Traitor's Blood

by Reginald Hill

  ‘When Kim joined me at Heathrow, what she told me disturbed me. She’d just finished packing when Angelica arrived. Kim thought she’d been drinking a bit. Kim explained what she was doing and Angelica helped her finish off the packing. According to Kim, she was talking rather wildly about packing up herself and catching the first flight to Venezuela. She was sick of this country, its hypocrisies, its lies. She assured Kim she could tell her things which would make her set off back to South Korea in disgust. And she said she was in the mood before she went to let the Great British Public know what kind of people were running their country.

  ‘Kim was concerned. She’d never seen your mother like this before. But they were interrupted by a ringing at the doorbell. It might have been Special Branch or perhaps SIS, though Kim got the impression that Angelica was expecting someone too. Anyway, your mother said she’d take care of it and Kim slipped out of the back entrance and joined me at the airport.

  ‘I tried ringing the house but got no reply. I was half inclined to go back, but Kim dissuaded me. Angelica was far from incapable in any sense of the word. My flight had been called already, so I left, telling myself that Paris was only a couple of hours from London in any case. I remember regretting it almost as soon as we took off and I must have appeared very nervous and very anxious during the flight, which didn’t help me later.

  ‘We took a taxi from Orly to the house of the people we were staying with. My host was a member of the French CP. He was a friend of long standing, one I trusted implicitly. What he told me was quite horrifying. He had just been telephoned by a London contact, someone who knew where I was going, with the news that Angelica was dead.

  ‘Naturally after the initial shock, my first instinct was to head back home. But they persuaded me to wait for more news. Officially there was very little, but by dint of using all possible contacts, mainly a chap in the Venezuelan Embassy and Percy Nostrand, the story was pieced together. Every piece was more horrifying. At an early stage I was taken to another house in case the trail was picked up. I could see no cause to run and hide, but my friends overruled me and for once I was in no fit mental state to go my own way. But even then I just wanted to make sure I had all the facts before I returned.

  ‘Well, as you know, all the facts added up to something pretty formidable. All the circumstantial evidence pointed to me. Fingerprints, times, my demeanour on the plane. And above all, your evidence which suggested Angelica might very well have found me in bed with Kim. Added to this was the news that the crime had been discovered by a group of Special Branch men calling on me to ‘invite’ me to go with them for questioning on some security matters. This rapidly became the equivalent of an arrest warrant. And certainly the following morning there was no doubt that an arrest warrant for me on a murder charge had been sworn out.

  ‘I still wanted to go back, Lem, but everyone argued against it. This was no accident, I was assured. This was a carefully organized plot to discredit me and to silence your mother at the same time. A man I knew from the Soviet Embassy in Paris was brought to see me. He offered me the security of his own country as a base from which to conduct my defence. No strings attached. I would be there merely as a visitor, not as a defector. I took a lot of persuading. But in the end I was persuaded.’

  ‘Bravo!’ I applauded. ‘That took a lot of guts, Pa. Running like that against your will. I must learn that trick of persuading you to do something you don’t want to do. How did it go again? Oh, I’m sorry. I’m interrupting. Do carry on with your interesting tale.’

  It was childish stuff, but in my father’s presence, I always felt a child.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s worth the effort, Lem,’ he said. ‘But as we’re not doing anything else, either of us, just for the moment, I’ll persevere. I went to Moscow, I called a press conference, I proclaimed my innocence. All those newspaper jackals wanted to know was whether I was applying for Soviet citizenship and whether I intended to marry Kim. I got angry, I’m afraid, and I recall letting them know at some length just what sort of monsters held the so-called free world in chains.

  ‘In the end I gave up in disgust. The choice had become very simple. Return to face a false but superbly orchestrated accusation which would almost certainly get me locked up for twenty years, or stay in Moscow where I was honoured and respected and offered every facility to work. The logic was inescapable. I had to stay. Anything else would have been an emotionally self-indulgent gesture.’

  I said, ‘I know the feeling, Pa. I decided much the same about my initial impulse to go under with Vita 3. It was inescapable logic that made me decide to run with the money.’

