Young Philby

by Robert Littell

  “Guy,” I said.

  “Jeffrey,” he said. “What do you do?”

  “I do anybody who needs doing.”

  “I mean by way of work.”

  “Indeed, work. At the moment I am weighing several options. My hope is to snag something in the F.O. Like almost everyone at Trinity, I read economics but switched to politics when politics became fashionable. Where did you go to school?”

  “I didn’t. Never made it past Sixth Form.”

  “Blessing in disguise, I should think,” I said. “Too much knowledge can bloat the brain.”

  “Surely carnal knowledge will be the exception to your rule.”

  “Depends on whom you’re carnal with,” I said. “Are you by any stretch of the imagination a Socialist?”

  “I am more bleeding heart liberal than Socialist.”

  “I grasp the bleeding heart part of the equation,” I said. “Pray tell what exactly do you mean by liberal?”

  “Pretty straightforward. A liberal is someone who is not revolted when he discovers his closest friend is a closet heterosexual.” He punched me playfully on the shoulder, which was more than enough encouragement to keep me focused on him despite his having spilt gin on the lapel of my new blazer.

  “I myself don’t disparage closet heterosexuality,” I confessed. “Been known to shag the occasional female if the bloke she’s with is pretty enough.”

  “Females bitch about men thinking with their dicks. Do you?”

  “Obliged to. I’m twenty-three this month and I’ve already fucked my brains out.”

  Eventually I smiled a certain smile and he bared his teeth in agreement and trailed after me to the W.C. at the end of the hallway where I delivered on the smile’s promise and gave him a blow job. I’d been so eager I’d forgotten to latch the lavatory door. We were at it in the shower stall when one of the Malthusian League ladies burst in. She didn’t bat an eye when she spied me squatting back on my heels so as not to soil my trousers, my fingers wrapped around the cock in my mouth. (I belong to the school of fellatio that holds that good hand work is every bit as indispensable as good tongue work. Swallowing is an ineluctable part of my ethic.)

  “You might have knocked,” my usher-slash-actor said crossly to the suffragette.

  “Mea maxima culpa,” the girl said in a syrupy voice thickened by Anthony Blunt’s whiskey, “but I desperately need to piddle.”

  The usher-slash-actor, buttoning his fly, and I, patting dry my lips on a silk handkerchief, emerged from the shower stall and planted ourselves in front of the Malthusian Leaguer with the intention of monitoring her response to this particular call of nature.

  “Don’t pretend you have never seen a girl urinate,” she exclaimed, flipping up the back hem of her skirt and parachuting onto the toilet seat.

  “Need to settle an old argument,” I explained.

  “What argument?” she demanded, closing her eyes in bliss as the pressure eased on her bladder.

  “Whether League stalwarts like yourself wear knickers.”

  “We are freethinkers in our deeds and the garments we choose not to wear reflect this,” the girl allowed.

  “No knickers?” concluded the usher-slash-actor.

  “No knickers,” confirmed the girl, snatching a fistful of toilet paper and blotting herself so deftly we never caught so much as a glimpse of her freethinking cunt. “No brassieres neither,” she added, heading for the door without bothering to flush the toilet. She spun around with one hand on the knob. “Not that it changes anything for Nancy boys like yourselves but we Malthusian Leaguers make use of a revolutionary form of female contraception—a copy of Margaret Sanger’s What Every Girl Should Know held firmly between the knees.”

  The usher-slash-actor tossed his head in admiration. “Now that’s an exit line,” he said.

  I got to meet the famous Magyar Litzi Friedman when Kim finally showed up with her at the Cadogan flat, her clothing and short hair disheveled from motorcycling in from Maida Vale, her eyelids puffed from having the wind in her face, her lips chapped beyond any repair lipstick could provide.

  “Least you could do, old sod, is equip her with a pair of aviator goggles,” I said.

  “I did—she lost them somewhere between Vienna and the Italian frontier. I didn’t feel it worth our while to turn b-back and look for them.”

  Anthony tried to elbow into the conversation. “Has anybody seen Gaspard Dughet’s Sacrifice of Abraham at the National Gallery?”

