by Lawton, John
‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Mind,’ he had said. ‘What’s to mind?’
‘Separate beds. Separate beds is to mind. But—’
‘It’s all right, I understand.’
‘Do you Troy? Do you?’
He had tried to persuade her out for the evening and failed. She had not wanted to leave the room, had not left it in a week.
‘How do you manage?’ he had asked.
‘Room service. I live off the delivery menu. I been all the way through the damn thing once already. I’m back to cold roast chicken again. I’ve eaten more pickled herring than Moby Dick. I could kill for pepperoni and mozzarella pizza or spaghetti vongole or even just a warm bagel.’
So they sat on the floor, backs against the matching beds, tore apart a whole roast chicken, which he downed with Perrier and she with slugs of bourbon. There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask, but he doubted he’d get answers to a single one, so instead he let her ask a thousand questions and did his best to answer them all. Until they came full circle, once more through another menu.
‘You were famous for a while, d’y’know that?’
‘Even in the Soviet Union?’
‘The Man Who Shot Jimmy Wayne. Quite a reputation.’
‘It sounds like a good title for a cowboy film. But I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t shoot him?’
‘No. Why would I shoot him?’
‘I heard you went up against him at Heathrow armed with a handgun. And he pulled a gun on you, and you winged him.’
‘Not the way it happened. High Noon At Heathrow isn’t exactly the English way, is it?’
‘Glad to hear it. And that’s an awful title for a movie.’
‘I did have a gun. A necessary precaution. But I also had six armed constables surrounding the plane he was on. And I didn’t have to shoot him for the simple reason he wasn’t armed.’
‘How d’he die? I know he never made it to the gallows.’
‘Suicide.’
‘Well, KGB gossip got that right. Hang himself with his suspenders?’
‘Cyanide capsule in one of his teeth. A legacy of his time in Berlin I should think. As soon as the Old Bailey handed down the sentence, he was put in a paddy wagon to be taken back to Brixton prison. He was handcuffed, but there should still have been someone in the van with him. Lazy sods rode up front so they could smoke and natter. He was dead when they opened the door at Brixton. If the trial hadn’t been in camera there would have been one hell of a row, but—hang on a minute, it was in camera, how did you know he was dead?’
‘We leaked it. Did you think I helped you catch him for old times’ sake? The British tried him in camera, fairly predictable after all. To try a CIA killer in public would put the last nail in the coffin of the special relationship. But we had our sources and we leaked it. Every newspaper in the western world knew Wayne was on trial and for what. Some of the French papers ran it for a day or two till the fist came down. Too late by then. We’d sown the seed of doubt. Probably more valuable as rumour than if Fleet Street had printed it in full. You were lucky not get the Order of Lenin.’
He got out of bed and tugged at the curtains. Another cloudless June morning. The bourbon bottle lay on its side, half-empty. The roses lay on the dressing table, sad and wilting where she had left them, petals fallen like giant snowflakes onto the lavender-coloured carpet. He didn’t think he’d bother buying her flowers again. And if she could drink like that he didn’t think he’d buy her bourbon again either. He pulled the sheet gently off her. Still she did not wake. He looked at her. She was thin, almost wasted by comparison with her old self. A stone or so underweight. It looked to him as though she’d been eating badly and too little and as though she had not seen the sun in a long time. He had vivid, tactile memories of the curve of her backside—it was one of the great backsides—which now seemed flattened, and the muscles of her calves seemed slack, and her back was a mass of bruises as bad as the ones she buried under pancake on her face. He’d seen such marks a hundred times in the course of the job—a good kicking to the kidneys.
He washed, shaved and dressed and came back to find that she had not moved. Only now her eyes were open.
‘Get up.’
‘Nuuuhh?’
‘Get up. We’re going out.’
‘Out?’
‘You can’t stay in this room for ever.’
‘Wanna bet?’
Tosca dragged herself to the bathroom naked, and emerged fully clothed, with another thick layer of make-up to her face, pulling a glove over the torn fingers of her right hand. She did not seem to bother with the left.
