The Russia House

by John le Carré

  ‘And the shopping list?’ I asked him again.

  He peered whimsically into his glass. ‘The targeting of one side, my dear Palfrey, is based on that side’s assumptions about the other side. And vice versa. Ad infinitum. Do we harden our silos? If the enemy can’t hit them, why should we bother? Do we superharden them – even if we know how – at a cost of billions? We’re already doing so, as a matter of fact, though it’s not much sung about. Or do we protect them imperfectly with SDI at a cost of more billions? Depends what our prejudices are and who signs our pay cheque. Depends whether we’re manufacturers or taxpayers. Do we put our rockets on trains or autobahns or park them in country lanes, which happens to be this month’s flavour? Or do we say it’s all junk anyway, so to hell with it?’

  ‘So is it ending or beginning?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘When did it ever end? Turn on your television set, what do you see? The leaders of both sides hugging each other. Tears in their eyes. Looking more like each other every day. Hooray, it’s all over! Bollocks. Listen to the insiders and you realise the picture hasn’t altered by a brush-stroke.’

  ‘And if I turn my television off? What will I see then?’

  He had ceased to smile. Indeed his good face was more serious than I had ever seen it before, though his anger – if such it was – seemed to be directed at no one but himself.

  ‘You’ll see us. Hiding behind our grey screens. Telling each other we keep the peace.’

  17

  The elusive truth that Ned was speaking of came out slowly and in a series of distorted perceptions, which is generally the case in our secret overworld.

  At six p.m. Barley was seen to ‘exit’ the VAAP offices, as our screens now insisted on advising us, and there was a flurry of apprehension that he might be drunk, for Zapadny was a drinking buddy and a farewell vodka with him was likely to be just that. He emerged, Zapadny with him. They embraced fulsomely on the doorstep, Zapadny flushed and a little excitable in his movements and Barley rather rigid, hence the watchers’ worry that he was drunk, and their rather odd decision to photograph him – as if by freezing the moment they might somehow sober him up. And since this is the last photograph of him on the file, you may imagine how much attention has been paid to it. Barley has Zapadny in his arms, and there is strength to their embrace, at least on Barley’s side. In my imagination, if no one else’s, it is as if Barley is holding the poor fellow up in order to give him the courage to keep his half of the bargain; as if he is literally breathing courage into him. And the pink is weird. VAAP is a former school on Bolshaya Bronnaya Street in the centre of Moscow. It was built, I guess, at the turn of the century, with large windows and a plaster façade. And this plaster was painted in that year a light pink, which in the photograph is transformed to a flaming orange, presumably by the last rays of a red sun. The entwined men are thus caught in an unholy scarlet halo like a red flash. One of the watchers even gained the entrance hall on the pretext of visiting the cafeteria, and tried to achieve the reverse shot. But a tall man stood in his way, watching the scene on the pavement. Nobody has identified him. At the news-stand, a second man, also tall, is drinking from a mug, but not with much conviction for his eyes too are turned to the two embracing figures outside.

  The watchers took no note of the scores of people who had passed in and out of the VAAP building during the two hours Barley had been in the place, how could they? They had no idea whether the visitors had come to buy copyrights or secrets.

  Barley returned to his hotel where he had a drink in the bar with a bunch of publishing cronies, among them Henziger, who was able to confirm, to London’s relief, that Barley was not drunk – to the contrary, that he was calm and in thoughtful spirits.

  Barley did mention in passing that he was expecting a phone call from one of Zapadny’s outriders – ‘We’re still trying to stitch up the Trans-Siberian thing.’ And at about seven p.m. he suddenly confessed himself ravenous, so Henziger and Wicklow took him through to the Japanese restaurant, together with a couple of jolly girls from Simon & Schuster whom Wicklow was counting on for light relief to ease Barley’s passage to his evening rendezvous.

  Over dinner Barley sparkled so brightly that the girls tried to persuade him to come back to the National with them, where a party was being thrown by a group of American publishers. Barley replied that he had a date but might come on afterwards if it didn’t run too long.

  Exactly at eight p.m. by Wicklow’s watch, Barley was summoned to the telephone and took the call in the restaurant, not five yards from where the party was sitting. Wicklow and Henziger strained, as a matter of routine, to catch his words. Wicklow recalls hearing ‘That’s all that matters to me.’ Henziger thinks he heard ‘We’ve got a deal’ but it might have been ‘not a deal’ or even ‘not yet real’.

  Either way, Barley was cross when he resumed his seat and complained to Henziger that the bastards were still holding out for too much money, which Henziger regarded more as a sign of his internal stress than of any great concern for the Trans-Siberian project.

  Quarter of an hour later the phone rang again and Barley returned from his conversation smiling. ‘We’re on,’ he told Henziger jubilantly. ‘Sealed, signed and delivered. They never go back on a handshake.’ At which Henziger and Wicklow broke out clapping and Henziger remarked that ‘we could do with a few more of them in Moscow.’

  It seems not to have occurred to either man that Barley had never before shown so much enthusiasm for a publishing agreement. But then what were they supposed to be looking for, except the night’s great coup?

