Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant

by Samantha Kate

  I did my best to look flummoxed, but he continued. ‘I turned him down and I’m regretting it. I know I’ve made my own bed and I’d be prepared to lie on it if it wasn’t for Eleanor. She’s making herself ill staying here, but I know she won’t leave until I do. You’ve got to help me to get out. Once I’m gone, they’ll let Eleanor leave; she’s still an American passport-holder and they promised me they would never hold her here against her will. I believe them.’

  He stopped and looked at me. I was momentarily stuck for words. What if it was a trap? I could not walk straight into it. ‘I’m an art historian,’ I said carefully, ‘not a travel agent.’

  He gave a brief laugh. ‘I don’t expect you to give me an answer now, or even admit to your true calling. All I’m asking – pleading for – is that you inform your friends at the Office of our conversation and submit my request. We can meet again here in five days to discuss their response. Are you willing to do that?’

  I inclined my head slightly and gave what I hoped was a blank look. ‘It’s always a pleasure to have tea with you, Mr Philby, and as you said, the Georgian cuisine is excellent. How could I refuse?’

  He called for the waiter and paid the bill. As we stood up to leave, he leant forward. ‘Look, Dr d’Arcy, Rose, whoever you are, I’m putting myself at considerable risk to do this. Even meeting you would be considered a hanging offence, if they knew who you were. I’m doing it for Eleanor and if you have any sympathy for her, you’ll help us. Be careful, though. If my friends here know what we’re doing, we’ll all be in severe – and I mean severe – danger.’ With that, he held open the front door and ushered me out.

  Friday, 21st February

  I woke early this morning and kick-started the prescribed routine for sending an urgent message to the Office. First, I wrote an anodyne note on a postcard of St Basil’s. Then I dipped my pen into the invisible ink and, in tiny letters, began to write between the lines, sketching my conversation with Philby and his request to come home. I mentioned my strong suspicion that I was being followed – and asked for instructions. When I was finished, I carefully unrolled the cotton wool in my sponge bag to reveal the details of the dead letter box I had been told to use. I spent the next four hours criss-crossing Moscow, to all appearances sketching the metro stations. When I was fairly sure I was clean, I hailed a taxi and asked him to take me to Gorky Park. I found the skate-hire shop I was looking for and, after asking for skates in my size, took them into the cloakroom to change. I put my shoes, as instructed, into the top right-hand cubby-hole, then sat down and started slowly putting on my skates, waiting for the room to empty. I was just lacing up my second skate when the last inhabitants left, a woman and child, skipping up and down on her blades in excitement. Looking around carefully, I went back to the shoe holes, reached up and carefully slotted my envelope into a gap above the top shelf, pushing it in until it didn’t show. Then I set off for the ice.

  The cold, fortunately, gave me the excuse to come in after half an hour. The evening was beginning to draw in, providing the cover I needed to finish the job. I walked quickly back across the bridge to the metro station, exited by GUM, ran up the stairs to the Ladies and, locking myself in the furthest cubicle, drew a cross in white chalk on the wall above the door. As I had been told, it hardly showed. With relief, I flushed the loo and went downstairs to a café, where I bought a small meat pie, which I forced myself to eat. The signal site would be checked, I had been told, each morning and then I would be contacted.

  Tuesday, 25th February

  The last few days have been unbearably tense. I’m sure I’m being followed, but am doing my best to act as though I haven’t noticed and to keep to my routine. I have changed my mind about Istanbul: I don’t care if I never see another icon. Right now, all I want is my own flat, Helena and Rafiki – and I’m not convinced I will ever see them again.

  Sitting in the Ladies at the Tretyakov, due to meet Philby in two hours, I am steeling myself to set off. It’s well below freezing-point again, but if I catch the metro and then walk across Gorky Park, I should be able to lose them. They’ve been using cars, I’m sure – I’ve noticed a mustard-coloured Volga on several occasions. There are probably others, but my sense is that they are less assiduous when I’m on foot.

