Here Be Monsters

by Anthony Price

  ‘I’m not Paul.’ She decided not to rise to ‘your own Paul’.

  ‘Is there any reason why I should be hurrying? When are we meeting Major Turnbull at this pub of yours?’

  She studied her mirror again. The police car would drop her at the next junction. ‘Would that be about 5.30? You know more about opening times than I do.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He looked at her innocently. ‘I take it that you’ve had lunch? You couldn’t have spent half the morning at that salon of yours—?’

  They both knew that she had ostentatiously placed a distinctively-labelled Rochard Freres bag in the car, so he couldn’t deny her cover-story. ‘I snatched a sandwich.’ But, on second thoughts, that casual reference to Paul might be a hint that he guessed—or, being David, somehow knew—where she’d been. ‘I hope you had something, David—I’m sorry, if I kept you hanging around, waiting for me. That was thoughtless of me.’

  ‘Not at all! I like your style, young woman.’ Audley chuckled. ‘Putting the Defence of the Realm second to Jimmy Rochard’s summer frocks is like old Macmillan sitting on the Front Bench when he was Prime Minister, ostentatiously reading letters from his gamekeeper before his official bumpf.’ Another chuckle. ‘Same with your Paul—or our Paul, if you prefer … First thing every morning, he should be reading his overnight SGs. And what does he do?’ He gave her a knowing look as though wishing to share an answer known to them both; which reminded her oddly of the object of their journey, since in Latin he could have actually worded the question to convey their shared certainty.

  ‘What does he do?’ She was certain that he did know about Paul and herself now, but she decided to play hard to get. ‘I’m sure I don’t know—?’

  ‘Why, he reads his morning post from all those 1914-18 veterans with whom he zealously corresponds, before they finally fade away.’ He cocked his head, half-smiling, half-frowning. ‘What is he into at the moment—the Battle of Loos, is it?’

  Elizabeth shrugged. ‘I’ve really no idea.’ But Paul was right: once a Sopwith Camel pilot pulls his stick, no one knows where the Camel is going! ‘But I do remember your Mr Andropov. He wasn’t very nice to the Hungarians, was he?’

  ‘Correct.’ A minute, and slightly more than a mile, passed while Audley consulted his own memories. ‘So you can appreciate why General Okolovich was scared in ‘56, having given the egregious Andropov demonstrably incorrect information about the state of the Hungarian nation before the rising. Because when the dust had settled, and they’d buried the 30,000 dead—including all the good Russian soldiers who’d turned their tanks over to the Hungarians, and offered to fight for them … when they had been shot too, if they were lucky—Comrade Ambassador Andropov was after blood. So Okolovich was very scared indeed. And while Okolovich was scared, poor old Gorbatov was comprehensively terrified. Because he hadn’t got anyone worth a damn to shop. So he knew he was for Siberia, if he was very lucky—or the chop, if he wasn’t. And he knew enough to know which was more likely.’ Audley waved a huge hand across the windscreen. ‘Actually, if he had reckoned on Siberia he wouldn’t have minded, because he was born there—his parents had been shunted off there in the twenties, because his grandfather had a Tsarist commission, but hadn’t annoyed his other ranks sufficiently to be lynched out of hand when the Red Revolution reached his regiment—he liked Siberia, did Andrei Afanaseevich Gorbatov.’ Audley nodded at the windscreen. ‘But then he remembered this colleague of his—or nodding KGB acquaintance—who’d done a tour in Canada during the war, and gone off to the North-West Territory of Canada, to tell the Canadians what a splendid fellow Uncle Joe Stalin was. And this fellow had told him about all the endless trees and snow, just like Siberia, but with the birds and the booze, and no questions asked afterwards. And Gorbatov then conceived the idea that if he followed the yellow-brick road to the West there was a land over the rainbow—with trees and snow, and women and drink, and no questions asked, like home only better.’ He nodded again. ‘So when he came over to our side he offered all he had in exchange for the North-West Territory. He thought he might be safe there, too, as well as happy.’

  The police car had fallen away, out of sight if not quite out of mind, baulked of its prey. But she wasn’t sure, now that there was nothing behind her, whether they hadn’t passed the word on. So she would just have to keep her eye on the rear-view mirror.

