Gentleman Traitor

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Gentleman Traitor Page 13

by Alan Williams


  Pol chuckled: ‘My dear friend, there are never indiscreet questions, only indiscreet answers.’

  ‘Fine. Now let’s get things straight. We’re in this together — both involved with Monsieur Kim — only for different motives. Mine is to get a newspaper story. What’s yours?’

  ‘Ah!’ Pol gaped at him with mock outrage. ‘Now that is an indiscreet question. However, I think I can trust you enough to answer it. When you ask me what is my motive in this affair, I can only reply that it is the oldest in the world. Also the most vulgar. Money.’

  ‘So Maddox was wrong when he said you were an idealist?’

  ‘Maddox was a misérable. He saw nothing beyond his nose. But you must understand, mon cher, that whatever the moralists say, ultimately everything of value in this life — including ideals — must be related to hard currency.’

  ‘And who’s providing it this time? Surely somebody very interested in Monsieur Kim’s fate? And I don’t suppose he’s got the kind of money you’d be interested in — even if you considered roubles to be hard currency.’

  ‘What are you inferring, Monsieur Cayle?’

  ‘If they were pushed, the British Secret Service might have the right money. They’ve certainly still got an interest in Monsieur Kim.’

  Pol made a little growling noise and spat delicately between his feet. ‘I’m afraid that again you are asking indiscreet questions, Monsieur Cayle. The matter of my personal finances is no concern of yours. Now, I am tired.’ He sighed and nodded at their compartment door. ‘The little one will now have finished her toilette, I think?’

  ‘Who is she?’ said Cayle.

  ‘Ah! A little idea of Monsieur Kim’s,’ he cooed, ‘to keep you company in Leningrad!’ And he turned and pulled open the compartment door.

  Galina Valisova now lay tucked into her bunk, her wide dark eyes peeping out above the sheet, while Passmore’s voice droned down from the bunk above: ‘You people are going to encounter the same sociological problems, however good your organization is. You see, it’s organization that is the real root problem.’

  ‘Rwoot?’ she called up; then looked round smiling as Pol and Cayle came in and sat down opposite her on Pol’s bunk. ‘Mr Passmore has been informing me,’ she said, ‘of many interesting facts about the American society. It is very complicated.’

  Cayle groped out in the dark for the bottle of Osoboya on the table under the window. ‘Has he told you about the new CIA computer?’ he asked: ‘The one that can translate Gone with the Wind into Russian in twenty minutes?’

  ‘Aw for God’s sake,’ Passmore cried feebly, ‘don’t go bring the CIA into this!’

  Cayle watched Galina Valisova’s naked shoulders creep an inch above the sheet. He pulled the cotton plug out of the bottle, took a swallow, and passed it to Pol. ‘Mr Passmore doesn’t like me talking about the CIA, Galina. It’s a very sensitive subject for Americans. It’s the equivalent of the KGB,’ he added, as Pol again belched noisily beside him.

  ‘Lay off,’ said Passmore. ‘It isn’t the same thing at all. The KGB is for internal security — like the American NSA, the National Security Agency.’

  In the darkness Pol made a slow retching noise, while the American went on, like a late-night radio announcer: ‘But the CIA is a highly motivated government-within-a-government. Its budget is more than many small countries’ put together. It’s a force for evil,’ he said, as Pol vomited between his knees.

  ‘Ah merde!’ he growled, and Cayle felt the bunk lurch upwards as the Frenchman’s weight lifted and he lunged for the door.

  Cayle saw Galina’s head duck back under the sheet, and he was just in time to drag the door open and push Pol out into the corridor before he was sick again.

  ‘Whisky et le champagne,’ he groaned.

  ‘Followed by vodka,’ Cayle said brutally: ‘Poison.’ He grabbed the Frenchman under the armpits and they began to stumble forward, Pol bouncing off the compartment doors with his head down, hands clasped across his mouth.

  The door of the toilet opened into a small room with a kidney-shaped sofa in wine-red velvet and a long gilded mirror under a tasselled lamp. The lavatory was through a second door. Both rooms were unoccupied, and Cayle managed to haul Pol through the two doors and push his head down into the toilet. The Frenchman’s big shiny face had turned the colour of a mushroom, and his spiral of black hair was spread across his egg-shaped head like a damp spider.

