by Joseph Hone
‘All those sheeps’ eyes rumbling about the belly a bit, eh, Reilly? Have to get you an easier pitch next time. Surveillance from a caff in the Mile End Road.’
And then the man was sick. At first it seemed he had just turned away to cough, cupping his hand over his mouth. But the cough rapidly matured into a long groaning spurt, a violent eruption of purplish liquid which shot from his mouth like a hose, all over one corner of the church steps. The two men jumped in surprise at the violence of the fit and then went for Reilly as he began to fold.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I shouldn’t –’ Reilly erupted once more, coming again like an experienced lover. ‘I shouldn’t –’
‘Well done, Croxley. Well done!’ McCoy almost shouted. ‘If he sees us now –’ McCoy danced around the steps in a wild fury. Croxley did no more than growl at him by way of reply. He was looking after one of his own men. ‘Give me a handkerchief,’ he said. ‘A clean one.’ Then he was on to Reilly again.
‘Get right down, Reilly, right down. Get it out of you!’
Reilly had his hands to his throat, gasping. He was a wretched sight.
‘It’s all right now, sir,’ he murmured after a time. ‘I should have had an omelette.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Croxley brushed him down with McCoy’s handkerchief like a parent. ‘It doesn’t matter. Probably better you had the Greek stuff, olives and all. He could well have been suspicious, seeing a man eating an omelette in that sort of restaurant. Get back to the van, take it easy. We have enough men. You know, back entrance to the Wigmore Hall, where they bring the pianos in.’
*
Their backs were turned when the man came to the end of the street by the church. He paused and glanced at the three wavering figures, the most unsteady man in the middle, and reflected, not for the first time, on the British tendency to public drunkenness – squiffy at midday, staggering by early afternoon. But it was a form of release he understood well enough. He had used it himself in less happy times. It was a necessary tool of his trade. You had to know how to handle it, that was all.
He re-lit his pipe, savouring the burnt sweetness for a moment, waiting for the traffic to pass. Then he crossed over, going in the opposite direction along Hinde Street, towards Manchester Square. It had been a good lunch, simple, yet full of precise flavours. And now what? Why not a glance at the Wallace Collection? How true it was, he reflected, that one never gets round to seeing the treasures on one’s own doorstep.
*
Summers had walked after him to the corner and now he almost ran to where the three men were standing.
‘He’s moving, sir!’ Croxley turned. ‘He’s on his way now, towards Manchester Square.’
‘The Wallace Collection.’
‘I should think so,’ Summers said. ‘Bound to be.’
Croxley turned to McCoy, but didn’t bother to take the advantage. He was serious now. In his book these games were coming to an end.
‘All right. Let’s take him.’ McCoy pruned the syllables viciously into sharp points. ‘Take him, Croxley.’ And now his words were harshly anguished like the pleas of Trojan women. ‘Take him – and let’s be done with this tomfoolery. Stop this nonsense, almighty God….’
McCoy had risen in anger, the fats about his body expanding like a cake. He looked up at the sooty portico of his church and at last cared nothing more for blasphemy. He swore then that he would fall upon this man with venom, forget a lifetime’s careful doubt. Within the hour, he would make him pay for all the bright glitter, the sins and gifts of others.
‘Bring them in, Summers. Call them in,’ Croxley said gently, as if his men were children who had strayed over the hill. ‘You know the routine. Back and front of the building. Keep the cars at a distance. When you’re ready, give us the word.’ He turned to McCoy. ‘It should go like clockwork. We planned it all before, you see.’
3
The man studied the group of Canalettos in the ante-room to the left of the hall. He had thought at first of leaving them to the end of his tour, but they had tempted him strongly, bright visions in the distance, and he was glad he’d given in. On closer inspection, he wondered if they might be deteriorating. There were cracks, minute hair-line fractures, running like waves about the placid blue arcs of sky over the canals. He felt a quick sadness, a disappointment. These perfect memorials were ephemeral as the perfect originals. Even art was not long. He stepped back for a larger view.
