The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  ‘No thanks to you.’

  ‘One doesn’t thank anyone in this business. It’s quite thankless.’

  ‘So you knew everything, all along,’ I said. My leg had begun to throb and ache.

  ‘We had to, didn’t we? That’s what it’s all about. Sometimes people are used in the process. But that’s just as true of ordinary life. You’ll see – if you get back into it.’

  ‘If?’

  ‘Who knows?’ McCoy finished his toilet. ‘If we get these names tonight they may consider your slate clean, Marlow – that you’ve worked your passage. A free pardon, even compensation.’

  Compensation. I remembered my tirade against McCoy in Durham jail months before, my anger at four years lost behind those granite walls. What would compensate me for this – these months as a patsy on everyone’s behalf: Helen’s, McCoy’s, the KGB’s?

  But no, I didn’t need any compensation for it now, I thought. The hell with it. It hadn’t been funny. But it wasn’t really tragic either. A bad tragi-comedy. I had been forced into a number of roles and now I could drop them. It hadn’t been a good production, it was folding. The audience had only been mildly amused. The backers were withdrawing their money. It was time to wipe the greasepaint off, tip the stage door man, and make my way quietly home. There certainly wasn’t going to be any party.

  I said, ‘Well, there’s time yet, isn’t there? Flitlianov may get away. You may never get those names.’

  And I hoped that he would get away, that someone would come out of it all clutching something decent, the deeds of a worthwhile future. For I believed Helen at least in that: that these names represented something valuable in Russia: a force against the indifference and brutality of that world. And I believed what she’d said about Flitlianov too, that he had something vital to offer, a balanced commentary on the appalling scene, something sane and passionate to invest in the confused affairs of men.

  And what did it matter if Helen had used me to escape back into this hopelessly optimistic adventure? She would pay more than I would in the end for her daring. She would be caught in full flight, while I would be returned to some shallow existence. Those forward parts in her nature, the driving engines of attack and laughter, would lead her to a final disaster. I, who had risen with her a little in the sky, attached to her like a glider, would now float down again into the listless winds of indecision and compromise, where the air had no buoyancy. Yes, she would pay, while I was still fumbling for the small change in my pocket.

  I said, ‘Flitlianov may still screw it all up for you, McCoy. And I hope he does.’

  McCoy nodded his head several times, as if at last confirming something long suspected. ‘You’re a good fellow, Marlow. You really ought to have got a job with Oxfam or Shelter. Out of harm’s way. We’ve got Flitlianov already – or as near as makes no difference. He’s in the Town Hall at the moment. Just had it from one of our men backstage. Last thing I thought Flitlianov would do. But I see it now. He must have thought he could get away with the dancers and musicians – they wouldn’t know anything about him – in the coach after the show. And even if we’d spotted him he’d know we couldn’t touch him amongst that lot – cause a terrible political rumpus. And the PM wants all this kept completely under wraps for the moment, till we get those names.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So – we’re going to have to separate them, aren’t we? Before they leave the hall and hop on the coach. Not too difficult. We’ve a lot of men in there. The finale could be the moment.’ McCoy got his glasses out and consulted a programme with distaste. ‘The finale, yes. “Gopak Dance” – whatever that might be. The whole company is on stage then. And Flitlianov will be somewhere alone behind the scenes. Just a matter of timing. I’ll tell the men.’ McCoy stood up. ‘Now there’s only your other friends to worry about, Marlow. Your wife and children, I should say. That must have been a lark.’ He smiled at me like a man on a winning streak at the races. ‘And you think we used you. But don’t worry – they’ll come safely home, wagging their tails behind them.’

  Ten minutes later they brought Helen, Mrs Grace and the children into the caravan. They sat up at one end, next to the door, a woman police officer tending them. I was up at the other end, on a bunk, by the radio equipment, immobilised – else I should have got out of the place at once. The police doctor was giving me a sedative. And of course, it must have seemed to Helen as if I was very much with the police – the agent provocateur come home to roost.

  Helen’s hair was wet, though there had been no rain – dark and glistening, as if she’d just come out of a shower. The policewoman gave her a towel. There were cups of tea. And silence. Helen looked at me briefly with indifference. Not hate – that would have been better. That would have meant something, that I existed for her still, as I didn’t any longer in this empty regard. I thought of saying something. But I knew it would do no good now. Excuses, she would have thought. Lies and excuses. I was the little robber, her look said, a cheat from the beginning, who had wormed my way into her trust and then sold her down the river, or tried to.

  I looked at her, and she was still so fine, so clear a person, that I began to doubt that she had ever intentionally betrayed me. I should like to have talked to her about that. But, my God, hadn’t we talked enough? And it had got us nowhere but here – to this huge division, where any words said would be the wrong ones. We had been driven into an implacable enmity towards each other.

