The Other Side of Silence

by Philip Kerr

  “Quite.”

  “Walter has an interesting theory about the tape,” said Maugham. “Don’t you, Walter?”

  “Yes, sir.” And I quickly told them about Hebel and his history as a practiced blackmailer in Germany. “This just may be a case of blackmail, pure and simple. If so, I can’t imagine anyone better equipped than Hebel to handle it for the Russians.”

  “Yes, but what could they want?” asked Reilly.

  “Money,” I said. “What else? The Soviet Union is desperately short of foreign currency. And they know how sensitive Anglo-American relations are right now. How anxious you would be to prevent the Americans from having ears on the tape. There’s no telling what’s on the other tapes being offered as part of the deal.”

  “They could be even more embarrassing,” said Reilly. “Yes, I do see what you mean.”

  “Under the circumstances,” I said, “two hundred thousand dollars looks cheap compared with the diplomatic cost of this tape and others like it appearing in the pages of the New York Times or on some foreign news network.”

  “If Walter’s right, then clearly someone in Russian intelligence has a sense of humor,” said Maugham. “The idea of the British government paying off the KGB to stop it from leaking secrets about its number one defector is nothing short of hilarious. At least, it would be if it wasn’t me who was being asked to pay up.”

  “Quite,” said Sinclair.

  “And Hebel is the man who was in possession of the incriminating photograph that Anthony bought from Willie’s nephew, Robin,” said Reilly. “Is that right? For a thousand pounds.”

  “Yes,” said Maugham. “I’m sorry about that, Anthony. You must let me give you the thousand pounds you paid him for it.”

  “Please don’t concern yourself too much, Willie,” said Blunt. “As you know, this is not so much an occupational hazard as a constitutional one. The picture and the negative were both purloined from my flat several months ago. In my work as director of the Courtauld Institute I have to entertain a great many students. Sadly, I think one of them must have stolen it and sold it to this awful man. I do have half an idea of who it might have been. An Austrian boy. Which makes it even more disappointing. He’s one of my most promising students.”

  “You know this fellow reminds me of the chap in the Sherlock Holmes story,” said Sinclair. “‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.’”

  Reilly smiled calmly. “Yes, of course. The king of blackmailers. Rather a good tale that one, I always thought.”

  “Milverton was based on a real blackmailer, by the way,” added Blunt. “A man called Howell who was blackmailing the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Howell was found with his throat cut and half a sovereign in his mouth. Which seems fitting, somehow.”

  “I wish someone would cut this man Hebel’s throat,” said Maugham. “I suggested to Walter that he should kill him, but alas he declined. Why don’t you have your two friends from Portsmouth pick him up and go to work on him with a red-hot travel iron. It seems to me that you could get all the answers you need from him that way.”

  “I don’t think the French would like that very much,” said Reilly. “We’re getting on rather well with them right now, what with all this Suez business. Which makes a very pleasant change. For once we’re on the same page. They wouldn’t like it at all if we acted in such a high-handed fashion as you describe, Willie.”

  “Besides,” added Sinclair, “we risk Hebel’s masters responding to that by simply sending one of the tapes to the Americans. Which would be a disaster. That’s the risk you take when you call the blackmailer’s bluff. That the whole thing goes pear-shaped.”

  “If this is just an attempt to raise a bit of extra money, then it’s rather clever,” said Reilly. “Willie pays the blackmailer—and pays quickly—to avoid personal embarrassment. We pay him—though rather more slowly, as is typical of government departments—to avoid placing Willie in the invidious position of wondering how to recover his money. And Walter is right, I think. These tapes have been keenly priced. Two hundred thousand is just enough to make it worth their while but not too much to stop Willie from buying them.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  We listened to the tape recording again, and this time, when it was finished, we left the whitewashed drawing room and stepped onto the terrace and had champagne and a cold lobster supper under the stars. Later on, Sir John Sinclair excused himself and went to make a telephone call to “the friends” in London, he said, to set in motion the laborious process of raising Maugham’s money from the cash-strapped British government. Robin Maugham continued to stay away from the Villa Mauresque, which suited his uncle, and, bored I think, Alan Searle drove off somewhere in his car, leaving Reilly, Blunt, Maugham, and me still talking over cigarettes and brandy. Then, with arms folded across his chest like an Egyptian mummy, and glasses perched on the end of his long, beaky nose, Blunt excused himself and set about surveying the old queen’s pictures. From time to time we could hear him utter some adjective to punctuate his breathless appreciation of Maugham’s collection, which, later on, he declared to be “as good as any he had ever seen in private hands,” pleasing the writer to no end. He himself was again in a good mood; the prospect of risking a large sum of money with no guarantee of reimbursement had been troubling him a great deal.