Then he heard the voices and had to force himself not to turn about and run.
Two voices, a man and a woman, talking in an unfamiliar Russian dialect. Estonia, Latvia, the Ukraine? He wasn’t sure – except that it was Soviet. Then he recognised a sentence – they were speaking of Canaletto and the Doge’s Palace. He relaxed and turned his head a fraction. One of the gallery attendants, a stocky fellow in his fifties with a face like a rock, was explaining Venice to a younger woman, toughly built like him, almost a gypsy woman, in her rough, unfinished bearing, her fair hair streaked with carrot. And the man was able to place them immediately – these displaced people. There had been hundreds of thousands of them just after the war, POWs for the most part, Russians who had been in prison and then refugee camps all over Germany for years after 1945; nationalist minorities who had never gone home to Mother Russia but had chosen to settle anywhere else, in countries the world over, without ever forgetting their homeland, their language or their loss.
It ruined his afternoon. For months now, prior to his transfer he had lived clear of all control and contact. He had been sleeping, without a trail, twenty-four hours a day, for many days. He had been nothing but George Graham, Senior Reports Officer at the COI in Westminster. There had been no other life but that of his cover and he had inhabited it guilelessly and completely so that he had come to forget, as was his purpose, that he was an officer with the KGB. Had he been interrogated, even tortured, during that time it is likely that he would have given nothing away. For he had, quite literally, put a curtain about his real past and future. He had been well trained in the craft – like Pelmanism or some other mnemonic game – completely to separate the real man from the false; to bury the first while the other slept.
Yet some hazard or commonplace, like words in an empty gallery, could resurrect and re-unite these halves long before their time and trigger the whole man into dangerous action. There had been no threat in the words of the old Russian exile, boring his daughter or his cousin, yet they had broken straight through into his secrets like the verbal shafts of a skilled prosecutor.
And now he saw nothing but the politics and dangers of his real commitment, his proper concern divested of all its pleasurable cover. He no longer saw the pictures, the Bouchers or Fragonards, or the green glaze, fathoms deep, on the Urbino porcelain, or the mineral wonders of the Louis Quinze mantel clocks. He looked on these marvellous gilded and enamelled artefacts but saw nothing, they meant nothing. His critical perspective disappeared; his knack of enjoyment died. All the casual pleasures that he had taken in the past weeks were soured, faded into some dull place in his mind where they lay like old and unrewarding duties. His links with the world, which had been so firm in that April of easy strolling through the fortunate weather, had been cut off suddenly; a fault had come in the middle of a precious message down the wire. Now, in the silence, the other man reared in him, whose only business was guile, alert and smelling the wind, while the happy man cursed the hour.
So it was that he was not altogether surprised when he turned in the armoury room at the end of the building and saw them. The innocuous words of the old man ten minutes before had led them to him as surely as a cord through a labyrinth: the disinherited man and the carroty woman had somehow advertised him as clearly as a shout all over the streets of Marylebone.
The two men stood in the doorway, in sensible coats and hats, behind the great medieval horseman, sword flourishing in the air above his tortuous Gothic armour. He had come into this room on a wrong turning, looking for the exit, straig
ht into a cage of antique weaponry. An orchestra of gleaming metal lay everywhere about him. Blades from Damascus and Toledo; Italian pikes and tufted halberds, taut Bavarian crossbows and small infernal devices from France – enough to nourish a new crusade.
He put a hand out, touching the thick glass on a case of pearl-handled Arab daggers, then gently ran his fingers down the slope in the off hand gesture of some proud and fastidious collector. It is here, he seemed to say, all in one place. After a lifetime pursuit I have gathered all this violence safely up, calmed this bloody provocation, resting quietly under my fingertips. It is here, I have tamed it all and have no need of it now.
