by John Lawton
“Never been able to think of it as a lark.”
“So bring me up to date . . . amuse me . . . I’ve spent all day with a French abstract painter who could bore for Europe. The man has an ego the size of the Eiffel Tower and could talk about himself till kingdom come. So . . . how is the prisoner? Anything we can flog to the News of the World yet?”
“You do realise that I am trying to get Alleyn to talk about himself, and while his ego clocks in at somewhat less than the Eiffel Tower . . .”
“Tell me . . . or I’ll bite your ear off.”
And feeling her teeth lock on to a lobe, Wilderness said, “He’s much the same. Sad, sentimental, desperate for company and utterly oblivious to the nature of his crime.”
“Aren’t they all. The blindness of the fanatic.”
“Oh, Bernard’s far from being one of those.”
“Then what does he think he is?”
Wilderness pondered this one.
“I think he thinks he’s an Englishman . . . an unfortunate Englishman. He is . . . acculturated . . . did I just make up a word?”
“No, it’s real enough.”
“Acculturated to Englishness. To being English. He sends his compliments to you, by the by, for your programme on Tristram Cary.”
“Good Lord. That’s more than you did.”
“It’s electronic twaddle, not music.”
“I shall bite you. Spare yourself and stick to the subject. In what way is the good comrade the unfortunate Englishman?”
“Well . . . he’s in the Scrubs . . .”
“Get on with it, Wilderness.”
“He has access to a daily paper, although it’s chained to the wall and he can’t cut out the coupons . . . He favours the Daily Mail, even reads Barry Norman’s gossip column . . . He has a radio . . . listens to The Archers . . . loves Jimmy Clitheroe . . . cannot understand Ken Dodd . . . He has telly, a couple of nights a week . . . gets BBC2 . . . adores Joan Bakewell . . . but he misses going to the Wigmore Hall . . . the National Gallery . . . and above all he misses his lunches at the Garrick.”
“Fucking hell. He’s a member of the Garrick?”
“Yep. Pays by a bank order once a year. We did not confiscate his assets or cash and he is in regular correspondence with his bank manager at Holt’s in Whitehall. I bank with Holt’s. Your dad banks with Holt’s. Comrade Liubimov is one of us. Alas, unlike them, I am not a member of the Garrick.”
“And we . . . I mean you—the spooks—just let him?”
“Apparently so. It isn’t illegal for a convict to have a bank account.”
“Fuck me . . . I mean . . . they could have stood in the same queue at Holt’s . . . he and Dad could have passed on the stairs at the Garrick . . . propped up the same bar . . .”
“Well . . . I won’t be telling Alec that, will I?”
“I mean bloody hell . . . they won’t let women in but they keep up the membership of a convicted traitor!”
“Spy. He’s a spy.”
“Oh no, sweetie . . . if he’s one of us, if he’s the unfortunate Englishman, then his misfortune is surely that he is a traitor?”
Wilderness pondered this one too. It informed, it qualified the tragedy that Alleyn had perceived, even if he would not so call it.
“Wilderness?”
“I’m listening.”
“Do you actually like Alleyn?”
“I don’t have to like him. I just have to deliver him. Think of him as less like a person and more like a commodity.”
“Like those bags of coffee you used to smuggle in Berlin? Or like the diamond necklaces you nicked from people in Hampstead who are now our neighbours?”
“Do you want me to like him?”
“No. But I would find detachment on your part, indifference to the man or to his fate, a bit out of character.”
“Judy, I am not going to involve myself in the troubles of Bernard Alleyn.”
§108
Alleyn looked as though he had slept badly.
“I’ve thought about what you said yesterday. Suppose for one moment you are right—that men . . . that is British agents . . . died because of me . . .”
“Those eleven RAF officers weren’t agents. They were liberated POWs with every expectation of freedom, not another prison camp and execution without trial. They were your allies.”
“I didn’t kill them, and I didn’t betray them.”
“They died because they’d shared a hut with the real Bernard Alleyn.”
Alleyn drew breath loudly. He was finding none of this easy. If being Bernard Alleyn was wearing not one mask but a series of masks, layer upon layer, then they were beginning to slip.
“Which I did not know until you told me yesterday.”
Wilderness said nothing to this. Just looked at Alleyn and waited.
“I was told the opposite. That after a decent . . . ”
He winced, a facial twitch that said he’d just chosen the wrong word.
“Decent . . . Good Lord . . . is any of this decent? After . . . after a brief interval all the survivors of VIII-B would be shipped home. I may have passed some of them in the time I spent at the camp. I may have. But I spoke to none but Alleyn. I didn’t know those men . . . I didn’t betray them. Can one ever betray those whom one does not know?”
He bowed his head for a moment and scratched the back of his neck where the blue woollen blouse chafed. Looked up at Wilderness. Wilderness was not going to bail him out with a question or a comment.
“Suppose for a moment you are right. That British agents in . . . Berlin . . . in Budapest . . . in Vienna . . . God knows where . . . died as a result of my actions. Suppose that the KGB has lied to me all along.”
It was hard not to be self-indulgent and let out a sigh laden with irony.
