The Secret Pilgrim Part 7

We both knew it was impossible. The most Head Office had ever granted me was a night spin round the island of Bornholm, and even that had been like drawing teeth.

On the Sat.u.r.day night we gathered in the farmhouse. Kazimirs and Antons Durba arrived together in the van. It was Antons's turn to go to sea. With such a small operational crew, everyone had to know everything, everyone had to be interchangeable. There was no more drink. From now on, they were a dry ship. Kazimirs had brought lobsters. He cooked them elaborately, with a sauce that he was famous for, while Bella played cabin girl to him, fetching and carrying and being decorative. When we had eaten, Bella cleared the table and I spread the charts under the hanging overhead lamp; Brandt had said six days. It was an optimistic guess. From the Kieler Forde the Daisy would make for open sea, pa.s.sing Bornholm on the Swedish side. On reaching the Swedish island of Gotland she would put in at Sundre on the southern tip, refuel and top up her provisions. While refuelling, she would be approached by two men, one of whom would ask if they had any herring. They were to reply: "Only in tins. There have been no herring in these waters for years."

All such exchanges sound fatuous in cold blood, and this one reduced Antons and Kazimirs to fits of nervous laughter. Returning from the kitchen, Bella joined in.

One of the men would then ask to come aboard, I continued. He was an expert - I did not say in sabotage, because the crew had mixed feelings on the matter. His name for the trip would be Volodia. He would be carrying a leather suitcase and, in his coat pocket, a brown b.u.t.ton and a white b.u.t.ton as proof of his good faith. If he did not know his name, or carried no suitcase, or did not produce the b.u.t.tons, they were to put him back on sh.o.r.e alive, but return to Kiel at once. There was an agreed radio signal for this eventuality. Otherwise they should make no signals whatever. A moment's silence gripped us, and I heard the sound of Bella's bare feet on the brick floor as she fetched more firewood.

From Gotland they should head northeast through international waters, I said, and steer a central course up the Gulf of Finland, until they were lying off the island of Hogland, where they should idle till dusk, then head due south for Narva Bay, reckoning to make landfall by midnight.

I had brought large-scale charts of the Bay and photographs of the sandy coastline. I spread them on the table and the men gathered to my side to look at them. As they did so, something made me glance up and I caught sight of Bella, curled up in her own corner of the room,, her excited eyes full upon me in the firelight.

I showed them the point on the beach that the Zodiac should make for, and the point on the headland where they should watch for signals. The landing party would be wearing ultra-violet gla.s.ses, I said; the Estonian reception party would be using an ultra-violet lamp. Nothing would be visible to the naked eye. After the pa.s.senger and his suitcase had been landed, the dinghy should wait no more than two minutes for any possible replacement before heading back for the Daisy at full speed. The dinghy should be crewed by one man only, so that if necessary he could take a second pa.s.senger on the return run. I recited the recognition signals to be exchanged with the reception party, and this time n.o.body laughed. I gave the shelving and gradients of the landing beach. There would be no moon. Bad weather was expected, and surely hoped for. Bella brought us tea, brushing carelessly against us as she set out the mugs. It was as if she were harnessing her s.e.xuality to our cause. Reaching Brandt, who was still stooped over the beach chart, she gravely caressed his broad back with both her hands as if filling him with her youthful strength.

I returned to my flat at five in the morning with no thought of sleep. In the afternoon I rode with Brandt and Bella to Blankenese in the van. Antons and Kazimirs had been with the boat all day. They were dressed for the voyage, in bobble hats and oilskin trousers. Orange life jackets were airing on the deck. Shaking hands with each man in turn, I pa.s.sed round the sea proofed capsules that contained their lethal pills of pure cyanide. A grey drizzle was falling; the little quay was deserted. Brandt walked to the gangway, but when Bella made to follow him, he stopped her.

"No more," he told her. "You stay with Ned."

She was wearing his old duffle coat, and a woollen hat with earflaps, which I suspected she had been wearing when he rescued her. He kissed her and she hugged him till he pushed her off and went aboard, leaving her at my side. Antons stepped into the engine house and we heard the engine cough and come to life. Brandt and Kazimirs cast off. n.o.body looked at us any more. The Daisy cleared the quay and headed sedately for the centre of the river. The three men's backs remained turned against us. We heard the hoot of her ship's horn, and watched her until she had slipped behind the curtain of grey mist.

