She didn't like my being duly touched. "Did you ever discuss Checheyev with him?"
I had given up expressing shock to her. "Of course not. Checheyev was officially cultural and under deep cover, whereas Zorin was declared to us as the diplomat with intelligence responsibility. The last thing I wanted to do was suggest to Zorin that we had rumbled Checheyev. I could have compromised Larry."
"What sort of international fraud did you discuss?"
"Particular cases? None. It was a matter of establishing future links between our investigators and theirs. Bringing honest men together, we called it. Zorin was old school. He yoked like something out of the October Parade."
"I see."
I waited. So did she. But she waited longer. I am back with Zorin for our farewell drink in Shepherd Market. Till now it was always the Office's whisky that we drank. Today it is in Zorin's vodka. Before us on the table stands the shining silver hip flask embellished with the red insignia of his service."
"I am not sure what future we may drink to now, Friend Timothy," he confesses with an uncharacteristic show of humility. "Perhaps you will propose an appropriate toast for us."
So I proposed the Russian word for order, knowing that order, not progress, was what the old Communist soldier loved the best. So order is what we drink to, at our net-curtained second-floor window, while the shoppers come and go below us, and the tarts eye their customers from doorways, and the music shop blasts out its mayhem.
"The questions put to you by the police about Larry's business dealings," Marjorie Pew was saying.
"Yes, Marjorie."
"They didn't jog your memory at all?"
"I assumed the police had got the wrong man as usual. Larry is an infant about business. My section was forever sorting out his tax returns, expenses, overdrafts, and unpaid electricity bills."
"You don't think that might have been cover."
"Covering what?"
I didn't like her shrug. "Covering hidden money he had acquired and didn't want anyone to know about," she said. "Covering a good business head."
"Absolutely not."
"Is it your theory that Checheyev is in some way linked to Larry's disappearance?"
"It's not my theory; it was what the police seemed to be suggesting."
"So you don't think Checheyev's presence in Bath is of any significance?"
"I don't have an opinion in this, Marjorie; how can I have? Larry and Checheyev were close. I know that. They had a mutual admiration society going. I know that. Whether they still have is quite another question." I saw my chance and took it. "I don't even know when Checheyev's visits to Bath are supposed to have taken place."
But she refused to take the bait. "You don't think it possible Larry and Checheyev have entered into a business arrangement, for instance? Of any kind? Never mind what?"
Wanting someone to share my irritation, I again glanced at Barney, but he was playing possum.
"No. Absolutely not," I said. "As I told the police, several times." And I added, "Out of the question."
"Why?"
I did not like being made to repeat myself. "Because Larry never gave a hoot about money and had absolutely no head for business. He called his Office pay his Judas money. He felt bad taking it. He felt—"
"And Checheyev?"
I was getting sick of her interrupting me too. "Checheyev what?"
"Did he have a business head?"
"Absolutely not. He rejected it. Capitalism ... profit ... money as motive—he hated all of it."
"You mean he was above it?"
"Below it. Whatever."
"Too truthful? Too honest? You accept the Larry view of him?"
"It's the pride of the gortsy that money buys nothing in the mountains. Greed makes a man stupid, they say." I was quoting Larry again. "Manhood and honour are all that count. It's probably romantic nonsense, but that was the line he pushed with Larry, and Larry was duly impressed by it." I'd had enough. "I'm not a feature in this, Marjorie. Larry's retired, so's Checheyev, so am I. I thought you should know that Checheyev had visited Larry in Bath and that Larry had disappeared. If you didn't know already. Why is anybody's guess."
"But you're not anybody, are you? You're the expert on the Larry-Checheyev relationship—whether you're retired or not."
"The only experts on that relationship are Larry and Checheyev."
"But didn't you invent it? Control it? Isn't that what you've been doing all these years?"
"Twenty-odd years ago I engineered a relationship between Larry and the KGB head resident of the day. Under my guidance Larry trailed his coat at him, played hard to get, finally said yes, I'll spy for Moscow."
"Go on."
I was going on anyway. I didn't know why she was goading me, and I wasn't sure she knew. But if she wanted a lecture on Larry's case history, she could have it. "First came Brod. After Brod we had Miklov, then Kransky, then Sherpov, then Mislanski, finally Checheyev, and Zorin as boss but Checheyev as Larry's handler. Larry found his own way to each of them. Double agents are chameleons. Good doubles don't act their parts, they live them. They are them. When Larry was with Tim, he was with Tim. When he was with his Soviet controller, he was with his Soviet controller whether I liked it or not. My job was to make sure we were getting the best end of the deal."
"And you were confident that we were."
"In Larry's case, yes, I was."
"And you still are."
"In my retirement, recalling events in tranquility, yes, I still am. With doubles you assume a certain wastage of loyalty. The opposition is always more attractive to them than the home side. That's their nature. They're constant rebels. Larry was a rebel too. But he was our rebel."
"So Larry and his Russian case officers could have got up to anything they liked and you wouldn't have been the wiser."
"Not so."
"Why not?"
"We had collateral."
"From?"
"Other live sources. Audio surveillance. The flat of an intermediary. A restaurant we'd bugged. A car we'd nobbled. Whenever we got microphone coverage, it tallied stitch by stitch with Larry's version. We couldn't fault him. All this stuff's on file, you know."
She gave me a flinty smile and resumed her study of her hands. The momentum seemed to have gone out of her. It occurred to me that she was tired and that it was unfair of me to imagine she could read twenty years' worth of files in one weekend of crisis. She took a breath.
"You refer in one of your last reports to Larry's 'remarkable affinity' with Checheyev. Would that include areas you might not know about?"
"If I didn't know about them, how can I answer your question?"
"What did it include?"
"I've told you already. Larry appointed Checheyev his university of the North Caucasus. Larry does that. He eats people whole. When Checheyev arrived here, Larry knew as little about the region as anyone else. He had a decent general knowledge of Russia, but the people of the Caucasus are a subject apart. After a few months, he could hold forth on the Chechen, the Ossetians, the Dagestanis, the Ingush, the Circassians, the Abkhazians, the you-name-them. Checheyev handled him really well. He had an instinct for him. He could crack the whip, and he could charm him out of the trees. He was droll. He had a gallows humour. And he kept Larry's conscience ticking. Larry always had to have a ticking conscience—"
Again she interrupted me. "Are you saying that your own affinity with Larry was more remarkable?"
No, Marjorie dear, I am not saying anything of the kind. I'm saying that Larry was a love thief on a seesaw, and as soon as he'd finished enchanting Checheyev he had to race back to me and make it right, because he was not only a spy but a clergyman's son with a diminished sense of responsibility who needed everybody's absolution for betraying everybody else. I'm saying that for all his breast-beating and moralizing and supposed intellectual breadth, he took to spying like an addict. I'm saying that he was also a bastard; that he was sly and vengeful and would steal your woman as soon as look at you; that he was a natural for tradecraft and the black arts and that my sin was to promote the cheat in him above the dreamer, which is why he sometimes hated me a little more than I deserved.