  Cayle went back and locked the outer door. Pol was now on his knees, grasping the lavatory bowl with both hands. ‘Who’s Passmore?’ Cayle shouted, above the roar of the wheels.

  ‘Passmore?’ Pol muttered, and his body heaved forward. ‘I don’t know him. He’s just an American — an ordinary American.’ Cayle tore out a paper towel from beside the basin, ran some cold water, and began to sponge the back of Pol’s neck. The Frenchman slowly struggled to his feet, and Cayle guided him to the basin. There were faint blotches of colour on his cheeks, but his eyes were tiny and dilated like dull beads. ‘My stomach,’ he moaned. ‘Ah, my stomach — it is ruined.’

  A voice bellowed something in Russian through the outside door, and the handle rattled violently. Cayle yelled, ‘Okay — harasho! Are you feeling better now?’ he said to Pol.

  The Frenchman turned and spat into the basin. There now came a heavy pounding on the outer door, followed by a kick. Cayle began to get angry. Pol was being sick again, this time into the basin, and Cayle left him and went through to the outer door. He snapped the lock up, pulled the door open, and had said the first syllable of the only Russian obscenity he knew when he was hit. It was a quick hard blow on the side of his neck, and as he stumbled, a gloved fist smashed into his jaw. He felt his head crack against the door-jamb, and caught a glimpse of two men, thick-set, in dark overcoats and black fur caps. He tried to back away and get the door shut again, but lost consciousness first.

  It returned in dull, disjointed waves. The floor was grinding and clanking, then falling away under him: the blue night-lights along the corridor roof came on bright again: he had the sensation of being lifted, dragged, his feet thumping down metal steps: a blast of freezing air and somewhere a voice saying, ‘Fuck, it’s that bastard, Cayle!’

  His legs were knee-deep in snow. He saw the train lit up in a long caterpillar of light. A bell was ringing. His arms were held stiff at his sides, and he was being dragged backwards, and the snow felt light and spongy under his feet. A whistle blew, and a voice called, ‘For Christ’s sake, hurry!’

  He felt dry leather and a sudden warmth. His trouser legs began dripping melted snow. He was in the back of a car. The engine was running and there was the blast of a fan-heater. Two men got in, one in front and one beside him, and the car sprang forward. A white glare swept across a high bank of snow and the straight black stems of pine-trees. The driver called over his shoulder, ‘Keep a good eye on him. Hit him again if he moves.’ Cayle didn’t move, except to be slung from side to side, bumping up and down as the headlamps flashed across the white-laced trees, plunging down into hollows of darkness. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of the man beside him: his face a dark blur under the fur hat, which had the earflaps hanging loose, swaying with the motion of the car.

  From the front seat came a small red glow, as the driver touched the dashboard lighter to a cigarette. He drew on it and the glow lit up his hard lumpy complexion. Like cold porridge, thought Cayle. Then he blacked out again.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was still too early for the tourist season, and the resort of Gagra, with its elegant palm-fringed front curving along the margin of the Black Sea, was quiet and empty in the southern spring. Most of the hotels were closed, the ice-cream emporiums shuttered, the chess-sets locked away in the beach-huts, the skiffs and pedalos pulled up on the pebbled shore.

  The day had been unusually warm, even for Georgia, and when Joyce Warburton had stepped off the train from Sochi that afternoon she had not even needed her coat. The orange trees along the main boulevar
d were not yet in blossom, and the snowline had been clear and very close, suspended high above the houses like a reef of shining cloud.

  As usual, the arrangements had been immaculate: there had been a car to meet her and drive her to the Grand Hotel Gagra, where she had been shown into a suite overlooking the sea. She had had little unpacking to do — an evening dress, pair of shoes and change of underwear, and her few toilet things which had looked rather pathetic spread out on the huge naked dressing-table. The tired trappings of the dirty weekend — in Leningrad, Kiev, Yalta, Sochi, and now Gagra. Only this time she had been promised that it would be different. From now on, no more excuses, no more brave smiles when she greeted Lennie Maddox back at the flat on Sunday evening, having to endure his simpering smile, his sudden tantrums and table-thumping rages. He was a vulgar bully; it had shown in his love-making, aggressive and artless, and in his treatment of waiters, clerks, cloakroom attendants — people he’d been able to lord it over in the West, but who shrugged him off in the Soviet Union, regarding him as just another ugly little foreigner.

