The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  ‘A romantic novel. That’s exactly what it was to begin with. And I suppose that was wrong too. We didn’t think. We didn’t have to. It was a perfectly mindless, completely happy time. All of it. And you know – I was wrong: it did work then – the reciprocal thing. There were no doubts. Once I understood her unhappiness she came to me completely. That’s very much part of the romantic thing too, isn’t it? – coming to someone in the rebound, finding each other through that.’

  ‘The rebound? I didn’t know.’

  ‘Another drink before they come down? I think that must be Harold.’ I heard a door open upstairs above the stairway; and then closing: a strange sound like a bellows sighing.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as if he’d told me before. ‘Some student infatuation in Beirut. One of her professors. Nothing to it. He was much older. But one’s very hurt at that stage. Very easily. It means a lot. She’d gone and buried herself in Rhodesia. No – we were very happy. That fellow made us very happy – some Armenian-American: brought us together; she needed me then.’

  He went to the drinks table again. And I thought, well, I’d been wrong about that: she hadn’t married him for any bad reason. She had loved him.

  And then, thinking of this correspondence, and the weeks before in London in Graham’s apartment where I’d read it, I remembered briefly all the work I’d done at the same time on Graham’s dossier, his curriculum vitae, the reports and transcripts which Croxley and his men had extracted from him.

  And something worried me in all this information I’d absorbed and partly forgotten, something which Guy had just now hinted at – some vital connection between his words and Graham’s file. What was it? Quaker girls, mission schools? No. Beirut? Yes, something there. And then I had it: some ‘Armenian-American’ she’d been infatuated with. Those words. That was it. And now it came back to me clearly, urgently, my stomach turning: George Graham had been recruited into the KGB in 1952 by Alexei Flitlianov – Croxley had told me all about him – the local Beirut Resident. And Flitlianov at the time had been ‘posing as an Armenian-American teaching at the American University’.

  The chain was now suddenly clear, though the links weren’t; several years after Graham’s recruitment by Flitlianov Helen had had an affair with this same man in Beirut, and several more after that she had done the same thing with George Graham. But did all three know that this had happened?

  *

  The water was cooling in the big bath upstairs. Helen pushed the hot tap with her toes, moving her foot quickly away from the sudden trickle of very hot water, bending her knee upwards sharply, legs apart, twisting her body out of the way of the fiery current …

  Twisting, dreaming, talking …

  She had woken very early that morning in the hotel in Addis, sweating in the small double bed, and had looked across at George – thinking him awake too, for though he had his back towards her, he was writhing about, struggling restlessly. But when she leant over him, the sheet thrown away far down his body, she saw that his eyes were closed – tightly closed, with crow’s feet wrinkling away from them on either side. His face had the tense disappointment of someone trying not to cry: his normally relaxed body, his limbs which flowed so readily in any kind of movement, now seemed animated by some awkward, kicking demon. His hand came down searching for the sheet, trying to pull it up over him – to hide, to bury himself in it, legs drawn up all ready for the womb.

  She took the sheet herself and drew it up over him gently, her hand touching his chest. But he pushed her away, struggling for some freedom from her, mumbling incoherently in a resentful tongue, words whose tone was both expiatory and guilty.

  An anguish filled his sleeping mind that she had never come across before, transmitting itself to her urgently but indistinctly, a Mayday message from someone sinking far down over the horizon, the desperate intention lost in the static of a nightmare.

  But she thought she knew what the message was. She had touched his real life with her words in the bar downstairs the previous evening, found his most secret place. She had been right. He was with Moscow.

  She left the bed silently and turned on the tepid shower in the small cubicle at the end of the room. And then he woke turning quickly on his back and lying quite still after the torment of his sleep, propped up a little, arms arched behind his head, blinking at her in the shower, a happy form again in the early morning light, listening to the trickle of water on the tiles.

  ‘I thought it was raining. A shower,’ he said.

  She smiled, feeling within her the hardening excitement of desire and sure reward, the same sense of imminent pleasure that she had felt at the Whitehall party after she’d first met him, seeing him walk across the room towards her, rescuing her from the Belafonte man from the Voice of Kenya Radio. And just as they had come together physically so quickly and easily after that, so she felt now a certainty that they could share each other in another way, a mental release as sharply pleasurable as the sexual.

  ‘I’m sweating,’ he said.

  ‘Were you dreaming? A nightmare? You were pushing and shoving about – possessed. I’ve never seen you like that.’

  ‘No. No dream I can remember.’ He looked at the sheets about him, rumpled and tossed in the shapes of an Arctic landscape, his knees rising steeply in the middle of it. ‘Just very hot for some reason.’

  The water danced on her shoulders, catching the bottom of her hair, turning the ends of it into a lot of swimming black elvers trying to fall down her back in the rush of water.

  ‘You were killing yourself, darling. Because you won’t say. But you mustn’t. Because you can say. Now.’

  ‘What?’ He wiped his eyes, starting to move again restlessly in the bed. ‘What was I saying – was I talking in my sleep?’

  ‘Nothing I could follow. But I know. I’m sure I do.’

  ‘Not that again. Not the bloody Russian.’