  But all ears were on the Magyar girl. “I say, does she speak English?” Don Maclean inquired of Kim.

  “I speak it well enough to know what buggered means,” the Friedman girl shot back.

  Her spunk couldn’t help but confound Kim’s Cambridge mates. “As the actress said to the bishop,” I exclaimed, “buggered is a splendid place to begin one’s mastery of the vernacular spoken in this scepter’d isle.”

  Litzi ran her fingers through her hair, which was the color of pitch. Gathering what little surplus there was at the nape of her neck, she slipped a rubber band from her wrist and deftly installed the tuft in it, passing the hair three times through the band. The gesture, so simple and at the same time so elegant no man could possibly pull it off, fascinated me. If she’d been a boy I would have been keen to let my hair go longish and ask her for a private lesson. I brought around two glasses of gin, neat, for Kim and his Hungarian. “Bloody decent of you to save a Jewish girl from the clutches of Fascism,” I told him. “I myself would be quite prepared to marry one so long as I was not expected to consummate the union.” I winked at Jeffrey. “Not against carnal knowledge per se if the individual being carnalled is fitted with a suitable anus.”

  “I wasn’t saving a Jewish girl,” Kim said, clearly irritated. “We happ-ppen to be in love.”

  “That explains everything,” I observed drily.

  “Indeed,” Don Maclean agreed, completely missing my fling at irony.

  As always in those days the conversation quickly turned to Germany’s Fuehrer. “There’s a story going round Hitler got syphilis from a Jewish whore in Vienna,” Don Maclean remarked.

  “I hope it’s true,” the Friedman girl said.

  Blunt prowled the fringe of the group. “For my money, Dughet has more talent than Poussin, who happened to be his brother-in-law and teacher.”

  “Fuck off with your Dughet and Poussin, Anthony,” Bob Wright told him. “Can’t you see we’re on to more important things than Frog art?”

  Sipping at our chilled gin, we toured the ominous horizon as seen from the leaded windows of a flat in Knightsbridge. We all agreed that the Reichstag fire had been set on Herr Hitler’s orders to give him a pretext to crush the great German Communist Party. But we were at a collective loss to come up with the name of the young Dutch Communist who had taken the rap for the crime.

  “It’s Marcus something or other,” Don Maclean said.

  “His name is Marinus, not Marcus,” the Friedman girl said. “Marinus van der Lubbe.”

  “That’s right,” Bob agreed, eyeing Kim’s Magyar spouse with newfound respect. “Marinus. Brave chap.”

  “Brave chap indeed,” the Friedman girl said. “He was convicted in a kangaroo court and beheaded in the prison yard.”

  “That Bulgarian Communist who was accused with the Dutchman—” I said.

  To Kim’s manifest satisfaction, the Friedman girl supplied his name as well. “Dimitrov. Georgi Dimitrov.”

  “Read his speech to the judge in The Times,” Don Maclean said. “Bloody miracle the Germans found him not guilty.”

  “The fix was in,” Kim said. “Russians were holding two or three German aviators as hostages against Dimitrov’s liberation.”

  “Could be Herr Hitler still doesn’t control all the strings of the German body politic,” Bob Wright said.

  The Friedman girl said, “He controls the important strings. He had a plurality in the Budestag until he expelled the Socialist and Communist deputies, at w
hich point he had an outright majority. Make no mistake, nothing will stop him short of war.”

  “Looks as if you’ve gone and married an Amazon,” Don told Kim.

  “Has she had one breast removed, the better to draw back the string on her bow?” I asked with mock innocence.

  “Both my breasts are intact, thank you,” the Friedman girl said. “Would you care to verify them?”

  She actually put her fingers to the top button of her shirt. I do believe she would have opened it then and there, if only to discomfit me in front of my friends.

  “Burgess doesn’t fancy breasts,” Don observed with a wry smile. “Do I have that right, Guy?”

  The Friedman girl appeared quite exasperated by all of us. “You seem to take what’s happening in Europe—what happened in Vienna—lightly. Kim takes it seriously. He was in Berlin five days after the Reichstag burned to the ground. With his own eyes he saw the monster rising from the ashes.”

