The Russia House

by John le Carré

  Still holding her, he tipped her handbag on to the roof of the car, found the key, unlocked the passenger door and bundled her inside. Then he ran round to the driver’s side in case she had ideas of taking over after all.

  ‘I shall go home,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know the way.’

  ‘Take me home,’ she repeated.

  ‘I don’t know the way, Katya! You’ll have to tell me right and left, do you hear?’ He grabbed her shoulders. ‘Sit up. Look out of the window. Where’s reverse on this bloody thing?’

  He fiddled with the gears. She grabbed the lever and slammed it in reverse, making the gearbox scream.

  ‘Lights,’ he said.

  He had already found them, but he made her turn them on for him, willing her by his anger to respond. As he bumped across the carpark he had to swerve to avoid an ambulance entering at speed. Mud and water blacked out the windscreen, but there were no wipers because it wasn’t raining. Stopping the car again, he sprang out and smeared the windscreen halfway clean with his handkerchief, then back into the car.

  ‘Go left,’ she ordered. ‘Be quick, please.’

  ‘We came the other way before.’

  ‘It’s one way. Be quick.’

  Her voice was dead and he couldn’t rouse it. He offered her his flask. She pushed it aside. He drove slowly, ignoring her instruction to be quick. Headlights in the driving mirror, not gaining or losing. It’s Wicklow, he thought. It’s Paddy, Cy, Henziger, Zapadny, the whole Guards Armoured of them. Her face lit and went out again under the sodium streetlamps but it was lifeless. She was staring into her own head at whatever frightful things she saw in her imagination. Her clenched fist was in her mouth. Its knuckles were wedged between her teeth.

  ‘Do I turn here?’ he asked her roughly. And again he shouted at her, ‘Tell me where to turn, will you?’

  She spoke first in Russian, then in English. ‘Now. Right. Go faster.’

  Nothing was familiar to him. Every empty street was like the next one and the last one.

  ‘Turn now.’

  ‘Left or right?’

  ‘Left!’

  She screamed the word at the top of her voice, then screamed it again. After the scream came her tears and they went on coming between choking hopeless sobs. Then gradually the sobs began to falter and by the time he drew up at her apartment block they had ceased. He pulled the handbrake but it was broken. The car was still rolling as she shoved her door open. He reached for her but she was too quick. Somehow she had scrambled on to the pavement and was running across the forecourt with her handbag open, foraging for her keys. A boy in a leather jacket was lounging in the doorway and he appeared to want to block her. But by then Barley was level with her so the boy leapt aside for them to pass. She wouldn’t wait for the lift or perhaps she’d forgotten that there was one. She ran up the stairs and Barley ran after her, past a couple embracing. On the first landing an old man sat drunk in the corner. They climbed and kept climbing. Now it was an old woman who was drunk. Now it was a boy. They climbed so many flights that Barley began to fear she had forgotten which floor she was supposed to live on. Then suddenly she was turning the locks and they were inside her apartment again, and Katya was in the twins’ room, kneeling on their bed with her head struck forward and panting like a desperate swimmer, one arm flung across the body of each sleeping child.

  Once more there was only her bedroom. He led her to it because even in that tiny space she no longer knew the way. She sat on the bed unsurely, seeming not to know how high it was. He sat beside her, staring into her dull face, watching her eyes close, half open and close again, not venturing to touch her because she was rigid and appalled and apart from him. She was clasping her wrist as if it were broken. She gave a deep sigh. He said her name but she didn’t seem to hear him. He peered round the room, searching. A minuscule worktop was fixed along one wall, a make-up table and writing desk combined. Tossed among old letters lay a ring-backed writing block similar to the sort that Goethe used. A framed Renoir reproduction hung above the bed. He unhooked it and set it on his lap. The trained spy ripped a page out of the notebook, laid it on the picture glass, took a pen from his pocket and wrote:

  Tell me.