  “Well, that’s a relief, I must say. About the money. I was thinking I might have to postpone the purchase of a nice little painting I’ve found by Stanislas Lépine. It is rather expensive. Icing on the cake, as it were. Or perhaps even the cherry. At my time of life, it’s a little hard to tell. By the way, the money will be available from Hottingers, my bankers in Nice, tomorrow morning at eleven.”

  “You were quite right to call us, Willie,” said Reilly. “Thank you. Thank you so much. There’s absolutely no question we have to stop these tapes from falling into the wrong hands. And if Mr. Wolf is agreeable, we’ll ask him to handle the exchange, I think. We wouldn’t like to spook this fellow Hebel by introducing anyone new to the proceedings at this late stage. Having said that, perhaps our chaps from Fort Monckton could ride shotgun with you for some of the time and help keep an eye on the money.”

  “That’s up to Walter,” said Maugham. “He and Robin are the only ones who’ve met this fellow Hebel.”

  “The roads being what they are, the exchange is to take place on a boat,” I told Reilly. “In Menton. It’s my guess he’s planning to make a quick getaway as soon as he’s counted the money. I’ll drive straight to Menton from Nice.”

  “Why Menton?” asked Reilly.

  “Because it’s on the Italian border,” said Maugham. “He can be at one of those joke banks in Ventimiglia within an hour of receiving the money.”

  “Of course,” said Reilly, “there’s no real guarantee that we’re going to put a stop to any of this by paying up. Once we’ve bought one job lot of tapes featuring the Cambridge Two, there’s potentially no end to it. This is how blackmail works, of course. In no time at all, we could find ourselves obliged to buy more compromising material. In fact, I should go so far as to say it’s a cast-iron certainty. Donald Maclean was based in Washington for four years, from nineteen forty-four to nineteen forty-eight, after which he was a key official in our Cairo embassy. It goes without saying he can make things very difficult with the Americans. Right now, J. Edgar Hoover regards us as a very leaky ship indeed. He looks at Burgess and Maclean and the state of MI6 and asks, what’s the point of sharing any more secrets with the Brits? But the trouble Maclean could make for us with the gyppos while this Suez business is going on doesn’t bear thinking of. I mean, he could really put the cat among the pigeons. We’ve been propping up King Farouk and allowing U.S. planes to land and refuel in the Canal Zone on their way to practice bombing missions over the Soviet Union. All of which makes General Nasser’s demands look pretty damn reasonable. So you see we really do have to buy what
they’re selling or risk enormous embarrassment.”

  “Yes, I do see,” said Maugham. “As soon as I listened to the tape I knew how damaging it was. Not just for me, but also for Her Majesty’s Government. To my mind it’s not just the English laws against homosexuality that provide a blackmailer’s charter; it’s the Official Secrets Act, as well. With anything where one places a premium on privacy there’s always the possibility that people are going to take financial advantage of that.”

  “You know, this might even get you your knighthood,” Reilly told Maugham.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Why not? I shall certainly say as much to Selwyn Lloyd when next I see him.”

  “The British foreign secretary,” said Maugham, in my direction. “And, as it happens, a bit of a fan of mine.”

