The Russia House

by John le Carré

  ‘What about your girlfriends? Not a hint to them?’

  ‘We are not angels. If I ask them for certain favours, they make certain assumptions. Sometimes it is I who provide the favours. That is all.’

  ‘And nobody helped Yakov compile his manuscript?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘None of his drinking friends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How can you be certain?’

  ‘Because I am certain that in his thoughts he is completely alone.’

  ‘Are you happy with him?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Do you like him – as well as love him? Does he make you laugh?’

  ‘I believe that Yakov is a great and vulnerable man who cannot survive without me. To be a perfectionist is to be a child. It is also to be impractical. I believe that without me he would break.’

  ‘Do you think he’s broken now?’

  ‘Yakov would say, which one is sane? The one who plans the extermination of mankind, or the one who takes steps to prevent it?’

  ‘How about the one who does both?’

  She didn’t reply. He was provoking her and she knew it. He was jealous, wanting to erode the edges of her faith.

  ‘Is he married?’ he asked.

  An angry look swept across her face. ‘I do not believe he is married but it is not important.’

  ‘Has he got kids?’

  ‘These are ridiculous questions.’

  ‘It’s a pretty ridiculous situation.’

  ‘He says that human beings are the only creatures to make victims of their children. He is determined to provide no victims.’

  Except yours, Barley thought: but he managed not to say it.

  ‘So, you followed his career with interest,’ he suggested roughly, returning to the question of Goethe’s access.

  ‘From a distance, and without detail.’

  ‘And all that time you didn’t know what work he did? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘What I knew, I deduced only from our discussions of ethical problems. “How much of mankind should we exterminate in order to preserve mankind? How can we talk of a struggle for peace when we plan only terrible wars? How can we speak of selective targets when we have not the accuracy to hit them?” When we discuss these matters, I am naturally aware of his involvement. When he tells me that the greatest danger to mankind is not the reality of Soviet power but the illusion of it, I do not question him. I encourage him. I urge him to be consistent and if necessary brave. But I do not question him.’

  ‘Rogov? He never mentioned a Rogov? Professor Arkady Rogov?’

  ‘I told you. He does not discuss his colleagues.’

  ‘Who said Rogov was a colleague?’

  ‘I assumed this from your questions,’ she retorted hotly and yet again he believed her.

  ‘How do you communicate with him?’ he asked, recovering his gentler tone.

  ‘It is not important. When a certain friend of his receives a certain message, he informs Yakov and Yakov telephones me.’

  ‘Does the certain friend know who the certain message is from?’

  ‘He has no reason. He knows it is a woman. That is all.’

  ‘Is Yakov afraid?’

  ‘Since he talks so much about courage, I assume he is afraid. He quotes Nietzsche. “The ultimate goodness is not to be afraid.” He quotes Pasternak. “The root of beauty – ” ’

  ‘Are you?’

  She stared away from him. In the houses across the street, home lights were appearing in the windows.

  ‘I must think not of my children but of all children,’ she said, and he noticed two tears lying neglected on her cheeks. He took another pull of whisky and hummed a few bars of Basie. When he looked again, the tears had gone.

  ‘He talks about the great lie,’ she said, as if she had just remembered.

  ‘What great lie?’

  ‘Everything is part of the same great lie, down to the smallest spare part of the least significant weapon. Even the results that are sent to Moscow are subject to the great lie.’

  ‘Results? What results? Results of what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Of testing?’

  She seemed to have forgotten her denial. ‘I believe, of testing. I believe he is saying that the results of testing are deliberately distorted in order to satisfy the orders of the generals and the official production requirements of the bureaucrats. Perhaps it is he personally who distorts them. He is very complicated. Sometimes he talks about his many privileges of which he has become ashamed.’

  The shopping list, Walter had called it. With a deadened sense of duty, Barley crossed off the last items. ‘Has he mentioned particular projects?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has he mentioned being involved in command systems? How the field commander is controlled?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has he ever told you what steps are taken to prevent mistaken launches?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has he ever suggested he might be engaged in data processing?’