  She moved her head around the flow of water, letting it come over the front of her body, looking at him through the rain fall.

  ‘I work with them too.’

  ‘You have such fantasies.’ He relaxed again, taking the sheet up and flapping it several times, aerating the bed. ‘But go on then,’ he continued, amusing himself with the conspiracy. ‘Which Directorate of the KGB? Who is your control? – isn’t that what it’s called? – and what’s your target? And your poison pill when they get you – you’ve got that, I hope?’ He paused, looking at her happily, and then with annoyance when she didn’t reply. ‘What are you doing to me? What game are you trying to play? It’s bloody stupid.’

  She dried herself at the end of the bed and then came forward, pushing down his knees, lying on top of him with the sheet between them.

  ‘Why a game?’ Then she considered her question, arching her body against his. ‘Well, a game in the sense that we shouldn’t get all dreary and upset about it.’ She didn’t kiss him. She wanted to look at him – every moment. So she let her face move gently with her body, coming to him with her eyes, then drifting away again.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this is quite crazy: if I did work for the Russians, your lying on top of me like this, quizzing me. That’s real Mata Hari. I wouldn’t tell you a word, would I?’

  He touched her shoulder, then ran one finger down judiciously to the point of her breast as she leant away from him. The sun had burst on the window, a streak of gold across the curtain.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. Let me tell you,’ she said.

  ‘Why should I believe you?’

  ‘You think I really have such fantasies – as that?’

  ‘No, funnily enough – you’re rather serious. That’s what worries me.’

  ‘You really think I’m a plant – from the other side?’

  ‘It’s not unknown – is it?’

  She pushed herself up from him for an instant with one arm and pulled the sheet down from between them with the other.

  ‘And this is the seduction scene?’ he went on, look
ing at her with interest, with a calm surprise. ‘This is where I “tell all”.’

  ‘No. This is just the seduction scene.’

  He was hard then beneath her, his skin damp and warm against hers, her body bruised with cold water. She touched him and it was hers – an object as freely available, as openly acknowledged as his index finger might have been. It had been like that from the beginning – always like that, making love, as easy as falling off a hundred logs together. They loved very openly, happy with every skill, without secrets or stress. And so, just as surely she thought, his other life could now be brought into the light with loving.

  He put his finger on the tip of her nose, pushing it gently upwards. ‘I don’t believe it. You know I don’t. An all-American girl, bright wide face, long mouth, smile like a toothpaste –’

  ‘Advertisement – you bastard!’ She clutched his shoulders and moved onto him. There was soap there too, which had not all come away in the shower, so that he came into her without any effort.

  ‘Married to a Whitehall diplomat, too. You really expect me to believe you work for the Russians? You work for the British. You’ve been sent to seduce me. Well, I’m not telling. So there.’

  She moved on him now, his head sliding down the pillow, his eyes closing, thinking.

  ‘You have no evidence. And I have no evidence,’ he said happily, turning his head away. ‘So what’s it all about? Want to play at being spies? Is that it? Some frustrated sense of adventure? All right, then, if that’s what you want – who recruited you, where?’

  She pushed on him harder, more urgently. ‘The KGB Resident. In Beirut.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘1957.’

  He opened his eyes, but didn’t turn round. She stopped moving. She was excited, close to the end.

  ‘What was his name?’

  She lifted herself up from him and looked with fascination down along his body to where they were together, her hair falling damply on his shoulders.

  ‘Alexei Flitlianov,’ she said, her throat constricting, her stomach beginning to rise in her body. And then suddenly the tension broke far inside her, and she had to come – falling down on him, pushing him into her deeply and violently until her body seemed to turn inside out and tip upside down, a steep plunge that lasted for a long time and no time at all – there was no measure she could give to it, it was so full, so spinning, so draining.

  ‘Alexei Flitlianov.’ She said again, ‘Alexei –’ letting all the tension flow from her as the truth emerged, like a birth, so that the name rose up for her, a repeated affirmation, a new sound, a new life in the sunlit room, as sharp and real as the physical truth she had just experienced, and thus, so linked with it, something which could not now ever be doubted, or denied.

  He turned round now, amazed, gripping her, head straining backwards, his whole body beginning to tremble against hers, arching himself, then coming – at last, she felt, responding to her truth, sharing her spirit.

  But what he said surprised her.

  ‘Not him, surely. Surely not – no, no,’ as the long spasm died in him.

  Then they lay together, absolutely still, without speaking, knowing the truth though they had spoken nothing of it yet, listening to the rising voices on the street outside, the porters and taxi drivers outside the hotel arguing on the new day, the clip-clop tympani of many hooves going to market.

  At breakfast that morning, at a corner table over milky bitter coffee, the men clearing out the ashes of the eucalyptus fire in the Ritz Bar next door, he asked her in tired astonishment: ‘How did it all begin? Alexei Flitlianov and you? You of all people. What made you believe in this, in all this – that world. Moscow.’ He stopped, lost for a moment in the enormous implications. ‘In something people don’t really believe in any more.’

  She started to tell him, shielding the morning sun from her eyes.

