by John Lawton
He jerked into waking.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know; I cannot see a thing.”
“How long have I . . . ?” He looked at his watch. He’d been out for three-quarters of an hour. It had suited her not to wake him.
“We haven’t long,” he said.
“For what?” she said.
“For you to tell me how you and Viktor came to spy for the Russians.”
She stared at him and said nothing. Black eyes behind the black veil.
Then she said, “I don’t know where to start.”
“Why not start with meeting a Russian. You must have encountered one at some point. You can hardly have answered a small ad on the front page of The Times.”
She sighed.
“Auschwitz,” she said. “It begins in Auschwitz.”
She sighed again, but the narrative was already in motion. She was reluctant to tell him what he wanted to know but he knew she’d do it all the same. It had its own momentum.
“In January nineteen forty-five, the Russians took Auschwitz. I wasn’t there. I was on what is now referred to as the death march. I do not know how long I had been walking . . . how many miles . . . how many days . . . but they overtook us. They undoubtedly saved my life . . . and they took me back to Auschwitz. In the commandant’s house they fed me and gave me fresh clothes and let me sleep. When I awoke they told me what I had worked out for myself, that they had not stumbled across me, they had been looking for me. You may imagine the odds against them finding me alive. They asked me to become a spy. They set in front of me photographs of three people, all of whom they said spied for them, all of whom mattered to me—indeed, after the death of my family, possibly the only people who mattered to me: Magda Ewald, whom I had known since childhood, who played with me in the Vienna Youth Orchestra and the Auschwitz orchestra; Viktor, whom I had known since I was ten; and Karel Szabo, whom I had known practically since I was born. Obviously, I said yes. They had me and they knew it. I never found out how they knew I knew Szabo, so I conclude he told them himself—if so, then he set me up for all that happened—the miracle is that they kept track of me while the Germans had me.
“In January nineteen forty-five, they knew Szabo was at Los Alamos and what he was working on. In the summer of forty-five, after the German surrender, they sent me to Paris, assigned me to a mentor to learn the trade of the spy while Viktor arranged the permits and visas to get me into Britain. The English were willing to give Viktor a knighthood, instead they gave him a partner. It was really very easy. They fell over themselves to please him. I arrived in the spring of nineteen forty-six, clutching my cello, a fully-fledged but untried spy.
“By then, Szabo was at Harwell. I was the one who met with him. Viktor never met him, and I never met Skolnik. Szabo would turn what he wanted to tell the Russians into a code—he loved that, it appealed to the mathematician in him—and he gave the master key to me. The basic went out via Skolnik to whoever his conduit was, and Viktor and I turned the master key into music. Then we could play it anywhere: London, Paris, Berlin. It was never written down. We never went near Russia, we never met with any Russians. It was foolproof. For nearly two years we played out the secrets of the atom bomb, worked into Schubert, Fauré, Beethoven . . .”
“Debussy?”
“Yes, Debussy. Do you know, you may well be the only person on Earth who noticed?
“This spring, Viktor met with Skolnik and told him he wanted to stop. Skolnik said no. Viktor met with him again, three or four times. Viktor had been a party member for thirty years but the truth was, he wanted to free me, not himself, to free me from being a Russian ‘hostage.’ Viktor did not care about himself. Each time, Skolnik said no. And then, in July . . .”
Her hand waved away the sentence into nothingness. Troy caught it midair.
“And in July, you killed Skolnik.”
Voytek’s hand froze in the gesture. Then touched her heart with fingertips pressed against the fabric of her coat.
Troy said, “Do you really think I thought Viktor had done it? Viktor Rosen wasn’t capable of killing anyone. You killed Skolnik.”
For a few seconds Voytek said nothing. The diddley da of the moving train loud beneath their silence. Troy filled it.
“And you told me you’d never met him.”
It sounded peevish but that was not what he meant. He’d no doubt she’d told him a hundred lies. One more or less did not matter.
She answered all the same.
“I did not lie; I never met Skolnik. I shot him in the back. Do you call that meeting him? We weren’t even face to face . . . I shot him in the back.”
“With a gun that used to belong to Princess Astrova.”
“Yes . . . with Astrova’s gun.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I told you, not five minutes ago, that the Russians assigned me to a mentor in Paris . . . Troy, I have to trust you now . . . this can go no further . . . if you tell me you are listening with copper’s ears I stop now.”
“If I were listening with copper’s ears, I’d’ve slapped the cuffs on you five minutes ago.”
“My mentor was Astrova’s son. Prince Sergei Oblonsky. I knew him as Serge. He is very much the Frenchman now. The gun was his parting gift to me. I’m sure he meant the jewels to be of value, not the gun itself—who knows, that may yet come to be.”
“You prized them out?”
“I have them here.”
She patted the handbag on her lap.
“My own private piggy bank. Much as my two gold fillings served me for a year in Auschwitz. I prized those out, too. Portable property, I think your Charles Dickens called it. It doesn’t come any more portable than teeth.”
“You missed one. A ruby.”
“I don’t mind. I got diamonds. You keep it.”
“July,” said Troy, picking up the thread. “And in August, three Czech agents called on Viktor in Chelsea to ask about the death of Skolnik. Were you there when they came?”
