by Joseph Hone
They were onto another song in the saloon – the mood besotted and elegaic: ‘Roses are blooo-ming in Picardy …’
‘Come on,’ Harper said. ‘Let’s go. We’ve no time. Where are the children?’ He was threatening now. And there wasn’t much time.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But just a quick one. I need it.’
‘Brandy?’ Harper turned away to order, and when he turned back I had the revolver out, pointing at him. Croxley looked at the weapon with great boredom, as if it was a dirty postcard I was trying to sell him. But he put his hand out, restraining the young policeman who had made a slight move forward. I liked Croxley. He’d always made the effort to try and see my point of view.
‘Thank you, Croxley. Get him to give me the keys of the car he came here in please.’
Croxley complied. So did the young policeman.
‘Stay here till you’ve finished your drinks,’ I said. ‘Don’t hurry.’
*
The car had only gone half-way down the narrow street when the engine suddenly stalled, then stopped. I tried the starter once, twice, but nothing. Yet there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it. There must have been some anti-theft device, an automatic cut-out on the ignition, some technical pre-condition which I had omitted to fulfil. And there was no time now to try again.
The door of the pub opened a hundred yards behind us. And in front, at the end of the street, a Panda police car appeared.
We were out of the car and running. There was a narrow alleyway twenty yards ahead of us to the right and we made for it. It led between two back garden walls to a piece of open, waste land, the site of some fine old urban estate now razed to the ground, with piles of brick and broken masonry everywhere.
We could hear them clearly now behind us. And then suddenly, looming up in the soft darkness in front of us was the shell of a whole house, still standing, a white stuccoed Italianate villa that had not yet come under the hammer.
At the side were steps leading down to the basement area and a door hanging drunkenly forward out of the deep shadows. Inside it was totally dark with a strong smell of fungus and old damp, and a more recent odour, dry and peppery, of lime dust and plaster rubble. We crouched just inside, backs against the wall, not daring to move further in or strike a light.
And now we could hear them running forward all round us, on either side of the house. But for some reason they had no torches and must have been as blind as we were. Someone stopped at the top of the basement steps. But then his footsteps moved away with the sound of half a dozen running feet and we breathed again.
‘Where do you think the Moorend Park Hotel is?’ I asked. ‘To the east of the town, off the Swindon road Mrs Grace said. We’re heading westwards. We’ll have to double back. The hotel is the first thing. And the second is to get rid of that packet of names, drop it somewhere. And pick it up again afterwards. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. Are you sure this is right at all?’
‘What else? Harper is with the KGB, not against them. He would have pushed us into their hands somehow; then “rescued” us and the children when they’d got those names off you.’
‘Listen, why don’t we give it up – I can’t risk the twins like this. Let’s give the KGB the names and get the children back. There’s no alternative really.’
I paused, thinking: the children versus hundreds of lives in Russia. But of course she was right. There was no alternative.
‘There isn’t anything else, is there?’ she said, a strangely conversational, easy voice coming from a black void, a hole in the air. And suddenly I felt the need to confirm her physical existence and I put my hand out and it touched her breast for an instant and then I found her arm and squeezed it.
‘No, of course not. There’s nothing else, Helen. Come on.’
And I felt we’d come to the end then, given up the battle, that the story was over: I trusted her completely at that moment, was completely convinced that she was right. How right and true she was, I thought. We could find the children and give the names up and then we could stop running for ever. And perhaps we would live together. Or perhaps we wouldn’t. That didn’t matter. But at least we would never do this again. Let them have their world of politics and spies, their long battles of belief. We would belong to ourselves from now on, lose the horrors that are due to great ideas: we would take the little roads that led somewhere.
So we went back the way we’d come, creeping through the alleyway, and there, in front of us, where we’d left it, was the police car. Empty. And I suddenly thought: what if I turn the ignition key anti-clockwise first, then in the normal direction? I got in and tried this and the engine fired and kept on running.
We came to the High Street, were forced right on a one-way system, then left up the long Promenade of the town, the lamps bright all along its sloping length under the huge canopy of chestnuts. But where to – which way now?
There was a uniformed policeman on the kerb half-way up by a set of traffic lights. I took the chance. Our car was unmarked. He gave us very precise directions to the hotel.
We went left off the Promenade and to our right we saw the floodlit Town Hall, a great Edwardian rump of blackened stone standing back from the road, with a poster outside – ‘The Kirov Dance Troupe and Balalaika Ensemble’. Harper had said the place was surrounded but no one stopped us or followed us as we passed it.
The hotel was a mile or two further on, a strange two-storeyed Chinese-styled building with a pagoda-like roof and delicately carved wooden eaves – just off a by-road, behind a row of new pseudo-Georgian villas.
The receptionist was very helpful. Yes, a woman and the two children were in number 14, at the end of a ground-floor corridor. At least they weren’t in the lounge in front of us. Of course they might be eating: the dining-room was on the left just before the bedrooms.
