by John Lawton
“I was, I know, a rather serious little girl. Mea culpa.”
“And now you are a very serious woman. Why else did you ever take up with a rogue like Joe or an old rogue like me—because we made you laugh?”
“Let’s not talk about Joe.”
“Ask yourself, Nell—what will serve you best? Following Brandt or not following Brandt? He has the same ambition, the same messianic urge, the same preposterous belief in himself.”
“Preposterous?”
“If Brandt ruled the world, every day might not be the first day of spring, but East would talk to West, North would talk to South and no one would go hungry.”
“As you said, preposterous.”
“You have hitched your wagon to his star.”
“But …”
“But?”
“But Bonn. Erno, it’s the dullest place on Earth.”
III
Omelettes
§11
The Palace of Westminster, London:
May 19, 1966, about 4 p.m.
Cloudy with Sunny Intervals
“Where is Bernard Alleyn?”
Fifteen minutes earlier it had been “Where is Leonid L’vovich Liubiumov?” One man, two names, but he did wish they’d make their collective mind up.
It was the third time Reg Thwaite had asked him that. This time, noticeably, pointedly without rank or status. Not Flight Sergeant Holderness, not even Mister.
Wilderness returned the compliment.
“I think I answered that question several minutes ago. I don’t know,” he lied.
“If you had answered me, I’d not be asking, would I? A Soviet agent, a Soviet agent in your charge, vanishes without trace—I’ll ask you a hundred times if I have to. Where is Bernard Alleyn?”
The chairman intervened.
“I think, Flight Sergeant, that Sir Reginald would like your ‘I don’t know’ placed in some sort of context.”
“Context?”
Wilderness felt Burne-Jones edging nearer, straining for proximity, everything short of scraping his chair across the parquet.
It was unusual for a parliamentary committee to question a serving MI6 officer, almost without prior protocol. Burne-Jones had been insistent … it would all take place behind closed doors, there’d be no stenographer, and as Wilderness’s immediate superior he’d be there too, half a pace behind.
“Run through the details of the handover.”
“Again?”
Wilderness felt Burne-Jones at his ear.
“Just answer the question, Joe.”
“All right. Once more. It hasn’t changed in the last half-hour. It won’t be any different. Alleyn and I walked out to the middle of the Glienicke Bridge—”
“Ah …” A rustling of papers on Thwaite’s part, the pretence of consulting notes. “Why was that? Why just the two of you?”
Wilderness could find it easy to hate Reg Thwaite. A working-class Yorkshire Tory MP, a privy councillor, who had taken it upon himself to be the voice of the patriotic working man, a barrack-room lawyer who had no truck with socialism and had made himself the scourge of what he saw as a secret service dominated by the English upper classes. He hated the old boy network, and even Wilderness’s East End accent carried no reassurance that he might be the antithesis of anything that could be termed “old boy.”
“More people, more guns, more possibilities of someone getting shot,” Wilderness replied.
“And you didn’t have Alleyn handcuffed?”
“No.”
“And you say no shots were fired?”
“No one even drew a gun,” Wilderness lied.
In reality, he and Yuri had stood in a face-off, pointing guns at each other’s heads. He’d no idea if he could ever have shot Yuri or Yuri him. He’d known Yuri since 1947, as plain Major Myshkin. At some point in the murk of Soviet history he had become General Bogusnik—another case of one man, two names.
“Alleyn crossed to the East German side as Geoffrey Masefield crossed to the West. They stopped for a moment. Got a good look at each other. Too long a moment. I watched General Bogusnik fold up in pain. Alleyn went to grab him, Masefield followed. Between them they got him back to his own people at the far end of the bridge. That was the last I ever saw of Alleyn.”
He hoped he’d placed the right emphasis on the final sentence.
“And what did you do?”
“I stayed on the American side of the line and I waited. I stood there with my hands in my pockets in a freezing wind and I waited. I thought Masefield would return, but when I heard engines start, I knew he wouldn’t. I knew the deal was off. I walked back into the American sector and drove into West Berlin.”
The Americans had backed him in this pack of lies. If they hadn’t, he’d be in the shit. He assumed it had been in both their interests to bury the truth—that Alleyn had crossed back with him. Frank Spoleto had been there—the CIA man posing as an Ad-man posing as a CIA man. As long as the grunts jumped when Frank barked, Wilderness didn’t care. Frank owed him no favours. He’d no idea why, but it must have suited Frank and the CIA to agree to his story. But—somebody had said something. There was a careless whisper in the air or pricks like Thwaite wouldn’t have their teeth into him.
“The last you saw of him?”
“Yes.”
“And where do you think he went after that?”
“I’ve no idea. Bogusnik died. That was common knowledge within ten days. They gave him a state funeral. Someone else will be looking after Alleyn. He could be on a pension with a row of medals on his chest, he could have a desk job, he could be propping up a bar with Kim Philby, he could be in a gulag.”
Thwaite looked pained. Mentioning Philby might have been showing the red rag to the bull, a one-person incarnation of everything Thwaite hated about the toffs. But he looked to his left, to the Liberal Party’s sole representative on the committee—J. Fraser Campbell, MP for islands in the North Atlantic where the sheep outnumbered the voters two hundred fifty to one—and passed the baton.
