by William Boyd
‘He knows you’re my daughter. He knows your name.’
‘So what?’ I said. ‘He also knows you’ve got him cold. Everything’s going to come out. He can’t lay a finger on you. You told him – you challenged him to pick up the phone.’
She thought about this.
‘Maybe you’re right … Maybe that’s enough. Maybe he won’t make any calls. But he might leave something written.’
‘What do you mean: “leave something written”? Leave something written where?’ I couldn’t follow her.
‘It would be safer to leave something written, you see, because …’ She stopped, thinking hard as she drove, hunching forward almost as if, in that posture, she could drive the car home more swiftly.
‘Because what?’
‘Because he’ll be dead by tomorrow morning.’
‘Dead? How can he be dead tomorrow morning?’
She glanced at me, an impatient glance that said: You still don’t get it, do you? Your brain doesn’t work like ours. She spoke patiently: ‘Romer will kill himself tonight. He’ll inject himself, take a pill. He’ll have had the method ready for years. It’ll look exactly like a heart attack, or a fatal stroke – something that looks natural, anyway.’ She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Romer’s dead. I didn’t need to shoot him with that gun. The second he saw me he knew that he was dead. He knew his life was over.’
14
A True-Blue English Gentleman
MY MOTHER, JOCHEN AND I stood close together under my new russet umbrella on the pavement outside the entrance to St James’s Church, Piccadilly. It was a cool, drizzly September morning – packed seal-grey clouds moved steadily above us – as we watched the dignitaries, guests, friends and family arrive for Lord Mansfield of Hampton Cleeve’s memorial service.
‘Isn’t that the Foreign Secretary?’ I said, as a dark-haired man in a blue suit hurried out of a chauffeur-driven car.
‘He seems to be getting a good turn-out,’ my mother said, almost eagerly, as if it were a marriage rather than a funeral, as a small queue began to bulk shapelessly at the entrance to the church, behind the iron palings of the small sunken forecourt. A queue of people not at all used to queuing, I thought.
‘Why are we here?’ Jochen asked. ‘It’s a bit boring, just standing out here on the pavement.’
‘It’s a church service for a man who died a few weeks ago. Someone Granny used to know – in the war.’
‘Are we going to go in?’
‘No,’ my mother said. ‘I just wanted to be here. To see who was coming.’
‘Was he a nice man?’ Jochen said.
‘Why do you ask?’ my mother said, now taking full notice of the boy.
‘Because you don’t seem very sad.’
My mother considered this for a while. ‘I thought he was nice at the beginning, when I first knew him. Very nice. Then I realised I had made a mistake.’
Jochen said nothing further.
As my mother had predicted, Lucas Romer did not live to see the next morning after we had left him. He died that night from a ‘massive heart attack’, according to the newspaper obituaries. They had been prominent but rather sketchy and David Bomberg’s portrait had been frequently reproduced, in the absence of any decent photographs, I supposed. Lucas Romer’s war-work had been summarised as ‘for the intelligence services, later rising to a senior position within GCHQ’. Many more words had been expended on his publishing career. It was as if they were commemorating the passing of a great literary figure rather than a spy. My mother and I looked at the guests as the queue to enter the church lengthened: I thought I spotted a newspaper editor, frequently on TV, I saw an ex-cabinet minister or two from distant governments, a famously right-wing novelist and many grey-haired elderly men in immaculately tailored suits, their ties discreetly signalling aspects of their past – regiments, clubs, universities, learned societies – that they were happy to acknowledge. My mother pointed out an actress: ‘Isn’t that Vivien Leigh?’
‘She’s long dead, Sal.’
Jochen tugged discreetly at my sleeve. ‘Mummy: I’m getting just a little bit hungry.’ Then he added considerately, ‘Aren’t you?’
My mother crouched down and gave him a kiss on the cheek. ‘We’re going to have a very nice lunch,’ she said. ‘The three of us: at a lovely hotel up the road called the Ritz.’
