by John Gardner
‘I’ve been in bloody bed,’ Naldo told him.
They ate. Then ate again, and, at last, when it was almost dusk, they took off. He could not believe it when he saw London from the air, and a real evening paper left lying in the flight room where they waited for the car.
Three hours later, they turned into the wide drive, through the security gates at Warminster. They drove to the far end of the compound and helped him out. ‘Down the stairs, and through the doors facing you,’ Gus said. ‘We’ll give you an hour to get organized.’
Barbara was waiting, standing in front of an imitation fireplace, for they had tried to give the guest suite a welcoming look.
‘Naldo?’ It was almost a question. He merely nodded. He recalled his father telling him of the time, at the end of the First World War, when, as a prisoner in some German schloss, they had brought his cousin in and told them they were to be taken home. He had thought his cousin dead. James always said, ‘Only when I saw her did I know what that Biblical phrase meant — they fell on each other’s necks and wept.’
Now, Naldo knew, and the pair of them just clung on to one another, sobbing, touching each other’s wet faces, tracing their fingers over noses, chins, ears, like blind people making sure they would never forget how they looked.
‘Love me a bit?’ Barbara said, trying to smile through the hail that was her tears, as she used their old familiar code.
‘Big bit.’ It sounded false, childish and sentimental, but, as Herbie would have said — ‘Who is doing the counting, Nald?’
‘Marry me?’ She did the asking, and did not take it for granted.
‘Of course. As soon as they can get a priest.’
‘No. Christmas Eve. At Redhill. Start at our beginning.’
He nodded, sight still blurred. Then Gus came down, with Herbie like a big bear out of control, knocking things over and riddling the conversation with trivia until Gus had to banish him.
‘We’ll start in the morning,’ Gus told them. ‘You don’t have to be around, Barbara. In fact best if you’re not. Come back each evening. Why not bring the children down tomorrow night?’
Before things got under way, on the following day, one of the Legal and General people came down with a sheaf of forms for Naldo’s signature. ‘Annulment of your Russian marriage,’ he said.
‘But she’s dead. In Russia I’m a widower.’ Naldo frowned.
‘Best to be on the safe side.’ The lawyer smiled a legal smile, and Naldo signed. A long time was to pass before the whole truth filtered through to him.
2
It was the old team, Gus said. Himself, his wife, Carole, and Martin Brook, the one they called the Fat Boy. ‘We’ve been on all this for eight years, Naldo,’ he said. ‘Just, for God’s sake, tell us the truth and we’ll get it finished with.’ He added that there would be others who had to be present.
‘Damage control?’ Naldo asked.
‘Not really. They’ve already presumed that you told them all that mattered.’ Gus gave him an encouraging smile. ‘No, people like myself and the medics. We’ll want some idea of how they do it. But let’s get all the routine over with. You ready?’
Naldo settled himself and lighted the first cigarette he had smoked in years. ‘Shoot.’
‘Why, Naldo? Why, in heaven’s name, did you go?’
‘Revenge. Vengeance. The usual common or garden reasons.’
‘Vengeance for what?’
‘For putting a great, splendid old man in the dirt.’
‘Caspar?’
‘Who else, Gus?’
‘How?’
‘How what?’
‘How could you wreak revenge for Caspar’s misfortunes?’
‘I did it. I killed the man who shat on the Yanks, on the country and on Caspar.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, come on, Gus. You must have been comparing notes with the dear cousins at Langley. Oleg Penkovsky, of course.’
C had warned them. ‘He’ll tell you he went to get Penkovsky who’s been dead these nine years. You might even think about believing him. I’ve had sight of some corroboration, but you’re getting nothing from me until you’ve talked to Naldo. Let him spill the lot to you.’
Now, in the air-conditioned room below the ground that was part of Warminster’s guest suite, Gus said, ‘Naldo, Oleg Penkovsky was tried and shot in the spring of 1963. He’s dead.’
‘He is now.’ Naldo smiled. It was the smile of a man who knew the truth.