“Thank you, Sir Reginald. Could we come to the incident that took place a few hours later? At the Invalidenstraße checkpoint?”
“I got Masefield out,” Wilderness said bluntly, and sensing what was coming next threw in, “I did my job. Or did you expect me to leave him there?”
“Is it part of your job to create diplomatic incidents?”
“Mr. Campbell, I’m an SIS field agent. In the field everything is a potential diplomatic incident. If it weren’t, we’d be known as the Obvious Service, not the Secret Service.”
“So you don’t deny this was a diplomatic incident?”
“I don’t deny it. I don’t care. I did what I had to do. I did my job.”
Campbell shoved a sheaf of papers to one side, spread out a newspaper, spun it around to show Wilderness the headline and photographs: Der Tagesspiegel, six months old, dated the day after the incident. He’d seen it before. The West Berlin press must have been nifty to get there so soon. Night shots, the stark unreality that flashbulbs create … the wreck of a car, the prat of a British officer he’d confronted, the bent barrier … it all looked as though he’d just walked out of shot seconds before.
“The barrier crashed,” Campbell was saying. “Our side confronting their side, shots fired, men injured. Do you have any idea how hard it was to placate the East Germans?”
Wilderness had no recollection of any shots fired, but at the moment he crashed through the barrier in that borrowed Austin Healey he would not have noticed a bomb going off.
He flicked up a lock of hair, not so casually that they could fail to notice the scar on his forehead.
“No shots were fired. The only people injured were me and Masefield. And I don’t care about placating the enemy. This was a skirmish at a Berlin crossing point, not the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
The British border patrol weren’t telling any lies on his behalf, but then they didn’t have Frank breathing down their neck
s. What they had were photographs. The camera never lies. And Wilderness wondered whether this meeting would be taking place at all if there’d been no photographs.
“But weapons were drawn?”
“You don’t draw a rifle, you just point the bloody thing.”
Wilderness heard another whisper from Burne-Jones: “For God’s sake. Remember your manners.”
Too loud a whisper. They’d all heard.
Thwaite again, “I find your attitude very hard to credit, Flight Sergeant Holderness. There’s no room here for your resentment.”
“And I find your questioning very hard to stomach. You shouldn’t be sitting here in judgment on me like the three wise monkeys.”
“Then what should we be doing? If not our duty?”
“I did my duty. I got Geoffrey Masefield out. A hapless bugger who should never have been there in the first place. Instead of whining about diplomatic incidents you should be giving me a fucking medal.”
Burne-Jones was on his feet at once.
“Sorry, gentlemen, but I’m afraid this meeting is suspended until further notice. You will understand if I say that I need to talk to Flight Sergeant Holderness alone.”
Thwaite had to have the parting shot.
“I’d understand if you said you had to smack his bottom.”
§12
It being a Thursday when Burne-Jones and Wilderness emerged into New Palace Yard, Wilderness had no expectations of an early resumption. On Fridays members of Parliament dashed back to their constituencies in the pretence of consulting the electorate, while shooting grouse or shagging mistresses. The earliest he’d be summoned again would be Tuesday.
Burne-Jones held up his furled brolly and hailed a cab. Turning in the open door he said, “Go home, Joe.”
“Shouldn’t that be ‘go home and look to your sins’?”
“No. Go home and look to your wife and children. If you can’t be a good spy, at least be a halfway decent son-in-law.”
A bit of a stinger. Nothing like the bollocking he might have expected. All the same he thought he was a very decent son-in-law to Burne-Jones and had no opinion at all on his own merits as a spy.
He watched the cab head west, glanced up at Big Ben and, realising it would soon be rush hour, turned into Westminster Bridge Road and headed for the Underground.
It was Saturday afternoon before he heard from Burne-Jones again. He was watching wrestling on ITV—the antics of Jackie Pallo and whichever lumpkin knew part B of the same routine and had been selected as fall guy. Judy had taken the twins to Hampstead Heath in the custom-made double pushchair the Burne-Joneses had given the Holdernesses for Christmas.
Wilderness turned the volume down and picked up the phone.
“Joe.”
The upper-class drawl of his father-in-law, a single syllable drawn out to sound almost horizontal.
“Dinner this evening?”
“I think we can manage that. Judy’s out at—”
“No. Just you and me. Madge will be going to the theatre. The Whitehall. You know how fond she is of farce.”
He did know. Madge had dragged both of them to some awful tosh over the last few years. The current Whitehall farce was an attempt to make a comedy out of a Soviet defection.
“Isn’t it still Chase me, Comrade? She must have seen it by now?”
“Twice, as I recall, but it’s the last night, and she’s taking a very special guest, Nureyev. Upshot, I have the place to myself. Shall we say seven thirty?”
So, a bollocking at the dinner table. Alec being one of nature’s gents, they’d at least get through the soup course before he laid into Wilderness.
§13
There was no soup course. After a stiff martini, during which Wilderness had answered half a dozen questions about the character/behaviour/university place/career prospects of his two year-old children, Alec had invited him to rip up a French stick while he deftly tossed omelettes over a naked flame at the dining table.
