The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  But the other man – he, him, the unknown rather uncertain-looking Englishman wearing Graham’s clothes he’d followed all across the Atlantic – there was something strange there, beyond the man’s impersonation, which worried him. How had Helen become so immediately friendly with him? How had he picked up with her so soon, so easily, so conveniently?

  He remembered the long lunch the two of them had had together in the Norman restaurant on the West Side and the street accident afterwards where he’d nearly been caught with the other man who’d been trailing her – a long meal of close chatter within a few days of meeting the woman. Was it all just sheer chance – or had the man some other personal or previous relationship with her? And in any case why had the British chosen the same man to replace Graham with and to follow her? Sheer administrative convenience perhaps? He could think of no other reason.

  He unpacked his small suitcase, looked over the new Zeiss pocket binoculars, cleaned the lenses gently, and then found the little pipe at the bottom of the bag. Without thinking he put a cigarette into it and smoked it that way for the first time in fifteen years. He looked at the tiny piece of wood, the yellow bakelite stem, the minute cherry bowl, the ridiculous angle of the cigarette, the curling smoke. And he remembered briefly – a very mild memory with nothing harsh in it – the first time he’d smoked it. He remembered being in Beirut simply a man with her and not a KGB agent – the pipe was full of all that, so much easier a life, when a person had obsessed him and not an idea. And the temptation there’d been to follow that emotion through and not the dry toil of political theory. Of course with her he might have had both, the first nurturing the second – the salami curling in the sunshine of that olive-filled valley and the long haul of revolutionary change. But that would have all have had to take place in the West, as a defector, as an academic somewhere perhaps, as an outsider in any case, as one of so many dispossessed Marxists, intellectual agitators whose work could never be more than a frustrating, masturbatory itch, an idealistic commentary or forecast on a movement which you had to be inside ever to influence. A man thinking as he did, at the very centre of the KGB, was worth a hundred hopeful books from sympathisers in the West.

  And so he had stayed in Russia – and left her outside in the world for other men to have lunch with, and long talks in small Norman restaurants on the West Side.

  What had they talked about? He wished his long training could have told him what – that his profession as spy could have done this one thing for him, more important than all the other things at that moment: the words, the tone of voice, the angle of her face, the statements and hesitations – the tempting magic of two people at the start of even the most casual relationship; the unique stance they will take towards each other – the spoken thought, and the unspoken one behind that; the present fact between them; the next one already forming, jointly proposed, immediately agreed upon and defined, and the limitless variety of future moments. That was what lunch with her had been like in Beirut – the meetings in the early days. And he realised that he was thinking of Helen and this other man as potential lovers, not as quarry and hound. Or old lovers? – the thought suddenly struck him. He sensed – or did he imagine? – this extremity of familiarity between them, thought he saw in their behaviour the beginning of something, or the happy renewal of an old habit.

  10

  In London that Saturday morning Harper had come in specially for a meeting with McCoy in their Holborn office – an empty glass honeycomb, shot through from wall to wall with bright July sunshine, Mid-East espionage and Navy Recruitment both closed down for the weekend. The duty security officer let them into McCoy’s office on the eighth floor in the northern wing and a smell of sun-warmed disinfectant greeted them, a disgusting mixture of synthetic lavender and carbolic.

  McCoy studied the text of the message which had come up overnight from Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham, rustling the flimsy but heavily typed orange paper, the letters pierced through to the other side like Braille.

  ‘Well, Marlow’s had nearly two months – and no joy.’ He looked up at Harper, passing him the message. ‘Nothing. No approach to him. And no approach to the mailbox at Grand Central. And nothing sent to the box either. We’ve no idea who the person is who’s getting all this stuff – the names of all these people. They must be onto us. Someone’s seen through Marlow.’

  ‘Of course we don’t know how often these communications take place,’ Harper said seriously, trying to give his hope weight. ‘Or how often the letters are picked up. They may let it pile up – or the recipient may be away.’

  ‘It’s no good, Harper. Something should have come through that mailbox by now. It’s the only dead-letter drop for this KGB internal security division in America. There must have been messages to send. That’s what Graham was going to do in the States after all – be given a batch of names from that box and check their security out.’

  ‘Well, we know it’s a woman.’ Harper pressed his optimism. ‘The Post Office authorities in New York told us that. It was a woman who rented out the box in the first place.’

  ‘Yes, three years ago. And the clerk fellow had no exact memory of what she looked like.’

  ‘Said she was American, quite young and pretty.’

  ‘Even in America there are quite a few women who fit that description.’ McCoy was sour and depressed. His scheme was falling apart, the trail had died, the CIA would soon cease to collaborate with them on it, and he didn’t want that. He wanted something to take out of it all, even if only the smell of success which he could waft in the faces of his superiors. And Harper knew this. McCoy’s vanity was really the only card he held.

  So he said, ‘We’ve not had Marlow on it long enough surely? You were more than eight weeks before you pulled in Graham.’

  ‘Exactly – and no one contacted him either.’

  ‘Can’t always hurry these things.’

