The Russia House - 13

by John le Carré

  Soon after he had delivered himself of this judgment, it was agreed he was under mental stress and his attendance was required more sparingly.

  Oh, and note was taken. Passively, since active verbs have an unpleasant way of betraying the actor. Very serious note. Taken all over the place.

  Note was taken that Ned had failed to advise the twelfth floor of Barley’s drunken breakout after his return from Leningrad.

  Note was taken that Ned had requisitioned all manner of resources on that same night, for which he had never accounted, among them Ben Lugg and the services of the head listener Mary, who sufficiently overcame her loyalty to a brother officer to give the committee a lurid account of Ned’s high-handedness. Demanding illegal taps! Imagine! Faulting telephones! The liberty!

  Mary was pensioned off soon after this and now lives in a rage in Malta, where it is feared she is writing her memoirs.

  Note was also taken, if regretfully, of the questionable conduct of our Legal Adviser dePalfrey – I even got my de back – who had failed to justify his use of the Home Secretary’s delegated authority in the full knowledge that this was required of him by the secretly agreed Procedures Governing the Service’s Activities as Amended by etcetera, and in accordance with paragraph something of a deniable Home Office protocol.

  The heat of battle was however taken into account. The Legal Adviser was not pensioned off, neither did he take himself to Malta. But he was not exonerated either. A partial pardon at best. A Legal Adviser should not have been so close to an operation. An inappropriate use of the Legal Adviser’s skills. The word injudicious was passed around.

  It was also noted with regret that the same Legal Adviser had drafted a glowing testimonial of Barley for Clive’s signature not forty-eight hours before Barley’s disappearance, thus enabling Barley to take possession of the shopping list, though presumably not for long.

  In my spare hours, I drew up Ned’s terms of severance and thought nervously about my own. Life inside the Service might have its limitations but the thought of life outside it terrified me.

  The announcement of Bluebird’s passing provided a temporary setback to our committee’s deliberations, but it soon recovered. The offending item was a six-line affair in Pravda, carefully pitched to be neither too much nor too little, reporting the death after illness of the distinguished physicist Professor Yakov Savelyev of Leningrad and listing his several decorations. He had died of natural causes – the bulletin assured us – soon after delivering an important lecture to the military academy at Saratov.

  Ned took the day off when this news reached him, and the day became three days, a light flu. But the conspiracy theorists had a ball.

  Savelyev was not dead.

  He had been dead all along, and the version we had dealt with was an impostor.

  He was doing what he had always been doing, running the Scientific Disinformation Section of the KGB.

  His material was vindicated, was not vindicated.

  It was worthless.

  It was pure gold.

  It was smoke.

  It was a truthful message of peace sent to us at immense risk by the moderates inside Moscow’s ruling ranks in order to show us that the Soviet nuclear sword had rusted in its scabbard and the Soviet nuclear shield had more holes in it than a colander.

  It was a fiendish plot to persuade the American faint-hearts to take their fingers off the nuclear trigger.

  In short, there was enough for everyone to get their teeth into.

  And, because in the symbiotic relationship that exists between belligerent states nothing can take place in the one without setting off a mirror reaction in the other, a counter-industry grew up and the history of the American part in the Bluebird affair was hastily rewritten.

  Langley knew all along that the Bluebird was bad, said the counter-industry.

  Or that Barley was.

  Or that both of them were.

  Sheriton and Brady were playing double-double games, said the counter-industry. Their one aim was to plant the smoke convincingly and steal another march on the Russians in the endless struggle for the Margin of Safety.

  Sheriton was a genius.

  Brady was a genius.

  They were all, all geniuses!

  Sheriton had scored a brilliant coup. Brady had.

  The Agency was staffed by nothing but brilliant strategists who were quite unlike their dismal counterparts in the overt world. God preserve the Agency. Where would we be without it?

