by Joseph Hone
They jumped into our bitter atmosphere and made it plain and sweet in a moment: an irrepressible demand for now, a stinging comment on the folly of our ways – if proof were needed, I thought. All such thoughts: the inventions of a happy childishness. And how dull we three were – infantile unliving adults: what fatuous toils we were engaged in, what sour intellects and dry ideals, flesh withering on three old sticks.
Guy opened a small fiddle case that had been stored among the rafters. Helen was persuaded back to the piano in the miniature drawing-room. And then the two children and their father began to hop about the street with strange bouncy steps to a scratchy jig. It was something the family had obviously worked up before, steps of their own invention, awkward and unbalanced, from no book of the dance, yet polished in their own way, and well remembered: an almost tuneless music, yet a perfectly shared harmony, unique to these four people – a family now quite without dissidence, generations firmly locked, the drawbridge up, secure in their own imaginative country, distant from me, inhabiting themselves properly at last.
It was a strange dance indeed, formal yet artless – the children holding hands, circling their father, bending their knees, stammering on their feet, then jumping a little in the air: some sort of familial rite from a lost civilisation discovered in a series of mysterious, angular drawings in a temple fresco. There was an extraordinary sense of propriety about it, of an essential but undiscovered meaning – an overwhelming reason in the movements that escaped all my grammar. It was something in code, the communication of a tribe, an urgent celebration of survival.
They bounced on like mechanical toys, silhouetted against the gas lights, shadows against Brooklyn bridge – Guy the Pied Piper in the pin-stripe suit, no longer distraught and monstrous but a composed, deeply intent figure, fingers darting about the strings of the funny tune; Helen invisible but there precisely on the dot, hitting all the right notes between the fiddle. Where are we, I thought? And what on earth have we all been talking about? And I felt, looking at their unfathomable gyrations, that perhaps all of us were going to have some luck after all.
12
Harper arrived at the East Side air terminal off 42nd Street in New York, sour and grimy after the long flight from London. He took a cab to the Hilton on West 53rd, and signed in. His room was 2057. He didn’t bother to unpack or wash, just took his shaving things with him in his pocket, came down two flights on the stairs, then walked towards the lift banks. A maid came towards him with a trolley of linen just as he came to room 1819. He had to double back after she had gone, slapping his pockets as if he’d forgotten something. The door was unlocked. He went in through the narrow hall. Andrei Popovich was lying back, feet up on the big bed, watching Ronald Coleman in Random Harvest on a big TV set.
The two men watched the film for a moment without saying anything, both apparently engrossed in the drama as if they’d been together in the room all afternoon. Then Harper looked up at the ceiling questioningly, cupping a hand over one ear. Popovich got up, nodding his head. He spoke to Harper very quietly, a whisper almost completely drowned in the noise from the TV. ‘Yes. There’s a Russian agricultural delegation buying wheat on the 30th floor. But I’ll tell you about it. Come into the bathroom.’
‘I’ve got to shave anyway,’ Harper said. Popovich went ahead of him into the cubicle, ran the bath taps gently and after that the wash-basin. Harper got his kit out, took off his shirt, doused his face, and started to work up a good lather.
Andrei Popovich was a small, dapper man, in the bottom part of a tightly fitting navy blue synthetic fibre suit; a firm, broad-boned, high-cheeked, Slavonic face; fiftyish, but looking younger with dark sparse hair standing up a little and then running straight back – thin strands with a lot of empty space underneath so that you could quite clearly see most of his scalp: compact, sure of himself, yet without any air of command or superiority – he was like an accountant at the back of a board meeting who knows the company figures better than any of the directors and will quite soon be taking over from them. The eyes were faint blue and very steady – the nose, chin and everything else about him neatly and inconspicuously formed. He looked entirely the busy, anonymous Russian bureaucrat which he was – one of half a dozen attachés at the New York Consulate.
