The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  He’d told her about Mrs Grace: how, when he’d been unable to get through the KGB cordon to her at the house in the hills, he’d followed the woman back one evening, found out where she lived, studied her carefully, and then taken the decision to approach her. And he’d been right. She was a member of his dissident group, recruited years before by one of his deputies in Russia. And the rest had been easy; the woman had no taste for kidnapping in any case. The only problem had been getting Helen out, for they couldn’t have all escaped with Mrs Grace together. But Marlow had done the trick there. After all, he’d been as anxious as anyone for her to get out so that the British could take her and the names and himself – in the clear, without a shooting-match, a diplomatic incident up in the hills. And wasn’t that just what Marlow had done – he’d asked Helen – the moment he’d found a telephone box? Phoned up HQ in London and told them everything was ready and given them the address of the studio hideout in the town.

  ‘But why did he bolt from the pub then?’ Helen had asked.

  ‘Another bluff. What kind, I don’t know. Don’t you see it, Helen? He double-crossed you all the way along. You must see it.’

  She believed him now. And indeed, Marlow had said it himself, hadn’t he? – had condemned himself – when he’d told her on the hills how there was dissolution in every new face you met. He’d simply been excusing his treachery, warning her of it in advance.

  Trees hung deeply over a high stone wall all along one side of the road, and the street lamps were hazy yellow globes, strung up high at intervals in the leaves – dark, heart-shaped patterns waving slightly in the warm air, moving over this abrupt, awkward, angular face which she had not seen in years, yet which was the same face, exactly so, as in those previous times; which had survived and was an indubitable presence, here in this suddenly glum autumn evening on this suburban road.

  His face. A good face. Its lack of conventional symmetry had so affected her in the past, had made the matrix of her love for him so much more precise, that now, as she looked at it closely again, she was able to trace and renew those old emotions for him in herself instantly, as though she had found in his physiognomy a long-lost map describing the treasures of her life and could now at last resurrect them.

  An ear-lobe still curled outwards in a minute, strange way; the wrinkles on his forehead were deeper but not more numerous; a front tooth was still chipped: she had travelled intimately about this body once. And then she had come to think, in his long absences, that these physical characteristics didn’t matter: you could forget them. You had to. Affection lived in the spirit, not in fact. But now she realised how the spirit was so often dependent on the unique configurations of flesh and bone: a precise reality, a moment when you looked at, touched, a living, present face – and knew it was yours. And such loss – the touch of someone’s hair – could well be the only real loss, she thought.

  She felt her stomach move with this sudden renewal of emotion – at this realisation, which she had suppressed, of how imperative immediate presence was in love; of how, just as it often started with a shared look across a room, so it survived, or could be regained in a moment, long afterwards, with this same simplicity of an intense regard.

  So her affection died for Marlow as it rose for Alexei: Marlow began to disappear and Alexei swung towards her, like the wooden figures on a miniature Swiss chalet that came out for sun, or rain. And the articles of trust were transferred from one to the other, as the deeds of a dead man’s estate are passed to a living heir.

  The church was coming up on their left, Catholic, a long, modern building, characterless as a Nissen hut, in reconstituted Cotswold stone, the Christian vernacular of the seventies, where the setting had to be as bland and undisturbing as the new Liturgy.

  As they got to the gateway of the church, a police car swung round the traffic-lights ahead of them and stopped on the corner. Two plain-clothes men got out. They could see Mrs Grace and the two children sitting in her car, parked on the far side of the chapel next to the presbytery.

  Alexei looked up the road. The men hadn’t seen them yet but they would at any moment.

  ‘Go inside, Helen. Quick. I’ll bring the others.’

  In a minute the five people, a perfect Sunday family, with Auntie, were sitting in one of the back rows. The mass had already begun. The children sniffed the air appreciatively, their eyes fixed on the altar and the movements of the priest as on some charade, a dumb crambo whose meaning would at any moment become clear to them, when they could then laugh and cheer.

