To pinpoint the best men—the coming men—and make sure they never arrived . . .
Sir Geoffrey was watching him narrowly now.
"Well, Colonel Butler?"
"Hmm!" Butler cleared his throat. "We'll look into it, Master. But in the meantime—tell me about Zoshchenko."
"Zoschenko?" The Master's expression saddened. "Zoshchenko ... I still find it hard to think of him as anyone other than Neil Smith. Indeed, if it was not my own testimony— if you were now telling me what I told Freisler—you might find me hard to convince."
"You knew him well?"
"Well? Not well, perhaps, but I liked what I knew. He was a likeable fellow, good-humoured but mature in his way. He seemed older than his years—"
"He probably was older."
"Yes . . . yes, I suppose he might have been. But he was still young—a jolly young man, if I may use a somewhat archaic word."
"Convivial?"
"A drinker? No, hardly that. I rather think it was part of the joke that everyone called him 'Boozy' when his friends relied on him to drive them home."
"He was popular, then?"
"He joined in the social life of the college certainly. Rowed bow in the second eight, and played a bit of rugger I believe. And he was president of the college's de Vere Society, which prides itself on balancing culture with athletic pursuits."
"And he was a scholar."
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"An exhibitioner. He had a good mind, but steady rather than brilliant—if he'd been less clever one might put him down as a plodder. But he was no plodder—plodders don't often get first-class degrees, you know. But I rather think teaching was more in his line than research."
"That was why I had no hesitation in recommending him to Gracey at Cumbria—Gracey is one of the few provincial vice-chancellors who are determined on quality rather than quantity in his student body, and I believed that Smith . . . that is, Zoschenko . . . was just the man for him."
The Master sighed heavily, though whether at his own error or at Zoschenko's betrayal of his confidence it was impossible to judge.
"And you never for one moment suspected that he might have any hand in the—ah—plot you suspected?"
Sir Geoffrey raised an eyebrow. "I never came upon him singing the Red Flag if that's what you mean,"
he murmured drily.
"I mean—" Butler began sharply and then blunted the anger in his voice as he saw the glint in the Master's eye "—I mean did he take part in politics here?"
"His politics were to the left of centre. He wasn't a communist—" The Master stopped abruptly. "I should say he gave no indication that he was a communist. I would have described him as a liberal socialist, equally anti-communist and anti-fascist."
Butler snorted. "Do you find that surprising?"
"Not in the least." Sir Geoffrey regarded him equably now. "It's fashionable to be a political animal up here. Not all the best of the young are left-wingers, but some of the cleverest certainly are. So he was neither extreme nor unusual."
"It wasn't as if he was going into the government service either. He had an academic career ahead of him and a moderate left-wing involvement wouldn't have damaged his chances. More likely it would have made him a more useful senior member later on."
Butler nodded. Deep down Sir Geoffrey still could not quite believe in Smith's duplicity, or was unwilling to believe in it in spite of his own knowledge. But in fact Zoshchenko's political cover had been simple commonsense.
"How did he come to you—to the college?"
"Through UCCA in the normal way. That is, through the University Central Council for Admissions.
The only complication, as I remember, was that the last years of his secondary education had been in dummy2.htm
New Zealand. But that was no great problem really, his parents were dead, but they'd left him enough money to put himself through one of the cramming establishments over here. He had a letter from his headmaster in New Zealand and another from an Anglican bishop out there."
"Forged, naturally. Or stolen."
The Master shrugged. "He had enough 'O' levels, and when he'd taken our scholarship examination we jumped at him. He was a promising man, as I've said."
It was too easy, all too easy: it was like taking candy from a baby. Audley had mentioned that UCCA was about to computerise itself, but as it was the checking was minimal. Up here the good brain validated the credentials: nobody really cared about a man's origins, but only about his potential. After all, it was a university, not a top security establishment.
That had been Audley's final comment—and it didn't seem to worry him very much either. But it made Butler shiver as he remembered Sir Geoffrey's contemptuous dismissal of the student files controversy : rather was there a near-criminal lack of guards at the gates of these ivory towers. Small wonder they had enemies within!
And yet—damn and blast it—these were British ivory towers, Butler told himself angrily. Freedom from the interference of bureaucratic snoopers ought to be part of a Briton's birthright: it was only the lesser breeds who were hounded by their ever-suspicious masters.
Butler cocked his head as the thought developed inside it: that might even be near the heart of this part of the problem ... it might very well be the heart itself.
A good mind, a steady mind—Hobson would not be wrong about that. And a good, steady mind which had been exposed to three years of Oxford.
"Would you say he was a young man of independent mind?"
"Sm— Zoshchenko?"
"Perhaps we'd do better to call him Smith." He was forgetting Audley's exhortation already. "Was he a man of independent mind?"
"Independent . . ." The Master examined the word. "No, hardly that. He was too young to be truly independent, whatever he may have thought."
"Isn't that what you teach them to be here?"
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"Teach them?" Sir Geoffrey almost chuckled. "We don't teach them. They have to reach their destination under their own steam—we merely point them in the general direction of truth."
It was difficult to tell whether he was joking. But then, as he stared at Butler, the meaning of the questions came home to him, and the sparse eyebrows raised in surprise.
Butler nodded.
"God bless my soul!" muttered Sir Geoffrey. "You mean to imply that we succeeded with him ?"
It wouldn't have been a sudden blinding flash on the road to Damascus, thought Butler. With that good, steady mind it might have been no more than a small nagging doubt at first —a small thing compared with the pleasure of pulling the wool over the eyes of all these clever old men. But what he would not have known was that the clever men were working on him too: that the tiny doubt was a poison working and spreading inside him, working and growing as he was admitted to their ranks until—
Until what?
Never mind that for the time being. Whatever it was, it had been just that bit too much for him; he had become one of them, the man with his own Cause—or at least the Cause of Holy Russia, buried deep inside him, and the division of loyalties had split his Slav temperament right down the middle . . . Wasn't it Hamlet that the Russians so enjoyed, with its dark vein of self-destruction?
Butler himself had no time for Hamlet, who seemed to him to have been in a fair way of doing damn all in cold blood until his uncle's stupid treachery had given him the hot-blooded excuse for action.
But that was how the thing might have happened, with some final dirty instruction pushing poor Zoshchenko-Smith to resolve his dilemma with a drunken motor-cycle ride through the night—a sort of motorised Russian roulette.
Certainly, everything he had found out so far, from Pett's Pond to King's chapel, bore out that theory.