  She was tired. ‘No.’

  ‘Does he get promoted now and then? Medals? Big parties as he moves up the ladder?’

  ‘He does not speak of promotion except that it is all corrupt. I told you already that maybe he has been too loud in his criticisms of the system. I do not know.’

  She had withdrawn from him. Her face was out of sight behind the curtain of her hair.

  ‘You will do best to ask him all further questions for yourself,’ she said, in the tone of someone packing up to leave. ‘He wishes you to meet him in Leningrad on Friday. He is attending an important conference at one of the military scientific institutions.’

  First the sky swayed, then Barley became aware of the evening chill. It had closed over him like an icy cloud, though the sky was dark and clear and the new moon, when it finally kept still, shed a warming glow.

  ‘He has proposed three places and three times,’ she continued in the same flat tone. ‘You will please keep each appointment until he is successful. He will keep one of them if he can. He sends you his greetings and his thanks. He loves you.’

  She dictated three addresses and watched him while he wrote them in his diary, using his apology for a code. Then she waited while he had a sneezing fit, watching him as he heaved and cursed his Maker.

  They dined like exhausted lovers in a cellar with an old grey dog and a gypsy who sang blues to a guitar. Who owned the place, who allowed it to exist or why, were mysteries Barley had never troubled to solve. All he knew was that in some previous incarnation, at some forgotten book fair, he had arrived here drunk with a group of crazy Polish publishers and played ‘Bless This House’ on someone’s saxophone.

  They talked stiffly, and as they talked the gap between them widened until it seemed to Barley to engulf the totality of his insignificance. He gazed at her and felt that he had nothing to offer her that she did not have tenfold. In the ordinary way, he would have made a passionate declaration of love to her. A lunge into absolutes would have been essential to his need to break the tension of a new relationship. But in Katya’s presence he could find no absolutes to put opposite her own. He saw his life as a series of useless resurrections, one failure supplanted by another. He was appalled to think that he belonged to a society that existed only in materialism and gave so little thought to its great themes. But he could tell her none of this. To tell her anything was to assail the image that she had of him, and he had nothing to offer in its place.

  They discussed books and he watched her slipping away from him. Her face became distracted, her voice prosaic. He went after her, he sang and danced, but she had gone. She was making the same flat statements he had been listening to all day long while he had been waiting to meet her. In a minute, he thought, I’ll be telling her about Potomac Boston and explaining how the river and the city are not joined. And God help him, he was, doing just that.

  It was not till eleven o’clock, w
hen the management put the lights out and he walked her down the lifeless street to the metro station, that it dawned on him against all sane reckoning that he might have made an impression upon her that in some modest way compared with the impression she had made on him. She had taken his arm. Her fingers lay along the inside of his forearm and she had fallen into a wide stride in order to keep pace with him. The white mouth of the elevator shafts stood open to receive her. The chandeliers twinkled above them like inverted Christmas trees as he took her in the formal Russian embrace: left cheek, right cheek, left cheek and goodnight.

  ‘Mr. Blair, sir! Thought I spotted you! Quite a coincidence! Come aboard, we’ll run you home!’

  Barley climbed in and Wicklow with his acrobat’s agility spirited himself into the back seat where he set to work to dislodge the recorder from the small of Barley’s back.

  They drove him to the Odessa and dropped him. They had work to do. The lobby was like an airport terminal in thick fog. In every sofa and armchair, unofficial guests who had paid the going rate slumbered in the gloom. Barley peered benignly round them, wrinkling his nose. Some wore jumpsuits. Others were more formally dressed.

  ‘Snoot, anybody?’ he called, quite loud. No response. ‘Anyone care for a glass of whisky at all?’ he enquired, fishing his bottle, still two-thirds full, from the poacher’s pocket of his raincoat. He gave himself a long pull by way of example, then passed the bottle along the line.

  And that was how Wicklow found him two hours later – in the lobby, squatted companionably among a group of grateful night souls, enjoying a last one before turning in.

