The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  ‘You will have to take that up with Special Branch.’

  ‘I’m surprised Special Branch was considerate enough to think of leaving the key.’

  She gave a wan smile. ‘So am I.’

  He let himself into the cold, dark house. The heating was off. When he went to turn it on he saw how offensive the police had been in their carelessness. One of their dogs had been allowed to take a shit on the stone floor in the kitchen. Collard stared at the desiccated remains. The downstairs toilet had been pissed in and not flushed, a cigarette butt staining the water a foul brown.

  The answerphone had been switched off. The tape of messages had been removed. That detail made him realize how thorough and petty these people were. They must have returned to the house more than once, as recently as the day before, because the machine had been working until then.

  At least the phone hadn’t been disconnected. He wondered if they had put a tap on the line, in case Nick did call.

  He dialled the code for West Germany then Frankfurt and spoke to the desk at the airport hotel. The receptionist he wanted to speak to had checked them in on the night of the twentieth, professing to remember Collard from previous trips and making a fuss over Nick.

  She was back from her holiday now and after reminding understood who he was.

  ‘Yes, I remember you were with your son.’

  ‘It’s my son I’m phoning about.’ He was aware people might be listening in. ‘Can you remember seeing him with anyone else in the hotel, a girl perhaps?’

  ‘Not at the desk, no, I don’t think so.’

  She sounded polite but mystified.

  Collard tried to come up with a question to prompt her memory. He stood there, bereft, wanting to turn the clock back.

  ‘A girl,’ she repeated. ‘Let me think. I thought about him afterwards because it was the day of the crash and some of our guests would have been on that flight. I know he was in the lobby in the morning because he saw me and waved. That’s right. They were standing by the plants.’

  Collard seized on the word ‘they’.

  ‘They were having an argument because I remember I was surprised when your son stopped and smiled at me.’

  ‘An argument?’

  ‘He was upset about something.’

  ‘Was this with the girl?’

  ‘No, it was with a man.’

  A man. Pressed for details, she said she could see Nick from her desk but his companion was mostly hidden behind the foyer’s potted plants. Collard urged her to remember. She confidently discounted his description of Angleton. All she would say was that she thought Nick was with a middle-aged man. Collard wondered if it might even have been him she was describing. At the end of the call she excused herself sweetly, saying, ‘I only had eyes for your son.’

  Collard looked around the unwelcoming hall. Before Christmas he had left a perfectly ordinary house he had given little thought to, except to wonder occasionally about its market value. Now it had been violated and abandoned. He no longer wanted to sleep in the bedroom once shared with Charlotte. He had been turned into a stranger in his own home. The palpable air of evacuation made the atmosphere all the more oppressive. At the bottom of the stairs he experienced trepidation unknown since childhood: the fear of going up and finding the familiar had become unrecognizable.

  Nick’s room looked like a bomb had hit it: drawers upturned, cupboards emptied and nothing put back, callousness apparent everywhere. It was like an extension of the crash, more shocking for being in his home. Collard had never felt more lonely or punished. He had been spared being on the plane for what? So anything he cared about could be smashed or taken from him.

  He tidied away, aware of being close to prying, knowing the police would have got there first. Collard found painful reminders of Nick’s interrupted life everywhere: a half-used tube of toothpaste on his basin; clothes not taken; cassette cases of tapes Nick had been playing before going away. There was no sign of the tapes; removed, presumably, by the investigators.

  He walked up the hill for his appointment at the bank. The manager was straightforward, polite and not to be moved. Collard emphasized his concern as a parent and got nowhere.

  They sat in a panelled room that smelt of cigarette smoke. The manager was coming up to retirement age. With his severely brushed hair and military moustache, he radiated discretion. They weren’t so different from spies, Collard thought: money and secrecy. The bank’s rules and regulations were there to be followed and not open to interpretation. The only way Nick’s account could be accessed was by official investigation; Collard would first have to take up the matter with the police.

  ‘I’m not unsympathetic,’ said the manager, standing to show the interview was over. It had taken less than five minutes. ‘But there are no short cuts I can offer.’