Like abandoned children, Bella and I walked hand in hand up the ramp to Brandt's parked van. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us had anything to say. I glanced back for a last sight of the Daisy, but the mist had swallowed her. I looked at Bella and saw that her eyes were unusually bright, and that she was breathing fast.

"He'll be all right," I a.s.sured her, releasing her hand while I unlocked the door. "They're very experienced. He's a great man:" Even in German, it sounded rather silly.

She got into the van beside me and took back my hand. Her fingers were like separate lives inside my palm. Get alongside her, Haydon had kept insisting. In my most recent signal, I had a.s.sured him I would try.

At first we drove in companionable silence, joined and separated by our shared experience. I was driving cautiously because I was taut, but my hand still held hers to give her comfort, and when I was obliged to take a firmer grasp of the steering wheel, I saw that her hand stayed beside me, fingers upward, waiting for me to come back. Suddenly I was terribly concerned about where to take her. Absurdly so. I thought of an elegant bas.e.m.e.nt restaurant with tiled alcoves where I took my banking joes. The elderly waiters would provide her with the kind of rea.s.surance she needed. Then I remembered she was wearing Brandt's duffle coat, jeans and rubber boots. I was no better dressed myself. So where? I wondered anxiously. It was getting late. Through the mist, lights were coming on in the cottages.

"Are you hungry?" I asked.

She put her hand back on her lap.

"Should I find us somewhere to eat?" I asked.

She shrugged.

"Shall I take you to the farmhouse?" I suggested.

"What for?"

"Well I mean, how are you going to spend the next few days? What did you do the last time he was away?"

"I rested from him," she said, with a laugh I had not expected.

"Then tell me how you would like to wait for him," I suggested magnanimously, with a hint of rank. "Do you prefer to be alone? Meet up with other exiles and have gossips? What's best?"

"It's not important," she said, and moved away from me.

"Tell me all the same. Help me."

"I shall go to cinemas. Look at shops. Read magazines. I shall listen to music. Try to study. Get bored."

I decided on the safe flat. There would be food in the fridge, I told myself. Give her a meal, a drink, get her talking. Then either drive her to the farmhouse or send her by cab.

We entered the city. I parked two streets away from the safe flat and took her arm as we walked along the tree-lined pavement. I would have done the same for any woman in a dark street, but there was something disturbing about feeling her bare arm inside Brandt's sleeve. The city was unfamiliar to me. In the lighted windows of the houses, people talked and laughed as if we didn't exist. She clasped my arm and drew my hand against her breast - to be precise, the underside of it, I could feel its shape precisely through the layers of clothing. I was remembering the Circus bar-room jokes about certain officers who picked up their best intelligence in bed. I was remembering Haydon asking me whether she had good t.i.ts. I felt ashamed, and took back my hand.

There was a man-door to one side of the cemetery gates. As I unlocked it and ushered her ahead of me, she turned and kissed me on the eyes, one after the other, while she held my face in both her hands. I gripped her waist and she seemed weightless. She was very happy. I could see her smile by the yellow cemetery lights.

"Everyone is dead," she whispered excitedly. "But we are alive."

I went ahead of her up the stairs. Halfway, I looked back to make sure she was following me. I was scared that she might have changed her mind. I was scared altogether-not because I was without experience-thanks to Mabel I was not-but because I knew already that I was encountering a different category of woman from any I had known before. She was standing right behind me, holding her shoes in her hands, still smiling.

I opened the door for her. She stepped through and kissed me again, laughing in merriment, just as if I had lifted her up and carried her across the threshold on our wedding day. I remembered stupidly that Russians never shake hands in doorways, and perhaps Latvians didn't either, and perhaps her kisses were some kind of ceremony of exorcism. I would have asked her, except that, near enough, I had lost my voice. I closed the door, then crossed the room to turn up the fire, an electric convector affair which, as long as the room was cold, blew out warm air with enormous vigour, but afterwards only fitfully, like an old dog dreaming.

I went to the kitchen to fetch some wine. When I returned she had disappeared and the light was on under the bathroom door. I set the table carefully with knives and forks and spoons and cheese and cold meat and gla.s.ses and paper napkins and anything else that I could possibly think of, because I was taking refuge in the distancing formalities of hospitality.

The bathroom door opened and she emerged wearing Brandt's coat wrapped round her as a dressing-gown and, to judge by her bare legs, little else. Her hair was brushed. In our safe flats, we always keep a brush and comb for hospitality.