  That’s just what he was, she thought: ugly and little. A nobody — so that now it was as though he’d never existed. Occasionally, over the last twenty-four hours since she’d been offered her freedom, she had been surprised, even a little dismayed at her complete lack of feeling for him. She told herself that she’d stuck him for so long because she’d thought he might be useful to her — at least, while he stayed with the Frenchman, for it had always seemed there might be some rich crumbs from that table. And besides, he had looked after her, provided for her, taken her out and shown her off — the best tables in the top Moscow restaurants, seats at the Bolshoi, the ritual round of cocktail parties and receptions where she’d been able to flirt skittishly with glass-eyed diplomats and bored businessmen.

  At first, the few shreds of English suburban tact that had clung to her as far as Moscow had prevented her from being unfaithful to Lennie Maddox; but soon there had been that glamorous photographer who was part Lebanese and had broken with his wife; but that hadn’t stopped him from returning to Rome after only six weeks, and since then there had only been one postcard.

  Then the Englishman had come along.

  She’d met him at a rather louche dinner-party given by a Russian whom Lennie had described as being ‘something pretty big with the KGB’, and who in turn seemed to believe that Lennie was equally big with Entreprises Lipp. It had been a typically ghastly evening, she remembered, with the Russians insisting on setting fire to their vodkas before drinking them, with the result that many of them had badly burnt their mouths; and the KGB man who had gone outside to get some air, disappearing down an open manhole and breaking his hip.

  During all this, she had found herself seated between an elderly Englishman and a Russian who spoke no English, and who had been counted out in the early stages of the meal when his head had slumped into his soup, and had been pulled out just in time to save him from drowning. For the rest of dinner she had the Englishman to herself. She had been a trifle disconcerted when he introduced himself as ‘Kim’ Philby: though not so much by his reputation, as by his obvious gentleness. She could not believe that he could really be a villain — or, for that matter, a Hero of the Soviet Union. While she was flattered and excited by the attentions of such a man, what really attracted her was something sad, almost defenceless, about him, with his poor tired face and that terrible stammer. He’d been through so much. A lone wolf come home to die, was how he’d described himself. And that’s what she’d come to call him: ‘Lone Grey Wolf’. And in turn he had called her his ‘Golden Mouse’, on account of her pale russet hair, which owed more to a hairdresser in Copenhagen than to nature; and whenever he called her by his pet-name it made her feel just like a schoolgirl again.

  In fact, she had been smitten like a schoolgirl from that very first meeting. (Only later had she heard the rumours that his long liaison with Melinda Maclean had just ended.) The next day he had telephoned her at the flat, while Lennie was at the office, and there began a number of discreet meetings, in cafés, obscure restaurants, museums and theatres and walks through the city parks. Then, after a decent interval of three weeks, he had seduced her, rather uncomfortably, on the back seat of an old Moskvitch car during an excursion into the Lenin Hills.

  Through the whole idyllic winter that followed she had indulged her secret passion, with each of them playing a protracted game of lovers in a hostile land — she outwitting the sly suspicions of Lennie Maddox, and he ducking the largely imagined attentions of the Western Press. She often felt that Kim enjoyed the intrigue for its own sake; and in the past few months he had even taken to sending her messages and telegrams in childish code, which she’d had to destroy at once, for fear of Lennie spotting them; or of telephoning late at night, often the worse for drink, and murmuring muddled endearments down the line, knowing that he must have been imperilling their relationship. And when, at their next clandestine meeting, she protested, he would either fob off the incident as a joke, or become profusely contrite, then march her into the Intourist Beriozka and carry away some extravagant gift — twelve dozen red roses, five hundred grams of Beluga, a pair of mink earmuffs — all charged to his personal account, which was one of the many privileges he enjoyed over his adopted countrymen. And afterwards, lying in bed in his book-lined flat — the address of which he’d made her swear to reveal to no one — they would listen to Beethoven’s violin sonatas and play with his two Burmese kittens, Donald and Guy, who were fed a dash of Scotch every morning in their saucer of milk.