  They shook hands. The manager looked shifty and Collard realized there was another reason for the man’s caution. He would have been approached by Customs and Excise wanting to access his own accounts for its investigation.

  Collard was struggling with the padlock on the front door when the telephone rang. He cursed, sure he wouldn’t reach it, positive it was Nick. He got the door open and grabbed the receiver, expecting to be cut off.

  ‘Nick, is that you?’

  ‘Nick? No, this is Oliver. You’re back.’ It was Round. Collard had walked back from the bank depressed at being reminded about the Customs and Excise investigation, and now Round would be calling to talk it over. But it turned out to be Nick whom Round wanted to talk about.

  ‘Have you heard from him?’

  ‘No. What about you?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  Round had always been a diligent godfather, generous with summer holidays when Collard had been hard up, inviting Nick to villas and farms, waving aside any contribution.

  ‘I don’t quite know how to put this, but I’ve been told there’s a file on Nick. Erm, to do with this . . .’

  Round’s sentences tailed away when he was embarrassed. At the age of eight it had happened all the time; hardly at all now.

  ‘Have you seen this file, whatever it is?’

  ‘Not as such. Nigel Churton told me about it. He recognized the name and asked if it was your boy, didn’t know I was his godfather.’

  Collard knew Churton’s name without being able to place it. He turned out to be the man in charge of the government investigation into the disaster.

  ‘Are you part of the team?’ Collard asked.

  Round gave a deprecating laugh. ‘No, absolutely not. I’ve known Nigel for yonks. I’m seeing him for a late breakfast tomorrow. I’m sure he won’t mind if you came along. It would be a good idea to put our heads together over Nick. Fortnum’s tomorrow at ten.’

  ‘Where do you think Nick is?’

  ‘He’ll turn up in that charming way of his. Probably got himself in a scrape that otherwise would have gone unnoticed and has ended up under the microscope. This bloody bomb caught everyone on the hop. No stone unturned and all that.’

  Round sounded casually optimistic. Why not use his old friend’s connections, Collard thought. That was how the system worked: families and connections.

  Unable to face the house, Collard walked up the hill and checked into what Charlotte had called the Love Motel, where several acquaintances had conducted daytime affairs. The functional 1960s building was out of keeping with the stucco of the area and was already running to seed. He was given a room at the front overlooking the petrol station.

  He arranged Angleton’s books in a pile on the bedside table. Then he went to the mini-bar fridge, took a whisky out and, reminded by the tiny bottle of the unbroken miniature from the crash, burst into tears.

  Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t have been out of the question to glance out of the window and see Nick slouching home from one of the cafés his friends frequented up the hill.

  Collard looked around the room. His single occupancy depressed him. He felt like a man hid
ing, someone who had done something wrong.

  Sleep refused to come. Whenever he closed his eyes he was in the disintegrating fuselage.

  At one, he gave up and read about Kim Philby instead.

  The book Valerie Traherne had given him covered Philby’s career as a spy up to his defection to Moscow in 1963. After the horrors of Collard’s imagination, Philby’s story of espionage and betrayal was familiar, even comforting. He had followed the scandal as a boy, as a result of having started to read newspapers the year before, for the salacious details of the Profumo–Keeler affair, a mysterious and enticing world of pimps, prostitutes, orgies, swimming-pool frolics and drug parties. Sex was only murkily understood at his school. He remembered Round had once announced, ‘I’m going to marry a blonde and screw her every night.’ He hadn’t succeeded in the first, and given his workload Collard doubted if he had managed the second. He still couldn’t decide how the plump schoolboy with his tiresome enthusiasms had transformed into such a sleek entrepreneur.

  The Philby book was old, well written and well read, with pencil markings in the text. The first was an exclamation mark next to Philby drinking fifty-two brandies with Guy Burgess while on a binge at the Moda Yacht Club in Istanbul.