  He put the paper before her and she read it with indifference without relinquishing her wrist. She gave a faint shrug. Her shoulder was leaning against his, but she was unaware of it. Her blouse was open and her rich black hair was tousled from the running. He wrote again Tell me, then he grabbed her by the shoulders while his eyes implored her with a desperate love. Then he stabbed his forefinger at the sheet of paper. He picked up the picture and rammed it into her lap for her to press on. She stared at the paper and at Tell me, then she gave a long heartbreaking choke and put her head down until he lost sight of her behind the chaotic curtain of her hair.

  They have taken Yakov, she wrote.

  He took back the pen.

  Who told you?

  Yakov, she replied.

  What did he say?

  He will come to Moscow on Friday. He will meet you at Igor’s apartment at eleven o’clock on Friday night. He will bring you more material and answer your questions. Please have a precise list ready. It will be the last time. You should bring him news of publication, dates, details. You should bring good whisky. He loves me.

  He grabbed back the pen.

  Was it Yakov talking?

  She nodded.

  Why do you say they’ve taken him?

  He used the wrong name.

  What name?

  Daniil. It was our rule. Pyotr if he is safe, Daniil if he is taken.

  The pen had been passing urgently between them. Now Barley held on to it as he wrote question after question. He made a mistake? he wrote.

  She shook her head.

  He has been ill. He has forgotten your code, he wrote.

  She shook her head again.

  Has he never got it wrong before? he wrote.

  At this she shook her head, took back the pen and wrote in an angry hand, He called me Mariya. He said, Is that Mariya? Mariya is how I should call myself if there was danger. If I am safe, Alina.

  Write his words.

  This is Daniil. Is that Mariya speaking? My lecture was the greatest success of my career. That was a lie.

  Why?

  He says always, in Russia the only success is not to win. It is a joke we have. He spoke deliberately against our joke. He was telling me we are dead.

  Barley went to the window and looked steeply down at the concourse and the street. The whole dark world inside him had fallen into silence. Nothing moved, nothing breathed. But he was prepared. He had been prepared all his life, and never known it. She is Goethe’s woman, therefore she is as dead as he is. Not yet, because this far Goethe has protected her with the last bit of courage left in him. But dead as dead can be, any time they care to reach out their long arm and pick her off the tree.

  For perhaps an hour he remained there at the window before returning to the bed. She was lying on her side with her eyes open and her knees drawn up. He put his arm round her and drew her into him and he felt her cold body break inside his grasp as she began sobbing with convulsive, soundless heaves, as if she was afraid even to weep within the hearing of the microphones.

  He began writing to her again, in bold clear capitals: PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

  The screens were rolling every few minutes. Barley has left the Mezh. More. They have arrived at the metro station. More. Have exited (sic) the hospital, Katya on Barley’s arm. More. Men lie but the computer is infallible. More.

  ‘Why on earth’s he driving?’ Ned asked sharply as he read this.

  Sheriton was too absorbed to reply but Bob was standing behind him and Bob picked up the question.

  ‘Men like to drive women, Ned. The chauvinist age is still upon us.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ned politely.

  Clive was smiling in approval.

  Intermission. The screens slip out of s
equence as Anastasia takes back the story. Anastasia is an angry old Latvian of sixty who has been on the Russia House books for twenty years. Anastasia alone has been allowed to cover the vestibule.

  The legend speaks:

  She made two passes, first to the lavatory, then back to the waiting room.

  On her first pass, Barley and Katya were sitting on a bench waiting.

  On her second, Barley and Katya were standing beside the telephone and appeared to be embracing. Barley had a hand to her face, Katya also had a hand up, the other hung at her side.

  Had Bluebird’s call come through by then?

  Anastasia didn’t know. Though she had stood in her lavatory cubicle listening as hard as she could, she hadn’t heard the phone ring. So either the call had failed to come through or it was over by the time she made her second pass.

  ‘Why on earth should he be embracing her?’ said Ned.

  ‘Maybe she had a fly in her eye,’ Sheriton said sourly, still watching the screen.

  ‘He drove,’ Ned insisted. ‘He’s not allowed to drive over there, but he drove. He let her drive all the way out to the country and back. She drove him to the hospital. Then all of a sudden he takes over the wheel. Why?’

