‘I want to talk to the police now. I have something urgent to tell them.’ But as he spoke, the orderly pushed him back against the bed.
‘Your case will be investigated,’ the tall man repeated, and they both went out and the door slammed shut again.
The commissionaire stepped in front of him and said, ‘Can I help you?’ Cayle noted that the ‘sir’ was offensively lacking.
‘I want to see Mr Simon Harm — Chancery.’
‘Got an appointment?’
‘No. Just tell him it’s Cayle — C for Charlie, A for apple…’
‘Wait here.’ The commissionaire went back into his cubicle and lifted a telephone. At the same moment a grey-haired man appeared from a side-door and paused, looking at Cayle.
‘Are you waiting for someone?’
‘I’ve got a lunch-date with the Ambassador’s wife,’ said Cayle.
The man was still thinking of the right thing to say when the commissionaire returned.
‘Mr Hann is engaged at present,’ he said, with pedantic satisfaction. ‘But if you’ll fill in this form, I’ll find out if someone else can see you.’
‘It’s got to be Hann or nobody,’ said Cayle. ‘Tell him it’s a matter of international importance.’
‘Excuse me.’ The grey-haired man had moved closer, ‘Are you a British subject, sir?’
Cayle turned his bruised, unshaven face towards him and leered, ‘No, and I’ve forgotten my black tie too. Now will you stop pretending this is White’s, and get me Mr Hann and smartish!’
The man turned stiffly to the commissionaire. ‘Give the gentleman the form, Albert. Will you wait here, please,’ he added to Cayle, and strutted back through the side-door.
Cayle took the sheet of paper with the Embassy heading, and against the question, NATURE OF BUSINESS, wrote ‘confidential’, then handed it back to the commissionaire, who grudgingly returned with it to his cubicle. Cayle sat down on a mock Empire sofa and waited.
Hann came down ten minutes later. He looked sleek and calm. ‘Hello, Mr Cayle. I heard you’d gone to Leningrad with the rest of your people.’
‘I had. That’s what I want to talk to you about.’
Hann glanced at his watch. ‘I can only spare you a few minutes. I’ve an appointment at eleven.’ He turned and led Cayle briskly towards the lift.
His office was a small impersonal room on the second floor. Cayle hung up his new muskrat coat, which he’d bought on his way here from GUM, along with a new pair of boots and gloves, and sat down under Annigoni’s portrait of the Queen, while Hann walked round behind a leather-topped desk.
‘You look terrible, Cayle. Have you been drinking?’
‘No. But I could do with one.’
Hann ignored him. ‘You said it was important. What’s happened?’
‘I got beaten up and spent most of the night in a sobering-up station. They gave me several injections against frost-bite and fined me fifty roubles.’
‘And I suppose you got robbed too? Well, if they’ve taken your passport, you’ll have to go to your own Embassy. We can’t help — even if you are a British resident.’
‘Thanks,’ said Cayle, ‘but as it happens, they didn’t take my passport, or anything else. Just me. I was grabbed off the Red Arrow Express to Leningrad last night. They knocked me cold in the toilet, and I woke up in some building back here in Moscow. I managed to get away, but without my coat or boots, and damned near froze to death before the cops found me.’
Hann had picked up a feather-stemmed ballpoint and began stroking it against his cheek. ‘Have you reported this to the police?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I wanted to, but then after they let me out of the medical station, I reasoned I’d had enough trouble without trying to explain everything to the Moscow cops. For a start, they probably wouldn’t believe me. Even if they did believe me, it would be months before they let me go.’
‘They’d be able to check easily enough if the train had been stopped and any of the passengers were missing,’ said Hann. ‘Or is there something more to all this?’
Cayle paused. ‘Have you got that drink?’
‘It’ll have to be a quick one.’ He opened a drawer in the desk and took out a glass and a bottle of Dimple Haig. He didn’t look like a secret drinker, thought Cayle, but then they never did.
‘Do you mind having it straight?’ said Hann.
‘Fine.’ Cayle got up and swallowed half of it standing. He returned to his chair and said: ‘Ever heard of a chap called Mayhew? MI5 liaison man with the Home Office.’