  For a huge city, Moscow has become intensely claustrophobic. I feel as if I am surrounded by eyes, boring into me from all directions, and yet I’m dreadfully lonely. Sometimes, I wake in the morning and wonder whether it’s not just a bad dream. I wish it were.

  I met Head of S on Saturday night, outside the Bolshoi Theatre as the ballet crowd was dispersing. I don’t think we were spotted. I told him in detail what Philby had proposed. He looked thoughtful – and concerned – and said he would contact London for instructions. This morning, a note was slipped under my room door. It said to bring the Marmalade back to Oxford, but to exercise the utmost caution in doing so.

  The coda had Bill’s signature all over it. Dear Bill – what I wouldn’t do to see his friendly face now.

  I can’t help but think of R. Now I can begin to imagine what it was like for him in Berlin, the days and weeks before he died. It was my fault. I as good as killed a good man – not an innocent one, I know, and one who had made a choice to work for a clandestine organisation. He knew the risks, but still, he wouldn’t have raised the ire of Boris had it not been for me.

  Boris: where is he? I feel his presence around every corner.

  Thursday, 27th February

  We leave in three nights. The plans are nearly set. Philby insisted we travel overland, by train to Leningrad and then north to the Finnish border. He says that’s our only chance. We leave on the midnight train and should not be missed until mid-morning the next day, if all goes as we hope. To give us an extra few hours, Eleanor will stay in their flat that night. The next morning, she has made an appointment at the American Embassy to discuss her forthcoming planned trip home to see her daughter. Sergei knows she is going; it should not cause suspicion. Not until she fails to leave the Embassy compound, by which time we should be almost at the border.

  I have the address of a safe house in Leningrad. A taxi-driver will meet us at the station and take us there. Agent 859 will be waiting to escort us to the meeting-point just this side of the border, in the woods near Vyborg. Head of S insists it will work like clockwork, but I don’t think even he believes that. Still, if we can trust Philby – and I suppose we have to, though there are times when a look of uncertainty crosses his face – it is our best chance of escape.

  If we can trust Philby.

  March

  I did my best to persuade myself that it was a relief to have lost my job, and instead buried myself in my aunt’s words, living through and with her the cold Russian winter of 1964.

  Two weeks after New Year 2006, I boarded a plane for Moscow. Apart from that brief trip to Colditz, it was my first time behind the old Iron Curtain. Previously, I’d always been drawn to the south or west: Africa and the Americas. The grey former Soviet states had held no appeal. But now I was excited. Reading my aunt’s diaries had pitched me into that world, and I longed to see at first hand what she had seen, to go to the same places, experience what she had. It was not only that: retracing her footsteps made her come alive again for me, and right then, living alone in a small flat, divorced from my Cambridge life, I needed her.

  Moscow was not what I had imagined. As the taxi emerged from the outer ring into the city centre, I was struck by how busy it was, and how grand. In the dusk, Stalin’s Seven Goddesses twinkled with fairy lights. We followed the river past the Kremlin on our right, the Bolshoi Theatre on our left, then GUM stores, which dwarfed Harrods in both size and grandeur. The taxi-driver was a large, jovial man, proud of his city but nostalgic for the old, Communist, ways. ‘Since market economy, we are very poor, have to work very hard,’ he said. ‘Was not like that before.’

  The Sovietsky was just as my aunt had portrayed it. The walls were still hung with por
traits of Stalin, and the corridors still smelled of polish. Only the air of menace was absent. Today in Russia, a foreigner is to be welcomed, not followed. As I crossed the city, by metro and by taxi, nobody looked at me and I did not feel out of place. One of my first stops was the Tretyakov Gallery, which I wandered around unnoticed, to my delight finding the Virgin of Vladimir among the ground-floor icons, emerging from a rose bush just as my aunt had described her.