  Three exclamation marks had been inserted next to Philby’s claim that Burgess was an uncontrollable drunk. Burgess’s homosexuality was noted with a triple underlining. Burgess had caused an international scandal by defecting to Moscow a dozen years ahead of Philby; against Philby’s claim that the Americans had discovered Burgess’s sun-lamp could be used as a radio transmitter was written the word ‘balls!’.

  It was the first and only note, in the same spidery scrawl as Angleton’s hand in the register and fishing diaries.

  Angleton had several entries. His name was underlined in one instance. ‘Angleton’s doubts about Philby, formed in the last phase of the war, hardened into suspicion.’ A large question mark had been written in the margin, followed by several smaller exclamations.

  Angleton emerged as a senior spy with a career dating back to 1943 when he was part of an American elite permitted top-security clearance into the British wartime spy system, with access to its most closely guarded secret, the penetration of coded German intelligence. Angleton had served his apprenticeship under Philby at what was jokingly known as the Ryder Street School for Spies. Other staff included Graham Greene, already established as the author of Brighton Rock.

  Values had changed since then and Philby had changed them. The old Roman virtues of duty and patriotism betrayed by Philby were replaced by hedonism and self-serving, both characteristic of Collard’s more indifferent generation. Did Angleton, that deranged old man stumbling around Frankfurt airport, still subscribe to those Roman virtues? Collard had seen none of the glamorous demeanour of the spymaster in the book. What to make of a colleague of Graham Greene and Philby singling out his teenage son to warn him of imminent disaster?

  Collard looked out of the window. The remnants of the Welsh snow had reached London. What fell barely settled before it melted. He hadn’t thought to look who had written the book. When he saw he was very surprised.

  Limited Omniscience

  Angleton saw what he hadn’t then, that he and Philby were out of Henry James or Edith Wharton or Ford Madox Ford – an essay in cultural pretension, a comedy of manners, a post-Victorian hangover uncomfortably positioned in the modern world. They became like one of those contrived minuets found in highly developed, decadent court societies, which simultaneously managed to be a game of Russian roulette.

  The line, as far as he could decide, was from secrecy to corruption to greed. Or maybe it was a circle.

  There were elements of ghost story too, of men haunted by their fathers, also curiously ghostly.

  Angleton’s job was Angleton’s invention, a work of strange genius, quite unrepeatable: thousands of meaningless files and years of futile speculation, the only real penetration the salacious bugging of Washington, starting back when everything was expansive and life was Byzantine, with a sense of fun and future. The fun to be had from blackmailing that old hypocrite and homo-hater J. Edgar Hoover, dirty snapshots of him sucking boyfriend Clyde’s dick exchanged for dropping his opposition to the founding of the new central intelligence service. The fun of working with that old Jewish gangster Lansky, whose technical boys had grabbed the Hoover snaps. The fun of being ‘No Knock’ Angleton, walking in on Allen Dulles to show him Hoover with a mouthful of Clyde, and explaining proudly, ‘It’s called a fish-eye lens.’ Lansky, also in possession of the evidence, was genial. ‘Jim, deep down I think you are another Mexican bandit.’

  After they had got rid of Angleton in 1974 no one could figure out how anything worked. It had all been in his head.

  The fun, above all, of famous long and boozy dry-Martini lunches: the Kim and Jim show, grand post-war reunion, Kim’s stutter brightening the booths of dull Washington restaurants.

  Luncheon indiscreet.

  On sitting down at Harvey’s, an English-style chophouse, Angleton said, ‘I am on to you and your KGB friends.’

  ‘Hahahahah!’ went Kim, covering so fast Angleton missed the flash of panic, being concerned with ordering the drinks. Both men laughed easily. That night Kim’s hand shook violently as he lifted his glass.

  They turned into family men with long-suffering wives, embarked on the slow suicide of drinking and smoking which was considered a permissible existence in an age of extraordinary sexual tension (amended by that revolting homo Guy Burgess to: ‘Not extraordinary, atomic sexual tension!’).

