‘Tosca, schmoshca. What’s in a name?’
It had been a wet night in the winter of 1944. The last bombs of the ‘Little Blitz’. His second meeting with M/Sgt Larissa Tosca WAC. The first counted for little.
He remembered feeling sodden and miserable, on the verge of giving up, when he had caught sight of her, making her way from Ike’s Overlord HQ in St James’s Square to her billet in
Orange Street. Not that he knew it was Orange Street, or he would not have tried to follow her, would not have wasted time, would not have had her turn on him, first accusing then challenging
him.
The challenge was sex—she assumed, she had told him, that he was following her because he fancied his chances. He had no way now of knowing whether this was true or not, and perhaps it
didn’t matter. He had tumbled willingly if clumsily into her bed less than half an hour later, and so embarked on a perilous course that had damn near cost him his life, and if the Yard had
ever found out about his liaison with a witness, his job too.
He had been seduced, in every conceivable sense of that word, by this pocket Venus, this pizza-toting, bourbon-guzzling, much-hyphenated Italian-American, a Manhattan moll born and brought up on
Spring Street, wise-cracking, foul-mouthed, Bowery-brash and brassy—and utterly, completely, totally false.
At the height of summer, almost exactly this time twelve years ago—8 or 9 June, he thought—she had vanished, leaving her Orange Street billet swamped in her own blood, and he had
reported her dead. Jack had been with him, but when push came to shove, Jack was the most reliable person he knew, the best of lieutenants, and he knew to ask no questions.
Then in the winter of 1948 M/Sgt Larissa Tosca WAC, Italian-American, had surfaced once again in a Berlin locked in Stalin’s iron fist—just when he needed a guardian
angel—mysteriously transformed into the Russian-American Major Larissa Dimitrovna Toskevich KGB, NKVD? P&O? … or whatever initials the Cheka had had at that time. He could not keep
track, and if there was one thing that characterised secret police all over the world it was that they were alphabetically mobile, changing initials at whim, it seemed.
Tosca had helped him trap Jimmy Wayne, alias John Baumgarner, the most elusive criminal Troy had ever set his sights on. Christmas Day 1948, and from that day to yesterday, the Sunday Jack had
read Lois Teale’s airmail letter out loud to him, he had heard not a whisper of her—Tosca, Toskevich, Teale—what, indeed, was in a name?
Troy woke late in the morning, nearer eleven than ten. The heap in the bed opposite did not move. Larissa/Lois Tosca-Toskevich-Teale was sleeping soundly. Late the previous
night she had pointed him to his own bed and said she was exhausted.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Mind,’ he had said. ‘What’s to mind?’
‘Separate beds. Separate beds is to mind. But—’
‘It’s all right, I understand.’
‘Do you Troy? Do you?’
He had tried to persuade her out for the evening and failed. She had not wanted to leave the room, had not left it in a week.
‘How do you manage?’ he had asked.
‘Room service. I live off the delivery menu. I been all the way through the damn thing once already. I’m back to cold roast chicken again. I’ve eaten more pickled herring than
Moby Dick. I could kill for pepperoni and mozzarella pizza or spaghetti vongole or even just a warm bagel.’
So they sat on the floor, backs against the matching beds, tore apart a whole roast
chicken, which he downed with Perrier and she with slugs of bourbon. There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask, but he doubted he’d get answers to a single one, so instead he let her
ask a thousand questions and did his best to answer them all. Until they came full circle, once more through another menu.
‘You were famous for a while, d’y’know that?’
‘Even in the Soviet Union?’
‘The Man Who Shot Jimmy Wayne. Quite a reputation.’
‘It sounds like a good title for a cowboy film. But I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t shoot him?’
‘No. Why would I shoot him?’
‘I heard you went up against him at Heathrow armed with a handgun. And he pulled a gun on you, and you winged him.’
‘Not the way it happened. High Noon At Heathrow isn’t exactly the English way, is it?’
‘Glad to hear it. And that’s an
awful
title for a movie.’
‘I did have a gun. A necessary precaution. But I also had six armed constables surrounding the plane he was on. And I didn’t have to shoot him for the simple reason he wasn’t
armed.’
‘How d’he die? I know he never made it to the gallows.’
‘Suicide.’
‘Well, KGB gossip got that right. Hang himself with his suspenders?’
