'I'm wanting him out of my hair by now. I'm getting panicky. He's coming close again. Face against face. Wheezing and grinding like a steam engine. Heart breaking out of his chest. These big brown saucer eyes. "What have you been drinking?" I said. "Cortisone?"
'"You know what else you said at lunch?" he says.
'"Nothing," I say. "I wasn't there. It was two other blokes and they hit me first." He's not hearing me again.
'"You said, 'Today one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."'
'"That's not original," I say. "None of it is. It's stuff I picked up. It's not me. Now just forget everything I said and go back to your own people." Doesn't listen. Grabs my arm. Hands like a girl's bur they grip like iron. "Promise me that if ever I find the courage to think like a hero, you will act like a merely decent human being."
"'Look," I say. "Leave this out and let's get something to eat. They've got some soup in there. I can smell it. You like soup? Soup?"
'He's not crying as far as I can tell but his face is absolutely soaked. Like a pain sweat all over this white skin. Hanging on to my wrist as if I were his priest. "Promise me," he says.
'"But what am I supposed to be promising, for God's sake?"
'"Promise you'll behave like a gentleman."
'"I'm not a gentleman. I'm a publisher."
'Then he laughs. First time. Huge laughter with a sort of weird click init. "You cannot imagine how much confidence I derive from your rejection," he says.
'That's where I stand up. Nice and easy, not to alarm him. While he goes on clutching me.
'"I commit the sin of science every day," he says. "I turn ploughshares into swords. I mislead our masters. I mislead yours. I perpetuate the lie. I murder the humanity in myself everyday. Listen to me."
'"Got to go now, Goethe, old lad. All those nice lady concierges at my hotel sitting up and worrying about me. Let me loose, will you, you're breaking my arm."
'Hugs me. Pulls me right on to him. Makes me feel like a fat boy, he's sothin. Wet beard, wet hair, this burning heat.
'"Promise," he says.
'Squeezed it out of me. Fervour. Never saw anything like it. "Promise! Promise!"
'"All right," I say. "if you ever manage to be a hero, I'll be a decent human being. It's a deal. Okay? Now let me go, there's a good chap."
'"Promise," he says.
'"I promise," I say and shove him off me.'
Walter is shouting. None of our preliminary warnings, no furious glares from Ned or Clive or myself, could switch him off any longer. 'But did you believe him, Barley? Was he conning you? You're a sharp cookie underneath the flannel. What did you feel?'
Silence. And more silence. Then finally, 'He was drunk. Maybe twice in my life I've been as drunk as he was. Call it three times. He'd been on the white stuff all day long and he was still drinking it like water. But he'd hit one of those clear spells. I believed him. He's not the kind of chap you don't believe.'
Walter again, furious.
'But what did you believe? What did you think he was talking to you about? What did you think he did? All this chatter about things not reaching their targets, lying to his masters and yours, chess that isn't chess but something else? You can add, can't you? Why didn't you come to us? I know why! You put your head in the sand. "Don't know because don't want to know." That's you.'
And the next sound on the tape after that is Barley cursing himself again as he stomps round the room. 'Damn,damn, damn,' he whispers. On and on. Until, cutting through him, we hear Clive's voice. If it ever falls to Clive to order the destruction of the universe, I imagine him using this same deserted tone.
'I'm sorry but I'm afraid we're going to need your rather serious help,' he says.
Ironically, I believe Clive was sorry. He was a technology man, not at ease with live sources, a suburban espiocrat of the modern school. He believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them. If he liked anything at all in life apart from his own advancement and his silver Mercedes car, which he refused to take out of the garage if it had so much as a scratch on it, then it was hardware and powerful Americans in that order. For Clive to sparkle, the Bluebird should have been a broken code, a satellite or an Inter Agency committee. Then Barley need never have been born.
Whereas Ned was all the other way, and more at risk on account of it. He was by temperament and training an agent-runner and captain of men. Live sources were his element and, so far as he knew the word, his passion. He despised the in-fighting of intelligence politics and left all that happily to Clive, just as he left the analysis to Walter. In that sense he was the determined primitive, as people who deal in human nature have to be, while Clive, to whom human nature was one vast unsavoury quagmire, enjoyed the reputation of a modernist.
