Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  “Is that safe?”

  “Oh, it’s only a metaphorical bag. Wouldn’t want the old bugger to suffocate now, would we?”

  §73

  The embassy had provided Blaine with a guest room. By the time he had dropped his suitcase, gone into a closed-door chat with Gus—Troy cooling his heels in the lobby, only too delighted not to be included—it was seven thirty.

  Blaine emerged from Gus’s office, with just his briefcase, looking a trifle flustered.

  “It’s going to be a stinker of a night,” Gus said. “Rain and more rain. There’ll be a cab at the door in five minutes. If the evening proves to be a long one, I’ll see you both in the morning.”

  “What?” said Troy. “You bloody well won’t. I’m off as soon as the dog sees the rabbit.”

  “Freddie, please. See that Bill gets to the Imperial in one piece, and be so kind as to escort him back. He doesn’t know Vienna, do you Bill?”

  “‘Fraid I don’t. Not my beat, as it were.”

  “That’s OK. Every cab driver in Vienna knows Vienna.”

  Gus took him by the arm, steered him into a huddle.

  “Freddie. Just do this. Need I remind you? Egg, duckling, Mother Duck.”

  “Make that Mother Goose and we’ve got a fucking panto! Which is pretty much what this feels like.”

  “Just do it!”

  It was a short hop to the Imperial.

  Troy said, “Surely you’ve met Burgess?”

  “Oh yes. Bumped into him a few times during my years with Five. He always seemed to be turning up. Proverbial bad penny. But even before that, we overlapped at Cambridge. Can’t say I knew him, but his set were very high profile, always being seen, always wanting to be seen.”

  “Then you probably overlapped with my brother too.”

  “Yes. But I didn’t know him either. We never really overlapped in what we did. He was very much Cambridge Union and debating.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “No, I rowed.”

  I might have guessed, thought Troy.

  “A blue in 1930. We beat Oxford by two lengths. Nineteen minutes nine seconds. Pretty good time. Second fastest since the end of the war, but in ‘34 we took more than a minute off that. Of course, I’d come down by then …”

  Troy tuned out.

  §74

  Burgess was his usual dishevelled self as he opened the door. If he remembered Blaine from their Cambridge days nothing in his face showed it. But, why would a man like Guy Burgess ever notice a Cambridge “blue”? A nice, muscular arse notwithstanding, “blue” was just a four-letter word to Burgess and so was “bore.”

  “Mr. Blaine,” Troy said. “I’ll be on the floor below. Room 707. Just knock on the door when you’re ready to leave.”

  As Blaine stepped into the room, Burgess looked blankly at Troy. He’d nothing to say. Just as well, there was nothing Troy wanted to hear.

  §75

  Voytek seemed surprised to see him.

  “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “I’m a detective. On Wednesdays you only play a matinee. Besides, I asked at the desk on my way in.”

  “Are … what do I call it … are ‘things’ happening?”

  “Things are happening even as we speak. MI5 are upstairs de-briefing Guy.”

  “Ah. I’ve been through that. It’s wheels within wheels, circles in circles. You learn fifty different ways to say the same thing. But tell me, are we just killing time?”

  “We are and we aren’t. I’d say I’ve a couple of hours, but I wanted to talk to you anyway.”

  “Then let us walk.”

  “It’s still wet … drizzling as I came in.”

  “I don’t care.”

  §76

  They stepped out into the brightly lit Kärntner Ring, one of the wide boulevards created when some emperor or another had decided Vienna could at last do without its city walls.

  A tram rattled by at slow speed and deafening volume, and when something close to silence resumed, she said, “I missed you yesterday. I wanted you to come to the concert.”

  “I was there.”

  “You mean you hid?”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “From me?”

  “From the questions I feel I must ask you.”

  “And now you’re not hiding?”

  She drew her coat tighter about her, dug her hands deep into her pockets, and tapped her forehead gently against his chest like a bird bobbing on its wooden perch.

