The drawing-room had the air of being tended by Napoleonic prisoners of war. Even the bricks of the fireplace had been polished and the plaster lines between them picked out in loving white. We sat in rose-patterned armchairs drinking gin and tonic, lots of ice. Horse-brasses twinkled from the glistening black beams.
‘Just come back from the States,’ O’Mara recalled, as if accounting for our recent separation. He raised his glass and ducked his mouth to it, meeting it halfway. ‘You fellows go there a lot?’
‘Occasionally,’ said Ned.
‘Now and then,’ I said. ‘When duty calls.’
‘We send quite a few of our chaps out there on loan, actually. Oklahoma. Nevada. Utah. Most of them like it pretty well. A few get the heebie-jeebies, run for home.’ He drank and took a moment to swallow. ‘Visited their weapons laboratory at Livermore, out in California. Nice enough place. Decent guest house. Money galore. Asked us to attend a seminar on death. Bloody macabre if you think about it, but the shrinks seemed to believe it would do everybody good and the wines were extraordinary. I suppose if you’re planning to consign large chunks of humanity to the flames you might as well know how it works.’ He drank again, all the time in the world. The hilltop at that hour was a very quiet place. ‘Surprising how many people hadn’t given the subject much thought. Specially the young. The older ones were a bit more squeamish. They could remember the age of innocence, if it ever existed. You’re a prompt fatality if you die straight off, and a soft one if you do it the slow way. I never realised. Gives a new meaning to the value of being at the centre of things, I suppose. Still, we’re into the fourth generation now. Dulls the pangs. You chaps golfers?’
‘No,’ said Ned.
‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘I used to take lessons but they somehow never made much difference.’
‘Marvellous courses but they made us hire bloody Noddy carts. Wouldn’t be seen dead in the things over here.’ He drank again, the same slow ritual. ‘Wintle’s an oddball,’ he explained when he had swallowed. ‘They’re all oddballs but Wintle’s got odder balls than most. He’s done Socialism, he’s done Jesus. Now he’s into contemplation and Tai Chi. Married, thank God. Grammar school but talks proper. Three years to go.’
‘How much have you told him?’ Ned asked.
‘They always think they’re under suspicion. I’ve told him he isn’t, and I’ve told him to keep his stupid mouth shut when it’s over.’
‘And do you think he will?’ I asked.
O’Mara shook his head. ‘Don’t know how to, most of ’em, however hard we boot ’em.’
There was a knock at the door and Wintle came in, an eternal student of fifty-seven. He was tall but crooked, with a curly grey head that shot off at an angle, and an air of brilliance almost extinguished. He wore a sleeveless Fair Isle pullover, Oxford bags and moccasins. He sat with his knees together and held his sherry glass away from him like a chemical retort he wasn’t sure of.
Ned had turned professional. His tantrums were set aside. ‘We’re in the business of tracking Soviet scientists,’ he said, managing to make himself sound dull. ‘Watching the snakes and ladders of their defence establishment. Nothing very sexy, I’m afraid.’
‘So you’re Intelligence,’ said Wintle. ‘I thought as much, though I didn’t say anything.’
It occurred to me that he was a very lonely man.
‘Mind your own fucking business what they are,’ O’Mara advised him perfectly pleasantly. ‘They’re English and they’ve got a job to do, same as you.’
Ned fished a couple of typed sheets from a folder and handed them to Wintle, who put down his glass to take them. His hands had a way of finishing knuckles down and fingers curled, like a man begging to be freed.
‘We’re trying to maximalise some of our neglected old material,’ Ned said, falling into a jargon he would otherwise have eschewed. ‘This is an account of your debriefing when you returned from a visit to Akademgorodok in August, 1963. Do you remember a Major Vauxhall? It’s not exactly a literary masterpiece but you mention the names of two or three Soviet scientists we’d be grateful to catch up with, if they’re still around and you remember them.’
As if to protect himself from a gas attack, Wintle pulled on a pair of extraordinarily ugly steel-framed spectacles.
‘As I recall that debriefing, Major Vauxhall gave me his word of honour that everything I said was entirely voluntary and confidential,’ he declared with a didactic jerkiness. ‘I am therefore very surprised to see my name and my words lying about in open Ministerial archives a full twenty-five years after the event.’
