The Russia House

by John le Carré

  This in one hypnotic flow while Barley grinned sheepishly and allowed himself to be settled in the place of honour.

  But Ned already sat stiffly, arms folded across his chest, and Clive, though he was of the circle, had managed to paint himself out of the picture. He sat among Sheriton’s young men and had pushed his chair back till they hid him.

  Sheriton remained standing before Barley and was talking down at him, even when his words said he was addressing someone else. ‘Clive, would you permit me to bombard Mr. Brown with some impertinent questions? Ned, will you tell Mr. Brown, please, that he is in the United States of America and that if he doesn’t care to answer anything he needn’t, because his silence will be taken as clear evidence of his guilt?’

  ‘Mr. Brown can look after himself,’ Barley said – but still grinning, still not quite believing in the tension.

  ‘He can? That’s great, Mr. Brown! Because for the next couple of days that’s exactly what we hope you’ll do!’

  Sheriton went to the sideboard and poured himself some coffee and came back with it. His voice struck the calmer note of common sense. ‘Mr. Brown, we are buying a Picasso, okay? Everybody round this room is buying the same Picasso. Blue, saignant, well-done, what the fuck? There are about three people in the world who understand it. But when you get to the bottom line there’s one question counts. Did Picasso paint it, or did J. P. Shmuck Jr. of South Bend, Indiana, or Omsk, Russia, paste it together in his potato barn? Because remember this.’ He was prodding his own soft chest and holding his coffee cup in his spare hand. ‘No resale. This is not London. This is Washington. And for Washington, intelligence has to be useful, and that means it has to be used, not contemplated in Socratic detachment.’ He lowered his voice in reverent commiseration. ‘And you’re the guy who’s selling it to us, Mr. Brown. Like it or not, you personally are the nearest we shall get to the source until the day we persuade the man you call Goethe to change his ways and work to us direct. If we ever do. Doubtful. Very, very doubtful.’

  Sheriton took a turn and moved to the edge of the ring. ‘You are the linchpin, Mr. Brown. You are the man. You are it. But how much of it are you? A little of it? Some of it? Or all of it? Do you write the script, act, produce and direct? Or are you the bit part you say you are, the innocent bystander we all have yet to meet?’

  Sheriton sighed, as if it were a little hard on a man of his tender sensitivities. ‘Mr. Brown, do you have a regular girl these days, or are you screwing the backlist?’

  Ned was halfway to his feet but Barley had already answered. Yet his voice was not abrasive, even now, it was not hostile. It was as if he were unwilling to disturb the good atmosphere all of us were enjoying.

  ‘Well now, how about you, sunshine? Does Mrs. Haggarty oblige or are we reduced to the habits of our youth?’

  Sheriton was not even interested.

  ‘Mr. Brown, we are buying your Picasso, not mine. Washington doesn’t like its assets cruising the singles bars. We have to play this very frank, very honest. No English reticence, no old-school persiflage. We’ve fallen for that horse manure before and we will never, never fall for it again.’

  This, I thought, for Bob, whose head was once again turned downward to his hands.

  ‘Mr. Brown is not cruising the singles bars,’ Ned cut in hotly. ‘And it’s not his material. It’s Goethe’s. I don’t see that his private life has the least to do with it.’

  Keep your thoughts to yourself, Clive had told me. His eyes repeated the message to Ned now.

  ‘Oh Ned, come on now, come on!’ Sheriton protested. ‘The way Washington is these days, you have to be married and born again before you can get on a fucking bus. What takes you to Russia every five minutes, Mr. Brown? Are you buying property there?’

  Barley was grinning, but no longer so pleasantly. Sheriton was getting to him, which was exactly what Sheriton intended.

  ‘As a matter of fact, old boy, it’s a rôle I rather inherited. My old father always preferred the Soviet Union to the United States, and went to a lot of trouble publishing their books. He was a Fabian. A kind of New Dealer. If he’d been one of your people he’d have been blacklisted.’

  ‘He’d have been framed, fried and immortalised. I read his record. It’s awful. Tell us more about him, Mr. Brown. What did he bequeath to you that you inherited?’

  ‘What the devil’s that to anyone?’ said Ned.

