‘First time you’ve met Randy, Mr Saunders?’ he asked, in a thick voice.
‘That’s right,’ said Philby. ‘I’m new here.’
‘He’s a shit,’ the man said, and drank some whisky. ‘My name’s Fielding, by the way. James Fielding. People call me Jimmy. I’m an Abominable like you. Glad to meet you.’ He put out his free hand and lurched slightly.
He was about the same build as Philby, with the same lined face and scruffy grey hair, and his voice was slurred and cultured. Philby recognized an awful mirror-image of himself and felt an uneasy empathy with the man. Not only was there this physical similarity between them; there was also the coincidence that ‘Fielding’ was the name Philby had chosen for his phoney British passport, with which he’d boarded the Troika-Caravelle in Leningrad and reached the sanctuary of the West. But there was another bond he shared with Fielding. They both disliked Randolph Grant. Philby had hated Grant on sight — hated him with those deep reflex instincts of the class-struggle that had been instilled in him far back in the Thirties, and which had marked his social conscience like a tattoo ever since. What had really appalled him about Grant was the way the man had been so ready — like everyone else in this country — to accept him as one of their own. Accept him into this fraternity of brash middlebrow bullies whom Philby had been fighting all his life. My God, he thought, I can’t be as bad as that!
He and Fielding stayed by the pool drinking, while the party swayed and cavorted round the glow of the charcoal fire, like a ritual dance to the pious attendance of the African servants who kept them freely supplied with the contraband whisky from Beira.
James Fielding was not a stimulating companion, and finally went to sleep in a long chair by the pool. Philby made his way over to the barbecue and had a few more drinks with Frobisher and his gang, while their host was absorbed with the attentions of a tall red-head — despite the presence of his latest wife, a formidable South African Jewess whose main attraction was said to be her share of a factory that had the concession for blankets to the Bantu townships.
Soon after midnight there were rumours that P. K. might show up; then came sniggers that he was ‘otherwise engaged’. And about two o’clock everyone came to attention while the National Anthem was played on a gramophone. The older guests stood rigid, with heads high, but several of the younger ones chattered and giggled. Philby took his leave soon afterwards. He was modestly satisfied with the evening. He had established himself without ostentation, had made a few contacts, and one friend.
He drove home carefully, watching out for the numerous police patrols who were quick to catch drunken drivers; and before going to bed he made sure that all the doors and windows were secured, and the alarm system switched on.
CHAPTER 25
Three days later, at 11.17 in the morning, a bomb exploded in Salisbury’s largest supermarket in the city centre. There were over two hundred people in the building at the time, most of them European women. Fourteen were killed instantly, five died in hospital, and a total of fifty-eight were injured, of whom seven were permanently maimed.
The explosion took place near the entrance, the windows of the surrounding buildings were blown in, and a number of people treated for cuts and shock, including a young woman who found a high-heeled shoe lying on the pavement with a foot inside it.
The bomb was believed to have been left in a carrier-bag, and to have consisted of about thirty pounds of gelignite, detonated by a sophisticated time-fuse. The police had cordoned off the area within minutes and questioned every shopper in the building, particularly the non-white staff. Nobody could remember anyone coming in with a carrier-bag, and there had been no suspicious Africans lurking about just before the explosion. But one woman in hospital was able to describe a short swarthy man, whom she’d taken to be an Italian or Greek immigrant, carrying two bags and making a number of random purchases, picking items off the shelves and tossing them into the bags as though he were on a shopping-spree.
One of the woman-cashiers thought she remembered him too, because he had paid with a Rhodesian twenty-dollar bill and seemed in a great hurry to get his change. She also thought he’d left only a few minutes before the explosion. It was the one lead the police had.
By noon the news had paralysed the city with a dull rage. African terrorists were the obvious suspects, though the police were disturbed by the ease and efficiency with which the outrage had been carried out. The possibility of it having been the work of European terrorists was not yet being even rumoured in the bars and drawing-rooms of Salisbury. The nightmare of all Whites in southern Africa — the appearance of a well-trained European terrorist movement — was still too awful to be openly entertained.
