High Jinx (22 page)

He turned to Comrade Balenkov. ‘That is most kind of you to look after me. I shall take good care of these books, and of course you will have them back. How—do I—arrange to call you?'

Comrade Balenkov pulled a card from her handbag, gave it to Fleetwood and said, ‘When you are ready for us to come to take the books back, you will simply inform the concierge on your floor and she will notify us.'

Alistair Fleetwood bowed. And without further ado, motioning to the young man to follow her, Comrade Balenkov walked to the door, opened it, and left.

At six o'clock the telephone rang. He had been expecting the ring with feverish anxiety, sedated only after the books came, which had made the last few hours pass by more quickly. Alice Goodyear Corbett was manifestly excited, but she was being cryptic, leaving it to Alistair Fleetwood to piece together the meaning of what she said. She spoke with unusual formality.

‘Bjorn,' she said, with heavy accent on his pseudonymous first name, ‘I have had a very pleasant afternoon visiting with … old friends. We talked at great length about you, and my friends are great admirers of yours. That is the first thing I wanted to tell you. And one of those friends, the, the … senior of those friends, is most anxious to meet you and to have a nice chat with you. He is not at this moment in Moscow, but will be here later on this evening, and he hopes—I hope—you will not object to meeting with him at a rather … unusual hour. He would be available shortly after midnight.'

Alistair Fleetwood had several reactions to what he had been told. Triumph, clearly. Unless he had drastically misunderstood the anfractuous message of Alice Goodyear Corbett, the Great God Beria had backed down and agreed to see him. But immediately following that agreeable sensation of victory it came to him that Beria was clearly imposing his own idiosyncratic schedule on his distinguished British visitor. A means of domesticating me, Fleetwood immediately thought.

He paused.

He was tempted to tell Alice that, really, at midnight, he would be much too tired to keep spirited company with her ‘friend.' … But a third reaction, modifying the second, rescued him from humiliation. He could accept the midnight meeting hour in the spirit of—security! After all, he was here in order to consummate a most private commission. Under the circumstances he might, without loss of dignity, respond to a midnight invitation as though he thought the hour selected with the single purpose in mind of maximising security. All this was done with only a moment's hesitation. And so he answered her:

‘Why of course, Alice. Midnight is fine with me. I understand the requirements.' (Dramatic pause.) ‘There is of course a condition to all of this, which is that you and I will dine together in our accustomed, civilised way. Only I fear it will be up to you to cope with the requirements of Room Service here. My Russian is not up to it.'

Alice Goodyear Corbett, manifestly relieved by his reaction, smiled. ‘Of course, my darling. I will be with you at eight, and I'll make all the arrangements.'

‘You did get the books?' Alice called back, a half hour later.

‘I did get the books, and I thank you most heartily for them.'

‘I am so glad. Well, of course I have made the arrangements. You do like caviar, do you not—Bjorn?'

‘I like caviar very much, never mind that I disapprove of anything that costs a hundred pounds a kilo. Plutocratic, conspicuous consumption; but since it needs to be consumed, I shall make the sacrifice.'

‘You will see me at eight o'clock'—she permitted herself an indiscretion, Alistair thought, by closing, ‘entirely prepared for you, dear Bjorn.' On the other hand, he supposed the KGB, judging from her fright earlier in the day, knew everything. They are, after all, supposed to know everything, he reminded himself, though he did not very much relish that anyone else should know everything about himself and Alice.

She had arrived at eight, told Alistair Fleetwood that the dinner would arrive at nine, they had both reenacted their rituals and were in bed, in intimate union, when the doorbell rang. Rang once, paused only momentarily, rang again, followed by peremptory, persistent use of the brass door knocker.

‘Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!' Alice Goodyear Corbett said, her voice a tangle of emotions. ‘I will go to the door. Oh-h, darling—forgive all of this.' Disengaged, she got up, and then said, ‘My goodness! I have no robe! I must dress!'

