‘Harry Lime, as I live and breathe. Gin? Two more, Linda,’ he says. ‘You’ve come all this way for me, Harry? I’m flattered.’
‘We’ve always been such good friends, Soapy.’
Fulton laughs. ‘Well, I quite like you, Harry.’
He is pink with gin and bonhomie, so it would be churlish of me to call him a liar.
‘Really, Harry, why are you here? Something to do with PEACH?’
I hold my hands open wide.
‘PEACH? That’s what we’re calling the Philby investigation,’ he explains. ‘You know how it is when something like this happens. Remember Burgess in ’fifty?’
‘’Fifty-one.’
‘Well, it’s the same.’ He sips his gin. ‘Nick’s the one I feel most sorry for because they were best friends for years – for ever.’
I follow his gaze to where Nicholas Elliott is perched on the arm of an old leather couch. The deputy head of the Service is telling him a joke. They look more like boarding-school housemasters than robber barons in their tortoiseshell spectacles and three-piece suits. Nick is one of many in the Service who fought his first battles on the playing fields of Eton and became a spy because it promised even greater sport. ‘They sent him out to Beirut to confront Philby,’ says Soapy. ‘Nick was sure Kim was ready to confess – cough it all up – then poof! Gone. Didn’t even tell his wife. The shit. The funny thing … he’ll hate Moscow. Everyone does. You know how he loved cricket.’
Soapy knocks back his gin in one great gulp. ‘Never thought I’d say this, Harry, but this business with Kim, well, I’m bloody glad to be going. Really I am.’
His declaration drops into a sudden silence like a cymbal crashing on a flagstone floor.
‘Cheer up,’ says one of the secretaries.
‘Yes, old man,’ says someone else.
‘I will, I will,’ he says, without conviction.
In an hour or so he’ll be under the table – and why not? He’s grieving. They’re all grieving for how the Service used to be. It’s a wake. All we’re missing is music and a body. The body has gone, but there will be music.
‘Remember this one, Soapy?’ I say, settling at the bar’s old piano.
Though now and then, di di ah
The world may seem so blue
A song will see you through
Let’s sing again.
It’s one of the ‘keep buggering on’ songs we were so fond of during the war, because most of us are of the finest-hour generation, the officers anyway. My song is well sung. I’m a respectable baritone – a matter of national pride, really. And to lift the gloom a little more I stride through my Fats Waller repertoire. Soapy is tearful with gratitude. A sentimental song or two and the past washes through him again.
‘I will miss this place,’ he says, and offers to buy me another drink. When it comes I raise my glass in a secret toast to the late Mrs Bugs, who used to slap my knuckles with a ruler when I played a wrong note. If only Mrs Bugs could have walked with me through life.
‘Good for you,’ Nicholas Elliott says, his hand on my shoulder. ‘Cheered us all up.’ His hand slips to my elbow and he steers me away from the group about the piano. ‘How’s Vienna?’
‘Same as usual.’
‘Soapy says you’re here for PEACH?’
‘I don’t know why I’m here.’
‘Ah. Well, you heard about Beirut?’
‘Just now.’
He nods and tries to smile.
‘Sorry, Nick,’ I say. ‘I know you and Kim were close.’
‘Everybody seems to,’ he says gloomily. ‘He isn’t a Communist, you know. Doesn’t have a political bone in his body. It was a game. A nasty little game of lies that he played with all of us, his wives too.’
‘I don’t know him, really.’
Nick laughs.
‘No, really, I don’t,’ I say.
‘Nobody does except me, apparently,’ he drawls, in the nasal way they learned at Eton. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m finished here. I’ll always be the one who let our greatest traitor slip away. The thing is, I think that’s what the chief wanted to happen. He could have picked up Philby in Beirut – he sent me to show him the evidence instead. The chief gave Kim a chance to escape and he took it – I was just a dupe.’
‘Why would he want Kim to run?’
‘Imagine the embarrassment of a treason trial?’ He shakes his head. ‘Better to have Philby out of sight and mind in Moscow.’
I gaze at my drink, rattle the ice, until Nick realises I have nothing more to say and he’s standing too close to me.
