by John Lawton
On the train to Zurich, Maclean, head back, eyes closed, said, “It could be worse.”
“Could it?” Burgess replied.
“It cuts both ways, y’know. I can think of people I’d far rather have eloped with than you.”
“Thank you, Donald. I shall always remember you for the small kindnesses. The little things that mean so much.”
§32
At Prague they walked unmolested from the international transit area to the domestic side. There stood a lone individual, clearly looking out for them. No heavies, no Slavic muscle, just one man in his late thirties in a well-cut single-breasted blue suit looking more like the Liberal candidate in a rural English bye-election than a KGB officer. All he lacked was a rosette.
“Mr. Dalton, Mr. Craig, I am Yevgeni Ivanovich Dragomirov.” He held out a manicured right hand. “A pleasure to meet you both.”
Maclean shook the hand, but said nothing.
Burgess shook and asked, “We weren’t at school together by any chance? You look awfully like a fag I used to have at Eton.”
Dragomirov laughed softly.
“No, Mr. Dalton. We have no fags in the Soviet Union.”
Maclean said suddenly, as though waking from a trance, “We’re not actually in the Soviet Union though, are we?”
Dragomirov seemed to read his mind.
“No. But you’re safe now. Believe me, you are safe.”
“And me?” Burgess said.
“You too are safe. Whether you go back or join us on the flight to Moscow.”
“Do I have a choice?”
Dragomirov gestured with a sweep of his hand to the almost empty concourse.
“Of course. There are no hidden guards. I’m not even armed. You have done … as you might say … sterling work, Mr. Dalton, but it’s over and we are grateful and if you wish to leave no one will stop you.”
Maclean coughed once into his fist.
“I’m grateful too, Guy. I know I’ve been a bit of a wet blanket … but y’know … couldn’t be helped.”
Burgess looked from the one to the other. The dishevelled ragbag that was Maclean, the Burton’s showroom dummy that was Dragomirov.
“I’ve come this far. I might as well see a bit of Russia. A couple of weeks away won’t do any harm. All I have waiting for me in England is the sodding dole queue. It can just wait a bit longer. What’s a fortnight in June … it’s a holiday, isn’t it?”
Looking back, years later, he was shocked at the ease with which he’d made the decision.
§33
Moscow: Later the Same Day
A hotel balcony somewhere near the Kremlin A pleasing sunset
“Is this vodka any good? I’ve never really had much of a taste for the stuff.”
“Seems OK, but there’s vodka and vodka, isn’t there? I mean … some chaps prefer a blended whisky and know not the joys of Laphroaig or Glenthingy.”
“Morangie. It’s Glenmorangie not Glenthingy.”
“Scottish pedant.”
“If you say so, you Sassenach prick.”
(pause)
“Two weeks, you said?”
“Did I?”
“In Prague. You said two weeks. A bit of a break. A holiday.”
“So I did. Might make it a month. June’s the silly season. Everyone I know will either be at Broadstairs or Bognor.”
“You know people who take holidays in Bognor?”
“Course I don’t. It’s a metawotsit, isn’t it. I mean … you can never get hold of a chap in summer for one reason or another and if I’m to land a job when I get back … Telegraph, Economist, even Punch … I’ll need to call in a few favours.”
“People owe you favours?”
“Come to think of it. Probably not. I might have recourse to a bit of blackmail.”
“Do you mean the queer thing?”
“I suppose I do. After all, I know half the arse bandits in London.”
(pause)
“You’d do that? Blackmail some bloke you’ve done the nasty with?”
“Probably not.”
“So it was just another metaphor?”
“I suppose it was. I’ve got to do something. More vodka?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
(pause)
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“What will you do?”
“Oh, Russia will find me something, and whatever it is, I’m going to have to look very co-operative if I’m to get Melinda and the kids out of England.”
“But you’re safe now.”
“Oh yes. Safe but suspect. The game is still afoot.”
(pause)
“Speaking of which. Look down there.”
“At what?”
