by Mitch Silver
The crowd of acolytes had thinned a little when I stepped forward and threatened to give the white-haired ascetic an Old Boy hug. “Anthony!” (By the way, one pronounces the th sound as in Antony and Cleopatra.) He must have retreated a good foot and a half before he recognised me, and then kept me at arm’s length by sticking out his hand as far as it would go. “Ian Fleming. Didn’t know you liked the Italian Renaissance.”
“Of all the Renaissances it’s my clear favourite. I’m simply gaga for it.” The students and academicians around us gave us a surprised sort of titter. The Sun God of Art History and the Antichrist of Popular Culture. Now to set the hook.
“Look, a couple of us from the old days are having a low-key drinks thing at my club, and I’ve been deputised to drag you along.”
“Tonight? I couldn’t possibly—”
I was indignant. “What kind of untutored clod do you take me for? Thursday, eight-thirty, at Boodle’s.”
The look on his face showed me how much he wanted to reminisce about the war. I had to stay on the offensive. “Actually, you’re the guest of honour. Twenty Years of Royal Pictures, or some such rot.” I dropped my voice. “It’s to be a sort of surprise, but we’re all friends here, right?” Chuckles and a couple of genuine guffaws. The idea of Blunt having chums was laugh-out-loud funny.
I turned to go. “Eight-thirty Thursday. Cheers!” And I was out before he could say another word.
White’s, Brooks’s, and Boodle’s, the trio of crusty establishments that form the backbone of Clubland in upmarket St James’s, sit within steps of each other—White’s having been there first. (A quarter of a millennium ago in The Rake’s Progress, Hogarth drew a man who’d just lost his fortune in the gaming room at White’s.) But Blunt is a fellow member there, and I wanted the home field advantage. Besides, Boodle’s is a much more leisurely environment, better suited to the kind of shakedown I had in mind.
Set back several feet from its neighbours, Boodle’s is distinguished by its oversized Palladian windows. The façade says Georgian England so perfectly, an exact copy of the place has just been erected by a homesick Brit in Hong Kong. One passes through the swing doors and is greeted by the rich background smell of cigar smoke wafting down the wide staircase from the club rooms. The member who seeks the bar must cross the worn black and white marble floor and go down a flight of stairs lined with your usual genre paintings: nineteenth-century racehorses and long-gone members in muttonchops. (For a more complete description, may I direct you to M’s club, Blade’s, in Moonraker.)
The bar, though, is a bit public for my purposes, as is the saloon directly behind those grand windows. So I set up shop in the idiosyncratically named Undress Dining Room, where members may sup in casual clothes. I sat and opened my black gunmetal cigarette box, extracting one of the cigarettes of Macedonian blend with the three gold rings round the butt that Morlands of Grosvenor Square make for me. The new Undress man, Michael, brought me my I. W. Harper’s American whisky and I waited. N.B.: I really think Pratt’s have the right idea. They call all the waiters George. So much simpler.
I almost felt sorry for the old thing when I saw him cross the threshold that evening with a wary grin and a boutonniere in his lapel. In all other respects he wore the uniform of St James’s Street: grey suit and starched white collar, though his bowtie was perhaps a bit artsy—dark blue with white spots, loosely tied around the neck. The man who loves pictures and hates people had decided to make the best of a loathsome evening with drunken louts.
It wasn’t until Michael had served him his Pimm’s (Pimm’s in winter!) that I let him know the “drinks party” was a con. He raised one eyebrow, which you have to practise if you’re going to do well.
I started in. “Anthony, there’s a picture I want you to look at.”
“So that’s what this is about.” He seemed relieved. Then he turned into Mr. Business. “My fee for an appraisal is five hundred pounds.”
“It’s not that kind of picture. And you pay me the fee.” I took out a copy of one of my holiday snaps—number 29 from viewing room 2—and pushed it across the table towards him. “That’s you with the Duke of Windsor’s letter, isn’t it?”
