The Secret Pilgrim (45 page)

“So when did you start giving Sergei all these great British secrets?” I said. “Well, what we
call
secrets, anyway. Obviously what was secret a few years ago is not going to be the same as what's secret today, is it? We didn't win the Cold War by secrecy, did we? We won it with the openness. The
glasnost
.”

It was the second time I had mentioned passing over secrets, but on this occasion, when I crossed the Rubicon for him, he came with me. Yet he seemed not even to notice he was on the other side.

“Correct. That's how we won it. And Sergei didn't even want the secrets at first, either. ‘Secrets, Cyril, they're unimportant to me,' he said. ‘Secrets, Cyril, in the changing world in which we live, I'm pleased to say, they're a drug on the market,' he said. ‘I'd rather keep our friendship on a non-official basis. However, if I
do
require something in that line, you may count on me to let you know.' In the meantime, he said, it would be quite sufficient if I wrote him a few unofficial reports on the quality of Radio Moscow's programmes just to keep his bosses happy. Whether the reception was good enough, for example. You'd think they'd know that, really, but they don't. You never know with Russians where you're going to strike the ignorance in them, to be frank. That's not a criticism, it's a fact. He'd like my opinion of the course as well, he said, for standards of instruction generally, any suggestions I might have for Boris and Olga in the future, me being somewhat of an unusual pupil in my own right.”

“So what changed it?”

“Changed what? Be lucid, please, Ned. I'm not nobody, you know. I'm not Mr. Nemo. I'm Cyril.”

What changed Sergei's reluctance to take secrets from you?” I said.

“His Embassy did. The diehards. The barbarians. They always do. They prevailed on him. They declined to recognize the course of history; they preferred to remain total troglodytes in their caves and continue with their ridiculous Cold War.”

I said I did not understand him. I said he was a bit above my head.

“Yes, well I'm not surprised. I'll put it this way. There was lot of them in that Embassy didn't like the time given over to cultural friendship, for a start. There was this internal rivalry going on between the camps. I was an impotent spectator. The
doves,
they were in favour of the culture, naturally, and above all they were in favour of the
glasnost.
They saw culture filling the vacuum left behind by the withdrawal hostilities. Sergei explained that to me. But the hawks—
including
the Ambassador, I regret to say— wanted Sergei concentrating more on the continuation of old attitudes, what's left of them, gathering intelligence and generally acting in aggressive and conspiratorial manner regardless of the changes in the world climate. The Embassy diehards didn't care about Sergei being an idealist, not at all. Well, they wouldn't, would they, any more than what Gorst does. Sergei had to tread a highly precarious path, frankly, a bit for one side, then a bit for the other. So did I, it was duty. We'd do our culture together, a bit of language, a bit of art or music then we'd do some secrets to satisfy the hawks. We had to justify ourselves to all parties, same as you with your HQ and me with the Tank.”

He was fading, I was losing him. I had to use the whip. “So
when
?” I asked impatiently.

“When what?”

“Don't be clever with me, Cyril, do you mind? I've got to get this down. Look at the time.
When
did you start giving Sergei Modrian information,
what
did you give him, what for, how
much
for, when did it stop, and why, when it could perfectly well have continued? I'd like a weekend, Cyril, if you don't mind. So would my wife. I'd like to put my feet up in front of the telly. I'm not paid
overtime, you know. It's strictly piecework, what they offer. One candidate's the same as another, when it comes to payday. We're living in a time of cost effectiveness, in case you haven't noticed. They tell me we could be privatised if we're not careful.”

He didn't hear me. He didn't want to. He was wandering in his body and in his mind, looking for distraction, for somewhere to hide. My anger was not all simulated. I was beginning to hate Modrian. I was angry about how much we depended on the credulity of the innocent in order to survive. It was sickening me that a trickster like Modrian had contrived to turn Frewin's loneliness to treachery. I felt threatened by the notion of love as the antithesis of duty.

I stood up smartly, anger still my ally. Frewin was perched listlessly on the edge of a carved Arthurian stool with the Royal Navy's ensign stitched into the seat.

“Show me your toys,” I ordered him.

“What toys? I'm a man, if you don't mind, not an infant. It's my house. Don't tell me what to do.”

I was remembering Modrian's tradecraft, the stuff he used, the way he equipped his agents. I was remembering my own tradecraft, from the days when I had run Frewin's counterparts against the Soviet target, even if they were not quite as a bad as Frewin. I was imagining how I would have handled a high-access walk-in like Frewin, living on borrowed sanity.

