Only then did Landau hesitatingly pass his scruffy package across the table and watch with lingering regret as Palmer's languid hand enfolded it.
'But why don't you simply give it to Mr. Scott Blair?' Palmer asked after he had studied the name on the envelope.
'I tried, for Christ's sake!' Landau burst out in fresh exasperation. 'I told you. I rang him everywhere. I've rung him till I'm blue in the face, I tell you. He's not at his home, he's not at work, he's not at his club, he's not at anywhere,' Landau protested, his English grammar slipping in despair. 'From the airport I tried. All right, it's a Saturday.'
'But it's Sunday, ' Palmer objected with a forgiving smile.
'So it was a Saturday yesterday, wasn't it! I try his firm. I get an electronic howl. I look in the phone book. There's one in Hammersmith. Not his initials but Scott Blair. I get an angry lady, tells me to go to hell. There's a rep I know, Archie Parr, does the West Country for him. I ask Archie: "Archie, for Christ's sake, how do I get hold of Barley in a hurry?" "He's skedaddled, Niki. Done one of his bunks. Hasn't been seen in the shop for weeks." Enquiries, I try. London, the Home Counties. Not listed, not a Bartholomew. Well he wouldn't be, would he, not if he's a –'
'Not if he's a what?' said Palmer, intrigued.
'Look, he's vanished, right? He's vanished before. There could be reasons why he vanishes. Reasons that you don't know of because you're not meant to. Lives are at stake, could be. Not only his either. It's top urgent, she told 'me. And top secret. Now get on with it. Please.'
The same evening, there being not much doing on the world front apart from a dreary crisis in the Gulf and a squalid television scandal about soldiers and money in Washington, Palmer took himself off to a rather good party in Montpelier Square that was being thrown by a group of his year from Cambridge - bachelors like himself, but fun. An account of this occasion, too, reached our committee's ears.
'Have any of you heard of a Somebody Scott Blair, by the by?' Wellow asked them at a late hour when his memory of Landau happened to have been revived by some bars of Chopin he was playing-on the piano. 'Wasn't there a Scott Blair who was up with us or something?' he asked again when he failed to get through the noise.
'Couple of years ahead of us. Trinity,' came a fogged reply from across the room. 'Read History. jazz fiend. Wanted to blow his saxophone for a living. Old man wouldn't wear it. Barley Blair. Pissed as a rat from daybreak.'
Palmer Wellow played a thunderous chord that stunned the garrulous company to silence. 'I said, is he a poisonous spy?' he enunciated.
'The father? He's dead.'
'The son, ass. Barley.'
Like someone stepping from behind a curtain, his informant emerged from the crowd of young and less young men and stood before him, glass in hand. And Palmer to his pleasure recognised him. as a dear chum from Trinity a hundred years ago.
'I really don't know whether Barley's a poisonous spy or not, I'm afraid,' said Palmer's chum, with an asperity habitual to him, as the background babel rose to its former roar. 'He's certainly a failure, if that's a qualification.'
His curiosity whetted still further, Palmer returned to his spacious rooms at the Foreign Office and to Landau's envelope and notebooks, which he had entrusted to the janitor for safekeeping. And it is at this point that his actions, in the words of our interim working paper, took an unhelpful course. Or in the harsher words of Ned and his colleagues in the Russia House, this was where, in any civilised country, P. Wellow would have been strung by his thumbs from a high point in the city and left there in peace to reflect upon his attainments.
For what Palmer did was have a nice time with the notebooks. For two nights and one and a half days. Because he found them so amusing. He did not open the buff envelope - which was by now marked in Landau's hand writing 'Extremely Private for the attention of Mr. B. Scott Blair or a top member of the Intelligence' - because like Landau he was of a school that felt it unbecoming to read other people's mail. In any case it was glued at both ends, and Palmer was not a man to grapple with physical obstacles. But the notebook - with its crazed aphorisms and quotations, its exhaustive loathing of politicians and soldiery, its scatter-shot references to Pushkin i the pure Renaissance man and to Kleist the pure suicide - held him fascinated.