  ‘I know that. But we’ve lost this hand. I feel it. We’ve got all the information we’re going to get on this KGB secret security service – from Graham himself. Special Branch are still working on him. Perhaps they’ll get some more from him. We might as well leave it at that.’

  ‘Why? After all there’s no urgency, no deadline. Marlow appears quite happy – why not leave him there for the moment? And we’re not paying for him after all – the UN is. And the twenty-four-hour surveillance on that mailbox is costing very little. And there’s one other thing: I don’t think this fellow Jackson has run Marlow as well as he might, not got enough out of him. I’d like to talk to Marlow. You see I’m sure that this KGB Security Officer – this “stayer” in New York – must have sounded Marlow out already. Someone in the UN maybe – she must have made some sort of tentative approach to him, either socially or professionally, and Marlow’s thought nothing of it, not seen the approach as at all important. And Jackson is not trained as an interrogation officer. He doesn’t know the right lines with him, how to run back through each and every person Marlow’s met since he arrived in New York, Probably has his mind on his next posting. Moving to Cheltenham isn’t he in August? Some new course in communications there.’

  ‘Yes. He said something about that. Couldn’t go on liaising with Marlow.’

  ‘I think I’d find something out if I spoke to him. I’m sure I would. I feel it –’

  ‘I feel you won’t. The trail’s dead. They’ve packed up.’ Harper’s spiel had been frustrated at its climax and he was annoyed. But he showed nothing. The humps and hollows, the switchbacks of skin about his pockmarked face remained quite stationary. Had he been pressing too hard? He tried the opposite approach as a last chance.

  ‘Maybe you’re right. Just thought we might rescue something from it all. But it’s too long a shot, I agree. Not worth it,’ he said, crossing his fingers in his mind. He got up and looked out the side window onto Red Lion Street. Then Harper’s stomach turned and he smiled as he heard McCoy say: ‘Well – perhaps. Yes. Yes – if you like,
why not try it, Harper? Last chance for a feather in our caps.’

  And they agreed then and there that Harper should leave for New York on the following day.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Harper said as they left the office, blowing their noses against the fearful smell. ‘I think I may find this woman – “American, quite young and pretty.” I think I will.’ And he really hoped he would, for Moscow wanted nothing less.

  ‘I hope you do, Harper – for all our sakes,’ McCoy added, looking at him very carefully. And he really hoped he would, smelling once more the chance of his own sweet success.

  Without noticing it – they never had – the two men walked past the Hepworth abstract in the forecourt and out into the warm sunlight, both deep in thought as to how each might deceive and trap the other.

  11

  ‘Yes, take him riding, Helen.’ Guy Jackson got up and went to the dining-room window, sipping his coffee. Hair too neatly brushed, in a polka-dot Skula dressing-gown, framed in the grand casements, he had the air of someone testing for the part Cary Grant got in the original High Society, There was something insincere in his suggestion. He looked out over the terraces of sloping lawn, past the meadow to the trees and mountains rising beyond, with too eager an expression, as if contemplating a bed and not a landscape. ‘We can swim later. Or take a picnic lunch to Flatrock.’

  The twins were in the kitchen, being fed by the housekeeper. Harold Perkins had not appeared for breakfast – no reasons offered, and none needed.

  ‘But I don’t ride. I’ve never ridden,’ I said, lying. I’d been round the pyramids several times years before – the sand made it easy falling – and as a child I’d been thrown twice by an old pony, suddenly come young again, passing other horses on the road. ‘Well, I’ve fallen off more times than I’ve ridden,’ I added.

  But it was no use. Guy wanted me off riding with her, getting his generous obsessions to work again first thing, gathering fodder for his morning fantasies. By lunch time, no doubt, he’d have organised some other little scheme for our exciting togetherness and his absent delectation.

  The stables and other yard buildings were quite a distance down from the side of the house, behind a big patch of chestnut trees with a grand arched gateway leading into them. There were two big bay hunters which we looked at, eighteen hands or whatever, fierce in the eye and quite frisky too, one of them bowing and pawing the ground ominously. And I said at once, there and then, that I wouldn’t think of riding either of them. Suicidal.

  ‘No. Not these ones. There’s another horse over the way, an old thing that barely moves. You’ll be all right.’

  Helen hadn’t gone in for the riding garb, I was glad to see – the dreadful black boots and jodhpurs business, the whip and saucy cap: just in Levis and a shirt, as I was myself. But she was very professional about all the rest of the mysterious business – testing the girths, adjusting bridles, dispensing with martingales.

  My horse indeed was quite an old thing, with a downy sheen of white the length of its nose, something like a small Shire cart-horse with tufty hair round its hooves and the melancholy expression of a seasoned drinker. But it had a powerful-looking rump and was in no way decrepit. I was prepared to believe in its age but not therefore in any serious mechanical failure – slightly less horsepower, simply, by comparison with Helen’s super charger.

  But there was no way out now – Guy’s ridiculous idea had become a fact with the groom busying himself with my stirrups, Helen telling me how to sit, and Guy himself pondering the whole scene with silent approval. What a bore his fantasies were, I thought – a dangerous bore; nothing so funny as horseplay – as horseplay with death.