  ‘So our people said “Maybe”. Only at first they were disappointed, because he gave them the usual chicken-feed about Hungary. Which they knew already, because of all the Hungarians who had come over—not just the ex-Communist patriots, but the AVRM secret police types, who were afraid of both sides … But then he gave them Debrecen, and that was something new.’

  Elizabeth steadied her foot on 70. It was a curious international idiosyncrasy that the Americans, who worshipped the individual, supplied cars which were equipped to adhere to speed limits, while the regimented Europeans let their drivers take their choice, and pay accordingly.

  ‘Something new.’ Audley agreed with himself. ‘That’s what concentrated their minds: they’d never had a smell of it before—and, according to Gorbatov, it had been functioning for at least three years, before he nerved himself to run. Which was when Okolovich took possession of his records, so the warnings he’d sent could be doctored out—then he knew he was being measured for a necktie.’

  Elizabeth nodded at the road ahead. That was a fairly ordinary scenario for defection, anyway. In the West it was often much more complicated, because life itself was more complex, with all its secret guilts and its multiple moral choices. But KGB colonels were not the type to experience sudden blinding lights accompanied by divine voices telling them to change course: with them it was usually naked self-preservation which dictated action.

  ‘He was quite frank about it. Although our Wise Men didn’t altogether believe him. They were inclined to think that he wasn’t so clever as he pretended to be—that he might well have given Okolovich dud information, and was about to get his just deserts. And he had a fairly sizeable drink problem, which he said had been caused by worry … But they reckoned it might have been the chicken which laid his egg for him—the drink problem. And what also made ‘em think he wasn’t too bright was that he didn’t rate what he had about Debrecen as being the jewel in his crown. Because he hadn’t had anything directly to do with it, it was way above his clearance as well as being outside his jurisdiction. It just happened to be something he knew the bare minimum about in general, but two specific things about by pure accident. He actually thought we knew about it already—took it for granted, even. Huh!’

  Now, at last, they were getting to the lean meat of the official record, which had dismissed Colonel Andrei Afanaseevich Gorbatov in one short paragraph. ‘What did he say about it … Debrecen?’

  ‘In general? Huh!’ Audley sniffed. ‘”That place where they process the foreigners—you know.” Which they didn’t. So they left it for a few days, and then worked back to it one evening when his vodka gauge was into the red. Only to discover that that was all he did know—not his directorate, big-time stuff for First Fifteen players while he had to scrum-down with the Hungarians.’ Audley paused. ‘But there were these two times when someone was off sick, and he had to sub for them. It was just on the transport arrangements—picking people up from an airfield, who’d come in by light plane cleared from somewhere in the west, or south-west—picking ‘em up and delivering ‘em, secret VIP treatment, semi-disguised subjects—hats, dark glasses, raincoats. All he knew was that they were Anglo-Saxon—or, Anglo-American—mostly youngish, or even young. And he knew the dates, near enough, over these two three-week periods in the summer. That was all.’ He nodded to emphasize the last word. ‘In the end they took him apart—leaned hard on him. But that was all he had.’

  But that wasn’t all that was in the record, thought Elizabeth. ‘All?’

  ‘They didn’t like it, of course.’ Audley breathed in deeply, and expelled a sigh of remembran
ce. ‘Most particularly, they didn’t like the bit about the semi-disguised VIPs being youngish or young. Because that smelt too much like laying down new claret, for drinking in the seventies. Like the Cambridge thirties vintages were laid down.’ Audley spoke off-handedly now, reminding Elizabeth that if there was one thing he hated, and invariably referred to in his most casual voice, it was the infamous Cambridge gang. For he was a Cambridge man himself, and desperately proud of it.

  ‘So what did they do?’

  ‘They went for Debrecen, of course.’ Audley’s voice harshened again. ‘This was ‘57—Hungary was still wide-open to us then, after ‘56, in the sense that the Hungarians all loathed the Russians so much that they’d do anything for us.’ The harshness was almost gravelly. ‘And we had any number of Hungarians who were prepared to go back, if they knew we wanted something.’ He drew another breath. “That was when we got all the physical data—pictures, measurements, the lot.’