  He said icily, ‘The cases are scarcely parallel.’

  But almost immediately he relaxed and added, ‘Though perhaps the psychologies are. And you too will naturally resist the truth which has made a mockery of so many years of your life as I resisted the truth that made a mockery of mine. Though, curiously, the circumstances of our learning it are not dissimilar. What odd parallels of experience seem to exist between us, Lem!’

  ‘You mean you were in captivity in an Italian villa when you found out the truth?’ I implied, still attempting mockery.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was in a hospital ward. I was listening to my wife, Kim. She was unburdening herself. You see, she was dying of a cervical cancer.’

  The word shocked the frivolity out of me, reminding me of what I was, what I must expect.

  I said, ‘And Kim told you … ?’

  He sighed and said, ‘Kim told me what should have been utterly clear all those years ago, that I had indeed been the victim of a plot, but not an imperfect plot which I’d been able in part at least to thwart. No, this plot had succeeded perfectly, for its ends had been to silence Angelica and to get me to Moscow. It had been laid by the KGB.’

  I was reduced to silence. Curiously, it was not the shock of what he was telling me that had this effect, but something else, something implied …

  I said, And Kim knew this all the time and had never thought to mention it? I mean, you married her, you shared her bed!’

  A quaint phrase.’ He laughed. ‘Yes, I shared her bed all those years and she never said a word. Though, ironically, since she told me, I have shared her bed again and her words have never been out of my mind. Oh, don’t judge Kim too harshly, Lem. Yes, you’ve surely guessed, she was a KGB agent, and she may have kept quiet in the first place because of her political loyalties. But I loved her and she loved me and in the end she kept quiet for love. To speak of such things especially in an official apartment would have been far too dangerous for either of us. Even in a hospital or a deathbed it was scarcely safe.’

  I cut in on him, for now it had come to me. Two things he had said with implications I could not ignore.

  I said, ‘Pa, when you said these circumstances were not dissimilar and then that crack about sharing her bed after you’d heard her confession …’

  He nodded approvingly.

  ‘How sharp of you, Lem. I was going to tell, not out of any wish for sympathy, but because I should like you to know, in the remote contingency of your feeling impelled to take any risk on my behalf, that there’s no need to bother. By one of life’s little ironies, during my visits to Kim I began to feel unwell myself. I was in the right place for a swift diagnosis. It had more of tragic inevitability than tragic shock when I was told that I too was suffering from cancer.’

  I have not often startled my father but now I startled him. I let out a great whoop of laughter. It had as much of outrage and protest and savagery in it as humour, but it was still a laugh. He stared at me, amazed.

  ‘Forgive me, Pa,’ I said with a kind of desperate gaiety. ‘These odd parallels you talk about just keep on going on and on. Still, it’s nice after all these years to find we have so much in common!’

  Now it was his turn to work things out. I could see he was finding it hard to let himself get there.

  I nodded. ‘Right, Pa,’ I said. ‘Me too. In the gu
t. I’m not making any plans for Christmas.’

  To my horror I saw his face contort with distress and those sharp blue eyes of his go hazy as though at the approach of tears.

  That would have been unbearable.

  I jumped up and grabbed his shoulders and began to shake.

  ‘Laugh, Pa! It’s a joke, isn’t it? Grisly but clever, eh? You taught me that there’s a laugh in nearly everything if you look for it! So look for the laugh, Pa! Look for the laugh!’

  I set an example by throwing back my head in an unconvincing bellow. Suddenly he joined in. For a moment our combined efforts were merely cacophonous and near-hysterical. Then all at once the rhythms of real laughter took over. We giggled and chortled and guffawed; we exploded, holding on to each other as the peals of amusement sent us rocking round the room. I don’t know about Pa, but I hadn’t laughed like this for twenty years. And the laughter allowed our faces to be stained with those tears that our psyches needed but our sensibilities did not dare to show.

