by Jonathan Coe
‘Well, Foley, it’s very good of you to come all the way out here to join us,’ said Mr Wayne at last.
‘I wasn’t aware,’ said Thomas, ‘that I had any choice in the matter.’
‘My dear fellow,’ said Mr Radford, ‘whatever can you mean?’
‘We thought Wilkins was bringing you out here.’
‘He bundled me into a car and pointed a gun at me, yes.’
‘A gun?’
At this, they both started to chortle.
‘A gun! Dear me!’
‘Poor old Wilkins!’
‘Really, he’s the end.’
‘He’s the absolute limit.’
‘Lives in a fantasy world, poor fellow.’
‘Reads far too many of those books. You know the ones I mean.’
‘I know the ones. What’s the author’s name?’
‘Fleming. Have you read them, Foley?’
‘No, I can’t say that I have.’
‘Having a terrible influence, you know . . .’
‘. . . on the chaps who work in our department.’
‘Pure fiction, of course. Gadding around the world . . .’
‘Bumping people off without so much as a by your leave . . .’
‘Sleeping with a different woman every night . . .’
This detail, it seemed, struck both of them as especially implausible.
‘I mean, dash it all, Radford, when was the last time you did that?’
‘Bump someone off, you mean?’
‘No – sleep with a different woman.’
‘Well, depends what you mean. Different from whom?’
‘Different from the last one you slept with, I suppose.’
‘Oh, well, in that case, I couldn’t possibly say.’
‘Within living memory?’
‘Hardly, old boy.’
‘Well, there you are, then. Not the smallest basis of reality in it.’
‘Well, we do, apologize, Foley, if you were made to feel at all uncomfortable.’
‘Uncomfortable?’ said Thomas. ‘Not at all. I love to be driven blindfolded for hours at a time.’
‘Driven blindfolded?’ said Mr Wayne.
‘You don’t mean to tell us,’ said Mr Radford, ‘that Wilkins made the driver wear a blindfold while he was bringing you here?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘There are limits, after all.’
‘Basic safety procedures, that sort of thing.’
By now Thomas felt ready to ask: ‘Where the hell am I, in any case?’
‘Well, we can’t very well tell you that, old man.’
‘What would be the point of the blindfold?’
‘But what is this place?’
Mr Radford and Mr Wayne glanced at each other; then nodded, and rose to their feet.
‘Come on then, we’ll give you the tour.’
They re-entered the house by the French windows, turned right into the gloomy corridor but almost immediately took a narrow wooden staircase to the upper floor. Here it had the feel of a long attic, running the full extent of the house, with doors leading off on either side of a central passageway. Some of the doors were open, and through these, as Thomas passed, he could see small rooms filled, for the most part, with a bewildering variety of electronic equipment: tape recorders, microphones, massive radio sets, even computers. Finally they came to a larger room which had all of this equipment and more; and contained, besides, the figures of three people – two women, and a man – who were wearing headphones and sitting at desks in front of radio sets, rapidly transcribing whatever it was that they heard. They looked up when Thomas, Mr Radford and Mr Wayne came in, but did not otherwise deviate from their tasks in hand.
‘Well, here you are,’ said Mr Wayne. ‘Welcome to the nerve centre.’
‘The heart of the operation, as it were,’ said Mr Radford.
‘Rather impressive, isn’t it?’
A man in a dark suit materialized behind them.
‘Everything OK, gents?’
‘Yes, yes, absolutely.’
‘Just giving our friend here an idea what you’re up to.’
‘Fine. Well, if he’s seen everything that he needs to see . . .’
The man’s tone was polite, but there was no mistaking his note of authority. The three of them were being dismissed. Mr Radford and Mr Wayne turned and shuffled out. Thomas, following them back down the staircase, could not remember ever having seen them so cowed.
‘Who was that?’ he asked as they walked out again on to the terrace.
‘That,’ said Mr Radford, ‘was the gentleman from whom we take our orders.’ He did not sound too happy about it.
‘Notice anything about him?’ Mr Wayne asked.
‘American, wasn’t he?’
‘Precisely,’ they said in unison; and began to lead him across the well-tended lawn towards the wilder reaches of the grounds.
After a few paces, Thomas turned to look back at the house. It was the first time he had really taken it in. In this setting – nestling amid woodland, ivy twining itself around the wooden pillars of the verandah, a brace of doves settled at the apex of the roof at one end – it looked rather like an illustration from a children’s picture-book. (That, at least, was how he might one day have described it to Sylvia – had he ever felt free to do so.) The warm reddish tint of the brick, and the thatched roof with its four dormer windows peeping out sleepily over the garden added to this effect. It was certainly hard to reconcile the house’s enchanted, fairy-tale aspect with the nature of the work that seemed to be carried on inside.
Mr Radford and Mr Wayne sat down on one of the wooden benches at the edge of the first cluster of oak trees, and invited Thomas to sit between them. Mr Radford took out three cigarettes and passed them along. Mr Wayne took out his matchbox.
‘Nice place, isn’t it?’ said Mr Wayne.
‘Shame it has to be used for something like this,’ said Mr Radford. ‘Doesn’t seem right, somehow.’
