by Chris Petit
‘One thing Philby couldn’t change was his stammer.’
‘A lot of men of that generation stammered. It doesn’t make Furse into Philby.’
‘Would you say there was a resemblance?’
‘It’s too late for this conversation.’
From her reticence, Collard wondered if she hadn’t been in on the whole thing too.
‘Look,’ she said carefully, ‘I’m worried you’ve had a terrible shock with everything you told me about you and your son. I think you should talk to a doctor.’
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘You’re putting me in a difficult position. I think you must seek medical help.’
‘Medical help?’ He knew he was under pressure, but it wasn’t clinical.
She sighed. ‘For some reason you have become fixated on Angleton. I told you I thought he was in the grip of psychosis.’
She trailed off. Collard sensed something had happened to make her change her mind about him. From the start of the call she had sounded not hostile exactly, more disappointed in him.
‘Help me, please. I’m lost here.’
‘All right,’ she said eventually. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you. A man spoke to me about you. He knew all about you.’
‘An American? Was his name Sheehan?’
‘He didn’t give his name but he was an American.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘We spoke on the telephone.’
‘Was his voice high-pitched, a little sinister?’
‘Will you listen, please. His voice has nothing to do with it. It was what he said.’
Collard could not work out how Sheehan had traced him to Wales.
‘Was he the one who said I was mad?’
‘He was politer than that. He said you had built a house of cards. Everything you told me was based on the fact that the man you saw on the day of the crash was Angleton.’
‘Yes. There was the motto, the school. The man was your guest in Wales.’
‘It couldn’t have been Angleton you saw that day. Angleton’s dead.’
Collard stared at the receiver after Valerie Traherne had hung up, refusing to believe she was right. If she was then he had been chasing phantoms.
Reeds shone bone-white in the moonlight and rippled in the wind. On the horizon a moving vehicle lit the night sky. Collard saw he had left his own headlights on.
Collard carefully dialled the Arlington number and listened to the connection being made down the overseas line.
This time his call was answered. A woman said hello. She sounded bright and elderly. Collard pictured parquet flooring, simple, elegant furniture.
He asked to speak to James Angleton.
‘You can’t. He’s not here.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘He won’t be back.’
Collard stared hard at the night. The lights from the moving vehicle were brighter.
‘Is there a number where I can reach him?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ the woman said drily. ‘Jim passed on.’
Valerie Traherne might still be wrong, if Angleton had just died.
‘I’m sorry. I saw him only just before Christmas.’
‘Who are you?’
The woman’s voice was sharper.
‘He recognized me because I was wearing his old school tie.’
‘This Christmas past?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am afraid you are very much mistaken, young man. Jim’s been dead nearly two years. He died in 1987.’
‘He quoted the school motto.’
‘What school was that?’
‘Malvern, in England.’
‘Certainly Jim was there but it wasn’t Jim you talked to, not last month.’ Her voice was not without amusement. ‘Jim would have been intrigued by your story. It’s the kind of thing that appealed to him.’
‘It was the day of the big airline crash.’
‘Oh, I see. Either you have a sick mind or this is a joke in very poor taste.’
‘Honestly, it’s not. I’ve just come from the hotel in Wales where he stayed in 1986. One of the men who died in the air crash was there with him. Colonel Barry, Chuck Barry, nearly the same as the singer—’
‘Jim never went to Wales.’
‘Not officially, of course.’ He floundered. ‘He was there for a secret meeting with Kim Philby.’
‘Now you are being ridiculous,’ she said and put down the phone.
Collard walked out of the phone box, back to the car, determined not to be undone. A peripheral movement made him look up.
He couldn’t understand what the man was doing there or where he had come from.
It was Sheehan’s sidekick, Parker.
Parker stopped, equally surprised. The Range Rover was parked down the road behind him, its lights off. Parker’s blow caught him on the temple and stars danced before Collard’s eyes and he thought stupidly, as he slipped into unconsciousness, that it was not just a figure of speech.
