by Lawton, John
Clark was looking across Troy’s shoulder. He turned. Beynon appeared above him.
‘Excuse us, sir. We was wondering like. It’s past ten and not a sign of Mr Cobb. He dropped us here more than an hour ago. You don’t suppose there’s anything we should be doing? We was wondering. You being the senior man an’ all.’
Troy was about to point out his raw recruit’s status on the operation when the door banged open and Cobb bustled in, red-faced and sweating. He slapped his case onto the trestle table, jerking Milligan once more to life. He looked around him, gasping and out of breath, taking in the room in a sweeping glance. As Troy had expected, that glance came to rest on Milligan.
‘You,’ he barked. ‘Shave and haircut the minute you’re off duty!’
He turned his gaze on Troy.
‘Good of you to join us, Mr Troy!’
‘You didn’t get my message?’ Troy said softly.
‘Yes—I got your message. But if you don’t mind, for the future, once a plan’s been agreed I’d be obliged if you’d stick to it.’
Troy slowly turned his left wrist around. Looked at his watch and looked at Cobb, making his point silently. Cobb ignored the hint. Whatever it was that had made him late, it had severely taxed his physique. The man was streaming sweat, as though he had just won first prize in the sack race.
‘Right,’ he began. ‘Rosters!’
Cobb tore off his blue mackintosh and scattered the schedule for the next ten days across the table. Troy glanced down it. It was chock-a-block. Not a day out of the next ten seemed to have as much as a tea-break built in to it. Bulganin and Khrushchev were about to be bounced the length and breadth of the British Isles by all known means of transport, and to be wined and dined by every dignitary London could unearth, in a punishing round of sociability that would strain a man half their age. For the evening of the twenty-third they were to be the guests of the Labour Party at the House of Commons. Suddenly Troy spotted trouble, but if the Branch and Her Majesty’s Government couldn’t see it, it was, he thought, scarcely his job to point it out to them.
‘First off. For those of you who’ve already spent good money at Moss Bros, there’ll be no evening dress. Our guests appear not to have brought theirs, so we’re all, to avoid embarrassment, to wear plain dark suits for the evening dos.’
Cobb looked briefly but pointedly at Troy. The follow-up to yesterday’s wisecrack.
‘Now—there’s a few rules and regulations. A few dos and don’ts. Cock up and you’ll have me to answer to. We all know why we’re here, and we all know what the front is. Each of you will log on and off shift with me. I want to know when you pick up the nobs and when you drop ’em, and when you drop ’em I want a full verbal report. I’ll be the one to decide what needs to be in writing. You won’t have time to take notes and even if you have, I don’t want anyone caught by the Russians jotting things down. For the purposes of clear communications, Khrushchev is codenamed Red Pig, Bulganin is Black Bear. Nobody uses their real names over the phone. Got it?’
He looked at them all in turn. For no reason Troy could see, he let his gaze rest on Clark.
‘Got it?’ he said again.
Troy heard Clark gulp and manage a faint ‘yessir’.
‘Right. Next on the agenda. Guarding Red Pig and Black Bear.’
He paused. Troy assumed he was straining for the pause to look meaningful.
‘Not your job. Repeat. Not your job. My boys will be everywhere and highly visible.’
‘What? Trench coats and bowler hats?’ said a voice from the back. Troy saw Cobb’s eyes home in. He turned to see Milligan receiving the gorgon stare.
‘Shuttit, laddie. Just shuttit.’
Cobb broke the stare. Looked at the roster in front of him.
‘As it happens,’ he said, reddening slightly, ‘it will be trench coats and bowler hats.’
Troy knew he was grinning. Unless God spared him quickly, a grin would become a snigger and a snigger a laugh and he would have Cobb down on him like an irate schoolmaster, armed with a piece of chalk. The thought of all those flatfoots swarming all over Claridge’s Hotel dressed up like pantomime policemen was too funny to resist.
Cobb’s finger shot out, aiming towards Troy.
‘You! Stop bloody grinning!’
Troy looked back and realised that Cobb was pointing at Clark. The fat little man was smirking with repressed laughter.
