Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  The man screamed.

  “Answer, matey—or I start on your bollocks!”

  “Sasha! For God’s sake.”

  “I’m … not … following you.”

  “I spotted you in Paris. If you’re not following me, then you’re following my brother, Rod.”

  “No.”

  A pained shake of the head to emphasise the syllable.

  He had Troy baffled now. It didn’t sound like a lie or the simplicity of denial.

  “Then who? You’re following someone.”

  He raised his burning wrist and pointed.

  “Her,” he said.

  “What?” said Troy and Sasha simultaneously.

  “Not following you. Following her.”

  Troy rocked back on his heels. This made no sense at all.

  Sasha said, “Me? You’re following me? You cheeky bugger!”

  “P … p … paid.”

  “Paid? By whom?” Troy said.

  “By her husband.”

  Sasha caught the man with a deftly aimed right hook and knocked him cold again. Then she straddled him and began to pound his chest with both fists.

  “Bastard! Bastard! You complete and utter fucking bastard!”

  Troy pulled her away, her legs pedalling in the air on some invisible tricycle.

  “Calm down. Calm down and go back to the hotel.”

  “No!”

  “Sasha, for fuck’s sake, leave this to me.”

  Her legs drooped. Troy felt her body sag.

  “I’m going to kill Hugh. This is the last fucking straw. I’m going to kill him. What did he expect to find? That I’m shagging every gigolo from Paris to Siena? I’m going to fucking kill him!”

  “Just go and leave this to me. Please, Sasha.”

  He released his grip. She pulled her coat around her a little tighter, and just when Troy thought she might go quietly, she landed a kick to the balls at the unconscious gumshoe.

  “Bastard! Don’t be long, Freddie. I want to know everything.”

  When she’d gone, Troy scooped up another handful of water and revived the man.

  “Bloody hell. My head hurts. Oh bloody hell. My bollocks hurt. Has the madwoman gone?”

  “Yes,” Troy replied. “But if you don’t start talking I’ll get her back.”

  “I don’t envy you a childhood with that harpy.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “I’m ex-Met, like yourself, Mr. Troy. Bob Thornton. I was a beat bobby at Paddington Green nick until ‘55. Been private ever since.”

  “I’m surprised you make a living. You’re not very good at it.”

  “This is all a bit new. Most divorce jobs take you no farther than Brighton. It’s a bad day if I have to go as far as Eastbourne.”

  “So Hugh is paying you to gather evidence for divorce?”

  “No. He never mentioned divorce … he just wants to know about all the … what he calls ‘fancy men.’”

  “To what end?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Troy. Just to have something on his wife.”

  Troy held out a hand and pulled Thornton to his feet.

  “I think the job’s over, don’t you?”

  “Too right it is. I’m not going near that madwoman again.”

  “Can’t say I blame you. Go home, go back to England and tell Hugh exactly what happened. Leave nothing out. Be sure to pick up your fee. And offer him a piece of advice from me.”

  “OK.”

  “That when he next meets my sister, his wife, he should wear his cricket box because his bollocks will be her first target.”

  “I’ve a dim recollection of her saying she’d kill him. Or did I imagine that?”

  “She might well, but she’ll start with his bollocks. Sorry I hit you so hard, by the bye.”

  “S’awright, Mr. Troy. No hard feelings.”

  §53

  “Paranoia,” said Rod.

  Troy had found him waiting up in the hotel lobby, sitting surrounded by newspapers in half a dozen languages in a jungle of overstuffed armchairs and sofas, a whisky and soda to hand.

  “Yours or mine?”

  “Well, it’s not likely to be mine, is it? I’m not the one with the dodgy profession.”

  “Hmm,” said Troy. “Are you sure you have the right frame of mind to become Home Secretary? I work for Scotland Yard. If you lot get lucky at the next election, I’ll end up working for you. Dodgy profession, my arse.”

  “How can I put this without adding further insult? You are a dodgy individual in an otherwise respectable profession.”