  I had been warned that Russia was about to enter a cold snap, and on my third day there, as huge neon signs announced that the mercury had sunk to minus 25, I felt the icy wind sear up my nostrils and through my eyeballs. It was, according to the Moscow Times, the coldest winter for more than forty years. My aunt was there forty-two years ago. It was an oddly comforting parallel. With her fortitude as inspiration, I continued to plunge from the overheated interiors into the freeze outside, tracing the routes she had walked and the places she had written about. I went to the Bolshoi Ballet and up to the top of the Ukraine Hotel. I took the metro to Sokol station and walked around the dreary streets behind Leningradsky Prospekt, comparing each apartment building to the description of the Philbys’ in my aunt’s diaries, in the hope that I might stumble upon it.

  One night I had dinner in a Georgian restaurant with a friend of a friend who had spent the last six years in Moscow, reporting for the Sunday Times. When I told him that I was interested in the Philbys, he asked whether I wanted to meet Mrs Philby.

  ‘Mrs Philby?’ I asked, temporarily stunned. In my head, Mrs Philby was Eleanor, and I knew she wasn’t in Moscow.

  ‘Rufina, Kim’s fourth wife. A lovely lady. She still lives in their old flat near Pushkin Square. I’m sure she’d be happy to meet you.’

  He gave me her number, and the next day I called her. A Russian voice answered, and when I started speaking in English and explained who I was, she switched languages and invited me to tea the following day, giving me detailed directions to her home. It was not the same flat that Philby had lived in with Eleanor, but smaller, and closer to the centre.

  I still managed to get lost, and arrived half an hour late and freezing. She could not have been more welcoming. Now in her mid-seventies, she is attractive and clearly intelligent. She showed me to a tall-backed armchair bequeathed to Philby by Guy Burgess, and pointed out the old-fashioned wireless on which her husband had listened to the BBC each morning while drinking his tea.

  The flat was comfortable and lived in, filled with Philby’s books – thousands of them, many inherited from Burgess – and the rugs and pictures that had been brought over for him from Beirut: the same ones that had adorned his Sokol apartment, where my aunt had met him with Eleanor. Rufina appeared to be devoted to his memory; the apartment, if not a shrine, was a tribute to her husband, and she seemed happy to talk about him, as if by so doing she could keep his memory alive. They had had a very happy marriage, by all accounts. She was thirty-eight and working as an editor at a publishing house when they were introduced by Ida, the Russian wife of another former British spy, George Blake. ‘He always claimed to have decided that day that he would marry me,’ she said, with a smile.

  For two hours, she reminisced about the husband who had now been dead for as long as they had been married. Many of the things she told me matched what my aunt had related in her diaries: the terrible nightmares, the constant surveillance, and his love of cooking – especially hot curries.

  ‘Did he ever tell you that he had tried to leave?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘He knew it was impossible. His life was here, and there was nothing he could do to change that. There were things that frustrated him, of course – he would have liked to have been of more use. But this was his home, and he was happy here.’

  Sunday, 1st March

  The last few days in Moscow were the most anxious of my stay. I met Philby once in a café and Head of S, late at night, in an underground bar off Tverskaya. On neither occasion did I spot surveillance, but I felt it there always, like an unblinking eye, even when I was alone and locked into my hotel room.

  As the date of our escape approached, it appeared increasingly preposterous. Was it even faintly conceivable that I would be able to travel hundreds of miles, through a strange and hostile country, infested with secret informers reporting to a feared and omnipotent KGB? I, who apparently had ‘foreigner’ emblazoned on my forehead, accompanied by Kim Philby, Moscow’s prize poodle, proud symbol of its supremacy over the West?

  Fear and uncertainty rushed over me in waves of desperation, interspersed by bursts of phoney bravado. This was not a game – nor even an adventure. Why had I accepted M’s challenge? Why hadn’t I disappeared into the bush in Kenya at Christmas, or married a bean-farmer when I was twenty-one and never come to London?

  Then I remembered R. I could not capitulate to the forces that had destroyed him.

  The night of February 29th was cold and clear. I packed my small holdall and checked out of the Sovietsky. Despite everything, it had been a good home to me, quiet and comfortable. Even Uncle Joe’s putty features, staring down from every wall, had become benign in their familiarity. Still, I will not miss it. There is nothing about Moscow that I will miss – not the cold, nor the food, the scared and beaten people, the watching eyes behind every wall, tree or window.