  He was right. The matter of Barley’s eccentric father had been aired and dismissed as irrelevant by the twelfth floor long ago. But not apparently by the Agency. Or not any more.

  ‘And in the ’thirties, as you no doubt also know, then,’ Barley continued in his calmer tone, ‘he started up a Russian Book Club. It didn’t last long but he had a go. And in the war when he could get the paper he’d publish pro-Soviet propaganda, most of it glorifying Stalin.’

  ‘And after the war what did he do then? Go help them build the Berlin Wall on weekends?’

  ‘He had hopes, then he packed them in,’ Barley replied after reflection. The contemplative part of him had regained the upper hand. ‘He could have forgiven the Russians most things, but not the Terror, not the camps and not the deportations. It broke his heart.’

  ‘Would his heart have been broken if the Sovs had used less muscular methods?’

  ‘I don’t expect so. I think he’d have died a happy man.’

  Sheriton wiped his palms on his handkerchief and like an overweight Oliver Twist carried his coffee cup in both hands back to the refreshments table, where he unscrewed the Thermos jug and peered mournfully inside before pouring himself a fresh cup.

  ‘Acorns,’ he complained. ‘They gather acorns and press them and make coffee out of them. That’s what they do out here.’ There was an empty chair beside Bob. Sheriton lowered himself into it and sighed. ‘Mr. Brown, will you let me spell it out for you a little? There is no longer the space in life to take each humble member of the human family on his merits, okay? So everybody who is anybody has a record. Here’s yours. Your father was a Communist sympathiser, latterly disenchanted. In the eight years since he died you have made no fewer than six visits to the Soviet Union. You have sold the Sovs precisely four very lousy books from your own list and published precisely three of theirs. Two awful modern novels which didn’t do a damn thing, a piece of crap about acupuncture which did eighteen copies in the trade edition. You’re on the verge of bankruptcy, yet we calculate your outlay for these trips at twelve thousand pounds and your revenue at nineteen hundred. You’re divorced, freestyle and British public school. You drink like you’re watering the desert single-handed and you pick jazz friends with records that make Benedict Arnold look like Shirley Temple. Seen from Washington, you’re rampant. Seen from here, you’re very nice, but how will I explain this to the next Congressional subcommittee of Bible-belt knuckle-draggers who take it into their heads to pillory Goethe’s material because it endangers Fortress America?’

  ‘Why does it do that?’ said Barley.

  I think we were all surprised by his calm. Sheriton certainly was. He was looking at Barley over his shoulder until then, affecting a slightly pitiful stance as he explained his dilemma. Now he straightened up, and faced Barley full on with an alert and quizzical directness.

  ‘Pardon me, Mr. Brown?’

  ‘Why does Goethe’s material scare them? If the Russians can’t shoot straight, Fortress America should be jumping for joy.’

  ‘Oh we are, Mr. Brown, we are. We’re ecstatic. Never mind that the entire American military might is invested in the belief that the Soviet hardware is accurate as hell. Never mind that a perception of Soviet accuracy is all in this game. That with accuracy, you can sneak up on your enemy while he’s out playing golf, take out his ICBMs unawares and leave him unable to respond in kind. Whereas without accuracy, you’d damn well better not try it, because that’s when your enemy turns right around and takes out your twenty favourite towns. Never mind that zillions of taxpayers’ dollars and whole j
unk-yards of political rhetoric have been lavished on the fond nightmare of a Soviet first strike and the American window of vulnerability. Never mind that even today the idea of Soviet supremacy is the main argument in favour of Star Wars, and the principal strategic fun-game at Washington cocktail parties.’ To my astonishment, Sheriton abruptly changed voices and broke into the accents of a Deep South hillbilly. ‘Time we blew those mothers apart before they do the same to us, Mr. Brown. This li’l ole planet just ain’t big enough for two superpowers, Mr. Brown. Which one do you favour, Mr. Brown, when poo-ush comes to sheu-uve?’

  Then he waited, while his pouchy face resumed its contemplation of life’s many injustices.