  After a while the door opened and Major Krylov came into the room, his automatic at the ready. The sight of his face set us off again and another couple of minutes elapsed before it was worth his while trying to speak. But he waited patiently with the sad, knowing expression of a serious man who could put a stop to this misplaced jollity whenever he liked.

  He was right.

  He said finally, ‘I have visitors for you.’

  And the laughter stopped as he waved Vasco and Angelica into the room.

  19

  … all good friends together …

  I went towards my daughter and said, ‘Angelica …’

  ‘My name’s Angie,’ she interrupted angrily. ‘Angie, you hear?’

  She was strung out to breaking-point. Vasco put his arms around her and drew her down on to the floor in the corner. I stood over them feeling helpless. We were back to square one. Their world had been invaded by strange, violent, old men and they trusted only each other now. I couldn’t blame them. Krylov must have whistled up reinforcements from somewhere and had them intercepted on their way in to Amalfi. Now on their return to the villa they found armed men in control and, more bewilderingly still, these two strange creatures, so recently at each other’s throats, now embraced in helpless laughter.

  It struck me with a shock that in my daughter’s eyes, standing before her were the men who between them had murdered both her mother and her grandmother.

  I wanted to speak, but no words came. Pa grasped my arm and drew me back to the bed. He shook his head slightly but commandingly as I opened my mouth, and he resumed his narrative as though we had been uninterrupted.

  ‘I had an exploratory operation in the small intestine,’ he said as if he were talking of a visit to the dentist. ‘They cut away, but the prognosis was bad. A few months, a year at the most. Everyone was very kind. They are kind people, the Russians. Most of them. I dare say even Krylov loves dogs and his old grandmother. He was very decent when we talked just before my operation.’

  ‘You knew Krylov in Moscow?’ I said.

  ‘Just vaguely. But I put in a request for a chat with someone in the KGB before I went into hospital and he came along. You see, it had occurred to me that it was very likely my last conversation with Kim had been bugged. Or, even if it wasn’t, that the KGB would simply assume Kim had told me all. In either case, it would be very convenient for them if I died under the anæsthetic. So I saw Krylov and repeated to him exactly what Kim had told me.’

  ‘For God’s sake, why?’ I exploded.

  ‘To save my life, of course,’ said Pa patiently. ‘In fact it was quite clear that the KGB knew exactly what Kim had told me. I think Krylov had been put on the case because he’d actually been in London for a time at the start of his career and knew many of the people concerned. He made no effort to deny what Kim had told me. Why should he? An old man, full of cancer, shortly to be operated on. I must have seemed a good security risk! He was all smiles, but the smiles stopped when I told him I’d prepared a full transcript of what Kim had told me and arranged for it to be smuggled to the West to be delivered in the event of my death.’

  ‘Delivered? Who to?’

  He looked almost apologetic as he said, ‘To you, of course, Lem. Who else? Though naturally I didn’t tell them that. I had no desire to involve you in any unnecessary risk. Krylov pretended not to believe me, but I could see he knew I was telling the truth. He also knew that I had advertised my imminent operation widely among my acquaintances in the foreign embassies. News of my death would be impossible to conceal or even contain. So I survived the operation. But they can’t have been happy when the surgeon revealed that my life expectation was severely limited.’

  ‘Pa,’ I said, ‘what the hell is it that Kim told you that still worries them so much after all these years? And who’s got this transcript now?’

  I got the old exasperated look again. He pulled his left ear lobe and his eyes flickered towards the youngsters. He was telling me that we might well be bugged even now as we spoke and the less that Vasco and Angie knew of things, the better their chances of survival.

  I said, ‘How did you get out?’

  ‘It was surprisingly easy,’ he answered. ‘I made an excellent and rapid recovery from my operation. It’s not unusual, I gather. A short Indian Summer before the Fall. But I let on that I was a weak and decrepit old man. They sent me to convalesce in a sanatorium near Odessa on the Black Sea. They were glad to get me out of Moscow, I suspect, while they did everything in their power to track the exit route of Kim’s confession. I meanwhile was planning my own exit route. To cut a long story short, I got into Jugoslavia via Romania. I have many old friends in Jugoslavia from the war. Communists, of course, but with no great love of the Soviets. They kept me under cover till they could arrange my passage. I was ferried in a fishing boat across the Adriatic from Split to Manfredonia. The next stop was to be Rome.’

