Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  The waiter didn’t seem to get the joke.

  ‘Mr Shinwell will not be attending, sir,’ he said quite seriously.

  Perhaps Troy was catching tastelessness from Khrushchev? He found a place with his name card on it. There was nothing else to do, so he sat down, feeling the nip as his Browning in its ludicrous holster jabbed him in the ribs. A few minutes later, the table began to fill. Next but one to him was Sergei, next to him one of the interpreters, next to him Wilson, next to him Rod, next to him another interpreter, next to him Bulganin, then the last interpreter, then Khrushchev and then Gaitskell. He looked at the place name of the vacant seat between himself and Sergei. It said ‘Mr Brown’. But which Mr Brown?

  Way over the other side, he could see Clem Attlee take his seat; down the room Clark and Beynon looked distinctly uncomfortable, disturbed by, rather than appreciative of, the democratic touch that had led them to be seated at the table and fed, rather than stuck along the walls and ignored for the duration of a five-course dinner. He didn’t envy them—ordinary coppers having to make small talk with the people’s representatives, whose grasp of the people they represented was based on researchers’ briefings and what the newspapers told them to believe. He’d no idea what he’d say himself if any of these unworldly beings deigned to engage him in small talk. Down there with Clark and Beynon he caught a glimpse of Tom Driberg. A friend from the war years. Too far away for a chat. Then he heard the scrape of a chair being pulled back and turned to see a short, stout, owlish man sat next to him. Brown. Of course. George Brown. MP for Somewhere-up-North. Shadow Minister for Something-or-Other. He had met him once or twice. Neither a friend nor an enemy of Rod’s. Somewhat to the right of the party, and known for his outspokenness.

  Brown exchanged a few pleasantries with Troy. Nice enough bloke, thought Troy. The chap on his left was deep in conversation with his neighbour, and when Brown started an awkward, mediated chat with Sergei, Troy realised he had been let off very lightly, and was free to graze his way through the awful House of Commons food and . . . well . . . dammit . . . daydream. In the event of any of the old fogeys really having a shotgun, Beynon could be the one to plug him dead.

  He dreamed his way through the delights of a weekend back in the country, something he looked forward to after a fortnight traipsing around London. Of spotted pigs and sprouting Aprilish vegetables. And when he had dreamed his rural idyll away he seemed to see in his mind’s eye the score of a Thelonious Monk arrangement he had spent a small age trying to master. April in Paris. The score was an illusion. He had never seen it written down—nor, he felt, had Monk—it was a visible pattern of fingers moving across a keyboard. An audible antipattern of deliberative tangents, of musical geometry.

  He had dreamed a dream too far. He could smell pipe tobacco, pulling him back to the solid world. The meal was over. They were into the speeches. He hadn’t noticed the pudding even as he ate it. Khrushchev was on his feet, the translator racing to keep up with him. And the seat next to him was empty. At some point Brown had sloped off. Troy looked around. Brown had moved around to face Khrushchev across the table, the pipe smoke was his. Suddenly Driberg appeared in the vacant seat.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here,’ he said, and Troy knew he was up to something. Khrushchev was still droning on about the new era of peace. Driberg all but whispered in his ear. ‘I don’t suppose you could get me an interview with Khrushchev, could you?’

  ‘You suppose right.’

  Driberg leaned closer. Oblivious as ever. ‘It could be very useful to me. I mean . . . none of the papers have got a look-in. No press conference, nothing. The Reynolds News or even the Herald couldn’t possibly turn me down if I brought them an exclusive.’

  ‘Tom, fuck off.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You could do it.’

  ‘With Bulganin and the embassy staff and the interpreters hanging about?’

  ‘You could get him alone. You speak the lingo.’

  Troy took his eyes off Khrushchev and looked at Driberg. ‘Tom,’ he said softly, ‘has it ever occurred to you that Khrushchev doesn’t know that, and might not be supposed to know that?’

  ‘Bugger,’ said Driberg and lapsed into a silence that Troy knew from experience could only be temporary.

  In the gap he suddenly became aware that Khrushchev’s tone had changed. He was on a different tack, there was a passion in his voice which no translator could hope to convey.

