The Russia House

by John le Carré

  And the next sound on the tape after that is Barley cursing himself again as he stomps round the room. ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he whispers. On and on. Until, cutting through him, we hear Clive’s voice. If it ever falls to Clive to order the destruction of the universe, I imagine him using this same deserted tone.

  ‘I’m sorry but I’m afraid we’re going to need your rather serious help,’ he says.

  Ironically I believe Clive was sorry. He was a technology man, not at ease with live sources, a suburban espiocrat of the modern school. He believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them. If he liked anything at all in life apart from his own advancement and his silver Mercedes car, which he refused to take out of the garage if it had so much as a scratch on it, then it was hardware and powerful Americans in that order. For Clive to sparkle, the Bluebird should have been a broken code, a satellite or an Inter Agency committee. Then Barley need never have been born.

  Whereas Ned was all the other way, and more at risk on account of it. He was by temperament and training an agent-runner and captain of men. Live sources were his element and, so far as he knew the word, his passion.

  He despised the in-fighting of intelligence politics and left all that happily to Clive, just as he left the analysis to Walter. In that sense he was the determined primitive, as people who deal in human nature have to be, while Clive, to whom human nature was one vast unsavoury quagmire, enjoyed the reputation of a modernist.

  5

  We had moved to the library where Ned and Barley had begun. Brock had set up a screen and projector. He had put chairs in a horseshoe with a special person in his mind for each chair, for Brock, like other violent minds, had an exaggerated appetite for menial labour. He had been listening to the interview over the relay and despite his sinister inklings about Barley a glow of excitement smouldered in his pale Baltic eyes. Barley, deep in thought, lounged in the front row between Bob and Clive, a privileged if distracted guest at a private screening. I watched his head in silhouette as Brock switched on the projector, first turned downward in contemplation, then sharply upward as the first frame struck the screen. Ned sat beside me. Not a word, but I could feel the disciplined intensity of his excitement. Twenty male faces flicked across our vision, most of them Soviet scientists who on a first hasty search around the Registries of London and Langley were deemed to have had possible access to the Bluebird information. Some were featured more than once: first with beards then with their beards touched out. Others were shown when they were twenty years younger because that was all the archives had of them.

  ‘Not among those present,’ Barley pronounced when the parade was over, suddenly shoving his hand to his head as if he had been stung.

  Bob just couldn’t believe this. His incredulities were as charming as his credulities. ‘Not even a perhaps or a maybe, Barley? You sound pretty sure of yourself for a man who was drinking well when he made the original sighting. Jesus, I’ve been to parties where I couldn’t remember my own name.’

  ‘Not a tickle, old boy,’ said Barley, and returned to his thoughts.

  Now it was Katya’s turn, though Barley couldn’t know it. Bob advanced on her cautiously, a Langley professional showing us his footwork.

  ‘Barley, these are some of the boys and girls around the Moscow publishing scene,’ he said over-casually as Brock ran up the first stills. ‘People you might have bumped into during your Russian travels, people at receptions, book fairs, people on the circuit. If you see anybody you know, holler.’

  ‘Bless us, that’s Leonora!’ Barley cut in with pleasure while Bob was still talking. On the screen a splendid burly woman with a backside like a football field was marching across a stretch of open tarmac. ‘Leni’s top gun with SK,’ Barley added.

  ‘SK?’ Clive echoed as if he had unearthed a secret society.

  ‘Soyuzkniga. SK order and distribute foreign books throughout the Soviet Union. Whether the books get there is another matter. Leni’s a riot.’

  ‘Know her other name?’

  ‘Zinovieva.’

  Confirmed, said Bob’s smile to the knowing.

  They showed him others and he picked the ones they knew he knew, but when they showed him the photograph of Katya that they had shown to Landau – Katya in her overcoat with her hair up, coming down the steps with her perhaps-bag – Barley muttered, ‘Pass,’ as he had to all the others he didn’t know.

  But Bob was delightfully upset. Bob said, ‘Hold her there, please,’ so unhappily that a babe in arms would have guessed that this picture had unrecognised significance.