‘You’re telling me that you went into the Soviet Union, with Arnie Farthing, to kill a man who’s already dead?’
‘Sit back, Gus, and let me tell you a tale.’ He smiled again and quoted Shakespeare, remembering that Arnold had quoted the same passage at him, in the Berlin green house, though Arnie had taken liberties.
‘For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings —
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed.
All murdered …’
Then Naldo Railton talked. They sent for coffee and sandwiches, and he talked on. He was still talking when it was time to end the day’s session. He told of Caspar’s funeral; of the meeting in Berlin; of everything that happened, leaving out only Caspar’s diaries and the document the old man had called Bogeyman, for that contained the trap; the way to whoever it was who had really sold the service and country for less than thirty pieces of silver. By the time they left, and his children had come happily into the room, Naldo had got as far as the night he went out, stood face to face with Penkovsky and killed him, only to find his three companions dead when he walked from the dacha.
‘It can’t be true, but I believe him,’ Carole said in Gus’s office in the main house.
‘Me too,’ from Martin, who had lost weight in the last year but was still known to them as the Fat Boy.
‘It can be true, and I have to find out.’ Gus picked up the telephone and put through a call directly to the shop. He caught C as he was leaving the office.
‘I have to go now,’ Gus told them. ‘Should be back late tonight.’ He shot a severe look at Martin Brook. ‘I leave you to look after my wife while I’m gone, and, if you cuckold me, I’ll know.’
Carole threw a hefty pillow at him.
‘It’s the death of Arnold I don’t follow,’ Brook said as they had a drink before dinner. ‘We know he’s still around, yet Naldo believes he saw him dead. There’s no doubt there.’
‘It’s the one thing that concerns me.’ Carole fished a piece of lemon from her gin and tonic. ‘If he swears to Arnold being shot to pieces, could they have taken him for a ride about Penkovsky.’
‘Let’s see what the guv’nor brings back from the great white chief. Either Naldo’s off his chump, or it’s true …’
‘Or Naldo’s lying in his teeth, and we never believed Caspar’s diary and the Credit findings, so he’s either mad or honest.’
Gus returned at three in the morning. Carole muttered in her sleep and then half woke. ‘Is he mad or true?’ she mumbled, and Gus knew exactly what she meant. ‘He’s true. Now go to sleep. Tomorrow all will be there, laid in front of you with only one very vital piece missing.’
‘Good. You haven’t got a vital piece missing, have you, my darling?’
‘Not when I last looked.’ But she was off into her dreams and did not hear him.
3
Naldo was in fine form when they gathered the next day. His children had grown from adolescence to adulthood, and he was amazed at their strength of character. He knew he must have looked as though he could not believe them as they told him of their lives in the present, but he was proud.
They took the news of the remarriage almost as a fore-gone conclusion, neither Arthur nor Emma even asked what their father had been up to, and he did not have to make a speech about keeping his return
a secret, for they already knew, like the rest of the family.
Arthur and Emma had stayed the night in the nearby garrison town, and Barbara left early to go back to London with them. She would do some shopping, and be back by the time the day’s work was done.
‘Right, Naldo,’ Gus began. ‘We want you to go over the murder of Oleg Penkovsky, and the deaths of Arnie, Spatukin and Kati again. Everything. All the tiny details. Don’t spare our stomachs.’
It took a long while, for Gus interrupted a great number of times, asking him to repeat the actual moment of Penkovsky’s death again and again — ‘He spoke to you? You’re certain of that? Now, Naldo, tell us again. Tell us exactly what happened when the bullets hit. Make us live it with you.’
They then passed to the three deaths outside the dacha. Again, Gus almost morbid about detail. ‘You saw bullets hit?’
‘Yes, I saw Arnold jerked off his feet.’
‘You saw blood, but — think Naldo — did you actually see the kind of thing you witnessed in the dacha? Did you see flesh being ripped apart?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘Ah.’
