Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  On the small table in front of the sofa was a piece of paper that hadn’t been there last night.

  It was a pen-and-ink sketch. A man, recognisably Troy, although far too Adonis-like in the body, was having intercourse with a woman, recognisably Venetia, although the body far too buxom, bent into the dog position, in front of the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. A policeman’s helmet lay discarded in the foreground. One of Troy’s hands rested on the curve of Venetia’s hip, the other held a truncheon upright, as if saluting, priapic, as if symbolising the hidden penis. And in the bottom right-hand corner … “Morituri te salutant.” Those about to die salute you. Petronius, Suetonius? Troy couldn’t remember. On the back Burgess had scribbled a note:

  I think we agree. War was made for fucking. And, the complications of your life set aside for the moment, if I were you, if I could ever imagine the attraction of a woman, I think I’d fuck Venetia Maye-Brown under floodlights in the middle of a hundred-bomber raid. That’d show ‘em.

  Yrs Ever,

  Guy.

  Show who? Troy wondered for a fraction of a second. But the answer all but preceded the question. Show them. Not the Germans. Not the ARP … them, the ubiquitous them that were not us. The real and imagined oppressors of Guy Burgess in the world Burgess had made for himself. What was troubling, but he’d hardly lose sleep over it, was that Burgess lumped Troy and himself together in this defiant, unarticulated us.

  There was a knock at the door. Troy quickly stuffed Burgess’s sketch in his pocket. Opened the door to find Superintendent Onions on the step. He’d said he’d call. It had completely slipped Troy’s battered and Burgess-burdened mind.

  “Tell me,” Troy said.

  “Stick the kettle on,” Onions said.

  Half an hour later Troy was no nearer a solution to the case that had led him from one dead rabbi to another to being walled up in the synagogue with Zette, but he had clearly, if silently, been told to file his report and drop it.

  In an abrupt change of subject, on his feet ready to leave, Onions said, “London’s gone sex mad. The Commissioner’s getting reports from beat bobbies of people shagging in Hyde Park in broad daylight. Would you believe it?”

  Troy would.

  He’d done it himself.

  Onions left the door open, light from the Indian summer sunshine reflecting off the far wall and into the otherwise gloomy sitting room.

  Troy pulled out the sketch. It struck him as unbelievable cheek. It struck him as absurdly funny. Then a shadow took the light. A figure in the doorway again. What had Stan forgotten? But it wasn’t Stan. It was his mother. Quickly he screwed up the sketch and lobbed it deftly across the room into the wastepaper basket. If his mother ever saw it his life wouldn’t be worth living.

  §13

  London: October 1948

  Almost falling off the roof proved to be the high and low point in Troy’s relationship with Burgess. Throughout the war he found himself invited to endless parties at Burgess’s flat. Once in a blue moon he would run out of excuses and accept. He found himself a fish out of water and usually left early.

  One day in 1948 he was crossing Piccadilly Circus to find that the statue of Eros was being replaced on its plinth. It had been removed to safety on the outbreak of war. The revellers who’d swamped the ‘Dilly on VE night had gathered around a boarded-up, empty plinth, plastered with advertisements urging thrift and the purchase of war bonds. But the war had been over three years. Like so much else in England normality was painfully slow in returning. The war ended, and then it hung around for ages, kicking its heels, reluctant to go home in case anything else happened. Rationing stretched out to infinity. The peace seemed like an inert interlude. The erotic charge spent. Surely something else would happen one day … some day … any day?

  A crane swung the statue up off a flatbed truck and three men in boiler suits and cloth caps guided Eros into place. One clunk, a couple of twists, and it was home. Wings spread, heel up, head down, the arrow shot. Love struck. The small crowd that had gathered applauded. Troy remembered the vulgar drawing Burgess had done of him all those years ago. Burgess had included Eros—the sketch would have made less sense without it. Love in an air raid, presided over by the skinny youth with the bow and arrow. He hadn’t, to the best of his knowledge, seen Venetia Maye-Brown since 1940. He couldn’t remember when he had last seen Burgess. Last year? The year before? Burgess had gone back to the BBC, and from there to the Foreign Office … but what he did for the Foreign Office, and whether he was still at the Foreign Office … and why the Foreign Office would want a man as indiscreet as Burgess … all went unanswered.

