Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  “Actually I don’t, Mrs. Kroger, but I’d like to speak to you and your husband, if he is at home. It’s rather urgent, I am afraid.”

  Helen Kroger looked at the young woman and decided she was serious. “Very well; I’ll get him.” She went to the back door and called out, “Peter, there’s someone here who wants to talk to us.”

  A moment later Peter Kroger came in the door, also dressed for gardening. He seemed to be about fifty, with a mop of white hair parted almost in the middle. He was large enough to be a good match for his wife, but thin and rather athletic in appearance. He smiled brightly and extended his hand. Automatically Alice took it.

  “Care to sit, Miss . . .” her hostess said.

  “No, I’ll stand, thank you.” She cleared her throat. “My name is Alice Silverstone. I’m a solicitor. Thank you for the book, but that’s not really why I’ve come.” Nothing for it but to dive in. “I have reason to believe that you are not Mr. and Mrs. Peter and Helen Kroger, but that you are in fact Morris and Lona Cohen.”

  The woman looked at her. “I beg your pardon? Who are these people, and how did you come to mistake us for them?”

  Meanwhile Peter Kroger peeled off his gardening gloves. “It’s funny, young lady, but you are not the first to make that mistake. Someone addressed Mrs. Kroger that way a few months ago in town. She must have a double somewhere.” He laughed at the thought.

  “That was Mr. Tom Wrought, sir, who saw her . . . and you too, a few weeks later at the same bookshop.” Time to start putting some cards on the table, Alice thought. “I believe you both know him from your days in New York, ten years ago and more.”

  Helen Kroger stood her ground. “Sorry, we don’t know anyone of that name.”

  But her husband had already decided on another tack.

  “Please sit down, Miss . . . Silverstone, and tell us what you came about.” He pulled a chair from the kitchen table and sat down. Wordlessly Helen Kroger did the same. Alice now felt she had to take a seat as well.

  When they were all sitting still at the oilskin-covered table, she began again. Alice had very few more cards to play. How well could she bluff? “As you know, Tom Wrought was arrested for murder.” If they knew, it wouldn’t be from newspaper stories. There had been none, really. Alice would learn something from any admission that they knew. She got none.

  Helen Kroger responded, “We know no such thing. Who is this Tom Wrought? What does a murder have to do with us?”

  Peter Kroger sighed. “Miss Silverstone, we are going to hear you out. But we aren’t going to bother confirming or denying your innuendos. Now, pray continue.”

  Alice looked from Peter Kroger to Helen Kroger and back. Then she began again. “Tom Wrought has been framed for a murder. I have reason to believe that the victim was either murdered by Soviet agents or that they arranged for him to be murdered under circumstances that throw grave suspicions on Mr. Wrought.”

  Peter Kroger now asked, “Why would Soviet agents do this, please?” Alice watched Helen Kroger give her husband a sharp look. She must also have kicked him under the table, as he could not suppress a grimace of pain. Kroger looked back at her and repeated his question. “Why would the Russians want to make trouble for this Mr. Wrought?”

  “That is something I was hoping you could help me with, Mr. and Mrs. . . .” Alice couldn’t decide what to call them. Then she chose, “Cohen.”

  Very calmly and with all the sincere friendliness she could muster, Helen Kroger replied, “I’m sorry, Miss Silverstone, but I promise you, our names are Kroger. I think we can prove that in a court of law. And we really know nothing about Soviet agents or your Mr. Wrought. Now unless there is something else you want to tell us, we need to get back to our garden before we lose the light.” She rose and began pulling on her gloves.

  “Very well, Mr. and Mrs. Cohen . . . or Kroger.” Alice got out of her chair. She had to raise the stakes. “I didn’t expect you immediately to own up to a junior solicitor asking questions.” There was only one threat to make. “So, speak to whomever your resident controller is. You may tell him that unless steps are taken to clear Mr. Wrought by revealing the real murderers, I will have no alternative but to identify you both to the CID and MI5. I should also tell you that, should I come to any harm, everything I have said today will find its way to the authorities.” She put a business card on the table. “You can reach me at this number.” Then Alice rose, and with all the appearance of sangfroid she could muster, walked to the front door and let herself out of the house.

  Alice was shivering as she walked back to the tube stop. It wasn’t a very cold day, but she was walking into a stiff breeze; suddenly the shirtwaist dress under her trench coat was sodden with perspiration. It was an acrid sweat of nerves and fright that Alice had not even noticed in the Krogers’ kitchen. There had been no sign of menace, but she must have picked it up without allowing the recognition of threat—especially from the woman—to penetrate her demeanour. Only at the station did she realize she had left the first edition of the Orwell and now would have nothing to distract her on the ride back to central London. And only after that did she recall that she had no particular reason to worry about threats to her life. She calmed down and cooled off quickly.

  It was the very next day when her intercom buzzed. “Telephone for you, a Mrs. Kroger.” The office clerk was speaking.

  “Very well, put her through, Mr. Boyle.” Alice smiled to herself. This was indeed before time. “Alice Silverstone.”