  “Then ask me. I’ve had ten years of distance from you. I don’t want the added distance of your suspicion.”

  “Kutuzov didn’t have a stroke, did he?”

  She drew back, eyes to his eyes, not avoiding his gaze.

  “Yes, he did, but that was in September. And that’s the only lie I told you. Why do you ask that?”

  “Because all this took planning.”

  “Ah. I suppose it did.”

  They walked on, her head down now, eyes looking at the puddles as she stepped around them.

  “Burgess has been asking to leave for two years now. He is like Oliver Twist in the queue for gruel. The Russians decided they’d let him earlier this year. I think they just got fed up with him. He’s a pest, but I think they know he’ll never name anyone the British don’t already know about, and what he’s learnt in Moscow you could jot down on the back of a postage stamp. But then, it was Burgess himself who hesitated. He’s no idea what the British have on him. He wanted to go home to Mayfair, not to Pentonville. The Russians could have just flown him into Berlin and let him walk across, but Burgess insisted he needed someone he trusted … a broker or a conduit … or he’d just end up in prison. So the Russians waited. Then, at the end of August, they got news of Rod’s Grand Tour.”

  “What? How?”

  “Was it meant to be a secret? Perhaps the cleaning lady at Westminster goes through your brother’s wastepaper bin, perhaps the doorman at the Garrick goes through his pockets … it could be any one of a dozen sources … but the simple truth is it was in the diary page of the Morning Post.”

  Suddenly Troy felt stupid, and stupid by proxy, at that. The grin on her face as she spoke told him he was being stupid.

  “They asked him if he would trust Rod … trust him to be the safe conduit he said he needed. Burgess said he needed someone he could trust more than Rod, and that was you. So they cooked up the idea of a visit to Vienna. Then in September Kutuzov had his stroke, and Anatoli approached me to play here in his stead at exactly the same time you and Rod would be here. I told Burgess … I suppose that was a mistake … and the next thing I knew he’d told the Russians he needed someone he could trust more than you … and that was me.”

  “And I told the stupid bugger never to mention your name and mine in the same sentence.”

  “It doesn’t matter, they haven’t put two and two together and they never will. They’ll never know I denounced myself. They’ll never know it was you got me out of the country. You are safe. I am safe. I’m a defector, a decorated spy. A Hero of the Soviet Union. I’ve got the medals to prove it.”

  “Why the pretence that this was all a last-minute thing? Why not tell the Konzerthaus? Why pretend Kutuzov would be the soloist, when both you and Chertkov knew he wouldn’t be?”

  “Would you have accepted the ticket if it had had my name on it?”

  “Of course I would have.”

  “I could not be sure. You will understand. Ten years in another life. In a life you may try harder than most to imagine, but nevertheless you cannot. Ten years. You might not have wanted to see me again. The last time we met I was fleeing … a murderer … I had killed for the first and last time in my life.”

  “I’d killed too. Four of them in a matter of minutes. They weren’t the first or the last. We were … equals.”

  She shook her head as though trying to shake off the idea like an insect caught in her hair. Then she looked at him, a glint of tears in her eyes.
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  “And that’s something I’ve never tried to imagine. Never wanted for one second to imagine. Yet it comes unbidden. Summoned by silence. But it, all of it, was enough to give me doubt. Doubt I should never have had about you, Troy. I’m sorry. But … but … the secrecy was not my decision, it never was going to be my decision. And even if it had been, I can only assume the KGB wanted to create the illusion of spontaneity.”

  “That’s absurd. Who in MI5 would ever believe Guy could get as far as Vienna without their sanction?”

  She shrugged this off.

  “You know Russians. They couldn’t be seen simply to hand Guy back. I don’t know, perhaps too much loss of face. As I said, they could just have flown him to Berlin and pushed him across the border. So, a simple, childish plot—me, you, Vienna, Mozart, a fake passport, the pretence they aren’t watching his every move. In the end, what Guy needed was what they wanted. Guy prosecuted is a risk. Guy accepted, in whatever ignominy, is not. They wanted the conduit, the safe option, as much as he did.”

