The Russia House - 13

by John le Carré

  The guards at the door creep into the room to listen, the guards from the stairs come to the doorway and the guards from the hall come to the stairs as the first notes of Barley’s swansong gather clarity and then a splendid power.

  ‘We’re going to the new Indian, for Christ’s sake,’ Henziger protests as they stand on the pavement under the stodgy gaze of the toptuny. ‘Bring Katya with you! We’ve booked a table!’

  ‘Sorry, Jack. We’re bespoke. Longstanding date.’

  Henziger is only putting on a show. ‘She needs welfaring,’ Barley has confided to him. ‘I’m going to take her off and give her a quiet supper somewhere.’

  But Barley did not take Katya to dinner for their farewell evening, as the irregulars confirmed before they were stood down. And it was Katya, not Barley this time, who did the taking. She took him to the place known to every urban Russian boy and girl from adolescence, and it is to be found at the top of every purpose-built apartment block in every major city. There is not a Russian of Katya’s generation who does not count such places among her memories of early love. And such a place was to be found at the top of Katya’s staircase also, at the point where the last flight ends and the attics begin, though it was more sought after in winter than in summer because it included the suppurating hot-water tank and steaming black-bandaged pipes.

  But first it was necessary for her to inspect Matvey and the twins and establish that they were still safe, while Barley stood on the landing and waited for her. Then she led him by the hand up several flights until the last, which was of wood. She had a key and it fitted the rusted steel door that ordered all trespassers to keep their distance. And when she had unlocked it and relocked it, she led him across the rafters to the bit of hard floor where she had prepared a makeshift bed, with a muddied view of the stars through the filthy skylight and the chugging of the pipes and the stench of drying clothes for company.

  ‘The letter you gave to Landau went astray,’ he said. ‘It ended up in the hands of our officials. It was the officials who sent me to you. I’m sorry about that.’

  But there was no more time for either of them to be shocked by anything. He had told her little of his plan and he told her no more now. It was understood between them that she knew too much already. And besides, they had more important matters to discuss, for it was on this night also that Katya told Barley the things that afterwards constituted the rest of his knowledge of her. And she confessed her love for him in terms simple enough to sustain him through the separation they both knew lay ahead of them.

  Nevertheless Barley did not outstay his welcome. He did not give the men in the field or the men in London cause to be anxious for him. He was back at the Mezh by midnight, in good time for a last one with the boys.

  ‘Oh Jack, Alik Zapadny’s summoned me to his traditional farewell snoot for old hands tomorrow afternoon,’ he confided to Henziger over a nightcap in the first-floor bar.

  ‘Want me to come along?’ asked Henziger. For like the Russians themselves, Henziger harboured no illusions about Zapadny’s regrettable connections.

  Barley smiled regretfully. ‘Your knees aren’t brown enough, Jack. It’s for us golden oldies from the days when there was no hope.’

  ‘What time?’ asked Wicklow, ever practical.

  ‘Four o’clock, I think he said. Seems a damned odd time for a drink. Yes, I’m sure he did. Four.’

  Then he wished them all an affectionate goodnight and rode to Heaven in the lift, which in the Mezh is a glass cage that slides up and down the outside of a steel rod, to the private worry of many honest souls below.

  It was lunchtime and after all our sleepless nights and wakeful dawns there was something indecent about a sensation that occurred at lunchtime. But a sensation it was. A hand-carried sensation. A sensation inside a yellow envelope inside a locked steel briefcase. Gaunt Johnny from their London station ran into the situation room with it, having brought it under guard from the Embassy across the square. He ran right through the lower level and up the little staircase to the command area before he realised we had moved to Sheriton’s rosewood parlour for our sandwiches and coffee.

  He handed it to Sheriton and stood over him like a stage messenger while Sheriton read first the covering letter, which he stuffed into his pocket, then the message itself.

  Then he stood over Ned while Ned read the message too. It wasn’t till Ned passed it back to me that Johnny seemed to decide he had read it enough times: a signals intercept, transmitted by the Soviet Military out of Leningrad, intercepted in Finland by the Americans and decrypted in Virginia by a bank of computers powerful enough to light London for a year.

  Leningrad to Moscow, copy to Saratov.

  Professor Yakov Savelyev is authorized to take a recreational weekend in Moscow following his lecture to the military academy in Saratov this Friday. Please arrange transport and facilities.