In his communication with Harper, though, he displayed one individual trait – the sense of a mother conducting a good-humoured game with a fretful child, a playful femininity, which Harper, who had dealt with him before, disliked considerably. He might have been flirting with him, Harper thought, but he could never be sure, for Popovich was never blunt about it. It was a gossamer-thin quality in the Russian – this knowing sensuousness – a hint like very faint perfume in the air: a twinkle in the blue eyes, a sudden gentle but unexpected movement, a minute roll of the lips, a quick softness in his perfect English pronunciation. And it kept Harper uneasy with him whenever they had met. The man swelled with a quality of secret, ultimate knowledge – easily borne, temptingly hinted at to favourites, potentially dangerous. And Harper could never decide if there were any sexual overtones in these marks of a hidden character, or if, as was quite logical, they were simply the fruit of his position as the most senior KGB officer in America.
‘Good,’ Popovich said firmly, watching Harper intently as he started to shave. ‘Good, good.’
Harper looked at him curiously in the mirror. ‘Good what?’ he asked above the soft rush of bath water. Popovich was standing very close to him now, hardly two feet away from his face, so that his voice could be heard. But was that the only reason for his proximity, Harper wondered?
‘Everything is good. But we must not rush it.’
‘Where is he then?’ Harper finished lathering his beard. But Popovich delayed. He kept looking at Harper, smiling.
‘Flitlianov? Or your man Marlow?’ he said at length. ‘They are both upstate in New York at this moment. Our men are there. They are both together.’
‘Together?’
Again Popovich paused, twinkling. ‘No, not together. In the same place.’
Harper frowned, and turned with his razor to consider a suitable route through his stubbled pock-marks. ‘And what about the letter drop in Grand Central?’ he asked. ‘Anything there. The woman? Have you any lead on her?’
‘We have her too. She is there as well. All three of them,’ Popovich said neatly.
‘Christ!’ Harper turned half-way through a scrape. ‘The three of them. I needn’t have bothered to come then. Are you sure it’s the right woman?’
‘Yes. As soon as Flitlianov followed them up to the country last Friday. Why else would he go? And he’s been tailing her before.’
‘What woman? Who?’
‘Mrs Jackson.’
‘Mrs who?’ Harper stopped everything.
‘The wife of your SIS liaison officer here – Guy Jackson.’
‘No.’ Harper showed an awful dismay through the white streaks of lather.
‘Yes, yes, Harper. We’ve checked her out. She lived in Beirut when Flitlianov was there in the mid-fifties. And of course George Graham was there before that. It all fits. That mail, the names we want, must be somewhere up in their house in the country. Mrs Jackson is the end of the letter drop all right.’
Harper felt real disappointment. His own plans for getting Marlow to New York had been quite incidental to the main action, he realised now. He was redundant: of course Guy Jackson had been useless – the contact with Marlow which they had wanted him to pin-point had been his wife.
‘It’s all over then,’ Harper said, thinking of Holborn again, and failure, and McCoy. ‘You just wait till she hands the stuff over to Flitlianov. And take him. It’s all over really.’
‘Just beginning, I think, Harper. No despair,’ he said, smiling softly. ‘Starting – just starting.’ He repeated the word, as though encouraging a child to resume a game he’s lost interest in. Then he opened the top of Harper’s after-shave lotion and smelt it. ‘Good. Very nice,’ he s
aid solicitously.
‘How? It’s all wrapped up. Apart from Jackson,’ Harper said petulantly. ‘Jackson’s a whole new script. I’d never have thought he was working for the KGB – or her.’
‘He’s not,’ Popovich said, putting a dab of the undistinguished pine cologne on his finger tips. ‘That’s where it begins: Guy Jackson is working for the Americans, the CIA.’
Harper had just finished shaving and now he turned and looked at Popovich angrily. ‘May I?’ He took his lotion back and put it on the shelf without using it. ‘Thanks – well, that’ll be your affair, won’t it. I can start packing again.’