  But, to think of the man was to conjure him up.

  That night, he took the cellist Méret Voytek, a woman renowned for her performance of Bach, a survivor of Auschwitz, and someone he strongly suspected of being both a murderer and a Russian spy, for an evening of British bebop at Club 11, only yards from Eros. He had not expected to find Burgess there. He did not mind finding Burgess there, but if everything he and Rod had long assumed about him was true, then it was odd to bump into him at precisely this moment, and Troy wondered if it was just a coincidence. Had she told him, had he told her? Were they total strangers? Or was he piggy in the middle?

  As he introduced them there was not a flicker of recognition on Voytek’s face. Guy was harder to read. He greeted everyone as though he had known them all his life. He slid into instant, if illusory, relationships as readily as putting on old slippers.

  He seemed to be under the influence of a mixture of Scotch and dope. An overly large drink in one hand, and a waving joint in the other. Troy had no difficulty not minding any of this. He’d seen Burgess light up a reefer in public countless times, and he’d scraped him off the pavement outside the pubs and clubs of Soho a dozen times. The only thing to mind was when Burgess held out the reefer to Voytek, which she accepted with a cheeky grin, and pigged Troy in the middle once more. It was as though they’d both be happier if he did mind. The self-regarding defiance of naughty children.

  Bebop, as played by Ronnie Scott, could drown out an air raid. Conversation with Burgess got as far as “What are you up to these days?” and not as far as an answer. When they parted in the street, Troy having declined all suggestion that they might “go on somewhere,” he realised the nature of his apprehension. He did not want a relationship to develop between these two. It was a complication too far. He was uncertain where investigating Voytek might lead. She might be innocent of everything, and even if she weren’t, he had little inclination to arrest her—he simply wanted to know. And to that process of knowledge Burgess, with his kitten’s curiosity, could only be an obstacle. Voytek-Burgess was a consummation not to be wished.

  About a month later Troy knew everything, and knowing there was not a damn thing he could do about any of it, he stuck Voytek on a cross-channel ferry to Calais on the assumption that she would lose herself before she was exposed. That she had exposed herself in an anonymous tip-off to the Daily Express was a secret they’d share for the rest of their lives.

  It was easy enough to keep. A few days later, his right-hand man, Jack Wildeve, stuck the Express in front of him. There was a headline:

  RUSSIAN SPY FLEES ACROSS CHANNEL

  And a photograph of Méret Voytek.

  Followed by …

  SCOTLAND YARD SEEK MYSTERY MAN

  And a scrappy sketch of someone Troy took to be himself.

  As Jack had said, “His own mother wouldn’t recognise him.”

  Indeed, she didn’t.

  Alas, someone else would.

  §14

  December 20, 1948

  Troy had been at school with Neville Pym. He had seen nothing of him since leaving school, until he had reappeared in Troy’s life in 1944 as Squadron Leader N. A. G. Pym, liaison officer between MI5 and the Yard.

  He was more obviously queer than either Guy Burgess or Tom Driberg, and Troy had concluded that the only reason he had not been v
ictimised or ostracised was a certain wilful incredulity on the part of his masters in military intelligence. How else had Burgess got away with it all these years? Burgess had ascribed it to luck. Pym’s luck ran out.

  The London copper felt no need of willed incredulity. Troy thought Burgess’s assessment of “they’d sooner thump you than nick you” to be pretty well accurate, but there was always just one bastard waiting in the wings, or in Pym’s case in the gents in the Holloway Road.

  It was Driberg who asked Troy to intervene, and Troy was sad that his intervention yielded no hope for Pym. As the copper had put it:

  “You should have better things to do with your time than running errands for queers. He’s going down, Mr. Troy, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Troy had broken the news to Pym himself, rather than leave it to Driberg. It was what he felt he owed to an acquaintance who had never really been a friend, and whom he’d never much liked.