  I caught the metro to Leningradsky Station. It was smaller than I had expected, just ten lines, all bound for Leningrad. My instructions were to meet Philby in a small café on Platform 1 at 23.30. Our train, the Kraznaya Stella – Red Arrow – left at five minutes before midnight. My heart was pounding as I walked down the platform and into the familiar clamour of steam trains, snorting like giant dragons preparing for flight. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was walking into the enemy’s lair. I willed myself forward. I had long since passed that mythical point of no return; I had no other options but belief and hope.

  There was no one in the café when I arrived, just two rough-faced men in heavy leather donkey-jackets, talking to a large lady behind the counter. They fell into a watching silence when I walked in, stripped bare by the lime glow of fluorescent lights. I sat at a table in the corner, praying that Philby would arrive. What sort of predicament was it when my fate rested in the hands of the greatest traitor of a generation?

  Five minutes passed in a grudging succession of slow seconds. Finally, the door opened and a small figure slipped through, almost swallowed by a heavy Astrakhan-collared greatcoat, a fur hat and scarf. I would not have recognised him had he not walked towards the table and beckoned me out. ‘Keep your hat on at all times when we’re not in our compartment,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Without it, you stick out like a sore thumb. And don’t say a word.’

  I nodded and followed him down the platform. It was still bitterly cold, despite the steam and smuts billowing out from the train chimneys, fiery sparks flying like particles of pumice from an erupting volcano. The air around us smelt of hot oil and coal, and each time the valves were released, to a full-bellied whistle, I felt my stomach contract. There were men standing on the platform, dressed in ankle-length black leather coats and heavy boots. They stared as we passed. I willed myself not to look back.

  Philby handed our tickets and a bundle of papers to the guard at the end of our carriage, who studied them carefully for what seemed like an age, before handing them back with a nod and leading us down the carriage. Philby had booked a first-class compartment under his Russian name. I travelled on Eleanor’s Russian papers. As soon as we had been shown in, he closed and locked the door behind us. ‘We’re here for the next nine hours,’ he said, producing a bottle of brandy from his bag. ‘Better make the best of it.’ He pulled down the blind and slid into the bench on one side of a small table, motioning me to sit opposite. ‘We’ve made it over the first hurdle. If you believe in God, you’d better pray the rest passes smoothly.’ He poured the brandy into two tooth-mugs, handed one to me and raised his. ‘To successful escapes,’ he said.

  ‘To safe
returns,’ I replied.

  We sat for a time, looking at each other as the engine gathered steam. As the wheels began to move, in their first hesitant rhythm, the sounds of a band playing the Red Flag were piped across the station. I noticed Philby stiffen, before he shrugged his shoulders and gave a wry smile.

  ‘I suppose it’s goodbye to all that,’ he said.

  ‘I hope so,’ I replied. ‘Are you sorry?’

  He appeared to contemplate my question. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘I was twenty-one when I became a Communist and I did so from the purest of motives. I believed it was the only way to counter the Fascist threat, and dampen the avarice of an increasingly self-interested West. It was simple and so beautiful, in theory. When I joined our friends here, I knew it was for life. I committed my soul, my mind and my body to the Movement. I never anticipated that I would turn tail and run.’

  ‘So why have you?’

  ‘I told you. For Eleanor.’ He grabbed the brandy bottle and poured himself another glass, which he drained in a single gulp.

  ‘I’m not sure I believe you,’ I said finally.

  He gave his shy smile. ‘Did you bring Scrabble?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you planning to sleep?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, looking out of the window as the dim lights of the city started to recede and we were swallowed by darkness.

  There was a knock and we froze. ‘Turn away, or put on a scarf or something,’ Philby hissed, before getting up to answer it. He opened the door a crack and I heard a deep voice asking a question in Russian. Philby said something, and the question was repeated. Then he appeared back in the cabin and reached for our papers. I could hear my pulse drumming a tattoo in my ears. There was another exchange of words, after which Philby called back, ‘Darling, I think the gentleman wants to check that you’re here. Are you decent?’