‘They all come to see me,’ he said as he poured Château Pétrus ‘64 for his guests. ‘Sometimes they want me to recall some bloody fool thing the Department decided back in the sixties, or they want me to use my influence with someone upstairs, or they want me to sell some ghastly little Victorian commode they’ve inherited.’ Silas looked round the table to be sure everyone present remembered that he had a partnership in a Bond Street antique shop. The taciturn American, Bret Rensselaer, was squeezing the arm of the busty blonde he’d brought with him. ‘But I see them all – believe me I never get lonely.’ I felt sorry for old Silas; it was the sort of thing that only very lonely people claimed.
Mrs Porter, his cook-housekeeper, came through the door from the kitchen bearing a roast sirloin. ‘Good. I like beef,’ said my small son Billy.
Mrs Porter smiled in appreciation. She was an elderly woman who had learned the value of a servant who heard nothing, saw nothing, and said very little. ‘I’ve no time for stews and pies and all those mixtures,’ explained Uncle Silas as he opened a second bottle of lemonade for the children. ‘I like to see a slice of real meat on my plate. I hate all those sauces and purées. The French can keep their cuisine.’ He poured a little lemonade for my son, and waited while Billy noted its colour and bouquet, took a sip, and nodded approval just as Silas had instructed him to do.
Mrs Porter arranged the meat platter in front of Silas and placed the carving knife and fork to hand before going to get the vegetables. Dicky Cruyer dabbed wine from his lips with a napkin. The host’s words seemed to be aimed at him. ‘I can’t stand by and let you defame la cuisine française in such a cavalier fashion, Silas.’ Dicky smiled. ‘I’d get myself black-balled by Paul Bocuse.’
Silas served Billy with a huge portion of rare roast beef and went on carving. ‘Start eating!’ Silas commanded. Dicky’s wife, Daphne, passed the plates. She worked in advertising and liked to dress in grandma clothes, complete with black velvet choker, cameo brooch and small metal-rim eyeglasses. She insisted on a very small portion of beef.
Dicky saw my son spill gravy down his shirt and smiled at me pityingly. The Cruyer boys were at boarding school; their parents only saw them at vacation time. It’s the only way to stay sane, Dicky had explained to me more than once.
Silas carved into the meat with skilful concentration. There were ooos! and ahhs! from the guests. Dicky Cruyer said it was a ‘sumptuous repast’ and addressed Silas as ‘mine host’. Fiona gave me a blank stare as a warning against provoking Dicky into more such comments.
‘Cooking,’ said Silas, ‘is the art of the possible. The French have been brought up on odds and ends, chopped up and mixed up and disguised with flavoured sauces. I don’t want that muck if I can afford some proper food. No one in their right mind would choose it.’
‘Try la cuisine nouvelle,’ said Daphne Cruyer, who was proud of her French accent. ‘Lightweight dishes and each plate of food designed like a picture.’
‘I don’t want lightweight food,’ growled Silas, and brandished the knife at her. ‘Cuisine nouvelle!’, he said disdainfully. ‘Big coloured plates with tiny scraps of food arranged in the centre. When cheap hotel restaurants did it, we called it “portion control”, but get the public-relations boys on the job and it’s cuisine nouvelle and they write long articles about it in ladies’ magazines. When I pay for good food, I expect the waiter to serve me from a trolley and ask me what I want and how much I want, and I’ll tell him where to put the vegetables. I don’t want plates of meat and two veg carried from the kitchen by waiters who don’t know a herring from a hot-cross bun.’
‘This beef is done to perfection, Uncle Silas,’ said Fiona, who was relieved that he’d managed to deliver this passionate address without the usual interjected expletives. ‘But just a small slice for Sally…well-done meat, if that’s possible.’
‘Good God, woman,’ he said. ‘Give your daughter something that will put a little blood into her veins. Well-done meat! No wonder she’s looking so damned peaky.’ He placed two slices of rare beef on a warmed plate and cut the meat into bite-size pieces. He always did that for the children.
‘What’s peaky?’ said Billy, who liked underdone beef and was admiring Silas’s skill with the razorsharp carving knife.
‘Pinched, white, anaemic and ill-looking,’ said Silas. He set the rare beef in front of Sally.