  ‘And I believe in Goethe,’ he went on in a startled voice. ‘I am on record as buying Goethe outright from the day he stepped out of the closet. Retail. Goethe for my money is a source whose time has come. And do you know what that tells me? It tells me that I also have to believe in Mr. Brown here and that Mr. Brown needs to be very candid with me or I’m dead.’ He cupped a paw reverently over his left breast. ‘I believe in Mr. Brown, I believe in Goethe, I believe in the material. And I’m scared shitless.’

  Some people change their minds, I was thinking. Some people have a change of heart. But it takes Russell Sheriton to announce that he has seen the light on the road to Damascus. Ned was staring at him in disbelief. Clive had chosen to admire the cue-cases. But Sheriton remained pouting at his coffee, reflecting on his bad luck. Of his young men, one had his chin in his hand while he studied the toe-cap of his Harvard shoe. Another was peering at the sea through the window as if the truth might rather lie out there.

  But nobody was looking at Barley, nobody seemed to have the nerve. He was sitting still and looking young. We had told him a little, but nothing like this. Least of all had we told him that the Bluebird material had set the industrial-military factions at one another’s throats and raised roars of outrage from some of Washington’s most sleazy lobbies.

  Old Palfrey spoke for the first time. As I did so, I had a sense of performing in the theatre of the absurd. It was as if the real world were slipping out from under our feet.

  ‘What Haggarty is asking you is this,’ I said. ‘Will you voluntarily submit to questioning by the Americans so that they can take a view of the source once and for all? You can say no. It’s your choice. Is that right, Clive?’

  Clive didn’t like me for that but he gave his reluctant assent before once more ducking below the horizon.

  The faces round the ring had turned to Barley like flowers in the sun.

  ‘What do you say?’ I asked him.

  For a while he said nothing. He stretched, he drew the back of his wrist across his mouth, he looked vaguely embarrassed. He shrugged. He looked towards Ned but could not find his eye, so he looked back at me, rather foolishly. What was he thinking, if anything? That to say ‘no’ would be to cut him off from Goethe for good? From Katya? Had he even got that far in his mind? To this day I have no idea. He grinned, apparently in embarrassment.

  ‘What do you think Harry? In for a penny? What does my mouthpiece say?’

  ‘It’s more a question of what the client says,’ I answered glossily, smiling back at him.

  ‘We’ll never know if we don’t give it a try, will we?’

  ‘I suppose we never will,’ I said.

  Which seems to be the nearest he ever came to saying, ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Yale has these secret societies, you see, Harry,’ Bob was explaining to me. ‘Why, the place is shot through with them. If you’ve heard of Scull and Bones, Scroll and Key, you’ve still only heard the tip of the iceberg. And these societies, they emphasise the team. Harvard now – why, Harvard goes all the other way and puts its money on individual brilliance. So the Agency, when it’s fishing for recruits in those waters, has a way of picking its team players from Yale and its high flyers from Harvard. I won’t go so far as to say that every Harvard man is a prima donna or every Yale man gives blind obedience to the cause. But that’s the broad tradition. Are you a Yale man, Mr. Quinn?’

  ‘West Point,’ said Quinn.

  It was evening and the first delegation had just flown in. We sat in the same room with the same red floor under the same billiards light, waiting for Barley. Quinn sat at the head and Todd and Larry sat to either side of him. Todd and Larry were Quinn’s people. They were clean-limbed and pretty and, for a man of my age, ludicrously youthful.

  ‘Quinn’s from way up there,’ Sheriton had told us. ‘Quinn talks to Defense, he talks to the corporations, he talks to God.’

  ‘But who hires him?’ Ned had asked.

  Sheriton seemed genuinely puzzled by the question. He smiled as if pardoning a solecism in a foreigner.

  ‘Well now, Ned, I guess we all do,’ he said.

  Quinn was six foot one, wide-shouldered and big-eared. He wore his suit like body armour. There were no medals on it, no badges of rank. His rank was in his stubborn jaw and shaded empty eyes, and in the smile of enraged inferiority that overcame him in the presence of civilians.

  Ned entered first, then came Barley. Nobody stood up. From his deliberately humble place in the centre of the American row, Sheriton meekly made the introductions.

  Quinn likes them plain, he had warned us. Tell your man not to be too damn clever. Sheriton was following his own advice.

