Secret Kingdom

by Francis Bennett

  Neither the Foreign Office nor the ISA will confirm that Leman actually arrived at his destination. ‘He was due back at work more than a month ago,’ a spokesman for the ISA said yesterday. ‘He never reappeared.’ Official sources say that Leman had regular access to restricted information.

  6

  The blanket smelled of stale cigarettes but it was all he’d got and it would have to do. Leman rolled it up and placed it at one end of the stained and dusty mattress to serve as a pillow. He lay down carefully in the darkness, hands behind his head, and gazed up at the ceiling.

  He wanted this to be a nightmare from which he would awaken to find himself back in Moore Street, Anna warm beside him, the morning light pouring into the bedroom, a day at the Institute in prospect; but the harshness of his circumstances did not allow him the luxury of such self-deception. His confinement was not the product of an overheated imagination. It was an undeniable fact. The key to the door was in someone else’s possession. The bars across the window were made of steel and embedded in concrete. The footsteps outside his cell were those of his captors whose task it was to see that he stayed put. He had lost control of his own life. He was trapped, the plaything of others. He had found adventure all right, pared-down, harsh, inescapable, and its brutality terrified him.

  *

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

  Six weeks before (only six weeks? It seemed like a lifetime), he had been trapped in a noisy, crowded room at the Institute, too many journalists and politicians and too many White Russians – those who worked for the Institute and endless hangers-on – who hovered around the bar cadging drinks off anyone they could and easing the canapés by the handful. Impossible to hear without shouting.

  ‘Stephen Sykes,’ the man repeated. ‘I publish a political weekly called Commentary. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’

  It was clear Sykes expected an answer in the affirmative.

  ‘I take it,’ Leman said lamely. Commentary was a left-wing journal unrelenting in the superiority of its moral and political stance and unforgiving in its hostility to the Conservative Government. Like many others, he bought a copy most weeks, but too often it resided unread in his briefcase along with other good intentions.

  ‘Are you part of this set-up?’ Sykes asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where do you fit in?’

  ‘I analyse Soviet agricultural production.’ How he hated talking about himself. It wasn’t untrue, rather a half-truth; he did more than that, but it was enough to satisfy Sykes, he hoped. ‘Ponder comparative wheat yields, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I suspect you do more than you’re letting on.’ What could Sykes know? Who could he have been talking to? ‘We like to have people like you writing for us.’

  ‘I’m not a journalist,’ Leman replied defensively.

  ‘I know what you are,’ Sykes said confidently. ‘You’re an expert. Expertise is in demand these days. I like the authority experts bring to what they write. You’d find yourself in good company.’

  Was it publisher’s flattery, elevating him to a rank he didn’t deserve? Or was it what Sykes genuinely believed? That was the man’s skill. There was no way of knowing. He could take the remark as he chose. He chose to be flattered, and Sykes responded to his conquest.

  ‘I’ve got an idea that might intrigue you. Come and have a natter. Here’s my card. Don’t leave it too long. Good ideas wither if they aren’t loved.’

  *

  For the first time since he had started to work at the Institute, Leman had a sense that he was drifting. He questioned the value of what work he was doing – did an analysis of the annual cereal production in Kazakhstan truly further anyone’s cause? He questioned himself for wasting his time doing it, increasingly finding he could do the work with his eyes shut, but when he tried to move away from the familiar world of Soviet economic statistics, he had no idea what he wanted and he despised himself for his ignorance. His academic success had failed to provide any instinct about where and how to take the leap into a world beyond Cambridge or the Institute, which, he saw, was really Cambridge in another form, the institution as refuge. How else was he to satisfy the longing for something more, something that tested him so that he could discover who he was?

  Why should he want more when already he had so much? Anna gave without thought, she brought her love to him and with it a home; she provided a kind of security he had never allowed himself to dream of when he was young and which many, he knew, would envy. For a time the novelty of this experience had smothered any residual longing to test himself. Anna and the life she gave him had overwhelmed his secret ambitions. Recently, and for reasons he didn’t understand, some part of his conscience had woken up and was uncomfortably reminding him of the truth of his situation. Someone – Anna? – had duped him into assuming the identity of a man who was both settled and content. He had lowered his defences, become lazy. Had he struggled all those years at Cambridge and before simply to exchange the cobbler’s shop in Pimlico for a smart address in Kensington? Was there not more to life than creature comforts, seductive as they were? Where would he be if a rich woman had not fallen in love with him? What was he without Anna?

  That had been his condition when he met Stephen Sykes.

  As he lay on the ancient mattress in his cell, he asked himself how he could have fallen victim to Sykes’s insane dreams. The man’s vision was extravagant, unbalanced. He must have been mad not to reject his proposal out of hand. If he could see that all too clearly now, why not at the time? The only answer he was prepared to accept was that, for a few days, perhaps only for a few hours, those dreams had seemed to coincide with his own. He’d been gullible, beguiled (that was the least harmful interpretation he could put on his behaviour), and the price he was paying for his moment of weakness was the loss of his freedom and the sacrifice of everything he had once had. He felt sickened and ashamed. There was no one he could blame for his predicament but himself. He had been stripped naked by his own foolishness because, for a few delicious moments, he had imagined that Sykes understood his secret dreams. How gullible he’d been! He was paying the price for that now.