‘What d’ya have in mind?’
‘Lunch. We’ll go to lunch. And we’ll talk.’
All Troy wanted was a clean, well-lighted place. A view of the canal would be nice. Any canal, it didn’t matter which. But all the way out, on every corner Tosca was looking over her shoulder, checking in the reflections of shop windows in an atrocious parody of fugitive caution.
‘Stop it,’ Troy said.
‘Stop what?’
‘All this cloak and dagger nonsense. If the person you think is following us is any good you won’t spot him, and if he isn’t, I’d’ve spotted him pretty quick myself.’
They had stopped by some law of serendipity outside a small café on the Prinsengracht. Troy decide to look no further and all but dragged her inside. To appease her they took a window table. Troy could see to the next bend in the canal one way, Tosca the other. She waved away the menu and ordered ‘coffee, black, lots of it’.
‘Who do you think is following you?’ he asked.
Tosca said nothing, did not return his gaze and made tramlines on the tablecloth with her fork.
Troy wondered how to break the silence. Her right hand let go of the fork and disappeared below the table. Glove or no glove he assumed she was acting upon an instinct to hide it, but the hand came up again clutching her handbag.
‘I got a letter for you.’
‘A letter? For me?’
‘Well, a note really.’
‘From whom?’
He had a momentary, illusory vision of long-lost cousins he’d never met and never heard of somehow encountering Tosca in the lost domain of family history that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. She fished into her handbag and brought out a tiny piece of paper folded over many times.
‘Burgess.’
‘Guy Burgess?’
‘Yeah. I got to know him pretty well, he gets bored easy, never really learnt Russian. He used to take me out drinking just to have a conversation in English.’
‘And you and Guy Burgess talked about me?’
‘Well, no, not exactly. I guess your name came up at some point. I mean most of the time he wanted to talk about England, he loved the fact that I’d lived there. That I’d not been there for a good five years before he split didn’t seem to matter, just to know the same bars and restaurants was enough. We ran through the names of everyone we knew there till he found a name we had in common. I never thought it would be you. He said if I was ever in England I should give you this.’
‘When did he say this?’
‘Christmas before last.’
Troy held out his hand for the note, but she unfolded it and began to read.
‘Hold on. I can’t . . . it says something like please send one dozen jars . . . jeezus it looks like . . . pappum papperum. Jeez, I dunno. Anyway that’s the stuff he wants you to send him. I guess it’s the English equivalent of a Hershey bar. You miss ’em like hell, then the first one you get you damn near barf and wonder what you ever saw in them.’
Troy snatched the scrap of paper from her. It read ‘Patum Pepperium’, in Burgess’s upright, loopless hand, his letters stiff and straight like lead soldiers in their box—the opposite of the man himself. Patum Pepperium, an anchovy paste which called itself ‘the Gentleman’s Relish’, much as Heinz boasted of its fifty-seven varieties.
Burgess gave an address at the Moskva Hotel and sent his best wishes. Troy screwed up the note and dropped it in the ashtray.
‘No,’ he said, ‘Guy can go fuck himself for his Patum Pepperium.’
‘If Burgess could fuck himself, he’d be the happiest man alive. As things are, he’s one of the unhappiest.’
‘Bad as that, eh?’
‘If you ever defect, defect to Paris or Monte Carlo—not Moscow, anywhere but Moscow.’
‘I hadn’t planned on it. Reminds me of a scrawl I once saw at Liverpool Street station. Where the sign says, “Harwich for the Continent”, some wag had written, “And Paris for the Rest of Us” underneath.’
She smiled. Without nervousness, without forcing it. A natural reflex action. The first in the many hours they had been together.
‘He’s right, whoever he is. Burgess is holed up in his hotel, pissed half the time, watched all the time. It’s no life.’
She paused to turn the tramlines she had scored on the white tablecloth into a chequerboard.
‘Tell me,’ she said, looking up. ‘Do you remember when you were interrogating Diana Brack?’
