The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  Wilderness’s look told Burne-Jones that not everyone had done that.

  “And . . . of course . . . you didn’t let him?”

  “Of course not. But he sees himself as a ladies’ man. Never been wholly sure what that means, but perhaps he’s one. I’m not saying he’s a fool for any woman who jiggles her tits at him, but . . . ”

  “But . . . you are . . . ?”

  “No harm done. He took the hint, big as it was. But whoever runs him in the field needs to know his weakness.”

  “You’re not volunteering then?”

  Wilderness ignored this too.

  “Masefield has come to us at a very good time. We can’t go on much longer just watching the trains go by.”

  Wilderness knew exactly what Burne-Jones meant by this. In the 1950s almost the sole resource of secret services was to look at the movement of men and materiel across the ambiguous zones of occupied Europe in the hope of anticipating a build-up of Soviet forces that might be the prelude to invasion. But all that had altered, however slow they had been to accommodate the change, with the independence—for independence read “guaranteed neutrality,” for “guaranteed” read “enforced”—of Austria, for ten years the four powers’ stomping ground of the less-than-secret services. Watching the trains go by was almost Victorian when both sides could stick a nuclear warhead on top of a missile that allowed only four minutes’ warning.

  One of the funniest lines in Beyond the Fringe, which had just taken the Edinburgh Festival by storm, was Peter Cook imitating the Prime Minister and intoning, “I’ll have you know, some people in this wonderful country of ours can run a mile in under four minutes.” There were times when that one line seemed to sum up the British defence capability against the Soviet Union.

  “We need people on the inside. I’m not saying Geoffrey Masefield is perfect, but he’s got more going for him than anyone else I’ve been offered lately. The mining and metallurgy thing is kosher . . . he works for New Caledonian Ores, he’s a member of all those professional bodies that scientific chaps have, Royal Society of This, National Institute of That . . . New Caledonian Ores is keen to expand, he’s sold them on the idea of Russia as a vast reserve of raw materials . . . plenty of room for scientific visits, buying missions, trade delegations . . . all the cover we could ask for . . . and the beauty of it is he speaks Russian and the buggers won’t even suspect that.”

  Wilderness concluded that the decision had been taken. He wasn’t about to repeat his reservations. Masefield was not his problem, and once this meeting was over they need never meet again. Wilderness did not run agents in the field; he was the agent in the field. And the more he sat behind a desk preparing digests for Burne-Jones the more Burne-Jones relied on him and the less he liked it. To “run an agent” would be on par with working behind the counter at a Woolworth’s . . . a Woolworth’s in Scunthorpe.

  “OK, let’s get him in.”

  §20

  “Of course, it would pay to be precise. Rather than just looking to buy anything the Russians want to sell, would it not make sense to have something specific in mind?”

  Masefield was way ahead of Burne-Jones.

  “I thought of that. Offering to buy all the pig iron they can produce might get me as far as a handful of shipping dockets and a trip to a marshalling yard in some industrial hole in the Ukraine. I think I should be looking for something a little out of the ordinary, something specific . . . well . . . something with the potential for travel. I was thinking of post-transition metals or rare earths, something like that.”

  Just when Wilderness thought Burne-Jones would ask what a rare earth was he asked instead,

  “Anything in particular?”

  “I was thinking of indium.”

  “Indium, eh? I see.”

  It may have been delayed in its appearance by a few seconds, but the look on Burne-Jones’s face told Wilderness that he was all at sea now. He’d survived rare earth, only to hit the iceberg, and he was taking in water rapidly at indium.

  For God’s sake, Alec, just reach for the lifebelt.

  “Do you know anything about indium, Joe?”

  “Yep. Atomic number 49, atomic weight 114 point something. Umpteen isotopes, in fact more than any other element, all but one are radioactive. About as common as mercury, somewhat harder . . . solid at room temperature but still soft . . . and not as rare as you’d think. It’s simply that it’s hardly ever found as pure ore . . . more often than not found in zinc dust and refined from that. In fact silver’s rarer. The only reason indium isn’t as valuable as silver is no one’s really found a use for it. I believe we coated aero-engine bearings with it during the war . . . and . . . er that’s about it.”

