Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  The British could not accept that they had no role in Egypt, as though to give away the Raj were quite enough for one day, or in Cyprus, whose Greek population were fighting the British in the streets for union with Greece—hardly a day went by without news of some British tommy being bumped off in Nicosia or Larnaca—or in Africa, where British Imperial jails were stuffed to the gills with men who one day would surely lead their countries, and more likely than not face their former captors across the table with more than a hint of resentment. For their part, the French had withdrawn ignominiously from Viet Nam and were looking to restore national prestige by taking it out on the Algerians. Sore winners the French. Along the borders of Israel—a country less than ten years old—and almost every other Arab state, were frequent skirmishes, spelling out, to those who watched, the possibility of imminent war. Only last month young Hussein, the Sandhurst- and Harrow-educated King of Jordan, had sacked Glubb Pasha, the British General of the Arab Legion, saying that his values, like his policies, were Victorian. Nasser had a point. Rod, Troy knew, rather admired the man. But the life he led demanded, if not outright duplicity, then from time to time devil’s advocacy. Troy looked at Khrushchev to see if he steamed, as Rod, smiling wickedly, asked Eden if he would restore the balance of power by giving Israel as much in the way of weaponry as the Soviet Union had given Egypt.

  Again Eden would not be drawn. Troy wondered how little the man had got away with telling the Russians.

  In the evening the Russian Embassy returned the astringent British hospitality with a formal reception. Troy knew what this meant. The embassy would never admit armed coppers, any more than MI5 would let armed KGB agents escort B & K, as the papers had dubbed them, around London. They’d spend a boring evening cooling their heels in an anteroom with a silent KGB guard for company. The bulge in Clark’s pocket was undoubtedly a book with which to while away the time. Troy had finished The Secret Agent, and forgotten to pick up a newspaper. Clark was never caught out by boredom.

  They handed B & K over to the embassy staff and waited for instructions. Troy watched his charges vanish into the throng of Russians awaiting their first guests, and saw a tall, thin young man heading towards him.

  ‘Gentleman,’ he began. ‘Tereshkov. Anton Tereshkov. Comrade Khrushchev has informed me that you are all to be our guests. If you would be so kind as to surrender your weapons to me, you may join the reception.’

  Clark and Milligan looked at Troy, waiting for their cue.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I doubt there’s anything about a service issue Browning they haven’t known for years.’

  They handed over their weapons like schoolboys parting with illicit catapults. Troy fished his own gun out of the absurd contraption that stuck it sharply up his armpit and gave it to Tereshkov.

  ‘A word, if I may, Chief Inspector.’

  Troy gestured Clark and Milligan away, and they moved slowly and suspiciously into the crowd, glancing back at Troy and looking like two coppers reluctantly pursuing a suspect into a ladies’ lavatory.

  Tereshkov took Troy by the arm, gently swung him around into the kind of huddle presumed to exclude other ears.

  ‘Chief Inspector. Comrade Khrushchev has invited you to visit the Soviet Union.’

  Good grief, thought Troy, the old fool had actually meant it.

  ‘There are complications,’ Troy said, trying for tact. ‘I’m grateful, but I really think it won’t be possible.’

  ‘The British would object? It would desTroy the career of a Special Branch officer?’

  ‘No, the British would not object. And I’m not in the Branch, I. run the Murder Squad at Scotland Yard. It’s more personal. Do you see?’

  ‘I see, Chief Inspector Troy, only as much as you wish me to see. However, the invitation stands. Comrade Khrushchev seems alarmed at the idea that you have never seen your homeland and extends his personal, his personal invitation to you. All you have to do is let him know through the embassy that you wish to come, and the necessary papers will be arranged by the office of the First Secretary in Moscow.’

  ‘Do you really think the KGB will forward a letter from an English copper to the ruler of the Soviet Union?’ Troy asked, more than a little incredulous.

  Tereshkov took a notebook from his pocket and jotted down a word in Russian—Пирожки. Pirozhki. Literally, it meant fried dumplings. He tore off the page and gave it to Troy. Troy could not help feeling that the man whose job it was to think these things up was secretly taking the mickey.

