by Tom Stoppard
RIDLEY Yes, that makes sense.
HAPGOOD Why?
RIDLEY Every double is a risk—Blair would have to consider it.
HAPGOOD Well, I hope he’s wrong.
RIDLEY That’s a funny thing to say, Mother.
HAPGOOD (With passion) Kerner is my joe! I turned him. If he’s bent, something must have turned him back again—recently, a few months …
RIDLEY What would that be?
HAPGOOD (Shrugs) Toska po rodine.
RIDLEY What’s that?
HAPGOOD Homesickness, but squared. You have to be Russian.
RIDLEY That could be. Did he leave a family?
HAPGOOD Why?
RIDLEY When I processed him after the meet I found a photograph, fingernail size, cut out with scissors, like from a team photo. It was hidden in the lining of his wallet, an amateur job … picture of a boy in a football shirt.
HAPGOOD (Looks at him steadily) What did you do with it?
RIDLEY I put it back, Mother. Do I have to keep calling you Mother? You can call me Ernest. (Pause.) Call me Ridley.
HAPGOOD You’re all right, Ridley. The firm will miss you.
RIDLEY Say again?
HAPGOOD You’re suspended. So am I. Wates took his story upstairs. Paul Blair is running my operations. Do you think I got you here for fun?
RIDLEY God almighty. What do we do now?
HAPGOOD You do what Blair tells you. In my office, seven o’clock, and you’re there to listen, don’t talk out of turn. By the way, we’re not telling the Americans.
RIDLEY Trust me. (Then a flat challenge.) Why don’t you, as a matter of fact?
HAPGOOD You’re not safe, Ridley. You’re cocky and I like prudence, you’re street smart and this is a boardgame. In Paris you bounced around like Tigger, you thought it was cowboys and Indians. In Athens you killed a man and it was the best time of your life, you thought it was sexy. You’re not my type. You’re my alibi and I’m yours. Trust doesn’t come into it.
RIDLEY Well, go and fuck yourself, Hapgood (He now takes his lighter out and lights his cigarette with deliberate, insolent defiance.), since we’re on suspension. You come on like you’re running your joes from the senior common room and butter wouldn’t melt in your pants but you operate like a circular saw, and you pulled me to watch your back because when this is a street business I’m your bloody type all right, and in Athens if you could have got your bodice up past your brain you would have screwed me and liked it.
He starts to leave.
HAPGOOD Ridley.
He stops.
Safety.
RIDLEY I didn’t reload.
HAPGOOD You saved on the blue.
RIDLEY That’s true. (He takes his gun from the holster, checks it, and puts it back.) This is all right.
HAPGOOD What is?
RIDLEY I like it when it’s you and me.
Ridley leaves.
Kerner enters, coming towards her out of the dark and into the light. She sees him and is not surprised. She takes her radio out of her bag.
HAPGOOD (To radio) Is he clear?
RADIO Green.
HAPGOOD I’m here to be told.
She puts the radio back into her bag.
(To Kerner) Do you mean there’s another one like him?
KERNER It’s a hypothesis.
HAPGOOD So where’s the other one?
KERNER Maybe that was the other one.
HAPGOOD Joseph!
Their manner is as of intimate friends.
Did you look at Wates’s diagram?
KERNER (Nods) Positional geometry. Leibnitz. I’ll tell you about him.
HAPGOOD No, don’t.
KERNER You’re right, it’s marginal. I’ll tell you about Leonhard Euler. Were you ever in Kaliningrad?
HAPGOOD No, I’m afraid not.
KERNER I was born in Kaliningrad. So was Immanuel Kant, as a matter of fact. There is quite a nice statue of him. Of course, it was not Kaliningrad then, it was Konigsberg, seat of the Archdukes of Prussia. President Truman gave Konigsberg to Stalin. My parents were not consulted and I missed being German by a few months. Well, in Immanuel Kant’s Konigsberg there were seven bridges. The river Pregel, now Pregolya, divides around an island and then divides again, imagine nutcrackers with one bridge across each of the handles and one across the hinge and four bridges on to the island which would be the walnut if you were cracking walnuts. An ancient amusement of the people of Konigsberg was to try to cross all seven bridges without crossing any of them twice. It looked possible but nobody had solved it. Now, when Kant was ten years old … what do you think?
