Tonight I will take Colonel Buky to a bar near the Stephansplatz U-Bahn station that I used to frequent when the war was a great deal hotter. It’s glitzy and expensive and it will be full of summer tourists, but that’s the sort of freedom he craves. Back in the day, the floor of the Casa Nova was so packed with couples it was impossible to do more than wiggle. The jazz was decadent, the hot licks sung in German, and when the power was cut we would kiss by candlelight. A CIA officer I liked told me it was the best jive joint he knew, and he was from Chicago. From time to time its proprietor let me join the band to play my version of ‘St Louis Blues’, and if the KGB was in the house the musicians would warn me by striking up ‘Hold That Tiger’.
In those days Vienna was divided into zones of occupation, but the KGB was everywhere. I was on nodding terms with a few of its officers. Angleton says Golitsyn was here; I don’t remember his name. My job, as always, was to recruit and run agents, and the challenge in a city full of charlatans and hucksters was knowing whom to trust. Real or fool’s gold? SUBALTERN was genuine 22-carat. Elsa talent-spotted its members in the city’s refugee camps, home to hundreds of thousands of Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians and Russian exiles. Later, we worked together, and we met our contacts in the corners of the Casa Nova.
I have booked the Park Hotel near the Schönbrunn Palace because I made love to Elsa for the first time in Room 52. Once they’ve dumped their luggage it’s out in the car for the ‘This is Vienna’ tour. Elsa tries to paint a picture of the city after the Nazis, but the girls are only interested in the best places to shop, and can they see the horses at the Spanish Riding School? ‘You’re hoping to go to Oxford,’ I shout over my shoulder to Bethan. ‘Students were more curious in my day.’ We drive past the vast Gothic town hall that escaped the wartime bombing, and the Parliament building that didn’t, the university, palaces, museums, squares so complete Elsa is struggling to find her bearings. Her city was a dark shell. At the Prater we ride the giant ferris wheel, and I tell the girls about the making of a film called The Third Man.
We don’t talk properly until Bethan and Mary have gone to bed. I want to make love; Elsa wants to walk. Late-summer sultry at ten o’clock, the streets are deserted this far from the city centre. A prosperous district of parks and villas, popular with rich Jewish families before the Nazis took control of the state. After the war the British Control Commission ran its sector from a bleak grey barracks building just up the road from the hotel. I had an office overlooking the courtyard; Elsa was on the floor above. The place reeked of cabbage and disinfectant. Senior army officers had rooms in the Schönbrunn, and there were refugees in the gardens. That was where Elsa met Béla Bajomi.
We did a lot of business with émigré groups in those days. Nazis and their collaborators, pimps and cheats, we soon discovered a good many of them were working with the Russians. Anything we got in the way of intelligence was treated as suspect and classified Mauve. But Béla Bajomi was one of the good guys, and as we walk away from the old barracks buildings I’m sure he’s in Elsa’s thoughts.
Béla was a Hungarian businessman, a former naval officer, and a devout anti-Communist who managed to escape to Vienna beneath a train. Elsa was a familiar face in émigré circles; it didn’t take Béla long to find her. 1947. The countries behind the new Iron Curtain were becoming Communist satellite states. Vienna station was preparing for war. We were working with our contacts to bury arms caches for a resistance movement to fight Uncle Joe Stalin if he decided to seize the country. There were some crazy ideas kicking around at that time.
The Russians controlled all the roads into Vienna and they were turning the screw. The KGB kidnapped opponents from the streets and drove them to a firing squad. Béla Bajomi wanted to fight back. The Americans offered him more money but Béla wanted to work with Elsa. They began to build the network we called SUBALTERN. Men like Paul Lovas who worked for one of the new Communist ministries in Budapest and could travel for us on an official pass. He would note down the size and disposition of the Soviet forces he saw on white chemical carbon paper, write something to his imaginary girlfriend in regular ink over the top, and post it to one of our letterboxes in Vienna. SUBALTERN grew and grew. Béla and Elsa were running couriers in and out of Hungary every day. London was impressed and pushed us for more.