  Helen and Alexei were at the end of the row, by the windows, in a distant hollow of the chapel. The congregation knelt in front of them for the Consecration. But the children stayed on their feet, happy infidels, peering intently over the edge of the pew.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she whispered to Alexei, their heads bowed, close together.

  He shook his head, without saying anything. The priest prepared the Host. At last he whispered back, ‘Out of here. You have the names.’

  ‘We’re not all going to get away. The roads will be blocked. The children. We can’t run forever. Couldn’t you give the names to the British? Get them to help in the future?’

  ‘No. They wouldn’t believe it.’

  The priest lifted the Host above the altar. A bell tinkled quickly – and then again, an impatient demand from some impossible old woman.

  ‘You’re beginning to believe like they do.’ He tilted his head briefly in the direction of the altar. ‘In failure. But we know all about that. That’s obvious everywhere. You don’t have to come to believe in it. You do something about it. I told you years ago. I said, “You believe in these political facts now; remember that when you begin to despair of them – as you will.” As you have.’

  ‘I still believe in those facts. But children are facts too. And so are road blocks.’

  ‘We’ll have to get out. The names you have – we’re responsible for hundreds of people: that’s a whole world in our hands.’

  ‘And so is this – us, here, now. That’s a world as well.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said with tiredness. The little bell rang again, insistently, another mysterious demand. ‘And you’ll lose it – if you stay.’

  ‘I’ll lose it either way, Alexei. We were lucky – sharing each other as well as a belief. But they don’t often go together. And not now. You go on your own with the names.’ She took out the plastic envelope tucked in behind her trouser belt, and passed it to him. ‘They can’t do much to me.’

  ‘They can. Prison. You’ll lose your children. And haven’t you lost enough already?’

  ‘Yes. But I knew the risks when I started. Be realistic: those names are more important than me. You know that, Alexei.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘I want to go with you. But it wouldn’t work. I want to very much. But you must go on your own.’

  She smiled – a rapid, intense smile, compacting the message, making it a sudden, boundless gift, through which she could tell him that she felt hope, and was not sad, in this divided future; a smile that would confirm her renewal with him as much as their imminent separation – which would tell him, without doubts, that she had re-achieved all the forward parts in her nature; that she had found again – here with him at this moment – the world, that proper world, which they had both sought for so long, where charity and affection ruled, where prayer was continuous and not distantly intermittent. And to find that world you had to lose it first. Wasn’t that what they said?

  ‘You must go, Alexei,’ she said quite simply.

  *

  Harper travelled inside with me in the ambulance from the hotel. He didn’t want to let me out of his sight, I thought – I was the one man who might know too much. I wondered if he’d try and kill me. We drove to the side of the Town Hall to a police caravan hidden in the trees, a temporary command post, where he got out to see how the road blocks were getting on.

  And now I could hear the
balalaikas quite clearly on the still air, coming from the Town Hall beside us, a long restrained vibrato on many instruments, which rose in pitch gradually, until the tune was suddenly released and a sad and restless music spread over the night.

  ‘Nothing,’ Harper said when he got back into the ambulance, sitting on the bunk opposite me. ‘Nothing yet.’ His face began to crinkle, filling up with a sly smile. ‘But they’ll come. We’ll get them.’ He was so happy.

  I said, ‘Now there’s only me to worry about.’

  ‘You?’ He reached out his arm and fingered the tap on an oxygen cylinder strapped to the partition at the end of the ambulance. He lifted the mask up and put it against his own face and stared at me, unblinking, like some fearful prehistoric fish revived from the depths.

  ‘One can die of too much oxygen, I suppose,’ he said, dropping the mask, ‘as well as too little.’

  ‘Might be tricky at the post mortem though.’

  ‘Would it – in your case? Delayed shock, a sudden seizure. I had to give you oxygen quickly … Would it?’