He studied himself with the sangfroid with which he might have viewed Saint Jerome and the Lion. “There are secrecy laws. This is obviously a bank’s client room. I shall have to take—”
“Legal action? I think you’ll find employing extralegal measures to recover misappropriated goods is extra extra legal these days. And that’s before we even utter the magic words ‘national security.’ ”
He could try calling my bluff. And he did, dropping his voice impressively for greatest effect. “You know perfectly well the people who sent you can’t afford for this to be made public.”
“Well, that’s where it’s advantage Fleming. Because there are no People Who Sent Me. Just moi telling vous—sorry, Anthony, I can’t bring myself to tutoyer a Knight of the Realm—that withholding the Crown’s property during wartime doesn’t go down well in these parts. Especially when it’s He for Whom Provenance Is Everything doing the withholding.” I took a swig of my bourbon firewater. It had a sweet thickness behind the alcohol. “Do you really want to be defrocked over this? Moscow can be so severe in winter.”
He pushed the offending image back across the table. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I admit nothing. The picture’s no good without the actual letter.”
I picked up my glass and clinked his, still untouched, with it. “I second the motion.”
I suppose my gesture didn’t register because, emboldened, he went on. “So. You found out where it is. What’s to keep me from going down to Coutts first thing tomorrow? I’ll put my laundry list in there and the letter some other place you don’t know about.”
“Anthony, I have the letter.”
He looked over the rim of his glass. “Impossible.”
There’s an adrenaline rush when you finally have the other man where you want him. It’s why the Draxes and Goldfingers like to stretch out the torture. I was starting to empathise with those adrenaline junkies of mine when I reminded myself we had business to conduct. “What’s impossible is coming up with a torn piece of high-rag-content, silk-weave, crème-coloured notepaper and making two precise copies of it in forty-eight hours. One for us and one for Moscow Centre.” I let him see the initials AB on the envelope I took from my pocket before putting it back. “Compared to that, what’s a little old-fashioned Thirty Assault Unit undertaking against the combined defences of a single video camera and the redoubtable Mr. Turley?”
Blunt dropped his head slightly. I had taken him at the crest, and he had fallen. Crestfallen is such a delicious word.
“So then, what do you want with me?”
Lately I’ve been getting these burning pains in my gut and I find the bourbon is much kinder to my innards than Scotch whisky. I took a wee dram and wondered what Blunt’s innards were doing at the moment. “Let’s start with what I don’t want. One, a full confession of your role as a Soviet agent. The whole Fourth Man thing: your relationship with Burgess, Maclean, and Philby, your Russian contacts, everything. Don’t want it.”
He had been stirring his drink as I was speaking, overvigourously, and now he spilled a little. “What did you say?”
“Two, an acknowledgement in writing of your forgeries of the letter in question. Don’t want that either.”
He stopped the stirring. “Then what in blazes is it that you do want?”
“I want you out of the spy business, I want the damage you’ve done…undone. But the thing that I need is a certificate of provenance from you for the real letter. How we got it, where you kept it, how you know it’s the genuine article. A couple of pages at the most.”
Michael freshened our drinks without my asking him to. It’s one of the nice things about clubs.
Blunt looked at me as if I were mad. “And that’s the lot?”
I made that gesture children make about s
ealing one’s lips and throwing away the key. “Look, all I want is to stick a pin in Windsor and his friends—pith him like a moth on a bit of cotton. I’m going to add what you give me to a rather large file I already have and tie it up with a ribbon. For posterity. The Government aren’t in any position to do it. And I won’t be either, if you don’t help me.”
It was a different look in his eyes when he spoke next. “Kim Philby came to me eighteen months ago, scared out of his wits by someone poking around in the old days—” His eyes widened. “That was you, wasn’t it, old boy? Anyway, he led Special Branch right to my doorstep. I’m afraid I turned him out into the cold. It’s not that I’ve gone soft. I was always soft. Just a terribly bourgeois Bolshevik, I suppose. There’s my flat, my pictures. The letter was my”—he looked like he was searching for a particular word—“inoculation against everything. But my protection died with the King. So you see, if I stuck out my neck to help Kim…”
Just at that moment I was helping myself to my Kentucky elixir. Blunt assumed he still had the floor and went on. “Obviously, Bertie knew I knew about his disgusting brother, the Duke. But I’ve had no way of finding out if our quick little tour of the American Zone, and the reason for it, was ever communicated to the present Queen. So I retired from the game. Discontinued my foraging for young men. Kept to the straight and narrow ever since. Or, at least, the narrow.”