  ‘I am Comrade Khrushchev’s man here. Any letter dropped into the embassy letterbox bearing this code will be sent straight to me, and by me straight to the First Secretary. No one else will know its content. Whatever dark secret you and your people are hiding—from us or the British—will be quite safe.’

  But, of course, Troy had no idea what he was hiding. Whatever it was it had been hidden by his father long ago. To entertain Khrushchev’s invitation as anything more than whimsy on the part of a mercurial old man was to risk ripping the lid off a can of worms. Since his father’s death in 1943 not a week had passed when Troy had not wished him alive for five minutes to answer one question or another, and with every year that passed the list grew longer.

  Far from being blown by the night at the Commons, Troy’s cover, and hence the cover of the team as a whole, seemed intact. Khrushchev made no further use of his knowledge that they were all spies. This confirmed Troy’s belief that the mission was hopeless from the start. He had thought all along that Khrushchev would never be indiscreet in the presence of the English. He now blustered and joked and raged in Russian, well aware that they all understood him, and dutifully paused for his interpreter as though the charade were real. The tasteless jokes resumed, the boundless curiosity pretended it was sated by more meetings with living monuments, more official statements, more damned statistics.

  He did not speak directly to Troy again. They lurched through a manic schedule that seemed designed to put Khrushchev in an early grave. He was, Troy thought, becoming tired, bored and irritated. This resulted in petulance, boyish behaviour teetering on the brink of a boyish tantrum. An evening of Margot Fonteyn at Covent Garden did nothing to lift his spirits, and the next day that which Troy had expected for some time happened. Khrushchev stamped his foot and told the Foreign Office to ‘Stuff your trip to Calder Hall up your collective arse!’ The interpreter, for once, showed tact and told the chinless wonder from the FO that perhaps a visit to the Atomic Research Establishment was not possible after all. The FO expressed their regrets and took it on the chin. Anyone, thought Troy, among those awful types at the FO and MI5 who might have suffered from the paranoid delusion that Khrushchev might be anxious to glean every last secret about Britain’s much-vaunted nuclear programme and would have to be watched every second of his trip, might just be dragged back to the reality: the man was bored by Britain and the British. Perhaps the obvious was surfacing? We had no secrets the Russians did not know about. Or were the spooks-and-powers-that-be incapable of reading the contempt that ran through Khrushchev’s refusal?

  §15

  On the dockside Troy waited with an assembly of nobs in the chill wind of April. The sky was ominously grey, just like the ship, and the papers were still moaning about a drought this summer. The Ordzhonikidze moved off at a snail’s pace, towering above them like a block of flats on castors, the Russian band on the deck blew its tuneless military pomp and the wind sucked the notes out of the air. Bulganin and Khrushchev stood and waved like the Soviet version of The Last of England. Cheerless and frumpish as May Day on Lenin’s tomb. Today was the day of the fawn mackintosh, the dark trilby, and contempt for matching accessories. Troy could not but believe that they were glad to be off these islands.

  Suddenly Khrushchev approached the rail, whipped off his hat, leaned out, looked straight at Troy and yelled with all his might. ‘Bugger England!’ he cried. ‘Come to Russia. Distance doesn’t matter. Come where we still have some s
pirit!’ Then he threw in an idiomatic, ‘Держи хвост пистолетом!’—the sort of thing one said to cheer up a miserable child, slouching home after a pasting from the school bully—‘Hold your tail like a pistol’—which had an approximate English equivalent in ‘Keep your pecker up.’

  Troy glanced around. In the long minutes of waiting for the ship to cast off, the nobs had chatted and drifted. He was, he realised, closer to the Ordzhonikidze than anyone but the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, who was standing right next to him. The Russian ambassador, in protocol Lloyd’s escort and vice versa, somehow had ended up about twenty feet behind them.

  ‘Что, Что?’ Troy heard him say. ‘I couldn’t understand a word of that.’

  Lloyd was looking baffled.