‘They’ll do the real work, and they’ll be recognisable. To everyone. But in the event of a real hoo-ha, there’s a routine to go through. First. The only time you do not accompany Red Pig and Black Bear is when other security is provided, e.g., royal palaces, Downing Street. In all other places you stick to them like glue. No matter where. Nobody is exempt. If you have to sit in on a cosy chat with the Archbishop of Canterbury, you do it. Second, you always go through doors ahead of them. Third, if any nutcase has a go at them, you get them out of the room and you let my boys handle the assailant. You do not tackle anyone unless you’ve no choice.’
Beynon’s hand shot up like an eager schoolboy.
‘Excuse me, sir. But have there been any actual threats?’
‘Threats?’ Cobb sneered. ‘Threats? Every bunch of cranks in Britain from the Empire Loyalists to the Last-of-the-Mosleyites has threatened ’em. They’re all nutters and it doesn’t mean a damn. If we believed every crank who thought Khrushchev was the anti-Christ there’d not be a copper left on point duty from here to John O’Groats. All the same, we play safe. Understood? And remember, the Russians wanted the KGB guarding their own blokes. We had quite a row convincing them we weren’t going to have armed Russian bully-boys swanning around London. So—bear this in mind. If we fuck up, we’ll never hear the last of it.’
Again he swept the room with a practised penetrating stare. Practised, no doubt, in front of a bathroom mirror from an early age. Cobb was, Troy decided, a brute of a man, but not the ugly brute he had first supposed. The man’s waffle gave him time to look and appraise. The stare was disturbing, more than Cobb ever meant it to be. He meant merely to command, and he did it rather well. But his eyes seemed asymmetrical. It was the cock-eyed, strabismic stare of a one-eyed man. But Cobb had two eyes. Then the penny dropped. It was the eyebrows. The left eyebrow drew all the attention to the left eye. It was white in the middle. A one-inch strip of premature white hair, as startling to observe as Diaghilev’s two-tone coiffure or the hennaed halo of Quentin Crisp. Troy remembered Cobb’s reputation at the Yard as a ladykiller. He was beginning to see why he had it. There was a slob side to him, that could appeal to the tidy instinct in a woman—a man for whom the right woman could roll pairs of socks into balls ever after—but there was also a raffish, brutal handsomeness to the man. To Troy it bespoke the surly Special Branch bastard. But, it was conceivable that to some young WPCs he was Mr Rochester of the Yard. Brown curls fell across his forehead, his mouth was wide, his jaw strong despite the extra chin—and he dressed surprisingly well. The mackintosh was a Burberry; the neat, double-breasted, figure-flattering blue suit must have cost a packet. Troy was all but indifferent to clothes. He had his suits made in Savile Row out of nothing more than habit. He dressed well only because money let him and tradition paved the way. Taste did not come into it. And a suit as sharp as Cobb’s he did not own.
‘And lastly—’
Lastly? Troy must have missed something.
‘Lastly. These.’
Cobb opened his case and tipped out six police-issue Browning automatics in their shoulder holsters. It was an odd moment. Troy had not seen a gun in a while. It had been well over a year since he had last had to request issue of one. They sat uneasily with his notion of ‘copper’.
‘Sign here. You get two extra clips of nine mill. And you account for every shell spent.’
Troy watched as Beynon, Beck and Molloy slipped into their shoulder holsters like practised gunmen. He fumbled at his. Clark fumbled. Milligan fumbled. It slowly dawned on Troy that the shoulder ho
lster could not be used left-handed. It went under the left armpit or nowhere. Clark managed to sling it around his neck, with the butt of the gun dangling across his sternum. Mulligan was all but making a cat’s cradle of it.
Cobb looked at them, making no attempt to disguise his contempt.
‘Jesus Christ. Amateurs. Rank bloody amateurs. Beynon, you show ’em!’
He stormed out. Beynon gave Troy a look that said ‘sorry’.
‘It goes like this you see, sir.’
He whipped off his own holster and slowly put it back on for the benefit of all three, exaggerating each gesture—the patient Scoutmaster teaching the dimwits a useful knot or two.
‘Left arm first. Down, around the back. Right arm through the elastic side, straight out and pull in. See?’
They saw. Mulligan got the hang of it. Troy and Clark looked like the last of the clowns.
