Old Flames (49 page)

‘And what did you say?’

‘I was a bit flummoxed. You can imagine.’

‘Of course.’

‘I found myself thinking what their next move might be after I said no—the Lubyanka? A salt mine? The Dissident Ladies’ Touring Orchestra of East Siberia? But then, when it
came down to it I was more interested in what happened if I said yes. I mean, it’s not as if I know any secrets. Five years in opposition—Gaitskell doesn’t tell me a bloody thing.
If he were PM I doubt he’d give me the time of day. So I said, “What exactly is it that you want me to do?” I was expecting Serov to answer. The interpreter was looking at him as
he spoke, but it was Khrushchev who chipped in. “We want you,” he said, “to spy on the Labourites.” For a second or two I didn’t know what he meant. Then I realised he
meant the party. Us. The Labour Party! I tell you, Troy, could have knocked me down with a feather.’

Troy sipped at his whisky.
Déjà vu.

‘That night at the Commons,’ he said, ‘when George Brown got right up Khrushchev’s nose. He got it into his head that Labour was some sort of anti-Soviet group. George
makes a strong impression at the best of times, and this was one of the worst, as I’m sure you’ll recall. Khrushchev thinks George is really representative of the party. And he thinks
he might be some sort of disaffected Trotskyite. Which is about as far from the truth as you could get. That, plus Rod giving him that list of missing East European dissidents and what-have-you
stuck in his mind. In fact, I’d say it irritated the hell out of him. I told him what the party was, but it was all to a deaf ear. He’s asking you to spy on the Labour Party because he
seriously thinks it’s a threat. Possibly the only man in Europe who does, but … What did you do, tell him Gaitskell would soon have his finger on the button?’

‘Not exactly,’ Driberg paused. Let Troy sip a little more of the malt. ‘I told him I’d do it.’

Nice, thought Troy. Get yourself out of that one, Tom. But, of course, the whole point in Troy’s being there was that Driberg expected something of him. Surely, even in his wildest
imaginings, he did not think Troy could get him out of this?

‘Tell me, Tom. Did Nikita Sergeyevich offer you a tot of vodka by any chance?’

‘Well, yes. Several, as a matter of fact.’

‘Fine. Now, let me get this straight. After a few too many, one over the eight, your hollow leg brimming with the spirit, you tell the leader of the Soviet Union and his head of KGB that
you’ll spy on the Labour Party for them?’

Driberg drew in his breath, let it out slowly, as though what followed needs must be precision.

‘Sort of,’ he muttered.

‘Sort of?’

‘Well. Obviously I won’t but …’ The sentence vanished into the vagueness from which it came. A hand waved out into nowhere indicating a vast whatever.

‘Let me put it this way, Tom. What on earth do you expect me to do?’

‘Well,’ Driberg perked up, almost smiled. ‘You know the bugger. You’ve spent more time with Khrushchev than anyone else in England. You must be the envy of half the
spooks in MI5. Can you trust him? Is what I want to know.’

‘I’d hate to
have
to trust him,’ said Troy hoping the remark was not too obscure for what appeared to be a bad day for Driberg’s intelligence. And at the back of
his mind dreading the day he would ever have to place his trust in a man like Nikita Khrushchev.

‘But if push comes to shove?’

‘Tom, he’s a politician!’

‘Bad as that, eh?’

‘Yes. And if you take my advice you’ll tell the spooks before one of their moles tells them first.’

‘Yeees,’ said Driberg slowly, musing. ‘I was going to have a natter with them a bit later on in the week. It was just … the money, you see.’

‘Eh?’

‘The money. They weren’t expecting me to do it for nothing. Gave me five hundred pounds up front. Told me they had a network. Absolutely untraceable. They could pay money to me in
Britain, and it would never be traced back to Russia. I’ve spent a few bob of it already. You know, souvenirs. That sort of thing.’

Troy did not believe a word of this. The idea of Driberg blowing hundreds of pounds on concentric wooden Russian dolls and odd boxes to keep fags in was pretty well preposterous. This was simply
Driberg’s way of stating that he was broke. It was in Driberg’s nature always to feel broke, regardless of circumstances—and his circumstances were that he was out of the House,
after stepping down at the 1955 election, and probably feeling very broke and very sorry for himself—but Troy knew damn well that literary London was awash with rumours that he had recently
taken a large advance—one never heard rumours of small advances—from a publisher, the Viennese
émigré
George Weidenfeld, to write a biography of Burgess. He was just
about the last person Troy would have trusted to write such a book, and he doubted whether George would get his money’s worth, but he rather thought that this had bankrolled the trip to
Russia. All Driberg was saying was that if at all possible he’d like to have his cake and eat it—to tell MI5 and somehow hang onto the loot.

‘If they’ve got a network, why did they take the risk of giving you cash?’

‘Network temporarily out of commission, Serov said. Asked if I minded cash, much the same way one asks a chap if he minds a cheque when one knows damn well the bloody thing’ll
bounce. I wasn’t crazy about carrying that much boodle through customs, but then they hardly look for currency coming in. Much more concerned about it going out. And they’d be back to
business as usual in a few weeks, Serov reckoned. I didn’t ask what he meant.’

Troy knew exactly what he meant. Angus had used precisely the same argument to him when Troy had queried the money-laundering operation in which Cockerell was so patently involved. Driberg was an
unlikely source for the confirmation Troy had sought, but here it was. The piece of the puzzle that made it all make sense. This was what the man had been up to with all those phoney figures and
floating thousands. It was logical. Soon enough, they’d replace him. A new courier would be found, and any minute now some of the world’s worst carpet-patterns would be magically
transformed into a healthy row of noughts in Driberg’s bank account.

