‘That is correct. But before she went with BOAC she had spent a year at a nursing school, so she is qualified to run our little infirmary. If a boy is seriously ill the doctor comes over.’
Did Miss Williams spend nights at St. John’s?
‘Most of the time. Her family lives nearby and occasionally she will leave after the boys have gone to bed and will be back by breakfast time in the morning. She has, of course, a day off every week.’ The priest then rose, shook hands with the solicitor, and said he would send in the matron.
A few minutes later, Renira Williams walked in.
She was a handsome woman, erect and heavyset. Dressed in a nurse’s stiff white uniform, she wore a small cap on her rich brown hair. A tiny red cross was sewn above the trim little pocket above her left breast. She greeted Blackford Oakes with poise and sat down.
‘Father Paine says you have some questions you wish to put to me? What about?’
‘About Bertram Heath.’
‘Oh,’ she said guardedly. ‘What about him?’
‘He has applied for a position, and a client of our firm’—Blackford extended a card identifying himself as ‘George Benton,’ an associate of ‘Whitelock & Entwhistle,’ solicitors of Gray’s Inn Road—‘has asked us to—well, to make the normal investigation.’
‘How did you get my name?’
Blackford gave the same story he had given to the headmaster. ‘Why, Mr. Heath evidently gave your name as a reference.’
‘He did not. You are lying to me.’
Blackford managed to look surprised as he reached up and pulled distractedly on his two-week-old beard. ‘Why, Miss Williams, I am most surprised at this. I have simply assumed that he gave your name, because your name appears on the list of the four or five people I have been instructed to consult. It could be, I suppose, that one of the other references gave your name; it would be in the file I have here.’ Absentmindedly, he looked into the little folder.
‘Look,’ Renira Williams said. ‘Let me be direct. Is your firm willing to pay for information?’
Blackford seized the moment. The tone of his voice changed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My firm is willing to pay for information.’
‘In that case, meet me at the Nell Gwynne Tavern in Windsor at nine-thirty.’
‘I shall be there. Thank you.’
Blackford walked out of the main door, down the steps to his car. It was very nearly dark. He opened the door, and thereby caused a bucket of water perched on the car roof and tied to the door handle to tumble, dousing him with its contents. He heard the squeals and giggles of boys from behind the brick wall running to the side of the school building. He thought briefly of giving chase, instead wiped the water from his face with the sleeve of his jacket and called out, ‘Nice aiming, boys.’ He drove off.
14
Alistair Fleetwood returned to his apartments late after the dinner in honour of Albert Einstein. Fleetwood had been asked to propose the first toast, and he was pleased, when he rose to speak, by the wall-to-wall murmur of appreciation, not unmixed with awe. He had spoken of Einstein’s humbling of the universe, a universe which had succeeded over so many centuries in outwitting the mind of man—until it came upon the mind of Albert Einstein.
A lot of that kind of thing, Sir Alistair chuckled internally, the sort of grandiloquent nothingness that works so well with people who are expecting profundity, and will find it, never mind the merit of the thought. (Einstein, Sir Alistair liked to think, hit on a very bright idea in his early twenties, and dithered for most of the rest of his life, but all that dither was interpreted as profundity, and Sir Alistair was willing to go along with the game, indeed thought it professionally self-enhancing to do so.) But Fleetwood had gone out of his way to indite a few sentences the meaning of which he knew would be understood by not more than a dozen of the hundred guests there: a nice, recondite cadenza on the subject of the choreography of wavelengths, which exercise would there and then reemphasise him as a part of that elect fraternity that could speak to Einstein in his own special language. After that, he turned his esoterica into a single metaphor that suggested the preeminent concern all civilised persons must have for peace, and—Sir Alistair Fleetwood smiled just a bit as he turned the key of his door—the crowd had, well, demonstrated the rare satisfaction they had taken from hearing such … poetry, from their very own Nobel laureate.
