The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Maybe. But why do you tell me that you’re a KGB agent? That’s more important. Why not get hold of your Russian contacts here, and tell them about me: that I’m impersonating a KGB officer. They’d be interested in that.’

  ‘I don’t have any contacts here. That’s why.’

  ‘Funny kind of agent.’

  ‘Yes.’ She stopped dead, passing the ball to me.

  ‘Well, there you are – that’s just it: you’ve confirmed something I suspected. But there must be so much more –’

  ‘Oh, the CIA could get the rest out of me. No trouble, don’t you think?’

  ‘Exactly. So why tell me? Without any prompting. No agent ever does that. I’m on the other side, even as a fall-guy, you knew that. It doesn’t make sense. You trusted me. Why? That you never do in our business. Never.’

  ‘You trusted me, didn’t you? – not telling them, or Guy, about Graham and me. And saying nothing about the letters. It’s quite simple. And that meal we had – watching you – watching you eat as if it hadn’t been for years. Looking at you. Talking with you.’ Then she came back and leant over the table, looking at me carefully. ‘About Rip Van Winkle, and my marriage – remember? And Women’s Lib. And before lunch – drinking, that Pernod or whatever, munching olives. It was pretty easy to trust you. And even easier, remembering you were George Graham. And wanting him.’

  I remembered Guy’s talk about how she had married him on the rebound. And it was the same with me, finding me that way as well. And I thought then that it was all too neat, too convenient: she’s only playing, pretending trust: she wants to find out more about me before telling her Russian contacts, before turning me over.

  She took up the coffee tray. ‘I can see you don’t believe it all – you’re looking for the flaw. But there isn’t any. Not for us. There needn’t be because neither of us are playing that game – not involved in the big league. You’ve something else on your mind altogether and I’ve very little left to do now. So don’t you see? – if we trust each other we’ll both get out of it in one piece.’

  ‘Why – why that trust in me?’

  ‘We’re both more or less transparent to the other – don’t you see that? That’s why.’

  I half saw … ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m no professional. But I know one thing about the business – they don’t let you out of it once you’re in. Least of all the KGB. Besides, to be with them in the first place, for them to have taken you on – you of all people – you must have believed in everything, hook, line and sinker. You surely don’t give all that up so easily – least of all just because your lover has disappeared. It couldn’t have been so weak a thing with you – so lightly to throw it away now.’

  She moved towards the door. I could hear footsteps coming towards the kitchen. ‘We can talk,’ she said. ‘There’s the whole weekend.’ She left the room.

  *

  Yes, she thought, that night in bed, he was right: it was no weak thing and I cannot, will not lightly throw it all away. But I must get out of this – not lose the belief, but the hell of believing and not being able to live or share it any more.

  Her two lives – political and emotional, both secret – now had no reality for her, were dead. With George, for more than six years, she had shared them both and could have lived that way well with him in the future. But there was no one now. He was gone. And her position with Alexei Flitlianov, whom she saw very rarely, was no more than that of post-mistress for his organisation, a safe repository for the letters that came to her private mailbox which she held under another name at Grand Central post office in New York – letters with envelopes inside which contained the coded names of the recruits for his clandestine agency within the KGB, in which George had been his principal overseas deputy.

  She had been nowhere near the mailbox in New York since the day she’d met Graham’s double at the UN, for she had to assume the worst – that they had found out about this poste-restante address from Graham in London, which he had used in writing to her – and would be watching it now, waiting to see who picked the mail up. And she had no way of contacting Alexei in Moscow. That contact was always one-way – a marked envelope in the box which she then opened. There was no other contact – George had been her only unofficial connection with Flitlianov’s group, a connection which Alexei had never known about.

  Thus she held the key, the master plan to the whole secret organisation within the KGB. And the group had now been penetrated by the British, of all people, and she was quite helpless to do anything about it, to warn anybody – for that had never been an expected part of her job since, apart from Alexei, she was never supposed to know the identity of anyone else involved in it. And she never would have done except for the chance of meeting Graham six years before in London.