And I remember thinking that if she was as bad as Haydon seemed to think she was, it was a pretty terrible thing for her to be wearing Brandt's coat in order to deceive the man she was already betraying; and a pretty terrible thing for me to be the man she had selected, while my agents were heading for high danger with lethal pills in their coat pockets. But I had no sense of guilt. I mention this in order to try to explain that my mind was zigzagging in any number of directions in its effort to still my desire for her.

I kissed her and took off her coat, and I never saw before or since anyone so beautiful. And the truth is that, at that moment and at that age, I had not yet acquired the power to distinguish between truth and beauty. They were one and the same to me, and I could only feel awe for her. If I had ever suspected her of anything, the sight of her naked body convinced me of her innocence.

After that, the images of my memory must tell you their own tale. Even today I see us as two other people, never as ourselves.

Bella naked by the half light of the fire, lying on her side as I had first seen her by the fire in the farmhouse. I had fetched the duvet from the bedroom.

"You're so beautiful," she whispered.

It had not occurred to me that I could fill her with a comparable wonder.

Bella at the window, the light from the cemetery making a perfect statue of her body, gilding her fleece and drawing light patterns on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Bella kissing Ned's face, hundreds of small kisses as she brings him back to life. Bella laughing at the limitless beauty of herself, and of the two of us together. Bella taking laughter into love, a thing that had never happened to me before, until every part of each of us was a matter for celebration, to be kissed and suckled and admired in its own way.

Bella turning away from Ned to offer herself, thrusting back to accept him as she continues whispering to him. Her whispering stops. She begins her ascent, arching backward until she is upright. And suddenly she is crying out, crying to me and the dead, and she is the most living thing on earth.

Ned and Bella calm at last, standing at the window and gazing down into the graveyard.

There is Mabel, I say, but it seems too early to get married.

"It is always too early," she replies as we start to make love again.

Bella in the bath and myself crammed happily against the taps the other end while she lazily fondles me under the water and talks about her childhood.

Bella on the duvet, drawing my head between her legs.

Bella above me, riding me.

Bella kneeling over me, her secret garden open to my face as she transports me to places I have never imagined, not even lying in my wretched single bed, dreaming over and over of this moment and trying with far too little knowledge to ward off the unknown.

And betweenwhiles you may see Ned dozing on Bella's breast, our untouched food still on the table that I had set so formally in self-protection. With a mind made lucid by our lovemaking, I ask whatever else I can think of that will satisfy Bill Haydon's curiosity, and my own.

I drove her home and reached my flat around seven in the morning. In no mood to sleep for the second night running, I sat down and wrote my encounter report instead, my pen flying because I was still in paradise. There was no message from the Daisy but I expected, none. Come evening, I received an interim report on her progress. She had pa.s.sed Kiel and was heading for the Kieler Forde. She would be hitting open sea in a couple of hours. I had a tame German journalist to see that night and a consular meeting in the morning, but I pa.s.sed the news in veiled terms to Bella on the telephone and promised to come to her soon, for she was determined I should visit her at the farmhouse. When Brandt returned, she said, she wanted to be able to look at all the places in the house where we had made love, and think of me. I suppose it testifies to the power of love's illusion that I found nothing underhand in this, or paradoxical. We had created a world together and she wished to have it round her when I was taken away from her. That was all. She was Brandt's girl. She expected nothing of me but my love.

When I arrived, we made straight for the long drawing room, where this time it was she who had laid the table. We sat at it quite naked, which was what she wanted. She wanted to see me among the familiar furniture. Afterwards we made love in their bed. I suppose I should have been ashamed, but I felt only the excitement of being appointed to the most secret places of their lives. "These are his hairbrushes," she said. "These are his clothes, you are on his side of the bed."

One day I will understand what this means, I thought. And then, more grimly: or is this the pleasure that she takes in betrayal? Next evening I had arranged to visit an old Pole in Lubeck who had established a clandestine correspondence with a distant nephew in Warsaw. The boy was being trained for cypher work in the Polish diplomatic service, and wanted to spy for us in exchange for resettlement in Australia. London Station was considering a direct approach to him. I returned to Hamburg and slept like the dead. Next morning, while I was still writing my report, a signal from London announced that the Daisy had successfully refuelled in Sundre and was on course for the Finnish Gulf with pa.s.senger Volodia aboard. I phoned Bella and told her all was still well, and she said, "Please come to me."