We looked in the dining-room – full of quiet, elderly people murmuring over Dover sole and roast chicken – then we moved on towards some french windows at the end of the corridor. Number 14 was the last bedroom on the right. Helen gestured me to go in first.
I knocked. Nothing. I tried the handle and went in.
The bedside light was on and a man was standing next it, behind the bed, facing me with a revolver, a silencer at the end of it: a small, intelligent-faced man with deep-set eyes, in his fifties with ruffs of white hair about his ears. He saw Helen immediately behind me, and he began to move his gun about, looking at her, waving her out of the way. Then he fired. I heard a slight ‘Pop’ the same moment as the bullet hit me somewhere in the thigh. There was no pain at first, just a quick stab like a syringe needle going in. And I was down on the floor, writhing, yet still there wasn’t pain; one was waiting for it somehow. And then it came, as if another bullet had hit me – a sharp and colossal pain, a succession of jabs, as though my whole thigh were being pressed down onto a row of knives.
*
Harper was leaning over me when I came to. I was lying on the bed of the same room. Croxley was standing behind him, and there was a doctor there, packing up his bag.
‘What happened?’ I asked after a minute. My mouth tasted of some kind of disinfectant. My trousers had been cut and my thigh was bandaged and numb.
‘Happened?’ Harper said pityingly. ‘You madman. You walked straight into it. I’d have told you if you’d given me half a chance without the woman, if you hadn’t jumped us in the pub; your friend Helen Jackson is with the KGB. She was using you all down the line, stringing you along. And you fell for it. If you’d stayed with us in the pub we’d have had them both – her and the other fellow she was meeting here.’
‘What other fellow?’
‘The man who shot you – Alexei Flitlianov, head of the KGB’s Second Directorate, on the run. That’s who she was making for all the time. She works with him. She has some names for him. We’ve known for some time. That’s why I told you to stick with her.’
‘And her children – the wo
man they were with?’
‘Well, they’re not here, are they?’ Harper said, looking round the room. ‘They’ve all gone. You one-man army! Never mind. All the roads out of the town are blocked. We’ll have them. They can’t get far with two children in tow.’
Croxley left the room with the doctor.
I said, ‘You’re lying, Harper. You’re making it up.’
He managed a look of very genuine astonishment. ‘Am I? Then that’s an imaginary bullet the doctor took out of your leg.’ He picked up a smudge of lead from the bedside table. ‘All right then, if I’m wrong, you tell me what happened.’
‘I came into the room. And he shot me –’
‘Yes? You had your own gun out, of course?’
‘No. I wasn’t expecting –’
‘Of course you weren’t. But he was. Got you first time round. It was all fixed. You walked into the room first, didn’t you – because she asked you to, didn’t she?’
And she had, I remembered. I nodded.
‘Look,’ he said, like a teacher spelling it out for a dunderhead, ‘you’ve been living in the Jacksons’ house above the town, haven’t you? And the place has been surrounded by the KGB. They got rid of Jackson in New York and put you in his place to get hold of this new code process here. That’s the gist of what you told me on the phone. But the real thing they wanted was a collection of names from Mrs Jackson – unreliable KGB operatives all over the world – which she’d been keeping for Flitlianov. And all she wanted was to get these to him – and get herself and her children safely out of the place at the same time if possible. You were the means. How did she do it? What happened?’
Harper was lying. He must have been. Hadn’t she said … No, not that. We’d said very little up in the hills. Much more, hadn’t we completely trusted and understood each other? Of course, it could all have been counterfeit.
‘She must have used you, Marlow,’ Harper went on, the clever Iago I thought at first, until I began to wonder. If I didn’t believe him I’d begun to doubt Helen. ‘Can’t you see?’ He was studious now, an earnest commentator on the arts of betrayal. And then I remembered Mrs Grace – that sweet smile full of some shared confidence which she had given Helen on my first day in the hills and her subsequent – and to me, almost unbelievable – recantation of her faith. Harper’s theory fitted there all right: she had been in league with Helen all along. She was a member of Flitlianov’s dissident group. That would fit her very well. She had been in contact with him on the outside; they had arranged the whole escape together – all three of them: she would take the children out and I would take Helen, for we would never have made it altogether. And afterwards I would have to be dispensed with. With a bullet. It seemed unfair. Yet it had been a bullet. There was no doubt about that. I didn’t trust Harper. But, yes, I had begun to distrust Helen – and, yes, she had gestured me into the room first, then got out of the way as he fired. That was certain too.
‘Well, so she used me. So what?’ I said brashly. And then I thought of the few days on the hill together, the easy things we’d done, the brilliant light and the leaves turning – all that sanity, affection and fun up there in the woods, and the fire in the evening. And I thought, no, it couldn’t be. How could she fake all that?
And then I thought, why not? She could. Hadn’t she spent a lifetime faking things with people? A fake marriage with her husband. And in her belief a whole faked face to all the world. Hadn’t she always inhabited permanent cover, absolutely according to the book, lied convincingly about everything? – about her politics as about her lovers.