  ‘It’s for you, Foreign Secretary,’ he lied. ‘Comrade Khrushchev is telling you to come and see him in Russia.’ He thought on his toes, cutting and pasting what Khrushchev had said into some semblance of diplomacy. ‘Physical distance is nothing, spiritual distances are what matter. He tells you to—’ Troy searched for something better than ‘keep your pecker up’, something utterly without ambiguity or innuendo—‘To keep your heart healthy.’

  ‘Healthy?’

  ‘Pure. He means pure. It’s an old Russian aphorism.’

  He glanced at the ambassador once more. The man was cocking a hand to his ear and still muttering ‘Что?’ ‘What?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Lloyd. ‘These aphorisms. Why can’t we have a few of our own. Er . . . er . . . Tell Mr Khrushchev . . . er . . . to put his hat on. It’s rather cold. I’d hate to think of him catching cold.’

  Pathetic, thought Troy. Lloyd smiled. Pleased with his own powers of invention. Troy yelled his translation back to Khrushchev. Khrushchev roared with laughter. Troy just made out a cry of ‘Bugger England!’ before the ship swung its bows seaward and he vanished from sight.

  §16

  Troy was back at the Yard in good time. The day had cleared wonderfully. By four-thirty of a beautiful spring afternoon he had had quite enough of paperwork and was gazing idly at the sunlight glinting on the Thames beneath his window. It was, he thought, almost identical to the view his brother Rod had from his office in the Palace of Westminster, a couple of hundred yards upriver. Out of office since 1951, Rod was a dutiful constituency MP. Often of a Friday evening he would call Troy in the hope of scrounging a lift down to the Hertfordshire mansion that his father had bought on his arrival in England in 1910. Troy wandered over to the Commons, down the tunnel that connected the Underground to Westminster, past a tired, Fridayish constable, saluting him in the most perfunctory fashion, and up the staircase to the office Rod, as Shadow Foreign Secretary, occupied on the south side.

  The door was open. Rod was in shirt-sleeves, obligatory red tie at half-mast, also looking very Fridayish, and rummaging about among a vast acreage of papers on his desktop. Troy leaned in the doorway, looking at the clutter in which Rod seemed to like to work. The dark panelling and the huge gothic Thameside window were a Tennysonian, a Burne-Jonesy mock-mediæval, softened, humanised, almost modernised by the paraphernalia Rod accumulated around him. The window-seat cover his mother-in-law had sewn for him, the knitted tea cosy stuck in the in-tray, the sentimental relics of his kids’ childhood—school photos, discarded mittens, outgrown caps, a one-armed teddy bear—all fighting with green-and-white Government papers for space atop the bookshelves. The personal and the political intermixed, crowned by a full outfit for a three-year-old, topcoat, bonnet, bootees and red Labour rosette included, hanging from the picture rail like the skin of some exotic insect long since turned into a more exotic butterfly. The butterfly was Alexander, Rod’s eldest, now all of nineteen and far from butterfly-like. A big, robust man like his father. Not unlike Troy in looks but built on a grander scale. Rod was the best part of six foot, going grey, going gently to seed at forty-eight and looking, as Troy had thought just the other night, distinctly portly.

  Rod heard the thought and looked up at him.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, returning his gaze to the papers and the desk, ‘that you’ve come to tell me I buggered up your week?’

  ‘No. I haven’t and you didn’t. As a matter of fact it all worked out rather well. And I came, incidentally, to offer you a lift home.’

  ‘Who’s driving?’

  ‘I am.’

  Rod found what he was looking for and tossed the corkscrew at Troy.

  ‘Good. Open a bottle. Your week may have been fine. I’ve just sat through a stinker.’

  Troy opened the cupboard next to the fireplace and pulled out a bottle of what Rod called his ‘stash’—the legacy of the late Alexei Troy—enough château-bottled wine to last a man a lifetime or two. Troy picked the nearest. A Gevrey-Chambertin 1938.

  ‘It probably escaped your notice while you were out playing the spy, but it was budget week. I’ve just spent several days cooling my arse on the front bench, watching Harold Macmillan wipe the floor with us.’

  Troy poured and handed the first glass to his brother. Rod sat on the window-seat watching the last of the sun and took up his litany of complaint once more.