  “It’s Helen Kroger, Miss Silverstone. You left your copy of Homage to Catalonia. Can you come collect it tomorrow round eight o’clock in the evening?”

  “Back up to Ruislip?”

  “Didn’t you say you live here?”

  A slip! Probably harmless now, but you have to keep your wits about you dealing with spies, Alice. “Oh yes. I’m at work just now in town.”

  Even before Alice had rung the bell, the door was opened by Peter Kroger, whose smile seemed forced. “Come in, Miss Silverstone. Please, follow me.”

  This time they turned left at the hall and entered a lounge, where Helen Kroger was already seated. The chesterfield was hard, in a durable fabric, with three little buttons across the back. The matching lounge chair looked no more comfortable. In the corner were a small television and a console radio with shortwave bands on the large tuning dial. The mantelpiece over a three-filament electric fire bore no pictures, Dalton china, or figurines. It was cold in the house. The room gave the appearance of never really being used much at all. It was as if the house’s occupants never wished to be seen from the street.

  No longer in gardening clothes, both Krogers were dressed for an evening excursion. Neither looked as calm or confident as they had when Alice had left them. All sat down round the coffee table. Helen Kroger was glaring at her with the look of someone about to lose her husband to another, younger woman. Peter Kroger kept his eyes to the floor, looking almost sheepish. Rather like a schoolboy about to come clean about a prank he had been resolutely refusing to admit doing. The silence persisted, however, even after they had settled themselves.

  Alice tried to piece the scene together. Her look could kill; his demeanour is hangdog. None of this makes sense.

  Kroger pushed a bamboo cigarette box towards Alice, and she took one. Finally he spoke. “There is someone who wishes to meet you, Miss Silverstone. But he requires complete anonymity. And therefore we need to take some extraordinary measures.”

  “Such as?” Alice was more curious now than anxious.

  “You will be blindfolded, and your hands will be bound, loosely, but in a way that assures you cannot pull down the blindfold.”

  “Would a promise on my honour not to peek suffice?”

  It was a Slavic voice from another room that replied, “Nope, ’fraid not.” Slavic, but obviously fluent and tinged with that Americanism “nope.”

  Alice stood, put her hands behind her, and allowed Helen Kroger to tie them with the sort of c
ord used to wrap book parcels. Then a hood was placed over her head. “I thought you said blindfolded.” She was surprised. “This is rather claustrophobic.”

  It was Peter Kroger who replied, “With regret, our friend insists. Mrs. Kroger and I will withdraw now, Miss Silverstone, and return when your interview is over.”

  A few moments later, Alice heard the front door close.

  “Please, tell me what you want,” came the voice of the man from the other room.

  Alice wanted to know at least something about the man she was dealing with. “Your English is American, isn’t it? Where did you learn?”

  The reply betrayed his origins. “Do not trifle with me.” He hadn’t lost the Russian difficulty with the English v for w, and the th came out as a zed. “Tell me what exactly you want.”

  “I want my client freed from jail.”

  “We had nothing to do with it.”

  “Whether or not you had anything to do with it, that’s what I want. Unless I get it, your friends’ names will be given to MI5.”

  “If that happens, Miss Silverstone, you won’t live very long, and neither will Mr. Wrought, in prison or out.”

  “So be it.”

  Was the man threatening her or bluffing? She knew immediately. Couldn’t be bluffing. This meeting is an admission that the Krogers are spies. At last she knew something for sure, something lethal. Not for her, but for Tom Wrought and Liz Spencer. It was a genie that could not be put back in the bottle without erasing their knowledge or erasing them. This genie can kill, she knew. But can it grant wishes? Alice was too scared to smile at the thought. Suddenly in the underheated lounge, Alice had begun to perspire again.

  “Why do you think we had anything to do with what happened to Mr. Wrought?”

  “Because he twigged to the fact that the Krogers are the Cohens.” Alice had to convince, she knew. “She had tried to get him involved in espionage back in the ’40s in New York. He knew immediately they were spies. They told you he’d identified them here. You couldn’t kill him, because an investigation might have led back to them. So you had him framed for a murder and sold him to the CID.”

  “No, no, no. You’re adding two and two and getting five. The Krogers never told me about meeting Wrought till yesterday. Foolish of them to have waited so long to tell me, but true. So, no one on our side had anything to do with it.”

  “Sorry. I’m not buying.” Alice was suddenly glad the hood was hiding her slight smile. “Find a way to get him out, or he goes to British counterintelligence. As for threatening him or me, if we promise to keep our mouths shut, you’ll always have to worry that we won’t. But if you kill either one of us, the information is guaranteed to get to MI5.”

  “I’m telling you for the last time, we had nothing to do with it, so far as I know.”

  “Maybe you don’t know everything.” It was time for the card she had been holding back. She had no idea of its value. She didn’t even know if it was a card in this game. “Perhaps you should ask Mr. Philby about it.”

  “Who?”

  “Philby, Kim Philby.”

  There was a distinct pause, an intake of breath, almost as if her interlocutor had received an elbow in the ribcage. Then the words came, “Who is he, please?”