He could scarcely believe she had raised the name, but the look in her eyes showed no anger, no sensibility that he too might feel anger, or remorse, or pain. He nodded.
‘She said talking to the old British Socialists was like spending an evening with the guys who planned the bus routes or mapped out the sewers or something like that. Well, I’ve seen the Soviet Union from the top since then, and believe me, the damn woman was right. You could take a job lot of council clerks and town planners and dump them down in Moscow or Omsk or Tomsk—and they’d feel at home in ten minutes and Russia would feel at home with them. It’s the bourgeois country, Troy. They’ve enshrined the practices of Middle England, even as they reject the values. They have a form for that, a Ministry of Circumlocution, a Department of Bumf. Jeezus, it’s a miracle they achieve anything! Russia has become the natural home of the little guy with the rubber stamp. For every heroic, bleeding Stakhanovite you hear about, there’s a dozen Mr Efficiencies running a world the borough surveyor from Fogtown and Bogshire would find recognisable. Praise the lord and pass the Turkey.’
‘How did you stick it?’
‘You sneering? Troy, you wouldn’t be sneering, now would you?’
‘It’s an honest question. I’ve never been there—but it is the most fantasised, the most imagined country since Lilliput.’
She shrugged her shoulders, stirred the tablecloth chequers into messy, concentric circles with her fork. And suddenly he realised that he had unleashed the flood. He had no idea what he’d said to achieve this, perhaps it was not of his doing at all, perhaps he had Burgess to thank for breaking her silence? But she was talking.
‘I guess I wasn’t there a lot. The whole point in having someone like me who can pass for an American is to send ’em abroad. Mostly I played Western Europe. I spent a lot of time in Berlin, but I got pulled from there not long after you snatched Wayne. It was too public a place. Every other guy was a spy. There was a risk of me getting too well known. And when I was home I was well treated. Until ’53, that is.’
‘’53? What happened in ’53?’
‘Stalin died. I thought you might have heard.’
‘I don’t quite see what you mean.’
‘When the top man goes there’s little guys all down the line who get reshuffled. It’s like a house of cards or a row of dominoes. One tumbles, they all go. Although the death that mattered was Beria’s. Once he was gone there was a purge of his people.’
‘You mean you were one of Beria’s people?’
‘Not directly. Not in any real sense. I mean I never even met the guy. But reason is not the way these things operate. Somewhere up the line a guy I had worked for was held to be too much the Beria man, so he was out. So then they look down the line, I was his as he’d been Beria’s. So while I wasn’t out, I was downgraded, reassigned to safer stuff and my promotion was stopped. I’m still a Major. I been a Major for seven years. Since 1953 all I’ve been is a low-level courier in cities that are considered relatively safe like Paris or Brussels or Zurich, places that have never been carved up into zones, places where the concierge leans in a window smoking cheap cigarettes for the hell of it instead of noting everyone who passes for one goddam secret service or the other. I did that for three years, just shuffling packages around, live drops and duboks. Then this March they pulled me off it. I began to wonder if some defunct apparatchik in some prison somewhere hadn’t fingered me to cut a deal for themselves. Or maybe Khrushchev’s denunciation finally did for me. Old Joe is knocked off his pedestal and the domino ripple finally reached me, the last apparatchik in the stack. God knows, I don’t. I wasn’t just off the job, I was under arrest.’
‘In the Lubyanka?’
‘God, no. I don’t think I was important enough for that, I wasn’t even in Dzerzhinsky Square. I was in one of those cheap hotels the KGB have. If they have one they have twenty. Lock you in a room, beat the shit out of you, and no one will hear because the place is empty or else everyone else in every other room is getting the shit beaten out of them at the same time.
‘You know what? They didn’t even ask me questions. That’s how unimportant I was. There was nothing they wanted to know. They just did it for the hell of it. They did it because it was their job, and they didn’t feel they were doing it properly any other way.’
She held up the gloved hand and turned it slowly. Made a fist and dropped it back to the tabletop.
