The Company of Strangers (40 page)

‘Do you know who did it, sir?’ asked Schneider, his voice sounding like someone else’s in the room. ‘And what was the Shumilov girl doing there? She was one of your agents, wasn’t she?’

Yakubovsky tore open the pack of cigarettes like a savage and got one going.

‘This is a delicate situation,’ he said. ‘A
political
situation.’

‘Forgive me for being forward, sir, but you were there last night, weren’t you?’ said Schneider, the vodka
steaming him open. ‘Who else was there? That should throw…’

‘I can understand your nervousness, Major. You probably feel exposed…out in the open,’ said Yakubovsky from under his dark and threatening eyebrows. ‘I
was
there, with General Mielke, if that satisfies your curiosity. We left at midnight. Stiller was shot about five hours later.’

‘And the girls?’

‘The girls arrived as we were leaving. They came with Horst Jäger.’

‘The Olympic javelin thrower? What the hell was he doing there?’

‘I understand he has quite a javelin in his trousers,’ said Yakubovsky, eyebrows off the leash. ‘And he doesn’t mind throwing it about…or who’s watching.’

‘So who was the other girl?’

‘Not one of ours, a girlfriend of Jäger’s.’

‘So when did Jäger and his girlfriend leave?’

‘Four o’clock, according to the guardhouse.’

‘Why was Olga Shumilov killed?’

‘Because she happened to be there, I suspect.’

‘And why
was
she there?’

‘Probably to make sure that Stiller didn’t go home,’ said Yakubovsky. ‘And under the circumstances, Major, I don’t think you need to know the answers to any more of your questions. I’ve already told you that this is a
political,
not an intelligence, matter and that should indicate that any greater knowledge could bring its own pressures. Have some herring.’

They drank some more, finished the food. The Russian signalled the end of the evening by holding up Schneider’s coat for him to get into. As he shrugged it up on to his shoulders Yakubovsky spoke quietly into his ear.

‘We won’t be seeing each other again on the same footing as before, you understand. Should anything happen to
you, I will not be able to help. It would be inadvisable to use my name.’

The half-bottle of vodka prevented Schneider’s fear from reaching the ends of his nerves which meant that the hair on the back of his neck stayed smooth as a seal’s.

‘Can I ask how strong General Rieff is in this matter, sir?’

‘He is very well positioned. Look at his career before he became Head of Special Investigations.’

‘And is he well-intentioned towards either of us?’

‘No, Herr Major, he is not,’ said Yakubovsky. ‘He is of the ascetic school. A hair-shirt man.’

Outside an icy wind had got up and in the short walk to the car it effectively flayed his coat off him. He sat at the steering wheel, tearful, panting with the alcohol in his system. He stuck gloved thumbs into his eyes to stem the tears and force some concentration into his brain.

Yakubovsky was telling him that this was a KGB job and that the hidden agenda was political and, hard as it was to believe, bigger than himself. A Moscow directive, but aimed at what? And leaving Rieff so powerful.

Nothing came to him.

He started the car, drove back to the main gate and out on to Neuwiederstrasse. The sloppy suspension and his drunkenness threw him about the cockpit as if he was on a rollicking fair ride. He stopped on Köpenickerstrasse, pulled into the kerb near one of the still visible storm drains. He was gritting his teeth and hammering the steering wheel with rage and frustration. He took out the wad of Deutschmarks, felt their newness, sniffed their ink. New money. Real money. But too much of it if you were in the unexpected position he’d just found himself. He added his own tip to the bundle of notes, opened the door and threw the lot down the storm drain. Now he would even have a problem getting that passport back.

He drove home, parked up in the garage underneath the apartment block. He locked the car door, staggered to the stairs and walked into the sudden flare from a pair of headlights. Two men approached from the darkness behind, their shoes gritty against the cement.

‘Major Kurt Schneider?’

‘Yes,’ he said, licking his lips.

‘We’d like you to come with us for a…little word.’

December 1970 to January 1971, London.

Andrea sat at her desk, the same desk that her mother had occupied for more than twenty years doing the same job. The work was not difficult and it meant that she met everybody who was doing any kind of operational work, and they all talked to her because they wanted to keep her sweet and lenient over their expenses sheets.

