by Robert Moss
Pollitt professed to be shocked.
“I took a day trip to Portsmouth on my own,” Johnny announced.
It was George’s turn to look shocked. His reaction, at least, was genuine.
“I went to the address of your AM organizer in Ports-mouth,” Johnny continued. “Billy Shar. Wasn’t that the name, George? They’d never heard of him. But it was an interesting establishment. I believe some of your countrymen would refer to it as a knocking shop.’
George Mikes squirmed.
“Surely there’s some mistake,” Pollitt interceded. “George?”
“Er — I’ll look into it.”
“It gave me an idea, all the same,” Johnny said, relaxing a bit now he had scored a point. “When I was in Belgium, we ran a bordello that was popular with army officers. We developed some useful friends. It’s one of the ideas I want to work on here.”
“Well, you’re the expert, of course.” Pollitt cleared his throat. “I’m not qualified to discuss these — ah — technical matters.”
“It’s going to require money. Like some other ideas I’ve got.”
“Now, that could be a problem.” Pollitt was back on home territory. “We’re not a wealthy party, you know. Times are hard, and a lot of our lads are on the dole. We scrape by as best we can.”
“We gave you more than eighty thousand pounds last year.”
“Steady on, now. The figure was nothing like that.”
“I’ve seen the paperwork,” Johnny pressed on, implacable. “Thirty thousand in direct grants, the rest fudged in one way or another. Like subscriptions to all those copies of the Daily Worker and Soldier’s Voice that nobody ever reads. And how much of this cash goes on AM work? Sixty bloody quid a month.”
He paused to see if either would contradict him. Neither did.
Pollitt poured another drink and said, “I’m not used to being talked to like this.”
“I apologize for being direct. I’m impatient to get my job done and get back to where my friends risk getting shot simply because they are Communists. I’m sure that would suit both of us.”
Pollitt seemed to like this better. “What do you need?”
“I want to pick new men to run the AM network. And I’ll need money. Two thousand to start with.”
Pollitt opened his mouth to protest, but Johnny said curtly, “It’s already been authorized. You can check if you like.”
Pollitt’s expression finally resolved itself into a smile. “I’ll see what we can do.”
Johnny thought, I’ll have to watch my back with this bastard.
2
Johnny had his own channels of communication, and naturally they had nothing to do with the British party. His regular post office was a rare bookshop near the British Museum, a location that suited him because he could steal an hour or two, upon occasion, in the reading room that — or so he indulged himself — still harboured the ghosts of the authors of the Communist Manifesto. Sitting there leafing through old editions of the forerunners — Saint-Just, Buonarroti’s strange account of the Conspiracy of the Equals he sought to renew his revolutionary faith. He had memorized two telephone numbers. One belonged to “Smollett,” the resident director of Red Army intelligence; the other was to be used only if he needed to arrange sudden flight. But the post office that meant most to him, as his lonely weeks in England turned into months, was a corner newsagent five minutes away from his bolthole in Richmond. It was the sort of place that had grubby filing cards in the window advertising second-hand bicycles and models who gave French lessons. He got on friendly terms with the owner, stopping in to buy his cigarettes and his copies of the Manchester Guardian and the Tory press. He told the man he had to travel a lot in his job and would be glad of someone to receive his mail while he was away. Whether or not the newsagent saw through this excuse, he was happy to oblige.
From then on, intermittently, Johnny received envelopes from Germany addressed to “D. Green.” The tone of Sigrid’s first letters was cheerful, if forced. She thanked him for the small gifts he had sent — a book of Elizabethan poetry, a poster from the Tate — and told him she had been able to increase her earnings as a commercial artist and would soon be moving to a place of her own. He interpreted this to mean that she was doing regular work for Willi Münzenberg’s agitprop organization in Berlin.
