by Jake Arnott
I’d often go for an evening drink with some of my staff but one night, after working into the early hours of the morning with an officer on secondment from Counter-Subversion, I ended up in a seedy after-hours club in Paddington. There was a cabaret of sorts: girls took turns to dance on stage or mime to gramophone records. They then sat out in the audience at the end of their ‘act’. It was obviously a knocking shop, but there was something more than usually exaggerated in the make-up and demeanour of the tarts as they plied their trade.
It was just when my colleague gave me a nudge and a knowing smile that I realised what was going on. The illusion was suddenly revealed, yet still intriguing. They were all female impersonators, and very good ones too. This was a silly entertainment for my fellow officer, at most a voyeuristic pleasure. I laughed along with him heartily as we got mildly drunk together. But a fortnight later I went back there on my own.
I found that I liked the uncertainty, the ambiguity. It made sense of that unsettling feeling I’d had in Malaya all those years ago. It was the pretence as much as anything, the act of disguise. I didn’t feel I was being unfaithful because what I was doing wasn’t entirely real. I certainly didn’t consider myself homosexual. I think you’ll find that most men who occasionally have sex with male transvestites feel the same way. It was a game: colluding in someone else’s deception, escaping from one’s own self. There’s an unbreakable code within, like that curious line that Iago utters at the beginning of Othello: I am not what I am. I’ve long since given up trying to decipher myself. Curiosity becomes its own definition.
This activity was a high-level security risk, of course, and at a time of the greatest paranoia in the Service. And I enjoyed the danger and the sense of transgression. But I wasn’t stupid; I didn’t do it too often. That made the whole thing more rare, more interesting. I took few risks and was diligent in covering my tracks. My sense of duty made me careful. And my marriage kept me stable. I was determined to save it and I endeavoured to spoil my wife whenever I could. I suggested a proper holiday, which we hadn’t had in years: three weeks in Jamaica with a visit to the Flemings while we were there.
In February 1963 we flew to Montego Bay Airport. We felt the heat as soon as we stepped off the aeroplane. That thick, slightly sweet smell of the tropics hit us, that familiar scent from when we had first disembarked at Singapore, which brought back memories of when we were young and in love. Our plan was to spend a week at the Flemings’ and then explore the island a bit. We picked up a hire car and set off for their villa at Oracabessa. Once we had left behind the hotels and cement villas of Montego, we were on a winding road through tumbling countryside, jungle interspersed with cane fields and mangrove swamps. Green hills that sloped gently into coves and headlands, a bright-blue sea diffusing into the horizon. We passed porched wooden houses and one-roomed shacks, whitewashed Baptist chapels with signs exhorting each passer-by to repent for the end is at hand. We smiled at each other, knowing that we’d made the right choice going there.
It was over fifty miles to the Flemings’ house. An idyllic place, built on a cliff overlooking the sea with a sunken garden and steps leading down to a beach of pure white sand and deep clear water. After we had showered and unpacked we joined Ann and Ian for cocktails and they showed us around their little estate. That evening Violet, their black cook and housekeeper, served us lobster and curried goat and rice. We retired early, just after sunset. As we said goodnight Ian was leaning against the railing at the bottom of the garden, looking out to sea and smoking incessantly, his aquiline profile patrician and melancholic, vigilant as darkness fell.
The night pulsed with tree frogs and cicadas as we made love. It was as tentative and romantic as it had been in the early days of my first colonial posting. A moment saved from time.
But though we felt briefly blessed in coming to Jamaica, it was soon clear that staying with the Flemings was a terrible mistake. There was a palpable tension between them and we were drawn into the conflict, as guests so often are, used as witnesses or referees in an endless round of accusations and point scoring. It made us realise that perhaps things weren’t so bad between us but it was awkward and embarrassing.
