by Jeremy Duns
‘I am a plain-clothes officer of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa,’ I said. ‘We are currently engaged in an important investigation into a man who has just left this building.’
I spoke with a pronounced Milanese accent, because it is much harder to convince someone you come from the same part of the country as they. She asked me for my papers, and I patiently explained that it was not customary for plain-clothes officers to carry identification, for obvious reasons, but if she chose to call Marco Zimotti, the chief of the SID, at headquarters, he would be able to vouch for me. I gave her an invented number and smiled sweetly, praying she wouldn’t call the bluff.
She looked me over for a few moments more, and then reached into the folds of her capacious dress and took out some keys. ‘That will not be necessary,’ she said, unlocking the door and letting me into the cool, dark vestibule. ‘How can I help you, signore?’
I described Pyotr and she nodded. The Swiss gentleman, Pierre Valougny. I told her that was an alias and that he was, in fact, a Communist agent, and after her eyes had widened and she had howled a bit, she spat over her shoulder and said she had known there was something wrong with him all along. I nodded soberly and asked her to show me his rooms, and she took me up a very creaky lift and along a dank corridor.
There was a large, well-furnished living room, with a window looking out onto the street and a telephone – he must have lived here a while to have arranged the connection, especially in this neighbourhood.
‘Three years,’ said the landlady. ‘Always paid the rent on time, and kept to himself. But I never liked him. I should have known. Please don’t tell anyone of our misfortune here. Was he planning a coup?’
I told her that was state business and asked her to leave. Once she’d gone, I got to work: I wouldn’t have too long before he realized I wasn’t coming to the meet and started heading back.
I began by just walking around the place, trying to get a feel for who I was dealing with. He’d done well, either through Moscow’s funding or his own business acumen, or a combination of the two. There were some hideous modern art paintings on the wall, but they were originals, and a few of the names were familiar. A desk by the window was home to an Olivetti typewriter and stacks of books – these were mostly hardbacks and, again, the subject was modern art. What was his cover, I wondered. Art dealer? That would bring him into contact with Arte come Terrore.
After rummaging around for a couple of minutes, I spotted a ladder next to one of the bookcases. Looking at the ceiling, I saw there was an attic. I pulled out the ladder and climbed up, pushing open the door.
I tugged a piece of string, and a naked bulb lit a small room containing a wing-backed leather chair and a rusty-looking filing cabinet. There was a mousetrap by the wall, loaded with a small triangle of cheese.
The filing cabinet was unlocked. The top drawer was filled with magazines, and I picked out a few. The first that came to hand was called La Classe and was dated today: the headline read ‘LOTTA DI CLASSE PER LA RIVOLUZIONE’: ‘Class struggle for the revolution’. The rest of the pile contained other underground magazines, with names like Carte Segrete. Interesting. And slightly odd. Pyotr didn’t strike me as a flower child, in or out of cover, so what the hell was he doing with these in his flat? I opened the next drawer down. More papers, but these were mostly invitations to showings at local art galleries: La Salita, Dell’Ariete. But there were also magazines here, and one of them, I saw, was called Transizione. Even more interesting – but not really enough to hang anyone for.
I turned to the bottom drawer and jerked it open. The radio transmitter stared up at me.
Bingo.
It was a simple short-wave set with a high-speed transmission converter, the kind you could buy from most electronics outfitters. He was presumably using it to communicate with the Station in the embassy here – they, in turn, would send out messages based on his information via telegraph or diplomatic bag to Moscow. Hidden behind the set was a Praktina camera and several neatly bundled wads of money: lire and dollars. I considered pocketing the lot – it would certainly be satisfying – but decided I would need all the evidence I could get.