  On the nineteenth of December, in his rooms at Albany, on Piccadilly, Pym had shot himself through the roof of his mouth, a bullet straight to the brain, his brains spattered across the wall, and left a suicide note which pointed Troy to Jimmy Wayne, a suspect he had lost track of four years ago. Of a kind, it was gratitude. It sharpened Troy’s sense of failure and his resolve. He’d been given a lead on a case that had gone cold as the grave.

  At the moment he’s running the airlift in Berlin.

  Troy had called Rod, a junior minister at the Air Ministry, and scrounged a flight to Berlin. Then he waited. He waited at home and when he got fed up waiting at home, he waited in the pub.

  It was only a few days before Christmas. Soon he would be able to have a quiet drink in a pub without being overwhelmed by dozens of office workers hell-bent on having a noisy drink.

  Troy sat alone in the back room at the Salisbury in St. Martin’s Lane—the velvet box, as someone had appropriately dubbed it—reading that day’s News Chronicle … record snowfalls in New York, the US military government of Japan about to hang war criminals, a tortured, ambivalent editorial on the state of Israel, West Berlin still under siege, the RAF shuttling planes in every minute … and taking a large gin and drinking it as slowly as he wished. There was hum and hubbub arising in the main bar, but nothing he could not ignore.

  He could not, however, ignore the man looming over him. The best he could hope for was to fake a little bonhomie.

  “Guy, fancy seeing you here.”

  Burgess had a rather tatty briefcase with him, tied up with bits of string. He slid off a couple of loops, took out a folded newspaper, and let the briefcase slide to the floor.

  He unfolded the paper, the Express from a couple of weeks ago, and spread out the headlines, with Voytek’s mug shot and the unfathomable your-mother-wouldn’t-know-you artist’s sketch.

  “I may be wrong,” Burgess said. “But isn’t this the young woman you were with at Club 11 the other night?”

  The other night? It was more than six weeks ago.

  Troy stood up.

  “Guy. Your tiny hand is empty. Let me get you a glass.”

  He went into the main bar, and bought time and a triple Scotch.

  This was no coincidence.

  This was no question.

  The bugger knew.

  The issue was—surely?—was this nosy old Guy, or had he clicked into spook mode and was investigating Troy as surely as Troy had investigated Voytek? Was he here for Voytek, or possibly, just possibly Pym? But … how could he know about Pym? The man had been dead less than twenty-four hours. But queer had its own grapevine—the “Homintern,” as some wag had put it. Was this a spook thing or a queer thing? Was he asking stupid questions because he felt like asking stupid questions or because whoever ran him, paid him—whatever—had told him to? Was he arseing about or checking him out?

  “Striking young woman. Shame about the white hair. Old before her time would be the phrase.”

  “She’s under thirty, Guy. Auschwitz can do that to you.”

  “Then it is the same woman?”

  “Of course it is. You knew that before you sat down. I’d go a little further than striking, wouldn’t you? Unforgettable would be the word.”

  “Quite. But if she’s on the run, she surely wants to be forgotten?”

  “I did suggest hair dye.”

  “So she is on the run?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve no idea where she is.”

  Burgess mused a moment over Troy’s denial. Took a hefty swig at his triple Teacher’s. If he downed it quickly enough, Troy would simply line up another. For once he wanted Burgess pissed.

  Burgess tapped on the sketch on the front page of the Express.

  “You took a risk, you know.”

  Troy said nothing.

  “I mean. If I spotted it for you. Bloody hell! Who else did?”

  Troy said nothing.

  Burgess knocked back his Scotch in one searing gulp and cheekily held out his glass for a refill, as though he’d heard Troy’s thoughts.

  “Tell you what, Guy. I think I’ve a bottle of Cragganmore under the sink. A rather nice Speyside, or so I’m told by them as likes it. Why don’t we nip across the road to Goodwin’s Court?”

  “Lead me to it!”

  Burgess leapt up so quickly his foot collided with his briefcase, knocking it to the middle of the room, spilling its contents out across the tiles.