  Burne-Jones blinked. Looked from Wilderness to Masefield. Had someone just said “radioactive”?

  “Can’t argue with that,” Masefield said. “Pretty good summary. I think I should be looking for indium for two reasons . . . It has no application whatsoever in nuclear fission or fusion, so it won’t set alarm bells ringing . . . indium-115 is radioactive and has a half-life that’s practically infinite, but of course indium-113 is harmless, and that’s what I’d be looking for, a perfectly stable element . . . and since there is no real use for it everyone wants to find a use for it . . . My people would be keen to get as much as they can to stockpile against future uses . . . so looking for it in a country with sizeable zinc production would seem pretty natural. Indeed, it won’t be long before someone does find a use for it . . . it has a great propensity to covalent bonding with other elements via the electrons in the penultimate valence as well as the ultimate. Makes it very, shall I say, versatile?”

  Burne-Jones blinked and said nothing. Wilderness knew he hadn’t the faintest idea what an atomic valence was, ultimate or not, nor was he going to ask.

  “And of course,” Masefield concluded, “it’s transparent. There aren’t that many transparent metals after all.”

  He might just as well have said “luminous porridge.”

  “Transparent metal? Good Lord, whatever next?”

  “It’s transparent only as an indium tin oxide, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “If you could get me in with all the right permits I’d have the perfect cover to go poking around in places like . . . like . . . well Chelyabinsk for example. Been a metallurgical plant there since the thirties and the five-year plans. The old T-34 tank was built there. And these days there’s a lot of zinc processing in Chelyabinsk.”

  “Chelyabinsk? Where’s that?”

  Wilderness answered first. “East of Samara, north of Kazakhstan. Arse end of nowhere, but lots of zinc, as Geoffrey says.”

  “Good,” said Burne-Jones warming to the idea. “Good, good.”

  “And a bloody great nuclear missile silo . . .”

  Both heads turned.

  “Whaaat?” Burne-Jones and Masefield said in unison.

  At last, Wilderness thought, something Burne-Jones could understand. He’d have been at home with a poem in ancient Greek, but he’d been baffled by “isotopes,” puzzled by “half-life,” panicked by “radio­active,” yet here was something he could grasp.

  “Or so we think,” he added.

  §21

  When Masefield had left, Wilderness said, “Why pretend you’ve never heard of Chelyabinsk?”

  “Oh.” Burne-Jones assumed an air of diffidence. “Just trying to draw him out, but you would leap in feet-first, wouldn’t you? Showing off your knowledge, top of the form again. And why mention bloody missiles?”

  “I suppose I just felt wicked. But, Chelyabinsk is the last place photographed by that U-2 the Russians shot down in May. If you check out its flight path across Kazakhstan, it was heading directly for Chelyabinsk. The Russians tried to shoot it down before it got there and failed. They took it out with a surface-to-air missile
only minutes after it photographed Chelyabinsk. Do you really think they’ll let Masefield get anywhere near Chelyabinsk? And another thing . . .”

  “Yes. I thought there would be.”

  “Indium may not be a nuclear component, but plutonium is, and they process that as well as zinc at Chelyabinsk. There was some sort of accident there a few years back that the Russians have been keeping very quiet about. I might even suggest that zinc is just a cover.”

  “Bit like an old tin bath out in the backyard then?”

  Wilderness ignored this.

  “And . . . if you wanted to hide a missile silo what better place than a uranium enrichment plant?”

  Burne-Jones was grinning now, his act as the silly-ass toff readily shuffled off.

  “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps there are missiles at Chelyabinsk. There must be a half a dozen launch sites and we haven’t positively identified one of them yet.”

  “Half a dozen . . . or Khrushchev’s bluffing.”