HAPGOOD Did he really? What a charming story.
KERNER The little Kant had no idea either. No, when Kant was ten years old, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler took up the problem of the seven bridges and he presented his solution in the form of a general principle. Of course, Euler didn’t waste his time walking around Konigsberg, he only needed the geometry.
He now produces Wates’s diagram on pink paper.
When I looked at Wates’s diagram I saw that Euler had already done the proof. It was the bridges of Konigsberg, only simpler.
HAPGOOD What did Euler prove?
KERNER It can’t be done, you need two walkers.
Pause.
HAPGOOD Good old Euler.
KERNER You like it?
HAPGOOD (Nods) It makes sense of those twin Russians trailing their coats around the pool. Last year the Swedes got themselves a KGB defector and the famous twins turned up in his debriefing with a solid London connection. If two Ridleys are for real they must have felt the draught. Those two jokers at the meet were brought in as decoys. Reflectors. I never believed in the twins till then. I know about reflectors.
KERNER Has this place been dusted?
HAPGOOD Dusted?
KERNER We can talk?
HAPGOOD (Amused) Oh, yes. We can talk. (She regards him steadily.) Now he’s careful.
KERNER The photograph? I’m ashamed.
HAPGOOD (Sudden force) No, I am. Oh, fiddle!
KERNER I mean, ‘an amateur job’.
HAPGOOD Oh, Joseph.
KERNER Yes, I’m one of your Joes. How is the little one?
HAPGOOD He’s all right. He’s fine. Stop sending him chocolates, they’re bad for his teeth and not good for his hamster. Dusted is fingerprints, you know. Microphones is swept. Where do you pick up these things?
KERNER Spy stories. I like them. Well, they’re different, you know. Not from each other naturally. I read in hope but they all surprise in the same way. Ridley is not very nice: he’ll turn out to be all right. Blair will be the traitor: the one you liked. This is how the author says, ‘You see! Life is not like books, alas!’ They’re all like that. I don’t mind. I love the language.
HAPGOOD (The language lover) I’m awfully glad.
KERNER Safe house, sleeper, cover, joe … I love it. When I have learned the language I will write my own book. The traitor will be the one you don’t like very much, it will be a scandal. Also I will reveal him at the beginning. I don’t understand this mania for surprises. If the author knows, it’s rude not to tell. In science this is understood: what is interesting is to know what is happening. When I write an experiment I do not wish you to be surprised, it is not a joke. This is why a science paper is a beautiful thing: first, here is what we will find; now here is how we find it; here is the first puzzle, here is the answer, now we can move on. This is polite. We don’t save up all the puzzles to make a triumph for the author.
HAPGOOD (Insisting) Joseph—twins. Who’s in charge and is he sane?
KERNER His name was Konstantin Belov, and, yes, he was sane, though in my opinion absurd.
HAPGOOD More.
KERNER He is not in charge now. The twins are his legacy.
HAPGOOD You knew him?
KERNER Sure. His training was particle physics, before he got into State Security. One day Konstantin Belov jumped out of his bathtub an
d shouted ‘Eureka!’ Maybe he was asleep in the bath. The particle world is the dreamworld of the intelligence officer. An electron can be here or there at the same moment. You can choose. It can go from here to there without going in between; it can pass through two doors at the same time, or from one door to another by a path which is there for all to see until someone looks, and then the act of looking has made it take a different path. Its movements cannot be anticipated because it has no reasons. It defeats surveillance because when you know what it’s doing you can’t be certain where it is, and when you know where it is you can’t be certain what it’s doing: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; and this is not because you’re not looking carefully enough, it is because there is no such thing as an electron with a definite position and a definite momentum; you fix one, you lose the other, and it’s all done without tricks, it’s the real world, it is awake.
HAPGOOD Joseph, please explain to me about the twins.
KERNER I just did but you missed it.
Pause.
HAPGOOD It’s crazy.
