The Russia House

Because she was a woman, seemed to be the answer. Because she believed in the redemption of male souls. Because I had not paid enough for being inadequate.

But I have paid now, believe me.

It is because of Hannah that I walk the secret corridors to this day, calling my cowardice duty and my weakness sacrifice. It is because of Hannah that I sit here late at night, in my grey box of an office with LEGAL on the door, files and tapes and films stacked around me like the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce without the pink string, while I draft our official whitewash,of the operation we called the Bluebird and of its protagonist, Bartholomew, alias Barley, Scott Blair.

It is because of Hannah also that even while he scribbles at his exculpation this old Palfrey now and then puts down his pen and lifts his head and dreams.

Niki Landau's recall to the British colours, if he had ever seriously abandoned them, took place exactly forty-eight hours after the notebooks hit Ned's desk. Ever since his miserable passage through Whitehall, Landau had been sick with anger and mortification. He hadn't gone to work, he hadn't bothered with his little flat in Golders Green which he normally buffed and pampered as if it were the lantern of his life. Not even Lydia could rouse him from his melancholy. I myself had hastily arranged the Home Office warrant to tap his phone. When she telephoned, wit listened to him putting her off. And-when she made a tragic appearance at his front door, our watchers reported that he let her stay for a cup of tea and then dismissed her.

'I don't know what I've done wrong but whatever it is, I'm sorry,' they heard her remark sadly as she left.

She was hardly in the street before Ned rang. Afterwards Landau shrewdly wondered to me whether that was a coincidence.

'Niki Landau?' Ned enquired in a voice you didn't feel like fooling with.

'I could be,' said Landau, sitting up straight.

'My name's Ned. I think we have a mutual friend. No need to mention names. You kindly dropped a letter in for him the other day. Rather against the odds, I'm afraid. A package too.'

Landau thrilled to the voice immediately. Capable and commanding. The voice of a good officer, not a cynic, Harry.

'Well, yes, I did,' he said, but Ned was already talking again.

'I don't think we need to go into a lot of details over the telephone, but I do think you and I need to have a long chat and I think we need to shake your hand. Rather soon. When can we do that?'

'Whenever you say,' said Landau. And had to stop himself from saying 'sir'.

'I always think now's a good time. How do you feel about that?'

'I feel a whole lot better, Ned,' said Landau with a grin in his, voice.

'I'm going to send a car for you. Won't be at all long, so perhaps you'd just stay where you are and wait for your front doorbell to ring. It's a green Rover, B registration. The driver's name is Sam. If you're worried, ask him to show you his card. If you're still worried, phone the number on it. Think you'll manage?'

'Our friend's all right, is he?' said Landau, unable to resist asking, but Ned had rung off.

The doorbell pealed a couple of minutes afterwards. They had the car waiting round the corner, thought Landau as he floated downstairs in a dream. This is it. I'm in the hands of the professionals. The house was in smart Belgravia, one of a terrace recently restored. Its newly painted white front glistened wholesomely at him in the evening sun. A palace of excellence, a shrine to the secret powers that rule our lives. A polished- brass sign on the pillared doorway said FOREIGN LIAISON STAFF. The door was already opening as Landau climbed the steps. And as the uniformed janitor closed it behind him Landau saw a slender, straight-built man in his early forties advance towards 'him through the sunbeams, first the trim silhouette, then the no-nonsense handsome healthy features, then the hand shake: discreet but loyal as a naval salute.

'Well done, Niki. Come on in.'

Good voices do not always belong to good faces, but Ned's did. As Landau followed him into the oval study, he felt he could say anything in the world to him, and Ned would still be on his side. Landau in fact saw a whole lot of things in Ned that he liked at once, which was Ned's Pied Piper gift: the careful charm, the restrained good looks, the power of ' quiet leadership and the 'Come on in.' Landau also sniffed the polyglot in him, for he was one himself. He had only to drop a Russian name or phrase for Ned to reach out for it and smile, and match it with a phrase of his own. He was one of us, Harry. If you had a secret, this was the man to tell it to, not that flunkey in the Foreign Office.