  9

  ‘Who on earth are Clive’s new Americans?’ I murmured to Ned as we assembled like early worshippers round Brock’s tape recorder in the situation room.

  The London clock said six. Victoria Street had not yet begun its morning growl. The squeaking of the spool sounded like a chorus of starlings as Brock wound the tape in place. It had arrived by courier half an hour ago, having travelled overland by bag to Helsinki, then by special plane to Northolt. If Ned had been willing to listen to the technological tempters, we could have avoided the whole costly process, for the Langley wizards were swearing by a new device that transmitted spoken word securely. But Ned was Ned and he preferred his own tried methods.

  He sat at his desk and was putting his signature to a document which he was shielding with his hand. He folded the paper, put it in its envelope and sealed the flap before handing it to tall Emma, one of his assistants. By then I had given up expecting a reply, so that his vehemence startled me.

  ‘They’re bloody carpetbaggers,’ he snapped.

  ‘From Langley?’

  ‘God knows. Security.’

  ‘Whose?’ I insisted.

  He shook his head, too furious to answer. Was it the document he had just signed that was annoying him, or the presence of the American interlopers? There were two of them. Johnny from their London station was escorting them. They wore navy blazers and short hair, and they had a Mormon cleanliness that I found slightly revolting. Clive stood between them, but Bob had sat himself demonstratively at the far end of the room with Walter, who looked wretched – I supposed at first because of the hour. Even Johnny seemed discomfited by their presence, and so immediately was I. These dull, unfamiliar faces had no place at the heart of our operation, and at such a crucial moment. They were like a gathering of mourners in advance of an anticipated death. But whose? I looked again at Walter and my anxieties were compounded.

  I looked again at the new Americans, so slight, so trim, so characterless. Security, Ned had said. Yet why? And why now? Why did they look at everyone except Walter? Why did Walter look at everyone except them? And why did Bob sit apart from them, and Johnny go on staring at his hands? I was grateful to have my thoughts interrupted.

  We heard the boom of footsteps on wood stairs. Brock had started the recorder. We heard clunks and Barley’s oath as he barked his back on the window frame. Then the shuffling of feet again as they clambered on to the rooftop.

  It’s a séance, I thought, as their first words reached us. Barley and Katya are addressing us from the great beyond. The immobile strangers with their executioners’ faces were forgotten.

  Ned was the only one of us with earphones. They made a difference, I later discovered when I tried them. You hear the Moscow doves shuffling on the gable and the rapid breathing inside Katya’s voice. You hear the beating of your own joe’s heart through the body mikes.

  Brock played the whole rooftop scene before Ned ordered a break. Only our new Americans seemed unaffected. Their brown glances brushed each one of us but settled nowhere. Walter was blushing.

  Brock played the dinner scene and still no one stirred: not a sigh or a creak or a handclap, not even when he stopped the spool and wound it back.

  Ned pulled off his earphones.

  ‘Yakov Yefremovich, last name unknown, physicist, aged thirty in 1968, ergo born 1938,’ he announced as he grabbed a pink trace request from the pile before him and scribbled on it. ‘Walter, offers?’

  Walter had to gather himself. He seemed distraught, and his voice had none of its usual flightiness. ‘Yefrem, Soviet scientist, other names unknown, father of Yakov Yefremovich q.v., shot in Vorkuta after an uprising in the spring of ’52,’ he declared without looking at his pad. ‘There can’t be that many scientific Yefrems who were executed for an overdose of intelligence, even in dear Stalin’s day,’ he added rather pathetically.

  It was absurd, but I fancied I saw tears in his eyes. Perhaps someone really has died, I thought, glancing once more at our two Mormons.

  ‘Johnny?’ said Ned, writing.

  ‘Ned, we think we’ll take Boris, other names unknown, widower, Professor of Humanities, Leningrad University, late ’sixties, one daughter Yekaterina,’ said Johnny, still to his hands.

  Ned seized another trace form, filled it in and tossed it into his out-tray like money he was pleased to throw away.

  ‘Palfrey. Want to play?’