Andrea had had to endure a long interview with Dickie Rose, as he was now known, and a shy man called Roger Speke, who would only ask her questions through Dickie Rose and never directly. She had found out nothing about either of them, neither their work, nor their job titles. Meredith Cardew had seen her, too, but that was more of a chat about old times – Lisbon, sardines on the beach, and whether the restaurant Tavares was still running. It was only as she was leaving that she happened to mention how surprised she was to find him in the Company.

‘Yes, well, got a taste for it during the war,’ he said. ‘Bored at Shell, so when I came over on a trip I arranged an interview. Stupid move, really. I’d have been much better off in the oil world but, you see, that was the other thing. Dorothy was fed up with the travelling, wanted to come back to the UK.’

‘To London?’

‘Good God, no, we bought a house in Gloucestershire. Happy as Larry out there. The girls have left the nest now,
of course. All married. So now it’s just grandchildren and the dogs.’

‘And you’ve got the Company.’

‘Heading for retirement now. Best days behind me. Berlin in the fifties, that was the time. We must have a drink, Anne…catch up on old times. Come over to the flat one of these cold evenings, keep an old man company.’

‘I’m Andrea now, Meredith.’

‘Of course. Sorry. Yes. And sorry about Luís and Julião. Jim told me the awful news. Terrible shock.’

The way he said it, as if it had happened last month and just as she was leaving, took her back a quarter of a century to the house in Carcavelos. Another terrible shock, as he put it. It set something off in her chest, a bird batting against her rib wall trying to get out.

She started in the early December. Wallis took her on a tour of the building. He reintroduced all the people who’d been at the funeral party. Peggy White, who’d assisted her mother in Banking. John Travis in Documentation. Maude West in the Library and Dennis Broadbent in Archives, who was the only one with anything to explain to her.

‘I’ve got you down here as a Grade 5 Blue and Yellow. Grade 5 is medium security, Blue is for banking and Yellow is for Foreign, which means you’re restricted to looking in files in that range and anything with a security rating of 5 and under. We all start on 5.’

‘What’s the highest?’

‘Grade 10 Red. You can look at anything with that, including the Hot Room, but there aren’t many Grade 10 Reds. Five in the whole building in fact and one of them is “C”.’

‘The Hot Room?’

He pointed to a door which had a card punch and a number pad by the jamb.

‘All Top Secret and Operational.’

‘What are the other colours I’m not allowed to look at?’

‘Green is for Home/MI5, boring as hell. White is for Personnel, which you’ll be cleared for in a few weeks’ time.’

‘Pink? Is there any Pink?’

‘Yes, there is as a matter of fact.’

‘What’s Pink?’

‘Sex.’

‘Is that kept in the Hot Room too?’

‘Under lock and key.’

‘Who’s got the key.’

‘Roger Speke.’

‘It’s always the quiet ones, Mr Broadbent.’

‘Just like your mother,’ said Broadbent, laughing. ‘Uncanny.’

Peggy White took her through the Banking procedures, sipping her way through glasses of water, as her small lips pursed themselves over International Money Transfers, Expense Sheets, Contingency Funds, Emergency Funds, Quarterly Finance Presentations, Cash Flow, Budgeting and all the other bean counting jargon.

‘It’s been pretty quiet recently. The last big flap was ‘68, after the Prague Spring. Agents flying this way and that. The money going all over. Your mother was retired by then. Yes, the Prague Spring did for her replacement. Terrible hash she made of it. Anyway, we really thought that was going to be it, you know. The Reds were going to pull back the Iron Curtain, charge through, and keep going until they hit Holyhead. Still, it’s all died down now. I do love it when the days hurtle by like that. To be honest, they’re dragging at the mo’. But…with the Russkies, anything can happen.’

Andrea settled into the work and made friends with everybody, especially Broadbent. He would leave her alone in Archives so that she could wander the files which she hadn’t been cleared for and she could also watch who had access to the Hot Room. Only Rose, Speke and Wallis ever used it. Broadbent revealed that there was a card with magnetic tape and a set of four numbers was issued every week by Roger Speke.

