It was a truly dreadful place. A gin house from a Hogarth plate. A joyless hole in which to drink and smoke and smoke and drink. A place with but one purpose, to quench the committed. A brown study of a brown room, a room of worn and peeling paintwork, of years of encrusted dirt, of woodwork shaped and worn with elbows, of floors patterned in spittle, with but a single piece of decoration, a tiny touch of red and gold among the shades of brown – a cobwebbed, foxed portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the wall behind the bar. Heroic of posture, caught in a media moment at the Finland Station, making his first speech in many a year on Russian soil. He had to make a speech – how else would he have passed the time in that sealed train except by writing a speech?
‘Don’t tell me it’s a dive, Freddie,’ said Charlie, reading his mind. ‘It’s this or nothing. Or to be precise, it’s some other place exactly like this or one of the hard-currency joints in the hotels which are strictly for the tourists. I can’t play the tourist. I’m here for life. Begin as you mean to go on, Isay.’
Dark eyes under beetle brows occasionally glanced at them as Charlie forced a way through to the bar. Miserable men, working men, heavily wrapped up against the winter cold, heavily wrapped upagainst the working life, their heads in clouds of tobacco fug, their feet in puddles on the floor, streaming from their boots. Two toffs, two foreigners, in good clothes, but scarcely meriting enough attention to detract from the serious business of getting seriously drunk.
Charlie got both elbows on the bar and seized the attention of the barman. He was a dead ringer for the late Maxim Gorki, a face consisting largely of open pores, a nose like a ripe strawberry and a moustache the size of a yard brush.
‘Now we get to the heart of the matter. Four fucking days in this utter fucking igloo of a country and I still can’t muster enough of the lingo to ask this bugger for a drink. I got you here just to order the booze. Tell him I want a whisky, and make damn sure he pours at least three fingers.’
This struck Troy as innocent, but he asked anyway.
‘Where do you think you are?’ said the barman. ‘What do you think this is? Order vodka or piss off the pair of you.’
Troy translated loosely for Charlie.
‘It’ll have to be vodka. That’s all they serve.’
‘If your English pal wants whisky he’ll have to use his privileges. In this place there are no privileges. We’re the scum of the earth. Vodka or vodka. And none of that fancy shit with bison grass or red peppers in it. Take it or leave it.’
‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Two large ones.’
‘Not so fast,’ said Gorki, and pointed over his shoulder to a small blackboard and the chalked entries under the heading ‘menu’.
‘First you order a meal.’
The kopeck dropped for Troy. It was not a bar; there was no such place as a bar. In a nation of drunks there were only two places to get drunk outside the privacy – or not – of your own home. In the street or in a café. An approximation of which this place seemed to be.
‘Charlie – you have a choice. Sausages, fish dumplings or soup.’
‘Sausages,’ said Charlie. ‘Anything as long as the bugger pours me a drink.
Troy ordered for them.
‘Nah,’ said Gorki. ‘Bangers is off.’
‘Dumplings then.’
‘Nah, dumplings is off too.’
Troy looked around the room at the pack of miserable boozers. Each one of them had in front of him a bowl of yellowish gruel. Not one of them seemed to have touched it.
Another kopeck dropped.
Nobody ate a damn thing in this satanic hole; the pretence of food, the utterly ‘off ’ menu, was just a front to keepa fraction the right side of the law. If a militiaman – the Soviet version of a copper – walked in, doubtless a few elbows would ply a few spoons, but that was it. A bar by any other name in a country where there were no bars was a caff.
Just for the pleasure of the hunt, he said, ‘What’s the soup?’
‘Yeller soup,’ said Gorki.
Troy could see that.
‘Yellow what?’
‘Yeller taters and yeller cabbage, bit o’ this, bit o’ that.’
‘Sort of like saffron?’
‘If you like.’
Then a kopeck dropped for him too.
‘Bloody good idea.’ He turned to a fat man in a greasy apron lounging behind him. ‘Andrei, change the menu. From now on its soupe au saffron.’ He stuck two bowls in front of them and ladled out the yellow mess.
‘Good bloody grief,’ said Charlie. ‘Crambe repetita. School dinners.’
‘You don’t have to eat it,’ said Troy. ‘No one else is.’