  “Didn’t know you’d been to Berlin, Kim,” I said.

  “I don’t talk about it because I am not very p-proud of how I comported myself,” he said.

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” the Friedman girl said with sudden passion. “If you could have seen him in Vienna—motorcycling through the city, bluffing his way past checkpoints, delivering false papers and clothing to Schutzbund militiamen trapped in the sewers, some of them with festering wounds. Not a few who managed to escape the Fascist thugs owe their lives to Kim.”

  “She is greatly overstating my c-contribution,” Kim said.

  Bob looked at Kim. “What did happen in Berlin?” he asked quietly.

  “Spill the beans, Kim,” Don said.

  “Go ahead and tell them,” the Friedman woman said. (She clearly had more of an influence on him than any of us.) “It will give them a better appreciation of what Hitler and Germany have in store for the world.”

  Kim shrugged his lean shoulders. “At one point I found myself inside a chemist shop. Truck p-pulled up filled with brownshirts. They jumped from the back and painted Jude on the store window. Posted themselves at the door and turned away customers. The chemist was a little man with a Jewish name. He stood there trying to catch his breath as if he had run a hundred-yard dash. He was so humiliated he couldn’t b-bring himself to look me in the eye. Whether humiliated for himself or for Germany, or for that matter both, I cannot say.”

  “Then what?” Bob Wright coaxed gently.

  “Say the rest of it, Kim,” the Friedman woman said.

  Kim looked as if he, too, were trying to catch his breath. “As I quit the shop,” he went on, his voice unsteady, “the brownshirts demanded to see my p-papers. When I produced my British p-passport, one of them asked what I’d been doing in a Jewish shop. I wanted to tell the b-bastards to go to hell. I’m ashamed to say I lost my nerve. I knew they would rough me up. I loathe violence. I get sick to my stomach at the sight of b-blood. I even dislike sports that involve physical contact. So I mumbled something about the Jews being their p-problem, not mine. And I went my merry way. I left without so much as a b-backward glance at the chemist inside his shop.”

  The Magyar girl put an arm around Kim’s waist and pulled him close to her. Bob said, “You are coming down too hard on yourself. Which of us could swear he would react differently?”

  “You would,” Kim said. “Whether in the coal mines or at Cambridge, you never b-backed away from a fight.”

  “You had the nerve to go to Vienna,” Bob said. “You had the nerve to help the poor sods in the sewers.”

  “I d-didn’t help the Jewish chemist in his shop.”

  Truth to tell, I found Kim’s little story touching. Pushed one to look inside one’s self, something I didn’t often do for fear of what I might find. “You couldn’t help the Jewish chemist in the shop,” I said. “If you had butted in, you would have only made his situation worse than it was.”

  “I trust everyone here is taking note,” Don said. “Guy Burgess has been caught out being serious.”

  “Appreciate it if you didn’t spread this around,” I said. “Ruin my reputation as a scapegrace.”

  * * *

  Fortnight later I lunched with Kim at a pub in Holborn. He was working nearby for £4 a week as a subeditor for the Review of Reviews, a scruffy monthly stuffed with dreary articles pilfered from British and American journals. The one thing that made it halfway readable was the motoring page, that and the occasional letter to the editor which, as the Review received no letters addressed to its editors, were written by Kim under pseudonyms. “Ah, the things one does to p-put groceries on the table,” he said with a sigh as we slid into a booth. A big-breasted female mopped up the spilt beer on the tabletop with a damp rag that, if you rang it out, could fill a mug. She produced a pad and a child’s coloring crayon and looked from one to the other, her mouth drooping open. “What’s your pleasure, gents?”

  “You,” I said.

  She swallowed the weary laugh of someone who has heard it all before. “No call to be gettin’ fresh, shall we.”

  “Let’s order,” Kim said.

  “What do you offer by way of potpie?” I inquired.

  “We have the house potpie, dearie. It’s all up on the chalkboard in large upper-class letters.”

  We each settled for house potpie and a pint of bitter.

  “How’s your Magyar Amazon surviving Maida Vale exile?” I asked.

