Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“The one taken in nineteen thirty-seven, yes.”

“Go on.”

“He’s now a very prominent art dealer. Very well connected. Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Anyway, I was a bit short of cash and so the last time I was in London, Anthony and I met for lunch at my club and I offered to sell him the photograph and some letters from him to Gerald. You see, Blunt’s a friend of this fellow Guy Burgess, too. In fact, I think they even shared a house during the war. Naturally, it would mean that Blunt would have to resign from all his offices if that picture ended up in the newspapers. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t a fortune I was asking. Just a thousand pounds, that’s all. Cheap at the price in view of how much Hebel is asking for it.”

“So what happened after you started blackmailing Blunt?”

“Steady on, old boy. I wouldn’t call it blackmail, exactly. I mean, I never threatened to send the letters and the picture to the newspapers or anything like that. You might even say I was trying to help the poor fellow out. To stop them from falling into the hands of anyone else. To give him peace of mind. Yes, I could have destroyed them, but then he might always have wondered what became of them, and if one day they might come back to haunt him. You do see the difference.”

“You’re a much better blackmailer than you think you are, Robin.”

Robin Maugham leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette with fury, as if he wished the ashtray had been my eyeball.

“Fuck you, Walter,” he said.

“I’d rather you didn’t. So, then; Blunt bought what you were offering so very cheaply. Prints, negative, letters, the whole package wrapped with a nice pink ribbon. Cash?”

“Yes. Cash. He moaned about it quite a lot but yes, eventually, he paid. So, naturally I was more than a bit surprised when this fellow Hebel turned up here with the photograph asking for fifty thousand dollars. I mean, fifty thousand dollars? Jesus. That rather puts my amateur effort in the shade.”

“Have you spoken to Blunt about this?”

“Yes. He says the photograph was stolen from his flat at the Courtauld Institute soon after I sold it to him.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Yes. Maybe. His place is always full of rent boys. Any one of them could have pinched it. Besides, I can’t see why he would hand the picture to someone who might easily blackmail him. It strikes me that Anthony Blunt has as much to lose as my uncle.”

“But a lot more to gain, perhaps. Is Blunt rich?”

“No, not especially. I mean, he has some rather valuable pictures, and some rich friends, but not much money of his own.”

“So, not as rich as your uncle Willie?”

“Lord, no. Not many people are.”

“So then. Has it occurred to you that Blunt and Hebel might be in this together? After all, Blunt could hardly threaten to send the picture to the newspapers himself. Your uncle would never believe he would risk doing that. But he would believe someone else was capable of it. Someone like Hebel, with nothing to lose. This might also explain how Hebel came to be in possession of this tape recording of Guy Burgess. Perhaps the friendship between Blunt and Burgess extended to more than just sharing a flat. We don’t know for sure that it was recorded on this Russian ship and not at a flat in London.”

“Yes, I suppose it’s possible. I can see Blunt using a picture in the way you describe. But this tape is something else again. My uncle will only buy it if the secret service is prepared to underwrite the cost of the purchase. And they won’t buy it without listening to it themselves. Which still leaves Blunt in the shit because of the photograph, I’d have thought.”

“Not really. Your uncle has the photograph now.”

“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?”

“So, unless Anthony Blunt’s name is on that tape, he’s in the clear. More or less.”

“Anthony Blunt?” Somerset Maugham came into the room and helped himself to some coffee. “What’s Anthony got to do with any of this?”

Robin Maugham blushed again, this time to the roots of his dyed hair, and stammered an answer. “I was just telling Walter that Blunt used to share a flat with Guy Burgess in London. And that now and then you had him bid for pictures at art auctions in London. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. Old Masters are his special thing. Poussin, Titian, not really my cup of tea. And too damned expensive. But over the years he’s spotted a couple of good buys for me. Impressionists, mainly. He has a good eye, Anthony.”

“And yet he didn’t seem to notice he was sharing a flat with a Russian spy,” I said.

“You didn’t know Guy Burgess,” said Maugham. “He was a very charming rogue and a most unlikely spy. Everyone thought so.”

“That’s the thing about the English,” I said. “You think charm excuses almost anything, including treachery and treason.”

“Yes,” said Maugham, lighting a pipe. “That’s quite true. It’s a failing of ours, to find excuses for people. Of course, charm only works for Germans when it seems to have been divinely conferred.”

“When was the last time you saw Guy Burgess?” I asked.

Maugham paused for a moment. “Probably Tangier in nineteen forty-nine. Got himself into a bit of a scrape in Gibraltar beforehand, I seem to recall. But that was the thing about Guy; he was always getting into scrapes. Frankly, his behavior made him a most improbable spy. Often drunk and outrageously homosexual-when he defected, nobody could quite believe how he managed to pull it off for so long. I suppose you might say it was the perfect cover, to seem so indiscreet that people couldn’t possibly think you might be a spy.”

Maugham set his coffee cup down and moved to a chair.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“As I’ll ever be.”

I stood up and walked over to the Grundig. In its green Tolex carry case, the tape machine resembled the forgotten layer of an old wedding cake. I twisted the gold switch and slowly the two reels began to turn.

Like most Englishmen of my recent acquaintance-at the Grand Hotel and the Villa Mauresque-Guy Burgess spoke with a plummy, nasal voice that seemed to contain a slight speech impediment, although that might just as easily have been the effect of too much alcohol. What else is there to do on a three-day voyage to Leningrad but get drunk? Suave, reptilian, and dripping with disdain, as if the whole business of being debriefed by his Russian handlers were beneath him, the voice reminded me of an English movie actor I’d once seen called Henry Daniell, who had seemed to me to be the screen personification of the sardonic, well-bred villain. As I listened to Burgess, it was as if the man were with us in Maugham’s drawing room, searching his memory and perhaps his conscience for the best interpretation of his actions-indeed, he seemed every bit as mannered as Somerset Maugham and as full of whinging self-justification as the great writer’s nephew. The recording was a good one, and occasionally, in the silences, you could even hear the dull, rhythmic throb of what might have been the ship’s engines but could as easily have been the slow breathing of some unseen leviathan.

“My name is Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess and I was born in Devonport, England, on the sixteenth of April nineteen eleven. For the purposes of verification, in nineteen forty-four I was running a Swiss source for MI5, code named Orange, who, I’m afraid to say, met with a sticky end in Trier. MI5 is, of course, Britain’s domestic secret intelligence service. My father was a naval officer and I myself attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth before going on to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge.