A Little White Death Read online

  Charlie dragged him to a newly vacated table by the window. They sat with two bowls of gruel and two large ‘waters’ between them. Condensation ran down the glass and the walls to mingle with the sawdust on the floor. He could see nothing out, only the muddied reflection of the room within. As they crossed the room he picked up snatches of the dozen or more conversations taking place within the hubbub.

  ‘So I says to him, I says, you want it doing you can bloody well do it . . .’

  ‘Meat and potater pie? Meat and potater fuckin’ pie? I said to ’er. Where’s the fuckin’ meat? I spend all day in a fuckin’ foundry and you serve me meat an’ potater fuckin’ pie with no fuckin’ meat? I clouted the silly mare, didn’t I?’

  ‘. . . Commissar or no bloody commissar. If he comes that one with me again I’ll do the sod. I don’t care if I spend the rest of me life in a fuckin’ gulag. It’d be worth it.’

  ‘. . . Women? Women? They’re just cunts, aren’t they? I never met a one that was anything more than a cunt and that includes the bitch I married.’

  A place to drink and a place to curse. It struck Troy that there was not a woman in the room, and that there could not be a conversation taking place – ‘the fuckin’ wife, the fuckin’ boss’ – that, with slight variation, could not be heard in the pubs of Liverpool or Newcastle or Glasgow. He hoped Charlie did not mean to stay long, but knew that if he once got a taste for vodka he might stay for ever.

  ‘Where have they put you?’ he asked.

  ‘In the Moskva Hotel. The same one Burgess was in. Poor bugger. Nothing permanent. They’re being completely coy about that. Not even guaranteeing that I get to serve out my days in Moscow. Bastards. They’ve had me in a couple of times for debriefing. I think they’re as surprised by the speed of all this as I am.’

  ‘Not as surprised as I was.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry about that. You slogged it all the way to Beirut for nothing. When I wired you I knew things were getting pretty final. Mr Smith did not usually turn upin January. He came for a summer outing. The linen suit, the panama hat and the chance of getting his knees brown. I sort of had the feeling they were going to pull something out of the hat. When I saw who Mr Smith was, I knew they were going to pull everything.’

  ‘Who?’ said Troy. ‘Who did they send?’

  ‘As a rule it would be some anonymous bugger from the Secret Service. I think they got to think of it as an office freebie – “Who’ll be lucky this year and get a long weekend in sunny Beirut giving old Charlie the once over?” Just reviewing my case, they’d call it. Making me sweat a bit, letting me know I wasn’t off the hook yet. Different bloke every time. For all I knew they really could have been called Smith. They were none of them very important, because they were none of them very good at it. I think the point should have been to screw more out of me, at which, to a man, they were useless. This time. This time, they rolled out the big gun. Tim Woodbridge MP, Minister of State. Number two at the Foreign Office. As soon as I saw him I knew I was a busted flush. Good old Tim. Lied through his teeth for me and the honour of the Service in ’57. Cleared me in the House when everybody knew I was guilty as sin. Made the London Globe print an apology. God, it was rich. I was grinning from ear to ear even as they booted me out. Lies, lies and more lies. But here’s the rub – prove it or not, old Timbo knew everything. For them to send him instead of one of the spooks meant trouble. I thought he was going to sit me down and tell me they’d finally got all the evidence they needed. I thought I’d find my life and treasonable times laid out neatly in one of those colour-coded foolscap folders they have depending on the nature and degree of one’s treachery – yours was buff as I recall, which means they’re pissing in the wind. I should think mine was dick-end purple by now. Not so, not so. Tim and I have a fairly decent lunch for two laid out on one of the upper floors of the embassy, away from prying eyes. No folder, just a fairly simple statement. “Something new has come to light,” he says. “What?” I say, and I’d genuinely no idea what he’d come upwith. “A body,” he says, “we have found a body.” At first he was tacking so slowly I thought he was using a metaphor – you know, along the lines of “know where the body’s hidden”. That sort of thing. But he wasn’t. “Whose body?” I said. And then you could have knocked me over with a fan dancer’s fanny feather. “Norman Cobb,” he says. “We have found the body of Inspector Cobb. We know you killed him.”