“I want to see your camera, don't I?” I said petulantly. “Your high-speed transmitter, right, Cyril? Your signals plan. Your onetime codepads. Your crystals. Your white carbons for your secret writing. Your concealment devices. I want to see them, Cyril, I want to put them in my briefcase for Monday; then I want to go home and watch Arsenal against United. That may not be your taste, but it happens to be mine. So can we move this along a bit and cut out the bullshit,
please
?”

The madness was running out, I could feel it. He was drained and so was I. He sat head down and knees spread, staring dully at
his hands. I could sense the end beginning for him—the moment when the penitent grows tired of his confession and of the emotions that compelled it.

“Cyril, I'm getting a bit edgy,” I said.

And when he still didn't respond, I strode to his telephone, the same one that Monty's fake engineer had made permanently live. I dialled Burr's direct line and heard his fancy secretary on the other end, the same one who hadn't known my name.

“Darling?” I said. “I'm going to be about another hour if I'm lucky. I've got a slow one. Yes, all right, I know, I'm sorry. Well, I said I'm sorry. Yes, of course.”

I rang off and stared at him accusingly. He climbed slowly to his feet and led me upstairs. His attic was a spare bedroom roof high. His radio receiver stood on a table in the corner—German, just as Monty had said. I switched it on while he watched me, and we heard an accented female Russian voice talking indignantly about Moscow's criminal mafia.

“Why do they
do
that?” Frewin burst out at me, as if I were responsible. “The Russians. Why do they run down their own country all the time? They never used to. They were proud. I was proud too. All the cornfields, the classlessness, the chess, the cosmonauts, and ballet, the athletes. It was paradise till they started running it down. They've forgotten the good in themselves. It's bloody disgraceful. That's what I told Sergei.”

“Then why do you still listen to them?” I said.

He was almost weeping, but I pretended not to notice.

“For the message, don't I?”

“Make it snappy, will you, Cyril!”

“Telling me I'm reactivated. That I'm wanted again. ‘Come back, Cyril. All is forgiven, love, Sergei.' That's all I need to hear.”

“How would they say that?” “White paint.”

“Go on.”

“‘There's white paint on the dog, Olga.' . . . ‘We need a spot of white paint on the bookshelf, Boris.' . . . ‘Oh dear, oh dear, Olga, look at the cat, someone has dipped her tail in white paint. I hate cruelty,' says Boris. Why don't they say it when I'm listening?”

“Let's just stick to the method, can we? All right, you hear the message. On the radio. Olga or Boris says ‘white paint.' Or they both do.
Then
what do you do?”

“Look in my signals plan.”

I held out my hand, commanding him with my snapping fingers. “Hurry!” I said.

He hurried. He found a wooden hairbrush. Pulling the bristles from the casing, he shoved his big fingers into the gap and hauled out a piece of soft, flammable paper with times of the day and wavebands printed in parallel. He offered it to me, hoping it would satisfy. I took it from him without pleasure and snapped it into my notebook; glancing at my watch at the same moment.

“Thanks,” I said curtly. “More, please, Cyril I need a codebook and a transmitter. Don't tell me you haven't got them, I'm not in the mood.”

He was grappling with a tin of talcum powder, tugging at the base, trying desperately to please me. He talked nervously while he shook the powder into the handbasin.

“I was respected, you see, Ned, you don't get that a lot. There's three of these. Olga and Boris tell me which to use, like with the white paint except it was the composers. Tchaikovsky was number three, Beethoven was number two, Bach was one. They did them alphabetical to help me remember. You get the glimpses but you don't get the friends, not normally, do you? Not unless you meet Sergei or one of his lot.”

The powder was all poured away. Three radio crystals lay in his palm, together with a tiny codepad and an eye-glass to enlarge it.

“He had all I'd got, Sergei did. I gave it to him. He'd tell me a thing, I'd add it to my life. I'd have a mood, he'd get me straight again. He understood. He could see right into me. It gave me a
feeling of being known, which I liked. It's gone now. It's been posted back to Moscow.”

His rambling was scaring me. So was his feverish desire to pacify me. If I had been his hangman, he would have been gratefully loosening his tie.

“Your transmitter,” I snapped. “What the hell's the good of crystal and a codepad if you can't send!”

At the same terrible pace, he bent his swelled body to the floor rolled back a corner of the tufted Wilton carpet.