Hann placed the feather-pen back in its holder. ‘What about him?’
‘He called on me just before I left London. Wanted to ask some questions about Sir Roger Jameson-Clarke. There was a Special Branch man with him called Dempster — Sergeant Dempster.’
Hann sat watching him with his cold oily stare. ‘And what has all this got to do with last night?’
‘Just that Sergeant Dempster was one of the boys who grabbed me off the Red Arrow Express. Afterwards he got me talking for about an hour, and I told him everything. Then, when he’d left me, I just walked out too. I guess it was what I was supposed to do — walk into the snow and do a Captain Oates.’
‘What exactly did you tell him?’
‘As I said, everything. All about Comrade Kim, and my meeting with him, and my meetings with Maddox, and my conversation with you.’ He drank some whisky. ‘All right, I wasn’t trying for any medal. Dempster had slugged me pretty efficiently, and I didn’t get the impression he was fooling around.’
‘Just a moment,’ Hann said. He lifted the phone and asked someone to cancel his eleven o’clock appointment. ‘Now let’s try and get some of this straight. You were travelling last night on the Red Arrow Express to Leningrad when someone stopped the train and attacked you in the lavatory?’
‘I told you — it was Dempster. There were two of them, and they attacked me as I opened the door, without making sure I was the right person.’
‘Are you trying to say they were after someone else?’
‘That’s right. Dempster must have checked my empty bunk when he came aboard, after somehow finding out who’d made the booking. And it wasn’t me.’
‘Who?’
‘Kim Philby.’
For a moment Hann’s guard dropped: there was a tight crease at the corner of his mouth and his eyes seemed to have gone dead; they were not looking at Cayle or at anything else. And suddenly Cayle knew. It was with a flash of understanding in which everything became clear: even the wildest events of the last few days now seemed so obvious and simple: the whole elaborate squalid racket from the beginning, more than twelve years ago, right up to the final unplayed act.
Hann recovered quickly. He opened the drawer and brought out the whisky bottle again, with a second glass. ‘You’d better have another yourself,’ he said. ‘This may take some time.’
All Cayle’s good sense now warned him to get clear before it was too late; but his professional instincts were more powerful. Millions of printed words had been spent on the Philby story — books, articles, theories, explanations, assertions, assumptions, deductions — while all the time the truth had been lying just below the surface, known only to a tiny cabal of conspirators, traitors and spy-catchers.
It was a messy, vicious truth. But Barry Cayle had grown up with a simple faith in truth as an unqualified virtue. He might cheat on his expenses, but he would not cheat on a story; and while others in his predicament might have sought escape in expediency and humbug, Cayle stood by the duties of his trade; for in his rougher, humbler calling he was like an archaeologist who stumbles on the vital clue that invalidates a whole tradition of knowledge and accepted fact.
He was also, with a certain clumsy innocence, a brave man; for he knew now that he was walking a very narrow line. With Hann, the perils might not be as immediate as they had been with Dempster. The difference was that with Dempster, Cayle
had still been ignorant, and could thus afford to be honest. Once in possession of the truth, he also became part of the conspiracy; from now on he would have to live the lie like the rest of them — by bluff, guile and subterfuge. And for the first time he began to experience perhaps something of what Kim Philby had had to live with for more than thirty years.
This first ordeal, with Hann, continued for just over two hours, with an interruption for sandwiches and coffee. Hann’s approach was less direct than Dempster’s, but none the less dangerous for that. He was quick, treacherous and sly. His one lapse, when the mask had slipped for those few vital seconds, was not repeated. For the rest of the session, he remained in perfect control.
Like Dempster, he wanted to know everything that Cayle knew; and Cayle not only had to supply him with the satisfactory answers, but to imply by those answers that he believed Hann to be something that he was not. Cayle decided from the start that his best role would be his most natural one: tough, rough, honest and gullible.
When he had finished, Hann smiled suavely and said, ‘The only thing that puzzles me, Cayle, is why you chose to come to me?’
