Visibility

by Boris Starling

  That was Stensness in a nutshell, Kazantsev said: a blowhard, a bullshitter. A nice enough man, sure, but one for whom the romance and secrecy of what he did were just as important as the content. No; they were more important than the content. His commitment was not to international socialism as such, but to snatched meetings in darkened pubs, to dead drops and tradecraft and the thrill of being clandestine.

  Just as de Vere Green had said.

  Kazantsev had pondered the issue long and hard, and was convinced that if a man was homosexual, as he knew Stensness was—come on, the MGB weren’t amateurs—then perhaps that kind of subterfuge was second nature.

  Maybe Stensness had believed, once. But it had all gone wrong in the summer, when he had gone to Moscow.

  There, he had met someone.

  His Intourist guide, in fact; also young, also handsome, also homosexual. Misha someone—Kazantsev could not remember the family name.

  Misha and Max had started an affair.

  It had not been a honey trap, a deliberate provocation, but no matter; the MGB were not ones to look gift horses in the mouth.

  They had recorded the last night of international passion on hidden cameras and sent the tapes to Kazantsev, in case he ever needed them.

  Then they had taken Misha away and shot him.

  Herbert gasped. Kazantsev shrugged: What did you expect?

  In the Soviet Union, homosexuality was not only illegal, it was also a mental illness, for it was a deviance from general social norms. It was social, in the purest sense of the word. An act of dissidence, a statement of rebellion, and there were only two sentences for that: a decade in the labor camps, maybe two, or a bullet in the back of the head.

  Herbert shook his head in disbelief; not that Misha had been killed, he could believe that all too easily, but that any society with pretensions toward civilization could possibly think that this kind of behavior was anything other than savage.

  Yes, Kazantsev admitted. It did, on reflection, seem a bit harsh. Perhaps there had been some kind of administrative misunderstanding, and Misha was supposed simply to have gone east for a few years, but somewhere along the line, wires had been crossed. These things happened all the time. The Soviet Union was a country sadly accustomed to death. No one worried too much about one more here and there.

  Had this romance just been a holiday affair, then Stensness would have remained none the wiser as to Misha’s fate. But he seemed to have taken a genuine shine to this young man. He had written long letters full of frankly adolescent longings, and had become increasingly agitated when he received no answer.

  His angst was such that he had begun to miss his appointments with Kazantsev. His information had become sporadic and unreliable.

  Yes, of course the MGB had other points of contact within the CPGB, but this had been Kazantsev’s job on the line; it was he who would have been in trouble had Stensness failed to deliver. So, in order to snap Stensness out of his lethargy, he had told him the truth about Misha.

  Well, it certainly did that, Kazantsev said wryly.

  Stensness had gone berserk. He had tried to attack Kazantsev, and had then cracked a couple of knuckles punching the wall.

  After that, he had started demanding money for his reports.

  Kazantsev had shown him the footage from the hidden cameras and pointed out that he was in no position to be making bargains. Reluctantly accepting the truth of this, Stensness had continued to work for Kazantsev, though with ill grace.

  Kazantsev had spoken to Moscow about cutting ties with Stensness and finding another source. There were four reasons why people became informers, and, as Herbert knew, they could be summarized in the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego.

  Stensness was unusual in that all four of these applied to him in some way or another. But Kazantsev knew, as any agent handler did, that the ideologically motivated agent was the only one worth running in the long term. All the other motivations could eventually make an informer greedy, lazy, or resentful, and once that happened, they were as good as lost.

  Yes, Moscow had said, sever contact with him.

  And Kazantsev had been about to break the news to him, at the conference, when Stensness had said he had something so huge, so important, that it would change the world, and he was going to sell it to the highest bidder, Kazantsev and his blackmailing be damned. This information was so precious that whoever got it would protect him as a matter of course.

  Of course Kazantsev had been tempted to dismiss this as fantasy, Stensness’ imagination run even more riot than usual. Perhaps he had got an inkling of his impending dismissal and was throwing caution to the wind in a last-ditch attempt to save the arrangement.

  But there was always that nagging doubt. What if it were true? What if Kazantsev turned down the chance of a lifetime? Worse, what if someone else grabbed it?

  It would have been bad enough in the West: dismissal, disgrace, menial jobs until the end of time. At least Western agents would still have been alive. Kazantsev would not even have been offered the Siberian option.

  Stensness had not spelled it out, but Kazantsev had known that there would be at least three interested parties: the MGB, the CIA, and Five.

  Nothing personal, Kazantsev said to Herbert, but the MGB’s biggest concern was the Americans; they were now the GP, the glavny protvinik, the main enemy.

  Before the war, sure, the British had been Moscow’s premier adversaries, but times had changed. Now, the average Englishman was apolitical and indifferent. He did not care who was governing him, where the country was going, whether the Common Market was good or bad. If he had a job, and a salary, and the wife was happy, that was enough for him.

  The Americans, on the other hand, believed. They believed in democracy and freedom and the American way, and that made them dangerous.

  So Kazantsev and Stensness had arranged to meet at the Peter Pan statue.

