Old Flames (12 page)

‘Listen, you Polish pig. If you fuck this up, I don’t care how many years you’ve got left till retirement, but I’ll see to it you never get another good body from the Yard
as long as you live. I’ll have you scraping the mud off the soles of suspicious boots for the rest of your days. The nearest you’ll ever get to a corpse is your own funeral. Do I make
myself clear?’

Kolankiewicz hadn’t even looked at Troy. He took another inch off his pint and spoke directly to Khrushchev in flawless Russian.

‘Nice to meet you, Uncle Nikki. It’s not often I get the chance of a chat with a relative of Troy’s.’

On the final phrase he turned to Troy and grinned the grin of the Cheshire cat.

Bonham scraped in the cards and dished out dominoes. The rules were simple enough. Only the principle of knocking required anything by way of explanation from Troy. Bonham took the first game;
Khrushchev the second. He smiled gently, but he had stopped asking questions in the presence of Kolankiewicz. One round into the third Kolankiewicz raised his fist as though about to knock on to
Khrushchev, then he unfolded it and one by one set his remaining dominoes on end.

‘East Germany,’ he said, reverting to Russian, as he set up the first. ‘Czechoslovakia.’ Up went the second. ‘Hungary, Poland, Lithuania.’

He ran out of dominoes, looked across at Khrushchev for the first time since the play had passed to him, clenched his fist again, and tapping it lightly with the forefinger of his left hand said
in a hoarse whisper, ‘Soviet Union!’ The fist crashed down to the table, and the dominoes toppled down one by one. Lithuania took out Poland, Poland took out Hungary, Hungary took out
Czechoslovakia and Czechoslovakia walloped East Germany. He looked into Khrushchev’s eyes and said softly and, it seemed to Troy, almost sweetly, ‘One man’s buffer zone is another
man’s home.’

In his heart Troy had always known he was not the stuff that heroes are made of. Pleasing, flattering to his vanity though the idea was, it was always going to be someone else who lit
Khrushchev’s fuse. That the someone should be Kolankiewicz, the Polish beast, the most rough-hewn of heroes, was wholly appropriate. He should have known that no threat, however uttered,
would deter him. He waited for the explosion, for Khrushchev to erupt in a furious spurt of Russian cursing. Bonham and his mates looked baffled, having no idea what Kolankiewicz had said by way of
preface to the gesture.

Khrushchev smiled back at Kolankiewicz, laid a six and three against Troy’s six and one and passed to Bonham. Bonham studied his hand for what seemed an age, and finally knocked gently.
The game went full circle, punctuated only by the banal chatter of play. Troy won, and as Bonham scooped up the dominoes in his colossal paws, found Khrushchev looking straight at him.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Do you suppose they serve vodka in this place?’

‘Almost certainly,’ Troy answered. ‘It’s immigrant territory. I should think they have Genever and Schnapps too if they’re to your taste.’

‘Vodka will do. Poland and I clearly have things to discuss that can only be thrashed out over vodka. Perhaps you would have two glasses—large ones—sent over.’

With that he beckoned to Kolankiewicz and moved to an empty table by the Jug and Bottle. Kolankiewicz looked at Troy. Sheepishly, Troy thought. Troy had never known Kolankiewicz hesitant in his
life—sheepish he was not—where angels feared to tread he was usually to be found in residence, having rushed in hours before with a camp bed, a shooting stick and a full thermos.

‘Go on,’ Troy said. ‘It’s what you wanted. It’s certainly what you asked for.’

An hour or so later, heading back to the West End in a taxi, Troy said, ‘What did you and Kolankiewicz talk about?’

Khrushchev was staring out of the window again into the night and drizzle. He did not turn around.

‘Oh, this and that,’ he said with the stifling of a yawn in his voice. ‘We redrew the map of Europe. What else should happen when a Russian and a Pole get together?’

‘I thought that line went “a Russian and a German”?’

‘Germans,’ Khrushchev replied, ‘are like policemen. Never one around when you want one.’

It was one in the morning before Troy turned in at Goodwin’s Court. He hung up the leather holster and the Browning on the bedstead and threw his shirt into the laundry
basket. The gun had left an oily stain on the shirt, the shape of a tiny heart, right over his heart. He declined to see a symbol in it and fell into bed. Before he could even switch off the lamp
the phone was ringing. It had to be Cobb.

