The Russia House

by John le Carré

  We were settling for a long wait when Mary the head listener rang, this time all sweetness and oil. ‘Ned, I think you ought to get round here a tiny bit fastish. Some of your eggs have hatched.’

  We tear back to Russell Square, Ned leaning the car against the curves at sixty miles an hour.

  In her cellar lair Mary received us with the doting smile she reserved for moments of disaster. A favourite girl called Pepsi stood beside her, dressed in green overalls. A tape recorder turned on the desk.

  ‘Who the hell’s that at this hour?’ a stentorian voice demanded and I recognised immediately Barley’s formidable Aunt Pandora, the Sacred Cow whom I had entertained to lunch. Hiatus while coins were fed into the machine. Followed by Barley’s courteous voice.

  ‘I’m rather afraid I’ve had it, Pan. I’m kissing the firm goodbye.’

  ‘Don’t talk cock,’ Aunt Pandora retorted. ‘Some fool girl’s been getting at you again.’

  ‘I’m serious, Pan. This time it’s for real. I had to tell you.’

  ‘You’re always serious. That’s why you’re such a fraud pretending to be frivolous.’

  ‘I’m going to talk to Guy in the morning.’ Guy Solomons, family solicitor, listed Barley contact. ‘Wicklow, the new man, can take it over. He’s a tough little runt and he’s a fast learner.’

  ‘Did you trace the phone box?’ Ned asked Mary as Barley rang off.

  ‘No time,’ said Mary proudly.

  From the tape we heard the renewed ring of a phone. Barley again. ‘Reggie? I’m having a blow tonight. Come and play.’

  Mary handed us a piece of card on which she had written, Canon Reginald Cowan, drummer and clerk in holy orders.

  ‘Can’t,’ said Reggie. ‘Bloody Confirmation class.’

  ‘Ditch them,’ said Barley.

  ‘Can’t. Buggers are here with me now.’

  ‘We need you, Reggie. Old Andy’s dying.’

  ‘So are we all. All the bloody time.’

  As the tape was ending, Brock came through on a live call from the Russia House asking for Ned urgently. His watchers had reported that Barley had looked in on his Soho drinking club an hour ago, drunk five whiskies then moved on to the Noah’s Arch at King’s Cross.

  ‘Noah’s Arch? You mean Ark.’

  ‘Arch. It’s an arch under the railway line. Noah’s an eight-foot West Indian. Barley’s joined the band.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘So far.’

  ‘What sort of place?’

  ‘Diner and boozer. Sixty tables, stage, brick walls, whores, the usual.’

  Brock thought all pretty girls were whores.

  ‘How full?’ said Ned.

  ‘Two-thirds and rising.’

  ‘What’s he playing?’

  ‘ “Lover Man”, Duke Ellington.’

  ‘How many exits?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Put together one team of three men and park them at a table near the door. If he leaves, straddle him but don’t touch him. Call Resources and tell them I want Ben Lugg to get his cab over to the Noah’s Arch immediately and wait with his flag down. He’ll know what to do.’ Lugg was the Service’s tame cabby. ‘Are there any public phones in the club?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Have them occupied till I get there. Has he seen you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t let him. What’s across the road?’

  ‘A launderette.’

  ‘Is it open?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wait for me in front of it.’ He swung round on Mary, who was still smiling. ‘There are two phones at the Noah’s Arch, King’s Cross,’ he said, speaking very slowly. ‘Have them faulted now. If the management’s got its own line, have that faulted too. Now. I don’t care how short-staffed the engineers are, fault them now. If there are phone boxes in the street outside, fault the lot. Now.’

  We abandoned the Service car and hailed a cab. Brock was waiting as ordered in the doorway of the launderette. Ben Lugg was parked at the curbside. Tickets were five ninety-five at the door. Ned led me past the watchers’ table without a glance and shoved his way to the front.

