‘You mean you were one of Beria’s people?’
‘Not directly. Not in any real sense. I mean I never even met the guy. But reason is not the way these things operate. Somewhere up the line a guy I had worked for was held to be too much
the Beria man, so he was out. So then they look down the line, I was his as he’d been Beria’s. So while I wasn’t out, I was downgraded, reassigned to safer stuff and my promotion
was stopped. I’m still a Major. I been a Major for seven years. Since 1953 all I’ve been is a low-level courier in cities that are considered relatively safe like Paris or Brussels or
Zurich, places that have never been carved up into zones, places where the concierge leans in a window smoking cheap cigarettes for the hell of it instead of noting everyone who passes for one
goddam secret service or the other. I did that for three years, just shuffling packages around, live drops and
duboks
. Then this March they pulled me off it. I began to wonder if some
defunct apparatchik in some prison somewhere hadn’t fingered me to cut a deal for themselves. Or maybe Khrushchev’s denunciation finally did for me. Old Joe is knocked off his pedestal
and the domino ripple finally reached me, the last apparatchik in the stack. God knows, I don’t. I wasn’t just off the job, I was under arrest.’
‘In the Lubyanka?’
‘God, no. I don’t think I was important enough for that, I wasn’t even in Dzerzhinsky Square. I was in one of those cheap hotels the KGB have. If they have one they have
twenty. Lock you in a room, beat the shit out of you, and no one will hear because the place is empty or else everyone else in every other room is getting the shit beaten out of them at the same
time.
‘You know what? They didn’t even ask me questions. That’s how unimportant I was. There was nothing they wanted to know. They just did it for the hell of it. They did it because
it was their job, and they didn’t feel they were doing it properly any other way.’
She held up the gloved hand and turned it slowly. Made a fist and dropped it back to the tabletop.
‘As torturers go they weren’t very inventive. At the end of April they decided to move me. God knows why. One hotel to another, but it meant crossing Moscow two days before May Day.
Most of the time you could play baseball in the street in Moscow; there’s almost no such thing as traffic or traffic jams. But Mischa and Little Yuri have been guarding me for a month.
Yuri’s OK but Mischa is a slob. Beats up on me because he likes it. The only reason he didn’t fuck me too was because I told him he’d better kill me afterwards, ’cos if he
didn’t I’d never stop till I got him. So he hit me some more, pawed every part he could reach, but he didn’t try and fuck me. Who knows, I could beat the rap and be back at work
in a few weeks. It’s been known to happen … I mean, pigs fly, Al Smith was a Republican. He wasn’t going to take that risk. But crossing Moscow we meet a military convoy getting
into position for May Day, and the traffic stops. Yuri’s driving, I’m in the back with Mischa. Cocky bastard didn’t even bother to cuff me—after all, where can I run to? And
he decides a good way to pass the time in a traffic jam would be for me to suck him off. Get’s his roscoe out and hard and says, “How about it?” Dumb cluck. I snapped his dick
back with my right hand, snatched his gun with my left, then hit him in the throat as hard as I could. Yuri reaches into his jacket and tries to turn in the seat. I put the gun on him and said,
“Yuri, do you really want to die just because this schmuck wanted his dick sucked?” He tosses his gun over the seat and says, “On your way.” Mischa is unconscious or he
fainted, I don’t know, so Yuri throws in a “Good luck.” I get out of the car and I walk away. Took me six weeks to get here. It was a month before I dared to leave Russia. I
figured they’d look for me at every port or crossing for a week or two and then assume I’d got through and switch their resources. I wasn’t that important any more. Then I came
across Finland and down through Norway and Denmark. Nice and slow. But now comes the problem. I ask myself what I’d do if I had to track me. I wouldn’t waste manpower and time on the
land crossings, there’s too damn many of them. I’d watch the one place I have to end up. I’d watch England, I’d watch the ports. If I really wanted Larissa Tosca back
I’d have guys watching every ferry that docked at Dover or Folkestone or wherever. This is where I come unstuck. I’ve no plan to get myself across the water. I live by my wits, I live
by plans and deceptions and I can’t get around this one. The fuckers’re gonna nab me the minute I set foot in England. And if I stay on the Continent, it’s only a matter of time.