Collard came to in what smelled like a chicken coop. His hands were bound in front of him and his head throbbed. Two men waited for him. They had removed his shoes and socks, and now hauled him to his feet and blindfolded him. The wire binding him cut into his wrists. The men had to support him as they moved outside across sharp, open ground. Collard felt ploughed earth underfoot, the ridges making it hard to balance.
After several minutes they stopped and told him not to move. He heard the men walk away. When he was sure they were gone he removed his blindfold. He was standing in the middle of the field and Parker was walking towards him. Collard saw the gun in the man’s right hand. Running was out of the question in bare feet.
He ran anyway, stumbling painfully, unbalanced by his tied hands and the ridged field, his breath hoarse in his throat. He kept tripping and falling and hauling himself on, a pathetic spectacle for Parker’s amusement. The last time he fell too awkwardly to get up and lay helplessly on his back like an insect waiting to be squashed. Parker leaned down and placed the barrel of the pistol against Collard’s forehead and asked why he had been following them.
Collard denied it. Parker cocked the pistol. Collard lay staring at the black dome of the night, less afraid than angry that he could do nothing for Nick now. He had taken stupid risks, telling himself it was for Nick’s sake, only to end up getting shot.
Parker gave a grunt of cruel satisfaction as he knelt down and grabbed a fistful of Collard’s hair, yanking his head back and jamming the pistol under his jaw.
‘Who are you working for?’
Collard squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the bullet to tear through his throat, up into his brain. Instead Parker offered him a last chance to talk.
‘Or it’s lights out.’
Collard sensed a glimmer in the blackness of his head. When he put it into words he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
‘I’m working for Nigel Churton,’ he said slowly. ‘Who are you working for?’
‘Fuck,’ said Parker, and for a moment Collard thought he would pull the trigger anyway.
He hobbled uncomfortably back over the broken field while Parker said nothing. Collard sensed the man was sulking. At least he had agreed to untie him which made walking a little less difficult. The moon was lost behind clouds making it harder to see.
Parker led him to a darkened outbuilding and locked Collard in, telling him to wait.
Collard felt more foolish than anything; an amateur among professionals.
Parker clearly thought so too when he returned with Collard’s shoes and told him he could go. He escorted Collard to the car and gave him the keys. Collard got in and saw the shoe box and invoice were gone.
Parker grabbed his door as Collard tried to close it and he again thought Parker wasn’t going to let him go after all.
‘Go home,’ Parker said. ‘You are way out of your depth.’
Dead Man Dreaming
Angleton had a map in hi
s head.
He was a ghost in his own afterlife – though strictly there was no after and no life, only the state of in-death. As a posthumous spook, a faulty receiver as in life: the only thing he had learned was you kept making mistakes.
He dreamed even in death, of a future television programme in which a wife warned her mobster husband, ‘None of it lasts.’ True.
Fly fishing: the names of flies always reminded him of those innocuous sounding companies that operated out of towns near Langley, fronts for Company subcontractions.
He missed movies. Double bills of Westerns had been his favourite. The Jimmy Stewart films with Anthony Mann the director, preferred to that sentimental old bullying drunk Ford. Raoul Walsh, another eyepatch man. Terror in a Texas Town, the name of its director long forgotten. He could see blind Borges sitting in the back of darkened cinemas of Buenos Aires playing his beloved Westerns, picturing their terrain from the dialogue and soundtrack.
He recalled Francis Ford Coppola’s turkey, Apocalypse Now, saved by Duvall, an actor he made a point of watching, and his line, ‘Charlie don’t surf!’, which echoed his own refrain, ‘Jews don’t have oil.’
