The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Yes. It is good, perhaps, that you have seen things from a different perspective.’

  ‘I’m surprised Louis didn’t put your mind at rest. If you didn’t know already, he would have told you that I’ve lost a son and a husband to a fascist, capitalist, imperialist and authoritarian state.’

  ‘It is refreshing to find someone both intellectually and emotionally motivated. I am sorry I doubted you. I don’t know how I could have done, given your pedigree.’

  The significance of that final word did not penetrate at first. She found herself thinking what exactly her pedigree was and got sidetracked by her earlier statement about Portuguese imperialism and the colonies. Gromov watched her mind at work from behind his glacial façade.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked.

  ‘Not at all.’

  She scratched through the contents of her handbag, rooting around in her mind at the same time. She found a cigarette. Gromov provided the light. The word came back again with its full force – pedigree.

  ‘Are you saying, Mr Gromov, that my mother used to work for you?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘She was an excellent servant of our cause. Her position within the Company’s administration was vital.’

  ‘I’m not sure…I’m not sure that…’

  ‘She was never very clear to us about her motivation. You understand that some people who work for us are anxious to establish their reasons. It assuages their feelings of guilt. Your mother was not one of these. She was never a clandestine member of the Communist Party, for instance, like you were.’

  ‘How was she recruited?’

  ‘Kim Philby recruited her during the war.’

  ‘Did he shed any light on her motivation?’

  ‘Only that it was for very deep emotional reasons, which she was not prepared to divulge,’ said Gromov. ‘This is our preferred motivation. Those who do it just for the money…well…they are already demonstrating an untrustworthy capitalist tendency. We remunerated your mother for the considerable risks she undertook but she told me once that luxury made her feel very uncomfortable.’

  ‘Was it you who laid those wreaths on her grave?’

  ‘Yes. One was from me, the other from Comrade Kosygin. It was a small way of honouring her service.’

  ‘She worked in banking.’

  ‘A very interesting position.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ve found someone satisfactory by now. It’s been four years since she retired.’

  ‘Just approach Jim Wallis…remind him.’

  ‘You said there was something specific.’

  ‘I don’t think I answered that question,’ said Gromov, on a roll now. ‘But there is, yes. Something that your mother had been working on before she retired. As you know, the shared culture and language of the two Germanys makes our job of planting agents very easy and they are extremely difficult to uncover unless they are betrayed. We are in the process of entering into discussions with the West and, specifically, with the West German Chancellor, Willi Brandt. We have some very well-placed sources who are gathering excellent material to aid us with our negotiations. We have lost some of those agents, not important ones at the moment, but we don’t want to lose any more. We are also losing the odd high-level defector to the West which is causing us a lot of…embarrassment. The problem is that since Philby left the Company our knowledge at an operational level has been very poor.’

  ‘But not nonexistent. You do have people?’

  ‘Your mother was one. Her retirement was a great blow. In spycraft, as in business, money is everything. It pays for things. You follow the money trail and you find out who it is paying.’

  ‘That sounds simple.’

  ‘Except that your mother traced every penny and concluded that the traitor on our side was either not receiving funds or receiving funds from a different source within the British Intelligence Service. We have since discovered that there is no separate source of funding for overseas operations.’

  ‘So, you have a traitor who is not motivated by money.’

  ‘It’s even rarer than that, Miss Aspinall,’ he said, which irrationally annoyed her for the second time. ‘We have a traitor who is operating without expenses. Not many of our officers, KGB or Stasi, are prepared to fund treacherous operations out of their own pockets. These officers are privileged, but they are paid in Ostmarks and roubles, which don’t go very far over the Wall.’

  ‘So he gets his money from somewhere.’

  ‘Possibly she. We are not even that far down the road.’

  ‘By the sound of it you think whoever it is, is in Berlin.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ve looked at all your agents with access to West Berlin, checked their backgrounds and nothing’s come up?’

  ‘It’s a long process.’

