by Lawton, John
They slurped their way through a bloody borscht, then Nikolai aired his cracked Polish and ordered Pierogi. Dumplings. With salmon and sour cream. Fried dumplings—Пирожки. Pirozhki—the code word Khrushchev’s man at the embassy had given him.
‘Tell me,’ Troy said. ‘Why would anyone want to spy on the Ordzhonikidze?’
‘Who, if I might ask, is anyone?’
‘The British. And I use the word loosely.’
Nikolai bit into his pierogi, chomped and shrugged.
‘No reason I can think of.’
‘Could you be a bit more forthcoming? Or do I have to wait till you’ve eaten your way through the menu?’
‘The British—or if I may be so bold as to call them “we”—we have no reason to spy on the Ordzhonikidze because we know all there is worth knowing about it, and have done since 1953. It is a Sverdlov class cruiser. The Sverdlov itself sailed from the Baltic to Odessa in that year. It anchored at Spithead as the Soviet gesture for the Coronation. We surveyed it again from Malta, and again last year when it paid a visit to Portsmouth. There is nothing we don’t know. The Ordzhonikidze is identical. A typical ship of her class. There are at least a dozen like her. I could show you a deck plan if you so wished.’
‘Did you know Khrushchev offered to sell her to the Royal Navy while we were in Greenwich?’
‘A joke, perhaps?’
‘Of course it was a joke, but his jokes were never just surface. He meant what he said about it being almost obsolete. And if it is, why would anyone spy on her?’
‘I don’t know. Khrushchev allowed a British naval officer to travel all the way from Baltisk with them—if I am to believe MI5 gossip, the Russians even boasted that they got him drunk on Khrushchev’s birthday and let him roam at will. On the weekend they were here they even threw the ship open to tourists. They have no secrets. We know they have no secrets. They know we know they have no secrets.’
‘But Cockerell did spy on the ship.’
‘So I’m told. You are certain it was Cockerell, by the way?’
‘I identified the body myself.’
Nikolai shrugged again.
‘Did they show you his kit?’
‘His kit?’
‘His frogman’s gear. It was, I am reliably informed, ten years out of date. The sort of thing that had not been issued to a naval frogman since the war. Very far from being the new equipment he was supposed to be testing. None of the modern gadgetry.’
‘Such as?’
‘Closed-circuit oxygen systems.’
‘Meaning?’
‘It’s like the condenser on a steam engine. It leaves no trail of bubbles. A frogman is virtually undetectable. No one would be able to see him.’
‘Somebody did. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. No, they didn’t show me anything. But it fits, doesn’t it? The man himself is ten years too old for the job. Ten years out of condition. And stupid enough to attempt an underwater swim on a full stomach. It’s all wrong. It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of espionage, isn’t it? A Looking-Glass War.’
‘Indeed it is. Are you on for cheesecake?’
Troy wondered at the old man’s skinniness. He had never known a time when he did not eat enough for two. Perhaps that was the paradox of wasting away. Nikolai was much his father’s junior, but even so he must be seventy-five or six. How long would he go on playing war games? Grateful though Troy was that he played them for the moment.
‘Doesn’t it look to you like a rogue operation? A bunch of amateurs, not the spooks?’
‘Yes it does, but the newspapers and my sources tell me otherwise. It is held to be official. And besides, Her Majesty’s Government has owned up to it.’
‘That’s the oddest thing. Why did they do it? Why not just deny it? Until the body was washed up, it was just another Russian rant. Even with the body, it was deniable.’
‘There I disagree. Enough people in Fleet Street knew about it. They knew Cockerell was missing. It was easy to draw the right and wrong conclusion. Besides, if the body were not Cockerell, where is Cockerell?’
‘Fleet Street could have been smothered with a D notice.’
‘Yes, but then there is the matter of your brother. Rod almost single-handedly forced an admission out of the Government. In fact, Sir Norman Spofford—you know who I mean . . . ?’
‘No.’