  “You failed. I’m insulted.”

  “Freddie … I had no reason to think that chap was following me until you put the thought into my head. You’re the one who … dammit … dammit, Freddie, you sail close to the wind and you know it. It was more than likely that that chap was following you. He might have been CIA or the other lot, or who knows what. Any of the acronyms you seem to upset on a regular basis.”

  “Instead, he was following our errant sister, in search of high jinks.”

  “Which surprised both of us.”

  “Quite. But he’ll stop now. Sasha scared the living daylights out of him.”

  “Suppose Hugh just hires somebody else?”

  “Then we ignore him. Whatever Sasha gets up to is her business, and now she knows that Hugh wants to know, I wouldn’t put it past her to deliver the goods.”

  “Oh hell. She’ll be fucking taxi drivers and tour guides.”

  “Altar boys and traffic cops.”

  “The archbishop of Florence … the Doge of Venice … in the street, frightening the horses.”

  “But at least we won’t feel paranoid anymore.”

  §54

  Florence

  Troy watched Sasha’s rage drop to a simmer. She did not raise the cause of her anger in conversation, as though storing it up for future reference and deployment. Had he given her the benefit of the doubt, he might have concluded that she was trying to make the holiday work for Rod’s sake, but he felt no urge to be her beneficiary. She was plotting something. He just didn’t know what.

  It was their second night in Florence before he saw the glimmer of a smile. A bar in Oltrarno, with a view of the river, after a morning inside Brunelleschi’s Duomo, and an afternoon in the Bargello, where she had gazed rapt at Bartolomeo Ammannati’s Leda and the Swan.

  “Unbelievable. No … I mean the opposite. Believable. You really can believe the swan … well … you know …”

  Silently Troy agreed, whilst finding it predictable she would fall for the most erotic sculpture in the city. It was something about the beak-to-lips kiss, something about the way his wing was held in the crook of her thigh and calf.

  “I mean to say,” she had said, “all those dozy buggers standing around in the piazza with their box cameras, snapping away at David’s willy, about as erotic as yesterday’s cold rice pudding, and here’s this, tucked away inside … a hidden whatchermacallit … thingy … gem! … and I’d never heard of it!”

  Sasha stood, wrapped up in a shawl, on the bar’s open terrace, looking across the river towards the Uffizi.

  She turned as Troy approached, and then he saw the smile. So unexpected. He realised the temptation was to read too much into it. Forgive and forget were not concepts the woman understood.

  “What’s making you smile?”

  She put an arm through his, pulled him close, whispered into his ear—not that anyone would have heard if she’d spoken out loud.

  “My imagination.”

  “And what are you imagining?”

  “Fucking a swan.”

  §55

  Venice

  Venice passed without incident or acrimony. Rod even read chunks of his father’s diary out loud to everyone at breakfast with scarcely a groan or an unexcused absence. They listened to a description of the city as it had been in 1907—of Alexei and Maria Troy, fugitives footloose on a Continent not yet capable of imagining wha
t might be to come, the empires and kingdoms not yet lost—the children not yet born. Troy began to think they might be able to pass for a family, after all.

  §56

  Someone was following Frederick Troy.

  §57

  Vienna

  By treaty in 1955, Austria’s post-war occupation had ended. The country’s neutrality was both guaranteed and enforced. It would not join the Warsaw Pact, nor would it be part of NATO. The last twenty-odd thousand Russian, French, American, and British troops departed—the zones of the country abolished and the sectors of Vienna restored to their civil status as Bezirke. All things considered, Vienna fared better than Berlin by 1958. Nobody was arguing over it any more, almost overnight it had ceased to be the most spied-in and spied-upon city in Europe, and if it didn’t immediately settle back to a life of swaying waltzes and strong coffee … well, you can’t have everything.