Then, just before Barbara returned, Gus told him that Arnold Farthing was still alive and in Russia. He did not believe it, so Gus took out a folder of photographs. They were of Arnie and also Spatukin. All were taken with some date visible — on a newspaper, a big digital clock on a Russian railway station.
Naldo went white, then became angry.
‘It’s OK, Naldo. You killed Penkovsky. That’s for certain. We believe you. What is difficult is the game Arnie’s been playing. We have evidence that he’s still operating on behalf of the United States. He used you as — they say — collateral.’
The anger died. ‘If that’s all, it’s OK by me. I’ve done that much for Caspar. What more can I do? I have things that should be brought in front of the so-called Credit committee, and I’d like to do it now.’
‘Then you’ll have to be patient, Nald. Our instructions are to complete a full investigation. You have KGB operational stuff that could be like hen’s teeth.’
‘Later. Please.’ Naldo was almost pleading. ‘Look, Gus. I’ve never done anything to discredit this service. Others have, and I want at least one of them brought down. I also want to finish the job I began — to clear Caspar’s name, OK?’
‘See what I can do.’ From the tone of Gus Keene’s voice, there was little he could do as yet. ‘You should make application to C now, this minute, to appear before the Credit committee as soon as possible.’
‘Let’s get on with it, then.’
On the following day, Keene’s fears were confirmed. Naldo was refused permission to appear before the committee until the interrogation unit were satisfied their work was complete.
Yet, unknown to Naldo, C had instructed Keene to get the bulk of the interrogation over with speed. At the same time he called in Willis Maitland-Wood, telling him to stand by to resurrect his beloved committee.
‘Naldo going to do a whitewash?’ BMW all but sneered.
‘I think,’ C told him, ‘Naldo might just give you the real truth.’
Keene and his team worked solidly for the next three weeks. Specialists came in to ask their own pertinent questions; doctors spent four days discussing the effects of Naldo’s KGB interrogation under drugs; covert and counter-intelligence people arrived at all hours, and fired friendly questions, then left, happy with their answers.
Each night, Barbara was there, and together they planned their future. Naldo constantly spoke of ‘going private’, in plain talk, retiring.
One morning towards the end of October, Gus came down and said they were finished. ‘Now you can set the date for your evidence before the committee,’ he told Naldo. ‘When?’
‘Will you drive me to Slough today, Gus?’ Naldo asked.
‘If I must.’
‘If you do, I’ll start giving them evidence at nine tomorrow morning.’
‘You’re on.’
That night, having gone to collect the papers, under the name of Bernard Carpenter, Naldo sat down and went through the material he had last seen in the Hotel Victoria-Jungfrau at Interlaken. Gus allowed him full use of the big photocopier, and he took three hours running off complete copies of both diaries and the covering letter. Bogeyman, the document which spelled out the hidden entrapment which Caspar had embedded, was not copied. On the following morning he left with all of it, except the Bogeyman papers. Those, he considered, would be used to do the biggest, and most unpleasant burn of his career.
As he drove to London, with Gus at the wheel, and Max as a personal protector, Naldo was very quiet. Gus put it down to nerves. After all, the man had waited a long time for this moment. Now it was here, he would feel apprehensive. Who would not?
In reality, Naldo was thinking about childhood. He had a long memory, and could recall those early days when he lived with his mother and sister, in the Kensington house to which he hoped to return. Those were days without his father, for it was during the First World War, when James was holed up, under arrest, and in fear of being shot as a spy in Germany.
He remembered the day his mother had opened the bedroom door singing and telling them that Daddy was coming home. It was much later that he learned she had said it on instinct, yet all her instincts were accurate. His mother was uncanny, and her rapport with his father, James, had always been extraordinary.
He could see, quite clearly, whole excerpts from his life, running like film clips — outtakes — in his head. First days at school; holidays between the wars, when they went all over Europe together. On the first day of the summer holiday, as he recalled it, James would pick him up from school and say, ‘Tomorrow we’re off, Naldo.’ He always took his entire quota of leave during the summer holidays — that was, apart from one week, saved for the riotous Redhill Christmases.
