Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  “About Blaine? Nothing. I can hardly just tell them Blaine was MI5, can I?”

  “No. I suppose not. The ambassador wouldn’t think much of that.”

  “Get on to London and find out what their cover story for Blaine is going to be. We’ll have to tell them something sooner rather than later. And if Jordan says he has to run ‘Upstairs’ with this one, tell him to make it quick.”

  Gus sighed.

  “It’s a mess.”

  “I’m the one in jail, Gus.”

  “And I’m the one trying to get you out. But … but …”

  “For God’s sake, Gus!”

  “But you were caught holding a smoking gun.”

  “A delightful cliché, and so rarely does anyone get to use it, but it’s not true. It wasn’t smoking. And the gun was Blaine’s. I think I must have picked it up after he drew it. I don’t honestly remember. His prints will be on it as well as mine.”

  Gus sighed again.

  “I wonder. Are we being set up?”

  “Maybe. If so, it’s a bloody clumsy attempt. No, Gus. Speaking professionally, I think they’re just incompetent. Their idea of procedure is a joke. I’m all they’ve got. I was at the scene of the crime. I’m a suspect. If I were them, I wouldn’t be turning me loose without answers to questions. But they’re not asking. They just leave me here to cool my heels. They’re pinning it all on ballistics—and if they think I shot Blaine with his own gun, well, ballistics will produce two rifle bullets that won’t match Blaine’s pistol. And, lest there be any doubt, if I’d just shot him, what was I doing with the gun in my right hand when they found me?”

  “Eh?”

  “I’m left-handed, Gus. You know that. I might have picked up the gun with my right, but if I wanted to shoot him it would be with my left. I couldn’t hit a barn door right-handed.”

  “Oh, of course. The old left-handed solution. Pure Perry Mason. Hamilton Burger gets it wrong yet again. No, I meant are we being set up by … by our friends in the east, by …?”

  “Just say it, Gus.”

  “OK. By Burgess. Has it all been a set-up from start to finish? From the moment Burgess approached you … a set-up. Did Burgess exploit a friendship with you to lure poor old Blaine out here and facilitate a KGB hit?”

  “Well … we’ll all be asking ourselves that, won’t we? I imagine it’ll be the first thing they think of when Jordan runs ‘Upstairs.’”

  “Y’know … I hate being made to feel like an idiot.”

  “And I hate being in a fucking cell. Get me out. Pull every diplomatic string you have.”

  §81

  It was dark before Gus returned. Troy had been fed, allowed to wash, but his trousers reeked of dried vomit and he’d sell his soul for a toothbrush and half an inch of Gibbs SR.

  “I’m afraid it’s going to be another night, Freddie.”

  “Like hell it is. Gus, get me out of here.”

  “They won’t release you on my recognisance. They’re waiting for the ballistics report. I can send for a lawyer, if you like, but London would take a dim view of that. They ask that you don’t make a statement. Any statement. You haven’t, have you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “All London asks that you don’t make waves. They want this dropped, not debated. The ballistics thing ought to kill it stone dead. Then you’re out.”

  “Who do the police think Blaine was?”

  Gus looked sheepish, embarrassed by the answer rather than the question. Two words spoken softly.

  “Cultural attaché.”

  “Cultural attaché? That old lie.”

  “If Blaine hadn’t had a diplomatic passport on him we’d have passed him off as a tourist.”

  “An armed tourist? An armed cultural attaché? A ballet-and-opera man with a shoulder holster and a Browning automatic? I said they were incompetent, not stupid.”

  “I know. It’s completely implausible, but it’s what’s been agreed. No one’s going to own up to this one. It suits Five and it suits Sir Francis.”

  “Who?”

  “Sir Francis Camiss-Low. The ambassador. The bloke you so curtly refused to meet when you were here last.”

  “Ah, I forgot his name. Mea culpa. My diplomatic blunder. But … I ask—what am I supposed to have been doing out with a gun-toting cultural attaché at ten o’clock of a Wednesday night in the middle of a rain-sodden Vienna? Shooting divas? Popping off at ballerinas? Assassinating the fucking hurdy-gurdy man?”