‘Water?’ Gorki was asking. ‘You want water?’
‘Water,’ said Charlie through Troy’s interpretation. ‘We don’t want fucking water.’
‘Yes you do,’ Gorki said. And he winked hammily at Troy.
‘Yes,’ Troy replied. ‘Two large waters will be fine. Doubles.’
Gorki set two far from spotless tumblers on the bar, splashed vodka generously, but without any sense of measure, into them and shoved them over. He did not ask for money. It looked to be the kind of place that did most of its business on the slate, and Gorki looked to be the kind of man who would never forget your face or what you owed him down to the last kopeck.
Charlie was staring at the disparity in their glasses. Troy swapped his huge one for Charlie’s lesser and they touched glass together.
‘About bloody time,’ said Charlie. ‘Cheers.’
He knocked back half the glass in a single swallow. Troy sipped at his.
‘Jesus, that’s strong. Bloody hell, they certainly mean you to get pissed, don’t they?’
‘Sole purpose of visit,’ said Troy. ‘It’s probably about 120 degrees proof. You could run a car on the stuff.’
‘Good,’ said Charlie. ‘I can die happy.’
Troy doubted this very much. All the same, he wondered at the shred of truth buried in the statement. That death was the only thing left to look forward to. It did not need to be said that Charlie had no idea what he was getting into, little idea of what kind of a country he had come to. But he felt sure it would be said, and equally sure of its finality. Charlie might live ten or twenty or thirty years, but Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, would be home for the rest of his days. And die happy he would not.
Charlie dragged him to a newly vacated table by the window. They sat with two bowls of gruel and two large ‘waters’ between them. Condensation ran down the glass and the walls to mingle with the sawdust on the floor. He could see nothing out, only the muddied reflection of the room within. As they crossed the room he picked up snatches of the dozen or more conversations taking place within the hubbub.
‘So I says to him, I says, you want it doing you can bloody well do it . . .’
‘Meat and potater pie? Meat and potater fuckin’ pie? I said to ’er. Where’s the fuckin’ meat? I spend all day in a fuckin’ foundry and you serve me meat an’ potater fuckin’ pie with no fuckin’ meat? I clouted the silly mare, didn’t I?’
‘. . . Commissar or no bloody commissar. If he comes that one with me again I’ll do the sod. I don’t care if I spend the rest of me life in a fuckin’ gulag. It’d be worth it.’
‘. . . Women? Women? They’re just cunts, aren’t they? I never met a one that was anything more than a cunt and that includes the bitch I married.’
A place to drink and a place to curse. It struck Troy that there was not a woman in the room, and that there could not be a conversation taking place – ‘the fuckin’ wife, the fuckin’ boss’ – that, with slight variation, could not be heard in the pubs of Liverpool or Newcastle or Glasgow. He hoped Charlie did not mean to stay long, but knew that if he once got a taste for vodka he might stay for ever.
‘Where have they put you?’ he asked.
‘In the Moskva Hotel. The same one Burgess was in. Poor bugger. Nothing permanent. They’re being completely coy about that. Not even guaranteeing that I get to serve out my days in Moscow. Bastards. They’ve had me in a couple of times for debriefing. I think they’re as surprised by the speed of all this as I am.’
‘Not as surprised as I was.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry about that. You slogged it all the way to Beirut for nothing. When I wired you I knew things were getting pretty final. Mr Smith did not usually turn upin January. He came for a summer outing. The linen suit, the panama hat and the chance of getting his knees brown. I sort of had the feeling they were going to pull something out of the hat. When I saw who Mr Smith was, I knew they were going to pull everything.’
‘Who?’ said Troy. ‘Who did they send?’