‘Because you tried to warn me off,’ said Cayle. ‘It’s always a mistake with newspapers, and newspapermen. Your boys tried the same thing with us when we first broke the Philby story. You leaned too hard. Newspapers are funny that way — they tend to get bloody-minded if they think the authorities are holding out on them.’
‘You’re going to have a job writing this story,’ said Hann. ‘As far as this fellow Dempster’s concerned, you’ve no proof, no witnesses, nothing to back you up except a file in a Moscow sobering-up station and a receipt for a fifty-rouble fine. Hardly effective evidence.’
‘You believe it,’ said Cayle.
Hann took a cigarette out of a black leather case and sat examining the end without lighting it. ‘I’m not saying whether I believe it or not. My job is to collect information — not to evaluate it.’
Cayle finished his drink and stood up. ‘Oh I know, Hann, you’re in the clear — you’re just the errand-boy. You don’t have to worry about your own skin — just the reputations of a mouldering old gang of starch-shirted mandarins who fell for the great Marxist day-dream of the Thirties and didn’t have the guts to come clean while the damage was being done. Because remember, those bastards aren’t just accomplices to treason, before and after the fact. They’ve also got blood on their hands. Philby had a lot of men killed, one way and another, and the old boys you’re supposed to be protecting allowed him to get away with it.’
‘I think I’ve heard enough,’ Hann said quietly; he sat with his cigarette burning away between his fingers, the ash beginning to curl like a grey claw. ‘I shall be making a full report on what you’ve told me, and will pass it on to the appropriate authorities. Meanwhile, I suggest you contact your own Embassy and make arrangements to return home before you get yourself into any more trouble.’ He stood up and came round the desk. ‘By the way, your friend Leonard Maddox was killed last night.’
‘Killed?’
‘He was run over by a truck behind the Bolshoi.’
‘Hit and run?’
‘As a matter of fact it was,’ said Hann. ‘How did you know?’
‘I heard some people talking about it in the hotel.’
‘Yes, nasty business. He lived with an Englishwoman here, and we’re having some difficulty tracing her. But again, not much of a story.’
‘I’m not thinking of writing anything yet. The big story hasn’t begun.’
‘Good afternoon, Mr Cayle.’ Hann waited until the door closed, then reached for his glass and found it was empty. He poured himself another, looked at the telephone, hesitated, then downed his whisky in a gulp.
Downstairs the commissionaire checked Cayle’s departure at 1.12 p.m. in the Embassy log.
CHAPTER 16
At 1.25 the taxi dropped Cayle outside the Hotel Rossija, on the south side of Red Square. He had chosen this hotel because it was the largest and most anonymous of all the hotels in Moscow: four gargantuan slabs of plate-glass and concrete forming an unlovely rectangle the size of the Kremlin, with accommodation for 15,000 guests. It was an excellent place in which to get lost and stay lost.
He went through the obligatory routine of handing in his coat to the cloakroom attendant, then joining one of the many queues for the travel desk. Half an hour later he faced a girl who looked like an out-of-work ballerina: sharp cheek-bones, long neck, too much eye-shadow. He handed her his passport and asked her to make him a reservation on the next flight to Leningrad. She opened his passport at the three-day visa, made a quick note on a pad beside her, and said: ‘If you would wait over there, sir, please.’ She nodded at a row of leather chairs, all of them occupied. ‘You will be informed in fifteen minutes if there is a reservation.’
Cayle thanked her, without getting a response, and sauntered away in search of the sauna and barber-shop. Both were full, with long queues outside; and in the downstairs restaurant every table was taken. The three bars were crowded to the doors. He wandered finally into the Beriozka, where rows of American and Scandinavian tourists were poring over trays of amber, painted wooden dolls, mink and musquash, and machine-made peasant blouses. The only caviar was the red brand which came in tubes, like shaving cream.
Twenty minutes later he was back at the travel desk, going straight to the head of the queue. The girl looked up at him, gave a sideways nod and two men stepped forward. They stood very close to him, one on either side, without actually touching him.