  As if all this were not enough, new tiers of possibility were added to the old. For example, that Sheriton had been the unwitting instrument of the Pentagon and Defense. It was they who had prepared the phoney shopping list and they who had known all along that the Bluebird was a plant.

  And each fresh rumour had to be taken seriously in its turn, even if the only real mystery was who had fabricated it or why. The answer, in many cases, appeared to be Russell Sheriton, who was fighting for his hide.

  As to the Bluebird, if he had not died of natural causes, he was certainly doing so now.

  Ned alone, returned from his self-imposed vigil, was once more so crass as to speak the likely truth. ‘The Bluebird was straight and we killed him,’ he said roundly, at the first meeting he attended. He was not invited to the next one.

  And all this while our search for Barley did not let up, even if there were those of us who were glad not to find him. We edged towards him, round him and, too often, away from him. But we were honourable men. We never let up.

  But what had Barley traded – and for what?

  What were the Russians prepared to buy from him – from Barley, who till now had only needed an expensive lunch, paid for most likely out of his own pocket, to talk himself into an irreversible loss?

  He was blown, after all! To smithereens! Already by the time he went to them! And knew it!

  What had he got to offer them that they couldn’t help themselves to? We are talking after all of torture, of the foulest methods, and registers of agony from which even the return is unimaginable hell. The Russians might be improving their image, but nobody seriously supposed that they were going to abandon overnight methods that had stood them in good stead for thousands of years.

  The first and most obvious answer was the shopping list. Barley could tell the Russians baldly he would not obtain it from his masters until he had the necessary assurances. And that he would sooner boil in oil for the rest of his life than fetch the shopping list for free.

  And they believed him. They saw that they would have to go without the shopping list if they didn’t play his game. And because the grey men of either side are as scared of self-sacrifice as they are of love, the tender sages of the KGB evidently preferred to deal with the part of him they understood, rather than meddle with the part they didn’t.

  They knew he had the power to refuse them, to say, ‘No, I will not fetch the shopping list. No, I will not walk into Igor’s apartment until you have given me your more than solemn word.’

  They knew, when they had listened to him, that he had the strength. And, like us, they were a little embarrassed by it.

  And Barley – as he had told Henziger and Wicklow at dinner – had never met a Russian yet who could give his solemn word and walk away from it. He was not talking of politics, of course – just business.

  And in return? What did Barley buy with what he sold?

  Katya.

  Matvey.

  The twins.

  Not a bad deal. Real people in exchange for unreal arguments.

  For himself? Nothing. Nothing that could conceivably modify the strength of his demand on account of those whom he had taken into his protection.

  And little by little it became clear that Barley for once in his life had hammered out a first-rate contract. If the Bluebird was a lost cause, Katya and her children showed every sign of being a saved one. She remained at October, she was sighted at the occasional reception, she answered her telephone at home and at her
office. The twins still went to school and sang the same daft songs. Matvey wandered his amiable ways.

  Soon, therefore, another great theory added itself to the rest. ‘The Sovs are engaging in an internal cover-up,’ it ran. ‘They do not wish to give currency to Bluebird’s revelations of incompetence.’

  So the needle swung the other way for a while and Bluebird’s material was deemed genuine. But not for long.

  ‘This is what they want us to believe,’ a man of power cried.

  So the needle swung hastily back to where it was before, because nobody wants to be made a fool of.

  But Barley’s deal held. Katya did not lose her privileges, her red card, her apartment, her job or even, as the months went by, her looks. At first, it was true, the reports spoke of the pallor of widowhood, of an unkempt appearance and long absences from work. And clearly nobody had promised Barley that she would not be invited to make a voluntary statement about her relationship with the late Bluebird.

  But gradually, after a becoming period of withdrawal, her ebullience reasserted itself and she was seen about.

  And of Barley himself?

  The trail went hot, then cold, then very cold indeed.