‘Don’t be difficult, Harper.’ Popovich was suddenly very calm, staring at him. Then he relaxed, his serious message received and understood. ‘You’ll be needed. I want you to know all about it. We’ll need you back in England. I’ll tell you: there are two points here, both connected, and you’ll be able to help, you’ll be very necessary indeed, when the time comes. One – we’ve no idea whereabouts these papers she has are hidden. And no idea when or how she’ll hand them over. It’s all sheer chance there. Open to any bad luck. Very difficult. And secondly, Guy Jackson; he’s been given a very interesting assignment by the CIA. He’s being posted back to England in a month, to Cheltenham –’
‘I knew that,’ Harper put in casually, trying to rescue something for himself from the whole business. ‘That he was going –’
‘You don’t know. Listen and I’ll tell you.’ Popovich moved away.
Harper put away his shaving gear and they went back into the bedroom where Random Harvest was coming to an end. Popovich turned the channel selector on the large TV set and at once a picture of the front lobby of the hotel appeared. Another twist displayed the entrance on 53rd Street. A third movement gave only a dark screen but now there were voices over it in Russian, a spirited conversation full of agricultural facts and figures. A fourth time – and then they heard the drawl of American voices, then a long pause. Then: ‘OK, this is the wheat deal again. Get Adam back will you? He’s in the lobby. He wants to have it all first hand.’
Popovich turned the volume down. ‘We’ve adapted this set for ourselves,’ he said very softly. ‘And we’ve had a little help on the other side from one of their electronics people. You see what we’re into here? All the private circuits in the building: the hotel’s closed-circuit TV system, the FBI bugging lines, and also a return line to a hidden micro in their central recording rooms in the basement. We can play it all back through this set, if we keep the volume low enough. So there’s no feedback.’
Popovich moved the selector again. They were back on the main lobby downstairs. ‘Now watch – you’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Watch who they get. They’ve just called for him in the recording room. He’s in the lounge – there, to the left.’
Harper watched carefully. A man crossed the screen from reception and returned a moment later with another American – a big, tall, balding man, genial in a creased Cabot Lodge tropical outfit, abundantly American, folding up the Leisure and Arts section of the New York Sunday Times.
‘There he is. That’s him. Adam Wheel.’
‘So?’ Harper was completely at sea.
‘He’s Guy Jackson’s CIA control. Works with him at the UN. Russian specialist. That’s why he’s here. Listening in on this wheat deal we’re fixing with the Americans. Well, he’s the fellow that’s set up this plan with Jackson in England. And that’s what we want – really as much as we want Flitlianov. And I think we can get both together – two birds, one stone. Put on your shirt and I’ll tell you about it.’
‘What deal? What deal in Cheltenham?’
‘Communications. A new system they have been working at the Foreign Office Communications headquarters there. So far an unbreakable system of satellite-directed code transmissions. The Americans want it – that’s why they got Jackson on it. They found out he was being posted there. And we want it, too, of course. That’s where you come in. And Mr Marlow.’
‘How did they get Jackson?’
‘The oldest way. The oldest profession. Blackmail, call-girls in New York. Jackson has some very peculiar habits. They photographed him, taped him, the usual things. He was very susceptible.’
‘Photographed him with them?’
‘Well, that and looking at them.’
‘Is that a crime?’
‘He thought so.’
‘How did you come on all this?’ Harper asked.
‘You don’t really need to know, Harper. But – through this.’ Popovich tapped the television set. ‘Here in the hotel – this is where they set the whole thing up. Call-girls, photographs, everything. We listened in.’
Harper turned his collar down, straightened his tie and looked out at the patch of leaden summer sky. ‘Something is wrong.’ He turned to Popovich. ‘An experienced officer like Jackson would never have fallen for that old trick in the first place. And if he had he’d have told us in London. There must have been something else.’
‘There was. The CIA told him they’d found out his wife worked for the KGB – that they’d get him as an accessory on that if he didn’t cooperate.’
‘How did they find that out?’
‘I don’t think they did. They invented it.’
‘Come on. She does work for the KGB. It couldn’t be coincidence. And in any case, when you heard that, why didn’t you close with her sooner?’
