London: October 1948
Almost falling off the roof proved to be the high and low point in Troy’s relationship with Burgess. Throughout the war he found himself invited to endless parties at Burgess’s flat. Once in a blue moon he would run out of excuses and accept. He found himself a fish out of water and usually left early.
One day in 1948 he was crossing Piccadilly Circus to find that the statue of Eros was being replaced on its plinth. It had been removed to safety on the outbreak of war. The revellers who’d swamped the ‘Dilly on VE night had gathered around a boarded-up, empty plinth, plastered with advertisements urging thrift and the purchase of war bonds. But the war had been over three years. Like so much else in England normality was painfully slow in returning. The war ended, and then it hung around for ages, kicking its heels, reluctant to go home in case anything else happened. Rationing stretched out to infinity. The peace seemed like an inert interlude. The erotic charge spent. Surely something else would happen one day … some day … any day?
A crane swung the statue up off a flatbed truck and three men in boiler suits and cloth caps guided Eros into place. One clunk, a couple of twists, and it was home. Wings spread, heel up, head down, the arrow shot. Love struck. The small crowd that had gathered applauded. Troy remembered the vulgar drawing Burgess had done of him all those years ago. Burgess had included Eros—the sketch would have made less sense without it. Love in an air raid, presided over by the skinny youth with the bow and arrow. He hadn’t, to the best of his knowledge, seen Venetia Maye-Brown since 1940. He couldn’t remember when he had last seen Burgess. Last year? The year before? Burgess had gone back to the BBC, and from there to the Foreign Office … but what he did for the Foreign Office, and whether he was still at the Foreign Office … and why the Foreign Office would want a man as indiscreet as Burgess … all went unanswered.
But, to think of the man was to conjure him up.
That night, he took the cellist Méret Voytek, a woman renowned for her performance of Bach, a survivor of Auschwitz, and someone he strongly suspected of being both a murderer and a Russian spy, for an evening of British bebop at Club 11, only yards from Eros. He had not expected to find Burgess there. He did not mind finding Burgess there, but if everything he and Rod had long assumed about him was true, then it was odd to bump into him at precisely this moment, and Troy wondered if it was just a coincidence. Had she told him, had he told her? Were they total strangers? Or was he piggy in the middle?
As he introduced them there was not a flicker of recognition on Voytek’s face. Guy was harder to read. He greeted everyone as though he had known them all his life. He slid into instant, if illusory, relationships as readily as putting on old slippers.
He seemed to be under the influence of a mixture of Scotch and dope. An overly large drink in one hand, and a waving joint in the other. Troy had no difficulty not minding any of this. He’d seen Burgess light up a reefer in public countless times, and he’d scraped him off the pavement outside the pubs and clubs of Soho a dozen times. The only thing to mind was when Burgess held out the reefer to Voytek, which she accepted with a cheeky grin, and pigged Troy in the middle once more. It was as though they’d both be happier if he did mind. The self-regarding defiance of naughty children.
Bebop, as played by Ronnie Scott, could drown out an air raid. Conversation with Burgess got as far as “What are you up to these days?” and not as far as an answer. When they parted in the street, Troy having declined all suggestion that they might “go on somewhere,” he realised the nature of his apprehension. He did not want a relationship to develop between these two. It was a complication too far. He was uncertain where investigating Voytek might lead. She might be innocent of everything, and even if she weren’t, he had little inclination to arrest her—he simply wanted to know. And to that process of knowledge Burgess, with his kitten’s curiosity, could only be an obstacle. Voytek-Burgess was a consummation not to be wished.
About a month later Troy knew everything, and knowing there was not a damn thing he could do about any of it, he stuck Voytek on a cross-channel ferry to Calais on the assumption that she would lose herself before she was exposed. That she had exposed herself in an anonymous tip-off to the Daily Express was a secret they’d share for the rest of their lives.
It was easy enough to keep. A few days later, his right-hand man, Jack Wildeve, stuck the Express in front of him. There was a headline:
RUSSIAN SPY FLEES ACROSS CHANNEL
And a photograph of Méret Voytek.
Followed by …
SCOTLAND YARD SEEK MYSTERY MAN
And a scrappy sketch of someone Troy took to be himself.
As Jack had said, “His own mother wouldn’t recognise him.”
Indeed, she didn’t.
Alas, someone else would.