“An omelette should never feel remotely leathery to the tongue,” he pronounced as the first turned a somersault.
He sounded so knowledgeable. All the same Wilderness knew he couldn’t so much as peel a potato if left to cook a proper meal. If he mentioned Elizabeth David, his father-in-law would raise an eyebrow and say “who?” It was not so much his party trick as just another toff thing. A leftover from his days in the Officers’ Mess. A gentleman should always be prepared to toss his own.
“Eat it while it’s at its best, Joe, don’t wait for me.”
A couple of minutes passed in silence. Burne-Jones flipped his own omelette onto his plate, took a mouthful and sighed at his own artistry.
“It’s good,” Wilderness said. “It’s very good.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“I’m not. You cooked it.”
“I meant Alleyn, Masefield … that pompous ass Thwaite.”
“Fuss about nothing,” Wilderness replied.
“Quite … but …”
Inevitable, thought Wilderness; he was here to rebutt the buts.
“But what?”
“Something set them off. Someone or something poked a sleeping pig with a stick.”
“So?”
“I’m tending towards the notion that it’s the Invalidenstraße incident that rang all the bells. After all, the Glienicke Bridge is American turf and they have little choice but to accept the Americans’ version of events. But Jock Campbell is not exaggerating. Invalidenstraße took some sorting. The Germans are utterly schizoid about things. They admire the guts and the dash for freedom whilst deploring the damage to their efforts at an Eastern Bloc Politik. But for Invalidenstraße I’m not at all sure Alleyn would be an issue. Our lords and masters might not have noticed him. But it remains, they have noticed. Pity you wrote off the car. Made too good a photo. Bigger pity our blokes couldn’t get it all straight before the press arrived, but there you are.”
Or, thought Wilderness, there I wasn’t.
“I got Masefield out. Surely no one thinks I should have left our Geoffrey behind?”
“No … no one does. I think it may well be your methods …”
“Tell me another way. I got him out without a shot fired.”
“And therein lies the saving grace. Not a shot fired. If there had been—well it doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“What do they want? What do they expect?”
“Dunno what they expect. Perhaps some evidence that Alleyn had reached Moscow?”
Wilderness shook his head.
“That’s … that’s naïve. To name one example. It took the Russians five years to admit Burgess and Maclean were there. Why would they trumpet Alleyn’s return? There’s no pattern.”
“It’s just that our people in Moscow have picked up nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“But the Russians aren’t complaining they didn’t get him back. So it’s meaningless. The Russians will do what they will do. And right now they’re using Alleyn’s presence or absence to create dissent here.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Probably not.”
“Do you have any idea at all where Alleyn might be if not in Moscow?”
“I’d only be guessing.”
“Then guess.”
Wilderness had last seen Alleyn in Charlottenburg six months ago. He had given him an Irish passport. A fake, but a good fake. One of Erno Schreiber’s small masterpieces. Alleyn would only hit trouble when or if he came to renew it. He’d also given him the address of his ex-wife in Dublin. He’d made no arrangement to get Alleyn out of Berlin, he’d left him to it, but it would be a man of very little imagination, let alone one who had lived a double life for fifteen years—English civil servant and Soviet secret agent—who could not navigate his way back to England using the hundred quid in fivers that Wilderness had also given him.
It would be a fairly safe guess to say that Alleyn was in Dublin.
“He could be anywher
e,” Wilderness replied.
“Anywhere except Moscow?”
“That’s right.”
“Joe, I think we are only a matter of days away from some arse like Reg Thwaite coming straight out and accusing you of turning Alleyn loose. An action Reg may well consider to be treason.”
“I shall deny it.”
“No you won’t.”
“Eh?”
“I got called upstairs yesterday.”
Ah.
Upstairs.
The office of C, Sir Dick White, head of MI6.
“You won’t get the chance to answer the question. Dick wants you out.”
“Out of the Service? Alec, for fuck’s sake!”
“No no no. Out of the country. Joe, Dick White doesn’t want you answering that question. In fact, he doesn’t want the question asked in the first place. The only reason we can give, the only acceptable reason, that is, for you not answering a parliamentary summons is if affairs of state intervene.”
“I say again, eh?”
“We can post you abroad, tell ’em it’s a top secret mission that only you can do. We pretend you’re 007 or some such tosh. They’ll all have seen a Bond film. Reg Thwaite surely has? He’s a dead ringer for that Goldfinger chap. If not, then they’re all of a generation to have grown up on Richard Hannay. They probably think that’s what you do.”
“I carry a gun. I wear a well-tailored suit. I don’t have a homing device in the heel of my shoe.”
“Quite. Nor do you have a pen with invisible ink. We invent a mission, then we just let their imaginations settle into a rut of Buchan’s or Fleming’s devising. Within a few months they’ll have forgotten about you.”
Wilderness found there was always a certain pleasure in being told he was “on a mission.”
“So. Back to Berlin,” he said, heightening the pleasure for himself.
“Er … ’fraid not. You and Berlin are a poisonous combination right now. I think it might well be the only place we couldn’t send you.”