  Nobody was dancing. The band’s front line was taking a break. Barley was standing centre stage in front of a gold chair, playing with the gentle backing of the double bass and drums. A brick arch made a sound chamber over him. He was still wearing his publishing suit and seemed to have forgotten to remove his jacket. Rotating coloured lights wandered over him, occasionally closing on his face which was running sweat. His expression was nerveless and remote. He was holding the long notes and I knew they were a requiem for Andy and for whoever else was occupying his beleaguered mind. A couple of girls had sat themselves in the band seats and were staring at him with unblinking eyes. A line of beers was also awaiting his attention. Beside him stood the immense Noah with his arms folded across his chest, listening with his head down. The piece ended. Deliberately and tenderly, as if he were dressing a friend’s wound, Barley cleaned out his sax and laid it to rest in its case. Noah did not allow applause but there was a scuffling noise while everyone snapped their fingers and there were calls of ‘encore’ but Barley didn’t bother with them. He drained a couple of the beers, gave a wave round and picked his way delicately through the crowd to the door. We went after him and as we stepped into the street Ben Lugg drew alongside with his flag up.

  ‘Mo’s,’ Barley ordered as he flopped into the back seat. He had another flask of Scotch from somewhere and was unscrewing the cap. ‘Hullo, Harry. How’s love at a distance?’

  ‘Great, thanks. I recommend it.’

  ‘Where on earth’s Mo’s?’ Ned asked as he settled beside him and I parked myself on the jump seat.

  ‘Tufnell Park. Underneath the Falmouth Arms.’

  ‘Good sound?’ Ned asked.

  ‘The best.’

  But it was not Barley’s false cheerfulness that alarmed me. It was the remoteness of him, the deadness of his eyes, the way he kept himself confined inside the fastness of his English courtesy.

  Mo was a blonde in her fifties and she spent a long time kissing Barley before she would let us sit at her table. Barley played blues and Mo wanted him to stay, I think for the night, but Barley could stay nowhere long, so we went to a music pizza house in Islington where he played another solo and Ben Lugg came in with us to have a cup of tea and a listen. Ben was a boxer in his day and still talked about the fight game. From Islington we crossed the river to the Elephant to hear a black group playing soul in a bus garage. It was four-fifteen but Barley was showing no sign of sleep; he preferred to sit with the group drinking spiked cocoa out of pint-sized china mugs. When we at last gentled him towards Ben’s cab, the two girls from Noah’s reappeared from nowhere and sat themselves either side of him in the back seat.

  ‘Now then, you girls,’ said Ben while Ned and I waited on the pavement. ‘Hop it.’

  ‘Stay where you are, I should,’ Barley advised them.

  ‘It’s not your cab, dears. It’s this bloke’s’ – indicating Ned – ‘now piss off, like good girls.’

  Barley swung his fist at Ben’s head, which was adorned with a black Homburg hat. Ben blocked the blow like a man waving away a cobweb, and in the same movement drew Barley carefully out of the cab and handed him over to Ned, who took him equally carefully in an armlock.

  Still in his Homburg, Ben disappeared into the back of the cab and came out with a girl in each hand.

  ‘Why don’t we all get a bit of fresh air?’ Ned suggested while Ben gave the girls a tenner each to get lost.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Barley.

  So we crossed the river in slow procession, with Brock’s watchers bringing up the rear and Ben Lugg’s cab crawling along behind us. A dirty brown dawn was rising over dockland.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Barley after a while. ‘No harm done, is there, Nedsky?’

  ‘None that I know of,’ said Ned.

  ‘Be alert,’ Barley advised. ‘You
r Country Needs Lerts. Right, Nedsky? Just felt like making a spot of music,’ he explained to me. ‘You a musical man, Harry? Chum of mine used to play to his girl over the phone. Only piano, mind, not sax, but he said it did the trick. You could try it out on your missus.’

  ‘We’re leaving for America tomorrow,’ said Ned.

  Barley took the news conversationally. ‘Nice for you. Nice time of year. Country looking at its best, I’d say.’

  ‘It’s nice for you too, actually,’ said Ned. ‘We thought we’d take you along.’

  ‘Casual, is it?’ Barley asked. ‘Or better pack a dinner jacket to be on the safe side?’

