Bloody London (23 page)

My father knew them all: Philby, Burgess, Vivian McFarland, and the lesser lights: Nigel Crowe, Iain Lamb, Alec Singleton. But Geoffrey Gilchrist was his favorite. The first Englishman I ever met.

“You kept the cufflinks?”

I still have them. One of the two or three things I still have from Moscow, cufflinks, a scarf from some English university so old and ratty it leaves balls of blue wool on my hands when I touch it. I don't know why I keep it.

It was in the back of my mind ever since I touched down in London and now I stared at the old man, who rolled a coffee cup between his hands as if the glass would warm them. The hands were yellow as wax paper and covered with brown spots the size and color of corroded pennies. The same gold ring he always wore was on his left pinkie. He put the cup down and held out one of his hands. It was warm from the cup.

The waiter brought pastries.

“Please, won't you eat something?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Did you recognize me?” Gilchrist spoke Russian but with a lousy English accent. He was eager. I looked at the shape of the shoulders, still square, and the light gray eyes.

“Sure, Geoff. You haven't changed that much,” I said, and he lit up like a bulb. His vanity made him lively.

“You would prefer something else for breakfast?” he said awkwardly, and I said, “No thanks. And we can speak English, if you want.”

“You've got an American accent, Artie, may I call you Artie? It was your western name, wasn't it?”

“It still is.”

We sat in the little restaurant, rain beating down outside. Maybe it was jetlag and I was wired, but I could see them all: my father; Gennadi; my mother, when she was pretty, young, contentious, not an old woman in a nursing home in Haifa, her mind claimed by Alzheimer's. She no longer remembers my name.

I finished the heavy brew and asked for another one. “Jesus. It's really you, isn't it? The guy in the bookstore called you? You knew it was me that called.”

“I'm not that good anymore.” He laughed. “I do get the odd call, someone asking, usually a journalist.”

“And you answer?”

“There might be money in it.”

“So, Geoff, how the hell come you're in England?”

He pulled a handkerchief out of his cuff and wiped his mouth. “Things change. After the Communists went we were in a very tenuous position actually, as you can well imagine. Anti-Communism was widespread, of course, in the Soviet Union, forgive me, in Russia. There was a serious disinclination to pay the upkeep on an elderly Englishman who had worked for the old oppressors. No one knew what to do with us. My sellby date was up.” He laughed. “They could have swept me out with the rest of the Cold War rubbish.”

“Go on.”

“I knew a few British journalists in Moscow who liked retelling my little story, the old days, the derringdo, the gossip about Philby and Burgess; it had its glamour, actually.”

“You could always make up great stuff, I remember that.”

“Thank you. I thought I'd better repackage myself for them, and one of them at least had rather good connections with the Foreign Office. The benign act of a new prime minister, I don't know, actually. A kindness, a reprieve. It took some years to arrange.”

“But you fixed it?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been here?”

He looked at his watch, distracted now. “Sorry?”

“How long?”

“Six months.” He grinned. The boyish grin. “I believe they think I've come home to die.”

Gilchrist leaned over the table again.

He was past seventy, the once-handsome face drawn tight from disease. He was thin as a stick, but the eyes were bright. He gave his debonair smile; my mother thought he looked like David Niven. We'd seen Niven once in Moscow, in some lousy print of a smuggled film.

Gilchrist said, “I do not plan to die yet, however, Artie. Your home is here now?”

“New York.”

“You really are an American?”

“Yes.”

“Of course. It was always America, wasn't it? I was
quite jealous. I tried to make a little Englishman of you, but it didn't take. The only thing English you were at all interested in was the Beatles. And the whiskey.”

“Not Scotch, Artemy,” he'd say, “Single malt. Malt whiskey. Very deep, very smoky – here, try a little, just taste with your tongue, you don't have to swallow it all, just smell it, put your tongue in the glass. Good. Good, Artyom.”

I adored the way he treated me, like a grown-up. “Live dangerously,” he said. “It's the best antidote.” I had no idea what the hell he meant. The only time my mother ever punished me was when she discovered he gave me booze. Deep down she despised Geoff. She couldn't understand it, these free guys from a decent place who spied for the son-of-a-bitch Soviets. My father, who enjoyed the company, the chess games and books, had lived through the war and believed in the patriotic cause. He could never grasp how a man could turn on his own country.

