Visibility

by Boris Starling

  Perhaps when she found out she would let him know, Herbert thought; after hearing all that, he was not sure he could tell.

  He did understand, or at least hoped he did; because while anyone could have comprehended it, in purely intellectual terms, he had actually felt it.

  The wrenches, the fury, the gaping wounds of loss had flowed from her as she spoke, or maybe they had been in him all along, and she had brought them to bloom.

  As for whether he was worthy of this knowledge, well, he hoped so, for it seemed more important than anything he had ever encountered.

  Hannah traced the fingers of her right hand over his mouth, forcing his lips slightly apart. Then she moved her fingers up to his cheek, fluttering them along the ragged sproutings of his late-night stubble, while her left hand flowed and undulated through the lines on his forehead.

  “Hmm,” she said. “A smile, a frown; hard to tell.” She paused. “Say something.”

  He could not speak, for what could he say that could possibly do justice to the things Hannah had been through?

  The words had not yet been invented that would have sounded adequate, and it was fear of being thought otherwise—of proving, through some ham-fisted platitude, that he was not the man she had taken him to be—that held him silent.

  That, and the sudden vertigo-inducing thought that he had never felt closer to any human being.

  “Oh, Herbert,” she laughed. “You know why I like you? Because you’re different.”

  “Different? In what way?”

  “Most men, they get you alone in a room, and they want sex, sex, right now.” Her tone suggested that this had not, on occasions, been entirely unwelcome. “Not you. We sit here till the end of time and still you do nothing, no?”

  His gut churned. “I’m not much to look at, Hannah.”

  “Well, you find the right person, then.” She laughed again, her delight a golden firework which fell on him and lit him up. “Herbert, Herbert, even if I see you, I don’t care what you look like.”

  She moved her lips to his, and he was destroyed.

  December 7, 1952

  SUNDAY

  Herbert woke with a start, already thrashing at the python which had wrapped itself round his body as he slept. Then he realized, with shamed surprise, that it was Hannah, her legs curled round his and her arms clasped across the back of his neck, as though she were a koala clinging to the trunk of a eucalyptus.

  Spot the man unaccustomed to waking up with a woman, he thought.

  Hannah stirred but did not wake. Herbert dropped his head back on to the pillow and dared a small smile as he thought about the previous night.

  Now, granted, he did not have much experience in these matters, but even if he had been Casanova, he would still have thought that Hannah was, as lovers went, incredibly skilled.

  Her fingertips were calloused, rough against his skin; from Braille, no doubt.

  She had told him, as her hands had traced intricate patterns across his skin, that some Indonesian masseurs were blinded in childhood to increase their sense of touch. Feeling the exquisite way in which her own fingers had known exactly where to apply pressure, and to what extent, he had easily believed it.

  Hannah had taken the lead, of course, extraordinarily confident both in her own desires and in the instructions she had given him, which made him think of all the practice she must have had to become that adept, and therefore of how many men had been with her before he had, and of how most of them would inevitably have measured up better than him.

  He blinked twice to rid himself of the thought.

  What did it matter? He seemed to have given Hannah some pleasure, too, unless she was a much, much better actress than he had given her credit for. And now she lay there, snuffling contentedly against his neck, and he was happy.

  So what did it matter, indeed, who had come before him?

  It mattered much more, he thought, that there be no one after him.

  The radio said that it was freezing at Kensington Palace, and colder still at London airport. Northolt had 90 flights scheduled in and out, and none were moving; of London’s 107, only 6 were still running.

  Herbert saw in the dim dawn light that the fog had crept into the edges of the room where they lay, gray streaks which would hang there until the fire had warmed enough to disperse them.

  The fog had settled for less than three days, but already there was a thick black film on everything inside Herbert’s flat. The curtains looked as though a chimney-sweep had toweled himself down with them, and the metal surface of the draining board was dusted in a fine layer of sooty grime.

  Putting more coal in the grate would hardly make the place cleaner, but the fire had gone out, and the room was appreciably colder than it had been when they retired.

  Faced with the choice of freezing or choking, Herbert decided that warmth was the sine qua non. He scooped a pile of black nuggets from the scuttle next to the fireplace.

  He watched Hannah as she dressed. In some inexplicable way, this seemed even more intimate and invasive than making love with her a few hours before had been.

  Only when she had finished did Herbert remember that he still had a killer to find.

  He had been lost in Hannah for hours, a blissful time out of time; he would have stayed there forever, but she would not have let him, and for that he loved her more than ever.

  The knock at the door was loud and sudden enough to startle them both.

  Herbert jumped slightly in his chair, sloshing coffee over the side of his mug. Hannah, who was standing, took a step backward, and turned her foot slightly on something. She bent down to pick it up, and Herbert saw as she ran her fingers over it that it was his makeshift paperweight; a model car, about six inches long with one wheel missing, an old childhood toy. It must have fallen from the desk.

  Strange, he thought, that she should jump so. For her, all sounds must in some way be sudden, and therefore the unexpected must have gradually become the norm.

