Read Online The Russia House by John le Carré - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John le Carré
Tags: Espionage
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laughter.
‘Well I hope old Johnny the Yank is footing the bill for this, Harry,’ he said.
But the joke did not receive the applause it deserved, since it happened to be true. So Landau took Reg’s pen and signed, and handed me the document and watched me add my own signature as a witness, Horatio B. dePalfrey, which after twenty years has such a practised illegibility that if I had signed it Heinz’s Tomato Soup neither Landau nor anybody else could have told the difference, and put it back inside its leather coffin and patted down the lid. There was handshaking, mutual assurances were exchanged, and Clive murmured, ‘We’re grateful to you, Niki,’ just like in the movie that Landau periodically convinced himself he was part of.
Then everybody shook Landau’s hand yet again and, having watched him ride nobly into the sunset or more accurately walk jauntily off down the corridor chatting away at Reg Wattle, who was twice his size, they waited fretfully for the ‘take’ on the intercepts for which I had already obtained the warrants under the infallible plea of intense American interest.
They tapped his office and home telephones, read his mail and fitted an electronic limpet to the rear axle of his beloved drop-head Triumph.
They followed him in his leisure hours and recruited a typist in his office to keep an eye on him as a ‘suspect foreigner’ while he served out the last weeks of his notice.
They put potential lady-friends alongside him in the bars where he liked to do his hunting. Yet despite these cumbersome and needless precautions, dictated by that same intense American interest, they drew a blank. No hint of bragging or indiscretion reached their ears. Landau never complained, never boasted, never attempted to go public. He became, in fact, one of the few finished and perfectly happy short stories of the trade.
He was the perfect prologue. He never came back.
He never attempted to get in touch with Barley Scott Blair, the great British spy. He lived in awe of him for ever. Even for the grand opening of the video shop, when he would have loved more than anything in the world to bask in the presence of this real-life secret British hero, he never tried to stretch the rules. Perhaps it was satisfaction enough for him to know that one night in Moscow, when the old country had called on him, he too had behaved like the English gentleman he sometimes longed to be. Or perhaps the Pole in him was content to have cocked a snook at the Russian bear next door. Or perhaps it was the memory of Katya that kept him faithful, Katya the strong, the virtuous, Katya the brave and beautiful, who even in her own fear had taken care to warn him of the dangers to himself. ‘You must believe in what you are doing.’
And Landau had believed. And Landau was proud as Punch that he had, as any of us should be.
Even his video shop flourished. It was a sensation. A little rich for some people’s blood now and then, including that of the Golders Green police, with whom I had to have a friendly word. But for others pure balm.
Above all, we were able to love him, because he saw us as we wished to be seen, as the omniscient, capable and heroic custodians of our great nation’s inner health. It was a view of us that Barley never quite seemed able to share – any more, I have to say, than Hannah could, though she only ever knew it from outside, as the place to which she could not follow me, as the shrine of ultimate compromise and therefore, in her unrelenting view, despair.
‘They are definitely not the cure, Palfrey,’ she had told me only a few weeks before, when for some reason I was trying to extol the Service. ‘And they sound to me more likely to be the disease.’
3
There is no such thing, we older hands like to say, as an intelligence operation that does not occasionally run to farce. The bigger the operation, the bigger the belly laughs, and it is a matter of Service history that the week-long manhunt for
‘Well I hope old Johnny the Yank is footing the bill for this, Harry,’ he said.
But the joke did not receive the applause it deserved, since it happened to be true. So Landau took Reg’s pen and signed, and handed me the document and watched me add my own signature as a witness, Horatio B. dePalfrey, which after twenty years has such a practised illegibility that if I had signed it Heinz’s Tomato Soup neither Landau nor anybody else could have told the difference, and put it back inside its leather coffin and patted down the lid. There was handshaking, mutual assurances were exchanged, and Clive murmured, ‘We’re grateful to you, Niki,’ just like in the movie that Landau periodically convinced himself he was part of.
Then everybody shook Landau’s hand yet again and, having watched him ride nobly into the sunset or more accurately walk jauntily off down the corridor chatting away at Reg Wattle, who was twice his size, they waited fretfully for the ‘take’ on the intercepts for which I had already obtained the warrants under the infallible plea of intense American interest.
They tapped his office and home telephones, read his mail and fitted an electronic limpet to the rear axle of his beloved drop-head Triumph.
They followed him in his leisure hours and recruited a typist in his office to keep an eye on him as a ‘suspect foreigner’ while he served out the last weeks of his notice.
They put potential lady-friends alongside him in the bars where he liked to do his hunting. Yet despite these cumbersome and needless precautions, dictated by that same intense American interest, they drew a blank. No hint of bragging or indiscretion reached their ears. Landau never complained, never boasted, never attempted to go public. He became, in fact, one of the few finished and perfectly happy short stories of the trade.
He was the perfect prologue. He never came back.
He never attempted to get in touch with Barley Scott Blair, the great British spy. He lived in awe of him for ever. Even for the grand opening of the video shop, when he would have loved more than anything in the world to bask in the presence of this real-life secret British hero, he never tried to stretch the rules. Perhaps it was satisfaction enough for him to know that one night in Moscow, when the old country had called on him, he too had behaved like the English gentleman he sometimes longed to be. Or perhaps the Pole in him was content to have cocked a snook at the Russian bear next door. Or perhaps it was the memory of Katya that kept him faithful, Katya the strong, the virtuous, Katya the brave and beautiful, who even in her own fear had taken care to warn him of the dangers to himself. ‘You must believe in what you are doing.’
And Landau had believed. And Landau was proud as Punch that he had, as any of us should be.
Even his video shop flourished. It was a sensation. A little rich for some people’s blood now and then, including that of the Golders Green police, with whom I had to have a friendly word. But for others pure balm.
Above all, we were able to love him, because he saw us as we wished to be seen, as the omniscient, capable and heroic custodians of our great nation’s inner health. It was a view of us that Barley never quite seemed able to share – any more, I have to say, than Hannah could, though she only ever knew it from outside, as the place to which she could not follow me, as the shrine of ultimate compromise and therefore, in her unrelenting view, despair.
‘They are definitely not the cure, Palfrey,’ she had told me only a few weeks before, when for some reason I was trying to extol the Service. ‘And they sound to me more likely to be the disease.’
3
There is no such thing, we older hands like to say, as an intelligence operation that does not occasionally run to farce. The bigger the operation, the bigger the belly laughs, and it is a matter of Service history that the week-long manhunt for
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