‘Sally is perfectly fit,’ said Fiona. There was no quicker way of upsetting her than to suggest the children were in any way deprived. I suspected it was some sort of guilt she shared with all working mothers. ‘Sally’s the best swimmer in her class,’ said Fiona. ‘Aren’t you, Sally?’
‘I was last term,’ said Sally in a whisper.
‘Get some rare roast beef into your belly,’ Silas told her. ‘It will make your hair curly.’
‘Yes, Uncle Silas,’ she said. He watched her until she took a mouthful and smiled at him.
‘You’re a tyrant, Uncle Silas,’ said my wife, but Silas gave no sign of having heard her. He turned to Daphne. ‘Don’t tell me you want it well done,’ he said ominously.
‘Bleu for me,’ she said. ‘Avec un petit peu de moutarde anglaise.’
‘Pass Daphne the mustard,’ said Silas. ‘And pass her the pommes de terre – she could put a bit more weight on. It’ll give you something to get hold of,’ he told Cruyer, waving the carving fork at him.
‘I say, steady on,’ said Cruyer, who didn’t like such personal remarks aimed at his wife.
Dicky Cruyer declined the Charlotte Russe, having had ‘an elegant sufficiency’, so Billy and I shared Dicky’s portion. Charlotte Russe was one of Mrs Porter’s specialities. When the meal was finished, Silas took the men to the billiards room, telling the ladies, ‘Walk down to the river, or sit in the conservatory, or there’s a big log fire in the drawing room if you’re cold. Mrs Porter will bring you coffee, and brandy too if you fancy it. But men have to swear and belch now and again. And we’ll smoke and talk shop and argue about cricket. It will be boring for you. Go and look after the children – that’s what nature intended women to do.’
They did not depart graciously, at least Daphne and Fiona didn’t. Daphne called old Silas a rude pig and Fiona threatened to let the children play in his study – a sanctum forbidden to virtually everyone – but it made no difference; he ushered the men into the billiards room and closed the ladies out.
The gloomy billiards room with its mahogany panelling was unchanged since being furnished to the taste of a nineteenth-century beer baron. Even the antlers and family portraits remained in position. The windows opened onto the lawn, but the sky outside was dark and the room was lit only by the green light reflected from the tabletop. Dicky Cruyer set up the table and Bret selected a cue for himself while Silas removed his jacket and snapped his bright red braces before passing the drinks and cigars. ‘So Brahms Four is acting the goat?’ said Silas as he chose a cigar for himself and picked up the matches. ‘Well, are you all struck dumb?’ He shook the matchbox so that the wooden matches rattled.
‘Well, I say –’ said Cruyer, almost dropping the resin he was applying to the tip of his cue.
‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Dicky,’ Silas told him. ‘The D-G is worried sick at the thought of losing the banking figures. He said you’re putting Bernard in to sort it out for you.’
Cruyer – who’d been very careful not to reveal to me that he’d mentioned me to the Director-General – fiddled with his cue to grant himself an extra moment of thought, then said, ‘Bernard? His name was put up but I’m against it. Bernard’s done his bit, I told him that.’
‘Never mind the double talk, Dicky. Save all that for your committee meetings. The D-G asked me to knock your heads together this weekend and try to come up with a few sensible proposals on Monday…Tuesday at the latest. This damn business could go pop, you know.’ He looked at the table and then at his guests. ‘Now, how shall we do this? Bernard is no earthly good, so he’d better partner me against you two
.’
Bret said nothing. Dick Cruyer looked at Silas with renewed respect. Perhaps until that afternoon he hadn’t fully realized the influence the old man still wielded. Or perhaps he hadn’t realized that Silas was just the same unscrupulous old swine that he’d been when he was working inside; just the same ruthless manipulator of people that Cruyer tried to be. And Uncle Silas had always emerged from this sort of crisis smelling of roses, and that was something that Dicky Cruyer hadn’t always managed.
‘I still say Bernard must not go,’ insisted Cruyer, but with less conviction now. ‘His face is too well known. Their watchers will be onto him immediately. One false move and we’ll find ourselves over at the Home Office, trying to figure out who we can swop for him.’ Like Silas, he kept his voice flat, and contrived the casual offhand tone in which Englishmen prefer to discuss matters of life and death. He was leaning over the table by this time, and there was silence while he put down a ball.