‘How’s Elsa?’ He takes a step away. ‘Still at the War Office?’
2
‘I RANG THE MOMENT I heard the chief wasn’t going to see me,’ I say.
Elsa is standing with a hand on her hip at the door of her Dolphin Square flat. ‘You’re drunk.’
I say,
‘My birthday began with the water –
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above … Above …’
‘Too drunk to remember. He wouldn’t have forgiven you.’
‘He would, and I have it anyway. It’s “I rose in rainy autumn and walked abroad in a shower of all my days.” A shower of all my days. I love that line. He was a genius.’
She lifts her chin a little, the better to look down her nose at me. ‘You think you can charm your way in here with a few lines of Dylan Thomas?’
‘Elsa, I’m just a year from fifty.’
She pulls a face – ‘Oh, disgusting’ – and pretends to shudder. ‘Self-pity!’ Quicksilver she moves, like a sparrow taking flight.
I’ve drunk too much to catch her. My ears are ringing, my left cheek is stinging. ‘What was that for?’
‘For not telling me you were back.’ Then she reaches for my coat lapels and rising to tiptoe she kisses me. ‘And that is for your birthday.’
I put an arm round her waist and stroke a strand of chestnut brown hair from her face. There are voices around the corner of the corridor. ‘What will your neighbours think?’ I say, though I know she doesn’t care for what others think of her. ‘Going to let me in?’
She frowns, as if the matter is still in doubt. ‘No sex. I’m not ready to forgive you.’
‘It’s my birthday.’
She pulls free with a sly smile. ‘You should have thought of that before.’
‘I’ve had a lot on my mind. Fix me a gin and I’ll tell you.’
She is a step ahead in the hall but I reach for the waistband of her skirt.
‘Hey. Let me go.’
I draw her back and she turns to kiss me. I want her so much and she is ready to have me, and because I’m still a year from fifty, and because she loves adventure, I know we won’t make it as far as the bedroom.
Elsa Frankl Spears. Frankl from her Austrian Jewish mother, Spears from her English Protestant father: the most unlikely of matches. London boarding school, then Oxford University, where she dropped the name Spears to protest her father’s support for appeasing the Nazis. By the 1930s the soldier spy who fell for the feisty student from Vienna was a most solid Conservative backbench MP. Poor man. His clever wife and daughter must have led him a merry dance. But when the war came it was Papa Spears who helped Elsa play her part by introducing her to one of his chums in MI5.
I was working for Five then too, helping to turn Nazi spies into double agents. We met for the first time at Guy Burgess’s flat in Bentinck Street. He liked to draw the pretty boys and girls of Five and Six into his own special circle. Bugger the bombs, we’ll party, was his approach to the war. He was working for Five, and so was his flatmate, Anthony Blunt. Their old Cambridge University chum, Philby, was a Bentinck Street regular, too. But it was my friend Goronwy Rees who introduced Elsa to the party. I’m sure he wanted to sleep with her, because that is what one does in war, and that was the way Guy Burgess wished it to be. The bedroom doors in Bentinck Street opened and closed with the frequen
cy of a French farce. You never knew who you would pass on the stairs. Rees was a newly-wed, Philby a father of three, and I was married then too. We were an egocentric and faithless bunch. Did Elsa sleep with Goronwy Rees? She didn’t sleep with me, although she says she wanted to. She was twenty-four and I was twenty-eight.
Elsa’s forty-five now, a senior civil servant at the War Office. She hasn’t married and she says she doesn’t want to, that having it off is enough. We finish on her couch. ‘Nice,’ she says, as casually as she can. She visits the bathroom and pads back with the dressing-gown I left in her wardrobe. Who has worn it in the months that have passed since I was here? She bought it for me in Vienna seventeen years ago and paid more than she should have because we’d made love for the first time just a few hours before.
Both of us moved from Five at the end of the war and were working for Six. Elsa was sent to Vienna to file and type but was too capable to do that for long, and by the time I arrived from Berlin she was running agents in and out of the Soviet zone of occupation. She was electric, she was tireless, driven by grief and anger that, so soon after the death of her mother’s people in the gas chambers, a new totalitarian order was taking the place of the old in Europe.