Kim Philby had no such doubts, however. He saw both the appalling reason and virtue behind this latest of Pol’s atrocities. For the moment Rhodesia seemed deceptively impregnable, enjoying the protection of her powerful neighbour to the south, and of the more doubtful Portuguese empire to the north and east. She remained a kind of nature reserve, where instead of wild life one saw the last of a tame but moribund species — the gin-and-tonic descendants of the Memsahibs, acting out the splendours of the British Raj in an affluent society that fed on Japanese cars and TV sets showing Portuguese programmes; on German cookers and Italian fridges; Portuguese wine, South African beer, and Chinese clothes from Hong Kong. It was a becalmed society, a false society. In his heart every White Rhodesian knew that he was dreadfully vulnerable.
Their greatest danger was a simple but insidious one. Most of them were recent European immigrants who enjoyed a safe prosperity in a pleasant climate. But once that safety ceased, and the prosperity began to wane, most of them would cut their losses and run — forsake their outlying farms and comfortable town houses, and seek the gilt-edged security of South Africa. Rhodesia would quickly become an embattled enclave where a handful of Poor Whites struggled stoically against hordes of mutinous Blacks — a miniature Congo, a second Algeria, another dismal monument to Colonialism, sliding into the same lethargic chaos as the rest of Black Africa.
Kim Philby now saw his main objective as not so much to infiltrate Rhodesian society and unmask the prominent Sanction-Busters, as to stake out strategic nerve-centres for targets of terrorism: restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels, shops, banks, big commercial buildings; factories and industrial complexes; railway junctions and airports. The odd well-placed bomb, the random ‘necessary killing’, would be enough to instil panic and despondency, and the rot would soon spread. Rhodesian morale would be sapped, and the bumptious Rhodesian Front would have to answer for the growing wave of terror. Mass emigrations would follow, and the White Rhodesian State would begin to crumble.
These were the dreams and aspirations that Philby enjoyed during his first few weeks in the country. He had little else to sustain him. No word came from Pol, though this did not worry him, since Pol had said he preferred to let Philby lie low and establish himself. Nor had London made contact. They usually ordered their regular local agents to make contact first — sometimes waiting months before identifying themselves. There were times when Philby wondered whether James Fielding was London’s man, and was biding his time, as well as keeping a wary eye on him. There was nothing in the man’s demeanour to arouse any direct suspicion — but from his own training Philby knew this was nothing to go by.
He continued to see Fielding several times a week, usually for their lunchtime drink at Meikle’s. These were not joyous occasions, but they afforded Philby one advantage. He was still nudging his way into the upper crust of Salisbury society. It was a closed society, and discriminated strongly in favour of those it felt worthy of it, and to these it extended a voracious warmth and sympathy.
On this third week Philby felt able to give a small cocktail party of his own. He invited Freddie Frobisher and Randy Grant, and their wives, and a number of hangers-on, as well as Fielding. Grant arrived late with a junior Minister — a small prune-faced man who’d been in the Royal Navy and
got quietly drunk — while the rest of the party went with a swing. Philby had managed to get hold of some Scotch, through a contact of Frobisher’s; and there was also French brandy and Havana cigars, acquired by a friend of Fielding’s from Cape Town.
Philby was careful not to get too drunk himself: not that he feared giving himself away, only that he might transgress some subtle border-line of behaviour that would offend his guests. He followed Horne’s advice: ‘You’ll be expected to drink like a fish, but hold your drink like a man. They expect you to get decently drunk.’
Apart from parties, his life was a quiet one. He even took to smoking a pipe — which he hadn’t done since before the war — and went so far as to pay large sums for his favourite English tobacco. His most immediate problem was getting hold of the news. In Moscow no one had frowned at his habit of collecting his airmail edition of The Times each day; but here he had to be more careful. A few British papers were to be found, usually a couple of days late, in the big newsagents, and these were bought up as soon as they arrived; but most were subscribed to by known or suspected opponents of the régime. Philby got round this dilemma by ordering the Daily Telegraph, which was considered to be reasonably respectable, and had it openly delivered to him at The Abominables’ Club, which occupied spacious premises opposite Meikle’s. He told his fellow ‘Snowmen’ that he couldn’t do without the British sporting news — an explanation that was accepted without reservation.