  Of course, she should never have confided in George Graham. They should have stayed just lovers. Why had love made her so sure – and so stupid? Alexei had left her, almost fifteen years before in Beirut, with clear instructions: tell no one, ever, of her position; do nothing, ever, which might draw attention to her real beliefs. If anything ever went wrong in picking up the letters from Alexei she would have to deal with it herself – she was never to try and contact him. He had told her quite clearly that afternoon nearly fifteen years ago when he had bought them both a little cigarette pipe and driven round the hills above Beirut – warned her that she would take no risk at all in the work she wanted to do other than one major risk: immediate and complete exposure which she would have no warning of if the KGB, or anyone else, discovered her poste-restante address. Did she realise that? Was she so sure she wanted the task? … Yes, she realised all that, she wanted the task.

  *

  She and Alexei had been talking on the way to Bhamdoun, circling up the hill roads from the coast, the car windows all wide open, gradually feeling the increasing sharpness of the spring air as they rose higher towards the mountains. Beirut had been damply hot with the onset of summer, people oppressed and sweating already at ten o’clock in the café on Hamra where they had met that morning in the city.

  They drove for an hour and when they were high enough from the sea where the air was warm without damp or chill, and there was a sudden view down a small rocky valley – a ruined orchard, it seemed, of feathery scrub and old olive trees – they stopped, parking just off the road, and tried their cigarette pipes. They looked ridiculous smoking them – amateur comedians experimenting with a hopeless act – the long American cigarettes sticking up vertically about their eyebrows, shuddering up and down, their teeth chattering as they laughed.

  ‘It mustn’t be a strain for you. I’d hate that,’ he’d said later.

  ‘Hate to be saddled with me, you mean – the object of a hopeless longing?’ She laughed. ‘No. Not that. We’ve talked that out, haven’t we? You’re older – one foot in the grave – that’s the only difference.’

  ‘It’s quite a lot. Not just fifteen years; a totally different past – and a different future.’

  ‘We talked that one out too. We agreed on that: just to have now.’

  He threw the cigarette away and just sucked the pipe, examining the minute bowl carefully. ‘You have it all so well organised in your mind, Helen. You set all your feelings out so clearly – like things on a tray – all in order. As if you were older than I was, had lived it all, and found just these few really valuable things – got rid of all the rest – the bad feelings, disappointment, being hurt. I’ve always been amazed by the clarity of your vision.’

  ‘You’ve just an old-fashioned idea about women, that’s all – you old Georgian peasant. I’m not orderly for want of feeling for you either, Alexei, or to prevent feelings for you. Don’t think that.’

  ‘No. No – I know that.’ He paused, looking at her carefully instead of at the pipe. ‘It makes me frightened of leaving you that’s all, that’s what worries me. Missing your temperament. It’s something very important to me, your balance – yet your full love: the un
complicated way you express your feelings, yet the depths you show as well but never talk about. One wants that all one’s life – passion and the reason. One wants the same thing politically, after all.’

  She looked at his unbalanced face and thought how much his lack of symmetry appealed to her: the chipped front tooth, hair dark, even slightly coarse at the top, fine and going white at the sides, the eyes set a bit too close and too deep, the long arms a little too long and the torso a little too short. And she thought: we do not love human perfection. Have we come to that simply through long disappointment? Or is it a quality in our nature, a natural truth, an essential factor in the preservation of the world? And if so, why should we hold out such hopes for any political ideal? Why should she? As an antidote to human failure – hers as a child, and her father’s now – searching for an outside order, like a child ruminating in a huge candy shop craving the satisfaction of all that ordered sweetness. Yes, that had been the original impetus in her case, however much she had rationalised her beliefs afterwards. She might just as well have taken to God and all the hands of Providence, she thought.

