It was the patronizing ‘just’ that irritated her. There was something invulnerable about his resolute coldness. Her sister had called him ‘the shy desperado’ and giggled when he called. But Nikki had found it easy to fall in love with Bret Rensselaer. How clearly she remembered it. She’d never had a suitor like him: slim, handsome, soft-spoken and considerate. And there was his lifestyle too. Bret’s suits fitted in the way that only expensive tailoring could contrive and his cars were waxed shiny in the way that only chauffeur-driven cars were, and his mother’s house was cared for by loyal servants. She loved him of course but her love had always been mingled with a touch of awe, or perhaps it was fear. Now she didn’t care. Just for a moment, she was able to tell him everything she felt. ‘Look here, Bret,’ she said confidently. ‘When I married you I thought you were going to…’
He held up his hand and said, ‘Let me turn off the bath, darling. We don’t want it flooding the study downstairs.’ He went back into the bathroom; the roar of water stopped. A draught was coming through the window to make steam that tumbled out through the door. He emerged tightening the knot of his dressing gown: a very tight knot, there was something neurotic in that gesture. He raised his eyes to her and she knew that the moment had passed. She was tonguetied again: he knew how to make her feel like a child and he liked that. ‘What were you saying, dear?’
She bit her lip and tried again, differently this time. ‘That night, when you first admitted that you were working in secret intelligence, I didn’t believe you. I thought it was another of your romantic stories.’
‘Another?’ He was amused enough to smile.
‘You were always an ace bullshitter, Bret. I thought you were making it all up as some kind of compensation for your dull job at the bank.’
His eyes narrowed: it was the only sign he gave of being angry. He looked down at the carpet. He had been about to do his exercises but she’d hammer at him all the time and he didn’t want that. Better to do them at the office.
‘You were going to bleed them white. I remember you saying that: bleed them white. You told me one day you’d have a man working in the Kremlin.’ She wanted to remind him how close they had been. ‘Remember?’ Her mouth was dry; she sipped more water. ‘You said the Brits could do it because they hadn’t grown too big. You said they could do it but they didn’t know they could do it. That’s where you came in, you said.’
Bret stood with his fists in the pockets of the red dressing gown. He wasn’t really listening to her; he wanted to get on, to bathe and shave and dress and spend the extra time sitting with a newspaper and toast and coffee in the garden before his driver came round to collect him. But he knew that if he turned away, or ended the conversation abruptly, her anger would be reaffirmed. ‘Maybe they will,’ he said and hoped she’d drop it.
He lifted his eyes to the small painting that hung above the bed. He had many fine pictures – all by modern British painters – but this was Bret Rensselaer’s proudest possession. Stanley Spencer: buxom English villagers frolicking in an orchard. Bret could study it for hours, he could smell the fresh grass and the apple blossom. He’d paid far too much for the painting but he had desperately wanted to possess that English scene for ever. Nikki didn’t appreciate having a masterpiece enshrined in the bedroom, to love and to cherish. She preferred photographs; she’d admitted as much once, during a savage argument about the bills she’d run up with the dressmaker.
‘You said that running an agent into the Kremlin was your greatest ambition.’
‘Did I?’ He looked at her and blinked, discomposed both by the extent of his indiscretion and the naïveté of it. ‘I was kidding you.’
‘Don’t say that, Bret!’ She was angry that he should airily dismiss the only truly intimate conversation she could remember having with him. ‘You were serious. Dammit, you were serious.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’ He looked at her and at the bedside table to see what she’d been drinking, but there was no alcohol there, only a litre-size bottle of Malvern water. She’d stuck to her rigorous diet – no bread, butter, sugar, potatoes, pasta or alcohol – for three weeks. She was amazingly disciplined about her dieting and Nikki had never been much of a drinker: it went straight to her waistline. When Internal Security had first vetted her they’d remarked her abstinence and Bret had been proud.