‘As a rule it would be some anonymous bugger from the Secret Service. I think they got to think of it as an office freebie – “Who’ll be lucky this year and get a long weekend in sunny Beirut giving old Charlie the once over?” Just reviewing my case, they’d call it. Making me sweat a bit, letting me know I wasn’t off the hook yet. Different bloke every time. For all I knew they really could have been called Smith. They were none of them very important, because they were none of them very good at it. I think the point should have been to screw more out of me, at which, to a man, they were useless. This time. This time, they rolled out the big gun. Tim Woodbridge MP, Minister of State. Number two at the Foreign Office. As soon as I saw him I knew I was a busted flush. Good old Tim. Lied through his teeth for me and the honour of the Service in ’57. Cleared me in the House when everybody knew I was guilty as sin. Made the London Globe print an apology. God, it was rich. I was grinning from ear to ear even as they booted me out. Lies, lies and more lies. But here’s the rub – prove it or not, old Timbo knew everything. For them to send him instead of one of the spooks meant trouble. I thought he was going to sit me down and tell me they’d finally got all the evidence they needed. I thought I’d find my life and treasonable times laid out neatly in one of those colour-coded foolscap folders they have depending on the nature and degree of one’s treachery – yours was buff as I recall, which means they’re pissing in the wind. I should think mine was dick-end purple by now. Not so, not so. Tim and I have a fairly decent lunch for two laid out on one of the upper floors of the embassy, away from prying eyes. No folder, just a fairly simple statement. “Something new has come to light,” he says. “What?” I say, and I’d genuinely no idea what he’d come upwith. “A body,” he says, “we have found a body.” At first he was tacking so slowly I thought he was using a metaphor – you know, along the lines of “know where the body’s hidden”. That sort of thing. But he wasn’t. “Whose body?” I said. And then you could have knocked me over with a fan dancer’s fanny feather. “Norman Cobb,” he says. “We have found the body of Inspector Cobb. We know you killed him.”
Troy looked at the two inches of vodka in the bottom of his glass, and took a sip. Bought himself a quick moment of silence and then looked at Charlie.
‘Where did you dumpthe body?’
‘Thames marshes, way out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Out past Purfleet. God knows, I couldn’t find the place again if they gave me a map. Jacob’s Reach, Esau’s Point. Something biblical. I weighted the bugger and watched him sink. And if it took seven years for the fat fool to surface, then I can’t have done too bad a job of it. I admired the bluff. They have nothing but circumstantial evidence to show I killed Cobb. Of course, I denied it. And Tim duly called me a liar, and said they knew I’d killed him, and it was the last straw. Something had to be done. I did see that, didn’t I? I had to see how far beyond the pale this was. “You can’t blow away coppers on the streets of London and expect to get way with it.” Then I laughed till I damn near bust. He took humpat that. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’
Troy did not find it funny, but he could see the irony. The last straw. Something must be done. Of all the sins of Charles Leigh-Hunt, and they were many, this was the worst. But he was innocent; he had not killed Norman Cobb. Troy had killed Norman Cobb. Of course, Cobb had been trying to kill him at the time. And had Troy been a slower or a poorer shot, Cobb most certainly would have killed him, and it would now be Troy’s bones, picked clean by lugworm, rising upin the Thames marshes. He had not reported the incident. He had given Charlie his chance and with that chance the corpse of Norman Cobb. He had never asked what he had done with the body. He had never even thought about it until now.
‘“It’s time,” said Woodbridge. “You should go now. There are people back in England who would like to see you charged with Cobb’s murder.” Then he paused, and I think he smiled, and he said, “We can’t have that.” And then he set out the deal. I was to clear off. He didn’t use the word “defect” at any point – odd that, I thought. I’d be exposed back home, spy, traitor, another Cambridge Commie, but the Cobb thing would be kept quiet. In return I was not to give any of those Burgess and Maclean-style press conferences. Once in Russia I was to shut up, be a good boy and keep my nose clean. If I didn’t, there’d be recriminations. I could not believe it, Freddie, I tell you, I was gobsmacked.’
Charlie seemed to have reached a natural lull. He shook his head from side to side, looked into his empty glass and seemed to be giggling to himself. Troy pushed his almost untouched vodka across the table to him, and fought his way back to the bar.
‘Same again,’ he said.
Gorki rubbed finger and thumb together.
‘Twenty-five kopecks for the soupe au saffron, two roubles fifty for the water.’
It dawned on Troy that he had no Russian currency. He dug into his coat pocket and came up with a one pound note.
‘Wossat?’ Gorki asked.
‘A British pound,’ said Troy. ‘Sterling.’