  But Stensness had not shown, and nor had he made contact to explain why, or to reschedule. Given his insistence on the intergalactic significance of the whole thing, this had seemed strange.

  So Kazantsev had gone to Stensness’ home address, only to find that he had moved out recently without telling him. Perhaps the omission was deliberate, perhaps not.

  King’s had given Kazantsev the right address—on the Thursday evening, however, not the Friday morning, contrary to what he had said last time—but Stensness had not been at home. Kazantsev had posed as one of his colleagues from King’s, and Stensness’ housemates said that they had not seen him.

  Worse, the housemates had then stayed in all evening. Kazantsev had watched from the car until midnight and then slept there, wrapped in five layers and freezing as though it were Murmansk in January.

  Eventually, sometime after breakfast on Friday, the housemates had left, and Kazantsev had broken into the empty house to see if he could find anything of interest. Midway through the search, Elkington had arrived. The rest Herbert knew.

  Herbert thought fast. Kazantsev had been first on Stensness’ list, at six thirty. If he was to be believed, Stensness had not shown, but still his body had been found in the Long Water. Maybe Stensness had been intercepted en route to his meeting with Kazantsev.

  “You never saw Stensness after he left the Royal Festival Hall?”

  “Never.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Absolutely positive?”

  “You can ask it any way you like, Inspector, but the answer’s still the same.”

  Kazantsev had nearly finished his food. Though he had done most of the talking, he had somehow managed to eat at a fearsome pace, too. “Now, Inspector …” The Russian speared his final piece of sausage with his fork and waved it at Herbert. “You want to know why the British preserve the monarchy? To distract the masses from the path of socialism, that’s why. The Bolsheviks had only been secure in their revolution once they had killed the Romanovs. For every Englishman a Soviet spy manages to
recruit, there are fifty they miss. How will you ever have a revolution in a country where the milk is delivered to the door every morning at eight?”

  “If I have you sent back to Moscow, what will happen to you?”

  “If I’m lucky, they’ll relocate me. Vienna would be nice. Murmansk is more likely.”

  “They won’t dismiss you?”

  “There are only two ways you leave the MGB, Herbert: in handcuffs, or feet first.” He smiled. “Ach, the hell with it. If you send me back, I have bigger problems.”

  “Such as?”

  “What to do with my cat, for a start. Would you like him?”

  Herbert laughed. “I’m not much of a cat man.”

  “That’s because you’re a cop, not a spy. All spies love cats; their devious feline mentality appeals to us more than the stupid sincerity of dogs. What about my jazz 78s? They’re quite brittle, but let me tell you, back in Moscow, we’d listen to homemade copies scratched on used film taken from hospital X-ray departments. Jazz on bones, we called it.”

  “I’m not much of a jazz man, either.”

  They could, Herbert thought, have been lovers killing time while one of them waited for a train.

  Herbert’s next notion was in every aspect absurd, but still it nagged at him. Kazantsev, more than de Vere Green, more than Papworth, was the one man in this whole affair who could help him, really help him, if he was allowed to do so.

  But that would never happen. Kazantsev was a Soviet spy. Cooperating with him might not have technically been treason, as Britain was not officially at war with the Soviet Union, but it would surely be seen as such.

  Herbert remembered something John Harington had said. “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

  In other words, the end justified the means. That was certainly something a good Marxist like Kazantsev would understand.

  Inevitably, perhaps, Herbert thought back to Burgess and Maclean. Whatever one’s opinion of them—and everyone had one—there was no denying that they were both intelligent and gifted men. Perhaps their dilemma had also been that of an entire generation caught in the contradictions and confusions of postwar Britain, where everything—the country’s role in the world, the health of its economy, the state of its colonies—seemed muddled and without philosophic purpose.

  True, there was an understanding on both sides of the political fence that a return to prewar levels of unemployment and poverty could not and would not be tolerated. The British were better fed, better educated, better doctored than ever before.

  But how superficial was this success?

  Houses were being built, but homelessness remained.

  Health care was being improved, but no new hospitals were appearing.

  People were being employed in their droves, but neither production nor investment were up much.

  Who would not be bewildered, in such a place? Why should loyalty to the Crown be the highest loyalty? Who had not betrayed something, or someone, more important than a country? Did governments have a monopoly on what was right and sensible?

  Actions could be noble, even—or especially—when they were illegal. Look at Alan Nunn May, who had passed atomic secrets to Moscow, and in doing so helped them develop their own bomb, a decade ahead of Western intelligence’s best estimates. Was he a traitor, or a savior?

  Perhaps his actions would, in time, help foster and preserve détente by leveling the playing field and, in ensuring the mutuality of any nuclear destruction, providing a more effective deterrent than a thousand North Atlantic treaties.

  “Tell me a bit about yourself, Alexander,” Herbert said.