‘S’cuse the thought, sir’, said Milligan, ‘but if I ever get Mr Cobb behind the bikesheds . . .’
‘After me in the queue,’ said Troy. ‘If I knew how this thing worked, I’d shoot him myself.’
He put the gun into the holster and put his jacket back on. It felt awkward and it felt silly. It stuck in his armpit like a cucumber. He’d have to live with it. God help Nikita Khrushchev if he ever had to draw it.
Guns boomed in the dockyard. Over and over again. Troy did not need to count. There would be thirteen blasts, as tradition demanded, followed by a Soviet reply of twenty-one. It meant the Russian ships were docking—or World War III had begun. Troy put his overcoat back on and joined the others in the yard.
‘You’re in luck,’ Cobb yelled at them over the sound of the guns. ‘You get a personal introduction. We stand in line and the Foreign Office bloke will introduce you in turn as personal bodyguards. Whatever they say to you, for pete’s sake look as though you don’t understand and don’t answer until the FO have translated for you. As far as the Russians are concerned you’re ordinary coppers—just how ordinary I shudder to think. Right, follow me.’
Cobb led off under the worn brick arch to the berth set aside for the Russian ships. The sun shone, but as they cleared the arch a salt wind came up off the sea to remind Troy that it was still only the middle of April and the weather could turn any minute. The quay was crowded: a horde of pressmen, the gentlemen of Fleet Street, standing around in groups smoking and joking; a horde of Foreign Office bigwigs and littlewigs, the gentlemen of Pall Mall, standing around not smoking and not joking. And, as Cobb had said, the unmistakable presence of Special Branch in its Sunday best, belted trench coats, bowler hats and big feet. There could scarcely be a phone tapped or a skull cracked the length of Britain this morning, there was no one to do it. They were all here looking like they were auditioning for the role of Chinese policeman in a seaside production of Aladdin. Troy did a quick head count of his own party, realised they were seven, and tried not to think of Snow White.
The Royal Navy provided a guard of honour, and the Marines a band to play the round of dreary national anthems. Under the vast grey shadow of the Soviet Navy’s battlecruiser Ordzhonikidze, the dignitaries lined up in precedence to prepare to greet the Russians. Troy found himself between Cobb and Beynon. Peering round Cobb, he could see the Russian Ambassador, Jakob Malik, and the two faces of Britain: the civil in Lord Reading, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and the military in Lord Cilcennin, First Lord of the Admiralty. Quite what the difference was in their roles he could not say. Although both of them were in the Government, he could not be certain whether Cilcennin was actually in the Navy or not, or whether it was even necessary that he should be in the Navy. Neither of them mattered much. Dogsbodies sent out to do duty on a windswept quayside. Nothing mattered much till they got to Victoria Station, the back door to Westminster, and came face to face with the Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, a veteran of the thirties—that dirty, double-dealing decade—the bright young Foreign Secretary who’d had the courage to resign from the Cabinet over Munich and Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, and who had for so long been heir apparent to the ageing and ailing Winston Churchill. Heir no longer—he had been PM for almost a year now, carrying with him the hopes of a nation deeply loyal to the old man, but desperately in need of the new man. The problem, as Troy saw it, was that heir apparent was a role one could play too long.
