by Joseph Hone
‘But he’d done his stuff by them. Covering for the others – Maclean, Philby. That was a certain skill. He knew we’d look right through a good-humoured classy drunk like him, never see a thing. Knew we’d notice his boozing, though, which would take the pressure off his friends. His indiscretions saved them all.’
McCoy turned away, curious at this sympathy. He felt a sudden unease standing next to this man who had once stood next to Burgess, in the very same spot. And though Croxley hadn’t let Burgess go, had played no part in that disaster, McCoy felt that he was somehow guilty by association, as if he had picked up some infection in that innocent drink he’d had with Burgess twenty-five years before, a disability which would tell in the coming hours with another traitor fifty yards down the street. McCoy looked round at the unchanged, ancient bar with its dark woods and barrels, its crusted panelling and ports and crystal, and thought there might be something buried here, in the wood or forever in its air – some gremlin or omen which favoured only the bad fairies, some hidden order which might reach out again at any moment, to protect the chancey, the dishonest, the laughter-makers, against all the ploys of honest people.
In fact, it was Croxley’s sympathy that had brought him to the top. He held a gentle fascination for the men he set out to trap. In another world they would have been among his closest friends at the Club. He appreciated their lying skills and secret humours, and failure to take them at the end had never soured his appetite, as it had McCoy’s.
It was so obvious, Croxley had always thought – a man, traitor to one side, was all the more necessarily hero to the other. And you had to recognise the other side of the coin whether you liked it or not. Other people had a right to their heroes, even if, as he knew, such men everywhere died miserably for little good.
They sipped their drinks again. McCoy thought he had spotted some sediment rising in his glass. But it was a trick of the light, golden motes above the counter caught in a sunbeam. The shower was dying outside.
Once they were sure the man was with the KGB, having tapped his phone, they had watched him for nearly two months, hoping to trace his contacts – from the Embassy, some other deep-cover ‘illegal’, or someone in the British forces or Intelligence. But he met no one. And no one had come near him. At first they assumed the man was sleeping or that he reported in some other extremely intermittent manner. Then, when they discovered he was making preparations to go abroad, they realised he was on transfer, marking time before his next posting, keeping his tail clean. At least, everyone except McCoy believed this. McCoy was still certain that he would make some contact before he left. And so Croxley and the others waited for orders to take him. McCoy was running the show.
‘Another week,’ McCoy had said. A fourth, then a fifth. This was the eighth week, close surveillance, round the clock, and Croxley had come to know their quarry, in his sympathetic way, like a friend one remembered in every detail but hadn’t spoken to for a long time – but a friend for all that, where the friendship would last no matter how long the parting. But he thought McCoy an optimistic fool who should have known better.
The man lived off Marylebone High Street, halfway up towards Regent’s Park, in a small flat above a firm of medical suppliers, and until a week before had gone every day to his present work as a Senior Reports Officer at the Central Office of Information in Westminster.
A week before, he’d finished his packing and there’d been a small party at his flat, saying goodbye to a few colleagues and friends. But he hadn’t left. They’d learnt that his booking on the New York boat wasn’t until a week later, and they’d watched him all the harder then – for surely, McCoy thought, this would be the week for some last contact, for some final check. But nothing happened. Even Croxley was initially surprised at this hiatus, while McCoy was incensed by it.
The man spent the week like a tourist, walking endlessly about the city, but with aims of sheer pleasure: he went to art galleries and museums in the morning, cinemas in the afternoons, theatres and restaurants at night. He had even fitted in the Tower of London and the Bridge as well. Croxley’s men had pursued him diligently, egged on by sighs of horror from McCoy. They skinned their eyes for a contact or a message drop. They had gone into public lavatories after him, rooting up tiles and destroying expensive flush systems. They had quizzed waiters, museum curators and vehement little ladies in the box-offices. They had stuck to him like clams, done everything but sleep with him, and had come up with absolutely nothing. He had spoken to no one, written nothing, dropped nothing nor picked anything up. He had fallen out of all his old life like a stone and come into pleasure like a tremendous inheritance.