‘Enough walking?’ I say, when we reach the gates of Meidling Cemetery. It’s after eleven and we’re a long way from the hotel. ‘We could catch the last tram?’
‘I’m forty-six,’ she says.
‘And as beautiful as you’ve ever been.’ I squeeze her tightly.
‘But what do I have to show for the years, Harry?’
‘A career. A husband – a poor one, I grant you. The love of two girls – Bethan’s devoted to you. I am. We all are.’
She tries to smile. ‘This city makes me sad.’
We catch the tram to the hotel and we make love, and when it’s over and her head is resting on my arm we talk about the future. ‘Leave the Service,’ she says again. ‘It’s enough. Take the job on the Economist.’
‘If Dick doesn’t call me back, I will,’ I say.
‘No, Harry, now. The girls need you at home,’ she says. ‘I need you.’
I wake in the early hours aware that she’s stirring, rise to my elbow and sweep a strand of hair from her cheek. Is she crying? ‘Of course not,’ she says. She turns her head and I kiss her. ‘I’m fine,’ she whispers. ‘Go back to sleep.’
The next day we visit more palaces and churches, and watch the horses prancing at the riding school, and for lunch we take a picnic to a wood south-west of the city. I tell the girls I buried treasure there, only I’ve forgotten precisely where. ‘You don’t believe me? Ask Elsa, she never lies.’
‘Didn’t you dig it up?’ She remembers we were caching a wireless and weapons to fight the Russians.
‘I don’t think we did.’
On the way into the city we pass the Hotel Imperial, freshly painted yellow and white, and quite as magnificent as it must have looked in the last days of the Habsburg Empire when Hitler was employed to shovel the snow from the pavement in front of its entrance. It was KGB headquarters after the war. I glance at Elsa in the passenger seat beside me, and I know she is thinking of Paul Lovas too.
Everyone assumes we were betrayed by a double. Someone local, we said. Elsa got a call from Béla Bajomi: one of his men had been lured to a rendezvous and bundled into a car with Russian plates. Elsa put everyone on notice: no blind dates, two people to every meet, new safe houses, and what we now call Moscow Rules. The following day, two more sub-agents went missing and there was no sign of the courier from Budapest. We met Béla at the Casa Nova. Elsa held his hand and pleaded with him not to do anything foolish. But later that evening he received a tip-off that the Russians were holding his men in the American Zone. The anonymous caller proposed meeting to organise a rescue. Béla left us a note: Es muß sein. It must be. By the time we received the note he was in the hands of the KGB.
Many months later we heard from someone who had spoken to him in prison. Béla arrived at the rendezvous at a little before eleven o’clock. The street was badly knocked about in the fighting before the fall of the city and only a block from the Russian Zone. First rule of Moscow Rules: pick the time and the place. Second rule: don’t ignore your instinct, because if it feels wrong, it is wrong. Everything about the meeting was screaming, ‘Trap.’ Béla heard Russian voices in the apartment but it was too late. They burst through the door and from the one behind him too. A KGB thug punched him in the face, another tried to gag him with a cloth, and he heard someone say, ‘Now we have you as well. You’re the real prize.’
They rounded up the entire network – and the brothers, sisters, friends and girlfriends of its members – at least a hundred people. Elsa had done her best to train our agents, but it was never going to be good enough. They were postmen, bakers, doctors, civil servants, and we exploited them because that’s what we do. They we
re tortured, and they suffered until they could suffer no more. Then they sang.
‘Tell them we were betrayed by someone in the British Intelligence Service,’ Béla Bajomi said to a comrade before he died. It took years for the message to reach me. Elsa was at the War Office, and our relationship that had seemed so necessary was no longer necessary. She couldn’t forgive herself or the Service, and I belonged to the Service. We have been great users of people.
‘Your father says he’s coming home soon, girls,’ she declares at dinner.
‘As soon as I can.’
‘Which will be very soon, won’t it?’ she says.