  The music changed from jazz to rock to pop, from detachment to Johnnie Ray, the Nabob of Sob. Angleton was barely aware of the fault lines. On the surface he lived a tranquil suburban existence, dressed the part in Brooks Brothers suits, with fob watch, New & Lingwood shirts and homburg. Only Kim’s house, with Burgess lurking in the basement, and a pack of unruly children, was feral, a ramshackle Bohemian place with an unkempt garden running down to woods.

  Angleton was back in Rome in a room and so drunk he could feel the fillings in his teeth and his swollen liver. Philby was in tears. He had flown in smashed and unannounced from Istanbul and spent the next three days entirely in Angleton’s company, sozzled, on a marathon booze-up. A woman was Angleton’s first guess; in fact, a dropped defector, picked up by the Russians.

  ‘The most appalling balls-up! The Embassy phone was tapped.’

  Philby did his best spaniel’s eyes. ‘Good dog, Kim. Have another.’

  Whenever in later life Angleton heard the song from The Jungle Book, ‘I wanna be like you-hoo-hoo’, he was reminded of that lost weekend. His children played it on the radiogram all the time. Every listening replete with ironies.

  Their first meeting: Philby the teacher, Angleton the student, Ryder Street, 1943. Some dozed in the soporific atmosphere of the lecture hall, Angleton shutting his eyes only to concentrate. Philby threw a stick of chalk at him, in its near-silent whistle a memory of old classroom humiliations.

  ‘It seems Mr Angleton can spy with his eyes shut. Perhaps he would care to remind us of the four ways of penetrating a foreign service, other than by signals intelligence.’

  ‘Doubling captured agents. Stealing foreign documents. Exploiting enemy representatives in neutral countries. An agent in place.’

  ‘And what is the advantage of an agent in place?’

  Philby stepped from the lectern and climbed the gangway between the tiered benches until he was standing over Angleton.

  ‘The value of an agent in place is as a source of validation. Validation, more than signals intelligence, is the essence of counter-espionage. An agent in place is the surest way of controlling information.’

  In the light of Philby’s betrayal, Angleton often reexamined that moment for some giveaway missed – the tiniest chink of the traitor at work – but found only Philby’s Cheshire Cat grin.

  Full English

  Collard arrived late at Fortnum and Mason. He had
run down Piccadilly and was sweating as he entered that hushed temple for the purveyance of fine foods where no one looked like they ever hurried. There had been a delay on the Northern Line.

  Oliver Round and Nigel Churton were waiting in a discreet corner of the restaurant, as English as their surroundings. Churton was a dapper, pampered man in his late fifties, with rigorously smoothed hair and close-shaved cheeks smelling of Lentheric. Gold-rimmed spectacles showed off eyes of the palest blue. His manner and dress were typical of the offhand confidence shown by men secure in the English establishment. The pink shirt hinted at a flamboyance denied by his sober pinstripe; Jermyn Street and Savile Row.

  Collard knew Round thought nothing of paying £70 for a bespoke shirt from Turnbull & Asser. He felt very off-the-peg.

  Churton resisted the blandishments of the menu and stuck to coffee and dry toast. Collard didn’t want to be stuck eating while trying to talk nor did he want to be seen to be copying. He compromised with the Continental breakfast.

  Churton, fully in charge, asked Round, who without hesitation said, ‘Full English.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Churton, leaving Collard thinking his choice was seen as a disappointment. ‘Oliver tells me your firm’s doing well. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to predict that security will be a huge market. The real test is how we handle the second phase.’

  Collard couldn’t decide if he was being vetted or invited in. He wondered if Churton knew about the Customs and Excise investigation and supposed he probably didn’t care, provided he came with Round’s endorsement. It was how these people worked, vaguely and by inference, on the assumption that you understood their language. Success depended on fitting in with like-minded men, privately educated and dedicated to repeating the experience for their children. Some irreverence was permitted. Round complained the school fees for his brood cost so much he couldn’t afford to replace his car or his wife. His wife’s Volvo estate had a sticker on the rear window proclaiming: I’M BACKING BRITAIN. It had been Round’s previously and he now drove a brand-new black Jaguar.