by Simon Mawer
On its coral island the device known as Ivy Mike steamed in the tropic sun. It steamed because it was a cryogenic system, the deuterium fuel for the fusion stage being supplied in liquid form at -249.5°C. The steam was water vapour condensed by cold out of the damp tropic air. To achieve such frigid cold, the whole assembly had been set up within a vast vacuum flask, with compressors working all the time, struggling like Sisyphus against the forces of nature that forever attempted to warm the flask up to the ambient temperature of the central Pacific.
Twelve thousand miles away, in London, Fawley watched Marian Sutro with an expression that mingled anticipation with satisfaction, like a child promised sweets. ‘David Trofimovich Absolon,’ he told her. ‘Newly accredited press officer at the Soviet embassy. We have, over the years, been watching this man. He started his career in the Red Army, writing for Red Star, the Soviet Army newspaper. After the war he appeared to move into full-time journalism with the TASS news agency. His writing appeared in Izvestia, Pravda, that kind of thing. Various foreign postings – Berlin, Vienna, Paris. And now he turns up as press officer at the embassy here. We think he is probably rather more than that.’
‘More?’
‘He is almost certainly an officer in the GRU.’
Marian looked blank.
‘Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye. The Main Intelligence Directorate,’ Fawley was warming to his theme, almost, but not quite, rubbing his hands in delight. ‘It’s possible, but unlikely, that he’s part of the MGB, Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the Ministry of State Security. That’s a rival organisation. You know the kind of thing from the war – the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst. One watches the other and they both watch us and neither is really sure who the true enemy is.’
‘You mean Absolon’s a spy?’
He pondered the matter, like a cleric ruminating about the distinction between priests and deacons. ‘I suppose one should call him an intelligence officer. He’d be responsible to the London GRU rezident, who himself reports directly to Moscow Centre. The ambassador doesn’t come into it. Indeed, for most purposes the London rezident outranks the ambassador.’ There followed a pause, one of Fawley’s pauses when you knew that the question was already formulated and he was letting the silence expand sufficiently to allow it appropriate space. ‘How exactly did you come to know this man, Marian?’
‘I told you, I met him in Paris a little while ago.’
‘Met him?’
‘At the Soviet embassy. I had a meeting, and there was Absolon. We had dinner together …’
Another pause. ‘In a group?’
‘The two of us.’
‘Just the two of you? You never mentioned this before.’
‘I didn’t think it mattered. It was a personal thing.’ She felt angry. What had it got to do with Fawley or anyone else? ‘Look, I knew him already. We met in Hamburg during the Ravensbrück trial where he was a liaison officer with the Red Army. Someone introduced us and we got on quite well. His English is excellent.’
‘So I believe. It seems he spent a large part of his childhood in England. His parents were academics.’ There was another pause. You could measure conversations with Fawley by the silences. The longer the silences the more there was to say. ‘You say you had dinner together. Do you mind telling me the exact nature of your relationship with this man?’
‘My relationship?’
‘How well did you get to know him?’ He looked at her impassively, the priestly face, waiting. In all her dealings with him, she had never shocked him. But now she wanted to see it in his eyes – puritanical disapproval.
‘It was largely sexual, if you want to know, Mr Fawley. We became lovers. Just one occasion so far but I daresay there will be others. Does that make me an unacceptable security risk?’
He considered her for a moment. What was he trying to assess? Was he endeavouring to work out the motions of her mind, understand how she might sleep with someone quite casually, as she pleased? Was he measuring her against his own tidy suburban standards? He shook his head. ‘Not at all, Marian. It suggests that, with your expert help, we may be able to turn him.’
‘Turn him?’
‘If you have no moral scruples about it, of course. I would hate to cajole you into anything that you were unhappy with.’
Unhappy. She considered unhappy, watching Fawley with curiosity, as though he were a specimen in the zoo, some nocturnal primate behind a glass wall.
