Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Out!’ he bawled.

  In seconds, Troy found himself in a group offour. Himself, Clark, a tall, calm young KGB officer and Khrushchev.

  Khrushchev led off into the sitting room. The KGB man followed. Clark’s expression was crystal clear. ‘What now?’ said the look in his eyes, the slant of his mouth. Troy waved him into a chair, and followed Khrushchev.

  The KGB man opened his case and set what appeared to be a large ornamental box—the sort of thing one brought back from a foreign holiday and kept stale fags in ever after—on the coffee table. He flipped open the lid. Troy had a fleeting glimpse of dials and lights, then the man nodded to Khrushchev and left. As the door closed Khrushchev flung himself down on the sofa.

  ‘It’s all right. You can speak now. No one will hear us.’

  Really? Troy could hardly believe this.

  ‘There are no hidden microphones. My men swept the entire suite before we arrived last Monday. They’re not tapping the phone either, which confirmed our suspicions. Your people have found a way to use a telephone as a radio transmitter. And we in our turn have found a way to jam it. Be a good boy and pour us both a vodka.’

  He reached for the telephone.

  ‘I hope you don’t smoke. There was no room for any fags in the box once we’d installed the jammer.’

  Troy opened a fresh bottle of red pepper vodka and pinned back his ears. It was a simple conversation.

  ‘Дейстбуй,’ said Khrushchev. ‘Do it.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Дейстбуй,’ he said again, and hung up.

  If he was wrong, and MI5 were tapping the line, then they’d learn bugger all from that, thought Troy.

  Khrushchev belted back the vodka. Troy sipped at his, thought it an acquired taste, and abandoned it. Khrushchev disappeared into the bathroom. Two minutes later he reappeared, scrubbed fresh like a schoolboy, and red of cheek. A minute more and they faced a disbelieving Clark in the anteroom.

  It felt to Troy like an audience with the headmaster. He looked at them dressed in topcoats and ready for the street, put down his book and stood up, as though trying to make the most of investing his short stature with a little gravity. His expression both mournful and incredulous.

  ‘Oh, bloody Nora. Oh, bloody Nora. Tell me I’m wrong. You’re never taking him out?’

  ‘Just check the corridor and the back stairs, Eddie.’

  ‘Mr Cobb’ll hang us out to dry if you’re seen. You know that don’t you, sir?’

  ‘And when have any of us seen Cobb after nine o’clock at night? Go and look.’

  Troy and Khrushchev waited in silence for Clark to return. Khrushchev hummed a little tune and jingled the coins in his pocket. Troy thought he recognised the tune as ‘Love and Marriage’—a recent hit for Frank Sinatra—‘they go together like a horse and carriage’. It seemed improbable, but who knew what acid drops of Western culture had seeped through the bullet-proof windows of the Daimler to settle corrosively in the man’s unconscious?

  ‘You’re in luck,’ Clark said when he came back. ‘There’s Beynon outside the Marshal’s door, there’s one of Mr Cobb’s men sleeping upright on the mezzanine stairs, and there’s another three in the linen room playing pontoon. The bloke on the garage has retreated into the glass booth the jobsworth has at the garage door. He’s the only one likely to see anything.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Wish us luck and we’ll be off.’

  ‘Luck be damned. You’ll get me shot.’

  Troy opened the door, looked both ways and they dashed for the door to the service stairs, which led down to the underground car park. It was dark and low; the glass booth at the entrance shone like a beacon. Troy could see Cobb’s constable, sitting with the Claridge’s man, hat off, feet up, sipping tea and nattering. Such was the contrast in light, it would be nigh impossible for either of them to see out.

  He opened the boot of the Bentley.

  ‘I thought you promised me the metro,’ Khrushchev said.

  ‘We need a car to get out of here. And you can’t ride the tube looking like Nikita Khrushchev. You can’t go into an English pub looking like the Russian bear.’

  Troy pulled out an old gabardine mackintosh and a cloth cap he used on odd occasions when he needed to follow people without looking like a copper and told Khrushchev to swap coats. The mac was tight on Khrushchev, and suitably tatty compared to his own, but the cap fitted, and beneath their shabbiness he looked surprisingly English. Troy took the scarf Khrushchev wore so elegantly beneath his jacket and threaded it like a muffler, with a huge knot under his chin. Giving him the once-over, the ensemble still lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

  ‘Put your glasses on,’ said Troy.