CHAPTER 5
We had moved to the library where Ned and Barley had begun. Brock had set up a screen and projector. He had put chairs in a horseshoe with a special person in his mind for each chair, for Brock, like other violent minds, had an exaggerated appetite for menial labour. He had been listening to the interview over the relay and despite his sinister inklings about Barley a glow of excitement smouldered in his pale Baltic eyes. Barley, deep in thought, lounged in the front row between Bob and Clive, a privileged if distracted guest at a private screening. I watched his head in silhouette as Brock switched on the projector, first turned downward in contemplation, then sharply upward as the first frame struck the screen. Ned sat beside me. Not a word, but I could feel the disciplined intensity of his excitement. Twenty male faces flicked across our vision, most of them Soviet scientists who on a first hasty search around the Registries of London and Langley were deemed to have had possible access to the Bluebird information. Some were featured more than once: first with beards then with their beards touched out. Others were shown when they were twenty years younger because that was all the archives had of them.
'Not among those present,' Barley pronounced when the parade was over, suddenly shoving his hand to his head as if he had been stung.
Bob just couldn't believe this. His incredulities were as charming as his credulities. 'Not even a perhaps or a maybe, Barley? You sound pretty sure of yourself for a man who was drinking well when he made the original sighting. Jesus, I've been to parties where I couldn't remember my own name.'
'Not a tickle, old boy,' said Barley and returned to his thoughts.
Now it was Katya's turn, though Barley couldn't know it. Bob advanced on her cautiously, a Langley professional showing us his footwork.
'Barley, these are some of the boys and girls around the Moscow publishing scene,' he said over-casually as Brock ran up the first stills. 'People you might have bumped into during your Russian travels, people at receptions, book fairs, people on the circuit. If you see anybody you know, holler.'
'Bless us, that's Leonora!' Barley cut in with pleasure while Bob was still talking. On the screen a splendid burly woman with a backside like a football field was marching across a stretch of open tarmac. 'Leni's top gun with SK,' Barley added.
'SK?' Clive echoed as if he had unearthed a secret society.
'Soyuzkniga. SK order and distribute foreign books throughout the Soviet Union. Whether the books get there is another matter. Leni's a riot.'
'Know her other name?'
'Zinovieva.'
Confirmed, said Bob's smile to the knowing.
They showed him others and he picked the ones they knew he knew, but when they showed him the photograph of Katya that they had shown to Landau � Katya in her overcoat with her hair up, coming down the steps with her perhaps-bag - Barley muttered, 'Pass,' as he had to all the others he didn't know.
But Bob was delightfully upset. Bob said, 'Hold her there, please,' so unhappily that a babe in arms would have guessed that this picture had unrecognised significance.
So Brock held, as we all did: held our breath.
'Barley, the little lady here with the dark hair and big eyes in this picture is with the October Publishing Company, Moscow. Speaks a fine English, classical like yours and Goethe's. We understand she's a redaktor, commissioning and approving English language translations of Soviet works. No bells?
'No such luck', said Barley.
At which Clive handed him to me. With a tip of his head. Take him, Palfrey. Your witness. Scare him.
I do a special voice for my indoctrination sessions. It's supposed to instil the terror of the marriage vow and I hate it because it is the voice that Hannah hates. If my profession had a false white coat, this would be the moment where I administered the wicked injection. But that night as soon as I was alone with him, I chose a more protective tone and became a different and perhaps rejuvenated Palfrey, the one that Hannah used to swear could overcome. I addressed Barley not as I would some raw probationer but as a friend I was seeking to forewarn.
Here's the deal, I said, using the most non-legal jargon I could think of. Here's the noose we're putting round your neck. Take care. Consider.
Other people, I make them sit. I let Barley roam because I had seen that he was more at case when he was able to pace and fidget and chuck his arms back in a luxurious stretch. Empathy is a curse even when it is short-lived, and not all the bad law in England can protect me from it.