Gorki trousered it. Troy had no idea of the rate of exchange but knew from the rate of trousering and way he filled the glasses to the brim that he had just made his day.
‘You’re English?’ Gorki asked with a hint of astonishment.
‘Yes.’
‘How come you speak Russian with a poncey accent? That’s how the last of the toffs spoke when I was a boy. Just before we put ’em upagainst a wall and shot ’em.’
‘Perhaps I come from a long line of ponces,’ said Troy.
Gorki roared with laughter and Troy gently wove through the crowd, clutching virtual quarter-pints of vodka.
Charlie sucked down a huge gulpand relished the rush. They stared a while at the soup congealing in the cold. It was, as Charlie had observed, remarkably reminiscent of school dinners, in which a multitude of sins could be disguised with custard – custard from a packet. Perhaps this was where all the British Army Surplus Custard Powder went. Dumped cheap on the Russian market.
Troy wiped a clear circle in the wet glass of the window with his fingertips and looked out. A woman stepped quickly back from the arc of light thrown by a streetlamp. It was the first and far from clear sighting he had had of her, but this must be the unfortunate woman who would be bound for Novaya Zemlya if she lost them. Troy would try to do the decent thing and ensure she kept up with them. The poor woman must be frozen stiff out there.
Charlie set down his glass and picked up his tale.
‘“How long have I got?” I asked him. “A day? Two?” “Terribly sorry, Charlie,” he says, “it’s less than that. They want you gone now.” We said goodbye. The bugger even shook my hand. I left the embassy. Slipped old Abu Wagih a fiver to keep an eye out for you, bought a toothbrush at a corner pharmacy and went straight to the docks. You can always count on there being at least one Russian ship in port. I found the captain. Recited him a little speech I’d learnt phonetically for just such an occasion years ago. He calls a Party apparatchik – you can always count on there being one of them too – they get on the shortwave to Moscow. Some poor bugger’s turfed out of his berth to make way for me. Three days later I’m met at Piraeus by the spooks and formally put in the diplomatic bag. Cetera quis nescit?’
The vodka showed in his face and in his eyes. A slack-jawed, hang-dog, rheum-eyed, tear-brimmed, bloodshot misery. He gazed into Troy’s – clear, fleckless black mirrors gazing back at him. It seemed he could not hold his gaze, his eyes flicked around the room and his hand took refuge around the glass once more.
‘You know I never noticed before – never could I suppose – they all look like you, Freddie. Little buggers. Shortarses with ebony eyes. About as warm as the outside bog in February. I feel like Gulliver, washed up in Lilliput, out of size and out of place, in a country I’d only dreamt about.’
Troy ignored the dig. If Charlie was this drunk there were more important things to be said before he vanished into incoherence. ‘Charlie, if all the British wanted was the guarantee of your silence, why didn’t they just have you bumped off ?’
Charlie took another huge, corrosive gulpof vodka and thought about it.
‘Y’know,’ he said at last, ‘that’s just what I’ve been asking myself for the past week. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? I could vanish without trace. No body, no culprit. Blame the bloody Arabs if they wanted. Blame who the hell they like. Why didn’t they just get it over with? Why didn’t the bastards just get it over with? Out to the swamplike Big Lennie. And wham! But – they didn’t . . . and here I am looking at the prospect of life in Mtensk . . . or Magneto-Gorsk . . . or Upyer-Bumsk.’
Troy watched Charlie’s head begin to loll at the end of his neck like a slackening string puppet. The jowls beneath his jawline, swelling and shrinking, bellows on a concertina, as his head rolled around in a lazy arc, and the palpebral flutter as his eyes fought to keep their focus. It was, he thought, all so implausible. He could understand that the British might not want another trial of a traitor quite so soon after George Blake and John Vassall. Indeed it could be argued, were there a sober opponent to argue with, that a trial would do more damage than a defection any day, particularly to relationships with the Americans, who might well be thinking by now that we were a deeply unreliable nation. A trial was dirty linen washed in public. A defection half tucked it away in someone else’s laundry basket, concealed as much as it revealed. But a hit? A discreet, untraceable murder? Really, there was no reason at all why Charlie should not have joined Norman Cobb belly-up, face-down, picked white, in the remote marshes at some biblical turning of the Thames.