Her belief, which was no doubt genuine, and the secrecy with which she’d had to hold it, had led her to infect and destroy every close relationship with the same illicit urges – to sacrifice any present truth, a happy body or thought, for a clandestine political ideal. Things had to be secret for her before they could be real and so she could not sustain love in any open reality. She was a woman who only really thrived on the intermittent and clandestine in any affair, who required eventual failure and betrayal in love as others seek orgasm as a culmination.
Or perhaps, simply, she had just wanted to be with Flitlianov again. Perhaps it had only really ever worked with him: a father, a body and a belief all wrapped up in one – and everything in her life since had simply been done in memory of him. Graham, Guy and I – we had simply been bystanders, stepping-stones to that end, to that eventual reconciliation with the one man who had really mattered to her. These were theories. And Harper could have been bluffing and lying. But whatever her motives there was no doubt that I’d been shot, that she’d left me and gone off with Flitlianov. That was no theory.
‘She used you good, Marlow,’ Harper went on, anxious and concerned for me now, and not dismissive. ‘Cut you up into little pieces. Couldn’t you have guessed – seen it coming?’
I couldn’t look at him. My thigh was numb but lower down in the calf something had begun to throb. ‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Tell me,’ Harper asked, with one of his crumpled smiles, ‘you weren’t just pretending to be man and wife up there? You slept with her, I hope.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘You did, didn’t you?’
‘Why not?’ I said angrily, as though I’d simply forced her to share a physical whim with me.
‘You liked her a little too, though. I can see it in you, Marlow.’ I looked at him with distaste. ‘That’s why you won’t accept it – that she pushed you down the river. There can’t be any other reason: the facts speak for themselves. Shouldn’t get involved that way with Russian agents, Marlow. That’s Rule One. But how should you have known? You’ve no experience in this business.’
And then I was really angry – at him or Helen, I didn’t know which. At both of them, I thought: angry at the truth.
*
‘Yes, but why shoot him, Alexei? Why?’ Helen asked.
‘I had to. How could you trust him?’ He looked at her in astonishment.
I did, she thought, I did.
‘He’d have ditched you at the end – after they’d got the names from you and taken me. I had to get him out of the way at once, without his having a chance to offer talk or arguments, to hold us up. He was a double agent all along. And would have been at the end too – for all he’s fooled you in the meanwhile. Couldn’t you have seen it coming, Helen? I’ve been following him for weeks, months – since he left London – while I was trying to get in touch with you. I saw you both upstate in New York one morning riding. I followed you there. I wondered how in hell he’d got into your family circle so quickly, and then in a flash you were in his arms.’
‘That didn’t mean anything. I was worried, that’s all.”
‘Of course you’ve been too long in the open, without anybody, any links with us that would have kept you going. I understand that. But falling for a British agent; that’s too much. That’s Rule One – not to.’
‘I didn’t know he was a double agent,’ she said. ‘I just believed the KGB were using him to get the technical information here, like I told you.’
‘That was one line, yes. But the British were using him as well – all the time: to get you and me together when you handed over the names. That’s obvious.’
Was it? she wondered. Had Marlow lied to her? Had there been nothing true in him during those days in the hills – and before in America when they had talked for so long – in Central Park, the Norman restaurant and upstate? Had his whole bearing towards her, from the beginning, been a crucial degree out of true, driving her towards the rocks, to this betrayal which Alexei had just prevented?
She was totally confused.
She had trusted and loved both these men. And now Alexei was killing Marlow in her mind, just as he had tried to kill him in reality. Was it jealousy or truth? Surely, after so long apart, Alexei could not have been jealous of her? He’d never been that sort of man. And there were no grounds for that now – the whole business for h
im with these names was a matter, precisely, of life and death for many people, including himself. Besides, he was vastly experienced in the business of subterfuge. And so she began to think that perhaps he was right. Or, at least, if he were not exactly right, she had begun to doubt Marlow. What she had seen as his naïveté, his inexperience in the work, his being framed by British Intelligence and forced into the New York job, as a tool – all this bruised innocence had been a very clever front, perhaps.
And then she remembered the extraordinary coincidence of their first meeting, the moment he’d got to New York in the guise of George Graham. He’d said the British had never known anything about her, that they’d never picked up that information from Graham. But of course, they had. And her meeting with Marlow had been no coincidence at all. It had all been arranged. He’d been planted on her – to get the names and, in the event, Alexei as well. Marlow was really as clever an operator as Alexei. And now that she was with Alexei she felt the truth of all this kindle in her and burst into flame in the suddenly renewed warmth of his presence.
In the hotel, fifteen minutes before, she had tried to do something for Marlow, struggling on the floor, before he passed out. But Alexei had pulled her away. They’d left the place by the french windows at the end of the corridor, hurried across the dark lawn under the huge ilex tree, and now they were walking along the small suburban road back towards town, to a church by the traffic-lights further up where they were to meet Mrs Grace and the two children.