  We looked at each other carefully, like boxers between rounds.

  Harper put the mask back. ‘I don’t have to run the risk. I know what you think about me, Marlow. But it’s just your word against mine. And after I’ve shopped hundreds of KGB men tonight who is going to believe you then? No one.’

  ‘How are you going to get those names?’ I asked. ‘They’re not going to leave the town all together. They’ll separate. And in any case they’re not going to give the names to you – of all people – whatever happens.’

  ‘I’ll get them.’

  I wanted to keep Harper talking. He was too confident. He was bound to relax – for an instant, at the wrong moment. Then I might get him. He thought I was an invalid. But I hadn’t been that badly wounded. I could move, I was sure – move fast for a few seconds at least.

  ‘They’ll give themselves up – the women and children. But he won’t. And it’s quite a big town, inside your road blocks.’

  ‘He can’t hang around in someone’s back garden for ever.’

  ‘And you can’t stop every car leaving town for ever either.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It may not be that easy, Harper. You may never get those names. I hope you don’t.’

  ‘Ah, Marlow, I should never have suggested you for this job in the first place.’ Harper shook his head in mock despair. ‘You believe in it all. In the rights and wrongs. But there aren’t any in this business. It’s fatal to believe anything about it. You get your head chopped off.’

  *

  Flitlianov moved carefully through the municipal gardens that lay at the back of the Town Hall, round a fountain, along neat paths, beside a wilting succession of herbaceous borders. Clouds had come in with the evening and for the first time in a week the night was dark.

  Ahead of him, between clumps of evergreens, he could see the stage door, to the right of the building, with a man posted outside. But to the left, on the other side of the hall, was another doorway with a pile of beer crates stacked beside it. A man came out, pushing a trolley of empty bottles. Flitlianov cut across the grass towards the catering entrance.

  Once inside the building, he walked through a pantry, across a corridor, and up some steps to a door which led backstage. He opened it and the music hit him, flowing over him, a Georgian peasant dance he remembered well, a bright and stormy affair, where two circles merged and then flowed away from each other, the men moving outwards, stamping their feet, the girls clustering in the centre clapping their hands. He knew the shapes of it all exactly without seeing anything behind the back curtain. A Russian approached him. Flitlianov showed him his card. ‘Embassy Security. I’ve just come down from London. Just a check-up. I’ll be leaving with you after the show.’ The man nodded blankly. Flitlianov listened happily to the music. He was home again.

  *

  The next time Harper left the ambulance I reached up for the small brass fire-extinguisher above my head and hid it beneath the blanket, holding the plunger tap firmly, and pointing the thing to where Harper had been sitting opposite me.

  And when he came back and was sitting comfortably and had lit a cigarette, had talked some more, and was saying: ‘No, you’ve had a lot of bad breaks, Marlow –’ I emptied the canister of foam straight into his face. And then I was up, hovering on my good leg, falling towards him, the canister raised until I cracked him over the head with it. I was getting quite good at chopping people’s heads off.

  Immediately I was finished with Harper the back doors of the ambulance flew open and Croxley was there with two plain-clothes men. They looked disappointed, I remember. One man stayed behind with Harper, while the other two carried me across to the police caravan. All three of them had been waiting just outside I realised. They must have been there all the time.

  ‘Harper is with them, Croxley. With the KGB,’ I said when they’d got me on a chair in the caravan. Croxley looked embarrassed. ‘Yes, Marlow,’ he sighed, politely. ‘We knew that. We –’

  The skin at the back of my neck and in the small of my back pimpled in an instant and my stomach turned violently.

  ‘Well, what the fucking hell have you been doing then?’

  ‘It wasn’t my –’ Croxley stopped and shrugged his shoulders. ‘The idea was that he’d hang himself, if we gave him enough rope. We –’

  ‘What rope? How?’ Croxley looked over my shoulder.