“All those people. Milling around like ants. Right now that’s MI5 and Special Branch, blindly milling around. Insects with no sense of direction. Looking for you everywhere. Dover, Calais …”
“Broadstairs.”
“Bognor.”
The mention of Bognor, even on his own lips, set Burgess giggling like a schoolboy. Infectious. Maclean caught it, grinned, sniggered and laughed out loud—spattering vodka out over the balcony. The two of them—laughing like idiots until some inner comedian cued them simultaneously and they yelled into the warm night air of Moscow, “Bugger Bognor!”
III
Voytek
§34
Moscow: 1952
The day they delivered a grand piano, she reluctantly realised that she was safe. Safe and unsuspected. It was the final, the telling gesture on behalf of people she would have to learn not to regard as her captors. It meant more than medals.
About eighteen months ago, Major Tosca had asked if there was anything she needed.
“Such as?”
“Anything. Anything in our power.”
She had asked for a piano. With her own piano she could expand her repertoire. It had always been her second instrument, but apart from a battered Victorian upright in her London flat—more suitable for a pub than a concert hall—she’d never owned one. Owning one didn’t matter. Having one in her own apartment did. She could rehearse in total privacy. She had hoped for a Blüthner or a Bösendorfer (both possible) or a Steinway (unlikely), but as they winched a Becker baby grand up the side of the building she felt no disappointment. A Russian piano in Russia. A pre-revolution instrument, hand-made in St. Petersburg, finished in a light, almost red chestnut, that had survived forty years of turmoil without a scratch. Once it was tuned, she’d christened it with a Rachmaninoff prelude, the short, lively C Major, dating from 1910—the same year as her piano.
It had not always been this way.
In 1948, there’d been questions. No more than half a dozen, but the same questions over and over. The same account of her leaving London for Paris, and then Austria, and her “defection” at the Soviet Embassy in Vienna. Then the questions.
They’d produced the front page of the Daily Express, the one with the police sketch artist’s impression of the “Mystery Man” who was said to have accompanied her to the cross-channel ferry.
“Who is this man?” Colonel Ronin had asked.
It was Troy, but it looked nothing like Troy.
“Who is this man?”
“Nobody.”
“A nobody? Or nobody you know?”
“Nobody at all. I made the journey to Dover alone. This is some fantasy of the English press.”
“You don’t know him?”
“He doesn’t exist.”
“He didn’t help you to escape?”
“I didn’t know I was escaping. I was on my way to concerts in Paris and Vienna. Only when I got to Vienna did I learn that I had been betrayed. I had a return ticket to England in my purse. Once I knew, I had little choice but to take refuge in the embassy.”
Throughout the interrogation—and there had been no threats, verbal or physical—she wondered how much they really knew. That she had denounced herself? That
Troy had put her on the ferry to Calais? That he’d mailed her letter of denunciation to the English press? That they’d timed it for her arrival in Vienna? That she’d dumped the gun with which Troy had killed four Czech agents into the English Channel?
Her lifeline had gone silent. Major Tosca, for so long her guardian angel, had been present at each interview, but had said nothing—left everything to Ronin.
At the end of the third day, Ronin had left and Tosca spoke.
“It’s over.”
“They believe me?”
“They were always going to believe you. The network in London was falling apart. Skolnik’s murder, Rosen’s suicide … if you hadn’t left they’d probably have had to pull you out anyway. Besides … the information you got out of London was priceless. You’re a hero. But I think you know that.”
She said nothing. She’d been the conduit from Los Alamos, to Harwell, to London, to Moscow. She’d given Russia the bomb. A hero.
“What now?”
“Oh … the usual retirement package … a better than average apartment, a dacha, a pension, a couple of medals … if you’re lucky Marshal Stalin will pin them on you in person.”
She searched for any hint of irony or sarcasm in Tosca’s voice.
“Retirement?”
“You’re blown. We can’t use you. But I think you know that too. Go back to the cello. Moscow has more concert halls than it has urinals. Moscow will love you.”
