The Sixth Directorate Read online

  I looked into the large eyes, the curiously circular, rather than oval lids in the photograph, the police measurements graded off round the edge of the print. Other than being a necessary part of the many parts that go towards making up something called a face, Graham’s eyes expressed nothing; nor did the other parts. He looked straight through the lens towards me with all the expression of a painted balloon. Yet a pin-prick would prove this bag less than insubstantial; it had no existence. This man had already destroyed his identity and I felt angry at the mechanisms in the world that had brought this about. Graham had nothing left to leave anyone. If I stepped into his shoes there would be nothing there: no one would be forced out, for he had released himself forever some time before from every pleasure and pain.

  Harper bent down to pick up another photograph that had fallen, pinning it back on the board. I thought for a second that it was a different man. But it was Graham, talking to a turbanned Sikh, standing up in the corridor of a train.

  ‘A year ago. Some COI work with Indian railways. Reporting on the new Delhi–Calcutta Express. Can you imagine? Never at a loss for good cover, this fellow.’

  Here the skin had every natural ornament. By comparison with the first photograph this one was a moving picture; one felt all the mobility that had gone into his life before and after the captured instant: gestures, words, the hard bright light through the window, the folds in the turban – each was part of a continuing fabric, and in Graham’s face one clearly saw all the happy marks of a long endearment with these moments, a firmly held commitment to the briefest values. His whole bearing, somewhere in India, was a forward position in a world where others often turned and ran, his expression an exposed asset in the general conspiracy – so much so that through his smile at that moment one could almost hear the words, coming out of the two mouths that hot afternoon:

  ‘Only thing you don’t have on the train is a bar.’

  ‘Well, that’s why we’re going to Calcutta.’

  It was a good photograph. In the other a whole life-style had leaked away. And in the comparison all Graham’s politics slipped away for me too.

  I didn’t care how many manifestoes he’d swallowed. I saw him now as one of those few expatriate communists who don’t give the movement a bad name, deviant because he was a person concerned with people not committees, a character out of a lost book on the faith. I wondered only where his blindness lay that had allowed him permanently to compromise his intelligence and affection, for he must have known the communist reality better than most – known that, before the millennium, his men would ruin Man in getting there, just as the other men would.

  Perhaps it wasn’t blindness, but a sad knowledge of this that made him smile for the moment, flashing through the famine lands of Bihar state – and the same true sense of the priorities that took him in search of Romanian Art at the British Museum, Bratby in Wimbledon and snails at L’Etoile. Perhaps he had seen the bitter culs de sac a long way off, the horrors that are due to great ideas, and had quietly resigned his politics over the years. Instead, long before, he had launched himself on the little roads that went somewhere – to museums in the London suburbs, to the restaurants in Charlotte Street.

  It wasn’t a question, I felt then, of replacing him, of copying his guile, for that had only been his cover in life. Instead I would pick up his life where he had dropped it and live it for him, like a memorial. I would continue something, replace nothing. Now I had no real need of Harper and McCoy; I was no longer on their side, I was on Graham’s. And I knew, in those terms, I could make myself indistinguishable from him though physically we so little resembled each other. It was an idea that I had to take over, not a body. What I needed now were the real details of this man’s life, the clear shapes of his affection, not this cold data that Harper had put about the room like a black museum.

  ‘Have to put a bit of weight on,’ Harper said. ‘You’ll have time on the boat. Graham was partial. You look as if you’d spent a year in bed.’

  ‘I have.’ We’d moved over to another board, headed ‘Eating Habits’.

  ‘It’s all here. Born with a silver fork in his mouth.’

  ‘Olives?’ I said, looking at one of the first items.

  ‘Yes,’ Harper said slowly. ‘Little bastard always went Continental. You don’t have to.’

  ‘I like olives.’

  A cloud ran across the silly shapes of Harper’s face.

  ‘You’re welcome. You’re welcome to it,’ he said savagely.

  ‘You said I ought to try and like him. “Sympathy”, you said.’