The girls don’t appear to care one way or the other. Mary wants a cigarette. I tell her she’s too young, and Elsa dips into her handbag for a packet. Bethan presses me for an increase in her allowance; Elsa urges me to pay more. The dinner table is a battlefield. The girls are veterans of marriage break-up and show great flair in playing us off against each other.
‘Can we talk about it?’ I say.
‘Why?’ she replies. ‘There’s nothing more to say.’
Sunday morning at six, and I wake to find her lacing a pair of flat walking shoes. ‘I’ve ordered a taxi.’
I feel a sudden chill. ‘To the airport?’
‘The airport?’ She laughs and leans over the bed to kiss me. ‘No, Harry, not yet,’ she says, ‘but if you don’t leave the Service …’
I ask her to wait for me, but she slips out of the room while I’m having a pee. The young lad at the front desk says the taxi is taking her to the Zentralfriedhof on the other side of the city. It’s the largest cemetery in Austria, a place of pilgrimage for music lovers who pay homage with flowers to Beethoven and Brahms and Schubert and at least a dozen other composers. A great-uncle of Elsa’s is buried beneath a wall of ivy, not far from Johannes Brahms. At this hour on a Sunday it will take me twenty-five minutes. The graves of those the state wishes to honour are to the right of the main gate, the Jews and the Evangelicals to the left. I will turn left through a choir of marble angels and obelisks, following signs for burial group 64, where the cheap stones are lost in a sea of long grass.
The KGB dumped Paul Lovas’s body in the ruins of the old Westbahnhof because the station was on our doorstep. It was covered with welts and bruises from many hours of excruciating pain. I expect he told them everything he knew in the first few minutes, but torturers never hear the truth if it comes easily. They wanted him to suffer and they wanted us to know he suffered. Paul was just eighteen. An official from the local Communist Party broke the news to his mother in Budapest. She was refused permission to attend her son’s funeral. Punish ‘the traitor’, punish his family: that’s the Russian way. Sippenhaftung in German: the family must pay. His comrades in the network were dead or in jail so we were left to dispose of his body.
I park in front of the monumental mason’s yard where I ordered Paul’s stone all those years ago. There’s nobody about at this hour but the keepers have opened the cemetery gates. A low sun catches beads of late-summer dew and it glistens, like a dragon’s hoard, in the grass. White-stone lovers cling to each other in a perpetual embrace, a small child cries over the corpse of a dove, and I wonder that the Austrians are more imaginative in death than I find them to be in life. At the junction of grave groups 25 and 26, I turn right at a Greek temple tomb, pockmarked in the last days of fighting, and follow the wall of the Evangelicals’ cemetery.
Elsa is bent over the stone. Where did she find the dark blue headscarf? The pink carnations are from the vase at hotel Reception. Too late to turn back now, or ever, and where better to reflect upon that than a necropolis, among stained stone images of a saviour who watched impassively as the Jews of Vienna were sent to the gas chambers and the city burned in the Blitz, and where a good Catholic boy screamed for mercy but found none.
She’s busy clearing ivy from the small cross we set upon his grave and doesn’t hear me approach.
‘I would have driven you.’
She doesn’t flinch or turn, just tears at the ropes of ivy, and as it comes away it leaves welts upon the white marble. She brought lilies to Paul’s funeral and a priest to say prayers. I remember how the nuggets of frozen earth bounced and rattled the lid of his coffin.
‘The guilt, the shame of it … It will never leave me.’ She places a hand on the cross as she rises.
‘I know.’
She turns to me at last. ‘Do you?’
‘They knew the risks, even Paul.’
‘They couldn’t imagine they would be betrayed by someone in the British Secret Service.’
‘If that’s true. The network grew so quickly, some of them were careless …’
‘That isn’t what happened.’
She seems very certain. I don’t know why, and I don’t care to ask. Instead I say the first anodyne thing that comes into my head: ‘It was a tragedy.’
She sighs with exasperation. ‘Harry Vaughan, you don’t believe in anyone or anything. That’s what the Service has done to you.’
‘I believe in us.’