‘You didn’t report in, Mr Troy,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Pubs,’ said Troy simply and honestly.

‘The procedure, I should not have to remind you, is that everyone logs off with me. Not four hours later, but when they hand over Red Pig.’

Troy hated this addiction the man had for code-words. Why couldn’t he say ‘Khrushchev’? The pretence of secrecy was absurd.

‘Sorry,’ he said lamely. ‘Forgot.’

‘Well …’ Cobb paused. ‘Anything to report?’

Troy remembered Khrushchev’s ‘Do it’. It puzzled him greatly and was undoubtedly the kind of thing he’d been placed to overhear. But, and there were two buts, Khrushchev
had uttered the cryptic two syllables in full knowledge of Troy’s command of the language, and, but the second, to tell Cobb anything now would be to invite his curiosity about the entire
evening, when it was best that he asked no more and learnt no more. Troy was confident that their jaunt had—Kolankiewicz apart—gone undetected. He’d been, as Clark had pointed
out, very lucky. The last thing he wanted was Cobb nosing around.

‘No,’ he lied. ‘Not a damn thing.’

‘Really? I heard there was quite a to-do at the Commons.’

‘There was, but as it all took place in public, indeed in the presence of a sizeable gathering of our lords and masters, I hardly saw it as a matter of any secrecy or importance. Or am I
now spying on George Brown and Nye Bevan as well Khrushchev and Bulganin?’

The irritation in Troy’s voice produced the desired effect.

‘Play it by the book will you, Mr Troy!’ Cobb snapped, and then he hung up.

Troy put out the light, still wondering what Khrushchev and Kolankiewicz had said to each other.

The following day he accompanied Khrushchev to the Strangers’ Gallery at the House of Commons. A Tory MP, a man whose hobby seemed to be the Russian language, sat in as
interpreter, and for once Khrushchev seemed genuinely interested by the farce that was democracy. At the best of times Prime Minister’s Question Time could be like a bear pit, the semblance
of English manners tossed to the wind—surely something any Russian could identify with? Khrushchev warmed to the occasion, upstaged the clowns in the pit by taking a bow every time someone
looked up and recognised him, as though the cry of ‘author author!’ had gone up from the stalls. It was an anodyne session until Troy saw Rod get to his feet from the Labour front
bench.

‘Will the Prime Minister inform the House of what arms Her Majesty’s Government have supplied to Egypt and Israel?’

Eden rose to answer him. Khrushchev looked sideways at Troy, seated on the far side of Bulganin.

Eden invoked security and declared that he could not answer the question. Rod rose with his supplementaries.

Khrushchev stopped playing the showman, became attentive to the line of questioning—as well he might. It was a drama in which he made many of the noises off. Colonel Nasser was rapidly
assuming the proportions of a cult figure among the Arabs. He had asserted the simple truth that the old imperial powers had no business in Egypt or any part of the Arab world, and offered his
vision of a Pan-Arabia stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, from Morocco to Aden. He was held to be hostile in the extreme towards Britain, a nation which fondly flattered itself that
it had done rather a lot for ‘Johnny Arab’—indeed there were those who thought we had done rather too much in giving him the financial aid he’d requested for his
hydroelectric dam across the Nile. Troy knew—Rod left no stone unturned when he wanted you to know—that this was a cynical ploy to keep Nasser out of the Soviet camp, and were it not
for the prospect of a fat Russian bankroll, the moths would have stayed zipped up in the British purse. But that was part of the national failing—the white man’s failing.

The British could not accept that they had no role in Egypt, as though to give away the Raj were quite enough for one day, or in Cyprus, whose Greek population were fighting the British in the
streets for union with Greece—hardly a day went by without news of some British tommy being bumped off in Nicosia or Larnaca—or in Africa, where British Imperial jails were stuffed to
the gills with men who one day would surely lead their countries, and more likely than not face their former captors across the table with more than a hint of resentment. For their part, the French
had withdrawn ignominiously from Viet Nam and were looking to restore national prestige by taking it out on the Algerians. Sore winners the French. Along the borders of Israel—a country less
than ten years old—and almost every other Arab state, were frequent skirmishes, spelling out, to those who watched, the possibility of imminent war. Only last month young Hussein, the
Sandhurst- and Harrow-educated King of Jordan, had sacked Glubb Pasha, the British General of the Arab Legion, saying that his values, like his policies, were Victorian. Nasser had a point. Rod,
Troy knew, rather admired the man. But the life he led demanded, if not outright duplicity, then from time to time devil’s advocacy. Troy looked at Khrushchev to see if he steamed, as Rod,
smiling wickedly, asked Eden if he would restore the balance of power by giving Israel as much in the way of weaponry as the Soviet Union had given Egypt.