  ‘That was my advice to you. I don’t have to take it myself.’ Harper moved off round the room pointing out the other boards.

  ‘“Physical Characteristics, Family Background, Education, Career, Personal Habits, Hobbies, Peculiarities” – some sound tracks, even a film show – the lot. You and I will take a rough look at it now. Then this evening we’ll break each classification down with the experts – McCoy and the man who took him, fellow from Special Branch.’

  We’d stopped by the board marked ‘Peculiarities’.

  ‘No. Not queer,’ Harper said, as if some axiomatic law of nature had been detonated. ‘On the other hand very few women. And then only casuals. Hardly more than tarts.’

  ‘Perhaps he was Irish. Or Australian.’

  Harper scowled against my smile.

  Under ‘Peculiarities’ I read off the names of the various Art galleries and museums I’d heard about from McCoy. And at the end was the fact that he subscribed to Country Life.

  ‘Now that was peculiar,’ Harper said.

  ‘Must have been for the saleroom notes at the end,’ I said. ‘And the pictures of antiques in country mansions.’ Country Life had been one of the most popular magazines amongst the old lags in Durham.

  ‘Wrong. He got it for his mother in South Africa. Sends it to her every week. You’ll be writing to her. Let’s go back to the beginning.’

  We moved up to ‘Background, Education and Career’ at the end of the room where the sideboard would have been.

  George Graham. Born 14 July 1929. Royal Free Hospital, Islington, of Mary and John Graham, 32 Canonbury Sq., W.C.1. Father was Master Printer with Seale & Co., small firm of fine-art printers in South Kensington. John Graham enlisted with Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders as an N.C.O. in 1939. Served with them in North Africa, Lybia and Egypt and was killed in action, Western Desert, May 1943. With the help of a grant from the Worshipful Guild of Master Printers, George Graham attended St. Paul’s School, Hammersmith, taking a scholarship from there to St. Andrew’s University in 1948, reading English and Modern Languages. Graduated in 1952. Joined British Council in same year and was posted to Beirut where he spent one year teaching English in the British School. In September, 1953 was transferred to the British School, Heliopolis, Cairo, where he taught for 2 years. From September, 1955 until he left Egypt during the Suez campaign of November 1956, he was Senior English Master at Victoria College, Cairo. Subsequently he worked as a teacher and University professor in East Africa attached to the British Council: at Nairobi, Makerere College, Uganda, and finally at colleges in what were then Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. At the break up of the Federation of these countries in 1961 he returned to London where he took up work as a junior Reports Officer at the Central Office of Information attached to their East African section, where he was responsible, among other things, for various film, TV and radio documentaries. Since 1968 he had been responsible for advising Information Controller, COI, on general policy matters relating to British propaganda in the Middle East, Africa and India. In this capacity he was away from London for several long periods….

  ‘Never trust these schoolteacher fellows, can you?’ Harper said to himself, running his eye down the paper. ‘Always something whacky there.’ He paused. ‘But of course that was your stamping-ground, wasn’t it? I forgot. Anyway, as regards his “career”, we’ve got quite a few papers on that. And there
’s bound to be more in his flat and his luggage. You can bone up on it on the boat.’

  ‘What about his flat?’

  ‘He’s packed nearly everything. What he isn’t taking is being stored. Pickfords are coming tomorrow. The only people you should be meeting. You’re off the day after.’

  ‘The keys and so on. The rent?’

  ‘All paid up. Keys go back to the Traherne estate office in Welbeck Street. It’s not a service flat. No porter.’

  ‘And what about all his friends?’

  ‘Think he left last week. Didn’t McCoy tell you?’

  ‘They may write to him. Or visiting firemen. They know he’s gone to the UN.’

  ‘Have to make sure you don’t give them a bed then.’

  ‘Relations?’

  ‘Really only his mother. In Durban. He typed most of his few letters to her and you’ll have his signature off pat when you start.’

  ‘And nobody else?’