She sprinted to the bathroom while the knocking on the door proceeded at progressively imperious tempo. In record time Alice Goodyear Corbett, her dress on, sped past the bedroom into the living room and opened the door. Through the slight opening of the bedroom door, Alistair Fleetwood could see three Russian waiters wheeling a huge trolley of foods into the living room, accompanying it with heated conversation. Alice was evidently reproaching them for bringing the dinner a full forty-five minutes before it had been expected, the headwaiter protesting something or other, all of it in energetic polemical tones; and then, suddenly, the three waiters were gone, the food and the large tray of bottles left on the table.

Fleetwood got up out of bed, dressed himself with only absolutely essential attire, and walked into the living room. ‘Really, Alice, I do think these arrangements most awfully … clumsy.'

She explained that evidently the management of National Hotel had been instructed to pay such special attention to the desires of Mr. Bjorn Henningsen that in the eagerness to please, the management had advanced the schedule she had stipulated. Her voice was soothing, and the odour of the Chicken Kiev, and the sight of the rare (in Russia) white French burgundy in the ice cooler soothed Alistair Fleetwood. He even permitted himself a laugh. ‘I think I shall propose a new maxim to the lexicographers,' he said. He drew his head back a bit, closing his eyes—a posture he used frequently in class, when he struggled visibly to decoct from the tumult of his stochastic knowledge a special truth—‘a fresh formulation, even.
“Coitus interruptus causa splendidissimi convivii.”
“The act of love interrupted by reason of the most splendid feast.” Do you like that, Alice my dear?' She said she did like it, and admired it, and that it confirmed everything she thought about him, including his wonderful good sportsmanship, and so they began their dinner as usual, except that when time came for the traditional liqueur, she cautioned, finger to her lips, ‘Let's not tonight, darling, not until after our meeting with our friend. I think we had better be very careful until then.' Alistair Fleetwood nodded good-naturedly, and put the top back on the bottle of kirsch.

It had really gone splendidly, Alistair reflected the following morning when he woke at 8:30. The car had been there waiting for them at 11:15. They were in the waiting room at the Lubyanka at 11:45. And at exactly midnight, they were called into the office.

Beria had risen and walked over toward Alistair Fleetwood as though he were a close friend, arrived on a surprise visit. Beria kissed Fleetwood on both cheeks, threw his arms about him, and walked him toward the chair by his desk. He was talking rapidly, Alice struggling in spurts to interpret. He had been most fearfully embarrassed and put out on learning that his Minister of State Security had dealt so—offhandedly—with Beria's distinguished guest. What had happened was a reflection of the top security status of the operation in which ‘Comrade Bjorn'—this was followed by a heh-heh-heh and a wink at Alice Goodyear Corbett—was ‘playing so vital a role.'

At that moment the door had opened and two trolleys were wheeled in with vodka and caviar and hot onion soup, and in moments the four of them—‘Josef,' a youngish, tall, sallow blond man wearing a double-breasted black suit, who had kept seated in the corner of the room during the whole period, was perfunctorily introduced as ‘my aide Comrade Josef'—were seated around the table. And Beria was telling Comrade Bjorn how highly he was prized in the Kremlin and how vital was his current mission.

After vodka had been poured for the third time and the trolleys removed, Lavrenti Pavlovich addressed Fleetwood. The operation, he said, needed to go forward immediately.

He showed—and for this Fleetwood was grateful and impressed—a meticulous knowledge of the physical requirements of the mini-Zirca, as Fleetwood had described them in the several sessions, personal and by radio, with Alice Goodyear Corbett. The requisite space had been located. It was appropriately situated to provide the mini-Zirca with a line of sight to a certain office. Fleetwood had said that an intervening structure would not in fact interdict the desired communications, but that a slight blur might result, so that the operation was best carried out between a building and the Kremlin window without ‘great steel things in between,' as Fleetwood had put it in an idiomatic communication to Alice Goodyear Corbett.

The mini-Zirca was situated, Lavrenti Pavlovich advised Fleetwood, in exactly such a situation. The specified electrical requirements had been met. ‘All that is now needed,' Beria said, wrinkling his face into a composite of fleshly wickedness force-fed by the demands of amiability—all that was now needed, in fact, was the ‘enabling' of the machine, and instructions to the technician on how to maintain it in operation.