By mid December she’d been through most of the main body of the archives and found nothing of any interest and no reference to the Snow Leopard anywhere. Ten days before Christmas the Americans finally moved out of her house in Clapham and Andrea left Wallis’s attic room and set up at home. She met Gromov again at the bowling green in Brockwell Park. He told her what she already knew, that she was going to have to gain access to the Hot Room and look at the operational files to find any reference to the Snow Leopard. If she could get him a card he would arrange for a duplicate to be made overnight. Once she had that, all she had to do was get the weekly number code. Easy. Easy for Gromov in his big coat with his chilled face sucking his one capitalist weakness, sherbet lemons.

She went back to watching the Hot Room users and where they kept their cards. Wallis and Rose were less frequent users than Speke and they kept their cards in their wallets. Speke, who went twice a morning, kept his in the breast pocket of his jacket. She watched Speke for a week and noticed that he only did Hot Room work in the mornings. Grade 10 Red files were not allowed to be removed from the Hot Room. The men worked in there and could only take notes. No photocopying.

She noticed that Speke was a very correct man, fastidious in his manners and dress, the sort who always had a comment about the single vent versus the double vent, and he never worked with his jacket on. He would wear it
between rooms but would always remove it before sitting down. He wore a cardigan underneath the jacket and the jacket was always hung on a hanger on the back of his door. The only problem was that she never had access to Speke. He didn’t speak to her, or anyone for that matter, apart from the other section heads. He left at five thirty every afternoon and never stopped for a drink. She wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t been at the funeral – not her mother’s type.

She was getting desperate and thinking about how she was going to find out who the fifth card holder was when an expense sheet appeared on her desk with a request for more funds. She checked back in her files and found that the agent, codenamed Cleopatra, should still have had £4,500. Cleopatra’s base was given as Tel Aviv. The Middle East was Speke’s section.

She waited until two minutes before lunch and knocked on Speke’s door. He was standing by the window, looking out on to Trafalgar Square, hands in pockets, stretching the cardigan out in front of him. He was startled to see her and made for his desk as if he had a gun in it. Andrea was sweating under her woollen suit, her blouse sticking to the small of her back. She handed him the expense sheet and talked him through it. He scratched the end of his nose and blinked behind his bifocals. He reached for his phone. She told him she’d be back in the morning. He stood as she backed away. He headed for the window again. Andrea opened the door. Speke stooped to fuss over a plant on the mantelpiece. She put two fingers in the breast pocket and lifted the card, closed the door.

Back at her desk, Peggy White asked her if there was anything wrong.

‘Institutional central heating, Mrs White. I can’t take it.’

‘Your mother was just the same,’ she said.

Andrea went out for lunch and queued for a passport
photo in Charing Cross station. A man stood behind her. She went into the booth and slipped Speke’s card behind the sample photos board. She stood and waited for her photos to be developed. The man behind her came out after his session but didn’t wait. Her photos came out. A few minutes later the man’s came out black.

The following morning there were two cards in the letter box at home, original and copy. She got to work early, in case Speke went straight to the Hot Room. He arrived. She gave him a few minutes and went to see him. He still had his jacket on. She blinked the intensity out of her eyes, slowed herself down. He was at his window again, looking out on the brittle, frosty morning. Speke, poor, portly Speke, who liked ten minutes to recover from his tube journey in the morning, stiffened.

‘I’ll come back,’ she said.

‘No, no, no, what is it?’

‘Cleopatra’s expense sheet.’

‘We must change that codename, you know.’

‘I agree. It’s absurd to think such mundane things of Cleopatra.’

‘Quite. One day we’ll find at the bottom: one asp – £3 9s 6d,’ he said, and laughed at his own joke. Poor Speke, he’ll never be able to go decimal.

‘Let’s hope not, Mr Speke,’ she said. ‘Shall I take your jacket?’

‘Oh…thaggadee,’ he said, five options colliding in his brain.

She lifted the jacket off his shoulders, replaced the card, hung it up.

‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘Cleopatra should not be requesting more funds. I shall send him a message forthwith. What do you think it should say…Miss Aspinall?’

‘I wish you all joy of the worm?’ said Andrea, knowing that Speke would appreciate Shakespeare.

Speke’s laugh came out higher pitched than a hyena’s in the bush at night.

