Visibility (21 page)

In the fog and the cold, de Vere Green had seen his lover’s body floating by the shore of the Long Water, already lifeless. To have been found there would have exposed him to all sorts of questions, both professional and personal, which he would rather not have answered.

What else could he have done, other than what he actually did: go home, stare numbly at the wall in shock all night, go to work the next morning as though nothing had happened, and, the consummate actor, feign ignorance when Herbert had appeared in Leconfield House a few hours later?

It was not hard, showing the outside world what they wanted to see. De Vere Green could have kept that up pretty much indefinitely. Had he known that Herbert was watching back at the cemetery, he would never have let his guard slip like that, not even for a second.

No; what was hard was when the door shut on him at night and it was just him, in his musty rooms with the dark red wallpaper and the hunting prints, without the laughter and arguments of children and the gentle nagging of a wife. Most of all, without the mundane, delicious normality of being a man who had nothing to hide.

Back in town, people—ordinary citizens, acting out of public spirit—were using flares to guide motorists, and only the men who sold flashlights were happy; they
were charging five shillings for a tinny-looking thing five inches long and with a wax face an inch across.

“It’s daylight robbery,” one man protested as Herbert walked past.

“Ain’t no daylight round here, squire,” said the flashlight seller.

Herbert felt an inestimable sadness. At last he had seen de Vere Green brought low before him, a reversal of fortune he had imagined would afford him the coldest, purest of triumphs.

Now it had happened, however, his emotions were quite the opposite. De Vere Green had appeared to him like the Wizard in Oz: behind the bluster and the façade was a man for whom there was nothing beyond love but an endless, reaching void. Herbert saw too much of himself in that to do anything other than shy from it.

Be careful what you wish for
, Stella had said, and Herbert himself had supplied the kicker:
It might just happen.

Of course, there were still practicalities to consider, and chief among them was that Herbert had de Vere Green over a barrel.

Notwithstanding what he had said about going easy on de Vere Green, Herbert knew full well that he retained the whip hand. If at any time in the future de Vere Green failed to cooperate, Herbert could threaten him with exposure. It was a threat he had to be careful not to overdo, for then it would lose its bite, but equally it was a threat he had ultimately to be prepared to carry out, if it was to serve its purpose, and with a timing that he would have to judge with discretion; for once he exposed de Vere Green, he would of course have lost all the leverage that the threat had given him in the first place.

Judgments and margin calls; these were the parameters of Herbert’s life.

The
Izvestia
offices—address kindly supplied on Kazantsev’s press card, which Herbert still held—seemed to be, as far as Herbert could tell through the murk, housed in a down-at-heel mews in a down-at-heel area behind Victoria station.

Privacy be damned; Herbert had been lied to.

Kazantsev wore a soft smile that crinkled the ends of his mustache.

“Inspector,” he said. “I wondered when you’d be back. How are you?”

“Fine. You?”

“Not so good.”

Herbert liked the way the Russians took the question literally, not as a social pleasantry. There was something refreshingly honest in it, in contrast to the British—
mustn’t grumble, mustn’t grumble
, knowing life was crappy but pretending it was not—and the Americans—
fine, fine
, determined to be in ruder health than the next man.

He reminded himself why he was there.

“You weren’t straight with me last time,” Herbert said. Kazantsev shrugged as if to say,
What did you expect?
This was no less a negotiation than the haggling in a bazaar, and should therefore be treated as such. “This time, you’ll tell me the truth, or I’ll have you turfed out of here by Monday morning.”

“Have you eaten?” Kazantsev asked.

The question was so random that Herbert felt himself answering almost without realizing. “Now you come to mention it, no.”

“Neither have I. And a man needs to fuel himself during the cold.”

They went to a greasy-spoon café on the main road which ran from the station down to Vauxhall Bridge, and ordered two full English breakfasts; Kazantsev’s with tea, Herbert’s with coffee.