‘There is a term for it,’ he added. ‘Most eloquent, really. Honey trap.’ And then, quite easily, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, they were planning what might be done and exactly how, the minutiae of an operation that she recognised from those days in the war, planning her own mission to France. ‘You’ll have to tread carefully,’ Fawley said. ‘Can you manage it?’
Something lit inside her, some little flame of elation. ‘Can I manage it?’ she repeated. ‘Of course I can.’ And she thought, because she was no fool, because she understood how they worked, because she was, in Fawley’s own words, ‘one of us’, she thought, They’ve been waiting for this to happen.
Photos
She felt a sense of exhilaration, as though she’d taken a drug of some kind that lightened her mood and stripped away her fears. As she walked through the narrow streets of Soho she watched for watchers on her tail, half hoping that she might find them so that she could throw them off with the carelessness of someone tossing aside a scarf. But to her disappointment there was nobody following her, no one interested in this woman catching a bus on Oxford Street to go down the Bayswater Road. She got off the bus two stops too far and watched to see whether anyone got off with her but there was no one trailing her as she left the main road and made her way back through the side streets towards the absurdly named Moscow Road.
The address Absolon had given was not far from where the Security Directorate used to be, not far from where she had been interrogated by Senter in those days when she was a nervous wreck just returned from Germany. That irony struck her. Perhaps it would amuse Absolon too. The house was one end of a terrace, set back from the street by a small garden that had been paved over to allow a car, a black Austin saloon, to be parked off the road. She walked a little way past, glancing up at the windows of the terrace opposite. Lace curtains. Blank reflections of the sky. A residential street in the silence of midmorning with nothing unusual about it. She turned left and left again, circled round a block and came back to the house. This time she went straight up to the front door and rang the bell. Immediately the latch released, as though someone inside had been waiting and knew that she was there. The door opened onto shadows and multicoloured brush marks of light from a fanlight above the lintel. And Absolon waiting in the narrow hallway.
There was an awkward moment of greeting, each nodding forward to kiss, both going the same way for an instant, the confusion resolved with an embarrassed laugh as they sorted out the double kiss, left cheek to left cheek, right cheek to right. He hung her coat and ushered her through into the sitting room with a certain formality, as though she were being interviewed for a job or something. ‘You found the place,’ he said, which was obvious really, because here she was, wasn’t she? ‘It’s good to see you again,’ he added.
‘Yes, it is. To see you again, I mean.’ She laughed to cover her confusion.
‘Were you followed?’
‘How do I know if I was followed? Why should I be?’
‘You never know.’ He fussed around her. Would she like to sit here? Or over there? Was that quite comfortable for her? A cushion, perhaps? She looked round, trying to get the measure of things. The plain furnishings must have come with the house – a three-piece suite of pre-war ugliness and a coffee table with copies of the Illustrated London News and Punch, the kind of things you might find in a dentist’s waiting room. Over the dead fireplace was a painting of an English pastoral scene. Only the desk was clearly his – a chaos of papers and books around an old R
emington typewriter: handwritten notes, a copy of The Times, an ashtray full of cigarette ends; and a framed photograph of a plain-looking woman wearing a padded jacket and a beret. The camera was angled upwards to look at her and she was smiling, as one does when confronted by a lens. Was that his wife?
He nodded. ‘Yelena. Taken in 1943, just before she was killed.’
There was a moment’s silence, as if the dead were being acknowledged in some way – he, his wife Yelena; she, Benoît, or perhaps Véronique. Had she told him about Véronique? She couldn’t quite remember. He walked over to the window and looked out. Lace curtains added a haze to the view. Outside, a couple walked past, heels clipping the pavement out of synchrony with each other, a stuttering syncopated sound like something you might hear in a jazz band. On the other side of the street a car drew up and a woman got out with a bag of shopping and a terrier dog on a lead. Mundane events in mundane lives.
‘Do you want something?’ Absolon asked. ‘A drink, perhaps? Or coffee?’
‘No thanks.’