His body battered by serious heart disease, his ego bruised by continued criticism of his writing, Ian felt that Ann was cold and lacking in affection towards him. Ann in turn thought that Ian had become spoilt and insufferable with the success of his novels. She felt that he was now overly content with the adulation he received and no longer appreciated the challenge of their relationship. Both suffered deeply from the other’s infidelities and took little account of all the sacrifices they had made for one another.
One day we drove out to Port Maria with Ann. Ian stayed behind to write. On our way back we went by a large white bungalow on a headland overlooking the harbour. Ann gestured vaguely at it, deliberately averting her eyes.
‘That is the house of Ian’s Jamaican mistress,’ she declared. ‘You may look, but I cannot.’
Another morning when we found Ian breakfasting alone in the garden, he confided to us: ‘I’m utterly exhausted by Ann’s ceaseless complaints and wounding attacks on me. I’m ill and I’m desperate. I need a little compassion.’
Finding ourselves constantly in the crossfire grew tiresome but that night in our room my wife seemed in a mischievous mood.
‘It’s said that they used to like whipping each other.’
‘Clarissa, really.’
‘Oh, come on. Everybody knows. I heard that when they stayed at Willie Maugham’s at Cap Ferrat they used up all the towels, running them under the tap and taking turns to flog one another with them. You think I’m shocked by such things, don’t you, darling?’
‘Well—’
‘Nobody’s completely normal, I know that, Marius,’ she said pointedly. ‘And I think I know what their problem is now. You see, before, they were acting it out. Playing out all that anger and resentment. Now it’s become real. They should play things out more.’
She turned and gave me a knowing smile.
‘Everybody should play things out more, shouldn’t they, darling?’ she demanded in a tone that offered hope for us yet. ‘Otherwise they end up killing each other.’
As the week wore on Ann tended to confide her feelings to Clarissa just as Ian vented his to me. He liked to drink and smoke late into the night.
‘I tried to kill him off, you know,’ he told me as we drank bourbon together. ‘I’m even writing his bloody obituary this time but it won’t do any good. I even had him in a health farm in one book, just so I could go and relax. But he won’t lie down. He’ll kill me first.’
And I remembered the strange remark he had made that afternoon on Pall Mall. He was talking about his hero, his fictional creation. His other self.
‘I punish him with pain. He punishes me with pleasure,’ he went on. ‘You see, like him I drink too much, smoke too much. Rush around in a constant state of nerves. Wear myself out. Except here. Here I write him and count the cost of the damage he has done me. Maybe it’s just guilt.’
He poured another drink, lit another cigarette.
‘You’re like me, Trevelyan. A staff officer. Sticking pins into maps and sending men into danger. From a desk. A handler: yes, that’s what I thought I was doing, handling another agent. But he’s ended up running me. He’s the revenge for all the men I’ve sent into danger.’
I wanted to ask him about this but he changed the subject. He was keen to talk about current intelligence concerns and Service gossip. The conversation quickly turned to Cuba. It was Jamaica’s nearest neighbour, after all, and it had only been three months since the Missile Crisis had nearly blown us all to kingdom come.
We agreed that American policy towards Castro had been a disaster. All the CIA’s interventions and black ops had only forced Cuba closer to the Soviets.
‘They should have set about deflating Fidel, rather than building him up as a threat to world peace,’ Fleming suggested.
‘I’ve always found that the Americans lack a little finesse in negritude. They’re not very good at lying. Too bloody sincere.’
‘They should have found a way of ridiculing Castro. I said as much to Kennedy.’
He explained rather sheepishly that the president of the United States was something of a fan of his novels and that they had met when he was still a senator.
‘I told him that they should generate black propaganda, purportedly from the Russians, informing them that atomic testing in the region had caused beards to become radioactive and advising them to shave them off, thus undermining the whole revolution. One of their security advisors actually thanked me for my idea with a completely straight face. They don’t seem to realise that you need a sense of humour. And a sense of luck.’
‘Luck?’