‘I think you’ve no choice about this, Tom. Tell the spooks. Give them the money and let them take care of it. At the very least you’ll get an anecdote for your memoirs out of
it.’

‘Oh really,’ said Driberg rather too keenly. ‘Do you think anyone will want to read them?’

A dozen times in the weeks since he had been summoned to Portsmouth to look at the bloated mess that once had been Arnold Cockerell, it had crossed Troy’s mind to call
Charlie. Each time he had put it off. He had never, on any Scotland Yard case, asked a favour of Charlie. It would break the silent agreement they had made many years ago, at the end of the war,
when the fiction of Charlie the Diplomat had first been launched; it would make of his work the last thing either wished it to be, an issue between them, that ran the constant risk that it might
divide them.

It was almost dusk when he got back from Driberg’s, a little the worse for the whisky, clutching
The Less Deceived,
which Driberg had thrust on him. He reached for the phone, not at
all sure what he would say if Charlie answered.

There was haste, a tearing urgency even in the word ‘hello’.

‘It’s Freddie.’

‘Freddie,’ Charlie slipped into charm mode, effortlessly. ‘Long time no see, but sad to say it may yet be longer. I have a cab at the door.’

‘I just wanted to—’

‘And a plane waiting. Sorry. Blame Colonel Nasser. I’m flying to Akrotiri tonight. If it can wait I’ll call you the minute I’m back. Honestly. Must dash!’

Troy said a snatched goodbye and hung up. He remembered what Charlie had read at Cambridge in the early thirties—Arabic. All British diplomats were Arabists. That, too, was part of the
fiction. It somehow lifted them onto a plane of academic respectability. To read German or Russian might mean you really wanted to be a spy, to read Economics or Philosophy might mean you were too
bright to be a spy, and as everyone who was too thick to read anything else read History, Arabic did nicely, tinged, as it was, with a little learning and a little empire, smacking of T.E.
Lawrence and St John Philby. He could not believe for one second that Charlie had ever thought he’d be called upon to use it, but what other purpose could there be in sending him to Cyprus?
Cyprus, after all, did not matter. Everyone who was anyone knew that sooner or later the British would give Cyprus to the Cypriots. Egypt—Egypt was another matter.

Clark called on Troy the next morning. It was gone nine. Troy was being lazy. Still in his dressing gown. Still sipping coffee and flicking through the morning paper. He had
read a page of Nabokov and felt better about it, and a page of Larkin and felt even better about that. He opened the door to see Clark standing in the eastern light, staring up at the warmth of sun
edging in over Bedfordbury, much as Troy’s pigs would do at any opportunity. He turned to Troy and smiled.

‘Cracked it, sir,’ he said simply.

Troy swung back the door and Clark bustled in. He took a sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket and quickly unfolded them at the dining table. Troy sat down, pushed a cup and the cafetiêre
towards Clark. Clark ignored it. He was brimful of enthusiasm, the customary demeanour of misery, his habitual disguise—all good coppers needed one, Troy thought—temporarily
suspended.

‘I can’t stop long. It was a piece of cake. The only thing that threw me was the knock-on. Every repetition would move on two, but every pattern of five, she’d move on three. I
think she must have been a darts player. Still, it was vowels more often than not.’

‘She?’ Troy queried. He had not been at all certain whether it was the work of Cockerell or of Madeleine.

‘It was written by a woman, sir. You’ll see. An amateur too, but a good one. Someone who took a real delight in deception. The satisfaction of a good red herring.’

It took Troy back a little to realise how much Clark had been able to deduce of the character of Madeleine Kerr from a simple cryptogram. She had been a delightful liar, he thought. She had paid
a terrible price for her lies. Was this the reason?

‘Skip the technical stuff, you’re talking to man who’s never finished a crossword in his life.’

‘Right you are, sir.’

Clark sat down opposite Troy, breathed deeply and began to read.

‘Dear Sis—does that make sense to you, sir?’

‘Yes—just read the lot, Eddie.’

Clark paused breathily. When he picked up again his voice had dropped almost to a whisper.

‘It’s signed “Stella”, and then there’s a list of numbers matching the keys you gave me to the banks.’

Troy felt the weight of silence. Clark’s professional satisfaction had not blinded him to the inherent sadness in the letter. A dead woman who referred to the conspiracies of complex,
devious organisations as a game. A romantic fool who’d paid with her life for what amounted to no more than a series of dirty weekends with a man twice her age in the fashionable watering
holes of Europe—a deadly holiday in a class not her own—a deadly ‘game’ of which she could scarcely have grasped the purpose. Troy was stunned. He was not surprised. Since
the day Angus had told him Cockerell was running a racket, what else could it have been? What else, after what Driberg had told him, could it be? How it must have appealed to the vanity of the man,
to be so deliciously out of his depth in the gaming rooms of Monte Carlo, with a woman as beautiful as Madeleine Kerr on his arm. To be seen with her, simply to be seen with her—and all the
time kidding themselves it was their secret, the fond illusion that they saw without being seen. What did she mean by ‘Ronnie ran circles’ round the spooks? What did she mean? When it
came down to brass tacks the war had done for Arnold Cockerell as surely as it had done for those it killed quickly and those it killed slowly in the years that followed. He had died of not
recovering, of not wanting to recover from that brief taste of adventure, that exhilarating rush of adrenaline. But Troy doubted that he had run circles around anyone—the spooks had him. They
loved romantic fools. They were better than cannon fodder.