Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“All right, what else did those bastards say?” he asked.

“Right now they seem to think that Guy Burgess may have accidentally revealed the existence of a spy at the very top of MI5-one they didn’t know about.”

“You’re joking.”

I told him all I’d heard about Roger Hollis at MI5 and how Reilly and Sinclair suspected that, like Guy Burgess, he, too, had been recruited by the Russians in the thirties.

“Roger Hollis? Never heard of him,” said Maugham.

“In my experience, it’s no good being a spy if people know your name.”

“I take your point. Although I am the living proof of the opposite argument. On and off I’ve been a British spy for as long as I’ve been a writer. And the more famous I’ve become the more effective a spy I’ve been.”

He came around the desk, sat down beside me on the sofa, and patted me on the knee. Not that I minded. He meant it kindly.

“Another spy, eh?” he said. “If this gets out the British can say good-bye to the ‘special relationship.’ Burgess and Maclean were one thing. But this is something much worse. A spy at the top of MI5 is nothing short of a catastrophe. Hoover would have a heart attack at the very idea.”

“That was certainly the tenor of the conversation I just overheard.”

“They’d have to purge everyone in the British intelligence community. MI5 and MI6, from top to bottom. If it’s true. You said it’s only suspected that this chap Hollis is a spy.”

“Look, I was certainly convinced even if Patrick Reilly wasn’t. Not that either man impressed me as particularly good at his job. In my opinion, civil servants make the worst kind of spies. To people like Sinclair and Reilly, it’s just a schoolboy game. A way of moving up the Whitehall ladder and getting a knighthood. But you can’t win that way. The British are at war with the Russians but they don’t know the Russians at all. Not as a people. That’s bad. They think the Russians are just an ideology. But they’re much more than that. I know. I spent almost two years of my life in a Soviet labor camp.”

“In Petrograd I got to know the Russians pretty well myself,” said Maugham. “Of course, I still made mistakes. Once I even killed the wrong man. But most of the time I knew what I was doing. I’m not sure that the people who run things these days do. People like Sinclair and Reilly. The Russians make excellent spies. Much better than us because they lie so well. And of course they lie to themselves most skillfully of all. Which is the key to all effective lying. You have to convince yourself, first of all. The English are hopeless liars by comparison. We’re too honest about ourselves. Too self-effacing. Lying shocks us. That’s why the English were so horrified by Burgess and Maclean. Because they were such unusually good liars. Like me-and you, I suspect. I think perhaps you are the best liar of us all, Walter. But then, maybe you’ve had to be.”

“Over the last twenty years I’ve found truth to be a very overrated virtue when it comes to staying alive.”

“Isn’t it? Well, I’ve spent my whole life lying for a living so I’m bound to agree with you. What are their plans now? Sinclair and Reilly?”

“I think they’re going back to their hotel,” I said. “To make more telephone calls to London in private. To set a rather urgent witch hunt into motion. After which, if you don’t mind, I’ll go home, too. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow to take care of the handover of the money. Until then, you know where I am if you need me.”

Maugham nodded. “Thank you for everything, my f-friend.”

“Once that’s done I’m just going to hunker down at the hotel. Safely behind my hotel desk, answering stupid questions for clueless tourists. It’s what I’m best at.”

Maugham smiled his inscrutable smile. “You don’t fool me for a minute, Walter. You’re just like me. A survivor. The only difference is that you’re not as old. Not yet. But, of course, if you live long enough, you will be.”

“Now, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? Nobody wants to get old, but then nobody wants to be dead, either.” I shrugged. “To be honest, I never thought I’d make it this far.”

After the English spymasters had returned to the Belle Aurore I drove back to Villefranche. The road home took me straight past their hotel and for a while I parked outside the entrance and contemplated sneaking into the little cliff-top garden to eavesdrop some more. All of the lights on the upper floors were burning brightly and I even caught a glimpse of Sinclair at the window, with the telephone pressed to his ear. But I’d had enough of spies and blackmail for one day. I was tired and all I wanted to do now was go to bed with Anne. There was that and the fact that at least two of them were carrying guns.

Although it was well past ten o’clock I found her typing in the guesthouse on her big pink Smith Corona. But the Hallicrafters radio was still on. I could hear the BBC World Service chattering away in the background.

Disaster was in the air, but it wasn’t the kind everyone else was expecting. This was to be a rather more bespoke, disastrous kind of disaster, created just for me.

“What’s the news?” I asked. “About Suez. Have the British invaded the zone yet? The French?”

“No. But it’s not looking good.”

She was wearing a crocheted white dress, with little flowers on the hem. Her feet were bare. In retrospect I ought to have counted the toes on her left foot just to make sure she didn’t have seven. She wasn’t wearing makeup and seemed smaller than I remembered, and just a bit more vulnerable, too. Even a little sad. She opened a bottle of wine and we drank some of it on the terrace. I told her I’d been back to the Villa Mauresque. She was quiet, unusually so, almost hermetically self-contained. And smoking a lot, too; there were at least a dozen cigarettes in the ashtray.

“Where’s the body? Floating in the pool? Or lying on the bedroom floor?”

“You’re looking at it.”

“I thought as much. Is something wrong? Only you seem a little tense.”

“Nothing serious. Just a little rigor mortis. It’s infectious when you’re researching a man like Somerset Maugham.”

She touched my face with the neatly manicured tips of her fingers and suddenly I realized how much I wanted her. I ached for her inside and I realized how much I’d missed her. And now that I had the scent of Mystikum in my nostrils, everything seemed all right; just about.

“Were you working on the biography all day?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve been on my own too much, really. I should have gone into town, or to the Grand Hotel for a swim, but I didn’t. And it’s still in my head a bit, that’s all. Books are like that sometimes. They get jealous of time spent doing other things. A bit like husbands, I suppose.”

“Do you have many of those, too?”

She smiled sadly but didn’t answer, which left me to draw my own conclusions. Had she been married before? I realized I didn’t know and resolved to ask her everything about herself when she was feeling a little more forthcoming. Perhaps.

“How’s it going? The book, I mean.”

“Well.” She paused and lit another cigarette, inhaling it fiercely. “As well as can be expected, I guess.”

“Sounds more like a crash victim.”

She shrugged. “It’s never easy.”

“You’ve had a better time than me, at any rate. I’ve spent the whole evening at the Villa Mauresque. It’s been difficult, to say the least.”

“What happened? More hijinks?”

“You could say that.”

I hesitated for a moment, wondering for the first time just how much I could really trust her.

“Look, I hate to bring this up again, but you haven’t forgotten our deal,” I said. “That you won’t write about this until after he’s dead. Or unless I say otherwise.”