  12

  We flew to the island in a small plane, arriving at dusk. The small plane belonged to a grand American corporation. Nobody said who owned the island. It was narrow and wooded, its middle sagged into the sea and its ends were propped up by conical peaks, so that my impression from the air was of a Bedouin tent collapsing into the Atlantic. I put it at two miles long. We saw the New England mansion and its grounds at one end, and the tiny white dock at the other, though I learned later that the mansion was called a summer house because nobody went there in winter. It had been built at the turn of the century by a rich Bostonian, in the days when such people called themselves rusticators. We felt the wings rock and smelt salt sea through the rattling cabin windows. We saw sunspots flicking over the waves like searchlights at a tattoo, and cormorants warring in the wind. We saw a light-beacon on the mainland to the west. We had been following the coast of Maine for fifty-eight minutes by my watch. The trees came up either side of us, the sky vanished, and suddenly we were bouncing and swinging along a grass avenue with Randy and his boys waiting with a jeep at the end of it. Randy was wholesome as only privileged Americans can be. He wore a windcheater and a tie. I felt I knew his mother.

  ‘I’m your host here, gentlemen, for as long as you elect to stay, and welcome to our island.’ He shook Barley’s hand first. They must have shown him photographs. ‘Mr. Brown, sir, this is a real honour. Ned? Harry?’

  ‘Jolly nice of you,’ said Barley.

  The pine trees, as we wound down the hillside, stood black against the sea. The boys followed in a second car.

  ‘You gentlemen fly British? Mrs. Thatcher really got a hold of that line!’ said Randy.

  ‘Time she went down with the ship,’ Barley said.

  Randy laughed as if laughing were something he’d learned on the course. Brown was Barley’s workname for the trip. Even his passport, which Ned carried, said that he was Brown.

  We bumped across a causeway to the gatehouse. The gates opened and closed behind us. We were on our own headland. At the top of it stood the mansion lit by arc-lights hidden in the bushes. Lawns and wind-burned shrubs fell away from it to either side. The posts of a broken jetty stepped precariously out to sea. Randy parked the jeep and, taking Barley’s luggage, led us along an illuminated path between hydrangeas to a boat-house. On our crossing to Boston, Barley had dozed and drunk and groaned at the film. On our small plane he had frowned at the New England landscape as if its beauty troubled him. But once we landed he seemed to re-enter his own world.

  ‘Mr. Brown, sir, my orders are to accommodate you in the bridal suite,’ said Randy.

  ‘Can’t think of anywhere nicer, old boy,’ said Barley politely.

  ‘You really say that, Mr. Brown: old boy?’

  Randy ushered us through a stone-flagged hall to a captain’s cabin. The style was designer homestead. A reproduction brass bed stood in a corner, a reproduction scrubwood writing desk at the window. Doubtful ship’s fittings hung on the walls. In the alcove where the all-American kitchen was, Barley identified the refrigerator, pulled it open and peered hopefully inside.

  ‘Mr. Brown likes a bottle of Scotch in his room of an evening, Randy. If you’ve such a thing in your locker he’d be grateful.’

  The summer house was a museum of golden childhoods. In the porch, honey-coloured croquet mallets lay propped against a dusty goat-cart laden with lobster buoys gathered from the beach. There were smells of beeswax and leather. In the hall, portraits of young men and women in broad hats hung beside primitive paintings of whalers. We followed Randy up a wide polished staircase, Barley trailing behind us. On each landing, arched windows bordered with stained glass made jewelled gateways to the sea. We entered a corridor of blue bedrooms. The largest was reserved for Clive. From our balconies we could look down the gardens to the boathouse and across the sea to the mainland. The dusk was turning to dark.

  In a white-raftered dining room, a Langley vestal managed not to look at us while she served Maine lobster and white wine.

  While we ate, Randy explained the rules of the house. ‘No fraternising with the staff, please, gentlemen, just a good morning and hullo. Anything needs saying to them, best let me say it for you. The guards are for your convenience and safety, gentlemen, but we would like you to remain within the confines of the property. Please. Thank you.’

  Dinner and speeches over, Randy took Ned to the communications room and I walked Barley back to the boat-house. A fierce wind was ripping over the gardens. As we passed in and out of the light-cones Barley seemed to be smiling into it recklessly. Boys with handsets watched us pass.

  ‘How about chess?’ I asked him as we reached his door.

  I wished I could see his face more clearly but I had lost it, just as I had lost his mood. I felt a pat on the arm as he wished me goodnight. His door opened and closed again, but not before I had glimpsed the spectral figure of a sentry standing not two yards from us in the darkness.