We sat at a table in the corner of the beautiful dining-room with a fine view of Green Park, where the leaves of the plane trees were turning yellow, giving up the fight prematurely after the broiling summer – autumn would be early this year. My mother was paying for everything, so she announced at the beginning of the meal, and we were to have nothing but the best on this memorable day. She ordered a bottle of vintage champagne and when it had been poured into our flutes we toasted each other. Then she let Jochen have a sip.
‘It’s rather nice,’ he said. The boy was behaving very well, I thought, polite and rather subdued, as if he sensed there was a complicated and secret sub-text to this unusual trip to London that he would never fathom.
I raised my fizzing glass to my mother.
‘Well, you did it, Eva Delectorskaya,’ I said.
‘Did what?’
‘You won.’ I felt absurdly emotional, suddenly, as if I might cry. ‘In the end.’
She frowned, as if she’d never considered this before.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘In the end. I suppose I did.’
Three weeks later we sat in the garden of her cottage on a Saturday afternoon. It was a sunny day, but bearable: the unending heat of the summer was a memory now – something to reminisce about – now we welcomed a bit of early-autumn sunshine, with its fleeting warmth. There were swift, scudding clouds and a freshening wind thrashed the branches of the trees across the meadow. I could see the ancient oaks and beeches of Witch Wood heave and stir restlessly as the rattle of their yellowing leaves carried across the uncut blond grass towards us – hushing, shushing – as the unseen currents of air hit the trees’ dense massiness and set their weighted heavy branches moving urgently, making the great trees seem alive somehow, shifting, tossing, provoked into a kind of life by the effortless power of the wind.
I was watching my mother reading a document with stern concentration. I had brought it with me, having just come from a meeting with Timothy ‘Rodrigo’ Thoms at All Souls, where he had given me a typewritten analysis of my detailed summary of The Story of Eva Delectorskaya – and this is what she now had in her hands. Thoms had tried, but failed, to seem unexcited as he spoke but I could sense the scholar’s plea underneath his calm explanations of what he thought had gone on in America between Lucas Romer – ‘Mr A’ as far as Thoms was concerned – and Eva Delectorskaya. Give me all this, his eyes said, and let me run with it. I made him no promises.
Much of what he told me was over my head or else I wasn’t fully concentrating – clustering acronyms and names of rezidents and recruiters, members of the Russian politburo and NKVD, possible identifications of the men who had been in the room when Eva was interrogated about the Prenslo Incident, and so on. The most interesting verdict, it seemed to me, was that he identified Romer unequivocally as a Russian agent – he seemed absolutely convinced about this – arguing that he had probably been recruited while he was studying at the Sorbonne in the 1920s.
This fact helped him explain the background to what had gone on in Las Cruces. He felt that the timing was the vital clue and all to do with what was happening in Russia in late 1941 when, coincidentally, another Russian spy – Richard Sorge – had told Stalin and the Politburo that Japan had no plans to attack Russia through Manchuria, that Japanese interests were concentrated and directed towards the west and the Pacific. The immediate consequence of this for the Russians was that it freed large numbers of divisions to fight against the German army, still marching towards Moscow. But the German invasion of Russia was faltering: the tenacity of Russian resistance, the over-extended lines of supply, fatigu
e and the encroaching winter meant that it was stopped and held finally just a few miles from Moscow.
Thoms had reached for a book and opened it at a marked page at this juncture.
‘I’m quoting from Harry Hopkins here,’ he said. Harry Hopkins – all I could think of was Mason Harding.
Thorns read, ‘ “As the new Russian armies from the Manchurian front began to mass and gather around Moscow, waiting to launch the inevitable counter-attack there began to grow in the Russian high command – and notably within the NKVD and the other secret services – the realisation that the tide had finally turned: the prospect of Russia defeating the Germans was finally realisable. Certain elements within the Soviet government began to think ahead, about political settlements in the post-war world.”’
‘What’s this got to do with agent Sage stuck in a car in the deserts of New Mexico?’ I asked.