  Berlin was still two cities, divided by a fairly neat if meandering line between the Russian sector in the east and all the other sectors in the west. Vienna’s dividing line had never been quite so clean. In fact, it was more of a mess. The French had a tidy cluster of districts, so did the Americans, but the Russians and the British jigsawed. And the whole of the city centre was subject to four-power administration, resulting in four-men-in-a-jeep, jack-in-the-box patrols consisting of one soldier from each army, a motley formula that might have led to a United Nations in miniature (and on wheels) but more often than not merely led to arguments about lunch and beer. And lest you forgot whose turf you were on, there had been regular white pavement-demarcation stencils.

  Troy found himself looking at one, scuffed and fading on the cobblestones that marked the line between the Landstraße Bezirk (3), which had been British, and the Wieden Bezirk (4), which had been Russian, on the Schwarzenbergplatz:

  CОВЕТСКИЙ CEKTOP

  He wondered if there’d ever be a day when the Second World War wasn’t a visible remnant in half the cities in Europe, scars upon the body politic. This one could have been scrubbed away. Its survival was deliberate. An act of conservation, not an error of omission.

  He scraped at it with the sole of his left shoe.

  “You’re destroying a bit of history,” said Gus Fforde.

  “Really? I wonder how many poor Russian conscripts wasted days of their own history going around painting this on every street corner?”

  “Marginally better than whitewashing piles of coal, I should think. And God knows plenty of our Tommies did that.”

  “Touché, Gus,” Troy replied. “However, you will appreciate that where Britain and Russia once met might blur the definition of ‘our’ in my case.”

  Gus had met Troy outside the Hotel Sacher on his way to work, as First Secretary at the British Embassy on Rennweg, only a few yards from where they were standing. Gus and Troy had been at school together. Their mutual loyalty was boundless. In 1956, Gus had arranged Troy’s marriage in Vienna to Larissa Tosca, knowing full well that she had been a Soviet agent. He had pulled every string at his fingertips, told a dozen lies, and given her the security of a British passport. And loyal still, he had asked no questions when the marriage had exploded later the same year and Tosca had vanished yet again.

  Troy had skipped breakfast to walk with Gus. His first morning without family in the best part of a fortnight. “Family and friends” was a phrase used so often to define emotional territory as to be little short of cliché—one that baffled Troy. They weren’t the same thing at all. Troy thought they needed a stencil to make that clear:

  You Are Now Leaving Family—This Is A Friend Вы покидаете семью—это друг

  “I hope Rod’s enjoying this,” Gus said, just as they reached the embassy.

  “Oh yes. He was nostalgic by proxy all the way here. Reading the old man’s diaries, retracing the journey. It’s different from now on. He’s nostalgic for himself. He’s reliving the Vienna he knew before they kicked him out after the Anschluss in ‘38. And he’s imagining the Vienna he never knew. He was born here, after all.”

  “Jolly good.”

  “Why do I find that ominous?”

  “God—am I so bad at dissembling? Not ominous, no. It’s just that I might be putting a bit of a damper on the fun.”

  “How?”

  “Someone back in London told the ambassador Rod’s here. I know this is a holiday, but the ambassador is not the sort of bloke not to take a politician’s visit seriously—in this case, too seriously. Wanted to know why I hadn’t told him. Pooh-poohed me saying it was a private visit and is pretty insistent on … dunno what to call it … not black tie …”

  “Just as well. None of us travelled with evening dress.”

  “And not a reception as such …”

  “A bit of a do?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I think Rod will be delighted.”

  “Really? And you?”

  “I’ll tolerate it. Just see that you water my sister’s wine if you don’t want a diplomatic incident.”

  “Ah … Sasha. Plus ça change. I’ll never forget her thrusting her hand down my trousers when I was fourteen and tweaking my John Thomas.”

  “Gus. I do wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  “Shall we say tomorrow night, seven thirty for eight, here?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  §58

  The following afternoon the Troys were walking through the Innere Stadt, like a caravan, it seemed to Troy—all they lacked were camels and music and sunlight and shifting sands. They had walked from the Danube Canal, the length of Rotenturmstraße in the direction of St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

  Someone was still following Frederick Troy, although in the absence of further paranoia he was now telling himself that someone was following Sasha Darbishire.