  ‘Peace has been too long coming. We have extended the olive branch time after time only to see it snapped off in our hands. We were a young country in 1919, building ourselves anew in the wake of a war that had almost destroyed us, free for the first time in history from the yoke of tyranny. We asked for help. What did you send? Soldiers to Archangel and Murmansk. An attempt to force a restoration upon us. Then in the 1930s—we were fighting Hitler long before you in Britain knew who he was.’

  A ripple of murmuring dissent went around the room. Brown grunted so audibly that Khrushchev looked straight at him, missed a single beat in the rising tempo of his improvisation on a theme, then took it up again. He was jazzing. It was what the man did best. In his mind’s eye Troy saw Monk’s fingers flash swiftly across the keys.

  ‘Do I need to remind you that the primary purpose of Nazism was opposition to the inferior race, the Slav; opposition to the demonic ideology, the Bolshevik? We were ready for Hitler throughout your compromises, ready for Hider when he invaded Czechoslovakia—’

  ‘Then why did Joe Stalin sign a pact with Hitler?’ said a voice from the back of the room. There was a brief pause in the heat as the interpreter spoke rapidly to Khrushchev sotto voce, his hands upturned, their heads bowed into a private huddle.

  Khrushchev had not seen who had spoken. It didn’t matter. It seemed to Troy that any one of them could and would have said it.

  ‘Necessity,’ Khrushchev began again. ‘Something you in the West seem scarcely capable of understanding. We either fought Hitler standing alone or we found some other way. That is necessity! We had troops massed on the border ready to aid our brethren in Czechoslovakia. The Poles would not let us through, because they took the line laid down by the French, by the British, by Chamberlain!’

  Again the rippling murmur of concern. But no voice of dissent. Troy doubted whether even the Tories would be able to raise a voice that would defend Chamberlain.

  ‘We had troops at the ready. A pact guaranteeing our help. What did the British do? They sent us a mission, who could say nothing, who could hear nothing, who could only sit and drink tea! And all the time your Government was egging Hitler on, prodding him eastwards away from your shores. If you and the French had understood us more, had shown us as a new, struggling nation, more understanding, instead of perceiving us as simply godless regicides, if you had cooperated with us, talked to us, I tell you now that the last war could have been avoided.’

  This stunned the Labour Party. It was almost the unthinkable. But Troy had long since, ever since Winston had got on his hind legs the best part of ten years ago in Missouri and dropped the Iron Curtain, felt this to be an age that specialised in thinking the unthinkable.

  Out of the slightness of silence, the mereness of murmur, one voice spoke clearly. Brown.

  ‘May God forgive you!’

  The interpreter showed a shred of tact. Troy could hear him whisper and the very angle of his arms and shoulders spoke denial—he was trying to tell Khrushchev he had not heard what Brown said. Khrushchev asked Brown to repeat what he had said. A buzz went round the room, a sizzling concern. Brown should not say it again. Brown went through the motions of relighting his pipe.

  Khrushchev said, ‘What’s the matter? Are you frightened to make yourself heard?’

  The interpreter, his tact and defiance exhausted in a single burst, rendered it instantly into English.

  Brown waved out his match, drew once on the pipe and took it from his lips.

  ‘No,’ he said clearly and calmly. ‘I said, “May God forgiv
e you.”’

  Khrushchev did not take his eyes off Brown. He drew a deep breath and exploded. Troy had the feeling that he was not the only person to notice that Khrushchev had not waited for the translation. The translator had not spoken.

  ‘No, little man. Your God may forgive you! Do you really think anything has changed since Archangel? Do you really think that your creeping Socialism makes you superior to us? Why, you are more opposed to us than the Conservatives! And if I were British I would be a Conservative! Your support for us has been non-existent. All you do is harass us over Eastern Europe!’

  This brought Nye Bevan to his feet, wagging his finger at Khrushchev, saying, ‘Don’t try and bully us!’

  ‘And don’t wag your damn finger at me,’ said Khrushchev, and took off into a tirade that the interpreter could not keep up with. Among a dozen insults Troy caught ‘Наглость’—‘cheek!’

  Rod got slowly to his feet. Waited for the steam to go out of the man. The very fact that he stood there and said nothing seemed to bring Khrushchev to a halt, like an old engine gliding slowly to the buffers.