  Sheriton put down his pencil and ran his forefinger round the inside of his collar. ‘So what’s the betting, Ned? Did Bluebird make his call or didn’t he? Come on.’

  Ned still had the decency to give the question honest thought. ‘Presumably he made it. Otherwise they would have gone on waiting.’

  ‘Maybe she heard something she didn’t like. Some bad news or something,’ Sheriton suggested.

  The screens had gone out, leaving the room sallow.

  Sheriton had a separate office done in rosewood and instant art. We decamped to it, poured ourselves coffee, stood about.

  ‘Hell’s he doing in her flat for so long?’ Ned asked me aside. ‘All he has to do is get the time and place of the meeting out of her. He could have done that two hours ago.’

  ‘Maybe they’re having a tender moment,’ I said.

  ‘I’d feel better if I thought they were.’

  ‘Maybe he’s buying another hat,’ said Johnny unpleasantly, overhearing us.

  ‘Geronimo,’ said Sheriton as the bell rang, and we trooped back to the situation room.

  An illuminated street map of the city showed us Katya’s apartment marked by a red pinlight. The pick-up point lay three hundred metres east of it, at the south-east corner of two main streets marked green. Barley must now be heading along the south pavement, keeping close to the curb. As he reached the pick-up point, he should affect to slow down as if hunting for a car. The safe car would pull alongside him. Barley had been instructed to give the driver the name of his hotel in a loud voice and negotiate a price with his hands.

  At the second roundabout the car would take a side turning and enter a building site where the safe truck was parked without lights, its driver appearing to doze in his cab. If the truck’s wing aerial was extended, the car would make a right-hand circle and return to the truck.

  If not, abort.

  Paddy’s report hit the screens at one a.m. London time. The tapes were available for us less than an hour later, blasted from the roof of the US Embassy. The report has since been torn to pieces in every conceivable way. For me it remains a model of factual field reporting.

  Naturally the writer needs to be known, for every writer under the sun has limitations. Paddy was not a mindreader but he was a lot of other things, a former Gurkha turned special forces man turned intelligence officer, a linguist, a planner and improviser in Ned’s favourite mould.

  For his Moscow persona, he had put on such a skin of English silliness that the uninitiated made a joke of him when they described him to each other: his long shorts in the summer when he took himself on treks through the Moscow woods; his langlaufing in the winter, when he loaded up his Volvo with ancient skis and bamboo poles and iron rations and finally his own egregious self, clad in a fur cap that looked as though it had been kept over from the Arctic convoys. But it takes a clever man to act the fool and get away with it for long, and Paddy was a clever man, however convenient it later became to take his eccentricities at face value.

  Also in controlling his motley of pseudo language students, travel clerks, little traders and third-flag nationals, Paddy was first rate. Ned himself could not have bettered him. He tended them like a canny parish priest, and every one of them in his lonely way rose to him. It was not his fault if the qualities that made men come to him also made him vulnerable to deception.

  So to Paddy’s report. He was struck first by the precision with which Barley gave his account, and the tape bears him out. Barley’s voice is more self-assured than in any previous recording.

  Paddy was impressed by Barley’s resolve and by his devotion to his mission. He compared the Barley he saw before him in the truck with the Barley he had briefed for his Leningrad run and warmed to the improvement. He was right. Barley was an enlarged and altered man.

  Barley’s account to Paddy tallied also with every checkable fact at Paddy’s disposal, from the pick-up at the metro and the drive to the hospital, to the wait on the bench and the stifled bell. Katya had been standing over the phone when it rang, Barley said. Barley himself had scarcely heard it. Then no wonder Anastasia hadn’t heard it either, Paddy reasoned. Katya must have been quick as light to grab that receiver.

  The conversation between Katya and the Bluebird had been short, two minutes at most, said Barley. Another neat fit. Goethe was known to be scared of long telephone conversations.

  With so much collateral available to him therefore, and with Barley navigating his way through it, how on earth can anybody afterwards maintain that Paddy should have driven Barley straight to the Embassy and shipped him back to London bound and gagged? But of course Clive maintained just that, and he was not the only one.