‘Then leave it, leave it for me.’
‘Look at you, cariad, here with the dead before breakfast. You never leave.’
Elsa has a way of gazing down at me from five feet four when she’s angry, as if she is occupying our old chapel pulpit. When she’s sure I know how she feels she lays the carnations on the grave and walks away. I catch her arm, but she wrenches free and shoves me in the chest. Not hard enough, because I’m close enough to put my arms around her. The next thing I know I’m bent double in pain and gasping for breath. Bitch: she’s kneed me in the groin. It’s enough because she’s suddenly sorry and solicitous, yet trying not to laugh. When I catch my breath, I kiss her. ‘Look you, I’ll tell Dick White I’m going, that it’s over,’ I say, even though I know it isn’t, that it can’t be, that I will stay to protect us both, and I’m telling her another lie.
26
16 September 1964
THE DAY AFTER a general election is called I’m summoned to an audience with C. Folk in the corridors of Century House are full of it, naturally. ‘Too close to call,’ says Tubby Powell in P Section (Eastern Europe).
‘The Labour Party by a whisker’: McKay in Accounts, gloomy at the prospect.
No one seems happy about it except me.
‘So, Mr Wilson may be on his way to Number 10,’ I say, so Dick knows I haven’t forgotten why I’m in exile.
‘Oh, there’s still hope’: his terse reply.
Only not that much, it seems, or Dick wouldn’t be ready to consider returning me to the fold so swiftly.
‘Just a few weeks more,’ he says, pushing a file across the table to me.
I imagine his few weeks will be the length of the election campaign. ‘Elsa wants me to leave the Service,’ I say.
‘Oh, really?’ he drawls, then taps his finger on the file he’s just given me. ‘Do that first, would you?’
‘I told Dick: “I’m ready to renounce my vocation,”’ I say to Elsa at dinner later. ‘See how much I love you.’
She laughs and leans across the table to kiss me. ‘Your vocation for lying. But never mind promises, when, darling, when?’
‘Soon.’
The following morning I’m on the flight to Vienna.
Head of Vienna station is a young redbrick Roundhead, schooled to take no risk that will jeopardise his career in the Service. He resents my presence at the embassy greatly. ‘I don’t know why London wants you to handle this,’ he says, ‘not after the mess your generation has made of things.’ Our great cause is history to him now, we should have faded away, yet here I am with the file C gave me, and responsibility for the station’s most promising prospect in years.
His name is Hoffmann and he’s a clerk in the security section at the Czech embassy in the city. He approached a British businessman two weeks ago with the usual trade of secrets for asylum, and now the analysts in London have pored over his first offering they’re hungr
y for more. ‘Keep him in play,’ was Dick’s instruction. ‘Then you can come home in triumph.’
Our postbox is a Protestant church in the old town. There’s a Saturday market outside and its doors are open for stallholders and shoppers to rest and thank their maker. I observe comings and goings in the reflection of a shoe-shop window for a while, then turn with a most pious face to follow an old lady inside. The interior resembles a whitewashed barn with none of the exuberance of the city’s famous baroque churches. Hoffmann leaves his messages between the pages of a Luther Bible, five pews from the main altar. He wants a face-to-face and he proposes Friday, 9 October, among the fountains and parterres of the Belvedere palaces.
On the Wednesday before I take my old flame, Nina, to dinner at a cool jazz club in the city. Nina is an honest friend, and a very fine pianist, and I love her for her earnestness because it reminds me of how we were in the thirties. Sometimes when she’s serious an evening can drag. I’m not surprised when, after a few drinks, she produces an article on nuclear proliferation that she’s cut from the Süddeutsche Zeitung and informs me that after much heartache she has decided it would be immoral to conceive children when the world may be obliterated in an apocalypse.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Are you going to tell me why?’
Yes, Nina’s itching to convince me – and while she talks I watch the thug at the bar who’s watching me. I guess he’s in his thirties, and very well built, and he’s wearing a brown suit, because brown, not red, is the true colour of Communism.
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