  Rod spoke in the quiet, demonstrative tones that chilled Troy to the bone with their reminder of his father’s technique for public speaking. He seized an audience by timbre—Troy could think of no other word for it—rather than by volume or speed; let the tessitura of his voice hold his listeners. It shut Khrushchev up. It shut the Labour Party up—and they hadn’t a clue what he was saying.

  ‘It seems, Comrade Khrushchev’—no other that night had called him comrade—‘that this is an apt moment at which to give you this. These are the names of political dissidents in Hungary, in Poland, in East Germany, in Czechoslovakia, who are missing. I would be most grateful to you if you could be of any assistance to me in tracing these people and in informing their families of their whereabouts.’

  Rod said no more, simply held out a single sheet of paper folded over. Khrushchev would not take it. A stalemate that seemed to drag on for the best part of half a minute followed, until the interpreter risked life and job by plucking the list gently from Rod’s hand. The spell broke. The mirror crack’d from side to side. Khrushchev headed for the door. All over the room, chairs were pushed back. Troy had to run to reach the door before Khrushchev got through it. They met almost shoulder to shoulder, almost collided. Troy could have sworn he heard Khrushchev say, ‘Bugger the lot of them’—and then they were out.

  §11

  Out in the Commons yard, in the April drizzle, Khrushchev was raging.

  ‘Они насрали на Россию! Они насрали на Россию! They shit on Russia! They shit on Russia!’

  He bellowed at the embassy staff, bellowed at Bulganin, and when his translator moved to get into the Daimler, he snatched Rod’s list from his hand and firmly pointed him to the escort car. Troy followed, assuming he meant to simmer alone, but Khrushchev stopped him with a hand on his sleeve.

  ‘No,’ he said, almost calm. ‘Not you. You get in the back.’

  The car moved off towards Victoria and Hyde Park Corner—Clark in the front with the driver, the dividing screen fully closed, and Troy in the back with quite possibly the most powerful man on earth, wondering what on earth was coming next. Khrushchev looked out of the window of the moving car, not speaking to Troy. As they passed Westminster Cathedral he turned his head and ducked to get a look at the looming red-brick tower, but still he said nothing. No tourist question. No tasteless black joke. At Hyde Park Corner he took Rod’s list from his inside pocket and looked at it for a moment or two. As his hand slid the folded paper back into his pocket, his eyes still focused on the street outside, he asked, ‘Who was he? The man with the names.’

  ‘My brother,’ Troy answered.

  ‘And where did you boys learn your Russian?’

  ‘At home. In the nursery. From our parents.’

  ‘From your parents,’ Khrushchev echoed flatly. It sounded to Troy more like realisation, a gentle mulling over, than a question.

  ‘The family name is Troitsky.’

  ‘Aha . . . Whites!’

  Khrushchev at last looked at Troy. A glint of triumph in the nutty little eyes.

  ‘No,’ Troy replied. ‘Nineteen-o-fivers.’

  ‘Mensheviks?’

  ‘More like Anarchists, I think. But that was a long time ago.’

  ‘Indeed. And now?’

  ‘My brother, as you will have gathered, has made his peace with history and joined the Labour Party. Whatever you might think, they are Social Democrats, no more, no less than that.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m a policeman. I have no politics.’

  ‘If a Soviet policeman made such a statement to me I’d have him fired for thinking I was stupid. You don’t think there’s a sentient being on this planet who can honestly say he has no politics, do you?’

  Of course Khrushchev was right. Troy knew that. Years ago, in Berlin, not long after the war, a Russian spy had told him that his father had been an agent of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ever since leaving Russia in the chaos of 1905. Frequently Troy had thought about this. It was something he did not want to believe, and in the end was something he had chosen not to believe. It was certainly not a conversation he wished to have with the First Secretary of that party.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Khrushchev asked.

  ‘Moscow mostly. Before that Yasnaya Polyana. It’s near Tula.’

  ‘I know where it is. I’ve been there several times. The place is virtually a Tolstoy museum now.’

  ‘I envy you, Comrade Khrushchev. I’ve never seen it. I don’t suppose I ever will.’