“Yes.”
“Hiding in the back of the apartment?”
“Yes. How do you know this?”
“They came to see me, too.”
“Ah . . . I see . . . and this afternoon they came back. They came to me in Clover Mews. I was out, but one of the neighbours described a man with scars. Him, I remember. I saw him through the crack in the door as I hid at Viktor’s. So I run. They will be back. So I run.”
They’d reached the point where their stories met. Full circle. There was so much Troy did not want to tell her. There was so little he would tell her.
“No,” said Troy. “No, they won’t.”
She looked baffled by this but pressed on with her story.
“It was August. After these men left, Viktor said that he knew we would never be free. I think it was then that he began to plan his suicide. Again thinking if he cut one more link I would be free. Without Viktor the system was useless. We had no way to communicate with them. Whereas I had thought that without Skolnik it was useless. But without Szabo it had to be useless. We would have nothing to communicate to them. So I denounced him. I hoped that if I denounced Szabo he might, in turn, denounce all of us. And we would be free.”
“Free to go to prison.”
“Free to go to a prison that one day would let us out. And I would have taken the blame for Viktor . . . I would have said it was me all along. They might have believed me. An old man, a famous man, a man with no apparent Russian or Communist connection. Viktor had been a party member since the Great War, but no one knew. But I timed it wrong. I gave them Szabo by an anonymous letter. And Szabo did not denounce me. Perhaps he wanted to be caught. Perhaps, as you English say, blood is thicker than water. I imagine Szabo told them nothing, and by the time MI5 decided to tell the press, Viktor had killed himself. It was only a matter of hours. If he had waited . . . oh, God, if he had just waited twelve hours.”
Troy waited. She was breathing so heavily
he thought she might cry, but she didn’t.
“And now?” he said.
She reached into her handbag, drew out an envelope, and handed it to him.
“Now . . . I denounce myself. Anonymously. There is no one left to do it. If it works, then I shall be free. If it works the Russians will never know that I denounced myself. I cannot turn myself in—unless the English hanged me, sooner or later I would be released, sooner or later the Russians would come for me. But if I am betrayed, no matter by whom, and if upon betrayal I am lucky enough, clever enough, to escape the English, and to defect, then I shall arrive in Russia as . . . as a hero. A hero so well known that I will be useless to them. Completely useless . . . and I shall be free.”
“You’re going to Russia? Joe Stalin’s Russia? A totalitarian state which doesn’t begin to understand the word freedom? And you think you’ll be free?”
“Yes.”
“After all you’ve been through?”
“After all I’ve been through? Troy, what is it you think I’ve been through? Some mix of physical torture and moral re-education? What do you think Auschwitz did to me?
“I went into Auschwitz a girl with a stick up her arse. I came out a woman with a stick up her arse. That’s the only thing a year in Auschwitz changed. Why? Because the greatest lie of all is the ennoblement of suffering . . . that suffering ennobles. It does not. Szabo summed it up very neatly to me after the war. He said he’d been in camps from Oranienburg to Los Alamos—he could not count the months he had spent behind barbed wire, German barbed wire, British barbed wire, American barbed wire—and he had learnt what I had learnt and not put into words . . . that you can come to accept almost anything as normal.
“I’ll accept Russia, Troy. Russia will be a new normality to me, and after the normality of Auschwitz quite possibly a pleasant one. Auschwitz taught me that everything is a commodity. Russia knows this par excellence. It is the one country that knows the price of every commodity. It has priced and numbered them all, for all to see. I shall not find such a system strange in any way. I shall not be a victim, I shall be free, for freedom does not abide in an ideology. I shall not be a pariah, I shall be free, for freedom does not abide in a moral code. I shall not be a prisoner, I shall be free, because freedom thrives in the absence of desire. I shall be . . . a lily of the field—I shall not toil, I shall not spin, I shall play . . . because that is what Russia will want me to do—after all, I shall be useless to them as a spy—and I shall be like a star of the Bolshoi or a champion chess player . . . or a lily of the field, a beautiful but useless adornment to their culture.”
Troy did not know how much of this he believed. He remembered Jack telling him that whoever killed Skolnik had balls of steel. This—throwing the Russians off the scent by defecting to Russia—this took balls of tungsten.
“A lily of the field?” he said without, he hoped, any trace of incredulity.
“Yes,” she said. “Better that than some Venus rising from her cello case, wouldn’t you say?”
So, she’d noticed after all.
Troy took the letter from her. Stuffed it unread into his coat pocket.
The train had pulled into Dover station. So engrossed had each been in the other, neither realized for the best part of a minute. They walked to within twenty yards of the barrier at the top of the ramp that led down to the ships and the sea, the customs and the passport control. They had missed what rush there might have been and found themselves alone by gaslight, wrapped in half-darkness. She stood with her back to the barrier. He stood with his back to England.