‘Cyanide capsule in one of his teeth. A legacy of his time in Berlin I should think. As soon as the Old Bailey handed down the sentence, he was put in a paddy wagon to be taken back to
Brixton prison. He was handcuffed, but there should still have been someone in the van with him. Lazy sods rode up front so they could smoke and natter. He was dead when they opened the door at
Brixton. If the trial hadn’t been in camera there would have been one hell of a row, but—hang on a minute, it was in camera, how did you know he was dead?’
‘We leaked it. Did you think I helped you catch him for old times’ sake? The British tried him in camera, fairly predictable after all. To try a CIA killer in public would put the
last nail in the coffin of the special relationship. But we had our sources and we leaked it. Every newspaper in the western world knew Wayne was on trial and for what. Some of the French papers
ran it for a day or two till the fist came down. Too late by then. We’d sown the seed of doubt. Probably more valuable as rumour than if Fleet Street had printed it in full. You were lucky
not get the Order of Lenin.’
He got out of bed and tugged at the curtains. Another cloudless June morning. The bourbon bottle lay on its side, half-empty. The roses lay on the dressing table, sad and wilting where she had
left them, petals fallen like giant snowflakes onto the lavender-coloured carpet. He didn’t think he’d bother buying her flowers again. And if she could drink like that he didn’t
think he’d buy her bourbon again either. He pulled the sheet gently off her. Still she did not wake. He looked at her. She was thin, almost wasted by comparison with her old self. A stone or
so underweight. It looked to him as though she’d been eating badly and too little and as though she had not seen the sun in a long time. He had vivid, tactile memories of the curve of her
backside—it was one of the great backsides—which now seemed flattened, and the muscles of her calves seemed slack, and her back was a mass of bruises as bad as the ones she buried under
pancake on her face. He’d seen such marks a hundred times in the course of the job—a good kicking to the kidneys.
He washed, shaved and dressed and came back to find that she had not moved. Only now her eyes were open.
‘Get up.’
‘Nuuuhh?’
‘Get up. We’re going out.’
‘Out?’
‘You can’t stay in this room for ever.’
‘Wanna bet?’
Tosca dragged herself to the bathroom naked, and emerged fully clothed, with another thick layer of make-up to her face, pulling a glove over the torn fingers of her right hand. She did not seem
to bother with the left.
‘What d’ya have in mind?’
‘Lunch. We’ll go to lunch. And we’ll talk.’
All Troy wanted was a clean, well-lighted place. A view of the canal would be nice. Any canal, it didn’t matter which. But all the way out, on every corner Tosca was looking over her
shoulder, checking in the reflections of shop windows in an atrocious parody of fugitive caution.
‘Stop it,’ Troy said.
‘Stop what?’
‘All this cloak and dagger nonsense. If the person you think is following us is any good you won’t spot him, and if he isn’t, I’d’ve spotted him pretty quick
myself.’
They had stopped by some law of serendipity outside a small café on the Prinsengracht. Troy decide to look no further and all but dragged her inside. To appease her they took a window
table. Troy could see to the next bend in the canal one way, Tosca the other. She waved away the menu and ordered ‘coffee, black, lots of it’.
‘Who do you think is following you?’ he asked.
Tosca said nothing, did not return his gaze and made tramlines on the tablecloth with her fork.
Troy wondered how to break the silence. Her right hand let go of the fork and disappeared below the table. Glove or no glove he assumed she was acting upon an instinct to hide it, but the hand
came up again clutching her handbag.
‘I got a letter for you.’
‘A letter? For me?’
‘Well, a note really.’
‘From whom?’
He had a momentary, illusory vision of long-lost cousins he’d never met and never heard of somehow encountering Tosca in the lost domain of family history that was the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. She fished into her handbag and brought out a tiny piece of paper folded over many times.
‘Burgess.’
‘
Guy
Burgess?’
‘Yeah. I got to know him pretty well, he gets bored easy, never really learnt Russian. He used to take me out drinking just to have a conversation in English.’
‘And you and Guy Burgess talked about
me
?’
‘Well, no, not exactly. I guess your name came up at some point. I mean most of the time he wanted to talk about England, he loved the fact that I’d lived there. That I’d not
been there for a good five years before he split didn’t seem to matter, just to know the same bars and restaurants was enough. We ran through the names of everyone we knew there till he found
a name we had in common. I never thought it would be you. He said if I was ever in England I should give you this.’