‘Well it’s the nearest you’ll ever get to immortality, sport, so I should shut up and enjoy it,’ O’Mara advised.
I interposed myself like somebody separating belligerents in a family row. If Wintle could just expand a little on the interviewer’s rather bald account, I suggested. Maybe flesh out one or two of the Soviet scientists whose names are listed on the final page, and perhaps throw in some account of the Cambridge team while he was about it? If he wouldn’t mind answering just one or two questions which might tilt the scales?
‘ “Team” is not a word I would use in this context, thank you,’ Wintle retorted, pouncing on the word like some bony predator. ‘Not on the British side anyway. Team suggests common purpose. We were a Cambridge group, yes. A team, no. Some went for the ride, some went for the self-aggrandisement. I refer particularly to Professor Callow who had a highly exaggerated opinion of his work on accelerators, since refuted.’ His Birmingham accent had escaped from its confinement. ‘A very small minority indeed had ideological motives. They happened to believe in science without borders. A free exchange of knowledge for the common benefit of mankind.’
‘Wankers,’ O’Mara explained to us helpfully.
‘We’d the French there, Americans galore, the Swedes, Dutch, even one or two Germans,’ Wintle continued, oblivious to O’Mara’s jibe. ‘All of them had hope, in my opinion, and the Russians had it in bucketfuls. It was us British who were dragging our feet. We still are.’
O’Mara groaned and took a restorative pull of gin. But Ned’s good smile, even if a little battered, encouraged Wintle to run on.
‘It was the height of the Khrushchev era, as you will doubtless recall. Kennedy this side, Khrushchev that side. A golden age was beckoning, said some. People in those days talked about Khrushchev very much as they talk of Gorbachev now, I’m sure. Though I do have to say that, in my opinion, our enthusiasm then was more genuine and spontaneous than the so-called enthusiasm now.’
O’Mara yawned and fixed his pouchy gaze disconcertingly upon myself.
‘We told them whatever we knew. They did the same,’ Wintle was saying as his voice gathered assurance. ‘We read our papers. They read theirs. Callow didn’t cut any ice, I’m bound to say. They rumbled him in no time. But we’d Panson on cybernetics and he flew the flag all right, and we had me. My modest lecture was quite a success, though I do say it myself. I haven’t heard applause like it since, to be frank. I wouldn’t be surprised if they still talk about it over there. The barricades came down so fast you could literally hear them crashing in the lecture hall. “Flow, not demarcation.” That was our slogan. “Flow” wasn’t the word for it either, not if you saw the vodka that was drunk at the late-night parties. Or the girls there. Or heard the chat. The KGB was listening, of course. We knew all about that. We’d had the pep talk before we left, though several objected to it. Not me, I’m a patriot. But there wasn’t a blind thing that any of them could do, not their KGB and not ours.’ He had evidently hit a favourite theme for he straightened himself to deliver a prepared speech. ‘I’d like to add here that their KGB is greatly misjudged, in my opinion. I have it on good authority that the Soviet KGB has very frequently sheltered some of the most tolerant elements of the Soviet intelligentsia.’
‘Jesus – well don’t tell me ours hasn’t,’ O’Mara said.
‘Furthermore I’ve no doubt whatever
that the Soviet authorities very rightly argued that in any trade-off of scientific knowledge with the West, the Soviet Union had more to gain than lose.’ Wintle’s slanted head was switching from one to another of us like a railway signal, and his upturned hand was resting on his thigh in anguish. ‘They had the culture too. None of your Arts-Sciences divide for them, thank you. They had the Renaissance dream of rounded man, still do have. I’m not much of a one for culture myself. I don’t have the time. But it was all there for those who had the interest. And reasonably charged too, I understand. Some of the events were complimentary.’
Wintle needed to blow his nose. And to blow his nose Wintle needed first to spread his handkerchief on his knee, then poke it into operational mode with his fingertips. Ned seized upon the natural break.
‘Well now, I wonder whether we could take a look at one or two of those Soviet scientists whose names you kindly gave to Major Vauxhall,’ he suggested, taking the sheaf of papers I was holding out to him.
