by Philip Kerr
“So what happened after you started blackmailing Blunt?”
“Steady on, old boy. I wouldn’t call it blackmail, exactly. I mean, I never threatened to send the letters and the picture to the newspapers or anything like that. You might even say I was trying to help the poor fellow out. To stop them from falling into the hands of anyone else. To give him peace of mind. Yes, I could have destroyed them, but then he might always have wondered what became of them, and if one day they might come back to haunt him. You do see the difference.”
“You’re a much better blackmailer than you think you are, Robin.”
Robin Maugham leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette with fury, as if he wished the ashtray had been my eyeball.
“Fuck you, Walter,” he said.
“I’d rather you didn’t. So, then; Blunt bought what you were offering so very cheaply. Prints, negative, letters, the whole package wrapped with a nice pink ribbon. Cash?”
“Yes. Cash. He moaned about it quite a lot but yes, eventually, he paid. So, naturally I was more than a bit surprised when this fellow Hebel turned up here with the photograph asking for fifty thousand dollars. I mean, fifty thousand dollars? Jesus. That rather puts my amateur effort in the shade.”
“Have you spoken to Blunt about this?”
“Yes. He says the photograph was stolen from his flat at the Courtauld Institute soon after I sold it to him.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Yes. Maybe. His place is always full of rent boys. Any one of them could have pinched it. Besides, I can’t see why he would hand the picture to someone who might easily blackmail him. It strikes me that Anthony Blunt has as much to lose as my uncle.”
“But a lot more to gain, perhaps. Is Blunt rich?”
“No, not especially. I mean, he has some rather valuable pictures, and some rich friends, but not much money of his own.”
“So, not as rich as your uncle Willie?”
“Lord, no. Not many people are.”
“So then. Has it occurred to you that Blunt and Hebel might be in this together? After all, Blunt could hardly threaten to send the picture to the newspapers himself. Your uncle would never believe he would risk doing that. But he would believe someone else was capable of it. Someone like Hebel, with nothing to lose. This might also explain how Hebel came to be in possession of this tape recording of Guy Burgess. Perhaps the friendship between Blunt and Burgess extended to more than just sharing a flat. We don’t know for sure that it was recorded on this Russian ship and not at a flat in London.”
“Yes, I suppose it’s possible. I can see Blunt using a picture in the way you describe. But this tape is something else again. My uncle will only buy it if the secret service is prepared to underwrite the cost of the purchase. And they won’t buy it without listening to it themselves. Which still leaves Blunt in the shit because of the photograph, I’d have thought.”
“Not really. Your uncle has the photograph now.”
“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?”
“So, unless Anthony Blunt’s name is on that tape, he’s in the clear. More or less.”
“Anthony Blunt?” Somerset Maugham came into the room and helped himself to some coffee. “What’s Anthony got to do with any of this?”
Robin Maugham blushed again, this time to the roots of his dyed hair, and stammered an answer. “I was just telling Walter that Blunt used to share a flat with Guy Burgess in London. And that now and then you had him bid for pictures at art auctions in London. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, that’s right. Old Masters are his special thing. Poussin, Titian, not really my cup of tea. And too damned expensive. But over the years he’s spotted a couple of good buys for me. Impressionists, mainly. He has a good eye, Anthony.”
“And yet he didn’t seem to notice he was sharing a flat with a Russian spy,” I said.
“You didn’t know Guy Burgess,” said Maugham. “He was a very charming rogue and a most unlikely spy. Everyone thought so.”
“That’s the thing about the English,” I said. “You think charm excuses almost anything, including treachery and treason.”
“Yes,” said Maugham, lighting a pipe. “That’s quite true. It’s a failing of ours, to find excuses for people. Of course, charm only works for Germans when it seems to have been divinely conferred.”
“When was the last time you saw Guy Burgess?” I asked.
Maugham paused for a moment. “Probably Tangier in nineteen forty-nine. Got himself into a bit of a scrape in Gibraltar beforehand, I seem to recall. But that was the thing about Guy; he was always getting into scrapes. Frankly, his behavior made him a most improbable spy. Often drunk and outrageously homosexual—when he defected, nobody could quite believe how he managed to pull it off for so long. I suppose you might say it was the perfect cover, to seem so indiscreet that people couldn’t possibly think you might be a spy.”
Maugham set his coffee cup down and moved to a chair.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“As I’ll ever be.”
I stood up and walked over to the Grundig. In its green Tolex carry case, the tape machine resembled the forgotten layer of an old wedding cake. I twisted the gold switch and slowly the two reels began to turn.
EIGHTEEN
Like most Englishmen of my recent acquaintance—at the Grand Hôtel and the Villa Mauresque—Guy Burgess spoke with a plummy, nasal voice that seemed to contain a slight speech impediment, although that might just as easily have been the effect of too much alcohol. What else is there to do on a three-day voyage to Leningrad but get drunk? Suave, reptilian, and dripping with disdain, as if the whole business of being debriefed by his Russian handlers were beneath him, the voice reminded me of an English movie actor I’d once seen called Henry Daniell, who had seemed to me to be the screen personification of the sardonic, well-bred villain. As I listened to Burgess, it was as if the man were with us in Maugham’s drawing room, searching his memory and perhaps his conscience for the best interpretation of his actions—indeed, he seemed every bit as mannered as Somerset Maugham and as full of whinging self-justification as the great writer’s nephew. The recording was a good one, and occasionally, in the silences, you could even hear the dull, rhythmic throb of what might have been the ship’s engines but could as easily have been the slow breathing of some unseen leviathan.