  Then, over the past month, the shadow had begun to fall. Kim’s moods of depression, which were frequent but usually short-lived, now sometimes persisted for days on end; and his drinking, which had always been heavy but never offensive, started to get out of control. On several occasions he had been drunk when they met and had passed out before the end of the evening. Sometimes he had been too drunk even to leave his flat, let alone make love; and at times she had noticed a flash of suppressed rage which she found all the more worrying because there seemed no reason for it.

  One evening a week ago she had been trying to coax him into the bedroom when he had suddenly lashed out with his fist, hitting the solid wooden door and spraining two fingers. But she had stubbornly consoled herself with the knowledge that her lover was an exceptional man, with exceptional problems. Even in their easiest moments together, Kim never discussed his professional life, and she had been wise enough not to ask. She just hoped, desperately, that it was his employers that were causing him distress, not her: for the thought of losing him made her feel sick.

  After the accident with his hand, four days had passed without a word from him; then the day before yesterday the telegram arrived: WOLF ALONE PINING FOR MOUSE STOP HAVE APPLIED TOURNIQUET TO SNAKEBITE STOP EREVAN.

  The signature was of the Erevan Restaurant in Moscow, which they used as a convenient rendezvous between her flat and his office in Dzerzhinski Square. When they’d met there that evening at 5.30, Kim had seemed a changed man: a little pale, perhaps, but his eyes had been clear, his hands steady, his mood at once serious and affectionate. He’d started by promising her that he was giving up ‘snakebite’ for good, and made the point by drinking only tea; then, between little hugs and pecks, he’d put his plan to her for the weekend down in Gagra.

  For such an enterprise it was surprisingly short notice. For Kim usually planned these weekends, with characteristic precision, at least ten days in advance, giving her time to deceive Lennie with the pretext that she was making one of her regular visits to her brother in Copenhagen. Besides, there was now an added risk. For over the last couple of weeks she had begun to sense that Lennie’s suspicions of her had been somehow confirmed. It was nothing she could put her finger on: just the odd snide remark, the surreptitious way he’d ask where she’d been, where she was going — but enough to make her extra wary.

  At this last meeting in the Erevan, however, Kim had dismissed her
fears with a pat on the arm and the assurance that she had no more cause to worry about Lennie. Then later, over dinner, he had made an oblique suggestion that she should pack up everything and move in with him; and there was even a hint, offered half-jokingly, that she might seek a divorce from that distant husband of hers, whom she’d last heard of running a hotel in Torquay.

  When they’d parted, she had almost broken down and wept with joy. But his manner had remained quiet and business-like, as he produced her air ticket to Sochi and her first-class train reservation on to Gagra. His instructions had been clear, and he’d repeated them twice: she was to check into the Grand Hotel and wait for him down in the lobby, not in their suite. He had promised to join her before evening.

  She had waited till after eight o’clock.

  The chandeliers were turned on, reflected a hundred times in galleries of ormolu mirrors. A bald man in striped pyjamas appeared, shouted at an invisible waiter, then went out again. From the esplanade came the last wailings of private enterprise: crones in white shawls like headstones, hawking fruit and fish and ballpoint pens.

  At 8.15 a party of men in brown suits and dark glasses filed through to the dining-room. Natives, as well as visitors to Gagra, were too used to Western tourists to give more than a glance at the woman sitting alone on the satin couch in the corner.

  By the norm of most Soviet women, Mrs Joyce Warburton still looked young. She had a good skin, under rather too much make-up, large features and eyes the colour of weak tea. Her clothes were unostentatious, with the hemline slightly longer than the Western fashion so as to conceal her somewhat stout legs. At a cocktail party in the English Home Counties she might have been thought a trifle common; but alone in the forlorn elegance of a one-time Imperial palace on the Black Sea she had a certain chic.

  Philby spotted her at once, and crossed over with a happy smile: ‘My little pet.’

 

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