“I don’t have a cello.”
“So? I’ll get you a cello. After all, I’ve done that before.”
Indeed, she had. Somehow, shortly after the war ended, Tosca had found her Matteo Groffiller cello, the one she had been forced to abandon in Auschwitz, and had shipped it to her in Paris.
“But not my cello. That’s in London.”
She kicked herself at once. Three days of questions and precise, evasive answers … and now she had given a hostage to fortune. Why did she not say Vienna? If she was leaving to perform in concerts in Paris and Vienna, why had she not taken her cello with her?
“No,” Tosca replied. “Not your cello. Just a cello.”
Tosca knew. Voytek knew that she knew. Each could see it in the other’s eyes.
“Trust me. I’ll get you a cello.”
And eighteen months later they delivered her piano too. Not her piano. Just a piano. Far better than her piano.
§35
Peredelkino: 1955 or Thereabouts
The years in Kuybyshev had felt like infinity. An infinity modelled on a drunken Saturday night in Glasgow circa 1880. It felt like punishment. Cultural deprivation. Hell among the proles. Kuybyshev was somewhere east of Moscow, about halfway to Chelyabinsk, his housekeeper had told him, but as he wasn’t allowed to own an atlas and he’d never heard of Chelyabinsk, he settled for thinking of it as that point where Russia ceased to be Europe and became a bit Asian. The housekeeper also told him that Kuybyshev was its Soviet name, and that when she was a girl it had been called Samarra, a name he thought he knew from the tales in The Arabian Nights—and then he remembered, the Somerset Maugham story, “The Appointment in Samarra,” a tale told by Death in which the moral appeared to be “you can’t cheat death.”
“Oh God,” Burgess thought time and again, “let me not die in this shithole.”
He knew that there were people back home who might very well think him pig enough to thrive in a shithole, but he didn’t. Oddly, Maclean did. Unremarkable, blatant drunkenness in the street, the Russian modus vivendi, gave him an outlet for what Burgess had mistakenly perceived as melancholy and he now recognised as rage. They grew apart. Never close, they drifted. Drifted to the point where Burgess would have been glad of the company, on the principle of a malign presence being better than none at all, but Maclean didn’t much want to know him. Tant pis. He wouldn’t miss the violence, those bitter, booze-fuelled orgies of vandalism when not an ornament or a window was safe from him. The Russians found this funny. Burgess didn’t. A happy drunk for much of his adult life, he could not understand miserable drunks. Being drunk and miserable was a waste of God’s good alcohol.
After what felt like infinity—in reality, no more than a few years—they were allowed back to Moscow. Suspicion if not abandoned then at least suspended. Suspended along with the irregular but tiresome interrogations. Interrogations in which, “I believe I answered that question in 1952, 1953, and again in 1954” would have been unacceptable and possibly fatal.
His first interrogator had been the woman he’d met at the Gare d’Austerlitz. Major Tosca. Silent at her side, a Colonel Ronin, who spoke only to say hello and goodbye. Perhaps they had not been hard enough. After their fifth visit they were replaced by Blodnik and Bolokov, who played hard man and soft man like a couple of bumbling Scotland Yard flatfoots. Blodnik would ask the same old questions Tosca had asked, with none of her charm, as though biting them off a tree trunk with his jaws only to spit them out … Bolokov would whip out a packet of fags and slide one across the table. Disgusting as they were, camel-shit and sawdust, Burgess accepted. It wasn’t torture. It was boredom. All it required was patience. Occasionally he had wondered how Maclean was coping with it all, but Maclean dismissed them as “Mutt and Jeff” and changed the subject.