  ‘For the press conference?’

  He looked at me in puzzlement and said, ‘There was to be no press conference. It was merely to be a staging-post on my way back to England. I had someone I could trust there.’

  ‘Teresa,’ I said.

  He nodded. I glanced across at Vasco whose defensive posture had relaxed considerably. As for Angie, the tension had almost vanished from her face and she was listening raptly.

  ‘But you hadn’t seen her for twenty years!’ I said.

  ‘Not so long,’ he said. ‘She came to Moscow twice with Carducci who was on various delegations. We met the first time by accident at an official reception. It was strange. She’d always kept very quiet about the Bessacarr connection. Noble bastardy is usually something the Italians are quite happy to boast about. Even when we met, she gave no sign of recognition. Well, we met again privately and we talked. If we aroused suspicion it was only that the lecherous old Englishman was trying to seduce the signora. As I say, she came to Moscow twice. And she wrote. I had a friend at the … at one of the foreign embassies who let me use their bag for any incoming or outgoing mail I wanted to keep private.’

  ‘So you were actually in Rome?’ I said.

  He shook his head.

  ‘I never got there. Perhaps fortunately, as I found out later that my plans were leaked in Manfredonia and Krylov would have been waiting for me along the road. The strain of all the journeys had been too much and I was taken ill. I needed somewhere completely safe and preferably a bit remote to recuperate. So I came here.’

  ‘But why here, for God’s sake?’ I cried.

  He smiled. ‘Didn’t you know, Lem? You remember dear old Cousin Giulio with his plans for a hotel? Well, he tried it, eventually went bankrupt, of course—he could have bankrupted King Solomon’s mines, given a free hand for a week—and lived alone in a corner of the place till he died ten years ago. He would have sold the villa, obviously, but under the terms of Grandmama’s will, he only had a life interest in it which passed to me after his death. When I go, it will pass to you.’r />
  ‘Bets?’ I said jocularly. I wished I hadn’t. As he remembered, an expression of weary pain crossed his face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘But all these people, Heathcliff, that is to say, Giorgio and his mates, who the hell are they?’

  ‘They’re refugees from the earthquake in the mountains last year,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t been here, of course, but I’d arranged through an agent—an estate agent I mean!—in the town to have a caretaker living in the villa. When I read about the devastation of the earthquake, not to mention the administrative chaos that followed, I sent instructions for the property to be made available to the refugees. During the winter I gather there were about sixty here. Most of them went back to their villages in the spring, but about a dozen stayed on. They’re good people, tight-lipped, hating authority but tremendously loyal. When my Jugoslav friends brought me here and explained that I was the villa’s owner and that all that I wanted from them was a place to stay in peace and quiet, they asked no questions but took me in and cared for me and kept their mouths shut. And when they saw that I was in some kind of danger, they rallied round to help, unasked. I hope to God none of them has been hurt!’

  There he goes! I thought, half irritated, half admiring. The big humanitarian gesture even from Moscow, and that aristocratic inspiration of loyalty even, or perhaps inevitably, to the point of discomfort and danger.

  ‘For once in your life, Pa, begin your charity at home,’ I said. ‘We’re all family in here. Let’s take care of our own.’

  I may have sounded more reproachful than I intended. He responded by saying, ‘It’s not my fault they’re here, Lem. I let Teresa know why I hadn’t turned up. A couple of weeks later I had a reply via the Carduccis saying that she’d learned through various CP contacts of her own that the Soviets had known I was heading for Rome and that one of their safe houses at Ostia was now occupied by a couple of Englishwomen called Swift. I asked her to find out more about them, especially the younger. She turned Vasco loose on the beach, I gather, and he soon came up with their identity and background. I’m afraid that Angie didn’t paint a very promising picture of you, and when you turned up, he played safe and got her out.’