  Formal letters of resignation, postmark Lisbon, were received by his aunts within a few days of the book fair and bore the marks of Barley’s earlier style – a general weariness of publishing, the industry has outgrown itself, time to turn his hand to other things while he still has a few good years ahead of him.

  As to his immediate plans, he proposed ‘to lose himself for a while’ and explore unusual places. So it was clear that he was not in Russia any more.

  Seemingly clear, that is.

  And after all, he said so himself. So did the pretty girl in the Barry Martin Travel Agency, which has its offices in the Mezhdunarodnaya. Mr. Scott Blair had decided he would fly to Lisbon instead of back to London, she said. A courier from VAAP brought his ticket. She rewrote it and booked him on the Aeroflot direct flight, leaving on the Monday at 1120 hours, arriving Lisbon 1530, stopping Prague.

  And somebody used that ticket. A tall man, spoke to nobody, a Barley to the life, or nearly. Tall like the man in the VAAP lobby perhaps, but we checked him anyway. We checked him all along the line and the line only stopped when it reached Tina, Barley’s Lisbon housekeeper. Yes, yes! Tina had heard from him, she told Merridew – a nice postcard from Moscow saying he’d met a lady-friend and they were going to take a holiday!

  Merridew was profoundly relieved to learn that Barley had not, after all, returned to his patch.

  Then over the next months a picture of Barley’s after-life began to form before it disappeared again.

  A West German drug-smuggler while in detention heard that a man of Barley’s description was under interrogation in a prison near Kiev. A cheerful fellow, said the German. Popular with the inmates. Free. Even the guards gave him the odd grudging smile.

  An adventurous French motoring couple returning home had been assisted by a ‘tall friendly Englishman’ who spoke some French to them when they were involved in a traffic pile-up with a Soviet limousine near Smolensk. Nobody was hurt. Six foot, brown floppy hair, polite, with a big laugh, and tended by these burly Russians.

  And one day near Christmas, not long after Ned had formally handed over the Russia House, a signal came in from Havana reporting a Cuban source to the effect that an Englishman was under special detention at a political gaol near Minsk, and that he sang a lot.

  Sang? went the outraged signal back. Sang about what?

  Sang Satchmo, came Havana’s reply. Source was a jazz fiend, like the Englishman.

  And the text of Barley’s letter to Ned?

  It remains a small mystery of the affair that it never reached the file, and there is no record of it in the official history of the Bluebird case. I think Ned hung on to it as something he cared about too much to file.

  So that should be the end of the story, or rather the story should have no end. Barley in the judgment of the knowing was all set to take his place among the other shadows that haunt the darker byways of Moscow society – the trodden-out defectors and spies, the traded ones and the untrusted ones with their pathetic wives and pallid minders, sharing out their dwindling rations of Western treats and Western memories.

  He should have been spotted after a few years, accidentally but on purpose, at a party where a lucky British journalist was mysteriously present. And perhaps, if times remained the same, he would be fitted out with some taunting piece of disinformation, or invited to throw a little pepper into the eyes of his former masters.

  And indeed that was the very ritual that seemed to be unfolding when a flash telegram from Paddy’s successor reported that a tall sandy Englishman had been sighted – not only sighted, heard – playing tenor saxophone at a newly-opened club in the old town, one year to the day after his disappearance.

  Clive was hauled from his bed, signals flew between London and Langley, the Foreign Office was asked to take a view. They did and it was unequivocal for once – not our problem and not yours. They seemed to feel the Russians were better equipped to muzzle Barley than we were. After all, the Russians had obliged before.

  Next day a second telegram arrived, this time from fat Merridew in Lisbon. Barley’s housekeeper Tina, with whom Merridew had reluctantly maintained relations, had been instructed to prepare the flat for the arrival of her master.

  But how instructed? asked Merridew.

  By telephone, she replied, Senhor Barley had telephoned her.

  Telephoned you where from, you stupid woman?

  Tina hadn’t asked and Barley hadn’t said. Why should she ask where he was, if he was coming to Lisbon any day?