KERNER (Unmoved) Oh, yes … but compared to the electron it is banal … Yelizaveta, when things get very small they get truly crazy, and you don’t know how small things can be, you think you know but you don’t know. I could put an atom into your hand for every second since the world began and you would have to squint to see the dot of atoms in your palm. So now make a fist, and if your fist is as big as the nucleus of one atom then the atom is as big as St Paul’s, and if it happens to be a hydrogen atom then it has a single electron flitting about like a moth in the empty cathedral, now by the dome, now by the altar … Every atom is a cathedral. I cannot stand the pictures of atoms they put in schoolbooks, like a little solar system: Bohr’s atom. Forget it. You can’t make a picture of what Bohr proposed, an electron does not go round like a planet, it is like a moth which was there a moment ago, it gains or loses a quantum of energy and it jumps, and at the moment of quantum jump it is like two moths, one to be here and one to stop being there; an electron is like twins, each one unique, a unique twin.
HAPGOOD Its own alibi.
KERNER It upset Einstein very much, you know, all that damned uncertainty, it spoiled his idea of God, which I tell you frankly is the only idea of Einstein’s I never understood. He couldn’t believe in a God who threw dice. He should have come to me, I would have told him, ‘Listen, Albert, He threw you—look around, He never stops.’ What is a hamster, by the way? No, tell me in a minute, I want to tell you something first. There is a straight ladder from the atom to the grain of sand, and the only real mystery in physics is the missing rung. Below it, particle physics; above it, classical physics; but in between, metaphysics. All the mystery in life turns out to be this same mystery, the join between things which are distinct and yet continuous, body and mind, free will and causality, living cells and life itself; the moment before the foetus. Who needed God when everything worked like billiard balls? What were you going to say?
HAPGOOD It’s like a fat rabbit with no ears.
KERNER Oh yes. You mean a khomyak.
HAPGOOD Yes, a khomyak called Roger. (Pause.) Joseph, after this thing with Ridley you’re blown, you know, your career will be over.
KERNER Except as a scientist, you mean.
HAPGOOD Yes, that’s what I mean, I won’t need you any more, I mean I’ll need you again—oh, sugar!—you know what I mean—do you want to marry me? I think I’d like to be married. Well, don’t look like that.
KERNER What is this?—because of a photograph in my wallet? It is not even necessary, I never look at it.
HAPGOOD Won’t you want to meet him now?
KERNER Oh, yes. ‘This is Joe.’ ‘Hello, young man.’
HAPGOOD (Defiantly) Well, I’m going to tell him, whether you marry me or not.
KERNER I’m not charmed by this. If I loved you it was so long ago I had to tell you in Russian and you kept the tape running. It was not a safe house for love. The spy was falling in love with the case-officer, you could hear it on the playback. One day you switched off the hidden microphone and got pregnant.
HAPGOOD That’s uncalled for. I loved you.
KERNER You interrogated me. Weeks, months, every day. I was your thought, your objective … If love was like that it would not even be healthy.
HAPGOOD (Stubbornly) I loved you, Joseph.
KERNER You fell into your own honeypot—
HAPGOOD (Flares) That’s a damned lie! You unspeakable cad!
KERNER —and now you think you’d like to be married, and tell Joe he has a father after all, not dead after all, only a secret, we are all in the secret service!—no, I don’t think so. And suppose I decided to return.
That brings her up short.
HAPGOOD Where? Why would you do that?
KERNER Toska po rodine.
HAPGOOD You mustn’t say that to me, Joseph. Please don’t say it.
KERNER You would not tell.
HAPGOOD I might. Take it back.
Kerner comforts her.
KERNER Milaya moya, rodnaya moya … it’s all right. I am your Joe.
She suffers his embrace, then softens into it.
Cad is good. I like cad.
HAPGOOD Honeypot …
KERNER Is that wrong?
HAPGOOD Honeytrap. And anyway that’s something else. You and your books.
KERNER I thought you would marry Paul.
Wrong. Hapgood stiffens, separates herself.
HAPGOOD I’ll see you tonight. And let Paul do the talking. Keep your end of it as simple as you can.