“If you would send one copy to MI5 and one to a newspaper—you pick, I never grasped what was what with English papers. Wait until Friday. I have things to do in Paris. Things to be, I think you would say, ‘wound up.’ On Friday, I play a Bach concert in Paris. On Saturday, I will be en route to Vienna. I play piano, Fauré’s first Piano Quintet, on the Wednesday after. A guest of the Vronsky Quartet. With any luck the story will break between the two concerts. And while the concert hall is in the British sector, I shall, of course, be staying in the Russian sector with the Vronskys. All of whom are Russian. All of whom are at the mercy of the state. And, of course, all military patrols in Vienna are international. Four strangers in a jeep. The British would not be able to make a move against me without the Russians knowing. The concert will be cancelled—I will disappoint my public, I will disappoint myself—it’s not often I get to play the piano in public—they had asked Viktor, almost needless to say—and I was surprised when they accepted my offer to stand in, but it was as though they had thrown me a lifeline. If I needed a way out, a way east, this was it. I didn’t have to take it, but it was inevitable that I would. I shall rehearse a piece I will never get to play—no matter . . .”
The backward shake of the head, the irritated tick under her left eye told him it did matter. It all mattered.
“I cannot see the Russians letting me keep that date. And . . . and a few days later I’m sure I will turn up Moscow. Maybe I read a statement they have made up for me, maybe not. Maybe they deny everything. And then, sooner or later, I start to play in public again. Not Paris, not Amsterdam . . . but perhaps Berlin, Warsaw . . . God knows, maybe Yakutsk . . . Magneto-Gorsk? Whatever.”
Troy felt as though he should have a speech ready about the insignificance of two little people and a hill of beans somewhere.
Instead, he said, “I can’t come any further. You know, passport control, customs. All increases the chances of being noticed.”
“I understand.”
“There’s something you must do for me.”
“Name it.”
Troy opened his coat, and said, “Open yours.”
As she did so, making a loose tent with his, he took Danko’s gun and shoved it under her arm.
“Drop that over the side about halfway to Calais.”
“I see,” she said. “Is this why the Czechs will not be back?”
“Yes.”
“You shot them?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have to kill them all?”
Troy said nothing.
She said, “No matter. Why do I ask? It’s not as if they were real, is it?”
Troy said nothing to this. He’d known all along insignificance would figure somewhere. Instead, he said, “Did Viktor know you killed Skolnik?”
“I don’t know. I can’t be sure. Certainly, I never told him.”
She kissed him, her head brushing the brim of his hat.
“Good-bye, Troy.”
Troy pulled the brim of Jordan Younghusband’s hat back down and watched her leave England. Then he went in search of a local train back to London. He was puzzled at a phrase she’d used and had not found the opportunity to ask her about it—“blood is thicker than water”—but then English was far from being her first language.
§151
He’d no idea how long Jordan would need. Even if the house was spotless by now, he didn’t feel like going home to it yet. Checking into a hotel was good advice. It might be as well if he did. It was gone four a.m. when he got back into London. He walked away from Victoria Station, into night and fog, picked up a cab in Buckingham Palace Road, suffered more cabbie wisecracks about being lost, and checked into the Ritz.
Just before nine he called room service, ordered breakfast, and then he called Anna.
“I hear you have a day off.”
“Oh. It’s you. Yes. Ten of them, a sort of loose transition between the NHS and Harley Street. Angus calls it my demob leave. As though I’d done National Service without the capital H. Thanks, by the bye, thanks for sending him home.”
“I need you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I need your professional services.”
“Oh, my God, what’s wrong? You’ve been shot!”
“No, I haven’t. I just need a little TLC and I’d rather it were you than Kolankiewicz.
Bring your bag of tricks. I’m at the Ritz. Room 323. Don’t be long, I’ve ordered breakfast for two.”
Over bacon and eggs she told him he had two cracked ribs and a broken toe on his left foot. The ribs would heal naturally as long as he did nothing strenuous for a week or two. The toe would be fine, it just wouldn’t bend where it was meant to bend.
“Your TLC was understatement, wasn’t it. You’ve had the shit kicked out of you. It’s your internal organs that worry me. The bruising on your chest and abdomen is awful. I’ve never seen so many shades of black. Are you peeing okay?”
“So far.”
“No blood?”
“No.”
“And nothing when you cough?”
He didn’t think he’d coughed lately, but that, too, she took as a good sign.
“Well, perhaps you’ll live. How many of them were there?”
“Three or four.”
“Bloody hell! You’re lucky they didn’t kill you. Will I be reading about this one in the papers?”
“No. No, you won’t. Nobody will ever know about this.”
Her hands paused on the open bag. It seemed to Troy that she might have worked out why no one would ever know. That if they had not killed Troy, perhaps it was because Troy had . . .
He watched the invisible veil wrap itself around her, with its gift of silence. He told her he needed sleep.
She closed her bag, ruffled his hair, kissed him lightly on the forehead, and said exactly what she’d said in nineteen forty-four when she’d visited him in the London hospital, “I always knew you were a fool.”
What was it Fish Wally had called him, not a fool . . . a dreamer?
He was woken from the dream—a host of cellos as mad and malevolent as Mickey Mouse’s barmy broomsticks—by the sound of the telephone. He looked at his watch. Four p.m. He’d been asleep for about five hours.
Jordan’s voice saying, “Troy?”
And then his own saying, “How did you find me?”