The Fourth Protocol (9 page)

The man who had hired him had given him a telephone number, the location of a phone booth, and three specific hours at which to call. The first of them was only a few minutes ahead.

Beryl Zablonsky returned from her Saturday-evening treat just before two in the morning. She parked her Metro across the street and, surprised to see the lights still on, let herself in.

Louis Zablonsky’s wife was a nice Jewish girl of working-class origins who had early learned that to expect everything in life is stupid and selfish. Ten years earlier, when she was twenty-five, Zablonsky had plucked her from the second-row chorus line of a no-hope musical and asked her to marry him. He had told her about his disability but she had accepted him nevertheless.

Strangely, it had been a good marriage. Louis had been immeasurably kind and treated her as if he were a too-indulgent father. She doted on him, almost as if she had been his daughter. He had given her everything he could—a fine house, clothes, trinkets, pocket money, security—and she was grateful.

There was one thing he could not give her, of course, but he was understanding and tolerant. All he asked was that he never know who, or be asked to meet any of them. At thirty-five, Beryl was a trifle overripe, a little obvious, earthy and attractive in that kind of way that appeals to younger men, a sentiment she heartily reciprocated. She maintained a small studio flat in the West End for her trysts and unashamedly enjoyed her Saturday-night treats.

Two minutes after entering the house, Beryl Zablonsky was crying and giving her address on the telephone to the ambulance service. They were there six minutes later, put the dying man on a stretcher, and tried to hold him in this life all the way to the Hampstead Free Hospital. Beryl went with him in the ambulance.

On the way he had one brief period of lucidity and beckoned her close to his bleeding mouth. Craning an ear, she caught his few words, and her brow wrinkled in puzzlement. It was all he was able to say. By the time they got to Hampstead, Louis Zablonsky was another of the night’s dead-on-arrival cases.

Beryl Zablonsky still retained a soft spot for Jim Rawlings. She had had a brief affair with him seven years earlier, before his marriage. She knew his marriage had now broken up and that he was again living alone in the top-floor apartment in Wandsworth whose telephone number she had called often enough to have memorized it.

When she came on the line she was still crying, and at first Rawlings had some trouble, dazed with sleep as he was, in making out who was calling. She was ringing from a public booth in emergency admissions and the pips kept going as she put in fresh coins. When he understood who it was, Rawlings listened to the message with increasing puzzlement.

“That’s all he said? Just that? All right, love. Look, I’m sorry, really very sorry. I’ll come up when the fuzz have cleared out. See if there’s anything I can do. Oh, and Beryl ... thanks.”

Rawlings replaced the receiver, thought for a moment, and placed two calls, one after the other. Ronnie, from the scrapyard, reached him first, and Syd was there ten minutes later. Both, as instructed, were tooled up, and they were just in time. The visiting party tramped up the eight flights of stairs fifteen minutes later.

Blondie had not wanted to take the second contract, but the extra money the voice on the phone had guaranteed was too much to turn down. He and his mates were East
Enders
and hated to go south of the river. The animus between the gangs of the East End and the mobs of South London is legendary in the capital’s underworld, and for a southerner to go “up East” uninvited, or the reverse, can be a ticket to a lot of trouble. Still, Blondie reckoned that at three-thirty in the morning things should be quiet enough and he could be back in his own manor with the job done before he was spotted.

When Jim Rawlings opened his door, a heavy hand shoved him straight back down the hallway leading to his sitting room. The two slags came in first, with Blondie bringing up the rear. Rawlings backed fast down the hallway to let them all in. When Blondie slammed the door behind him, Ronnie came out of the kitchen and leveled the first slag with a pickax handle. Syd came out of the coat closet in a rush and used a nailbar on the cranium of the second man. Both went down like felled oxen.

Blondie was scrabbling at the doorknob, trying to get back out to the safety of the landing, when Rawlings, stepping over the bodies, caught him by the scruff and slammed him face-first into a glass-fronted portrait of the Madonna, ownership of which was the nearest the little man had ever come to organized religion. The glass broke and Blondie collected several small shards in his cheeks.