  ‘Yes, his father’s family. Scottish, from outside Aberdeen. An uncle and cousins. The uncle comes down every second year to London for the Calcutta Cup. So you’re all right there. Two years to go till the next one.’

  ‘Must have been someone he was closer to. At the office.’

  ‘Oh yes. He had a lot of friends. But he was British, you know – colleagues, you understand. Kept his distance. Gave a drinks party for them all before he left. They’ll have forgotten all about him in a week.’

  ‘And no women. You really think that’s likely?’

  ‘Not no women, Marlow. I didn’t say that. None we’ve traced, that’s all. You may be luckier – what with all these new singles bars I hear about in New York. The point is, Marlow, this fellow didn’t cultivate close friendships. For the job in New York he had to keep himself as clean as a whistle. Then he could start living. Now let’s see the film and the recordings.’ Harper drew the curtains and started to fiddle incompetently with a projector at the end of the table. ‘Give you some idea of the living man.’

  They were all street shots, mostly in the Marylebone area: coming out of his apartment, going into restaurants, walking in the little park behind the ugly Kellogg building in Baker Street, where the film car couldn’t follow him. He disappeared among a crowd of old pensioners sitting in the sun on benches and one could just see his head bobbing away behind the shelter in the middle. Another sequence followed him down the High Street in a shower. A girl came towards him, trying vainly to open an umbrella. They nearly collided. Then he helped her with it.

  ‘Gallant,’ Harper said. ‘Thought she might have been a contact.’

  Once Graham seemed to look straight into the camera for a long moment, standing at the kerb, about to cross.

  ‘They always do that some time or other. Can’t see a thing of course. Gives you the creeps though. Notice the way he walks?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He doesn’t hang about – looking for green stamps, bargains in the windows and so on. Not even in the antique shops. Always seems to know exactly where he’s going.’

  ‘Unusual?’

  ‘It can be. We thought at first he knew he was being followed. You don’t slow down then.’ Harper was depressed at the man’s decisiveness. ‘It’s as if he’d mapped every pace down to the last foot before he left home.’

  ‘Why not? You said he was out to enjoy himself. Why waste time?’

  There was another shot of him now, coming out of a Sicilian restaurant in Frith Street.

  ‘Mafia I suppose. He’s with the mob, not the KGB.’

  Harper was disgusted. ‘I don’t know what they were paying him for.’

  ‘Not your typical rat, is he? – crawling along alleyways in dark glasses with a ․38, moseying round Wimbledon Common looking for letter drops. It’s upsetting.’

  They’d collected some of Graham’s radio tapes and documentary films from the COI and, more daringly, a recording of him ordering dinner in Chez Victor.

  The voice wasn’t like his walk. I was surprised. There was no speech hesitancy, but it ambled rather, tended to double back; it seemed intentionally oblique and diffident, rushing into high notes over the contents of an hors d’oeuvre; slumbering, almost dead, in its comments on a beef casserole. I wondered what gave it this vivid yet indecisive character before deciding that Graham had all the varied tones and rhythms of a natural actor who yet loathed self-advertisement.

  One felt, in his accents, some huge sense of excitement within him which he wished to restrain, as a liability in dull times and as a danger to his work. The little dramas in his voice had been put there as an eccentric diversion, which, because they so nearly mirrored his obsessive taste for life, would all the more certainly put people off the track of this, his real nature. Graham’s mild histrionics were a role indeed, covering all his real history. He knew what he wanted on the menu all right, but he wasn’t going to let anyone know of his enthusiasm.

  ‘So?’ Harper drew back the curtains.

  ‘He’s nothing much like me.’

  ‘Apart from all his Mid-East experience. And being a teacher and a Reports Officer – like you. And the coat, Marlow. If the coat fits … And it fits you pretty well.’

  I stood up. I had forgotten I was still wearing it.

  ‘There’s food in the kitchen. And the bed’s in the usual place. The others will be here in the evening.’