  ‘Well thank you, Mr. Administration Officer, Leningrad,’ Sheriton murmured.

  Ned had taken back the signal and was re-reading it. Of all of us, he seemed to be the only one who was not impressed.

  ‘Is this all they broke?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Ned,’ said Johnny, not bothering to conceal his hostility.

  ‘It says here “one over one”. What’s that supposed to mean? Find out whether it’s the only one in the batch. If it isn’t, perhaps you’d be good enough to find out what else they picked up on the same trawl that was worth a damn.’ He waited till Johnny had left the room. ‘Perfect,’ he said acidly. ‘Copybook. My God, you’d think we were dealing with the Germans.’

  We stood about, nibbling distractedly at our food. Sheriton had shoved his hands into his pockets and turned his back to us while he stared out of the smoked-glass window at the silent traffic. He was wearing a long-haired black cardigan. Through the interior window the rest of us could watch Johnny talking on one of the supposedly safe telephones. He rang off and we watched him come back across the room to us.

  ‘Zero,’ he announced.

  ‘What’s zero?’ Ned said.

  ‘ “One over one” means one over one. It’s a solo. Nothing either side.’

  ‘A fluke then?’ Ned suggested.

  ‘A solo,’ Johnny repeated stubbornly.

  Ned swung round to Sheriton, who still had his back to us. ‘Russell. Read the signs. That intercept is completely on its own. There’s nothing anywhere near it and it stinks. They’re tossing us a piece of bait.’

  Now it was Sheriton’s turn to make a second study of the sheet. When he finally spoke, he affected a deep weariness and it was clear he was reaching the limits of his tolerance.

  ‘Ned, I am confidently assured by the cryptographers that the intercept came from lowgrade military crap put out on an army squeezebox vintage 1921. Nobody plants deception that way any more. Nobody does those things. It’s not the Bluebird that’s going off course. It’s you.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why they planted it that way! Isn’t that what you and I might do? Come in on the blind side?’

  ‘Well, maybe we would at that,’ Sheriton conceded, as if it scarcely mattered to him. ‘Once you start thinking that way, it’s pretty hard to think any other way.’

  Clive at his worst. ‘We can hardly ask Sheriton to break off the operation on the grounds that everything is going well, Ned,’ he said silkily.

  ‘On the grounds of pixie voices,’ Sheriton corrected him, his temper gathering as he wandered moodily back into the room. ‘On the grounds that anything going our way is a Kremlin plot, and everything we fuck up is evidence of our integrity. Ned, my Agency damn nearly died of that ailment. So did you guys. We’re not going that route today. It’s my operation and my ass.’

  ‘And my joe,’ said Ned. ‘We’ve blown him. And we’ve blown the Bluebird.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Sheriton with icy affability. ‘No question.’

  He glanced unlovingly at Clive. ‘Mr. Deputy?’

  Clive had his own ways o
f sitting on the fence, and they were all of them well tried. ‘Russell – if I may say so – Ned. I think you are both being slightly egotistical. We are a service. We live corporate lives. It is our masters, not we ourselves alone, who have given the Bluebird their blessing. There is a corporate will here that is bigger than any of us.’

  Wrong again, I thought. It is smaller than all of us. It is an insult to the powers of each of us, except perhaps of Clive who therefore needs it.

  Sheriton turned back to Ned, but still did not raise his voice. ‘Ned, do you have any idea what will happen in Washington and Langley if I abort now? Can you imagine the peals of hyena laughter that will resound across the Atlantic from Defense, the Pentagon and the neanderthals? Can you guess what view might be taken of the Bluebird material until now?’ He pointed without apparent rancour at Johnny, who sat skull-eyed, watching each of them in turn. ‘Can you see this guy’s report? This Judas? We were sowing a little moderation around town, remember? Now you tell me I’ve got to throw Bluebird to the jackals.’

  ‘I’m telling you not to give him the shopping list.’

  Sheriton inclined his ear as if he were a little deaf. ‘Barley the shopping list? Or Bluebird the shopping list?’

  ‘Neither of them. Abort.’

  Finally Sheriton became very angry indeed. He had been winding himself up for this moment, and now it had arrived. He stood himself before Ned and not two foot from him, and when he flung up his palms in remonstration he wrenched half his fluffy cardigan with him so that he resembled an overweight bat in a fury.