  Merridew was appalled. He was not the only one. We advised the Americans, but Langley had suffered a collective loss of memory. They near as nothing asked us, Barley who? There is a public notion that services such as ours take violent retribution against those who have betrayed their secrets. Well, and sometimes it is true, they do – though seldom against people of Barley’s class. But in this case it was immediately clear that nobody, and least of all Langley, had any wish to make a shining beacon out of somebody they would greatly prefer to forget. Better to square him, they agreed – and keep the Americans out of it.

  I mounted the staircase apprehensively. I had declined the protective services of Brock, and Merridew’s half-hearted offer of support. The stairwell was dark and steep and inhospitable and unpleasantly silent. It was early evening but we knew he was at home. I pressed the bell but did not hear it ring, so I rapped the door with my knuckles. It was a stubby little door, thickly panelled. It reminded me of the boat-house on the island. I heard a step inside and at once stood back, I still don’t know quite why, but I suppose it was a kind of fear of animals. Would he be fierce, would he be angry or over-effusive, would he throw me down the stairs or fling his arms round me? I was carrying a briefcase and I remember transferring it to my left hand as if to be ready to protect myself. Though, God knows, I am not a fighting man. I smelt fresh paint. There was no eyehole in the door, and it was flush against its iron lintel. He had no way of knowing who was there before he opened to me. I heard a latch slip. The door swung inward.

  ‘Hullo, Harry,’ he said.

  So I said, ‘Hullo, Barley.’ I was wearing a lightweight dark suit, blue in preference to grey. I said, ‘Hullo, Barley,’ and waited for him to smile.

  He was thinner, he was harder and he was straighter, with the result that he had become very tall indeed, taller than me by a head. You’re a nerveless traveller, I remember thinking as I waited. It was what Hannah in her early days used to say we should both of us learn to become. The old untidy gestures had left him. The discipline of small spaces had done its work. He was trim. He was wearing jeans and an old cricket shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He had splashes of white paint on his forearms and a smear of it across his forehead. I saw a step-ladder behind him and a half-whited wall, and at the
centre of the room heaps of books and gramophone records partly protected with a dustsheet.

  ‘Come for a game of chess, Harry?’ he asked, still not smiling.

  ‘If I could just talk to you,’ I said, as I might have said to Hannah, or anybody else to whom I was proposing a half-measure.

  ‘Officially?’

  ‘Well.’

  He studied me as if he hadn’t heard me, frankly and in his own time, of which he seemed to have a lot – much, I suppose, as one studies cellmates or interrogators in a world where the common courtesies tend to be dispensed with.

  But his gaze had nothing downward or shameful in it, nothing of arrogance or shiftiness. It seemed to the contrary even clearer than I remembered it, as if it had settled itself permanently in the far regions to which it used occasionally to drift.

  ‘I’ve got some cold plonk, if that’ll do you,’ he said, and stood back to let me pass him while he watched me, before he closed the door and dropped the latch.

  But he still didn’t smile. His mood was a mystery to me. I felt I could understand nothing of him unless he chose to tell it me. Put another way, I understood everything about him that was within my grasp to understand. The rest, infinity.

  There were dustsheets on the chairs as well but he pulled them off and folded them as if they were his bedding. Prison people, I have noticed over the years, take a long time to shake off their pride.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked, pouring us each a glass from a flagon.

  ‘They’ve asked me to tidy things up,’ I said. ‘Get some answers out of you. Assurances. Give you some in return.’ I had lost my way. ‘Whether we can help,’ I said. ‘Whether you need things. What we can agree on for the future and so on.’

  ‘I’ve got all the assurances I need, thanks,’ he said politely, lighting on the one word that seemed to catch his interest. ‘They’ll move at their own pace. I’ve promised to keep my mouth shut.’ He smiled at last. ‘I’ve followed your advice, Harry. I’ve become a long-distance lover, like you.’