The men walked towards him, past a silver inlaid Spanish cannon that said ‘Do not Touch’ and they took him quietly by a case of arquebuses and hatchets.
His pipe fell as they frisked him and the burnt grains of tobacco skidded over the shiny floor. Croxley bent down to pick it up and thought of the blackened grain in the gut of a dead bird, shot violently out of a big sky. Summers went through his other pockets, but the man had no weapons.
‘Nothing, sir. Except this bag of olives.’
4
McCoy went round to see Croxley in his office by the Thames later next morning. He was impatient.
‘He’s in the basement. We’re starting, but it will take some time. Do you want to go down?’
‘How long?’
‘They disorientate him first.’
‘A week?’
‘Depends. It’s an army speciality. We have one of their men on it now. Depends on how long the sounds take to sink in. And the darkness, as well as the other physical – awkwardness. It’s cumulative, you know, forty-eight hours perhaps – at best.’
Croxley was embarrassed even in hinting at this psychological violence, so that he turned away from McCoy and looked over the river as a precaution. He had realised long ago the disadvantages, among outsiders, of his sympathetic approach to security interrogations. They took it for weakness. Only other professionals recognised the skill that lay behind his gentle attitudes; the tools that Croxley masked with his diffidence were those of a great interrogator. And when the army had finished, the man downstairs would recognise this too, without knowing it, and be moved by Croxley’s sympathy to outrageous confidences, as many other men had been.
*
McCoy came down again three days later, sooner than expected, for Croxley had a preliminary report ready for him.
‘So?’ McCoy glanced rapidly through it. ‘How so soon?’
Croxley shrugged, drawing a blank over the whole procedure and McCoy looked at the opening paragraphs:
George Graham. Born Islington, Royal Free Hospital, 14 July 1929…. These were details they knew already.
Recruited by Alexei Flitlianov, KGB Resident in Beirut, in April 1952, while he was teaching there with the British Council.
‘Well, we practically knew that.’ McCoy flicked through the pages. ‘What’s the rough outline of the rest? What’s important? Who are his contacts here? Anyone else on our side?’
‘No. Nothing of that sort, and no deep-cover Soviet illegals either. His contacts, such as they were, were all with Embassy or trade mission staff. And they were practically non-existent. No message drops or anything like that. Nothing. Very thin on the ground –’
‘But what is it all about? – what was he giving them?’ McCoy insisted. ‘It couldn’t just have been COI stuff. There’s hardly anything classified there – just a lot of Commonwealth public-relations jaw.’
‘Well, that’s the point of course. That’s what I had to press him on. He seems to have passed on nothing at all. That wasn’t his job. You see –’
‘That couldn’t have been all. They don’t keep a man on ice for so many years doing nothing. There must have been something else.’
McCoy’s impatience rose again. After all this, he thought, nothing – the man was just a complete sleeper, a back marker, nothing more than a courier perhaps – just a weak queer in love with Marx. Croxley inclined his eyes sympathetically towards the unhappy McCoy. He was the doctor once more.
‘They’ll keep someone quiet for as long as they have to,’ he said. ‘If there’s something else in mind. And there was. There was something else. They kept this man out of the way all these years on purpose, kept him clear –’
‘Because he was a dolt, a back marker, no real use to them.’
‘On the contrary. He was highly skilled; a deep-cover illegal, senior rank. They took a great deal of trouble over him. Initially in Beirut and subsequently when he taught in Cairo. He went back to Moscow during his holidays there – said he was looking round the Middle East, Petra and such like, long hikes. In fact he was doing their advanced training, what they call the “Silent School” – individual tuition, you might say, where he’d meet no other KGB men except one or two at the top. They took a lot of trouble.’
‘For what?’
‘For the job he was going to do. In the future. Always in the future. The job that was to start next week in New York.’
McCoy had taken out a pipe but quite forgot about it now. It stuck out of his puffy white face, clenched in his teeth, giving him the startled immobility of a snowman.