  In the shape of her father humanity had dropped her once. Thus she expected – indeed could only love – imperfection and failure there. But politically, in retaliation for all unsuccessful nature, she wished for the moon. Yet fulfilment in that quarter would have frightened her as something quite unnatural. So she was secretly pleased at Alexei’s pessimism now, which confirmed her natural experience, and at the same time disgusted at her pleasure.

  They went a little way down the valley towards the minute vision of sea, pushing through the dry underbrush beneath the old trees, slipping on loose stones, frightening salamanders, treading on clumps of lemon thyme, running their nails along the stalks of other herbs as they passed, collecting dry balls of leaves, a pungent pot-pourri, pushed up into the palm of their hands as if by machine as they moved along, which they smelt before throwing them away behind them.

  And it was a bit of one of these leaves, thrown over his shoulder, that caught her in the eye, and his hands smelt incredible as he looked for it, the skin dry and the ribs on his fingers a little coarse like fine sandpaper.

  The hands of care about her face, without invitation or suggestion. They had not come here to do that. They had come out for the day to walk and talk and look – two ordinary people, she thought, ordinarily involved in the most casual pursuits, not bent on any sexual gratification, not grasping for emotional success. All that they knew they possessed in any case. And even though time was running out that did not matter either. Didn’t matter today, now – or not yet she wondered? Well yes, it might matter a little. And she would get over it. For surely there was that balance, that complete understanding between them that must include a palliative against any real future hardship?

  Yet now he had said he was going to miss something – her, it, everything … It seemed a contradiction of all the terms in their association. Now he was setting up loss, the hurt – assembling the bridges that she had never thought to cross, suggesting pain, and therefore creating a future that had never existed before – a time of empty, unhappy consideration and memory for both of them. It annoyed her.

  She said, angrily, ‘Why tempt me – tempt yourself – with a future between us, Alexei, sad or happy? Why do that with talk of missing me?’

  And she was surprised at the small, measured anger of his return: ‘You can easily think of now – there’s lots of it for you, even if it wasn’t a quality you possessed so fully anyway – living now, with reason, curiosity, passion, all that. But perhaps without too much reflection, the need for hope. And we need both: ironic reflection as well as the singing and dancing.’

  ‘Listen, what sort of hope can you suggest for us? If you had, I would have thought about it, I can tell you. Shall we go and live in Moscow? Or back in the States? Or anywhere – I don’t mind. But there isn’t that hope; there never was.’

  They had come suddenly, for the first time together, to that stage of telling things in love – putting it into too many words, justifying it, commenting, trying to commemorate it in speech and not in deed – the time when one feels the first intimations of losing it and tries to save it by punishing the other.

  Pain rose from somewhere strange inside her and blew up in her mind, a bitter explosion, and with it came a world of violent needs, an uncontrollable desire to demean their whole shared experience, to cut it all down to size and turn it into nothing more than a prolonged one-night stand.

  ‘Words, you have the words, Alexei – all as neatly arranged as you said my feelings were. And just because you put it into words you think it’s all explained – and therefore all over and all right. You’ve justified yourself – but not me, not my feelings. I can’t argue myself into that kind of happy goodbye anymore – I could, but not now, now you’re more or less saying it: “Cheerio, and toodleloo, and goodbye and wasn’t it wonderful? Absolutely great. Oh yes, and we shouldn’t worry about anything else, no, not at all, absolutely nothing. Because it’s been great – and hasn’t it been great in bed too? Hasn’t it? Smashing.” And that’s all there ever really was – all we really wanted: the now business and doing it first thing in the morning as well. And thanks very much and we can both of us reflect on it ironically afterwards. “Ironic reflection” – that’s just what I needed, that makes it all absolutely wonderful. But I can’t fucking well reflect on it all ironically. Not now.’

  ‘I didn’t say any of that, Helen. I said I’d miss your future – that’s what I said.’

  ‘That’s what kills me – because I’d never seen us missing each other until you mentioned it.’

