The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Not names?’

  ‘Well, yes, the names he gives you. But the stayer – that’s the man we really want. That man will have more names in him than any Resident. He’ll have been passing names for years, dealing out the execution cards, never playing the game himself. And that’s what makes it practically impossible ever to get such a man. He’s never involved in any action. He’s just a walking list of KGB operatives.’

  ‘But he’s never going to give me his name. I won’t even see him. I’ll just get a message. Over the phone.’

  ‘Maybe. And in that case we’ll just have to settle for putting the squeeze on the people he gives you. On the other hand, I have a feeling you will meet him. He’ll certainly come face to face with you, without your knowing it. Besides, where can he phone you? Only at your UN office, since he won’t know your home number. Those are practically open lines for the KGB – and for the CIA. He’s not going to risk it.’

  ‘Just give me an outside number to contact him, then. A call box between certain times.’

  ‘And risk being picked up at that number, between those certain times? No, I think you’ll see him. I don’t think he’s going to risk phoning you – or writing anything down on paper. But if he does, well, we’ll just settle for the names.’

  ‘You call these KGB men they want checks on “potential unreliables” – when we get their names, are they going to be all that use to anybody? Surely we want the names of the reliable men?’

  ‘Just the opposite. You think it out. The KGB is doing half our work for us – pinpointing their weak links, the people in their networks open to pressure. Now your contact with us, when you get any names, is through Guy Jackson, one of our men, already in the UN Secretariat. He works in the Secretary General’s political department, African Section. And you should be able to meet him quite openly – informally since you’re both on the British quota to the UN – and professionally, since your Reports work can easily be made to coincide with his interests at certain points. He’s been briefed on all this. You’ll have no trouble there. And he’s your link in New York if anything else untoward happens.

  ‘Now, let’s go through the details of your UN posting. I have all Graham’s papers here on that – seems like a good job, lot of money, tax-free, and a lot of allowances. Even without a family.’

  ‘I hope I won’t have time to enjoy it. And – the family won’t need it.’

  A little nervousness moved over Croxley’s face.

  ‘Yes. I remember. Your wife. You were with Skardon four years ago, weren’t you? Got you twenty-eight years. I thought it might have been a frame-up, that. I think he did too. But the Crown insisted. Rotten business.’

  ‘My department insisted.’

  ‘Comes to the same thing.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t suppose the Queen was consulted.’

  Croxley opened a folder and drew out a large printed sheet headed: U.N. Secretariat: Salary, Grade and Allowances.

  ‘And I don’t suppose this will sweeten things that much either.’

  ‘Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.’

  ‘They’d have left you in Durham, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Croxley looked sad again. He had a facility that way. But it was a true gift. The light was dying now outside, even with the extra hour, and I felt sleepy again. The room was hot, I’d eaten nothing, and the whole long day had done nothing but repeat the promise of summer, full of the free, fine weather I’d thought never to know again. I felt all Graham’s appetites now, and more.

  ‘Listen, Croxley,’ I said. ‘I’m finished with being locked up. I’m doing the job, so let’s stop this zoo nonsense. I want some air, a drink. I’ll even settle for some olives.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Croxley was like an absent-minded aunt being at last reminded of the real interest of her visit for her schoolboy nephew – a ten-shilling note to blow in the tuck shop. ‘I can tell you about the job outside. There’s a pub round the corner. Wine bar, too, if you like that sort of thing. And a good Greek restaurant next door.’

  5

  Graham’s apartment was at the top of a narrow, ill-lit, almost grubby staircase, on the first floor, above a firm of medical suppliers in Weymouth Street just off Marylebone High Street. The contrast was abrupt, not because Graham’s rooms were squalid, but because, in the darkness, with the scalpels and wheelchairs spotlit in the window, one seemed to walk into something sharp and anonymous as a hospital only to find oneself immediately translated into unkempt life.

  One long front room looked over the street, with a large floppy sofa and two armchairs on an old but genuine Persian carpet. Three small rooms, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom gave off this to the back, their doors, together with the hall door, in a line along the wall like the set for a bedroom farce. At one end of the living-room half a dozen tea chests had been filled with books and papers and with small domestic objects – from the kitchen, the walls, shelves and tables. At the other end, a cabin trunk and three suitcases lay open and half packed with clothes. On a table next to the window were a duplicate set of keys, laundry book and parcel and a note from Pickfords confirming their arrival the next morning to remove the furniture and chests.

  I turned the light on in the bedroom which was in the same confusion. The kitchen, on the other hand, was conspicuously clean and tidy. But then, of course, he had rarely used it.

  The place had about it all the mundane doom of departure – old keys dug up from behind the fridge, last laundry lists and senseless, busy notes from Pickfords and the gas company. Graham had lived here for nearly ten years. It was hard to credit this in any measure of personal time. His jumbled possessions had reasserted all the predominance which they had had on Graham’s first confused day here, which they would always have in the end. They had been kept at bay by the force of his life in the place. Each moment he had spent there – active or even in sleep – the pots and pans, the furniture, the dirty shirts and the toothbrush had cowered from him, camouflaged in unwilling order. Now, as if sensing his demise, they had bloomed about the apartment with the speed and rapacity of weeds on a ruined estate. The armchair was an ambush finally that had once held him comfortably with a gin thinking of the evening – the sofa a booby-trap that had been carte blanche for many girls in all those ordered years.