McCoy had been involved in the chase from the start. The man had at one time worked indirectly for his section while he was with the British Council in Beirut. Almost certainly, McCoy thought, the KGB had recruited him there at the same time. Probably Henry Edwards had done the work. For Edwards, they’d discovered – just before his death in Cairo in 1967 – had been a senior KGB officer in British Intelligence for nearly twenty years.
And now, impossibly, like a bad joke long condemned, here was another man in that disastrous chain, one more character popping up in the big book of deceit, negligence and snobbery that had for so long characterised British Intelligence. It had started with Burgess and Maclean, then Philby, Blake and the others. And just when they’d thought it finished four years previously with Edwards, here was another ghost that had quietly laid ruin all about them, and who, when caught, would cause them more trouble still. For to catch a man like this was to publicly compound the vast defeat. Better to leave him free, some thought, with tabs on, than to win Pyrrhic victories at the Old Bailey.
But McCoy didn’t believe this. Retribution was his guiding star. So when Croxley had come to him and told him of the chase, he had put on his riding boots and grabbed a whip, like the old-stager he was, full of anger and discredit. McCoy thought he saw a chance of saving everything, never admitting that the battle had been well lost long ago far from any fields which he, in his small way, patrolled. Now he believed, with a flush of acid hope, that he could save the day by catching more than just this single traitor: through him he would feel his way along a chain, find the initial contact and take the rest one by one – deep-cover ‘illegals’ he hoped, as this man was, operating quite outside the Embassy or trade missions, few of whom had ever been caught in Britain. That would be the saving grace. McCoy saw at last a golden page for himself in the unwritten history of the service.
So it was that the man’s innocent behaviour upset him intensely; his infuriating independence came to plague all his hopes. The man had said goodbye to everyone a week before but hadn’t left and had done nothing since. Yet he must have stayed on for some clearly sinister reason, for what sane man – a Londoner from birth – could take pleasure from a constant wandering about a place he must know so well? – through streets that had been always his, among parks and buildings and trees that had stood up on his horizon for half a lifetime. And the man had looked at all these familiar shapes, and all the objects of the city, with such intensity and contentment, as a stranger might, come to a dying Venice for the first time.
McCoy couldn’t understand, but it hadn’t taken Croxley long. For Croxley knew what could come over someone before they left their country – the moods of an industrious nostalgia, the need to imprint all the last reminders, fix the solutions of a city: because you might not come back, or would be prevented, or because everything was at risk in any case: the buildings would be torn down, and the parks and trees tidied up and put away. So you banked as much pleasure as you could before you left and might take a week off, alone, to do it. But McCoy couldn’t accept such wilful licence in a man. His character, as much as his profession, condemned him to ulterior motives, while he had long ago been taught that pleasure was a permit, not a liberty.
‘I only hope you’re right,’ he said to Croxley. ‘That he’s just been looking at the city.’
> ‘He’s taken a week off, grubbing around. Why not?’
‘As if he knew it was his last chance.’
‘He doesn’t. He just likes to do that sort of thing. He’d do it anyway. Besides, it’s always a last chance, when you think of the buses. Or a slate from a roof. There was a job I was on once, waiting outside a pub in a bit of a wind, and this sign fell on me, bloody thing – “The George and Dragon”, inches –’
‘Yes, but why doesn’t he see anyone, though? None of his friends. Just picture galleries and matinées. And eating. You’d think he was working his way through the Good Food Guide.’
‘He’s resting.’ Croxley looked at McCoy’s puzzled face. It was his turn to explain. ‘As actors say. Pity to take him, somehow.’
‘You’ve too much feeling for him, Croxley. Too much altogether.’
‘If I didn’t feel for him, sir,’ Croxley put in with real and quiet concern, ‘if I didn’t get into his skin with feeling, we’d never get him. It’s the feeling that gets results you know. That’s how Philby and the others survived so long, playing double. They had the feeling. We kept our heads in the sand.’