‘We’re sitting in his constituency right now. I see him from time to time. He’s one of those backbench Tories, utterly opposed to Eden—Spofford told me that Rod had almost certainly been wholly responsible for getting Eden to spill the beans. And Rod is not subject to D notices. There was virtually no way to shut him up. To own up may well have been the best chance of getting him to shut up. To let rumour run, and denial merely feeds rumour, was probably the worst solution. Someone up there took a decision to end the matter by admission, and by admission to contain it—damage limitation as Newspeak has it. Personally I think that was the biggest lie of all. But it was plausible. Whereas the notion that Cockerell might have acted alone was not. Am I to take it that you have confirmation of this from someone, that Commander Cockerell was indeed a rogue?’
‘Yes,’ said Troy.
‘Fine. Someone you can trust? No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. We are in this too deep already. It is almost a family affair. Rod has been stirring mightily. It does, by the way, prompt me to say that if it gets out that you were the last man to see Cockerell alive, then someone might put two and two together, your part in the matter and Rod’s, and make five.’
Nikolai worked his way through a hefty slice of cheesecake. Troy sipped Russian tea, thinking as he did every time he succumbed to tradition that he much preferred it with milk, and that whatever their other failings—and they were legion—the English were still the only tribe that knew how to make a good cup of tea.
‘What,’ Nikolai asked, puffing out a fine dust of icing sugar from his beard, plucking words out of the air that Troy had thought he had uttered and discarded, ‘do you mean by “a Russian rant”?’
Troy thought about it. ‘Do it!’
‘I think,’ he began slowly, ‘I think Khrushchev wanted something to happen. I think the incident came gift-wrapped and it must be pissing him off no end that it’s not turned out to be a clear propaganda victory.’
Nikolai beckoned to the waitress, and ordered another helping of cheesecake.
‘Suddenly you are the master of understatement. It is, in the language of football, an own goal. Or to put it another way, the Prime Minister has shot himself in the foot so many times that the cook at Number 10 uses his shoes to strain the vegetables.’
Out in the street, retracing their steps. Nikolai put on the sunglasses again, squinted up at the sky, decided he did not need them and dropped them into the breast pocket ofhisjacket. He set off. Yes. The walk was definitely sliding slowly into a shuffle. Once more he rummaged among Troy’s words.
‘You say you half not seen Sasha in a while?’
Troy did not answer. In the keen ear of the mind he heard the surface break over a rising ‘you know what your trouble is?’ The old man walked on slightly ahead of him, throwing the words over his shoulder.
‘Yet she is at Mimram most weekends. Is she not?’
He paused. Troy declined the bait.
‘Ergo you half not been to Mimram. Ergo you half not seen your wife.’
Troy quickly drew level. He was damned if he’d talk to his back.
‘If you’re about to utter a catechism of cliché along the lines of “marry in haste, repent at leisure”, or “mixed marriages never work”, then don’t. I don’t want to hear it.’
Nikolai looked up at him, the beginning of a twinkle in his eye.
‘Far from it, my boy. The regret was all mine. The first time I saw her I wished I were thirty years younger.’
§77
He lay on the bed and opened Lolita. He read the first sentence: ‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my
loins,’ and by the second do-re-mi recitation of Lo-lee-ta knew he was defeated. He took the copy of Casino Royale off the bedside table—the one he had pinched from Cockerell’s office—and decided to read it again. He was less disturbed this time by its author’s lush, almost surreal prose than he was intrigued by the mind of its erstwhile reader, the late Commander Cockerell. Was this how he saw himself? Smooth, charming and vulnerable in a brutal, mannish sort of way? Troy looked at the cover. More than a little lurid, with an artist’s impression of James Bond in black and white at the bottom. Cockerell, with his weaselly face, pencil-line moustache and air of self-regarding weediness, looked nothing like this ideal. If anything it resembled the actor Eric Portman, a rather old-fashioned English face, strong in the nose and jaw—much more like Rod than like Cockerell. Cockerell was much more a poor man’s—if not an outright beggar’s—Ronald Colman. And that was the generous view. The painfully truthful view invoked the name of Edward Everett Horton, in all his spindly bumbling, once more. God save us all from self-awareness, thought Troy.