He got up and went round to her side of the bed to give her a kiss. She offered her cheek. It was a sort of armistice but his fury was not allayed: just repressed. ‘It’s a glorious sunny day again. I’m going to have coffee in the garden. Shall I bring some up?’
She pulled the bedside clock round to see it. ‘Jesus Christ! The help won’t be there for an hour yet.’
‘I’m perfectly capable of fixing my own toast and coffee.’
‘It’s too early for me. I’ll call for it when I’m ready.’
He looked at her eyes. She was close to tears. As soon as he left the room she would begin weeping. ‘Go back to sleep, Nikki. Do you want an aspirin?’
‘No I don’t want a goddamned aspirin. Anytime I bug you, you ask me if I want an aspirin: as if talking out of turn was some kind of feminine malady.’
He had often accused her of being a dreamer, which by extension was his claim to be a practical realist. The truth was that he was even more of a romantic dreamer than she was. This craving he had for everything English was ridiculous. He’d even talked of renouncing his US citizenship and was hoping to get one of these knighthoods the British handed out instead of money. An obsession of that kind could bring him only trouble.
There was enough work in the office to keep Bret Rensselaer busy for the first hour or more. It was a wonderful room on the top floor of a modern block. Large by the standards of modern accommodation, his office had been decorated according to his own ideas, as interpreted by one of the best interior decorators in London. He sat behind his big glass-topped desk. The colour scheme – walls, carpet and long leather chesterfield – was entirely grey and black except for his white phone. Bret had intended that the room should be in harmony with this prospect of the slate roofs of central London.
He buzzed for his secretary and started work. Halfway through the morning, his tray emptied by the messenger, he decided to switch off his phone and take twenty minutes to catch up with his physical exercises. It was a part of his puritanical nature and upbringing that he would not make a confrontation with his wife an excuse to miss his work or his exercises.
He was in his shirt-sleeves, doing his thirty pressups, when Dicky Cruyer – a contender for the soon to become vacant chair of the German Stations Controller – put his head round the door and said, ‘Bret, your wife has been trying to get through to you.’
Bret continued to do his pressups slowly and methodically. ‘And?’ he said, trying not to puff.
‘She sounded upset,’ said Dicky. ‘She said something like, “Tell him, you get your man in Moscow and I’ll go get my man in Paris.” I asked her to tell me again but she rang off.’ He watched while Bret finished a couple more pressups.
‘I’ll talk to her later,’ grunted Bret.
‘She was at the airport, getting on the plane. She said to say goodbye. “Goodbye for ever,” she said.’
‘So you’ve said it,’ Bret told him, head twisted, smiling pleasantly from his position full length on the floor. ‘Message received and understood.’
Dicky muttered something about it being a bad phone line, nodded and withdrew with the feeling that he’d been unwise to bring the ugly news. He’d heard rumours that all was not going well with the Rensselaer marriage, but no matter how much a man might want to leave his wife it does not mean that he wants her to leave him. Dicky had the feeling that Bret Rensselaer wouldn’t forget who it was who had brought news of his wife’s desertion, and it would leave a residual antipathy that would taint their relationship for ever after. In this assumption Dicky was correct. He began to hope that the appointment of the German Stations Controller would not b
e entirely in Bret’s gift.
The door clicked shut. Bret began the pressups over again. He had inflicted that mortifying rule on himself: if he stopped during exercises he did them all over again.
When his exercises were done Bret opened the door that concealed a small sink. He washed his face and hands and as he did so he recalled in detail the conversation he’d had with his wife that morning. He told himself not to waste time pondering the rift between them: what was gone was gone, and good riddance. Bret Rensselaer had always claimed that he never wasted time upon recriminations or regrets, but he felt hurt and deeply resentful.
To get his mind on other matters he began to think about those days long ago when he’d wanted to get into Operations. He’d drafted out some ideas about undermining the East German economy but no one had taken him seriously. The Director-General’s reaction to the big pile of research he’d done was to give him the European Economics desk. That wasn’t really something to complain about; Bret had built the desk into a formidable empire. But the economic desk work had been processing intelligence. He always regretted that they hadn’t taken up the more important idea: the idea of promoting change in East Germany.