  “The trouble is,” Reilly continued, “these two—Burgess and Maclean—can now make any amount of mischief with impunity. Guy Burgess can repeat more or less whatever he likes and even if it isn’t true, the Americans are going to believe him. He and Maclean look like better and more effective spies than they were, perhaps, merely by virtue of the fact that they got away with it so long.”

  “Isn’t that the definition of a perfect spy,” I said. “Getting away with it—in their case for almost two decades?”

  “Walter’s right,” observed Maugham. “It’s hard to imagine how they could have been more successful than they were.”

  “The net was closing in on them when they defected,” argued Reilly. “I can’t say too much about that but I’m quite certain we’d have caught them before very much longer.”

  “I’m sure that’s of enormous relief to Mr. Hoover,” Maugham said pointedly. “He’ll sleep more soundly knowing that they were about to be caught. Before they managed to do some real damage to Britain’s relationship with America.”

  I lit a cigarette and grinned. I liked the old man’s sense of humor. In many ways it was a lot like mine—sharp and bitter and sometimes hardly funny at all. The kind of black humor that nearly always got you a big laugh in Berlin.

  “Of course,” he added, “one does wonder if these two were the only spies at the heart of the British establishment. When I was listening to Guy Burgess describe going up to Cambridge in nineteen twenty-nine to find that most of his friends had either joined the Communist Party or were at least very close to it in that febrile atmosphere of anti-Fascism, I asked myself if there were not others who, like Burgess, betrayed their country. Perhaps several others. In which case Burgess and Maclean are merely a sample of what you can expect from now on.”

  “I went to Oxford myself,” said Reilly. “New College. Came down the same year as Burgess. Never a sniff of any Bolshiness there. Funny thing about people who went to Cambridge University. Hard to like any of them, really. I think it must have something to do with the inclement weather in that part of England. Very cold in Cambridge, you know.”

  “Even now,” persisted Maugham, “there may be other Cambridge men like Burgess and Maclean who are handing over the family silver to the Russkies. Have you considered that possibility? I hope so, Patrick. I hate to sound like the witchfinder general, but one would hate to think that there is more that could be done to find out just how deep this treason goes.”

  Reilly smiled thinly as if such a thing were inconceivable—which only served to make the rest of us think that it was—and changed the subject with undiplomatic dexterity. “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Wolf,” he said. “You interest me more and more.”

  “There’s not a lot to tell. Less of a novel and more of a short story, you might say. And not a very interesting one at that.” I gave Reilly the blue-penciled, redacted version of the kind he was probably used to sending in triplicate to his political masters. Just about every bit of it was untrue, apart from the fact that I’d once been a cop in Berlin, and every time I repeated it I was almost convinced I had as much talent for fiction as Somerset Maugham himself. Maybe I did, too; being a writer always looks like a good job to have when you’re as dishonest as I am.

  “You’re not a Communist, I trust?” said Reilly. He said the word as if such a thing would have been impossible among civilized men.

  “No, I always hated the Communists. Especially after nineteen seventeen.”

  “Still, I expect you were probably quite left-wing when you were a young man back in Germany.”

  “I was a Social Democrat when the Nazis came to power, if that’s what you mean. They thought that was left wing. Then again they were Nazis. Interestingly the Communists thought Social Democrats were as bad as Nazis. Being a Social Democrat in nineteen thirty-three wasn’t a political choice so much as a predicament.”

  “Where are you now, politically?”

  “Same place. Middle of the road. Neither fish nor fowl. As far as that goes in a country like France. Given the French love of empire, I’m not sure there can be any center ground in a country like this.” I shrugged. “Mind you, the same could be said of England.”

  Reilly nodded patiently. “What do you usually do when you’re not working?”

  “Play bridge. Drink too much. Stay out of the sun during the day. Read a lot. I’m more suited to the night, I think.”

  “Been back to Berlin lately?”

  “No, and I can’t see myself going, either. Not since they surrounded it with the GDR, a lot of barbed wire, and a tissue of lies.”

  “Pardon me for asking this in your presence, Willie. Have you ever been queer, by any chance, Mr. Wolf?”

  “No.”