  *

  Harold Perkins drank three martinis quietly but quickly before dinner and by mid-way through the meal, his hand beginning to slide clumsily round his claret glass on the long polished dining table, he was studiously, carefully drunk.

  It had been a beautifully laid table – English silver, red Bohemian glass finger-bowls, tall clear celery glasses, Waterford decanters, a big spreading vase of wildflowers in the middle. And to begin with Harold had presided over it all with happy regality. But now he was a small, beaten emperor, his white crew-cut head swaying low over the half-eaten remains of his food, delving into unhappy memory.

  ‘Marshall Aid gave us ideas above our station,’ he said with sad venom. ‘That was where it began – we couldn’t stop at the soup-kitchen, had to police the charity as well. Suddenly, there was a “moral responsibility” that went with the handouts. The next thing we were the defenders of the “Free World” and guns replaced the butter.’

  He had been talking of the Middle East, of his life in Beirut, but now he had brought his frustrations into a global context.

  ‘You know, I’m not too old. But I’ve seen all I want to see – so I’m old that way – McCarthy, McCarran, Nixon and the rest. When you start to police the world there’s something rotten under the carpet at home. And so you have to have a moral justification to support your guilt – encourage hysterical grass-roots self-righteousness. And that brings out your witch hunters, and all the other two-bit men suddenly stricken by high principle, my God.’ He tailed off, wiping his chin.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Guy murmured. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘And as for your United Nations,’ Harold got onto his high horse again, looking hard at Guy. ‘That collection of … of … the underdeveloped world, indeed. What cheek!’

  ‘The less developed, we call it –’

  ‘Sitting on their asses in six hundred committees, singing while the world burns. Why in hell should they want our development? What’s it really done for us?’

  ‘Coffee?’ Helen stood up. Harold continued to browbeat Guy. ‘Yes,’ I said, getting up and following her into the kitchen. The housekeeper had disappeared, leaving the coffee cups on a tray and a big dishwasher warbling in the corner.

  ‘He lost his job you see,’ Helen said, quite suddenly, putting the kettle on, opening a fresh tin of Yuban Columbian Rich Blend, and sniffing it. ‘His opinions. Those ones. He was in Washington. An under-secretary in the State Department’s Middle East Bureau – Eisenhower’s first administration. A little Left in the thirties, communist friends then, though he was never in the party. But McCarthy got onto him, dragged it all up in a congressional committee; wanted him to name his friends. He took the Fifth, refused. And he was ruined, fired, kaput. No one here would give him another job – nothing in Washington, nothing academic. Finally, he got a post at the American University in Beirut and we all went out there. It wasn’t the money. He just wanted the work – the position to work for those opinions. He was no Communist, but he might just as well have been – he’d have suffered no more. He might as well have gone the whole way.’

  She stood over the double sink, warming a big earthenware coffee pot under the tap, the busy domestic movements of a social woman, a hostess handling everything with supreme confidence – wrapping up her father’s political past as easily as she went about making coffee.

  And I thought I saw it then: the beginning – or perhaps just the final confirmation – of her beliefs: she had taken up her father’s failure, fifteen years before in Beirut, and made a success of it. Senator McCarthy had ruined her father’s career, but made hers, delivering her into the hands of Moscow while attempting to save his country from the same scourge.

  ‘What an awful business,’ I said, trying to get through one of those moments when there is really nothing to say.

  She turned. ‘Yes. You probably knew all about it anyway.’ The kettle boiled. She made the coffee, pouring the water straight over the warmed grounds. ‘Knew about me, about Father, about everything.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I feel it. Felt it all along. You k
now everything about Graham, you’ve taken him apart and put on all the bits and pieces yourself so you must know about me – how could you not?’

  Suddenly she was slack, empty, the coffee brewing on the table between us, all the social energy gone, her face tired, troubled – the one where she put on experience and knowledge and was no longer an advertisement for success and innocence. ‘Why have I been pretending with you all this time? You must know, mustn’t you? And I’m tired, really tired.’

  ‘Know what?’

  She was tired beyond anger, which would have been there otherwise. ‘Why don’t you tell them – your own people – and have them tell the Americans? Isn’t that your real job over here? – to check me out, to find all Graham’s contacts, the people he would have dealt with over here, who wouldn’t know what he looked like?’

  ‘And you’re one of them?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I thought you were just his mistress.’

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve begun to think something more. But you knew what he looked like – you couldn’t have been one of my contacts.’

  ‘I wasn’t supposed to know Graham at all. That was just sheer chance.’

  ‘You’re telling me you were an agent with him – you realise that? – with the KGB?’

  ‘You knew it,’ she said, gazing down at the coffee pot. Then she pulled her hair to either side of her ears and looked up at me, standing terribly straight, with an expression of royalty taking the salute on a parade ground. ‘Why carry on this farce, the pretence? You knew – either from Graham himself when they caught him in London, or some other way.’

  ‘Some other way. I told you, Graham never mentioned any women. I heard nothing about you in England. I explained all that to you as well.’

  ‘Yes, I believed you – that, and the fact that you wanted none of the whole business. It struck me all along – that you were some kind of fall-guy, forced into the whole thing.’