They went without any known plan. The train to Dover, and then the boat to Calais and a train to Paris. From there they searched out places all over Europe. His father could speak enough of every tongue to get them by. There were plots and plans as they moved south, and then into Italy and Switzerland. Naldo recalled it all during that drive to London.
The pensions and hotels, the little restaurants where such a fuss was made of them. The Swiss lakes and swimming as the ferries chugged to and fro; Italy — he remembered Milan, and being shown the cathedral, with the mummified body of St Charles Borromeo in the crypt; Rome, and having pictures taken with a box Brownie on the Spanish Steps; Berlin, when they sat at cafes along the Kurfürstendamm and sipped coffee; mountain country, near the Soviet border; his first ever glass of champagne in Paris.
Lights, glitter, strange voices, odd smells, coffee, foreign cigarettes; the newspapers, and everywhere they went there were friends. Men and women who would suddenly appear, as if out of nowhere, and embrace his father, and gravely shake his mother’s hand. He always thought, as a growing boy, that somehow this was the wrong way round. And, later, he realized these people were probably more than just old friends. They were his father’s agents. Later still, he saw some of their photographs in old files in the shop’s registry.
With a touch of sadness he remembered them meeting Uncle Caspar, he thought it was on the Channel coast, Dieppe, or Calais. They had all gone to a café to eat eggs and chips, and an itinerant clown came in dressed as Charlie Chaplin.
Caspar and his father had got a little drunk. He could hear Cas now, ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight. Oh, what days we’ve seen,’ quoting and misquoting Shakespeare and punching his father’s arm. ‘What days we’ve seen.’
When they reached the shop, Naldo could have wept for the loving wonderful memories. All gone. Like the golden lads and lasses. All turned to dust.
‘They’re waiting for you, Nald.’ Gus brought him out of the reverie.
‘Right.’ Naldo took a deep breath. ‘OK, Gus, let’s put this calumny to rest once and for all.’
TWENTY-FOUR
1
They looked at him as though he had come from another planet which, he thought, was, in a way, true. Their eyes were hard, like coloured pebbles, and their faces blank, like a jury about to show no mercy.
Nobody could doubt the hostility that came from the reformed Credit committee. They were quite prepared to reject the fact that black was black and white was white. Big Herb would have called them ‘flat-earthers’.
Willis Maitland-Wood glared from the head of the long table; Tubby Fincher tilted his skull-like head, his eyes failing to meet those of Naldo. The charming, well-groomed David Barnard smoothed a hand over his silky hair; Indigo Belper fiddled with his watch chain; Desmond Elms, of the Soviet Desk, tried to outstare Naldo: his eyes said he had heard and seen it all before, and he would not be fooled; of them all, Arden Elder, Gus Keene’s second in command from Warminster, appeared to be interested; while the usually pert and pretty Beryl Williamson’s mouth was set, and there were patches of colour high on her cheekbones.
Naldo, with Gus Keene’s assistance, had carried in the large parcels of papers and set them on a table just inside the door. Now he stood, facing down the table so that he looked towards the chairman, BMW.
‘This is going to be short, and, for me, very sweet.’ There was no malice in his voice. ‘Might I ask, sir, if this is the whole of the Credit committee, responsible for passing internal judgement on my uncle, Sir Caspar Railton?’
‘Yes. Of course, yes.’ BMW’s voice was as steely as his eyes.
‘I have brought further documents, authenticated by a solicitor of high reputation, Mr Leo Morris. I do not blame you for coming to the conclusion you did, with the evidence at your disposal —’
Indigo Belper made a ‘ptcha’ kind of noise, as though he was already dismissing what Naldo had said.
‘However,’ pause counting three. ‘However, you did not have all the documents available. That was, I know, Sir Caspar’s intention. He wished to set a small trap. Before anyone can deal with this device — which must eventually be defused — I ask you to examine what I am now going to place before you. C has already seen the originals. Each of you will get copies, apart from Mr Maitland-Wood who will also get the originals.