The idea of meeting Khrushchev rolled Troy back into memories of youth. When he was nineteen or twenty a cousin of his father’s had visited England as part of a Soviet trade mission. He was the only Troitsky Troy had ever met. One of the few to have stayed and tried to make the best of a dire inevitability. Troy’s father had entertained cousin Leo royally, keen for any news of the old country, lost in time like the Sisters Prozorova, dreaming of Moscow once more, drunk on Moscow once more. Moscow. Moscow was the fiefdom of the party boss of the city, a cunning peasant named Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. It was the first time anyone had heard the name. A hardy survivor of the Revolution, Khrushchev was in the process of building Moscow’s showcase Metro—the triumph of public works over private demands. From the outside it began to look as though the new Soviet Union was raising its head above the parapet for the first time. Cousin Leo had an abundance of tales of the eccentric, domineering, charming, drunken apparatchik in charge of the first burst of colour the Soviet Union had seen in almost twenty years. From time to time Troy had followed the career of this intriguing little man. The late thirties had seen him put in charge of the entire Ukraine—where he took to dressing like a peasant and imitating the accent of the region. More peasant than the peasant, full of old aphorisms and Ukrainian lore. The pretence had cost him. Ever wise to the weaknesses of his subordinates, Stalin had hoisted Khrushchev on his own petard. ‘Dance!’ he had told Khrushchev, and the fifty-two-year-old fat little Khrushchev danced for his life, flailing and sweating at his pastiche of the Ukrainian gopak for the delight of a man who would have thought little of putting him on the next train to Siberia or seeing him hanged in public. The war had found Khrushchev in uniform as a front-line political commissar, a Lieutenant-General—one better than Bulganin, whose title of ‘Marshal’ was hardly more meaningful than that of a Southern Colonel in Mississippi or Tennessee. Khrushchev had, by 1949, reappeared in Moscow as a full-blown member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, complete with overcoat, Homburg and his place on top of Lenin’s tomb each May Day. Soon enough the old dictator was dead. To those who hardly paid attention to matters Soviet there might have been some immediate confusion as to who had really inherited power—Beria? Malenkov? The mock Marshal, Bulganin? Or the real Marshal, Voroshilov? Nominally, the head of state was Voroshilov, and for the purposes of this visit it fell to Bulganin. Neither Troy, nor HM Government it seemed, had any doubts as to where the real power lay. As far as Troy was concerned, Khrushchev was a rocket waiting for someone to light the blue touch paper and retire. The only thing that was predictable about the man was that he was unpredictable. In his public persona Khrushchev had often struck Troy as having the fundamental defining characteristic of a kitten—a boundless, reckless curiosity.
Sometime between the war and the fall of Beria, cousin Leo had vanished. Troy’s brother Rod had been in the Cabinet in the dying days of the Labour Government and had used what influence he could. All Rod’s enquiries had yielded was that the man had never existed in the first place. A non-person, even in death. In a nation where simply to have survived was an achievement, Khrushchev was the survivor par excellence.
For weeks now rumours had circulated in the Western press that he had denounced Stalin, denounced him as a tyrant responsible for the slaughter of countless numbers of his own people. No one knew for certain, and no one had been able to quote a word the man said as gospel. The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been addressed by Khrushchev in a closed session. Yet the effects were noticeable. Reports came in from Poland and from Hungary of a change in the political climate, amounting to a faith
in the veracity of the rumour—it was, as so many journalists had remarked, the first sign of a thaw in the cold war, the tinsel rustle of political spring.
The Band of the Royal Marines struck up. Troy looked up at the ship. An interminable row of Soviet dignitaries stood to attention for their national anthem. At their head, two stout little men in vast black coats. Bulganin was not a well-known figure, Khrushchev was, yet they both seemed to Troy to be variations on the same theme as they made their way down the red-carpeted gangplank to the quay. They were stout men, they were little men, but their stoutness was at odds with their boyishness. He could think of no other word to describe them. With their round, smiley faces, and bright, darting eyes they were like two little boys, two schoolboys blown up into men with a bicycle pump.
They approached the start of the British line and began pumping flesh, Khrushchev following and smiling fiercely, Bulganin leading, smiling, it seemed, more naturally, his beautiful blue eyes shining and his hair coiffured like icing on a cake. As he shook Troy’s hand he looked to Troy like a living parody of Sir Thomas Beecham, right up to the goatee beard. And Khrushchev, Khrushchev only a foot away now, shaking the giant paw of Norman Cobb and looking like the Russian peasant he really was, another rendition of the Ur-Russian face that Troy had seen staring back at him from countless pictures and photographs all his life.
Khrushchev let go of Cobb’s hand. Troy let go of Bulganin’s, and in the twinkling of an eye he found himself clasping the podgy hand of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, looking into the nut-brown eyes of the leader of the Other World, and counting the warts on the face of the most fascinating man alive.
§8
Khrushchev was a bore. A bully and a bore. There were no two ways about it, the man was terrible. He had all the character and gusto that Troy had expected of him, but shot through with the corruption of power, an easy manipulation of others that manifested itself in an utter lack of regard for the feelings of those others.