‘That’s what’s so fascinating,’ he said. ‘You see, some people, particularly in the intelligence services, began to think that, for the Russians, it might actually be for the best, in the long term, if the USA did not enter the war in Europe. If Russia was going to win, then the last thing they wanted was a strong US presence in Europe. Russia could do it on her own, given time. Not everyone agreed, of course.’
‘I still don’t follow.’
He explained: towards the end of 1941, NKVD interest began to focus on the strenuous efforts that the British were making to persuade the USA to ally themselves with Britain and Russia against the Nazis. These efforts seemed to be working: to the Russians it appeared as if Roosevelt was looking for any excuse to join the war in the Allied cause. The discovery of the Brazilian map was a key factor in this propaganda war – it seemed to have genuinely tilted the balance. A great coup by BSC, so it was judged. US public opinion could understand much better a threat that lay at their own borders, rather than one that was a distant 3,000 miles away.
So, Thoms argued, it was probably at this juncture that whoever was running Mr A issued him with instructions to try to do something to undermine this increasingly successful BSC propaganda, and expose it as such. To his mind the events at Las Cruces looked very typical of this sort of destabilising exercise. If indeed agent Sage had been found dead with a forged German map of Mexico, he said, then the whole BSC South American case would have been exposed as the sham it was and the isolationist, non-interventionist cause in America would have been hugely strengthened.
‘So Sage was meant to be the smoking gun,’ I said. ‘BSC exposed – perfidious Albion, yet again.’
‘Yes, but Mr A’s hands were totally clean. It was a brilliant, very, very clever operation. Mr A issued no instructions to Sage beyond the initial courier delivery – everything Sage did on the way to New Mexico and in Las Cruces was impromptu, completely unplanned and the result of decisions made on the spot. It was as if agent Sage could be relied upon to engineer his own destruction. Remorselessly, unthinkingly.’
Engineer her own destruction, I thought – but she was too smart for them all.
‘Anyway, it didn’t matter in the end,’ Thoms said, with a wry smile. ‘The Japanese came to the rescue with the attack on Pearl Harbor – and so did Hitler with his subsequent unilateral declaration of war on the USA a few days later: everyone tends to forgets about that …Everything changed, for ever. All this made sure that, even if Sage had been compromised, it would have made no difference at all. The US was finally in the war. Mission accomplished.’
Thoms had made a few other points. He felt that the assassination of Nekich seemed very significant. Information from the FBI debriefing of Nekich appeared to have reached Morris Devereux in November 1941, hinting about serious Soviet penetration of the British security and intelligence services (‘We know now just how extensive it was,’ Thoms added, ‘Burgess, Maclean, Philby and whoever else in the gang is still lurking out there’). Devereux would never have suspected Mr A as a ‘ghost’ had not agent Sage’s experiences in Las Cruces caused grave doubts to be raised and the finger of culpability to be pointed. Devereux was clearly very close to unmasking Mr A before he was killed. His death – his ‘suicide’ – bore all the signs of an NKVD assassination squad, which again supported the case for Mr A being a Russian agent, rather than German.
‘I think Mr X is probably Alastair Denniston, director of the Government Code and Cypher School,’ Thoms said as he walked me to my car. ‘He would have sufficient power to be able run his own “irregulars”. And, think about this, Ruth, if, as seems highly likely, Mr A was an NKVD “ghost” in GCHQ then he probably did more for the Russian cause during the war than all the Cambridge spies put together. Amazing.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, this is the real dividend of the stuff you gave me. It would be shocking if it was made public. Huge scandal.’
I said nothing more. He asked me if I wanted to go out for a meal some time and I said I would call – life was a bit frantic at the moment. I thanked him very much and drove out to Middle Ashton, picking up Jochen on the way.
My mother seemed to have reached the final page. She read out loud: ‘“However, this is not to denigrate the story of agent Sage. The material you gave me provides a fascinating account into both the huge extent and the minutiae of BSC operations in the USA. This is all compelling stuff to someone like me, needless to say – the lid has been kept very firmly pressed down on what the BSC was up to over the years. Until now, no one on the outside has really had any idea of the extent of British intelligence operations in the USA before Pearl Harbor. You can imagine how this information might be received by our friends on the other side of the Atlantic. Forging a ‘special relationship’ clearly wasn’t enough – we needed British Security Coordination to go the extra mile.”’