McCoy looked displeased, as if the sediment had, after all, been lurking all the while in his ale, and had just then risen, souring his mouth. The big crevices in his face narrowed and his lips puckered.
‘You still think he may make some contact?’ Croxley asked with care but in an easy tone. ‘It’s two months now. There’s been nothing.’
‘One more afternoon. One never knows – some last-minute instructions, a change of plan.’ McCoy was angered by the inevitable apology in his voice.
‘I doubt it. As I’ve said before – they let a man sleep completely before a transfer. Give him an absolutely blank trail. It was only sheer luck we got onto him in the first place with that phone call. He had his last instructions six months ago and more, I shouldn’t be surprised. When he was accepted for this UN post. They’ve been preparing this move for years. With a deep-cover chap like this they take the long view, you know.’
‘All right. We’ll just see where he goes after lunch. A last shot. Then you can take him.’
‘The Wallace Collection.’
‘That’s near here, isn’t it?’
‘Round the corner.’
‘He must have been to it before then.’
‘Usually not.’ Croxley was like a doctor with sad news. ‘One never seems to get round to the sights on your doorstep. Look at me – been living next to Clapham Junction for over thirty years – and never taken a train from there.’
‘Yes – but why the Wallace?’
‘He usually does a gallery after lunch.’
‘And he’s done all the others?’ McCoy was as weary of the man’s aesthetic proclivities as he was of Croxley’s ability to forecast them. The two men seemed as master and student in a university where he had no arts.
‘Most of them.’ Croxley took out a notebook and murmured the names quickly: ‘BM, National, National Portrait, Tate, V and A, Horniman, Sir John Soane; then the private galleries: the Bond Street ones, most of them – and even the ones in the suburbs. Wimbledon – he was there yesterday. I don’t expect he’d leave the Wallace out of that collection, do you? Stands to reason, sir, not feeling.’
‘A pound to a penny, Croxley.’
‘A pound to a penny it is, sir.’
The two men looked at each other, their eyes meeting in grim measure for a second. Then they left the pub and walked down towards Hinde Street past the Greek restaurant.
2
They could see him now inside, sitting with his back towards them in the window seat. Nearly every day he had taken lunch there, before setting out on his odysseys, and each day there had been one or two of Croxley’s men with him, at some other table, but he’d always been alone and had never spoken to any other guest. McCoy had gone there himself for lunch a few days before, just to be sure, sitting in a corner as far out of the way as possible.
It was an unpretentious Cypriot place, not a kebab shop. There was linen on the tables and Mediterranean fare of some variety, even originality. If McCoy had not appreciated this, sticking rigidly to the ‘English’ side of the menu, he had been horrified at the man’s demeanour: he had used the place like a Continental, as a regular and concerned patron, knowing the waiters, speaking some of their language, savouring a decent if in no way elaborate meal – houmous, sometimes a rice soup, warm pancakes of hollow bread, followed by a pork or lamb kebab spiced with an interesting chopped garnish – always a freshly dressed salad and a half bottle of some Attic burgundy, ending with a gritty Turkish coffee. And olives: big, puffed-up black olives, glistening in their own clear oil. He never missed these, keeping a bowl of them by his plate throughout the meal, picking them out at odd moments, punctuating the other foods with relish, biting the flesh decisively from between thumb and forefinger and letting the pips drop neatly in a line along another plate.
At the end of the meal he would smoke a pipe of some mildly aromatic tobacco, Dutch perhaps, certainly not English. And the day McCoy had been there he had taken a glass of Metaxas brandy with it, though this was not a regular feature of his lunch. He left his serious drinking and eating for the evenings – nothing stupendous apparently, Croxley’s men had reported: a succession of carefully chosen menus in small restaurants of repute about the city. And his other pleasures had been carefully listed too: Monday. Furneaux Gallery, Wimbledon: Watercolours by John Bratby. Tuesday. Hayward Gallery: Art in Revolution – Soviet Art and Design after 1917. Wednesday. Marlborough: Sidney Nolan – Recent Graphics. Thursday. Mayfair Gallery: Andy Warhol – Graphics and Paintings. Friday. British Museum: Treasures from Romania: 4000 years of Art and Silver. His interest in the theatre and the movies was fully represented as well – almost every decent thing that had been on in London that month.
