by Joseph Hone
‘I’ll do it myself.’ And I did.
‘Well, we lost the whole Cairo-Albert circle out there. And only you had been in touch with them all. Then you turned up back in England, remarkably, in the circumstances. How could the Egyptians have missed you, we thought, when they got everyone else? Because the Russians organised your escape, you were one of them, being sent home to roost again. We couldn’t really come to any other conclusion. You were the deep-cover man in our section, not Williams.’
I liked McCoy’s extra-legal, seventeenth-century use of the word ‘we’ in his précis, as though judges, in matters where the security of the state was involved, were no more than venal hacks, bewigged, red-faced oafs who could be paid off later with a yard or two of ale and a night out with John Cleland. ‘Cairo-Albert circle’: the ridiculous code designation rang out for me that morning like a distant ‘Tally-Ho!’ heard by a vegetarian, an omen of danger and disgust, swelling on the wind again, attractive and repellent in equal measure. For it is the unpleasant parts of old life that really stay with us, even when we have learnt the tricks of denying them any currency.
Yet somehow one is grateful, too, for this horrifying renewed evidence of a life once badly lived; for these viscous images, once resurrected, burn with a fierce warmth, while others, which were purely happy, seem beyond recall. And I was grateful that morning for anything, however shabby, which linked me indubitably to a past existence, which proved I had lived once, however badly.
And that must have been exactly McCoy’s intention – the thought behind his précis, with which he had to jog my heart. I would be no use to him, I was dead unless he could re-invest me with my previous identity, tempt me with the evidence of an old role. He knew the rot, the pretence, of offering anybody the chance of ‘turning over a new leaf’. He knew that what we really want is a future in old and rash ways, subtle approval of a lost excess – knew, with the perception of a psychiatrist, that if we are all prisoners (and there could be no doubt about that in my case) the grudge we bear for this insists that, for release, we must take up where we left off, not start afresh. And so that morning he called up for me my old self, the men, and all the details of the Cairo-Albert circle four years before, all the shabby folly of those times, as one drags a rotten carcase across the land to stir a fox.
‘What could we do? The evidence seemed …’
He shook his pulpy head in amazement as if the evidence had been as awful and incontrovertible as a quartered body in the well of the court. Whereas it had been as thin as paper, as insubstantial as the blurred photograph of a woman in Moscow in one of Springer’s scandal rags.
‘How could we have seen it?’
‘By looking beyond your nose. If you could.’ McCoy was prodding me, tempting me, searching out the vengeance, blowing the embers. And they were there, too. He knew that. I’d begun to feel the little heats myself.
‘There are mistakes. People –’
‘Lucky they’ve done with the rope then.’
‘People can be wrong. People –’
‘The law is an ass.’
‘One can be made a fool of – I don’t deny it. The Russians, the Americans too –’
‘Twenty-eight years is quite a price to pay – even for a fool.’
‘The evidence –’ he said. I interrupted him. Now I had suddenly found my stride in fury.
‘Fuck the evidence. And four years locked up alone in this place is quite a payment on account. What would you say the interest was on that – my interest? The compensation.’
‘Be reasonable, Marlow. Rationally –’
‘Where’s the application form, McCoy? One of those chits Miss Charlbury dealt with in the annexe? What’s owing this time? “Out-of-pocket expenses”? Right then. Item: to four years wait, sixteen seasons – how many holidays would that make in Normandy? How many lobsters in season with Muscadet? Or even the odd bottle of Guinness in Brighton? Anyway, item: missing the rain, drying in the sun, drinking myself silly – oh yes, McCoy, item: how much will you pay for a thousand opening times and friends in the evening? And how many women, McCoy, could you fit in afterwards, three long winters lying in different beds? Item: to a dozen casual girls – or perhaps one or two real ones – missing. And sometimes, McCoy, oh yes indeed, I used to watch cricket in the summer, tumbling out of bed with someone before lunch on Saturdays. Lords, and even the Oval. And there were the papers on Sundays. You’d have been surprised with my Sundays, McCoy, how little I did with them. But they were mine to lose. Item: to how many lost weekends? How many items for Miss Charlbury, McCoy? How many, how many?’