  So Brock held, as we all did: held our breath.

  ‘Barley, the little lady here with the dark hair and big eyes in this picture is with the October Publishing Company, Moscow. Speaks a fine English, classical like yours and Goethe’s. We understand she’s a redaktor, commissioning and approving English language translations of Soviet works. No bells?’

  ‘No such luck,’ said Barley.

  At which Clive handed him to me. With a tip of his head. Take him, Palfrey. Your witness. Scare him.

  I do a special voice for my indoctrination sessions. It’s supposed to instil the terror of the marriage vow and I hate it because it is the voice that Hannah hates. If my profession had a false white coat, this would be the moment where I administered the wicked injection. But that night as soon as I was alone with him, I chose a more protective tone and became a different and perhaps rejuvenated Palfrey, the one that Hannah used to swear could overcome. I addressed Barley not as I would some raw probationer but as a friend I was seeking to forewarn.

  Here’s the deal, I said, using the most non-legal jargon I could think of. Here’s the noose we’re putting round your neck. Take care. Consider.

  Other people, I make them sit. I let Barley roam because I had seen that he was more at ease when he was able to pace and fidget and chuck his arms back in a luxurious stretch. Empathy is a curse even when it is shortlived, and not all the bad law in England can protect me from it.

  And while I temporarily warmed to him I noticed a number of things about him I had not registered in the larger company. How his body leaned away from me, as if he were guarding himself against his deep-rooted disposition to give himself to the first person who asked for him. How his arms, despite their striving for self-discipline, remained unruly, particularly at the elbows, which like renegades seemed to be wanting to break free of whatever uniform they were pressed into.

  And I noticed my own frustration that I could still not observe him closely enough, but cast round for other glimpses of him in the gilded mirrors as he passed them. Even to this day, I think of him as being a long way off.

  And I noticed the pensiveness in him as he dipped in and out of my homily, taking a point or two then swinging away from me in order to digest it, so that suddenly I was facing a breadth of powerful back that was not to be reconciled with the unreconciled front.

  And how, as he returned to me, his eyes lacked the subservience that in other recipients of my wise words so often sickened me. He was not daunted. He was not even touched. His eyes disturbed me nonetheless, as they had the first time they appraised me. They were too truthful, too clear, too undefended. None of his milling gestures could protect them. I felt that I or anyone else could have waded into them and claimed possession of him, and the feeling scared me as if it were a threat. It made me fear for my own security.

  I thought about his file. So many headlong crashes, acts of seeming self-destruction, so little prudence. His frightful school record. His efforts to earn himself a few laurels by boxing, for which he ended up in the school sanatorium with a broken jaw. His expulsion for being drunk while reading the Epistle at Sung Eucharist. ‘I was drunk from the night before, sir. It was not intentional.’ Flogged and expelled.

  How convenient, I thought, for him and me, if I could have pointed to some great crime that haunted him, some act of cowardice or omission. But Ned had shown me
his entire life, secret annexes and all, medical history, money, women, wives, children. And it was small stuff all the way. No big bang, no big crime. No big anything – which may have been the explanation of him. Was it for want of a greater sea that he had repeatedly wrecked himself against life’s little rocks, challenging his Maker to come up with something bigger or stop bothering him? Would he be so headlong when faced with greater odds?

  Then abruptly, before I am aware of it, our rôles are reversed. He is standing over me, peering down. The team is still waiting in the library and I hear sounds of their restlessness. The declaration form lies before me on the table. But it is me that he is reading, not the form.

  ‘So have you any questions?’ I ask up at him, conscious of his height. ‘Anything you want to know before you sign?’ I am using my special voice after all, for self-protection.

  He is at first puzzled, then amused. ‘Why? Have you got more answers you want to tell me?’

  ‘It’s an unfair business,’ I warn him sternly. ‘You’ve had a big secret thrust on you. You didn’t ask for it but you can’t unknow it. You know enough to hang a man and probably a woman. That places you in a certain category. It brings obligations you can’t escape.’