Inside, he took off his black tie and dinner jacket and laid them down on the armchair in his living room for Jackson, his manservant, to pick up in the morning, press, and hang up. He went into his large, book-lined study, in one corner of which he kept his formidable collection of radios. (He boasted to his friends that he had not paid an overseas long-distance telephone bill for years, so proficient was he in the use of ham radios. ‘If I wish to speak to Paris, God save me, I simply ask a fellow ham operator in the area kindly to “patch me in” to the desired number, to introduce the vocabulary of the fraternity!’) He went to the little wire recorder he had preset to tune into Radio Moscow at nine. This was, after all, a Monday, Alice Goodyear Corbett’s day of the week. He wound the wire back, flicked on the switch, and continued undressing as he listened to what had come in on the 7.150 MHz frequency. It began as always with the top of the news:
‘Soviet authorities today delivered identical notes to Great Britain, France, and the United States, proposing a Big Four summit conference to take place in August or September in order to pave the way for the European Security Meeting already suggested by Soviet authorities to the three nations on July 24.’ The announcer continued for five minutes, mostly on this development as yet another indication of the dogged priority attached by the Soviet Union to a peaceful world.
Then came the gravelly voice of the woman with the personal announcements, mostly devoted to an account of awards given to workers who had distinguished themselves in one way or another. ‘Nikita Kholkov’ had received an award: which meant that at eight the following morning Fleetwood must tune in on MHz 3.008. He yawned, but had no need to set his alarm. He always woke early, and tomorrow morning he would need to begin to work on the Rede lectures he was to deliver in October.
The following morning, across an unusual amount of static, he tuned in on the humdrum voice giving the humdrum messages. He singled out the one intended for him, along with the code number. It was ‘eleven.’ That meant: go to Stockholm. The number was repeated three times: ‘Kholkov eleven eleven eleven.’
The repetition—eleven, three times—meant that the need was very pressing.
He turned to his desk and looked at his calendar. It was relatively uncrowded for the three weeks remaining in August, before the beginning of the next term—it would be easy enough to put off the two or three casual engagements he had for lunch and dinner. And going off to Stockholm never presented any ambient curiosity. His academic contacts were kept lively. There was always work to do in Stockholm.
But mostly he had to look forward, in Stockholm, to Alice Goodyear Corbett. To think of it! Almost twenty years since, as an eighteen-year-old, he had met her. And, even now, when he was with her he felt biologically eighteen years old, and otherwise something like a god, which is how Alice treated him, assuming there were any such things as gods. It was as basic as that she truly worshipped him, and in her hands he found his own natural self-esteem wonderfully warmed. No one could speak quite as Alice spoke of Alistair’s singularity. Of his towering intellect. Of his contributions to human knowledge and to the advancement of social idealism. And—of his personal irresistibility. His manly body, his extraordinary eyes, his … He forced himself to stop, else he’d have needed to reenter the shower.
By ten his travel arrangements were made. He used his ham radio to telephone a colleague in Stockholm who passed along the word to the right quarter about his impending arrival.
Alistair Fleetwood spent the afternoon of the following day in the laboratory of the University of Stockholm, where he was a frequent visitor. He surveyed the logs ke
pt by two graduate students studying the metamorphosis of radio wave patterns in space, made a few comments in a notebook, spoke over the telephone with a fellow astrophysicist. Two of his colleagues invited him to dine, but Fleetwood pleaded fatigue, told them that night he would eat in his room, retire early, and be the life of the party with them the following night.
He reached his room at six, called room service, and ordered smoked salmon, roast beef (Alice loved roast beef, which was hard to get in Moscow), a bottle of red and a bottle of white wine, coffee ice cream, and acquavit—for two. ‘Serve me at eight,’ he added. ‘At eight exactly.’ He put down the telephone and went into the bathroom to shower.