Again Eden would not be drawn. Troy wondered how little the man had got away with telling the Russians.

In the evening the Russian Embassy returned the astringent British hospitality with a formal reception. Troy knew what this meant. The embassy would never admit armed coppers, any more than MI5
would let armed KGB agents escort B & K, as the papers had dubbed them, around London. They’d spend a boring evening cooling their heels in an anteroom with a silent KGB guard for
company. The bulge in Clark’s pocket was undoubtedly a book with which to while away the time. Troy had finished
The Secret Agent,
and forgotten to pick up a newspaper. Clark was never
caught out by boredom.

They handed B & K over to the embassy staff and waited for instructions. Troy watched his charges vanish into the throng of Russians awaiting their first guests, and saw a tall, thin young
man heading towards him.

‘Gentleman,’ he began. ‘Tereshkov. Anton Tereshkov. Comrade Khrushchev has informed me that you are all to be our guests. If you would be so kind as to surrender your weapons
to me, you may join the reception.’

Clark and Milligan looked at Troy, waiting for their cue.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I doubt there’s anything about a service issue Browning they haven’t known for years.’

They handed over their weapons like schoolboys parting with illicit catapults. Troy fished his own gun out of the absurd contraption that stuck it sharply up his armpit and gave it to
Tereshkov.

‘A word, if I may, Chief Inspector.’

Troy gestured Clark and Milligan away, and they moved slowly and suspiciously into the crowd, glancing back at Troy and looking like two coppers reluctantly pursuing a suspect into a
ladies’ lavatory.

Tereshkov took Troy by the arm, gently swung him around into the kind of huddle presumed to exclude other ears.

‘Chief Inspector. Comrade Khrushchev has invited you to visit the Soviet Union.’

Good grief, thought Troy, the old fool had actually meant it.

‘There are complications,’ Troy said, trying for tact. ‘I’m grateful, but I really think it won’t be possible.’

‘The British would object? It would desTroy the career of a Special Branch officer?’

‘No, the British would not object. And I’m not in the Branch, I. run the Murder Squad at Scotland Yard. It’s more personal. Do you see?’

‘I see, Chief Inspector Troy, only as much as you wish me to see. However, the invitation stands. Comrade Khrushchev seems alarmed at the idea that you have never seen your homeland and
extends his personal, his
personal
invitation to you. All you have to do is let him know through the embassy that you wish to come, and the necessary papers will be arranged by the office of
the First Secretary in Moscow.’

‘Do you really think the KGB will forward a letter from an English copper to the ruler of the Soviet Union?’ Troy asked, more than a little incredulous.

Tereshkov took a notebook from his pocket and jotted down a word in Russian—
Пирожки
. Pirozhki. Literally, it meant fried dumplings. He tore off
the page and gave it to Troy. Troy could not help feeling that the man whose job it was to think these things up was secretly taking the mickey.

‘I am Comrade Khrushchev’s man here. Any letter dropped into the embassy letterbox bearing this code will be sent straight to me, and by me straight to the First Secretary. No one
else will know its content. Whatever dark secret you and your people are hiding—from us or the British—will be quite safe.’

But, of course, Troy had no idea what he was hiding. Whatever it was it had been hidden by his father long ago. To entertain Khrushchev’s invitation as anything more than whimsy on the
part of a mercurial old man was to risk ripping the lid off a can of worms. Since his father’s death in 1943 not a week had passed when Troy had not wished him alive for five minutes to
answer one question or another, and with every year that passed the list grew longer.

Far from being blown by the night at the Commons, Troy’s cover, and hence the cover of the team as a whole, seemed intact. Khrushchev made no further use of his knowledge that they were
all spies. This confirmed Troy’s belief that the mission was hopeless from the start. He had thought all along that Khrushchev would never be indiscreet in the presence of the English. He now
blustered and joked and raged in Russian, well aware that they all understood him, and dutifully paused for his interpreter as though the charade were real. The tasteless jokes resumed, the
boundless curiosity pretended it was sated by more meetings with living monuments, more official statements, more damned statistics.