  “No one’s asking that. No one but you.”

  “And that doesn’t strike you as odd?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “You suppose? Gus, go back to the embassy, bypass the fucking ambassador, and call Onions. If his narks at MI5 haven’t told him what’s going on, you tell him.”

  §82

  On Friday morning before it was light, a uniform opened the door to Troy’s cell and handed him all his possessions, his wallet, his warrant card, his passport, his overcoat, and led him to the front desk.

  Gus was waiting.

  The flic who arrested him was waiting.

  “You are free to go,” he said in English, and handed him a typed page.

  Troy said nothing.

  Read enough to learn that the bullets that killed Blaine had been 9mm, and the handgun 7.65mm. Well, he knew that all along.

  He screwed up the page into a ball and thrust it back.

  “A formidable policeman, your Mr. Onions,” the flic said with a hint of a sneer.

  “And you’re not,” Troy replied.

  Out in the street, Gus said:

  “I know it’s early, even earlier in London, but Stan is at the Yard. You’d better call him. I gather he read the riot act to that flic. Your brother’s name got used like a cudgel. Brother of a man tipped to be Prime Minister and blah blah blah. Not the approach Five or the ambassador wanted, but …”

  “But I’m out, and your chickenshit tactics would have had me sitting in a cell till doomsday.”

  “For the ambassador to step in would mean a diplomatic incident. No one wants a diplomatic incident, Freddie.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Gus. It’s been a diplomatic incident from the minute Burgess showed up in Vienna.”

  “Then perhaps I mean ‘crisis’ rather than incident.”

  “Gus—bollocks! What the hell has happened to you? When we were at school you were team leader, top tearaway, the first over the wall … mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

  Gus stopped, paused, faced Troy.

  “If this is your rude way of saying I’ve lost my nerve, then I take all the offence you intend, Freddie. But I haven’t. You’re an outsider. I’m half insider. You haven’t a clue how much the names of Burgess and Maclean still sting the British Establishment, the insiders. The cock-up of a lifetime, the 3-D Technicolor cock-up of the twentieth century. You could have come to me asking for asylum for Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan and caused fewer ripples. You could have told me Martin Bormann and Dr. Mengele were waiting tables in a Viennese coffee bar and scarcely raised an establishment eyebrow. After all, neither of them went to Eton. But Burgess? Guy bloody Burgess? The man who let the whole side down? The man who didn’t play with a straight bat? Personally, I don’t give a toss, as you well know, but I answer to an ambassador who does. If you were to ask me if I think Sir Francis is a pusillanimous prick, a man who makes me wonder why I ever bothered to enter the diplomatic service, a man ideologically and patriotically opposed to the Soviets but, more importantly, scared shitless of the queers, I would privately agree with you. But for your sake I have outmanoeuvred this pusillanimous prick, incurred his future pusillanimous wrath, and God knows what else. And your reproach is unwarranted.”

  “OK.”

  “I’ll take that as ‘sorry.’”

  “Please do.”

  They walked through the breaking dawn to the embassy, less than a quarter of a mile away. Drizzle again, one of the things Burgess said he missed abou
t England, and which seemed to be ubiquitous in Vienna.

  Gus got through to Scotland Yard on the scrambler.

  Handed the telephone to Troy.

  “Get out now,” Onions said.

  “There’s been a murder.”

  “I know there’s been a murder.”

  “Murder is my business.”

  “Do as you’re told.”

  “It’s not a week since you told me to stay. A man’s dead. There are questions to be asked here.”

  “I just moved heaven and fucking earth to get you out of jail. Do as you are fucking well told and leave now!”

  Troy held the telephone away from his ear. It did little to diminish the volume of Onion’s rage.

  “OUT! NOW! GET ON THE NEXT BLOODY PLANE! YOU’RE NOT INVESTIGATING THIS ONE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

  The phone was slammed down. Troy was left with an electrical buzz.

  “Not one for subtlety, is he?” Gus said.

  “No. All the same, I’m not getting on the next plane.”

  “Freddie, the man just got you out of jail.”

