by Philip Kerr
“Who’s Sinbad?” asked Robin.
“Before he was director of MI6, Sir John Sinclair was a major general in Royal Artillery,” said Maugham. “But prior to that he went to Dartmouth Naval College and for two years he was a midshipman in the Royal Navy. Sinbad the sailor. And that’s how I know him. He served with the Murmansk force in northern Russia and for a while, in a small way, was one of my field agents.”
“I don’t even know where the Belle Aurore is,” Searle said peevishly.
“It’s on Avenue Denis Semeria,” I explained. “Just down from the Villa Ephrussi.”
“I say, listen to the hotel concierge,” said Robin.
“On the main road to Villefranche?” said Alan.
I nodded. “I drive past it almost every day.”
“Sounds a bit noisy to me,” said Alan.
“Guy Burgess went to Dartmouth Naval College, didn’t he?” I said. “At least that’s what he said on the tape.”
“Yes, he did,” said Robin.
“Sinbad is much older than Guy Burgess,” said Maugham. “About fifteen years older, probably. So there was no chance of an overlap there. Besides, Burgess isn’t Sinbad’s type at all.”
“You don’t mean he’s queer?” said Alan.
“No, I don’t. Sinbad is happily married.”
“Stands to reason someone must be,” I said.
“To Esme, I believe. For many years.”
“Anyone married to someone called Esme for many years must be queer,” said Robin.
“I find it hard to imagine that anyone who was a midshipman in the Royal Navy isn’t a bit queer,” objected Alan. “If they’d ever put it on the recruiting posters that the traditions of the Royal Navy were rum, sodomy, and the lash I’d have joined immediately. But instead I ended up in the army. In fucking Yorkshire. That’s enough to cure anyone of homosexuality, for life.”
“Is this all you people ever talk about?” I said. “Who’s queer and who isn’t?”
“It’s that or bloody Suez,” said Alan, “and right now I think I’d rather not talk about Suez.”
“No, indeed,” murmured Robin. “The gyppos are going to drop us all in the shit again.”
“Don’t think for a minute we haven’t discussed you in the same vein, Walter,” said Maugham. “Before the Nazis, Berlin was a poof’s paradise. I find it very hard to imagine that you are not without something more interesting in your extremely secret history than a couple of unfortunately dead wives.”
I shifted uncomfortably on my chair, lit a cigarette, and told myself that the sooner I could leave the Villa Mauresque the better. The atmosphere always made me uneasy, as though it had been calculated to make me feel as if I were the queer one. Perhaps I was at that. A fish out of water, certainly; out of water, and out of oxygen. I helped myself to another drink and tried to remain affable.
“I don’t know that I’d call it a secret history,” I said. “I think I told you quite a bit already, didn’t I?”
“If you were a fictional narrator, my friend,” said Maugham, “I should say that you were a narrator who was not to be trusted. Like Tristram Shandy. Please don’t get me wrong. That’s not a bad thing. Not in his case, nor in yours. It’s merely entertaining.”
Robin frowned at me and then looked irritably at his uncle. “What’s Walter doing here anyway? That’s what I’d like to know. He’s a German. Surely an evening like this should be Brits only. I can’t imagine someone like Sir John will welcome a Jerry at a meeting like this.”
“You’re right, of course,” said Maugham. “An Englishman has an instinctive knowledge of what’s right and wrong. And can always be relied on not to let the side down, unlike some fucking kraut. Especially someone who went to Eton and Cambridge. Someone like Guy Burgess, perhaps.”
Alan laughed.
“Besides, Sinbad isn’t the only one who can put on a bit of maximum security,” said Maugham. “So can I.”
“Well, I think he’s a little too old to be a bodyguard,” sniped Robin.
“Isn’t that right, Walter?”
I slipped the automatic Spinola had given me back at La Voile d’Or out of my trouser pocket for a moment to let everyone see it, but mainly the sight of the gun was for Robin’s benefit.
“So that’s what it is,” said Robin. “And here was me thinking that lump in his trousers might be his cock.”