  That had certainly been precise: the long-disused Imperial Hapsburg hunting-lodge in the forest, well away from the city and effectively in the middle of nowhere which the Nazis had reanimated and uglified with military perimeter and buildings as a training centre for their Brandenburg elites, which had operated far beyond the battle lines in Russia, which lay only a few miles away; and which, when the wheel had turned full circle, the Russians had in turn occupied, to train a very different elite to fight a very different war in the opposite direction, so it seemed.

  All the physical data. ‘But they’d gone by then?’ She spurred him.

  ‘Uh-huh. The birds had flown.’ She just caught him twitch under her spur. ‘The eggs had hatched, and the fledglings had departed for warmer climes, never to return.’ He looked at her suddenly. ‘That was the difference: never to return.’

  ‘Why did they close it down?’

  ‘Ah … well, at first the Three Wise Men thought it was because of the Rising in ‘56, simply. And they were half-right, anyway.’

  ‘How—half-right?’

  ‘Because there were Hungarians who’d seen too much, in the nature of things, Elizabeth.’ He made a face at her. ‘Because there were AVRM Hungarians—most of them were bastards, and some of them got lynched in ‘56.’ He looked at her again suddenly. But this time he really saw her, as he had not done before. ‘Jesus Christ, Elizabeth! You don’t really remember ‘56, do you? When the Iron Curtain was split open wide for a time, and you could drive all the way to Budapest, and the people in the villages would cheer you on, and offer you drinks? And Suez—when Radio Cairo went off the air after our Canberras had hit it? You were just a baby then, of course.’

  Momentarily his guard was down: Hot heart, cool head was what he preached, which was the old KGB-NKVD axiom. But the recollection of long ago—and perhaps of a mistake he had made in that far-off time—was animating him now, and betraying him as it did so.

  ‘I’m not quite with you, David—?’

  ‘It was the Age of Innocence, love. Or relative innocence, anyway—when I was young … or, if not quite young, not senile, anyway.’ He grinned at her hideously. ‘Old memories—senile reminiscences, no more.’ He flexed a leg, and massaged its constricted knee. ‘The fact of it was that he wasn’t the only defector. Because there was this Hungarian AVRM who came over at about the same time—probably for much the same reasons as Gorbatov. Only he went over to the Americans, not our people. But he’d run all the rackets in the Debrecen district, and he was nobody’s fool. So it transpired.’

  So that was what had happened, Elizabeth realized in a flash: the British had stumbled on something, more or less by accident. But, when it had gone cold on them, they had naturally offered it to the Americans—naturally, because after Suez they must have been hell-bent on ingratiating themselves with their former allies, and Comrade Colonel Gorbatov had said ‘or Anglo-American’, so they had something to offer.

  ‘And what did he say?’ And that, to clinch the matter, helped to account for those two lists—one British, but the other American.

  ‘He’d got the other half of the sweepstake ticket.’ Audley nodded. ‘Which he shouldn’t have had. But he was a lot smarter than old Gorbatov, anyway. Because, when he came across, it was Debrecen that he reckoned was his ticket to the good life—the bit printed in Russian, which the Americans would want to read, do you see?’

  Elizabeth saw, but didn’t quite see. Because the record was inexact here, to say the least, and what Paul had told her about David confirmed its equivocation about the exact nature of Debrecen: ‘he never quite says the same thing twice’.

  But she had to cut through all that now, after the Pointe du Hoc and their Xenophon interview, and all the miles which were slipping away now, at more than one for each minute, towards Major Turnbull and the onetime Squadron Leader Thomas.

  ‘What was Debrecen, David?’ If he’d never said the same thing twice he probably wouldn’t say the same thing now, when his neck was on the block. But even the difference between what he said now, and what he had once said, was something she had to establish. ‘Really?’

  He took the point of the question, judging by the mile-or-more he used to think about it, at 70 mph, while estimating both ends against the middle.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He took another half-mile. ‘Well, that’s the million pound bingo question, Elizabeth.’ He tried to stretch a leg again. ‘It used to be the sixty-four-thousand dollar question, but we’ve had inflation since then.’

