‘Maisie thinks Lena should have denounced you in 1956, Misha, she wants to know why it never happened; after all, you’d had her expelled from Hungary in ’56 and saved her life, she should have been in the building in Budapest which the secret services of the Warsaw Pact countries blew up the night before the Russian tanks returned, Lena was in touch with the resisters, sorry, the plotters, but you know that we say resisters nowadays, people in the best parts of town, enlightened communists, cosmopolitans, friends of Imre Nagy, bang! a present from Markov, thirty enlightened communist lackeys of imperialism fewer, but not Lena, gone off in a car just before, not willingly, it saved her life.
‘Maisie would like to fill a few of the little gaps in the file, she’ll interrogate you about that, and also about the year 1943 and the aftermath, you weren’t there in ’43 but apparently you know.
‘After her hysterical hand-in-the-knickers session with the one-armed man, Berg, colonel or civilian? Was he really at Hans Kappler’s funeral? Or did I dream it? Anyway, Lena had got back from Lisbon, took the first plane, in the watchers’ notes the most interesting bit was missing: the envelope, neatly slipped into Lena’s knickers.
‘The envelope was very small, microfilm of a report, on a stage in the middle of the room a fado singer almost drowns the conversation, one hand under the table, the hysterical lady returned to the United States in her splendid seaplane, with information about what was going on in Poland, a report comes from various sources, rail tracks all arriving bang in the middle of camp huts, chimney stacks, women, kids, Jews.’
Lilstein and Morel stopped when they were level with the Pont des Arts. They stare at the building of the Institut. Morel gestures to the left wing of the pile:
‘That’s where the Tour de Nesle used to be, a period which people imagine was full of tragic love affairs. For more cheerful kinds of chivalry we have another symbol, look yonder, way along there, the equestrian statue, King Henri IV. In those days … Am I boring you with my talk of kings? You’re surely not thinking of jumping into a taxi? Back from Portugal, with her microfilm, no one was prepared to believe her, apparently she got desperate, she went back in the finest plane in existence, she watched the wing through the window, a marvel of technology, they told her it’s the same wing that’s used for the big bombers that are sent over Germany, she could see herself making her report, Berg’s words, the microfilm. And now they were sending planes to bomb railway tracks in Portugal. And in Washington they just say thank you and do nothing. Don’t they believe her?
‘No, they believe her but give the issue a low priority, Lena desperate, nothing’s being done! The question is whether she kept her desperation to herself or whether she did something which was beyond her remit, do I know too much, Misha? How did I manage that? If I told you that in the end I spoke to de Vèze, would that make you happy? Can you see me having drinkies with the man who ran off with my wife? Or was it more simple, that Maisie shared her hypotheses with me? But I prefer talking about Lena, about the way she felt, about what she told her friend Max, who also talked to de Vèze from time to time, lives might have been saved thanks to her and nothing was done, maybe she had a breakdown, the future which turns into an empty-handed ghost.
‘Maisie asked what it was with Lena, so categorical in her choices, “you know, Philippe”, that’s right, Maisie calls me Philippe, occasionally “my dear Mr Morel”, but most often it’s Philippe, “you know, Philippe, I don’t trust these categorical characters, agents lose heart if they see their controllers are dragging their feet with their file and invalidating the information they supply, in which case they hand over all they know to people who are more active”.
‘To Uncle Joe, for example, Lena and Uncle Joe, that’s what Maisie suspects, at least Uncle Joe ensures the rule of order and purity, and he’s on the march, give Uncle Joe the means of getting to Poland sooner, Stalin’s no tyrant, the whole of the American press have stopped saying he’s a tyrant and are calling him Uncle Joe, because the Americans are refusing to bomb those installations, I’ll hand all I know over to Uncle Joe, everything that’s being said in Roosevelt’s entourage.
‘And so, Misha, at a given moment for one reason or another, on account of some tale about railway lines that are allowed to reach certain camps or because of some civil servant asleep on the job, your precious Lena loses confidence, runs out of respect for her colleagues, for her superiors, she didn’t betray anybody, she just started speaking more freely with a different set of people, people whom she quite liked but whose ideas she’d disliked from the very beginning, certain of your sympathisers in the United States, scientists, intellectuals.
‘She knew Roosevelt’s entourage pretty well, and she also had equally close links with all the people who might be in contact with Moscow, Maisie thinks that it was while the war was going on that certain items of intelligence material were passed to the Russians using Lena as go-between, leaks of a diplomatic nature before the Conference at Yalta for example, or even before the Tehran Conference, leaks which allowed Stalin to know just how angry he could allow himself to get, and what quantities of equipment they were prepared to let him have, or basic verbal suggestions, all this started long before you were freed, as early as 1943.
‘And in ’45 it was maybe that which saved your life. Your pre-war relationship with Lena, at the Liberation you don’t rate the attentions of Stalin’s sorters, you rush off to Asia to rebuild your strength, a few months, then back you go to Rosmar, you still have the profile of the sort of man they continue to eradicate in large numbers, a thirties communist, you keep a dangerous photo in your head, comrade Lilstein, I’m sure you were there in 1932 when Ulbricht and Goebbels staged their joint meeting in Berlin, the great hall of the Friedrichshain, it went very badly, general brawl instead of a confrontation of two antibourgeois points of view, but you’re one of the witnesses, Ulbricht and Goebbels on the same platform, in the same photo that you keep in your head, not the sort of thing you can boast about.
‘And then you resisted, were part of the home-grown resistance, prisoner of the Nazis, cosmopolitan profile, they could fix you up with a file as a cosmopolitan collaborating with the English or even the Nazis, they don’t do it, in 1945 they hesitate, in ’46 they spare you, Misha, they give you responsibilities, so there are more important things in life than hunting down trotsko-cosmopolitans, normally you’d be a candidate for a bullet in a corridor and then somebody talks about a woman and says maybe Lilstein could restore her confidence and keep her on board, that’s it, someone in Beria’s entourage says that you could resume contact and restore the confidence of a friendly American woman who is beginning to have doubts about the virtues of Uncle Joe, from 1946 onwards, Madame Hellström must be asking a whole heap of questions.
‘The Iron Curtain, the tensions, Poland, Czechoslovakia, that woman is worth far more than her weight in gold, but for some time she hasn’t passed anything to Uncle Joe, she’s lost confidence in him. And she’s due to sing in Berlin, lovely surprise, for whom?
‘You went to hear her, “Misha I’m so pleased!” she trusts you, she realises that Uncle Joe is turning out badly, but if you’re there all is not lost, problem is Uncle Joe’s entourage, one part of his entourage, his negative face, so you resurface, such an old friend, the positive face of Uncle Joe, you natter away with Lena, everyone’s there, the Russians, the Americans, the English, the Germans, the French, they stare at you, and between the blah-blahing and Lena’s wide eyes, those large deep-blue eyes, you are there, it’s not all over yet, the cause of peace is not dead, in Berlin in ’37 Lena saved you, and you saved her six months later.