He did this, and then brought from his travel bag the cologne, picked up his dressing gown and looked at himself in the mirror, both with his dressing gown on and with it off. He was pleased by both sights, even acknowledging that he was tucking in his stomach just a very little bit. But he weighed only 180 pounds, which was not heavy for someone nearly six feet tall, and he wondered whether anywhere in the world a Nobel laureate looked quite as—well, noble was not such a bad word for it, though Alistair Fleetwood hated puns. He felt mounting anxiety in his loins, and for a fleeting instant, but not for more than an instant, he wondered whether Alice would let him down. Surely she had got word of the time of his arrival? And she always took such pride in the promptness of her own coordinated arrivals when he answered her frequent biddings to come to Stockholm. He took the bottle of sherry he had bought at the airport, opened it, and at that moment heard the knock.
She came dressed in a white blouse and flared orange skirt, her dark hair in braids around the back of her head, her ample bosom alight with excitement reflected in her eyes and with a smile on glistening lips. They kissed passionately. ‘Oh my darling Alistair, my handsome, brainy Alistair, the little boy I took all over the Soviet Union … Just think that only a very few years ago you were a student, and now—well, now you are quite simply the most exciting, and the most handsome, young physicist in the world. Everybody knows that. What they don’t know is that you are also the greatest lover in—in—’
‘The spy world?’ Alistair Fleetwood proffered, laughing. And then, ‘Hurry, hurry, dear Alice, don’t keep me waiting now. It has been two months.’
A separation of two months was for Alice as heavy a privation as it was for Alistair. Since that summer before the war, she had come to think of him as something of a flower she was herself responsible for nurturing. She had presided over his formal initiation into manhood. She had enlisted him in the great struggle for the world. And she had found herself in the company of a man who year by year, month by month, almost day by day, suggested the towering limits to which one human being could go. Her little eighteen-year-old, whom she had taken from museum to museum, now a Nobel Prize winner! Now the instrument of the most formidable intelligence breakthrough in history!
She went happily into the bathroom. He drew down the blinds in the bedroom and moments later was waiting for her in bed. She came to him, and he wondered whether it was possible that she could have added to her inventory of knowledge of how to pleasure him. She was resourceful, and adamant, and adoring; and she whispered, as they locked together, her devotion to him, to his great genius, to the great debt the world owed to him; and he knew bliss, unaware whether what he heard in his ears or what he experienced in his loins gave him the greater pleasure. Soon, he moaned. And she fell silent, her lovely, loosened head of hair on his chest.
Fleetwood looked at her and reflected that she was a very special vessel of delight. She managed a fluent combination of talents, he thought. She knew how to appeal to his mind, by saying things he liked to hear—liked to hear them because after all they were true: he was a scientist, and he knew as a scientific fact that he was abnormally good-looking, and very probably a genius. And then she had a true appreciation of his body. The combination of skills she used, with her hands, her lips, her breasts, were perfect orchestrations of a tribute to his remarkable body. Yes, Alice Goodyear Corbett was really quite remarkable, a refreshing contrast to the perfumed mini-delights he satisfied himself with in London. And then, behind it all, they had the spiritual bond in common, that great and exciting struggle in which they had joined against Western hypocrisy.
It was very nearly too much, Sir Alistair thought contentedly as he reached over and turned on the bed light. It was twenty minutes to eight.
‘I have ordered dinner for the usual time. A dinner fit for a queen. Fit for you, my dear Alice. My dear Alice Goodyear Corbett. I am glad that I do not remember the name of that Russian yokel you are married to.’
‘Ah, my darling. That is, really, a professional relationship. Not to be mentioned in the same breath with yours and mine.’
When the doorbell rang, she rose and went into the bathroom.
Fleetwood let the waiter into the large living room adjacent to the bedroom. After the dinner, he poured them each an aquavit and then said, ‘All right now, Alice Goodyear Corbett. What is going on?’
She was grave now, as she began.
Although she had been in the company of the head of the KGB a total of four times, starting when Alistair Fleetwood had confided to her what he thought he could accomplish, she was always terribly nervous in his presence. And when, three days ago, she had been instructed to go to him at midnight, she found herself wondering whether he might actually have in mind something—personal. The idea of anything personal with Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria did not appeal to her, ‘not one little bit, Alistair.’