‘Good fortune, yes. That’s what it mostly relies on, isn’t it? You have to find a way of using it. Take Cuba. You know what happened when Castro marched into Havana and gave his first televised speech in front of the cheering crowds? Two doves appeared. One perched itself on his shoulder. Now, in Santería, the Cuban version of voodoo or whatever, that meant he had the protection of the gods and was all-powerful. I mean, imagine being able to engineer something like that?’ He smiled. ‘Political power is largely a matter of superstition. Intelligence too. Magic, some of it.’
‘Like Operation Mistletoe?’
He let out a wheezing laugh and stood up, swaying a little.
‘Too late for that now. We’ll talk more tomorrow.’
The following night Fleming gave me his final word on the Hess affair.
‘You remember what Winston said? “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” That’s what worked so well for us. Perfidious Albion, yes, we’ve always been good at that. Our lies were better than theirs. Some of it was Maxwell Knight’s fantasy. M believed in some of that mumbo-jumbo so it appeared convincing.’
‘Stalin was sure that the Service had a part in the Hess flight.’
‘Yes, and we know now how well informed he was about British Intelligence. But I’m not so sure, you know. Crowley had some occult contacts in Germany that we used but nobody was sure if they actually had an effect. What did you find out?’
‘Not much.’
I told him that I’d managed to track down an astrologer and pyschic who had been some kind of voice teacher. Astrid Nagengast had been arrested during Aktion Hess and also had a record of being connected to a Munich section of the Red Orchestra. Along with some occultists she had been interrogated and detained in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two months.
‘What happened to her?’
‘She survived the war and went to live in California.’
‘You could go out there and see her.’
‘Perhaps. But, you know, once you start investigating that part of the world it becomes more and more absurd. Crowley had something of a cult out there for a while, of course, but it’s easy to get carried away with conspiracies and all kinds of nonsense.’
Fleming poured us both another drink.
‘I circulated a paper for Naval Intelligence in 1940 titled Rumour as a Weapon,’ he said. ‘I wrote that we had the ammunition; we just needed the device to direct it. In Political you called it the Black Game or negritude. Later I found my own name for it. For where it all belonged. The House of Rumour.’
‘The House of Rumour?’
‘At the centre of the world where everything can be seen is a tower of sounding bronze that hums and echoes, repeating all it hears, mixing truth with fiction. It’s from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A lovely image, don’t you think?’
‘It is, rather.’
‘And that’s what every intelligence service is, at its heart. It’s been the same since classical times. It was from the House of Rumour that the Trojans learnt that the Greeks were coming. An advance warning system. And we knew that Germany was planning to invade Russia and that’s what would save us. But we had to make sure. So there were all manner of phony peace feelers to help convince the enemy that they might not have to fight a war on two fronts.’
‘Like Operation Mistletoe?’
‘Perhaps. Though we’ll never be sure if it really had any effect. I think it was mostly good fortune. And bad luck on their side. You have to remember that in the end the Trojan War was won by deception and counter-intelligence.’
‘Oh yes, the wooden horse. Particularly nasty piece of negritude.’
‘Another phony peace offering. Well,’ he sighed, ‘we still need the House of Rumour. To make sure our own Trojan War never takes place. I mean, we had a bloody close shave last October.’
And that was the last time I spoke to Fleming about the case. He died the following year of a massive heart attack. Looking back, I think it was from that night on that I began to stop chasing after the affair. The myths and conspiracies continued to circulate but I chose to conclude that it was more likely that the Deputy Führer was deranged and had acted on his own.
The most ludicrous theory that I came across about Hess was that a doppelgänger had flown in his place. An absurd hypothesis with scant evidence or explanation, yet one that presented a compelling image: the double, that great theme of fiction and intelligence. And of two worlds, too — a splitting of possible outcomes. Fleming told me that there were only two crucial moments in any life (and he used this conceit in the title of the novel he was working on): that of birth and death. But by then he was facing the end. Now, it’s nearly all over for me too. I’m left with the final mystery of the Hanged Man. Just why was a ‘suicide note’ planted on him?