‘Here,' Lavrenti Pavlovich smiled, ‘I have a wonderful surprise for you. Not only a wonderful surprise for you, Comrade Bjorn. But a wonderful surprise for our friend here—' he pointed to Alice.

‘The technician in charge of the Zirca will be: Comrade Belushi!

Alice Goodyear Corbett turned sharply to Beria, exclaiming in rapid Russian, causing Beria to reply in rapid Russian, leaving Alistair Fleetwood with little to contribute, though he sensed that Comrade Belushi was somebody very important or somehow controversial. In due course Beria turned to his guest, waiting for his interpreter to speak. Alice found it difficult to interpret a passage at once so impersonal, and so personal.

‘Comrade Belushi,' Alice exactly relayed the words spoken slowly by Beria, ‘is the proud husband of—no less—' and Beria raised his vodka glass and bowed in the direction of Alice Goodyear Corbett.

Alistair Fleetwood had not supposed that his visit in Moscow would involve an acquaintance with the creature Alice had been required as a matter of administrative convenience to marry. He did not look forward to receiving as his pupil the man he had cuckolded. But on the other hand war was war, so to speak. And his happening physically on Comrade Belushi would not in any way interfere with the large hold that Alice Goodyear Corbett had on his emotions. So all he could think to say was:

‘How convenient, Lavrenti Pavlovich.' And, looking to one side at Alice, a tiny shrug of the shoulders: so what? She returned the gesture with a suddenly affected indifference.

As they were being driven back to the hotel, Fleetwood reminded himself that he had intended to ask Beria some direct questions about the implications of this rather serious gesture of intra-Kremlin politics. But, he confessed to himself, he had been so much taken by the hospitality, Beria's gratitude for favours past, Beria's admiration of Fleetwood's continuing work for the revolution—all of this had caused Fleetwood to put aside pronouncing questions his curiosity had prompted him to ask.

And so as, wearily, he slid into bed at three in the morning for the second successive night, he blanked out what his musical colleague at Trinity liked to call the ‘hemidemisemiquavers.' What mattered was that the revolution marched forward, and that unquestionably the most brilliant young scientist in the Western world was performing indispensable services for that revolution. It was, of course, comforting to know that the full measure of his importance was known to the chief of the KGB, that vast, vital system geared to contend with the subtle fascist machinations of reactionaries inside and outside the boundaries of the Soviet Socialist Republic. And that evening Sir Alistair Fleetwood, Nobel laureate, pride of British science, the envy of lesser men all over the world, had dined in the sanctum sanctorum of Revolutionary Intelligence in intimate contact with its head: that squat, ugly, fleshy little man who, Alistair Fleetwood was convinced, was the principal custodian of Soviet security.

25

Blackford had a telephone call from his mother early that afternoon. She told him that a messenger had delivered an envelope for him. ‘Really all very spooky, darling, because the envelope is addressed in red ink with very wide lettering, and it says: “For the attention only of Blackford Oakes, Esquire.” I am of course very proud to know that others are aware that you can be reached through your mother. Will you drop around for it, dear, or shall I just post it?'

‘No, no,' Blackford said. ‘Does it have any return address on it?'

‘No, nothing. Nothing at all.'

‘I'll come by, Mother—' he thought for a moment. The day, as planned, was crowded, and it was not easy simply to go in and then out of his mother's house. ‘No, Mother, I'll send someone by for it. He will identify himself as Mr Brown. Give him the package, all right? I look forward to our outing tomorrow.' He pursed his lips to make the sound of kisses and hung up.

And so a young aide from James Street was dispatched. He was back within half an hour. Blackford was alone at his desk, studying the plans of the building where, he now knew, Henry lived and worked in apartment 516. He waited to open the envelope until the aide had removed himself.

He stared at the piece of paper, unbelieving. The brief message was signed merely
BB
. Written in German, in neat block letters, was:

Mr. Oakes. You remember that confessional that was very useful three years ago?

I shall be the priest, at 9:03
P.M
.
You the penitent. This is most urgent business of mutual concern. I shall wait only three minutes. I cannot overestimate the importance. If there are interruptions of any kind, the benefit to both parties will be eliminated
.