We had arrived at the moment we had come for. Of the four of us in the room, I suspected only Wintle was unaware of this, for O’Mara’s yellowed eyes had lifted to Ned’s face and he was studying him with a dyspeptic shrewdness.
Ned led with his discards, as I would have done. He had marked them for himself in green. Two were known to be dead, a third was in disgrace. He was testing Wintle’s memory, rehearsing him for the real thing when it came. Sergey? said Wintle. My goodness yes, Sergey! But what was his other name then? Popov? Popovich? That’s right, Protopopov! Sergey Protopopov, engineer specialising in fuels!
Ned coaxed him patiently along, three names, a fourth, guiding his memory, exercising it: ‘Well now, just think about him a second before you say no again. Really no? Okay. Let’s try Savelyev.’
‘Come again?’
Wintle’s memory, I noticed, had the Englishman’s embarrassment with Russian surnames. It preferred first names that it could anglicise.
‘Savelyev,’ Ned repeated. Again I caught O’Mara’s eye upon him. Ned peered at the report in his hand, perhaps a mite too carelessly. ‘That’s it. Savelyev.’ He spelt it. ‘ “Young, idealistic, talkative, called himself a humanitarian. Working on particles, brought up in Leningrad.” Those were your words, according to Major Vauxhall all those lifetimes ago. Anything more I might add? You didn’t keep up with him, for instance? Savelyev?’
Wintle was smiling in marvel. ‘Was that his name, then? Savelyev? Well I’m blowed. There you are. I’d forgotten. To me he’s still Yakov, you see.’
‘Fine. Yakov Savelyev. Remember his patronymic?’
Wintle shook his head, still smiling.
‘Anything to add to your original description?’
We had to wait. Wintle had a different sense of time from ours. And to judge by his smirk, a different sense of humour.
‘Very sensitive fellow, Yakov was. Wouldn’t dare ask his questions in the plenum. Had to hang back and pluck your sleeve when it was over. “Excuse me, sir, but what do you think of so-and-so?” Good questions, mind. A very cultural man, too, they say, in his way. I’m told he cut quite a dash at some of the poetry readings. And the art shows.’
Wintle’s voice trailed off and I feared he was about to fabricate, which is a thing people do often when they have run out of information but want to keep their ascendancy. But to my relief he was merely retrieving memories from his store – or rather milking them out of the ether with his upright fingers.
‘Always going from one group to another, Yakov was,’ he said, with the same irritating smile of superiority. ‘Standing himself at the edge of a discussion, very earnest. Perching on the edge of a chair. There was some mystery about his father, I never knew what. They say he was a scientist too, but executed. Well a lot were, weren’t they, scientists. They killed them off like fruit flies, I’ve read about it. If they didn’t kill them, they kept them in prison. Tupolev, Petliakov, Korolev – some of their greatest stars of aircraft technology designed their best stuff in prison. Ramzin invented a new boiler for heat engines in prison. Their first rocketry research unit was set up in prison. Korolev ran it.’
‘Bloody well done, old boy,’ said O’Mara, bored again.
‘Gave me this piece of rock,’ Wintle continued.
And I saw his hand, upward on his knee again, opening and closing round the imaginary gift.
‘Rock?’ said Ned. ‘Yakov gave it to you? Do you mean music? No, you mean a geological sample of some kind.’
‘When we Westerners left Akadem,’ Wintle resumed, as if launching himself and us upon an entirely new story, ‘we stripped ourselves of our possessions. Literally. If you’d seen our group on that last day, you would not have believed it. We’d our Russian hosts crying their eyes out, hugging and embracing, flowers on the buses, even Callow was having a weep if you can believe it. And us Westerners unloading everything we had: books, papers, pens, watches, razors, toothpaste, even our toothbrushes. Gramophone records if we’d brought them. Spare underclothes, ties, shoes, shirts, socks, everything except the minimum we needed for our decency to fly home in. We didn’t agree to do it. We hadn’t even discussed it. It happened spontaneously. There was some did more, of course. Particularly the Americans, being impulsive. I heard of one fellow offering a marriage of convenience to a girl who was desperate to get out. I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t. I’m a patriot.’
‘But you gave some of your goodies to Yakov,’ Ned suggested, while he affected to write painstakingly in a diary.