‘We did, Harper. We checked her out completely. But we’d nothing on her in Moscow – no traces, no associations with us. We went right through her. It wasn’t until Flitlianov arrived here and started to follow her that we started to add things up. Until then we assumed that the CIA were bluffing, or had cooked up some evidence. You see, they wanted Jackson badly: the British aren’t sharing this information with anyone. And Jackson, they knew, was going back to England – the one man who could get them into the centre of this business.’
‘Well how in hell do we get the information? Turn Jackson a second time?’
‘He wouldn’t buy it a second time. But that’s beside the point – which is that I don’t think for a moment that Jackson is going to go along with the Americans anyway. He’ll drop them, but not until he’s clear of them, out of America and back home. He is far too experienced an operator. On the other hand that’s just the quality which your man Marlow lacks – from what you’ve told us. There’s where we can bring pressure, with twenty years jail hanging over him.’
Harper looked numb, quite distant.
‘They’re really quite like one another, too,’ Popovich went on. ‘Not that it matters. But it helps.’ He went over to his coat and produced two photographs, New York street shots, of Marlow and Jackson. He gave them to Harper.
‘Well, the same height –’ Harper said.
‘Same age, build, weight, thinning hair, rather English-looking,’ Popovich continued.
‘I don’t see it.’ Harper paused. Then it hit him. ‘You’re not thinking of –’
‘Yes. Yes, of course I am. They switched him for George Graham; we’ll switch him for Jackson.’
Harper laughed. ‘Not in a million years! It won’t work. They must know the man they’re getting in Cheltenham, know what he looks like. And you forget, Jackson’s married – he’ll be going back with his wife and family. What are they going to say about taking a new husband back with them?’
‘We’ve checked, Harper,’ Popovich said, calm again now, quietly hard. ‘And you’ll do some more for us, personnel details and so on in Cheltenham – and as far as we know they don’t know anything about Jackson in Cheltenham. His work with British Intelligence has been entirely in Africa, a few months in London and here with the UN. And as for his wife, well she’s with us, isn’t she? She can be made to respond. Of course it’s a big risk. Someone may know Jackson in Cheltenham. Or they may check Marlow against a photograph of Jackson when he arrives. He may never get beyond the front gate. But it’s no more of a risk than the British took in substituting M
arlow for Graham in the first place. In this business small risks never pay. Big ones sometimes do.’
‘And Flitlianov? The names of his group? I thought that was the most important thing.’
‘Well, he fits in with this too. Think about it: how can we move on those letters? Force her now? No. The Jackson deal would fall through. Force Flitlianov? How? We’ve no idea when he’s going to get them from her. Go through the house upstate – or her apartment here? Impossible. So what? Well, there’s one time we know she’ll have those papers: when she moves back to England – to some empty house or apartment in Cheltenham. That’s certain. She’ll take them with her. And that’s when we can get them. And take Flitlianov as well. Since of course he’ll follow her back there.’
‘What if Flitlianov gets the letters from her before she leaves? He may even have had them off her already, if he’s up there now.’
‘No. Not on our information. Our men say he’s just sounding the ground out this weekend. And he won’t have the time to get it before she leaves – she’s leaving next week, getting out of the summer here, going ahead to England with the children. Her husband is not joining her for several weeks.’
‘The whole thing seems risky and unlikely to me, Andrei.’ Harper moved away a little, but Popovich drew up with him at once, gesturing towards the bathroom. They ran the taps again and Popovich took the opportunity of brushing his teeth.
‘First of all,’ Harper went on, ‘Flitlianov can still get these letters over here –’
‘We’re onto him all the time. If he does, we’ll take them off him here. And go ahead with Marlow and the Cheltenham deal as planned.’
‘What is this deal? What are you after there?’
‘You don’t need to know, Harper – just that it’s the crucial data on this new electronic one-time pad they’ve developed there. And if we get it – it’s the Rosetta Stone for us.’
‘A needle in a heavily guarded haystack, Andrei.’
‘Of course. But that’s the luck of Jackson. He was going back to learn about this very process in Cheltenham.’