Ronnie and Syd tied up the two heavies while Rawlings hauled Blondie into the sitting room. Minutes later, held at the feet by Ronnie and around the waist by Syd, Blondie was protruding several feet out of the window, eight floors above the ground.

“See that parking lot down there?” Rawlings asked him. Even in the blackness of a winter night, the man could just make out the glint of streetlights on cars a long way down. He nodded.

“Well, in twenty minutes that parking lot’s going to be full of fuzz. Standing around a plastic sheet. And guess who’s going to be under it, all squashed and nasty?”

Blondie, aware that his life expectancy was now measurable in seconds, called from his extremity, “All right, I’ll cough.”

They brought him in and sat him down. He tried to be ingratiating. “Look, we know the score, squire. I was just ’ired to do a job, right? Recover something what got nicked. ...”

“That old man in
Golders
Green,” said Rawlings.

“Yeah, well, ’e said you’d got it, so I come ’ere.”

“He was a mate of mine. He’s dead.”

“Well, I’m sorry, squire. I didn’t know ’e ’ad an ’eart condition. The boys only tapped ’
im
a couple of times.”

“You crap-eater. His mouth was all over the parish and all his ribs cracked. So what did you come for?”

Blondie told him.

“The what?” asked Rawlings incredulously.

Blondie told him again. “Don’t ask me, squire. I was just paid to get it back. Or find out what ’appened to it.”

“Well,” said Rawlings, “I’m very close to having you and your mates in the Thames before sunup, wearing a nice new line in concrete underpants. Only I don’t need the aggro. So I’m letting you go. You tell your punter it was empty. Completely empty. And I burned it ... to a cinder. There’s nothing left of it. You don’t really think I’d keep something taken from a job? I’m not a complete fool. Now get out.”

At the doorway Rawlings called Ronnie back. “See them back across the river. And give the little rat a present from me, for the old man. Okay?”

Ronnie nodded. Minutes later, down in the parking lot, the more damaged of the East
Enders
went into the back of his own van, still trussed up. The half-conscious one was put behind the steering wheel with hands untied and told to drive. Blondie was thrown in the front passenger seat, his broken arms in his lap. Ronnie and Syd followed them to Waterloo Bridge, then turned back and went home.

Jim Rawlings was perplexed. He made himself a cup of espresso and thought things over.

He had indeed intended to burn the
attaché
case amid the rubble. But it was so beautifully hand-tooled; the dull, burnished leather glowed in the light of the flames like metal. He had examined it for any sign of an identification mark. There was none. Against his better judgment and despite Zablonsky’s warning, he had decided to risk keeping it.

He went to a closet and brought it down from a high shelf. This time he went over it like a professional cracksman. It took him ten minutes to find the stud on the hinge side of the case that slid sideways when pushed hard with the ball of the thumb. From inside the case he heard a sound. When he reopened the case the base had risen half an inch at one side. With a paper knife he eased up the base and glanced inside the flat compartment between the case’s real base and the false one. With tweezers he extracted the ten sheets of paper that lay within.

Rawlings was no expert on government documents, but he could understand the rubric of the Ministry of Defense, and the words
TOP SECRET
are understandable in any man’s language. He sat back and whistled softly.

Rawlings was a burglar and a thief, but like much of the London underworld he would not have anyone “trash” his country. It is a fact that convicted traitors in prison, along with child molesters, have to be kept in seclusion because professional “faces,” if left alone with such a man, are likely to rearrange his component parts.

Rawlings knew whose apartment he had burgled, but the robbery had not yet been reported, and he suspected, for reasons he could only now fathom, that it might never be. So he did not need to draw attention to it. On the other hand, with Zablonsky dead, the diamonds were probably gone forever, and his cut of their value with them. He began to hate the man who owned that apartment.

He had already handled the papers without gloves, and he knew his own prints were on file. He dared not identify himself, so he had to wipe the papers clean with a cloth, erasing the traitor’s fingerprints as well.