The man’s father had been a master printer. They’d traced that back easily enough – and no doubt that explained his interest in these graphics and suchlike, but this did nothing to ease McCoy’s temper; indeed it increased his resentment. These gastronomic and artistic concerns reinforced McCoy’s unease tenfold; made him suppose that just as the man visited so casually so many different restaurants and strange imaginations, so in the end he would give them the slip too and disappear forever into the world, where he seemed to have a season ticket, whereas a choice of sausages and suet puddings and smutty seaside postcards would inevitably have limited him and McCoy would have slept easier.
They walked quickly past the window but McCoy had time to glance again at the tweed jacket, the broad back leaning forward at that moment, reaching for an olive or glass. He wasn’t that tall but the face was like the back, McCoy remembered – a good square face, slightly leathery and tanned from years in the sun, relatively unlined for a man more than forty. He had the air of a sportsman, McCoy thought – like one of those bronzed Australian cricketers that he’d seen playing in England just after the war. Not muscle-bound; his would have been the summer games, of rules born in fine weather, played on strings and wood, on beaches and underwater: the lightly-coppered face, like the dust of travel – gestures so fluid that they seemed melted down by the years of sun and recast in a happier mould, sinews that had relaxed and lengthened with fulfilled pleasure. He was like the end of rationing, McCoy thought, the bitterness rising in him sweetly like justified tears, or a hamper from America in the famished winter of 1947.
The face was conventionally handsome in a lost way, as in some old advertisement for pipe tobacco in the thirties; the clear, open expression of a ‘good sort’ in those times: a casually tended but reliable face, gleaming spontaneously from an enamel hoarding. He might have driven a Sunbeam Talbot around Surbiton before Munich and married a little woman of those parts that blowy suburban day Chamberlain landed at Croydon with a piece of paper. There were nowhere about him clues to a contemporary life, nothing indoor or metropolitan, no smoky rooms or brandy or modern art – no suggestion anywh
ere of McCoy’s horror at what he had always seen as the epitome of dissolute bohemianism: an interest in graphics and oysters.
Above all there was nothing of Moscow in that quickly good-humoured face, no trace of Beria, the Berlin Wall and all the good men gone. But there it was, and McCoy realised he ought to have seen it sooner: trips to view the likes of Messrs Warhol, Nolan and Bratby were commensurate with the worst the KGB had to offer. There was no doubt they were clever people, fiends …
They came to the end of the High Street to the great grey hulk of the Methodist Church on the corner, where they met Reilly, one of Croxley’s men, who had just left the Greek restaurant. He was wiping his mouth surreptitiously, shamefacedly indeed, like a Bunter come to grief. A streak of something, some foreign gravy, ran down his lapel.
‘Nothing, sir,’ he reported. ‘Except –’ He choked a little. ‘Except those wicked little starved sardines to begin with –’ He stopped again, trying to batten down the hatches on some sickness within him.
‘Anchovy, Reilly, anchovy.’
‘Sir! Well then that flour paste, four sticks of pig, most of a bottle of Greek red biddy and a glass of that caramel water they call brandy. Quite a blow-out in fact. Think it means anything?’
‘You’re getting quite expert, you lot, aren’t you?’ Croxley said. ‘In the Greek manner.’
‘I don’t know about that, sir. I shouldn’t like to be in the Greek Special Branch, I can tell you.’ Reilly smothered a belch.
‘I expect not, Reilly. Though they do very well on it out there these days.’
‘Oh, and the olives. More than the usual quota I’d say. Piping and poking at them all through the meal he was.’
‘Summers is still inside with him?’
‘Frankly, sir, I came over a bit queasy after the meat. Needed a spot of air. Summers is looking after him.’