John le Carré: The Russia House

'Now did all your group receive that treatment or only you?'

'The lot of us. One nod, we were through.'

'You didn't feel singled out in any way?'

'What for?'

'You didn't have the impression you might be getting a different kind of treatment from other people? A better one, for instance?'

'We went through like a bunch of sheep. A flock,' Landau corrected himself. 'We handed in our visas, that was it.'

'Were other groups going through at the same rate, did you notice?'

'The Russkies didn't seem to be bothering at all. Maybe it was the summer Saturday. Maybe it was the glasnost . They pulled a few out to inspect and let the others through. I felt a fool, to be truthful. I didn't need to have taken the precautions that I did.'

'You were no sort of fool. You did marvellously,' said Ned, without a hint of patronising while he wrote again. 'And on the plane, who did you sit next to, remember?'

'Spikey Morgan.'

'Who else?'

'No one. I had the window.'

'Which seat was that?'

Landau knew the seat number off pat. It was the one he pre-booked whenever he could.

'Did you talk much on the flight?'

'Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.'

'What about?'

'Women, mainly. Spikey's moved in with a pair of freewheelers in Notting Hill.'

Ned gave a pleasant laugh. 'And did you tell Spikey about the notebooks? In your relief, Niki? It would have been perfectly natural in the circumstances. To confide.'

'I wouldn't dream of it, Ned. Not to a soul. I never did, I never will. I'm only telling you because he's vanished and you're official.'

'How about Lydia?'

The offence to Landau's dignity momentarily outweighed his admiration of Ned, and even his surprise at Ned's familiarity with his affairs.

'My ladies, Ned, they know a little about me. They may even think they know more than they do,' he replied. 'But they do not share my secrets because they are not invited to.'

Ned continued writing. And somehow the trim movement of the pen, coupled with the suggestion that he could have been indiscreet, provoked Landau into chancing his hand, because he had noticed already. that every time he started to talk about Barley, a kind of freeze settled over Ned's quietly reassuring features.

'And Barley's really all right, is he? He hasn't had an accident or anything?'

Ned seemed not to hear. He took a fresh card and resumed his writing.

'I suppose Barley would have used the Embassy, wouldn't he?' said Landau. 'Him being a professional. Barley. It's the chess that gives him away, if you want to know. He shouldn't play it, in my opinion. Not in public.'

Then and only then did Ned's head rise slowly from the page. And Landau saw a stony expression in his face that was more frightening than his words. 'We never mention names like that, Niki,' said Ned very quietly. 'Not even among ourselves. You couldn't know, so you've done nothing wrong. just please don't do it again.'

Then seeing perhaps the effect that he had had on Landau, he got up and strolled to a satinwood side table and poured two glasses of sherry from a decanter and handed one to Landau. 'And yes, he's all right,' he said.

So they drank a silent toast to Barley, whose name Landau had by then sworn to himself ten times already would never again cross his lips.

'We don't want you to go to Gdansk next week,' said Ned. 'We've arranged a medical certificate and compensation for you. You're ill. Suspected ulcer. And stay away from work in the meantime, do you mind?'

'I'll do whatever you say,' said Landau.

But before he left he signed a declaration of the Official Secrets Act while Ned benignly looked on. It's a weaselly document in legal terms, calculated to impress the signatory and no one else. But then the Act itself is scarcely a credit to its drafters either.

After that, Ned switched off the microphones and the hidden video cameras that the twelfth floor had insisted on because it was becoming that kind of operation.

And this far, Ned did everything alone, which was his good right as head of the Russia House. - Fieldmen are nothing if not loners. He didn't even call in old Palfrey to read the riot act. Not yet.

If Landau had felt neglected until that afternoon, for the rest of the week he was swamped with attention. Early the next morning, Ned telephoned asking him with his customary courtesy to present himself to an address in Pimlico. It turned out to be a 1930s block of flats, with curved steel-framed windows painted green and an entrance that should have led to a cinema. In the presence of two men whom he did not introduce, Ned took Landau crisply through his story a second time, then threw him to the wolves.

The first to speak was a distraught, floating man with baby-pink cheeks and baby-clear eyes and a flaxen jacket to match his straggling flaxen hair. His voice floated too. 'You said a blue dress, I think? My name's Walter,' he added, is if himself startled by the news.

'I did, sir.'

'You're sure?' he piped, rolling his head and peering crookedly at him from under his silken brow.

'Totally, sir. A blue dress with a brown perhaps-bag. Most perhaps-bags are made of string. Hers was brown plastic. "Now Niki," I said to myself, "today is not the day, but if you were ever thinking of having a tumble with this lady at a future date, which you might, you could always bring her a nice blue handbag from London to match her blue dress, couldn't you?" That's how I remember, you see. I have the connection in my head, sir.'

And it is always an oddity of the tapes when I replay them that Landau called Walter 'sir', while he never called Ned anything but Ned. Bug this was no great sign of respect in Landau so much as of a certain squeamishness that Walter inspired. After all, Landau was a ladies' man and Walter was quite the opposite.

'And the hair black , you say?' Walter sang, as if black hair strained credulity.

'Black, sir. Black and silky. Verging towards the raven. definitely.'

'Not dyed, you don't think?'

'I know the difference, sir,' said Landau, touching his own head, for he wanted to give them everything by now, even the secret of his eternal youth.

'You said earlier she was Leningrad. Why did you say that?'

'The bearing, sir. I saw quality, I saw a Russian woman of Rome. That's how I think of her. Petersburg.'

'But you didn't see Armenian? Or Georgian? Or Jewish, for example?'

Landau dwelt on the last suggestion but rejected it. 'I'm Jewish myself, you see. I won't say it takes one to know one but I'll say I didn't go ting-a-ling inside.'

A silence that could have been embarrassment seemed to encourage him to continue. 1 think being Jewish is overdone, to be frank. If that's what you want to be, good luck I say. But if you don't need it,_ nobody should make you have it. Myself, I'm a Brit first, a Pole second and everything else comes afterwards. Never mind there's a lot would have it the other way round. That's their problem.'

'Oh well said!' Walter cried energetically, flapping his fingers and giggling. 'Oh that does put it in . a nutshell. And you say her English was really rather good?'

'More than good, sir. Classic. A lesson to us all.'

'Like a schoolteacher, you said.'

'That was my impression,' said Landau. 'A teacher, a professor. I felt the learning. The intellect. The will.'

'Could she not be an interpreter, you see?'

'Good interpreters efface themselves, in my opinion, sit. This lady projected herself.'

'Oh well I say, that's rather a good answer,' said Walter, shooting his pink cuffs. 'And she was wearing a wedding ring. Well done.'

'She certainly was, sir. A betrothal ring and a marriage ring. That's the first thing I look at after the usual, and in Russia it's not England, you have to look the wrong way round because the girls wear their wedding rings on the right hand. Single Russian women are a pest and divorce is off the peg. Give me a nice solid hubby and a couple of little ones for them to go home to any day. Then I might oblige.'