  ‘But you’ve been doing it.’

  Gromov shifted a foot, his first noticeable movement.

  ‘It’s in progress.’

  ‘But easier and quicker through me?’

  ‘You will be rewarded.’

  ‘My reward will be to see João Ribeiro restored to his position on the central committee…if he wants it.’

  ‘It will be done,’ said Gromov.

  ‘The other thing is, Mr Gromov, that this will be the only operation I will perform on your behalf. I have ideological faith but I do not have the same quarrel with my country that my mother did. I also suspect that this is the end of my research project at Cambridge. I imagine that I will have to tell Jim Wallis that it didn’t work out. It will be a burned bridge. I’ll need work. Admin within the Company may not be such a bad job, but I don’t want to be a permanent spy there.’

  Gromov nodded. He would work on her. She would come round to him in the end.

  ‘The only clue we have on the identity of the traitor was something your mother overheard back in ‘66 from Jim Wallis. It was a codename she’d never heard of before and she could find no existing financial record for it. The name was: Snow Leopard.’

  ‘Well, they’re rare, aren’t they, Mr Gromov?’

  ‘Very rarely seen indeed,’ he replied. ‘I come from Krasnogorsk in Siberia, not far from the Mongolian border. At that point the Sayan mountains form the frontier, which is the natural habitat of the snow leopard. My father took me hunting when I was sixteen and while Wall Street was having its magnificent crash I shot the one and only snow leopard I have ever seen. My wife wears it today as a jacket when we go to the ballet.’

  Andrea sat on a bench, high up in Brockwell Park, overlooking the Dulwich Road. The wind had got up and one side of her face was frozen, the eye tearful and her nose red. She hoped this discomfort would prompt some reasoned thought as to why she had just committed herself to spying for the Soviet Union. She had given Gromov good reasons. She wanted João Ribeiro to be rehabilitated. She had hinted that she was motivated in part by the death of her son and husband. Gromov had thrown up the pedigree business. It would appear that this was her family tradition. He’d also brought Louis Greig into the game. Her lover. Had she been considering that? Was it important not to disappoint Louis? His standing with Gromov would be enhanced. Would hers with Louis? Was that what she wanted? Were any of these the real reasons?

  Then it struck her. The thought that had nearly penetrated at the end of the train journey. Control. Everyone, in this business and out, was looking for control. Louis had taken her as his lover because the secret of it gave him control over Martha. Andrea went along with it, with his demands, because she wanted to control Louis. As Louis sensed his control over Andrea waning, he drove her back into a vulnerable state. She allowed it, she wanted it, because she perversely interpreted this as regaining control over Louis by giving him what he wanted. She wanted to go back into the Company because, the spy’s fantasy, it would give her ultimate control. Perhaps that was it after all.

  This had become her nature. Gromov had talked about pedigree, and he was right. She was her mother’s daughter.
Her mother’s revenge for Longmartin’s injustice had been twenty-five years of treachery against her country. She wondered if she’d confessed that to Father Harpur.

  Unable to stand the cold any longer she left the park. Gromov had told her that she was to meet Louis Greig at Durrant’s Hotel in George Street in the West End which, it occurred to her, was not far from the Edgware Road. She checked her handbag to make sure she was still carrying the key to safe-deposit box 718 at the Arab Bank. She took a bus to Clapham Common and the tube into the West End. She came up into Oxford Street from the Marble Arch tube station and walked up the Edgware Road, wondering what instinct in her had prevented her from looking in the box before now.

  Within half an hour she was sitting alone in a cubicle with the oblong stainless steel box, hands sweating, unaccountably nervous. Inside the box were sheafs of tenpound notes. She didn’t have to count them because there was a note in her mother’s hand showing a total of £30,500.

  Outside in the autumn wind she hailed a cab and, leaning against the passenger door, thought for a few moments and made her decision. She asked the driver to take her to King’s Cross Station. She took the afternoon train back to Cambridge and spent the evening packing her things. She went to the pub, ordered a double gin and tonic and called Jim Wallis.