  We had no reserves in our relationship, which might have saved things. Trust, which needed time, hadn’t had a minute. She and I had travelled across the whole spectrum of an affair in a matter of a few days, hours even – had experienced the happiness and the pain, the beginning and the end, almost simultaneously, without ever having had the chance to live things in between, to save ourselves from a bad end. But could we have done that in reality, I wondered, if there’d been the chance – even in Regent’s Park with Mrs Grace as housekeeper and the children boating on the lake? Could we have saved each other from the familiarity and boredom that eat away the poetry of even the happiest association? An end had overtaken all our surprises. Expectation had been killed, all the mechanics of happiness had been smashed. ‘Shall we do this tomorrow, next week, or next year? Or shall we do that? Will you phone me? Shall we meet?’ The mundane arrangements that are yet so bright, so imperative in love had been struck off the calendar. The future had shut up shop and sane adventure had been locked away for the duration.

  She had written to Graham, I remembered, how we think we have experienced the past, because we have lived it, willy nilly. But how there were so many turnings off it which we knew about but had never travelled: the little roads that went somewhere – and how she had wanted to live now, with him, all that was unlived then. And that she felt she had the gifts for this. And she had. She might have done it with me.

  And I was angry then – not at her, but at the loss of this. And I looked at her with this anger, which she could not have understood. She could only have taken it as evidence of a mutual disgust. And perhaps that pleased her, thinking my enmity as great as hers, that our disgust balanced out – so to end things neatly, which is the last ambition of two people who have come apart: to leave something neat and tidy between them, even if only hatred.

  So there was silence, an empty space, where words had died and anger bloomed – and where that fabulous regard which two people can share, that calm offering of self, so unmistakable in promise and beyond all language, had gone too. That vision between us had become despicable. The radio behind me crackled and perhaps the wind changed, for I could hear the balalaikas from the hall again now, rising and falling sweetly. But neither message pleased – the words and music from a cooling, sour world.

  The twins had been looking at me, I suddenly noticed. And of course I realised I was still in their father’s clothes – his shirt and old school tie and coat and ruined trousers.

  They tried to walk over to me but Helen and the policewo
man held them back. They were tired and the pain of all these confused events was beginning to show in their faces. The game was wearing thin. But they had recognised me – brightly and eagerly – and were sorry now that they couldn’t come over to me.

  ‘But that’s the Daddy we play with,’ one of them said. ‘Not our real one, but the one that tells us stories, Mummy. Can’t we have a story?’

  ‘No, not now,’ Helen said, smiling at them, touching their hair, stroking their cheeks, intensely familial, in these last moments. ‘Later perhaps. When we get home.’

  And that was the saddest story I ever heard.

  *

  I hobbled over to the doorway of the caravan, but could see nothing of the rear action inside the huge building.

  I don’t know exactly how they got Flitlianov. But they got him, of course. And they got the names, for by the end of the month the whole thing blew up and more than a hundred Russian diplomats and trade officials were expelled from the country.

  I tried to imagine Flitlianov’s last moments. Like something from a Hitchcock film, I supposed: the men creeping up through the audience, along the aisles, and the others coming in by the stage door at the back. A pincer movement. Perhaps he’d hidden in a lavatory and had tried to flush the names away? Perhaps he’d put up a fight – fisticuffs or guns? – one wouldn’t have heard anything above the din on stage. It was ludicrous, I thought – a man being trapped like this. It always was. Sheer fantasy. Perhaps it had happened like the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera – Flitlianov swinging across the stage on a chandelier, losing himself among the players, then a frantic chase about and behind the stage. The comedy of this idea appealed to me. And I longed for a comic life. And not the strident music, so full of vehement intention, which we heard throughout the finale – the Gopak Dance: feet stamping, shouting, endless clapping, the clash of swords. It all went on for a long time, before it ended and a tremendous applause broke out over the evening. Bravo …

  They brought him out through a side door quite close to the caravan – while the applause was at its height – so that it seemed that Flitlianov was the reason for the frenzied appreciation, a hero being hurried away from the field of his glory.

  Helen and the others had been taken away just before and I’d hobbled over to the doorway of the caravan to watch. And now I saw them both for an instant before they were put into separate cars, and though I couldn’t make out anything in their faces, I saw them wave to each other before the cars drove off and turned into the lights under the huge chestnut trees along the Promenade.

  McCoy came back into the caravan to pick up his things – happy, savouring already a tremendous future: the bureaucratic commendations, possibly a medal from the Queen.

  ‘All over, Marlow. Finished. Safe and sound. And you’ve helped. At least, I’ll say you did. A few days in hospital and then I’m sure we can let you out to grass.’

  I looked at McCoy – the puffy, ruined face proud now and full of all the silly rewards he worked for.

  ‘We’ve got them altogether, now. Every one. All happily resolved. Don’t you see?’ he said, as though he was offering me at last the incontrovertible evidence, the veracity of faith I had long denied.

  I smiled at McCoy then. The only thing that had been resolved was our absence from each other.

  ‘All together, McCoy, of course,’ I said, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Fucking Amen.’

  McCoy looked at me curiously.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Marlow,’ he said.

  by Joseph Hone in Faber Finds

  PETER MARLOW NOVELS

  The Private Sector

  The Sixth Directorate

  The Flowers of the Forest

  The Valley of the Fox

  The Paris Trap

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Joseph Hone, 1982

  Preface © Jeremy Duns, 2014

  The right of Joseph Hone to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–31566–6