She tossed the pages down on to the grass; she seemed upset and stood up, ran her hands through her hair and went into the house. I didn’t go to her – I thought she probably needed some time to let all this analysis filter through to her, to see if it fitted, made sense.
I reached over and picked up the typed pages, tapping them into shape on my knee, deliberately thinking about other things, such as the intriguing news the morning’s post had brought – an invitation to the marriage of Hugues Corbillard and Berangere Wu in Neuilly, Paris, and another letter from Hamid, sent from a town called Makassar on the island of Celebes, Indonesia, announcing that his salary had risen to $65,000 and that he hoped to take a month’s leave before the end of the year, during which he intended to come to Oxford to see me and Jochen. Hamid wrote to me regularly once a week: he had forgiven me my crassness in the Captain Bligh without my having to ask for it or before I could apologise. I was a very bad correspondent – I think I’d replied briefly to him, twice – but I sensed Hamid’s dogged wooing would continue, none the less, for a long time to come.
My mother came back out of the house, a packet of cigarettes in her hand. She seemed more composed as she sat down, offered me one (which I refused, I was trying to give up, as a result of Jochen’s persistent nagging).
I looked at her and watched her light her cigarette.
‘Make any sense, Sal?’ I asked, tentatively.
She shrugged. ‘How did he express it? “The minutiae of BSC operations in the USA …” I suppose he’s right. Suppose de Baca had killed me – it wouldn’t have made any difference. Pearl Harbor was right around the corner – not that anybody ever guessed it would happen.’ She managed a chuckle, but I could tell she didn’t find it funny. ‘Morris used to say that we were like miners chipping away at the coal-face miles underground – but we hadn’t a clue how the mining industry was run on the surface. Chip-chip-chip – here’s a piece of coal.’
I thought for a while and then said, ‘Roosevelt never made that speech, did he? When he was going to use your Mexican map as evidence. That would have been amazing – might have changed everything.’
‘You’re very kind, darling,’ my mother said. I could tell she was not going to be bucked
up today whatever I tried: there was a kind of resigned weariness about her – too many unhappy memories swirling around. ‘Roosevelt was due to make the speech on 10 December,’ she said. ‘But then Pearl Harbor happened – and he didn’t need a Mexican map anymore.’
‘So Thoms is saying that Romer was a Russian agent. Like Philby, Burgess, Maclean – I suppose that’s why Romer killed himself. Too old to run like they did.’
‘It makes more sense,’ she said. ‘I could never understand why Morris thought he was an Abwehr ghost.’ She smiled an empty smile. ‘Still,’ she added with heavy irony, ‘it’s good to know how insignificant and petty it all was in the “big picture”, I must say.’
‘It wasn’t insignificant and petty to you,’ I said, putting my hand on her arm. ‘These things all depend on your point of view. You were the one in the desert with de Baca – no one else.’
She looked suddenly weary, saying nothing and stubbed out her cigarette, half smoked.
‘You all right, Sal?’ I said.
‘I’m not sleeping well,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s been in touch with you? Nothing suspicious?’
‘I’ll get in the car and drive home if you bring that up again. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s over.’
She paid no attention. ‘You see, that was the mistake, my mistake. It’s bothering me: you should have gone to meet him under a false name.’
‘That wouldn’t have worked. He’d have checked up on me. I had to tell him honestly who I was. We’ve had this conversation a hundred times. Please.’
We sat in silence for a while.
‘Where’s Jochen?’ I said.
‘Inside – drawing.’
‘We should head off.’ I stood up. ‘I’ll get his bits and pieces.’ I folded away Rodrigo’s letter and as I did so I thought about something.
‘What I still don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is why Romer would have become a Russian agent in the first place.’
‘Why did any of them?’ she said. ‘Look at them: they were all middle-class, well educated, privileged, establishment figures.’