‘When did he say this?’
‘Christmas before last.’
Troy held out his hand for the note, but she unfolded it and began to read.
‘Hold on. I can’t … it says something like please send one dozen jars … jeezus it looks like … pappum papperum. Jeez, I dunno. Anyway that’s the stuff he wants you
to send him. I guess it’s the English equivalent of a Hershey bar. You miss ’em like hell, then the first one you get you damn near barf and wonder what you ever saw in them.’
Troy snatched the scrap of paper from her. It read ‘Patum Pepperium’, in Burgess’s upright, loopless hand, his letters stiff and straight like lead soldiers in their
box—the opposite of the man himself. Patum Pepperium, an anchovy paste which called itself ‘the Gentleman’s Relish’, much as Heinz boasted of its fifty-seven varieties.
Burgess gave an address at the Moskva Hotel and sent his best wishes. Troy screwed up the note and dropped it in the ashtray.
‘No,’ he said, ‘Guy can go fuck himself for his Patum Pepperium.’
‘If Burgess could fuck himself, he’d be the happiest man alive. As things are, he’s one of the unhappiest.’
‘Bad as that, eh?’
‘If you ever defect, defect to Paris or Monte Carlo—not Moscow, anywhere but Moscow.’
‘I hadn’t planned on it. Reminds me of a scrawl I once saw at Liverpool Street station. Where the sign says, “Harwich for the Continent”, some wag had written, “And
Paris for the Rest of Us” underneath.’
She smiled. Without nervousness, without forcing it. A natural reflex action. The first in the many hours they had been together.
‘He’s right, whoever he is. Burgess is holed up in his hotel, pissed half the time, watched all the time. It’s no life.’
She paused to turn the tramlines she had scored on the white tablecloth into a chequerboard.
‘Tell me,’ she said, looking up. ‘Do you remember when you were interrogating Diana Brack?’
He could scarcely believe she had raised the name, but the look in her eyes showed no anger, no sensibility that he too might feel anger, or remorse, or pain. He nodded.
‘She said talking to the old British Socialists was like spending an evening with the guys who planned the bus routes or mapped out the sewers or something like that. Well, I’ve seen
the Soviet Union from the top since then, and believe me, the damn woman was right. You could take a job lot of council clerks and town planners and dump them down in Moscow or Omsk or
Tomsk—and they’d feel at home in ten minutes and Russia would feel at home with them. It’s
the
bourgeois country, Troy. They’ve enshrined the practices of Middle
England, even as they reject the values. They have a form for that, a Ministry of Circumlocution, a Department of Bumf. Jeezus, it’s a miracle they achieve anything! Russia has become the
natural home of the little guy with the rubber stamp. For every heroic, bleeding Stakhanovite you hear about, there’s a dozen Mr Efficiencies running a world the borough surveyor from Fogtown
and Bogshire would find recognisable. Praise the lord and pass the Turkey.’
‘How did you stick it?’
‘You sneering? Troy, you wouldn’t be sneering, now would you?’
‘It’s an honest question. I’ve never been there—but it is the most fantasised, the most imagined country since Lilliput.’
She shrugged her shoulders, stirred the tablecloth chequers into messy, concentric circles with her fork. And suddenly he realised that he had unleashed the flood. He had no idea what he’d
said to achieve this, perhaps it was not of his doing at all, perhaps he had Burgess to thank for breaking her silence? But she was talking.
‘I guess I wasn’t there a lot. The whole point in having someone like me who can pass for an American is to send ’em abroad. Mostly I played Western Europe. I spent a lot of
time in Berlin, but I got pulled from there not long after you snatched Wayne. It was too public a place. Every other guy was a spy. There was a risk of me getting too well known. And when I was
home I was well treated. Until ’53, that is.’
‘’53? What happened in ’53?’
‘Stalin died. I thought you might have heard.’
‘I don’t quite see what you mean.’
‘When the top man goes there’s little guys all down the line who get reshuffled. It’s like a house of cards or a row of dominoes. One tumbles, they all go. Although the death
that mattered was Beria’s. Once he was gone there was a purge of his people.’