by John Lawton
“Joe? Do we have deal?”
“I think we do.”
“And the price?”
At last. First things saved till last.
Wilderness gilded the lily. Named a price he hoped was too high. It was.
“That’s … that’s … what’s the word … steep.”
“It’s what it goes for in Helsinki.”
“But this isn’t Helsinki. It’s ten miles across the lake. Easier for you by far.”
“I could offer a discount. But there’d be a quid pro quo.”
“I’m listening.”
“When you take delivery of the vodka, I want your men to load something else onto the plane.”
“We’ve nothing you could possibly want.”
“Bring me the sacks of bog paper.”
Kostya looked dumbstruck. He said nothing for the best part of a minute.
“You know. I was about to order breakfast. I don’t think I’ll bother. Joe, what in God’s name do you want with bog paper?”
“You said it yourself, yesterday. Before it encountered Soviet arse-holes, it was Classified or Secret or Top Secret.”
“But it’s covered in—”
“I know.”
“And it’s secret.”
“But it’s covered in—”
“Stop, stop, stop!”
“It’s because it’s covered in shit that you can give it to me. Unless my people can find a way of cleaning it up without losing the print, it’s worthless, therefore it can’t be secret anymore, can it?”
“That’s very specious reasoning, Joe.”
“Specious? It’s pure sophistry. But let it salve your conscience. You’d be giving me something worthless.”
“Might your people clean it up?”
“I’ve no idea. I don’t care. I just want the pleasure of mailing them sacks of Russian shit in the diplomatic bag.”
Another pause for thought. The waitress approached with her notepad. Kostya just shook his head, and with it seemed to shake off all doubt about the deal.
“How much of a discount?”
“Ten percent.”
“Twenty.”
“Fifteen.”
“Done.”
“You are your mother’s son after all.”
What, Wilderness wondered, brought the blush to his cheeks? The mention of Volga Vasilievna Zolotukhina or the mistaken assumption that he’d just negotiated well with the enemy and scored a few points?
§51
Wilderness left Persereiikkä with a Russian-made map of Lapland in his hand, a creek just north of Nellim ringed in blue biro, and a dozen questions in his head. Some of them he’d put to Eddie as soon as he could.
Chaplin looked at the encrypted message.
“Another wedding? So soon?”
“No. A funeral. My great-grandmother died. One hundred and fifteen.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Yes. Isn’t it?”
“I’ll have to tell Mrs. Burton.”
“Has she told you not to send?”
“Not yet, but she will.”
Wilderness to Eddie:
—What do the Watchers say Mother is short of? And don’t give me a lecture just a list.
The replies:
—Such as?
—No prompts just tell me what they think.
—Zinc’s OK. Copper’s down. Nickel’s all but wiped out. Steel’s booming.
Second biggest uranium reserves on Earth. Mountains of coal. Petrol pouring in from Roumania. Will that do?
—Crops?
Two lousy harvests in a row, but you could have found that out from the Daily Express. Is this leading anywhere? I’ve got work to do y’know.
—What have you heard about a crackdown on illegal stills?
—Oh, they’ve been moaning about that for a while. It takes a bushel of grain to make a gallon of vodka.
—What the fuck is a bushel?
—About 60 lbs. It takes 10-12 pounds of grain to make a bottle of vodka. Mother can’t spare the grain. Been importing grain for years. One bottle of vodka gets one bastard drunk for a day.
12 lbs of grain makes enough bread to last a family for a week. Simple maths really.
—So they really are short of vodka?
—And spuds.
—And paper?
—That too. There’s a story going round the office that the poor buggers stationed in East Germany are so short of bog roll they’re wiping their backsides on classified documents.
—You have to wonder, don’t you? Who makes these things up?
§52
It was still summer, but soon enough September would begin to look autumnal and presage a winter of almost unimaginable cold.
To be sitting by a sun-dappled lake on the edge of the arctic circle, sipping a Belgian beer, watching sand martins and swallows take insects on the wing, made life in London seem exactly where it was—a thousand miles away.
“You know,” said Pastorius, “your friend Kostya might have fucked it up for us all.”
“How so?”
“You have been bored.”
“Are we back to Hamlet again?”
“Whereas I have been happy.”
“Busy doing nothing?”
“Which, as we know, is a crime.”
“You didn’t have to listen to Prudence Latymer … and while you oblige me by sitting through the worst that British cinema has to offer … you don’t have to.”
“Kostya … has made us spies again. I was happy as a sleeper. I might even say I was happy as a travel agent. But you, you want the bit between your teeth, don’t you?”
“I was content enough trucking the vodka around.”
“But now you seem to have a real spy. And if you have a real spy … so do I.”
Kostya had shown up the night before at the hotel in Persereiikkä and paid in full for the seventy-two bottles of 105 proof vodka currently winging their way across the lake, with all the potential for drunk, puking and blindness.