“I haven't got a knife actually, Ned,” he confessed.

Neither had I, but I dared not leave him, I dared not break my command over him. I crouched beside him. He was peering vaguely at a loose floorboard, trying to raise it with his thick fingertips. Clenching my fist, I punched one end of the board, and had the satisfaction of seeing the other end lift.

“Help yourself,” I said.

It was old stuff, I could have guessed, nothing they cared about any more—a rig of grey boxes, a squash transmitter, a lash-up to be fitted to his receiver. Yet he handed it to me proudly, in its tangled mess.

A terrible anxiety had entered his eyes. “All I am now, you see, Ned, I'm a hole,” he explained. “I don't mean to be morbid, do I, but I don't exist. This house isn't anything either. I used to love it. It looked after me, same as I looked after it. We'd have been nothing without each other, the house and me. It's hard for you to understand that, I dare say, if you have a wife, what a house is. She'd come between you. You and the house, I mean. Your wife. You and him. Modrian. I loved him, Ned. I was infatuated. ‘You're too much, Cyril,' he used to say. ‘Cool down. Relax. Take a holiday. You're hallucinating.' I couldn't. Sergei was my holiday.”

“Camera,” I ordered.

He didn't read me at once. He was obsessed with Modrian. He looked at me, but it was Modrian he saw.

“Don't be like that,” he said, not understanding.

“Camera!” I yelled. “For Christ's sake, Cyril, don't you
ever
have a weekend?”

He stood at his wardrobe. Camelot sword blades carved on oak doors.

“Camera!” I shouted louder as he still hesitated. “How can you slip film to a good friend at the opera if you haven't photographed your files in the first place?”

“Take it easy, Ned. Cool down, will you? Please.” Grinning in a superior way, he reached a hand into the wardrobe. But his eyes were ogling me, saying “Now watch this.” He groped in the wardrobe, smiling at me mysteriously. He pulled out a pair of opera glasses and trained them on me, first the right way, then back to front. Then he handed them to me so that I could do the same to him. I took them in my hands and felt their unnatural weight at once. I turned the central dial until it clicked. He was nodding at me, encouraging me, saying “Yes, Ned, that's the way.” He grabbed a book from the bookshelf and opened it at the centre,
All the World's Dancers,
illustrated. A young girl was doing a
pas de chat.
Sally too had been at ballet school. He unbuckled the neck strap and I saw that the short end did duty as a measuring chain. He took the binoculars from me and trained them on the book, measured the distance and turned the dial till it clicked.

“See?” he said proudly.
“Comprenez,
do you? They made it specially. For me. For opera nights. Sergei designed it personally. There's a lot of idleness in Russia, but Sergei had to have the best. I'd stay in late at the Tank. I'd photograph the whole weekly float for him if I felt like it, then give him the film while we were sitting in the stalls. I'd give it to him in one of the arias, usually—it was a sort of joke between us.” He handed the binoculars back to me and drifted down the room, scrabbling his fingertips on his bare scalp as if he had a full head of hair. Then he held out his hands like someone testing the atmosphere for rain.

“Sergei had the best of me, Ned, and he's gone.
C'est la vie,
I say. Now it's up to you. Have you got the courage? Have you got the
wit? That's why I wrote to you. I had to. I was empty. I didn't know you, but I needed you. I wanted a good man who understood me. A man I could trust again. It's up to you, Ned. Now's your chance. Jump out of yourself and live, I say, while there is yet time. That wife of yours is a bit of a bully, by the sound of her. You'd be well advised to tell her to live her own life instead of yours. I should have advertised, shouldn't I?” A terrible smile, which he turned full upon me. “Single man, non-smoker, fond of music and wit. I peruse those columns sometimes—who doesn't? I contemplate replying sometimes, except I'd never know how to break it off if I wasn't suited. So I wrote you a letter, didn't I? It was like writing to God in a way, till you came along in your shabby coat and asked a lot of spotty questions, no doubt drafted by HQ. It's time you stood on your own feet, Ned, same as me. You're cowed, that's your trouble. Your wife is partly to blame, in my opinion. I listened to your voice while you were apologising and I was not impressed. You won't reach out to take. Still, I reckon I could make something of you, and you could make something of me, too. You could help me dig my pool. I could show you music. That's evens, right? Nobody's impervious to music. I only did it because of Gorst.” His voice leapt in horror. “
Ned!
Leave that alone, do you mind! Take your thieving hands off my property, Ned.
Now
!”