  Tears came, unnoticed, her face angled from him, her vision clouding, a sense of warm water perfectly composed about her eyeballs, supporting them easily with a salty buoyancy, which might at any moment collapse.

  ‘What you’re angry at, Helen, is my loving you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I know the feeling, how much easier without that, with just the fun and the affectionate thing between us. And not the tense business under it all. I know that: the wasting sense when you’re thought of, not with me, which isn’t a feeling to live at all comfortably with, which is always pushing you to all sorts of desperation, which is not loving but more destroying, so that you would do anything to turn the tap off – but can’t. You’re sorry for that, Helen – those sort of feelings in each of us that we don’t talk about because there isn’t a future in it. I know. All we can do is live it now, and not think about it too much. And that’s marvellous. But it’s also very little.’

  And she didn’t feel like crying then. The tears had drained away while he talked without ever falling, leaving her eyes tender and ticklish and dry. And she could look at him now, and she did quite easily, and without any more anger. And she said, ‘Where shall we have our picnic?’

  9

  The sign above the side door of the liquor store at the end of the single village street of Stonestead said ‘Rooms – Vacancies’. But the door was locked, so Alexei Flitlianov came round to the front, stepped up onto the small verandah that gave out onto the hot tarmac, and came into the shop. There was no one there either.

  It was hot in the small quiet room – full of a long afternoon’s heat – with the quick ‘flap-flap-flap’ of tyres on huge trucks as they passed over the soft tar every few minutes outside. But outside there had been a breeze and on it now, coming from an open doorway that led to the back of the building, he smelt meat burning, the air singed with fat falling on charcoal, a dry smoky breath that he could almost taste in his mouth as it flowed through the room and out of the mosquito-wired front door.

  A woman appeared in the corridor, passing from the kitchen to the garden, wiping her hands vigorously on a meat-stained apron. But she saw him. She was a small, delicate, spinsterish, shy-looking lady with glasses, wearing very new coloured plimsolls. Yes, she had a room: $2.50 by the night, or $14.00 the week. He took it for two nights, paying in advance.


  ‘Put your car out back,’ she said, not at all shy. ‘Down the side. There’s a lot at the end.’

  ‘Grigorian,’ he said, though he’d not been asked to sign anything and she seemed quite incurious about him. ‘Mr Grigorian. I’m from overseas. Come to look up some of my relatives round here.’

  ‘Oh yes? Not a name I’ve heard round these parts. But we’re new here. Only a couple of years. They’ll most ways know in the store down the street.’

  She showed him up to his room.

  He had followed the Jacksons and the Englishman up from New York that same afternoon, an hour behind them, in a hired Avis, for he’d known exactly where they were going – to the house at Belmont. He’d seen Helen and the children with their summer gear piling into the car outside their apartment in the East Fifties and had followed them down Second Avenue to the UN building where she’d picked up her husband and the other man outside the staff entrance.

  He’d been nowhere near her mailbox at Grand Central post office, of course, and had sent nothing to it. Nor could he risk telephoning her – the phone would surely be tapped – for she was almost certainly being followed by someone else from the CIA or British Intelligence, as well as by Graham’s double, so that any direct approach to her in New York had been out of the question too. The only chance of making a safe contact with her, he felt, was in the wilds of the country, in the house upstate which she’d talked to him about in the past, where there was plenty of cover, where she went riding, where he might get a message to her and where there was a fair chance that any secondary surveillance might be dropped for the weekend. In any case, in those open spaces, he could see who might be following her – besides the other man, which he could not do in New York.

  The other man – the man the British had put in Graham’s shoes. How had he got onto Helen, he wondered? Simply through her poste-restante address in New York? They’d got that information out of Graham in London of course, watched the mailbox and seen her pick something up from it quite recently, then followed her back home and identified her. The man couldn’t have found her any other way. And now they’d be looking for all that coded information which she possessed, were closing in for it. Where did she keep it? Whatever happened he would have to get that correspondence first.