  Khrushchev fished out a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, in which he usually, Troy had noticed, managed to avoid being photographed. He blinked at Troy through them. Troy weighed him up. Not only did he look English, he reminded Troy of those sturdy Londoners, packed with muscle after a lifetime in the docks, now running gently to seed on a diet of chips and beer. It solved a problem. Despite the promise, Troy had had no idea quite where to take him. The Salisbury carried the danger of running into Charlie, any pub in Soho, from the Salisbury all the way to the Fitzroy, via the Coach and Horses and the Colony Club, carried the risk of an encounter with Johnny Fermanagh. The man’s face had been plastered all over the papers for the best part of a week. Only the marriage of Prince Rainier of Monaco to the unbelievably beautiful American film star Grace Kelly had eclipsed him—the best joke of the entire trip had been when a bunch of undergraduates greeted the Russian leaders with a poster reading ‘Welcome Grace and Rainier’, and it rammed home the point: Khrushchev was as famous as any film star. Where in London would Troy find a pub whose regulars paid more attention to Grace Kelly than they would to Nikita Khrushchev? Like it or lump it, Nikita Sergeyevich was about to make a trip into the heart of London’s East End, where, if they’d read them at all, yesterday’s papers would be wrapping tonight’s chips. He liked the idea. He’d not been down the Brickie’s Arms in a long time. There was a place where it was possible to earwig conversations in Yiddish or Polish; Russian would hardly seem remarkable or worth remarking. He’d seen too little lately of George Bonham, the gentle giant, retired station sergeant of his old nick in Stepney, and a Brickie regular. George’s good nature would not lead him to question Troy if he passed Khrushchev off as a distant relative, and his grasp of current affairs was almost nil. Troy had spent much of the war explaining the war to him. After the war he had spent almost as much time explaining the new welfare state.

  So far, so good, thought Troy, as they rode the escalator down to the Central line at Oxford Circus. He had told Khrushchev to lie low as they drove past the Special Branch flatfoot in the glass booth. He parked the car two streets away, and walked with him the last quarter mile across Mayfair. Khrushchev was gazing about him intently, his expression flickering between fascination and disgust at the plethora of advertising that lined the escalator shaft, learning the English obsession with health and quackery—of the reinvigorating powers of Horlicks and ‘Yeast-Vite’; and their careless obliviousness to health and common sense—of the strength, mildness, coolness, flavour, ad infinitum, of Kensitas, Churchman’s No.1 and a dozen other brands of fag. And the breasts, a diagonal gallery of breasts, a moving staircase of tit and titillation, advertising every conceivable form of ‘foundation’, that is ways to wrap and pack women into their own clothes. It was little short of a national obsession; the day was approaching when tits could be used to sell anything. Divide and conquer. Up, out and cleave.

  At platform level Khrushchev took in everything, poring over the multicoloured map of the tube lines, even begging a sixpence off Troy to try the chocolate machine.

  They boarded an eastbound destined for Hainault. It was well past rush hour, and the train was sparsely populated with mid-evening travellers, not one of whom paid the slightest bit of notice to Khrushchev. K
hrushchev stared openly. Troy tried seeing the English through his eyes. It must, he thought, strike him as very familiar, if all the clichés of the popular press’s version of the USSR were to be believed. The English were a drab bunch. A uniform bunch. Grey men in grey clothes. Bad haircuts, bitten fingernails, nicotined fingers, clacking false teeth, leaking shoes, stained trousers that hardly saw a dry cleaner’s from one year to the next and, on a night like this, a rippling sea of wet gabardine—a sensory assault of damp and dirt. Miserable, downtrodden men in a miserable downtrodden nation. A nation, he hardly dared think, in need of some sort of revolution. Not marching in the streets, not the storming of the Winter Palace—that after all was Sandringham, too far away, and so unpalace-like—but a cultural revolution, something to shake the cobwebs off the country. Had Troy felt any close identification with his nation, he too, like Her Majesty’s Government, would have thought twice about showing it off to any foreigner.