I spent the morning in the Reeperbahn police station extricating a pair of drunk British merchant sailors who had broken up a brothel, and the afternoon at a ghastly consular wives' tea party to rally support for the Week of the Political Prisoner. I wished the merchant sailors had broken up that brothel too. I arrived at the farmhouse at eight in the evening and we went straight to bed. At two in the morning the phone rang and Bella answered it. It was my cypher clerk calling me from the shipping office: a decypher yourself, flash priority; I was required at once. I drove like the wind and made the office in forty minutes. As I sat down to the codebooks, I realised that Bella's smells were on my face and hands.

The signal had been transmitted over Haydon's symbol, personal to Head of Station, Hamburg. The Daisy's landing party had come under heavy fire from prepared positions, it said. The dinghy was unaccounted for, and so was everyone aboard it, which meant Antons Durba and his pa.s.senger, and very likely whoever was waiting on the beach. There was no word of the Estonian patriots. The Daisy had sighted ultra-violet-light signals from the sh.o.r.e, but only one completed series of the agreed pattern, and the a.s.sumption was that the Estonian team had been taken captive as soon as they had lured the landing party to its fate. It was a familiar story, even if it was five years old. The fallback radio in Tallinn was not replying.

I was to pa.s.s this information to n.o.body and return to London on the first flight of the morning. A seat had been reserved for me. Toby Esterhase would meet me at Heathrow. I drafted an acknowledgement and handed it to my clerk, who accepted it without comment. He knows, I thought. How could he not? He had telephoned me at the farmhouse and spoken to Bella. The rest he could see in my face and, for all I knew, he could smell it too.

This time there was no joss burning in Haydon's room and he was sitting at his desk. Roy Bland, his Head of Eastern Europe, sat one side of him, Toby Esterhase the other. Toby's jobs were never easily defined, for he liked to keep them vague in the hope that they would multiply. But in practice he was Haydon's poodle, a role which later cost him dear. And I was surprised to see George Smiley sitting unhappily apart from them on the edge of Haydon's chaise longue; even if the symbolism of his posture did not dawn on me till three years later.

"It's an inside job," Haydon said without preliminaries. "The mission was blown sky high in advance. If Durba hasn't gone down with the ship, he's already swinging by his thumbs, telling his all. Volodia doesn't know a lot, but that may be his tough luck, because his interrogators aren't going to believe him and he's got a hamper full of explosives to explain. Maybe he took the pill, but I doubt it-he's a ninny."

"Where's Brandt?" I said.

"Sitting under a bright light in the Sarratt interrogation wing and roaring like a bull. Somewhere somebody blundered. We're asking Brandt whether it might possibly be him. If not, who? It's a carbon-copy f.u.c.k-up from the last time round. Each member of the crew is being grilled separately."

"Where's the Daisy?"

"In Helsinki. We've put a navy crew aboard and they're under orders to get her out tonight. The Finns don't fancy being seen providing safe harbour for people teasing the Bear. If the press don't get to hear about it, it'll be a b.l.o.o.d.y miracle."

"I see," I said stupidly.

"Good. I don't. What do we do? You tell me. You've got thirty Baltic agents waiting on your every word. What do you say? Abort? Apologise? Act natural and look busy? All suggestions gratefully acknowledged."

"The Durbas weren't conscious to the Estonian network," I objected. "Antons can't blow what he doesn't know."

"So who blew Antons, pray? Who blew the landing party, the coordinates, the beach, the time? Who set us up? We asked Brandt the same question, funnily enough. We thought he might suggest Bella, the Baltic strumpet. He suggested it was one of us lot instead, the cheeky b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

He was furious and his fury was directed at me. I would never have imagined that lethargy could convert to such violent anger. Yet he still spoke quietly, in the nasal, upper-cla.s.s drawl he had. He still managed to remain offhand. Even in pa.s.sion he conveyed a deadly casualness, which made him all the more formidable.

"So what do you say?" he demanded of me.

"What about?"

"About her, sweetheart. Pouting Miss Latvia."

He was holding up the encounter report that I had written after our first night together. "Christ Almighty, I asked for an a.s.sessment, not a b.l.o.o.d.y aria."

"I think she's innocent," I said. "I think she's a simple peasant kid. That's my a.s.sessment. I expect it's Brandt's too. She answered my questions, she gave a plausible account of herself."