And then I was at him, uncontrollably, with what I thought all the precisely dictated fury of an animal. I was standing over him, squeezing his throat dry, my fingers crushing the old starched-white collar. I expected his eyes to bulge and choking noises but there was nothing. He sat on the chair impassively, his suit smelling of too much dry-cleaning, his torso shaking gently under what I felt was a barrage of force. When he started to push me away I thought my grip unbreakable so that I was amazed to see my hands slip from his neck, lightly and easily, as though they were oiled. When the warder came in I was lying on the floor, shouting. ‘When will I be paid, McCoy, for all that, all that …’
And McCoy was happy, helping me back onto the bed. There was lightness in his face, a relief, the expression he’d assumed in the old days when some bureaucratic ploy of his had come off, when someone, like Henry, had just left his office and had started on his long journey down the river. His face reflected a professional’s joy in a point well taken; he had discovered my enmity again, accepted in my lifeless fists the crucial transference which signals a cure. He had wound me up secretly, compressing the vehemence, like a toy. Then he had slipped the catch.
*
We were alone again. I was cold. Suddenly the quilt had no warmth in it and I wanted sheets and blankets. I drank the coffee and it had a taste The cigarette seemed fragrant as woodsmoke.
‘What were we fighting about, McCoy? I don’t remember. Except that you realise I was framed. You’ve found out about Williams. So now what do you want? I’m free –’
‘Yes, we’ve found out – something. Not about Williams. So don’t jump too soon. That depends about your being free. Depends on you, in fact.’
I could see it already. Another plan, no doubt as careful as the one that had sent me after Henry and given me a life sentence. But in this case it would take me out into a world whose flavours I had just begun to sense again, and I had to remember not to snatch at it, not to show too willing. For the truth was that I’d have done anything to have been in London that weekend, to book a hotel room there and disappear into life.
‘Listen, Marlow, just listen. Then you can take it – or leave it.’ McCoy looked about the cell and up at the small window with its view over the roof of the old laundry if you stood on tiptoe. The day was grey and wet, a smell of sodden ashes coming on the wind from the garbage dumps on the other side of town. I knew what he meant. He went on confidently now, as though recounting an old chestnut that yet never failed to please. ‘A week ago we took a man in London, fellow called George Graham, deep-cover KGB. An illegal. He was on his way to start a satellite circle in the United States, one they have to spy on the spies there. Just a lucky chance, one in a million, that we got on to him. He used to be involved with our circle in Beirut and afterwards in Cairo, but before your time there. His cover till now has been as a Senior Reports Officer with the COI, advising on overseas propaganda, doing radio and television programmes and such like. He’s forty, dark hair, pretty well built, fluent Arabic, few connections – he’s been out of the light for a long time, but he knows the ropes all right. He’s quite a bit like you in fact, Marlow. And he’s going to New York next week …’
‘And he’s dispensable – just like me,’ I said when McCoy had finished outlining his ‘suggestion’ as he put it. ‘The old story, I’ve heard it before. It’s what put me here.’
‘And it will
take you out. Dispensable, yes. But that will be up to you. If you survive, you’ll stay out. All this – will be forgotten.’ He looked around him again.
‘I’ll get a medal.’
‘None of us are indispensable,’ McCoy said quickly, as if to forestall an accusation of cheating. And for that moment I believed him, sensed that, at heart, he recognised his own failures intimately.
‘Besides, you’ll survive. You’re just as much an unknown quantity as this other man. Most of your trial was in camera. The photographs the press dug up on you were from five and ten years before. And no one will know you from Adam in the United Nations. Point is, Marlow, we’re going to turn you into a completely new man – new name, new background, new future. That should be your cue – a real chance to start over again.’
‘Jesus, you like the games, don’t you?’