He was standing there looking out of the window as though uncertain how to proceed. But wasn’t it plain enough? She’d come here for one thing only, hadn’t she? Wasn’t that understood?
‘This isn’t easy,’ he said in the portentous tone of someone carrying bad news.
‘What isn’t easy?’
‘May I speak to you honestly?’
‘Is there another way? What’s this all about?’
Absolon coughed. He didn’t turn to look at her. Was he embarrassed about what was happening? Confronted by the photograph of his wife, was he feeling some kind of guilt? She didn’t know. That was the confusion of casual intimacy: you know so much and so little about the other. She had opened her body to him and yet he remained as foreign as another country, apprehended only in the way that a casual visitor recalls such a place, by a glimpse, a smell, a taste.
‘Apparently there was a visit by two dancers from the Kirov State Ballet,’ he said. ‘A couple of months ago, before I arrived.’
‘We helped arrange it.’
‘I believe so. And it was, in many ways, immensely successful. So I am told.’
‘So what’s that got to do with us now?’
Again, a little cough. ‘I am going to put my cards on the table.’ He enjoyed his English idioms, she remembered that from the first time they’d met. Sometimes he got them slightly wrong – something a little anachronistic perhaps, or the precise context incorrect – but more often than not he was dead right. And in this case the turn of phrase seemed even more appropriate because he left the window and went over to the desk, took a card from a drawer and laid it carefully on the table in front of her. Except that it wasn’t a card, it was a photograph.
He turned it round for her to see.
The print was grainy but the scene was plain enough: a narrow room illuminated by the stark light of bare bulbs. Two men were sitting on a sofa directly across the room from the camera. There were glasses, an open bottle, cigarettes in ashtrays. The younger of the two men had his feet up on a low table. He had a wide, Slavic face with a hint of Asia in his high cheek bones and slanted eyes. His elaborate lips held a cigarette that he was just about to take between two fingers of his left hand. He was entirely naked. The man next to him was wearing underpants and a vest. Also smoking. She recognised the naked youth as one of the ballet dancers, a young man called Ilya. The other man, the one in underpants and vest, was Ned.
‘Oh, Christ.’ She felt ill. Vomit crouched behind her breastbone, poised to leap upwards. She managed a few incoherent phrases. ‘Where …?’ ‘Oh my God …’ That kind of thing. And part of her thought, this is the axe falling, and it has come from an entirely unexpected direction. She had been waiting for the solemn officers of the law to tramp into Ned’s life with a summons to the nearest police station. She had feared exposure, scandal, shame, the tearing apart of lives. And instead she got this man from the Russian embassy, in an agony of concern and embarrassment.
Absolon produced a silver cigarette case and offered her a cigarette. There was a moment’s business with a lighter before she could draw smoke in and settle her stomach.
‘Where did this come from?’ she said finally, knowing the answer even as she asked the question. The embassy had rented a flat to house their precious dancers and keep them out of harm’s way. Keep them from the temptations of London life. And here was one of them, stark naked with her brother. ‘You set him up, didn’t you? You put temptation in his way and you deliberately set him up.’ But she knew there was another part of the truth. It was she who had invited Ned to the performance at Sadler’s Wells, and afterwards it was she who had taken him backstage to introduce him to the performers. She recalled Ilya, a strange, self-regarding youth who kept flexing his muscles as they spoke, as though if he stood still his joints might seize. At the time he had made her think of a racehorse, something animal and highly trained and mindless. She recalled his shaking Ned’s hand, and then later, seeing the two of them in a corner of the dressing room, laughing together, each trying to understand what the other was saying and neither really caring.
‘There are …’ Absolon hesitated … ‘other shots. Not the kind of thing I can show you.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that? I’m not a child. If you are about to blackmail Ned I may as well see all the evidence.’
He snapped angrily. ‘I’m not trying to blackmail anyone. If I were, I wouldn’t be showing this to you. I’d be presenting it directly to your brother.’