In the later letters Sigrid’s tone turned sombre, even desperate. She chronicled the daily signals of Hitler’s as-cent, small things she witnessed in the streets, beatings of Jews, the defection of neighbours — even, it seemed, her father — to the Hitler movement. In the shadow falling over Germany, she seemed to read the death of love, of any hope of private fulfilment.
“Now I begin to understand you,” she wrote. “In the world as it is, there is no room for individuals, that is to say, neutrals. I will give up my art and work only as a draughtsman for the cause.” Then she added, in anguish, “But isn’t this another small triumph for the destroyers? I see Germany at the mercy of terrible legions that will trample everything human in the name of an abstract, impossible humanity. Some of them are singing the Internationale. On the day I join the party, I will destroy my canvases. Even the ones of you.”
He wrote back across the aching distance, begging her not to lose hope. “I’m coming for you,” he promised.
Sigrid’s letters never mentioned Helene. He found this vaguely ominous, though he tried not to brood on it. He had enough to worry about, trying to lick the British network into shape. He found an energetic man called Jim Straw, a carpenter by trade who had fought on the Somme and knew what wars were about, to take over from George. Together they located some of the sailors discharged after the Invergordon mutiny and put them to work in pubs near the docks at Southampton and Portsmouth. They recruited a sergeant at Catterick camp who had already formed an active cell. With help from Communists in the railwaymen’s and transport workers’ unions, Johnny roughed out plans for lightning strikes to prevent troops and war materiel from reaching the docks. But less than three hundred pounds of the money he had demanded from Pollitt had been forthcoming, and he was reduced to running to “Smollett,” the lugubrious Fourth Department man in London, for funds to pay his own rent.
He sent report after report to Berlin, describing his progress while excoriating Pollitt and the leadership of the British Communist Party. He half hoped that Pollitt was complaining loudly enough to get him recalled. Though he threw himself into his assignment, he felt on the sidelines in Britain. He belonged in Berlin, in the thick of the battle, with Heinz — and with Sigrid.
Besides, the more he saw of the British, the more his conviction grew that Engels was right. Here even the proletariat was bourgeois. The trade unions remained resolutely reformist, and the police and armed forces — for all his efforts — seemed almost impervious to Communist teachings. Even in the sour, smoky slums of the industrial north, in human slagheaps cast off by factories whose machines were half a century out of date, the workers weren’t signing up for any revolution. The British Empire was doomed — wasn’t the writing on the wall, for all to see? — yet the working class, more than any other social group, seemed to be lulled by the romance of the Raj. Throughout the nation the birthday of the dead Queen-Empress Victoria, May 24, was still celebrated as Empire Day.
On Empire Day 1932, Johnny watched hundreds of schoolchildren dutifully chanting Kipling’s hymn of dedication,
Land of our birth, we pledge to thee
Our love and toil in years to be
and found that in part of himself he envied them for their uncomplicated faith, their primitive sense of belonging.
Unlike Germans or Russians, the Englishman was allergic to abstract causes. Johnny remembered Max Fabrikant’s grudging admiration for the British as “reactionaries without complexes.” It would take more than his efforts or those of a thousand like him to bring down the foundations of the British Empire. Only the British themselves could do that, if they ever lost their nerve.
/> 3
In a larger plan the British Communists had their uses. Their seamen’s organization smuggled Comintern agents to India and all of the garrison colonies — Malta, Gibraltar, Aden, Hong Kong. Johnny saw it at work when Smollett called on him for a professional favour.
They sat side by side on a bench on Hampstead Heath. Beyond the trees men were hammering tent pegs and setting up booths, getting ready for a summer fair. Englishmen who had escaped from their offices to catch a few precious rays lay prone on the grass or lounged in deck chairs, jackets and ties discarded.
“We’re having trouble with Ved Gupta.” The Russian wiped his long, pendulous nose. He was getting a summer cold, the most maddening kind. “Do you know him?”
“Only by reputation. He runs the East Indian Seamen’s Association, doesn’t he?”