He saw Philby’s father, St John, Arabist and maverick adventurer, around 1922 or 3 standing next to Allen Dulles, young lawyer and future ‘spymaster’, as the newspapers would like to call him, in the dirt of the Middle East. (Oh, that old Mesopotamian Rag! So elegant, so swellegant!) They carved up the twentieth century between them, as effectively as anyone had; oil its necrophiliac lifeblood, America’s addiction.
Look to the fathers; but no one did.
Those Spooky Boys
Lotte was back in the office, armed with a double box of Kleenex. She fussed over Collard. Facing the staff hadn’t been as bad as he feared. They were as keen to avoid the subject of the crash as he was. Only Lotte had examined him closely for signs of distress. He in turn thought something was worrying her. She waved his concern aside.
‘I could have done with another day in bed, that’s all.’
She was dressed disastrously as usual, with a grey cardigan over a bright pink tracksuit, and her hair was rinsed an even more startling blue than Collard remembered.
After Parker’s warning of the previous night, he had decided that turning up for work as normal was the best prescription. Otherwise he would be left stranded on his high ledge looking down at his tiny life.
‘How is everything?’ he asked Lotte, who jumped like she had been caught doing something wrong. She snatched a handful of tissues and blew her nose.
Her phone rang.
‘For you. A Ms Stack.’ She pulled a face. To her women were Miss or Mrs.
Collard took the call in his office.
‘Evelyn’s been in hospital,’ was the first thing Stack said. ‘Heart attack. He’s home now.’
‘My God.’
All the usual ambushes were still in place. The larger disaster did nothing to stop those. Evelyn was only fifty-eight. He seemed older, with the wear and tear of booze and nicotine. The plummy old-school mannerisms and toff’s drawl were from another generation.
Stack said, ‘Have you time to meet later? There’s something I need to talk about.’
‘We can talk now if you like.’
‘I’d rather not on the phone.’
He wondered if she thought his telephone was tapped.
She turned out to live less than a mile from him, between Chalk Farm and Kentish Town; another coincidence of geography, he thought, as he suggested his hotel bar. She said eight o’clock was fine.
Collard hung up, curious, and rang Evelyn who sounded falsely cheerful. ‘Ticker’s good as new. Can start all over again.’
He failed to disguise the fear in his voice.
‘What can you tell me about Kim Philby and James Angleton?’
‘Dear boy, what do you want to know? I wrote the book.’
Evelyn lived off West End Lane, again not far from Collard, who wondered if he would be visiting if Evelyn had been stuck in South London. His voice sounded frail on the outdoor buzzer. Frayed carpet slippers added to the impression of battered convalescence. He looked little more than skin and bones.
The flat took up the first floor of a large stucco house. The fixtures hadn’t been replaced in several decades nor, Collard noticed as he passed through a dark corridor, had the place been decorated or tidied. Housekeeping was clearly an alien concept, heroically so.
Evelyn led the way down into a high kitchen. He hadn’t graduated to an electric kettle and lit the gas ring.
The view was of bare gardens and trees. The room was big enough to take a large table in the centre where Evelyn worked, on a battered portable typewriter. A gas fire made the room too hot. Evelyn, looking glum, said he felt the cold more than usual at the moment. Collard wondered how many people had ever come into the flat. Evelyn’s socializing would have been done in the bars and lobbies of the world’s hotels.
Evelyn laced Collard’s tea with a splash of whisky, but left his own.
Collard explained everything that had happened from the impossible sighting of the man he believed was Angleton to Beech’s disappearance. Evelyn fiddled with a packet of cigarettes as he listened, taking one out, putting it in his mouth and replacing it unlit, then repeating the action.
‘Bravo,’ he said when Collard was done. ‘Never mind that the initial sighting which prompted your investigation defies rational explanation unless you were the recipient of a psychic visitation. Do you believe something like that happened?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither. Pity.’
Evelyn phoned his paper and asked for Obituaries. He flirted with someone that sounded like an old flame.