  “I only need a few hours. Get me on a flight after lunch. Stan won’t know what time I get back to London.”

  “Freddie. You can’t make up for the shortcomings of the Vienna police all on your own.”

  “I’ve no intention of trying. Onions is right about that. Not my case. I was merely pointing out the irony of him ordering me to guard a spy, but ignore a murder. But he doesn’t do irony either. There are other questions besides ‘who shot Bill Blaine?’ And there are other ends, ones I’d rather not leave loose.”

  “I won’t ask.”

  “Then let me ask. Gus, why did you become a diplomat?”

  Gus mused, twirled a pencil in his hand, tapped on the desk with the rubber end.

  “I suppose I could reply by asking why you became a copper. Unlikely choices both if you think of us at fifteen or so. But it’s a conversation for another time in another country. Now, you’d better get off. Your ends are getting looser by the hour.”

  §83

  Troy went back to the Sacher, showered, changed, scrubbed his teeth viciously. Felt the quasi-erotic pleasure of a freshly laundered shirt on bare skin.

  He was at the Imperial by nine o’clock.

  “Herr Spode checked out on Thursday morning, sir. Would you be Herr Troy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then this is for you.”

  The desk clerk handed Troy a hotel-embossed envelope. Inside was a scrap of lined paper folded over several times:

  Oh shit. What a mess. Looks like it’s back to the life sentence and the Moscow rock pile. How I long for Pudding Island.

  Thanks for trying.

  TTFN.

  Yrs ever,

  Spode.

  PS. Nip into Simpson’s and eat a bowl of porridge for me, would you. Salt, no sugar.

  Troy stuffed the note in his pocket.

  Perhaps he’d be allowed to go home now?

  Perhaps this time he really had seen the last of Burgess?

  §84

  He found Voytek in the small rehearsal room at the back of the Konzerthaus. Almost half the room was taken up by the huge Bösendorfer concert grand—ninety-seven keys, the best part of ten feet long. She always looked small, dwarfed by her piano.

  She was working out, playing, for the exercise of her fingers, the Schubert E-flat Impromptu—a piece so fast it made Troy’s brain ache and it was a good day when he could play it through without making a mistake. To finish it lifted the heart, to finish it without error was bliss.

  He heard her out. She knew he was there and would no more stop halfway through the four-minute keyboard blitz than he would have done himself.

  After four minutes and forty-six seconds, she lifted her fingers from the keys, rested her hands on her thighs, breathed deeply, and looked at Troy.

  “You didn’t come back. I missed you. I thought you’d gone back to England.”

  “I’ve been in jail.”

  “That must make a change for you.”

  He ascribed the sarcasm to the fact that however long he might be banged up, it was nothing to her experience. A night in the damp and deep Rossauer Lande prison and nine months in indescribable Auschwitz.

  “The man the English sent to interview Guy is dead, and Guy is gone.”

  “So … no trip back home?”

  “Did you ever think there would be?”

  She stood up, came to within inches of him as he stood in the curve of the piano, took his left hand in both of hers and squeezed.

  “Troy, please do not see a conspiracy where there is none. If the Russians used you, then they also used me. Burgess asking to go home was real. I don’t know what’s happened—”

  “Gunned down in the street. An MI5 officer gunned down in the street. That’s what happened.”

  She leaned her head against his chest.

  “Oh God. I am so sorry. But believe me. I knew nothing of this. And I doubt Burgess did too. Troy, he really wanted to go home. He really believed the Russians would let him.”

  Troy put his arms around her.

  “And you?”

  “Where’s my home? Fucked if I know. I have to go back to Moscow. What choice do I have? You may say the English have nothing on Burgess. They have too much on me. It’s a simple choice. A lifetime in the Soviet Union or a lifetime in prison. But for you, I’d never have had even that choice.”

  He lifted her head gently. Tears bursting in the corners of her eyes.

  “And now?”