I lit another cigarette and offered him the case. He shook his head and lowered his voice a bit. “People will say I’m no more orthodox as a homosexual.”
I thought it was time I said something. “You mean your wife?”
“My quite pregnant wife.”
I’ve been told that, for a fairly handsome face, mine gets a very comical look when I’m puzzled. Blunt took pity on me. “Oh, Ian, don’t take on so. One adapts. If you know I’ve a wife, you’ve obviously read my files. Under the new laws, one more transgression and it’s Borstal for me. The Philby thing…” He had another little sip of his drink. “It threatened to scatter all the dust I’d so carefully swept under the carpet.” Now he looked at me. “I have it on good legal authority that marriage—and even better, paternity—is considered a sufficient defence against the sort of charges that used to arise against me. So when my assistant found herself in the family way and thinking of ending the pregnancy, we were in a position to help each other. You’ve met her, you know.”
“Who?”
“Maggie.”
I recalled her then, showing me around the Courtauld with Hyde-Jones. Very easy on the eyes. “And you’re telling me this because…”
My hand happened to be resting on the tablecloth, and he covered it with his own. For emphasis, I suppose. “I want to trust you, Ian. To be honest, I’ve always found your pursuits, your interests to be, well…vulgar. And yet. All I really have is my position and what remains of my good name. And now that I’m a raving heterosexual like yourself, a good name is something I intend to pass on.”
Lord knows what the elderly Tory at the next table made of two members holding hands. I extricated mine to lift my glass to my lips. I suppose I could have used the other hand, but I wanted to let Sir Anthony know, indirectly, that he still had a lot to learn about being a raving heterosexual.
The waiter, Michael, must have been hovering nearby because he chose that moment to inject himself into the conversation. “Gentlemen, I was wondering if the two of you might possibly feel like a bit of a fool.”
Blunt and I stared at each other. Michael stepped aside slightly to reveal a rolling cart on which sat a large cut-glass serving bowl heaped with a sweet, sticky confection that is the specialty of the house: Boodle’s orange fool.
Michael had two silver serving spoons in his hands and two bowls at the ready. He must have seen himself as comic relief. “I realise, gentlemen, that you have not yet had dinner, but as you well know, a fool cannot wait. And as this is the club’s two-hundredth year, Chef has created a double Cointreau fool to mark the occasion.”
Personally, I can’t think of anything more likely to go amiss than a glorified trifle of cooked fruit and whipped cream on top of two American bourbon whiskies. Blunt came to my rescue. “My good man, we are not suffering fools this evening.”
Michael beat a quick retreat with the rolling cart. Really, where do they get these people? The two of us seemed to have formed an alliance based on necessity and an indifference to sweets. Now for the question uppermost in my mind. “Tell me, Anthony, have the Russians ever made use of the letter?”
He pursed his lips in thought. Then he said, “You know how they operate. The right-hand Ivan never knows what the left-hand Ivan is doing. I’d have thought possibly Suez, but now it seems that was the Americans’ doing. Last year’s cock-up with that hideous Profumo and a Russian sharing the same bit of fluff—they might have unleashed the dogs over that. But”—he gave me one of those palms-up shrugs the French use to mean, who can say?—“of course, they don’t confide in me.”
“Humble pie isn’t your dish, Anthony. Of course they confided in you. You were the linchpin of their little plan.” I’d be damned if I’d let Anthony think he’d got one over on me. I exhaled and made a perfect smoke ring. “As a good little English Communist, you didn’t decide to do this forgery business on your own, did you?”
The smoke ring had drifted toward Blunt. He put his index finger into the middle of it and broke it up, saying, “You’re the one blowing smoke.” The icy übermensch had returned.