‘As torturers go they weren’t very inventive. At the end of April they decided to move me. God knows why. One hotel to another, but it meant crossing Moscow two days before May Day. Most of the time you could play baseball in the street in Moscow; there’s almost no such thing as traffic or traffic jams. But Mischa and Little Yuri have been guarding me for a month. Yuri’s OK but Mischa is a slob. Beats up on me because he likes it. The only reason he didn’t fuck me too was because I told him he’d better kill me afterwards, ’cos if he didn’t I’d never stop till I got him. So he hit me some more, pawed every part he could reach, but he didn’t try and fuck me. Who knows, I could beat the rap and be back at work in a few weeks. It’s been known to happen . . . I mean, pigs fly, Al Smith was a Republican. He wasn’t going to take that risk. But crossing Moscow we meet a military convoy getting into position for May Day, and the traffic stops. Yuri’s driving, I’m in the back with Mischa. Cocky bastard didn’t even bother to cuff me—after all, where can I run to? And he decides a good way to pass the time in a traffic jam would be for me to suck him off. Get’s his roscoe out and hard and says, “How about it?” Dumb cluck. I snapped his dick back with my right hand, snatched his gun with my left, then hit him in the throat as hard as I could. Yuri reaches into his jacket and tries to turn in the seat. I put the gun on him and said, “Yuri, do you really want to die just because this schmuck wanted his dick sucked?” He tosses his gun over the seat and says, “On your way.” Mischa is unconscious or he fainted, I don’t know, so Yuri throws in a “Good luck.” I get out of the car and I walk away. Took me six weeks to get here. It was a month before I dared to leave Russia. I figured they’d look for me at every port or crossing for a week or two and then assume I’d got through and switch their resources. I wasn’t that important any more. Then I came across Finland and down through Norway and Denmark. Nice and slow. But now comes the problem. I ask myself what I’d do if I had to track me. I wouldn’t waste manpower and time on the land crossings, there’s too damn many of them. I’d watch the one place I have to end up. I’d watch England, I’d watch the ports. If I really wanted Larissa Tosca back I’d have guys watching every ferry that docked at Dover or Folkestone or wherever. This is where I come unstuck. I’ve no plan to get myself across the water. I live by my wits, I live by plans and deceptions and I can’t get around this one. The fuckers’re gonna nab me the minute I set foot in England. And if I stay on the Continent, it’s on
ly a matter of time. The disguise that suited the KGB so well is the same one that makes me stick out like Paul Robeson at a Klan meeting. They’re gonna get me. I know it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll think of something.’
She simpered, smiled, almost contrived to blush, dipped her face and gazed up at him through fluttering eyelids.
‘Gee, big boy—I was hoping you’d say that.’
He would have, he realised, to get used to being sent up.
§28
Back at the hotel, Tosca kicked off her shoes, took apart her vanity case, ripped up the false bottom and tipped out a dozen assorted passports into a heap on the carpet. They sat as they had most of the previous night, inches apart on the floor, like children playing.
‘Now. Who am I? Take your pick. Lois Teale has had her day. Time to be somebody else.’
Troy picked one up off the pile.
‘Greta Olaffssonn. Born 3 August 1912, Duluth, Minnesota.’
‘Nah. I been Greta too many times.’
‘Are they all fake? How did you get them?’
‘Fake? Of course they’re not fake. Most are got through the old trick. You find out the name of some poor kid who died very young, never applied for a passport, and you get one in her name with your face on it. Works every time. Greta never made it to her second birthday.’
Tosca picked up another and looked at the name.
‘Clarissa Calhoun Breckenridge. Well, I never been her, but with a name like that is she from the Deep South or is she from the Deep South? I’d never manage the accent. And I don’t know how to cook chitt’lins.’
She tossed it back on the pile. Troy picked it up.
‘Born Hoboken, New Jersey, 22 August 1913,’ he said.
‘Well. Whaddya know? I could do Hoboken. It’s Sinatra’s hometown. It’s only a spit and a ferry ride away from Manhattan. I’ll have to remember that. Ole Clarissa could come in handy.’