  Then the voice rose from the bedroom next door, suddenly and sharply, a man angry in a hard north-country way:

  ‘Tell her I’ve left the country!’

  It was one of those few moments in my life that I wished I’d had a gun. Instead I looked around for something. There was nothing except a battery-operated gas light, like a child’s ray gun. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it.

  ‘Leave it,’ the man shouted again. ‘Keep away from the window. And stay there. If anyone comes, tell them to get out.’

  He was expecting the gas man or Pickfords sooner than I was. What a fool I’d been – going straight into it again, the oldest trick in the world, taking you at the last moment just when you felt in the clear. The voice was McCoy’s of course. He’d left the other apartment hours before and had hidden in Graham’s bedroom. Now his real plan for me would emerge. He went on in a different voice, dramatically confiding, really establishing his role in some wretched play. I’d hardly have credited him with the imagination but excitement will reveal quite unexpected resources.

  ‘The windows were closed,’ the voice said heavily. ‘The heat struck up at them from the linoleum. There was a stink of rubber and wax. One curtain was slightly drawn.’

  I looked around the kitchen. Everything was almost exactly as he said. I wondered how on earth he could see me through the wall.

  ‘All right, McCoy,’ I said, hoping to calm him. ‘Take it easy. I’m here. Come on out and tell me all about it.’

  But instead he continued: ‘Gaunt reached out to pull it.’ I was sure now that McCoy had lost his head, become the mad paranoic that I’d fel
t had always lain at the bottom of his character.

  ‘The calendar on the wall advertised a firm of Dutch diplomatic importers …’

  I moved my head a fraction. The calendar in Graham’s kitchen was by courtesy of a local delicatessen. McCoy seemed to have lost his grip completely. I stole towards the living-room and stopped just outside the bedroom door.

  ‘… it’s like a prison cell, he thought; the smell was foreign but he couldn’t place it.’

  I swung the bedroom door open softly with my foot.

  ‘“Well I am surprised”, Gaunt was saying. “This is Mr Harting’s room. Very gadget-minded, Mr Harting is”.’

  I went in and saw the radio next to Graham’s bed. It was a powerful mains receiver connected to the light switch which I had turned on at the door. BBC Radio 4: A Book at Bedtime. The announcer came in: ‘You can hear the next episode of John le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany tomorrow evening at eleven o’clock: episode three – The Memory Man.’

  And I was sorry then, for a moment, that it hadn’t been McCoy – that I hadn’t come back among him and Harper and Croxley, into a world of devious ploys. For Graham’s apartment was appallingly arid, so empty of everything, that one might even have welcomed McCoy’s deceits into its vacuum as evidence, at least, of life. The place badly needed people, arguments, chatter, even lies. Now it was just four walls where all the clues, like Graham, had been packed up and put away.

  I spent most of the next thirty-six hours unpacking them, looking for some real leads to the previous man. In the tea chests there were a great many papers, mostly copies of his African reports, but not many letters, apart from his mother and one or two other people.

  There were some yellow Kodak folders with a collection of rather uninteresting photographs of Graham and his family, together with the original negatives – the two seemed not to have been touched since they’d come back from the chemists thirty years before: childhood cameos for the most part: Graham at the zoo, the boy and the monkeys both grinning badly; Graham shivering on a Scottish loch, a boy from one of Arthur Ransome’s stories.

  There were other folders, too, packed tight with the detritus of life, odds and ends that are kept in the hope of a fascinating maturity – copies of his school magazine, a reference to his tennis skills in the junior championships, his University notes and the beginnings of a diary he’d kept on his first arrival in Beirut as a teacher. I thought this might prove significant but it stopped after the first few pages which included nothing but the usual traveller’s notes on the more obvious aspects of the city and its history. His university papers, too, suggested an intellectual approach which was traditional, even dull: a model student marking time.

  Graham from the first seemed intent on creating a very different image: something at once more formal and less true to himself – the image of a man with safe, unambitious appetites. He must, in fact, have entered his cover in boyhood – prolonged the natural adolescent differences with his parents in his hidden profession. And there were, of course, no documents on this lifelong disguise, no clues which suggested Graham’s real animation. He must have intentionally destroyed everything, the smallest item, which could give a lead to his real political character. The image here was of the completely reliable civil servant, the hack without inspiration or any other deviant quality. And yet one knew that he had been otherwise – that beyond his real politics he had been a happy man: a man sure in his own small pleasures, certain of the wider folly and frail in any other belief. And of this creed I could find nothing either, as though Graham had looked on such optimistic evidence as damning as the phone number of the Russian Embassy found in his notebook.