There was silence. Outside a car drove by. Somewhere a door slammed and someone called out. But the words were indistinct and irrelevant because what mattered, all that mattered, was the photograph on the table of her brother, and the second one that Absolon retrieved from the same drawer and laid on the table beside the first. This one was different. Ned was naked now, kneeling before the equally naked Russian dancer like a suppliant before a religious statue. Ned’s mouth was full.
For a moment she toyed with the idea of grabbing the beastly things and tearing them up. But that was absurd. There’d be copies. These probably were copies. She would just look like a hysterical fool.
‘Let me explain,’ said Absolon.
‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘But I think you have to. For my sake as well as for yours; and your brother’s. I have managed to take charge of this case—’
‘It’s a case?’
‘Of course it’s a case.’
‘And you’re not just a humble press officer to His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador, are you? You’re a spy, an agent, an intelligence officer, whatever euphemism you care to use. You probably always were, even when we met in Hamburg, certainly when you fucked me in Paris—’
The word fucked stuck in her mind. The rasp of it. The violent fricative and harsh plosive. He had done that to her, spread-eagled her and fucked her. Anger bubbled to the surface of her distress. She looked at him with something close to hatred. ‘You targeted me, Absolon. I believed in the things you said – that your country was trying the greatest social experiment ever and rubbish like that. And all the time you were laughing at me. We shared our ideas as well as our bodies and you didn’t give a damn. Fucking me and laughing at me, that’s what you’re doing. Weeping over your dead wife and telling me how lonely you were and all the time you were just doing the bidding of your masters. Go after her, they told you. Win her over. A honey trap, isn’t that what they call it? You win over a gullible woman and you get to stick your cock inside her as well.’ She slithered to a halt, on the edge of tears.
‘None of that’s true,’ he said.
She fumbled with her cigarette, drew on it, felt the acrid smoke inside her. ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’
He waited. That was the gift of an intelligence officer – to wait. Even through a mist of tears she understood that well enough.
‘So what is true?’
He gave a sour laugh. ‘Isn’t that wh
at joking Pilate asked?’
‘Jesting Pilate. And he asked, what is truth? Which is rather different. And he wouldn’t stay for an answer. But I’m staying. And waiting.’
There was a silence. Thoughts scrambled through her mind. Fawley, what Fawley would think of this. And Ned. His stupidity. Cupidity, perhaps. And hers as well, coming here on this nondescript afternoon to a nondescript corner of London expecting to have sex with a near stranger. We may be able to turn him. Clément would laugh if he knew. And what would Benoît have said? Suddenly, inconsequentially, she realised that she didn’t know Benoît, had never really known Benoît any more than she knew this tall thin man with the ascetic, angular look of a Jew. A man to whom she had offered her body with barely a thought about the implications. She was no better than Ned with his priapic dancer.
‘The truth is,’ Absolon was saying, ‘in my world there’s no difference between ordinary work and intelligence. The overlap is complete. I’m a diplomat, with diplomatic status and within my work I have … various responsibilities.’
‘You mean, you’re a spy.’
‘And when I get posted to London, I find this case dropped in my lap. Is that what you say? Dropped in my lap?’
‘It fits.’
‘It was started by my predecessor, but he has been unexpectedly recalled. So I’ve inherited it. With clear instructions from Moscow.’
‘From Moscow?’
‘Unfortunately it has gone that high. We in the field are just dancing to their tune. No different from what you were doing ten years ago.’
‘There was a war on then.’
‘There’s a war on now, except that this one doesn’t yet involve killing people. We hope to keep it that way but I doubt that the Americans do—’
‘You targeted him. Maybe not you personally but the system. The bloody system.’
He came and sat down near her, not touching her but close. ‘Of course he was targeted. What do you expect? We look at anyone who may help our cause in any way. Do you think the British and the Americans don’t do the same? And now with Professor Fuchs out of the picture we obviously considered the new possibilities and how we might approach a likely informant. I’m afraid my predecessor came up with this particular idea. I can’t pretend it’s very pleasant and I’m not even sure if it would have been effective, but that’s what he did.’