In the last two days of our stay the bad feeling between the Flemings became almost unbearable. Ian became tetchy even with me. I had been told that if I went for a morning swim, I was to make a detour around the front of the house because he didn’t like anything passing in front of his view out to sea at that time. It was then that he gazed out at the ocean and thought about what he was going to write that day. Well, I forgot and he bawled me out for it.
Later he was in a more sombre mood. He said that the greatest sadness in life was the failure to make the one you loved happy. He told me of his quantum theory of affection: that if not a single particle of comfort existed between two people, then they might as well both be dead.
And Clarissa was shocked when Ann confessed to her that being with Ian was like living with a wounded animal and at times she simply wanted to put him out of his misery.
‘Of course,’ she added with a cold smile, ‘I still love him, you see.’
So it was with great relief that we left the following morning. There were breezy farewells and promises to meet up back in London. Behind the clenched smiles and alert eyes, one felt the murderous intensity between them. It made one almost fearful to leave them on their own together.
We had gone only two or three miles when Clarissa realised that she had left a bracelet behind.
‘Can’t we get them to send it on?’ I reasoned.
‘For goodness’ sake, Marius, it belonged to the duchess.’ She meant her grandmother. ‘It’s a priceless heirloom.’
I turned the car around and drove back to the entrance to their driveway.
‘Please,’ pleaded Clarissa, ‘will you go? I don’t think I can bear going back there. It’s on the table in the garden.’
As I approached the house my first thought was to walk around the side but that would mean passing Ian’s window and interfering with his precious morning view. So I went up to the front door and knocked. It was off the latch so I let myself in. There was no sign of Violet the housekeeper. As I passed through the living room I heard a fearful row. The sound of violence, of blows, of cries of pain and harsh oaths. It was coming from the Flemings’ bedroom.
The door was ajar. I readied myself for the ghastly task of coming between them, of breaking up some pitiful domestic fight. But as I gently pushed at the door I saw the two of them standing nake
d, Ann armed with a riding crop, Ian with a thin bamboo cane, gleefully taking turns at one another. They were utterly oblivious to my presence in the doorway. The air sang with the swoosh of their thrashing, with loud yelps, exquisite insults and obscenities.
I turned on my heel and swiftly made for the garden to retrieve Clarissa’s bauble. Then around and back out to the driveway. I felt a spring in my step as I made my way back to the car. My mind still vivid with the image of them, the look of sheer joy beaming from their faces. The pure, bright energy of it. I remembered what Clarissa had said those few nights before and I found myself laughing out loud. Who knows what true happiness is? It’s the greatest mystery of all.
13
the devil
Haven’t you noticed how aliens always seem to look like pre-pubescent girls? Their heads too big for their skinny little bodies. You see them naked with no hair, no external genitalia. These are the ones called the Greys. I was ten years old when I became one. For them. They took off all my clothes and put a nylon stocking over my head, covering my hair, making my head bulge a little. My ears were flattened, my nose became two nostrils, my mouth a slit. Then they put dark goggles over my eyes and dusted me all over with talcum powder. Becoming a Grey was just one of the many rituals I performed for the cult that ran Operation Paperclip.
This was just after the war in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County. Mother drove me out to a big house there one evening. She had spent years pimping me out as a child actress. I figured that this was just another job.
Larry always thought I was making this stuff up. He never called me a liar to my face. He couldn’t. Lying and stealing, that was his job. He stole all my life experiences for his stories and novels. Fantasy, that was his racket. He admitted it. He told me once that he had developed this problem with reality. And he said himself that science fiction was a ridiculous conjunction, a contradiction in terms. I mean, how can fiction be scientific or vice versa? No, I know the truth. He took it from me. And he used it to give his stuff credibility.