  *

  But I had my answer next morning. A collection of letters came for Graham that had been delayed for more than two months in the national postal strike earlier that year – business letters and bills for the most part, and one from his mother in South Africa. But three of the letters – or rather one long letter in three separate parts – were quite different, from a woman, without signature or address, postmarked Uxbridge, the large sprawling handwriting falling over the pages in a long hurry. These were the real clues I’d been waiting for – something no one could have foreseen. As I began to read them I realised I had left Harper and McCoy well behind now, feeling Graham’s real identity coming over me properly for the first time.

  Dear darling – he didn’t find out, he doesn’t know. I’ll write and even if this strike comes on it doesn’t matter – you’ll just have to read these letters like a book later, whenever you get them. I won’t say anything rash – just I must, I want to write. I’ll have to put up with him for the moment, that’s all.

  It’s as it was before we met – a terrible depression, living in a continuous drizzle from one day to the next, when I thought it would never happen again – you know, being excited – not knowing that there were even going to be good days again whenever I saw you. And when we loved each other, that it was going to be so easy, willing a thing – that it had nothing to do with disguise and cheating, I mean – with hotel bedrooms and porters in the middle of the night and all that. It wasn’t being in a strange place at all. We made up everything – absolutely – between ourselves.

  The point is I won’t be with him for ever, not for any longer than can be helped, he knows that. And that length is for the children, as soon as I can be sure of a proper settlement over them. I hate all this legal business. But having gone through with it in the first place legally I’m determined to get out of it properly in the same way. That’s a habit.

  It’s a habit too, the remnants of a stiff background as much as other needs, that makes me write to you in this almost indecipherable way, not giving a name or address and so on. I don’t want you to get involved in some boring divorce case with adultery as the reason. I want the grounds to remain ‘incompatibility’ or whatever – the truth just, of a bad marriage, and not the fact that I met you halfway through it. The facts of us should have no bearing on my failure with him – that you and I were so quickly together in hotels: that shouldn’t come into it legally, or in any way except for us. It was dead with him long before you arrived. I’ll go on with this later.

  Who was this woman? How long had she known George Graham? There were no answers to this. One could only imagine. How many months or years had they been slipping in and out of back doors and hotel beds, phoning on the dot at midday, two rings and the next one is from me? How long had there been the business of codes on the telephone, poste-restante addresses, and slipping her letters into the box next Mac Fisheries in Uxbridge on soaking Monday mornings? I hadn’t expected the clandestine everywhere in Graham’s life, with women as well as with Moscow. Couldn’t he do anything straight? But then I supposed, like all such lovers, they would have said it wasn’t their fault.

  A married woman, husband, children: Graham hadn’t had much luck – fighting and losing on two fronts, the personal and the professional. And these letters were the only clues to the affair, the only lifelines left, written to a man who was another man now. It was beyond irony.

  Wednesday

  It’s now six years since that party for the Africans in your office when we met. That man you brought back with you from Kenya working on the film with you, the one who was so keen at being at ease with whites that he did his best to get off with me, while you just stood there. He nearly succeeded too, one of those Belafonte men in a Nehru jacket, you know, without a collar, edged with gilt braid. Pretty handsome. Your secretary brought him over, Sarah something who had such dark eyes and spoke French. And I thought, I was sure, when they came across to me, that she was yours – you know, in that way. And that was the first time, the sense of disappointment. I felt it then before I ever thought of wanting you: a sudden feeling that I’d been caught doing something guilty, I didn’t know what. And then I knew what it was: I wanted to be with you and not Belafonte.

  I looked up Graham’s curriculum vitae. He had come back from East
Africa in the spring of 1965 – six years of clandestine effort, emotional and sexual. I wondered if the woman was really being true in thinking that hotel bedrooms and hall porters had added nothing to their relationship. Deceit will lend all the more impetus to an affair when we openly admit and discount that element in it from the start, for what we do then is to indulge in a stronger excitement than simply the illicit, which is to anticipate, to visualise, the strange wallpaper above the bed rather than waiting to be surprised by it.

  But certainly there was nothing casually indiscreet about it all. Six years of such dissembling was proof of gravity and application at least, and these are real attributes of passion. Graham, of course, hadn’t ever risked a note to her, I thought. It wouldn’t have been in character. But I was wrong: these letters was where his real character lay, reflected back at me now in the daring intimacies of remembered affection. These were Graham’s proper secrets besides which my own and Harper’s inventions paled.

  Saturday

  … ‘Thank you for your letter’ – I feel like a secretary – ‘of the 17th. inst.’ I picked it up OK. Yes, Africa. Of course it was mostly South Africa for me – he and his parents and the high plainsland before the children came. The Kruger National Park. And the Elephant did all the nutty things then that they did with us on that trip we managed in East Africa – waddling across the road that evening with their great wrinkled backsides, our hearts stopped, the car inches away from them; the leopard with its eyes in the headlights for a second before it disappeared into the long grass; the snake we crunched over later on outside the game lodge – stomach-turning – and the three lionesses creeping round the waterbuck in the mists by the river next morning …