  Thus to the three mysteries that by now were sticking in Ned’s throat – the embrace, the drive from the hospital with Barley at the wheel, the two hours they spent together in the flat. For Barley’s answers, we must see him as Paddy saw him, bowed over the low light on the table in the truck, his face glistening from the heat. There is the whirr from the bafflers in the background. Both men are wearing earphones, a closed-circuit microphone lies between them. Barley whispers his story, half to the microphone, half to his station chief. Not all Paddy’s nights of adventure on the North-West Frontier could have yielded a more dramatic atmosphere.

  Cy sits in the shadows in a third pair of earphones. It is Cy’s truck but he has orders to let Paddy host the feast.

  ‘Then she goes and gets the wobblies,’ says Barley, with enough of the man-to-man in his voice to make Paddy smile. ‘She’d been winding herself up all week for his call and suddenly it was over and she went pop. Probably didn’t help her, me being there. Without me around, I reckon she’d have held it back till she got home.’

  ‘Probably would at that,’ Paddy agrees understandingly.

  ‘It was too much for her. Hearing his voice, hearing he’ll be in town in a couple of days, her worries about her kids – and about him, and about herself as well – it was just too much for her.’

  Paddy understood perfectly. He had known emotional women in his day, and was experienced in the sorts of thing they cried over.

  From there everything else flowed naturally. The deception became a symphony. Barley had done what he could to comfort her, he said, but she was in bad shape so he put his arm round her and lugged her to the car and drove her home.

  In the car she did some more crying but she was on the mend by the time they got to her flat. Barley made her a cup of tea and patted her hand, until he was confident she was able to cope.

  ‘Well done,’ said Paddy. And if, as he says this, he sounds like a nineteenth-century Indian Army officer congratulating his men after a futile cavalry charge, that is only because he is impressed and his mouth is too near the microphone.


  There is lastly Barley’s question, which is where Cy came in. With hindsight, no doubt, it sounds like a straight declaration of larcenous intent. But Cy didn’t hear it that way and neither did Paddy. Neither, in fact, did anyone in London except Ned, whose impotence was by now unnerving. Ned was becoming the pariah of the situation room.

  ‘Oh yes – that’s it – what about the shopping list?’ says Barley as he prepares to leave. The question emerges as one of several small administrative worries, not a solo. ‘When do you get to press the shopping list into my hot little hand?’ he asks repetitiously.

  ‘Why?’ says Cy from the shadows.

  ‘Well I don’t know. Shouldn’t I bone up on it a bit or something?’

  ‘There’s nothing to bone up,’ says Cy. ‘It’s written questions, yes-or-no answers, and it is positively important that you do not know any part of it, thank you.’

  ‘So when do I get it?’

  ‘The shopping list we do as late as possible,’ says Cy.

  Of Cy’s own opinion of Barley’s state of mind, one nugget is recorded. ‘With the Brits,’ he is reported to have said, ‘you never know what the hell they’re thinking anyway.’

  That night at least, Cy had a certain justice on his side.

  ‘There was no bad news,’ Ned insisted while Brock played the truck tapes for the third or thirtieth time.

  We were back in our own Russia House. We had taken refuge there. It was like the early days all over again. It was dawn, but we were too wakeful to remember sleep.

  ‘There was no bad news,’ Ned repeated. ‘It was all good news. “I’m well. I’m safe. I gave a great lecture. I’m catching the plane. See you on Friday. I love you.” So she weeps.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, talking against my own mood. ‘Haven’t you ever cried when you were happy?’

  ‘She weeps so much he has to cart her down the hospital corridor. She weeps so much she can’t drive. When they get to her apartment she runs ahead of him to the door as if Barley doesn’t exist, because she’s so happy that the Bluebird’s flying in on time. And he comforts her. For all the good news she’s had.’ Barley’s recorded voice had come on again. ‘And he’s calm. Totally calm. Not a worry in the world. “We’re bang on target, Paddy. Everything’s fine. That’s why she’s weeping.” Of course it is.’