  ‘A wise lawyer, a fine officer,’ Russell Sheriton advised me next morning in a reverential murmur, knowing I was neither, as his strong, soft palms enveloped my hand. ‘One of the true greats. Harry, how are you doing?’

  Little had changed in him since his tour of duty in London: the rings beneath the eyes a little doggier, a little sadder, the blue suit a size or two larger, the same white-shirted paunch. The same mortician’s aftershave, six years on, anointed the Agency’s newest head of Soviet operations.

  A group of his young men stood respectfully apart from him, clutching their travel bags and looking like stranded passengers at an airport. Clive and Bob were mounted either side of him like cohorts. Bob looked older by ten years. A chastened smile had replaced his old-world self-assurance. He greeted us too effusively, as if he had been warned to stay away from us.

  The Island Conference, as it euphemistically became known, was about to begin.

  There is an underlying pleasantness to the events of the next days, an air of good men going about their business, which I am in danger of forgetting as I recall the rest.

  It is the hardest point for me to make, yet I owe it to Barley to try, for he never took against our hosts – he never blamed them for anything that happened to him, then or later. He could grumble about Americans in general, but no sooner had he met them individually than he spoke of them as decent fellows all. There was not a man among them he wouldn’t have been happy to swap a drink with any evening at the local, if we’d had one. And of course Barley always saw the force of any argument that was directed against him, just as he was always vastly impressed by other people’s industry.

  And my goodness, were they industrious! If numbers, money and sheer endeavour alone could have produced intelligence, the Agency would have had it by the cartload – except that, alas, the human head is not a cart, and there is such a thing as unintelligence as well.

  And how deeply they yearned to be loved! – and Barley warmed immediately to their need. Even as they tore into him, they needed to be loved. And by Barley, too! Just as to this day they need to be loved for all their staged putsches, destabilisations and wild adventures against The Enemy Out There.

  Yet it was this very mystery of good hearts turned inside out that gave our week its underlying terror.

  Years ago I talked to a man who had been flogged, an English mercenary who was doing us a few fav
ours in Africa and needed paying off. What he remembered most was not the lash but the orange juice they gave him afterwards. He remembers being helped back to his hut, he remembers being laid face down on the straw. But what he really remembers is the glass of fresh orange juice that a warder set at his head, then crouched beside him, waiting patiently, till he was strong enough to drink some. Yet it was this same warder who had flogged him.

  We too had our glasses of orange juice. And we had our decent warders, even if they were disguised behind headsets and a surface animosity that quickly melted before Barley’s warmth. Within a day of our arrival, the same guards with whom we were forbidden to fraternise were tiptoeing at any odd moment in and out of Barley’s boat-house, stealing a Coke or a Scotch from him before slipping back to their posts. They sensed he was that kind of man. And as Americans they were fascinated by his celebrity.

  There was one old hand called Edgar, an ex-Marine, who gave him quite a run for his money at chess. Barley, I learned later, got his name and address out of him, against every known canon of the trade, so that they could play a contest by post ‘when all this is over’.

  Not only warders either. In Sheriton’s chorus of young men, as in Sheriton himself, there was a moderation that was like an even beat of sanity against the hysterical highs and lows of those whom Sheriton himself dubbed collectively the egomaniacs.

  But that, I suppose, is the tragedy of great nations. So much talent bursting to be used, so much goodness longing to come out. Yet all so miserably spoken for, that sometimes we could scarcely believe it was America speaking to us at all.

  But it was. The lash was real.

  The interrogations took place in the billiards room. The wooden floor had been painted dark red for dancing and the billiards table replaced by a ring of chairs. But an ivory scorer and a row of initialled cue-cases still lined the wall, and the long downlight made a pool at the centre where Barley was obliged to sit. Ned fetched him from the boat-house.

  ‘Mr. Brown, sir, I am proud to shake your hand and I have just decided that my name for the duration of our relationship is Haggarty,’ Sheriton declared. ‘I took one look at you, I felt Irish. Don’t ask me why.’ He was leading Barley at a good pace across the room. ‘Most of all, I wish to congratulate you. You have all the virtues: memory, observation, British grit, saxophone.’