As head of Soviet Section, I’d read the reports from Five on the Lonsdale Ring, which they had rounded up in ’61. This wasn’t quite as damning as the material they had found in the Krogers’ flat in Ruislip – everything from cellophane sheets tucked away in a Bible to a microdot reader in a tin of talcum powder – but it was close. A radio transmitter, a camera and significant sums of money all spelled out ‘foreign agent’ in capital letters. He’d been caught red-handed – or he soon would be…
I stopped. There had been a noise. Was that him returning already? I stood very still for a moment, breathing as shallowly as possible, wondering what the hell to do. I wasn’t armed, and he’d have his Makarov…
Then I saw the mouse, scuttling across the floorboards – the noise had merely been its nails scratching against the wood. The tiny creature paused for a moment, looking up on its hind legs with its snout twitching, before dropping back onto all fours and scurrying forward again.
Snap!
The trap sprung with brutal velocity, catching the mouse at the base of its neck. There was a tiny, almost inaudible squeak and then its eyes froze.
I made my way back downstairs and replaced the ladder next to the bookcase. A bookcase, I now noticed, that was built into the wall. I knelt down and inspected the skirting board. A few inches from the floor there was a sharp line in the board. I pressed the base of my hand against it and pushed. It slid upwards, revealing a small metal knob beneath, rather like a light switch. I flicked it, and the lowest shelf of the bookcase moved a few inches. I pulled it all the way out. Hidden behind it was a small space, inside of which sat a blue and silver cardboard box with the words ‘Baci Perugina’ printed on it.
The chocolates had long since been eaten, but in their place was a sheaf of papers bound with an elastic band. The front page was embossed with a red star in a black circle, and a string of reference numbers lay beneath the typed heading: ‘НЕЗАВИСИМЬІЙ’.
The world around me suddenly hushed, and everything narrowed to the field of my gaze. It was as if a mouse had scuttled its way across my scalp, and that one word had snapped the spring shut. The last time I’d met Sasha I had asked him what my codename was, and he had told me: ‘NEZAVISIMYJ’, meaning ‘independent’.
This was my file.
I picked it up and slowly turned to the first page:
INDEPENDENT was recruited in the British Zone of Germany in 1945 – please see Appendix 1 for details of the operation …
Well, hadn’t Sasha been clever? He’d realized I might not listen to his message at Heathrow, so he had given Toadski a copy of my file and told him that if I didn’t come in with him he should follow me and hand it over to the local resident wherever I arrived. Presumably the photographs were in here, too? Yes, there they were, in a small plastic pouch beneath the file.
I shook them out and saw that, as well as the pictures with Anna that completed the nasty little honey trap that had brought me into this mess, there were around a dozen surveillance shots that had been taken of me over the years, in London, Istanbul and elsewhere. My anger at not having spotted the tails was somewhat mollified by the fact that I was now sitting in Pyotr’s flat looking through their photographs.
I turned back to the file itself. The typeface was raised and glossy, almost like Braille, and the paper thick and crested. The pages were torn in places, with official stamps placed haphazardly over them and the words Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie everywhere. So I was under the control of the GRU: Sasha hadn’t lied about that, at least. There was a long biography that focused mainly on my military service and relationship with Father, and detailed reports of every single meeting I’d attended. There was even a brief essay on my character, dated 12 December 1948, by one Nikolai Pavlovich Vasilyev – presumably Georgi’s real name:
&nbs
p; When meeting with INDEPENDENT, be advised to choose your words carefully: he has a sharp tongue and his temper cools slowly, so you will waste valuable time antagonizing him unduly. Do not make the mistake of trying to become his friend or sharing your views on the wider world with him. INDEPENDENT is intensely irritated by anything that he senses as prevarication or skirting around an issue – you would be much better advised to take a direct approach.
INDEPENDENT is prone to questioning any statement he regards as unclear or euphemistic. He is also insistent that he will only give us information on matters of principle, so every request for information must be framed in such a way as to make him believe that it is of crucial importance, not just to our own efforts but to the benefit of all humanity. This is, naturally, sometimes a difficult task…
Quite an astute assessment, on the whole. Had I really wanted everything to be of benefit to humanity? I couldn’t really deny it, absurd as it looked in black and white. Still, Pyotr hadn’t taken this advice to heart: his approach had been direct, all right, but it had certainly antagonized me, and unduly at that.