Bret’s idea had never been to get an effective agent into the top of the Moscow KGB. He would prefer having a really brilliant agent, with a long-term disruptive and informative role, in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic. It would take a long time: it was not something that could be hurried in the way that so many SIS operations were.
The Department probably had dozens of sleepers who’d established themselves, in one capacity or another, as longtime loyal agents of the various communist regimes of East Europe. Now Bret had to find such a person, and it had to be the right one. But the long and meticulous process of selection had to be done with such discretion and finesse that no one would be aware of what he was doing. And when he found that man, he’d have the task of persuading him to risk his neck in a way that sleepers were not normally asked to do. A lot of sleepers assigned to deep cover just took the money and relied upon the good chance that they’d never be asked to do anything at all.
It would not be simple. Neither would it be happy. At the beginning there would be little or no cooperation, for the simple reason that no one around him could be told what he was doing. Afterwards there would be the clamour for recognition and rewards. The Department was very concerned about such things. It was natural these men, who laboured so secretly, should strive so vigorously and desperately for the admiration and respect of their peers when things went well. And if things did not go well there would be the savage recriminations that accompanied post-mortems.
Lastly there was the effect that an operation like this would have upon the man who went off to do the dirty work. They did not come back. Or if they did come back they were never fit to work again. Of the survivors Bret had seen, few returned able to do anything but sit with a rug over their knees, talk to the officially approved departmental shrink, and try vainly to put together ruptured nerves and shattered relationships.
It was easy to see why they couldn’t recover. You ask a man to leave all that he holds most dear, to spy in a strange country. Then, years later, you snatch him back again – God willing – to live out his remaining life in peace and contentment. But there is no peace and no contentment either. The poor devil can’t remember anyone he hasn’t betrayed or abandoned at some time or another. Such people are destroyed as surely as if they’d faced a firing squad.
On the other hand it was necessary to balance the destruction of one man – plus perhaps a few members of his family – with what could be achieved by such a coup. It was a matter of the greater good of the community at large. They were fighting against a system which killed hundreds of thousands in labour camps, which used torture as a normal part of its police interrogation, which put dissenters into mental asylums. It would be absurd to be squeamish when the stakes were so high.
Bret Rensselaer closed the door that hid his sink and went to the window and looked out. Despite the haze, you could see it all from here: the Gothic spike of the Palace of Westminster, the spire of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Nelson balancing gingerly on his column. There was a unity to it. Even the incongruous Post Office tower would perhaps look all right given a century or so of weathering. Bret pushed his face close to the glass in order to see Wren’s dome of St Paul’s. The Director-General’s room had a fine view northwards and Bret envied him that. One day perhaps he would occupy that room. Nikki had made jokes about that and he’d pretended to laugh at them but he’d not given up hopes that one day…
Then he remembered the notes he’d made about the whole project. A great idea struck him: now that he had more time, and a staff of economists and analysts, he’d have it all up-dated. Maps, bar charts, pie charts, graphs and easy to understand figures that, even the Director-General would understand could all be done on the computer. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Thank you, Nikki.
And that brought him back to his wife. Once again he told himself to be resolute. She had left him. It was all over. He told himself he’d seen it coming for ages but in fact he hadn’t seen it coming at all. He’d always taken it for granted that Nikki would put up with all the things of which she complained – just as he put up with her – in order to have a marriage. He would miss her, there was no getting away from that fact, but he vowed he wouldn’t go chasing after her.
It simply wasn’t fair: he’d never been unfaithful to her all the time they’d been married. He sighed. Now he would have to start all over again: dating, courting, persuading, cajoling, being the extra man at parties. He’d have to learn how to suffer rejection when he asked younger women out to dinner. Rejection had never been easy for him. It was all too awful to contemplate. Perhaps he’d get his secretary to dine with him one evening next week. She’d told him it was all off with her fiancé.