  ‘You were the rope, Marlow,’ a voice said.

  I turned. McCoy was standing in the doorway, his puffy face gleaming from some exertion, folds of skin seeping out over his starched collar and tightly knotted old boys’ tie. He came in and looked at my leg with distaste. ‘We knew about Harper. But couldn’t really prove anything.’ McCoy was suddenly an awful version of Hercule Poirot, assembling the candidates for murder in the library, about to superintend the final denouement. We had moved from The Thirty-Nine Steps to Agatha Christie. It was all still so unreal, still a fiction to me. But not for much longer, I thought. The fiction was running out fast.

  ‘So?’ I asked, working now for the truth.

  ‘We’d been watching him quite a while, tapping his phone. And when you called him this afternoon telling him about Guy Jackson in New York and how you’d got away from the KGB – out of that house in the hills, we thought he’d probably try and get rid of you then. You were screwing all their plans up. But once you ran from the pub, we were sure he’d go for you. Because somehow you knew about him then, didn’t you? That he was a double with the KGB. And he knew that you knew. So we gave him his head with you after that – left you alone together – in the hotel room, in the ambulance. And hoped he’d get on with it. Instead you bungled it – tried to kill him. If only you’d let him do it, then we’d have had cast-iron evidence.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Croxley looked sad, one of his crestfallen looks, as though he knew for certain now the ale was off.

  ‘You stupid fucker, McCoy.’

  McCoy took no notice. He moved over to the sergeant on the radio desk. Some information was coming in, a voice crackling on the receiver. McCoy listened carefully.

  ‘We’d have stopped him actually killing you,’ Croxley put in, by way of mitigation. ‘We were just outside.’

  ‘Thanks again.’

  McCoy came back.

  ‘Well, you have Harper now,’ I said. ‘A week with Croxley here, and he’ll spill everything. But what about the others? You know about these names? Flitlianov must have them now – a liberal group within the KGB, dissidents. They’re important.’

  ‘Yes,’ McCoy said wearily, ‘we know about the names. But they’re not liberal dissidents, Marlow. Our politicals here checked. They’re just unreliable KGB agents, the names we sent you over to New York for in the first place. Nothing to do with liberalism. Mrs Jackson sold you that idea. I suppose she thought we might take them over and believe we were running them back against Moscow. But it would have been the ot
her way round: we’d have bought ourselves a brigade of double agents, instead of the one or two like Harper we have anyway. “Liberal dissidents” my foot. I can tell you – when we get those names we’ll pack them out of the country smartish.’

  ‘You knew about Mrs Jackson then – all along?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About her and George Graham?’

  ‘Yes. Graham told us about her as well as the names – in the end. And of course we’d read her letter to Graham that morning in Marylebone before you did.’

  ‘So I was planted on her – from the start? You knew she was with the KGB?’

  ‘Well, obviously we couldn’t have told you, Marlow. We had to get you to trust each other, so that we could keep tabs on her, through you. Guy Jackson was no use. We knew that. He was working for the Americans. So you were the crucial link there. And it would have gone fine – we’d have had all the information about her out of you – and got those names a lot earlier – if the KGB hadn’t decided to switch you and Jackson in New York and start this Cheltenham deal.’

  ‘You knew about that too?’

  ‘Yes. And we decided to ride with it. Jackson was no loss. And it looked like an interesting situation, full of possibilities from our point of view: whatever happened when you got back to England we were going to lay our hands on a lot of KGB men in this country – legals and illegals. To handle you they were going to have to come out of their holes and be counted. And they have, Marlow, they have: half a dozen so far – and more to come, many more, before the night is out. So you’ve done all right, Marlow. Even though you did your best to screw it all up. Don’t despair.’

  ‘I don’t, McCoy. Only of you.’

  McCoy got out a handkerchief and began to wipe his hands with it carefully. ‘Don’t be like that. We have to do a job. And you’re here – alive, in one piece.’