“He’s a greasy Hindu from Bengal,” Smollett said charitably. “Round and dumpy as a piece of nan.”
“What’s the problem?”
“We ordered him to move his headquarters to Calcutta. The bloody babu won’t go—”
Smollett broke off to stifle a sneeze.
“Perhaps he’s afraid his ex-wives will catch up with him,” Johnny suggested.
“I think he’s been lining his nest. He’s got his nose into some nice little rackets he doesn’t want to give up. Look, I know this isn’t really your parish, but I could do with some help.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pay him a visit. Find out what the score is. Then remind him who’s paying for his lifestyle and put some fear of God into him.”
“And if he won’t be persuaded?”
The Fourth Department man considered this. “Then we’ll have to get rid of him,” he concluded. “I wouldn’t put it past him to go crying to the police. Let me know what happens. Do you need any help?”
“I’ll manage with my own boys.”
Johnny’s personal network was expanding fast. He had rented rooms in Poplar, near the town hall, where he held training sessions for his best recruits. He had found a wiry Tasmanian, Barry Flynn, who had been to the Lenin School in Moscow, to take charge of the docks. He had promoted a thrusting young British Communist, John Gollan, to help run the national Apparat.
He told Flynn to pick a couple of sturdy young men who weren’t scared to use their fists and to meet him near the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel the following night. The babu lived and worked above the seamen’s club on the East India Dock Road.
Under the uncertain glow of the streetlamps, the street had the grainy, sepia look of an old photograph. There was a stir outside the club. A crowd of lascar seamen, some incoherently drunk, were apparently in the midst of a party.
Johnny led the way around the back and up a fire escape. He had already reconnoitred his ground.
He shouldered his way past the male secretary who tried to stop them at the door and found Ved Gupta in the midst of a business transaction. The Indian’s comfortable bulk overflowed a splendid mahogany desk as he scrabbled to sweep several wads of banknotes — American dollars — into the top drawer. There were two other men in the room: a turbaned Sikh, impassive and watchful, and a Cockney with a pinched, nervous face, who clutched a leather satchel and looked ready to jump out the window.
“Relax,” Johnny said to him. “We’re not the police.”
“I’ve seen this one before,” Barry Flynn remarked, pointing his thumb at the Cockney.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” Johnny said to Gupta, examining the lavish appointments of the room. He pulled back a louvered folding door and found a row of steel cabinets. “Are these your files?”
“I say, you can’t go in there! This is not at all seemly!” The babu’s voice trembled.
“I quite agree. I think we ought to talk privately, don’t you?”
Flynn was puzzling over the Cockney.
“I’ve got it!” he suddenly announced. “It’s the Ferret, isn’t it? Ferret Friedman! They had you up for dope running!”
Friedman ran for the inside door.
“She’ll be apples!” Flynn whooped at Johnny. He sprinted after Friedman and brought him down with a rugby tackle.
In a moment Flynn had the briefcase open. It was packed full of little oilcloth packets. He opened one, took a pinch of the powder inside, sniffed, then dabbed it on his tongue to make sure.
“Opium,” he pronounced.
“Did you get it from him?” Johnny demanded, pointing to Gupta.
The Ferret’s response was not very helpful. Flynn kicked him just once, in the kidneys.
“Yes,” Friedman grunted.
“How many of these deals have you done?”
“This is the first, I swear — blimey!”
A second, more vicious kick, brought the confession that the Ferret had done business with Gupta over a period of more than a year.
“All right,” Johnny said to him. “Out!”
The Ferret did not need a second invitation. Once he was gone, Johnny identified himself, and the babu’s trembling became more violent.
“I’m curious to see how much you’ve been making,” Johnny went to the desk, pushed Gupta aside and wrenched open the drawer. It was full of currency — at least four thousand dollars in American bills plus smaller amounts in British, German and Japanese notes.
“I can see now why you weren’t keen on moving to Calcutta,” Johnny said.