‘He was going to start an alternative KGB circle in America. A new network, a satellite circle. These are completely unknown to the local KGB Resident, and quite separate from any other espionage network in the country. They report only, and direct, to Moscow, almost as a freelance might do. There’s never more than, at most, half a dozen people involved. And sometimes just one person. The point of these circles is to keep tabs on the official espionage groups. They’re set up, very quietly, with that express purpose – to spy on the spies. That’s what they’ve been holding Graham for all these years – to head one of these circles.’
Croxley paused, wondering if McCoy had really followed the implications. But he had.
‘So, Graham would know the identity of the people in the other official groups?’
‘Not before he went there, he wouldn’t. Too risky.’
‘What happens?’
‘Well, he told me,’ Croxley said diffidently, as though the man had given the information over a cucumber sandwich tea, ‘he picks up the gen when he gets there. When he gets into his new cover.’
‘How?’
‘There’s always one crucial contact in the designate circle area. Either someone sent specially from Moscow, or more often what they call a “stayer”, someone already there who has absolutely no other activity other than that of passing on the names that Moscow wants a check on.’
‘Who would that be?’
‘Graham wouldn’t know that either. The contact would be completely one-sided. The “stayer” makes it. And he’d know very little about the new man. All he would know would be his name, real or assumed, what his cover was, where he worked.’
‘Then he’d make the contact?’
‘Yes. In this case all he’d have been told was that a George Graham, from London, was joining the UN as a Reports Officer in their information department round about a certain date. He’d check him over carefully beforehand, then make an approach.’
‘Check him? He’d have a photograph? Exchange a code? How would he be sure of him. That would surely be crucial.’
A plan was straining in the depths of McCoy’s mind, something which might save the day in this disappointing affair.
‘No photographs. There’d be nothing documentary, nothing on paper. If anything, it would be verbal. So – yes, there could be an exchange code.’
‘What they used to call a “password”.’ McCoy sighed for Kim and the Jungle Books.
‘Yes.’ Croxley looked at McCoy, his face full of understanding as usual, but not caring this time whether McCoy took offence or not. ‘It’s a risk you’d have to take.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You could replace this man Graham, couldn’t you? Have someone else go to New York in his place.’
‘Perhaps. On the other hand you’d really be on to something then, if you could break the “stayer”. You could work your way through an entire deep-cover network, for example, just with the “stayer’s” name, if you handled it properly.’
‘They must take very considerable pains to prevent that happening,’ McCoy said sharply.
‘They have. They have indeed. They’ve done just that. They’ve kept Graham clean as a whistle for years. It was sheer chance we got on to him in the first place. Absolute chance. No one’s been near him, possibly for years, until they told him he was on for this job they’d trained him for. He’s a loner. He had to be, at this juncture especially. Everything depended on Moscow’s keeping completely clear of him, keeping him clean, so that there could be no trail and therefore no chance of any substitution. That’s the way it works. As far as they’re concerned he’ll be on the boat to New York next week.
‘You see, the essence of the matter is that for him to be effective in his future role no one must know about him in the past. He’s completely unknown to any KGB Resident here or anywhere else. That’s the beauty of it: the man had no previous form. Among his own, he had no identity. So you can create that for him – in the shape of another man. You have a chance in a million.’
‘That’s the odds against it, I’d say, Croxley. Not the chances. I’ll read your report. Is he downstairs now?’
‘There is just one other thing – before you go,’ Croxley said. Again the deprecatory tone, as though the matter were of no real importance. ‘Graham spoke of something else – after he’d told me about his real work for the KGB.’
‘“Spoke” – willingly?’
‘Well, not exactly. No, not willingly. Not at first. It was about his communicating with his chiefs, making his reports in America. I asked him how he did it – what the form was. I, er – pressed him on that. He eventually became … incoherent, yes …’