I smiled calmly; it seemed a little more socially adept than whipping him across his pink, sweaty face with the gun. But there’s more than one way to slap a bitch hard.
“Perhaps, sir,” I said to Maugham, “your nephew might be interested to know that Anthony Blunt is also coming tonight.”
“Blunt? Coming here?” Robin Maugham was agitated. I didn’t blame him. It must be awkward to meet someone socially when you’ve been blackmailing them. He stood up, red-faced and puffing like one of the carp in his uncle’s ornamental pond, and flung away his cigarette. “No one told me. Why the fuck is Anthony Blunt coming here as well? I don’t understand. Who asked him anyway?”
“Sir John suggested he might join us,” said Maugham. “Blunt knows Guy Burgess as well as anyone. Besides, during the war Anthony worked for MI5. Which makes him doubly qualified to be here. Alan, please go and retrieve that cigarette end before it starts a fire. Everything in the garden is so very dry right now. Do try to be more thoughtful, Robin.”
Alan stood up, found the cigarette, and returned it to the ashtray while Robin continued to sound off on the subject of Blunt’s imminent arrival.
“Thank you, Alan.”
“I didn’t know he worked for MI5,” said Robin. “I thought he was an art historian, not a fucking spy.”
“Art historians make good spies,” said Maugham. “In art as in life, things are never quite what they seem. During the last war I myself did some work for MI6 in Lisbon. And then, in New York, I helped Bill Stephenson run British Security Coordination from the Rockefeller Center. But I’m still not allowed to say too much about that.”
“Is there a queer in London who doesn’t work for the security services?” Robin Maugham whined. “That’s what I’d like to know. Well, I wish someone had told me he was coming, that’s all.”
“I’m telling you now,” said Maugham.
“If you’re planning to be around when they get here,” I told Robin, adding to his now obvious discomfort, “maybe now would be a good time to tell your uncle what he doesn’t know. I mean about you and Blunt.”
“Good Lord, you haven’t fucked him, too,” said Maugham, and started to laugh his gravelly old laugh. “You little devil.”
Robin Maugham regarded me with pinpoint hatred.
“Perhaps before Blunt tells your uncle himself. Which he might well do, don’t you think? It’s just a suggestion, Robin. To save you any needless embarrassment.”
“You bastard.”
“He has fucked him, hasn’t he?” Maugham was still laughing delightedly in his almost Satanic way. “Do tell.”
But Robin had had enough and marched off the terrace like an angry terrier. A few minutes later we heard his Alfa Romeo take off.
“Now I really am fascinated,” said Maugham, continuing to cackle. “What on earth’s the matter with the boy?”
It was time. I told the old man about the photograph, how his nephew had used it to blackmail Anthony Blunt and how Blunt had alleged it had later been stolen from his flat in London. “It might just be that Robin and Harold Hebel were in cahoots to make some money from you,” I explained. “Fifty thousand dollars, if you see where I’m going.”
“Yes, I do see. Oh dear. Poor Robin. No, it’s not funny at all, is it?”
Composing himself again, Maugham sipped his martini, ate the olive, and then sighed. “Look, Walter, I don’t expect you to understand this in the slightest, but for men like me and Robi
n and Alan, silence about who and what we are is not a choice so much as a matter of constant vigilance. In fact, it’s nothing short of an obsession. We inhabit a dog-eat-dog world of extortion and blackmail the way some people live with religion or politics. Blackmail infects us to the extent that we’re not merely its victims but, just as often, its perpetrators. Lovers spurned become our most painful tormentors. Boys we fondly kept in toys and treats and money—always lots of money—turn around and bite the hand that once fed them so generously in the name of their own freedom. Letters we’ve written are the tools of our own torture and potential downfall. It would be easy for me to condemn my nephew’s actions out of hand, but I’m not going to. As you yourself no doubt remember, I myself blackmailed you to come and help me out with this business. So, you see, I’m just as rotten and unscrupulous as Robin is.”
“I think you’re making excuses for him,” I said.