  Harper went out and locked the door. I watched him from the window, crossing the road, going down towards Oxford Street. He stopped and talked to a man on the opposite pavement.

  *

  McCoy arrived with a small man called Croxley just after six o’clock. McCoy was impatient. The small man behaved as if he’d been sniffing gas leaks and looking round such dust-covered apartments all his life.

  ‘Had a good run through with Harper?’ McCoy’s dramatics were so thin.

  I said, ‘Yes. We couldn’t find the fellow’s shoes though.’

  ‘What do you want his shoes for?’

  ‘I’m getting everything else about him – why not his shoes? Somebody who knew him – first thing they’ll notice: I’ve got the wrong feet on. It’s a point.’

  ‘You’re beginning to enjoy it all, are you, Marlow?’

  ‘I know. You’d like to put the smile the other side of my face.’

  McCoy left shortly after. ‘I’ll give you his shoes,’ he muttered. I think he felt he was slipping.

  ‘How do you feel about the man?’ Croxley said when we had got into the dining-room. The light was still bright and slanting with long shadows outside. We’d had an extra hour of daylight all winter, on European time, and now it was really beginning to tell. I wished I’d been able to make better use of it.

  ‘He seems to have been a likeable fellow.’

  I was fed up with McCoy and Harper, but Croxley seemed to have wider sympathies.

  ‘Yes. Yes, he was. All this’ – he looked round the line of boards – ‘can’t give more than a trace of him. But we like it – thinking of people as bits of paper. Photographs.’

  ‘It’s the curse of the age.’ And Croxley sighed too for bureaucracy.

  ‘All you need from these are the factual details, or as much as you can absorb. In case there are queries. But the real business, you’ll have to create that yourself.’

  ‘Queries?’

  ‘Yes. I imagine McCoy only touched on it. The “stayer”. The man who contacts you. He may have some way of making sure of your identity.’

  ‘He may have seen “me” before. Awkward.’

  ‘No. Not on the job you’re doing. Won’t know you from Adam. That’s absolutely the point. He’ll just give you the names Moscow wants a check on – potential “unreliables”. And we know from Graham that most of these KGB people, not necessarily all Soviet nationals, are currently placed in the UN, either in the Secretariat or in one of the delegations in New York. That’s why Graham was aimed for the job. The stayer will probably be in the UN too. So he’ll have time to check up on you before he
makes an approach.’

  Croxley sat at one end of the table thumbing through some notes.

  ‘These transcripts aren’t of much use. What checks this contact may make I can’t say. Graham didn’t know, wouldn’t know. So it could go wrong from the first; he may never make a contact. On the other hand, in the nature of your KGB job, the stayer should know nothing about you or your past. Graham was let lie fallow for years precisely in order to avoid the chances of any substitution, so they won’t suspect that, nor will the stayer. He’ll just have been told your name and number in the UN. You see, Graham had no identity among his own, so you too should be safe enough.’

  ‘Who does Graham report to – and how?’

  ‘Only to the few very senior KGB men who were involved with his recruitment and training.’ Croxley paused, as though sorry for some deserving party who had been left out in the reading of a will.

  ‘And you have their names?’

  ‘Yes. We have his name.’

  ‘I suppose that’s how Graham lost his shoes?’

  Croxley looked at me for a moment, sadly. Then he suddenly found his place again.

  ‘A senior KGB officer stationed in Beirut who recruited Graham in 1952 is the crucial figure; he runs Graham, though Graham said he hadn’t seen him for more than ten years. A man named Alexei Flitlianov. He has some mild cover job with the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow. Allows him to travel about. In fact he heads the KGB’s Second Directorate, their internal security division – as well as a satellite security bureau – which Graham was working for – quite outside the main organisation, reporting only to Flitlianov. This fellow comes to America from time to time. He’d be coming to hear from you, probably a couple of months after you get there. Graham didn’t know exactly when. Let’s hope we can get the word to you when he does. In fact though, with any luck, you should be out of it all by then. And we should have the name we want.’