  And, God help me, I think of Hannah again. He has woken the pain of her in me as if she were a brand-new wound.

  He shrugs, brushing off the burden. ‘I don’t know what I know,’ he says.

  There is a thump on the door.

  ‘The point is, they may want to tell you more,’ I say, softening again, trying to make him aware of my concern for him. ‘What you know already may be only the beginning of what they want you to find out.’

  He is signing. Without reading. He is a nightmare client. He could be signing his life away and he wouldn’t know it and wouldn’t care. They are knocking but I have still to add my name as witness.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says.

  ‘What for?’

  I put away my pen. Got him, I think, in ice-cold triumph, just as Clive and the rest of them march in. A tricky customer but I signed him up.

  But the other half of me is ashamed and mysteriously alarmed. I feel I have lit a fire inside our own camp, and there is no knowing how it will spread or who will put it out.

  The only merit of the next act was that it was brief. I was sorry for Bob. He was never a sly man and he was certainly not a bigot. He was transparent, but that is not yet a crime, even in the secret world. He was more in Ned’s stamp than Clive’s, and nearer to the Service’s way of doing things than to Langley’s. There was a time when Langley had a lot of Bob’s sort, and was the better for it.

  ‘Barley, do you have any concept at all of the nature of the material that the source you call Goethe has so far provided? Of its overall message, shall we say?’ Bob enquired awkwardly, putting up his broad smile.

  Johnny had pitched the same sort of question at Landau, I remembered. And burned his fingers.

  ‘How can I?’ Barley replied. ‘I haven’t set eyes on the stuff. You won’t let me.’

  ‘Are you quite certain Goethe himself gave you no advance indication? No whispered word, author to publisher, of what he might – one day, if you both kept your promises – supply? Beyond what you have already accounted for in Peredelkino – the broad talk of weaponry and unreal enemies?’

  ‘I’ve told you everything I remember,’ said Barley, shaking his head in confusion.

  Also like Johnny before him, Bob began squinting at the brief he held below the table. But in Bob’s case with genuine discomfort. ‘Barley, in the six visits you have made to the Soviet Union over the last seven years have you formed any connection, however briefly, with peaceniks, dissidents or other unofficial groups of that nature?’

  ‘Is that a crime?’

  Clive cut in. ‘Answer the question, will you?’

  Amazingly, Barley obliged. Sometimes Clive was simply too small to reach him. ‘You meet all sorts, Bob. Jazz people, book people, intellectuals, journalists, artists – it’s an impossible question. Sorry.’

  ‘Then can I turn it around a little and ask whether you are acquainted with any peace people back in England at all?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Barley, would you be aware that two members of a certain blues group you played with between 1977 and 1980 were involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as other peace outfits?’

  Barley seemed puzzled but a little enchanted. ‘Really? Do they have names?’

  ‘Would it amaze you if I said Maxi Burns and Bert Wunderley?’

  To the amusement of everyone but Clive, Barley broke out in jolly laughter. ‘Oh my Lord! Forget the peace label, Bob. Maxi was a red-toothed Com. He’d have blown up the Houses of Parliament if he’d had a bomb. And Bert would have held his hand while he did it.’

  ‘I take it they were homosexual?’ said Bob, with an old dog’s smile.

  ‘Gay as trivets,’ Barley agreed contentedly.

  At which, with evident relief, Bob folded up his piece of paper and gave Clive a glance to say he’d finished, and Ned proposed to Barley that they take some air. Walter moved invitingly to the door and opened it. Ned must have wanted him as a foil, for Walter would never have dared otherwise. Barley hesitated a moment, then picked up a bottle of Scotch and a glass and dropped them one into each side pocket of his bush-jacket, in what I suspect was a gesture designed to shock us. Thus equipped he ambled after them leaving the three of us alone without a word between us.

  ‘Were those Russell Sheriton’s questions you were shooting at him?’ I asked Bob amiably enough.

  ‘Russell’s too bright for all that damn stuff these days, Harry,’ Bob replied with evident distaste. ‘Russell’s come a long way.’