Moscow … “aah, Moscow,” as Olga, Masha, and Irina dreamed and sighed. A brand-new Moscow apartment … and his own dacha in Peredelkino. About forty miles south-west of the city, he could go there every evening if he chose, and often didn’t, but weekends in summer … that was when the dacha came into its own. Once the private estate of the Dolgorukovs, who had married the Romanovs, run the court and whatever, and most of whom seemed to have perished in the revolution, it had, at Maxim Gorky’s suggestion, sometime in the thirties, become a writers’ and artists’ colony. A wooden Toytown of talent. Initially he had wondered where he fitted in … Babel had lived there, Pasternak still did—he’d never read a word of either—slaving away at his translations of Shakespeare. But then the one word that mattered surfaced—privilege, privilege made manifest in walls and roofs and a small garden he conspicuously neglected. He was still watched, still listened in on, but his new housekeeper—name so unpronounceable he dubbed her Doris—assured him that not every room was bugged, just most of them.
“Well … which one isn’t?”
“The bedroom.”
Ah … he could let fly a morning fart in freedom and peace.
Peace was compromised. Maclean had a dacha not a hundred yards off. It was possible to avoid him, much as he was being avoided, but neither mode felt natural or comfortable. They were separate and inseparable. Still, the village had its own bar and social life was tolerable, except when Maclean gave in to the magmatic rage that seethed within him and trashed the bar. Best not go in for a day or two, lest he be held accountable as well.
This was one of those mornings after. Doris had told him. Maclean had broken chairs and picked fights with two blokes twice his size. Better to take a stroll in the opposite direction. Away from the bar, away from any chance encounter with a hungover Scotsman.
A dozen dachas on, a furniture van was unloading—an upright Bösendorfer piano, very much like the one Frederick Troy had had in his small house off St. Martin’s Lane, was being manhandled up the path to the front door by four very grumpy furnitchniks.
Burgess had what he called “kitchen” Russian, the vocabulary of his London clubs rendered into rough Russian that Doris could understand … mostly nouns … words like gin and sausage and tea and mustard … but he knew enough to recognise the force of their complaining.
« Дерьмо, дерьмо, дерьмо! » Shit, shit, shit!
So … a musician moving in among the writers and the prominenti.
Interesting.
He hung about for a few minutes as the men manoeuvered the piano inside, hoping that the pianist himself might appear, hoping for a bit of a chat. But he didn’t.
Undeterred, Burgess walked back that way after lunch the follow
ing day.
To his delight, the new chap was at the piano practising. The sound of a Brahms intermezzo wafting through the open door into the summer lane.
Brahms was not exactly Burgess’s favourite—a bit late in the century for him, but he was a musical beggar, not a chooser. He stood by the door, peering into the dim interior and seeing nothing. He waited until the pianist stopped and then rapped on the door with his knuckles.
“Please God, in whom I do not believe, let this bloke understand a bit of English.”
Out of the gloom a young woman appeared. Thirtyish, thick black hair, pale skin, slender unto skinny, but quite beautiful in her ghostly way.
She shielded her eyes and Burgess concluded she could not make him out, such was the contrast between the interior and the bright sunshine behind him. He turned sideways, she stepped out, looked up at him and said, “I know you.”
He didn’t know which was the more shocking, the more pleasing. That she knew him or that she really had spoken in English—accented though it was.
“You do?”
“You’re Guy Burgess.”
“And you have the advantage of me.”
“Club 11. Great Windmill Street. 1948.”
“You mean in London?”
“Of course. Is there a Great Windmill Street in Moscow? You came and sat with us at our table.”
“I did? I mean … ‘us’?”
“Me … Me and Troy.”
The penny dropped, clunked down in his befuddled memory.
Voytek. Méret Voytek, the atom spy who’d done a bunk a couple of years ahead of him. The woman Troy had told him to forget.
“Good Lord.”
“Quite, as Troy always said. Now, Mr. Burgess … aimez-vous Brahms? I was just practising the E-flat Major Intermezzo. I shall finish soon. Come in and sit quietly until I do.”
§36
Miss Voytek had mastered the samovar. Made a good cup of tea. He never had, and accepted Doris’s disgusting brew with grim patience. Any East End caff would tip tea as stewed as Russians seemed to like it. Cuppas like creosote.