I checked my watch again: it had just gone half eleven. He would be at the gardens soon, and wondering what had happened to me. I calculated I had at least an hour before he would be back. I read on, transfixed. There was a bundle of correspondence from early in my career that made for very curious reading. Skimming through as fast as I could, it appeared that Moscow had not initially believed that they had succeeded in recruiting me. They had become convinced that the Service had knowingly let me be recruited, so they could then use me to pass disinformation over. This suspicion appeared to stem from one of the earliest reports I had given. In 1949, Georgi had asked me to note down everything I knew about the Service’s efforts to recruit agents in the Soviet Union. As far as I knew there were no such efforts, and so I had said so. But that hadn’t been good enough for one Anatoli Panov, an analyst in the Third Department of the First Directorate:
No British agents of note have been exposed as a result of INDEPENDENT’S assistance, although he would certainly have access to such information. Are we expected to believe that he and others have chosen to fight for our cause, and yet the British have failed to recruit a single one of our men to theirs? Ours is clearly the more desirable ideology, but this is nevertheless not a plausible assessment. The truth, of course, is that INDEPENDENT has come up against a piece of information he cannot divulge without hindering the British more than they would like, and has stubbornly insisted on this fatuous line in the hope that we swallow it whole. Let us not fall for such a simple trick. It proves comprehensively that he is a plant: a triple agent.
I read the last line several times, my temple throbbing. It seemed this idiot had been incapable of accepting that I might have been telling the truth. I was even more shocked to see that his report had been counter-signed by Stalin himself, who in the margin had even scribbled ‘Иссдедуйте дадее’– ‘Investigate further’. It took me several moments to take it in, and I realized my hands were shaking. After the whole rig marole they had gone through to recruit me, the extraordinary organization and time and resources that must have gone into that operation, after all the meetings in London and the precautions taken, and all the files I had passed over and reports I had written… After all of that, Uncle Joe hadn’t believed I was a genuine double agent! Flicking forward, it wasn’t until November 1951 – over two years later – that they had finally given me the all clear:
We are now satisfied that INDEPENDENT is secure and that no disinformation is being passed to us. Please renew contact with this highly valuable agent.
Thinking back, I realized that this coincided with Sasha’s arrival in London. After several frustrating years of intermittent contact, I finally had a regular handler again, and he had pumped me for information in a way Georgi had never done. But, it seemed, to very little purpose. I searched in vain for reports on the operations I had betrayed at that time. It looked like Sasha had decided not to pass any of it on. But why on earth not, if I had been cleared? One reason immediately sprung to mind. Even in the Service, information that inconveniently contradicted a widely held theory – especially if it were also held by a Head of Section – was sometimes skimmed over or quietly dropped for fear of the messenger being shot. It looked like that might literally have been the case for Georgi: a brief note at the top of a file from 1949 explained that he had been classified as an ‘undesirable’. He had been recalled and sent to the gulags, of course – perhaps Sasha didn’t want to make the same mistake.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So it had all been for nought, or as near as dammit. My recruitment and handling hadn’t been some grand game of chess, but a muddle of crossed wires, paranoia and office politics. I’d spent twenty-four years deceiving everyone around me, but it seemed that for several years the men I had thought I was serving hadn’t even been given the information I had obtained, let alone used it.
I straightened up. Did it matter, ultimately, that they had failed to take advantage of the material? Did I really need a tally of my own treachery, a count of the dead men? No. I had done it. I was a traitor, no matter what the cost had been.
But a terrifying thought suddenly occurred to me. The analyst Panov would have vanished from the scene long ago, of course, no doubt sent to the gulags himself for not having tied his shoelaces the right way. But his way of thinking had been accepted for two years, and clearly something of it had survived because it looked like much of the information I’d handed over subsequently still hadn’t been passed up the ladder. What sort of an organization could have allowed that to happen? What if there was a new Panov in Moscow, or a group of them even, and they had decided that my actions in Nigeria proved I’d been a triple agent all along? After all, they had lost two long-serving agents at my hand. Could that be why I had been targeted? Yes, of course it bloody could.