  Troy looked at the two inches of vodka in the bottom of his glass, and took a sip. Bought himself a quick moment of silence and then looked at Charlie.

  ‘Where did you dumpthe body?’

  ‘Thames marshes, way out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Out past Purfleet. God knows, I couldn’t find the place again if they gave me a map. Jacob’s Reach, Esau’s Point. Something biblical. I weighted the bugger and watched him sink. And if it took seven years for the fat fool to surface, then I can’t have done too bad a job of it. I admired the bluff. They have nothing but circumstantial evidence to show I killed Cobb. Of course, I denied it. And Tim duly called me a liar, and said they knew I’d killed him, and it was the last straw. Something had to be done. I did see that, didn’t I? I had to see how far beyond the pale this was. “You can’t blow away coppers on the streets of London and expect to get way with it.” Then I laughed till I damn near bust. He took humpat that. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

  Troy did not find it funny, but he could see the irony. The last straw. Something must be done. Of all the sins of Charles Leigh-Hunt, and they were many, this was the worst. But he was innocent; he had not killed Norman Cobb. Troy had killed Norman Cobb. Of course, Cobb had been trying to kill him at the time. And had Troy been a slower or a poorer shot, Cobb most certainly would have killed him, and it would now be Troy’s bones, picked clean by lugworm, rising upin the Thames marshes. He had not reported the incident. He had given Charlie his chance and with that chance the corpse of Norman Cobb. He had never asked what he had done with the body. He had never even thought about it until now.

  ‘“It’s time,” said Woodbridge. “You should go now. There are people back in England who would like to see you charged with Cobb’s murder.” Then he paused, and I think he smiled, and he said, “We can’t have that.” And then he set out the deal. I was to clear off. He didn’t use the word “defect” at any point – odd that, I thought. I’d be exposed back home, spy, traitor, another Cambridge Commie, but the Cobb thing would be kept quiet. In return I was not to give any of those Burgess and Maclean-style press conferences. Once in Russia I was to shut up, be a good boy and keep my nose clean. If I didn’t, there’d be recriminations. I could not believe it, Freddie, I tell you, I was gobsmacked.’

  Charlie seemed to have reached a natural lull. He shook his head from side to side, looked into his empty glass and seemed to be giggling to himself. Troy pushed his almost untouched vodka across the table to him, and fought his way back to the bar.

  ‘Same again,’ he said.

  Gorki rubbed finger and thumb together.

  ‘Twenty-five kopecks for the soupe au saffron, two roubles fifty for the water.’

  It dawned on Troy that he had no Russian currency. He dug into his coat pocket and came up with a one pound note.

  ‘Wossat?’ Gorki asked.

  ‘A British pound,’ said Troy. ‘Sterling.’

  Gorki trousered it. Troy had no idea of the rate of exchange but knew from the rate of trousering and way he filled the glasses to the brim that he had just made his day.

  ‘You’re English?’ Gorki asked with a hint of astonishment.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How come you speak Russian with a poncey accent? That’s how the last of the toffs spoke when I was a boy. Just before we put ’em upagainst a wall and shot ’em.’

  ‘Perhaps I come from a long line of ponces,’ said Troy.

  Gorki roared with laughter and Troy gently wove through the crowd, clutching virtual quarter-pints of vodka.

  Charlie sucked down
a huge gulpand relished the rush. They stared a while at the soup congealing in the cold. It was, as Charlie had observed, remarkably reminiscent of school dinners, in which a multitude of sins could be disguised with custard – custard from a packet. Perhaps this was where all the British Army Surplus Custard Powder went. Dumped cheap on the Russian market.

  Troy wiped a clear circle in the wet glass of the window with his fingertips and looked out. A woman stepped quickly back from the arc of light thrown by a streetlamp. It was the first and far from clear sighting he had had of her, but this must be the unfortunate woman who would be bound for Novaya Zemlya if she lost them. Troy would try to do the decent thing and ensure she kept up with them. The poor woman must be frozen stiff out there.