He had to admit it was still a good read, and he made a mental note to pick up a few more Flemings the next time he was in the Charing Cross Road. The plot, the outcome of this one, made him think of the Marlowe line: ‘. . . but that was in another country and besides, the wench is dead.’ Dead wenches were terribly useful to plots in novels, particularly if, like Fleming, you wanted to keep your hero unencumbered and tortured in the soul. God knows, Fleming gave Bond enough torture of the body as it was—Troy winced as he read the scene in which Bond is thrashed across the bollocks with a rattan carpet-beater. What kind of a mind thought these things up? What kind of a man did Arnold Cockerell think he was, in his own mind? Did that drab, duplicitous little life long to see itself tortured, grieving at the grave of a dead bitch for the rest of his days, whilst carelessly fucking all the others? Troy had, he realised too late, just formulated the plot of the cheap novelette of his own life for the last ten years or more. And it hurt like hell. God save us from self-awareness.
The phone rang and saved him from a reflection that was utterly futile.
‘Hello, Troy? You there?’
Troy heard the familiar if rare tones of Tom Driberg. Driberg had not called him at home in years. The precedent did not augur well.
‘Yes, Tom. I’m off sick, as a matter of fact.’
It was a losing tactic. Appealing to Driberg’s sense of tactful consideration for the poorly was as likely to put him off as it was a charging rhino, for the same pachydermous reasons.
‘I don’t suppose you could come over?’ Driberg went on as though Troy had not said what he had. ‘Bit of a pickle.’
Driberg was a master of understatement. In all likelihood, a bit of a pickle meant police involvement somewhere.
‘Who is it this time?’
‘It’s not what you think.’
‘Is it you?’ Troy asked with visions of outraged bobbies in public lavatories, enforcing the unenforceable.
‘Honestly, Troy. It’s something else entirely. Take my word. Buggery has no part of it.’
‘Delighted to hear it. I suppose you’ll tell me it can’t wait, all the same.’
‘Well . . .’ Driberg stalled.
‘Don’t worry, Tom. I’ll be round in an hour or so. I could do with the air.’
He rang off. Driberg could lie for Britain. Troy knew in his bones that he had fallen foul of the law and was, as before, appealing to Troy’s rank in the force to cover up some queer indiscretion. If not his own, then some crony’s. Rod would have a fit. Just before the last election Driberg had asked Troy whether he could put in a word with Rod—in the eventuality of Labour winning he thought it was high time he got a ministerial post. No, had been Troy’s answer. He knew damn well what Rod thought of Driberg. Almost without pause Driberg had shifted the conversation round to one of his escapades—the time he had blown a guardsman on duty at Buckingham Palace, after dinner with George VI and Queen Elizabeth. A couple of beers later he once again tried to coax Troy into ‘having a bit of chat with your brother’. There was, it seemed, no natural division in the man’s mind to prevent him rolling the distastefully disparate into a single conversation. Not that Driberg lacked all discretion. Or else he would have been nicked long ago.
The flat Driberg had was not the same one he had had during the war. Troy was relieved at that. His mildly superstitious sense bristled at the memory of finding Neville Pym there all those years ago, with all the consequences that followed. Perhaps he was wrong after all. Perhaps Driberg just wanted to natter. The Driberg who opened the door to him certainly seemed to be relaxed. He had a glass in his hand, and as he led Troy to the narrow window terrace, no more than a shelf above the street, he snatched a bottle of malt off the coffee table. Troy glanced down at the table. Driberg was an inveterate reader of poetry. A slender volume of Philip Larkin lay face down—The Less Deceived—its pages splayed in lieu of a bookmark. The flat was tiny, serving Dnberg as nothing more than a London base, but the walls were lined with bookshelves. The man read more than anyone else he knew, short of his Uncle Nikolai. Troy remembered Ian Fleming, with whom he had passed a long afternoon, and for a fleeting second felt the pointless pinprick of cultural guilt.