“My name is Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess and I was born in Devonport, England, on the sixteenth of April nineteen eleven. For the purposes of verification, in nineteen forty-four I was running a Swiss source for MI5, code named Orange, who, I’m afraid to say, met with a sticky end in Trier. MI5 is, of course, Britain’s domestic secret intelligence service. My father was a naval officer and I myself attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth before going on to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge.
“Today is the twenty-eighth of April nineteen fifty-one and I just turned forty a couple of weeks ago, which seems incredible and rather horrible to me. Currently I am aboard a Russian freighter which must remain nameless, I’m afraid, and on my way to Leningrad in the company of my Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean, with a collected edition of Jane Austen in my bag and a new raincoat from Gieves in Old Bond Street. But I can tell you that Donald and I reached Saint-Malo on the Falaise, from Southampton. And that prior to this, I hired a car from Welbeck Motors in Crawford Street to make the journey to Southampton. I think it was an A-forty. Cream color. In Saint-Malo I paid a taxi driver rather a lot of money to drive his empty taxi to Rennes and to buy two tickets to Paris in our names. Meanwhile, we boarded this Russian ship. Because the fact of the matter is that I’ve decided I want to live in the Soviet Union because I am a socialist and it’s a socialist country. And I think Donald feels the same way that I do. In fact, I know he does.
“The reason I’m saying all this on tape now is so that my Russian friends can send the
recording to the BBC in London in the hope that they might broadcast it and let people back home in England know for themselves the truth about my decision and not what they’ve been told by the British government. I expect the newspapers are already calling me a traitor, but of course I’m nothing of the kind. That’s a lot of nonsense. No more is it true of Donald Maclean. Besides, I really don’t know what this word means anymore. I did what I did for conscience sake, for something I believed in, and which I happen to think is rather more important than some outmoded notion of loyalty to king and country. As it happens, I do love my country very much indeed, I just think it could be governed rather better than it is. (But for my poor eyesight I would very likely be a serving naval officer right now, like my late father.) But I still have family back in England and at some stage I would rather like to be able to go back for a month or so, and see them again, but I couldn’t ever do that, of course, unless I knew for certain that I could get out of England again and come back to Russia.
“My critics will doubtless see this recording as a confession; I prefer to think of it as an explanation. As Voltaire once said, ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’ And whilst I don’t expect to be forgiven, I do hope that my actions might come to be better understood. Consequently, I think it only right to place this explanation firmly in the context of my early life. So I suppose I ought to begin by mentioning that when I first went up to Cambridge in the summer of nineteen twenty-nine I found that most of my friends had either joined the Communist Party or were at least very close to it politically. Indeed, by nineteen thirty-two, the atmosphere in Cambridge was so febrile and the issue of Fascism so horribly pressing that I joined the party myself. It seemed to me inarguable that the Western democracies had taken an uncertain and compromising attitude toward Nazi Germany and that the Soviet Union constituted the only real bulwark against European tyranny. I believe that during the war the Soviet Union was never treated as a full and trusted ally by Britain and America in spite of the fact that the sacrifices made by the people of Russia were greater than those of all the other Allies put together.
“After I joined the Communist Party, like most young men I did a lot of talking and not much else. But by January nineteen thirty-three, with the election of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, that no longer seemed enough. Perhaps if I’d come down from Cambridge in the summer of nineteen thirty-seven, I might have gone to Spain to fight in the civil war, but in the summer of nineteen thirty-three I felt obliged to look elsewhere for some means of making my new beliefs seem at all relevant. Then, in December nineteen thirty-four, I met a Russian called Alexander Orlov who recruited me into the Russian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD—the forerunner of the KGB, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It was he who persuaded me that I could best serve the cause of anti-Fascism by resigning from the Communist Party and spying for the Soviet Union.
“Orlov introduced me to another man called Arnold Deutsch, code-named Otto, who urged me first to join the BBC—where I was a Talks Assistant; and then as war approached, MI6, which is Britain’s foreign intelligence service. Indeed, so keen was Deutsch on my achieving a perfect cover for my future espionage activities within the British establishment that he actively encouraged me to try and wed Winston Churchill’s niece. Can you imagine? Me, married to a Churchill? I did as I was told and pursued her for a whole month even though I did have some rather obvious disadvantages as a prospective husband for the girl. We were quite friendly for a while. I think I even took her for a weekend to stay with Dadie Rylands and his family in Devon and I may have introduced her to them as my fiancée. Clarissa Churchill is, of course, now the wife of the current British prime minister, Anthony Eden.