‘Angleton, James Jesus, died 1987. Fax it over, there’s a love. And send Philby while you’re about it. Initials H.A.R. making his full initials HARP which is what he’s playing now, if he’s lucky.’ He looked at Collard. ‘Because of his initials his code-name for himself was Angel. Did you know that?’
Collard didn’t even know that Philby was dead. He skipped obituaries but that would have been news. He must have been away.
‘Two dead spooks,’ Evelyn went on. ‘Spook, as in spy, becomes spook, as in spirit or ghost. The question is what kind of spook did you see? Certainly not a black man.’
He was laughing at his joke as the phone rang.
‘That’ll be the fax. Save my legs, would you? It’s in the study, second door on the right.’
Evelyn’s study consisted of an old partner’s desk, faded Oriental rug and thousands of books and newspapers, stacked floor to ceiling, some on shelves, some in towers. Every available surface was covered, including the desk and the floor. Nothing had been thrown out or dusted in years. Collard sneezed. He located the fax by its hum, hidden under more papers.
It was Angleton’s obituary: a photo portrait came through upside down showing him still young.
Back in the kitchen, Evelyn asked, ‘Is that your man?’
Collard looked at the picture the right way up, a younger version of what he remembered, skin stretched like a mask, the eyes with the same mirthless humour, suggesting the hollow laugh of a man who, in ceasing to find life a joke, had stumbled across the biggest one of all.
‘Here’s a coincidence,’ Evelyn said. ‘Angleton and Philby died on exactly the same day, a year apart. Angleton kicked the bucket on 11 May, 1987 and Philby in 1988. Uncanny! Spooky even!’
Evelyn giggled and after a moment said he had thought his heart attack would kill him, too. It was like being grabbed by iron claws.
Evelyn had been a reporter in Beirut, arriving there at the end of 1963, just after Philby’s defection. ‘He used the lobby of the Hotel Normandie as his unofficial office. He had an arrangement to collect his mail there.’
‘Where was Angleton?’
‘Still in Washington, head of CIA counter-intelligence. A story went round Beirut that Angleton was gunning for Philby. My impression was Angleton once had a crush o
n Philby. Nothing homo, but Philby was everything Angleton wanted to be. It had made the betrayal all the harder. Philby had committed the unforgivable sin. The story in Beirut was Angleton was using a former spook to tail Philby and was close to bringing him in.’
‘But Philby slipped the net before Angleton could close it.’
‘Tipped off by British intelligence, according to some sources.’
‘Does that make sense?’
‘Presumably it preferred Russia had him to America.’
Collard took the photograph of Angleton from his wallet. Evelyn examined it for a long time.
‘Not the most specific picture I’ve seen. It might be Jim Angleton. The same with Mr Furse; could be Philby. Let’s take Angleton as given, but I’ve not heard a squeak about Philby wanting to leave Moscow.
‘The tall gent in the white mac, however, is no more Scobie than I am. I’ll bet anything the third man in the picture is none other than the author of The Third Man.’
‘Graham Greene!’
‘Scobie was Greene’s character in The Heart of the Matter. Angleton, Greene and Philby all knew each other in the war and Greene met Philby in Moscow in 1987, the first recorded meeting since his defection. Perhaps this photograph shows that there had been previous unrecorded ones.’
‘Why would they meet in Wales?’
‘Maybe Philby wanted to come back and got Greene to play go-between. You could ask Greene but you’d not get anything. He’d want the story for himself.’
Collard showed Evelyn the photograph of Beech.
Evelyn grunted. ‘His brother went down for gun-running, squealing all the way that he had been fitted up, that he was a secret agent on a government assignment who’d been shafted.’
‘Was he?’
‘They all say that, standard defence. As for Sandy Beech, I suspect I know him as “Mr Nero”. He tried to sell me the “truth” behind his brother’s arrest. The name certainly came in quotation marks, and I guessed the same would go for the truth. Only spoke on the phone.’
‘Valerie Trahrene said he had trouble pronouncing his rs.’