  Chapter 33

  15th January 1971, East Berlin.

  The Snow Leopard stood three feet back from his living-room window and looked down from his fourth-floor apartment on to the empty packed snow and ice between the five concrete blocks which constituted his part of the not-so-new development on the Karl Marx Allee. He was smoking a Marlboro cigarette in a cupped hand and watching, and waiting, and thinking that life had become all about numbers – three feet, four floors, five blocks, all surrounded by nothingness, white, white zero snow. No cars. No people. No movement.

  The two apartment blocks immediately opposite were completely unlit, not a square of light to be seen, not even the hint of someone stretching in a half-dark room, preparing for another all-night surveillance of nobody. The sky above was a muffled grey. The noise level was close to what city people knew as silence. The Snow Leopard’s wife snored quietly in the bedroom, her door open, always open. He cocked his head as one of his two daughters squeaked in her sleep, but then his face went back to the window, his hand back up to his mouth, and there was the unmistakable taste of export America.

  He went into the kitchen, dowsed the butt and threw it in the bin. He shrugged into his heaviest coat. It was minus twelve degrees outside, with more Russian snow due during the day. He put his hand to the radiator. Still working – glad they weren’t on the tenth floor where the heating probably wasn’t and State plumbers as rare as Omaha steak around here. He reviewed the situation one last time. Quiet. Two a.m. His time of night. His type of weather. He crammed a brimmed hat on to his head, picked up his uniform, which was protected by brown paper, and left the apartment, taking the stairs down to the garage.

  He put his uniform in the boot and got into his black Citroën. He drove slowly over the ice-packed roads until he reached the cleared Karl Marx Allee, which had been the Stalin Allee, until Uncle Joe had been Khrushchevified, and then Brezhneved. He turned left, heading into the centre of town and the Wall. There was no traffic but he checked the rear view constantly. No tail. At Alexanderplatz he turned left on to Grunerstrasse, crossed the River Spree and parked up in Reinhold-Huhnstrasse. He took a brisk walk into an unmarked building, flicked a pass at two guards, who nodded without looking, and dropped down two flights of stairs into the basement. He went through a series of swept and swabbed tunnels until he reached a a door which he unlocked. This door, which he relocked, gave on to a small hallway and in four short steps he was walking southwards down Friedrichstrasse on the West side of the Wall.

  He walked quickly and crossed the street at the Kochstrasse U-bahn. A hundred metres later he paid ten Deutschmarks to a swarthy, moustachioed man in a glass cubicle under a neon sign which read Frau Schenk Sex Kino. He entered through a large heavy leather flap and stood at the back, unable to see and unable to work out what was happening on the dark screen. Only the soundtrack told him that several people were approaching ultimate satisfaction with customary and prolonged ecstasy while the camera locked itself unerringly on their biological detail. Porn, he thought, the desecration of sex.

  He reached the side wall of the cinema and walked slowly down to the front and another door, which let him into a passage lit by a single red bulb. A ginger-haired man, the same width as the passage, stood at the far end with his hands in front of his groin. Close to, the Snow Leopard could see that the man had the eyelashes of a pig. He handed over another ten marks and opened his coat. The man patted him down, squeezed his pockets.

  ‘Number three is free,’ he said.

  The Snow Leopard went into number three cubicle and closed the door. There was a binful of used tissues and some wishful graffiti on the walls. Beyond the tinted glass panel there was a girl kneeling on the floor with her face turned sideways, cheek to the ground, eyes closed, tongue roving her lips and her behind as high up in the air as it would go. She was fingering herself. He turned his back on the scene, checked his watch and tapped on the plywood wall. No answer. He tapped out his code again and this time received the correct reply. He took a roll of paper, a coded message, from the cuff of his coat and pushed it halfway through a hole drilled in the wall. It was removed from the other side. He waited. Nothing came back. A few minutes later the next-door cubicle was vacated.