  “Life here is too damn humdrum to suit her,” Kim said.

  “After Vienna, she was bound to find London a bit tedious,” I said. “Is she a Communist?”

  “Very much so,” he said. “That’s what she misses, Guy. She feels she’s been put out to p-pasture. In Vienna she was in the thick of things. She was a member of a district committee. Important comrades came to her flat for meetings. She collected leaflets from a secret printing press and delivered them to Communist cells in the workers’ tenements.”

  “You ought to find something for her to do. She could hand out leaflets in Hyde Park reminding the natives that the end is nigh.”

  “The both of us marched in the May Day p-parade yesterday. I have to say it was Vienna redux. Must have been thirty thousand in the streets. Litzi was radiantly happy. Today’s her b-bloody b-birthday. Haven’t found her a p-present yet.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Yes, well, her body might be twenty-four but her eyes are twice that.”

  “You’re spot-on—she’s seen things she would p-prefer to put out of mind,” Kim agreed.

  “What’s your old man up to these days?” St John’s latest exploits were always good for a quarter hour of conversation.

  “Ahhh, he’s going to drive his Ford station wagon from Jiddah to Britain via Transjordan and North Africa. He’s planning to cross over to Europe at the P-Pillars of Hercules. I am trying to talk him into contributing a travelogue to the Review. I’m proposing to call it Mecca to Maida Vale. Snappy b-banner, don’t you think?”

  Our bitters arrived. The potpies weren’t far behind. We degusted in silence for a time.

  “I say, Kim, does your father work for His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service? Everyone says he must.”

  “Not that I know of. On a first-name b-basis with one or two of the top chaps from his salad days, though he categorically refuses to name names. What makes you ask?”

  “All that meandering the Saudi desert is certainly suspicious. Seems as if he spends half his waking hours buttering up Ibn Saud. Here’s the thing, Kim, I have a wizard idea. We ought to become spies.”

  “Funny, I thought you said spies.”

  “I did say spies. Consider the advantages. You would get to get a stipend, don’t you think? Help make ends meet, sort of thing. Drink real claret instead of the bilge water they serve here. And it would be damn glamorous. Think of all the sods you get to take to bed on the grounds you’re fucking them for their secrets.”

  “For whom would we spy?”


  “Adolf’s out of the question. Ditto Benito. If worse came to worst, we could always spy for the home team.” I had a sudden inspiration. “Or the Reds. What about the Reds?”

  “The Russians? Surely you must be joking.”

  “But Kim, they’re on the side of the angels—dictatorship of the proletariat and all that twaddle. Holidayed in Moscow some weeks back. Must say I came away impressed.”

  “If something in Moscow impressed you, it will have been one of the fairies you p-picked up at the Metropole.”

  “You make the very serious mistake of reducing everything to sex, Kim. The economy is what impressed me. It works. No sign of the Great Depression having reached Mother Russia. No unemployment. No soup kitchens. Universal health care. No strikes. Well, no strikes because there are no labor unions, but no labor unions because the proletariat owns the means of production, whatever. Hell, Moscow’s even building a tube. They say you’ll be able to set your watch by the trains pulling into the stations every minute on the minute. They say the stations will make Covent Garden look like a cesspit. They say Joe Stalin’s five-year plan will pull them even with Germany and Britain in, well, eh, five years.”

  “They’d bloody better p-pull even with Germany. Chances are they’ll be at war with the Huns in five years.”

  “All the more reason to spy for them.” Disregarding the stench of stale beer wafting from the tabletop, I leaned half across. “The NKVD is the aristocracy of the Soviet Union,” I said, speaking in what theatrically would have been termed sotto voce. “Its spies are the aristocracy of the NKVD.”

  “Well and good to join an aristocracy, but what on earth could we tell them?”

  “Well, for starters, we could beef up this conversation. Lunch with a junior cabinet minister’s principal assistant who said such and such. That sort of drivel.”

  “You are kidding.” The smile faded from Kim’s face. “You aren’t kidding. Listen up, Guy, you’re talking sheer nonsense. If we were to spy for the Reds, we’d be spying on Britain.”