But mostly they made fun of the Brits: their terrible teeth, their funny accents, the incomprehensible sports they followed, like cricket.

“Joff was terribly out of sorts today,” my father would say, coming home with Uncle Gennadi, and they'd have a glass of Georgian wine at the kitchen table and laugh about him, the accent, the clothes.

“Personally I preferred Leslie Howard in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
,” my mother would say. “He was a better kind of Englishman. I thought of naming you Leslie for a while, but it might have been difficult for a good Soviet boy.” My mother would say stuff like that, then hold on
to the kitchen sink and crack up at her own private jokes. I can see her: slender, blonde, joking, but always furious. Her anger at the system got my father kicked out of the KGB later on.

I was obsessed with America, but all foreigners were exciting and England had the Beatles. When we got the news, the Beatles were everything. Somehow, someone, some kid with a father who travelled or was a Party bigwig, got an illegal print – there weren't any videos then – of
A Hard Day's Night.
I was maybe twelve years old. We sat in a dark room, someone threaded it on the projector. We were blown away. No one talked afterwards. The realization that we lived in a nowhere place hit me hard when I saw it.

I was a smarty pants Moscow kid and Geoffrey Gilchrist was an opportunity. Joff. Hallo, Joff, we'd imitate his fancy accent to each other. Talk British to us, we'd kid him. Had a hard day's night, Joff ? Been working like a dog? I laughed out loud remembering. He must have thought we were crazy kids. What did Gilchrist know about the Beatles? He wasn't that kind of Englishman. Been sleeping like a log, Geoff ? Geoff was a sideshow.

Gilchrist was talking now. “What is your work?”

“I'm a cop. Was a cop. I do private work.”

“Ah,” he said. “The family business. You are married?”

“No.”

He shifted his chair.

“Back to the wall, Geoff? You expecting someone?”

He looked at the wet window. “Always. Shall we go?”

The waiter brought a check. I put some money on the table, Gilchrist picked up some of the coins and said, “Too much”, then put them absently into his own pocket.

The rain battered the black umbrella Gilchrist held over both of us, and seeped over the edges, dripped on his tweed hat and down my neck. But I stayed with him, walking slow, in the little cocoon of the umbrella.

He shuffled up and down the curb, looking for a cab, and stuck his umbrella impatiently into the air. A black taxi pulled up. We got in and he gave an address, then closed his eyes.

Ten minutes later, we were on Ponsonby Terrace, a narrow street with pretty houses. I made a mental note of the address. The rain had turned the streets slick.

Gilchrist's house had blue window-boxes with spiky fall flowers. I followed him up the steps, he switched on the light. In it, he looked old and frail, the face cross-hatched by a million lines, the skull almost visible through the skin. The mustache was white but still thick; the eyes always saved him. They gave the face warmth, and it wasn't until you'd been seduced, that you saw the malevolent curiosity, the subversive self-obsession. The thing about Geoff I couldn't put
a name on when I was a kid was the charm.

“Come in. Please.”

On a long table was a lap-top, the screen lit up, and next to it a glass bowl with two pale-skinned fish in the water. Gilchrist shut the door behind us, then reached in his pocket and tossed a coin in the bowl. “They feed off copper,” he said. “It bleeds the color out of them, but they can't resist. I read of this phenomenon in a marvelous book about Venice once, and felt I needed them for the irony. They've been with me for a long time, since Moscow. Do you know Venice, Artie?”

I ignored the conversational come-on, but I was pretty curious. The house consisted of the living room and kitchen. There was a small garden out back. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bathroom.

He took off his coat and took mine and put them in the bathroom, then came back and pulled a bottle from a silver tray that was crowded with whiskey bottles and heavy crystal glasses. Laphroaig. Always the same brand.

There was a fireplace, and he switched the gas on and lit it. It kicked up a blue flame. He poured whiskey into glasses. It was an obsessive's room: the bookshelves were impeccably organized, the antique tables neatly stacked with files and paper, all of it squared off and dusted, tied with cotton string. He gestured to a deep leather chair and said, “Sit down. Please.”