  “We’ve picked up another tail,” he said to Rod.

  Rod’s head jerked as though on a string.

  “No, don’t turn around. We’ll get out to middle of the square and I’ll nobble him.”

  “I’m getting fed up with this.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  He slowed his pace, let the family pull ahead as they passed the southern corner of cathedral, and as they reached the chapel on the far side, Troy turned and walked quickly back across the square to face his pursuer.

  It was a little bloke, quite unlike the last. Short and tubby. A black winter overcoat and a rather tatty homburg, and shoes soled in leather that rang on the cobblestones. Not a hint of gum about the shoe.

  They stood face-to-face, almost nose-to-nose.

  Troy could almost swear the man was blushing.

  “Look. I’ll tell you what I told the other chap. Fuck off back to London and tell my brother-in-law to grow up.”

  “Sie sind Herr Troy?”

  “What?”

  “Herr Frederick Troy, aus London?”

  “You know bloody well who I am.”

  But the man didn’t seem to understand a word he’d said.

  “Ja,” with exasperation. “Ich bin Frederick Troy.”

  “Ich habe einen Brief für Sie.”

  He stuck an envelope in Troy’s hand, turned on his heel, and walked away without looking back.

  Troy watched in disbelief, felt as though he’d just been served with a summons, felt tempted for a moment to go after him and grab hold, to thump him as hard as he’d thumped the last dim-witted gumshoe, but the moment passed and he tore open the envelope.

  No letter, no note, just a ticket for the Großer Saal at the Konzerthaus—Stalls seat D18, that same night.

  KONZERTHAUS

  GROSSER SAAL

  LOTHRINGERSTRASSE 20, WIEN

  _____________________

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  KLAVIERKONZERT 20 IN D-MOLL

  SINFONIE CONCERTANTE IN ES-DUR

  & SYMPHONIE 41 IN C, ‘JUPITER’

  DIE MOSCAUER KAMMERORCHESTER

  DIR. ANATOLI CHERTKOV

&nb
sp; SOL. LAVRENTI KUTUZOV

  D18

  And he’d no idea what this was about.

  §59

  Predictably, Rod was furious.

  “What do you mean you’re not coming? It’s your pal arranged this dinner.”

  “He’s your pal too. You’ve known Gus even longer than I have. And you know the ambassador, Sir Francis Whatsisname. I’ve never even met the man.”

  “It’s bad form, Freddie.”

  “It’s fucking awful form, but it’s what I have to do.”

  “What’s so important you have to skip dinner at the embassy?”

  “Something more important, obviously.”

  “Oh my God … it’s not spook stuff, is it?”

  Troy had no idea what it was, but “spook stuff” was a useful concept. It was a forbidden country and if Troy told Rod it was “spook stuff,” he wouldn’t go there.

  “Might be,” he said.

  “You know, that’s the sort of answer you gave to questions when you were ten!”

  §60

  From his centre aisle seat Troy would have a first-rate view of the pianist. His benefactor might well have given him the best seat in the house. Four rows back—usually considered the best for sound—but close enough for him to see Kutuzov’s hands move across the keys. As the lights dimmed, as Chertkov took to the stage, as the first round of applause went up, the seat next to Troy remained empty. He wondered if it had been reserved for a purpose, if he was meant to meet whoever had been given the ticket.

  As the applause tailed off, Chertkov, tall and stunningly handsome, one of the young Turks of Russian music in the relaxed post-Stalin era, was still facing the audience. He wasn’t taking bows. He was, against tradition, about to speak.

  Troy’s German was poor, but Chertkov’s was simple.

  “I am sorry to say that Lavrenti Kutuzov is indisposed.”

  Kutuzov was not one of the young Turks. He was seventy-five if he was a day. Was this a tactful way of saying he was dead? A huge sigh rippled out across the audience, most of whom had probably paid the earth to see one of the most famous pianists on the planet.