“Suppose all that has happened, just as you say. I didn’t know those men either. But I know the men you are asking me to name. And that would be a betrayal. I would have their deaths on my conscience as surely as you think I have deaths of those eleven RAF officers. I can’t do it. I would like to help you. I will cooperate with you as I cooperated with Mr. Westcott, but not in that way.”
§109
Wilderness reported back to Burne-Jones.
“We’re not going to get anything more out of him. We may as well exchange as soon as possible.”
“Is he that steadfast?”
Odd choice of word, thought Wilderness, as odd as “decent.”
“No. He’s about as steadfast of one of Madge’s blancmanges. But he’s eaten up with guilt. He won’t drop anyone else in it. It’s as simple as that. His last words to me today were ‘haven’t there been enough deaths?’”
“We don’t take Russian agents out behind the bike sheds and shoot them. As a rule, nine times out of ten, we deport them.”
“Try telling Alleyn that. Why would he believe us?”
“Perhaps because we didn’t shoot him? Merely banged him up in the Scrubs where he’s suffered all the hardships of the prison library.”
“This is going nowhere. I’m booking myself a flight to Berlin.”
Wilderness was aware of the contradictions. Alleyn was enough the Englishman to grasp the truth of what Burne-Jones had just said. It ought to be perfectly possible to offer him the reassurance he sought, however much success might depend upon patience and repetition. Wilderness would not be the one to say it again. The one who doubted it was Wilderness and with every repetition he doubted it more. He wondered how many men had met their end “behind the bike sheds,” as Burne-Jones had so euphemistically rendered it, using the vocabulary of a prep school. And with it he wondered who played at being the Englishman better . . . himself or Leonid L’vovich Liubimov?
“There is one thing. Before I go.”
“Eh, what?”
“Not following you here, old man.”
“My desk fills up with paperwork, usually dumped there by you. If I’m handling the exchange of Masefield and Liubimov . . . who is going to deal with it? You said yourself this could take some time.”
“Ah . . . what do you have in mind?”
“We get someone in to do the bloody paperwork.”
“Oh, a new recruit, eh?”
“No. A rather old recruit.”
§110
Wilderness had left messages for Swift Eddie at Scotland Yard. At one point he had even been put through to Eddie’s boss, a Commander Wildeve, whom Wilderness had no recollection of ever meeting.
He got home shortly after seven, to hear the telephone ringing as he turned the key in the lock. No sign of Judy and the twins, most probably at her mother’s in Campden Hill.
He picked up the phone.
“Joe?”
“Eddie? Been trying to reach you all day.”
“Urgent, is it?”
“Fairly.”
“Secret, is it?”
“Not particularly. I wouldn’t discuss it on the top deck of a 38 bus, but . . .”
“Then come over. I’m around the corner.”
“Around the corner?”
“Church Row. Number 17.”
It took a second or two for the penny to drop, and when it did Wilderness felt stupid.
“Troy?”
“Both Troys as it happens, and if it’s a spook thing I’m sure they’ll give us a corner to ourselves.”
It was not a situation he would have chosen—he had intended to get Eddie alone—but it seemed it had chosen him. He hoped Eddie could not hear him hesitate.
“No, no . . . that’ll be fine. I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes.”
After all, if they couldn’t talk spook in front of the Home Secretary, then where in London could they talk spook? And if all else failed, he could nab him as he left and have all the discretion of a Hampstead street corner.
Church Row was grand. The two sides of the street did not match, it was the work of half a dozen different architects, but still it was grand . . . in a way Perrin’s Walk wasn’t. Perrin’s Walk was tarted-up garages, Church Row was fading beauty, beauty fading into greater beauty as time and age wrote themselves across it.
A beauty in her fifties, age and time writing well, answered the door.
“You must be Joe. Eddie talks about you so much I almost feel we’ve met. Dinner will be a little late, say half past eight, but you will stay, won’t you?”
One thought, one line ran through Wilderness’s mind: “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.” And if he’d had a pocket watch he would have consulted it before tumbling down the rabbit-hole.
“I’m Rod’s wife,” the beauty added, as though he were looking as dumb as he felt.
“Yes, I’m Joe Holderness, Lady Troy.”
“Cid, please. Or the Women’s Institute will have me opening bazaars. The blokes are all in what Rod laughingly calls the library.”
She did not show him in so much as point him in the right direction. He would not have laughed. This tight, sage-green and walnut room held more books than even Burne-Jones could muster.
Rod Troy was facing into the room, braces on his back, odd socks and slippers on his feet, and as he turned, a gin and It in one hand. The free hand was Wilderness’s to shake.
“Joe. How nice to meet you after all this time. How nice to have a real spy in the house.”
Wilderness glared at Eddie as he shook. Eddie was perched on the edge of an armchair, little legs just reaching the floor, a large scotch in his fist.
“It’s not exactly a secret, Joe,” he said. “And you’re more real than I ever was.”
Next to him, sprawled more languidly, but scarcely any taller, toes seeming to tap the carpet rather than rest upon it, was the younger Troy brother, Frederick—an ex-copper with an unenviable reputation.