‘So who will go?’ said Silas, tilting his head to look at Cruyer like a schoolmaster asking a backward pupil a very simple question.
‘We have short-listed five or six people we deem suitable,’ said Cruyer.
‘People who know Brahms Four? People he’ll trust?’
‘Brahms Four will trust no one,’ said Cruyer. ‘You know how agents become when they start talking of getting out.’ He stood back while Bret Rensselaer studied the table, then without fuss potted the chosen ball. Bret was Dicky’s senior but he was letting Dicky answer the questions as if he were no more than a bystander. That was Bret Rensselaer’s style.
‘Good shot, Bret,’ said Silas. ‘So none of them have ever met him?’ He smoked his cigar and blew smoke at Cruyer. ‘Or have I misunderstood?’
‘Bernard’s the only one who ever worked with him,’ admitted Cruyer, taking off his jacket and placing it carefully on the back of an empty chair. ‘I can’t even get a recent photo of him.’
‘Brahms Four.’ Silas scratched his belly. ‘He’s almost my age, you know. I knew him back when Berlin was Berlin. We shared girlfriends and fell down drunk together. I know him the way you only know men you grew up with. Berlin! I loved that town.’
‘As well we know,’ said Cruyer with a touch of acid in his voice. He cleared the pocket and rolled the balls back along the table.
‘Brahms Four tried to kill me at the end of 1946,’ said Silas, ignoring Cruyer. ‘He waited outside a little bar near the Alexanderplatz and took a shot at me as I was framed against the light in the doorway.’
‘He missed?’ said Cruyer with the appropriate amount of concern.
‘Yes. You’d think even an indifferent shot would be able to hit a big fellow like me, standing full-square against the light, but the stupid bastard missed. Luckily I was with my driver, a military policeman I’d had with me ever since I’d arrived. I was a civilian in uniform, you see – I needed a proper soldier to help me into my Sam Browne and remind me when to salute. Well, he laid into Brahms Four. I think he would have maimed him had I not been there. The corporal thought he’d aimed at him, you see. He was damned angry about it.’
Silas drank a little port, smoked his cigar, and watched my inexpert stroke in silence. Cruyer dutifully asked him what had happened after that.
‘The Russkies came running. Soldiers, regimental police, four of them, big peasant boys with dirty boots and unshaven chins. Wanted to take poor old Brahms Four away. Of course, he wasn’t called Brahms Four then, that came later. Alexanderplatz was in their sector even if they hadn’t yet built their wall. But I told them he was an English officer who’d had too much to drink.’
‘And they believed you?’ said Cruyer.
‘No, but your average Russian has grown used to hearing lies. They didn’t believe me but they weren’t about to demonstrate a lot of initiative to disprove it. They made a feeble attempt to pull him away, but my driver and I picked him up and carried him out to our car. There was no way the Russians would touch a vehicle with British Army markings. They knew what would happen to anyone meddling with a Russian officer’s car without permission. So that’s how we brought him back to the West.’
‘Why did he shoot at you?’ I asked.
‘You like that brandy, do you,’ said Silas. ‘Twenty years in the wood; it’s not so easy to get hold of vintage brandy nowadays. Yes – well, he’d been watching me for a couple of days. He’d heard rumours that I was the one who’d put a lot of Gehlen’s people in the bag, and his closest friend had got hurt in the roundup. But we talked about old times and he saw sense after a while.’ I nodded. That vague explanation was Silas’s polite way of telling me to mind my own business.
We watched Bret Rensselaer play, pocketing the red ball with a perfectly angled shot that brought the white back to the tip of his cue. He moved his position only slightly to make the next stroke. ‘And you’ve been running him since 1946?’ I said, looking at Silas.
‘No, no, no,’ said Silas. ‘I kept him well away from our people in Hermsdorf. I had access to funds and I sent him back into the East Sector with instructions to lie low. He was with the Reichsbank during the war – his father was a stockbroker – and I knew that eventually the regime over there – Communist or not – would desperately need men with top-level banking experience.’
‘He was your investment?’ said Cruyer.