But then Landau had not realised, until he began talking, hi;w desperately he had been needing to confide. He opened his mouth, he was away. All he could do from then on was listen to himself in amazement, because he wasn't just talking about Katya and the notebooks, and why he had accepted them, and how he had hidden them, but about his whole life till now, his confusions about being a Slav, his love of Russia despite everything, and his feeling of being suspended between two cultures. Yet Ned did not lead him or check him in any way. He was a born listener. He hardly stirred except to write himself neat notes on bits of card, and if he interrupted, it was only to clear up a rare point of detail - the moment at Sheremetyevo, for example, when Landau was waved through to the departure lounge without a glance.

'Now did all your group receive that treatment or only you?'

'The lot of us. One nod, we were through.'

'You didn't feel singled out in any way?'

'What for?'

'You didn't have the impression you might be getting a different kind of treatment from other people? A better one, for instance?'

'We went through like a bunch of sheep. A flock,' Landau corrected himself. 'We handed in our visas, that was it.'

'Were other groups going through at the same rate, did you notice?'

'The Russkies didn't seem to be bothering at all. Maybe it was the summer Saturday. Maybe it was the glasnost. They pulled a few out to inspect and let the others through. I felt a fool, to be truthful. I didn't need to have taken the precautions that I did.'

'You were no sort of fool. You did marvellously,' said Ned, without a hint of patronising while he wrote again. 'And on the plane, who did you sit next to, remember?'

'Spikey Morgan.'

'Who else?'

'No one. I had the window.'

'Which seat was that?'

Landau knew the seat number off pat. It was the one he pre-booked whenever he could.

'Did you talk much on the flight?'

'Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.'

'What about?'

'Women, mainly. Spikey's moved in with a pair of freewheelers in Notting Hill.'

Ned gave a pleasant laugh. 'And did you tell Spikey about the notebooks? In your relief, Niki? It would have been perfectly natural in the circumstances. To confide.'

'I wouldn't dream of it, Ned. Not to a soul. I never did, I never will. I'm only telling you because he's vanished and you're official.'

'How about Lydia?'

The offence to Landau's dignity momentarily outweighed his admiration of Ned, and even his surprise at Ned's familiarity with his affairs.

'My ladies, Ned, they know a little about me. They may even think they know more than they do,' he replied. 'But they do not share my secrets because they are not invited to.'

Ned continued writing. And somehow the trim movement of the pen, coupled with the suggestion that he could have been indiscreet, provoked Landau into chancing his hand, because he had noticed already. that every time he started to talk about Barley, a kind of freeze settled over Ned's quietly reassuring features.

'And Barley's really all right, is he? He hasn't had an accident or anything?'

Ned seemed not to hear. He took a fresh card and resumed his writing.

'I suppose Barley would have used the Embassy, wouldn't he?' said Landau. 'Him being a professional. Barley. It's the chess that gives him away, if you want to know. He shouldn't play it, in my opinion. Not in public.'

Then and only then did Ned's head rise slowly from the page. And Landau saw a stony expression in his face that was more frightening than his words. 'We never mention names like that, Niki,' said Ned very quietly. 'Not even among ourselves. You couldn't know, so you've done nothing wrong. just please don't do it again.'

Then seeing perhaps the effect that he had had on Landau, he got up and strolled to a satinwood side table and poured two glasses of sherry from a decanter and handed one to Landau. 'And yes, he's all right,' he said.

So they drank a silent toast to Barley, whose name Landau had by then sworn to himself ten times already would never again cross his lips.

'We don't want you to go to Gdansk next week,' said Ned. 'We've arranged a medical certificate and compensation for you. You're ill. Suspected ulcer. And stay away from work in the meantime, do you mind?'

'I'll do whatever you say,' said Landau.

But before he left he signed a declaration of the Official Secrets Act while Ned benignly looked on. It's a weaselly document in legal terms, calculated to impress the signatory and no one else. But then the Act itself is scarcely a credit to its drafters either.

After that, Ned switched off the microphones and the hidden video cameras that the twelfth floor had insisted on because it was becoming that kind of operation.

And this far, Ned did everything alone, which was his good right as head of the Russia House. - Fieldmen are nothing if not loners. He didn't even call in old Palfrey to read the riot act. Not yet.

If Landau had felt neglected until that afternoon, for the rest of the week he was swamped with attention. Early the next morning, Ned telephoned asking him with his customary courtesy to present himself to an address in Pimlico. It turned out to be a 1930s block of flats, with curved steel-framed windows painted green and an entrance that should have led to a cinema. In the presence of two men whom he did not introduce, Ned took Landau crisply through his story a second time, then threw him to the wolves.