Read Online The Russia House by John le Carré - Free Book Online

all this nonsense but that didn’t stop him. He looked disappointed and mighty unbelieving. He looked as if he had caught Landau in a lie. The video film shows him overacting quite outrageously. ‘How can you be so damn sure, for God’s sake? You never even saw her in an overcoat.’
    Landau is undismayed. ‘That’s the lady. Katya,’ he says firmly. ‘I’d recognise her anywhere. Katya. She’s done her hair up, but it’s her. Katya. That’s her bag too, plastic.’ He continues staring at the photograph. ‘And her wedding ring.’ For a moment he seems to forget he is not alone. ‘I’d do the same for her tomorrow,’ he says. ‘ And the day after.’
    Which marked the satisfactory end to Johnny’s hostile examination of the witness.
    As the days progressed and one enigmatic interview followed another, never the same place twice, never the same people except for Ned, Landau had increasingly the feeling that things were advancing to a climax. In a sound laboratory behind Portland Place, they played him women’s voices, Russians speaking Russian and Russians speaking English. But he didn’t recognise Katya’s. Another day, to his alarm, was devoted to money. Not theirs but Landau’s. His bank statements – where the hell did they get them from? His tax returns, salary slips, savings, mortgage, endowment policy, worse than the Inland Revenue.
    ‘Trust us, Niki,’ said Ned – but with such an honest, reassuring smile that Landau had the feeling that Ned had been out there fighting for him somehow, and that things were on the verge of coming right.
    They’re going to offer me a job, he thought on the Monday. They’re going to turn me into a spy like Barley.
    They’re trying to put it right about my father twenty years after his death, he thought on the Tuesday.
    Then on the Wednesday morning, Sam the driver pressed his doorbell for the last time and everything came clear.
    ‘Where is it today then, Sam?’ Landau asked him cheerfully. ‘The Bloody Tower?’
    ‘Sing Sing,’ said Sam, and they had a good laugh.
    But Sam delivered him not to the Tower and not to Sing Sing either, but to the side entrance of one of the very Whitehall ministries that Landau only eleven days earlier had attempted unsuccessfully to storm. The grey-eyed Brock guided him up a back staircase and disappeared. Landau entered a great room that looked on to the Thames. A row of men sat at a table facing him. To the left sat Walter with his tie set straight and his hair slicked down. To the right sat Ned. Both looked solemn. And between them, with his cuffed hands resting flat on the table and lines of refusal round his neat jaw, sat a younger, sharp-suited man whom Landau rightly assumed to be senior in rank to both of them, and who, as Landau later put it, looked as though he had stepped out of a different movie. He was sleek and tightlipped and groomed for television. He was rich in more than money. He was forty and rising, but the worst thing about him was his innocence. He looked too young to be charged with adult crimes.
    ‘My name’s Clive,’ he said in an underpowered voice. ‘Come in, Landau. We’ve got a problem about what to do with you.’
    And beyond Clive – beyond all of them, in fact – Niki Landau as an afterthought saw me. Old Palfrey. And Ned saw him see me and Ned smiled and made a pleasant show of introducing us.
    ‘Ah now, Niki, this is Harry,’ he said untruthfully.
    Nobody else had earned a trade description till then but Ned provided one for me: ‘Harry’s our in-house umpire, Niki. He makes sure everyone gets a fair deal.’
    ‘Nice,’ said Landau.
    Which is where, in the history of the affair, I made my own modest entrance, as legal errand boy, as fixer and bit player, and pleaser, and finally as chronicler; now Rosencrantz, now Guildenstern, and just occasionally Palfrey.
    And to take even more care of Landau there was Reg, who was big and ginger and reassuring. Reg led Landau to a dunce’s