  Charlie set down his glass and picked up his tale.

  ‘“How long have I got?” I asked him. “A day? Two?” “Terribly sorry, Charlie,” he says, “it’s less than that. They want you gone now.” We said goodbye. The bugger even shook my hand. I left the embassy. Slipped old Abu Wagih a fiver to keep an eye out for you, bought a toothbrush at a corner pharmacy and went straight to the docks. You can always count on there being at least one Russian ship in port. I found the captain. Recited him a little speech I’d learnt phonetically for just such an occasion years ago. He calls a Party apparatchik – you can always count on there being one of them too – they get on the shortwave to Moscow. Some poor bugger’s turfed out of his berth to make way for me. Three days later I’m met at Piraeus by the spooks and formally put in the diplomatic bag. Cetera quis nescit?’

  The vodka showed in his face and in his eyes. A slack-jawed, hang-dog, rheum-eyed, tear-brimmed, bloodshot misery. He gazed into Troy’s – clear, fleckless black mirrors gazing back at him. It seemed he could not hold his gaze, his eyes flicked around the room and his hand took refuge around the glass once more.

  ‘You know I never noticed before – never could I suppose – they all look like you, Freddie. Little buggers. Shortarses with ebony eyes. About as warm as the outside bog in February. I feel like Gulliver, washed up in Lilliput, out of size and out of place, in a country I’d only dreamt about.’

  Troy ignored the dig. If Charlie was this drunk there were more important things to be said before he vanished into incoherence. ‘Charlie, if all the British wanted was the guarantee of your silence, why didn’t they just have you bumped off ?’

  Charlie took another huge, corrosive gulpof vodka and thought about it.

  ‘Y’know,’ he said at last, ‘that’s just what I’ve been asking myself for the past week. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? I could vanish without trace. No body, no culprit. Blame the bloody Arabs if they wanted. Blame who the hell they like. Why didn’t they just get it over with? Why didn’t the bastards just get it over with? Out to the swamplike Big Lennie. And wham! But – they didn’t . . . and here I am looking at the prospect of life in Mtensk . . . or Magneto-Gorsk . . . or Upyer-Bumsk.’

  Troy watched Charlie’s head begin to loll at the end of his neck like a slackening string puppet. The jowls beneath his jawline, swelling and shrinking, bellows on a concertina, as his head rolled around in a lazy arc, and the palpebral flutter as his eyes fought to keep their focus. It was, he thought, all so implausible. He could understand that the British might not want another trial of a traitor quite so soon after George Blake and John Vassall. Indeed it could be argued, were there a sober opponent to argue with, that a trial would do more damage than a defection any day, particularly to relationships with the Americans, who might well be thinking by now that we were a deeply unreliable nation. A trial was dirty linen washed in public. A defection half tucked it away in someone else’s laundry basket, concealed as much as it revealed. But a hit? A discreet, untraceable murder? Really, there was no reason at all why Charlie should not have joined Norman Cobb belly-up, face-down, picked white, in the remote marshes at some biblical turning of the Thames.

  § 10

  Charlie lay sprawled on his back across the bed, arms and legs spread wide, still in his shirt, socks and underpants, his mouth open, snoring. Troy shook him gently. He did not stir. He shook him harder. His gut wobbled between the gaping shirt buttons and the elastic of his Y-fronts, but he did not wake. It seemed to Troy that he might well sleepoff a bellyful of cheapvvodka until lunchtime.

  He went through Charlie’s pockets, pinched a few roubles to get him through the morning, put on the winter wardrobe – the sable hat, the fur coat – and stepped into the Moscow streets. The first time. The first breath of Russian air, the first sight. Last night did not count. Charlie got between him and Moscow. Vodka got between him and Moscow. Again the same question in his mind: ‘Is this it?’ Whatever he saw – splendour or squalor – ‘Is this it?’ was the only form response could take in his mind. After so long, after a generation and more: ‘Is this really it?’