In those days we were clinging to the rubble of Vienna by our fingertips. The city was a shooting gallery. Its people did what they needed to do to get by; everything was for sale, everyone a tart or a tout, and Fräulein Frankl was ready to crawl through shit for their secrets. You pay a price for living in those sorts of dark corners.
Friends love a good spy story. I remember a showing of The Third Man at the barracks we were using as Six’s station headquarters. ‘This is me,’ she said, as Harry Lime escaped through the sewers, ‘or it could be.’ She could see clearer than most of us who work for the Firm that the lies we tell and the people we hurt in pursuit of our greater good will turn us in time into someone we hate. Our colours bleed. The image of who we were is washed from the page. SUBALTERN. 1948. It came to a head for Elsa when we lost SUBALTERN and dozens of our most successful agents.
She’s standing at the drinks tray in a lamb’s wool jumper that barely covers her nakedness and her hair is falling in tight brown curls about her face. Watching her, I know I’m happy, and I can’t remember the last time I felt that way. I think of her as my little Jewess, although she would slap me if I said so, because she isn’t mine and she’s small only in stature. Petite and dark, like her mother, she has an elfin face with thick eyebrows and charming little laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. ‘No ice, I’m afraid,’ she says, turning with the bottle. ‘Sure you still want some?’
After the failure of the SUBALTERN operation she left the Service for the War Office. I stayed but moved to London with her. Then the fourth floor thought it a clever thing to send me back to Vienna as station chief, and I made the mistake of going.
‘You have your drink now,’ she says, as she walks towards me with two glasses. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’ She settles beside me, her legs curled beneath her on the couch. ‘Let me guess: they’re looking for someone to blame.’
‘Is that what they’re saying at the War Office?’
‘No, it’s what I say. The government’s still hoping, praying, Philby will turn up. One security scandal is unfortunate. Two is going to look like carelessness.’
‘There’s another?’
Her glass hovers at her lips while she considers whether she should say more. ‘You’ll read about it soon enough. The secretary of state for war was sleeping with a prostitute. She’s nineteen and he’s about your age.’
‘Profumo? The one with the actress wife?’
‘Take that smile off your face. What have you got to smile about? First Burgess and Maclean, then Blake and Vassall, and now the man in Six who used to be responsible for catching spies turns out to be one too. And you knew Philby was a spy, didn’t you? After Burgess and Maclean, you knew.’
I turn too quickly and slop gin on her legs. ‘Not true.’
‘You suspected, Harry. You did. We discussed it. You said there were people in Five who thought the same.’
‘Not enough. He was too popular to accuse anyway.’
She gives me a withering look. ‘He was sly – that corner-of-the-mouth smile and something dead in his eyes. But he was “one of the chaps”, one of your robber barons.’
‘Not mine.’
‘And the chaps came to his rescue time and again, even when it was as plain as the nose on your face that he helped Burgess and Maclean to escape.’
I sip my drink and say nothing: it’s time to be humble.
‘The Service won’t be able to sweep it under the carpet this time,’ she says. ‘Philby took the Americans too, and they’ll want heads to roll.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
She pulls my head down and kisses me. ‘Yours will be all right, my sweet.’
‘Have they spoken to you?’
‘Me? I hardly knew Philby.’
I nod slowly. ‘He was a great collector of women. I thought perhaps … Ow!’ She has nipped my ear.
‘Not funny,’ she says. ‘Philby was only half a human being. I prefer your rough sincerity.’
I hold her face in my hands. ‘Can I just say …’ and I kiss her again, because we love each other, but circumstances … Well, we hardly ever say so.
Later, I stand at her bedroom curtains and watch the last lights go out in the blocks on the opposite side of Dolphin Square. Elsa lives on the fourth floor of Beatty. There’s a garden below with a few frostbitten saplings, and three bronze dolphins are leaping from a floodlit fountain, but the square is little more than a fortress for the well-to-do, with ten floors of red brick on all sides, as bleak as the blocks they’ve built in Moscow for heroes of the Soviet Union. I expect Philby will be given a flat just like this one.