  At each station Khrushchev got out, stood among the jostle of passengers elbowing their way home, and looked around him rather like a jaded train-spotter, the amateur expert—seen it, done it—to whom no sight can ever be fresh. Troy passed on Holbom, stayed put in the car. Holbom had cost him too much already. By the time they reached Bank, Khrushchev was ready to deliver his appraisal.

  ‘It lacks grandeur,’ he said simply.

  Troy thought about it. Grandeur was not part of it. The London Underground was a piecemeal creation of lines dug separately, by different, private and public enterprises over a period of almost a hundred years. They each had their own idea of how to dress up a hole in the ground, but Troy doubted if grandeur had ever been part of anyone’s scheme.

  ‘My metro, in Moscow. My metro can hold its own with the finest palaces on earth. It is a cathedral under the ground.’

  There were many who thought St Pancras railway station as fine as any cathedral. Troy thought of going out of their way to show it him—a quick change to the Northern line now would have them there in ten minutes—but decided instead to tell him the old chestnut about the American tourist mistaking it for St Pancras’ church and respectfully removing his hat as he entered. Khrushchev shrugged. Knowing nothing of the sheer beauty of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s unearthly masterpiece of turrets and gables and countless tiny, dormer windows, he probably took it as merely indicative of American naiveté. The anecdote neither amused nor interested him. He was thoroughly preoccupied with the recorded announcements urging him in the strangled tones of pre-war received pronunciation to ‘Mind the gap!’ One day, Troy thought, when presumptive classlessness had rendered all England gorblimey, RP would survive in dark corners of the London Passenger Transport Board, still warning people to ‘stand clear of the doors’ and ‘mind the gap’ in the superfluous diphthongs of a lost age.

  A far better place to change, Troy concluded, was Liverpool Street, London’s terminus for the old Great Eastern Railway, where a Piranesi-like nightmare of catwalks in the sky, usually shrouded in a miasma of soot and steam, was mirrored by an equally labyrinthine network of gloomy tunnels underground. Besides, it was the only place on the entire Underground system where you could prop up a bar, pint in hand, without even leaving the platform.

  Troy bought halves. He didn’t want to be here all night.

  Khrushchev sipped at his beer and pronounced it good. It wasn’t, but Troy had instigated an expedition in search of the common man—it was not for him to reject the common man’s taste. Tom Driberg had often urged him to drink beer as the first and simplest way to break the ice with the lower classes, but Troy hated the stuff and did not, in any case, share Driberg’s sexual fascination with the working man. Khrushchev stood on the down Metropolitan platform, elbow on the bar, shoulder to shoulder with a working man, who was nose-deep in the late final Evening Standard and oblivious to his presence.

  The platforms were deserted, devoid of Londoners but strewn with their litter, a windswept mess of toffee papers—the British had binged on confectionery ever since it came off ration—cigarette ends and old newspapers. Troy watched Khrushchev watching an old Standard with Grace Kelly’s face on the front being wafted across the platform and onto the track. It flipped over completely as it left the edge and Princess Grace’s face gave way to Khrushchev’s own. Troy wondered, as the picture disappeared under the wheels of an oncoming train, whether Khrushchev had just felt someone walk over his grave. Instead he took his glass in hand, walked out to the middle of the platform and looked up the line, the knowing train-spotter once more. Past the end of the platforms, the blackened walls of buildings rose like a canyon before the tunnel to Moorgate swallowed the tracks. Beer and bar apart, it was a depressing pit. It required an odd mentality to like it, a twist in the mind that could enjoy this cold, subterranean world, neither indoors nor out. Sometimes Troy had it, sometimes he hadn’t. Sometimes he could spend whole evenings down here. Sometimes he loathed the place. A couple of years after the war, Johnny Fermanagh had taken him on a classic pub crawl around the bars of the Circle line. Starting out from Sloane Square’s southside bar with a horde of Johnny’s drinking cronies, pockets stuffed with miniatures, they had boozed and schmoozed their way to the Hole-in-the-Wall at King’s Cross, to Liverpool Street, to come full circle at Sloane Square, shedding cronies all the way, until just he and Johnny remained to attempt the round one more time, only to fall short and end up at Liverpool Street again, pissed and penniless in this pit of soot and iron. Years, decades after the ending of steam-hauled trains, the underground still smelt of soot. Aldgate, one station down the line towards Victoria, was quite literally a pit, dating from the plague of 1666. The engineers of the Circle line had dug the station out through archaeological strata of human remains. Liverpool Street, he recalled, was the site of Bedlam, home to generations of lunatics.

