The Russia House Read Online Free

Niki has the buzz, Harry, no one buzzes better, as the girls all know.
    The first thing he saw was the envelope. He registered the three notebooks underneath it and saw that the envelope and notebooks were joined with a thick elastic band, the kind he always saved but never found a use for. But it was the envelope that held him because it had her writing on it – a strict copybook kind of writing that confirmed his pure image of her. One square brown envelope, glued rather messily and addressed ‘Personal for Mr. Bartholomew Scott Blair, urgent’.
    Slipping it free of the elastic band, Landau held it to the light but it was opaque and revealed no shadow. He explored it with his finger and thumb. One sheet of thin paper inside, two at most. Mr. Scott Blair has undertaken to publish it with discretion , he remembered. Mr. Landau, if you love peace … give it immediately to Mr. Scott Blair. Only to Mr. Scott Blair … it is a gift of trust.
    She trusts me too, he thought. He turned the envelope over. The back was blank.
    And there being only so much that one may learn from a sealed brown envelope, and since Landau drew the line at reading Barley’s or anybody else’s personal mail, he opened his briefcase again and, peering into the stationery compartment, extracted from it a plain manila envelope of his own, with the words ‘From the desk of Mr. Nicholas P. Landau’ inscribed tastefully on the flap. Then he popped the brown envelope inside the manila one and sealed it. Then he scribbled the name ‘Barley’ on it and filed it in the compartment marked ‘Social’, which contained such oddities as visiting cards that had been pressed on him by strangers and notes of odd commissions he had undertaken to perform for people – such as the publishing lady who needed refills for her Parker pen or the Ministry of Culture official who wanted a Snoopy T-shirt for his nephew or the lady from October who simply happened to be passing while he was wrapping up his stand.
    And Landau did this because with the tradecraft that was instinctive in him, if totally untaught, he knew that his first job was to keep the envelope as far away as possible from the notebooks. If the notebooks were trouble, then he wanted nothing that would link them with the letter. And vice versa. And in this he was entirely right. Our most versatile and erudite trainers, dyed in all the oceans of our Service folklore, would not have told it to him one whit differently.
    Only then did he take up the three notebooks and slip off the elastic band while he kept one ear cocked for footfalls in the corridor. Three grubby Russian notebooks, he reflected, selecting the top one and turning it slowly over. Bound in crudely illustrated board, the spine in fraying cloth. Two hundred and twenty-four pages of poor-quality, feint-ruled quarto, if Landau remembered correctly from the days when he peddled stationery, Soviet price around twenty kopeks retail from any good stationer, always provided that the delivery had arrived and that you were standing in the right queue on the right day.
    Finally he opened the notebook and stared at the first page.
    She’s daft, he thought, fighting off his disgust.
    She’s in the hands of a nutter. Poor kid.
    Meaningless scribblings, done by a lunatic with a mapping pen, in Indian ink at breakneck speed and furious angles. In the margins, sideways, longways. Diagonally across itself like a doctor’s writing on the blink. Peppered with stupid exclamation marks and underlinings. Some of it Cyrillic, some English. ‘The Creator creates creators,’ he read in English. ‘To be. Not to be. To counter-be.’ Followed by a burst of stupid French about the warfare of folly and the folly of warfare, followed by a barbed-wire entanglement. Thank you very much, he thought, and flipped to another page, then another, both so dense with crazy writing you could hardly see the paper. ‘Having spent seventy years destroying the popular will, we