‘Mr Kay-eel? You will come.’ He was a couple of inches shorter than Cayle, with a round pale face pitted and spongy like fresh bread, and black hair combed flat across his scalp. His companion was taller, broader, with a slack mouth and colourless eyes. Both wore suits of grey artificial fibre that were too tight at the shoulders and too loose round the legs.
The small one nodded in the direction of the main entrance, and the three of them began to move in a close trio across the crowded floor. Near the doors Cayle said, ‘I’ve got a coat — a new one.’
Both men ignored him. A group of tourists came in, laughing and unslinging cameras. None of them glanced at Cayle or his escort. He began to feel rather lonely and unimportant.
Outside there was an icy mist and the crust of the snow was turning soggy. A grey truck was double-parked next to the taxi-rank. A man in a fur-lined military cap and bulky blue overcoat sat at the wheel. A second uniformed man sat in the back, with a short-muzzled machine-pistol slung across his waist. Cayle sat in front, between the driver and the smaller of the two plainclothes men. The other got in the back, and without a word they started off.
There were no sirens, no militiamen halting the traffic. They passed the long queue outside the Lenin Mausoleum and stopped for the lights at the corner of the GUM store. Cayle didn’t bother to ask where they were going. They crossed into Svedlova Square, between the Bolshoi and the Metropol, and started up Karl Marx Prospekt, keeping with the traffic in the outside lane. The mist seemed to be getting heavier; most of the traffic was now driving on side-lights, and round the edge of Dzerzhinski Square there were lights in many of the windows. They turned left into Dzerzhinski Street, then hard right, under a concrete arch, and pulled up in front of a red and white pole.
Two sentries with automatic rifles stepped forward and peered in on either side, their breath thickening the mist. The driver flashed his headlamps twice, and the red and white pole swung up. The truck moved forward, into a tall grey courtyard where the snow had been stamped down into boot-patterns of dirty ice. The driver kept in bottom gear, round the edge of the yard until they reached a low doorway. The small plain-clothes man next to Cayle opened the truck door and stepped down. Cayle followed, gasping with the cold.
Inside the building a flight of concrete stairs ended at a padded door. The small man pushed it open and there was a rush of warm air. The corridor beyond was painted the colour of milk chocolate. The only sound was a
low humming like the inside of a great ship. The plain-clothes man stopped at an unmarked door and opened it without knocking, then motioned Cayle inside.
It was a narrow office with a steel filing-cabinet, a desk, a bench, and a tube of fluorescent lighting that fizzed and flickered from the ceiling. A woman with straight grey hair and rimless glasses sat at the desk under a faded brown photograph of Lenin and peered at Cayle over the top of an antique typewriter. The plain-clothes man nodded Cayle towards the bench, then closed the door and stood with his back to it. He spoke rapidly to the woman, who inserted a double sheet of pink duplicating paper into the typewriter; then said to Cayle: ‘To empty your pockets, please!’
Cayle was beginning to feel like a schoolboy caught out in a misdemeanour. The plain-clothes man took each item and described it in Russian, and the woman punched out the words with two fingers on the typewriter, while the man arranged the miscellaneous belongings on the desk beside her: keys to Thackeray Mansions and the Moke, wallet, passport, traveller’s cheques, dollars and roubles in cash, Press cards and letters of introduction, and Lennie Maddox’s business card. Also a sheaf of used air-tickets from London to Moscow via Kabul, with a wad of receipts to correspond — all to keep the accounts people happy back in London, and as good as a written confession of his devious itinerary back into the Soviet Union. Finally, there was his ticket and reservation on the Red Arrow Express to Leningrad, dated the night before.
The whole procedure took forty minutes and filled two double pages of pink paper. The plain-clothes man laid them out on the desk, produced a pen and jabbed it at Cayle. ‘Please, to sign!’ Cayle signed; and the plain-clothes man gathered the pages up and stuffed them into his inside pocket. ‘Please, to follow.’ Cayle followed, down more milk chocolate corridor, and stopped at another unmarked door. The plain-clothes man opened it and stood aside: ‘Please, to wait.’
Cayle glanced inside and said, ‘How long do I wait?’ It was the first question he’d asked since leaving the Hotel Rossija.
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