  It was right that Larry should open the questioning because Larry was the outgoing one. Todd was virginal and withdrawn, but Larry wore an overlarge wedding ring and had the colourful tie and did the laughing for them both.

  ‘Mr. Brown, sir, we have to think this thing through from the point of view of your detractors,’ he explained with elaborate insincerity. ‘In our business, there’s unverified intelligence and there’s verified intelligence. We’d like to verify your intelligence. That’s our job and that’s what we’re paid for. Please don’t take any hint of suspicion personally, Mr. Brown. Analysis is a science apart. We have to respect its laws.’

  ‘We have to imagine it’s an organised put-together,’ Todd blurted belligerently from Larry’s side. ‘Smoke.’

  Amusement, until Larry laughingly explained to Barley that he was not being offered a cigarette: ‘smoke’ was the trade word for deception.

  ‘Mr. Brown, sir, whose idea was it, please, to go out to Peredelkino that day, fall two years ago?’ asked Larry.

  ‘Mine, probably.’

  ‘Are you sure of that, sir?’

  ‘We were drunk when we made the plan, but I’m pretty sure it was me who proposed it.’

  ‘You drink quite a lot, don’t you, Mr. Brown?’ said Larry.

  Quinn’s enormous hands had settled round a pencil as if they proposed to strangle it.

  ‘Fair amount.’

  ‘Does drinking make you forget things, sir?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And sometimes not. After all, we have long verbatims between you and Goethe when you were both totally inebriated. Had you ever been to Peredelkino before that day, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Often?’

  ‘Two or three times. Maybe four.’

  ‘Did you visit with friends out there?’

  ‘I visited friends, yes,’ said Barley, instinctively bridling at the American usage.

  ‘Soviet friends?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Larry paused long enough to make Soviet friends sound like a confession.

  ‘Care to identify these friends, please, sir, names?’

  Barley identified the friends. A writer. A woman poet. A literary bureaucrat. Larry wrote them down, moving his pencil slowly for effect. Smiling as he wrote, while Quinn’s shadowed eyes continued glowering at Barley on fixed lines down the table.

  ‘On the day of your trip then, Mr. Brown,’ Larry resumed, ‘on this Day One, as we may call it, did it not occur to you to press a few doorbells of your old acquaintance, see who was around, sir, say hullo?’ Larry asked.

  Barley didn’t
seem to know whether it had occurred to him or not. He shrugged and performed his habitual trick of pulling the back of his hand across his mouth, the perfect untruthful witness.

  ‘Didn’t want to saddle them with Jumbo, I suppose. Too many of us to cope with. Didn’t occur to me, really.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Larry.

  Three excuses, I noted unhappily. Three where one would have been enough. I glanced at Ned and knew he was thinking the same. Sheriton was busy not thinking at all. Bob was busy being Sheriton’s man. Todd was murmuring in Quinn’s ear.

  ‘So was it also your idea to visit Pasternak’s tomb, Mr. Brown, sir?’ Larry enquired, as if it were an idea anyone could be proud of having had.

  ‘Grave,’ Barley corrected him testily. ‘Yes, it was. Shouldn’t think the others knew it was there till I told them.’

  ‘And Pasternak’s dacha too, I believe.’ Larry consulted his notes. ‘If “the bastards” hadn’t pulled it down.’ He made bastards sound particularly dirty.

  ‘That’s right, his dacha too.’

  ‘But you didn’t visit the Pasternak dacha, am I right? You didn’t even establish whether the dacha still existed. The Pasternak dacha disappeared totally from the agenda.’

  ‘It was raining,’ Barley said.

  ‘But you did have a car. And a driver, Mr. Brown. Even if he was malodorous.’

  Larry smiled again and opened his mouth just wide enough to let the point of his tongue caress his upper lip. Then he closed it and allowed a further pause for uncomfortable thoughts.

  ‘So you mustered the party, Mr. Brown, and you identified the aims of the journey,’ Larry resumed in a tone of whimsical regret. ‘You rode point, you led the group up the hill to the tomb. Grave, forgive me. It was you personally, no one else, that Mr. Nezhdanov spoke to as you all came down the hill. He asked if you were American. You said, “No, thank God, British.” ’