  Langley’s power struggles were a mystery even to those who were involved in them, and certainly – however much we pretended otherwise – to our barons of the twelfth floor. But in the seethings and jockeyings, Sheriton’s name had featured frequently as the man likely to come out at the top of the heap.

  ‘So who authorised them?’ I asked, still upon the questions. ‘Who drafted them, Bob?’

  ‘Maybe Russell.’

  ‘You just said Russell was too bright!’

  ‘Maybe he has to keep his boyars quiet,’ Bob said uncomfortably, lighting up his pipe and swinging out the match.

  We settled down to wait on Ned.

  The shade tree is in a public garden near the waterfront. I have stood under it and sat under it and watched the dawn rise over the harbour while the dew made teardrops on my grey raincoat. I have listened, without understanding, to an old mystic with a saintly face who likes to receive his disciples there, in that self-same spot by daylight. They are of all ages, and call him the Professor. The bench is built round its trunk and divided by iron arm-rests into seats. Barley sat at the centre with Ned and Walter either side of him. They had talked first in a sleepy sailors’ tavern, then on a hilltop, Barley said, but Ned for some reason refuses to remember the hilltop. Now they had come back into the valley for their final place. Brock sat wakefully in the hired car keeping a view of them across the grass. From the warehouses on the other side of the road came a whine of cranes, a pumping of lorries and the yells of fishermen. It was five in the morning but the harbour is awake from three. The first clouds of dawn were shaping and breaking like the First Day.

  ‘Choose somebody else,’ Barley said. He had said it before in several different ways. ‘I’m not your man.’

  ‘We didn’t choose you,’ Ned said. ‘Goethe did. If we knew a way of getting back to him without you, we’d jump at it. He’s taken a fix on you. Probably been waiting ten years for someone like you to turn up.’

  ‘He chose me because I wasn’t a spy,’ said Barley. ‘Because I sang my bloody aria.’

  ‘And you won’t be a spy now,’ said Ned. ‘You’ll be a publisher. His. All you’ll be doing is collaborating with your author and with us at the same time. What’s wrong with that?�
��

  ‘You’ve got the draw, you’ve got the wits,’ said Walter. ‘No wonder you drink. You’ve been under-used for twenty years. Now’s your chance to shine. You’re lucky.’

  ‘I shone at Peredelkino. Every time I shine, the lights go out.’

  ‘You might even be solvent,’ said Ned. ‘Three weeks of preparation back in London while you’re waiting for your visa, a jolly week in Moscow and you’ll be off the hook for ever.’

  With the prudence that was innate in him, Ned had avoided the word ‘training’.

  Back comes Walter, a touch of the whip, a piece of flattery, both over the top, but Ned let him run. ‘Oh never mind the money, Barley’s far too grand! It’s one shot for your country and a lot of people never get the chance. They dream of it, they write in for it but it never comes their way. And afterwards, when you’ve done your bit, you can sit back and enjoy the benefits of being British, knowing you’ve earned them even if you sneer at them, which is your good right, something that has to be fought for like everything else.’

  And Ned had judged rightly. Barley laughed and told Walter ‘Come off it,’ or something of the kind.

  ‘One shot for your author too, if you think about it,’ Ned cut in, with his plain man’s talk. ‘You’ll be saving his neck for him. If he’s going to hand over State secrets, the least you can do for him is put him on to the competent people. You’re a Harrow man, aren’t you?’ he added as if he had just remembered this. ‘Didn’t I read somewhere you’d been educated at Harrow?’

  ‘I just went to school there,’ Barley said and Walter let out one of his hoots of laughter, in which Barley out of politeness joined.

  ‘Why did you apply to us all those years ago? Do you remember what prompted you?’ Ned asked. ‘Some sense of duty, was it?’

  ‘I wanted to stay out of my father’s firm. My tutor said teach at a prep school. My cousin Lionel said join the spies. You turned me down.’

  ‘Yes, well I’m afraid we can’t do you the favour a second time,’ said Ned.