‘Still,’ said his colleague, ‘these are desperate times.’
‘Absolutely.’ Mr Radford sighed, in contemplation of this sentiment, and turned to Thomas. ‘So, what’s your reading of it all?’
‘My reading?’
‘The situation, as it’s developed, over the last couple of days. What do you think’s been going on?’
‘We’d be interested to know what you make of it.’
Thomas looked at them both in turn. It seemed they were genuinely curious to know what he thought. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is how it appears to me.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette, then plunged on: ‘Tony – Mr Buttress – has been working at the British pavilion, giving technical advice on the replica ZETA machine and other exhibits. Increasingly, he’s been getting friendly with Mr Chersky of the newspaper Sputnik. I dare say you people have somehow been listening to their conversations and getting concerned about it. Tony is a bit of a radical, in his unassuming British way. Supports CND, votes Labour, that sort of thing. And now, it would seem, his socialist instincts have got the better of him, and Mr Chersky has persuaded him to go over to the other side. He’s taken the designs of the machine, and for all I know the replica itself, and handed them over to the Soviets and right now he’s quite probably sitting in their embassy telling them everything he knows.’ Thomas paused for breath, and looked to them both for confirmation. ‘Well, am I right?’
Mr Radford glanced at his colleague. ‘What do you think, Wayne?’
‘I’d say he’s had a pretty good shot at it. I’d give him two out of ten for effort.’
‘Plus another point for ingenuity, would you say?’
‘Why not, old man? No harm in being generous.’
‘What do you mean?’
said Thomas. ‘Are you saying that I’ve got it all wrong?’
‘From start to finish, I’m afraid.’
‘Not even close.’
Thomas let out an impatient sigh. ‘So what is going on? Could you please tell me why I’ve been dragged out here?’
‘Well,’ said Mr Wayne, pausing only to tap a morsel of ash from the end of his cigarette onto the wild grass at his feet, ‘let’s start with your friend Tony. Mr Buttress and his famous machine. Where to begin, with that one? As I’m sure he’s told you – or you read in the papers – a few months ago the head of the ZETA programme in the UK, Sir John Cockroft, announced a huge breakthrough. I’m no scientist – I don’t know the details – maybe Mr Radford can help out on this point . . .’
‘Not me, old man,’ said Mr Radford, shaking his head sadly. ‘Wouldn’t have a clue.’
‘Well – apparently – I don’t know – but back in January Sir John claimed that his team had been observing these things – what are they called? – neutron bursts, and they’d been happening in the sort of numbers you might expect when there was a thermonuclear reaction. Would that be fair, would you say?’
‘Search me. Didn’t even get School Certificate in science.’
‘Well, that’s my spin on things, anyway. Nuclear fusion. Announced to the press in January, and generally considered to be the biggest feather in the cap of British science since the Lord knows when. Three cheers for brave Sir John, and yah boo sucks to the Russians, while we’re at it. And so your mob in Baker Street suggest they mock up a replica of the machine and show it off at the British pavilion. Jewel in the crown of British research, and so on. Which is all done, with a certain amount of secrecy – enough to make sure that nobody gives away the finer points of how the thing actually works. With me so far?’
Thomas nodded.
‘All right. So here we all are in Brussels, having a jolly good time at the fair, pulling together, selling Britain to the rest of the world as hard as we can, and all the rest, and meanwhile back at home Sir John and his team of eggheads are still hard at it, tinkering away with their beloved machine and carrying out more and more tests. And earlier this week – guess what? Another discovery. Another breakthrough. Only it’s not quite so exciting this time. They’ve found out something new about the ZETA machine, something no one was expecting.’
‘Yes?’ said Thomas.
‘Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.’
Mr Wayne allowed these words to sink in, while he lit himself another cigarette. Neither Thomas nor Mr Radford was inclined to say anything.
‘Seems the announcement in January had been much too optimistic, and this burst of neutrons, or whatever it was, was just some sort of coincidence, just a perfectly ordinary by-product of the experiments. Egg on face all round, of course. And there was the offending machine on display, in the middle of the British pavilion in Brussels, with your pal Mr Buttress on hand to tell all and sundry what a terrific invention it was and how it was going to solve mankind’s energy problems for the next few centuries. Well, the chaps at home weren’t going to put up with that for long. Yesterday morning an urgent call came through from Whitehall telling him to pack the whole thing up and bring it home, pronto. Which is exactly what he did.’
‘So he’s gone? Back to London? And he’s not coming back?’
‘Afraid not,’ said Mr Wayne. ‘Still, look on the bright side. You’ve got that cabin to yourself now.’
‘Every cloud has a silver lining, and all that,’ Mr Radford agreed.
Thomas was silent for a long while. He was so confused that it became difficult, now, to phrase even the simplest question.
‘So . . . I don’t follow . . . if none of this has anything to do with Tony, or Mr Chersky . . . what does it have to do with me?’
‘It has everything to do with Mr Chersky,’ said Mr Radford. ‘Mr Chersky, and Miss Parker.’
‘Emily?’ said Thomas, more surprised than ever.
‘Yes indeed.’
‘The girl from Wisconsin.’