  “When is the bugger not bluffing? Life with Stalin was a chess game . . . with Khrushchev it’s poker. You never know what he’ll do next. You never know what hand he’ll slap down. One minute he’s hobnobbing with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine, the next he’s banging his shoe on his desk at the UN and telling us he’ll ‘show you Kuzka’s Mother’ . . . whatever that means.”

  Wilderness would never admit it, but he liked Khrushchev. Stalin was the silent tyrant. If you could discount mass murder, he was dull. Eisenhower was dull. All plaid pants and golf spikes. Macmillan had second billing in the music hall of international politics, but he was still just the warm-up act for the man with the star on his dressing room door—Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

  “Кузькина мать. It means something like ‘Kiss my arse.’”

  “Really? Vulgar little man. Fact is, I don’t know what will work. I think letting Masefield try is better than doing nothing. Just having someone on the inside is better than doing nothing. Anything’s better than ­doing nothing. Finding out Mr. K is bluffing would be far, far better than ­doing nothing.”

  “You weren’t really going to send him out without knowing what he was getting into?”

  “No, probably not.”

  “And you’ll run him how exactly?”

  “Out of Berlin, I think. Assign him to Tom Radley . . . New Caledonian has an office there. Pretty well perfect cover. We’ll let our Geoffrey look around and report back to Tom, that’s all we can do.”

  “And if our Geoffrey finds out Mr. K is bluffing by just looking around?”

  “Oh . . . the usual. The honours will be boundless. George Cross, life peerage and a night on the razzle with Princess Margaret. That sort of thing.”

  Wilderness was sure the jokes were meant to conceal rather than reveal, but reveal they did. It was all a bit half-arsed, and Burne-Jones knew it.

  §22

  Wilderness had, at Burne-Jones’s request, one last meeting before Masefield set off for Berlin and from Berlin to an international trade ­mission—French, Belgians, Dutch, a couple of other Englishmen—bound for Moscow. A man on a mission, without a mission. A man who’d been told in the precision of Cold War spy-speak to “have a bit of a look around.”They sat in a deserted, seedy coffee bar in Marylebone Lane one dark November afternoon—scratched Formica, rusting chrome chairs, sauce bottles ringed in darkening goo, the scorch marks of a thousand cigarettes. The natural home of beatniks—a fast-vanishing London breed. A bit of fifties flotsam washed up in a new decade that seemed too slow off the blocks.

  Wilderness had felt a little foolish offering Masefield the standard speech. He didn’t even believe it himself. “Regard every Russian you meet as a spy because that will be their attitude to you” and “Sex is a quagmire: blackmail is the KGB’s strongest weapon and yours is discretion.”

  “Don’t pick up any loose women, eh?”

  Wilderness didn’t blame him for smirking as he said it. It was but a fraction away from laughable at the best of times.

  “I was thinking more of ‘don’t let any loose women pick you up.’ Even more . . . ‘don’t let any loose men pick you up.’”

  This embarrassed Masefield. For a moment or two he stared down into his frothy coffee.

  When he looked up he said, “I’m not queer, you know. I may not be married, but I’m not queer.”

  Wilderness did know. All the same he said nothing, let the pause ramble on.

  “I had . . . I had expected a bit more.”

  It seemed almost plaintive. Wilderness was not entirely sure what he was on about.

  “You’ll be paid what was agreed.”

  “Oh no. I meant . . . well, more in the way of briefing. Not just a bit of a warning about the tarts and queers.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well . . . for example, I haven’t got a gun.”

  Wilderness stared back at Masefield, hoping he felt like the fool Wilderness thought he was.

  “Why would you need a gun?”

  “I don’t know. I just sort of assumed I’d have one.”

  “Geoffrey, let me put it another way. Why would a metallurgist on an invited trade mission have a gun?”

  This shut him up for a while. He sipped at his fashionably frothy coffee. His head came up with a strand of white foam clinging to his moustache.

  “I’m sorry. I suppose that was rather silly. But a camera?”

  “Buy one and bring us the receipt. Anything you like, nothing too ostentatious. Berlin’s a very good place to buy a camera. For that matter so’s Moscow. Most tourists would pick up a Zenit or a Zorki simply because they’re cheap.”