‘You tell me a better way of setting you on your feet? Ten years as Reports Officer with us, Arabic, the right accents – you’ll pass as someone born to the job in the UN. And the Third World they’re always talking about: you know about that too, don’t you? – all those grubby backstreets in Cairo and bilharzia in the canals.’ McCoy raised his eyes again to the high window and the dark grey clouds like smog rolling over the city. ‘That’s what should worry you, Marlow.’ He nodded sagely at the bruised view, curling his lips a fraction, like a picture restorer contemplating a hopeless canvas. ‘That should be your first concern. Fresh fields and that. Isolation kills more than anything. You’ll be doing yourself the favour.’
‘And you.’
‘And us, Marlow. All of us are going to be happy. I’ve thought a lot about it.’
‘I’ll bet you have. Another plan up your sleeve for dumping me somewhere worse than this.’
‘What could be worse than this, Marlow?’
The main door into ‘E’ wing opened and slammed. I heard the milk lorry leaving, the churns bouncing over the little concrete ridges they had before Main Gate to slow the traffic down. Then the train robber’s door opened down at the end of the corridor. He was going out for exercise. The dogs had been shut in between the new electric fence and the east wall. A siren shrieked, then died, in the town. Automatically I knew the time, the date, the day. The Governor’s twelve o’clock lunch, lamb chops and HP sauce, the tin canteens that would come up from the main kitchen to our wing, to be left untouched. Then the doctor’s orders, the hospital food that was just as unpalatable. I’d come to live on crackers and honey at that time, listening to the talk of drip feeds behind the screen.
The only thing I really doubted then was my strength to play the role McCoy had offered me. I had already accepted it, there was no doubt about that, listening to the robber’s footsteps, his high-pitched laugh with the warder, as they went out to walk those concrete circles in the gloom. He would always be stuck with the man he had been, the failure of his past. Even if he reached Copacabana beach he would never throw off his grubby identity; he would always inhabit the same devious turns of mind, trying to swindle Allende now, instead of the Postmaster General. But I was being offered a whole fresh personality, a cure which would really make a new man of me. It would be a matter of survival to forget my own past, not to look backwards, to live in a new present: rehabilitation in the grand manner. I might learn to forget vengeance, too, and the other acids that eat up time, forget disenchantment in the swirls of another man’s future. That was the theory anyway.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right then. You’d better give me the details.’
The rain started in earnest. All morning it had fluttered minutely on the window pane, spotting the glass in odd hurried squalls before dying. But now when it came the sky was so black and full and close that it was hard even to imagine fair weather. McCoy’s face darkened in the gloom but the features were clear enough – those of a smiling conspirator, of a boy who sets out happily once more from the softly lit stairhead into the darkest recesses of the house, hiding from Nanny before bedtime.
McCoy got up and switched on the light.
‘You’ll be out of here by morning. We’ll do the rest in London. You’re being transferred, Marlow. Another jail. Place isn’t safe enough to hold you. They’re dispersing all the dangerous fellows, you know. Sending them all over England. Into the wide world.’
I spent a long time that night taking McCoy’s plan apart, isolating the pieces, looking for the flaw, the other plan he had for me behind the first. There were a dozen awful possibilities, besides the one of twenty years more inside, and before I slept I was sick of thinking of them, knowing, as McCoy had, that I’d risk anything to live again with alternatives, whatever they were, for that was the world.
3
Alexei Flitlianov – now Timor Gregorian, an Armenian business man from Beirut – looked out from the bedroom window of his hotel just off Marylebone High Street – gazing at the doorway of the apartment building to his right some way down on the other side of the street. It was his third day in London and his second morning’s vigil. The man he was looking for had neither left the building at breakfast time nor returned there in the evening and the lights in the front room in the apartment had never been switched on.
George Graham had disappeared. Perhaps he’d simply left town to say goodbye to a friend or relative in the provinces. But more likely he’d been caught. Flitlianov had always feared that it had been Graham’s voice which their KGB London Resident had originally picked up on the telephone which British security had been tapping. But Flitlianov had no way of finding out now. All he could do was wait and watch until the day Graham had been due to leave for New York and hope that he’d turn up.