KERNER Worry about yourself. I will be magnificent.
ACT TWO
SCENE 1
Hapgood’s office, evening. Blair sits in Hapgood’s place. Hapgood sits to one side. Ridley sits to the other side. They are waiting. When Ridley gets bored with this he opens his mouth to say something.
BLAIR (Mildly) Shut up, Ridley.
The door opens and Maggs comes in with a potted plant, with card attached, and delivers it to Hapgood. She opens the little envelope and looks at the florist’s card, replaces the card, and puts the envelope back where it started on the potted plant. Meanwhile Maggs receives a nod from Blair and leaves the room, returning immediately to let Kerner into the room. Maggs retires again closing the door.
(Greeting Kerner) Joseph!
KERNER Hello, Paul.
BLAIR Sit here, won’t you?
KERNER (Turns to Hapgood) So. Something special.
Hapgood ignores his glance. After a slight pause, Kerner takes the chair down-table opposite Blair.
BLAIR This is a friendly interview. That’s a technical term. It means it is not a hostile interview, which is also a technical term. I’ll define them if you wish. (Pause.) Well, I won’t protract this.
From a dossier he produces about half a dozen five-by-eight black-and-white photographs; pages from a typewritten document.
Have a look at these, would you?
He pushes them down the table to Kerner who spreads them face up in front of him.
I’m afraid they’re not very good—photographs of photographs—but you can probably see what they are.
KERNER Of course.
BLAIR One of your regular reports on the anti-matter programme you’re running with the Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva, April/May; copies to the main contractors, the Livermore Research Laboratory in California, through the SDI office in the Pentagon, travelling by embassy courier from Grosvenor Square; and copies to the Defence Liaison Committee, also by hand; both lots under the control of this office, where indeed the copies are made; a very limited circulation, fifteen copies in all, nine American and six British. In fact, however, these photographs are of a British copy. The white patches are the erasure of the circulation number printed on to each page ab origine. Washington adds an American circulation prefix, missing from these pages but not erased. All clear so far?
KERNER Where did the photos come from?
BLA
IR Moscow. They were received in Washington two days ago from an American agent in place, not an American, of course; ‘in place’ means—
KERNER Please, I am not illiterate.
BLAIR The six British copies have a read-and-return distribution of eleven. That includes the Minister, the Liaison Committee, and the Prime Minister’s box. It doesn’t include your lab, or this office where our copy is kept on file with the turnkeys.
KERNER May I ask a question?
BLAIR Yes, do.
KERNER Why are you sitting in Mrs Hapgood’s chair?
BLAIR That is a very fair question. The answer is that Mrs Hapgood isn’t here. Mr Ridley isn’t here either. They are on paid leave, which is why they can’t be with us this evening, and which is why this is a friendly interview.
KERNER (Laughs) Oh, Paul, have you broken the rules at last?—turned by a pair of pretty eyelashes?
HAPGOOD Behave yourself, damn you!
BLAIR (Intervenes calmingly) Please … As you know, there is a regular traffic of monitored information going to the Soviets from this office, organized and prepared by Mrs Hapgood and Mr Ridley, and delivered to you for delivery to your Russian control. In other words a channel already exists. As a precautionary measure, Mrs Hapgood and Mr Ridley have been relieved of their duties. In the same spirit of caution rather than insinuation, your research programme will have to be interrupted for a while, in the national interest. Notice of your own suspension will reach you by messenger at eight o’clock in the morning.
KERNER Paul, listen—you don’t know how many people get their hands on this … my lab—the Whitehall secretariat, the turnkeys, the Minister’s wife, his mistress—who knows?—also it could be an American Embassy copy before it receives the Washington prefix. There’s probably fifty, sixty people, the channel means nothing.
BLAIR The pages were photographed on some kind of table-top, I expect a little hurriedly as is often the way in these affairs. The last page—photograph number six—is not well framed. You can see how it happens: the pages were pinned together at top left and turned over one by one, and the five turned pages have twisted the sixth page a little askew. The frame has caught the edge of a further document lying underneath.