‘I started to, yes. It’s a bit like feeding the birds in the park, handing out your treasures is. You pick the one who’s not getting his share and you try to fatten him up. Besides, I’d taken to young Yakov, you couldn’t help it, him being so soulful.’
The hand had frozen round the empty shape, the fingertips striving to unite. The other hand had risen to his brow and taken hold of a sizable pinch of flesh.
‘ “Here you are, Yakov,” I said. “Don’t be slow in coming forward. You’re too shy for your own health, you are.” I’d an electric shaver in those days. Plus batteries, transformer, all in a nice carrying case. But he didn’t seem to be that comfortable with them. He put them aside, sort of thing, and kept shuffling about. Then I realised he was trying to give something to me. It was this rock, wrapped in newspaper. They’d no fancy wrapping, naturally. “It’s a piece of my country,” he says. “To thank you for your lecture,” he says. He wanted me to love the good in it always, however bad it might sometimes seem from outside. Spoke a beautiful English, mind, better than half of us. I was a bit embarrassed, frankly, if you want to know. I kept that piece of old rock for very many years. Then my wife threw it out during one of her spring-cleans. I thought of writing to him sometimes, I never did. He was arrogant, mind, in his way. Well a lot of them were. I dare say we were in our way, too. We all thought science could rule the world. Well I suppose it does now, though not in the way it was meant to, I’m sure.’
‘Did he write to you?’ said Ned.
Wintle wondered about this for a long time. ‘You can never tell, can you? You never know what’s been stopped in the post. Or who by.’
From the briefcase I passed Ned the bunch of photographs. Ned passed them to Wintle while O’Mara watched. Wintle leafed through them and suddenly let out a cry.
‘That’s him! Yakov! The man who gave me the rock.’ He thrust the picture back at Ned. ‘Look for yourself! Look at those eyes! Then tell me he’s not a dreamer!’
Extracted from the Leningrad evening paper dated 5th January 1954 and reconstituted by Photographic Section, Yakov Yefremovich Savelyev as a teenaged genius.
There were other names, and Ned took Wintle laboriously through each one of them, laying false trails, brushing over his tracks until he was satisfied that in Wintle’s mind at least Savelyev meant no more than the rest.
‘Clever of you to hide your trump in the middle of your hand,’ O’Mara remarked as, glass in hand, he walked us down the drive to the car. ‘Last
time I heard of Savelyev he was running their testing range in darkest Kazakhstan, dreaming up ways to read their own telemetry without everyone reading it over their shoulder. What’s he up to now? Selling the shop?’
It is not often I take pleasure in my work but our meeting and the place had sickened me, and O’Mara had sickened me more than both. It is not often that I seize someone by the arm either, and have to recoil, and loosen my grip.
‘I take it you have signed the Official Secrets Act?’ I asked him quietly enough.
‘Practically wrote the bloody thing,’ O’Mara retorted, very surprised.
‘Then you will know that all knowledge that comes to you officially and all speculation based upon that knowledge are in the perpetual property of the Crown.’ Another legal distortion, but never mind. I released him. ‘So if you like your job here, and you are hoping for promotion, and if you are looking forward to your pension, I suggest you never think of this meeting again or of any name associated with it. Thank you so much for the gin. Goodbye.’
On the journey back, with the identification of Bluebird confirmed and phoned ahead of us in wordcode to the Russia House, Ned remained withdrawn. Yet when we reached Victoria Street he was suddenly determined not to let me go. ‘You stick around,’ he ordered me, and guided me ahead of him down the basement steps.
At first glance the scene in the situation room was one of purest joy. The centrepiece was Walter, poised like an artist before a whiteboard as big as he was, drawing up the details of Savelyev’s life in coloured crayons. If he had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat and smock, he could not have looked more rakish. Only at second glance did I recall my eerie apprehensions of that morning.
Around him – which meant behind him, for the whiteboard was propped against the wall beneath the clocks – stood Brock and Bob, and Jack our cypher clerk, and Ned’s girl Emma, and a senior girl called Pat who was one of the mainstays of Soviet Registry. They held glasses of champagne and each of them in his different way was smiling, though Bob’s smile was more like a grimace of pain suppressed.
The Russia House Page 21