Wilderness had watched the Beaver take off, as improbable as an albatross or a giant bumble bee. Wings too small, feet too big. As speed and lift broke the meniscus of the water it was as though something organic had snapped and the plane popped skyward.
Now it was returning, just visible in the east, all but touching the treetops. He doubted they’d flown much higher at any point on the trip.
“Of course—”
Pastorius paused as the Beaver dropped sharply, as though it would just bounce off the water.
“Of course what?”
“Of course we still don’t know he’s a spy. And if he’s not a spy then he’s just a crook—in short, he’s one of us.”
“Oh, he’s a spy alright. We just haven’t proved it yet.”
“And were he to be a spy … what is there to spy on? The trees and the lakes are all too apparent … the mines are underground … there’s no industry to speak of and absolutely no military bases. The Russians and the Americans have photographed every square metre and the Swedes have mined the highways. In short, everyone knows everything. We are the naked country. Stripped bare as your Lady Godiva in our spurious neutrality.”
The Beaver dipped to the left, the near wing seemingly inches above the water—a graceful 180-degree turn—the engine died and as the propeller fluttered down to zero Momo set the plane neatly at the end of the jetty.
A thing of beauty, Wilderness thought. Some part of him wished he’d learned to fly, that would have given an extra touch of credibility to being in the RAF—but he hadn’t even finished basic training before MI6 had nabbed him.
The door opened. Bruce stood on the jetty, stretched, yawned, yelled.
“You bastards. You pair of complete and utter fucking bastards!”
Momo threw a large plastic sack out of the plane, to land at Bruce’s feet.
“Stuff, you said. We’d be carrying ‘stuff’ back. This isn’t stuff, it’s shit! Leastways it smells like shi
t. My plane stinks like a Borroloola dunny on a summer’s day. You bastards!”
“What’s he talking about?” Pastorius asked.
“Niilo, if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“And there’s six of them! You fuckers!”
Over beer and more beer, Momo said, “All those Russian phrases you had me learn were no fuckin’ use. All the Ivans do is grunt.”
All? There’d been four—Здравствуйте (hello)—Джо послал нас (Joe sent us)—Положите их сюда (put them here)—Спасибо (thank you).
“OK. Next time I’ll come with you.”
“For real?”
“Why not? I’ve spent my life since I was eighteen studying Russia and Russians and this side of the lake is the closest I’ve ever been. Who knows? I might even put a toe over the border.”
“If you like I could fly that bit further, kick you out and let you walk back. Shit bags, Joe. You’ve got me hefting shit bags around for a living. The next time England takes on the Krauts you can whistle Land of Hope and Glory and fly your own fucking Spitfires.”
§53
Wilderness found his way to “Dispatch,” one floor below ground level at chancery.
It was a little like being backstage in a theatre—more like a packing shed than an office. England was not on display—no gilt, no paintings on loan from the National Gallery, no mirrors, and just one royal photograph above the desk and that both old (George V & Queen Mary) and dusty.
A bloke in a brown warehouse coat looked at the sacks. Then he looked at Wilderness.
“Six at once?”
“Yes, please. Next diplomatic bag.”
The man bent down and sniffed.
“Bit whiffy, aren’t they?”
Oh, the gentle English art of understatement.
Then he bent lower, inhaled too much and began waving his hand madly as though trying to disperse a fart.
“S’truth!”
Wilderness knew he was dying to ask what was in the sacks, but the rules didn’t allow for that. And if he mentioned a Borroloola dunny the man would be none the wiser.
“SIS, you say? What department?”
Forensics or Decryption? Wilderness wondered. He settled on Forensics. If they could clean it up to the point where text was visible then the paper could go to Decryption.
There might, he thought, be something in this, there might not. Either way there was a pleasing surge of satisfaction in being able to mail six sacks of shit to MI6.
Time to celebrate.
On the way home he bought two bottles of Moldavian claret.
§54
A couple of hours later Janis Bell appeared on his doorstep, burdened with five boxed reels of film.
“What, no wine?”
“Take them off me. They weigh a ton.”
“What is it?”
“What you asked for. Alfie.”
Wilderness took the reels off her and dumped them on an armchair. Janis kicked off her shoes and parked herself on the sofa. He nipped into the kitchen, thinking to open the Moldavian claret, when she called after him.
“You haven’t shown any films lately. Farr says he hasn’t seen hide nor hair of you.”
That gave him pause for thought. Suspicion always did. Her tone verged on making the sentences into questions.
He waited until a shriller, more enquiring “Joe?” echoed out of the sitting room. Instead of wine he picked up a bottle of the Lapland vodka and two shot glasses. Set all three down on the coffee table.
“And what conclusion do you draw from that, in your capacity as the future head of service?”
“That you’ve found something else to do. Either you’re working a fiddle, as you seem to have done everywhere you’ve ever been posted, or you’ve found something genuine.”
“Run that adjective by me again.”
“Genuine … legitimate … of interest to the Service.”
“And if I tell you?”