  “Oh. That’s easy. I don’t need to think about now. Lavrenti Kutuzov’s stroke paralysed his left arm, and while we both know there are pieces for left hand, I’ve never heard of a concerto for right hand. No. I must stay in Vienna, almost till Christmas. Till the twenty-third. Fulfil all Kutuzov’s obligations. I don’t mind. He undertook to play most of the Mozart concertos. Nineteen out of the twenty-seven. It’ll be a challenge to play them almost back to back. I’ve never done that.

  “Then ‘home’—that ironic term—home to Moscow, and back to Vienna for just two days, and back to the cello for the New Year’s Eve concert with the Philharmonic and Willi Boskovsky at the Musikverein. Strauss, Strauss, and more Strauss. The sugary icing on the sugary cake.”

  “All the same, that’s quite an honour.”

  “Yes. It is. Unimaginable when I was growing up in this city. Unimaginable while Vienna was occupied too. I suppose neutrality has its uses. Tell me, Troy. Does anyone play my cello?”

  Voytek had pawned her two-hundred-fifty-year-old Matteo Goffriller cello for a few pounds just before her defection in 1948. Troy had redeemed it and lodged it in his brother’s study in Hampstead. If he ever went broke, selling the cello could be his life’s pension.

  “Yes. My niece Nattie, Rod’s daughter, plays it. She’s twenty now. Not bad at all. Not you, but not bad. We duet occasionally. A little Brahms, perhaps a little more Schubert.”

  “Duets you never got to play with me.”

  “No. I missed that. But, I can ship the cello, if you’d like. Guy had his books and his harmonium shipped, after all.”

  “No. I’d far rather your niece kept playing it. I’d far rather be able to think of you playing a duet when I’m stuck in fucking Moscow. A pleasant thought, and I can get so short of pleasant thoughts.”

  They kissed.

  Far longer than friendship.

  A duet without instruments.

  VI

  Wilderness

  §85

  MI6 HQ, 54 Broadway Buildings, London SW

  The British Counter-Espionage Service, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, answered to different branches of government—MI5 to the Home Office, via which it had access to the Police Force in the rough shape of Special Branch, and MI6 to the Foreign Office. If that were not enough to make them suspicious of one another, add that MI6 had its own counter-intelligence section, and add further that Dick White, who had
been head of MI6 (“C”) for the last couple of years, had previously been head of MI5, and had been a deputy head at the time of the “Missing Diplomats” crisis of 1951, and a pattern for mutual mistrust was established.

  MI5 had cocked it up at the time, and Dick White knew it. Letting Burgess and Maclean escape had been so stupid, so easily avoided. MI5 had not so much egg on their face as a whole omelette. They might go on apologising to the Americans for ever. White might blame himself as well as blaming those above him—he had, after all, been one of the many who dismissed whisky-sodden, garlic-munching “Guy the Spy” as too improbable for words—but in 1958 he felt no inclination to let MI5 handle the death of William Blaine, despite the fact he was their own agent, not Six’s. But, it would be as well if MI5 never knew that.

  White sent for his most trusted advisor, Lt. Colonel Alexander Burne-Jones—whose rank had not changed in twenty years, whilst his powers and responsibilities had grown exponentially … but as Burne-Jones often said, there’s no such thing as a pay grade or a rank once you don the cloak and pick up the dagger.

  Burne-Jones hated visiting C in his den—his fourth-floor office, from which he rarely descended to meet “the troops.” It reminded him of a doctor’s waiting room. All that was missing were a stack of outdated magazines depicting a fiction of the English countryside … riding to hounds … county shows … pseudo-debutantes. He always kept the curtains drawn, never lit the fire, never offered you a sherry, and had never found so much as five minutes to take you down the rogues’ gallery, the photographs of his predecessors … all those moustaches … all those intimidatingly misshapen English teeth in fading monochrome.

  C was reading. Glanced up as Burne-Jones came in. Waved him into one of the oversized leather armchairs that faced his desk. Burne-Jones found himself looking at a bank of telephones. Perhaps a qualification for getting the top job was knowing which phone to pick up? He had three and would invariably answer the wrong one. C had four. Three black, and the green scrambler, next to the overflowing ashtray and the open packet of Senior Service cigarettes. If C got through this meeting without lighting up Burne-Jones would be amazed.