  And yet there was a feeling of sharp enjoyment – getting up on the beast and sitting in the saddle before anything happened, smelling the saddle-soaped leather and the damp cheesy smell of horse, my head ten feet up looking straight at the low gutters of the stable, the smooth crown of Guy’s head, and finding Helen parallel to me, the two of us suddenly in a quite unexpected position, strangely suspended above the ground. And I’d have been perfectly happy to have stayed that way and just walked round the yard for a bit and then got off and gone home. But of course that wasn’t the idea at all, and off we went, out the archway and along the back drive that led through neatly planted maples and old elms down towards the farm.

  And this part was easy enough, and happy, at walking pace beside the other horse, on the sure surface, the morning air coming on my face, marvellously cool and lively, an element as clear and constant as water – and looking up at the very high skies with great white clouds that reduced the proportions of everything on the land – land that was wilderness and blue hills in front of us, and to our right Hereford cattle, the dairy and barns made to seem like models from a child’s farm kit. Birds started from the hedge, some of them so brightly coloured with red wings, and one with a scarlet tail, that I feared the horses might bolt.

  It was magnificent, untouched country, rich in foliage, colour, form – rampant in everything. It was as if a classic English parkland had exploded and run wild over a thousand acres: a world unfound, it seemed, where people had not come.

  I said, ‘Guy seems terribly concerned to get us off alone together.’

  ‘Yes – pimping for me. One of his problems.’

  My horse was falling behind. ‘What do you do to make it go faster?’

  ‘Kick it – gently.’

  I kicked. Nothing happened. She looked back. ‘Harder.’

  I kicked it harder. Nothing.

  ‘Knows you don’t know how to ride. They sense it at once.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She reined in, waiting for me.

  ‘Isn’t that rather uncomfortable?’ I asked.

  ‘What? You’ve got to sit up straight, not slouch. Keep your knees in line with your toes.’

  ‘No, I meant the pimping.’

  ‘Yes. But there’s always got to be something in someone, hasn’t there? – some flaw. Better to have it in the open. He really does it quite openly. That’s something.’

  She looked over at me, questioningly, perfectly upright yet relaxed, as if I was the only person now who was hiding anything. And of course that was true. She pressed the advantage.

  ‘How is your work going? Think you’ll be able to finish it and get back home?’

  ‘No. Nothing’s happened.’

  ‘We agreed – you remember, in Central Park – to work together so that both of us might get out of this business: “in one piece” you said – you with your work done and me with – I don’t know what now. Have you forgotten? That’s what I was saying last night too. Don’t let the reins slack – hold them firmly, hands just above the withers.’

  We moved off the back drive towards the hills to the north along a narrow, heavily overgrown lane, a rutted old cart track with rotten branches and sometimes whole tree-trunks fallen along our path, and elders and a great deal of tangle from other trees above us.

  ‘No, I remember.’ I sighed mentally. The fine day seemed less good and the air was dank and almost wintery and rotten-smelling in the covered laneway. ‘You want a progress report, you and the KGB. For me to hand you on a plate all my stupid arrangements. That’s ridiculous.’

  She bent away from a large briar, then held it back for me as I passed. Her shirt was dotted with some kind of greenfly and they must have got into her hair too for she started to scratch her head. ‘Look, you could have gone back to New York last night and told your people about me,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t. And nor will I. I promise – even if I had someone to tell.’

  Well, why not this conspiracy as good as any, I thought? Just she and I. I knew a great deal about her now – and felt no more need to tell them about it in London than I had at the beginning when I’d read her letters. And as for her betraying me – that was a hurdle of trust I had to take blindly or not at all. I didn’t go on her looks or her words. They meant very little in the decision. It was a matter of sim
ple choice on my part and nothing else, a gamble one way or the other – something for life or against it.

  So I told her. And it was quite easy once I started – very easy, really, telling this second woman all about myself. I suppose I must have a penchant for that sort of confidence.

  I told her about Durham jail, coming to London, being forced into Graham’s shoes and being packed off to New York to wait for the contact, the ‘stayer’ with the names of suspect KGB agents – told her the whole thing, and it sounded a wonderfully stupid charade in the telling.

  ‘Graham was going to set up a KGB satellite circle over here – part of their internal security division,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s what you’re in too? You’re the “stayer” surely?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘You’ve got all the qualifications they told me to expect – someone quite unexpected, outside all the usual grubby circles, not active in any way, just a post-box, with practically unbreakable cover: Manhattan socialite, yet Marxist – that’s all you.’

  ‘It’s not. I’m not your contact. I promise.’

  ‘No.’ And I believed her words and her face then. ‘No, I suppose not. That would be too easy – you could give me the names I need then, couldn’t you, and I could go home with them and get a medal.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to do with that KGB security circle.’

  ‘But Graham had. And you were linked with him – and don’t tell me you neither of you knew the other was in the KGB.’

  Either her face was colouring or the green light was getting darker. She didn’t answer my point and I let it be. The answer was obvious: her silence confirmed it. Instead she asked, ‘And Graham – what will they do with him?’