  “Ask around.” She heard the man rise, walk—no, stomp out of the room, and slam the front door. Thank you, Kim Philby. Whoever you are, you’ve made everything I’ve said much more convincing.

  A moment later Alice heard the front door open again. The Krogers had returned. Her hood was removed and her hands unbound. Wordlessly Helen Kroger handed Alice her coat and the book, pushed her out the door, and locked it.

  Alice walked back to the underground station. This time she felt cool and collected, happy with the way the interview had gone. Alice noticed that at least for a little while, her pain was gone, suppressed perhaps by some combination of adrenalin and whatever else made one happy. She couldn’t blame the Krogers for beating a retreat, though she had no intention of blowing their cover, not immediately at any rate. But they couldn’t be sure of that.

  Sitting under a lamp at a bench on the open platform, she unwrapped the Orwell and began to read. She suspected that she’d hear from the Russia spy network in London even before she finished the book. She was wrong. Homage to Catalonia was a fast read, and the first main directorate of the KGB was a very ponderous organization.

  A wet morning engulfed the whole southeast of England as Alice arrived at Brixton Prison. Her high-heeled pumps were sodden. The rainwater was still running off her coat and pooling round her feet by the time she’d finished filling out the prison visit forms. The walk to the interview room felt like treading on sponges. And the passageways were holding on to all the cold they had absorbed in the wintry night.

  Would the authorities confiscate the magic slates? she wondered. Were the warders really taken in by the tale about the psychiatrist? Who was so interested and so powerful that they were permitted to violate a prisoner’s rights with such impunity? Approval for that kind of illegality could only come from someone high in government—a cabinet minister or senior civil servant. Well, there was no point making an issue of it before she had found a way to free Tom Wrought. If you live long enough to do either of those things.

  After the usual protocols, Tom and Alice faced each other and took up the psychiatric charade again as she handed him a slate.

  Tom said, “Here’s the next two composition books, all filled out.” Alice had tried to indicate the slates, but he kept talking. Then he took a slate and wrote,

  They’re filled with gibberish, but they have been examined every time I am out of the cell for exercise period. There’s a long arm reaching into this prison.

  Taking up her slate, she spoke a bit too loudly in case anyone was listening. “I’m afraid I didn’t bring new ones.”

  Tom’s face assumed a look of disappointment. Then he took one of the books back. “There are still some blank pages in this one. I’ll finish it off, shall I?”

  “Yes, of course.” She handed him the slate on which she had been writing.

  Krogers are spies. I visited them. It spooked them into contacting their controller. He met with me. Didn’t see his face though.

  My hypothesis: They alerted KGB that you could blow their cover. Their controller denies any involvement. Threatens death to you, me, if we disclose to authorities. Thoughts?

  Tom read and reflected for a moment, handed the slate back, and then began writing.

  Possible Krogers are gathering intelligence on British nuclear program. That would be enough to make them worth protecting. But why not just threaten to silence or kill me themselves? Another question: Does the KGB control Scotland Yard? Can it reach into a remand prison now?

  He passed the slate to her. Alice wiped it clean quickly and passed it back. She had been writing at the same time that he was answering her first message.

  They couldn’t kill you. Thorough investigation of your death might have led the Brits right to the Krogers.

  Now, if you trade Krogers to MI5 for your freedom, KGB will probably target you, me, Liz(?) anyway.

  We could demand they exchange someone they are holding in Russia for you and threaten them with disclosure if they refuse.

  Tom read quickly and shook his head violently.

  No go. I don’t want to live in Russia, and I certainly wouldn’t take Liz there. How about you? Do you think the KGB will leave you here untouched?

  Now it was Alice’s turn to shake her head. She took up her stylus again.

  There’s got to be more pieces to the puzzle we’re missing.

  Remember the name Kim Philby I asked you about a few weeks ago? He’s the one who called Michael Foot about your anonymous articles.

  He thought for a moment. Then he shook his head and wrote,

  Told you I don’t recognize the name. Why?

  She responded,

  It’s just a small piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit. I
tried to find out anything I could about him. Then a well-connected friend warned me he was dangerous. I tried the name on the Krogers’ control. He claimed not to know the name either. But he didn’t act like it.

  Tom picked up his slate.

  I’m sorry I got you into this. Wish I could be more help. Just playing with magic slates is maddening.

  Alice smiled and wrote,

  Don’t worry about me. Solicitors know how to protect themselves. This is the best case I’ve taken since I was admitted to the bar. More fun than defending Soho strippers.

  Then she added,

  Liz comes back from the States tomorrow morning. Let’s see if she has found some more puzzle pieces.

  The next morning Alice Silverstone was at her desk in Red Lion Square. She had taken The Confessions of Tom Wrought from the Left Luggage at Kings Cross and was rereading them for the fourth time. Alice was trying to find something she had missed or a way of connecting the episodes that would withstand the most obvious objections. What she wanted was a cigarette, but it was eight fifteen and if she took one this early, her throat would hurt, and she would have finished a packet by suppertime. Why are you worried about smoking too much, Alice? she demanded of herself, but could find no answer. Then the intercom rang. “A Liz Spencer for you.”