Otherwise, he played a shrewd game of bridge, tolerable backgammon, and was even persuaded to try his hand, with less success, at golf. As far as he knew, his old reliable charm was still working and everyone he met liked him and asked to see more of him.
By the end of his first month in Rhodesia he had made probably more friends than at any time in his life, and was accepted as a true Rhodesian gentleman.
Then, in his fifth week, he received a telegram at the Poste Restante, dispatched from Geneva the night before: SEE YOU HOTEL POLANA LOURENÇO MARQUES FRIDAY 8 PM — CHARLES. The message was in English.
Friday was two days ahead, which gave him time to apply for his Portuguese visa to Mozambique; then he booked a flight for Friday afternoon on Rhodesian Airways. He also telephoned the Polana Hotel to be told that a room had already been booked for him by a Monsieur Cassis, who was also staying in the hotel on Friday. Pol’s effrontery rather shocked Philby, who had been steeped in the lore of security all his adult life. Pol was a conspicuous person in any community; and his face had already been splashed across the world’s Press in connection with the Troika-Caravelle incident. Yet he now dared to expose himself on Philby’s doorstep, when a letter, or even an intermediary, would have surely done the job as well. Unless, of course, Pol had some special reason for coming so far.
Philby also realized that Pol’s hold over him was as firm as ever, and not for one moment did he seriously entertain the idea of not going to the rendezvous; for he knew that if he spurned Pol now, his continued existence in Rhodesia would not only be rendered impotent — it might be put in real danger.
He told no one of his visit to Mozambique — not even Fielding, who in any case had left the day before on a two-week visit to a remote but fashionable hotel called Hillcrest, just north of Umtali, close to the Mozambique border. Fielding had been particularly depressed lately; he had been hitting the bottle hard, and friends had urged that a stay in the mountains might do him good.
At 4.30 on Friday afternoon Philby stepped off the Boeing 707 — one of the regime’s triumphs of Sanction-Busting — and walked through the sticky heat of Lourenço Marques’ Vasco da Gama Airport. It had been raining and a yellow haze hung over the heaving, grey-green skin of the Indian Ocean. By the time he reached the terminal he was sweating. He was also struck by the number of black and brown faces mingling with the sun-tanned new arrivals; and realized, with a sense of shock, how subtly he had been infected by the semi-Apartheid of Rhodesia, where non-Europeans merely formed a neutral background, as impersonal as a bus queue glimpsed from the back of a comfortable car. He even found himself glancing suspiciously at the Portuguese Immigration officer — a sallow man with crisp black hair and distinctly simian features.
The twenty-minute taxi-ride into the city took him along the coastal plain, burnt brown by the long summer, past groups of handsome African girls in tribal costume offering themselves laughingly to the White visitors.
Philby had heard that Lourenço Marques has the reputation of being the Paris of the southern hemisphere; but his first impressions were of another ragged modern metropolis — shantytowns crumbling at the feet of high-rise blocks, most of them unfinished, like steel skeletons straddling the few old Portuguese houses whose stone frontages now looked forlorn and abandoned.
The European Continental myth persisted only along the wide muggy boulevards with their pavement cafés and open restaurants which boast the famed L. M. lobster. Most of the cafés were crowded, often with soldiers in baggy green combat-fatigues and soft-visored caps with canvas shields over the neck. Philby noted that well over half of them were African.
As they turned off the main Avenida, the taxi-driver let out a yelp and pointed ahead. ‘Vibora!’ he shouted with a wide grin. Philby looked ahead, and at first all he saw was the rear of a diesel-belching Army truck; then he noticed a silvery-grey coil spring from beneath the wheels and come rolling towards them. ‘Serpente!’ the driver laughed.