It was past lunchtime, but the breakfasts were available all day, and there was something about the fog which so dislocated time that eating breakfast mid-afternoon seemed entirely appropriate.

Herbert took a table by the window, exits and entrances within his sightlines. Once a spy, always a spy.

“Before we start, Inspector,” Kazantsev said, “I want you to clear something up for me—the biggest mystery I have encountered in this country.”

“I’ll try.”

“I cannot for the life of me fathom this. How is it, despite all the crowds that trample and lie on it, the grass of England always springs up freshly and so green; while at home in Russia, where walking on the grass is strictly forbidden at all times, is it always so crushed and muddy?”

Despite himself, Herbert laughed.

If circumstances had been different, Herbert thought, perhaps he and Kazantsev could have been friends.

“I know who Stensness was supposed to meet that night,” Herbert said. “And knowing what I know about that person, or those people, I think it’s safe to say that if you are merely an
Izvestia
correspondent, and have no connection whatsoever with Soviet intelligence, then I’m a Dutchman.”

Kazantsev was encouraging Herbert as he talked, interjecting little phrases—“I see,” “I understand”—leaning
forward, enough to show interest but not so much so as to be threatening.

Herbert continued. “I want to know what your relationship with Stensness was—the whole lot, chapter and verse, start to finish. I don’t care about anything else. I’m not interested in your operational details or exposing your agents or anything like that. A man has been murdered and I want to know who killed him. Simple as that.”

The food arrived. Kazantsev took three mouthfuls, one after the other at a fearsome pace, and began to talk only when immediate hunger had been satisfied.

“Max was an informer,” Kazantsev said at length. “No, not an informer, that’s the wrong word. That implies the information he was giving me came from sources who didn’t know and wouldn’t have wanted it. Max was a
liaison
, that’s better. He was my link to the Communist Party of Great Britain. He would tell me what was going on, pass over documents and stuff. In return, I would hand over instructions from Moscow. The CPGB knew he was doing this, of course. The top brass encouraged it. But they liked to let people like Max do the dirty work, for obvious reasons.”

“Anything scientific?”

“Sometimes. Low-level stuff. Crystallography, mainly. Nothing we weren’t getting from other sources. Nothing that a thousand scientists in Soviet academies weren’t finding out for themselves every day, come to think of it.”

“Was he ever approached by other intelligence agencies?”

“Five had a go at him once, about the time of Burgess and Maclean. He told me about it. I calmed him
down and told him not to worry. This kind of provocation is pretty routine.”

Herbert saw then why Kazantsev would have been a good agent runner. He gave sufficient confidences for one to want to return the favor, and he was as happy talking as listening.

The problem, said Kazantsev, was that he had never been entirely convinced of Stensness’ communist credentials. On one occasion Stensness had started banging on about what Marx said in
Das Kapital
, and Kazantsev had interrupted him.

“You have read
Kapital?”
Kazantsev had asked.

“Of course,” Stensness had replied.

“All ten volumes?”

“Of course.”

“Then you have accomplished the impossible. There are only three.”

That was Stensness in a nutshell, Kazantsev said: a blowhard, a bullshitter. A nice enough man, sure, but one for whom the romance and secrecy of what he did were just as important as the content. No; they were
more
important than the content. His commitment was not to international socialism as such, but to snatched meetings in darkened pubs, to dead drops and tradecraft and the thrill of being clandestine.

Just as de Vere Green had said.

Kazantsev had pondered the issue long and hard, and was convinced that if a man was homosexual, as he knew Stensness was—come on, the MGB weren’t amateurs—then perhaps that kind of subterfuge was second nature.

Maybe Stensness
had
believed, once. But it had all gone wrong in the summer, when he had gone to Moscow.

There, he had met someone.

His Intourist guide, in fact; also young, also handsome, also homosexual. Misha someone—Kazantsev could not remember the family name.

Misha and Max had started an affair.

It had not been a honey trap, a deliberate provocation, but no matter; the MGB were not ones to look gift horses in the mouth.