‘That might be a little too sinister,’ he said, ‘but excellent nonetheless. Put the wind up in Tel Aviv. Nothing wrong with that.’

Andrea came away exhausted. These things seemed so easy in films but they tore her nerves to shreds, like stealing sixpences from her mother’s purse, except it was ten years in Holloway for this kind of domestic pilfering. And she still had to get the weekly access code. And she still had to get into the Hot Room with enough time to achieve something. She knew what she was up against in there. Hundreds of files, and that was just the Berlin/Soviet section.

Cardew asked her over for drinks and supper in his flat, a one-bedroomed affair in a mansion block in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury. They drank gin and tonics while Cardew made a Bolognese sauce in his galley kitchen,
Don Giovanni
on the record player.

‘Spag Bol’s my staple,’ he said, looking a bit sad from behind, grey trousers hanging off his backside. ‘I think I’m going to try something else but I always gravitate towards the minced meat and the tins of tomatoes. Pathetic, really. We ate so well in Lisbon.’

‘I miss the fish,’ she said. ‘I even miss the salt cod and I never thought I was going to miss that.’

‘Fish only comes in a finger these days,’ he said. ‘You know, I liked the salt cod with the cured ham on top. Ever try that? One of our girls came from up north and that was how they did it up there.’

‘Doesn’t Dorothy ever come down and cook you something up…or go to the theatre?’

‘Dorothy wouldn’t be seen dead in London. Hates the damned place. Filthy dirty. Full of Flash Harrys. I’m all
right, Jack, and eff you, is how she sees it. Pity, really. Lonely old life I lead down here. G&T, Spag Bol and opera in the evening.’

They ate the pasta and salad, started on the second bottle of red. Cardew’s conversation drifted towards work.

‘Yes, the fifties were terrific once we got rid of bugger boys Burgess and Maclean. Thought we were right on top of the game, only to find it was a complete bloody farce, with George Blake spoon-feeding the KGB the whole Berlin works and Kim in London doing the dirty here. Made fools of us all. Khrushchev said to Kennedy once that we should give each other a list of all our spies and we’d probably find they read the same. Too bloody right. Another drop, dear?’

He refilled the glasses. Sweat glistened on his top lip. He was on his way.

‘It’s much more secure now,’ said Andrea. ‘They seem to have cut admin away from operations. We’re all boxed off. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing.’

‘As if that was the bloody problem. They’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick, as per u. Nothing was leaking out of admin. It was ops, that was the holey bucket. Now we sit trussed and blindfolded in our offices, not daring to do a damned thing. And they put us all through the wringer back in the sixties, I can tell you. I held on to my Grade 10 Red status…a lot of the others didn’t. Plenty of early retirements, one or two arrests. Gutted the Company. Barely ticking over now.’

‘I don’t see much of you in Archives,’ she said. ‘Flashing your Grade 10 Red status.’

‘Not the way I do things, Andrea. Not my style. Never been a bookworm. Not like Speke. He loves those files. That’s his nest. He’s the one who devised the system. Gave us all our little bloody cards. Comes round every Monday morning and tells us the weekly code numbers. I can never
remember the damn things. Once he told us the numbers and forgot to reprogramme the lock, decided there’d been a security breach and they set the dogs on us again. Yes, he was a bit sheepish after that, old Speke. Bloody right, too.’

They finished the wine. Cardew put on the
Magic Flute
, poured himself a whisky and a brandy for Andrea. He stood in front of the gas fire and conducted an imaginary orchestra. The whisky bottle found its way to the rim of his glass once every half an hour and after the third he hunched himself over and made a ghastly face and said:

‘The Bells, The Bells,’ as he poured himself another, trying to divert attention from the fact that he was hitting it hard. It was Teacher’s, too.

Andrea sipped through her brandy and said she had to leave. At the door Cardew held her coat to his chest in a neck lock, very drunk now, eyes fluttering.

‘Don’t suppose you’d care to make an old man happy?’ he asked, and before she could disappoint him, ‘no, no, no, bloody ridiculous thing to say. Four sheets to the…no, ten sheets to the wind. Don’t know what I’m saying. Take no notice. Always thought a lot of you, Anne. Yes…liked you very much. Very, very much. Very…’