  “And now they’ve got it. A pointless de-brief of a de-defecting agent by an MI5 officer, who’ll get nothing out of Guy that the Russians don’t want him to say. All watched over … or listened in to … by a loving KGB. I thought it was a pantomime, but it’s a farce.”

  “Yes. It’s a farce … and I never even got to rehearse my part in it.”

  Troy looked back towards the hotel.

  “I wonder what’s being said in that room right now.”

  “I don’t. I don’t give a damn. I just want this to end. I’ve grown fond of Guy, but now I want him out of my life.”

  “And I feel much the same. Poor Guy. He’s just a game of pass the parcel, isn’t he?”

  It was raining harder now. Voytek turned up her collar, shivered.

  “Let’s go back. If all we have to do is wait, let’s wait in my room. I’m tired.”

  “I’m not surprised. You’ve played a Mozart concerto and tried to second guess the KGB. All in one day.”

  §77

  Voytek had kicked off her shoes and lay on the bed. Troy sat in an armchair. He thought she might be sleeping. He flicked off the reading lamp and stared at nothing.

  “Troy? Lie with me.”

  He hesitated, had not moved a muscle when the inevitable knock at the door sounded. He put the light on.

  “That’s Blaine. I have to take him back to the embassy.”

  “How long?”

  “Less than an hour.”

  “Then come back to me.”

  §78

  Outside the Imperial, the rain had eased, the street glistened.

  “Any chance we could walk?” Blaine asked.

  “Oh, it’s close enough.”

  “Good. I feel … what’s the word … closeted. I could do with fresh air.”

  “Closeted with Burgess is closeted indeed.”

  “Exactly. The room was full of him before I even got there. I take it you knew Burgess before his defection?”

  “Yes,” Troy replied. “I did. I was one of millions.”

  They left the Ring in the direction of Karlsplatz. Troy hoped Blaine would have no more questions. Let him play the Englishman and just talk about the weather.

  But once he’d established that one fact, no doubt prompted by something Burgess had said, Blaine seemed to retreat into himself. He was a mutterer, a man who talked to himself—the kind of oddity Troy had recalled being abused at school with the nickname “chunter.” It went with the unnatural bulk of the man, less athletic than awkward in middle age, and with the solid glass barrier between self and other that spectacles could provide to those who sought it. Rowing had probably been his salvation, a team sport that wasn’t a team sport, no ball to pass or fumble. You took your place in a thin blue line and you beat your strokes in time.

  Troy decided to take a shortcut via the Red Army War Memorial. The Russians had bunged up their memorials at the speed of light, commemorating their dead even as they were dying—so fast, in fact, that they had built the Berlin memorial before the final division of the city had been completed, and it stood to this day in the British sector, close to the Brandenburg Gate, guarded by Soviet troops demonstrating the goose-step to Berliner and visitor alike every couple of hours. In Vienna, they got the geography right. The memorial was in the former Russian sector—just. It was a few yards from the stencilled white line, and only a couple of hundred yards from the British Embassy—in what had until very recently been known as Stalinplatz. The new Austria had given guarantees for the safety of the monument, and the curving colonnade of pillars that framed it, but none as to the permanence of Stalin’s name. However, the forty-foot high monument to the liberators of Europe still bore his signature, there for all to see in the glare of floodlights that burned all night.

  As they reached the vast Victorian fountain—the Hochstrahlbrunnen—in front of the monument, Blaine looked up at the statue.

  “Good Lord. It’s monstrous!”

  “Are war memorials known for their good taste?” Troy replied. “If you’d been here a couple of years ago there’d have been a T-34 tank parked in front of it as a reminder.”

  “Rubbing salt in the wounds, eh?”