Philby didn’t ask what kind of snake it had been. Despite his love of animals he’d always had a peculiar horror of snakes. He hoped there were none at the Hotel Polana.
He was relieved to find that he had been given an air-conditioned room with sealed windows, overlooking the lawn and the ocean. He still had more than two hours before he was due to meet Pol. He gave the African porter five escudos and told him to bring him a large whisky sour. It arrived before he had time to undress and shower.
Later he wandered downstairs, into a lounge full of pink-faced men in shorts and long socks, drinking tea with their dowdy wives. The African waiters moved among them on slippered feet, while piped music played and a stock-exchange telex chattered in a back room. The receptionist was pure Portuguese, with a soft ingratiating manner, and Philby resisted the temptation to ask if M. Cassis had checked in yet, for he was still wary of being associated too openly with Pol.
As it was, at the precise moment that Philby was walking out of the hotel, Pol lay naked on the bed of his room — only two doors along from Philby’s — talking on the telephone. He spoke in French, in slow, deliberate sentences, often repeating a phrase several times, or pausing to explain the meaning of some word. It was a conversation that would have meant little to anyone eavesdropping — even supposing the new Portuguese régime bothered to maintain their police surveillance. Nor was the number he had called of any significance; it belonged to an obscure international organization devoted to cultural welfare, and was situated in a Black African capital to the north of Mozambique.
Pol was still talking, when the taxi dropped Philby at a newsagent’s on the Avenida de Liberdade, where he bought that day’s South African English-language newspapers. He then chose one of the less crowded cafés and sat inside under a clanking fan, ordered a beer, lit his pipe and began to read.
The papers were full of a fresh terrorist attack in Rhodesia, in which a car-load of South African tourists, driving to the Rhodes Inyanga National Park on the Mozambique border, had been blown up by a land-mine, killing all six passengers. Despite a massive security operation, no arrests had been made. It was the second outrage in three weeks that had yielded no result, and the Rhodesian authorities were clearly getting jumpy.
Philby chewed his pipe and tacitly acknowledged Pol’s expertise. He could even imagine the former Captain Peters — equipped with forged Rhodesian papers — volunteering as a reservist to help hunt down the killers.
At 6.30, as the street-lamps came on, he strolled back down the Avenida and stopped for a drink at the ‘Girasol’ — a circular pen
thouse restaurant-bar on the top of one of the city’s tallest buildings. Its walls were of tinted glass and sloped out over the whole panorama of Lourenço Marques, past the domino patterns and necklaces of light, to the dark space of the ocean and the single red light marking the island of Inhaca.
It was the European cocktail hour and the place was crowded. Through the aquarium gloom Philby could just make out groups of smooth young men with lean bronzed girls — mostly English South Africans over for the weekend, he decided — and nut-brown Portuguese with fat wives hung with jewellery, sipping Martinis and whispering money; and a few grey-flannelled Rhodesians swilling beer and talking sport. A sad-eyed African waiter in a white smoking-jacket sat fingering the keys of a piano, tracing a Blues melody. His was the only black face there.
A Portuguese waiter had stopped Philby and was glancing round to find him an empty table, when Philby saw Pol. He was sitting with his back to the room, his head sunk into his great rounded shoulders, talking to a man who had his back to the window, almost looking at Philby.
It was eighteen years since Philby had last seen him, but he had changed little: thin, grey, self-effacing, in the sober three-piece uniform of the Civil Service. Roland Carter-Smythe, a permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, who had called several times on Philby during his dog-days in the mid-Fifties, when they’d discussed his ‘pension’ from the Service, following the Burgess-Maclean scandal.
The last time they’d met had been in a pub in Horseferry Road, just after the publication of the Government Paper which had formally cleared Philby of all allegations of his having been the ‘Third Man’. Carter-Smythe had been very pleasant and discreet, but Philby had known that he didn’t believe the official story. For Carter-Smythe was one of the hard-liners, and although Philby had never been able to prove it, he had been fairly certain that the man’s FO title was a cover for Intelligence activities.
Gentleman Traitor Page 24