  He waited more minutes, his back to the glass panel, until there was a polite knock on the door. They always knocked, just in case. He followed another man down a passage, which curved to the right past other cubicles. The man opened a door to the left and waved the Snow Leopard through. The lighting returned to neon normal in this part of the building.

  ‘Second on the left,’ said the man, to the back of his head.

  He went into the office. A man with a substantial belly stood up on the other side of a desk. They shook hands and the man offered coffee, which he accepted. The Snow Leopard laid a small white sachet on the sports page, which the man had been reading. The man set the coffee down, picked up the sachet, closed his newspaper and laid out a piece of dark blue velvet. He emptied the sachet on to it. He inspected the diamonds visually first, divided them up and then weighed them on a set of scales he had on top of the safe in the corner of the room.

  ‘Three hundred thousand,’ he said.

  ‘Dollars?’ asked the Snow Leopard, and the man laughed.

  ‘Are you OK for cigarettes, Kurt?’ he said, showing how seriously he took the attempt at negotiation.

  ‘I’ve got plenty.’

  ‘Did you bring any of those Cuban cigars with you this time?’

  ‘What are we celebrating?’

  ‘Nothing, Kurt, nothing.’

  ‘That’s why I didn’t bring any.’

  ‘Next time.’

  ‘Only if it’s dollars, not Deutschmarks.’

  ‘You’re getting to be a capitalist.’

  ‘Who? Me?’

  The man laughed again, asked him to turn his back. The Snow Leopard sipped his good, strong, real coffee down to the grounds and turned to find six blocks of money on the desk. He put them into the lining of his coat.

  ‘Which way out?’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go back through there like I did the last time.’

  ‘Left, right, keep going until you get to a door and that’ll put you into the Kochstrasse U-bahn.’

  ‘Why couldn’t I come in that way?’

  ‘That way we don’t get the twenty Deutschmarks entrance fee from you.’

  ‘Capitalists,’ said the Snow Leopard, shaking his head.

  The man boomed another laugh.

  The Snow Leopard got back into his Citroën on the East side of the Wall. He headed north through the old Jewish quarter of Prenzlauer Berg on the Schönhauser Allee. He took a right after the Jewish cemetery and,
as the street narrowed, went up on to the pavement and parked under the arch of the ersterhof of a huge and decrepit Mietskasern in Wörtherstrasse. He waited with the engine running and then rolled into the first courtyard of the old nineteenth-century rental barracks, the terrible fortress-like forerunners to the kind of place he was now living in himself. He parked up and crossed the courtyard to the hinterhof, the back building, which never saw any sunlight. It was silent. The place was deserted, the living spaces totally uninhabitable, the damp, at this time of year, frozen on the walls. Chunks of plaster and concrete lay scattered across the stairs and landings. He knocked on the metal door of an apartment on the third floor. Feet approached from the other side. He took a full-face ski hat out of his pocket and pulled it over his head.

  ‘Meine Ruh’ ist hin,’ said a voice.

  ‘Mein Herz ist schwer,’ he replied.

  The door opened. He stepped into the heat.

  ‘Do we have to have such depressing lines from Goethe?’

  ‘I’ll be changing to Brecht next week.’

  ‘Another cheerful soul.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Herr Kappa?’

  The Snow Leopard took off his coat, laid it on the chair and removed an American passport in the name of Colonel Peter Taylor from the lining. Amongst its pages was a loose passport-size photograph.

  ‘You know the deal. Take the old one off, put the new one on.’

  The man, late thirties with bland, unnoticeable, dark features opened the passport, leafed through it with the familiarity of a border guard, which was what he had been fifteen years before. The nine years he’d spent in prison as a member of a five-man ring who’d been caught smuggling people to the West had not dulled his attention to detail, but rather sharpened it to a professional level.

  ‘This is genuine,’ said the man, looking up out of the corner of his head.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I’ll need forty-eight hours.’