“Upon my word, sir, those are party funds. I can account for every penny.”
“Then you won’t object if we examine your financial records.”
“I am entirely at your disposal, sir. But my records are kept in Sanskrit. Perhaps you have studied the language?” The Babu displayed a gleaming row of teeth.
“Barry—” Johnny turned to Flynn. “Start clearing out those files, will you?”
“What’ll we put them in?”
“That will do for a start.” Johnny indicated the most expensive of the oriental rugs.
“You’re making a very great mistake,” Gupta protested, in high agitation. “Such behaviour is not tolerated in London. All my activities have the approval of the very highest authority.”
“Indeed? And who might that be?”
“I have had tea with Mr. Pollitt,” Gupta said triumphantly.
“I don’t doubt it.” Johnny called Smollett’s private number.
“Yes?”
“You were right. He’s turned the place into an opium den. I’d say he’s been pocketing five thousand a year.”
Smollett didn’t waste any time. He issued instructions that wound up the affair the same night. Gupta was bound and gagged and driven to Harwich by Flynn in the back of a van. Smollett’s agents were waiting at the harbour. They chloroformed the Indian, nailed him inside a packing crate and stowed him on board a freighter bound for Leningrad, via Antwerp.
“I’d like to see his face when he gets to the other end,” Smollett remarked to Johnny afterwards.
The episode deepened Johnny’s scepticism about his assignment. Everywhere he turned, he found the British Communist movement suppurating with corruption and betrayal. Activists like Flynn, willing to take risks without thought of personal gain, were exceptions. There might be few men as venal as Ved Gupta in Pollitt’s crowd, but there were even fewer revolutionaries.
4
“I’m glad to be able to repay a favour,” Smollett told him. “I’ve got good news for you.”
“You mean I’ve been recalled?”
“What are you thinking of? No, your woman’s coming.” It was Sigrid’s face that leaped into his mind, so vivid that his own features lit up. The light was gone the next instant. It’s Helene who is coming, he realized. Max is passing her back to me — and his OGPU friends in London.
He said, “When?”
“Thursday. She’s coming on the night-boat from Antwerp. You don’t look exactly overjoyed. Found a new one, did you?”
Johnny’s eyelids narrowed.
“It’s no
ne of my business, I know,” the Russian backed off. “Good luck all the same.”
Cecil Hitchcock, the elderly thespian who presided over the boarding house in Richmond, expressed mild dismay at the news that his foreign lodger was about to acquire a roommate whom Johnny described evasively as “his fiancée from the Continent.” It was not clear whether Mr. Hitchcock disapproved because the couple were unmarried or simply because the new lodger was to be a woman. Whatever its source, his disapprobation evaporated within an hour of Helene’s arrival. He waxed rhapsodic over her accent and her clothes — she appeared in a close-fitted suit with puff shoulders and a hat that dipped low across her forehead — and made her promise to take part in the musical soirees he held in his own apartment “for the pleasure of a few very discriminating friends.”
They walked in the park that afternoon. Across the greensward a herd of royal deer kept pace with them.
Helene stretched out her hand to him, and he took it. Her skin was cool and dry.
“Sigrid told me everything,” she said, not looking at him. “I expect you know that.”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t.”
“You might have told me first.”
“I was going to—”
“I would have thought you owed me that much. We’ve shared a few things together, you and I.”
“I never asked you about your lovers.”
“This is different.”
He did not contradict her. He watched her throat move as she swallowed. She was trying to bring herself to some kind of resolution.
After a long silence, she said, “We’ll go on as before. We both have work to do, responsibilities. But you must promise me that it’s over with Sigrid.”
“It’s not over. I’m in love with her.”
“Then you’re making a fool of yourself!” she burst out. She turned her face to the deer and he thought that she might be on the edge of tears. It struck him that he had never seen her cry.
He felt a surge of consuming tenderness towards this woman who had always seemed so utterly in command.