“Oh, I’m not Mrs. Burton’s girl. I’m not your girl either. I’m my own. Whatever you tell me you tell me, and it stays with me.”
“What if I say it’s a matter of national security?”
“I’d say you were full of it.”
“OK. Curl up, have a drink and I’ll tell you. Vodka OK?”
He gave her a neat shot of moonshine, without warning, that left her gasping, “Water! Joe, for fuck’s sake, water!”
“So glad to have got your attention.”
She knocked back half a pint of tap water in a single gulp.
“You sod,” she said at last. “You sod. So that’s it? Eh? Reindeers and moonshine not polka dots and moonbeams? You sod.”
“You’ll understand if I say the second glass is just a prop. You couldn’t pay me to drink any more of that, at least not neat—and, by the bye, it’s considered the good stuff.”
“Who in God’s name does drink it?”
“Much of Helsinki, it would seem—suitably thinned with tonic water, and given a measure of taste with a twist of lemon or a splash of Martini, I’d guess. Unthinned, taken neat … most of the Russians out at their base in Rayakoski.”
“Oh God … you’re selling vodka to the Russians? Have you gone completely potty?”
“No. Think of it as bait.”
“Bait?”
“I’ve hooked a KGB captain.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What? He just strolled over and asked to buy a bottle?”
“More or less.”
“Can you be certain he’s real?”
“Yep. Knew him in Berlin during the airlift. And it’s bottles plural. Seventy-two so far. Kostya will be running some sort of racket on the other side. Selling on at a profit. It’s what he did in Berlin.”
“So two peas in a pod, eh?”
“I’ll try to take that as a compliment. The difference is … in those days a racket was just a racket. Now it looks more like a mask for something else. We played at spies … the smuggling, the black market were what was real. Now …”
“Now you think he’s spying for real?”
“I know he is.”
“On what?”
“I don’t know. Which is where you come in.”
“I do?”
“If you want to run MI6 you have to start somewhere.”
“OK … you really do have my attention now.”
“Find out what in Lapland, anything north of Rovaniemi, is worth his attention on a regular basis. Go through what we have on industry, armaments … anything. Including things the Finns might not think we know about. Pastorius is quite convinced there are no Russian agents on his patch, so I need to know more about his patch.”
“You know your man … but Pastorius knows his territory. If he says there’s nothing worth spying on …”
“I suppose that sentence had to end in three dots.”
“How long have I got?”
“Well … I’d like to be out of here by Christmas.”
§55
It took forty-eight hours for the shit to hit the fan.
He was in what passed for his office, a room as perfunctory as his apartment. One desk, one chair—no in/out trays, as though neither person nor paper would ever pass his way—and a phone that never rang.
Burton just stood in the doorway and yelled.
“In my office now!”
He followed, far from meekly. Janis Bell managed to find herself in need of a file as they passed through her office and put a six-foot metal door between herself and any scrutiny.
Then they were in Burton’s office. The door slammed behind Wilderness, and Mrs. Burton assumed her position behind the desk, pigeon-puffed with rage.
“How dare you?”
Wilderness had heard that phrase all his life. From schoolteachers, officers … people who felt the dignity on which they stood had been violated by oiks like him. He still didn’t know what it meant.
>
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” he lied.
“Really? So you know nothing about six sacks of—I can hardly bring myself to utter the word … why … I’m getting … I’m getting complaints from Dispatch here, from Forensics in London. Six sacks of paper … covered in—”
“I’ll make it easy for you. The word is shit.”
“And you mailed six sacks of it to London! In the diplomatic bag!”
“Mrs. Burton. Before you bollock me any further, why don’t you wait and see what Decryption have to say. It isn’t ordinary paper, it’s classified Soviet paper … which just happens to be covered in—”
“Do not say it again!”
She sat down in her chair with a thump—if a thump could sound petulant, it was a petulant thump. She pushed the London memos towards him.
“Read for yourself.”
“No thanks. Nothing they say, until Decryption get back to me, matters a damn. Let’s just wait.”
“How did you come by classified Soviet documents?”
“I’m a field agent, it’s a field matter, you know that.”
“I’m the Head of Station!”
“Which is why you have to be free to disown any field agent, if you have to. Right now, the less you know the better.”
“So you’re keeping me in the dark?”
“What you don’t know can’t hurt you. It’s in everybody’s interests.”
If Wilderness had been Head of Station, his next sentence would have consisted of the words “off” and “fuck.”
“Get out!” she said. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
Such are the limitations of a vocabulary lacking constructive obscenity.
§56
He packed for the north. He took Janis Bell’s hint and let her book him and his projector into a couple of villages on the Gulf of Bothnia.
Where Farr had managed to find Les Vacances de M. Hulot with Finnish subtitles was a mystery little short of a miracle. It received the best reception yet, and Wilderness began to wonder if Jacques Tati hadn’t hit upon the universal language.
He’d time getting to Lapland for Kostya’s next visit. And if Momo didn’t care for M. Hulot, there was always Alfie.