Mr Radford leaned towards him. ‘What do you know about her, exactly?’
‘What’s your impression?’
‘What do you make of her?’
‘How does she strike you?’
Thomas blew out his cheeks. ‘I don’t really know. Lovely girl, of course. Highly attractive. Apart from that, I hadn’t given her much thought.’
‘Well, it’s about time you did.’
‘It’s about time you started giving a bit more thought to her, and a bit less thought to Anneke Hoskens.’
Thomas stared from one man to the other, utterly out of his depth.
‘Emily Parker,’ Mr Wayne explained slowly and emphatically, ‘is in love with Andrey Chersky.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, you’ve seen all the equipment we’ve got up there. We know everything that’s going on at the fair.’
‘But she’s Tony’s girl. At least she has been for the last few weeks.’
‘That might be what you think. And it might be what he thinks. But we know differently. She’s been meeting Chersky in secret. Much more often than she’s been seeing Mr Buttress.’
‘All right,’ said Thomas, taking this in slowly. ‘What of it? A young American girl falls for a handsome Russian journalist. They have a . . . fling in Brussels. So what? What difference does it make?’
‘Andrey Chersky is not a journalist,’ said Mr Radford. ‘He’s a high-ranking officer in the KGB.’
‘And Emily Parker,’ Mr Wayne continued, even before Thomas had properly been able to absorb this new information, ‘is not just any American girl. Her father, Professor Frederick Parker, is one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of nuclear research.’
‘Nuclear weapons research, that is.’
After a moment, Thomas stood up. He walked away from the bench and towards the shade of the oak trees. Mr Wayne and Mr Radford watched him, wordless and impassive. He paced between the trees for a minute or two, until he had finished his cigarette, the stub of which he then crushed under his foot. When he came back to join them, he had a new note of resistance in his voice.
‘Even if what you tell me is true,’ he said, ‘I don’t see why it has anything to do with us.’
‘Us?’ said Mr Wayne.
‘Us. The British. This is a matter for the Americans and the Russians, surely. The best thing would be for us to keep well out of it.’
Mr Wayne and Mr Radford looked at each other, and then both laughed.
‘My dear fellow, it isn’t as simple as that.’
‘Things don’t work like that any more.’
‘We’re all in it together, these days.’
‘You have to take sides.’
‘Look at it this way.’ Mr Radford stood beside Thomas, and gestured towards the quaint old house in the distance. ‘You’ve seen what’s going on here. Who do you imagine is paying for all that? Whose equipment do you think we’re using? We don’t get it for nothing, you know. They expect something in return.’
‘They expect favours.’
‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’
‘Share and share alike.’
‘All right,’ said Thomas, after giving this some thought. ‘But why me? Where do I come into it?’
Now it was Mr Wayne’s turn to stand up and start pacing.
‘Miss Parker,’ he explained, ‘is a very emotional girl. As I’m sure you’ve noticed. Excessively romantic, you might say. Highly strung.’
‘She is an actress, after all,’ Mr Radford chipped in.
‘She’s come to Belgium, it seems, hell-bent on having a European romance. First it was your friend Tony. Then she lost interest in him and set her sights on Chersky. The point is . . . well, we think she can easil
y be diverted.’
‘Diverted?’
‘Yes. All she needs is someone to take her mind off this Russian chap. Another object for her affections.’
‘A good-looking fellow, preferably – like yourself.’
‘Me?’ said Thomas. ‘Good-looking?’
‘Oh, come on, don’t be modest.’
‘Don’t try to deny it.’
‘There’s a touch of the Gary Coopers about you, you know.’
‘A spot of the Dirk Bogardes, I would have said.’
‘So, do you see what we’re driving at?’
‘Do you get our drift?’
Thomas saw what they were driving at, at last. He didn’t know whether to be horrified or flattered. At the moment, indeed, he felt a combination of the two.
‘You’re proposing,’ he faltered, ‘that I . . . that I, as it were, should attempt to lure Miss Parker away from Mr Chersky?’
‘In a nutshell, yes.’
‘As a matter of some urgency.’
‘Urgency? Aren’t you being a tad over-dramatic? I mean, I assume you wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if it wasn’t important to you, but . . .’
Mr Wayne took his arm. ‘Look, old boy, we don’t bandy words like that around without any reason. We’ve got to do something about this.’
‘Our information,’ said Mr Radford, ‘is that this silly girl is ready to follow her Soviet sweetheart to Moscow just as soon as he says the word.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’ Mr Wayne snorted, in a way which suggested to Thomas that his response to the predicament was, chiefly, one of resigned irritation. ‘And you know where that would leave us, don’t you? In a nice old pickle!’
A private room
SMERSH is the official murder organization of the Soviet government. It operates both at home and abroad and, in 1955, it employed a total of 40,000 men and women. SMERSH is a contraction of ‘Smiert Spionam’, which means ‘Death to Spies’. It is a name used only among its staff and among Soviet officials. No sane member of the public would dream of allowing the word to pass his lips.
The headquarters of SMERSH is a very large and ugly modern building on the Sretenka Ulitsa. It is No. 13 on this wide, dull street . . .