He sat down at his desk and picked up some papers but the words floated before his eyes as his mind went back to Nikki. What had started the breakdown of his marriage? What had gone wrong? What had Nikki called him: a ruthless bastard? She’d been so cool and lucid, that’s what had really shaken him. Thinking about it again he decided that Nikki’s cool and lucid manner had all been a sham. Ruthless bastard? He told himself that women were apt to say absurd things when they were incoherently angry. That helped.
2
East Germany. January 1978.
‘Bring me the mirror,’ said Max Busby. He hadn’t intended that his voice should come out as a croak. Bernard Samson went and got the mirror and placed it on the table so Max could see his arm without twisting inside out. ‘Now take the dressing off,’ said Max.
The sleeve of Max’s filthy old shirt had been torn back as far as the shoulder. Now Bernard unbound the arm, finally peeling back a pad that was caked with pus and dried blood. It was a shock. Bernard gave an involuntary hiss and Max saw the look of horror on his face. ‘Not too bad,’ said Bernard, trying to hide his real feelings.
‘I’ve seen worse,’ said Busby, looking at it and trying to sound unruffled. It was a big wound: deep and inflamed and oozing pus. Bernard had stitched it up with a sewing needle and fishing line from a survival kit but some of his stitches had torn through the soft flesh. The skin around it was mottled every colour of the rainbow and so tender that even to look at it made it hurt more. Bernard was pinching it together tight so it didn’t break right open again. The dressing – an old handkerchief – had got dirty. The side that had been against the wound was dark brown and completely saturated with blood. More blood had crusted in patches all down his arm. ‘It might have been my gun hand.’
Max bent his head until, by the light of the lamp, he could see his pale face in the mirror. He knew about wounds. He knew the way that loss of blood makes the heart pound as it tries to keep supplying oxygen and glucose to the brain. His face had whitened due to the blood vessels contracting as they tried to help the heart do its job. And the heart pumpe
d more furiously as the plasma was lost and the blood thickened. Max tried to take his own pulse. He couldn’t manage it but he knew what he would find: irregular pulse and low body temperature. These were all the signs: bad signs.
‘Put something on the fire and then bind it up tight with the strip of towel. I’ll wrap paper round it before we leave. Don’t want to leave a trail of blood spots.’ He managed a smile. ‘We’ll give them another hour.’ Max Busby was frightened. They were in a mountain hut, it was winter and he was no longer young.
A one-time NYPD cop, he’d come to Europe in 1944, wearing the bars of a US Army lieutenant, and he’d never gone back across the Atlantic except for an attempted reconciliation with his ex-wife in Chicago and a couple of visits to his mother in Atlantic City.
After Bernard had replaced the mirror and put something on to the fire, Max stood up and Bernard helped him with his coat. Then he watched as Max settled down carefully in his chair. Max was badly hurt. Bernard wondered if they would both make it as far as the border.
Max read his thoughts and smiled. Now neither wife nor mother would have recognized Max in his filthy overcoat with battered jeans and the torn shirt under it. There was a certain mad formality to the way that he balanced a greasy trilby hat on his knees. His papers said he was a railway worker but his papers, and a lot of other things he needed, were at the railway station and a Soviet arrest team was there too.
Max Busby was short and squat without being fat. His sparse hair was black and his face was heavily lined. His eyes were reddened by tiredness. He had heavy brows and a large straggly black moustache that was lop-sided because of the way he kept tugging at one end of it.
Older, wiser, wounded and sick, but despite all that and the change in environment and costume, Max Busby did not feel very different to that green policeman who’d patrolled the dark and dangerous Manhattan streets and alleys. Then, as now, he was his own man: the wrongos didn’t all wear black hats. Some of them were to be found spooning their beluga with the police commissioner. It was the same here: no black and white, just shades of grey. Max Busby disdained communism – or ‘socialism’ in the preferred terminology of its practitioners – and all it stood for, with a zeal that was unusual even in the ranks of the men who fought it, but he wasn’t a simplistic crusader.