  6

  1

  She leans her bicycle against the railings, opens the gate, goes down the steps and across the forecourt into the entrance hall. It is dark after the bright sunlight. She remembers the times she brought Dora here, every day for how many years? and the ritual of hanging up your coat and your lunch bag when you arrived. Around her she can hear the hum of voices, one class is rehearsing a song, a phrase repeated again and again until it is sung with the correct intonation, another is taking dictation in Russian. Sentences are read with unnatural pauses. Where is the concierge whose name she has forgotten? Her memories of the school are that she was always around, sitting in her cubby hole under the stairs or, armed with a mop, guarding the place and the Marxist ideologies taught within it as if her life depended on her vigilance which, perhaps, it did.

  ‘What do you want?’

  She wears a faded tunic and slippers, her hair is pulled back into an untidy bun and she stands, arms crossed, in an aggressive defence of her territory. She is as ugly and ill-tempered as Eva remembers.

  ‘I’m Dora Balassi’s mother. You may not remember me. My daughter was at school here.’

  ‘I see too many parents to remember names. What do you want?’

  ‘I should have done this ages ago.’ Faced with this woman’s cold, unfriendly stare, she is glad she took the trouble to rehearse her lines. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t but I’ve been so busy, you know how it is, at least that’s my excuse.’ She pauses. That too had been planned. She has said enough, she hopes, to give the impression of a disorganized mother. ‘I came to collect Julia Kovacs’s things. The headmistress wrote to me ages ago. I should have come before now, shouldn’t I? Julia and I were cousins. There’s no reason why you should know that. I’m so sorry if this is inconvenient. Perhaps I should have made an
appointment.’

  She smiles her carefully prepared, hopeful smile.

  ‘Wait there.’

  Eva is left alone in the hall, looking at the children’s paintings that have been put up on the walls, bright poster colours worked on thick grey paper, celebrating the glorious victory of the proletariat: men driving tractors through endless fields of bright yellow corn, women carrying bales of hay, a battle scene full of explosions, tanks and soldiers. The bodies of the enemy are lined up in one corner, crude representations of the American flag draped around them, a portrait of a leader (Rakosi? Stalin?), his hand raised, talking to a group of children. The caption reads: “The Father of the Nation Directing the Future”. Above them, a banner in huge black and red letters: THE STRUGGLE TO BUILD THE NEW WORLD.

  ‘This is all I can find.’

  Was that it? All that was left of Julia at the school where she had taught for years was a small bag not even full. Not even her own. The bag carries the crudely sewn initials ‘N.R.’. It must have belonged to a child who’d left it behind. Is this what our lives amount to when we die?

  ‘Thank you.’

  That’s it. What could be easier? She has got what she wanted, no questions asked. She walks out into the sunlight. She smiles only when she is certain that the concierge can’t see.

  *

  She emptied the bag on to her kitchen table. A pair of shoes, one with a broken heel, some old laddered stockings, a handkerchief, a notebook, two pencils, a box of aspirin, a folded timetable of her teaching schedule, a diary, a purse, some loose coins, a note about a new time for a teachers’ meeting.

  She flicked through the diary, the few entries that Julia had completed now more than a year old. The start and end of terms were marked, the times and days of the teachers’ union meetings (for some reason Julia was determined to get elected to the committee of the union). The afternoons when she took her class for political instruction. Nothing personal. No birthdays, no dates for meetings with friends, no trips to the cinema. This was her school diary. She was about to close it when she saw that Julia had drawn a line through the second week in February. Across the days she had written in capital letters the single word: Moscow.

  The metro ticket and now this. Her heart was close to breaking.

  She drank a glass of water and composed herself. She remembered that Julia had been away last year. There’d been a teachers’ conference in Pecs in February. Wasn’t that where she said she’d gone? Her uncertainty was the price of being disorganized – no wonder Julia criticized her for the way she managed her life. She looked through the pages of the exercise book that she kept next to the telephone. Julia had given it to her because she was always losing the scraps of paper on which she wrote her notes and messages. Lists of groceries, numbers to ring, messages for Dora. Messages for Julia too. Doodles. Reminders. Slowly she worked her way backwards. Even though no date was written down, it wasn’t difficult to identify March of the previous year. Her writing changed at that point. It was unusually careful, using the lines on the page, not scrawled in her familiar hasty fashion. Her grief had briefly reformed her untidy habits.

  The exercise book confirmed nothing. But the diary entry and the metro ticket were evidence that she couldn’t ignore. Julia had deceived her. It was a painful conclusion, but it had to be drawn. Julia had secrets, perhaps another life that she knew nothing about. What she was discovering didn’t mean that her own memories of Julia were false. They were pages torn from a book. True in their way but not the whole story. What frightened her was that the structure of her life that she had taken for granted was suddenly shaking. Whether it would survive many more revelations was open to question. She felt shocked, angry, perplexed. The discovery that those you love have deceived you is the hardest way to lose your innocence.