  ‘He’s such a flash bastard. The only thing he didn’t do was juggle the despatch box and the mace.’

  Troy sipped at his glass. He’d no idea, nor had Rod, how long such wine kept. It tasted fine. He joined Rod in the window, wondering why he was so ratty. Rod’s disposition was ordinarily so even; he was, Troy accepted, most of the time a remarkably well-balanced man.

  ‘It’s so bloody frustrating. Watching him, and not being able to get up and have a go.’

  ‘You don’t want the Chancellor’s job, do you?’

  ‘Want it? Of course I don’t bloody want it. Who in their right mind would give up the Foreign brief now? Just when your new friend has made it quite possibly the most interesting job on the front bench?’

  ‘You mean Khrushchev?’

  ‘Of course I mean Khrushchev! If he goes on kicking over the traces in this way we’ll be running to keep up with him. Stalin never sets foot outside Russia except to pow-wow with Churchill. Khrushchev tours like Liberace. That’s the beauty of the Foreign job—wondering what the bugger’s going to do next.’

  Rod looked at Troy, as though expecting Troy to answer the implicit question.

  ‘Well,’ Troy said, silently wondering what Khrushchev had told Kolankiewicz, ‘he didn’t tell me.’

  Rod drained his glass and held it out for the refill.

  ‘But you did talk to him, didn’t you?’

  The glint reappeared in his eyes, the irritation of the day deserting him in a wine-red flush of nosiness.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Troy said coyly.

  ‘Perhaps my backside. Out with it!’

  ‘Well . . . I did get the chance of a bit of a chat.’

  ‘I suppose you gave him your usual jaundiced view of the country? Did he realise you were spying on him?’

  ‘Of course. He’s not stupid.’

  Troy paused, wondering how much he dare tell Rod. The trip to the East End, and the jaundiced views of the British working man, had better stay a secret. But there was no harm in recounting the old boy’s views. He had aired them so freely as they rode the cab back to Claridge’s.

  ‘He as good as told me he thought Eden was mad.’

  ‘As good as?’

  Troy raised his left hand to his temple.

  ‘He tapped the side of his head. Very much the gesture our grandfather used to use when he thought someone was a bit crazy. Then he said Eden was a few grains short of a bushel—which I took to be some sort of peasant aphorism or something he’d made up to sound like a peasant aphorism.’

  Rod glugged his wine, and stared at the river for a moment.

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said softly. ‘I would not have credited a man of such obvious bluster with such acute perception. He’s quite right, of course, Eden is barking. I’ve thought so for a while now. Absolutely barking bloody mad. There
’s talk he won’t last the term. I’ve bet Nye Bevan a tenner Macmillan will lead the Tories into the next election. He’s backing Rab Butler.’

  ‘And,’ Troy went on, ‘I know for a fact Eden buttonholed the Russians over Egypt. Tried a bit of armtwisting to get them to stay out of whatever rumpus is brewing out there. I heard Bulganin and Khrushchev rehashing it.’

  Rod leaned his head back against the panelling and sighed gently.

  ‘Ye gods and little fishes. Then he really is barking. It’s the last subject I would have raised with them. Why give them the impression we’re going to invade? The send-a-gunboat days are over. If he doesn’t know that then our Prime Minister is the last man in England who hasn’t heard.’

  Troy made and cared nothing of this.

  ‘And,’ he pressed on, ‘Khrushchev invited me to Russia.’

  ‘Bloody hell! You must go. He invited Gaitskell. If he’d asked me I’d have been off like a shot.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Rod. I can’t go to Russia. Nor can you.’

  ‘Why the hell not? There’s nowhere on earth I’d rather go. And with Mr K’s personal invitation you could escape the usual InTourist rubbish.’

  ‘We can’t go—either of us,’ Troy said firmly. ‘It simply isn’t on.’

  ‘Freddie, I spent my entire childhood listening to tales of the old country. Do you think I’d throw up a chance to finally see it for myself? I had to give Khrushchev that list of political prisoners. It was duty. But I knew damn well I was queering the pitch for myself as a visitor. If he’s asked you, you have to go.’