  Khrushchev sniffed the air.

  Soot or madness or death? Troy wondered. Railways always put Troy in mind of Anna Karenina’s death under the wheels of a train. Grace Kelly had never, as far as he knew, played Anna—the version he knew was Garbo’s. That mournful, miserable beauty. The moist smell of the underground, that ancient mixture of soot and humanity, was as strong as the reek of cordite to him, inseparable from the thought of death, the thought of the woman in black laying her head upon the tracks.

  Khrushchev’s gaze swept around from the low, dark, dirty roof, across the clutter of signs and posters to the lantern glow of the bar once more. He walked back towards Troy, his short legs shooting out stiffly like a tin soldier’s, and placed his empty glass on the bar.

  ‘It lacks unity,’ he said.

  Unity was an impossibility. Only in the 1930s had it even approached unity and that was in terms of aspects of style. Troy would put it no more strongly than that—Beck’s map, the Nuremberg lighting at Arnos Grove, the modernist lines of the newer stations out along the far reaches of the Piccadilly line. By now, in the mid-fifties, that short burst of style had been absorbed and the true nature of tlie system reasserted itself. There was only one word for it.

  ‘It’s ramshackle,’ he told Khrushchev. ‘But it works.’

  ‘It works, but can you be proud of it?’

  ‘I don’t think Londoners think of it with pride. I doubt whether they think of it at all.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘A little awe for the works of men would not be out of place. You have cathedrals and palaces galore. Where is the palace of the people? What is the palace of the people if not a railway station?’

  Troy had no answer as yet, and fielded Khrushchev’s question with one of his own that had been nagging at him for quarter of an hour.

  ‘What is it you can smell? You’ve done that at every place we stopped.’

  Khrushchev breathed in deeply.

  ‘Soot,’ he said. ‘Soot and . . . and . . . despair.’

  Troy looked out towards the tunnel, to the drizzling misery of a black night in London. For so long now it had struck him as some makeshift shanty, shabbytown, shorn of
all pride, laid bare, without dignity. But despair? How had Khrushchev noticed that? Where had he seen it—where, since it seemed his operational mode, had he smelt it? Was this what the national odour of wet gabardine spelt out to the perceptive nose?

  ‘Soot,’ Khrushchev said again. ‘And despair . . . and someone frying bacon.’

  He wanted Khrushchev to see Stepney Green. After his outburst to the Labour Party on the matter of who had done what in the war, it was fitting that he should see some of what London had been through. They left the underground at Whitechapel. By the Blind Beggar, a pub gaining a reputation for trouble, and deemed by Troy to be highly unsuitable for the experiment they were essaying, they crossed over the Mile End Road. At the junction of Hannibal Road and Stepney Green they turned right, down the side of the Green, past the London Jewish Hospital and rows of abandoned houses—windowless, some floorless, with the zigzag shadows of collapsed staircases scorched onto the walls and blackened hearths stranded halfway up without rooms to wrap them—and out into the blitzed remains of Cardigan Street.

  It had not occurred to Troy before that every other street in this neck of the woods was named after one aspect or another of the last war Britain had actually fought with Russia—unless you counted Murmansk, which Troy did not and Khrushchev surely would. The importance of Stepney Green to Troy was that it was as flat today as the day Hitler had levelled it in 1940. Hundreds of homes blown to dust. Thousands of lives lost, many, many more disrupted and displaced. This corner of the East End had never recovered from the Blitz, had never retrieved its people from the dispersal of the war, nor reclaimed its identity in the peace. It was grassed over now, but to Troy the lines of rubble were still visible beneath the wilderness of green. As Troy told him this Khrushchev nodded, said nothing. Just looked and sighed. At last he said, ‘I saw Stalingrad. I saw Moscow. I was there when we took back Lvov.’