  Herbert got up and went to the door, tensing himself.

  “Who is it?” he called out.

  “Me. De Vere Green.”

  Herbert looked at Hannah, who raised her eyebrows in surprise.

  “Are you alone?” Herbert asked.

  “Of course.”

  Herbert opened the door.

  De Vere Green looked terrible. A week’s groceries would hardly have filled the bags under his eyes, his hair rose and fell in spiky clumps, and his knuckles were white where he gripped a manila folder whose edges sprouted paper sheets.

  Herbert half-ushered, half-dragged de Vere Green inside and steered him to the kitchen table, kicking the front door shut behind him as he did so.

  “Coffee?” Herbert asked.

  “Please.” De Vere Green’s voice was hoarse. He looked around the room, his eyes seeming to focus only intermittently. When he finally realized that Hannah was there, he stared at her for several seconds before shaking his head, though Herbert could not tell whether this was disapproval or disbelief.

  De Vere Green had been drinking, that was clear from the mosaic of burst blood vessels on his nose and in his eyes—not to mention the sweet, slightly high odor which leached from his pores. Herbert wondered whether, drunk aside, he was also on drugs. It seemed unlikely, but then de Vere Green had turned enough suppositions on their head in the past twenty-four hours; nothing about him would surprise Herbert anymore.

  When the coffee came, de Vere Green warmed his hands on the mug, visibly collected himself, and began his spiel.

  “You have the whip hand here, dear boy. You know my secrets, you could destroy me just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if you wanted, and heaven alone knows I’d deserve it, after the way I’ve treated you. I could appeal to your kindness, but men like me don’t understand such concepts, not really. So forgive me if I address you in my language: that of the deal, an arrangement of mutual benefit…”

  Herbert did not really know what de Vere Gre
en was talking about, but he nodded anyway: Go on.

  “I have something here which may be—no, let’s be honest, which I think is most definitely—germane to your case. It’s something which in the normal course of events you should never see, but under the circumstances I feel it only proper to make an exception. Before I show it to you, however, you must in turn give me an undertaking: that you will never reveal my secret, that indeed you must take it to the grave, if God forbid you reach that dreadful gate before me.”

  It was strange, Herbert thought, and perhaps telling too, that though de Vere Green knew full well that Hannah was there, he seemed not in the slightest bothered by her presence. Perhaps he thought she was deaf as well as blind; or perhaps he was so dismissive of women that he considered her a trifle.

  Herbert remembered the calculations he had made about his leverage over de Vere Green; in particular, about when best to use it.

  “How do I know that what you have is worth my silence?” Herbert asked.

  “You have to trust me.”

  After everything that had happened between them, it sounded absurd. “You have to trust me,” de Vere Green repeated, audibly more desperate than before. “It’ll be worth your while, I promise you.”

  It was pitiable, to see a man reduced to this; and Herbert was less comfortable with pity than he was with hatred, that was the uncomfortable truth he knew too well.

  But there was another truth, equally apparent: he wanted to solve this case. If de Vere Green had the means to help him do so, then it would be the most ridiculous act of self-spiting to reject the offer of aid simply because of its provenance.

  And besides, what was to stop Herbert giving de Vere Green the assurance and then, if need be, going back on it?

  Information could not be unlearned, after all. The hold he had on de Vere Green expired when he made the truth public, not when he agreed not to do so.

  He was becoming harder; he was becoming more pragmatic.

  He did not know which.

  “You have my word,” Herbert said.

  With a smile of such pathetic gratitude that Herbert almost rescinded the agreement on the spot, de Vere Green opened the manila folder he had brought.

  Inside were sheets of typewritten paper in various sizes, some foolscap, some little more than scraps, most somewhere in between. De Vere Green fanned them out on the kitchen table like playing cards.

  “You told me yesterday that Papworth knew about Max,” he said.

  Herbert nodded. “That’s right.”

  “And I told you that no one knew about Max; he was my secret.”

  “You did.”

  “So how can they both be true?”

  “One of you is wrong.” Lying or mistaken, it did not matter which; one more falsehood in this investigation could hardly be detected, let alone considered.

  De Vere Green shook his head. “No. We’re both right.”

  Herbert shrugged. “Then how?”

  “Because Papworth is a Soviet agent.”

  Impossible, Herbert said. He had met Papworth, and the man had taken virtually every opportunity to launch into a tirade against the mortal evil that was communism.

  “Come on,” said de Vere Green. “You leave Five, and instantly forget everything you know about reading people’s motives? Of course Papworth would say that, if he was a Soviet agent, of course he would. He’d lambast them at every turn, to make you think exactly what you’re thinking now, that there’s no way he could be anything other than America’s finest.”

  “Prove it,” Herbert said.

  “These papers are decrypts from the Venona program,” de Vere Green said. Yes, the very ones that had first alerted London to Maclean’s treachery. Venona covered only the war and the few years afterward, but there was such an enormous backlog that most of the transmissions were only now being decoded.

  That was by the by. The point was this: double agents did not simply stop. Once they were in, they were in, and they were terminated only by death or discovery.