“Of course I am. Robin is my nephew, and in spite of his manifest failings I’m very fond of him. I’ll always be making excuses for him. He is the only member of my family I like. No, that’s not quite true—I have a niece, Kate, my brother’s daughter, of whom I am rather fond. But Robin is a weak man. And needs me. ‘Need’ is a more important word than ‘love,’ Walter. Especially at my time of life. Although perhaps it always was. It’s good to be needed. Perhaps one day you’ll realize that.”
TWENTY-TWO
Sir John “Sinbad” Sinclair crossed his long legs and straightened the perfect creases on the trousers of his summer-weight suit. His polished brown shoes gleamed in the lamplight, while his short, gray hair sat on top of a long head like an army beret. He looked exactly like what he was: an ex-general in the British army, one of those paternally minded and probably much-loved generals who regarded his men as his sons, and his junior officers as younger brothers. While he listened to the tape, he made notes with a fountain pen and occasionally rubbed a broken nose that was bent toward the left side of his face. He was a handsome man, about sixty years old and rather more vigorous than the other Englishman accompanying him. Patrick Reilly was younger than Sinclair by more than a decade, and while he was probably as tall as Sinbad, he was altogether less physical, with the beginnings of a double chin and a posture that belonged in a plantation chair on the veranda of some Indian bungalow. Where Sinclair’s expression was lively and adventurous, like a well-trained gun dog, Reilly’s was altogether more feline and wary, with small, searching green eyes and a mouth as tight as a Frisian miser’s purse. Neither of them had said very much, but Reilly already struck me as the more intelligent of the two. Both men regarded me with strong suspicion and were more than a little surprised—as was I—when Maugham had earlier introduced me as his “private detective.”
“Winston had one, when he came to stay here at the Villa Mauresque,” added Maugham, by way of explanation and justification. “Can’t remember the fellow’s name.”
“Walter Thompson, I think,” said Sinclair. “Like the advertising agency.”
“No, that was the previous one,” said Reilly. “Don’t you remember? Obtuse sort of chap. We had all that trouble when he wanted to publish a book about his experiences guarding Winston.”
“Oh yes.”
“Well, my detective is also called Walter,” said Maugham. “And he’s here with us tonight because he’s been helping me to deal with this blackmailer, Harold Hebel. I trust you have no objection to his being here because I’ve rather come to rely on his judgment. In any event, I prefer him to remain. Just as I’m sure you feel safer with your two chaps from Special Branch. If that’s what they are.” Maugham nodded in the direction of the French windows, where two largish Englishmen with guns were blundering around in the gardens and trying to look inconspicuous.
“I’ve no idea where they’re from.” Reilly looked at Sinclair. “Do you?”
“Not my department. I drew them both from stores. Standard issue for an excursion like this. They’re from Fort Monckton, I believe. Portsmouth muscle.”
The third visitor from London seemed to belong at the Villa Mauresque in a way Sinclair and Reilly could never have done. Obviously homosexual, Anthony Blunt was about fifty, tall, as thin as a Giacometti bronze figure, with a shock of boyishly combed gray hair and the look of a man who had just tasted a rather indifferently blended sherry. He wore an open-necked white shirt with short sleeves as, unlike the other two, he had removed his jacket since it was a very warm evening. The deep laugh lines around his slit of a mouth were in frequent use. His dry sense of humor was deployed often and he struck me as a man both charming and highly intelligent, albeit deeply untrustworthy. The idea that this man had ever been a spy in MI5 seemed preposterous, but he didn’t look like a blackmailer and I quickly discounted the idea that he might be in cahoots with Hebel to extort money from Maugham. I doubt he could have demanded his morning newspaper with any real menace. He, too, was making copious notes, and when we’d finished listening to the tape for the first time it was Blunt who spoke. His voice was probably as familiar to the English Queen as her own, and I assumed it was probably the way she herself spoke.
