Miss Voytek had mastered the samovar. Made a good cup of tea. He never had, and accepted Doris’s disgusting brew with grim patience. Any East End caff would tip tea as stewed as Russians seemed to like it. Cuppas like creosote.
“We can talk now,” she said.
With one hand he held the glass of delicately scented tea, the right amount of hot water, the kipyatok, added to the dark, overbrewed tea concentrate; with the other he pointed at the ceiling and described circles in the air.
“Oh,” she said. “The house isn’t bugged. They stopped bugging me in 1949. I’m a spent force. No use to them and so no threat.”
“My dacha is bugged, so’s my Moscow flat. They have a minimum level of decency—they don’t put microphones in the bedroom.”
“If you’re still bugged, then you still matter to them. There’s something they still want from you.”
“They know everything. I was interrogated every few weeks until earlier this year. Two clowns called Blodnik and Bolokov. I couldn’t have made up names like that if I tried.”
“Ah … I got Tosca and Ronin. They weren’t clowns.”
She had her back to him momentarily, thumping a cushion into shape. Then she turned, sat, and gestured to him to sit on the other end of the sofa.
“Little woman? Eyes like conkers … rather well …”
He described the arc of Tosca’s bosom with his right hand.
“Ah. You’ve met?” Voytek said.
“Oh yes.”
“She was your London control?”
“Oh no. That was ‘Peter.’ I didn’t meet Major Tosca until I was on the run. She was my first interrogator. Brighter than all the others put together. I rather liked her.”
“I see.”
“And you didn’t like her?”
“I had … have … very mixed feelings. She rescued me from the Nazis. But then she made me a Soviet spy and put me into London. I have reasons to be grateful and reasons to resent her.”
“I still see her from time to time. I often think she misses London as much as I do. We have a drink together and reminisce.”
Voytek had paused. The needle pulled suddenly from the groove.
“I’m not sure I’d want to.”
“I find I can talk to anyone with approximately the same memories I have. There are times I think I’d relish a chat with a chap from Nottingham or Derby and I’ve never been to either. Desperate, isn’t it?”
“Of course … I’m not tied to this house or to Moscow or even to Russia. I can travel. All the Warsaw Pact countries, and the neutrals too … Sweden, Switzerland … Austria. I suppose I’m not desperate.”
“I can’t go anywhere. Would you believe I’m still a secret? The British may be ninety-nine per cent certain where I am, but Moscow won’t tell them. It reinforces my isolation. I’d love to come clean, to be able to say ‘Guy Burgess is alive and well and living in Moscow.’”
“And what would that gain you?”
Burgess could feel tears gathering.
“Letters,” he said softly. “My mother would have an address for me. She’d write me letters.”
He paused as one lonely tear ran down his cheek.
“And I would write back.”