  Venona was implicating hundreds of people, mainly in Washington and New York. There were informants in the State Department, and Agriculture, and Justice, and the Treasury, not to mention the Office of Strategic Studies, the Army Signal Corps, the Office of National Intelligence, and that was before you got to General Electric, Standard Oil, and U.S. Rubber.

  The West was crawling with closet Reds, in other words.

  But the decrypts which de Vere Green had brought were more scientifically orientated than most, and concerned a Soviet agent known only as Achilles.

  They had been sent to him under the auspices of the counterintelligence committee on which he sat with Papworth, and spanned a period of four years, on and off, 1944 through 1948, and various branches of science: non-ferrous metals, three types of engineering (aeronautical, chemical, and manufacturing), crystallography, physics, biochemistry—and, of course, atomic energy.

  The rub was this: Papworth had been involved with all of these.

  Times, places, areas of expertise; they all matched. Here were transmissions made from Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project; there were outgoings from London just after Papworth had arrived. Each different decrypt in itself could have applied to several people, sometimes even scores. But take them together, and one by one the possibilities were whittled down until only Papworth was left.

  It had taken de Vere Green a while to be sure, and even then he had shied from it. He was a patriot, and he liked Papworth, so both in terms of friendship and ideology, he did not want to believe that the truth was the truth, as it were.

  “You’re sure?” Herbert asked.

  “Positive.”

  “There’s no doubt?”

  “Papworth is the only man who fits all the decrypts. The only one.”

  “And you think he was somehow running Stensness, too?”

  “I don’t know. But if he was there, and he is who he is, then …”

  “Well, there’s only one thing for it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We must go and talk to Papworth.”

  De Vere Green sighed. “I knew you’d say that.”

  “You don’t seem thrilled by the prospect.”

  “I’m … Well, it’s not as simple as all that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because all these decrypts I get, Papworth receives them, too.”

  The fog was black and gauzy, like a widow’s funeral veil. It hung in cold, clammy sheets, scummy and tight. It wanted to suffocate, that was obvious enough. It was no longer simply a meteorological phenomenon; it was a sentient, malevolent being.

  Hannah had demanded to come, too. De Vere Green had refused—she had already heard too much—but when he and Herbert went out of the flat, they could see so little that for long moments they did nothing but stand still and try to orientate themselves, clinging on to the door frame as a child would clutch the side of a swimming pool.

  So Hannah had come, too. Besides, Herbert felt that she might be useful as more than a guide; if she was half as perspicacious about the case as she had been about him, perhaps she would uncover some piece of evidence, or make some connection, which had hitherto eluded him.

  Herbert had no doubt that he was breaking the rules in bringing her along, but if the best the Met could offer him from their own resources was Elkington, then perhaps the rules needed fracturing in the first place.

  Hannah walked with extraordinary assurance, much faster and more confidently than anyone else shuffling along uncertainly in the mist; the only person for whom the fog was not debilitating. Hannah alone, handicapped in everyday conditions, could now bestride this strange world without pause or worry.

  She gripped her cane with thumb and three outer fingers, index pointing down the shaft toward her feet, and swept the stick before her like an antenna or the beam on a radar screen, low across her front and to each side, touching the ground every stride, in front of the foot that was about to come forward.
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  Arm, hand, and cane: lines of protection.

  At first, it almost scared Herbert to keep up, convinced as he was that at any moment they would run headlong into someone coming the other way, or perhaps an object even more unyielding, such as a lamppost or a wall. Then he pulled himself together; if a small, blind girl could go at that pace, then so could he.

  The only time they missed a beat was when Herbert tried to speak. Hannah stopped, muttered something which he took to be a reminder of where they were, and turned to him.

  “Please,” she said. “Blind people walk with their heads as well as their feet.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “A draft of air which change mean to me a revolving door. Sudden smell of exhaust is passing car. Leather in the air, a shop for shoe repairs is nearby. I know route we take, but I must concentrate hard. So, I cannot listen to you. Every second, I must remember how far we are gone, and so how far is still left for us. I know, from A to B, it take me certain minutes. I can’t do it quicker. I try to do it slower, I get lost. So always maintain same speed.”

  They walked on in silence after that.

  They were almost at the door of the American Embassy when Papworth came out.

  He was no more than two or three yards from them, but still he did not see them, partly because of the fog, and partly because he was intent on where he was going. He turned left out of the door and set off.

  When de Vere Green made as if to call out, Herbert clamped a hand across his mouth. Better to follow Papworth, his eyes said silently, and see what he was up to, than beard him here and now.

  Papworth walked with a strange mix of purpose and slowness, the urgency in the set of his body undone by the restrictions of progressing through such gloom.

  It was Herbert rather than Hannah who now led the chase, making constant, minute adjustments to their pace. They had to be close enough to Papworth to keep him in sight, but far enough away to remain undetected.

  With any other quarry, pursuit would have been well nigh impossible; but the metallic clacking of Papworth’s heel inserts helped them track his progress as surely as a homing beacon.