They stepped out into the brightly lit Kärntner Ring, one of the wide boulevards created when some emperor or another had decided Vienna could at last do without its city walls.
A tram rattled by at slow speed and deafening volume, and when something close to silence resumed, she said, “I missed you yesterday. I wanted you to come to the concert.”
“I was there.”
“You mean you hid?”
“I suppose I did.”
“From me?”
“From the questions I feel I must ask you.”
“And now you’re not hiding?”
She drew her coat tighter about her, dug her hands deep into her pockets, and tapped her forehead gently against his chest like a bird bobbing on its wooden perch.
“Then ask me. I’ve had ten years of distance from you. I don’t want the added distance of your suspicion.”
“Kutuzov didn’t have a stroke, did he?”
She drew back, eyes to his eyes, not avoiding his gaze.
“Yes, he did, but that was in September. And that’s the only lie I told you. Why do you ask that?”
“Because all this took planning.”
They walked on, her head down now, eyes looking at the puddles as she stepped around them.
“Burgess has been asking to leave for two years now. He is like Oliver Twist in the queue for gruel. The Russians decided they’d let him earlier this year. I think they just got fed up with him. He’s a pest, but I think they know he’ll never name anyone the British don’t already know about, and what he’s learnt in Moscow you could jot down on the back of a postage stamp. But then, it was Burgess himself who hesitated. He’s no idea what the British have on him. He wanted to go home to Mayfair, not to Pentonville. The Russians could have just flown him into Berlin and let him walk across, but Burgess insisted he needed someone he trusted … a broker or a conduit … or he’d just end up in prison. So the Russians waited. Then, at the end of August, they got news of Rod’s Grand Tour.”
“What? How?”
“Was it meant to be a secret? Perhaps the cleaning lady at Westminster goes through your brother’s wastepaper bin, perhaps the doorman at the Garrick goes through his pockets … it could be any one of a dozen sources … but the simple truth is it was in the diary page of the Morning Post.”
Suddenly Troy felt stupid, and stupid by proxy, at that. The grin on her face as she spoke told him he was being stupid.
“They asked him if he would trust Rod … trust him to be the safe conduit he said he needed. Burgess said he needed someone he could trust more than Rod, and that was you. So they cooked up the idea of a visit to Vienna. Then in September Kutuzov had his stroke, and Anatoli approached me to play here in his stead at exactly the same time you and Rod would be here. I told Burgess … I suppose that was a mistake … and the next thing I knew he’d told the Russians he needed someone he could trust more than you … and that was me.”
“And I told the stupid bugger never to mention your name and mine in the same sentence.”
“It doesn’t matter, they haven’t put two and two together and they never will. They’ll never know I denounced myself. They’ll never know it was you got me out of the country. You are safe. I am safe. I’m a defector, a decorated spy. A Hero of the Soviet Union. I’ve got the medals to prove it.”
“Why the pretence that this was all a last-minute thing? Why not tell the Konzerthaus? Why pretend Kutuzov would be the soloist, when both you and Chertkov knew he wouldn’t be?”
“Would you have accepted the ticket if it had had my name on it?”
“Of course I would have.”
“I could not be sure. You will understand. Ten years in another life. In a life you may try harder than most to imagine, but nevertheless you cannot. Ten years. You might not have wanted to see me again. The last time we met I was fleeing … a murderer … I had killed for the first and last time in my life.”
“I’d killed too. Four of them in a matter of minutes. They weren’t the first or the last. We were … equals.”
She shook her head as though trying to shake off the idea like an insect caught in her hair. Then she looked at him, a glint of tears in her eyes.
“And that’s something I’ve never tried to imagine. Never wanted for one second to imagine. Yet it comes unbidden. Summoned by silence. But it, all of it, was enough to give me doubt. Doubt I should never have had about you, Troy. I’m sorry. But … but … the secrecy was not my decision, it never was going to be my decision. And even if it had been, I can only assume the KGB wanted to create the illusion of spontaneity.”
“That’s absurd. Who in MI5 would ever believe Guy could get as far as Vienna without their sanction?”
She shrugged this off.
“You know Russians. They couldn’t be seen simply to hand Guy back. I don’t know, perhaps too much loss of face. As I said, they could just have flown him to Berlin and pushed him across the border. So, a simple, childish plot—me, you, Vienna, Mozart, a fake passport, the pretence they aren’t watching his every move. In the end, what Guy needed was what they wanted. Guy prosecuted is a risk. Guy accepted, in whatever ignominy, is not. They wanted the conduit, the safe option, as much as he did.”
“And now they’ve got it. A pointless de-brief of a de-defecting agent by an MI5 officer, who’ll get nothing out of Guy that the Russians don’t want him to say. All watched over … or listened in to … by a loving KGB. I thought it was a pantomime, but it’s a farce.”
“Yes. It’s a farce … and I never even got to rehearse my part in it.”
Troy looked back towards the hotel.
“I wonder what’s being said in that room right now.”
“I don’t. I don’t give a damn. I just want this to end. I’ve grown fond of Guy, but now I want him out of my life.”
“And I feel much the same. Poor Guy. He’s just a game of pass the parcel, isn’t he?”
It was raining harder now. Voytek turned up her collar, shivered.
“Let’s go back. If all we have to do is wait, let’s wait in my room. I’m tired.”
“I’m not surprised. You’ve played a Mozart concerto and tried to second guess the KGB. All in one day.”