  ‘So okay! Here’s our worst-case situation. Cooked Ned-style. Okay? We show Bluebird the shopping list and he turns out to be their asset, not ours. Have I considered that possibility? Ned, night and day I have considered little else. If Bluebird is their guy and not ours, if Barley is, if the girl is, if all or any of the players is less than strictly kosher, the shopping list will shine a very bright light up the anal orifice of the United States of America.’ He began pacing. ‘It will show the Sovs what has been given away by their own man. So they’ll know what we know. Already bad. It will show the Sovs what we don’t know, and how we don’t know it. More bad, but there’s worse to come. Cleverly analysed, the shopping list can show them the gaps in our intelligence-gathering machinery and if they’re cleverer still, in our own grotesque, fucking ridiculous, incompetent, ludicrously overstocked arsenal. Why? Because in the end we concentrate on what scares us, which is what we can’t do and they can. That’s the down side. Ned, I have looked at the bank balance. I know the stakes. I know what we can earn ourselves from Bluebird and what he stands to cost us if we screw up. Losing disenchants me. I’ve seen it done. I am not impressed. If we’re wrong, it’s shit city. We knew that back on Nowhere Island and we know it a little better now because it’s live-ammunition time. But this is not the moment to start looking over our shoulders unless we have a cast-iron reason!’

  He came back to Ned. ‘Bluebird is straight, Ned! Remember? Your words. I loved you for them! I still do! Bluebird is telling the unpolluted truth as he knows it. And my myopic masters are going to have it shoved up their asses even if it turns their balls to water. Do you read me, Ned? Or have I put you to sleep already?’

  But Ned would not rise to Sheriton’s black rage. ‘Don’t give it to him, Russell. We’ve lost him. If you give him anything at all, give him smoke.’

  ‘Smoke? Play Barley back, you mean? Admit the Bluebird’s bad? Are you joking? Give me proof, Ned! Don’t give me hunches! Give me fucking proof ! Everybody in Washington who hasn’t got hair between his toes tells me that Bluebird is the Holy Bible, the Talmud and the Koran! Now you tell me, give him smoke! You got us into this, Ned! Don’t try and jump off the tiger at the first fucking stop!’

  Ned pondered this for a while, and Clive pondered Ned. Finally Ned gave a shrug as if to say perhaps it made no difference anyway. Then he returned to his desk where he sat alone seeming to read papers and I remember wondering suddenly whether he had a Hannah too, whether we all did, some life unled that kept him to the wheel.

  Perhaps it was true that VAAP had no small rooms or perhaps Alik Zapadny, after his years in prison, had an understandable aversion to them.

  In any case the room he had singled out for their encounter seemed to Barley big enough for a regimental dance, and the only thing small about it was Zapadny himself, who crouched at one end of a long table like a mouse on a raft, watching his visitor with darting eyes as he ambled down the parquet floor at him, his long arms dangling at his sides, elbows up a little, and an expression on his face such as neither Zapadny nor perhaps anyone else had ever seen in him before: not apologetic, not vague, not wilfully foolish, but of an almost menacing firmness of intention.

  Zapadny had arranged some papers before him, and a heap of books beside the papers and a jug of drinking water and two glasses. And it was evident that he wished to offer Barley an impression of being discovered in the midst of his duties, rather than facing him in cold blood without props or the protection of his numberless assistants.

  ‘Barley, my dear chap, look here it’s most kind of you to call by and say your farewells like this, you must be as busy as I am at this moment, my hat,’ he began, speaking much too quickly. ‘I would say that if our publishing industry continues to expand like this, then I see no way out of it, though it is only my personal and unofficial opinion, we shall have to employ a hundred more staff and most likely apply for larger offices also.’ He hummed and fussed his papers and pulled back a chair in what he imagined to be a gesture of old-style European courtesy. But Barley as usual preferred to stand. ‘Well it’s more than my life is worth to offer you a drink on the premises, when the sun is not even over the yardarm as we say, but I mean do sit down and let us kick a few thoughts around for a few minutes –’ raising his eyebrows and looking at his watch – ‘my God, we should have a month of it, not five days! How is the Trans-Siberian Railway progressing? I mean I see no basic difficulties there, provided our own position is respected, and the rules of fair play are observed by all the contracting parties. Are the Finns being too greedy? Perhaps your Mr. Henziger is being greedy? He is certainly a hard-nosed character, I would say.’