He felt little sense of urgency, none of responsibility. He was a diplomat,'not a Friend, as the spies were called. And Friends in Palmer's zoology were people without the - 45 intellectual horsepower to be what Palmer was, Indeed it was his outspoken resentment that the orthodox Foreign Office to which he belonged resembled more and more a cover organisation for the Friends' disgraceful activities. For Palmer too was a man of impressive erudition, if of a random kind. He had read Arabic and taken a First in Modem History. He had added Russian and Sanskrit in his spare time. He had everything but mathematics and common sense, which explains why he passed over the dreary Pages of algebraic formulae, equations and diagrams that made up the other two notebooks, and in contrast to the writer's philosophical ramblings had a boringly disciplined appearance. And which also explains - though the committee had difficulty accepting such an explanation - why Palmer chose to ignore the Standing Order to Resident Clerks relating to Defectors and Offers of Intelligence whether solicited or otherwise, and to do his own thing.
'He makes the most frantic connections right across the board, Tig,' he told a rather senior colleague in Research Department on the Tuesday, having decided,that it was finally time to share his acquisition. 'You simply must read him.'
'But how do we know it's a he, Palms?'
Palmer just felt it, Tig. The vibes.
Palmer's senior colleague glanced at the first notebook, then at the second, then sat down and stared at the third. Then he looked at the drawings in the second book. Then his professional self took over in the emergency.
'I think I'd get this lot across to them fairly sharpish if I were you, Palms,' he said. But on second thoughts he got it across,to them himself, very sharpish indeed, having first telephoned Ned on the green line and told him to stand by.
Upon which, two days late, hell broke loose. At four o'clock on the Wednesday morning the lights on the top floor of Ned's stubby brick out-station in Victoria known as the Russia House were still burning brightly as the first bemused meeting of what later became the Bluebird team drew to a close. Five hours after that, having sat out two more meetings in the Service's headquarters in a grand new high-rise block on the Embankment. Ned was back at his desk, the files gathering around him as giddily as if the girls in Registry had decided to erect a street barricade.
'God may move in a mysterious way,' Ned was heard to remark to his red-headed assistant Brock in a lull between deliveries, 'but it's nothing to the way He picks his joes.'
A joe in the parlance is a live source, and a live source in sane English is a spy. Was Ned referring to Landau when he spoke of joes? To Katya? To the unchristened writer of the notebooks? Or was his mind already fixed upon the vaporous outlines of that great British gentleman spy, Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair? Brock did not know or care. He came from Glasgow but of Lithuanian parents and abstract concepts made him angry.
As to myself, I had to wait another week before Ned decided with a proper reluctance that it was time to haul in old Palfrey. I've been old Palfrey since I can remember. To this day I have never understood what happened to my Christian names. 'Where's old Palfrey?' they say. 'Where's our tame ' legal eagle? Get the old law bender in! Better chuck this one at Palfrey!'
I am quickly dealt with. You need not stumble on me long. Horatio Benedict dePalfrey are My names but you may forget the first two immediately, and somehow no body has ever remembered the 'dc' at all. In the Service I am Harry so, quite often, being an obedient soul, I am Harry to myself, Alone in my poky little bachelor flat of an evening, I am quite inclined to call myself ' Harry while I cook my chop. Legal adviser to the illegals, that's me, and sometime junior partner to the extinct house of Mackie, Mackie & dePalfrey, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, of Chancery Lane. But that was twenty years ago. For twenty years I have been your most humble secret servant, ready at any time to rob the scales of the same blind goddess whom my young heart was brought up to revere.
A palfrey, I am told, was neither a warhorse nor a hunter, but a saddle horse deemed suitable for ladies. Well, there's only one little lady who ever rode this Palfrey any distance, but she rode him nearly to his grave and her name was Hannah. And it was because of Hannah that I scurried for shelter inside the secret citadel where passion has no place, where the walls are so thick I cannot hear her beating fists or tearful voice imploring me to let her in and brave the scandal that so terrified a young solicitor at the threshold of a respectable career.
Hope in my face and nothing-in my heart, she said. A wiser woman might have kept such observations to herself, it has always seemed to me. Sometimes the truth is by way of being a self-indulgence. 'Then why do you pursue a hopeless case?' I would protest to her. 'If the patient is dead, why keep trying to revive him?'