  ‘Come to Russia.’

  Troy looked at Khrushchev. He was smiling. Perhaps he even meant it.

  ‘I don’t think that’s possible. My family history is a bit more complicated than I could tell you.’

  ‘Come to Russia,’ he said again. ‘I’ll show you a good time. Better than this dreary traipsing round the monuments of Britain.’

  ‘You’ve met Eden. You’ve met the Queen and the Duke. It hasn’t all been St Paul’s and the Tower.’

  ‘Eden’s a monument. The Royals are monuments.’

  Troy agreed wholeheartedly, but felt it was not for him to say so at this or any other juncture.

  ‘Where are the people? Where are the workers?’ The fat little hands, with their stubby little fingers spread outwards, emphatically open and empty. ‘Where are the peasants?’

  Khrushchev had a point. The crowds had been thin on the ground from the start. B & K had been somewhat less than mobbed. In anticipation Troy had assumed that the visit would be little different from visiting royalty or a personal appearance by Frank Sinatra or Johnnie Ray; in reality he had almost begun to wonder if the English had been told to stay home, or if, perhaps, Gone With the Wind was showing nightly on ITV.

  ‘I doubt the English have any peasants. And you met a worker on Saturday. You just chose to shortchange him.’

  ‘You mean at Harwell?’ Khrushchev was almost shouting again. ‘The man was an Eden apparatchik! A stooge!’

  Quickly Troy weighed up the risk and concluded it was worth it. After all, his cover was blown, and with it probably the cover of the entire squad, and he would, no doubt, find himself resuming his holiday with a flea in his ear from the Branch, on the morrow.

  ‘With all respect, Comrade Khrushchev, he wasn’t. He was speaking his mind. Quite possibly the only person you’ve talked to this entire trip who has. And I do not mean by that that I question the integrity of George Brown or of my brother, but they, like you, are politicians.’

  Troy paused. In for a penny, in for a thousand roubles, he thought. If Khrushchev was about to explode again, so be it. He would be the one to light the blue touch paper, and with any luck he would be the one to retire safely. It really was irresistible.

  ‘If you were to ask me, I would tell you that the trip, for you and for the Marshal, has been a diplomatic contriv
ance on both sides. Your own side doesn’t want you meeting the people. It’s a waste of their time. They’d far rather you chewed the fat with a dimwit like Eden or exchanged brown bears and harmless pleasantries with Her Majesty. The British don’t want you meeting the people. They’d far rather you were perceived as someone stripped of normal human feeling by the godlessness of Marxism. The last thing Eden wants is you pressing the flesh among the proles.’

  Troy paused again. Cobb would surely fire him the minute he learnt that Khrushchev had seen through their pathetic charade. He had nothing to lose, not a damn thing.

  ‘However if that’s what you want, it’s not yet nine-thirty and I’m sure something could be arranged.’

  Khrushchev twinkled, mischief rippling out across those chubby cheeks, lighting up the impish eyes.

  ‘An English pub?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘A pint of “wallop”?’

  ‘That’s what they’re for.’

  ‘The metro?’

  ‘We call it the tube, but if that’s what you want, I’d be happy to show it to you.’

  Troy looked back at Khrushchev, resisting the grin that threatened to split at any second. The best, surely, was yet to come.

  ‘Ditch the embassy people,’ he said. ‘And we’ll go on somewhere.’

  The phrase pleased Troy enormously. He was not at all sure he’d ever used it before, or that his Russian rendered it precisely. It was a man’s phrase, Charlie’s phrase, the turn of phrase men like Charlie used to pick up women or to armtwist old mates into drinking longer after tolerance of pub crawling had expired. Somehow it seemed wholly appropriate for the daring into which he now tempted Comrade Khrushchev.

  §12

  Back at Claridge’s, Khrushchev stormed up to the mezzanine, trailing Special Branch and KGBniks from his apron strings. In the anteroom of his suite he announced his exhaustion and with it an early night. No one seemed surprised, but there was hesitation. Troy could not count, but putting the English and the Russians, the police and the spooks, the scientists, the dutiful son and the embassy officials together, there must have been fifteen or more people standing wondering what they were supposed to do next. Khrushchev left them in no doubt.