  “Something like—”

  The first bullet sent chips of stone flying from the paving flags between them. Troy ducked under the broad lip of the fountain. The second bullet hit Blaine in his right thigh and his legs shot from under him. He rolled towards Troy with too little momentum to get clear, but enough for the third bullet to ping uselessly off the stone behind him.

  He was scrabbling inside his coat.

  “Troy!”

  His hand emerged clutching a gun. He sent it skidding across the flags towards Troy a split second before a fourth bullet struck him in the chest. Then he moved no more.

  Troy rolled out of cover, grabbed the gun, and rolled back too hard. His head hit the side of the fountain and the world turned billiard-table green, then Florentine blue, and finally Bible black.

  He had no idea how long he’d been out. Asked to be objective he’d have said seconds, but that seemed impossible. There were boots everywhere, boots walking, boots standing—and right in front of him shiny black shoes and the hem of a trench coat, just at eye level.

  “Put the gun down, Herr Troy.”

  Eh? What gun?

  Troy realised he was holding a gun in his right hand. He’d no memory of this.

  He looked up at the owner of shoes and trench coat. A man of his own age. Rimless glasses, good haircut. Every inch the flic. And he wasn’t coming any closer till Troy surrendered the gun.

  Troy flipped the gun. Held it out to the flic butt first. Then a helping hand pulled him to his feet. He was unsteady. He looked around. There were uniformed Viennese coppers everywhere, one or two sporting sub-machine guns. Blaine lay where he’d fallen, in an oceanic slick of his own blood.

  Then a green surge passed before his eyes and he was out again.

  §79

  He came to in the back of a police car in front of the Marokkanergasse Police Station. There was vomit down his coat and trousers.

  Inside, they sat him down, took his coat and jacket.

  A police surgeon examined the lump on the back of his head and said he would be fine.

  “No need hospital. Verstehen Sie?”

  Troy nodded.

  “Wasser,” he said simply, wanting to rinse the taste of vomit away.

  Instead, two uniforms escorted him backstage, and he found himself locked in a cell. It was the same faecal colour scheme, but it was warm. He put his head down and slept. At least they hadn’t taken his tie and shoe laces.

  Nor had they taken his watch, and when the flic reappeared he looked at it. They’d taken an hour and a half to get around to this.

  Behind the flic was a uniform, clutching a tray. On it were a glass of water, a sandwich, Troy’s passport, warrant card, and the gun. He set it down and left. The flic pulled up a chair.


  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “What haven’t you figured out?”

  “In your own words—please.”

  “We were on our way … Mr. Blaine and myself … from the Hotel Imperial to the British embassy. Mr. Blaine is a guest there. As we reached the fountain there were shots. Four, I think, if there were more I was out cold and didn’t hear them. I’d say they came from the direction of the war memorial, perhaps a man behind one of the columns, but I could be wrong … it sounded to me like a rifle … a rifle with a decent telescopic sight, and the gunman could have been in a building on the Rennweg. Blaine was hit twice. The second shot probably killed him.”

  “Or,” the flic said. “Perhaps this did.”

  He held up Blaine’s automatic pistol.

  “No. That hasn’t been fired.”

  The flic held the gun up to his nose, close enough to smell.

  “Perhaps, perhaps not, but until we get a ballistics report you may appreciate … you were found with a gun in your hand.”

  Troy thought back to the moment when he handed over the gun.

  “Have you fingerprinted Blaine?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you should fingerprint me. My fingerprints will overlap Blaine’s, not his mine.”

  “And what would that prove?”

  §80

  Troy declined to say more without a representative from the embassy. But it was eight in the morning before Gus appeared.

  “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Freddie. They called me less than twenty minutes ago. I think, to use police jargon, they were trying to sweat you.”

  “Pointless. They have both my passport and my warrant card. They know I’m a copper so they know I can’t be sweated.”

  “What have you told them?”