But just in case, acknowledging the realities—that if he was determined to take her, she could hardly resist the head of the KGB—she went to him after taking a hot shower, using some perfume, and taking precautions.
‘I mean you can never absolutely tell. But on my way to the Kremlin I reminded myself that he likes routinely to keep very late hours. Between you and me,’ she said to Alistair, ‘it is quite widely thought that he does this because Stalin always did it, and of course there are those who believe—I would not mention this to anyone but you, my darling—that he would not mind stepping into Stalin’s shoes, in case, for instance, Malenkov failed, or whatever. Anyway, I was told to be there at midnight, I got there at eleven-thirty, and he called for me at one-fifteen!’
‘And then?’ Alistair Fleetwood asked, anxiety audible in his voice.
‘And then he came quite quickly to the point.’
‘Which is?’
‘Well, Lavrenti Pavlovich says that an agent of his in whom he has supreme trust has told him there are reasons to believe that counterrevolutionary activity is being conducted by a highly placed Soviet official. But someone so highly placed—he did not, of course, disclose the name—that the KGB cannot proceed against him as it would against ordinary suspects. Nothing like tapping his telephone or surveying his mail, that kind of thing. Apparently this official gets most of his communications right through the Kremlin coding machine. And it is an urgent matter of state security to detect him in this pursuit. Lavrenti Pavlovich told me’—Alice’s eyes were wide open, her grave face very grave, her voice now lowered so that Alistair had to strain to hear her—‘told me that this official could be a mortal enemy of the Soviet State.’
‘Mortal enemy? How can there be a mortal enemy, dear Alice? There is no such thing as a “mortal” enemy of history. It is history that is working on our side. There can be setbacks—of course. But nothing fatal. Nothing mortal.’
‘Well that was the word he used—smertel’nyi, which is the Russian for “mortal,” “fatal”—’
Fleetwood interrupted her. ‘Dear Alice, do you not suppose I now know why I have been summoned?’
‘Of course, dear Alistair. And the question is, can you supply a Zirca for Lavrenti Pavlovich?’
Fleetwood sighed. ‘My darling, it is most awfully intricate. You know that I had to put it together myself. I must have spent—oh, two hundred hours on it. The parts alone need to be hand-made. The testing,
the refining, the fine-tuning …’
‘He said to tell you that the entire resources of the Soviet State are at your disposal.’
‘The entire resources of the Soviet State wouldn’t save me five minutes’ work.’ Alistair Fleetwood seldom passed by opportunities to acknowledge the singularity of his achievements. Normally in the course of drawing attention to himself, he would not disparage the Soviet Union, but the scientist in him had just now been provoked. ‘Those chaps—’ he said heatedly, ‘Tamm, Sakharov, Cherenkov, Frank—have become very skilled in manufacturing hydrogen bombs, and I am aware that they are working on a missile, and perhaps one day, not far away, a satellite. But they are heavily dependent on Western scientists, people like me—well, there aren’t, exactly, “people” like me, except Einstein, Teller, Oppenheimer maybe. Yes, people like us. But you know, on the whole, Soviet scientists have not yet learned how to make, well, shredded wheat. Help me with a Zirca? Help Michelangelo paint a ceiling?’
‘Oh darling, we rely on you so heavily. But I must tell you that Lavrenti Pavlovich stressed that there is nothing more important than this mission. Your contribution could be critical, he said. I will avoid using the word you say is anti-Marxist, but suppose that he is correct, and that this counterrevolutionary official could deal us a devastating blow.’ Alice Goodyear Corbett was becoming fiery in her delivery. Alistair Fleerwood remembered how, twenty years ago, lecturing to the young Cambridge socialists, she had spoken of Leon Trotsky. ‘You will do it, won’t you, Alistair?’
‘There is an obvious alternative, Alice. Quite obvious.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Use the one that is already made.’
She drew a deep breath. ‘I have to admit, I had not thought of that.’
‘Well, you should think of that. Especially since as we both know, we are not even acting on the information we are currently getting.’
High Jinx Page 11
