Ignoring the question, Charlie said, ‘An attempt is to be made to steal the Romanov Collection, currently on display in Palm Beach, in Florida.’
‘Who is this?’ demanded the voice again.
‘Ensure that the information reaches Comrade General Valery Kalenin,’ said Charlie, and replaced the receiver.
He returned to the car, going back south along the coast road. It had been seven years, he reflected. Nearly eight, in fact. Would Kalenin still be the operational head of the K.G.B.? Charlie had liked the squat, burly Russian during their meetings in Vienna and Prague, when he had determined upon the retribution against those who had tried to have him killed. Then Kalenin had agreed that the only bait big enough to lure the British and American Directors to Vienna would be for the head of the Russian service to appear to be a defector.
‘You’ll regret doing it, afterwards,’ Kalenin had warned him, when there had still been time for the whole thing to be called off.
‘They were willing to let me die,’ Charlie had argued. ‘I shan’t be sorry.’
But he had been wrong, he admitted to himself, turning the hire car back across the bridge towards Palm Beach. There had rarely been a day when he and Edith had been on the run when he hadn’t remembered what the K.G.B. chief had said. And after Edith had died, during the time when the British and the Americans had come so close to catching him, that regret had changed to abject remorse. If it hadn’t been for Willoughby, Charlie sometimes wondered if it would not have eventually become suicidal.
Reminded of Willoughby’s friendship, Charlie thought again of what he had asked Clarissa to do. By the time anything happened, she would be miles away, at Lyford Cay, he decided. That offered a little reassurance: no matter what the justification, it was no way to repay Willoughby’s help. He continued the reflection, snorting at his own hypocrisy. If he were completely honest, he would admit to being a willing bed partner, too.
‘You’re a shit, Charlie,’ he told himself as he parked the car outside the hotel. ‘A proper shit.’
He heard movement through the open, linking door of their suites as soon as he entered his own rooms. At the sound of his door closing, she came through, smiling at him. She had been swimming. Her wet hair was coiled back with a band and she still wore the bathing wrap in which she had come from the pool. Without make-up she looked very young.
‘Wonderful news,’ she said eagerly.
‘What?’
‘I met that man Pendlebury. He was in the bar by the pool and spoke to me. We chatted and then he asked me where you were and I said working because you were worried and when he asked why I said because you thought there might be an attempt on the collection… isn’t that fabulous?’
Her words tumbled out in her excitement, which gradually diminished at the look on his face.
‘What is it, darling?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ said Charlie. ‘I was just reminded of something that had occurred to me coming back in the car.’
She came further into the room, putting out her arms to hold his. ‘That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what I wanted.’
‘You don’t sound pleased.’
Knowing her need for reassurance, he pulled her close and kissed her forehead.
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘I’m very pleased.’
She clung to him and Charlie stood, staring out over her head to the view at which he had been looking when the idea about the Russians had come to him three hours earlier.
Survival – his own, personal, unhindered safety – had always been the motivating force in Charlie’s life. He had conceded that, to himself, very early in his operational career and then defended it, later, when others had recognised the trait and criticised the lengths he was prepared to go for it. There had, of course, been the proper awareness and a proper regret that people sometimes had to suffer, but Charlie had rarely been troubled by any lasting conscience, perhaps because usually people he was exploiting were in the same profession and would not have been concerned at doing the same to him.
But suddenly it wasn’t easy any more. He pulled Clarissa away from him, kissing her lightly on the forehead again. He didn’t think he was going very much to enjoy living with the sort of conscience he had now.
Jack Pendlebury sat unmoving in a chair in his sitting room, two floors below Charlie Muffin, considering what the woman had told him. He decided that Clarissa Willoughby was stupid. And that therefore the information had been volunteered unwittingly.
He was connected to Warburger within minutes and as soon as he told the Director the reason for the call, War-burger brought Bowler on the line in a conference call.
‘Kill him,’ said Warburger immediately.
‘But at the proper time,’ argued Pendlebury, content with the idea that had come to him.
‘That’s now,’ insisted Bowler.
‘No,’ said Pendlebury. ‘My way we get an indictment for murder against Terrilli.’
14
General Valery Kalenin was a short, square-bodied Georgian considered unique within the Kremlin and therefore regarded by some with awe, by others with suspicion and by nearly everyone with respect. He had come unscathed through the Stalin era, even during the purges of the Intelligence departments which had followed Lavrenti Beria’s fall from favour and survived, too, the apparent liberalisation under Khrushchev, which in reality had been nothing of the sort. He had achieved this not by sycophancy, even in Stalin’s time when the attitude was considered essential, because he regarded sycophancy as the surest way to disaster. It had even come to as adept a toady as Beria.
Kalenin had survived by absolute and utter dedication to his job, thus creating an efficiency unparalleled in any other department of Soviet government, and because the majority of Soviet government is clogged by bureaucracy this increased his prestige.
That he was able to show such dedication was possible because of the unusual sort of person he was. A bachelor with a brilliant, calculating mind, he had absolutely no social ability, and because of some psychological quirk, which he accepted without regret because he didn’t know what he was missing, he had no sexual inclination, either male or female. This lack of interest was usually obvious to both sexes, heightening the regard in which he was held, because other men in Kalenin’s position invariably used their power for personal indulgences. Beria had actually created a squad of men to kidnap pubescent virgins off the streets of Moscow.
With virtually nothing to distract him apart from his absorption in the history of tank warfare, in which he was an acknowledged expert, Kalenin’s entire existence was devoted to the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, and within the K.G.B. itself he was a revered figure. He worked sixteen hours a day either in their headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, a grey stone building which before the Revolution had belonged to the All-Russian Insurance Company, or in any of the capitals of the Warsaw Pact, of which he was over-all Intelligence commander, no matter what lip-service was made to the pretence of separate, national identity. Any surplus time was spent organising solitary war games with his toy tanks on the kitchen floor of his apartment in Kutuzovsky Prospekt and it was during this relaxation that he occasionally regretted the absence of friends. Even though he was scrupulously fair, never cheating with the dice, it was always difficult to perform as leader of both sides.
Normally something as minuscule as an anonymous telephone call to a foreign embassy would not have been forwarded for his personal attention, because Kalenin regarded delegation as an essential part of efficiency. But it was not normal for anonymous telephone callers to refer by name to the head of the K.G.B., for as with sex, Kalenin was entirely uninterested in fame or notoriety, actually going to extensive lengths to conceal his identity throughout the Eastern bloc and taking absolute care that it was not known in the West.