  He found a bookshop on a street corner less than quarter of a mile away and bought a map of the city. The address was imprinted in his memory. Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street, where Tolstoy used to live, out in the Khamovniki, the old industrial quarter. He could find no such street on the map. Then the obvious dawned on him and he quickly found Lyev Tolstoy Street. For all he knew it had been renamed some forty years or more. All the same, he’d know the house as soon as he saw it. Of that he was certain. The Moscow home of the Troitskys, abandoned by his father in 1905, passed to an uncle in the interim and confiscated by the state in 1922.

  He knew as soon as he left the bookshop that she was following him. It confirmed what he had first thought, that he, not Charlie, was the object of suspicion. He would have liked a clear look at her, but the streets offered too few plate-glass windows in which to catch her reflection. He decided it did not matter. She was unlikely to lose him, and sooner or later, he’d have a chance to turn without simply stopping her on the street. He caught a tram out to the southwest. The spook ran and leapt onto the platform at the last minute. If she broke a leg doing it, this woman would not dare lose him.

  § 11

  Even the paint was the same colour his father had described to him – a middling, dull shade of green. The house rose straight upfrom the pavement on Lyev Tolstoy Street, the ground-floor windows too high to see into, the outer doors closed tight against the season. A narrow, gabled house, climbing to five storeys in off-off-white, almost pale brown brick, with copper pipes and gutters dulled by a century and a half of air and rain to a verdigris green brighter than the paintwork. The bars of the gates were folded back, a pattern of blooming lilies, venuses rising from conch-like shells, woven into the ironwork. A splash of yellowy-white amid the greens.

  A polished brass plate was fixed to the wall underneath the house number. ‘Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley’. The house had once belonged to the owner of the perfume distillery next door. His father had told him of the wafting scents that had curled upto his open window all summer long. The ministry had taken both buildings. Not a wisp of summer’s scent remained.

  There seemed no point in ringing. The doors looked to him as though they opened for no one. Besides, what reason, what excuse could he give for wanting to see inside? The Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley could scarcely be accustomed to the sons of the disinherited asking for a quick look round. He crossed the street to look upat the topfloors, where the rooms disappeared into the pitch of the roof and reappeared as dormer windows, copper topped and adorned with ironwork so distant they could be fleur-de-lis or budding roses. He could not tell and he could not recall that the old man had ever mentioned them to him. His father’s memory was for incident much more than static detail. He described the rooms – the dining room in green, again green, as though it were the colour motif of the building; the main bedroom with its faded wallpaper of vast Monetesque flowers in paintbox colours; the library in red maroon – simply because the boy Troy had nagged him for such detail. Of his own choosing he had told of his own boyhoo
d in the next to attic room that was his nursery, where a German governess had taught him to read and her French successor had let him watch her strip and bathe.

  Troy looked slowly down the height of the building, each floor’s windows closed and shuttered as though the Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley had no need of natural light, and it struck him that the house was blind, that the ministry had put out its eyes, that the house was great and grey and grief-stricken, blind as blind Gloucester. It saddened him. He could recall every room, though he had seen none. The governess’s bedroom; beneath that his aunt’s; beneath that his grandparents’; beneath that the dining room; next to that the library; beneath that the drawing room; beneath that the scullery. He could have no feeling one way or the other about the use to which the Soviet government put the building. No feeling even about the simple fact of possession. They were welcome to it. But the blindness of the house seemed simple and sad. They should not put out its eyes.

  The spook stood at the corner. Awkward and idle. Her back to him as though waiting for anyone but him. She was small, even in the bulk of furs; he thought she could not be much more than five foot four and eight stone.

  Troy turned on his heel and set off across the street to the house on the other side, to No. 21, a clay-coloured house with green shutters, looming lime trees beyond a garden fence, and a bigger brass plate reading ‘Tolstoy House Museum. Home of Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy 1828–1910. Writer.’ It could not have been more different as a house. A glorified wooden cottage on a grand scale, grander than the Troitskys’ brick house, and found for Count Tolstoy by Troy’s grandfather some time in the 1880s.