“Thank you.” He saw me look at the computer. “Marvelous, the computer, the Internet. I'm quite good with it. All kinds of tremendously interesting things you find. Don't you think so. Tea?”

I shook my head. “The whiskey's fine.”

He spoke like a man back from a long trip in a spaceship: his English was old-fashioned and detached.

I said, because I didn't know what else to say, “Gennadi Ustinov is dead.”

“Yes,” he said. “I'd heard about the general. The Americans murdered him in the end in spite of everything.”

I shrugged.

He said, “Both of them dead. Ustinov. Your father.”

I nodded.

“How did it happen? Your father?”

“An accident. A bomb on a bus in Israel. Tourist bus. Wrong bus, wrong bomb. Nothing special. Nothing spooky. Not your kind of thing, really.”

For a while we sat and drank silently in the small comfortable room. Outside the rain came down the windows and I saw it suddenly run red, like blood; I thought I was drunk. I pulled myself out of the soft leather chair and went to the window. Thought about Thomas Pascoe. And Lily.

There was a rusty metal overhang – some kind of pipe or rain gutter – and the rust itself, brownish-red like dried blood, was flaking and had mixed with the water. It made the water coming down the pane seem bloody. Gilchrist's eyes followed me and, for a moment, as the room got hotter from the fire, his large eyelids came down over the gray eyes. I thought, for a second, he's dead. Dead.

In the hot room, while Gilchrist dozed and the blood-colored water ran down the panes, I watched him and wondered if us meeting was an accident. The
mantelpiece was crowded with photographs. One showed my family in Moscow at a picnic. My father is laughing at the camera.

Gilchrist opened his eyes. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Forgive me for dropping off. Can I do anything for you?”

“What kind of thing did you have in mind? Can I smoke?”

He nodded. “Your father was a considerate man. General Ustinov too. He was your godfather, your father's great friend?”

I nodded.

“It was the general who proposed I should come home. I owed him, I owed your father, I'd like to repay you. What can I give you? How can I help you?”

“What makes you think I need help? I'm a private investigator, I do light industrial cases, I report on restaurants, I'm in London because my girlfriend's here, and that's about it. I'm not a spy. I'm not CIA or KGB or MI 5, 6, 7 or 8 – whatever they call it now – or anything else. It's the end of the century. The end of the millennium.” I looked at the computer. “You're a cyberpunk, Geoff, you know how fast things move. There's a whole generation of American kids who never heard of the Cold War. It's over.”

Gilchrist took a cigar box from a drawer, offered it to me, selected one, removed the paper ring, sniffed it, snapped the end off, lit it and said, “It's never over. The Cold War will never end. There's always human debris. It won't be over until my sort are all dead. Maybe yours too, Artie.”

I looked at my watch.

“We've all left too much behind. Too much rubbish. Too many ghosts,” he said. “Look at me. Look at you,” he said and he leaned forward, the cigar in his hand.

“You Americans – if that's really what you are, Artie Cohen – you left your Coca Cola, your land mines, your dollars. The Soviets left busts of Lenin, tin wind-up toys, promises of pie in the sky. We left women. Babies without fathers. Weapons without spare parts. In Havana and Hanoi, Addis, Angola, Chile, and, of course, Cuba. Cuba was our paradise and playground, good music, women, drugs, as it had been yours. There are still true believers.”

“Including you?”

“I gave up ideology for cash.”

“No wife? No kid?”

He shrugged.

“You never married, did you, not like the others? No Russian girls appealed?”

He didn't answer.

“How come they really let you back in? I don't really buy this benign prime minister stuff, Geoff. I mean, why should they care? You fucked over the Brits in a major way, they're suddenly going to care if you live or die in Moscow?”

Gilchrist shifted his shoulders as if they hurt him. His fingers were already knotted with arthritis. “The West is frightfully sentimental.” Gilchrist spoke English most of the time. When he was angry, he switched to crude Russian. “It's conditional, of course. I haven't got a passport.”