I looked at my watch again. I’d been in here nearly an hour already, and Pyotr would soon be boarding a tram on his way back. I took the file and chocolate box and walked over to the desk by the window. There was an old Olivetti typewriter on top of it. I lifted the cover, took a sheet of paper from the drawer and rolled it into the machine. I began typing.
A couple of minutes later I scrolled the paper out, folded it, and placed it in my jacket pocket. I walked back to the bookcase and replaced the chocolate box, then glanced around the flat again, checking that everything was in order, picked my file from the desk, turned off the lights and quietly closed the door behind me.
*
I took the lift back down and thanked the landlady for her assistance. I warned her that I might return with some of my colleagues, but that whatever she did she should give no signal to Signor Valougny that he was under suspicion. She promised heartily to uphold her patriotic duty.
I went back into the bar across the street and asked for the lavatory. The barman pointed down a flight of rickety stairs. Once there, I locked the door and tore each page of my file into strips before feeding it into the bowl. Then I flushed it all away. There would be copies in Moscow, of course, but this would do for the time being. And there was a strange sense of satisfaction in watching the words dissolve and disappear. A plan of action had started to form in my mind. I went over all the scenarios I thought it could lead to, and decided that, while it was certainly a risk, it was one worth taking. Or perhaps I simply no longer cared.
I went upstairs again and asked if I could use the telephone. The barman looked at me, and nodded his head imperceptibly to the left. I gave him 100 lire, received two tokens and ten lire in change, and walked over to the machine. Severn picked up on the first ring.
‘Where the hell are you? You’ve been gone over three hours, and Zimotti just called to say a body has been discovered in the museum—’
‘It’s Barchetti,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got him. I’ve got the bastard…’
‘Slow down. Got who?’
‘The man who arranged
Farraday’s assassination. The head of Arte come Terrore. Barchetti was scared at the meet, insisted I follow him into a dark room at the end of the gallery. But by the time I got in there, someone had already strangled him.’
There was a short silence, and I imagined Severn’s face turning paler.
‘Did you manage to get anything from him at all? What about his European lead?’
‘Nothing. But I saw this chap leaving the museum in a hurry and he looked fishy, so I trailed him and he came running back to a flat in Trastevere. I waited until he left, and broke in. It’s him,’ I said. ‘He’s our man. Call Zimotti and tell him to bring a few of his men around to Viale Trastevere as fast as he can. Then jump in your car and come here yourself. I’m in a bar called’ – I picked up a menu from the top of the telephone set – ‘La Maddalena, about halfway up the street. I’ll tell you about it when you get here.’
X
‘I demand to see a lawyer.’
Zimotti offered him an insincere smile. ‘I’m afraid we can’t extend you that right, signore.’
Pyotr glared back with contempt. I didn’t blame him: his flat was suddenly looking rather cramped.
Severn had arrived in his race car fifteen minutes after my call, accompanied by his wife. Hot on their heels had been Zimotti, who had arrived with a couple of black Lancias containing two of his men, nasty-looking brutes in leather jackets and jeans. I had explained the situation in the back of the bar and shown them the note: Severn and Zimotti had glanced at each other in grim acknowledgement. Almost as if on cue, Pyotr had stepped off the tram, walked up the street and unlocked his front door.
And we’d pounced. The landlady had fretted over what the neighbours would think, but one of Zimotti’s men had taken her to one side and explained that she was performing a great service for the republic, and her massive chest had risen with pride at the thought and she had waved us through, almost in tears. Pyotr had been brewing himself a cup of coffee when we’d broken the door down. He’d protested, of course, strenuously and in fluent Italian, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it: he didn’t have diplomatic cover.