  “Please, call me Sasha. We are friends now, no?” Kazantsev smiled. “Tell you about myself… Well, I’m a normal fellow, I guess, with normal hobbies. I’m married, with two daughters. I collect old locks and the wise thoughts of my friends. I’m interested in numismatics and the poetry of the Silver Age. Out of choice, I drink Moskovskaya vodka and smoke Camel cigarettes.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “Ah-ha! I am the true son of proletarians.” He said it with a slight flourish, as if to let Herbert know that he was not taking all this rigid communist doctrine too seriously. “My father, Sergei Grigoreyevich, was a factory accounts clerk; my mother, Elizabetha Stanislavovna, used to sew costumes for the Bolshoi. Both have passed away now, sadly. But they and their forebears left me with the best legacy a man can have in Soviet Russia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Not a drop of Jewish blood in our family, not for at least three generations! Ridiculous, of course. But then all governments are, in the end. And it’s not just the Jews Moscow has a problem with. Balts and Caucasians are allowed abroad just as rarely. Whatever we say about internationalism, in the end we prefer to rely on Russians.”

  “Do you enjoy what you do?”

  Kazantsev puffed out his cheeks “I don’t think enjoyment is any kind of criterion, to be honest. Sometimes I think the whole thing’s a joke. I studied at the MGB college out in the woods at Balashikha. On the wooden perimeter fence someone had scrawled in chalk: School for spies. So much for secrecy!

  “Since you’re asking me seriously, though, I’ll say this: spying is as necessary and as disagreeable as cleaning toilets. It widens one’s understanding of human nature, that’s for sure. But at the same time it coarsens you. Could any decent person peep through keyholes and gather, crumb by crumb, information that his neighbor would rather keep to himself?”

  He could have been bluffing, Herbert thought, playing the mildly rebellious cynic in order to impress him. Besides, there was nothing a Russian liked more than a good bit of maudlin philosophy. But at some stage, Herbert supposed, one had to trust.

  Kazantsev went on: “Perhaps the worst is that, sooner or later, no matter how much you fight it, you come to see man, with all his joys and sorrows, all his merits and shortcomings, as nothing more than an object for recruitment. You sniff and lick at him, you ensnare and seduce, and finally you hook him …” He paused. “At least whores have the decency to demand money.”

  Outside the café, Herbert returned Kazantsev’s wallet to him, press pass and all.

  Kazantsev said something in Russian.

  “What was that?” Herbert asked.

  “I said ‘thank you’—but using the informal version of the second person, ty. We communists use ty to each other. Vy is for waiters and class enemies.”

  Herbert could see more through his shirt when he pulled it over his head of a morning than he could outside.

  The fog was three-ply, double-milled and thick-weave. Ambulancemen and women had forsaken their days off and returned to work, if only to walk in front of those vehicles ferrying the sick around—a group which they might shortly be joining, to judge from their streaming eyes and bloody feet. Passengers staggered ahead of cabs carrying their suitcases.

  Herbert should have rung in to New Scotland Yard and let them know what he had ascertained over the past few hours on his trawl round the representatives of three espionage services; but he was still angry at being deceived over the funeral, even though he knew full well that, had it not been for what he had seen at the graveside, he would never have worked out the truth about de Vere Green.

  Besides, what exactly would he tell Tyce? Herbert seemed to have discovered an awful lot, but when he put it all together, he didn’t seem any closer to the truth.

  So he went back to Hannah’s flat in Soho, both to take his mind off the case, and to apologize for having offended her earlier, albeit unwittingly.

  She was in, which pleased him, and happy to see him, which pleased him more.

  “Happy birthday,” she said, kissing him on the cheek and pressing something into his hand. It was a present, beautifully wrapped in bright paper and tied with a bow.

  “Can I open it?” he asked.

  “Don’t be silly. Of course.”

  It was a little black ename
l box, about six inches by three, the lid painted in exquisite swirls of red and green. “It’s beautiful,” Herbert said, and meant it.

  “You like it? That please me. It’s for your cufflinks and collar studs.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Then you buy some,” she laughed. “A man should look smart.”

  “Is it from Hungary?” Herbert said.

  She cocked her head. “Yes. Hungarians make lovely things.”

  She had the radio on, and Herbert listened for the news.

  Visibility at Kew and Kingsway was still officially nil; wind was one knot at Kew, zero at Kingsway. The high-pressure anticyclone remained immovable; the center was straight above the Thames Valley, and the thermal inversion was intact. The weather forecast talked of widespread fog and frost.

  It did not mention that London was completely sealed in, its inhabitants forced to breathe choking fumes from chimneys and power stations all working full tilt to provide heat, light, and poisoned air to those below.

  It did not mention smog, or people dying.

  It did not say that hospitals were busier than at any time since the Blitz.

  The BBC prided itself on being the best news organization in the world, so this omission could only have been deliberate. The Soviets weren’t the only ones who knew how to control public information, Herbert thought.

  “We should go out,” Hannah said.

  “Why?”

  “My friends come back later. There is big party nearby, so they use flat to meet.”

  “Won’t they want you to be there?”

  Hannah shrugged. “There is key, with owner of café next door. They can get in.”

  They went down the stairs, Hannah moving ahead of Herbert with what seemed to him extraordinary assurance. Then he realized that the staircase had a handrail, the steps were all the same height, and objects were unlikely to be left where they shouldn’t have been. In other words, it was predictable.

  Outside, he took her firmly by the upper part of her right arm. She stopped dead.

  “Listen,” she said. “If I want help, I ask.”

  “I was only trying to—”