Shouldn’t you be there to chaperone her?”
“She prefers to do those things alone.”
“Of course. Her independent streak. And she’s not too young for you?”
“When she is, I’ve no doubt she’ll tell me.”
“Bully for you, Tim. Stout boy. Never withdraw your cavalry from the battle, I always say. The Emmas of this world require our constant attention. Look at her record.”
“No, thank you.”
But with Merriman you never score. “No, thank you? You haven’t peeked?”
“No, and I don’t intend to.”
“But, my dear boy, you must! So full, so varied, quel courage! Change the names, you could write a blockbuster in your old age. Far more lucrative than Uncle Bobby’s weasel’s piss. Tim?”
“What is it?”
His fingers tightened round my biceps. “This long, long connection you had with dear Larry. Winchester, Oxford, the Office . . . So fruitful at the time. So appropriate. But today, dear boy, a no-no.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“The image, dearie. The noble past, the old era. In the hands of Grub Street,
dynamite. They’ll be crying university spy rings and the love that dare not speak its name before you can say Kim Philby. And you weren’t, were you?”
“Weren’t what?” I replied, fighting off the memory of Emma standing naked at my bedroom window, asking me the same question.
“Well, you know. You and Larry. Any of that. Were you?”
“If you’re enquiring whether we were homosexuals and traitors, we were neither. Larry was that public school rarity the Compleat Heterosexual.”
He gave my arm another lingering squeeze. “Poor you. What a disappointment for a healthy lad. Ah well, that’s the way of it, isn’t it? Punished for the crimes we never committed, while we get away with grand larceny somewhere else. So important that we’re all terribly, terribly careful. The worst is scandal. Lie as much as you like, but spare me scandal. Very hard for the Office to find its niche these days. Lot of flies round the honey pot. Always here, dear boy. Anytime.”
Munslow was hovering in the anteroom. Seeing me emerge, he fell in beside me. His hands dangled uncomfortably at his sides. Neither of them carried my passport.
5
I had two hours to kill before the last train left for Castle Cary, and probably I walked. Somewhere I must have bought an evening newspaper, though I loathe them. It was in my raincoat pocket the next morning, folded into a grimy wad of illiterate newsprint, with the crossword completed in spiky capitals quite unlike my own. And I must have had a couple of Scotches along the way, for I remember little of the journey beyond the reflection riding along beside me in the black window, and sometimes the face was Larry’s, sometimes mine, and sometimes Emma’s with her hair up, wearing the eighteenth-century pearl collar I had given her the day she brought her piano stool to Honeybrook. So much was in my head that nothing was. Larry has stolen thirty-seven million; Checheyev is his accomplice; I am supposed to be another. He has fled with the loot; Emma has gone after him. Larry, whom I taught to steal, rifle desks, pick locks, photograph papers, memorise, bide his time, and, if he ever had to, run and hide. Colonel Volodya Zorin, once the pride of Moscow’s England section, is under house arrest. Crossing the footbridge at Castle Cary station, I was confused by the clatter of young shoes in the Victorian ironwork and fancied I smelled steam and burning coals. I was a boy again, lugging my school suitcase down the stone steps for another solitary holiday with Uncle Bob.