‘And you’re one of them?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I thought you were just his mistress.’
‘Nothing more?’
‘Yes. I’ve begun to think something more. But you knew what he looked like — you couldn’t have been one of my contacts.’
‘I wasn’t supposed to know Graham at all. That was just sheer chance.’
‘You’re telling me you were an agent with him — you realise that? — with the KGB?’
‘You knew it,’ she said, gazing down at the coffee pot. Then she pulled her hair to either side of her ears and looked up at me, standing terribly straight, with an expression of royalty taking the salute on a parade ground. ‘Why carry on this farce, the pretence? You knew — either from Graham himself when they caught him in London, or some other way.’
‘Some other way. I told you, Graham never mentioned any women. I heard nothing about you in England. I explained all that to you as well.’
‘Yes, I believed you — that, and the fact that you wanted none of the whole business. It struck me all along — that you were some kind of fall-guy, forced into the whole thing.’
‘Maybe. But why do you tell me that you’re a KGB agent? That’s more important. Why not get hold of your Russian contacts here, and tell them about me: that I’m impersonating a KGB officer. They’d be interested in that.’
‘I don’t have any contacts here. That’s why.’
‘Funny kind of agent.’
‘Yes.’ She stopped dead, passing the ball to me.
‘Well, there you are — that’s just it: you’ve confirmed something I suspected. But there must be so much more —’
‘Oh, the CIA could get the rest out of me. No trouble, don’t you think?’
‘Exactly. So why tell me? Without any prompting. No agent ever does that. I’m on the other side, even as a fall-guy, you knew that. It doesn’t make sense. You trusted me. Why? That you never do in our business. Never.’
‘You trusted me, didn’t you? — not telling them, or Guy, about Graham and me. And saying nothing about the letters. It’s quite simple. And that meal we had — watching you — watching you eat as if it hadn’t been for years. Looking at you. Talking with you.’ Then she came back and leant over the table, looking at me carefully. ‘About Rip Van Winkle, and my marriage — remember? And Women’s Lib. And before lunch — drinking, that Pernod or whatever, munching olives. It was pretty easy to trust you. And even easier, remembering you were George Graham. And wanting him.’
I remembered Guy’s talk about how she had married him on the rebound. And it was the same with me, finding me that way as well. And I thought then that it was all too neat, too convenient: she’s only playing, pretending trust: she wants to find out more about me before telling her Russian contacts, before turning me over.
She took up the coffee tray. ‘I can see you don’t believe it all — you’re looking for the flaw. But there isn’t any. Not for us. There needn’t be because neither of us are playing that game — not involved in the big league. You’ve something else on your mind altogether and I’ve very little left to do now. So don’t you see? — if we trust each other we’ll both get out of it in one piece.’
‘Why — why that trust in me?’
‘We’re both more or less transparent to the other — don’t you see that? That’s why.’
I half saw … ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m no professional. But I know one thing about the business — they don’t let you out of it once you’re in. Least of all the KGB. Besides, to be with them in the first place, for them to have taken you on — you of all people — you must have believed in everything, hook, line and sinker. You surely don’t give all that up so easily — least of all just because your lover has disappeared. It couldn’t have been so weak a thing with you — so lightly to throw it away now.’
She moved towards the door. I could hear footsteps coming towards the kitchen. ‘We can talk,’ she said. ‘There’s the whole weekend.’ She left the room.
Yes, she thought, that night in bed, he was right: it was no weak thing and I cannot, will not lightly throw it all away. But I must get out of this — not lose the belief, but the hell of believing and not being able to live or share it any more.
Her two lives — political and emotional, both secret — now had no reality for her, were dead. With George, for more than six years, she had shared them both and could have lived that way well with him in the future. But there was no one now. He was gone. And her position with Alexei Flitlianov, whom she saw very rarely, was no more than that of post-mistress for his organisation, a safe repository for the letters that came to her private mailbox which she held under another name at Grand Central post office in New York — letters with envelopes inside which contained the coded names of the recruits for his clandestine agency within the KGB, in which George had been his principal overseas deputy.
She had been nowhere near the mailbox in New York since the day she’d met Graham’s double at the UN, for she had to assume the worst — that they had found out about this poste-restante address from Graham in London, which he had used in writing to her — and would be watching it now, waiting to see who picked the mail up. And she had no way of contacting Alexei in Moscow. That contact was always one-way — a marked envelope in the box which she then opened. There was no other contact — George had been her only unofficial connection with Flitlianov’s group, a connection which Alexei had never known about.
Thus she held the key, the master plan to the whole secret organisation within the KGB. And the group had now been penetrated by the British, of all people, and she was quite helpless to do anything about it, to warn anybody — for that had never been an expected part of her job since, apart from Alexei, she was never supposed to know the identity of anyone else involved in it. And she never would have done except for the chance of meeting Graham six years before in London.
Of course, she should never have confided in George Graham. They should have stayed just lovers. Why had love made her so sure — and so stupid? Alexei had left her, almost fifteen years before in Beirut, with clear instructions: tell no one, ever, of her position; do nothing, ever, which might draw attention to her real beliefs. If anything ever went wrong in picking up the letters from Alexei she would have to deal with it herself — she was never to try and contact him. He had told her quite clearly that afternoon nearly fifteen years ago when he had bought them both a little cigarette pipe and driven round the hills above Beirut — warned her that she would take no risk at all in the work she wanted to do other than one major risk: immediate and complete exposure which she would have no warning of if the KGB, or anyone else, discovered her poste-restante address. Did she realise that? Was she so sure she wanted the task? … Yes, she realised all that, she wanted the task.
She and Alexei had been talking on the way to Bhamdoun, circling up the hill roads from the coast, the car windows all wide open, gradually feeling the increasing sharpness of the spring air as they rose higher towards the mountains. Beirut had been damply hot with the onset of summer, people oppressed and sweating already at ten o’clock in the café on Hamra where they had met that morning in the city.
They drove for an hour and when they were high enough from the sea where the air was warm without damp or chill, and there was a sudden view down a small rocky valley — a ruined orchard, it seemed, of feathery scrub and old olive trees — they stopped, parking just off the road, and tried their cigarette pipes. They looked ridiculous smoking them — amateur comedians experimenting with a hopeless act — the long American cigarettes sticking up vertically about their eyebrows, shuddering up and down, their teeth chattering as they laughed.