Eddie stayed put, as though to move were more effort than a little fat bloke could aspire to. Frederick Troy sprang to his feet, small and dark and nimble.
“Rod’s forgetting his manners, Joe. What can I get him to get you?”
“Oh . . . what Eddie’s having will be fine.”
Rod looked from the one to the other.
“You two know each other?”
“Fifty-nine, wasn’t it?” Wilderness said.
“Fifty-eight,” said Troy. “I was still a copper in those days.”
“Yes . . . I heard you’d retired.”
“Quit would be more the word. Eighteen months ago. Followed by a year in New York that damn near killed me.”
“An accident?”
“Tuberculosis. I almost coughed myself to death like some poor bugger in a Dostoevsky novel.”
“But you’re OK now?”
“Touch wood.”
“You won’t be going back to the Yard?”
Wilderness hoped Troy would say no. If it was yes he’d never prise Eddie out.
“No, I won’t.”
Rod reappeared. Thrust a whisky and soda into Wilderness’s hand.
“Ask him what he means to do now. Won’t answer me when I ask. Fifty years old . . . ”
“Forty-nine,” said Troy.
“Forty-nine years old and he does bugger all.”
Over dinner Wilderness found it hard to revel in Rod Troy’s indiscretions, the ins and inners of the Labour cabinet, a government that had been in office less than a year, and at that by the skin of its teeth—it would surely go to the country any minute for a bigger majority.
It was Frederick Troy who interested him. The last time they met had been a knot of tensions—each of them in his professional mode. He had seen the task in hand more than he had seen the man.
He got a good look at him, and had Troy anything to say would have got a good listen, but the man was taciturn. Rod held forth, Cid did her best to draw them all into conversation, and Wilderness was surprised how forthright Eddie could be on things political. Left to their own devices the room would have dissolved around Rod and Eddie, as Eddie laid into the Wilson government with the righteousness of a convinced socialist—a word he would not apply to the prime minister.
Troy said nothing.
Wilderness looked on, appraising—a more than fleeting resemblance to the young James Mason of fifteen or so years ago, thick, unruly black hair not yet turning to grey . . . a small, dark elf of a man . . . something from a Diaghilev ballet . . . bespoke suit and shoes, a tailored shirt, worn, gold cuff links handed down the generations . . . it cost a lot to dress a Troy, he concluded . . . no rings on the manicured hands, a pianist’s hands, as Eddie had said . . . and Wilderness realized that Troy was not listening to his brother, or to anyone at the table, that his left hand held a fork, but his right was forming chords on the tablecloth and in his head he was playing music, the fork would occasionally stab an airy nothing rather like a conductor’s baton . . . and a moonsliver razor scar on the left cheek . . . and obsidian eyes . . . there was a Russian folk song he recalled from his training . . . “Dark Eyes,” “Ochi Cherniye”:
Очи чёрные, очи пламенны
И мaнят они в страны дальные,
Где царит любовь, где царит покой,
Где страданья нет, где вражды запрет
It ended something like
“Вы сгубили меня очи чёрные. ”
You have ruined my life, dark eyes.
Well, his reputation preceded him. It was said Frederick Troy had ruined several lives. Eddie’s had not been one of them. Wilderness had been the one who had almost ruined Eddie’s life.
/> Troy broke the spell of his own hidden music and the spell of Wilderness’s gaze. He got up from the table, uncorked another bottle of wine. Wine wasn’t just red or white to Wilderness. He’d grown up beer and skittles but encountered good wines long ago, on the grounds that it paid to know what you were stealing.
Troy filled Wilderness’s glass and seeing the look in his eye turned the bottle around to show him the label.
“Haut-Bailly ’43,” he said. “Rather a good year.”
“The ’45’s better.”
“Touché, Joe. Touché.”
Wilderness and Eddie had smuggled plenty of wine in their Berlin days, including a couple of dozen cases of the Haut-Bailly ’45, which they’d sampled far too young. And they’d had a brief, disappointing encounter with ten thousand bottles of first growth claret. Yes, Wilderness had been the one who had almost ruined Eddie’s life.
Wilderness cornered him over coffee.
“Would you care to be real again?”
“Eh?”
“You said, not two hours ago, that I was more real than you’d ever been.”
“I meant a real spy.”
“So did I.”
“Joe . . . what are you up to?”
“I have a very tricky mission coming up. I need someone to take over from me in London. For two years now I’ve been Burne-Jones’s desk jockey. This is my chance to shuffle it all off onto someone who actually likes being in an office.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“Are you offering me a job?”
“I am so empowered.”
“I’d be back in Intelligence?”
“Often a misnomer, but yes.”
“And where would you be?”
“Back in the field. Back in the game. With any luck the old man will never get me behind a desk again.”
“The field? Another bloody misnomer. Which field?”
“Berlin.”
“Oh bloody Norah, not again.”
“Oh yes.”
“When was it? Sixty-one? Burne-Jones wanted you to run the Berlin station and you . . .”
“Eddie. To be fair he never actually asked.”