Haydon had found his charm again. He could do that at the drop of. a hat. He drew you and he repelled you. I remember that exactly. He danced all ways for you, playing your emotions against each other, because he had none of his own.

"Most spies do give a plausible account of themselves," he retorted as he turned the pages of my report. "The better ones do, anyway. Don't they, Tobe?" -favouring Esterhase.

"Absolutely, Bill. All the way, I would say," said Esterhase the pleaser.

The others had a copy too. Silence settled while they studied it, pausing at the pa.s.sages Haydon had sidelined. Roy Bland lifted his head and peered at me. Bland had lectured to us at Sarratt. He was a North Countryman and former don who had spent years behind the Curtain under academic cover. His accent was broad and very flat.

"Bella admits her father's not her father, right, Ned? Her mother was raped by the Germans and got pregnant from it, so she's half German by origin. Right, Ned?"

"Yes. Right, Roy. That's what she told me."

"So when her father, as she calls him, when Feliks comes back from prisoner-of-war camp, and hears what's happened, he adopts the child. Her. Bella. Nice of him. She, volunteered that to you. She made no secret of it. Right, Ned?"

"Yes. Right, Roy."

"Then why the f.u.c.k doesn't she tell Brandt the same tale as she tells you?"

I had asked her this myself, and so was able to answer him at once. "When he brought her to the West, she was afraid he wouldn't take her in if he knew she wasn't his best friend's natural daughter. They weren't lovers then. He was offering protection and a life. She was scared. She took it. She'd been living in the forest. It was her first time in the West. Her own father was dead, so she needed another father figure."

"Brandt, you mean?" said Bland slyly.

"Yes, of course."

"Well, don't you think it's pretty b.l.o.o.d.y odd then, Ned, that Brandt didn't know the truth about her anyway?" he demanded triumphantly. "If Brandt was her father's close buddy like he says he was, wouldn't he be bound to know all that? Come on, Ned!"

Smiley cut in, I thought in order to help me: "Brandt very probably does know, Roy. Would you tell your best friend's daughter that she was the illegitimate child of a German soldier if you thought she wasn't aware of it? I'm sure I wouldn't. I'd go to quite some lengths to protect her. Specially if the father was dead and I was in love with the daughter."

"b.u.g.g.e.r love," said Haydon, turning another page of my report. "Brandt's a randy old goat. Who's this Tadeo she keeps talking about? 'Tadeo saw the bodies being loaded into the truck. Tadeo says he saw my father's body go in last. They'd shot most of the men in the face, but my father was shot in the chest and stomach, a machine gun had nearly cut him in two.' I mean, Christ, for a wilting violet she's b.l.o.o.d.y explicit when it helps her story, I will say."

"Tadeo was her first lover," I said.

"Jealous, are we?"

Haydon asked me, drawing laughter from the satraps either side of him.

But not from Smiley. And not from me.

"Tadeo was a boy at her school," I said. "He'd been ordered to keep guard outside the house while the meeting took place, but he was making love with Bella in a field nearby. That's how she managed to escape. Tadeo told her to run for it, and who to ask for when she reached the partisans. Then he hid in a nearby house and watched what happened before joining her. It's in my report."

Toby Esterhase added his own kind of sneer, in his own kind of Austro-Hungarian English. "And Tadeo is most conveniently dead, of course, Ned. Being a witness in Bella's story is actually quite a risk business, I would say."

"He was shot by a frontier guard," I said. "He wasn't even trying to cross. He was making a reconnaissance. She has the feeling everyone she touches dies," I added, thinking involuntarily of Ben.

"She could be right, at that," said Haydon.

Perversely, it seemed to me, Roy Bland now joined in my defence - for increasingly I had the feeling I was in the dock. "Mind you, Tadeo could be kosher and wrong about Feliks's death. Maybe the police faked his death. After all, he did go into the truck last. He'd have been covered with blood anyway in that slaughterhouse. They wouldn't have needed to splash the tomato ketchup on him, would they? It would have been done for them already."

Smiley took up Bland's cudgels. I was beginning to regret I had lobbied so hard to be posted out of his care.

"Is the father really so important to us, Bill?" he objected. "Feliks can be the Judas of all time, and still have a perfectly honest daughter, can't he?"

"I believe that too," I said. "She admires her father. She has no problem talking about him. She honours him. She's still in mourning for him."