‘Or, you might say, I was his investment,’ said Silas. The game was slower now, each man taking more time to line up his shot as he thought about other things. Cruyer aimed, missed and cursed softly. Silas continued, ‘We were both going to be in a position to help each other in the years ahead. That much was obvious. First he got a job with the tax people. Ever wondered how Communist countries first become Communist? It’s not the secret police who do the deed, it’s the tax collectors. That’s how the Communists wiped out private companies: they increased the tax rate steeply according to the number of employees. Only firms with less than a dozen employees had a chance of surviving. When they’d destroyed private enterprise, Brahms Four was moved to the Deutsche Emissions und Girobank at the time of the currency reform.’
Dicky smiled triumphantly at me as he said to Silas, ‘And that later became the Deutsche Notenbank.’ Good guess, Dicky, I thought.
‘How long was he a sleeper?’ I asked.
‘Long enough,’ said Silas. He smiled and drank his port. ‘Good port this,’ he said, raising his glass to see the colour against the light from the window. ‘But the bloody doctor has cut me back to one bottle a month – one bottle a month, I ask you. Yes, he was a sleeper all through the time when the service was rotten with traitors, when certain colleagues of ours were reporting back to the Kremlin every bloody thing we did. Yes, he was lucky, or clever, or a bit of both. His file was buried where no one could get at it. He survived. But, by God, I activated him once we’d got rid of those bastards. We were in bad shape, and Brahms Four was a prime source.’
‘Personally?’ said Dicky Cruyer. ‘You ran him personally?’ He exchanged his cue for another, as if to account for his missed stroke.
‘Brahms Four made that a condition,’ said Silas. ‘There was a lot of that sort of thing at that time. He reported to me personally. I made him feel safer and it was good for me too.’
‘And what happened when you were posted away from Berlin?’ I asked him.
‘I had to hand him over to another Control.’
‘Who was that?’ I asked.
Silas looked at me as if deciding whether to tell me, but he had already decided; everything was already decided by that time. ‘Bret took over from me.’ We all turned to look anew at Bret Rensselaer, a dark-suited American in his middle fifties, with fair receding hair and a quick nervous smile. Bret was the sort of American who liked to be mistaken for an Englishman. Recruited into the service while at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, he’d become a dedicated Anglophile who’d served in many European stations before taking over as Deputy Controller of the European Economics desk, which later became the Econo
mics Intelligence Committee and was now Bret’s private empire. If Brahms Four dried up as a source, Bret Rensselaer’s empire would virtually collapse. Little wonder he looked so nervous.
It was Bret’s shot again. He balanced his cue as if checking its weight, then reached for the resin. ‘I ran Brahms Four for years on a personal basis, just as Silas had done before me.’
‘Did you ever meet him face to face?’ I asked.
‘No, I never went across to the East, and as far as I know, he never came out. He knew only my codename.’ He finally finished with the resin and placed it carefully on the ledge of the scoreboard.
‘Which you’d taken from Silas?’ I said. ‘What you’re saying is that you carried on pretending to be Silas.’
‘Sure I did,’ said Bret, as if he’d intended to make this clear from the start. The only thing field men hate more than a Control change is a secret Control change with a name switch. It wasn’t something any desk man would boast about. Bret had still not made his shot. He stood facing me calmly but speaking a little more rapidly now that he was on the defensive. ‘Brahms Four related to Silas in a way no newcomer could hope to do. It was better to let him think his stuff was still coming to Silas.’ He leaned over the table to make his shot. Characteristically it was faultless and so was his next, but the third pot went askew.
‘Even though Silas had gone,’ I said, moving aside and letting Silas see the table to choose his shot.
‘I wasn’t dead!’ said Silas indignantly over his shoulder as he pushed past. ‘I kept in touch. A couple of times, Bret came back here to consult with me. Frequently I sent a little parcel of forbidden goodies over to him. We knew he’d recognize the way I chose what he liked, and so on.’
‘But after last year’s big reshuffle he went soggy,’ Bret Rensselaer added sadly. ‘He went very patchy. Some great stuff still came from him but it wasn’t one hundred per cent any more. He began to ask for more and more money too. No one minded that too much – he was worth everything he got – but we had the feeling he was looking for a chance to get out.’