  He caught Barley’s eye again and his discomfort increased. Standing over him, Barley bore no resemblance to a man who wished to discuss the Trans-Siberian Railway.

  ‘I find it actually a little odd that you insisted so dogmatically on speaking to me completely alone, you see,’ Zapadny continued rather desperately. ‘After all, this one is fairly and squarely in Mrs. Korneyeva’s court. It is she and her staff who are directly responsible for the photographer and all the practical arrangements.’

  But Barley also had a prepared speech though it was not marred by any of Zapadny’s nervousness. ‘Alik,’ he said, still declining to sit down. ‘Does that telephone work?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I need to betray my country and I’m in a hurry. And what I would like you to do is put me in touch with the proper authorities, because there are certain things that have to be hammered out in advance. So don’t start telling me you don’t know who to get hold of, just do it, or you’ll lose a lot of Brownie points with the pigs who think they own you.’

  It was mid-afternoon but a wintry dusk had settled over London, and Ned’s little office in the Russia House was bathed in twilight. He had put his feet on his desk and was sitting back in his chair, eyes closed and a dark whisky at his elbow – not by any means, I quickly realised, his first of the day.

  ‘Is Clive Without India still cloistered with the Whitehall nobles?’ he asked me, with a tired levity.

  ‘He’s at the American Embassy settling the shopping list.’

  ‘I thought no mere Brit was allowed near the shopping list.’

  ‘They’re talking principle. Sheriton has to sign a declaration appointing Barley an honorary American. Clive has to add a citation.’

  ‘Saying what?’

 
‘That he’s a man of honour and a fit and proper person.’

  ‘Did you draft it for him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Silly fellow,’ said Ned with an air of dreamy reproof. ‘They’ll hang you.’ He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  ‘Is the shopping list really worth so much?’ I asked. I had a sense, for once, of being more practically disposed than Ned was.

  ‘Oh it’s worth everything,’ Ned replied carelessly. ‘If any of it’s worth anything, that is.’

  ‘Do you mind telling me why?’

  I had not been admitted to the inmost secrets of the Bluebird material, but I knew that if I ever had been I would not have been able to make head or tail of them. But conscientious Ned had taken himself to night-school. He had sat at the feet of our in-house boffins and lunched our grandest defence scientists at the Athenaeum in order to bone up.

  ‘Interface,’ he said with contempt. ‘Mutually assured bedlam. We track their toys. They track ours. We watch each other’s archery contests without either of us knowing which targets the other side is aiming at. If they’re aiming for London, will they hit Birmingham? What’s error? What’s deliberate? Who’s approaching zero-CEP?’ He caught my bewilderment and was pleased with himself. ‘We watch them lob their ICBMs into the Kamchatka peninsula. But can they lob them down a Minuteman silo? We don’t know and they don’t. Because the big stuff on either side has never been tested under war conditions. The test trajectories are not the trajectories they’ll use when the fun starts. The earth, God bless her, is not a perfect globe. How can she be at her age? Her density varies. So does the old girl’s gravitational pull when things fly over her, like missiles and warheads. Enter bias. Our targeteers try to compensate for it in their calibrations. Goethe tried. They pour in data from earth-watch satellites, and perhaps they succeed better than Goethe did. Perhaps they don’t. We won’t know till the blessed balloon goes up, and nor will they, because you can only try the real thing once.’ He stretched luxuriously as if the topic pleased him. ‘So the camps divide. The hawks cry, “The Sovs are pinpoint! They can knock the smile off the arse of a fly at ten thousand miles!” And all the doves can reply is, “We don’t know what the Sovs can do, and the Sovs don’t know what the Sovs can do. And nobody who doesn’t know whether his gun works or not is going to shoot first. It’s the uncertainty that keeps us honest,” say the doves. But that is not an argument that satisfies the literal American mind, you see, because the literal American mind does not like to grapple with fuzzy concepts or grand visions. Not at its literal field level. And what Goethe was saying was an even larger heresy. He was saying that the uncertainty was all there was. Which I rather agree with. So the hawks hated him and the doves had a ball and hanged themselves from the chandelier.’ He drank again. ‘If Goethe had only backed the pinpoint boys instead, everything would have been fine,’ he said reprovingly.