The disguise that suited the KGB so well is the same one that makes me stick out like Paul Robeson at a Klan meeting. They’re gonna get me. I know it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll think of something.’
She simpered, smiled, almost contrived to blush, dipped her face and gazed up at him through fluttering eyelids.
‘Gee, big boy—I was hoping you’d say that.’
He would have, he realised, to get used to being sent up.
Back at the hotel, Tosca kicked off her shoes, took apart her vanity case, ripped up the false bottom and tipped out a dozen assorted passports into a heap on the carpet. They
sat as they had most of the previous night, inches apart on the floor, like children playing.
‘Now. Who am I? Take your pick. Lois Teale has had her day. Time to be somebody else.’
Troy picked one up off the pile.
‘Greta Olaffssonn. Born 3 August 1912, Duluth, Minnesota.’
‘Nah. I been Greta too many times.’
‘Are they all fake? How did you get them?’
‘Fake? Of course they’re not fake. Most are got through the old trick. You find out the name of some poor kid who died very young, never applied for a passport, and you get one in
her name with your face on it. Works every time. Greta never made it to her second birthday.’
Tosca picked up another and looked at the name.
‘Clarissa Calhoun Breckenridge. Well, I never been her, but with a name like that is she from the Deep South or is she from the Deep South? I’d never manage the accent. And I
don’t know how to cook chitt’lins.’
She tossed it back on the pile. Troy picked it up.
‘Born Hoboken, New Jersey, 22 August 1913,’ he said.
‘Well. Whaddya know? I could do Hoboken. It’s Sinatra’s hometown. It’s only a spit and a ferry ride away from Manhattan. I’ll have to remember that. Ole Clarissa
could come in handy.’
Troy picked up another.
‘Nora Schwartz. Born Chicago, 10 June 1911.’
‘Nah. Don’t like the name. If I’d been born Nora Schwartz I’d’ve changed it. Betty Boop, Minnie Mouse, anything but Nora Schwartz.’
‘Larissa Dimitrovna Tosca. Born New York, 5 April 1911. This is yours. And it’s still valid. This must be a fake. It’s only four years old.’
‘No. It’s real. And Tosca’s my real name too. It was all immigration could make of my old man’s name. My last passport ran out in ’52. I just took it to the
American Embassy in Lisbon and got a new one.’
‘But the Americans think you’re dead. You died in a bloodbath in Orange Street in 1944.’
‘Yeah. But apart from the guys I worked with at the time, why should anyone know that? Just ’cos you filled in a few forms at Scotland Yard and posted ’em off to Grosvenor
Square? Troy, the world is not that efficient. Who matches births to deaths? It’s the same as getting a ringer. You show up with the right face and the right papers, who gives a
damn?’
Then, the penny dropped. He should have seen at once. Such a simple solution. The right face, the right papers, who gives a damn?
‘Look. I think I’ve found the solution.’
‘Aha?’
‘You have to become British. We get you a British passport.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘You have to marry me.’
‘Not the cutest proposal I ever received, I can tell you.’
‘You have to marry me, because marriage confers citizenship. And once you’re a citizen you can apply for your own passport. You enter Britain as Mrs Frederick Troy, British subject.
Tosca no more, Greta no more. We’ll marry in Vienna. We’ll have to wait a few days, quite possibly more than a week, while the embassy issues a passport to you. Then we go into England
through the back door.’
‘Back door?’
‘Ireland.’
‘Why Ireland?’
‘Because there’s no immigration control between the republic and the mainland. And we fog the trail by stopping over at the Isle of Man. Ships from there are not counted as
international. We dock at Liverpool at a domestic berth. No customs, no passports, and hence no reason for any of your spooks to be watching.’
‘It’ll work?’
‘If we can get into Vienna without being spotted, yes.’
‘And then what, a plane to where? Dublin?’
‘Yes.’
Tosca stared at the carpet, then she looked him in the eye.
‘Mrs Frederick Troy.’ She enunciated the words very slowly.
They lapsed into silence. He filled it.
‘It’s just a convenience.’
She stared at him.
‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Liar,’ she said.
She scooped up the passports and clutched them to her chest.
‘It’s OK. I’m game. But I don’t see how we can work this scam from this side of the Channel.’
‘I have a friend,’ he said.
‘Aha?’
‘At our embassy in Vienna. Are you known in Vienna?’