They had recorded the last night of international passion on hidden cameras and sent the tapes to Kazantsev, in case he ever needed them.

Then they had taken Misha away and shot him.

Herbert gasped. Kazantsev shrugged:
What did you expect?

In the Soviet Union, homosexuality was not only illegal, it was also a mental illness, for it was a deviance from general social norms. It was social, in the purest sense of the word. An act of dissidence, a statement of rebellion, and there were only two sentences for that: a decade in the labor camps, maybe two, or a bullet in the back of the head.

Herbert shook his head in disbelief; not that Misha had been killed, he could believe that all too easily, but that any society with pretensions toward civilization could possibly think that this kind of behavior was anything other than savage.

Yes, Kazantsev admitted. It did, on reflection, seem a bit harsh. Perhaps there had been some kind of administrative misunderstanding, and Misha was supposed simply to have gone east for a few years, but somewhere along the line, wires had been crossed. These things happened all the time. The Soviet Union was a country sadly accustomed to death. No one worried too much about one more here and there.

Had this romance just been a holiday affair, then Stensness would have remained none the wiser as to Misha’s fate. But he seemed to have taken a genuine shine to this young man. He had written long letters full of frankly adolescent longings, and had become increasingly agitated when he received no answer.

His angst was such that he had begun to miss his appointments with Kazantsev. His information had become sporadic and unreliable.

Yes, of course the MGB had other points of contact within the CPGB, but this had been Kazantsev’s job on the line; it was he who would have been in trouble had Stensness failed to deliver. So, in order to snap Stensness out of his lethargy, he had told him the truth about Misha.

Well, it certainly did
that
, Kazantsev said wryly.

Stensness had gone berserk. He had tried to attack Kazantsev, and had then cracked a couple of knuckles punching the wall.

After that, he had started demanding money for his reports.

Kazantsev had shown him the footage from the hidden cameras and pointed out that he was in no position to be making bargains. Reluctantly accepting the truth of this, Stensness had continued to work for Kazantsev, though with ill grace.

Kazantsev had spoken to Moscow about cutting ties with Stensness and finding another source. There were four reasons why people became informers, and, as Herbert knew, they could be summarized in the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego.

Stensness was unusual in that all four of these applied to him in some way or another. But Kazantsev knew, as any agent handler did, that the ideologically
motivated agent was the only one worth running in the long term. All the other motivations could eventually make an informer greedy, lazy, or resentful, and once that happened, they were as good as lost.

Yes, Moscow had said, sever contact with him.

And Kazantsev had been about to break the news to him, at the conference, when Stensness had said he had something so huge, so important, that it would change the world, and he was going to sell it to the highest bidder, Kazantsev and his blackmailing be damned. This information was so precious that whoever got it would protect him as a matter of course.

Of course Kazantsev had been tempted to dismiss this as fantasy, Stensness’ imagination run even more riot than usual. Perhaps he had got an inkling of his impending dismissal and was throwing caution to the wind in a last-ditch attempt to save the arrangement.

But there was always that nagging doubt. What if it were true? What if Kazantsev turned down the chance of a lifetime? Worse, what if someone else grabbed it?

It would have been bad enough in the West: dismissal, disgrace, menial jobs until the end of time. At least Western agents would still have been alive. Kazantsev would not even have been offered the Siberian option.

Stensness had not spelled it out, but Kazantsev had known that there would be at least three interested parties: the MGB, the CIA, and Five.

Nothing personal, Kazantsev said to Herbert, but the MGB’s biggest concern was the Americans; they were now the GP, the
glavny protvinik
, the main enemy.

Before the war, sure, the British had been Moscow’s premier adversaries, but times had changed. Now, the
average Englishman was apolitical and indifferent. He did not care who was governing him, where the country was going, whether the Common Market was good or bad. If he had a job, and a salary, and the wife was happy, that was enough for him.

The Americans, on the other hand,
believed.
They believed in democracy and freedom and the American way, and that made them dangerous.