  Barley’s dinner conversation was later painstakingly reconstructed, without result. He was talkative but not excitable. His subject was jazz, his idol was Slim Gaillard. The great ones were always outlaws, he maintained. Jazz was nothing if not protest. Even its own rules had to be broken by the real improvisers, he said.

  And everyone agreed with him, yes, yes, long live dissent, long live the individual over the grey men! Except nobody saw it that way. And again, why should they?

  At nine-ten p.m., with less than two hours to kill, Barley announced that he would stretch out in his room for a bit, he had letters to write and business to clear up. Both Wicklow and Henziger offered to give him a hand, for they had orders not to leave him to himself if they could avoid it. But Barley declined their offers and they could not insist.

  So Henziger took up his post in the next-door room and Wicklow placed himself in the lobby while Barley stretched out, though in reality he cannot have stretched out even for a second, for what he accomplished verges on the heroic.

  Five letters were traced to this short span, not to mention two telephone calls to England, one to each of his children, both monitored within the United Kingdom and bounced through to Grosvenor Square but neither of operational consequence. Barley was merely concerned to catch up with family news and enquire after his granddaughter, aged four. He insisted she be brought to the telephone, but she was too shy or too tired to talk to him. When his daughter Anthea asked him how his love-life was, he replied ‘complete’, which was held to be an unusual sort of reply, but then the circumstances were not usual.

  Ned alone remarked that Barley had said nothing about returning to England the next day, but Ned was by now a voice in the wilderness and Clive was seriously considering taking him off the case altogether.

  Barley also wrote two shorter letters, one to Henziger, one to Wicklow. And since they were not tampered with, so far as the laboratories could afterwards determine, and since – even more remarkable – the hotel delivered them to the correct room numbers promptly at eight o’clock next morning, it was assumed that these letters were in some way part of the package that Barley had negotiated while he was inside the VAAP building.

  The letters advised the two men that if they left the country quietly that day, taking Mary Lou with them, no harm would come to them. Barley had a warm word for each.

  ‘Wickers, there’s a real pu
blisher in you. Go for it!’

  And for Henziger, ‘Jack, I hope this won’t mean you take premature retirement in Salt Lake City. Tell them you never trusted me anyway. I didn’t trust me, so why should you?’

  No homilies, no apt quotations from his large, untidy store. Barley, it seemed, was coping very well without the assistance of other people’s wisdom.

  At ten o’clock, he left the hotel accompanied by Henziger only, and they had themselves dropped on the northern outskirts of the town where Cy and Paddy were once more waiting in the safe truck. This time Paddy was driving. Henziger sat beside him and Barley got in the back with Cy, slipped off his coat and let Cy put on the microphone harness and give him the latest operational intelligence: that Goethe’s plane from Saratov had arrived in Moscow on time; and that a figure answering Goethe’s description had been observed entering Igor’s apartment block forty minutes ago.

  Soon afterwards, lights had come up in the windows of the target flat.

  Cy then handed Barley two books, one a paperback copy of From Here to Eternity which contained the shopping list, the other a fatter volume, leather-bound, which was a concealment device containing a sound-baffler to be activated by pulling open the front cover. Barley had played with one in London and was proficient in its use.

  His body microphones were tuned to defeat the impulses of the device, but normal wall microphones were not. The disadvantage of the baffler was also known to him. Its presence in the room was detectable. If Igor’s flat was microphoned, then the listeners would at once be aware that a baffler was being used. This risk had been passed by both London and Langley as acceptable.

  The other risk had not been considered, namely that the device might fall into the hands of the opposition. It was still in the prototype stage and a small fortune and several years of research had been lavished on its development.

  At ten-fifty-four p.m., just as Barley was leaving the safe truck, he handed Paddy an envelope and said, ‘This is for Ned personally in case anything happens to me.’ Paddy slipped the envelope in his inside jacket pocket. He noticed that it was a fat envelope and, so far as he could see in the half-light, it was not addressed.

  The most lively account of Barley’s walk to the foot of the apartment block was provided not by the military reportese of Paddy, still less by the Haig-speak of Cy, but in the boisterous tones of his good friend Jack Henziger who escorted him to the entrance. Barley did not utter, he said. Neither did Jack. They’d no wish to be identified as foreigners.

  ‘We walked alongside of each other out of step,’ Henziger said. ‘He has this long step, mine’s short. It bothered me we couldn’t keep step. The apartment house was one of these brick monsters they have out there with like a mile of concrete round them, and we kept on walking without getting anywhere. It’s like one of those dreams, I thought. You keep on running but you don’t make any distance. Very hot, the air. Sweaty. I’m sweating, but Barley’s cool. He was collected, no question. He looked great. He looked straight into my eyes. He wished me a lot of luck. He was at peace with himself. I felt it.’

  Shaking hands, Henziger nevertheless had a momentary impression that Barley was angry about something. Perhaps angry against Henziger, for now in the half-dark he seemed determined to avoid Henziger’s eye.

  ‘Then I thought, Maybe he’s mad at Bluebird for getting him into this. Then I thought, Maybe he’s mad at all of us, but too polite to say it. Like he was being very British somehow, very laid back, very understated, keeping it all inside.’