Soapy says Kim’s old pal Tony Milne is on the way home from Buenos Aires station for questioning. They were at Westminster School together. Tony slept with Kim’s first wife. In just a few hours I’ll meet the chief and my head may drop into the same basket. Perhaps it’s time: the best ‘friends’ left years ago. I have my daughters – they’re still young enough to be polite – and I send Christmas cards to a brother and an aunt in Wales, but it’s Elsa who matters most to me. I should climb back into bed beside her and ask her to marry me. Pin her wrists to the pillow until she says, ‘All right, you fool.’
There’s a pinprick of orange light beneath one of the trees. Someone is drawing deeply on a cigarette. It must have been his final drag because he steps from the shadow and stubs it out on the low wall round the fountain. He’s about five feet seven or eight, broad shoulders, broad chest, and he’s wearing a black mac and trilby, like one of MI5’s ex-coppers. It’s after midnight and the temperature must be close to freezing, but he’s in no hurry. He glances up at Beatty block and reaches into his coat for his gloves. He can’t see me at the curtain, but he knows where I am, and he doesn’t care to hide it.
3
‘WHAT ABOUT THIS evening?’ Elsa asks, at the bedroom door. She’s wearing a black dress and pearls and an imperial-purple coat: what a figure she must cut in Whitehall.
‘I’ll ring you if I can, cariad.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘You’re older than I remember, Harry. What on earth do you expect to happen?’
I reach behind my head for the pillow. She’s too quick – it smacks against the door.
The chief lives in an elegant eighteenth-century red-brick house in Queen Anne’s Gate. A private bridge connects home to the ‘the office’ where Security waits with the lift door open. He barely sets foot on any floor but the fourth. To the junior officers working on the other floors he is no more than a single letter in green ink on confidential papers: he is C – our very own Wizard of Oz. The curtains in his personal office are always drawn against Russian spies with long lenses. I’m sure they would be in any circumstance, because secrecy is his life – all our lives – and secrecy is a na
rcotic.
The front door in Queen Anne’s Gate has been buffed to a mirror sheen. I use it to straighten my tie. On this day and every day, the basement and ground-floor windows are half shuttered. I ring the bell, and before I can step back the door opens. It’s the chief himself, Sir Dick White – ‘Hello, Harry’ – and he shakes my hand with what feels like genuine warmth. ‘Long time … Come in, come in.’ I follow him into the oak-panelled hall.
I’ve known Sir Dick White a long time, in the hail-fellow way one knows most people in the Service. We turned German agents together during the war, and he would sometimes fetch up at Bentinck Street parties, but I sensed even then that he didn’t think much of Burgess and some of his set. Guy used to call him ‘the Schoolmaster’ – he was for a time – and it’s true that he seems too solid and trusting to be a spy. But Guy meant bourgeois and boring, because Guy was one of the Service’s old-school-ties, and Dick had gone to nowhere. That much we have in common, and it’s no small thing.
‘I think we’ll talk in my study, Harry.’ He gestures to the stair. ‘Sorry about the short notice. What is it the Americans say? “We have a difficult situation here.”’ He’s dressed casually in an open-neck shirt and moleskin trousers, as if he’s just stepped in from the garden. ‘You’re wearing well,’ he says, as we climb.
‘Not as well as you, sir.’
Dick had been a university athlete and, a couple of years short of sixty, he still has something of the physique. Not bad for a man who has spent the last ten behind a desk as director general of MI5 and then as the chief of MI6. Whitehall loves him as much as the robber barons despise him because he doesn’t like to rock the boat. Well, it’s rocking now.
Our meetings have always taken place behind the green baize door of his office in Broadway, curtains drawn, a mile of desk between us. This is the first in his home. I half expect to find an interrogator in his study, but instead of a grilling he seems to have arranged for a cosy fireside chat. The room is lined with calf-bound books and paintings of quiet landscapes that he’s borrowed from the National Gallery. We sit in burgundy silk armchairs on either side of the fire and he asks after Elsa and my two daughters. He may even be interested in my answers, because he’s a family man with chapel views on sex and marriage. Lies are excusable but only in the line of duty.
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