  Another mile, tenth by tenth, almost empty and featureless, and boring now that there was nothing sniffing her British Racing Green tail across the Wessex countryside, which was opening up on either side. But she could still afford to wait for her answer.

  ‘Our Three Wise Men were never 100 per cent convinced—just about 80 per cent.’ About half a mile. ‘And neither were the Americans.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not?’ Four-fifths of a mile. ‘Deep down, they didn’t want to believe that young Americans could betray 1950s America—even though they put a man on it who believed that everyone was guilty, until proved innocent. And even then probably not. He was a hard man—in some ways a monster.’

  That led straight to the next question, but he continued before she could get it out. ‘Our people had fewer illusions. Not because they were smarter, but because they had bitter recent memories. And also we’d just come down in the world—and down with a bump, after Suez. So we weren’t just the poor relations—we were maybe the baddies. So what was there to betray? A British Dream, like the American Dream? What dream?’ He glanced at her. ‘So what was Debrecen? Our people weren’t sure—but they knew they were on to something. And they reckoned there might be an American angle, and they needed to get in with the Americans again, after Suez. So they decided to offer them what they’d got as a present, in the hope of re-establishing co-operation.’ He tossed his head. ‘That was my first big job: carrying tribute to Caesar.’ Then he shook his head sadly. ‘I had no idea what I was getting into—no idea, poor innocent youth that I was!’

  Elizabeth noticed that her speed had crept up to 85, but mercifully there was nothing behind her. And there was nothing of the truth in his last words, either: he had been a rich bachelor in his thirties in ‘58, and the reverse of innocent for sure, then as well as now. She dropped back to 70. ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Hah!’ He brightened perversely at the memory. ‘Absolutely nothing—at first. In fact, when they knew what I’d got with me, it was all roses and violets. Because it was exactly what they wanted, so they thought -because they had their appalling Hungarian, you see. About whom we didn’t know, but who had given his half-ticket to them, so they had a much better idea of what Debrecen might have been than we did. They knew more—and they’d also had a look at the place, just like us. But with the same result. And they really didn’t know what to do next, or even where to start.’ The brightness remained, but it was as frosty as a short winter’s day.

  ‘And then in flew Sir Frederick Clinton
’s new star, with a warm Special Relationship smile on his face and the rest of the ticket in his briefcase. Roses and violets, Elizabeth.’

  But dust and ashes to come, thought Elizabeth grimly. ‘You had the dates Colonel Gorbatov gave you. But what exactly were these people doing in Debrecen? Why were they there?’

  Audley gazed out of the car window at his side, as though he had suddenly found the rural view more interesting. ‘You’ve read the record, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She waited for him to continue, but instead he went on admiring the Hampshire countryside. ‘”Hand-picked subjects, with good career prospects, psychologically equipped for deep-sleeping”.’

  ‘Yes.’ Audley nodded at a cow which, from its melancholy expression, looked as though it had heard all about the new EEC milk quotas. ‘So?’

  ‘So what was so particularly important about Debrecen?’

  Audley turned towards her. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  It ought to be enough, thought Elizabeth with a deep-down shiver: the idea of long-term treachery, waiting to mature like wine, but cellared instead in the dark recesses of certain human souls. But somehow it wasn’t. ‘No, David.’

  He smiled a sudden genuine smile, which cruelly reminded her of that smile of Latimer’s. ‘Quite right, Elizabeth. But how do you know?’

  Elizabeth was torn between the two smiles. Because if Paul was right and Latimer was gunning for David … if it came to the crunch—whose side was she on? Whose side? The answer confused her horribly, it was so immediate. And she knew she must cover her confusion. ‘Don’t ask me how. I don’t really know.’

  ‘Of course! Who ever does, when it comes to instinct? Don’t worry, my dear—be glad that you’ve got it, that’s all.’ He nodded. ‘Everyone thinks they have it, but it’s atrophied in most people—like the hunting instinct. I knew a troop-sergeant in Normandy who’d never fired a shot in anger until we landed, but he always knew when there was an 88 waiting for us.’ Nod. ‘Your Paul hasn’t got it—with him it’s mostly reason and logic, plus a little experience and a lot of knowledge … all topped off by low cunning and an eye for the main chance. But most women have more of it than most men, anyway. So just be thankful.’