  “I meant . . . a miniature camera.”

  “What, hidden in your bow tie?”

  “Now you’re just making fun of me.”

  Who could resist? It would be harder to take the piss if he hadn’t been wearing a bow tie in the first place. It had been Wilderness’s contention all along that Masefield’s vision of the job in hand was based on his innate romanticism, “gullibility” might be a better word, and a fondness for spy novels. In his heart of hearts Mr. Masefield wanted what he was never going to get—the armourer’s scene with which Fleming had opened Dr. No, swapping a dainty Beretta .22 for a lethal Walther PPK 9mm. Wilderness almost felt sorry for him—almost, but not quite. He’d played that scene himself when he was still a teenager, taught how to shoot and kitted out with his first gun by Major Weatherill. He’d let him down as gently as possible.

  “Geoffrey, it’s in your own interests. If the Russians were to find a gun or a miniature camera your cover would be blown at once. I hope to God you never need a gun. In the meantime, for this mission you need a tourist camera. A simple, compact 35 mil SLR. Something up front that will arouse no suspicion, something you can afford to have confiscated if they do get suspicious. If you see anything of interest then you bury it in a mass of tourist snapshots. Snap the local totty if you like, shoot all the damn statues of Lenin, photograph the domes of St. Basil’s. And if you should ever need a miniature camera, Tom Radley, our man in Berlin, will issue you with one.”

  “Tom Radley? Good man, is he?”

  “One of the best,” Wilderness lied, regretting the throwaway remark and making a mental note to tell Berlin never to issue a miniature camera to Masefield.

  More coffee, more foaming moustache. Surely there were no more bits of spy-trivia the man could trawl up to quiz him with?

  “Tell me, Mr. Brown. Have you ever . . . killed a man?”

  It occurred to Wilderness to answer. It occurred to Wilderness not to answer. And while he made up his mind, Masefield was waiting, looking up at him in anticipation.

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Why? Because he left me no choice.”

  That was another lie, but no
amount of straining for sympathy with Masefield could convince Wilderness that the man was entitled to the truth.

  §23

  Moscow: December 1960

  Philip Bowles, fat and brutal, had given Masefield a black eye—on three separate occasions.

  Ronald Shaw, short and ugly, had kicked Masefield in the balls. So hard he was wincing with pain hours later and his mother had tripled any embarrassment by dragging him to the doctor.

  Patrick Gratian, tall and mean, had broken his glasses by knocking them to the ground and stamping on them. Masefield had refused to wear glasses “ever again.” He had blundered blearily around for years until common sense, NHS specs, and a newly nurtured moustache prevailed. Glasses branded you as a runt. Glasses and a moustache might hint at distinction.

  These indignities had befallen him years ago, a war had come and gone in the years that passed, an empire—our empire—had wrapped its shining yards and departed in shame, but there was something in Masefield that nurtured “never forget,” and at odd turning points in his life he would find himself remembering the school bullies of the thirties. Not in any sense of “I wonder where they are now”—they were every one of them in overalls at Rolls-Royce or British Railways, working at menial jobs for scrimp-and-scratch wages. He knew because his mother had kept up with the failures of all his school contemporaries via a network of over-the-garden-wall gossip, for as long as she had the wall, and reported to him with a neutrality that he never found quite credible. Masefield could not be neutral. He greeted every piece of bland gossip, every sacking, every divorce, every pennyweight of debt, with joy at the news—none of them had clawed their way out of the abyss. He remembered them with an inner voice saying “if they could see me now.” At every advance in his own fortunes a silent Masefield gloated over his invisible opponents—“if they could see me now.”

  Fewer advances in fortune, fewer moments of self-regarding glory could equal landing at Sheremetyevo Airport, as a paid-up MI6 agent. All he lacked was a gun and a camera. He’d buy the camera as soon as he could as Brown had suggested. Part of him wished he could buy the gun—it would complete the dream, but Brown had been adamant about that—only part of him: dreams were dreams and he wasn’t dreaming now.