  ‘Put me down for the Leningrad newspapers, will you please, Ned?’ I said as airily as I could, given that Clive’s Americans had turned their brown gaze full upon me. ‘I’d like runners, starters and winners of the Mathematics Olympiad of 1952,’ I said amid laughter. ‘And for safety’s sake perhaps you’d throw in ’51 and ’53 as well. And shall we add his academic medals, please, somewhere along the line? “He made candidate of sciences, he made doctor of sciences. He made everything,” she said. Can we have that, please? Thank you.’

  When all the bids were in, Ned glared around for Emma to take the trace forms down to Registry. But that wasn’t good enough for Walter who was suddenly determined to be counted – for, leaping to his feet, he marched fussily to Ned’s desk, all five foot nothing of him, his little wrists flying out in front of him.

  ‘I shall do all the ferreting myself,’ he announced, in far too grand a tone, as he grabbed the pink bundle to his breast. ‘This war is far too important to be left to our blue-rinse generals of Registry, irresistible though they may be.’

  And I remember noticing how our Mormons watched him all the way to the door, then watched each other as we listened to his merry little heels prinking down the corridor. And I do not think I am speaking with hindsight when I tell you that my blood ran chill for Walter, without my having the smallest idea why.

  ‘A breath of country air,’ Ned told me on the internal telephone an hour later when I was barely back at my desk at Head Office. ‘Tell Clive I need you.’

  ‘Then you’d better go, hadn’t you?’ said Clive, still closeted with his Mormons.

  We had borrowed a fast Ford from the car pool. As Ned drove, he brushed aside my few attempts at conversation and handed me the file to read instead. We entered the Berkshire countryside but he still didn’t talk. And when Brock rang on the carphone to give him some elliptical confirmation he required, he merely grunted, ‘Then tell him,’ and returned to his brooding.

  We were
forty miles from London, on the foulest planet of man’s discovery. We were in the slums of modern science, where the grass is always nicely cut. The ancient gateposts were mastered by eroded sandstone lions. A polite man in a brown sports jacket opened Ned’s door. His colleague poked a detector underneath the chassis. Politely, they patted us both down.

  ‘Taking the briefcase, are we, gentlemen?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ned.

  ‘Care to open it, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dip it in the box, can we, gentlemen? We’re not talking unexposed film, I presume, sir?’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Dip it in the box.’

  We watched while they lowered the briefcase into what looked like a green coal bin, and took it out again.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, taking it back.

  ‘It’s my pleasure, sir. Not at all, I’m sure.’

  The blue van said FOLLOW ME. An Alsatian dog frowned at us from its barred rear window. The gates opened electronically and beyond them lay mounds of clipped grass like mass graves grown over. Olive downs stretched towards the sunset. A mushroom-shaped cloud would have looked entirely natural. We entered parkland. A pair of buzzards wheeled in the cloudless sky. High wire fenced off the hay fields. Smokeless brick buildings nestled in artful hollows. A noticeboard urged protective clothing in Zones D to K. A skull and crossbones said ‘You Have Been Warned.’ The van ahead of us was moving at a funeral’s pace. We lumbered round a bend and saw empty tennis courts and aluminium towers. Lanes of coloured pipe jogged beside us, guiding us to a cluster of green sheds. At their centre, on a hilltop, stood the last vestige of the pre-nuclear age, a Berkshire cottage of brick and flint with ‘Administrator’ stencilled on the gate. A burly man came tripping down the crazy-paving path to greet us. He wore a blazer of British racing green and a tie with gold squash rackets on it, and a handkerchief shoved into his cuff.

  ‘You’re from the Firm. Well done. I’m O’Mara. Which of you is who? I’ve told him to kick his heels in the lab till we whistle for him.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ned.

  O’Mara had grey-blond hair and an offhand regimental voice cracked by alcohol. His neck was puffy and his athlete’s fingers were stained mahogany with nicotine. ‘O’Mara keeps the long-haired scientists in line,’ Ned had told me in one of our rare exchanges during the drive. ‘He’s half personnel, half security, all shit.’