  She heard Dora letting herself into the apartment. She wanted her to know nothing of what Dora would call her ‘revisionism’, the steady destruction of Julia’s reputation in the light of revelations following her death. To Dora Julia remained her ‘second mother’, whose loss in her own way she mourned every day.

  Hastily she swept everything back into the bag and put it on the chair in the bedroom.

  2

  ‘Please sit down, Miss Livesey. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m a friend of the Leman family.’ She’d told him as much over the telephone. What she hadn’t explained was why she was so anxious to see him. Pountney listened without interruption to what she had to say, nodding over arched fingers.

  ‘We’re all concerned about Joe Leman’s disappearance,’ he said.

  On the face of it, he seemed a diffident man, so different to Sykes. Nothing manipulative about him, nothing intimidating. Beneath the passive exterior, she sensed there was a point where he could dig his heels in and refuse to budge. One of those deceptively quiet men who could be stubborn if the mood took him. Not to be underestimated, she decided. Quite attractive, too. She liked his brown hair. But he looked tired. A man with too much on his mind.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but Joe went to Vienna to write a piece for Commentary. I believe the journal is owned by your brother-in-law.’

  That was the bombshell, establishing the connection between Leman and Sykes. Pountney’s reaction showed he was taken aback by what she’d said. She felt pleased with herself. It was a small victory but it made up for the high-handed way his colleagues had treated Esther.

  ‘Are you sure of that?’ Pountney asked.

  ‘Joe told me before he disappeared that he was writing something for Commentary and when I saw him two days ago, Sykes made no secret that he’d commissioned an article from Joe. You can telephone him if you want to.’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary.’ Pountney was writing in a notebook. ‘Did Sykes tell you what Joe was doing for him? Did he mention the nature of his commission?’

  ‘He said he’d asked Joe to write a piece on Europeans living with the threat of communism, what it’s like for people whose countries border on the Soviet bloc. In any political crisis they’re the ones on the front line.’

  Pountney looked at her enquiringly. ‘Why do I get the impression you aren’t convinced by that explanation, Miss Livesey?’

  ‘Joe’s an economic analyst, not a journalist. The proprietor of a political journal like Commentary could find dozens of more suitable people to write a piece like that, couldn’t he? Why ask Joe?’ Pountney’s silence forced her to continue. ‘In the last few days before he disappeared, he wasn’t his usual self at all. He was miles away, distracted. His mind was where he was going even though he hadn’t got there yet. I’d have expected him to have been worrying about what he was going to write, that would have been more in character. Despite his abilities, he’s not very confident about himself.’

  Pountney sucked on the end of his pencil. ‘I see.’ More comments in the notebook. ‘You’re suggesting that your analysis of Joe’s subsequent behaviour has another explanation?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘What might that be?’

  ‘I think Joe was on to something and whatever it was, Sykes had put him up to it. Which is why he disappeared. The commission was a cover story, nothing more. There was never any intention to write an article.’

  She was implicating Sykes now. She wondered what Pountney would make of that. Could he be even-handed?

  ‘If we assume that what you’re saying is true, then the consequence is that Sykes must be lying. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’d prefer to say he’s knows more than he’s letting on, that he’s deliberately hiding something. I think he has a pretty good idea where Joe is because he sent him there.

  But I suspect he’s as mystified as we are about his disappearance. I don’t think that was ever part of his plan.’

  ‘But you’ve no evidence for such an allegation?’

  ‘Nothing more than I’ve told you, no.’ She felt tears pricking
at her eyes. ‘I can’t imagine another reason for Joe disappearing into thin air.’

  ‘People don’t disappear into thin air, Miss Livesey. They vanish because they want to or because someone makes them do so, usually against their will.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I am grateful to you for coming. I hope this hasn’t been too much of an ordeal. We will follow up what you’ve told us, you can count on that. I’ll arrange to have a word with my brother-in-law and when I’ve done so, I’ll come back to you.’

  3

  When Sykes telephoned a week later to suggest they meet for a drink after work, Leman’s first instinct had been to refuse. He’d had a trying day at the Institute working on Soviet policy issues with an argumentative White Russian whose ferocious halitosis was ‘a deadly weapon at anything less than three feet’. Sykes clearly had other ideas. Leman gave way to a barrage of insistence, learning quickly that if you said no to Sykes he behaved like a spoiled child until you changed your mind, which he clearly expected you to do.

  The office was in a row of Regency houses on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Leman was ushered into a high-ceilinged, book-lined room on the first floor overlooking the square. Sykes, he discovered, had no small talk. He said what was on his mind without preamble.

  He was picking up signals, he told Leman as he poured him a drink, that suggested the communist alliance was nowhere near as secure as the Kremlin wanted the West to believe. Was that Leman’s impression too?

  ‘What kind of signals?’ Leman asked.

  ‘A growing restlessness in Poland, East Germany, Hungary. Incidents of dissent, individuals refusing to accept what the Soviets impose, like the enforced teaching of Russian in schools. Nothing major, no public demonstrations, no violence. Trouble simmering just below the surface. Small-scale but significant.’