I was the HMS Relentless. “The war was ending, governments were falling all over Europe, and Moscow decided to give ours an extra push. Yes? To do that, Moscow would have to take down their old, sworn enemy. Yes?”
“And who might that have been?”
“Churchill.”
Blunt dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and then tossed it on the table. “Your imagination has always been your best quality.”
I plowed on through cruel, uncaring seas. “Winston’s the one who saw the Iron Curtain descending. Coined the term, in fact. Winston was the great defender of the monarchy, of our whole way of life. So, tar the King’s brother and you feather Winston. Do it while he’s still in power, and you might bring down more than the Government. You might bag the whole system.”
“If you say so.” There was that one eyebrow again.
“I do say so. But time was of the essence, and I’m guessing you ran out of it. This is what I think: the Kremlin and Whitehall are more like each other than either wants to admit. Factions, study groups, more study groups—by the time they knew what they’d got in that letter and how they wanted to use it, poof! We’d held our snap election, Winston and the Conservatives were out. Atlee and Labour were in. You’d missed your chance. The people’s party are running the show, Winston’s packed off to write his memoirs, and no one’s left in Government to use the letter against.”
Blunt had been leaning back in his chair throughout my tirade. Now he pressed forward. There was a ruddy colour in his face I hadn’t seen before. “Why are you going on so about this? Look, it’s over and done.”
“I said there’s no one left in Government who knows about the letter. That’s the whole point of blackmail, isn’t it? Someone has to know you know a dirty secret about them. The only people who fit that description now are the Royal Family.”
“Damn the Royal Family!” Blunt said it in a hoarse whisper but too loudly. The old Tory behind him gave me a murderous look. Why me? I hadn’t said it, so I tried to deflect the accusation by discreetly pointing my index finger toward my drinking companion. Unaware of the high drama around him, Anthony took out a handkerchief and dabbed at invisible perspiration on his forehead before going on. “All right, I believed in a cause, the People’s cause. You believed in one too, while it lasted: liberal democracy. ‘Our way of life,’ you called it. And Windsor, wasn’t he a believer? In Fascism. Racial purity. Anti-Bolshevism. Whatever it was. Pure rot, but he believed in it all the same. Who’s to say who was right? You?
Me? Why not leave the deciding to history?”
The passion had drained away as quickly as it had come. He leaned back again, his voice almost a whisper. “I told them they had to act fast. That the minute the Germans surrendered, all the common man would want to hear about would be jobs and housing and getting on with life. Put the war and everyone in it behind us. Them. But I was just an upper-class fop. What could a man of my station possibly know about the common man and his wants?” He raised his voice a bit as the bile came up. “You learn more about a man lying naked next to him than all the economic theorists will ever…” He left the thought unfinished.
The County type sitting at the table behind Blunt gave us a look that announced he had heard the bit about naked men; that no right-thinking clubman would ever think such a thought, let alone utter it aloud; and that if one did, one should recant or rethink one’s membership. All in one look.
In a few minutes we rose from the table, said our good-byes, and parted at the door, Blunt for Portman Square and I for a late supper with Ann. The next evening I received the above document, which I bequeath to you. It should vouchsafe the authenticity of the Duke of Windsor’s letter to Hitler.
Anthony has proved himself unorthodox indeed.
Chapter 50
PROVENANCE
For the last ten days I’ve been holed up in my room, typing like a madman. Ann and I are leaving for Goldeneye tomorrow, and I’ve wanted to have this finished before we go. The only break I’ve given myself has been to go round one morning to see my godfather at Hyde Park Gate, number 28. He recently took the decision not to stand for reelection from Woodford, making this only the twelfth year this century he has not been active in public service. Imagine.
I expected a man in his ninetieth year to act his age. Not Winston. He hallooed me into the room with an “Ian, my boy!” and a thunderclap of a slap on the back. Before I could take off my coat or get in a word of greeting, he’d launched into a monologue—disguised as a question—about writing habits. He was talking around one of his perennial cigars, so I thought he said “riding habits.” The nattering served to let me know he was vigourously engaged in a new book and was not some round, pink nonagenarian who’d been put out to pasture.