  Ninety seconds later as they were preparing to leave, Cy and Paddy saw a silhouette at Igor’s window and took it to be Barley’s. The right hand was adjusting the top of the curtain, which was the agreed signal to say ‘All’s well.’ They drove away and left the surveillance of the apartment to the irregulars, who covered each other in shifts all night, but the light in the apartment stayed burning and Barley didn’t come out.

  One theory out of hundreds is that he never went up to the apartment at all, and that they took him straight through the building and out the other side, and that the figure in the window was one of their own people, for instance one of the tall men in the photograph taken in the VAAP foyer that afternoon. It never seemed to me to matter, but to the experts for some reason it did. When a problem threatens to engulf you, there’s nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.

  Speculation about Barley’s disappearance began slowly and built throughout the night. Optimists like Bob, and for a while Sheriton, clung on till dawn and after. Barley and Bluebird had drunk themselves under the table again, they kept insisting in order to keep each other’s spirits up. It was Peredelkino all over again, a re-run, no question, they told each other.

  Then for a short while they worked up a kidnap theory, until soon after five-thirty in the morning – thanks to the time difference – when Henziger and Wicklow had their letters and Wicklow without further fuss took a cab to the British Embassy, where the Soviet guards at the gate did not obstruct him. The result was a flash signal to Ned, decypher yourself, from Paddy. Meanwhile, Cy was putting through a similar message to Langley, Sheriton and anyone else who was still willing to listen to a man whose Moscow days looked like being over very soon.

  Sheriton took the news with his customary phlegm. He read Cy’s telegram, he looked around the room and realised that the whole team was watching him – the smart girls, the boys in ties, loyal Bob, ambitious Johnny with his gunman’s eyes. And of the Brits, Ned, myself and Brock, for Clive had prudently discovered urgent business elsewhere. There was a lot of the actor in Sheriton, just as there was in Henziger, and he used it now. He stood up, he hauled at his waistband, he massaged his face like a man reckoning he needed a shave.

  ‘Well, boys. Better put the chairs on the tables till next time.’

  Then he walked over to Ned, who was still sitting at his desk studying Paddy’s telegram, and he laid a hand on Ned’s shoulder.

  ‘Ned, I owe you dinner some time,’ he said.

  Then he walked over to the door and unhooked his new Burberry and buttoned himself into it and departed, followed after a moment by Bob and Johnny.

  Others did not bow out so elegantly, least of all the barons of the twelfth floor.

  Once again, a committee of enquiry was formed.

  Names should be named. Nobody should be spared. Heads must roll.

  The Deputy to chair it, Palfrey to be secretary.

  Another purpose of such committees, I discovered, is to impart a sense of ceremony to events that have passed off without any. We were extremely solemn.

  The first to be heard, as usual, were the conspiracy theorists, who were recruited in short order from the Foreign Office, the Defence Ministry and a rather unlovely body called the Informal Consultants, which consisted of industrial and academic scientists who fancied themselves as Sunday spies. These amateur espiocrats commanded huge influence around the Whitehall bazaars, and were heard at inordinate length by the committee. A professor from Edinburgh addressed us for five full pipe-loads and nearly gassed us all, but nobody had the nerve to tell him to put the damn thing out.

  The first great question was, what would happen next? Would there be expulsions, a scandal? What would become of our Moscow station? Had any of the irregulars been compromised?

  The audio truck, though Soviet property, was an American problem, and its abrupt disappearance caused hushed concern among those who had favoured its use.

  The question of who is expelled for what is never a plain one, for heads of station in Moscow, Washington and London are these days declared to their host countries. Nobody in Moscow Centre had any illusions about Paddy’s activities, or Cy’s. Their cover was not designed to protect them from the opposition, but from the gaze of the real world.

  In any case, they were not expelled. Nobody was expelled. Nobody was arrested. The irregulars, who were stood down indefinitely, went peaceably about their cover jobs.

  The absence o
f a retaliatory gesture was quickly seen by Western pundits as vastly significant.

  A conciliatory move in the season of glasnost?

  A clear signal to us that the Bluebird was a gambit to obtain the American shopping list?

  Or a less clear signal to us that the Bluebird material was accurate, but too embarrassing to acknowledge?

  The battle-lines were set. Somewhat along the principle that Ned had already explained to me, doves and hawks on both sides of the Atlantic once more gleefully parted company.

  If the Sovs are sending us a signal that the material is accurate, why then clearly the material is inaccurate, said the hawks.

  And vice versa, said the doves.

  And vice versa again, said the hawks.

  Papers written, feuds waged. Promotions, sackings, pensions, medals, lateral postings and downgradings. But no consensus. Just the usual triumph of the fattest, disguised as rational deduction.

  In our committee Ned alone refused to join the dance. He seemed cheerfully determined to accept the blame. ‘The Bluebird was straight and Barley was straight,’ he repeated to the committee over and again, without once losing his good humour. ‘There was no deception by anyone, except where we deceived ourselves. It was we who were crooked. Not the Bluebird.’