  “What about spying? Ever done any of that?”

  “Spying?”

  “What I mean is, have you ever undertaken any clandestine activities?”

  “Only at the Grand Hôtel. When I’m not muscle for Mr. Maugham I work as a concierge. I’m often to be found looking through keyholes. I like to keep an eye on blondes to see if they’re natural or not.”

  “What’s the verdict?”

  “These days most of them are faking it.”

  “Walter has had a tough time with the ladies, I think,” observed Maugham. “I think his heart has been broken once too often.”

  “There’s nothing like an unhappy love affair to give you a good laugh,” I said.

  “Righto,” said Reilly in a cheery sort of way. “I just wanted to make sure you can be trusted. I’m sure you can appreciate why we need to do something like that. Things being what they are, right now. Everyone in Whitehall is more than a little paranoid.”

  “Sure, I get it.” I smiled uncertainly, wondering if I had just been vetted; and the possibility that Patrick Reilly had cleared me as a security risk was enough to make me understand for the first time just how easy it had been for Burgess and Maclean to spy successfully for the Russians over such a long period of time. Burgess hadn’t exaggerated. A retarded child could probably have been as effective a spy as he’d managed to be. If Reilly could have cleared me he might just as easily have cleared Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  “Anyone know the score in the test match?” he asked brightly.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Sir John Sinclair came back from the library, took Reilly aside with some urgency, and then moved him smoothly into the drawing room, leaving me alone on the terrace with Somerset Maugham. The MI6 director’s face had been flushed and was anything but its usual inscrutably English mask. Clearly he had learned something from London that had alarmed him. After a moment or two, he came back and closed the French windows firmly, as if the utmost discretion was now required.

  “Hello,” said Maugham, “something’s up, I think.”

  I helped myself to another brandy. I was drinking too much but when the brandy was as good as that being served at the Villa Mauresque such considerations hardly seemed to matter. Besides, I was bored. That’s the thing about the British, even when they’re spies they’re so ve
ry boring.

  “Oh Lord,” said Maugham, “I do hope they’re not going to start quibbling about the money.” His snake eyes narrowed. “Look here, I’ve decided. I’m not going to pay if there’s any question of them not reimbursing me. Sorry, Walter, and rest assured I’ll pay you what I agreed to pay you. But I shall copy the Duke of Wellington’s example and tell this German bastard to publish and be damned. I’d rather say to hell with them all than lose that Lépine. After all, what can the press do to me down here? I’m already an exile. It will be tough on my brother, but we’ve never been close and he’ll just have to ride out the storm.”

  From the place where he’d left them, on the refectory table in the drawing room, Sinclair collected the notes he’d made when listening to the tape and consulted them impatiently; then, giving up, he tossed the notebook aside, turned a knob on the Grundig, and wound the tape back to the beginning.

  “I don’t think it’s a problem with the money,” I said. “I’d say there’s a problem with something Burgess said.”

  “You don’t suppose they think the tape is a fake?” Maugham asked.

  “You heard Blunt. He’s certain that it’s Burgess talking. And according to all of you, he’s the one who knows Burgess better than anyone. Whatever that means. No, this is something else. Something factual, perhaps. If only we could hear what’s happening in that drawing room.”

  “Shit.” Maugham turned a full circle on his heel and then stamped his foot irritably.

  “There’s nothing to do except be patient,” I said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Soon enough might be too late.” Maugham shook his head. “Look here, Walter,” he said, “there is a way someone can eavesdrop on what’s happening in there. But you need to be a lot younger and quicker than I to do it. I was going to use this method in Ashenden, but my editor didn’t believe it would work. But it does work, I can assure you. At least it does at the Villa Mauresque. If you go up to my study and then climb along the roof a bit, you can hear almost everything. The fireplace in the drawing room acts like a giant ear trumpet and conducts all of the sound straight up the chimney. The number of times I’ve stood up there and listened to what my guests really thought about me. I shall never invite Diana Cooper again. Well, go on. I’ll follow you up to the study.”