  Troy bent down and picked up a couple of documents, intending simply to help Burgess repack. Each one was stamped “Top Secret” in red ink. He handed them back without a word.

  Burgess stuck them back in along with his copy of the Daily Express.

  “What’s to become of me, eh? Clumsy as a clown after just one drink.”

  §15

  Burgess plonked his briefcase on the coffee table, sloughed off his coat and jacket, and began to prattle.

  “Odd thing, bumping into you twice so soon. I don’t seem to run into you in any of my clubs. Although I suppose you’re not a clubbable sort of person. Of course your father was. And I’m pretty sure I first met him in one club or another. I forget which. The Reform, Brooks’s, the Garrick? Come to think of it, it probably was the Garrick. He was a member, wasn’t he? An awfully good choice now I come to think about it. After all, it’s the actors’ club. Unlikely to be full of fellow hacks. And I suppose what anyone wants from their club is a haven. Perhaps even an escape. Did he ever put you up for membership? But I suppose policemen aren’t really clubbable, are they?”

  Troy hit him in the sternum. More of a tap than a blow. Just enough to send Burgess backwards into the sofa.

  “How quickly you catch on.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Burgess. “I mean, bloody hell.”

  “Stop pretending, Guy.”

  “Stop pretending what?”

  Troy picked up the briefcase. Yanked on one of the many pieces of string holding it together and scattered a dozen sheafs of paper across the table. White, buff, and red covers. Every one of them stamped “Secret” or “Top Secret.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, Guy. A red cover means ‘Do Not Remove From Office.’ You didn’t knock your briefcase over accidentally. I know you can be a clumsy fucker, but after one drink? Guy, whisky is to you as mother’s milk is to a baby. It’s the stuff of life. There’s nothing you can do sober that you can’t do pissed. You knocked it over just to be certain you had my attention. You were doing what you’ve done as long as I’ve known you. You were flirting with me. But for once the object of your interest is not my perfectly formed arse.”

  Burgess stared at the pile of secrets for a few moments. Made no effort to gather them up. The magician whose props have been exposed. The bottle, the glass, the rabbit, and the pigeon all tumbling from the top hat at once and all mystery dissolved.

  Then, smiling faintly:

  “Did you mention something about a bottle of Cragganmore?”

  “Stay there. Do not move. If you run, I will only come after you.”


  Troy returned with a half-full bottle, two glasses, and the small jug of water. He’d no intention of joining Burgess in a drink, but as long as he poured for both of them Burgess was unlikely to notice if Troy left his untouched. Left long enough, he’d probably drink it himself.

  They sat opposite one another in a temporary if spacious silence. Troy knew Burgess would probably say nothing until he’d necked his first drink, all the same the speed with which he downed it was startling. Troy topped him up at once.

  “You didn’t,” he said, “just bump into me tonight. You sought me out. You’d probably called here first and tried the next logical place. You didn’t just happen to have the Daily Express on you. You’ve been carrying it around for days.”

  Burgess said, “I do drink in the Salisbury every so often, you know.”

  “I’m sure you do. But not tonight. You were looking for me. Don’t even bother to deny it. It doesn’t matter. What matters is were you looking for me that night at the Club 11?”

  Troy topped him up again.

  “Guy?”

  Troy didn’t think he’d ever had occasion to describe Burgess as sheepish—until now. It was at least thirty seconds and a full glass of Scotch before Burgess would look him in the eye.

  “No,” he said softly. “I wasn’t. It really was pure chance running into you there. I suppose I was slumming. Odd notion, really. You probably think my whole life is slumming. I just wanted to hear what this bebop thing was all about. Miss Voytek, or rather what Miss Voytek plays, is much more what I’m about than any kind of jazz. Of course I recognised her. I’d just no idea you knew her.”

  “But then you saw the Express?”

  “Then I saw the Express. And I knew at once that you were the one who spirited her out of the country. And as the rest of the papers picked it up, suddenly the connections were clear … she was Viktor Rosen’s protégé … Viktor Rosen was an old friend of your brother’s …”