“I think the answer to the most obvious question right now—is this Guy Burgess speaking on the tape?—is categorically yes; in my opinion, it is. The details and dates he gives of his early life are, of course, accurate. As is the code name of the Swiss source he was running for MI5 back in nineteen forty-four: Orange. Only Guy and one or two others, including myself, would have known that name. Known, too, that poor Orange did indeed meet a sticky end with the Gestapo in Trier. That’s one thing in favor of this tape’s authenticity. And here’s another, which is paradoxically confirmation by way of a perverse delusion, it being Guy’s perverse delusion, of course.
“In spite of the weight of experience he had behind him to form a contrary opinion, I have to say it was entirely typical of Guy that he might actually believe the BBC would even be capable of broadcasting this tape recording. Guy was always extremely critical of the BBC and all its works. He believed, as I do, that the BBC is one of those institutions that trivializes the serious and it’s impossible to imagine that they would have treated this tape as he could ever have wished them to. I can only assume he must have supposed some left-leaning soul at the BBC, intent on embarrassing the government, would leak the tape to a newspaper such as the Manchester Guardian in order that they might publish an extract from the tape. But even they would have been subject to a Defense Advisory Notice forbidding publication on the grounds of national security. The idea that open criticism of the security services is now permissible in our media is laughable, to say the least. Nor is his admission of the ease with which he helped himself to sensitive files something that could ever be allowed to be heard by the great British public.”
“Yes, that’s very damaging,” admitted Sinclair. “It makes us look like incompetents.”
“The story about Guy driving down to Chartwell to interview Churchill is true,” continued Blunt. “I’d heard it before, of course, and the story is well known, I think. Guy told it often enough in the Reform Club, especially when he was drunk. What is much less well known is that Guy did indeed pursue Churchill’s niece, Clarissa—now Mrs. Anthony Eden. I was vaguely aware of it at the time and of course I was surprised, to say the least, for the obvious reason. I certainly had no idea that he’d been put up to it by his Russian controller, Arnold Deutsch, code name Otto.”
“MI6 has, to the best of my knowledge, never heard of a Russian handler called Arnold Deutsch, code name Otto,” said Sinclair.
“Nor have I,” admitted Reilly. “He might have been one of the great illegals, I suppose. Those Trotskyist Communists not born in Russia who believed in the Comintern. But I thought I’d heard of all of them. No such man as Deutsch, Otto or Arnold, exists in our files. I’m certain of it.”
“How about you, Anthony?” asked Sinclair. “Ever heard of him?”
“No. I’ve ne
ver heard of him. Certainly there was no one I remember at Cambridge who fits that description. And none I remember who crossed Guy’s meandering, not to say erratic, path.”
“Of course,” added Reilly, “the Russians might readily own up to him now if he’s dead, murdered by Stalin back in nineteen thirty-eight—a few years after Guy says he was recruited to the NKVD—like most of the illegals. So that would make sense.”
“To me, the stuff about Hector McNeil is very damaging,” said Sinclair.
“Especially as he was a government minister at the time.”
“Certainly to the Labour Party if not to McNeil himself. He died last year.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He was only forty-eight.”
“Christ. Scots, of course. Working-class Glasgow. They never seem to live long, do they?”
“The information about Britain having a list of which Russian cities we might bomb in a preemptive strike is also damaging,” said Reilly. “The British people don’t like to think of themselves as aggressors. That could never have been broadcast. Not in a million years.”
“I would like to know who this man was that Deutsch and Guy met in Paris,” said Sinclair. “The one he says Deutsch was looking to recruit for the comrades.”
“The ones who’d just come back from China?” said Blunt. “Yes. That was rather interesting.”
“It sort of rings a bell with me somewhere,” said Sinclair. “But why?”
“He’d been working for a tobacco company, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out,” said Reilly. “But what interests me more is where the tape comes from. We need to find out from the BBC if they ever received it. And if they did receive it, who gave it to them and what happened to it. One can hardly imagine they wouldn’t have been aware of its importance.”
“On the other hand, if this chap Hebel was given the tape by someone in the KGB,” said Blunt, “the question is what the Soviets can hope to achieve by letting us have it now, five years after Burgess and Maclean went to Russia. Disinformation or disclosure? It’s rather a dilemma.”