Out on the terrace there was just enough room for two upright chairs, but the impulse was right. It was an evening to take in the passing of day and watch London wend its way home and then work its way out into the street again. Summer in the city. Well worth it as a spectator sport; beat the goggle-box any night. A pleasing variation on Troy’s verandah habit.
Driberg sloshed three fingers of whisky into a glass and handed it to Troy. It might just turn out to be a pleasant evening after all. When he didn’t have a bee in his bonnet, Driberg could be the best of company. Pushed, even Rod would admit that Tom was a wag.
‘I’ve been in Russia,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Troy.
‘I got my interview with Khrushchev.’
‘I noticed,’ said Troy. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Hang on, there’s more.’
Driberg paused. Swirled his scotch, and then, almost against the grain of character, weighed up his words.
‘When it was over—or at least when I thought it was over—this other chap was summoned, and I found myself interviewed. Tables turned. If you see what I mean?’
Troy didn’t.
‘What other chap?’
‘Serov. Victor Serov.’
Troy began to see all too clearly.
‘Ivan Serov?’
‘Dunno. Could be, I suppose. Victor. Ivan. That sort of name.’
‘The head of the KGB?’
‘That’s the feller.’
Suddenly Troy could see for miles and very little of what followed caused him to raise a single hair of an eyebrow. It might just be a pleasant evening, but Troy could feel it begin to slip away from him. Serov, after all, was a nasty piece of work. He had been shown the diplomatic door in March or April, when Khrushchev had been stupid enough to send him on ahead, and he was surely the man who, Nikolai had predicted, would not live to collect his pension.
‘Khrushchev sends for this chap,’ Driberg went on. ‘The interpreter stays put, and the next thing I know he’s asking me to spy for them.’
This was not sufficient to break the stride of the conversation. The only thing that disturbed Troy was that only Driberg would ever dream of having a conversation like this on a balcony. Down in the street the citizens of London, Her Majesty’s subjects, in whose name all this cloak and dagger nonsense was conducted, shuffled around between home and job, stopping-off points on the way to the grave. It reminded Troy of Eliot’s office workers teeming across London Bridge—he had not known death had ‘undone so many’. Oblivious to the culture of deceit in which they swam like fish in water, dreaming dreams of better days—or as his wife had so bluntly put it ‘still harping on about the goddam war’. One day, thought Troy, they might even come to look back
fondly on the bizarre equilibrium of the cold war—if it ever ended.
‘And what did you say?’
‘I was a bit flummoxed. You can imagine.’
‘Of course.’
‘I found myself thinking what their next move might be after I said no—the Lubyanka? A salt mine? The Dissident Ladies’ Touring Orchestra of East Siberia? But then, when it came down to it I was more interested in what happened if I said yes. I mean, it’s not as if I know any secrets. Five years in opposition—Gaitskell doesn’t tell me a bloody thing. If he were PM I doubt he’d give me the time of day. So I said, “What exactly is it that you want me to do?” I was expecting Serov to answer. The interpreter was looking at him as he spoke, but it was Khrushchev who chipped in. “We want you,” he said, “to spy on the Labourites.” For a second or two I didn’t know what he meant. Then I realised he meant the party. Us. The Labour Party! I tell you, Troy, could have knocked me down with a feather.’
Troy sipped at his whisky. Déjà vu.
‘That night at the Commons,’ he said, ‘when George Brown got right up Khrushchev’s nose. He got it into his head that Labour was some sort of anti-Soviet group. George makes a strong impression at the best of times, and this was one of the worst, as I’m sure you’ll recall. Khrushchev thinks George is really representative of the party. And he thinks he might be some sort of disaffected Trotskyite. Which is about as far from the truth as you could get. That, plus Rod giving him that list of missing East European dissidents and what-have-you stuck in his mind. In fact, I’d say it irritated the hell out of him. I told him what the party was, but it was all to a deaf ear. He’s asking you to spy on the Labour Party because he seriously thinks it’s a threat. Possibly the only man in Europe who does, but . . . What did you do, tell him Gaitskell would soon have his finger on the button?’