‘Nah. I never played Vienna. Too many goddam spooks.’
She fanned the passports out like a hand of cards and spread them on the carpet.
‘Who am I?’ she said.
‘You’d better be yourself. That’s a risk we have to take. The entry stamps on your passport would be useful, and the marriage and hence the citizenship will only be valid if
you’re Larissa Tosca. I can’t marry you as Minnie Mouse or Betty Boop. There’d be no point. You have to enter Austria and marry as yourself.’
‘I understand. But what I meant was, “Who Am I?” Capital W, capital A, capital I.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Nor me. That’s why I’m asking, Troy. Who Am I?’
Gus Fforde was a rogue. A rogue, a wag and an old friend. He and Troy and Charlie had been schoolboys together. Charlie was the leader, Troy and Dickie Mullins very much the
NCOs, and Gus the inspired, reckless subaltern. Fforde it was who had taught Troy how to disable a car by shoving a potato up the exhaust, how to blow out the down-pipe on a lavatory cistern with
gun-cotton so that the next poor sod to flush the bog got a free shower, and how to catapult stink bombs in chapel. Of these, Troy had only found the first to be of any lasting value.
Fforde was also First Secretary at Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy in Vienna, capital of the newly reconstituted Austria—its democratic government only weeks old, the Russian and
American troops that had been there since 1945 having departed a matter of months ago.
‘A passport, you say?’
‘Yes, Gus. For my wife.’
‘She’s not English then?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Okey doh. And when did you get married?’
‘Tomorrow. You can be a witness if you like.’
‘Freddie, there wouldn’t be anything … how shall I say? … untoward about this, would there?’
‘Untoward, no. Downright dodgy, yes. In need of discreet assistance from an old friend, yes.’
‘Quite,’ said Fforde. ‘What are old friends for?’
Fforde did his bit. Witnessed a civil wedding, pronounced Tosca, even with her haggard look and pancake make-up, to be ‘a stunner’, discreetly intervened when the clerk raised the
vexatious matter of ‘residency’, popped the champagne and served the Sachertorte in the lobby of the Sacher Hotel, and rushed through a British passport, asking no questions and
stepping lightly over embassy staff who remarked that it was all a little irregular.
‘Speaking of the irregular,’ he said. ‘Seen anything of Charlie lately?’
Troy thought about it.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Wish I had. But I don’t think I’ve set eyes on him since April.’
‘I have,’ Fforde went on. ‘He was through here only a week or two back. All nods and winks, nothing definite. Wouldn’t tell me a damn thing. Do you think he’s still
at it? After all these years, I mean.’
What are old friends for? Fforde had been immeasurably good to Troy. God knows, this whole thing could rebound on him, and a lesser friend would have told Troy to go home and sort it out there.
But Troy’s debt to Gus could not include such truths. It seemed odd that in his position he did not know, but if he didn’t Troy could not be the one to tell him. Of course Charlie was
still at ‘it’. And ‘it’ was something Troy would not go into. He shrugged it off and mourned the days when they had all told each other everything. What were old friends
for?
It was a smooth crossing. Over the Irish Sea. Aboard the
Maid of Erin,
out of Dublin, bound for Liverpool via Douglas I.O.M. Within sight of the Isle of Man, not far
off the uninhabited southern island, the Calf of Man, they stood at the rail watching the gulls circle, and the herring boats bobbing in the distance.
‘Give me the gun,’ Troy said.
‘What? I mean why?’
‘Just give it to me.’
Tosca looked around, checked no one could see, took the gun out of her handbag and slipped it to him palm to palm. It was so small he could conceal it almost completely in his hand. He looked
around, exactly as she had done, and dropped the gun over the side into the grey surf.
‘We don’t need guns,’ he said.
‘We don’t?—No—I guess not.’
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let’s agree on a story.’
He stopped the Bentley in the curve of beech trees, resplendent in their bottle green, the late June sun glinting off their leaves as from a thousand tiny mirrors. The house
was just visible beyond the curve, a quarter of a mile or so in the distance.
Tosca said, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley.’
He looked at her, surprised and pleased that she knew an English novel, that she knew anything that wasn’t Huck Finn—she was always reading Huck Finn—but she wasn’t
smiling.
‘Is this poetry or premonition?’ Troy asked.