Flitlianov started to move away from the window but just as he did so he noticed a very muddy car drawing up at an apartment doorway twenty yards down from the hotel on the same side of the street. There was something official about the large new saloon, he thought vaguely – something institutional in its dark blue paint, its small two-way radio aerial on the roof. Three men got out. And now Flitlianov was sure there was something unusual about the vehicle. For two of the men had the knowing solidity of plain-clothes police everywhere in the world, while the third, a taller, younger man, had all the marks of a prisoner – weak, unsteady, at a loss in the strong light, the noise and bustle of the city. After more than twenty-five years close observation of the clandestine Flitlianov recognised these characteristics almost automatically. The party disappeared into the doorway of the building. It was almost opposite Graham’s block on the corner of the High Street. Was there any connection between them, Flitlianov wondered? He settled down again by the window to wait and see.
4
‘We’ve just three days before your boat goes,’ someone called Harper said to me, with a face like a piece of bad carpentry, looking at me unhopefully. We were in the front room of a third-floor apartment next-door to a hotel just off Marylebone High Street, where I’d been taken direct from Durham that morning. The furniture was covered in dust sheets and there was a faint smell of gas in the rooms. Harper opened a window and I noticed the weather in the south had taken a turn for the better, brisk and cold, and bright – big-city weather with the houses like white cliffs and the sun as sharp as silver paper. Footsteps shot up from the pavement below with a metallic clatter which was quite unreal to me. Now that I was face to face with it I had no conception of people walking freely in a street and felt the need to keep away from the windows, as though crippled with vertigo.
Harper went over to the window. ‘His apartment is there, opposite us on the corner. You’ll be moving in tonight. This meanwhile will be HQ Ops. as it were. We’ve rigged up some data for you next door.’ We walked through into what had been a dining-room but was now cleared of most furniture. Instead there were photographs of Graham and other blow-ups, of his handwriting, letters he’d written and received, and suchlike, fixed onto a row of insulating boards which had been set up about the room. The dining-table had been left and on it were Graham’s personal effects,
the last known bits of his life: a tweed jacket, flannels, latchkeys, wallet, a square-faced gold-cased Hamilton watch, an old Mentmore fountain pen, long-stemmed briar pipe, roll of Dutch aromatic tobacco, a catalogue of Warhol’s Graphics from the Mayfair Gallery, some restaurant bills and two paid accounts, one from the Express Dairies and the other from a car-hire service which had taken him to Wimbledon for some reason a week previously. The room was like the remains of a bad accident in which the body had disappeared completely, disintegrated by the force and thrown in pieces to the four winds. Harper bent down, turning on a radiator.
‘Tailor fellow’ll be coming later for any alterations. Bringing shoes too. We don’t seem to have had the shoes. Try the jacket on for size. Just been cleaned. Had any experience of this sort of doubling?’
‘Who has?’
‘No. I suppose not.’ I put the coat on: ‘Not bad. Sleeves could come out an inch. You’re about that much taller than he was.’
‘Was?’
‘To all intents and purposes. Don’t worry. You’re not going to bump into him in the street.’ Harper laughed, ‘Used to do it at school – the dressing-up bit. Every Christmas. Midsummer for us actually in Australia. Lot of horseplay.’
‘Nothing so funny as horseplay – as horseplay with death.’
‘Yes … Well, then. Let’s take a look. The face is a more difficult business.’ We moved towards a series of enlarged full-face and profile shots of Graham. Harper looked from me to them. ‘Nothing much there I’m afraid. A fuller face altogether. And more hair. Prison doesn’t help, of course, with you. And Graham was leading the good life by all accounts. Eating in all the best places in town; cinemas, theatres, museums, art galleries – the lot. You’ve seen the details already, haven’t you? – the Special Branch reports?’
‘Yes. But you’re not going to try and fake my face, are you?’
‘We thought of it. But there’s no point. No, the point of all this is that we have to make you feel completely in his shoes. Confidence in that is everything. Second skin – and you’ve got to really feel at home in it. Now, to do that you’ve somehow got to get to like this man. Then you’ll come to look like him. To all intents and purposes. Sympathy is the second thing, Marlow. And let’s hope that’s not too difficult. He seems to have been quite a likeable fellow, by all accounts. Apart from his politics, of course.’