The next afternoon, Sunday, he mailed a plain brown envelope, well sealed and with an excess of stamps, from a post box in the Elephant and Castle. There was no collection until Monday morning and the package did not arrive at its destination until Tuesday.

That day, January 20, Brigadier Bertie Capstick called John Preston at Gordon. The bluff geniality was gone from his voice. “Johnny, remember what we were talking about the other day? If anything cropped up ...? Well, it has. And it’s not the Christmas fund. It’s big, Johnny. Someone has mailed me something in the post. ... No, not a bomb, though it might turn out worse. It looks as if we have a leak here, Johnny. And he has to be very, very high. That means it comes under your department. I think you’d better come down and take a look.”

That morning also, in the owner’s absence, but by appointment and letting themselves in with provided keys, two workmen arrived at an eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House. During the day they chipped the damaged Hamber safe out of the masonry of the wall and replaced it with an identical model. By nightfall they had redecorated that wall as it had been before. Then they left.

Moscow

Wednesday, January 7, 1987

FROM
:
H. A. R. Philby

TO
: The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Permit me to begin, Comrade General Secretary, with the briefest description of the background of the British Labour Party and of its steady penetration and successful eventual domination by the Hard Left over the past fourteen years.

The Party was originally founded by the trade union movement as the political arm of the recently organized British working class. From the outset it espoused the cause of moderate bourgeois socialism—of reform rather than revolution. The home of the true Marxist-Leninist was then in the Communist Party.

Even though the bedrock of Marxism-Leninism in Britain has always been in the trade union movement, true believers were excluded from the Labour Party itself. From the 1930s onward, a few of our pro-Soviet Hard Left friends in Britain managed to infiltrate the Parry by subterfuge, but they had, once inside it, to maintain an extremely low profile. Other friends of Moscow, perceived as they sought to enter the Labour Party, were refused admission or, if spotted inside the Party, were expelled.

The reason our true friends in Britain were for so many years excluded from the mass-support Labour Party can be described in two words: “proscribed list.”

This was a list of banned organizations; it prohibited all fraternal contact between the Labour Party and those much-smaller groups inhabited by the true revolutionary socialists—that is, the Marxist-Leninists. Further, no member of a Hard Left group was permitted membership in the Labour Party under the terms of the proscribed list, which were staunchly maintained by successive Labour Party leaders for fifty years.

As the Labour Party was the only mass-support party of the Left with a hope of acceding to government of Britain, infiltration and domination of it by our friends, following the classic Leninist teaching of “entryism,” was for all those years an elusive dream. Nevertheless, our friends within the Party, few though they were, worked tirelessly and covertly; in 1973 their efforts were finally crowned with success.

In that year, when the Party was under the weak and vacillating leadership of Harold Wilson, they achieved a wafer-thin majority on the all-important Party National Executive Committee, and used it to pass a resolution abolishing the proscribed list. The outcome was beyond their dreams.

With the floodgates open, shoals of Hard Left young activists of the post-1945 generation swarmed into the Labour Party and were at once able to offer themselves for office at every level of the Party organization. The road to entryism, influence, and eventual takeover was open, and that takeover has now been achieved.

Since 1973 the absolutely vital National Executive Committee has seldom been out of the hands of a Hard Left majority, and it has been through the skillful use of this tool that the constitution of the Party and its composition at the higher levels have been changed out of all recognition.

A brief word of digression, Comrade General Secretary, to explain precisely whom I mean by “our friends” within the British Labour Party and trade union movement. They fall into two categories: the deliberate and the unwilling. With the first category I am referring to people not of the so-called Soft Left or of the Trotskyite aberration, both of whom abhor Moscow, albeit for different reasons. I refer to those of the Hard Left with, at their core, the Ultra-Hard Left. These are dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninists, who would not appreciate being called Communists since this implies membership in the quite useless British Communist Party. They are, nevertheless, staunch friends of Moscow and in nine cases out often will act in accordance with Moscow’s wishes, even though those wishes may remain unexpressed and even though the person concerned would stoutly claim he was acting for “conscientious” or “British” reasons.