“It was Deutsch who gave me the code name Mädchen—the German word for ‘girl’—and in retrospect it’s clear to me that Arnold must have had a great sense of humor. My first major task—if it can described thus—was to make friends with as many people in government and the civil service as possible, and you might almost say that I became a sort of talent spotter for the NKVD. I made a pitch to everyone who was anyone. The historians G. M. Trevelyan and Stuart Hampshire, John Maynard Keynes, Noel Annan, the poet W. H. Auden, Anthony Blunt, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin. All of them pillars of the British establishment now. And I wasn’t exactly subtle about it. I’m not saying I tried to recruit all of these people as spies, not a bit of it; I was trying to chivvy out people who were sympathetic to the Russian cause, and who might be persuaded to speak up for Russia and for the Communists—which is of course a very different thing. It’s often forgotten that men as famous as George Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union in nineteen thirty-one and became enthusiasts for Russian Communism. And yet until his death last year only his most virulently right-wing critics were inclined to call him a traitor.
“I think it must have been in nineteen thirty-seven—around the time of the Spanish Civil War—that I went to stay with the writer Somerset Maugham at his fabulous villa on the French Riviera. There were five of us, I think. Dadie Rylands, Anthony Blunt, Victor Rothschild, Victor’s girlfriend Anne Barnes, and me. Victor had a smart new Bugatti and we drove to the Cap from Monte Carlo, where we’d been staying. I think I may have tried to sound him out as a potential recruit to the cause but Maugham wasn’t much interested in politics; he was much more interested in boys, and I remember I had a rather marvelous time as his guest. Certainly after Victor and Anne left. For a young and highly impressionable queer like me, it was like peeking through the keyhole at Trimalchio’s party and an insight into what it might be like to live quite openly as a practicing homosexual. God, how I envied that man. We all did. Anyone who was queer, that is.
“From the French Riviera I went to Rome and from there to Paris, which both the GRU—the GRU is Russian military intelligence—and the KGB were using as a recruitment and clearance center. It was a chance for me to meet my controller in a more relaxed environment, which is to say, far away from the risk of surveillance. I even made a pitch to Edouard Pfeiffer, Daladier’s chef de cabinet, who at the time of my proposition was playing ping-pong across the body of a naked young man in lieu of a net. I stayed on in Paris until just before Christmas nineteen thirty-seven. The Paris Bureau of the Comintern introduced me to all sorts of interesting people, many of them sympathetic Englishmen, such as Claud Cockburn and John Cairncross. Meanwhile, Arnold Deutsch took me out to dinner with all sorts of strange folk, not all of them obvious recruitment material. People who had no languages. People who hadn’t even been to university. Some of them were downright dull. Not to say stupid. I remember a very uninspiring young English salesman recently returned from China, where he’d been working for a tobacco company. I mean, this chap hadn’t even been to university, let alone Cambridge. All he could talk about was tobacco and the Chinese and about some awful bloody girl he’d married back in Somerset. And I remember thinking, what’s the point of trying to recruit a chap to the cause who’s going to be happily married and selling cigarettes? Are the Russians so desperate for spies that we’re willing to fund the local tobacconists? Not that he took Arnold’s ruble, so to speak. Anyway, ours not to reason why and all that rot. Of course, lots of these people are dead now. Killed in the war. Disappeared. God knows.
“In nineteen thirty-eight, I got back to London from Paris and joined Section D of MI6, before joining MI5, who sent me back to the BBC and while there, I interviewed Mr. Winston Churchill, in September nineteen thirty-eight. This was, of course, the time of the Munich crisis, which upset me greatly and resulted in my subsequent resignation from the BBC. Anyway, I had a Ford V8 of which I was inordinately fond, and one morning I drove down to Westerham and Churchill’s house at Chartwell. I told him I was in some despair about what had happened and he showed me a letter from Prague, signed by Edvard Beneš, which ran as follows: ‘My dear Mr. Churchill, I am writing to you for your advice and perhaps your assistance regarding my unhappy country.’ C
hurchill looked at me and said, what advice, what assistance should I offer, Mr. Burgess? I am an old man, without power, and without party; what help can I give? And I said, don’t be so downhearted, sir, offer him your eloquence; awaken people in this country with your speeches. He was rather pleased by that, I think. We then shared a bit of mutual hatred about Neville Chamberlain. Having finished discussing Munich, he then presented me with a book of his speeches, which he inscribed for me and which I still have. You and I know that war is inevitable, he added; if I am returned to power—and it seems likely that I shall be—and you need a job, come and see me, present this book, and I will make sure that you are suitably employed. I then went outside to my car and drove home. But it’s an interesting story, I think—certainly of interest to listeners to The Week in Westminster, which is the show I used to produce for the BBC. The point of me telling this story now is to demonstrate to any listeners I might have that while I may be a Communist and allegedly a traitor, I am still enough of a patriotic Englishman to admire an old Tory grandee like Winston Churchill.
“From the BBC I went to the news department of the Foreign Office, and after the war I became an assistant to Hector McNeil, the current secretary of state for Scotland, who was then a junior minister in the F.O. and who sometimes stood in for Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, which meant there were lots of MI6 papers that came my way.
